SpaceX needs to prototype this stuff before they can design a real system because they have no experience making spacecraft. Boeing and Lockheed-Martin can focus on gathering requirements and doing engineering, on paper, because they know what they are doing. The only reason NASA has to go with SpaceX is because they are likely to get a better deal, but they've gotta wear the risk.
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin know a lot less than you think. What manned space vehicles have they built in the last 30 years? I will grant that Boeing has been building space station hardware, but that's a lot different than a crew launch vehicle that has to survive ascent and reentry. Any new effort will be essentially starting from scratch. SpaceX and t/Space have been building and testing hardware, while Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have been drawing artist conceptions and writing reports, the same way they've tackled every failed STS replacement program to date. Whatever the differences in approaches, there is no contest between them. One of Boeing and Lockheed will get the $* billion CEV contract. SpaceX is working on a vehicle for ISS resupply, which is a separate, much less expensive ($500m), and better structured program.
Also, SpaceX built their life support system in 2004, before NASA published the requirements for life support systems on vehicles carrying US government employees. That does not mean that the system they designed wouldn't work or even that it would be unsafe. It just doesn't meet NASA's new requirements.
The more interesting question is this: when Saudi Arabia dries up and Russia is powering the globe with their He-3 fusion reactors supplied by cargo tugs from the Moon, what will they spend all their money on?
It is admittedly a high risk project, but every spacefaring country should be actively investigating this.
But fair use is not grounds for circumventing DRM under the DMCA.
But you don't have to circumvent DRM to copy a DVD if you have a DVD duplicator, a device which the MPAA presumably has. The only right CSS "manages" is playback.
There are very few reasons to ever want to bring space salvage back to Earth. Re-using space salvage in space, on the other hand, is much cheaper, possible, and potentially profitable. The first steps have already been taken by Orbital Recovery Corporation's CX-OLEV project, which will attach itself to dead or dying satellites. It will take over their orbit keeping functions to allow them to continue functioning. This is profitable because a company that paid $x00 million to build and launch their communications satellite with a 10 year lifespan then gets another 5 years or so out of it for a small additional payment (I'm guessing another 20-50 mil). That's another 5 years that satellite does not become space junk. At the end of its life, it can be deorbited, moved to a graveyard orbit, or moved somewhere else to be recycled by whatever improved orbital facilities we have 5 years from now.
This is an effective counterexample to your argument that imagination can never make orbital salvage a cheaper option than just launching more crap off the Earth. The only problem with my counterexample is that it has not yet been proven with an actual launch and salvage. However I don't think you can claim that it an impossible idea, and the economics of launching a small satellite to save a big one are reasonable.
NASA shouldn't be abandoned, as there's still room for government involvement, especially in strictly scientific missions like launching satelites.
I think what you mean is space probes, not satellites. Launching satellites is not really a science project, and NASA hasn't been involved in it since 1986.
If NASA exists only to do science, though, how would it be any different from the NSF? Is there really a need for two government agencies that do the same thing?
It is fair to say that rockets that launch satellites are not based on manned spacecraft. The discoveries I was referring to, however, were made by the astronauts themselves in space. How would you build a satellite if you didn't know how many meteoroids it would hit while it was in orbit? How would you maneuver a satellite in orbit if you did not understand the physical properties of outer space? The human space flights of the 1960s provided important information about the environment of space. This information would be easy to collect by robotic microsatellites today, but back then it was a job for humans.
That is, none of the actual benefits of space travel have come from the space part, more from the preparation and the coolness factor.
This is incorrect. The counterexample is that the discoveries made by sending humans into space in the 1960s allow us now to build those satellites. The fact that those discoveries could today be made by robots in no way diminishes the importance of the early accomplishments in human space flight.
Private industry? What a laugh. First off, much of NASA's work *IS* done by private industry. The company I used to work for, Rockwell-Collins, had a major shuttle contract when it was being developed. They abused the hell out of it. Whenever any project ran out of hours, they charged it to the shuttle, even if it was unrelated. Private industry is supposed to *save* us money?
Government contractors are not the end-all and be-all of private industry in space. Plenty of companies, for example XM Radio, are making money in space, and they aren't tied to cost-plus contracts. The kind of waste you are talking about is what happens when privatization goes bad, but it isn't any worse than what is happening right now inside of NASA. What the article was talking about looked to me like a new direction for private participation in the space program: NASA stops building and owning billion dollar spaceships, and instead buys rides from "spacelines". A subsidized airline industry did wonders for the prosperity of the world in the last century, and a real space launch industry, freed from reliance on government interest, will do the same in this one.
Fair enough, my ISS estimates were based on the US budget for the project. However even $70 billion isn't "hundreds of billions of dollars". I'm not saying ISS costs haven't ballooned over the estimates, or that it has been a worthwhile project to date. ISS has been almost criminally mismanaged. Unfortunately estimations of the actual cost of the project by the press seem to have been based on one-upping the last estimate instead of grounded in real numbers. This is being re-applied to SEI II. Bush: "I'd like to commit $1 billion over the next five years to try to fix NASA." Press: "One trillion dollars while we have a budget deficit!?! OMG!"
Of course in a government agency no one can be sure how much a project costs, but let me try to narrow it down a little. Hubble: Initial cost $1.5b Maintenance $230m x 13yrs = $3b Shuttle missions $500 x 3 = $1.5b Total $6 billion for Hubble project to date So on that count you are correct. However your ISS numbers need some work. ISS: ISS funding $1.5b? x 10yrs = $15b Shuttle missions $500 x 16 = $8b Total ~$23b for ISS So the entire space station project has cost only 4 times as much as Hubble. In addition previous ISS crews have completed several experiments on biology including human spaceflight, among others. I was able to get all this information from publicly available sources in a matter of minutes. Also the Hubble space telescope cost as much as six B-2 bombers. Why did you feel you had to exaggerate the numbers to make your case?
ITAR is the State Department's regime for allowing technology transfer to other countries. Unfortunately, the State Department has not been able to balance technology transfer with the well-being of the American economy. According to Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace (a suborbital transportation company):
The situation is so delightfully Orwellian that it is
almost impossible to believe. Currently any communication
with anyone outside the U.S. or any non U.S. citizen working
inside the U.S. is supposed to be approved,
WORD FOR WORD, IN WRITING, with the State
department in advance, with a delay which might be only a
few months if you're a major aerospace corporation dealing
with the U.K, and might be never if it has even the slightest
risk of political fallout, as there is no time limit on how long
State can (and does) sit on things. Pratt & Whitney's deal
to pay Energomash to TEACH US HOW TO BUILD THEIR
MOST ADVANCED TURBOPUMP was held up so long
that the deal almost collapsed, just because it was percieved
as politically sensitive. Great job protecting our national
security, guys!
Also, the IEEE wrote a letter to President Bush Jr. about this, expressing their concerns.
The auction clearly lists State Department ITAR approval as a prerequisite for winning. The same policy that is killing the US launch industry now protects you from terrorists wielding microsatellites that they bought on eBay.
Space projects are fundamentally state financed projects (due to their horrific costs and risks) and will remain so for the foreseeable future.
This is obviously untrue. Communications satellites have not only been privately financed since the 1980's, most have been very profitable. Satellite television is so much more efficient than terrestrial cable, the outdated cable industry is pulling an RIAA by trying to make up new laws to stop the growth of companies like EchoStar and DirecTV. Earth reconnaisance just became profitable for private enterprise in the last few years.
As economies of scale and new technologies grow, access to space and activities in space become cheaper. This enables new projects that decades ago seemed horrifically expensive to be pursued by private industry for a profit. Space tourism is probably the next big space project that years ago seemed impossible, but now can be pursued in an economically beneficial fashion. Space solar power or asteroid mining may be next. By allowing your vision to be clouded by (horrifically expensive, yes) government space projects, you don't see the benefits that private enterprise in space does, or can, offer to you. The key is to make investments in science, technology, and demonstrations that enable new industries. Right now an investment in space solar power is a good bet for the DoE and NSF.
We should retire the shuttle completely instead of reducing missions because the shuttle system has a yearly fixed cost of ~$3 billion. This means that the cost of sending no shuttle missions at all in a year is equivalent in cost to sending 150 people into orbit in Russian or Chinese-style capsules.
I use MO disks for backup. I looked into longevity of MO vs. CD-R as well as all the scratches on my old CD-R backups a few years ago. MO drives are cheap and reliable. MO disks are well protected from scratches and magnetic fields.
Boeing recently canceled their Delta IV program due to a lack of customers in the commercial satellite business.
You didn't read the article. Boeing has not cancelled the Delta IV. Their launcher is still being considered for the manned OSP program, and has plenty of orders from the US military. Boeing only stopped taking new commercial orders for the Delta IV. This isn't a sign that space is stagnant, they're just coming to terms with the fact that their expensive rocket can't compete in a marketplace that passed them up years ago.
Space is heating up. Right now all the launches are going to countries with better rockets, but there are some startups like SpaceX and Orbital Recovery which have a good chance of turning things around for the American space industry.
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Three dozen 'next generation' shuttle projects that are killed once they pass the 50% completion mark.
NASA has released a report which analyzes their previous RLV development efforts. It is a pretty good read, and hypothesizes that the X-33/VentureStar and the X-34 were both doomed from the start, and were far from being halfway finished.
Mark my words, nothing will change until NASA is no longer under the authority of a beancounter, and the Congrassholes stop worrying so much about brangin' home tha pork(tm).
Nothing will change with new leadership either. American industry is far more adept at creating cheap transportation than the government could ever be. You can have the best of government space exploration and cheap access to space by forcing NASA to buy transportation services from American companies, instead of allowing the government to build cathedrals in the sky.
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Yes, good point.
Boeing and Lockheed-Martin know a lot less than you think. What manned space vehicles have they built in the last 30 years? I will grant that Boeing has been building space station hardware, but that's a lot different than a crew launch vehicle that has to survive ascent and reentry. Any new effort will be essentially starting from scratch. SpaceX and t/Space have been building and testing hardware, while Boeing and Lockheed-Martin have been drawing artist conceptions and writing reports, the same way they've tackled every failed STS replacement program to date. Whatever the differences in approaches, there is no contest between them. One of Boeing and Lockheed will get the $* billion CEV contract. SpaceX is working on a vehicle for ISS resupply, which is a separate, much less expensive ($500m), and better structured program.
Also, SpaceX built their life support system in 2004, before NASA published the requirements for life support systems on vehicles carrying US government employees. That does not mean that the system they designed wouldn't work or even that it would be unsafe. It just doesn't meet NASA's new requirements.
The more interesting question is this: when Saudi Arabia dries up and Russia is powering the globe with their He-3 fusion reactors supplied by cargo tugs from the Moon, what will they spend all their money on?
It is admittedly a high risk project, but every spacefaring country should be actively investigating this.
But you don't have to circumvent DRM to copy a DVD if you have a DVD duplicator, a device which the MPAA presumably has. The only right CSS "manages" is playback.
There are very few reasons to ever want to bring space salvage back to Earth. Re-using space salvage in space, on the other hand, is much cheaper, possible, and potentially profitable. The first steps have already been taken by Orbital Recovery Corporation's CX-OLEV project, which will attach itself to dead or dying satellites. It will take over their orbit keeping functions to allow them to continue functioning. This is profitable because a company that paid $x00 million to build and launch their communications satellite with a 10 year lifespan then gets another 5 years or so out of it for a small additional payment (I'm guessing another 20-50 mil). That's another 5 years that satellite does not become space junk. At the end of its life, it can be deorbited, moved to a graveyard orbit, or moved somewhere else to be recycled by whatever improved orbital facilities we have 5 years from now.
This is an effective counterexample to your argument that imagination can never make orbital salvage a cheaper option than just launching more crap off the Earth. The only problem with my counterexample is that it has not yet been proven with an actual launch and salvage. However I don't think you can claim that it an impossible idea, and the economics of launching a small satellite to save a big one are reasonable.
I guess Mike Melvill and Brian Binnie's 2004 flights out of Mojave don't count then?
Here's the proof.
h_cassini_nowwhat_2,1.jpg
h_cassini_nowwhat,0.jpg
Apollo lunar rover dimensions: 3.0m x 2.3m
Mars Exploration Rover dimensions: 1.6m x 2.3m
Perhaps the copy you saw was a scale model?
I think what you mean is space probes, not satellites. Launching satellites is not really a science project, and NASA hasn't been involved in it since 1986.
If NASA exists only to do science, though, how would it be any different from the NSF? Is there really a need for two government agencies that do the same thing?
The space station is orbiting at 360 km right now. Does that mean it isn't in LEO either?
It is fair to say that rockets that launch satellites are not based on manned spacecraft. The discoveries I was referring to, however, were made by the astronauts themselves in space. How would you build a satellite if you didn't know how many meteoroids it would hit while it was in orbit? How would you maneuver a satellite in orbit if you did not understand the physical properties of outer space? The human space flights of the 1960s provided important information about the environment of space. This information would be easy to collect by robotic microsatellites today, but back then it was a job for humans.
This is incorrect. The counterexample is that the discoveries made by sending humans into space in the 1960s allow us now to build those satellites. The fact that those discoveries could today be made by robots in no way diminishes the importance of the early accomplishments in human space flight.
Government contractors are not the end-all and be-all of private industry in space. Plenty of companies, for example XM Radio, are making money in space, and they aren't tied to cost-plus contracts. The kind of waste you are talking about is what happens when privatization goes bad, but it isn't any worse than what is happening right now inside of NASA. What the article was talking about looked to me like a new direction for private participation in the space program: NASA stops building and owning billion dollar spaceships, and instead buys rides from "spacelines". A subsidized airline industry did wonders for the prosperity of the world in the last century, and a real space launch industry, freed from reliance on government interest, will do the same in this one.
Fair enough, my ISS estimates were based on the US budget for the project. However even $70 billion isn't "hundreds of billions of dollars". I'm not saying ISS costs haven't ballooned over the estimates, or that it has been a worthwhile project to date. ISS has been almost criminally mismanaged. Unfortunately estimations of the actual cost of the project by the press seem to have been based on one-upping the last estimate instead of grounded in real numbers. This is being re-applied to SEI II. Bush: "I'd like to commit $1 billion over the next five years to try to fix NASA." Press: "One trillion dollars while we have a budget deficit!?! OMG!"
Of course in a government agency no one can be sure how much a project costs, but let me try to narrow it down a little.
Hubble:
Initial cost $1.5b
Maintenance $230m x 13yrs = $3b
Shuttle missions $500 x 3 = $1.5b
Total $6 billion for Hubble project to date
So on that count you are correct. However your ISS numbers need some work.
ISS:
ISS funding $1.5b? x 10yrs = $15b
Shuttle missions $500 x 16 = $8b
Total ~$23b for ISS
So the entire space station project has cost only 4 times as much as Hubble. In addition previous ISS crews have completed several experiments on biology including human spaceflight, among others. I was able to get all this information from publicly available sources in a matter of minutes. Also the Hubble space telescope cost as much as six B-2 bombers. Why did you feel you had to exaggerate the numbers to make your case?
ITAR is the State Department's regime for allowing technology transfer to other countries. Unfortunately, the State Department has not been able to balance technology transfer with the well-being of the American economy. According to Jeff Greason of XCOR Aerospace (a suborbital transportation company):
Also, the IEEE wrote a letter to President Bush Jr. about this, expressing their concerns.The auction clearly lists State Department ITAR approval as a prerequisite for winning. The same policy that is killing the US launch industry now protects you from terrorists wielding microsatellites that they bought on eBay.
This is obviously untrue. Communications satellites have not only been privately financed since the 1980's, most have been very profitable. Satellite television is so much more efficient than terrestrial cable, the outdated cable industry is pulling an RIAA by trying to make up new laws to stop the growth of companies like EchoStar and DirecTV. Earth reconnaisance just became profitable for private enterprise in the last few years.
As economies of scale and new technologies grow, access to space and activities in space become cheaper. This enables new projects that decades ago seemed horrifically expensive to be pursued by private industry for a profit. Space tourism is probably the next big space project that years ago seemed impossible, but now can be pursued in an economically beneficial fashion. Space solar power or asteroid mining may be next. By allowing your vision to be clouded by (horrifically expensive, yes) government space projects, you don't see the benefits that private enterprise in space does, or can, offer to you. The key is to make investments in science, technology, and demonstrations that enable new industries. Right now an investment in space solar power is a good bet for the DoE and NSF.
> Why retire the shuttle compltely?
We should retire the shuttle completely instead of reducing missions because the shuttle system has a yearly fixed cost of ~$3 billion. This means that the cost of sending no shuttle missions at all in a year is equivalent in cost to sending 150 people into orbit in Russian or Chinese-style capsules.
One is scheduled to lift off next week. Vandenburg lists two to be launched in 2004.
I use MO disks for backup. I looked into longevity of MO vs. CD-R as well as all the scratches on my old CD-R backups a few years ago. MO drives are cheap and reliable. MO disks are well protected from scratches and magnetic fields.
You didn't read the article. Boeing has not cancelled the Delta IV. Their launcher is still being considered for the manned OSP program, and has plenty of orders from the US military. Boeing only stopped taking new commercial orders for the Delta IV. This isn't a sign that space is stagnant, they're just coming to terms with the fact that their expensive rocket can't compete in a marketplace that passed them up years ago.
Space is heating up. Right now all the launches are going to countries with better rockets, but there are some startups like SpaceX and Orbital Recovery which have a good chance of turning things around for the American space industry.
Q: I heard that RFID tags are always abused or mean. What's their problem?
A: Whoever told you that is a total liar. Just like any other tool, RFID tags can be mean OR totally awesome.
Dish Network offers another option to TiVo and DIY PC PVRs. The DishPVR has fewer features than the TiVo, but also does not require a monthly fee. See a comparison.