The probe uses a new solar electric propulsion system which converts solar energy its panels into motion via the expulsion of ions.
Solar electric propulsion is hardly new. It's been used for getting communications satellites out to their final geosynchronous orbits for a number of years now, and NASA demonstrated using solar-powered ion engines for interplanetary primary propulsion on Deep Space 1 back in '98.
What ESA is claiming is new about this mission is that they'll be combining ion propulsion with gravity assist maneuvers. AFAIK that hasn't really been done yet (although I know some guys at JPL who're working on it), and given how difficult it can be to work out low-thrust trajectories in the first place I would imagine that successfully throwing gravity assists into the mix would be a significant acheivement.
Last time I had a math heavy presentation I ended up generating a bunch of encapsulated postscript files directly from LaTeX sources, and then pasting them in to PPT. A little awkward, but preferable to the MS-supplied equation editor...
It's not the backgrounds, and it's not the animation effects. Mostly it's the ease of layout - HTML slides are much harder to arrange. HTML is fine if all you want to present is bulleted lists. But if you're trying to present information in an interesting and visually meaningful way, layout becomes an issue. Content becomes next to useless if the audience can't rapidly absorb it and layout is key to that process.
It doesn't have to be powerpoint. It just has to work. I've been bouncing between powerpoint and impress a lot recently. I usually find that I can draft out a presentation in impress, but end up having to clean it up and finish it in powerpoint (and no, it's not because I want all the cutesy little MS animations). To be honest, my gripes with impress, aside from the slow load time, are mostly bugs (which you're right, I need to report in Issuezilla): The handling of inserted images seems to be a little flaky at times; the master slide functionality seems to have a few glitches (or I don't understand how to use it correctly); some silly UI issues (as much personal preference as anything else), and a few other irritations. Nothing huge, but the sum of all those little nagging problems is an experience (for me) that is not as good as I would like. Not that powerpoint doesn't have its annoyances too...
Actually, the bulk of the losses result from ions (or electrons) running into the inner electrode, which is a grid. The IEC consists of two concentric spheres, with a charge across them. The resulting electrostatic field accelerates ions or electrons (depending on the direction of the field) towards the center of the spheres, where fusion occurs. So ideally you want no grid at all, because you want the ions or electrons to zip through the inner electrode and directly to the center.
That was Bussard's big breakthrough - he developed a way to use magnetic fields to protect the inner electrode from electron impacts, and thus increase the efficiency. Unfortunately, as far as I know, he never got the money to take it much beyond the concept demonstration stage (not as far as break-even). See "The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor: And How to Make It Work" for more details.
However, there is good news on the horizon: the Abiword folks are working with Sven Herzberg in creating just such an application, using the Abiword and GNOME libraries. See Criawips
Thanks for the tip! That's great to hear! Dare I ask where the name "Criawips" comes from?
Not that it isn't cool that a college freshman managed to build this, but this isn't exactly the big news it sounds like. What Wallace built is essentially an Inertial Electrostatic Confinement (IEC) fusion reactor. IECs use the electrostatic field generated by charged concentric spheres to confine the fusing plasma - you can think of it as a mini-sun that uses electrostatic fields instead of gravitational fields. IECs have been around for a good long while (since the days of Philo Farnsworth, as the article mentions).
Unfortunately, Wallace's IEC, like every other IEC ever built, doesn't get even close to break-even. Their primary utility is, as the article mentions, as a neutron source (and in fact that's what they're usually used for). There are some folks that are hopeful they can find a way to improve the efficiency of IEC fusion and exceed break-even (Robert Bussard, of Bussard ram-jet fame, for example), but no one's managed to actually demonstrate a working, energy-generating IEC yet.
Abiword 2.0 is part of the just-released GNOME-Office 1.0, which, as riggwelter writes "coordinates GNOME2 versions of AbiWord, Gnumeric, and GNOME-DB, the database interface."
I see a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a database app. How about that other stalwart of the "office productivity" suite, presentation software? Much as it pains me to say it, Powerpoint has become almost indispensable (at least in my line of work) these days. OO.org's Impress is nice, but still not quite on a par with PPT. A Gnome-Office PPT equivalent would be a nice addition to the suite. Or is there some other open source presentation option out there I'm not aware of?
Spreadsheets are not databases, and generally should not be used that way. However, to dismiss them as being merely stedding stones to real databases is to miss the point entirely. They're quite good at lots of other things.
Just to second Jody's point: I've seen spreadsheets (specifically Excel) used for, of all things, spacecraft design (among other things). In fact, JPL's Project Design Center (aka Team X) uses a whole slew of linked workbooks to develop entire conceptual mission designs. The beauty of spreadsheets is that they are very flexible, and it's easy to create and modify low-fidelity models very rapidly. As a result, Excel gets heavy use throughout the aerospace industry for doing all sorts of back-of-the-envelope calculations and simple math modelling. As Jody says, they make a great scratch pad.
True. But they are subject to more in the way of radiation degradation, as well as having their coverglass slowly made more opaque by micrometeoroid impacts. At least on Earth it's possible to wipe the dirt off the cells:-)
They have exactly the same efficiency on the ground: they will convert 35% of the light that falls on them into electricity (after all, that's what efficiency means). It's just that on the ground they will be subject to light that has been attenuated by the atmosphere, so will produce less Watts per square meter than they would in space.
Re:Bullhoey(energy conversion rates)
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Solar Window Panes
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· Score: 4, Informative
Current conversion rates are about 18%, and haven't changed much in 20 years or more;
Well, actually, solar cell technology has been improving steadily over the last several years. There are currently flying spacecraft with 26% efficient cells, 28% cells due to start rolling off the production lines sometime in the next year or two, and experimental designs for cells that are up to 35% efficient.
But you're right - nothing anywhere near 50% (at least AFAIK). And 100% efficient sounds like total BS.
I don't know what surrey sattelites does, please enlighten me.
You can check out their website here. Most of their real money-making launches have been Earth imaging of one sort or another (e.g. their current big project - the Disaster Monitoring Constellation - is all about responsive Earth imaging). However, they've also flown several scientific and experimental payloads, they just landed a contract to do some of the prototype work on Galileo, and have a good business helping other countries get space programs up and running in a short amount of time.
The X-prize is a philanthropic donation made by a bunch of really rich guys. This kind of money will help us achieve certain milestones, but once they've been achieved it will vanish. Unless we can find buisiness in space, it won't work as it did with airplanes because people don't NEED to go to space, nor does much mail need delivering.
The X-prize is modeled after the prizes that kick-started aviation in the early decades of the 20th century. It's not intended to last forever, it's intended to provide the impetus for developing things that will be self-sustaining, but aren't self-starting. People don't NEED to go into the air either - but it gets them there faster. Cheap suborbital transportation could drastically reduce point-to-point travel times. In an age of global business and "just-in-time" everything, that seems like it could make some money. I'm sure Fedex would happily charge a premium for "same-hour, anywhere in the world" service too.
These companies are aiming to serve the comsat community, which isn't doing anything really spectacular when you think of it. I agree that the technology and achievement is cool, but they're not breaking any new ground.
Read my comment again. I said smallsat launcher. Smallsats are not usually used as comsats (with the possible exception of Orbcomm), since comsats need massive amounts of power that smallsats don't have. My point was that several companies believe that there is enough of a market for smallsat launches that they're trying hard to win that market. I don't know what the business plan of all those smallsat customers is, but I can tell you that cheap, responsive launches and rapidly built smallsats open up business possibilities that don't exist right now.
They launched 1 guy, once. The other two potential customers (Lance Bass and that guy from South Africa) couldn't afford it and decided it wasn't worth the cost respectively. Given NASA's new failures, you're not going to see any new tourists in space any time soon. All this also neglects the fact that these tourists were riding on government funded infrastructure, and their costs only paid a fraction of a percent of the costs of the entire program.
Two, actually. Mark Shuttleworth went up last year. Both Tito's and Shuttleworth's tickets more than covered the cost of their flights. Sure, two flights doesn't cover the cost of the program. But two flights doesn't cover the cost of a 747 either. It's all about volume. And NASA's shuttle woes won't do a whole lot to the Russian space program - the Soyuz is well known to be far more robust than the fickle shuttle.
They're still going to lose a bundle on developing and launching the system. This is done out of nationalistic neccesity, not to be a commercially viable competitor to GPS. And few private companies today could muster the resources to launch such a program, even if the returns were guaranteed and the risks of failure were much lower than they are now.
I wouldn't be so sure about the ROI on Galileo. Sure there won't be an immediate return, but I suspect they could pay for it over the long haul. Particularly if aircraft start getting into precision GPS approaches. That's a very large number of subscriptions right there. And there are lots of other businesses that would probably be willing
Well, to be fair, NASA pretty much begged the military to come on board, since making shuttle the "nation's launch system" was about the only way they could even come close to rationalizing the launch rate predictions they needed to make the cost of the program something congress would swallow. The military requirements went away right about the time that the DoD saw that Challenger might just cause the entire shuttle program to go away (or at best get suspended for a good long while), and realized that it might not be so smart to put all their eggs in one basket. Hence the move back to expendables.
While government agencies are generally bureaucratic, corporations are also notoriously short-sighted. Excluding all the information satellites and the like, there isn't a whole lot (to my knowledge) that will make space profitable until we cut the cost (not in dollars, but in resources) to actually get into space. Mining asteroids might be feasible, but I doubt even that would be profitable in the very near future..
Yeah, that might explain why Surrey Satellites in the UK is making so much off of stuff other than comsats. And why there are several groups racing to win the X-prize. And why there several companies desperately trying to be the first to market with a cheap smallsat launcher. And why the Russians are able to make $20M a pop for launching rich tourists into space. And why the EU is considering charging for subscriptions to the precision version of Galileo (their answer to GPS). And that's only what I can think of off the top of my head. Nope, no money to be made in space at all.
Seriously, the problem isn't that there aren't opprtunities to do profitable stuff in space, it's that US companies are hamstrung by the government. There's a reason that most of the most innovative space stuff is happening outside of the US these days.
While I haven't looked at current proposals I do seem to remember that the USAF back in the '60's was actually rather close to developing an Aerospace plane, in fact you COULD call the X-15 perhaps the first of these. There is no need to make an Aerospace plane that rides into space atop some huge rocket.
You are mostly likely thinking of the X-20 DynaSoar, which was considered the next step after the X-15 until it got cancelled in favor of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo. However, the X-20 concept did involve launching on top of a rocket - the OSP is very much a rehash of the old X-20 idea.
There's no reason you couldn't design some sort of hybrid air-breather/rocket that could get to altitude via an air-breathing system and then achieve orbit via a rocket system.
No reason aside from the fact that it requires a lot of technology development (i.e. money) to do a hybrid airbreather/rocket engine. OSP is intended to be a "quick and dirty" interrim solution, until a real next gen RLV can be developed. The argument is that it may not be the right "quick and dirty" solution (something more Apollo-like might be better in a lot of ways).
A cheaper hybrid airbreather/rocket system (and perhaps this was what you were actually referring to) would be one that didn't combine both engines into one (ala the Pegasus launch vehicle). In fact, this is the approach that Burt Rutan is taking with his White Knight/SpaceShipOne X-prize entry. However, that design is, at least at this point, only good for suborbital hops. Is this really the best answer? I don't know. But I think that one of the nice things about the X-prize is that we get to see a bunch of different concepts actually perform, and from there we can pick the best ones. Much like the early evolution of aircraft design.
The problem is that doing a compile/test run only costs processor cycles. Launching a rocket costs hardware.
That said, the good old days of test flight in the 50's and early 60's saw a lot of build-test-build programs that built capability incrementally. More recently, the DC-X program did the same thing (until it was killed), and Surrey Satellites in the UK has been very successful at incrementally developing better and better spacecraft. But most modern aerospace efforts get mired in bureaucracy that frowns on any kind of failure (even the kind you learn from), and are subject to government funding cycles that preclude built-test-build style programs.
Businesses want profits and the profits just aren't there for pure science research in space.
The profits aren't there because it costs so much to put things in space. It costs so much to put things in space because of NASA's stranglehold on space, and the massive amount of useless government red-tape involved in a launch.
Universities won't be funding space exploration -- it's often tough for them to find enough money in the budget for facilities maintenance.
Actually, many universities do run their own spacecraft programs. Admittedly, in some cases the funding comes through NASA, but the actual design, development, and operation of the spacecraft is handled by the university with minimal NASA oversight. This model works well. In fact, it's very similar to the way the early airmail companies (forerunners of the airline industry) were encouraged - the government didn't set up its own airmail system, it contracted with a bunch of private groups to do it.
Boeing is not going to land a man on Mars in the hopes that they will be able to turn a profit from the mission.
Probably not. However they'd undoubtedly be willing to take some money from e.g. the Mars Society to land some people on Mars. The question we need to ask is "why are we going to Mars". Much as I would like to see us land on Mars, if we don't have an answer, we won't be going. Most people don't think a Mars expedition is worthwhile. Those that do tend to get hooked up with the Mars Society, and put their money where their mouth is.
Lockheed is not going to fund the launch of a next-generation space telescope with the expectation of making money from the venture.
Again, that's probably true. But if they science is valuable then grants will be available to do it, and the telescope will get built. The government can value the science without having to be intimately involved in the actual production of the data.
I just don't believe that it would further our knowledge, increase our enthusiasm, or make us proud to be Americans if some private firm launched Lance Bass (of 'N Sync), Dennis Tito, and other multi-millionaire space-tourist-wannabes into orbit.
Actually, I'm fairly confident that it will further our knowledge (although gaining an understanding of the zero-gee tolerance, or lack thereof, of boy-band stars may not be what you had in mind;-) And I can assure you that my enthusiam and pride in America was fired far more by seeing Dennis Tito, a former aerospace engineer who worked hard to achieve his dream, going into space than it does seeing a shuttle launch. Because if Tito can do it, then there's hope for the rest of us.
The private sector will continue to fund and launch communications satellites -- and will do little else. Nothing else having to do with space has been shown to have any real promise of generating a positive cash flow.
Right. Which might explain why Surrey Satellites in the UK has made so much money not launching commsats. Or why the Space Imaging guys are making money. Or why I heard on NPR the other day about Florida orange farmers using satellite surveillance to gauge the Brazilian orange crop. There are ways to make money in space. There will be more if the cost of launch came down. Which won't happen until the government butts out.
A President's job is to look out for the good of the country, not pander to trailer park inbreds who think that astrology and astronomy are the same thing.
That's a nice thought, but it is completely at odds with the way the system is set up at present. If that's your beef, then you have larger problems to deal with than just the fact that the government is screwing up space exploration.
Look, I'm in favor of space exploration. But I've been involved in the government end of the space industry for the past 3 years, and I've learned the hard way the that the number one problem with "government space" is the "government" part. Thankfully, there are other ways to get things done, and some orgaizations are using those ways.
Actually, if you stop and think about you'll realize that the way NASA put men on the moon was very much in line with the FBC philosophy. Rather than investing a huge amount of money in something complex and "high-tech" like the X-20 DynaSoar and taking forever to develop the missions NASA operated on a fixed, very tight schedule (land and return before the decade is out), and opted for simple, rugged solutions. Sounds a lot like the mandated "3 years from 0 to launch" policy and deliberate selection of less complex solutions to me that APL used for NEAR and other FBC missions. Sure, the NASA lunar program to develop a lot of new technology, but the underlying philosophy very much FBC. FBC doesn't mean spending less money, and it doesn't mean doing a bad job. It means thinking about what you are doing, and trying to maximize the value for the money you are spending.
We don't need a good return on investment -- we need more investment. NASA's annual budget is less than we are spending every two months occupying Iraq. In the mid-60's, NASA received about 5% of the total federal budget. Now it gets less than 1/2%. We need a President like Kennedy again -- one who values space exploration more than oil exploitation.
Presidential politics have very little to do with it. While I agree that Kennedy was extremely inspiring, I think he was dealing with a very different environment than we face today. What we really need is for the federal government to get its nose out of space, and to back off on the various regulations that mke it hard for commercial interests to do anything in space. The American public (as a whole) apparently doesn't care about space. If they did, it would be a great campaign platform, and someone would use it as such. The "public" doesn't want to spend the money, they have no tolerance for failure, and all they are interested in is spectacular firsts. This attitude is not conducive to a healthy space program. When you add in the fact that NASA is now a bloated bureaucracy, riddled with incompetent engineers and managers, drowning in unwanted congressional pork, and essentially wedded by politics to a launch system that is clearly over-priced and broken, it's no surprise that our space program is a mess.
As someone who has worked on satellite software development and testing, I can tell you that system complexity is one of the biggest enemies of the 'Faster, Better, Cheaper' philosophy. As the complexity of a spacecraft increases, so does the testing.
No doubt. Which is why successful FBC missions tend to deliberately work to reduce complexity. That's how they make them fast and cheap. It's a foolish project manager (i.e. one that really doesn't "get" FBC) that tries to implement the "Faster" and "Cheaper" parts of FBC on a mission that is as complex is a non-FBC mission.
NASA needs to revert to the slower, more reliable, more expensive philosophy that brought so much success throughout the sixties and seventies. We need to accept that space exploration is complex and expensive and attempts to shortcut will just result in horrible failures and even the loss of life.
The last thing NASA should do is revert to its old philosophy. That philosophy is appropriate for some missions, but disaster for most: it costs way too much, and provides poor return on investment. FBC, if done right, can provide a much better ROI. Space exploration does not have to be complex and expensive. Look at NEAR, SAMPEX, HETE, Clementine, Lunar Prospector, the AMSATs, Orsted, Freja, Orbcomm, Mars Pathfinder, Beagle, MightySat, RADCAL, or MACSAT. FBC can be done, and done right.
Unfortunately, I have to second the opinion of one of the other people that replied to this post: NASA is riddled with incompetents. Sure, they were great during the Apollo program, and sure, there are still a few sharp people there. But there are also alot of people who are just dead weight.
A large part of the reason for the rampant incompetence is that NASA is a government agency, and as such it must pay its employees on the GS pay scale. Which sucks. I have seen them attempt to hire people at slightly more than half the salary that same person could pull in industry. Needless to say, those people go into industry instead. The best of the NASA centers, in terms of employee competence, seems to be JPL. But they're not really a normal NASA center: JPL employees work for Caltech, not NASA. As a result they get pay that is comparable to industry, and JPL gets employees that know what they're doing.
the rules clearly state that you may only choose 2 of the above!!
Yeah, yeah. Everyone keeps saying that. But the truth of your statement depends entirely on how you define "better". In the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" philosophy "better" doesn't mean that an individual mission is any less likely to fail. Under FBC "better" means that the overall ROI across a large number of missions is higher. The words "faster" and "cheaper" apply to individual missions. The word "better" applies to the program as a whole. It's a shame that NASA never adequately managed to explain this to the public:-(
Note that the above does not necessarily imply that NASA always implements FBC well - there are many in NASA that don't understand what the "better" part means either. The result is a bunch of projects that attempt to achieve the same or better performance, but on a radisally compressed schedule and budget. Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster. As you stated, success for that kind of project is "against the rules".
Wish I could mod the parent higher than a 5 somehow. You have hit the nail precisely on the head. I get sick of hearing everyone regurgitate the "pick any two" line. "Faster, Better, Cheaper" as a design philosophy was always supposed to mean "do lots of small, low-cost missions quickly, accepting the fact that some will fail in return for the higher overall science return".
Too many people interpret the "better" part to mean that an individual mission will be "better". Not necessarily so (although an argument can be made that smaller, less complex missions can be as or more reliable than bigger mission). It all comes down to how you define "better". In FBC terms, "better" is improving the amount of science data you can get back. If you spend $600M on one big mission, and it fails, you've just lost $600M worth of science data. If you spend $600M on 3 smaller missions you may be able to generate more data than with one big mission (more flexibility with several observation platforms). More importantly, if you lose all 3 missions then you're no worse off than you would be with one big mission, but e.g. if you lose only 2/3 of your missions, you still get $200M worth of science.
FBC does work, when it is done right. Look at APL's NEAR mission, or Clementine, or Lunar Prospector, or SAMPEX, or HETE, or any of the UoSATs. It's not impossible, even for NASA. It's just that not all parts of NASA are good at it, or implement it correctly.
It doesn't sound like the X-43A was killed by FBC. It sounds like sloppy systems engineering to me (not retesting after a change like adding extra heat protection sounds very risky to me - although it's entirely possible that they did they risk analysis, and decided it was ok to proceed without the test - that's the chance you take). It wouldn't be the first time that's happened. Implementing FBC demands solid systems engineering. The problem is that many parts of NASA interpret "cheaper" to mean "cut all parts of the budget", and hack away at the systems engineering budget along with everything else. Not a good idea.
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Solar electric propulsion is hardly new. It's been used for getting communications satellites out to their final geosynchronous orbits for a number of years now, and NASA demonstrated using solar-powered ion engines for interplanetary primary propulsion on Deep Space 1 back in '98.
What ESA is claiming is new about this mission is that they'll be combining ion propulsion with gravity assist maneuvers. AFAIK that hasn't really been done yet (although I know some guys at JPL who're working on it), and given how difficult it can be to work out low-thrust trajectories in the first place I would imagine that successfully throwing gravity assists into the mix would be a significant acheivement.
Last time I had a math heavy presentation I ended up generating a bunch of encapsulated postscript files directly from LaTeX sources, and then pasting them in to PPT. A little awkward, but preferable to the MS-supplied equation editor...
It's not the backgrounds, and it's not the animation effects. Mostly it's the ease of layout - HTML slides are much harder to arrange. HTML is fine if all you want to present is bulleted lists. But if you're trying to present information in an interesting and visually meaningful way, layout becomes an issue. Content becomes next to useless if the audience can't rapidly absorb it and layout is key to that process.
It doesn't have to be powerpoint. It just has to work. I've been bouncing between powerpoint and impress a lot recently. I usually find that I can draft out a presentation in impress, but end up having to clean it up and finish it in powerpoint (and no, it's not because I want all the cutesy little MS animations). To be honest, my gripes with impress, aside from the slow load time, are mostly bugs (which you're right, I need to report in Issuezilla): The handling of inserted images seems to be a little flaky at times; the master slide functionality seems to have a few glitches (or I don't understand how to use it correctly); some silly UI issues (as much personal preference as anything else), and a few other irritations. Nothing huge, but the sum of all those little nagging problems is an experience (for me) that is not as good as I would like. Not that powerpoint doesn't have its annoyances too...
That was Bussard's big breakthrough - he developed a way to use magnetic fields to protect the inner electrode from electron impacts, and thus increase the efficiency. Unfortunately, as far as I know, he never got the money to take it much beyond the concept demonstration stage (not as far as break-even). See "The World's Simplest Fusion Reactor: And How to Make It Work" for more details.
Thanks for the tip! That's great to hear! Dare I ask where the name "Criawips" comes from?
Unfortunately, Wallace's IEC, like every other IEC ever built, doesn't get even close to break-even. Their primary utility is, as the article mentions, as a neutron source (and in fact that's what they're usually used for). There are some folks that are hopeful they can find a way to improve the efficiency of IEC fusion and exceed break-even (Robert Bussard, of Bussard ram-jet fame, for example), but no one's managed to actually demonstrate a working, energy-generating IEC yet.
I see a word processor, a spreadsheet, and a database app. How about that other stalwart of the "office productivity" suite, presentation software? Much as it pains me to say it, Powerpoint has become almost indispensable (at least in my line of work) these days. OO.org's Impress is nice, but still not quite on a par with PPT. A Gnome-Office PPT equivalent would be a nice addition to the suite. Or is there some other open source presentation option out there I'm not aware of?
Just to second Jody's point: I've seen spreadsheets (specifically Excel) used for, of all things, spacecraft design (among other things). In fact, JPL's Project Design Center (aka Team X) uses a whole slew of linked workbooks to develop entire conceptual mission designs. The beauty of spreadsheets is that they are very flexible, and it's easy to create and modify low-fidelity models very rapidly. As a result, Excel gets heavy use throughout the aerospace industry for doing all sorts of back-of-the-envelope calculations and simple math modelling. As Jody says, they make a great scratch pad.
True. But they are subject to more in the way of radiation degradation, as well as having their coverglass slowly made more opaque by micrometeoroid impacts. At least on Earth it's possible to wipe the dirt off the cells :-)
They have exactly the same efficiency on the ground: they will convert 35% of the light that falls on them into electricity (after all, that's what efficiency means). It's just that on the ground they will be subject to light that has been attenuated by the atmosphere, so will produce less Watts per square meter than they would in space.
Well, actually, solar cell technology has been improving steadily over the last several years. There are currently flying spacecraft with 26% efficient cells, 28% cells due to start rolling off the production lines sometime in the next year or two, and experimental designs for cells that are up to 35% efficient.
But you're right - nothing anywhere near 50% (at least AFAIK). And 100% efficient sounds like total BS.
You can check out their website here. Most of their real money-making launches have been Earth imaging of one sort or another (e.g. their current big project - the Disaster Monitoring Constellation - is all about responsive Earth imaging). However, they've also flown several scientific and experimental payloads, they just landed a contract to do some of the prototype work on Galileo, and have a good business helping other countries get space programs up and running in a short amount of time.
The X-prize is a philanthropic donation made by a bunch of really rich guys. This kind of money will help us achieve certain milestones, but once they've been achieved it will vanish. Unless we can find buisiness in space, it won't work as it did with airplanes because people don't NEED to go to space, nor does much mail need delivering.
The X-prize is modeled after the prizes that kick-started aviation in the early decades of the 20th century. It's not intended to last forever, it's intended to provide the impetus for developing things that will be self-sustaining, but aren't self-starting. People don't NEED to go into the air either - but it gets them there faster. Cheap suborbital transportation could drastically reduce point-to-point travel times. In an age of global business and "just-in-time" everything, that seems like it could make some money. I'm sure Fedex would happily charge a premium for "same-hour, anywhere in the world" service too.
These companies are aiming to serve the comsat community, which isn't doing anything really spectacular when you think of it. I agree that the technology and achievement is cool, but they're not breaking any new ground.
Read my comment again. I said smallsat launcher. Smallsats are not usually used as comsats (with the possible exception of Orbcomm), since comsats need massive amounts of power that smallsats don't have. My point was that several companies believe that there is enough of a market for smallsat launches that they're trying hard to win that market. I don't know what the business plan of all those smallsat customers is, but I can tell you that cheap, responsive launches and rapidly built smallsats open up business possibilities that don't exist right now.
They launched 1 guy, once. The other two potential customers (Lance Bass and that guy from South Africa) couldn't afford it and decided it wasn't worth the cost respectively. Given NASA's new failures, you're not going to see any new tourists in space any time soon. All this also neglects the fact that these tourists were riding on government funded infrastructure, and their costs only paid a fraction of a percent of the costs of the entire program.
Two, actually. Mark Shuttleworth went up last year. Both Tito's and Shuttleworth's tickets more than covered the cost of their flights. Sure, two flights doesn't cover the cost of the program. But two flights doesn't cover the cost of a 747 either. It's all about volume. And NASA's shuttle woes won't do a whole lot to the Russian space program - the Soyuz is well known to be far more robust than the fickle shuttle.
They're still going to lose a bundle on developing and launching the system. This is done out of nationalistic neccesity, not to be a commercially viable competitor to GPS. And few private companies today could muster the resources to launch such a program, even if the returns were guaranteed and the risks of failure were much lower than they are now.
I wouldn't be so sure about the ROI on Galileo. Sure there won't be an immediate return, but I suspect they could pay for it over the long haul. Particularly if aircraft start getting into precision GPS approaches. That's a very large number of subscriptions right there. And there are lots of other businesses that would probably be willing
Just out of curiosity, what kind of page rate does it sustain during the other 12 hours of the day? :-^)
Well, to be fair, NASA pretty much begged the military to come on board, since making shuttle the "nation's launch system" was about the only way they could even come close to rationalizing the launch rate predictions they needed to make the cost of the program something congress would swallow. The military requirements went away right about the time that the DoD saw that Challenger might just cause the entire shuttle program to go away (or at best get suspended for a good long while), and realized that it might not be so smart to put all their eggs in one basket. Hence the move back to expendables.
Yeah, that might explain why Surrey Satellites in the UK is making so much off of stuff other than comsats. And why there are several groups racing to win the X-prize. And why there several companies desperately trying to be the first to market with a cheap smallsat launcher. And why the Russians are able to make $20M a pop for launching rich tourists into space. And why the EU is considering charging for subscriptions to the precision version of Galileo (their answer to GPS). And that's only what I can think of off the top of my head. Nope, no money to be made in space at all.
Seriously, the problem isn't that there aren't opprtunities to do profitable stuff in space, it's that US companies are hamstrung by the government. There's a reason that most of the most innovative space stuff is happening outside of the US these days.
Apollo 8 was the mission that first entered lunar orbit (but did not land).
You are mostly likely thinking of the X-20 DynaSoar, which was considered the next step after the X-15 until it got cancelled in favor of Mercury/Gemini/Apollo. However, the X-20 concept did involve launching on top of a rocket - the OSP is very much a rehash of the old X-20 idea.
There's no reason you couldn't design some sort of hybrid air-breather/rocket that could get to altitude via an air-breathing system and then achieve orbit via a rocket system.
No reason aside from the fact that it requires a lot of technology development (i.e. money) to do a hybrid airbreather/rocket engine. OSP is intended to be a "quick and dirty" interrim solution, until a real next gen RLV can be developed. The argument is that it may not be the right "quick and dirty" solution (something more Apollo-like might be better in a lot of ways).
A cheaper hybrid airbreather/rocket system (and perhaps this was what you were actually referring to) would be one that didn't combine both engines into one (ala the Pegasus launch vehicle). In fact, this is the approach that Burt Rutan is taking with his White Knight/SpaceShipOne X-prize entry. However, that design is, at least at this point, only good for suborbital hops. Is this really the best answer? I don't know. But I think that one of the nice things about the X-prize is that we get to see a bunch of different concepts actually perform, and from there we can pick the best ones. Much like the early evolution of aircraft design.
That said, the good old days of test flight in the 50's and early 60's saw a lot of build-test-build programs that built capability incrementally. More recently, the DC-X program did the same thing (until it was killed), and Surrey Satellites in the UK has been very successful at incrementally developing better and better spacecraft. But most modern aerospace efforts get mired in bureaucracy that frowns on any kind of failure (even the kind you learn from), and are subject to government funding cycles that preclude built-test-build style programs.
The profits aren't there because it costs so much to put things in space. It costs so much to put things in space because of NASA's stranglehold on space, and the massive amount of useless government red-tape involved in a launch.
Universities won't be funding space exploration -- it's often tough for them to find enough money in the budget for facilities maintenance.
Actually, many universities do run their own spacecraft programs. Admittedly, in some cases the funding comes through NASA, but the actual design, development, and operation of the spacecraft is handled by the university with minimal NASA oversight. This model works well. In fact, it's very similar to the way the early airmail companies (forerunners of the airline industry) were encouraged - the government didn't set up its own airmail system, it contracted with a bunch of private groups to do it.
Boeing is not going to land a man on Mars in the hopes that they will be able to turn a profit from the mission.
Probably not. However they'd undoubtedly be willing to take some money from e.g. the Mars Society to land some people on Mars. The question we need to ask is "why are we going to Mars". Much as I would like to see us land on Mars, if we don't have an answer, we won't be going. Most people don't think a Mars expedition is worthwhile. Those that do tend to get hooked up with the Mars Society, and put their money where their mouth is.
Lockheed is not going to fund the launch of a next-generation space telescope with the expectation of making money from the venture.
Again, that's probably true. But if they science is valuable then grants will be available to do it, and the telescope will get built. The government can value the science without having to be intimately involved in the actual production of the data.
I just don't believe that it would further our knowledge, increase our enthusiasm, or make us proud to be Americans if some private firm launched Lance Bass (of 'N Sync), Dennis Tito, and other multi-millionaire space-tourist-wannabes into orbit.
Actually, I'm fairly confident that it will further our knowledge (although gaining an understanding of the zero-gee tolerance, or lack thereof, of boy-band stars may not be what you had in mind ;-) And I can assure you that my enthusiam and pride in America was fired far more by seeing Dennis Tito, a former aerospace engineer who worked hard to achieve his dream, going into space than it does seeing a shuttle launch. Because if Tito can do it, then there's hope for the rest of us.
The private sector will continue to fund and launch communications satellites -- and will do little else. Nothing else having to do with space has been shown to have any real promise of generating a positive cash flow.
Right. Which might explain why Surrey Satellites in the UK has made so much money not launching commsats. Or why the Space Imaging guys are making money. Or why I heard on NPR the other day about Florida orange farmers using satellite surveillance to gauge the Brazilian orange crop. There are ways to make money in space. There will be more if the cost of launch came down. Which won't happen until the government butts out.
A President's job is to look out for the good of the country, not pander to trailer park inbreds who think that astrology and astronomy are the same thing.
That's a nice thought, but it is completely at odds with the way the system is set up at present. If that's your beef, then you have larger problems to deal with than just the fact that the government is screwing up space exploration.
Look, I'm in favor of space exploration. But I've been involved in the government end of the space industry for the past 3 years, and I've learned the hard way the that the number one problem with "government space" is the "government" part. Thankfully, there are other ways to get things done, and some orgaizations are using those ways.
Actually, if you stop and think about you'll realize that the way NASA put men on the moon was very much in line with the FBC philosophy. Rather than investing a huge amount of money in something complex and "high-tech" like the X-20 DynaSoar and taking forever to develop the missions NASA operated on a fixed, very tight schedule (land and return before the decade is out), and opted for simple, rugged solutions. Sounds a lot like the mandated "3 years from 0 to launch" policy and deliberate selection of less complex solutions to me that APL used for NEAR and other FBC missions. Sure, the NASA lunar program to develop a lot of new technology, but the underlying philosophy very much FBC. FBC doesn't mean spending less money, and it doesn't mean doing a bad job. It means thinking about what you are doing, and trying to maximize the value for the money you are spending.
We don't need a good return on investment -- we need more investment. NASA's annual budget is less than we are spending every two months occupying Iraq. In the mid-60's, NASA received about 5% of the total federal budget. Now it gets less than 1/2%. We need a President like Kennedy again -- one who values space exploration more than oil exploitation.
Presidential politics have very little to do with it. While I agree that Kennedy was extremely inspiring, I think he was dealing with a very different environment than we face today. What we really need is for the federal government to get its nose out of space, and to back off on the various regulations that mke it hard for commercial interests to do anything in space. The American public (as a whole) apparently doesn't care about space. If they did, it would be a great campaign platform, and someone would use it as such. The "public" doesn't want to spend the money, they have no tolerance for failure, and all they are interested in is spectacular firsts. This attitude is not conducive to a healthy space program. When you add in the fact that NASA is now a bloated bureaucracy, riddled with incompetent engineers and managers, drowning in unwanted congressional pork, and essentially wedded by politics to a launch system that is clearly over-priced and broken, it's no surprise that our space program is a mess.
No doubt. Which is why successful FBC missions tend to deliberately work to reduce complexity. That's how they make them fast and cheap. It's a foolish project manager (i.e. one that really doesn't "get" FBC) that tries to implement the "Faster" and "Cheaper" parts of FBC on a mission that is as complex is a non-FBC mission.
NASA needs to revert to the slower, more reliable, more expensive philosophy that brought so much success throughout the sixties and seventies. We need to accept that space exploration is complex and expensive and attempts to shortcut will just result in horrible failures and even the loss of life.
The last thing NASA should do is revert to its old philosophy. That philosophy is appropriate for some missions, but disaster for most: it costs way too much, and provides poor return on investment. FBC, if done right, can provide a much better ROI. Space exploration does not have to be complex and expensive. Look at NEAR, SAMPEX, HETE, Clementine, Lunar Prospector, the AMSATs, Orsted, Freja, Orbcomm, Mars Pathfinder, Beagle, MightySat, RADCAL, or MACSAT. FBC can be done, and done right.
A large part of the reason for the rampant incompetence is that NASA is a government agency, and as such it must pay its employees on the GS pay scale. Which sucks. I have seen them attempt to hire people at slightly more than half the salary that same person could pull in industry. Needless to say, those people go into industry instead. The best of the NASA centers, in terms of employee competence, seems to be JPL. But they're not really a normal NASA center: JPL employees work for Caltech, not NASA. As a result they get pay that is comparable to industry, and JPL gets employees that know what they're doing.
Yeah, yeah. Everyone keeps saying that. But the truth of your statement depends entirely on how you define "better". In the "Faster, Better, Cheaper" philosophy "better" doesn't mean that an individual mission is any less likely to fail. Under FBC "better" means that the overall ROI across a large number of missions is higher. The words "faster" and "cheaper" apply to individual missions. The word "better" applies to the program as a whole. It's a shame that NASA never adequately managed to explain this to the public :-(
Note that the above does not necessarily imply that NASA always implements FBC well - there are many in NASA that don't understand what the "better" part means either. The result is a bunch of projects that attempt to achieve the same or better performance, but on a radisally compressed schedule and budget. Needless to say, this is a recipe for disaster. As you stated, success for that kind of project is "against the rules".
Too many people interpret the "better" part to mean that an individual mission will be "better". Not necessarily so (although an argument can be made that smaller, less complex missions can be as or more reliable than bigger mission). It all comes down to how you define "better". In FBC terms, "better" is improving the amount of science data you can get back. If you spend $600M on one big mission, and it fails, you've just lost $600M worth of science data. If you spend $600M on 3 smaller missions you may be able to generate more data than with one big mission (more flexibility with several observation platforms). More importantly, if you lose all 3 missions then you're no worse off than you would be with one big mission, but e.g. if you lose only 2/3 of your missions, you still get $200M worth of science.
FBC does work, when it is done right. Look at APL's NEAR mission, or Clementine, or Lunar Prospector, or SAMPEX, or HETE, or any of the UoSATs. It's not impossible, even for NASA. It's just that not all parts of NASA are good at it, or implement it correctly.
It doesn't sound like the X-43A was killed by FBC. It sounds like sloppy systems engineering to me (not retesting after a change like adding extra heat protection sounds very risky to me - although it's entirely possible that they did they risk analysis, and decided it was ok to proceed without the test - that's the chance you take). It wouldn't be the first time that's happened. Implementing FBC demands solid systems engineering. The problem is that many parts of NASA interpret "cheaper" to mean "cut all parts of the budget", and hack away at the systems engineering budget along with everything else. Not a good idea.