Some solutions to inflight, mixed crew issues on long (Mars) flights:
1- Every Friday is Fight Club Night. Clear out the Node and the crew wrestles/UFCs to their heart's content. Structured, limited physical violence will greatly limit abuse and competition issues outside "the Octagon".
2- Swingers. I love this idea even if it's not my own style. Everyone on the crew is lovers to some extent. Jealousy is heavily limited because everybody is forced to share and step outside their normal boundaries. Three Dolphin Club and all that.
3- Chemical castration. Truly awful in a technocratic, puritannical manner. Everyone on the crew is given drugs to heavily limit sexual desire. Warning - this kind of approach likely has problems with making the crew into listless zombies as well.
4- Send nuclear families. Mom, Dad and the (grown) kids perform the mission. Better for settlement missions than NASA-style exploration.
Bill Gates has been getting a lot of "pirate" heat lately, first the Romainian PM saying that Warez built their IT industry, now Gorby begging for pirate amnesty...
I thought that Crassus and Pompeii were both banished. I was also under the impression that he had survived the journey through to China. Memory fails.
When Crassus was ejected from the Roman empire, for a failed coup, he took his legion east. They knew (from merchants) that a great empire lived on the other side of the hated Parthians, so they marched in a loop northeast and eventually became border guards for the Chinese emperor. It makes sense, they already knew how to fight the Persians and couldn't live anywhere near the Roman sphere.
"Liqian" is supposedly "Roman" Sinosized.
This made the news in 2005, when the walls and tombs were found:
"This response, nor the current security paranoia in no way would have stopped 9/11."
Not a bit. Today's incident is Bruce Schneir's security theatre in action. There's nothing to see here, move along and be scared. Nothing to see here.
"Most security, isn't. This is yet another example of wasted tax dollars."
Mayor Menino was saying that it cost $750K in response today, and that they'll be pursuing the responsible parties. How again is a young artist supposed to pay that? Will they pursue the Cartoon Network? Menino also said they'd try to get 2-5 years in prison for anyone involved = the people that put the signs up. The real culprit seems to be whoever reported the "suspicious package" to the police, but they'll be regarded as the anonymous hero that saved the city from some kid with dreadlocks.
Here are pics of Zebbler putting the signs up, I think with the Glitchcrew. These are local artists doing the deed for Interference and Cartoon Network. Having lived in Boston for years, and was there on 9/11, I'm somewhat conflicted about this. Should they have gotten permission from the city? These are magnetic signs, not grafiti. The signs were up for two weeks before anyone freaked out.
It's a battery-capacitor hybrid that has interesting properties. It's not at the same production level, but doesn't provide quite the same strong claims as the EESTOR system. Any opinions on the Brown effort?
I learn something new every day, thanks. The artist with the 3d printer didn't make that claim, it was just the first working unit i'd ever heard of. j
The Blue Origin's vehicle isn't anything like DC-X, except that they are both VTVL. The Goddard/New Shepard vehicles are axisymetric, base-first reentry and use hydrogen peroxide/kerosene. DC-X (and follow-ons) were biconic, used a side-first reentry with body flaps and were LOX/LH2 powered. Very different machines, both these test vehicles and any further versions. DC-X was based on the classified AMARV test article, the Goddard is more like the old "mega capsule" heavy lift concepts from the 60's and 70's, such as Boeing's LEO.
All the best to Bezos and Blue Origin! The flight video is excellent!
I met this artist in 93 or 94, he had built the world's first 3D printer. It used glue and sand, and printed out all sorts of shapes. I don't remember his name, but it was a really interesting presentation. He also had a chair that could shake at different frequencies (he was searching for the Brown Note).
Also, Sears has a 3d woodworking "CompuCarve" that takes 14x5xinfinite pieces. It's sold out because BoingBoing linked to it.
All that's well and good. So why are you guys so terrified of flying astronauts on Atlas and Delta? Instead of slight modifications to existing rockets, you are rolling out two entire new lines of vehicles that might or might not have the advertised capabilities. Existing EELV are no more dangerous than the proposed ARES I and V, and they exist today. We could begin the lunar program now, in 20 ton chunks, instead of waiting 15+ years to do it in 100 ton chunks.
Payload neutrality, commercial sourcing, base-camp and resource staging are the way to succeed and do it quickly. Building behemoth launchers out of 30-year old components is a route to failure, IMHO. If it's about jobs, just offer buyouts to all those Shuttle workers. It doesn't much matter because a US commercial project is going to beat you guys back to Luna, using US and Russian hardware.
I would guess that the "ipod generation" (dumb name, BTW) isn't indifferent to space development, just NASA's extremely poor PR. The younger folks out there seem interested in space, human or robotic exploration, space tourism, astronomy, all sorts of stuff. It's NASA's marketing and the pitiful plan they've put forward that fall flat. People are excited about space, just not NASA space. Private spaceflight excites almost everyone I talk with, it's the ability to go there yourself that people are interested, not 4 government employees sometime in the next several decades. You should have seen all the excited young people at the X Prize Cup - and very little of that excitement is about the maybe-Moon missions.
It's going to take a few more years to fly, but Postcards To Space will take your handwritten or emailed Postcard, fly a scan of it on a space sculpture (later a solar sail), display the image with space as a backdrop and email it back to you. Not as near as the Phoenix mission, but definitely more interactive.
I've been a Planetary Society member since the late 80s, and greatly appreciate everything they've done and continue to do.
It's amazing how nobody in the press or these unlettered savages can tell the difference between evolution (change through time) and the origin of life? They are totally different issues and very different fields of study.
Evolution is proven fact, otherwise corn, dogs and dolphins wouldn't exist. If evolution wasn't an ongoing process then you would be an exact clone of your mother. Every time two lifeforms mate, they perform an act of evolution. Life originated somewhere, that's also a fact. Did it originate with a creator? Who created the creator? Did it originate in a stew of comet-delivered nitrogen-rich organic compounds? Chemically provable, but you have to "believe" in chemistry, astrophysics, genetics, DNA and the scientific process to comprehend it. DNA can be read like a book, face facts, all you creationists.
I'm surprised this suit would happen in Russia, but anti-logic knows no nationality.
Messychusetts has to many laws. High tax burden, overregulation, hostile business climate. Oh, yeah, and MANDATORY health insurance - you will be fined if you refuse to pay up, even if you're perfectly healthy. No wonder the population shrank 4 out of the past 5 years. I moved to Rhode Island from Boston 3 years ago and have loved almost every minute of it.
Deval Patrick might have some really good stuff going for him, but he's also doing some really dumb things like putting the fox in charge of the IT hen house and being ignorant on one of the region's big industries: commercial fishing. On the ODF fight, I think there will eventually be enough pressure to force even M$ into using truly open formats.
I'd like to point out that "systems engineering" regularly fails to produce rockets. Like every "X" vehicle of the past 2 decades. I'll trust actual rocket scientists over viewgraph-flying Systems Engineers any day. NASA hasn't designed a real rocket since the mid-70s, and they are following their typical Mafia-tactics in dealing with outside criticism.
The Stick may or may not be over/underweight. The real issues, to me, are that it uses the most dangerous part of the Shuttle architecture (but rebuilds into an untested new stage) while promising to be as absolutely expensive as possible. All this while replicating current (Atlas, Delta, Soyuz, Ariane) capabilities. Just buy your flights to LEO and base-camp from there! Instead of waiting 15 years for crewed access to the moon, NASA could be building the deep space hardware they are actually good at and leave the Earth-LEO segment to the companies that already do it regularly.
NASA, where having something, maybe in a couple decades, is more important than keeping today's capability.
And yes, I'm a big supporter. Except when Hanley and the others act like 6th graders because someone criticized their wittle wocket.
> Such claims are completely unjustified by observational facts, which was my original point.
There are hydrated minerals in some chondrites, none have been remotely detected in the Martian moons yet. If 1% of the material is hydrated (Lewis), or even hydrogen rich, on either Phobos or Deimos, that is still vastly more material than in Luna's polar craters.
> As I said, Phobos and Deimos equatorial orbits make them shitty platforms for exploration. You cannot reach the polar caps from an equatorial orbit. It takes a great deal of energy to change the inclination of an orbit from 0 to 90 degrees.
The point is to have orbital facilities around Mars to offer realtime teleoperation. There needs to be a network of comm/GPS satelites for any human presence. Light-delay is the biggest factor, a medium-orbit like the moons or a polar orbit will do, but high-eccentricity ellipses don't. The point is to be able to explore and extract resources while operating in a familiar (freefall) environment. Establish orbital and ground-side ISRU. Then we can colonize Mars incrementally. It'd be dicey using current Russian hardware, but we could start this process now instead of in 30 years.
I'm with you on the "public participation" angle, but my main interest is in private space development. If NASA needs to go to the moon to maintain our interest, that's one thing. If you're trying to make a pile of money or build/support Hotels and orbital villas, then other destinations make more sense.
In the aggregate, I support anything Dr. Griffin does. He is the first NASA admin in decades with real Vision.
> Phobos and Deimos are S and C type asteroids repectively. S class Eros was found to be devoid of water. It is not likely that Deimos is water rich either.
John Lewis in Mining the Sky posits significant quantities of water under the surface of Phobos. Even without water there, it is a good staging point for Mars teleoperation and we already know that Mars has water in it's polar caps and Elysium. Luna is bone dry or nearly so. There is some conjecture about exactly what type of bodies Phobos and Deimos are. The "Phobos-Grunt" sample return would help answer some of them, but it'll probably require boots on the ground to answer all.
Actually, water is the first and primary resource we need. Petrochemicals, nitrates and phosphates, metals and all that come way below water. "An environment wildly hostile to human life, and devoid of the myriad of elements" describes Earth's Moon perfectly. Mars and it's moons do have all or most of what is needed to build a technical civilization.
Wasn't that the point of the original ARPANET? To route around broken parts of the network? BBN was involved in that, too. What, have they been double-billing the DoD this whole time?
The real action is going to be on Phobos and Mars, in that order. Don't look for the next Iceland, look for the next New York City, the slam-dunk locations in space. The Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, Earth-crossing "dead" comets and Mar's small moons are good candidates. Phobos allows both resource extraction including actual water (not maybes in polar shadows), Phobos also offers realtime contact with Mars and the convenience of working in familiar freefall. The moon has a lot of unaddressed operational issues that a Phobos/Mars orbitter and mine scheme doesn't possess. Admittedly there is a lot of handwaving in this, but we discussed the tradeoffs here:
Slashdot Mirror
Some solutions to inflight, mixed crew issues on long (Mars) flights:
1- Every Friday is Fight Club Night. Clear out the Node and the crew wrestles/UFCs to their heart's content. Structured, limited physical violence will greatly limit abuse and competition issues outside "the Octagon".
2- Swingers. I love this idea even if it's not my own style. Everyone on the crew is lovers to some extent. Jealousy is heavily limited because everybody is forced to share and step outside their normal boundaries. Three Dolphin Club and all that.
3- Chemical castration. Truly awful in a technocratic, puritannical manner. Everyone on the crew is given drugs to heavily limit sexual desire. Warning - this kind of approach likely has problems with making the crew into listless zombies as well.
4- Send nuclear families. Mom, Dad and the (grown) kids perform the mission. Better for settlement missions than NASA-style exploration.
Josh
Pirated Software 0WNS You!
8)
Bill Gates has been getting a lot of "pirate" heat lately, first the Romainian PM saying that Warez built their IT industry, now Gorby begging for pirate amnesty...
I thought that Crassus and Pompeii were both banished. I was also under the impression that he had survived the journey through to China. Memory fails.
When Crassus was ejected from the Roman empire, for a failed coup, he took his legion east. They knew (from merchants) that a great empire lived on the other side of the hated Parthians, so they marched in a loop northeast and eventually became border guards for the Chinese emperor. It makes sense, they already knew how to fight the Persians and couldn't live anywhere near the Roman sphere.
"Liqian" is supposedly "Roman" Sinosized.
This made the news in 2005, when the walls and tombs were found:
http://orbis-quintus.net/blog/?p=1700
Josh
"This response, nor the current security paranoia in no way would have stopped 9/11."
Not a bit. Today's incident is Bruce Schneir's security theatre in action. There's nothing to see here, move along and be scared. Nothing to see here.
"Most security, isn't. This is yet another example of wasted tax dollars."
Mayor Menino was saying that it cost $750K in response today, and that they'll be pursuing the responsible parties. How again is a young artist supposed to pay that? Will they pursue the Cartoon Network? Menino also said they'd try to get 2-5 years in prison for anyone involved = the people that put the signs up. The real culprit seems to be whoever reported the "suspicious package" to the police, but they'll be regarded as the anonymous hero that saved the city from some kid with dreadlocks.
Josh
That sucks. Turner better back Zebbler and anyone else up on this. Boston is never really "safe".
We literally have "security theatre" going on here. They've arrested a performance artist for cartoon crime.
Here are pics of Zebbler putting the signs up, I think with the Glitchcrew. These are local artists doing the deed for Interference and Cartoon Network. Having lived in Boston for years, and was there on 9/11, I'm somewhat conflicted about this. Should they have gotten permission from the city? These are magnetic signs, not grafiti. The signs were up for two weeks before anyone freaked out.
1 /mission1.html
http://zebbler.com/intcomp/CartoonNetwork/mission
I can't believe that none of the cops at Sullivan Square saw it and said "hey, that's from a cartoon".
Heard about this on the radio and looked it up a couple months ago:
0 06-07/06-022.html
http://www.brown.edu/Administration/News_Bureau/2
It's a battery-capacitor hybrid that has interesting properties. It's not at the same production level, but doesn't provide quite the same strong claims as the EESTOR system. Any opinions on the Brown effort?
Josh
I learn something new every day, thanks. The artist with the 3d printer didn't make that claim, it was just the first working unit i'd ever heard of.
j
The Blue Origin's vehicle isn't anything like DC-X, except that they are both VTVL. The Goddard/New Shepard vehicles are axisymetric, base-first reentry and use hydrogen peroxide/kerosene. DC-X (and follow-ons) were biconic, used a side-first reentry with body flaps and were LOX/LH2 powered. Very different machines, both these test vehicles and any further versions. DC-X was based on the classified AMARV test article, the Goddard is more like the old "mega capsule" heavy lift concepts from the 60's and 70's, such as Boeing's LEO.
All the best to Bezos and Blue Origin! The flight video is excellent!
Josh
I met this artist in 93 or 94, he had built the world's first 3D printer. It used glue and sand, and printed out all sorts of shapes. I don't remember his name, but it was a really interesting presentation. He also had a chair that could shake at different frequencies (he was searching for the Brown Note).
i onID=@@@@0018833813.1168235300@@@@&BV_EngineID=cdc caddjkllkmklcefecemldffidfki.0&adCell=P3&pid=00921 754000&vertical=TOOL&ihtoken=1
Also, Sears has a 3d woodworking "CompuCarve" that takes 14x5xinfinite pieces. It's sold out because BoingBoing linked to it.
http://www.sears.com/sr/javasr/product.do?BV_Sess
Josh
All that's well and good. So why are you guys so terrified of flying astronauts on Atlas and Delta? Instead of slight modifications to existing rockets, you are rolling out two entire new lines of vehicles that might or might not have the advertised capabilities. Existing EELV are no more dangerous than the proposed ARES I and V, and they exist today. We could begin the lunar program now, in 20 ton chunks, instead of waiting 15+ years to do it in 100 ton chunks.
Payload neutrality, commercial sourcing, base-camp and resource staging are the way to succeed and do it quickly. Building behemoth launchers out of 30-year old components is a route to failure, IMHO. If it's about jobs, just offer buyouts to all those Shuttle workers. It doesn't much matter because a US commercial project is going to beat you guys back to Luna, using US and Russian hardware.
Josh
I would guess that the "ipod generation" (dumb name, BTW) isn't indifferent to space development, just NASA's extremely poor PR. The younger folks out there seem interested in space, human or robotic exploration, space tourism, astronomy, all sorts of stuff. It's NASA's marketing and the pitiful plan they've put forward that fall flat. People are excited about space, just not NASA space. Private spaceflight excites almost everyone I talk with, it's the ability to go there yourself that people are interested, not 4 government employees sometime in the next several decades. You should have seen all the excited young people at the X Prize Cup - and very little of that excitement is about the maybe-Moon missions.
Jon Goff has a good piece on Selenian Boondocks right now, called "VSE Apathy Woes". http://selenianboondocks.blogspot.com/
It's not "space" that youth are apathetic over, it's NASA.
Josh
wake me when it's flying.
It's going to take a few more years to fly, but Postcards To Space will take your handwritten or emailed Postcard, fly a scan of it on a space sculpture (later a solar sail), display the image with space as a backdrop and email it back to you. Not as near as the Phoenix mission, but definitely more interactive.
I've been a Planetary Society member since the late 80s, and greatly appreciate everything they've done and continue to do.
Josh
It's amazing how nobody in the press or these unlettered savages can tell the difference between evolution (change through time) and the origin of life? They are totally different issues and very different fields of study.
Evolution is proven fact, otherwise corn, dogs and dolphins wouldn't exist. If evolution wasn't an ongoing process then you would be an exact clone of your mother. Every time two lifeforms mate, they perform an act of evolution. Life originated somewhere, that's also a fact. Did it originate with a creator? Who created the creator? Did it originate in a stew of comet-delivered nitrogen-rich organic compounds? Chemically provable, but you have to "believe" in chemistry, astrophysics, genetics, DNA and the scientific process to comprehend it. DNA can be read like a book, face facts, all you creationists.
I'm surprised this suit would happen in Russia, but anti-logic knows no nationality.
Josh
Messychusetts has to many laws. High tax burden, overregulation, hostile business climate. Oh, yeah, and MANDATORY health insurance - you will be fined if you refuse to pay up, even if you're perfectly healthy. No wonder the population shrank 4 out of the past 5 years. I moved to Rhode Island from Boston 3 years ago and have loved almost every minute of it.
Deval Patrick might have some really good stuff going for him, but he's also doing some really dumb things like putting the fox in charge of the IT hen house and being ignorant on one of the region's big industries: commercial fishing. On the ODF fight, I think there will eventually be enough pressure to force even M$ into using truly open formats.
Josh
I'd like to point out that "systems engineering" regularly fails to produce rockets. Like every "X" vehicle of the past 2 decades. I'll trust actual rocket scientists over viewgraph-flying Systems Engineers any day. NASA hasn't designed a real rocket since the mid-70s, and they are following their typical Mafia-tactics in dealing with outside criticism.
The Stick may or may not be over/underweight. The real issues, to me, are that it uses the most dangerous part of the Shuttle architecture (but rebuilds into an untested new stage) while promising to be as absolutely expensive as possible. All this while replicating current (Atlas, Delta, Soyuz, Ariane) capabilities. Just buy your flights to LEO and base-camp from there! Instead of waiting 15 years for crewed access to the moon, NASA could be building the deep space hardware they are actually good at and leave the Earth-LEO segment to the companies that already do it regularly.
NASA, where having something, maybe in a couple decades, is more important than keeping today's capability.
And yes, I'm a big supporter. Except when Hanley and the others act like 6th graders because someone criticized their wittle wocket.
Josh - proud member of the peanut gallery
> Such claims are completely unjustified by observational facts, which was my original point.
There are hydrated minerals in some chondrites, none have been remotely detected in the Martian moons yet. If 1% of the material is hydrated (Lewis), or even hydrogen rich, on either Phobos or Deimos, that is still vastly more material than in Luna's polar craters.
> As I said, Phobos and Deimos equatorial orbits make them shitty platforms for exploration. You cannot reach the polar caps from an equatorial orbit. It takes a great deal of energy to change the inclination of an orbit from 0 to 90 degrees.
The point is to have orbital facilities around Mars to offer realtime teleoperation. There needs to be a network of comm/GPS satelites for any human presence. Light-delay is the biggest factor, a medium-orbit like the moons or a polar orbit will do, but high-eccentricity ellipses don't. The point is to be able to explore and extract resources while operating in a familiar (freefall) environment. Establish orbital and ground-side ISRU. Then we can colonize Mars incrementally. It'd be dicey using current Russian hardware, but we could start this process now instead of in 30 years.
Josh
I'm with you on the "public participation" angle, but my main interest is in private space development. If NASA needs to go to the moon to maintain our interest, that's one thing. If you're trying to make a pile of money or build/support Hotels and orbital villas, then other destinations make more sense.
In the aggregate, I support anything Dr. Griffin does. He is the first NASA admin in decades with real Vision.
josh
> Phobos and Deimos are S and C type asteroids repectively. S class Eros was found to be devoid of water. It is not likely that Deimos is water rich either.
John Lewis in Mining the Sky posits significant quantities of water under the surface of Phobos. Even without water there, it is a good staging point for Mars teleoperation and we already know that Mars has water in it's polar caps and Elysium. Luna is bone dry or nearly so. There is some conjecture about exactly what type of bodies Phobos and Deimos are. The "Phobos-Grunt" sample return would help answer some of them, but it'll probably require boots on the ground to answer all.
Josh
I'll take Deimos and Mars if that's what happens. I just think Luna is a non-starter because it lacks so many resources.
J
Actually, water is the first and primary resource we need. Petrochemicals, nitrates and phosphates, metals and all that come way below water. "An environment wildly hostile to human life, and devoid of the myriad of elements" describes Earth's Moon perfectly. Mars and it's moons do have all or most of what is needed to build a technical civilization.
josh
Wasn't that the point of the original ARPANET? To route around broken parts of the network? BBN was involved in that, too. What, have they been double-billing the DoD this whole time?
The real action is going to be on Phobos and Mars, in that order. Don't look for the next Iceland, look for the next New York City, the slam-dunk locations in space. The Lagrange points in the Earth-Moon system, Earth-crossing "dead" comets and Mar's small moons are good candidates. Phobos allows both resource extraction including actual water (not maybes in polar shadows), Phobos also offers realtime contact with Mars and the convenience of working in familiar freefall. The moon has a lot of unaddressed operational issues that a Phobos/Mars orbitter and mine scheme doesn't possess. Admittedly there is a lot of handwaving in this, but we discussed the tradeoffs here:
r d=businesstech&Number=503952&page=&view=&sb=&o=
http://uplink.space.com/showthreaded.php?Cat=&Boa
Josh