"Both of those were "LLC-style" hops where the mod flies gently up to about 55 meters and then gently back down. Since both of those went well, we decided to do a "boosted hop," where instead of gently flying up and down, it goes full throttle for about three seconds, coasts to apogee at low throttle, falls quickly back down and then throttles up before touching down"
"A closed-loop control system is one in which an input forcing function is determined in part by the system response. The measured response of a physical system is compared with a desired response. The difference between these two responses initiates actions that will result in the actual response of the system to approach the desired response."
So, engine generates thrust X, desired target of which is X+Y. Throttle is increased until measured response is X+Y. At which point the throttle is maintained or decreased, depending on what part of the flight profile the vehicle is in.
And as a bonus, part of the group AA belongs (the Commercial Spaceflight Federation?) to is trying to establish multiple markets for commercial enterprise. If they can give away a couple science payloads, and then later have a relatively cheap offering (sub 7-figure) for one-off or repeat experiments in the same flight profile, they demonstrate a new market. It's actually rather difficult for universities to get payloads to near-space. Year(s) waiting times mean that sometimes students and staff never see their projects take off (literally).
As someone who has tried three or four times now to "get it" I have to concur with your assessment. Either you have to know and incredibly active social network of people already in, so that you can be guided and have shit explained to you, or you're stuck with the non-intuitive nature of the UI, world and environments.
Not to mention the furries, the sex clubs and the walking dildos. Or the assholes who setup content bombs that pop you.
Second Life is user created, but it has all the unattractive qualities of a fan-fic slush pile and MUSH combined, graphics that are from the mid-90s, and performance of a P90 trying to play DOOM3.
The first thing they really need to nail is the UI for just plain interacting. Then they need to nail the "base" avatar creation. As is, you can spend hours creating your first avatar and it will still look like shit, whereas in most other virtual worlds, you fiddle with a few sliders and have a respectable-looking avatar.
I'd love to find a reason to stay, but Second Life doesn't seem to want to "get it" to the idea of bringing new people in who want a world on par with the other virtual worlds they are already interacting in. If aesthetics/content/performance don't matter, then I could use IM and "myspace" much more effectively in networking than Second life will ever be. If they do matter, then they need base content and performance that is of peer-quality to the current state of the industry.
You don't plug and pray. You install and interate as you learn the product. You don't turn the tool to IPS everything mode from the get go.
You start out in IDS mode, monitoring for everything. Then you decide which of the types of alerts it is capturing properly, say worms in this instance.
Then you flip the bit for IPS mode for those signatures or anolomies ONLY. And the traffic of that specific type gets blocked, not everything to or from the hosts. Specific traffic only.
If you get reports of something getting blocked, you 'detune' it to IDS mode until you can figure out why it is triggering. Luckily you can get packet capture for most of the enterprise IPSes, so it is usually fairly easy to peg why something false-positived. Some even have an emergency 'flip to IDS mode only'.
You iterate this process until you have a comfort level for the IPS and IDS balancing act. Sigs or types of traffic you're worried false positive too much? Keep them in IDS mode or feedback to the provider that you're getting too much noise! Pretty sure that something on Kazaa ports using Kazaa commands is probably Kazaa or a Kazaa worm? Use IPS to block that specific traffic.
None of the enterprise network people I've talked to would enable to 'Big Red Button' automation script, though. Definitely have the SoC or NoC check the alert and then have them make routing changes. Otherwise, just let the IPS drop/reset the 'bad' traffic.
The 'unknown application breakage' is definitely a problem, especially the closer to the data core you get. I would slowly enable things one at a time, and take a slow and steady approach. The last thing you want to do is break some 100M USD application because you set a sig to block!
As other posters have commented, this does relatively little against a well prepared intruder, but it will hopefully clear off the bottom 90% of your incidents so that you can watch or react to things in a more focused manner. Also, some of the IPSes do check for common single intruder commands , like rm -rf/, su to root, etc.
Clarion funding has always been tight. This is a program for students in a specific genre of writing that is not generally taught/funded in most writing programs.
Writers never make a ton of money, with some notable exceptions. And most of those make thier "real money" off of other properties (film, etc). The same for being an instructor of writers, or a student in writing program. They don't have the same types of alumni that can leave an huge financial endowment, unlike the tech sector.
So they're trying to fund things the way they can, without gouging the students for the six weeks of instruction. Most of the authors have pointers to the auction on their respective sites, so I'm fairly sure most of the approve of the use of their donations.
There are some fairly interesting discussions happening on the ARocket lists regarding the roll. Everyone has their pet theory:
Uneven nozzle erosion Uneven thrust from the hybrid grain Propellant (NOX) "sloshing" Failure of the RCS systems to correct for some thrust vectors end of the climb Aerodynamic issues Mike M.'s "nudged a control" failure combinations of the above
Any way you slice it, there aren't a whole slew of passengers who would like that kind of ride/risk. However, for a X-Prize winning event, this IS the type of thing test pilots will undertake. They have a different level of risk adversity.
There may or may not be failure modes that might create a lower atmosphere failure (with possible damage to craft). There are probably rolls and pitch that might result in an blacked out pilot (not many but some). There are a lot of possible abort modes for this craft and flight profile though.
It'd be great if they could disclose what really happened, but they have the deal with Virgin now, and Scaled is fairly tight-lipped about technical matters in the first place.
We'll have to wait and see what happens Monday really. Scaled is making their stab at the history books, and best of luck to them for it.
This stuff is hard. There are risks. Progress is sometimes messy.
I haven't checked in on the Falcon in some time, since they stalled a while back. I'd thought that the thrust was rather high for passengers, but again it has been a while.
I was just saying, in terms of choices, I'd much rather take a Scaled or Armadillo spacecraft than something that (I'd thought) had a RSD onboard.
Time to re-re-read up on the Falcon news... ahh, now I remember why, the entire SpaceX site used to be flash only.
Yeah, except for the fact that the Falcon vehicles aren't currently man-rated IIRC.
I dunno, the thought of riding something with a self-destruct (sorry, range safety device) mode just does not make me a happy camper.
I think the visionaries understand that space flight is hard but not nearly as hard as some people make it out to be (Boeing, LockMart) and they figure it's worth a stab to see if they can be a big player in yet another industry.
Bigelow Aerospace has hired Musk's SpaceX firm to launch some of his initial inflatable modules/stations. So I'd assume the plan would be to have the Falcon or similar delivery system put up the hardware and use these orbital shuttles to get the people up there.
I haven't had my coffee yet, but IIRC John posted something about them all sitting behind the nice concrete bunker with only the wireless antenna in direct view of the rocket.
Neither of them is a civilian spaceport. The site has to get a HUGE amount of paperwork. EPA, etc. Also, the military ranges tend to want termination devices on spacecraft (the missle model of recovery)
They're making some really neat progress with the jet vane concept, but until they get site and vehicle clearance they won't be coming close to catching up with the Scaled Team.
That's ok though, each team: Scaled, Armadillo, XCor, DaVinci, etc. is approaching things differently, so who knows we might end up with a heterogenous and competitive rocket industry.
Heck, there's even JP Aerospace with their airship/ballon platform to orbit method!
this isn't a part of the final attempt, just another one of their (very comprehensive) tests. I would guess, based off of their findings in this flight profile, that they will attempt a full or near full altitude test flight before offically attempting the 2 flights in 2 weeks test.
My WAG would be another flight in early-mid June, barring any vehicle issues.
Followed by the 2 flights on or near the 4th and the 17th/20th of July dates.
You *are* aware that Allen donated/invested some very large sum to Scaled, right? Something along the lines of 10 Million IIRC.
Or that he's donating millions for the VLA (aptly named after him) for the SETI programme? Or that he's invested in at least one other rocket programme/company at the moment?
Or how's reaching millions of children worldwide with treatments for curable diseases? The Gates Foundation does a huge amount of that kind of work. Since the number of people they reach IS objectively measurable, you should be thrilled.
I know its popular to bash Gates and Allen, but really. While they don't spend all their money on charitable causes, they do spend some significant amounts of money on *real* charities and noble causes. I'm not counting donations of WIN-systems to schools in that, obviously.
Now perhaps "all rich people who you don't like" aren't donating directly to some "objectively measured goal" that *you* feel is important, but they do reach other people in need with their philantrophy.
Not only has Scaled made several shots, but currently there's a lot of speculation that the Scaled folks are aiming for the culmination of the second flight on either July 17th or the 20th (both rather significant rocketry dates IIRC).
Armadillo has done hover tests as well. The UK group (starchaser) has done some unmanned testing of their rocket infrastructure as well. I know the DaVinci team is also planning at least one launch attempt this summer/early fall as well.
Too bad about Armadillo Aerospace, unless the jet vanes really work well, it doesn't sound like they'll be launching this year. Still, their vehicle programme might go farther for the orbital race.
you might try checking the Scaled, Armadillo Aerospace, DaVinci team, Starchaser sites. The X-prize site is also useful.
XCor looks like they're going to get there, but they are the ready-steady course and are designing their way instead of for XPrize compliance.
The reason that most of Neoteris' clients seem to be using it is for the same reason we are: the client doesn't have to be at their home/field machine, with a clear IPSec tunnel to the firewall.
This is very attractive for field users, consultants (shudder) and obnoxious executives. They only have to remember a webaddress instead of "complicated" VPN setups. Have 443 access?, you're in.
It is NOT a 100% or even in my estimation a 90% solution, but since it meets my 80-20 rule metric, it gets a nod.
Personally, as the person who has to deal with the security complications this creates, I would rather have everyone come login locally. (can you say virus/security nightmare vectors?)
You can nail down the environment by user group. So they can or cannot connect to: SMB shares, web resources, ssh sessions, etc.
They're getting more exotic in 3.2 and higher versions, allowing some NetBIOS activity and more of the traditional "Full Ride VPN".
They're still struggling with WebDAV for some reason, but overall making very quick and positive progress.
Also, once item of convenince is that it allows your field user to connect, even if they are doing so from behind a firewalled resource, 80/443 are generally available to people if they are on the net.
If you've ever had to troubleshoot a thousand people's IPsec client connections, you know what a pain firewalls in the middle of the stream can wreck.
No choice made yet, I believe both competitors have now performed full length runs, essentially ground level endurance runs of the same time as the expected launch runs.
While they may select one hybrid provider now, testing an engine on the ground is not always the same as testing it in flight (which is why this stuff really IS rocket science).
I'm still boggled that eAc is allowed to perform rocket tests over waterways in Florida (check their test videos). There must be a lot of exemptions near the Cape for rocket-related testing.
What is really interesting is that some of the newer exploits stil affect systems even with patch-26 applied. Not to mention that NT4 workstations and servers appear to be on SP6a and that might still not patch things.
Production networks are complex, sometimes you can't kickin a reboot or even change services, especially when you're talking about the core method Microsoft uses to make things 'easier'.
That and now the various viral writers are producing payloads that hit the DCOM ports (mumu.a variants). Looks like the joyousness of more code red loss of productivity (shoulda patched, been warned but, 'naw we'll be ok').
Slashdot Mirror
From a post by Matthew Ross: http://spacefellowship.com/Forum/viewtopic.php?p=38466#p38466
"Both of those were "LLC-style" hops where the mod flies gently up to about 55 meters and then gently back down.
Since both of those went well, we decided to do a "boosted hop," where instead of gently flying up and down, it goes full throttle for about three seconds, coasts to apogee at low throttle, falls quickly back down and then throttles up before touching down"
A 5 second serch on Wiki: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closed_loop
"A closed-loop control system is one in which an input forcing function is determined in part by the system response. The measured response of a physical system is compared with a desired response. The difference between these two responses initiates actions that will result in the actual response of the system to approach the desired response."
So, engine generates thrust X, desired target of which is X+Y. Throttle is increased until measured response is X+Y. At which point the throttle is maintained or decreased, depending on what part of the flight profile the vehicle is in.
And as a bonus, part of the group AA belongs (the Commercial Spaceflight Federation?) to is trying to establish multiple markets for commercial enterprise. If they can give away a couple science payloads, and then later have a relatively cheap offering (sub 7-figure) for one-off or repeat experiments in the same flight profile, they demonstrate a new market. It's actually rather difficult for universities to get payloads to near-space. Year(s) waiting times mean that sometimes students and staff never see their projects take off (literally).
As someone who has tried three or four times now to "get it" I have to concur with your assessment. Either you have to know and incredibly active social network of people already in, so that you can be guided and have shit explained to you, or you're stuck with the non-intuitive nature of the UI, world and environments.
Not to mention the furries, the sex clubs and the walking dildos. Or the assholes who setup content bombs that pop you.
Second Life is user created, but it has all the unattractive qualities of a fan-fic slush pile and MUSH combined, graphics that are from the mid-90s, and performance of a P90 trying to play DOOM3.
The first thing they really need to nail is the UI for just plain interacting. Then they need to nail the "base" avatar creation. As is, you can spend hours creating your first avatar and it will still look like shit, whereas in most other virtual worlds, you fiddle with a few sliders and have a respectable-looking avatar.
I'd love to find a reason to stay, but Second Life doesn't seem to want to "get it" to the idea of bringing new people in who want a world on par with the other virtual worlds they are already interacting in. If aesthetics/content/performance don't matter, then I could use IM and "myspace" much more effectively in networking than Second life will ever be. If they do matter, then they need base content and performance that is of peer-quality to the current state of the industry.
That's the thing about the modern IPSes though.
/, su to root, etc.
You don't plug and pray. You install and interate as you learn the product. You don't turn the tool to IPS everything mode from the get go.
You start out in IDS mode, monitoring for everything. Then you decide which of the types of alerts it is capturing properly, say worms in this instance.
Then you flip the bit for IPS mode for those signatures or anolomies ONLY. And the traffic of that specific type gets blocked, not everything to or from the hosts. Specific traffic only.
If you get reports of something getting blocked, you 'detune' it to IDS mode until you can figure out why it is triggering. Luckily you can get packet capture for most of the enterprise IPSes, so it is usually fairly easy to peg why something false-positived. Some even have an emergency 'flip to IDS mode only'.
You iterate this process until you have a comfort level for the IPS and IDS balancing act. Sigs or types of traffic you're worried false positive too much? Keep them in IDS mode or feedback to the provider that you're getting too much noise! Pretty sure that something on Kazaa ports using Kazaa commands is probably Kazaa or a Kazaa worm? Use IPS to block that specific traffic.
None of the enterprise network people I've talked to would enable to 'Big Red Button' automation script, though. Definitely have the SoC or NoC check the alert and then have them make routing changes. Otherwise, just let the IPS drop/reset the 'bad' traffic.
The 'unknown application breakage' is definitely a problem, especially the closer to the data core you get. I would slowly enable things one at a time, and take a slow and steady approach. The last thing you want to do is break some 100M USD application because you set a sig to block!
As other posters have commented, this does relatively little against a well prepared intruder, but it will hopefully clear off the bottom 90% of your incidents so that you can watch or react to things in a more focused manner. Also, some of the IPSes do check for common single intruder commands , like rm -rf
Clarion funding has always been tight. This is a program for students in a specific genre of writing that is not generally taught/funded in most writing programs.
Writers never make a ton of money, with some notable exceptions. And most of those make thier "real money" off of other properties (film, etc). The same for being an instructor of writers, or a student in writing program. They don't have the same types of alumni that can leave an huge financial endowment, unlike the tech sector.
So they're trying to fund things the way they can, without gouging the students for the six weeks of instruction. Most of the authors have pointers to the auction on their respective sites, so I'm fairly sure most of the approve of the use of their donations.
There are some fairly interesting discussions happening on the ARocket lists regarding the roll. Everyone has their pet theory:
Uneven nozzle erosion
Uneven thrust from the hybrid grain
Propellant (NOX) "sloshing"
Failure of the RCS systems to correct for some thrust vectors end of the climb
Aerodynamic issues
Mike M.'s "nudged a control" failure
combinations of the above
Any way you slice it, there aren't a whole slew of passengers who would like that kind of ride/risk. However, for a X-Prize winning event, this IS the type of thing test pilots will undertake. They have a different level of risk adversity.
There may or may not be failure modes that might create a lower atmosphere failure (with possible damage to craft). There are probably rolls and pitch that might result in an blacked out pilot (not many but some). There are a lot of possible abort modes for this craft and flight profile though.
It'd be great if they could disclose what really happened, but they have the deal with Virgin now, and Scaled is fairly tight-lipped about technical matters in the first place.
We'll have to wait and see what happens Monday really. Scaled is making their stab at the history books, and best of luck to them for it.
This stuff is hard. There are risks. Progress is sometimes messy.
Can you find a reference? Because all I see is reference to the X-Prize Cup which is entirely different than a "X-Prize a year" concept.
The X-Prize Cup is a bit more oriented towards "racing" team competition than as a stepping stone towards commercial space travel/tourism.
Not that the racing concept isn't useful for publicity and development of parts of the playing field, but they aren't the same prizes.
Or the Sarbanes-Oxley Act for financial reporting which has major public company requirements starting this winter and next spring.
Ahh, thanks. My recollection must have been off.
I haven't checked in on the Falcon in some time, since they stalled a while back. I'd thought that the thrust was rather high for passengers, but again it has been a while.
I was just saying, in terms of choices, I'd much rather take a Scaled or Armadillo spacecraft than something that (I'd thought) had a RSD onboard.
Time to re-re-read up on the Falcon news... ahh, now I remember why, the entire SpaceX site used to be flash only.
Yeah, except for the fact that the Falcon vehicles aren't currently man-rated IIRC.
I dunno, the thought of riding something with a self-destruct (sorry, range safety device) mode just does not make me a happy camper.
I think the visionaries understand that space flight is hard but not nearly as hard as some people make it out to be (Boeing, LockMart) and they figure it's worth a stab to see if they can be a big player in yet another industry.
Bigelow Aerospace has hired Musk's SpaceX firm to launch some of his initial inflatable modules/stations. So I'd assume the plan would be to have the Falcon or similar delivery system put up the hardware and use these orbital shuttles to get the people up there.
I haven't had my coffee yet, but IIRC John posted something about them all sitting behind the nice concrete bunker with only the wireless antenna in direct view of the rocket.
Neither of them is a civilian spaceport. The site has to get a HUGE amount of paperwork. EPA, etc. Also, the military ranges tend to want termination devices on spacecraft (the missle model of recovery)
They're making some really neat progress with the jet vane concept, but until they get site and vehicle clearance they won't be coming close to catching up with the Scaled Team.
That's ok though, each team: Scaled, Armadillo, XCor, DaVinci, etc. is approaching things differently, so who knows we might end up with a heterogenous and competitive rocket industry.
Heck, there's even JP Aerospace with their airship/ballon platform to orbit method!
this isn't a part of the final attempt, just another one of their (very comprehensive) tests. I would guess, based off of their findings in this flight profile, that they will attempt a full or near full altitude test flight before offically attempting the 2 flights in 2 weeks test.
My WAG would be another flight in early-mid June, barring any vehicle issues.
Followed by the 2 flights on or near the 4th and the 17th/20th of July dates.
But what do I know, I just spectate.
You *are* aware that Allen donated/invested some very large sum to Scaled, right? Something along the lines of 10 Million IIRC.
Or that he's donating millions for the VLA (aptly named after him) for the SETI programme? Or that he's invested in at least one other rocket programme/company at the moment?
Or how's reaching millions of children worldwide with treatments for curable diseases? The Gates Foundation does a huge amount of that kind of work. Since the number of people they reach IS objectively measurable, you should be thrilled.
I know its popular to bash Gates and Allen, but really. While they don't spend all their money on charitable causes, they do spend some significant amounts of money on *real* charities and noble causes. I'm not counting donations of WIN-systems to schools in that, obviously.
Now perhaps "all rich people who you don't like" aren't donating directly to some "objectively measured goal" that *you* feel is important, but they do reach other people in need with their philantrophy.
Not only has Scaled made several shots, but currently there's a lot of speculation that the Scaled folks are aiming for the culmination of the second flight on either July 17th or the 20th (both rather significant rocketry dates IIRC).
Armadillo has done hover tests as well. The UK group (starchaser) has done some unmanned testing of their rocket infrastructure as well. I know the DaVinci team is also planning at least one launch attempt this summer/early fall as well.
Too bad about Armadillo Aerospace, unless the jet vanes really work well, it doesn't sound like they'll be launching this year. Still, their vehicle programme might go farther for the orbital race.
you might try checking the Scaled, Armadillo Aerospace, DaVinci team, Starchaser sites. The X-prize site is also useful.
XCor looks like they're going to get there, but they are the ready-steady course and are designing their way instead of for XPrize compliance.
Errr, as of mid January everyone who signed up for Live was admitted.
He's actually a fairly successful children's book writer, a fact mentioned in the Ask /. that was done close to a year ago, IIRC.
Re: SSH.
Works great, configuration option to limit who/where ssh tunnels can be established.
Use it to ssh to one of the boxes that I need to check at night. No problems from my end.
The reason that most of Neoteris' clients seem to be using it is for the same reason we are: the client doesn't have to be at their home/field machine, with a clear IPSec tunnel to the firewall.
This is very attractive for field users, consultants (shudder) and obnoxious executives. They only have to remember a webaddress instead of "complicated" VPN setups. Have 443 access?, you're in.
It is NOT a 100% or even in my estimation a 90% solution, but since it meets my 80-20 rule metric, it gets a nod.
Personally, as the person who has to deal with the security complications this creates, I would rather have everyone come login locally. (can you say virus/security nightmare vectors?)
You can nail down the environment by user group. So they can or cannot connect to: SMB shares, web resources, ssh sessions, etc.
They're getting more exotic in 3.2 and higher versions, allowing some NetBIOS activity and more of the traditional "Full Ride VPN".
They're still struggling with WebDAV for some reason, but overall making very quick and positive progress.
Also, once item of convenince is that it allows your field user to connect, even if they are doing so from behind a firewalled resource, 80/443 are generally available to people if they are on the net.
If you've ever had to troubleshoot a thousand people's IPsec client connections, you know what a pain firewalls in the middle of the stream can wreck.
Just some info.
Yeah, unfortunately the patch doesn't patch all systems. Especially networks with legacy servers.
No choice made yet, I believe both competitors have now performed full length runs, essentially ground level endurance runs of the same time as the expected launch runs.
While they may select one hybrid provider now, testing an engine on the ground is not always the same as testing it in flight (which is why this stuff really IS rocket science).
I'm still boggled that eAc is allowed to perform rocket tests over waterways in Florida (check their test videos). There must be a lot of exemptions near the Cape for rocket-related testing.
What is really interesting is that some of the newer exploits stil affect systems even with patch-26 applied. Not to mention that NT4 workstations and servers appear to be on SP6a and that might still not patch things.
Production networks are complex, sometimes you can't kickin a reboot or even change services, especially when you're talking about the core method Microsoft uses to make things 'easier'.
That and now the various viral writers are producing payloads that hit the DCOM ports (mumu.a variants). Looks like the joyousness of more code red loss of productivity (shoulda patched, been warned but, 'naw we'll be ok').
Mmmm, Trusted Computing.