It'd stop working about about a month or two and that'd just be more facility for the Russians to spend time repairing.
The Shuttle simply isn't speced for long term exposure to space. The fact that it doesn't fall apart for the 14 days that it is typically on-orbit is a result of constant care and attention on the ground.
The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
The ISS program people will occasionally say "I could talk to you all day long about the great science we're doing on the ISS" and THEN THEY DON'T. Maybe if they talked "all day" about it now and then people wouldn't refer to their project as "busy work" for the space program.
But if you don't care about science, maybe you only care about exploration, then I guess you have to go with the argument that the lessons we've learnt about maintaining space systems on the space station will be invaluable for going to Mars.. and we're definitely not ready yet.
Umm.. that's all 3 options. Even if the shuttle gets extended, it will only be extended up until Orion is flying. And if COTS-D comes along, that will change things too.
The Shuttle/ISS subcommittee headed by Dr Sally Ride has presented three options:
1. Do nothing, let the shuttle stop flying at the end of 2010 and let the station be de-orbited at the end of 2016. 2. Fly 1 more mission, and still de-orbit the station at the end of 2016. 3. Extend station operations through to the end of 2020 and fly more shuttle missions to support it.
The options explain how to do it, what funding will be required, and the consequences on other programs.
The President and the new NASA Administrator will take these options and decide which to implement, depending on what funding they can get from Congress.
The committee is not chartered with making any recommendations, and the options are not final until the report is released, around Aug 31.
You can give your opinions to the committee via the website: http://hsf.nasa.gov/
We're not part of your religion, we don't know the dogma, if you want to convert us you have to go over the same old ground. Take it as an opportunity to tune up your references.. you have references right..
Why? Negroponte made it clear that he doesn't care about Linux or open source.. he went to Apple first to get the OS remember? He probably went to Microsoft too. I expect when he saw that Microsoft was interested he saw it as an opportunity to dump Linux. All that said, there were other people who definitely were in it for the "million of converts", whether it be to open source in general or to python in particular.
Do we really need a lab study to tell us this? Even the article admits that we've known for decades now that users will happily accept a broken cert. There was a case where the Mozilla people received a complaint from a security researcher saying their certificate checking was broken because he was connecting to a known trusted website and her certificate wasn't broken, so it must be Mozilla's fault - they concluded that it was man-in-the-middle attack and she later apologized. If a security researcher can't even tell, how are my parents supposed to?
How about this for a solution? Instead of a "Privacy Shield" you have a "Security Shield".. when you press the Security Shield button you enter Lock Down Mode and your web browser will refuse to display pages that are not retrieved via TLS. You could also enable some extra paranoia settings.. turn off plugins, Flash, etc. When you've finished your banking, or whatever, you press the Security Shield button again and now you can go back to Facebook.
Why is it that every time someone mentions Ontologies I can't help but think of pseudoscience.. and that typically makes me think of scientology. Oh, that's right, because its all bullshit. Ontological classification is completely arbitrary.. and typically only helpful when it is specifically tailored to a particular application.
time to market.. heard of it? They hyped up their product then dragged their feet, by the time it was ready, alternatives had been found. This is the reason why the stealth startup was invented.
ahh what comedy. I would agree with you that nuclear is better than *, and I sure hope that fear of the global warming bogey man causes the ridiculous regulation preventing the creation of new plants to be freed up, but boy, are you brainwashed.
There's no evidence that shows that human activities are the cause of global warming. There's correlation data, but correlation != causation. You know this, I know this, but whenever talking to the drooling public we're required to forget about it because they don't *care*. They see correlation evidence as proof, especially if it's a lovable idiot that is presenting it to them.
Besides, there's easier ways to point out why the global warming hoopla is bullshit. No-one has a working model of the weather of this planet. No-one has any more the ability to predict the global temperatures for next year than they do to predict the best stocks to invest in for next year. It's guess work, and not very good guess work.
And even if you believe the bullshit guess work, does anyone actually read it? No-one but the most craziest people are saying global warming will have any effect on human life on this planet within the next 50 years. The legitimate scientific community unanimously agrees that any effect that global warming will have will be gradual.
Predicting disaster is the hardest of all predictions to make. You literally have to be psychic.. because any avoidable disaster will be avoided. You're not going to get up one day and find sea levels have raised 200 feet and we're all going to drown. It can't happen like that. What may happen is that waterfront property will sell for less as the square footage goes down.. and maybe, eventually, the property will be abandoned or, more likely, they'll buy some sandbags. Not as sexy as "we're all gunna die" but hey.
Heh, yeah. See, the problem was that the safety of the orbiter was dominated by the safely of the SSME, because the orbiter was designed to be reusable, the SSME could be speced to such incredible reliability because it wouldn't be thrown away after every launch.. you could amortize that cost across the long life of a single engine. Of course, this was all for a design that was meant to just shuttle people up and down and a little payload.. not for a space truck. To get the space truck concept you had to tack on solid rocket boosters (o-ring failures) and an external tank (falling debris). All of a sudden your safety assumptions are completely wrong, but what are you gunna do, go back to the drawing board? Explain that to Congress.
Who says they will be finished sooner? Citation needed. The people offering to make these man-rated boosters say it will take them 5.5 years (and they're often wrong by 2x to 3x their estimates). On the other hand, there's SpaceX, who will happily deliver a manned Dragon capsule in 2.5 years after they get the $350 million funding.. of course, that's not going to help you launch the Orion.
To date, no-one has published details on how they intend to solve the communications problem. The prize has set the bar a tad too high on that one. About the only way to do it is to put a very big antenna on the lander. Even if you use inflatables you're looking at a massive bit of hardware there. It really is the mass variable for the mission. Unfortunately, most all the competitors are rovers people, not rocket people.
Heh, I remember this video. It's about as realistic as the prize.
1. Interest in launch watching goes up 100,000% 2. The rocket is so damn fast that it can get the lander to the Moon in seconds. 3. Doesn't even need a stage to enter lunar orbit. 4. The lander doesn't even have a main engine.. apparently RCS is all you need to land on the Moon now. 5. Uplink antennas only need to be the size of your typical hand held umbrella. 6. The rover doesn't need to fit in the lander. 7. It doesn't even need an antenna. 8. Rutan is great, all hail SpaceShipOne. The reusable, reliable, less expensive revolution is here! It's so reusable it never flew again. 9. "The competition ignited a revolution that will launch thousands of civilian passengers into space." Any day now. 10. "The Moon.. only days away".. way to point out your own spin-doctoring, see point 2. 11. re Apollo "These early missions learned much about the Moon.. but they were much too expensive.. and lacked any long term plan, so in 1972 Moon 1.0 was abandoned." Ohhhh.. that's why it was abandoned.. cause there was no long term plan! I thought it was because the public lost interest.. see point 1. 12. Cut to terribly interested people, thanks to the Internet! 13. Queue weasel words about how resources on the Moon "could" provide Earth with clean affordable limitless energy. 14. "Much of the lunar soil is silicon, a key ingredient in solar cells".. *facepalm*. 15. Solar Power Satellites using lunar resources.. and there's that weasel word again. 16. Bonus prizes for doing impossible things.. I mean, more impossible than just winning the major prize at a profit.. which is the only reason why you'd care about the bonuses. The one mentioned is lunar ice.. because landing at the poles is so obviously easy with today's super rockets, see point 2. 17. Apparently shining a torch at the ground is sufficient to do spectral analysis to determine the presence of lunar ice. Someone call the LCROSS folks! 18. Bonus for surviving the lunar night, complete with kitschy "wake up now little rover" scene. 19. Oh, and the most stupid Bonus prize of them all. A prize for the team that can find artifacts of previous lunar exploration. Yes, that's right, because if it wasn't hard enough that we suggest you land at the pole, we're now suggesting that you drive to the equator.. or maybe you only do this bonus, in which case you "only" have to do a precision landing, should be no trouble with the advanced lander propulsion system, see point 4. 20. More shots on the lander approaching the Moon at warp factor 5, with no orbital insertion engine and no descent engine. 21. "... and this time we're planning to stay." queue music.
This video, most graphically, demonstrated to me that the GLXP is a gimmick, backed by morons with no serious understanding of the amazing achievement that Apollo really was. Apparently the prize will be won by bored teenagers who will subsequently shrug off the whole "space is hard" myth and go build a lunar base to make constellations of solar power satellites to stick it in the face of their baby boomer grandparents who didn't have the vision to do it the first time around and subsequently destroyed the planet./rant
Slashdot Mirror
It'd stop working about about a month or two and that'd just be more facility for the Russians to spend time repairing.
The Shuttle simply isn't speced for long term exposure to space. The fact that it doesn't fall apart for the 14 days that it is typically on-orbit is a result of constant care and attention on the ground.
Actually, there's ITAR restrictions on selling the station to anyone who would conceivably want it.
Can you believe that? The Russians have daily access to the ISS but selling it to them would be an ITAR issue.
Not that there's any evidence they are willing or able to buy it.
The ISS is the most amazing laboratory ever built. Vast amounts of awesome science is done on it. Thing is, NASA is so completely inept at communicating this to the public that even space geeks, like myself, have no idea what the hell they do up there.
The ISS program people will occasionally say "I could talk to you all day long about the great science we're doing on the ISS" and THEN THEY DON'T. Maybe if they talked "all day" about it now and then people wouldn't refer to their project as "busy work" for the space program.
But if you don't care about science, maybe you only care about exploration, then I guess you have to go with the argument that the lessons we've learnt about maintaining space systems on the space station will be invaluable for going to Mars.. and we're definitely not ready yet.
Umm.. that's all 3 options. Even if the shuttle gets extended, it will only be extended up until Orion is flying. And if COTS-D comes along, that will change things too.
The Shuttle/ISS subcommittee headed by Dr Sally Ride has presented three options:
1. Do nothing, let the shuttle stop flying at the end of 2010 and let the station be de-orbited at the end of 2016.
2. Fly 1 more mission, and still de-orbit the station at the end of 2016.
3. Extend station operations through to the end of 2020 and fly more shuttle missions to support it.
The options explain how to do it, what funding will be required, and the consequences on other programs.
The President and the new NASA Administrator will take these options and decide which to implement, depending on what funding they can get from Congress.
The committee is not chartered with making any recommendations, and the options are not final until the report is released, around Aug 31.
You can give your opinions to the committee via the website: http://hsf.nasa.gov/
Wow, you almost made an argument there.
What consequences?
We're not part of your religion, we don't know the dogma, if you want to convert us you have to go over the same old ground. Take it as an opportunity to tune up your references.. you have references right..
The emissions have had a warming effect.
Oh, clearly you don't have references.
Why? Negroponte made it clear that he doesn't care about Linux or open source.. he went to Apple first to get the OS remember? He probably went to Microsoft too. I expect when he saw that Microsoft was interested he saw it as an opportunity to dump Linux. All that said, there were other people who definitely were in it for the "million of converts", whether it be to open source in general or to python in particular.
Do we really need a lab study to tell us this? Even the article admits that we've known for decades now that users will happily accept a broken cert. There was a case where the Mozilla people received a complaint from a security researcher saying their certificate checking was broken because he was connecting to a known trusted website and her certificate wasn't broken, so it must be Mozilla's fault - they concluded that it was man-in-the-middle attack and she later apologized. If a security researcher can't even tell, how are my parents supposed to?
How about this for a solution? Instead of a "Privacy Shield" you have a "Security Shield".. when you press the Security Shield button you enter Lock Down Mode and your web browser will refuse to display pages that are not retrieved via TLS. You could also enable some extra paranoia settings.. turn off plugins, Flash, etc. When you've finished your banking, or whatever, you press the Security Shield button again and now you can go back to Facebook.
Ya, so: rock OLPC hard place.
Hopefully everyone else learnt the lesson. If you want to compete with Microsoft/Intel/etc you have to strike quickly.
Why is it that every time someone mentions Ontologies I can't help but think of pseudoscience.. and that typically makes me think of scientology. Oh, that's right, because its all bullshit. Ontological classification is completely arbitrary.. and typically only helpful when it is specifically tailored to a particular application.
time to market.. heard of it? They hyped up their product then dragged their feet, by the time it was ready, alternatives had been found. This is the reason why the stealth startup was invented.
In particular, trying to cram yet more hardware into it to meet the demands of the Microsoft lobby.
If they'd just made the widget, put it into production, and focused on the sales, they would have made a difference.
ahh what comedy. I would agree with you that nuclear is better than *, and I sure hope that fear of the global warming bogey man causes the ridiculous regulation preventing the creation of new plants to be freed up, but boy, are you brainwashed.
There's no evidence that shows that human activities are the cause of global warming. There's correlation data, but correlation != causation. You know this, I know this, but whenever talking to the drooling public we're required to forget about it because they don't *care*. They see correlation evidence as proof, especially if it's a lovable idiot that is presenting it to them.
Besides, there's easier ways to point out why the global warming hoopla is bullshit. No-one has a working model of the weather of this planet. No-one has any more the ability to predict the global temperatures for next year than they do to predict the best stocks to invest in for next year. It's guess work, and not very good guess work.
And even if you believe the bullshit guess work, does anyone actually read it? No-one but the most craziest people are saying global warming will have any effect on human life on this planet within the next 50 years. The legitimate scientific community unanimously agrees that any effect that global warming will have will be gradual.
Predicting disaster is the hardest of all predictions to make. You literally have to be psychic.. because any avoidable disaster will be avoided. You're not going to get up one day and find sea levels have raised 200 feet and we're all going to drown. It can't happen like that. What may happen is that waterfront property will sell for less as the square footage goes down.. and maybe, eventually, the property will be abandoned or, more likely, they'll buy some sandbags. Not as sexy as "we're all gunna die" but hey.
Another GLXP team was quoted as saying "we promise to stay outside the fence".
Heh, yeah. See, the problem was that the safety of the orbiter was dominated by the safely of the SSME, because the orbiter was designed to be reusable, the SSME could be speced to such incredible reliability because it wouldn't be thrown away after every launch.. you could amortize that cost across the long life of a single engine. Of course, this was all for a design that was meant to just shuttle people up and down and a little payload.. not for a space truck. To get the space truck concept you had to tack on solid rocket boosters (o-ring failures) and an external tank (falling debris). All of a sudden your safety assumptions are completely wrong, but what are you gunna do, go back to the drawing board? Explain that to Congress.
So far their record is better than any launch vehicle that has ever flown 5 times.
It's not like they're doing it alone.. they're getting plenty of help from NASA.
Who says they will be finished sooner? Citation needed. The people offering to make these man-rated boosters say it will take them 5.5 years (and they're often wrong by 2x to 3x their estimates). On the other hand, there's SpaceX, who will happily deliver a manned Dragon capsule in 2.5 years after they get the $350 million funding.. of course, that's not going to help you launch the Orion.
27 is a little over 100? Wow, I'd hate to see a lot over 100.
Oh, and do remember that the shuttle has no launch escape system, so just about any design with a launch escape system will be safer.
To be fair, it says a lot more about Elon Musk than it does about private companies in general.
To date, no-one has published details on how they intend to solve the communications problem. The prize has set the bar a tad too high on that one. About the only way to do it is to put a very big antenna on the lander. Even if you use inflatables you're looking at a massive bit of hardware there. It really is the mass variable for the mission. Unfortunately, most all the competitors are rovers people, not rocket people.
My last rant on the subject:
> Nice YouTube video on the Google Lunar X Prize competition:
>
> Moon 2.0: Join the Revolution.
> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9K4zosGUMBw
Heh, I remember this video. It's about as realistic as the prize.
1. Interest in launch watching goes up 100,000% .. way to point out your own .. but .. and lacked any long term plan, so in .. see point 1. .. *facepalm*.
2. The rocket is so damn fast that it can get the lander to the Moon in seconds.
3. Doesn't even need a stage to enter lunar orbit.
4. The lander doesn't even have a main engine.. apparently RCS is all
you need to land on the Moon now.
5. Uplink antennas only need to be the size of your typical hand held
umbrella.
6. The rover doesn't need to fit in the lander.
7. It doesn't even need an antenna.
8. Rutan is great, all hail SpaceShipOne. The reusable, reliable,
less expensive revolution is here! It's so reusable it never flew
again.
9. "The competition ignited a revolution that will launch thousands of
civilian passengers into space." Any day now.
10. "The Moon.. only days away"
spin-doctoring, see point 2.
11. re Apollo "These early missions learned much about the Moon
they were much too expensive
1972 Moon 1.0 was abandoned." Ohhhh.. that's why it was abandoned..
cause there was no long term plan! I thought it was because the
public lost interest
12. Cut to terribly interested people, thanks to the Internet!
13. Queue weasel words about how resources on the Moon "could" provide
Earth with clean affordable limitless energy.
14. "Much of the lunar soil is silicon, a key ingredient in solar
cells"
15. Solar Power Satellites using lunar resources.. and there's that
weasel word again.
16. Bonus prizes for doing impossible things.. I mean, more impossible
than just winning the major prize at a profit.. which is the only
reason why you'd care about the bonuses. The one mentioned is lunar
ice.. because landing at the poles is so obviously easy with today's
super rockets, see point 2.
17. Apparently shining a torch at the ground is sufficient to do
spectral analysis to determine the presence of lunar ice. Someone
call the LCROSS folks!
18. Bonus for surviving the lunar night, complete with kitschy "wake
up now little rover" scene.
19. Oh, and the most stupid Bonus prize of them all. A prize for the
team that can find artifacts of previous lunar exploration. Yes,
that's right, because if it wasn't hard enough that we suggest you
land at the pole, we're now suggesting that you drive to the equator..
or maybe you only do this bonus, in which case you "only" have to do a
precision landing, should be no trouble with the advanced lander
propulsion system, see point 4.
20. More shots on the lander approaching the Moon at warp factor 5,
with no orbital insertion engine and no descent engine.
21. "... and this time we're planning to stay." queue music.
This video, most graphically, demonstrated to me that the GLXP is a /rant
gimmick, backed by morons with no serious understanding of the amazing
achievement that Apollo really was. Apparently the prize will be won
by bored teenagers who will subsequently shrug off the whole "space is
hard" myth and go build a lunar base to make constellations of solar
power satellites to stick it in the face of their baby boomer
grandparents who didn't have the vision to do it the first time around
and subsequently destroyed the planet.
Watch the video deadshit.
Long story short: Theo rules with an iron fist and springs releases like pop quizzes.
Ya, the legal definition disagrees with you.. and I kinda think its about the only definition that counts.
If you want to overgeneralize the word don't be surprised when people look at you funny.
This is gunna take me days to read.