Grush's plan is sound as far as back-of-the-envelope estimates go. But there is more to this than money. Roughly half of NASA's HSF budget goes to projects that exist only to spend money. As in, you could cancel the projects, reduce NASA's budget by that amount, and you would still get the same amount of space exploration done. Unfortunately, when the budget crunch comes, those projects are never the first ones cancelled. So I think the key to effective long-term space exploration is to establish incremental and self-sustaining capabilities while resisting cost growth in the pork projects.
So, yeah, someday we can send astronauts to the moon. But first we need to figure out how to send people to orbit for "free". And we need to expose the pork projects for what they are while preventing infrastructure from being built around them. You can help! Don't buy the BS that NASA is going to send humans to Mars for 0.5% of the federal budget. When your Science Committee congress-person comes up for re-election, reward responsible oversight and not "vision".
Whatever you do, don't blow the school's money on a project that is going to be obsolete in five years. Obsolescence should be matched to your annual budget. For example, if you have $1000 a year to spend on something that will last three years, make sure you can replace it for ~$3000. No annual budget? Just buy books.
So the authors looked at the number of asteroids that it would be ***commercially profitable to mine with today's technology***, and they estimate ten? That's fantastic news! Let the asteroid mining begin! I am sure once those ten are mined out, the infrastructure will be in place to bring a thousand more within reach.
The singularity is here. It started a few decades ago, but we are only now noticing it because it is accelerating. Kurzweil forgot to consider variance in the capacity of human minds to adapt to change.
And yes, robot cars are one of the horsemen of the technologocalypse.
You really need to familiarize yourself with how crypto-currencies work. To a certain extent, it is the burden of the issuer to prove that their system is secure, so you can rail on how insecure digital, decentralized, and anonymous currency is all you want. However, consider this. Bitcoins are being used in everyday trade right now. The market cap is > $1B last I checked. The FIRST TIME the core algorithm is hacked to give someone free money, the total value of the system drops to $0. That $1B represents the discounted future value of the currency plus a certain level of speculation (and minus a large chunk of investors who don't understand what they are looking at). It includes our collective best guess as to how secure the system is. That is a lot of confidence in the system.
MintChip sounds pretty lame, but it shouldn't taint the efforts of better cryptocurrencies.
While they have restricted access to the paper that describes how they are going to do this, what Tito is going to do has already been revealed. Most of the sentences in the summary are wrong. Yes the mission will include humans. No it will not be bringing anything beyond what is required to keep the astronaut(s) alive. Astronaut training? You could fly this mission yourself tomorrow if you had the dedication and the planets were aligned. Which they aren't, and won't be until 2018. Word is that this will be a single launch of a Falcon Heavy with a Dragon capsule. Hardware cost could be less than $200 million.
The mission will fly by Mars but not orbit or land on it. Round trip will be roughly 500 days. Crew activities will involve posting photos of themselves with Mars in the background to Facebook, eating space food, and playing lots and lots of Angry Birds. It is possible that a flyby of Venus could be in the mission plan as well. If and when they return to Earth they will not be able to walk again without significant physical therapy and they will be known as the biggest bad-asses in the Solar System.
"Should the U.S. go back to its 'Let's put a man on the moon' ideology, or is the federal government fighting an uphill battle against newly emerging private space expeditions?"
Why is that the only choice? Why can't we do something useful in space, like build power plants or prospect for valuable minerals or, most pressingly, deflect asteroids? Those are worthy goals of a new space race. They are achievable with the resources we have.
Oh, right, because none of those involve sending humans to plant American flags on the rocks and planets of space. None of those provide a pretense for NASA to spend billions building a monster rocket that they can't finish and couldn't afford to fly if they did.
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
What makes you think this would be the case? All the test-based evaluation systems I have heard of measure performance above expectations. If you have two fifth grade teachers at the same school, and one's students perform significantly better at the end of the year, year after year, than the other's, that should be reflected in teacher evaluations. Those promoting the status quo seem to have a very difficult time understanding this aspect.
I'm pretty sure logos can be both copyrighted and trademarked. For example, the Coca-Cola logo is a registered trademark which has fallen into the public domain as the copyright term has expired. The current Pepsi logo, on the other hand, is copyrighted.
Very sad story. The plant had some odor problems in the beginning, but then it turned into a classic case of mass hysteria. People were calling in complaints on days when the plant wasn't even operating.
1. School gives laptop to student
2. Student reports laptop stolen, takes it home
3. School activates security feature, randomly catches student popping pills while doing homework
4. IT sends photo of student to principal to get laptop back
5. Idiot principal gives student "don't do drugs" talk instead
6. Student panics, tells parents the school is spying on everyone
7. Parents sue school
8. Media frenzy!
The previous comments list some good targets. When you go looking for them with your 4" telescope, here are some suggestions for giving your students the best viewing experience.
First off, when hunting for deep-sky objects like galaxies and nebula, wait for the Moon to go away. Otherwise it will light up the sky and wash everything out. Also, you're lucky if you live in a rural area, but if you don't, see if you can get away from the city lights.
Bringing a chair or, even better, an adjustable stool will help your students to look through the telescope. This gives your eye some stability and is usually compared to increasing your aperture by an inch or so in terms of the detail you will see.
Have your students sketch what they see. If they've forgotten how to draw, have them take some photos of the Moon through the telescope with their cell phones. It's easy to look at Mars and see a red ball, but if you have to draw it on a piece of paper, you notice all the details that you would have otherwise ignored.
Finally, some color filters might be a good investment. They can help increase the contrast for planetary targets, you can swap them out and compare what you see with each color, and you can have your students come up with an explanation why they see different details through each filter.
Picking a platform and sticking with it is what got us the stupendously expensive Space Shuttle and ISS. If an approach is demonstrably not working, we shouldn't just "stay the course" and hope for the best, we should try something new. What the Augustine committee found was that NASA was incapable of simultaneously operating a launch system while building a new one. NASA's current plan is to build two and operate them simultaneously. This plan is going to leave us stranded in low Earth orbit even if we eventually get a heavy lifter. All the alternatives would only field a single new launcher, and many of them make effective use of the resources we have already put into Ares I + Ares V. So far, we're maybe halfway done with Ares I, but it's a rocket we don't need and will cost at least $1 billion per year to operate if we finish it. Ares V hasn't even started yet, so, when comparing it to Saturn V and the alternatives, Ares V is the paper and Powerpoint rocket.
I'm afraid we're probably working with different definitions of what constitutes a colony. Admittedly we have a long way to go to get to self-sufficient space colonies. I cannot conceive of a definition that would be so far off that year-long space missions could be dismissed as an "amusement park ride".
Manned colonization of the cosmos is demonstrably not magical thinking. Over the past several decades we have come close to a permanent human presence in space, first with Mir, and then with the ISS. Self-sufficiency in space does still require some technological advancement, but we have within our grasp the ability to support a human settlement in Earth orbit. What has been missing until this point is the political will and economic incentive to make it happen. Calling those who accept this reality a "magical-religious cult" is unhelpful and ignorant.
As I understand it, these companies both plan on sending people straight up and returning them to the same place they took off from. This is wonderful, but impractical for anything but a joy ride. How about creating something that lands you at some other place on the earth's surface?
Three reasons: cost, flight rate, and physics. First, physics. If your spacecraft's design has enough energy to go straight up to the edge of space and then come back down, bleeding off that energy to go cross-country is going to reduce the altitude significantly. Adding more energy to a suborbital spacecraft is a difficult and expensive problem to solve. Second, no one is going to pay $100,000 just to get from point A to point B. People are reserving seats at those prices to have the experience of a lifetime. Finally, the only reasons for a spacecraft to shuttle passengers are to get them to someplace they couldn't go before, or to get them there more quickly than the alternatives. You can go from one end of the country to the other on a business jet quite a few times in between flights of the Lynx or SS2. That said, watch for advances in suborbital point to point spacecraft from the military.
I'm curious about the problems with LDCM. Did the private companies walk away from the project because the government was going to be the only customer? Or did they walk away because the government wasn't offering enough money to make a commercial solution profitable? If a COTS-style Landsat didn't work out because the government wasn't willing to offer enough money for the data, how much extra would have closed the business case? Would buying the data at market rates have cost more than building the LDCM has using procurement contracts?
There's a big difference between insured cargo and paying passengers. The passengers will, according to the Lockheed plan, have an effective escape mechanism available throughout the launch. Maybe the Atlas V will have no better reliability than the Space Shuttle. The only damages the passengers of a failed launch will be able to recover after floating safely to the ground will involve bruises from the acceleration of the escape rockets and the rough landing that follows.
Tool choices are not just an issue of personal taste. There are tools which are better than others, and there are some tools that are worth a lot of money because of the productivity gains that experienced programmers can get out of them. This is particularly true of debuggers.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that sells development tools, including tools for Linux.
Some bugs can be fiendishly difficult to diagnose, particularly bugs that involve timing, resource usage, random events, and memory corruption. If you run into a bug like this and your tools consist of vi, a shell, and gdb, you are either going to spend months trying to diagnose it, or you will have to ship your program with a known defect. You could instead get yourself a trace-capable debugger, run your program in it while logging the execution of every instruction, wait until the bug surfaces, then step backwards through the program until the point where things start to go awry. I have used a debugger like this to solve problems that I would not be able to solve with, for example, Eclipse. I admit there are a lot of tools that make things easier by hiding the details of source repository checkouts and building projects, and I tend to avoid them in favor of the command line equivalents that can be scripted. When a tool provides me a better view of how my program works, it's worth using.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't know that. Thanks!
Grush's plan is sound as far as back-of-the-envelope estimates go. But there is more to this than money. Roughly half of NASA's HSF budget goes to projects that exist only to spend money. As in, you could cancel the projects, reduce NASA's budget by that amount, and you would still get the same amount of space exploration done. Unfortunately, when the budget crunch comes, those projects are never the first ones cancelled. So I think the key to effective long-term space exploration is to establish incremental and self-sustaining capabilities while resisting cost growth in the pork projects.
So, yeah, someday we can send astronauts to the moon. But first we need to figure out how to send people to orbit for "free". And we need to expose the pork projects for what they are while preventing infrastructure from being built around them. You can help! Don't buy the BS that NASA is going to send humans to Mars for 0.5% of the federal budget. When your Science Committee congress-person comes up for re-election, reward responsible oversight and not "vision".
Whatever you do, don't blow the school's money on a project that is going to be obsolete in five years. Obsolescence should be matched to your annual budget. For example, if you have $1000 a year to spend on something that will last three years, make sure you can replace it for ~$3000. No annual budget? Just buy books.
So the authors looked at the number of asteroids that it would be ***commercially profitable to mine with today's technology***, and they estimate ten? That's fantastic news! Let the asteroid mining begin! I am sure once those ten are mined out, the infrastructure will be in place to bring a thousand more within reach.
The singularity is here. It started a few decades ago, but we are only now noticing it because it is accelerating. Kurzweil forgot to consider variance in the capacity of human minds to adapt to change.
And yes, robot cars are one of the horsemen of the technologocalypse.
Yes, you're right. I forgot about that incident.
You really need to familiarize yourself with how crypto-currencies work. To a certain extent, it is the burden of the issuer to prove that their system is secure, so you can rail on how insecure digital, decentralized, and anonymous currency is all you want. However, consider this. Bitcoins are being used in everyday trade right now. The market cap is > $1B last I checked. The FIRST TIME the core algorithm is hacked to give someone free money, the total value of the system drops to $0. That $1B represents the discounted future value of the currency plus a certain level of speculation (and minus a large chunk of investors who don't understand what they are looking at). It includes our collective best guess as to how secure the system is. That is a lot of confidence in the system. MintChip sounds pretty lame, but it shouldn't taint the efforts of better cryptocurrencies.
While they have restricted access to the paper that describes how they are going to do this, what Tito is going to do has already been revealed. Most of the sentences in the summary are wrong. Yes the mission will include humans. No it will not be bringing anything beyond what is required to keep the astronaut(s) alive. Astronaut training? You could fly this mission yourself tomorrow if you had the dedication and the planets were aligned. Which they aren't, and won't be until 2018. Word is that this will be a single launch of a Falcon Heavy with a Dragon capsule. Hardware cost could be less than $200 million.
The mission will fly by Mars but not orbit or land on it. Round trip will be roughly 500 days. Crew activities will involve posting photos of themselves with Mars in the background to Facebook, eating space food, and playing lots and lots of Angry Birds. It is possible that a flyby of Venus could be in the mission plan as well. If and when they return to Earth they will not be able to walk again without significant physical therapy and they will be known as the biggest bad-asses in the Solar System.
"Should the U.S. go back to its 'Let's put a man on the moon' ideology, or is the federal government fighting an uphill battle against newly emerging private space expeditions?"
Why is that the only choice? Why can't we do something useful in space, like build power plants or prospect for valuable minerals or, most pressingly, deflect asteroids? Those are worthy goals of a new space race. They are achievable with the resources we have.
Oh, right, because none of those involve sending humans to plant American flags on the rocks and planets of space. None of those provide a pretense for NASA to spend billions building a monster rocket that they can't finish and couldn't afford to fly if they did.
What if we just ended it altogether, like so many other civilized countries already have?
Get the ball rolling, sign this petition: http://wh.gov/IFE
2) Teachers penalized for things not under their control - For example, in a large district like Manhattan, if teachers in the high-crime inner-city schools are evaluated in the same pool as the teachers serving students who live on Park Avenue, those teachers will be at a fundamental disadvantage simply because their job is harder.
What makes you think this would be the case? All the test-based evaluation systems I have heard of measure performance above expectations. If you have two fifth grade teachers at the same school, and one's students perform significantly better at the end of the year, year after year, than the other's, that should be reflected in teacher evaluations. Those promoting the status quo seem to have a very difficult time understanding this aspect.
I really hope for the best, but that should read "In the unlikely event that Curiosity lands successfully ...". Have you seen the concept videos?
http://mars.jpl.nasa.gov/msl/multimedia/videos/movies/msl20110722/MSLanimation20110721-640.mov
I'm pretty sure logos can be both copyrighted and trademarked. For example, the Coca-Cola logo is a registered trademark which has fallen into the public domain as the copyright term has expired. The current Pepsi logo, on the other hand, is copyrighted.
Very sad story. The plant had some odor problems in the beginning, but then it turned into a classic case of mass hysteria. People were calling in complaints on days when the plant wasn't even operating.
I think my theory is more viable because it only requires a few butt-covering lies and not a conspiracy. But I guess we'll see.
1. School gives laptop to student
2. Student reports laptop stolen, takes it home
3. School activates security feature, randomly catches student popping pills while doing homework
4. IT sends photo of student to principal to get laptop back
5. Idiot principal gives student "don't do drugs" talk instead
6. Student panics, tells parents the school is spying on everyone
7. Parents sue school
8. Media frenzy!
The previous comments list some good targets. When you go looking for them with your 4" telescope, here are some suggestions for giving your students the best viewing experience. First off, when hunting for deep-sky objects like galaxies and nebula, wait for the Moon to go away. Otherwise it will light up the sky and wash everything out. Also, you're lucky if you live in a rural area, but if you don't, see if you can get away from the city lights. Bringing a chair or, even better, an adjustable stool will help your students to look through the telescope. This gives your eye some stability and is usually compared to increasing your aperture by an inch or so in terms of the detail you will see. Have your students sketch what they see. If they've forgotten how to draw, have them take some photos of the Moon through the telescope with their cell phones. It's easy to look at Mars and see a red ball, but if you have to draw it on a piece of paper, you notice all the details that you would have otherwise ignored. Finally, some color filters might be a good investment. They can help increase the contrast for planetary targets, you can swap them out and compare what you see with each color, and you can have your students come up with an explanation why they see different details through each filter.
Picking a platform and sticking with it is what got us the stupendously expensive Space Shuttle and ISS. If an approach is demonstrably not working, we shouldn't just "stay the course" and hope for the best, we should try something new. What the Augustine committee found was that NASA was incapable of simultaneously operating a launch system while building a new one. NASA's current plan is to build two and operate them simultaneously. This plan is going to leave us stranded in low Earth orbit even if we eventually get a heavy lifter. All the alternatives would only field a single new launcher, and many of them make effective use of the resources we have already put into Ares I + Ares V. So far, we're maybe halfway done with Ares I, but it's a rocket we don't need and will cost at least $1 billion per year to operate if we finish it. Ares V hasn't even started yet, so, when comparing it to Saturn V and the alternatives, Ares V is the paper and Powerpoint rocket.
I'm afraid we're probably working with different definitions of what constitutes a colony. Admittedly we have a long way to go to get to self-sufficient space colonies. I cannot conceive of a definition that would be so far off that year-long space missions could be dismissed as an "amusement park ride".
Manned colonization of the cosmos is demonstrably not magical thinking. Over the past several decades we have come close to a permanent human presence in space, first with Mir, and then with the ISS. Self-sufficiency in space does still require some technological advancement, but we have within our grasp the ability to support a human settlement in Earth orbit. What has been missing until this point is the political will and economic incentive to make it happen. Calling those who accept this reality a "magical-religious cult" is unhelpful and ignorant.
Three reasons: cost, flight rate, and physics. First, physics. If your spacecraft's design has enough energy to go straight up to the edge of space and then come back down, bleeding off that energy to go cross-country is going to reduce the altitude significantly. Adding more energy to a suborbital spacecraft is a difficult and expensive problem to solve. Second, no one is going to pay $100,000 just to get from point A to point B. People are reserving seats at those prices to have the experience of a lifetime. Finally, the only reasons for a spacecraft to shuttle passengers are to get them to someplace they couldn't go before, or to get them there more quickly than the alternatives. You can go from one end of the country to the other on a business jet quite a few times in between flights of the Lynx or SS2. That said, watch for advances in suborbital point to point spacecraft from the military.
I'm curious about the problems with LDCM. Did the private companies walk away from the project because the government was going to be the only customer? Or did they walk away because the government wasn't offering enough money to make a commercial solution profitable? If a COTS-style Landsat didn't work out because the government wasn't willing to offer enough money for the data, how much extra would have closed the business case? Would buying the data at market rates have cost more than building the LDCM has using procurement contracts?
There's a big difference between insured cargo and paying passengers. The passengers will, according to the Lockheed plan, have an effective escape mechanism available throughout the launch. Maybe the Atlas V will have no better reliability than the Space Shuttle. The only damages the passengers of a failed launch will be able to recover after floating safely to the ground will involve bruises from the acceleration of the escape rockets and the rough landing that follows.
Tool choices are not just an issue of personal taste. There are tools which are better than others, and there are some tools that are worth a lot of money because of the productivity gains that experienced programmers can get out of them. This is particularly true of debuggers.
Disclaimer: I work for a company that sells development tools, including tools for Linux.
Some bugs can be fiendishly difficult to diagnose, particularly bugs that involve timing, resource usage, random events, and memory corruption. If you run into a bug like this and your tools consist of vi, a shell, and gdb, you are either going to spend months trying to diagnose it, or you will have to ship your program with a known defect. You could instead get yourself a trace-capable debugger, run your program in it while logging the execution of every instruction, wait until the bug surfaces, then step backwards through the program until the point where things start to go awry. I have used a debugger like this to solve problems that I would not be able to solve with, for example, Eclipse. I admit there are a lot of tools that make things easier by hiding the details of source repository checkouts and building projects, and I tend to avoid them in favor of the command line equivalents that can be scripted. When a tool provides me a better view of how my program works, it's worth using.
It crashed. The rocket had a thrust termination system, not a self-destruct system.