With respect to the fast breeding/quick changes these are still only examples of micro evolution. As stated in the article, a fly is still a fly. Macro evolution is about a fly becoming a higher order life form.
You, sir, are changing the goal posts. "Macro evolution" has a specific meaning: "Large-scale evolution occurring over geologic time that results in the formation of new taxonomic groups." That includes speciation along with larger-order changes. Speciation doesn't even occur on geologic scales, it has been observed in and out of the lab many times. Drosophilia, aquatic worms, certain flowers, every domesticated crop, check out the talk.origins fact for actual cited science on this. Speciation, in fact not rhetoric, is COMMON, hence the incredibly diverse biota on Earth. No cite, but I've heard that humans have changed physically in recorded history: Roman writers record that men could, in that time, pull their testicles up into their body. Show me an modern human that can do that.
Science isn't about determining truth, it is about understanding the natural world and applying that knowledge. "Truth" is elusive and spiritual.
Genetic engineering has no more to do with religion than writing evolving computer code.
this message brought to you by the Old Poster's Club.
I was gonna post to the Mars Forum when I got home, and you slashdott3d it!! You hosed the forum!! Thanks a lot, now I have to go do something productive.
This is an interesting project, it will help to fill in the holes in the knowledge of our origins. Most cultures have legends of the journeys that led to settling a new home, with this research we will see much more clearly who went where,
Here is the map I want to see more fully realized:
http://www.mitomap.org/WorldMigrations.pdf
There are interesting legends and recent research that Genographic project might help: were there Austronesian ("aborigine") migrations across the Pacific 40,000 years ago? Are modern Tibetans and Athapaskan speakers (Navaho) related through the so-called Amur River Culture? When and how often have the "X" haplogroups travelled to America, and were these only Neolithic migrations or did they occur throughout the Bronze and Iron ages? Finally, how much back-migration occured from the Americas to the Old World continents? I'm not the one to research it, but a correlation between Am-Indian oral lore and this geno-map could make for an interesting thesis.
My guess is that the project will show far more migration than previously expected - humans are nothing if not mobile.
I'd like to second Watts on this. I ran BeOS as my primary home OS for several years on both PPC then Intel hardware. BeOS is one of my favorite OSes ever, right up there with NewtonOS and Amiga. BeOS was incredibly responsive on even the most modest hardware back then. For me the OS provided a stable writing, web development and browsing platform that also allowed great control over disk formats, allowing recovery of crashed Mac and Windoze drives. It could also do things like play several dozen instances of large Quicktimes simulataneously - like 30 copies of a Star Wars trailer at once. BeOS rocked - it was everything that Apple and Commodore had promised but come up short with their products.
I also agree w/ parent about this new ZetaOS not being compelling in 2005. A lot of great software has been written in past 5-6 years.
Phunny photo. nasawatch.com had the infamous "Mars Hydro and Marina" picture today.
There's one problem with this ever-continuing quest for water: The Viking probes confirmed the existence of massive water reserves in the north polar caps. That was 30 years ago. A recently released image, emargoed for a couple of decades, clearly shows Vallis Marineris with dense fogbanks from wall to wall. I think the real question is what are we going to do with all that water?
This Station has two theoretical "finishes": Core Complete and a more nebulous Assembly Complete. Originally, the station (Reagan's Freedom) was to be finished in 1994, then 1998, then it got redesigned. It has only gotten more complicated since then. It may be like Fusion power and Commodore's release schedules - station will always be finished 10 years from now.
At this point, it really depends on what you define "Core Complete" as.
There are some potential roadblocks toward getting the European Columbus, Japanese Kibo and the US Centrifuge flown. NASA is already looking at mothballing the first two (finished) modules and not building the Centrifuge. The Shuttle has been having groundings for various reasons since the late 90s (maintenance, fuel line cracks and Columbia RIP) - there is no guarantee that the fleet can fly through 2010.
It's time to stop talking about "The Space Station" and start talking about space stations. Bigelow Aerospace is about to one-up the X-Prize with the America's Space Prize and their Nautilus inflatable stations. They want to sell the final modules to any party that can afford one, all backed up by a billionaire with some Vision. The idea of the One True Space Dock is so Cold War. We are quickly approaching a new age of exploration and human frontiers, companies like Scaled, Bigelow, SpaceDev and SpaceX are going to enable this. NASA needs to stop doing operations and get on with exploring, or their going to get swept aside -- lead, follow or get out of the way.
>Laws? Great googly-moogly, no. But I'll bet two dimes to a doughnut that pretty much everyone who travels to another world, whether on his own initiative or as a government employee, is going to have to come home post-haste or die. There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
I have to disagree. (sorry it took so long to reply) There have been exstensive studies dealing with hi-volume access to LEO, and the businesses that become viable below certain price points. One application is permanent elder care in low or zero G - old bones respond better with less gravity to fight against. There are also plenty of studies and stories (yes, fiction) about permanent settlements from the start - flags and footprints is a waste of time if colonization is the goal. One engineering perspective is George Herbert's One Way To Stay plan. I highly recommend John Lewis book "Mining the Sky" - he goes into detail about the sheer quantity of resources available in the inner solar system. Comets, many chondrite asteroids and both of Mars' moons have significant quantities of water and other volatiles. Water makes fuel and atmosphere, combined with other volatiles you can have plastics. One of the major missing elements is actually nitrogen, but mining that from Earth's atmosphere becomes viable as well with LEO industry. Radiation is less an issue when you can live in a city in the center of a comet or shell of water. Sure, it's fiction for now, but if enough people work to make it happen, we'll all be a lot better off for it.Something to think about.
On the "lock em up" thing - i was just pushing things past their logical extension.
>There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system.
Would you like to have laws to prevent people from spreading offplanet? An iron curtain around Earth, so to speak? Government "programs", whatever, but are you going to tell people that they can't fly on their own dime? When the tech is their to build spacecraft at garage-level, are you willing to enforce a ban on the cosmos? Heck, let's have Burt Rutan arrested, post-haste. Talk about absurd.
I agree with you about the slieght-of-hand on the Vision for Space Exploration. The Hubble people should put the new instruments into a new craft and then plan out the NEXT one. I'd love to see "Hubble" as a line of similiar telescopes - imagine what becomes visible with 4 Hubbles as interferometers in solar orbit!
When there is a reason, a real reason, to go into space, people will. And they'll go to stay, hopefully, and build new worlds and cultures, and repopulate Earth when we get whacked with a comet again.
> You have to cope with large stresses, heat and moment in the heat of the moment of launch - or so the torque goes.
Yes, and when something goes wrong, you have fewer and more dangerous option for escape. On top of a rocket, payload has the option of a launch-escape tower that will pull the capsule away from the explosion. 15Gs for 3-6 seconds sucks, but it's better than being dead. With Shuttle, all launch-aborts involve problems with colliding with the stack of ET/SRBs, in some, the Shuttle also has to do a backward loop to escape. Some engineers question most of the Shuttle's abort modes - especially the ones that involve abort-to-launch-site and landing in the North Atlantic. With a capsule, you pull up, fall back to Earth in a self-stabilizing vehicle and land on parachutes/rockets.
There is a video clip online somewhere of a Soyuz in the 70s, beautiful shot up the rocket, it's launching. Something goes wrong, and the capsule just pops off the stack, arcs off into the night.
Sure, the R7 (Soyuz) lineage of boosters are fantastic, they've got 1600+ launches so far. On sci.space.policy and s.s.tech, there have been endless debates on kerosene vs hydrogen and shuttle vs everything, I highly recommend those newsgroups for more.
SpaceDev hybrids are my favorite rocket motor, followed by the low-parts-count Northrop engine in development. Supposedly, there are mass-fraction issues with SpaceDev's motors (rubber and liquid N2O), but I am a very big fan of their work. SpaceDev engines currently power the only flying US manned space system.
Regardless, the Shuttle should not be allowed to fly any longer, it is to dangerous. If United Space Alliance wants to build a heavy lift rocket from Shuttle components, more power to them. The Shuttle in it's current state should never again carry people. How many more astronauts have to die for NASA/JSC/MSFC to realize their mistake? If NASA wants to finish the station, they need to figure out how to either fly the remaining modules on an expendable like Delta IV or build new modules that serve the same functions. ATV and any of the larger rockets should be able to finish the station - it could also be a big PR coupe for NASA and ESA. Spaceref/Nasawatch had an article last week about China offering the Shenzhou capsule and maybe their space station components for ISS.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/03/china_ to _propos.html
If NASA goes ahead with the full 28-flight roster, there is going to be another accident. Remember the fuel line cracks that grounded them for many months recently? There are more surprises like that waiting in the Orbiters. Again, hanging your payload on the side of your rocket is asking for trouble. There is no way around this issue for the Shuttle in it's current configuration.
I'd wager that the biggest threat to Shuttle is hanging the payload off the SIDE of the rocket. That has doomed 2 Shuttles already, while orbital debris has only caused minor damage. No "but, this COULD be a bigger threat", either - the major danger to Shuttle and crew is one of the vehicle's "features". Rockets with payload and launch-escape system on top of the contained explosion are inherently safer than mounting the valuables next to the explosives.
Capsules and rocket-launched cargo make so much more sense than this pseudo-plane. If we are going to have "spaceplanes", they should be in the heritage of x-15 and SS1, not Shuttle. 'We' in this context is the US and the open passenger market mostly. If tickets were available right now, I wouldn't even consider flying on Shuttle, whereas Soyuz, SS1 or any of the historical capsules are all safe enough. Compare the evidence of Soyuz, Apollo or X-15 to Shuttle for safe ops vs. a dangerous design.
I'm going to be real cynical for a moment: Not A Space Agency shouldn't be allowed to say Not Another Shuttle Accident ever again! Never A Straight Answer from them...
The fleet should be grounded and put in a museum and that money rolled into a crash capsule fly-off prize (1 year unmanned, 3 years first manned) and after that paying for tickets instead of operations and hardware.
On Columbus (actually "Colon" - he was not Italian), he had been part of Prince Henry's navigation school (an evolution of the Portugeuse Templars - the Order of Christ), Colon learned the new sailing skills and also saw maps that the prince collected. Colon also took part in a 1477 trip from Norway (royalty linked to Portugal), to Iceland and probably beyond. Colon probably heard northern seamen's tales of vast land beyond the "land of cod" that we now call the Grand Banks. The Vikings and later Scandinavians had been travelling the whole northern arc of the Atlantic from at least 800AD onward, with fishermen from Bristol, the Shetlands and Orkneys, Norway, Bremen and Basque following from at least the 1300s. Supposedly the permission letter from Ferdinand and Isabella granted him to go claim the lands he had already discovered (past/present tenses being important in Spanish). Colon's calculation of the size of the Earth and his brother's maps were largley political, IMHO - they were trying to sell this trip any way they could.
Colon wasn't the only southern European traveller to the Americas in the late 1400s, either. The whole Atlantic had been a Portugeuse pond from the 1450s onward. The settlement of the Azores and Madieras spawned plenty of journeys that included possible settlement in Puerto Rico and the discovery in the 1470s of "Lavrador" by Juan Corte Real, sailing a privately funded mission. Maps from the 1400s (based on Ptolemy even) show the Americas as a third peninsula hanging off China - the oldest sometimes just show Mexico and isthmus of Panama, the later ones (1448 Walsperger, IIRC) have complete maps of S. America rivers and coastal N. America labelled as "India Meridionalis".
What Columbus/Colon did was not original but part of a spectrum of trips that were taking place at the time. The Portugeuse contibution is obscured because of the Lisbon earthquake and the fact that much of the School of Navigation's work was a state secret. An argument could be made that the only thing Columbus did was commit an act of supreme treason against the Portugeuse Crown.
ObSpace: we can draw VERY important lessons from exploration and frontiers of the past - but the new situation is equally different in nature. "Space" still needs to pay for any of us to be able to go - so NASA, JAXA, ESA are only going to be bit-players in a truly space-faring future.
I've had an original Leatherman (stolen by a hippie) and a Leatherman II for the past 10 years. The L-2 has two blades, many screwdrivers and all that, and mine came in anodized BLACK. It's the only one i've ever seen like that. Only problem after a decade of use is that I snapped the smallest flat-head driver. It mostly gets used for computer and bike repair, and all the tools lock and have no wiggle after intense use. The L-2 at least is heavy enough to open the pliers one-hand, but the little tools require both hands.
They don't make that model any more, but the new Wave models are the follow-on. Some of them come with replacable screwdriver bits. Not sure about the new ones, but the original Leatherman is milspec, which is part of why they are so sturdy.
I agree with one of the above posts, too, consider a completely separate knife for your toolkit. Nothing beats a good one-hand, thumbstudded, locking knife. I recommend Benchmade (I've got an Elishowitz StrikerII), CRKT and surprisingly the new Buck knives are pretty nice.
... and then transferred to NASA control and flown as "DC-XA". At which point a NASA tech disconnected the hydraulic line to one of the extendable legs, causing the vehicle to crash. This was not part of planned maintenance during the flights.
one of my buddies likes to play hacker. He has glued little strips of black foam rubber all over the insides of several PCs and his Mac. Even hotglued some of the foam on the metal face of a harddrive. It definitely made the machine quieter, right before the drive and PSU died.
3. Switched back to capsules and good old fashioned rockets instead of riding to space on the side of an explosion.
4. Succeeded in designging the "Shuttle Successor" - Failures in this: NASP, DC-X (destroyed, maybe delibrately), X-33, OSP, CRV, ACRV. And those are just the past 15 years - Billions to Lockheed and Boeing for show-nothing "development", and those companies keep killing astronauts.
I wish Discovery, Cmdr Collins and everyone involved the best of luck.
RSA and Energia use the medium-lift Proton rocket for delivering both the Zarya and Zvezda modules. They are each roughly equal to the Unity lab in size.
Soyuz rocket flying Soyuz or Progress capsules can only handle several tons to ISS, but the other rockets in Russian fleet can handle upwards of 30-40 tons.
Whether global warming is real should not be an issue. The warming already exhibited trends below the low-end of the IPCC's predictions. It is also far less than the climate change we have experienced in the past: Near East devastation in 1200BC, shifts of the Sahara, end of last Ice Age, etc. The real threat, IMHO, is in cataclysmic disasters. Preventing/mitigating them is part of how we can weather out global warming.
Regional disasters devastating populations are inevitable in most places - tsunamis, asteroids and continental supervolcanoes among others. Cities and whole coastlines should be protected with seawalls, especially coastal industrial zones. The economics of building the walls (they are considerable) are beside the point: How much does it cost to replace Manhattan? Or the whole east coast, if that volcano in the Canary Islands breaks apart? Beckerman in "through green colored glasses" makes the calculation for seawalling Bangladesh to prevent and control their seasonal flooding, it would cost about $16 Billion which is comparable to a good monsoon's damage.
Kyoto is mainly for taxing the industrial countries/companies through carbon trading. Obviously, interests here in the US are against that. (This is bipartisan - the Senate refused to vote on it, 99-0) Kyoto speaks nothing of disaster mitigation, a far, far bigger issue than a 1-degree increase in global temps. If this temperature rise is ongoing/accelerating, those in power would have to reach a consensus on some kind of radical action - it is not going to happen with the entrenched interests worldwide. That leaves it to citizens and corporations, so go ride your bicycle.
We, humans, are the first species on Earth capable of spreading our biosphere into space. It is not alarmist to say that continent and planet cleansing events happen on a periodic basis. The recent tsunami and asteroid 2004MN's ever-changing error ellipse are evidence of dynamic, destructive processes that affect both humanity and the larger biosphere. It is our duty, as the first space-goers, to create bio-redundancy, to explore and develop.
A project as large as terraforming Mars (or an asteroid) by it's very nature will require massive biological systems for completion. I predict that living creatures will be adapted both to vaccuum and various atmospheres, if we don't find life already there - giant tree cities on comets, kelp ponds in Mars craters, post-human cyborgs, etc.
Creating new biospheres and offworld industries will greatly improve both standards of living and our ecological footprint on Earth. Enough colonization will mean the ability to protect the home world better. Making Mars bloom is our duty and destiny.
Support private spaceflight, it's the only way this can happen. And fire up the florine pumps. 8)
The old stories and Ways contain many truths, much of which gets hidden again by dogma. Question everything and you begin to scratch that surface. Blind faith never solves problems.
Your epochs match the relation of Genesis to the Universe that one of my good friends advocates. Genesis explicitly states that god's time is not the same as man's. Religious literalists always seem to miss the subtlety that any holy book contains - there is much more than one level that they can be read at.
I would argue that regardless of religious views, anything that departs from observable physics, cosmology and biology is wrong/incorrect until proven otherwise. Physics especially shows time and again that it is self-consistent and accurate, hence an accurate representation of the universe. "god embraced himself in that special way and let his waters run from his mouth and made the universe" (Egyptian Pta creator-diety) or "God made the universe in 7 days" (Christian) are equally invalid as accurate descriptions of the universe if taken literally. However, they also contain seeds (so to speak) of wisdom: the stuff of life does flow out from dying stars (along w/ a mystical connection to the Milky Way) and it is possible to divide the ages of the (anthropomorphic) universe into seven "days". Alternatively, the Hopi and Maya divided the epochs into 4 "worlds". There's a lot to learn without letting dogma interfere.
Slashdot Mirror
>Take the humans out of the program and then you don't need to worry about all sorts've other heavy things like air, food, safety equipment.
answer: Robots STILL can't breed.
You, sir, are changing the goal posts. "Macro evolution" has a specific meaning: "Large-scale evolution occurring over geologic time that results in the formation of new taxonomic groups." That includes speciation along with larger-order changes. Speciation doesn't even occur on geologic scales, it has been observed in and out of the lab many times. Drosophilia, aquatic worms, certain flowers, every domesticated crop, check out the talk.origins fact for actual cited science on this. Speciation, in fact not rhetoric, is COMMON, hence the incredibly diverse biota on Earth. No cite, but I've heard that humans have changed physically in recorded history: Roman writers record that men could, in that time, pull their testicles up into their body. Show me an modern human that can do that.
Science isn't about determining truth, it is about understanding the natural world and applying that knowledge. "Truth" is elusive and spiritual.
Genetic engineering has no more to do with religion than writing evolving computer code.
this message brought to you by the Old Poster's Club.
josh
I was gonna post to the Mars Forum when I got home, and you slashdott3d it!! You hosed the forum!! Thanks a lot, now I have to go do something productive.
Josh
This is an interesting project, it will help to fill in the holes in the knowledge of our origins. Most cultures have legends of the journeys that led to settling a new home, with this research we will see much more clearly who went where,
Here is the map I want to see more fully realized:
http://www.mitomap.org/WorldMigrations.pdf
There are interesting legends and recent research that Genographic project might help: were there Austronesian ("aborigine") migrations across the Pacific 40,000 years ago? Are modern Tibetans and Athapaskan speakers (Navaho) related through the so-called Amur River Culture? When and how often have the "X" haplogroups travelled to America, and were these only Neolithic migrations or did they occur throughout the Bronze and Iron ages? Finally, how much back-migration occured from the Americas to the Old World continents? I'm not the one to research it, but a correlation between Am-Indian oral lore and this geno-map could make for an interesting thesis.
My guess is that the project will show far more migration than previously expected - humans are nothing if not mobile.
josh
I'd like to second Watts on this. I ran BeOS as my primary home OS for several years on both PPC then Intel hardware. BeOS is one of my favorite OSes ever, right up there with NewtonOS and Amiga. BeOS was incredibly responsive on even the most modest hardware back then. For me the OS provided a stable writing, web development and browsing platform that also allowed great control over disk formats, allowing recovery of crashed Mac and Windoze drives. It could also do things like play several dozen instances of large Quicktimes simulataneously - like 30 copies of a Star Wars trailer at once. BeOS rocked - it was everything that Apple and Commodore had promised but come up short with their products.
I also agree w/ parent about this new ZetaOS not being compelling in 2005. A lot of great software has been written in past 5-6 years.
Josh
Phunny photo. nasawatch.com had the infamous "Mars Hydro and Marina" picture today.
3 999
There's one problem with this ever-continuing quest for water: The Viking probes confirmed the existence of massive water reserves in the north polar caps. That was 30 years ago. A recently released image, emargoed for a couple of decades, clearly shows Vallis Marineris with dense fogbanks from wall to wall. I think the real question is what are we going to do with all that water?
image:
http://sciforums.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=
This Station has two theoretical "finishes": Core Complete and a more nebulous Assembly Complete. Originally, the station (Reagan's Freedom) was to be finished in 1994, then 1998, then it got redesigned. It has only gotten more complicated since then. It may be like Fusion power and Commodore's release schedules - station will always be finished 10 years from now.
At this point, it really depends on what you define "Core Complete" as.
There are some potential roadblocks toward getting the European Columbus, Japanese Kibo and the US Centrifuge flown. NASA is already looking at mothballing the first two (finished) modules and not building the Centrifuge. The Shuttle has been having groundings for various reasons since the late 90s (maintenance, fuel line cracks and Columbia RIP) - there is no guarantee that the fleet can fly through 2010.
It's time to stop talking about "The Space Station" and start talking about space stations. Bigelow Aerospace is about to one-up the X-Prize with the America's Space Prize and their Nautilus inflatable stations. They want to sell the final modules to any party that can afford one, all backed up by a billionaire with some Vision. The idea of the One True Space Dock is so Cold War. We are quickly approaching a new age of exploration and human frontiers, companies like Scaled, Bigelow, SpaceDev and SpaceX are going to enable this. NASA needs to stop doing operations and get on with exploring, or their going to get swept aside -- lead, follow or get out of the way.
True 'dat
>Laws? Great googly-moogly, no. But I'll bet two dimes to a doughnut that pretty much everyone who travels to another world, whether on his own initiative or as a government employee, is going to have to come home post-haste or die. There's no air out there. No food, damn little water, too much radiation, the works.
I have to disagree. (sorry it took so long to reply) There have been exstensive studies dealing with hi-volume access to LEO, and the businesses that become viable below certain price points. One application is permanent elder care in low or zero G - old bones respond better with less gravity to fight against. There are also plenty of studies and stories (yes, fiction) about permanent settlements from the start - flags and footprints is a waste of time if colonization is the goal. One engineering perspective is George Herbert's One Way To Stay plan. I highly recommend John Lewis book "Mining the Sky" - he goes into detail about the sheer quantity of resources available in the inner solar system. Comets, many chondrite asteroids and both of Mars' moons have significant quantities of water and other volatiles. Water makes fuel and atmosphere, combined with other volatiles you can have plastics. One of the major missing elements is actually nitrogen, but mining that from Earth's atmosphere becomes viable as well with LEO industry. Radiation is less an issue when you can live in a city in the center of a comet or shell of water. Sure, it's fiction for now, but if enough people work to make it happen, we'll all be a lot better off for it.Something to think about.
On the "lock em up" thing - i was just pushing things past their logical extension.
>There will always be those who cling to the absurd notion that humanity will spread to the other bodies in our solar system.
Would you like to have laws to prevent people from spreading offplanet? An iron curtain around Earth, so to speak? Government "programs", whatever, but are you going to tell people that they can't fly on their own dime? When the tech is their to build spacecraft at garage-level, are you willing to enforce a ban on the cosmos? Heck, let's have Burt Rutan arrested, post-haste. Talk about absurd.
I agree with you about the slieght-of-hand on the Vision for Space Exploration. The Hubble people should put the new instruments into a new craft and then plan out the NEXT one. I'd love to see "Hubble" as a line of similiar telescopes - imagine what becomes visible with 4 Hubbles as interferometers in solar orbit!
When there is a reason, a real reason, to go into space, people will. And they'll go to stay, hopefully, and build new worlds and cultures, and repopulate Earth when we get whacked with a comet again.
Josh
he can have 5% of 0 anytime he wants. whoever heard of paying for WAR3Z?
'Nuff Said
> You have to cope with large stresses, heat and moment in the heat of the moment of launch - or so the torque goes.
Yes, and when something goes wrong, you have fewer and more dangerous option for escape. On top of a rocket, payload has the option of a launch-escape tower that will pull the capsule away from the explosion. 15Gs for 3-6 seconds sucks, but it's better than being dead. With Shuttle, all launch-aborts involve problems with colliding with the stack of ET/SRBs, in some, the Shuttle also has to do a backward loop to escape. Some engineers question most of the Shuttle's abort modes - especially the ones that involve abort-to-launch-site and landing in the North Atlantic. With a capsule, you pull up, fall back to Earth in a self-stabilizing vehicle and land on parachutes/rockets.
There is a video clip online somewhere of a Soyuz in the 70s, beautiful shot up the rocket, it's launching. Something goes wrong, and the capsule just pops off the stack, arcs off into the night.
Sure, the R7 (Soyuz) lineage of boosters are fantastic, they've got 1600+ launches so far. On sci.space.policy and s.s.tech, there have been endless debates on kerosene vs hydrogen and shuttle vs everything, I highly recommend those newsgroups for more.
_ to _propos.html
SpaceDev hybrids are my favorite rocket motor, followed by the low-parts-count Northrop engine in development. Supposedly, there are mass-fraction issues with SpaceDev's motors (rubber and liquid N2O), but I am a very big fan of their work. SpaceDev engines currently power the only flying US manned space system.
Regardless, the Shuttle should not be allowed to fly any longer, it is to dangerous. If United Space Alliance wants to build a heavy lift rocket from Shuttle components, more power to them. The Shuttle in it's current state should never again carry people. How many more astronauts have to die for NASA/JSC/MSFC to realize their mistake? If NASA wants to finish the station, they need to figure out how to either fly the remaining modules on an expendable like Delta IV or build new modules that serve the same functions. ATV and any of the larger rockets should be able to finish the station - it could also be a big PR coupe for NASA and ESA. Spaceref/Nasawatch had an article last week about China offering the Shenzhou capsule and maybe their space station components for ISS.
http://www.nasawatch.com/archives/2005/03/china
If NASA goes ahead with the full 28-flight roster, there is going to be another accident. Remember the fuel line cracks that grounded them for many months recently? There are more surprises like that waiting in the Orbiters. Again, hanging your payload on the side of your rocket is asking for trouble. There is no way around this issue for the Shuttle in it's current configuration.
Josh
I'd wager that the biggest threat to Shuttle is hanging the payload off the SIDE of the rocket. That has doomed 2 Shuttles already, while orbital debris has only caused minor damage. No "but, this COULD be a bigger threat", either - the major danger to Shuttle and crew is one of the vehicle's "features". Rockets with payload and launch-escape system on top of the contained explosion are inherently safer than mounting the valuables next to the explosives.
Capsules and rocket-launched cargo make so much more sense than this pseudo-plane. If we are going to have "spaceplanes", they should be in the heritage of x-15 and SS1, not Shuttle. 'We' in this context is the US and the open passenger market mostly. If tickets were available right now, I wouldn't even consider flying on Shuttle, whereas Soyuz, SS1 or any of the historical capsules are all safe enough. Compare the evidence of Soyuz, Apollo or X-15 to Shuttle for safe ops vs. a dangerous design.
I'm going to be real cynical for a moment: Not A Space Agency shouldn't be allowed to say Not Another Shuttle Accident ever again! Never A Straight Answer from them...
The fleet should be grounded and put in a museum and that money rolled into a crash capsule fly-off prize (1 year unmanned, 3 years first manned) and after that paying for tickets instead of operations and hardware.
Josh
On Columbus (actually "Colon" - he was not Italian), he had been part of Prince Henry's navigation school (an evolution of the Portugeuse Templars - the Order of Christ), Colon learned the new sailing skills and also saw maps that the prince collected. Colon also took part in a 1477 trip from Norway (royalty linked to Portugal), to Iceland and probably beyond. Colon probably heard northern seamen's tales of vast land beyond the "land of cod" that we now call the Grand Banks. The Vikings and later Scandinavians had been travelling the whole northern arc of the Atlantic from at least 800AD onward, with fishermen from Bristol, the Shetlands and Orkneys, Norway, Bremen and Basque following from at least the 1300s. Supposedly the permission letter from Ferdinand and Isabella granted him to go claim the lands he had already discovered (past/present tenses being important in Spanish). Colon's calculation of the size of the Earth and his brother's maps were largley political, IMHO - they were trying to sell this trip any way they could.
Colon wasn't the only southern European traveller to the Americas in the late 1400s, either. The whole Atlantic had been a Portugeuse pond from the 1450s onward. The settlement of the Azores and Madieras spawned plenty of journeys that included possible settlement in Puerto Rico and the discovery in the 1470s of "Lavrador" by Juan Corte Real, sailing a privately funded mission. Maps from the 1400s (based on Ptolemy even) show the Americas as a third peninsula hanging off China - the oldest sometimes just show Mexico and isthmus of Panama, the later ones (1448 Walsperger, IIRC) have complete maps of S. America rivers and coastal N. America labelled as "India Meridionalis".
What Columbus/Colon did was not original but part of a spectrum of trips that were taking place at the time. The Portugeuse contibution is obscured because of the Lisbon earthquake and the fact that much of the School of Navigation's work was a state secret. An argument could be made that the only thing Columbus did was commit an act of supreme treason against the Portugeuse Crown.
ObSpace: we can draw VERY important lessons from exploration and frontiers of the past - but the new situation is equally different in nature. "Space" still needs to pay for any of us to be able to go - so NASA, JAXA, ESA are only going to be bit-players in a truly space-faring future.
Josh
I've had an original Leatherman (stolen by a hippie) and a Leatherman II for the past 10 years. The L-2 has two blades, many screwdrivers and all that, and mine came in anodized BLACK. It's the only one i've ever seen like that. Only problem after a decade of use is that I snapped the smallest flat-head driver. It mostly gets used for computer and bike repair, and all the tools lock and have no wiggle after intense use. The L-2 at least is heavy enough to open the pliers one-hand, but the little tools require both hands.
They don't make that model any more, but the new Wave models are the follow-on. Some of them come with replacable screwdriver bits. Not sure about the new ones, but the original Leatherman is milspec, which is part of why they are so sturdy.
I agree with one of the above posts, too, consider a completely separate knife for your toolkit. Nothing beats a good one-hand, thumbstudded, locking knife. I recommend Benchmade (I've got an Elishowitz StrikerII), CRKT and surprisingly the new Buck knives are pretty nice.
Josh
... and then transferred to NASA control and flown as "DC-XA". At which point a NASA tech disconnected the hydraulic line to one of the extendable legs, causing the vehicle to crash. This was not part of planned maintenance during the flights.
josh
one of my buddies likes to play hacker. He has glued little strips of black foam rubber all over the insides of several PCs and his Mac. Even hotglued some of the foam on the metal face of a harddrive. It definitely made the machine quieter, right before the drive and PSU died.
8)
Josh
>What NASA hasn't done: 1... 2...
3. Switched back to capsules and good old fashioned rockets instead of riding to space on the side of an explosion.
4. Succeeded in designging the "Shuttle Successor" - Failures in this: NASP, DC-X (destroyed, maybe delibrately), X-33, OSP, CRV, ACRV. And those are just the past 15 years - Billions to Lockheed and Boeing for show-nothing "development", and those companies keep killing astronauts.
I wish Discovery, Cmdr Collins and everyone involved the best of luck.
Josh
RSA and Energia use the medium-lift Proton rocket for delivering both the Zarya and Zvezda modules. They are each roughly equal to the Unity lab in size .
Soyuz rocket flying Soyuz or Progress capsules can only handle several tons to ISS, but the other rockets in Russian fleet can handle upwards of 30-40 tons.
he hedged his bets with the "little red men" scenes in the Mars trilogy.
Whether global warming is real should not be an issue. The warming already exhibited trends below the low-end of the IPCC's predictions. It is also far less than the climate change we have experienced in the past: Near East devastation in 1200BC, shifts of the Sahara, end of last Ice Age, etc. The real threat, IMHO, is in cataclysmic disasters. Preventing/mitigating them is part of how we can weather out global warming.
Regional disasters devastating populations are inevitable in most places - tsunamis, asteroids and continental supervolcanoes among others. Cities and whole coastlines should be protected with seawalls, especially coastal industrial zones. The economics of building the walls (they are considerable) are beside the point: How much does it cost to replace Manhattan? Or the whole east coast, if that volcano in the Canary Islands breaks apart? Beckerman in "through green colored glasses" makes the calculation for seawalling Bangladesh to prevent and control their seasonal flooding, it would cost about $16 Billion which is comparable to a good monsoon's damage.
Kyoto is mainly for taxing the industrial countries/companies through carbon trading. Obviously, interests here in the US are against that. (This is bipartisan - the Senate refused to vote on it, 99-0) Kyoto speaks nothing of disaster mitigation, a far, far bigger issue than a 1-degree increase in global temps. If this temperature rise is ongoing/accelerating, those in power would have to reach a consensus on some kind of radical action - it is not going to happen with the entrenched interests worldwide. That leaves it to citizens and corporations, so go ride your bicycle.
And please think about seawalls.
Josh
Josh
that's like the "Canadian Conspirancy" - northern people always throwing styrofoam on the fire.
We, humans, are the first species on Earth capable of spreading our biosphere into space. It is not alarmist to say that continent and planet cleansing events happen on a periodic basis. The recent tsunami and asteroid 2004MN's ever-changing error ellipse are evidence of dynamic, destructive processes that affect both humanity and the larger biosphere. It is our duty, as the first space-goers, to create bio-redundancy, to explore and develop.
A project as large as terraforming Mars (or an asteroid) by it's very nature will require massive biological systems for completion. I predict that living creatures will be adapted both to vaccuum and various atmospheres, if we don't find life already there - giant tree cities on comets, kelp ponds in Mars craters, post-human cyborgs, etc.
Creating new biospheres and offworld industries will greatly improve both standards of living and our ecological footprint on Earth. Enough colonization will mean the ability to protect the home world better. Making Mars bloom is our duty and destiny.
Support private spaceflight, it's the only way this can happen. And fire up the florine pumps. 8)
Josh
The old stories and Ways contain many truths, much of which gets hidden again by dogma. Question everything and you begin to scratch that surface. Blind faith never solves problems.
Your epochs match the relation of Genesis to the Universe that one of my good friends advocates. Genesis explicitly states that god's time is not the same as man's. Religious literalists always seem to miss the subtlety that any holy book contains - there is much more than one level that they can be read at.
I would argue that regardless of religious views, anything that departs from observable physics, cosmology and biology is wrong/incorrect until proven otherwise. Physics especially shows time and again that it is self-consistent and accurate, hence an accurate representation of the universe. "god embraced himself in that special way and let his waters run from his mouth and made the universe" (Egyptian Pta creator-diety) or "God made the universe in 7 days" (Christian) are equally invalid as accurate descriptions of the universe if taken literally. However, they also contain seeds (so to speak) of wisdom: the stuff of life does flow out from dying stars (along w/ a mystical connection to the Milky Way) and it is possible to divide the ages of the (anthropomorphic) universe into seven "days". Alternatively, the Hopi and Maya divided the epochs into 4 "worlds". There's a lot to learn without letting dogma interfere.
So, do you use the Old Knowledge or abuse it?
josh