Any biosphere we create on the moon doesn't have to be fully self sustaining. There are plenty of materials on the moon - oxygen, hydrogen, carbon - that can be used to give the artifical biosphere a boost when needed.
Very true. Not only that, but it might be possible to build shelters using nothing more than solar energy and moondust. We might be able to melt the lunar "soil" (regolith, I suppose) in kilns powered by solar energy and form it into blocks or other shapes as needed, working with it like a ceramic. It might even be possible to build spacecraft and satellites partially out of such material.
You might also be able to reproduce larger objects in 3D printers that use lasers to melt the powdery lunar material and build objects layer-by-layer. The US military is already experimenting with such devices here on earth, using powdered metals to reproduce parts in the field. In theory, such devices could produce objects of any shape and of considerable size.
We're already lifting many tons of machinery - and food - and water - and air - into LEO so that three astronauts can sit up there and keep the ISS from falling apart at the seams. Why not skip the consumables and spend all of the money to launch machines that can MANUFACTURE the consumables on-site?
Would building a moonbase require new technologies? Sure. So did building the ISS, but you aren't calling that "science fiction". Unlike the ISS though, the technologies used for building a moonbase would have vital, practical applications going forward. ISS is a boondoggle - none of the tech being developed to "boldly sit where no man has sat before" will do a thing to further human advancement into the solar system. We aren't really even building anything in LEO. We're just hauling up a 100 billion dollar high-tech human Habitrail and putting the pieces together.
Yeah, I know how much a mosfet factory weighs. And I know I wouldn't launch one into orbit at $10,000 (or even $1,000) a pound - I'd build one on site using materials gathered on site. When the first European settlers came to America, did they carve off a chunk of London or Madrid and sail it out into the middle of the Atlantic on a barge, and then just sit there, at enormous expense? No. Did they import all of their food, water, air and clothing to the "New World"? No. They came with tools and built the infrastructure they needed to survive on site, using the materials at hand. We should be spending the hundreds of billions we're currently wasting on the ISS and on these unworkable "reusable" launch vehicles on developing the tools to make ourselves self-sufficient on other worlds.
Would a moonbase cost more than the ISS? Dunno. Depends upon how many trillion NASA throws at developing this "next-generation" reusable launcher in order to supply and support the ISS over the next 20 years. Because you can bet the defense contractors will keep the International Pork Station alive as long as they can in order milk it for additional hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Would it? There are resources on the moon. There's silicon and oxygen, solar energy and metals. It's probable there is ice on the moon, which could be used to produce water, or hydrogen for rocket fuel. There's probably also carbon on the moon - just look for where carbon rich rocks may have smacked into the surface over the past 4 billion years. Not only can you support people with those resources, you can use them to build more habitat and more infrastructure to support still more people.
In low earth orbit, the only resource you have is solar energy. Everything else has to be trucked up from earth, at something like $10,000 a pound. It costs 2,500 bucks to shoot a Quarter Pounder into orbit. Astronauts eat the equivalent of 3 of those every day. Add to that the cost of air and water, and pretty soon a moonbase starts to look pretty good in comparison, especially given the stated lifespan of the ISS (at least a decade).
Would a moonbase cost more? Sure, in the short term. But over the long run, a moonbase would become essentially self sufficient - something the ISS could never do - and could then go on to pay for itself. Because lunar gravity is 1/6th that of earth, and it has no atmosphere, it would be much, much cheaper to launch payloads into earth orbit from the moon than it is to launch them from the earth. Using a moonbase to launch probes to the other planets, or giant communications satellites to orbit the earth, could save NASA and analogous space agencies around the globe hundreds of billions of dollars.
Ah, but they're going to lower launch costs with these new rockets, right? Well, that's the same line of bull Congress bought when they authorized the construction of the space shuttle back in the 1970's. The shuttle would be this reusable wonder that would drastically slash the cost of getting into orbit. Yeah, right. It costs more to launch payloads on the shuttle than it does on any other system currently in operation (and all of them are disposable). So if you truly believe this latest attempt to design a reusable booster will slash launch costs tenfold, I have a bridge I wanna sell you.
The ISS is a $100 billion boondoggle, a black hole that's sucking up NASA's budget and giving back nothing in return. It's like watching Columbus anchor his fleet just outside of the harbor at Palos and burn Isabela's money to keep warm, instead of sailing to the Indies. It's a pointless waste. Developing yet another generation of overpriced "reusable" rockets in order to support such misadventures is pure folly.
Why would anybody pay to read reviews in the first place, especially so-called "professional" reviews from a corporate site? Just go to Amazon.com and see what consumers there have to say about a game. It's free, and I've found the "amateur" reviews at Amazon to be far more informative (and more honest) than anything I've ever read at Gamespot.
Eh? M.U.L.E. was coded on the 800. Did M.U.L.E. on the C64 even support four human players? The 800 had 4 joystick ports, which makes it the ideal M.U.L.E. box.
I'm surprised nobody has hacked the code for M.U.L.E., possibly using one of the Atari 800 emulators, and made a web-enabled version that would allow folks to play online.
This star group the article refers to is around 500 light years away, not 500,000. Next time, CNN should assign this "reporter" to cover trends in hairstyles or sightings of Elvis or some other topic the "reporter" might be capable of understanding.
Or maybe this is just another example of Time Warner math coming from CNN's parent, the same arithmetic that shows the record studios to be losing billions of dollars due to music "piracy". The multiples are probably similar in both instances.
Maybe, but the 1040ST came out at least a year earlier, cost less, had more RAM and a more professional-looking desktop (once you changed the background color from that putrid default lime green - although that color supposedly worked best if you were using a television as your monitor).
The Amiga's desktop was even more color-challenged than the ST's - Amiga's designers must have been colorblind. The icons were tacky as hell, too. It looked like something running on a Commodore 128 . . . which is what a lot of people mistook the Amiga 500 for, much to its detriment. The 500's ugly case didn't help matters (these "old school" all-in-one "Keyboard PCs" look almost as bad, if not worse). At least the ST cases were well designed (although the plastic was a few shades of gray too dark).
Still, if either Atari or Commodore had played their cards right, they could have bumped Apple out of the marketplace entirely. Unfortunately, both tried to duke it out almost exclusively in the sub-$1,000 PC market instead of eating Apple's lucrative high-end lunch. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Er, wrong. Santa Claus is an Americanization of Sinterklaas, the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas was one of the early Christians (he participated in the first Council of Nicaea), and went on to become one of the most famous and well regarded saints in all of Europe. His reputation for generosity and kindness gave rise to legends of miracles he performed for the poor and unhappy.
Although the trappings associated with the modern Santa Claus legend date to the late 1800's and the American poem "Twas The Night Before Christmas" (flying reindeer, sleigh, chimney sliding and the red coat were all original creations of that poem), the concept is completely Christian in origin and far older, dating back almost to the time of Christ.
Now, one could argue that Christmas *itself* isn't a Christian tradition, per se, since the early Christians simply co-opted the Roman holiday Saturnalia, a holiday far more like our modern Christmas than Christmas itself was up until about a hundred years ago, and one which involved festivals, a state holiday, a feast, lights and the exchange of gifts. Everything old . . .
I had to laugh when I looked at Compaq's site. Designs for "transformable" & modular PC systems have been floating around for at least 20 years. Check out these designs at the Atari Historical Society site, http://www.atari-history.com/computers/concepts/co ncepts.html. The Modular designs link isn't working, unfortunately, but you can get an idea what they were up to with the Desktop and Laptop designs back then.
Of course, none of it ever saw the light of day (from Atari, anyhow), but similar designs were later produced by companies like IBM and Tandy.
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Any biosphere we create on the moon doesn't have to be fully self sustaining. There are plenty of materials on the moon - oxygen, hydrogen, carbon - that can be used to give the artifical biosphere a boost when needed.
Very true. Not only that, but it might be possible to build shelters using nothing more than solar energy and moondust. We might be able to melt the lunar "soil" (regolith, I suppose) in kilns powered by solar energy and form it into blocks or other shapes as needed, working with it like a ceramic. It might even be possible to build spacecraft and satellites partially out of such material.
You might also be able to reproduce larger objects in 3D printers that use lasers to melt the powdery lunar material and build objects layer-by-layer. The US military is already experimenting with such devices here on earth, using powdered metals to reproduce parts in the field. In theory, such devices could produce objects of any shape and of considerable size.
We're already lifting many tons of machinery - and food - and water - and air - into LEO so that three astronauts can sit up there and keep the ISS from falling apart at the seams. Why not skip the consumables and spend all of the money to launch machines that can MANUFACTURE the consumables on-site?
Would building a moonbase require new technologies? Sure. So did building the ISS, but you aren't calling that "science fiction". Unlike the ISS though, the technologies used for building a moonbase would have vital, practical applications going forward. ISS is a boondoggle - none of the tech being developed to "boldly sit where no man has sat before" will do a thing to further human advancement into the solar system. We aren't really even building anything in LEO. We're just hauling up a 100 billion dollar high-tech human Habitrail and putting the pieces together.
Yeah, I know how much a mosfet factory weighs. And I know I wouldn't launch one into orbit at $10,000 (or even $1,000) a pound - I'd build one on site using materials gathered on site. When the first European settlers came to America, did they carve off a chunk of London or Madrid and sail it out into the middle of the Atlantic on a barge, and then just sit there, at enormous expense? No. Did they import all of their food, water, air and clothing to the "New World"? No. They came with tools and built the infrastructure they needed to survive on site, using the materials at hand. We should be spending the hundreds of billions we're currently wasting on the ISS and on these unworkable "reusable" launch vehicles on developing the tools to make ourselves self-sufficient on other worlds.
Would a moonbase cost more than the ISS? Dunno. Depends upon how many trillion NASA throws at developing this "next-generation" reusable launcher in order to supply and support the ISS over the next 20 years. Because you can bet the defense contractors will keep the International Pork Station alive as long as they can in order milk it for additional hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Would it? There are resources on the moon. There's silicon and oxygen, solar energy and metals. It's probable there is ice on the moon, which could be used to produce water, or hydrogen for rocket fuel. There's probably also carbon on the moon - just look for where carbon rich rocks may have smacked into the surface over the past 4 billion years. Not only can you support people with those resources, you can use them to build more habitat and more infrastructure to support still more people.
In low earth orbit, the only resource you have is solar energy. Everything else has to be trucked up from earth, at something like $10,000 a pound. It costs 2,500 bucks to shoot a Quarter Pounder into orbit. Astronauts eat the equivalent of 3 of those every day. Add to that the cost of air and water, and pretty soon a moonbase starts to look pretty good in comparison, especially given the stated lifespan of the ISS (at least a decade).
Would a moonbase cost more? Sure, in the short term. But over the long run, a moonbase would become essentially self sufficient - something the ISS could never do - and could then go on to pay for itself. Because lunar gravity is 1/6th that of earth, and it has no atmosphere, it would be much, much cheaper to launch payloads into earth orbit from the moon than it is to launch them from the earth. Using a moonbase to launch probes to the other planets, or giant communications satellites to orbit the earth, could save NASA and analogous space agencies around the globe hundreds of billions of dollars.
Ah, but they're going to lower launch costs with these new rockets, right? Well, that's the same line of bull Congress bought when they authorized the construction of the space shuttle back in the 1970's. The shuttle would be this reusable wonder that would drastically slash the cost of getting into orbit. Yeah, right. It costs more to launch payloads on the shuttle than it does on any other system currently in operation (and all of them are disposable). So if you truly believe this latest attempt to design a reusable booster will slash launch costs tenfold, I have a bridge I wanna sell you.
The ISS is a $100 billion boondoggle, a black hole that's sucking up NASA's budget and giving back nothing in return. It's like watching Columbus anchor his fleet just outside of the harbor at Palos and burn Isabela's money to keep warm, instead of sailing to the Indies. It's a pointless waste. Developing yet another generation of overpriced "reusable" rockets in order to support such misadventures is pure folly.
Why would anybody pay to read reviews in the first place, especially so-called "professional" reviews from a corporate site? Just go to Amazon.com and see what consumers there have to say about a game. It's free, and I've found the "amateur" reviews at Amazon to be far more informative (and more honest) than anything I've ever read at Gamespot.
Remakes for the Atari? M*U*L*E was developed for the Atari 800. It was ported to the C64, PCjr and NES later (in the case of the NES, much later).
Eh? M.U.L.E. was coded on the 800. Did M.U.L.E. on the C64 even support four human players? The 800 had 4 joystick ports, which makes it the ideal M.U.L.E. box.
I'm surprised nobody has hacked the code for M.U.L.E., possibly using one of the Atari 800 emulators, and made a web-enabled version that would allow folks to play online.
This star group the article refers to is around 500 light years away, not 500,000. Next time, CNN should assign this "reporter" to cover trends in hairstyles or sightings of Elvis or some other topic the "reporter" might be capable of understanding.
Or maybe this is just another example of Time Warner math coming from CNN's parent, the same arithmetic that shows the record studios to be losing billions of dollars due to music "piracy". The multiples are probably similar in both instances.
Maybe, but the 1040ST came out at least a year earlier, cost less, had more RAM and a more professional-looking desktop (once you changed the background color from that putrid default lime green - although that color supposedly worked best if you were using a television as your monitor).
The Amiga's desktop was even more color-challenged than the ST's - Amiga's designers must have been colorblind. The icons were tacky as hell, too. It looked like something running on a Commodore 128 . . . which is what a lot of people mistook the Amiga 500 for, much to its detriment. The 500's ugly case didn't help matters (these "old school" all-in-one "Keyboard PCs" look almost as bad, if not worse). At least the ST cases were well designed (although the plastic was a few shades of gray too dark).
Still, if either Atari or Commodore had played their cards right, they could have bumped Apple out of the marketplace entirely. Unfortunately, both tried to duke it out almost exclusively in the sub-$1,000 PC market instead of eating Apple's lucrative high-end lunch. Dumb, dumb, dumb.
Er, wrong. Santa Claus is an Americanization of Sinterklaas, the Dutch name for Saint Nicholas. Saint Nicholas was one of the early Christians (he participated in the first Council of Nicaea), and went on to become one of the most famous and well regarded saints in all of Europe. His reputation for generosity and kindness gave rise to legends of miracles he performed for the poor and unhappy.
Although the trappings associated with the modern Santa Claus legend date to the late 1800's and the American poem "Twas The Night Before Christmas" (flying reindeer, sleigh, chimney sliding and the red coat were all original creations of that poem), the concept is completely Christian in origin and far older, dating back almost to the time of Christ.
Now, one could argue that Christmas *itself* isn't a Christian tradition, per se, since the early Christians simply co-opted the Roman holiday Saturnalia, a holiday far more like our modern Christmas than Christmas itself was up until about a hundred years ago, and one which involved festivals, a state holiday, a feast, lights and the exchange of gifts. Everything old . . .
I had to laugh when I looked at Compaq's site. Designs for "transformable" & modular PC systems have been floating around for at least 20 years. Check out these designs at the Atari Historical Society site, http://www.atari-history.com/computers/concepts/co ncepts.html. The Modular designs link isn't working, unfortunately, but you can get an idea what they were up to with the Desktop and Laptop designs back then.
Of course, none of it ever saw the light of day (from Atari, anyhow), but similar designs were later produced by companies like IBM and Tandy.