With only one government owned destination to visit, I'd like to hear the business case that results in more than one commercial crew provider. The ISS can support six crew. Assuming crew rotations similar in length to the current 6 month expeditions and three person crew vehicles, there will be 16 launches between 2016 (when the commercial entities are likely ready to fly according to the NASA deputy administrator) and 2020, the planned ISS retirement date. Any company must recoup their investment over its share of those 16 flights. Note that this neglects the Russians, that any increase in crew size per launch reduces the number of flights, and that having more than one provider dilutes the pool. Once the current crop of companies do the math, the number of bidders will fall.
The companies will gain some efficiency from leveraging their cargo launchers, but that automatically reduces the field of competitors for crewed launches. There may be non-governmental entities that alter the playing field by providing additional destinations, but the question would then be what their business case is.
The end result will likely be one heavily subsidized company that the government will not be able to let fail.
Those who can afford to pay cash for an automobile in its entirety would be able to do so while those who have to take out a loan are again restricted to using a bank and thus the National ID card again. I paid cash for a car last year and was required to supply my Social Security number. When I complained, the dealer pointed out that the purchase form cites the paragraph from the USA Patriot Act that requires this. Moreover, my credit union has signs all over it indicating that anyone who opens a new account will have to provide their Social Security number under the terms of the USA Patriot Act.
The Democrats sold us down the pike in 2001 when they agreed to the Patriot Act. I don't believe that they are any better than Republicans except that they appear to have conveniently gained just a little bit of conscience ahead of the next election cycle.
Better yet, send the surviving Mercury astronauts up. They were the inspiration for Star Trek, as well as most folks who work in the space program today.
downloading nine critical security updates every month! No other OS gives me my money's worth of software like Windows. It's like getting a whole new OS every lunar cycle!
NASA, like any large organization, uses a variety of hardware new and old for different needs. NASA has some software that I have never seen a hint of in the OSS world, and which could be of major significance to outside users. While there has been talk of open-sourcing various projects, no one knew what the process would be. I'm glad to see that someone at Goddard has taken the lead on this.
It works the same way as the $20 service, but you use the APN wap.voicestream.com. The real intent is to support WAP and email on phones, but it can also be used to connect your laptop.
T-Mobile now offers free unlimited WAP over GPRS with all their calling plans. It does not use your plan minutes. The only restriction is that only ports 80, 110, and 25 are open., o no secure web sites can be accessed. I can connect my Powerbook through my cellphone using bluetooth, and get free web surfing and mail.
I just performed a my "once every six month" backup to CD-RWs, and found that the first three disks in my backup set could not be read or erased by any of Disk Utility, Toast, or Retrospect on OS X. The rest of the disks could be read and erased properly. The three that failed - all Memorex.
My parents still have pulse dialing precisely because the phone companies charge for tone dialing. The way my Dad sees it, he's probably forcing the phone company to maintain an ancient switch just to support him, so they are losing money by not giving him the tone dialing for free.
Since 70% of the postal codes will be in the middle of the ocean, I can't wait to send out snail mail to random addresses. "Return to sender: no creature with opposable thumbs was available to sign for delivery. Try back in 3 billion years."
I think Apple's Keychain is a good answer to this, especially if they could rig up iSync to sync Keychains between different computers. (The Keychain is an encrypted file that contains all your passwords, and can be moved from one computer to another.) Chimera (and any other program that wants to add the support) can store/retrieve passwords to/from the Keychain. All you need to know is the one password to unlock the Keychain. Right now, you have to manually copy the Keychain file between computers, but you could put it on any online storage you have available - no need for Microsoft in the loop at all.
Between the Russians and Americans, hundreds of people have now flown in space. All but two have been civil servants.
The ISS represents collusion between the spacefaring governments to keep ordinary people out of space. It has generally been a great success from that standpoint thus far. I sure hope that the Russians will continue to be desperate enough for cash to send the occassional private citizen. The US government probably never will.
In the late '70s, the local cable company in my hometown sent people door-to-door to sell the benefits of cable television. The biggest benefit that they touted was that there would be no commercials on cable channels since the networks were collecting money directly from the consumers. Within a year all the channels were showing advertising, except for the "premium" channels that only show their own (and affiliated) advertising. No matter what business model is selected, advertising will always be a guaranteed source of additional revenue. As a result, it will never go away.
When the MPAA sends notice that you are sharing copyrighted files from IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, you'll have documented evidence that they violated the law and the right to DOS their servers. If they do not produce the IP address, there is no evidence against you. Simple and neat.
TDRS aren't much use for deep space missions because their single access parabolic dish and multiple access phased array antennas point at the Earth and Earth-orbiting satellites, most of which are below the TDRS altitude. The TDRS space-to-ground link antenna has a limited gimbal range, so you can't just flip the spacecraft over to point away from the Earth. The antennas on TDRS HIJ do have enough azimuth gimbal range to see significantly past the limb of the Earth, but even a three-axis stabilized satellite is not a very stable platform for the extremely accurate pointing required to talk to very small spacecraft very far away with limited transmitting power. Using TDRS for deep space missions is an unlikely proposition at best.
Mr. Lampson is the congress-critter for the area around the Johnson Space Center, which is about to get hammered for inducing a $5 billion overrun on the International Space Station. The Houston Chronicle recently had an article stating that 4000 jobs were at risk at JSC (out of ~16,000 total). Lampson wants to be able to say that he tried to save jobs at JSC in order to bolster his re-election chances.
NASA can't manage the money it has
on
Space Wars
·
· Score: 1
NASA gets $15 billion per year, hardly a pittance, and has proved that it cannot successfully manage the money. Congress has approved $5 billion for the Space Launch Initiative over the next five years, and it's goal is solely to develop technology for new launch vehicles. Not the vehicles themselves; just the technology that would go into hypothetical vehicles (missions not yet defined). The SLI program is already confused because there is no end goal to it. This has to be one of the largest government R&D projects ever, but I doubt the public will see any substantial benefit to it. I agree that competition with China might give a new motivation to NASA, but I truly hope that the next space race will be between various organizations getting everyone who would like to go into space rather than just civil servants.
So does the CD crash Sony computers? Maybe Sony decided to produce a CD that would crash every other system to prove the superiority of their products. Naw, I doubt even a Japanese company would have this much foresight.
The Chinese should pay attention to the failures of the American and Russian manned space programs. Strict government control of access to space results in the loss of public interest and ultimately the reduction of the program to tasks that have been done over and over before. If the public knows that they will never have the chance to go themselves they will not support the program over other national priorities; even national pride only lasts for so long. If the Chinese were smart, they'd design their space program to be self-sustaining using the dollars of Western passengers right from the start. The line of people hoping to fly on the October Soyuz mission to ISS keeps growing; send some of them up. Design for a large number of paying passengers right from the start; create the volume market.
TDRS HIJ were designed for launch on an Atlas in order to reduce launch expenses.
Also, none of the articles I have read yet have indicated that TDRS I is leaking fuel. There are many other failures that could lead to a lack of fuel flow from one the tanks - a pinched line, failure of the pressurization system, bad bladder inside the tank, etc.
If you read Boeing's statement, they have confidence they can resolve the problem. After seeing Hughes (now Boeing) engineers slingshot a satellite around the moon a couple times to get it to a geosync orbit, I wouldn't underestimate what they can do in this case.
There has been a freeware utility, ApplWindows, available for 8 years that allows your application menu to show all the individual windows associated with an application. It is a system mod that works on OS 7 through 9.1 at least. See this link for info.
Under OS X, rather than searching through a pile of taskbar buttons called "http://www...", I right click on the Explorer icon in the dock and pick the window I want by it's full name. It works very much like ApplWindows works. The windows are logically tied to the application they belong to, and one click/drag combination gets me instantly to any window I want.
NASA is not going to like this. It sounds like the plan is to rotate the ISS crew rescue Soyuz capsule through the commercial space station for a couple weeks before sending both it and its crew on to the ISS. The crew would then fly the "old" Soyuz to the ground. If this is the case, the ISS is essentially subsidizing this commercial venture at the cost of knocking two weeks of life off of each Soyuz rescue vehicle at the ISS (they are only good for 6 months). Secondly, the ISS still gets the unwanted visitors during at the Soyuz switchover, which is all that Dennis Tito was there for. Thirdly, NASA may feel that the Russians do not have adequate Soyuz production capacity to support the ISS let alone this venture. If the ISS Crew Rescue Vehicle gets the axe (as is the plan under the Administration's budget), then a 6-person crew on the ISS will require 2 Soyuz capsules for escape - doubling the number currently required.
I hope that a commercial manned space venture of some type does succeed to break the governmental monopoly, but NASA and the other ISS partners are not going to be happy about this deal.
Slashdot Mirror
With only one government owned destination to visit, I'd like to hear the business case that results in more than one commercial crew provider. The ISS can support six crew. Assuming crew rotations similar in length to the current 6 month expeditions and three person crew vehicles, there will be 16 launches between 2016 (when the commercial entities are likely ready to fly according to the NASA deputy administrator) and 2020, the planned ISS retirement date. Any company must recoup their investment over its share of those 16 flights. Note that this neglects the Russians, that any increase in crew size per launch reduces the number of flights, and that having more than one provider dilutes the pool. Once the current crop of companies do the math, the number of bidders will fall. The companies will gain some efficiency from leveraging their cargo launchers, but that automatically reduces the field of competitors for crewed launches. There may be non-governmental entities that alter the playing field by providing additional destinations, but the question would then be what their business case is. The end result will likely be one heavily subsidized company that the government will not be able to let fail.
Better go look at the budget. Obama's budget *increases* NASA spending while removing its most visible mission. Basically, he plans on creating the next Lockheed or Boeing at taxpayer expense. http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/420990main_FY_201_%20Budget_Overview_1_Feb_2010.pdf
The Democrats sold us down the pike in 2001 when they agreed to the Patriot Act. I don't believe that they are any better than Republicans except that they appear to have conveniently gained just a little bit of conscience ahead of the next election cycle.
Better yet, send the surviving Mercury astronauts up. They were the inspiration for Star Trek, as well as most folks who work in the space program today.
downloading nine critical security updates every month! No other OS gives me my money's worth of software like Windows. It's like getting a whole new OS every lunar cycle!
NASA, like any large organization, uses a variety of hardware new and old for different needs. NASA has some software that I have never seen a hint of in the OSS world, and which could be of major significance to outside users. While there has been talk of open-sourcing various projects, no one knew what the process would be. I'm glad to see that someone at Goddard has taken the lead on this.
It works the same way as the $20 service, but you use the APN wap.voicestream.com. The real intent is to support WAP and email on phones, but it can also be used to connect your laptop.
T-Mobile now offers free unlimited WAP over GPRS with all their calling plans. It does not use your plan minutes. The only restriction is that only ports 80, 110, and 25 are open., o no secure web sites can be accessed. I can connect my Powerbook through my cellphone using bluetooth, and get free web surfing and mail.
I just performed a my "once every six month" backup to CD-RWs, and found that the first three disks in my backup set could not be read or erased by any of Disk Utility, Toast, or Retrospect on OS X. The rest of the disks could be read and erased properly. The three that failed - all Memorex.
My parents still have pulse dialing precisely because the phone companies charge for tone dialing. The way my Dad sees it, he's probably forcing the phone company to maintain an ancient switch just to support him, so they are losing money by not giving him the tone dialing for free.
Major Microsoft worm starts on Monday... Major power outage on East Coast on Thursday. You make the call!
Since 70% of the postal codes will be in the middle of the ocean, I can't wait to send out snail mail to random addresses. "Return to sender: no creature with opposable thumbs was available to sign for delivery. Try back in 3 billion years."
I think Apple's Keychain is a good answer to this, especially if they could rig up iSync to sync Keychains between different computers. (The Keychain is an encrypted file that contains all your passwords, and can be moved from one computer to another.) Chimera (and any other program that wants to add the support) can store/retrieve passwords to/from the Keychain. All you need to know is the one password to unlock the Keychain. Right now, you have to manually copy the Keychain file between computers, but you could put it on any online storage you have available - no need for Microsoft in the loop at all.
Between the Russians and Americans, hundreds of people have now flown in space. All but two have been civil servants. The ISS represents collusion between the spacefaring governments to keep ordinary people out of space. It has generally been a great success from that standpoint thus far. I sure hope that the Russians will continue to be desperate enough for cash to send the occassional private citizen. The US government probably never will.
In the late '70s, the local cable company in my hometown sent people door-to-door to sell the benefits of cable television. The biggest benefit that they touted was that there would be no commercials on cable channels since the networks were collecting money directly from the consumers. Within a year all the channels were showing advertising, except for the "premium" channels that only show their own (and affiliated) advertising. No matter what business model is selected, advertising will always be a guaranteed source of additional revenue. As a result, it will never go away.
As long as the resultant disk plays in your DVD player, it doesn't matter what burner you use.
When the MPAA sends notice that you are sharing copyrighted files from IP xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx, you'll have documented evidence that they violated the law and the right to DOS their servers. If they do not produce the IP address, there is no evidence against you. Simple and neat.
TDRS aren't much use for deep space missions because their single access parabolic dish and multiple access phased array antennas point at the Earth and Earth-orbiting satellites, most of which are below the TDRS altitude. The TDRS space-to-ground link antenna has a limited gimbal range, so you can't just flip the spacecraft over to point away from the Earth. The antennas on TDRS HIJ do have enough azimuth gimbal range to see significantly past the limb of the Earth, but even a three-axis stabilized satellite is not a very stable platform for the extremely accurate pointing required to talk to very small spacecraft very far away with limited transmitting power. Using TDRS for deep space missions is an unlikely proposition at best.
Mr. Lampson is the congress-critter for the area around the Johnson Space Center, which is about to get hammered for inducing a $5 billion overrun on the International Space Station. The Houston Chronicle recently had an article stating that 4000 jobs were at risk at JSC (out of ~16,000 total). Lampson wants to be able to say that he tried to save jobs at JSC in order to bolster his re-election chances.
NASA gets $15 billion per year, hardly a pittance, and has proved that it cannot successfully manage the money. Congress has approved $5 billion for the Space Launch Initiative over the next five years, and it's goal is solely to develop technology for new launch vehicles. Not the vehicles themselves; just the technology that would go into hypothetical vehicles (missions not yet defined). The SLI program is already confused because there is no end goal to it. This has to be one of the largest government R&D projects ever, but I doubt the public will see any substantial benefit to it. I agree that competition with China might give a new motivation to NASA, but I truly hope that the next space race will be between various organizations getting everyone who would like to go into space rather than just civil servants.
So does the CD crash Sony computers? Maybe Sony decided to produce a CD that would crash every other system to prove the superiority of their products. Naw, I doubt even a Japanese company would have this much foresight.
The Chinese should pay attention to the failures of the American and Russian manned space programs. Strict government control of access to space results in the loss of public interest and ultimately the reduction of the program to tasks that have been done over and over before. If the public knows that they will never have the chance to go themselves they will not support the program over other national priorities; even national pride only lasts for so long. If the Chinese were smart, they'd design their space program to be self-sustaining using the dollars of Western passengers right from the start. The line of people hoping to fly on the October Soyuz mission to ISS keeps growing; send some of them up. Design for a large number of paying passengers right from the start; create the volume market.
TDRS HIJ were designed for launch on an Atlas in order to reduce launch expenses. Also, none of the articles I have read yet have indicated that TDRS I is leaking fuel. There are many other failures that could lead to a lack of fuel flow from one the tanks - a pinched line, failure of the pressurization system, bad bladder inside the tank, etc. If you read Boeing's statement, they have confidence they can resolve the problem. After seeing Hughes (now Boeing) engineers slingshot a satellite around the moon a couple times to get it to a geosync orbit, I wouldn't underestimate what they can do in this case.
There has been a freeware utility, ApplWindows, available for 8 years that allows your application menu to show all the individual windows associated with an application. It is a system mod that works on OS 7 through 9.1 at least. See this link for info. Under OS X, rather than searching through a pile of taskbar buttons called "http://www...", I right click on the Explorer icon in the dock and pick the window I want by it's full name. It works very much like ApplWindows works. The windows are logically tied to the application they belong to, and one click/drag combination gets me instantly to any window I want.
NASA is not going to like this. It sounds like the plan is to rotate the ISS crew rescue Soyuz capsule through the commercial space station for a couple weeks before sending both it and its crew on to the ISS. The crew would then fly the "old" Soyuz to the ground. If this is the case, the ISS is essentially subsidizing this commercial venture at the cost of knocking two weeks of life off of each Soyuz rescue vehicle at the ISS (they are only good for 6 months). Secondly, the ISS still gets the unwanted visitors during at the Soyuz switchover, which is all that Dennis Tito was there for. Thirdly, NASA may feel that the Russians do not have adequate Soyuz production capacity to support the ISS let alone this venture. If the ISS Crew Rescue Vehicle gets the axe (as is the plan under the Administration's budget), then a 6-person crew on the ISS will require 2 Soyuz capsules for escape - doubling the number currently required. I hope that a commercial manned space venture of some type does succeed to break the governmental monopoly, but NASA and the other ISS partners are not going to be happy about this deal.