Rutan has always been one of thos engineers who thinks outside of the box and has quite a few successes and here is another one. The current approach and basically unchanged since rocketry's infancy has been to avoid drag as much as possible in hopes of fuel economy and vehicle efficiency. Conventional wisdom has always said," go straight up and pass through the least amount of atmosphere and get to were you want to be as fast as possible and you will save the most fuel". The current wisdom has always treated drag as an enemy which it is but drag also has a sibling called lift. Now in a rocket going straight up, lift from an airfoil is to be avoided since the lift vector is in an axis perpendicular to the main direction of travel and all it will do is cause extra drag. Rutan's approach, way out of the box when it comes to rockets, is to use an effecient airfoil which will give minimal drag and maximum lift and travel to a high altitude with a minimum amount of fuel. By doing this he is:
1. Drastically reducing the fuel requirements just to get were the air is thin for the high speed portion of the launch.
2.Reducing the size of the launch vehicle system drastically just by not having to carry all that extra fuel.
3.Using smaller propulsion units because of decreased launch vehicle mass. These not only will weigh less but be cheaper to manufacture and be more durable.
4.By using smaller and more conventional propulsion units, he is also gaining a significant level of safety. A moderate sized jet or rocket engine is much easier to control technically. You can always just turn off the fuel and the fire goes out. One of the big safety issuse with the shuttle program has been the solid fuel booster engines. Once they are lit, there is no turning them off until they are consumed. Also because a rocket has no lift, there are limited options of launch abortal in the early moments of launch. Actually as the launch proceeds and gains altitude, the emergency procedure options increase dramatically with conventional launches. By using a quasi-conventional aircraft design, the complete launch vehicle will always have the ability to do an engine out glide return to earth up to vehicle seperation and actual high altitude launch sequence begins. Even this will be at a very great altitude
giving many emergency options and this space vehicle is also a lifting body so it will be capable of gliding also.
Rutan has had a huge influence on winged aviation for the military and civilian side. It appears that he is leaving his mark on the space program also.
As a side note, Rutan and Nasa and the Air Force are on very friendly terms. It wouldn't surprise me if they have not been helping fund some of this research. I can't waqit to see this actually fly and reach orbit.
The RIAA is actually going about this in a winnable fashion and they don't even have to win to win.
First they are taking on a person who does not have the deep pockets to defend himself against the 2,000Lb. gorilla that the RIAA is. If the student does not defend himself, the RIAA wins by default. The RIAA would then have a judgement placed against the student which would not be avoidable by bankruptcy and probably even have rights to his estate after his death. His credit is ruined and he would never have any hope of keeping any assets (cash or property), any earnings he is able to earn would probably be garinsheed also. The RIAA will also probably continue to keep the student in court until he dies of old age, demanding that he prove that he has no assets at each summons which would require several appearances.
If the student fights the court case, the RIAA will keep him in court for years, one day at a time until he is broke and has to quit. At this point the RIAA wins be default again. This whole game is in the RIAA's favor since they have the bucks, resources, and the time (corporations can live a lot longer than people). Basically the poor guy's life is ruined unless some White Knight steps up and can give the RIAA a run for the money.
In order to beat the RIAA at this game the student must somehow out spend the RIAA, tough to do. If the RIAA wins or settles out of court, they win. I f the student is able to win the case and the appeals that surely will follows, the RIAA has only lost one of an indefinite number of battles. Bottom line is this poor sucker is going to be made an example of to frighten the masses into submission.
This war is a matter of life and death for the RIAA and they are going to pursue winning it as such.
Actually, they already do. The LINEAR telescope for one and a slew of others. A few are actually designed to scan a major portion of the sky nightly with special high speed ccd cameras. The scope has a special mount to slew rapidly and accurately while the wide field camera system continuously downloads the images to the computer system where the previous nights images are subtracted from the current. Any new objects are immediately flagged and reported. There are several amateur astronomers who have scopes dedicated to doing this. A high percentage of the newly discovered comets are discovered this way also. Actually the number of telescopes currently scannining the sky is sufficient, the real need is computational horsepower when analysing orbital information.
Actually $50/hr. is a pretty good deal. The three scopes, their mounts, and the ccd camera systems are worth about $75,000 -$100,000 total. Combine that with his location which has excellent seeing in excess of 80% of the time and you have a prime system for some real serious deep sky work. Most people don't realize how difficult astrophotography is. During the exposure which can last anywhere bewteen seconds and hours depending on the magnitude (brightness) of the object being imaged, the scope must track the object without any vibration or error as the earth rotates (less than.000005in. at the mount). In addition to this, these scopes must have perfect goto systems, any error and the user will have a zero chance of being able find where the scope is pointing too. The ccd cameras on these scopes are top self stuff, depending on exactly which cameras he has, they cost anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000. The peltier cooling systems on the ccd cameras would make most over clockers droole. The ccd chip temperature must be maintained +-.5C or better and at 0C or below to maintain image and data accuraccy plus the temperature must be ramped down and back up at a rate which will not destroy the ccd chip. Also since these are robotic ccd camera scopes, they must be focused by software control. Put the whole system together and you have some very serious computer hardware and software. By the way, this guy has a roll off observatory building, that's why the scopes appear to be in the open. You still have plenty of time to enjoy Saturns rings for at least another year; meteor showers are viewed best with the naked eye, a scope has too narrow of a view to catch them; and no you can't or even Hubble see the flag on the moon. It would take something bigger than the Twin Kecks in orbit.m This stuff is actually computer geek heaven!
I am afraid your base data is wrong about the moon. The moon's diameter is approx 27% yielding a cross sectional area 6% of the earth's and it's mass is 10% of the earth's mass. The fact remains that during the rotational period when the moon leads the earth that the farside IS exposed to a greater probability of impact without the benefit of any significant atmosphere and that the earth is not shielding the moon at this point. Comet debris would seem to be th biggest hazard, we aren't talking big particles but at the given velocities, their impact energies could be considerable. Astronomers do visually see impacts at the moons terminator, these are rare but still are frequent enough that many amateur astronomers do invest time waiting for a visible impact event. If the probabability for damage to a receiver is negligble from meteors in space than why do we take precautions with our orbital satellites? The combined gravitional forces acting on a meteor that is in the orbital path will have an increased velocity and potential for increased impact and damage to any structure that is built on the moon's farside. I also am assuming that we would want more than a 10 yr. design life out of this project. I also was assuming that if serious SETI research where going to be done and we were going to invest this much money into a project such as this, that a very wide frequency spectrum would be employed, thus you would want to shield it from the sun's noise. Also I was assuming since you were desiring to construct an extemely sensitive detector that you would want to protect it from proton and electron radiation which could be significant in the case of a solar flare. If you where to construct this antenna system out of insitu materials than wouldn't you have a dish that is not steerable except for limited steering allowed by phase arrays? At least Arecibo can do a 360 deg.scan once every 24 hrs instead of this projects 4 wk. scan period. A radio telescope's antenna does not have to be massive to work. All you need is a radio reflective material that has a surface continuity that is greater than 1/4 wavelength of the signal's wavelength. In a zero G environment very thin films are excellent candidates for an antenna structure. For rfi shielding the same parameters apply, you don't necessarily need a large mass in the way, I was using massive in the effective sense i.e. extemely effective. Most earth based optical telescopes are usable more than 25% of the time (more than 6hrs./day) and are maintainable. I think one of the critera for site selection is that they need observable skies greater than 80% of the time. If the real problem is earth based rfi than why don't we invest a fraction of a moon far side based project into active rfi suppression technology? Look what active optics have done for earth based visual telescopes.
Good idea except for a couple of significant problems. Number 1 is the meteor problem, during the 2 wks in which the moon leads the earth through space, the combined gravational forces of the moon and earth significantly increase the probability of a meteor striking the telescope system if it where built on the far side. Take a look at some of the photos NASA has from the far side, the near side is silky smooth compared to the far side. The moon acts as a meteor shield for the earth,this plus our atmosphere are the main reasons why the earth's surface isn't cratered like the moons surface. The second major problem is that over half the time the telescope would be pointed at or at least exposed to the sun which in it self is a significant source of rfi. If you had the logitical problems covered you still would be hard pressed to have this very expensive instrument usable more then 1 wk. out of 4 wks. If anyone is actually serious about this concept, it would be much more feasible to place a radio telescope device with massive rfi shielding from the earth's noise out in deep space.The idea of a radio telescope on the moon's far side is not new and neither are the practicalities. The cheap and dirty solution is to ask everyone to turn off the power for a few hours. I hope this guy is not trying for a degree in astrophysics, he hasn't done his home work if he is.
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Rutan has always been one of thos engineers who thinks outside of the box and has quite a few successes and here is another one. The current approach and basically unchanged since rocketry's infancy has been to avoid drag as much as possible in hopes of fuel economy and vehicle efficiency. Conventional wisdom has always said," go straight up and pass through the least amount of atmosphere and get to were you want to be as fast as possible and you will save the most fuel". The current wisdom has always treated drag as an enemy which it is but drag also has a sibling called lift. Now in a rocket going straight up, lift from an airfoil is to be avoided since the lift vector is in an axis perpendicular to the main direction of travel and all it will do is cause extra drag. Rutan's approach, way out of the box when it comes to rockets, is to use an effecient airfoil which will give minimal drag and maximum lift and travel to a high altitude with a minimum amount of fuel. By doing this he is: 1. Drastically reducing the fuel requirements just to get were the air is thin for the high speed portion of the launch. 2.Reducing the size of the launch vehicle system drastically just by not having to carry all that extra fuel. 3.Using smaller propulsion units because of decreased launch vehicle mass. These not only will weigh less but be cheaper to manufacture and be more durable. 4.By using smaller and more conventional propulsion units, he is also gaining a significant level of safety. A moderate sized jet or rocket engine is much easier to control technically. You can always just turn off the fuel and the fire goes out. One of the big safety issuse with the shuttle program has been the solid fuel booster engines. Once they are lit, there is no turning them off until they are consumed. Also because a rocket has no lift, there are limited options of launch abortal in the early moments of launch. Actually as the launch proceeds and gains altitude, the emergency procedure options increase dramatically with conventional launches. By using a quasi-conventional aircraft design, the complete launch vehicle will always have the ability to do an engine out glide return to earth up to vehicle seperation and actual high altitude launch sequence begins. Even this will be at a very great altitude giving many emergency options and this space vehicle is also a lifting body so it will be capable of gliding also. Rutan has had a huge influence on winged aviation for the military and civilian side. It appears that he is leaving his mark on the space program also. As a side note, Rutan and Nasa and the Air Force are on very friendly terms. It wouldn't surprise me if they have not been helping fund some of this research. I can't waqit to see this actually fly and reach orbit.
The RIAA is actually going about this in a winnable fashion and they don't even have to win to win. First they are taking on a person who does not have the deep pockets to defend himself against the 2,000Lb. gorilla that the RIAA is. If the student does not defend himself, the RIAA wins by default. The RIAA would then have a judgement placed against the student which would not be avoidable by bankruptcy and probably even have rights to his estate after his death. His credit is ruined and he would never have any hope of keeping any assets (cash or property), any earnings he is able to earn would probably be garinsheed also. The RIAA will also probably continue to keep the student in court until he dies of old age, demanding that he prove that he has no assets at each summons which would require several appearances. If the student fights the court case, the RIAA will keep him in court for years, one day at a time until he is broke and has to quit. At this point the RIAA wins be default again. This whole game is in the RIAA's favor since they have the bucks, resources, and the time (corporations can live a lot longer than people). Basically the poor guy's life is ruined unless some White Knight steps up and can give the RIAA a run for the money. In order to beat the RIAA at this game the student must somehow out spend the RIAA, tough to do. If the RIAA wins or settles out of court, they win. I f the student is able to win the case and the appeals that surely will follows, the RIAA has only lost one of an indefinite number of battles. Bottom line is this poor sucker is going to be made an example of to frighten the masses into submission. This war is a matter of life and death for the RIAA and they are going to pursue winning it as such.
Actually, they already do. The LINEAR telescope for one and a slew of others. A few are actually designed to scan a major portion of the sky nightly with special high speed ccd cameras. The scope has a special mount to slew rapidly and accurately while the wide field camera system continuously downloads the images to the computer system where the previous nights images are subtracted from the current. Any new objects are immediately flagged and reported. There are several amateur astronomers who have scopes dedicated to doing this. A high percentage of the newly discovered comets are discovered this way also. Actually the number of telescopes currently scannining the sky is sufficient, the real need is computational horsepower when analysing orbital information.
Actually $50/hr. is a pretty good deal. The three scopes, their mounts, and the ccd camera systems are worth about $75,000 -$100,000 total. Combine that with his location which has excellent seeing in excess of 80% of the time and you have a prime system for some real serious deep sky work. Most people don't realize how difficult astrophotography is. During the exposure which can last anywhere bewteen seconds and hours depending on the magnitude (brightness) of the object being imaged, the scope must track the object without any vibration or error as the earth rotates (less than .000005in. at the mount). In addition to this, these scopes must have perfect goto systems, any error and the user will have a zero chance of being able find where the scope is pointing too. The ccd cameras on these scopes are top self stuff, depending on exactly which cameras he has, they cost anywhere between $5,000 and $25,000. The peltier cooling systems on the ccd cameras would make most over clockers droole. The ccd chip temperature must be maintained +- .5C or better and at 0C or below to maintain image and data accuraccy plus the temperature must be ramped down and back up at a rate which will not destroy the ccd chip. Also since these are robotic ccd camera scopes, they must be focused by software control. Put the whole system together and you have some very serious computer hardware and software. By the way, this guy has a roll off observatory building, that's why the scopes appear to be in the open. You still have plenty of time to enjoy Saturns rings for at least another year; meteor showers are viewed best with the naked eye, a scope has too narrow of a view to catch them; and no you can't or even Hubble see the flag on the moon. It would take something bigger than the Twin Kecks in orbit.m This stuff is actually computer geek heaven!
I am afraid your base data is wrong about the moon. The moon's diameter is approx 27% yielding a cross sectional area 6% of the earth's and it's mass is 10% of the earth's mass. The fact remains that during the rotational period when the moon leads the earth that the farside IS exposed to a greater probability of impact without the benefit of any significant atmosphere and that the earth is not shielding the moon at this point. Comet debris would seem to be th biggest hazard, we aren't talking big particles but at the given velocities, their impact energies could be considerable. Astronomers do visually see impacts at the moons terminator, these are rare but still are frequent enough that many amateur astronomers do invest time waiting for a visible impact event. If the probabability for damage to a receiver is negligble from meteors in space than why do we take precautions with our orbital satellites? The combined gravitional forces acting on a meteor that is in the orbital path will have an increased velocity and potential for increased impact and damage to any structure that is built on the moon's farside. I also am assuming that we would want more than a 10 yr. design life out of this project. I also was assuming that if serious SETI research where going to be done and we were going to invest this much money into a project such as this, that a very wide frequency spectrum would be employed, thus you would want to shield it from the sun's noise. Also I was assuming since you were desiring to construct an extemely sensitive detector that you would want to protect it from proton and electron radiation which could be significant in the case of a solar flare. If you where to construct this antenna system out of insitu materials than wouldn't you have a dish that is not steerable except for limited steering allowed by phase arrays? At least Arecibo can do a 360 deg.scan once every 24 hrs instead of this projects 4 wk. scan period. A radio telescope's antenna does not have to be massive to work. All you need is a radio reflective material that has a surface continuity that is greater than 1/4 wavelength of the signal's wavelength. In a zero G environment very thin films are excellent candidates for an antenna structure. For rfi shielding the same parameters apply, you don't necessarily need a large mass in the way, I was using massive in the effective sense i.e. extemely effective. Most earth based optical telescopes are usable more than 25% of the time (more than 6hrs./day) and are maintainable. I think one of the critera for site selection is that they need observable skies greater than 80% of the time. If the real problem is earth based rfi than why don't we invest a fraction of a moon far side based project into active rfi suppression technology? Look what active optics have done for earth based visual telescopes.
Good idea except for a couple of significant problems. Number 1 is the meteor problem, during the 2 wks in which the moon leads the earth through space, the combined gravational forces of the moon and earth significantly increase the probability of a meteor striking the telescope system if it where built on the far side. Take a look at some of the photos NASA has from the far side, the near side is silky smooth compared to the far side. The moon acts as a meteor shield for the earth,this plus our atmosphere are the main reasons why the earth's surface isn't cratered like the moons surface. The second major problem is that over half the time the telescope would be pointed at or at least exposed to the sun which in it self is a significant source of rfi. If you had the logitical problems covered you still would be hard pressed to have this very expensive instrument usable more then 1 wk. out of 4 wks. If anyone is actually serious about this concept, it would be much more feasible to place a radio telescope device with massive rfi shielding from the earth's noise out in deep space.The idea of a radio telescope on the moon's far side is not new and neither are the practicalities. The cheap and dirty solution is to ask everyone to turn off the power for a few hours. I hope this guy is not trying for a degree in astrophysics, he hasn't done his home work if he is.