I am not going to doubt his word, so it presumably happened, but it is also bullshit. NASA has plenty of rocket research going on. Right now, for example, NASA is testing the J2X rocket for the SLS at Stennis. If you look at the link, you will see considerably better facilities than a hanger in a field.
NASA is a big organization, with lots of parts, and it is certainly conceivable that some center sent somebody inexperienced to see what was going on at Armadillo, but if those were real rocket people, I suspect what they were doing was closer to industrial espionage than to basic education.
The greatest advantage to this is speed. No pre-breathing and cycle time in a big airlock. You could be out in space in minutes it sounds like, or less.
The other great advantage is that one person should be able to put on their own suit - now, it takes substantial help from a partner.
I have this mental image that in the future not everyone will be able to pass as human (i.e., routinely solve captchas), and the ones who can may be able to rent out that service to those who can't.
On this side of the human / AI line, we call this propaganda. It has historically proved very effective, specially if you can control all of the "training data."
The big problem is that liquid Hydrogen won't keep long in space. A few hours, sure. A week? Not so much. So, if you are going to use the most efficient propellant, LEO rendezvous is very dicey. (If the second launch, the one with the crew, doesn't go on time, you spent a lot of money to orbit an empty tank.)
The Soviet plan was to land a return vehicle on the Moon, check it out, and then send a crew to land, walk over , and fly it back. The return vehicle could be hypergolic so there was no rush on the crew's timing. Everything could be sized this was to enable long stays on the Moon. They actually built this hardware, but of course it never flew. Given the close ties between the Russian and Chinese space efforts, look for the Chinese to do something broadly similar.
Starfish prime knocked out a bunch of satellites, but I believe that that was because of its own radiation, not because of an EMP. I would assume that spy satellites and the like are properly shielded for this, and it would take a near hit to take them out. Commercial satellites could be another matter...
You are thinking of "Operation Plowshare"... A not-wildly-successful-but-truly-a-classic-of-the-nuclear-optimism-period project. Essentially, team nuclear realized that mankind now had the power to dig very large holes very quickly and proceeded to see what sorts of civil engineering could be shoehorned into being based on very large holes.
This was one of Edward Teller's attempts to justify his life.
Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.
Well, not quite. There is useful post-bomb carbon dating. Basically, we put a lot more C14 into the atmosphere in the 1950's than the natural background. It's largely gone from the air, but it will be decaying in trees and the like for some time to come, and that, too, can be used for dating.
Starfish Prime occurred during a sudden burst of testing between the lapse of an unofficial US-Soviet testing moratorium and the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1961-63). If the geopolitical winds had been a little different (i.e., if Khrushchev and Kennedy had respected each other and the French hadn't started testing in the Sahara), there might not have been any exo-atmospheric tests before the LTBT, and we wouldn't know about EMT.
Makes you wonder if there are any other major effects we and the Soviets missed.
Hall effect thrusters have a good specific impulse and a great reliability record, but they have thrust in the milliNewton range, which means 6 months to a year or so to get to the Moon. Now, you could imagine putting a whole bunch of them together to get a higher thrust, but then, where is Excalibur going to get the 100 megawatts or so they would need for reasonable trip times?
Excalibur would be better off trying to get some of the flight qualified NERVA rockets refurbished, or do what Space Adventures plans, and fly a new Zond around the Moon.
Do you have links to anything that documents Jupiter and Venus being out of chemical equilibria? I searched for a while, but couldn't find much more than a few lines, and I'd be very interested to know more.
For Venus, you have to look at the Soviet literature, as they did most of the exploration, and much of that is not on-line. See, e.g., Volkov, 1991. There is an interesting "tri-modal" distribution of cloud droplet diameters, and Iron, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chorline have all been detected at altitude.
For Jupiter, look at any of the color images returned by spacecraft. All those different colors are different materials, probably polysufides, although AFAIK there is no consensus as to exactly which material makes each color. Whatever makes the colors, it must be operational on a grand scale, as the colors are consistent over at least a century, and the residence times in the visible layers of the atmosphere are much shorter than that. Perhaps the best evidence is the change in the color of Oval BA, where in less than a year a storm complex the size of the Earth significantly reddened with nothing else apparently changing. The authors of the above paper postulate an unobservable change in global temperature but, who knows, maybe there is a biosystem that thrives in and colonizes the large storms, and the reddening is byproduct of that. That at least has the advantage of being testable (by seeing if the reddening is a general, but delayed, feature of new mega storm systems).
Now, none of this is proof of anything biological on Jupiter, but if you want to take the opposite viewpoint, the Jupiter biosphere could be immense (comparable to or larger than the mass of the Earth), and still be consistent with our available data. For Venus, a biosphere could be a remnant from the age before the run-away Greenhouse, and could easily be comparable in mass to the maximum biosphere that currently could be active on Mars. Neither has gotten much spacecraft attention; I guess bugs in the air aren't as sexy as bugs in the permafrost.
I think that the 50 years of space exploration shows that we are most interested in life that is somewhat like us, in settings we can understand. Bacteria on Mars ? Fish on Europa ? Yes, launch the spacecraft! Floating life at 40 km altitude on Venus or in the clouds of Jupiter or Saturn ? Not so much. And, yet, the atmospheres of both Venus and Jupiter show signs of being out of chemical equilibria, the essential signature of a biological system.
People need to understand how slowly we are exploring the solar system. Yes, substantial progress is being made, but it is taking a long time to settle even the most basic questions. Ones that are rated secondary (such as life on Jupiter) could take a century or more to address.
Just because I know that some will be confused by the summary, Juno is purely an orbiter. It doesn't have an entry probe. So, it can look for water, but it is has to do it from orbit.
From an article in Aviation Week: "The experiment of exposing an unpressurized hand to near vacuum for a significant time while the pilot went about his business occurred in real life on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal."
Note that pressure at 102,000 feet is comparable to that at the lowest places on Mars (i.e., the Hellas Basin).
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In other words, the money that the Court awarded to compensate artists and rightsholders for their losses is not going to the artists at all."
Anyone who is at all surprised by this has simply not been paying attention.
The opening line in Hamlet rings true,"To be or not to be".
Act 3 scene 1. It's nowhere near the beginning.
I am not going to doubt his word, so it presumably happened, but it is also bullshit. NASA has plenty of rocket research going on. Right now, for example, NASA is testing the J2X rocket for the SLS at Stennis. If you look at the link, you will see considerably better facilities than a hanger in a field.
NASA is a big organization, with lots of parts, and it is certainly conceivable that some center sent somebody inexperienced to see what was going on at Armadillo, but if those were real rocket people, I suspect what they were doing was closer to industrial espionage than to basic education.
I'd be shocked if there weren't also a ship-interior cover for the hatch.
I believe that the rear hatch can be closed while it is docked..
The greatest advantage to this is speed. No pre-breathing and cycle time in a big airlock. You could be out in space in minutes it sounds like, or less.
The other great advantage is that one person should be able to put on their own suit - now, it takes substantial help from a partner.
This is a feature, not a bug, of the "Reagan Revolution."
Historically? Just what do you think D.A.R.E. is?
amateurs
I have this mental image that in the future not everyone will be able to pass as human (i.e., routinely solve captchas), and the ones who can may be able to rent out that service to those who can't.
The "original article" has a link to the arxiv preprint at the bottom.
On this side of the human / AI line, we call this propaganda. It has historically proved very effective, specially if you can control all of the "training data."
The big problem is that liquid Hydrogen won't keep long in space. A few hours, sure. A week? Not so much. So, if you are going to use the most efficient propellant, LEO rendezvous is very dicey. (If the second launch, the one with the crew, doesn't go on time, you spent a lot of money to orbit an empty tank.)
The Soviet plan was to land a return vehicle on the Moon, check it out, and then send a crew to land, walk over , and fly it back. The return vehicle could be hypergolic so there was no rush on the crew's timing. Everything could be sized this was to enable long stays on the Moon. They actually built this hardware, but of course it never flew. Given the close ties between the Russian and Chinese space efforts, look for the Chinese to do something broadly similar.
The judge was of course riffing on "We have met the enemy, and he is us." (Pogo, 1970).
It was a fairly good joke, for judge, but I guess more humor than the NZ judicial system could bear.
Anyone surprised by this is truly clueless.
Starfish prime knocked out a bunch of satellites, but I believe that that was because of its own radiation, not because of an EMP. I would assume that
spy satellites and the like are properly shielded for this, and it would take a near hit to take them out. Commercial satellites could be another matter...
You are thinking of "Operation Plowshare"... A not-wildly-successful-but-truly-a-classic-of-the-nuclear-optimism-period project. Essentially, team nuclear realized that mankind now had the power to dig very large holes very quickly and proceeded to see what sorts of civil engineering could be shoehorned into being based on very large holes.
This was one of Edward Teller's attempts to justify his life.
Here's how crazy of an effect nuclear bombs have had on our atmosphere. Basically, artifacts from the latter half of the 20th century and much of the 21st century will not be able to be reliably carbon dated in the future. Even if you want to include a compensation factor, the concentrations for a given location at different times over the lifespan of an organism and the organism's uptake at different points in its life aren't readily quantified.
Well, not quite. There is useful post-bomb carbon dating. Basically, we put a lot more C14 into the atmosphere in the 1950's than the natural background. It's largely gone from the air, but it will be decaying in trees and the like for some time to come, and that, too, can be used for dating.
http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=starfish+explosions&qpvt=starfish+explosions&FORM=IGRE
Starfish Prime occurred during a sudden burst of testing between the lapse of an unofficial US-Soviet testing moratorium and the Limited Test Ban Treaty (1961-63). If the geopolitical winds had been a little different (i.e., if Khrushchev and Kennedy had respected each other and the French hadn't started testing in the Sahara), there might not have been any exo-atmospheric tests before the LTBT, and we wouldn't know about EMT.
Makes you wonder if there are any other major effects we and the Soviets missed.
Hall effect thrusters have a good specific impulse and a great reliability record, but they have thrust in the milliNewton range, which means 6 months to a year or so to get to the Moon. Now, you could imagine putting a whole bunch of them together to get a higher thrust, but then, where is Excalibur going to get the 100 megawatts or so they would need for reasonable trip times?
Excalibur would be better off trying to get some of the flight qualified NERVA rockets refurbished, or do what Space Adventures plans, and fly a new Zond around the Moon.
You must mean this one ; http://adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2000DPS....32.1008I
Do you have links to anything that documents Jupiter and Venus being out of chemical equilibria? I searched for a while, but couldn't find much more than a few lines, and I'd be very interested to know more.
For Venus, you have to look at the Soviet literature, as they did most of the exploration, and much of that is not on-line. See, e.g., Volkov, 1991. There is an interesting "tri-modal" distribution of cloud droplet diameters, and Iron, Phosphorus, Sulphur and Chorline have all been detected at altitude.
For Jupiter, look at any of the color images returned by spacecraft. All those different colors are different materials, probably polysufides, although AFAIK there is no consensus as to exactly which material makes each color. Whatever makes the colors, it must be operational on a grand scale, as the colors are consistent over at least a century, and the residence times in the visible layers of the atmosphere are much shorter than that. Perhaps the best evidence is the change in the color of Oval BA, where in less than a year a storm complex the size of the Earth significantly reddened with nothing else apparently changing. The authors of the above paper postulate an unobservable change in global temperature but, who knows, maybe there is a biosystem that thrives in and colonizes the large storms, and the reddening is byproduct of that. That at least has the advantage of being testable (by seeing if the reddening is a general, but delayed, feature of new mega storm systems).
Now, none of this is proof of anything biological on Jupiter, but if you want to take the opposite viewpoint, the Jupiter biosphere could be immense (comparable to or larger than the mass of the Earth), and still be consistent with our available data. For Venus, a biosphere could be a remnant from the age before the run-away Greenhouse, and could easily be comparable in mass to the maximum biosphere that currently could be active on Mars. Neither has gotten much spacecraft attention; I guess bugs in the air aren't as sexy as bugs in the permafrost.
I think that the 50 years of space exploration shows that we are most interested in life that is somewhat like us, in settings we can understand. Bacteria on Mars ? Fish on Europa ? Yes, launch the spacecraft! Floating life at 40 km altitude on Venus or in the clouds of Jupiter or Saturn ? Not so much. And, yet, the atmospheres of both Venus and Jupiter show signs of being out of chemical equilibria, the essential signature of a biological system.
People need to understand how slowly we are exploring the solar system. Yes, substantial progress is being made, but it is taking a long time to settle even the most basic questions. Ones that are rated secondary (such as life on Jupiter) could take a century or more to address.
Just because I know that some will be confused by the summary, Juno is purely an orbiter. It doesn't have an entry probe. So, it can look for water, but it is has to do it from orbit.
http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/14/3/033001/pdf/1367-2630_14_3_033001.pdf
I am still not sure exactly what the physics is here.
From an article in Aviation Week: "The experiment of exposing an unpressurized hand to near vacuum for a significant time while the pilot went about his business occurred in real life on Aug. 16, 1960. Joe Kittinger, during his ascent to 102,800 ft (19.5 miles) in an open gondola, lost pressurization of his right hand. He decided to continue the mission, and the hand became painful and useless as you would expect. However, once back to lower altitudes following his record-breaking parachute jump, the hand returned to normal."
Note that pressure at 102,000 feet is comparable to that at the lowest places on Mars (i.e., the Hellas Basin).