I agree that zealotry is non-productive in general, but in this case, I'd say the historical evidence is squarely in the "politicians that ignore economics kill everyone" side. Look at Venezuela, Iran, Argentina, Russia, North Korea, etc. Then look at the messages coming from our government about "profit taxes" for oil, nationalization of oil, etc.
There are some things economics can't solve - this is not one of them.
All the soil in South America was exhausted? I think that is unlikely. Remember, we don't really know what happened to the Maya during the great collapse, we just know they left the lowlands. There is considerable evidence that a long drought caused that - and true, if mother nature whacks you you may die...
Anyway, the Mayan civilization survived that - and the people were not reduce to poverty because of it either. We call it the collapse because they left that area, not because they all died or something. Their culture and technology survived, but in a different location. The political angle here is that we decided that having to leave the lowlands was inherently bad.
I'll concede Easter Island, though I'm not sure there was any real economics involved with their resource allocation strategy. Global warming (which I would normally argue about being a catastrophe in the making - I'm unimpressed about a 1 degree baseline change when the standard deviation is far larger) is not the same as this - if Global warming is a real problem, it is a problem because it fits in a well known failing of economics: externalities.
I do fear political involvement there as well - I believe externalities exist and are harmful, but I believe the political "solutions" are almost universally more harmful than the original problems. (Occasionally not, such as river pollution - but especially with regards to Global Warming I think the case has not been made)
By the way, it is pretty hard to argue politics are not involved in these things when the solution most politicians come up with to a shortage is to punish the suppliers - any economist (and most people with a modicum of common sense) will tell you that will have the opposite effect... see what the Democrats are doing about the oil shortage, vs the Republican response. Ignore morals - which solution will work?
Fair enough. Admittedly, economics free of government involvement is virtually impossible, but I would say that whenever a market has failed at this particular problem it has definitely been due to politics. You can talk about economics failing due to lack of info, or externalities, but this is pretty straight forward.
Admittedly, it also shows survival bias - if economics had failed at some point, most likely whoever it failed would be dead and not likely to report.
True, but why could they not grow more food? I believe you will find that those reasons were political, not economics. I agree that politics can kill economics and make it ineffective, but not that economics couldn't solve the problem. (In this case, starving people could have grown food themselves but chose not to due to political concerns.)
Well, I'll admit I had not thought of that case and I should have - but even in that case, the solution (given by economics) was to move to other areas that had more resources. The civilizations were not really wiped out - they merged into nearby ones that still had those resources.
And even in those cases, the standard of living most likely did not change much... as long as they moved. For those whom politics prevented from moving, I'm sure they were not happy - but I provided that politics seems to do that a lot...
True - however, the economy was sort of designed, and economics is roughly the study of that economy (and ways to improve it). As I decided when I wrote it, the language wasn't perfect, but communicated the message adequately.
Not true - this kind of thing is done with extremely high efficiency all the time in industry. The term you are missing is "regeneration" - the idea is very simple: Take this very cold stuff and use it to pre-cool the stuff coming into the plant. As it warms up, it cools the incoming feed material lowering the energy required to get it to final temperature.
The only real limits on this is volume and time - if you can wait days, and can use space-shuttle tile class insulators, a C cell battery could power it!
And why does a wooden ship need to be sail powered? Diesel will work just fine on a wooden ship - wood propeller and all. It is simply harder to maintain than steel and iron.
Don't worry, there is plenty of zinc, etc in the planet.
Whenever you see a scare-monger story like this, remember: economics is designed to fix stuff like this. As zinc becomes harder to get, zinc becomes more expensive. That drives technological growth in zinc extraction, bringing the price back down. Alternately, it drives some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it. Alternately, it also makes currently uneconomical mines (such as current waste dumps) economical, increasing supply at the higher price.
This is the type of problem a free market is best at solving. The danger is government involvement - since you bring up oil, much of the current cost of oil is due to anti-oil lobbying preventing the "new" oil technologies being implemented. The Democrats are essentially preventing oil-shale (and, of course, offshore drilling) in the US.
I have never met an activist that was willing to live and let live - never! I donate a large percentage of my income to charities, and I work with inner city kids to try to improve their lives - what do you do?
There is a huge difference between an activist and someone trying to get something done. An activist only stops others - they never do anything. At least that is my definition - if yours is different, then perhaps we are talking across each other.
To me, the defining aspect of an activist is that they stop others, but never build anything themselves (except rules, of course, for the others to follow). March on Congress for anything - you are an activist. Give your own time and money to promote a cause - you are not an activist, you are a volunteer.
go denigrate people who've dedicated their lives to making the world a better place
Yah right - activists do not want to make the world better, They want to prevent me from being happy, because my happy is different from their happy - and they think that makes me wrong.
Why do you think they never want a compromise? For them, a compromise is a loss - they need to stop others, not move themselves forward.
My 2 cent political descriptions: Republicans want to build new stuff, Democrats want to redistribute existing stuff. These are not irreconcilable, unless it is really about power.
And so what is it if I force you to work half your time on my projects, since my projects are popular?
Even progressive taxation is slavery - you are taking the few people in society that are good at creating value and forcing them at gunpoint to labor harder to support those that are not.
One constant across human existence - eventually the slaves rebel.
Actually, if you think about it, what is the probability that a black hole created in a particle accelerator will have a lower velocity than Earth's escape velocity? Seeing as how it starts life at nearly C, I'd say the odds are good that anything created is headed for deep space.
I have learned to not use the word "impossible". Especially when "materials properties" are the hurdle. But I'm betting against the success, partly because of engineering hurdles, but MOSTLY because neither the prize nor goal (the 'why') are worth pursuing, especially given the miniscule budget. If it happens, make sure we know about it. I'll be watching. Of course, by that time, I'll be playing Duke Nukem Forever waiting for a ride on the Space Elevator;-) Oh, now that I totally agree with!;-}
OK, well getting into a credentials pissing contest with a pseudo-anonymous person is just silly - especially since, if what you say is true, our credentials are orthogonal. (My title has three letters in it, and my budget is much larger than yours I'd bet)
But, as I said, I'm pseudo-anonymous, your pseudo-anonymous - so let's let the math speak for us:
Wave drag + stagnation temperature - you seem to be assuming high velocities in the atmosphere which, as you point out, is probably a sub-optimal design. Fortunately I assumed no such thing - I was doing a back-of-the-envelope calc, and just assumed that getting 10 kg clear of the appreciable atmosphere was not going to be a challenge, as balloons do that every day, etc. BTW, I did include "wave drag" and every kind of drag in my "couple of hundred m/s. Obviously, you could challenge that and I would not try to back it up - I'm not interested in this contest, except possibly as an advertising vehicle, so I am hand waving a lot of issues aside. (As I am sure you know, stagnation temperature means nothing - it is the temperature of the air a few feet in front of you. You want to calculate the heat flux transmitted to you by it, but fortunately you do not ever have to survive that temperature. Otherwise, no one would ever pass mach 5 or so - indeed, for a long time it was thought to be impossible)
Combustion pressure - Look, I hate to be rude, but this paragraph really doesn't sound like it was written by an aerospace guy. The engine pressure needs to be at least 3 times the external pressure or so (minimum design point). Since the burn will start way out of the atmosphere, that pressure will actually be limited by your combustion process rather than external pressures. Your pressure vessel calculations are, well, wrong. Tank mass scales directly with pressure and volume - and tanks do not care much about shape (as long as you have directional strength capabilities). That said, enclosing your entire propellant supply at full operating pressure is unlikely to be optimal - there are many ways to raise the propellant up to pressure as it is used, as I'm sure you realize. The critical point here is that engines with a T/W ratio of 100 are pretty easy using dense propellants. This really isn't the issue you seem to think it is.
Guidance, Circularization - OK, a lot of this just gets chalked up to the agreed premise that only thrusting in the atmosphere is dumb. But since I was talking about a rocket, rather than Bull's cannon, that is beside the point. Guidance is very hard - but not for the reasons you claim. Vectoring thrust is easy, proven and addresses all of your claims. What you missed is that while engines, tanks, and thrust vector control systems scale with vehicle size - guidance computers do not. This is a real problem for a 500 gram rocket - and is one of those things that you would have to design around.
Final stage - OK, if there was a point here, I missed it. I proposed an SSTO, which you say is dumb (words I believe you will eat inside 10 years). You then said that adding staging hardware eats mass (sort of - I submit that SSTO is harder and therefor heavier, but whatever). While true, it does not really apply.
You also mentioned performing a shuttle boost trajectory - that would not be very clever, since the shuttle only does that because they need to hit a particular orbit and have to launch from Florida. This project has no such requirements - obviously you would go to the equator and launch due east, for maximum boost.
On your engineering claims, I know how I would attempt it if I wanted to (somehow, dreams of $20K just don't excite me anymore) but I don't want to discuss that in an open forum. (You do know about ITAR, right?)
Let me just say that in regards to engineering (and science, for that matter), never believe someone who says it cannot be done. You cannot prove something impossible, and existenc
No, I did not neglect gravity, air resistance, etc. Orbital velocity is 7.7 km/s. I had a few hundred m/s extra for drag, and a few for gravity. I assumed a dense fuel (that's why the Isp sucks at 280), which minimizes air drag. I assume a rapid (as in high G) boost, because I don't see how you could possibly do this otherwise. I made lots of other assumptions, all vaguely reasonable, to make a back of the envelope calculation. The most unreasonable assumption, if you want to know, is that I am assuming an SSTO - which was obvious from the math, and so since you did not call me on it you are obviously not someone who has ever designed a rocket! An SSTO is very hard at normal sizes, and a tiny one is going to really require some "clever stuff", but hey, that why you get the big bucks for this design!;-}
20:1 ratios have been achieved in the 1960s - yes, it is aggressive, are you saying this prize is not going to require an aggressive design?
If you really want to go into all this, read the wiki on delta-v - last time I was there, it was pretty good. High Isp designs (450 seconds, like the shuttle) require large delta-v budgets for air resistance and gravity losses, because they use hydrogen which is not dense, leading to larger airframes and lower thrust engines. (Engine T/W ratio is linked to propellant density).
No, this is Fed Ex for ISS! Don't you remember the near tragedy of Apollo 13? No, not the LOX tank rupture, don't you remember the Jack Swigert forgot to file his taxes before he left? He only narrowly avoided a long, painful death in the IRS dungeons because he was on good terms with the President!
No longer will our brave astronauts have to risk life, limb, and tax form! With this advance, the forms can be quickly sent to the ISS and returned!
Slashdot Mirror
leases that they already have
Cite please - if true I'm very interested.
I agree that zealotry is non-productive in general, but in this case, I'd say the historical evidence is squarely in the "politicians that ignore economics kill everyone" side. Look at Venezuela, Iran, Argentina, Russia, North Korea, etc. Then look at the messages coming from our government about "profit taxes" for oil, nationalization of oil, etc.
There are some things economics can't solve - this is not one of them.
All the soil in South America was exhausted? I think that is unlikely. Remember, we don't really know what happened to the Maya during the great collapse, we just know they left the lowlands. There is considerable evidence that a long drought caused that - and true, if mother nature whacks you you may die...
Anyway, the Mayan civilization survived that - and the people were not reduce to poverty because of it either. We call it the collapse because they left that area, not because they all died or something. Their culture and technology survived, but in a different location. The political angle here is that we decided that having to leave the lowlands was inherently bad.
I'll concede Easter Island, though I'm not sure there was any real economics involved with their resource allocation strategy. Global warming (which I would normally argue about being a catastrophe in the making - I'm unimpressed about a 1 degree baseline change when the standard deviation is far larger) is not the same as this - if Global warming is a real problem, it is a problem because it fits in a well known failing of economics: externalities.
I do fear political involvement there as well - I believe externalities exist and are harmful, but I believe the political "solutions" are almost universally more harmful than the original problems. (Occasionally not, such as river pollution - but especially with regards to Global Warming I think the case has not been made)
By the way, it is pretty hard to argue politics are not involved in these things when the solution most politicians come up with to a shortage is to punish the suppliers - any economist (and most people with a modicum of common sense) will tell you that will have the opposite effect... see what the Democrats are doing about the oil shortage, vs the Republican response. Ignore morals - which solution will work?
Fair enough. Admittedly, economics free of government involvement is virtually impossible, but I would say that whenever a market has failed at this particular problem it has definitely been due to politics. You can talk about economics failing due to lack of info, or externalities, but this is pretty straight forward.
Admittedly, it also shows survival bias - if economics had failed at some point, most likely whoever it failed would be dead and not likely to report.
In fact, this is what I argue the true problem is - politics causes the downfall, not economics.
True, but why could they not grow more food? I believe you will find that those reasons were political, not economics. I agree that politics can kill economics and make it ineffective, but not that economics couldn't solve the problem. (In this case, starving people could have grown food themselves but chose not to due to political concerns.)
Well, I'll admit I had not thought of that case and I should have - but even in that case, the solution (given by economics) was to move to other areas that had more resources. The civilizations were not really wiped out - they merged into nearby ones that still had those resources.
And even in those cases, the standard of living most likely did not change much... as long as they moved. For those whom politics prevented from moving, I'm sure they were not happy - but I provided that politics seems to do that a lot...
True - however, the economy was sort of designed, and economics is roughly the study of that economy (and ways to improve it). As I decided when I wrote it, the language wasn't perfect, but communicated the message adequately.
First, the market will be helpless if there really is no alternative.
And in the history of mankind this has happened: NEVER!
And second, when there is an alternative, it may be something so drastically different than our current standard of living
And in the history of mankind this has happened: NEVER! As a race, the only time we go backwards is because of politics, not economics.
Not true - this kind of thing is done with extremely high efficiency all the time in industry. The term you are missing is "regeneration" - the idea is very simple: Take this very cold stuff and use it to pre-cool the stuff coming into the plant. As it warms up, it cools the incoming feed material lowering the energy required to get it to final temperature.
The only real limits on this is volume and time - if you can wait days, and can use space-shuttle tile class insulators, a C cell battery could power it!
This isn't even a new idea - some of our mines are actually mining the "garbage dump" from Roman mines...
And why does a wooden ship need to be sail powered? Diesel will work just fine on a wooden ship - wood propeller and all. It is simply harder to maintain than steel and iron.
Don't worry, there is plenty of zinc, etc in the planet.
Whenever you see a scare-monger story like this, remember: economics is designed to fix stuff like this. As zinc becomes harder to get, zinc becomes more expensive. That drives technological growth in zinc extraction, bringing the price back down. Alternately, it drives some of the existing buyers to alternatives, leaving only those that really need it. Alternately, it also makes currently uneconomical mines (such as current waste dumps) economical, increasing supply at the higher price.
This is the type of problem a free market is best at solving. The danger is government involvement - since you bring up oil, much of the current cost of oil is due to anti-oil lobbying preventing the "new" oil technologies being implemented. The Democrats are essentially preventing oil-shale (and, of course, offshore drilling) in the US.
Do you know any activists?
I have never met an activist that was willing to live and let live - never! I donate a large percentage of my income to charities, and I work with inner city kids to try to improve their lives - what do you do?
There is a huge difference between an activist and someone trying to get something done. An activist only stops others - they never do anything. At least that is my definition - if yours is different, then perhaps we are talking across each other.
To me, the defining aspect of an activist is that they stop others, but never build anything themselves (except rules, of course, for the others to follow). March on Congress for anything - you are an activist. Give your own time and money to promote a cause - you are not an activist, you are a volunteer.
go denigrate people who've dedicated their lives to making the world a better place
Yah right - activists do not want to make the world better, They want to prevent me from being happy, because my happy is different from their happy - and they think that makes me wrong.
Why do you think they never want a compromise? For them, a compromise is a loss - they need to stop others, not move themselves forward.
My 2 cent political descriptions: Republicans want to build new stuff, Democrats want to redistribute existing stuff. These are not irreconcilable, unless it is really about power.
And so what is it if I force you to work half your time on my projects, since my projects are popular?
Even progressive taxation is slavery - you are taking the few people in society that are good at creating value and forcing them at gunpoint to labor harder to support those that are not.
One constant across human existence - eventually the slaves rebel.
Do you know what it is called when you (the majority) pass taxes that only apply to a minority?
Slavery.
Actually, if you think about it, what is the probability that a black hole created in a particle accelerator will have a lower velocity than Earth's escape velocity? Seeing as how it starts life at nearly C, I'd say the odds are good that anything created is headed for deep space.
I hear you on safety - but I bet it wasn't 10 mg of mylar!
I AM a ... Savvy?
OK, well getting into a credentials pissing contest with a pseudo-anonymous person is just silly - especially since, if what you say is true, our credentials are orthogonal. (My title has three letters in it, and my budget is much larger than yours I'd bet)
But, as I said, I'm pseudo-anonymous, your pseudo-anonymous - so let's let the math speak for us:
Wave drag + stagnation temperature - you seem to be assuming high velocities in the atmosphere which, as you point out, is probably a sub-optimal design. Fortunately I assumed no such thing - I was doing a back-of-the-envelope calc, and just assumed that getting 10 kg clear of the appreciable atmosphere was not going to be a challenge, as balloons do that every day, etc. BTW, I did include "wave drag" and every kind of drag in my "couple of hundred m/s. Obviously, you could challenge that and I would not try to back it up - I'm not interested in this contest, except possibly as an advertising vehicle, so I am hand waving a lot of issues aside. (As I am sure you know, stagnation temperature means nothing - it is the temperature of the air a few feet in front of you. You want to calculate the heat flux transmitted to you by it, but fortunately you do not ever have to survive that temperature. Otherwise, no one would ever pass mach 5 or so - indeed, for a long time it was thought to be impossible)
Combustion pressure - Look, I hate to be rude, but this paragraph really doesn't sound like it was written by an aerospace guy. The engine pressure needs to be at least 3 times the external pressure or so (minimum design point). Since the burn will start way out of the atmosphere, that pressure will actually be limited by your combustion process rather than external pressures. Your pressure vessel calculations are, well, wrong. Tank mass scales directly with pressure and volume - and tanks do not care much about shape (as long as you have directional strength capabilities). That said, enclosing your entire propellant supply at full operating pressure is unlikely to be optimal - there are many ways to raise the propellant up to pressure as it is used, as I'm sure you realize. The critical point here is that engines with a T/W ratio of 100 are pretty easy using dense propellants. This really isn't the issue you seem to think it is.
Guidance, Circularization - OK, a lot of this just gets chalked up to the agreed premise that only thrusting in the atmosphere is dumb. But since I was talking about a rocket, rather than Bull's cannon, that is beside the point. Guidance is very hard - but not for the reasons you claim. Vectoring thrust is easy, proven and addresses all of your claims. What you missed is that while engines, tanks, and thrust vector control systems scale with vehicle size - guidance computers do not. This is a real problem for a 500 gram rocket - and is one of those things that you would have to design around.
Final stage - OK, if there was a point here, I missed it. I proposed an SSTO, which you say is dumb (words I believe you will eat inside 10 years). You then said that adding staging hardware eats mass (sort of - I submit that SSTO is harder and therefor heavier, but whatever). While true, it does not really apply.
You also mentioned performing a shuttle boost trajectory - that would not be very clever, since the shuttle only does that because they need to hit a particular orbit and have to launch from Florida. This project has no such requirements - obviously you would go to the equator and launch due east, for maximum boost.
On your engineering claims, I know how I would attempt it if I wanted to (somehow, dreams of $20K just don't excite me anymore) but I don't want to discuss that in an open forum. (You do know about ITAR, right?)
Let me just say that in regards to engineering (and science, for that matter), never believe someone who says it cannot be done. You cannot prove something impossible, and existenc
OK, I am a rocket engineer, you are not...
;-}
No, I did not neglect gravity, air resistance, etc. Orbital velocity is 7.7 km/s. I had a few hundred m/s extra for drag, and a few for gravity. I assumed a dense fuel (that's why the Isp sucks at 280), which minimizes air drag. I assume a rapid (as in high G) boost, because I don't see how you could possibly do this otherwise. I made lots of other assumptions, all vaguely reasonable, to make a back of the envelope calculation. The most unreasonable assumption, if you want to know, is that I am assuming an SSTO - which was obvious from the math, and so since you did not call me on it you are obviously not someone who has ever designed a rocket! An SSTO is very hard at normal sizes, and a tiny one is going to really require some "clever stuff", but hey, that why you get the big bucks for this design!
20:1 ratios have been achieved in the 1960s - yes, it is aggressive, are you saying this prize is not going to require an aggressive design?
If you really want to go into all this, read the wiki on delta-v - last time I was there, it was pretty good. High Isp designs (450 seconds, like the shuttle) require large delta-v budgets for air resistance and gravity losses, because they use hydrogen which is not dense, leading to larger airframes and lower thrust engines. (Engine T/W ratio is linked to propellant density).
No, this is Fed Ex for ISS! Don't you remember the near tragedy of Apollo 13? No, not the LOX tank rupture, don't you remember the Jack Swigert forgot to file his taxes before he left? He only narrowly avoided a long, painful death in the IRS dungeons because he was on good terms with the President!
No longer will our brave astronauts have to risk life, limb, and tax form! With this advance, the forms can be quickly sent to the ISS and returned!