Alan Bond and crew have been talking about Skylon/HOTOL for decades with nothing to show. They've had funding in the past and produced nothing. Compare to SpaceX who have taken a fairly conservative concept and run with it from idea to orbit in well under a decade.
The main problem with Skylon and the Sabre engine is that both engine and airframe need unobtainium to work. Active-cooled sharp aerosurfaces are a nightmare problem for reentry - plus the engine gets exposed to reentry-like conditions throughout flight profile.
Second major problem is the combined-cycle engine concept as a whole and the horizontal-launch nature of Skylon. The craft is supposed to launch, compress it's oxidizer on the way up through the worst part of atmosphere and then fly into space. All while storing 70%+ deadweight in oxidizer as only 23% of it is oxygen - it'll be contaminating it's fuel-flow w/ tons of useless N2. Look at any real rocket's ascent profile and it is apparent that this does not work. It might work for point-to-point but not for orbital ascent.
There is a reason that all ground-launched rockets use vertical ascent - it gets you out of the worst part of the atmosphere as fast as possible.
The Skylon concept should be (-1 Snakeoil)
Generally compare this vapourware to American vaporware: Skylon is in same class as Kelleyspace's Griffin, Pioneer's XP, the K1 and the various other hangar queens that never made it.
No Shuttle ET (external tank) has ever stayed in orbit - they burn up a little while after separation. Other rockets regularly place upper stages in orbit. The Shuttle's upper stage, the Orbiter, returns to Earth.
Reusing ETs or other upper stages makes a lot of sense but is not currently practice.
Moving ISS out of Low Earth Orbit is insane - the station was designed specifically for that environment. Even GEO, L1 or Lunar orbit are vastly different (radiation, thermal, etc) than LEO. Much better to customize a new station for each target environment.
the USA has the most to lose from any anti-satellite efforts. A general attack on our space assets (.mil and civ) would be terrible. This is what Obama's policy aims to prevent. He probably personally opposes things like "Rods from God" (orbital kinetic bombardment) or orbital storage of nuclear weapons (illegal under... START2, IIRC) but preventing ASAT development and hardening our fleet is just a common sense plan. The goal is to preserve our edge in space.
Current policy seems to be about ASATs and maintaining leadership in space. Both commendable but let's expand the discussion some.
What is a space weapon? At root, anything moving @ orbital velocities is a weapon if used as such. What about dedicated systems? Nukes-on-orbit are out for political & treaty reasons (and common sense). What about laser, particle, EMP or kinetic? Dropping Marines from suborbitals? (Roughnecks!) Should any or all of these be prevented from being developed despite their obvious tactical and strategic advantages?
Beyond preserving the satellite fleet and space environment, what place does space operations have in modern conflict? It may be impossible from preventing the High Frontier from being a conflict zone, in which case it is suicide to hobble ourselves. Maintaining a zone of relative freedom-from-conflict should also be important - civilian surface ships are unarmed for a reason - it encourages peaceful development instead of a bunker mentality.
Fasces - the original symbol of Roman power. A Senator's posse would carry the bundle where they went and untie it for use in rough situations. Whoever his best warrior was would grab the ax, everyone else grabs a stick and starts smashing heads.
Bigelow Aerospace and SpaceX will soon field a complete system of commercial stations and launch assets. Bigelow bought the old TransHab patents from NASA; also has two test modules in orbit right now. SpaceX has their capsule-launching rocket on the pad (w/ test hardware) and a 1-3 track record on Falcon 1. When Falcon 9 works it will change the equation on American spacelift capability. Both these companies, their founders and workers, have the Vision Thing.
Together they will provide habitat and access for a price but they need customers (not just NASA)in the form of hoteliers, operators, integrators and explorers. This requires entrepreneurs to develop new applications for space. This is not something traditional Big Aero wants to do - Boeing doesn't operate cruise ships or 737s. Robert Bigelow has said that he doesn't want to be a hotelier - he wants to build ships. Elon Musk is on record as saying he wants to build rockets to fly other people to Mars and elsewhere. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs of all kinds, especially with the proposed amount of segmentation of access - want to go for a week to someone's orbital or buy a whole stack of modules for Mars exploration? They'll sell you the parts, go do it.
Russia had an 18 year lead in developing commercial space systems but has stumbled with limited exceptions and notable exceptions. This gap is an enormous market niche for US companies to fill. The first Bigelow BA-330 and Dragon capsules will be a vastly more comfortable and reliable station for space tourism and that will probably go online around 2013.
Next year or the year after (assuming you the entrepreneur w/ a good idea) could fly a payload on DragonLab, recoverable rack-space capsule w/ 2-year duration. In a couple more years, time-share on the first or second Bigelow-based stations. This then becomes the basic platform to use in offering space services or as owner go where you want in space.
It has immediate applications for tourism and Bigelow's "international astronaut corp". It has further applications in beamed-power, server farms and antennae structures.
This picture is the power of space, we can do so much more from above:
They still have to figure out how to build the actual ribbon - even carbon/fullerene nanomaterials have not achieved the required tensile strengths. lasers or some guy with a broomstick doesn't matter if the cable snaps on deployment.
This is why honest ROCKETS make so much more sense - proven tech that gets cheaper as frequency of flight increases.
Can't hide what? A couple of C5 Galaxy and some large hangars? It could be right out in the open (on.mil bases) and no one need know outside the right circles. Small spaceplanes of the type rumored (blackstar, aurora) don't require the same kind of pads as rockets - they are "cargo" on a plane, light the rocket over ocean post-drop, perform mission in space & reenter then land as an aircraft at the remote desert Air Force base of your choice.
Small spaceplanes might be the easiest form of space-lift to hide. Think of how "indetectable" from above the SpaceShipOne system was when not flying.
The microwaves are tuned to be transparent to water - eliminating most potential atmospheric heating from SSP.
Second, the rectennae on the ground can be situated close enough to population centers to reduce transmission losses. Example - New England and New York get a lot of power from eastern Canada - about 2/3s of it is wasted in transmission. If we could deploy receivers near NYC and Boston we could help reduce that waste (which also generates waste heat).
Some engineers inside the SSP community have talked about flat, phased-array antennae instead of steerable or dish styles. Has nothing to do w/ politicians or buzzwords. Thanks for the additional info.
It is unknown whether SSP makes sense for baseline power. O'Neill-class gigawatt stations would definitely be capable of powering cities and homes - if it is possible to build them. There are a lot of unknowns with SSP - I don't discount any possibilities with it but see the infinite capability it could provide.
Disaster relief and DoD could be strong drivers for the first phase of space-ground power transmission, if the ground stations can be made transportable or easily assembled. The original designs for SSP rectennae on the ground saw them as permanent installations of mesh on tall towers. The DoD can afford to design whatever portable system they wanted - which is definitely a lead into eventual commercial power from space. There are other paths which would see ISO operators or other companies doing it first - with the right incentives or need. My favorite concept is placing rectennae off-shore, coupled with tidal generators. If possible steerable LEO powersats would be combined with much larger GEO units to provide a complete spectrum of delivery scales and options. They real questions are is this possible and how to make it happen?
Generally SSP is conceived as providing steady power, not bursts of energy for powering weapon systems - it would require being plugged into a kilometer-scale grid to charge something like a railgun. Much better to charge at a base into a battery/capacitor/flywheel and use while mobile - a solution explored in the DoD's future studies. The idea would be that military bases would deploy a rectennae and charge tanks and electric vehicles from SSP baseline power. So far the assumption is that units charge up and go instead of carrying their own rectennae afield.
For space exploration and satellite power, SSP can be an enabler. Lunar poles don't get permanent sun in quantity - only a few peaks on Shackleton Crater get it and even then they are talking 100m high towers for better light. SSP would be perfect for any lunar base. Beamed power would extensible to any planetary surface - Lunar pole, Martian equator, Ceres, Ganymede, Europa etc in the long term. These are far out options though since a test unit hasn't even been demonstrated in orbit. In the deep future our descendants may operate a network of beaming stations inside Mercury's orbit but we have more immediate steps to take.
SSP holds immense promise and it is encouraging that the new administration is at least looking into this promising technology. The basic science and some of the technology is in place, the real question is if it can scale.
-Josh
2 other problems not just ad revenue
on
Are Newspapers Doomed?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Ad revenue is only one of 3 issues causing the collapse of the newspaper industry. While classified ads and print ads provided the bulk of newspaper's income, there are two other factors involved in recent problems. Think of advertising revenue as the "incoming problem" - here are the "outgoing problems"
Home delivery is the weak link in distribution. The Boston Globe, for instance, maintains a huge fleet of delivery trucks that bring papers not just around the city but throughout coastal New England. I'm not sure of the exact costs, but it has to be millions per year, to deliver dead trees to people's doors and stores. This is a hold-over from a time when media was a one-to-many form of distribution, it has almost no relevance to today's media markets or readers. Netbooks or e-readers shipped with custom software (NYTimes "Reader) or just the local paper's website as a landing page would make more sense.
The third problem is the readers and our changing habits. Most people don't have the time to read a newspaper or won't make the time - for younger people it interferes with Facebook & gaming, for middle-aged people it interferes with being overworked on that adjustable-rate mortgage train. The only reliable newspaper readers in demographic terms are retirees.
All of this boils down to one thing, one thing most papers have missed completely: relevance.
How to take massive institutions, industrial-era institutions if you've seen the presses running, and make them into nimble, 21stCentury, Internet-centric businesses? It's a tough nut to crack and so far I'm not seeing any of them actually make it work. It's weird because I personally love reading the news from a broadsheet but it's an anachronism when the entire world's news is available at my fingertips, 24/7. The world simply does not wait for the morning print run. When news impacts "after deadline" the morning newspaper is already out of date when it lands in the driveway.
Colonization and other industrial activities can evolve from SSP if done as public-private enterprise. Enable sSP to create a much larger launch market - the govt. can enable businesses to build, fly and operate SSP. Flight frequency is the #1 determinant of cost-of-launch. Hundreds of SSP component launches per year would open up space access to vastly more organizations and individuals, hence enabling settlement and development.
The best thing the govt. can do is create an open environment for making this happen - NASA should not be in the power-station business any more than it should be in the rocket-launching business - they should be doing R&D and daring exploration with people and robots. Let the professionals handle the transportation. NASA could already have been assembling the lunar stack if they had gone the sort of route outlined.
The problem with calling for space colonization now is one of economics and infrastructure - everybody knows it's further in the future than something like space tourism or SSP. Anyone that studies space settlements issues will understand that we are 2+ decades minimum away from having the necessary infrastructure for any scale of colonization. Projects such as Bigelow Aerospace's line of commercial station modules need to be available for it to happen, there is a lot of other hardware needed. SSP would be a powerful enabler to help that happen.
No cite needed. Fact: the 2000-era OSP/Orbital Space Plane project was going to provide a capsule or small spaceplane atop EELV.
the VSE said nothing about "Build a heavy lift rocket" - it did say to open the Solar System to human economic sphere. Mike Griffin took Bush's VSE and created ESAS plan from it - this became the Ares/Constellation projects. While Orion (the capsule) is an OK idea, the fact that NASA is trying to field yet another medium-lift rocket is a terrible idea. The obvious part of the problem - no payload should be designed to fly exclusively on one rocket. Even more short-sighted is fielding a giant new HLV that will also have exactly one customer - and it will still be mostly flying propellant - the actual hardware is light enough for ELVs. Instead of building the payloads and helping to build the existing market for medium-class launch while focusing on the mission (go to Moon, go to Mars, make conditions for homesteading/mining, etc) they have focused and stumbled on the first mile of the problem.
This goes back to Griffin's recent "Your not qualified" statements - he only sees the engineering aspect and is apparently blind to economic, historical and political forces. Apollo on Steroids is hide-bound not muscle-bound.
On SSP - SSP will require putting thousands of tons of hardware in orbit regardless of specific tech choices. Boeing proposed an "Ultra Heavy Lift" booster in the 1970s called LEO - 250tons to orbit. It can be done in arbitrarily large chunks but has also been proposed on the other end by Dr. Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited as a single payload of 25t flown on EELV. Beamed power can be demonstrated on an in-space scale first (w/ huge market potential) and later on Earth. The DoD has looked into an all-electric future with SSP, Gerard O'Neill proposed basing the entire space economy on beamed power as well. The basic tech has been demonstrated in the lab and recently between two Hawai'i islands.
Beamed power can be one of the most environmentally benign forms of energy production. It produces a microwave equivalent of 2X sunlight strength on the target rectennae and is tuned to be transparent to water, producing little to none atmospheric heating. Developed as GEO power plants they could provide baseline power to cities. Digital phase-array antennae may provide dynamic control and non-photovoltaics may be the better solution for generation (solar-dynamic/sterling). SSP is one technology that offers tremendous potential.
The thing that's nice is that the PS3 is commodity hardware and we know it will be around for a while - and Cell is ridiculously fast for certain operations.
I'm pretty sure that PS3Cluster uses the GPU - but am not 100% because I only tested and did image-capture for the project. Whatever it is when you gang a bunch of them together it pumps out teh complex maths just fine.
Cell processors on a PCI card or in blades would be nice but neither of those are real "commodity" hardware solutions. One of the nice things with PS3Cluster is that the Playstation consoles can be scaled to arbitrarily large clusters.
I helped Chris with the documentation, testing and image capture on this project. I see some "it doesn't do this!" comments above - please remember this is a young project that started out of one researcher's need to solve a specific type of problem. If you want to see this advance, it's all open source so start hacking.
So my setup: 1 40Gb Playstation3 w/ HDMI cable out and keyboard Hauppauge HDPVR digitizer PC running Windoze and Photoshop TV hanging off the HDPVR for reference
Software as described on PS3Cluster.org including Geoff's Cell libraries, boot image on USB and Fedora 8 for PPC.
Plugged everything together, installed Fedora 6 the first time around since we knew that worked, then redid it with Fedora 8. Added the MPI libraries and ran the little Pi test code. Digitized the whole install as video, proofed out the process in terms of instructions. Did frame grabs from the video, cropped etc in Photoshop. Lots of work, totally worth it seeing the project posted here.
Oh, and it runs X - kinda cool having Firefox running on a game deck.
Depends on the specific code - to my knowledge no one has written/ported a 3d renderer to the PS3Cluster architecture yet - so you should get to work on it. 8) To get realistic textures does require a lot of RAM or a lot of swapping. One thing that could help in this context is to have a big block of NAS on the same network - and treat part of it as a RAM disk or texture buffer. Not necessarily efficient but could work following any of several weird render schemes.
I only suggest the block of external storage because I know that is part of Dr. Khanna's setup and it works.
When I installed linux+MPI on the test PS3 it recognized all the processors - pretty cool seeing 8 little penguins pop up. From what Chris said the programming is fairly generic C/C++ to utilize the whole console. It's apparently not that hard and PS3s are dirt cheap (compared to supercomputers or even blade servers).
Answer: PS3s were used because of the vector processors - they are significantly faster than general purpose CPUs for some of Dr. Khanna's needs and the general vision of the project. These are chips designed for raytracing which makes them perfect for some forms of scientific processing.
Also a rack unit full of PS3s looks way cooler than some crufty old PCs pulled from a dumpster.
Are you familiar with the actual practice of chicken (esp. layers - egg production) or industrial pig farming? They may be more efficient grain-consumption-per-pound over beef but are incredible polluters.
Chickens are treated as pure product in a typical egg facility and it is not much better for meat birds. Arguably, "ichto" or "octo"-vegetarians have a less ethical stand than a meat diet WRT chicken farming. Fish farming produces more sewage than humans in cities.Pig farming has created massive water-pollution issues in the US Southeast. Is beef feed-lot production better or worse? Soybeans? Modern Corn? They are all pollutants in some ways either as oil-consumers or waste producers. How do you complete the circle between those problems?
Free range makes more sense of course put has land-use issues that would be opposed in some environmental circles. Terrestrial fish farms produce pollution in quantity, plus contribute to the depletion of feeder fish in the oceans as fish meal.
All food has ethical issues.
So what? I still like an omelet or steak once in a while. Food more than anything is a commercial enterprise - people vote with their dollars and overwhelmingly vote for (some) meat.
There are ways around the ethical problems but the steps to get there can be tremendous. One is to use biomass more efficiently, another is create habitat that attracts exploitable species (reefs, buffalo reintroduction) a third to mandate industry and utilities to be zero-effluent (good luck w/ that). Personally the idea of saline agriculture is an interesting co-opting of this as it would enable both the plant crops as food and better fish farming practices. Creating more ecology, living space for more life that can be harvested, is the really important step - especially in the seas. Increase density of habitat, increase amount of life - things like floating reefs in the mid-ocean and build other artificial reefs, in quantity. Much of the ocean is sandy wastes - a little terrain goes a long way underwater. Mats of floating plants could work using saline crops and mangrove, once started they could drift as floating islands or be anchored in place w/ tide generators.
Slashdot Mirror
Alan Bond and crew have been talking about Skylon/HOTOL for decades with nothing to show. They've had funding in the past and produced nothing. Compare to SpaceX who have taken a fairly conservative concept and run with it from idea to orbit in well under a decade.
The main problem with Skylon and the Sabre engine is that both engine and airframe need unobtainium to work. Active-cooled sharp aerosurfaces are a nightmare problem for reentry - plus the engine gets exposed to reentry-like conditions throughout flight profile.
Second major problem is the combined-cycle engine concept as a whole and the horizontal-launch nature of Skylon. The craft is supposed to launch, compress it's oxidizer on the way up through the worst part of atmosphere and then fly into space. All while storing 70%+ deadweight in oxidizer as only 23% of it is oxygen - it'll be contaminating it's fuel-flow w/ tons of useless N2. Look at any real rocket's ascent profile and it is apparent that this does not work. It might work for point-to-point but not for orbital ascent.
There is a reason that all ground-launched rockets use vertical ascent - it gets you out of the worst part of the atmosphere as fast as possible.
The Skylon concept should be (-1 Snakeoil)
Generally compare this vapourware to American vaporware: Skylon is in same class as Kelleyspace's Griffin, Pioneer's XP, the K1 and the various other hangar queens that never made it.
No Shuttle ET (external tank) has ever stayed in orbit - they burn up a little while after separation. Other rockets regularly place upper stages in orbit. The Shuttle's upper stage, the Orbiter, returns to Earth.
Reusing ETs or other upper stages makes a lot of sense but is not currently practice.
Moving ISS out of Low Earth Orbit is insane - the station was designed specifically for that environment. Even GEO, L1 or Lunar orbit are vastly different (radiation, thermal, etc) than LEO. Much better to customize a new station for each target environment.
the USA has the most to lose from any anti-satellite efforts. A general attack on our space assets (.mil and civ) would be terrible. This is what Obama's policy aims to prevent. He probably personally opposes things like "Rods from God" (orbital kinetic bombardment) or orbital storage of nuclear weapons (illegal under... START2, IIRC) but preventing ASAT development and hardening our fleet is just a common sense plan. The goal is to preserve our edge in space.
Current policy seems to be about ASATs and maintaining leadership in space. Both commendable but let's expand the discussion some.
What is a space weapon? At root, anything moving @ orbital velocities is a weapon if used as such. What about dedicated systems? Nukes-on-orbit are out for political & treaty reasons (and common sense). What about laser, particle, EMP or kinetic? Dropping Marines from suborbitals? (Roughnecks!) Should any or all of these be prevented from being developed despite their obvious tactical and strategic advantages?
Beyond preserving the satellite fleet and space environment, what place does space operations have in modern conflict? It may be impossible from preventing the High Frontier from being a conflict zone, in which case it is suicide to hobble ourselves. Maintaining a zone of relative freedom-from-conflict should also be important - civilian surface ships are unarmed for a reason - it encourages peaceful development instead of a bunker mentality.
We need a first generation of pioneers.
Fasces - the original symbol of Roman power. A Senator's posse would carry the bundle where they went and untie it for use in rough situations. Whoever his best warrior was would grab the ax, everyone else grabs a stick and starts smashing heads.
absolutely. we just don't have the answers yet.
Bigelow Aerospace and SpaceX will soon field a complete system of commercial stations and launch assets. Bigelow bought the old TransHab patents from NASA; also has two test modules in orbit right now. SpaceX has their capsule-launching rocket on the pad (w/ test hardware) and a 1-3 track record on Falcon 1. When Falcon 9 works it will change the equation on American spacelift capability. Both these companies, their founders and workers, have the Vision Thing.
Together they will provide habitat and access for a price but they need customers (not just NASA)in the form of hoteliers, operators, integrators and explorers. This requires entrepreneurs to develop new applications for space. This is not something traditional Big Aero wants to do - Boeing doesn't operate cruise ships or 737s. Robert Bigelow has said that he doesn't want to be a hotelier - he wants to build ships. Elon Musk is on record as saying he wants to build rockets to fly other people to Mars and elsewhere. This is a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs of all kinds, especially with the proposed amount of segmentation of access - want to go for a week to someone's orbital or buy a whole stack of modules for Mars exploration? They'll sell you the parts, go do it.
Russia had an 18 year lead in developing commercial space systems but has stumbled with limited exceptions and notable exceptions. This gap is an enormous market niche for US companies to fill. The first Bigelow BA-330 and Dragon capsules will be a vastly more comfortable and reliable station for space tourism and that will probably go online around 2013.
Next year or the year after (assuming you the entrepreneur w/ a good idea) could fly a payload on DragonLab, recoverable rack-space capsule w/ 2-year duration. In a couple more years, time-share on the first or second Bigelow-based stations. This then becomes the basic platform to use in offering space services or as owner go where you want in space.
It has immediate applications for tourism and Bigelow's "international astronaut corp". It has further applications in beamed-power, server farms and antennae structures.
This picture is the power of space, we can do so much more from above:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2009/44.president/inauguration/mall.satellite/
definitely hard to hide an Atlas 5 sized pad - even the semi-subterranean Russian/Sov systems stood out in overflight imagery.
They still have to figure out how to build the actual ribbon - even carbon/fullerene nanomaterials have not achieved the required tensile strengths. lasers or some guy with a broomstick doesn't matter if the cable snaps on deployment.
This is why honest ROCKETS make so much more sense - proven tech that gets cheaper as frequency of flight increases.
Can't hide what? A couple of C5 Galaxy and some large hangars? It could be right out in the open (on .mil bases) and no one need know outside the right circles. Small spaceplanes of the type rumored (blackstar, aurora) don't require the same kind of pads as rockets - they are "cargo" on a plane, light the rocket over ocean post-drop, perform mission in space & reenter then land as an aircraft at the remote desert Air Force base of your choice.
Small spaceplanes might be the easiest form of space-lift to hide. Think of how "indetectable" from above the SpaceShipOne system was when not flying.
The microwaves are tuned to be transparent to water - eliminating most potential atmospheric heating from SSP.
Second, the rectennae on the ground can be situated close enough to population centers to reduce transmission losses. Example - New England and New York get a lot of power from eastern Canada - about 2/3s of it is wasted in transmission. If we could deploy receivers near NYC and Boston we could help reduce that waste (which also generates waste heat).
yes you can! Simply do a headstand under the beam-spot.
Some engineers inside the SSP community have talked about flat, phased-array antennae instead of steerable or dish styles. Has nothing to do w/ politicians or buzzwords. Thanks for the additional info.
It is unknown whether SSP makes sense for baseline power. O'Neill-class gigawatt stations would definitely be capable of powering cities and homes - if it is possible to build them. There are a lot of unknowns with SSP - I don't discount any possibilities with it but see the infinite capability it could provide.
Disaster relief and DoD could be strong drivers for the first phase of space-ground power transmission, if the ground stations can be made transportable or easily assembled. The original designs for SSP rectennae on the ground saw them as permanent installations of mesh on tall towers. The DoD can afford to design whatever portable system they wanted - which is definitely a lead into eventual commercial power from space. There are other paths which would see ISO operators or other companies doing it first - with the right incentives or need. My favorite concept is placing rectennae off-shore, coupled with tidal generators. If possible steerable LEO powersats would be combined with much larger GEO units to provide a complete spectrum of delivery scales and options. They real questions are is this possible and how to make it happen?
Generally SSP is conceived as providing steady power, not bursts of energy for powering weapon systems - it would require being plugged into a kilometer-scale grid to charge something like a railgun. Much better to charge at a base into a battery/capacitor/flywheel and use while mobile - a solution explored in the DoD's future studies. The idea would be that military bases would deploy a rectennae and charge tanks and electric vehicles from SSP baseline power. So far the assumption is that units charge up and go instead of carrying their own rectennae afield.
For space exploration and satellite power, SSP can be an enabler. Lunar poles don't get permanent sun in quantity - only a few peaks on Shackleton Crater get it and even then they are talking 100m high towers for better light. SSP would be perfect for any lunar base. Beamed power would extensible to any planetary surface - Lunar pole, Martian equator, Ceres, Ganymede, Europa etc in the long term. These are far out options though since a test unit hasn't even been demonstrated in orbit. In the deep future our descendants may operate a network of beaming stations inside Mercury's orbit but we have more immediate steps to take.
SSP holds immense promise and it is encouraging that the new administration is at least looking into this promising technology. The basic science and some of the technology is in place, the real question is if it can scale.
-Josh
Ad revenue is only one of 3 issues causing the collapse of the newspaper industry. While classified ads and print ads provided the bulk of newspaper's income, there are two other factors involved in recent problems. Think of advertising revenue as the "incoming problem" - here are the "outgoing problems"
Home delivery is the weak link in distribution. The Boston Globe, for instance, maintains a huge fleet of delivery trucks that bring papers not just around the city but throughout coastal New England. I'm not sure of the exact costs, but it has to be millions per year, to deliver dead trees to people's doors and stores. This is a hold-over from a time when media was a one-to-many form of distribution, it has almost no relevance to today's media markets or readers. Netbooks or e-readers shipped with custom software (NYTimes "Reader) or just the local paper's website as a landing page would make more sense.
The third problem is the readers and our changing habits. Most people don't have the time to read a newspaper or won't make the time - for younger people it interferes with Facebook & gaming, for middle-aged people it interferes with being overworked on that adjustable-rate mortgage train. The only reliable newspaper readers in demographic terms are retirees.
All of this boils down to one thing, one thing most papers have missed completely: relevance.
How to take massive institutions, industrial-era institutions if you've seen the presses running, and make them into nimble, 21stCentury, Internet-centric businesses? It's a tough nut to crack and so far I'm not seeing any of them actually make it work. It's weird because I personally love reading the news from a broadsheet but it's an anachronism when the entire world's news is available at my fingertips, 24/7. The world simply does not wait for the morning print run. When news impacts "after deadline" the morning newspaper is already out of date when it lands in the driveway.
-Josh
Colonization and other industrial activities can evolve from SSP if done as public-private enterprise. Enable sSP to create a much larger launch market - the govt. can enable businesses to build, fly and operate SSP. Flight frequency is the #1 determinant of cost-of-launch. Hundreds of SSP component launches per year would open up space access to vastly more organizations and individuals, hence enabling settlement and development.
The best thing the govt. can do is create an open environment for making this happen - NASA should not be in the power-station business any more than it should be in the rocket-launching business - they should be doing R&D and daring exploration with people and robots. Let the professionals handle the transportation. NASA could already have been assembling the lunar stack if they had gone the sort of route outlined.
The problem with calling for space colonization now is one of economics and infrastructure - everybody knows it's further in the future than something like space tourism or SSP. Anyone that studies space settlements issues will understand that we are 2+ decades minimum away from having the necessary infrastructure for any scale of colonization. Projects such as Bigelow Aerospace's line of commercial station modules need to be available for it to happen, there is a lot of other hardware needed. SSP would be a powerful enabler to help that happen.
No cite needed. Fact: the 2000-era OSP/Orbital Space Plane project was going to provide a capsule or small spaceplane atop EELV.
the VSE said nothing about "Build a heavy lift rocket" - it did say to open the Solar System to human economic sphere. Mike Griffin took Bush's VSE and created ESAS plan from it - this became the Ares/Constellation projects. While Orion (the capsule) is an OK idea, the fact that NASA is trying to field yet another medium-lift rocket is a terrible idea. The obvious part of the problem - no payload should be designed to fly exclusively on one rocket. Even more short-sighted is fielding a giant new HLV that will also have exactly one customer - and it will still be mostly flying propellant - the actual hardware is light enough for ELVs. Instead of building the payloads and helping to build the existing market for medium-class launch while focusing on the mission (go to Moon, go to Mars, make conditions for homesteading/mining, etc) they have focused and stumbled on the first mile of the problem.
This goes back to Griffin's recent "Your not qualified" statements - he only sees the engineering aspect and is apparently blind to economic, historical and political forces. Apollo on Steroids is hide-bound not muscle-bound.
On SSP - SSP will require putting thousands of tons of hardware in orbit regardless of specific tech choices. Boeing proposed an "Ultra Heavy Lift" booster in the 1970s called LEO - 250tons to orbit. It can be done in arbitrarily large chunks but has also been proposed on the other end by Dr. Hoyt of Tethers Unlimited as a single payload of 25t flown on EELV. Beamed power can be demonstrated on an in-space scale first (w/ huge market potential) and later on Earth. The DoD has looked into an all-electric future with SSP, Gerard O'Neill proposed basing the entire space economy on beamed power as well. The basic tech has been demonstrated in the lab and recently between two Hawai'i islands.
Beamed power can be one of the most environmentally benign forms of energy production. It produces a microwave equivalent of 2X sunlight strength on the target rectennae and is tuned to be transparent to water, producing little to none atmospheric heating. Developed as GEO power plants they could provide baseline power to cities. Digital phase-array antennae may provide dynamic control and non-photovoltaics may be the better solution for generation (solar-dynamic/sterling). SSP is one technology that offers tremendous potential.
THat's even cooler.
The thing that's nice is that the PS3 is commodity hardware and we know it will be around for a while - and Cell is ridiculously fast for certain operations.
I'm pretty sure that PS3Cluster uses the GPU - but am not 100% because I only tested and did image-capture for the project. Whatever it is when you gang a bunch of them together it pumps out teh complex maths just fine.
Cell processors on a PCI card or in blades would be nice but neither of those are real "commodity" hardware solutions. One of the nice things with PS3Cluster is that the Playstation consoles can be scaled to arbitrarily large clusters.
I helped Chris with the documentation, testing and image capture on this project. I see some "it doesn't do this!" comments above - please remember this is a young project that started out of one researcher's need to solve a specific type of problem. If you want to see this advance, it's all open source so start hacking.
So my setup:
1 40Gb Playstation3 w/ HDMI cable out and keyboard
Hauppauge HDPVR digitizer
PC running Windoze and Photoshop
TV hanging off the HDPVR for reference
Software as described on PS3Cluster.org including Geoff's Cell libraries, boot image on USB and Fedora 8 for PPC.
Plugged everything together, installed Fedora 6 the first time around since we knew that worked, then redid it with Fedora 8. Added the MPI libraries and ran the little Pi test code. Digitized the whole install as video, proofed out the process in terms of instructions. Did frame grabs from the video, cropped etc in Photoshop. Lots of work, totally worth it seeing the project posted here.
Oh, and it runs X - kinda cool having Firefox running on a game deck.
Enjoy,
Josh
Cool - but is it open source?
Depends on the specific code - to my knowledge no one has written/ported a 3d renderer to the PS3Cluster architecture yet - so you should get to work on it. 8) To get realistic textures does require a lot of RAM or a lot of swapping. One thing that could help in this context is to have a big block of NAS on the same network - and treat part of it as a RAM disk or texture buffer. Not necessarily efficient but could work following any of several weird render schemes.
I only suggest the block of external storage because I know that is part of Dr. Khanna's setup and it works.
Josh
When I installed linux+MPI on the test PS3 it recognized all the processors - pretty cool seeing 8 little penguins pop up. From what Chris said the programming is fairly generic C/C++ to utilize the whole console. It's apparently not that hard and PS3s are dirt cheap (compared to supercomputers or even blade servers).
Josh
Answer: PS3s were used because of the vector processors - they are significantly faster than general purpose CPUs for some of Dr. Khanna's needs and the general vision of the project. These are chips designed for raytracing which makes them perfect for some forms of scientific processing.
Also a rack unit full of PS3s looks way cooler than some crufty old PCs pulled from a dumpster.
Josh - PS3Cluster tester
+1 Sarcasm
Are you familiar with the actual practice of chicken (esp. layers - egg production) or industrial pig farming? They may be more efficient grain-consumption-per-pound over beef but are incredible polluters.
Chickens are treated as pure product in a typical egg facility and it is not much better for meat birds. Arguably, "ichto" or "octo"-vegetarians have a less ethical stand than a meat diet WRT chicken farming. Fish farming produces more sewage than humans in cities.Pig farming has created massive water-pollution issues in the US Southeast. Is beef feed-lot production better or worse? Soybeans? Modern Corn? They are all pollutants in some ways either as oil-consumers or waste producers. How do you complete the circle between those problems?
Free range makes more sense of course put has land-use issues that would be opposed in some environmental circles. Terrestrial fish farms produce pollution in quantity, plus contribute to the depletion of feeder fish in the oceans as fish meal.
All food has ethical issues.
So what? I still like an omelet or steak once in a while. Food more than anything is a commercial enterprise - people vote with their dollars and overwhelmingly vote for (some) meat.
There are ways around the ethical problems but the steps to get there can be tremendous. One is to use biomass more efficiently, another is create habitat that attracts exploitable species (reefs, buffalo reintroduction) a third to mandate industry and utilities to be zero-effluent (good luck w/ that). Personally the idea of saline agriculture is an interesting co-opting of this as it would enable both the plant crops as food and better fish farming practices. Creating more ecology, living space for more life that can be harvested, is the really important step - especially in the seas. Increase density of habitat, increase amount of life - things like floating reefs in the mid-ocean and build other artificial reefs, in quantity. Much of the ocean is sandy wastes - a little terrain goes a long way underwater. Mats of floating plants could work using saline crops and mangrove, once started they could drift as floating islands or be anchored in place w/ tide generators.