Anybody interested in visualizing hyperspace should learn about Alicia Boole Stott and her amazing story. She was the daughter of George Boole (of boolean algebra fame) who developed a mind-boggling series of paper cutout models of four dimensional objects that won her an honorary math doctorate in 1914. Check out these extensive photos of her work.
I just wish the USA Today reporter for this story would get his facts straight. AAAS doesn't stand for American Academy of Arts and Sciences; it stands for American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Chemistry for chemistry's sake has been banned all along. Check out this article on how to get your banned pdf copy of one cool 1960s chemistry book with some not-so-cool experiments...
Good post. You are objective, fair and mostly right on the money. A few comments, mostly clarifying my earlier points...
"The shuttle is a much more expensive spacecraft to operate than the ATV" - Don't be too sure. That ATV is a custom one-off product (averaging at least $250 million each) and its expendable launch vehicle (runs $120 million each) is no real bargain, either. Expressed in $ per pound, future reboost fuel is costing ($250M + $125M) / (4.7 t * 2000 lb/t ) = $40,000 per pound. That's higher than shuttle, which has some economies of scale and reusability working in its bloated favor.
"There may also be a commercial option available for re-supply and reboost in the next 3-4 years through the COTS program" - True, but depending on the tech cavalry to come over the hill is mainly how ISS has become the mess it is in the first place. Based on my limited glimpses behind the curtain, my personal opinion is that SpaceX has a few more spectacular failures to go before they are ready to save the day on ISS.
"There is absolutely nothing wrong with Soyuz or Orion performing crew rotation. Both of these craft have lower operating costs than the shuttle, and lower projected loss of crew probability" - Funny story about projections: ask Elon Musk sometime where the debris field would have been for the maiden SpaceX Falcon 1 if there had been an early final stage shutdown or explosion (Answer - someplace between San Francisco CA and Savannah GA). I was told to not worry (and I did anyway, quite vocally from my padded cell) because the reliability of a Falcon 1 was too high for any failure scenario to be credible, much less the one I was worried about. Heh. Look what happened to the first two Falcon flights - failure, followed by final stage late engine failure. I'd be laughing last if I were laughing at all about that one, which I'm not. Rena, I'm looking at you.
"The dirty little secret...Total BS. The international partners are well aware of how much reboost the ISS needs and are planning accordingly. There is no secret. Progress, ATV, or the shuttle alone can't do all of the reboost, but combined they can. Also, once construction is finished, the ISS will be boosted to a slightly higher orbit to reduce the effect of drag. Lastly, the ISS is at nearly maximum drag, with only one more solar array to be added, but still growing in mass. Added mass works out net neutral. The momentum reduces the effect of drag just as well as it reduces the effectiveness of reboosts." - Well, I was being metaphorical in saying a dirty little secret - it's more like the elephant in the middle of the room that I think being ignored. Show me any evidence that financial budgeting is being planned for on what it's gonna take to keep this thing up past 2010 and I'll shut up. I contend it's being kept off the public radar because all would agree it doen't make sense to finish if the true maintenance costs to keep it up were known, publicized, and widely understood. Hey, let's focus instead on the fact that there's a Buzz Lightyear toy on this mission!!! Also, the mass isn't really neutral - I agree that by increasing vehicle density it means the reboost has to occur a little less often, but it's still a lot greater load that's gotta be lifted when you do.
"The contention of crooked accounting is unsubstantiated." - I agree that's a low blow. I have absolutely no knowledge of true criminal wrongdoing or fraud and will say that the NASA officials I have worked with over the years are honest, ethical and hardworking. However, the accounting of money flow for Space Station is undeniably a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul shell game played by all to keep the gravy train rolling under extremely difficult circumstances. I stand by my statement that NOBODY can truly say how much this thing costs.
For reference, here's some pretty good Wiki articles on ISS and JV.
The facts: "On this first ATV mission, Jules Verne will deliver 4.6 tonnes of payload to the ISS, including 1 150 kg of dry cargo, 856 kg of propellant for the Russian Zvezda module, 270 kg of drinking water and 21 kg of oxygen. On future ATV missions, the payload capacity will be increased to 7.4 tonnes.
About half of the payload onboard Jules Verne ATV is re-boost propellant, which will be used by its own propulsion system for periodic manoeuvres to increase the altitude of the ISS in order to compensate its natural decay caused by atmospheric drag."
Also: On April 25, 2008, the European Space Agency announced that earlier in the day its first automated transfer vehicle (ATV), the "Jules Verne," increased the altitude of the International Space Station by about 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers)--the first time an ESA craft had performed such an important task. The 12.3 minute maneuver was directed by ESA's ATV Control Center, which is located in Toulouse, France.
At 6:22 a.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) (0422 GMT), controllers turned on two of the Jules Verne's four main engines. The two engines produced a thrust that increased the station's speed by about 8 feet per second (2.65 meters per second).
To achieve this re-boost in altitude, the ATV consumed 537 pounds (244 kilograms) of fuel. In all, the ATV carries about two metric tons (about 4,400 pounds) of propellant for re-boost activities.
After the burn was completed, the new altitude of the ISS became 212.5 miles (342 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.
The Space Station needs periodic boosts to raise its orbit because its orbit decays slowly over time due to a very small amount of atmospheric drag on the large structure as it orbits about the Earth.
In the past, the RSA Progress, the NASA Space Shuttle, or the ISS itself has performed such a maneuver. However, only RSA Progress and the ESA ATV are able to re-boost the space station to such a high level due to the amount of fuel onboard each vessel.
The Jules Verne ATV (ATV-001) will perform three additional re-boost maneuvers over the next few months: on June 12th, July 8th, and August 6th. Normally, the space station tries to keep at an orbital height of about 211 miles (340 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.
Later in August 2008, the Jules Verne, loaded with waste and unneeded materials from the space station, will be undocked from the ISS. The ATV has a capacity of carrying up to 6.3 metric tons (13,900 pounds) of unwanted material from the Station."
So what most people don't realize is that JV carries a LOT more (dense, low-volume) as mass as fuel for reboost than it does anything else in that cool pressurized comparment it has the astronauts go in. I understand that the JV maneuvers were held off to allow Shuttle attachment of KiBo at the lower and easy to reach altitude. But my point is that things are only going to get worse and will ultimately I think go beyond what JV is designed or funded to do to keep ISS up.
JV is an experiment in European autonomous docking technology, not an integrated reboost system. I have yet to see any plans for how many JVs will be flown in the long run - currently there are only 4 more in the pipeline thru 2015. The numbers above represent the data required to figure out just how many JVs will be required to keep ISS up for X number of years. I predict that when that calculation is finally run - and when NASA explains to ESA that there will be zero American funding to keep the JV production line running - that ESA will say, OK, we ain't payin no Euros to keep this junkheap up either, which side of Hawaii do you want us to splash the ISS in?
No, I'm saying that IF cooperating with the Russians had ORIGINALLY been a goal of the program, that ISS would have a COMPELTELY different design and location than what is up there now. People just see photos of floating astronauts on TV and say, oh, what a cool space station. The reality is quite different.
The NASA Freedom / Alpha space station program in the late 1980s and early 1990s was well on its way to complete cancellation due to horrendous cost overruns and total program mismanagement and in-fighting between NASA HQ in Washington, the side "Level II" bueracracy that had been set up in Virginia, and Johnson Space Center in Houston. This may sound like an exaggeration, but ask anybody that was there. One thing and one thing only saved it - the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Next thing you know, all of these American carpetbaggers were headed for Moscow to try and broker cooperative deals with the newly-open-for-business Russian space organizations. I know becasue I was one of them, in Moscow in October 1993 when Yelsin literally sicced a tank on the die-hard Communists holed up in THEIR White House - what they call their national parliment building. I was there with a group to get a protein crystal experiment launched to Mir, and next thing I know the head of the factory for SS-20 production is asking us if we would be interested in a tour of his factory and possible Western sales deals as a small satellite launcher. Just a couple of years before I had blurry classified intelligence reports on his SS-20 locked in my work safe, figuring out how to simulate its trajectory capabilities for a star wars interceptor program in Denver I worked at - now this guy wanted to give me a tour the CIA might literally have killed for, and and wanted to sell me a rocket to boot. Them was crazy days.
The biggest carpetbagger of all ws Al Gore. Maybe he didn't invent the internet, but Al Gore sure invented the ISS, traveling to Moscow to sign a deal with the Russians where we would fly experiments and astronauts to their then-orbiting MIR station in exchange for turning the US-only Alpha into a joint American-Russian ISS. In one fell swoop the NASA station came a LOT more about politics and national prestiege than about science - the alternative to nuclear war and the crown jewel of Clinton foreign policy. And actually, this really WAS good for America, for Russia, and for the world.
But it was TERRIBLE for the ISS. The Russians with their spunky but primative Soyuz modules were totally unable to reach the original orbit planned for the US Space Station. So we obliged and changed the planned station cruise orbit to THEIR optimal Soyuz launch orbit, which OUR Space Shuttle could reach ONLY if WE took a 30,000 pound payload reduction on every flight. Thus began a totally insane, I-can't-detail-it-all technical death march of cutting the module sizes from 42 to 27 feet to trim weight (wonder why there's no US potty up there?), lauching the modules empty without equipment or experiment racks to save weight, risking crews on launches that ran the Shuttle main engines at a heart-stopping 109% of thrust presented to the public like that was a routine maneuver, and launching far fewer modules and missions than planned because we can't afford to get everything up from Florida to the 57 degree inclined Russian orbit. And once its up there and needs to be resupplied, we can get only 10,000 pounds of resupply payload to ISS instead of the 40,000 pounds a Suttle used to carrry to a normal 28 degree Florida-style, and most of that 10,000 pounds goes to the airlock and docking adapter in the payload bay. Read the newspaper articles carefully. "The shuttle delivered a ton (2000 pounds) of frozen pizzas and clean underwear to the astronauts". To those who know what was originally planned, and what has been tossed overboard to get this all to work, such a statement is a true tragedy. You cannot run this stati
The Jules Verne used the remainder of its unused docking fuel to raise ISS less than 5 km, and that one time kick that cannot be counted on to be there every time. Docking fuel is supposed to be allocated to docking, not reboost, during mission planning. JV also transferred less than a ton of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to Zevzda. THis is primarily intended for attitude control, not reboost. Even if it wasn't, final completed weight of ISS in 2010 is slated to be 460 tons, so fuel being transferred from JV to Z will be only 1/460 of total ISS mass. When I get home from work today I'll get my textbooks out and calculate delta V between two concentric circular orbits at 300 and 320 km and then use ideal rocket equation to figure up the required specific impulse to get said delta V from a 1:460 mass fraction, but I already know the answer in my heart - Zvezda ain't runnin' that hydrazine thru no ion drive.
This totally ignores that it is even dumber to launch resupply to a 57 degree Russian space station from an equatorial European launch site on an expendable rocket than it is from a 28 degree American launch site in Florida on a reusable one.
Do the math. Houston, after 2010, we have a problem.
Oh, dude, you've gotten me started. I worked on Space Station in the early 1990s and still haven't recovered from the bad taste that experience has left in my mouth. Political boondoggle white elephant doesn't even begin to cover what a stupid mess the ISS is. The only thing worse than setting it up in its shuttle-payload-upmass-hostile 57 degree inclined orbit to allow Russian participation is totally cutting off Shuttle participation in 2010. ISS was DESIGNED for Shuttle resupply during its lifetime and that resupply was first strangled and then totally cut off. Soyuz and Orion taking astronauts to this thing is a joke, and doing resupply by Jules Verne is a criminal waste.
The dirty little secret about ISS is that at full mass and max solar array deployment upon completion, this thing is going to deorbit even faster from atmospheric drag than it is now and no way can Progress or Jules Verne is keep the completed assembly reboosted - only the Shuttle could. Do your homework about how far that thing fell during the years following Columbia when no shuttle visited, and that's without the full solar arrays. Once the Shuttle stops going, ISS is heading straight for the Pacific even if it takes a few years to deorbit and get there. And secretly if not in public, NASA will breathe a sigh of relief when it splashes.
But I digress. Nobody even knows anymore how much ISS costs anymore because of crooked accounting hiding the drawing of funds from everywhere within NASA, but nobody argues it's at least $100 billion dollars. I cannot prove an absence of good science. Instead, YOU tell ME what the top three discoveries on ISS have been. Hell, just tell me one thing we have learned on ISS that we didn't already know. "Bones decalcify in zero G"? This was new info worth $100 billion?
Here's a less sexist explanation. In Texas Hold'Em poker, everybody tries to tell lies (sell bluffs) about what their secret cards are when paired with public community cards that are true and visible to everyone. Level II screens are a different form of poker where the public cards (bids and asks) shown by each of the market makers are the lies being told and the secrets of their true intentions are kept solely to themselves.
Here, read this Investopedia article, which is about at the same level as saying women are complicated but interesting. Always remember that f*cked has two meanings, and Level II screens and women will eventually show you both.
Welcome, grasshopper, and get ready to lose a lot of money learning the answers to your questions - but we all started where you are now, once upon a time. Go to Amazon and get a remaindered, out-of-print copy of The Undergroundtrader.com Guide To Electronic Trading as a one-stop place to get up to speed on all of this.
ARCA (AKA Archipelago) is a commercial electronic trading system and competitor or ISLD (AKA Island, get it?) and other so-called ECNs that "shadow" the NASDAQ, which is the true major market. Think ARCA=Yahoo, ISLD=Google and NASDAQ=Microsoft, sort of. ECNs allow a subset of users to make trades faster (under 1 second) than the NASDAQ market as a whole (maybe 5 seconds), but at a greater price and risk in that the stock shares may not be available at all (thinly traded). They are useful in saving your butt if you are on the wrong side of a suddenly moving market and need to bail out RIGHT NOW.
And everybody else, yes, I realize this is a vast oversimplification. But understanding gotta start somewhere...
I own several Dell Latitude C400s and I think they are the greatest laptop ever. Lightweight, very sturdy, USB, PCCard, internal wifi card, no internal drive and best of all, a 6 hour add-on battery pack is out there if you can grab one when they show up. Plus lots of other pros, Get one.
Actually, the data we have for the Crab Nebula shows it at age 2008 - 1054 = 954 years vs. at age 140 years for the new supernova. You should compare the 6500 year "real" date to the new nova's 28,000 year date, not the 140 year date.
No wonder they use stardates in star Trek.
The NASA press release talks about the new nova being pretty special, but the Crab Nebula is no slouch. It expanded to over 10 light years in size in under 1000 years. That's 1% of the speed of light. Plus it is over four times closer and not obscured by dust, so both the larger angular size and visible light availability still means the Crab Nebula is still "the people's supernova".
NASA is wrong in saying this new supernova is the "youngest" - it is actually just the MOST RECENTLY OBSERVED. The Crab Nebula supernova has it beat as "youngest", exploding occuring only 6500 years ago (and observed less than 300 years ago, in 1731) instead of exploding 28,000 years ago (and observed in 2008).
The cherry on top in your scenario would be utterly wasted. Highly enriched uranium is not highly radioactive. We can only hope that terrorists will be dumb enough to waste precious nuclear weapon material by using it as mere debris in a chemical bomb.
Agreed. True WMD (as opposed to dirty bomb) detection is even worse. Turns out you're not looking for the U-235 but instead the easier-to-see U-238 that was not removed during the enrichment process. It's still trivially easy to shield your small fissile core during transport with a couple of hundred pounds of lead. See this and this and this for interesting details.
Superworms such as Storm represent perhaps the greatest threat to the internet becasue their stealthy natures allows the organization of millions of computers into a covert zombie botnet before their true exploit is finally launched. Will Cyber Command launch offensive operations to hunt down and destroy superworms already imbedded in cyberspace civilian computers, or create supermilworms (new word for CC use if you wish, with zero Google hits) that covertly draft millions of civilian cyberspace computers as secret War Reserve resources available for future callup and deployment in a future cyberspace battle?
Interesting story from NASAwatch:
"The planned launch of 50 Juno I model rockets from Cape Canaveral to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Explorer I launch has now been cancelled by the station's wing commander. Although the CCAFS has no quams about launching Deltas, Atlas and other massive rockets, they go into a complete tither when it comes down to launching a 12 inch long model rocket made of balsa wood and paper weighing just under 2 oz.
The intended launching was to be used as a fund raiser for the CCAFS Museum with each of the rockets being armed with the smallest engine they can carry, an A8-3. This engine would have propelled each of these 2 oz. Juno I replicas the a computer calculated altitude and or range of only 239 feet and each is recovered with a 12 inch parachute.
The Air Force, however, upon discovery of the planned flights felt that these rockets could pose a hazard to the nearby Delta pads- which are made of concrete and steel and are more than 10 times farther from the model's launch site than the rockets can fly. With that as their reason, the Air Force started the red tape machine. Soon the USAF Jags got involved and wanted a held harmless form signed by everyone near the launch site.
Next, a USAF person of non-importance decided to contact NASA and tell them that the rockets would be firing from the actual Explorer I launch site, which was on their property. Now enters the NASA red tape machine, which demanded a full safety review (keep in mind that kids have been flying such rockets since before NASA was even created). With this red tape storm in full swing, the CCAFS wing commander's office had heard enough and scrubbed all 50 launches.
Thus, all over America on January 31, 2008 school kids and adults will celebrate the the day that the US Army launched Explorer I into space by launching model rockets. In spite of the winter conditions, the launches will take place in parks and school yards and back yards all over the United States- every place EXCEPT for Cape Canaveral.
In 1958, the US Army restored the nation's pride following Sputnik, but it seems that in 2008, the Air Force and NASA cannot even get out of their own red taped way to launch a simple rocket made of balsa wood and paper.
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Anybody interested in visualizing hyperspace should learn about Alicia Boole Stott and her amazing story. She was the daughter of George Boole (of boolean algebra fame) who developed a mind-boggling series of paper cutout models of four dimensional objects that won her an honorary math doctorate in 1914. Check out these extensive photos of her work.
I just wish the USA Today reporter for this story would get his facts straight. AAAS doesn't stand for American Academy of Arts and Sciences; it stands for American Association for the Advancement of Science.
Joseph Ferson / Department of Environmental Protection / Joseph.Ferson@state.ma.us / 617-654-6523
Chemistry for chemistry's sake has been banned all along. Check out this article on how to get your banned pdf copy of one cool 1960s chemistry book with some not-so-cool experiments...
"The shuttle is a much more expensive spacecraft to operate than the ATV" - Don't be too sure. That ATV is a custom one-off product (averaging at least $250 million each) and its expendable launch vehicle (runs $120 million each) is no real bargain, either. Expressed in $ per pound, future reboost fuel is costing ($250M + $125M) / (4.7 t * 2000 lb/t ) = $40,000 per pound. That's higher than shuttle, which has some economies of scale and reusability working in its bloated favor.
"There may also be a commercial option available for re-supply and reboost in the next 3-4 years through the COTS program" - True, but depending on the tech cavalry to come over the hill is mainly how ISS has become the mess it is in the first place. Based on my limited glimpses behind the curtain, my personal opinion is that SpaceX has a few more spectacular failures to go before they are ready to save the day on ISS.
"There is absolutely nothing wrong with Soyuz or Orion performing crew rotation. Both of these craft have lower operating costs than the shuttle, and lower projected loss of crew probability" - Funny story about projections: ask Elon Musk sometime where the debris field would have been for the maiden SpaceX Falcon 1 if there had been an early final stage shutdown or explosion (Answer - someplace between San Francisco CA and Savannah GA). I was told to not worry (and I did anyway, quite vocally from my padded cell) because the reliability of a Falcon 1 was too high for any failure scenario to be credible, much less the one I was worried about. Heh. Look what happened to the first two Falcon flights - failure, followed by final stage late engine failure. I'd be laughing last if I were laughing at all about that one, which I'm not. Rena, I'm looking at you.
"The dirty little secret ...Total BS. The international partners are well aware of how much reboost the ISS needs and are planning accordingly. There is no secret. Progress, ATV, or the shuttle alone can't do all of the reboost, but combined they can. Also, once construction is finished, the ISS will be boosted to a slightly higher orbit to reduce the effect of drag. Lastly, the ISS is at nearly maximum drag, with only one more solar array to be added, but still growing in mass. Added mass works out net neutral. The momentum reduces the effect of drag just as well as it reduces the effectiveness of reboosts." - Well, I was being metaphorical in saying a dirty little secret - it's more like the elephant in the middle of the room that I think being ignored. Show me any evidence that financial budgeting is being planned for on what it's gonna take to keep this thing up past 2010 and I'll shut up. I contend it's being kept off the public radar because all would agree it doen't make sense to finish if the true maintenance costs to keep it up were known, publicized, and widely understood. Hey, let's focus instead on the fact that there's a Buzz Lightyear toy on this mission!!! Also, the mass isn't really neutral - I agree that by increasing vehicle density it means the reboost has to occur a little less often, but it's still a lot greater load that's gotta be lifted when you do.
"The contention of crooked accounting is unsubstantiated." - I agree that's a low blow. I have absolutely no knowledge of true criminal wrongdoing or fraud and will say that the NASA officials I have worked with over the years are honest, ethical and hardworking. However, the accounting of money flow for Space Station is undeniably a rob-Peter-to-pay-Paul shell game played by all to keep the gravy train rolling under extremely difficult circumstances. I stand by my statement that NOBODY can truly say how much this thing costs.
"The [science]
The facts: "On this first ATV mission, Jules Verne will deliver 4.6 tonnes of payload to the ISS, including 1 150 kg of dry cargo, 856 kg of propellant for the Russian Zvezda module, 270 kg of drinking water and 21 kg of oxygen. On future ATV missions, the payload capacity will be increased to 7.4 tonnes.
About half of the payload onboard Jules Verne ATV is re-boost propellant, which will be used by its own propulsion system for periodic manoeuvres to increase the altitude of the ISS in order to compensate its natural decay caused by atmospheric drag."
Also: On April 25, 2008, the European Space Agency announced that earlier in the day its first automated transfer vehicle (ATV), the "Jules Verne," increased the altitude of the International Space Station by about 2.8 miles (4.5 kilometers)--the first time an ESA craft had performed such an important task. The 12.3 minute maneuver was directed by ESA's ATV Control Center, which is located in Toulouse, France.
At 6:22 a.m. Central European Summer Time (CEST) (0422 GMT), controllers turned on two of the Jules Verne's four main engines. The two engines produced a thrust that increased the station's speed by about 8 feet per second (2.65 meters per second).
To achieve this re-boost in altitude, the ATV consumed 537 pounds (244 kilograms) of fuel. In all, the ATV carries about two metric tons (about 4,400 pounds) of propellant for re-boost activities.
After the burn was completed, the new altitude of the ISS became 212.5 miles (342 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.
The Space Station needs periodic boosts to raise its orbit because its orbit decays slowly over time due to a very small amount of atmospheric drag on the large structure as it orbits about the Earth.
In the past, the RSA Progress, the NASA Space Shuttle, or the ISS itself has performed such a maneuver. However, only RSA Progress and the ESA ATV are able to re-boost the space station to such a high level due to the amount of fuel onboard each vessel.
The Jules Verne ATV (ATV-001) will perform three additional re-boost maneuvers over the next few months: on June 12th, July 8th, and August 6th. Normally, the space station tries to keep at an orbital height of about 211 miles (340 kilometers) above the Earth's surface.
Later in August 2008, the Jules Verne, loaded with waste and unneeded materials from the space station, will be undocked from the ISS. The ATV has a capacity of carrying up to 6.3 metric tons (13,900 pounds) of unwanted material from the Station."
So what most people don't realize is that JV carries a LOT more (dense, low-volume) as mass as fuel for reboost than it does anything else in that cool pressurized comparment it has the astronauts go in. I understand that the JV maneuvers were held off to allow Shuttle attachment of KiBo at the lower and easy to reach altitude. But my point is that things are only going to get worse and will ultimately I think go beyond what JV is designed or funded to do to keep ISS up.
JV is an experiment in European autonomous docking technology, not an integrated reboost system. I have yet to see any plans for how many JVs will be flown in the long run - currently there are only 4 more in the pipeline thru 2015. The numbers above represent the data required to figure out just how many JVs will be required to keep ISS up for X number of years. I predict that when that calculation is finally run - and when NASA explains to ESA that there will be zero American funding to keep the JV production line running - that ESA will say, OK, we ain't payin no Euros to keep this junkheap up either, which side of Hawaii do you want us to splash the ISS in?
The NASA Freedom / Alpha space station program in the late 1980s and early 1990s was well on its way to complete cancellation due to horrendous cost overruns and total program mismanagement and in-fighting between NASA HQ in Washington, the side "Level II" bueracracy that had been set up in Virginia, and Johnson Space Center in Houston. This may sound like an exaggeration, but ask anybody that was there. One thing and one thing only saved it - the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Next thing you know, all of these American carpetbaggers were headed for Moscow to try and broker cooperative deals with the newly-open-for-business Russian space organizations. I know becasue I was one of them, in Moscow in October 1993 when Yelsin literally sicced a tank on the die-hard Communists holed up in THEIR White House - what they call their national parliment building. I was there with a group to get a protein crystal experiment launched to Mir, and next thing I know the head of the factory for SS-20 production is asking us if we would be interested in a tour of his factory and possible Western sales deals as a small satellite launcher. Just a couple of years before I had blurry classified intelligence reports on his SS-20 locked in my work safe, figuring out how to simulate its trajectory capabilities for a star wars interceptor program in Denver I worked at - now this guy wanted to give me a tour the CIA might literally have killed for, and and wanted to sell me a rocket to boot. Them was crazy days.
The biggest carpetbagger of all ws Al Gore. Maybe he didn't invent the internet, but Al Gore sure invented the ISS, traveling to Moscow to sign a deal with the Russians where we would fly experiments and astronauts to their then-orbiting MIR station in exchange for turning the US-only Alpha into a joint American-Russian ISS. In one fell swoop the NASA station came a LOT more about politics and national prestiege than about science - the alternative to nuclear war and the crown jewel of Clinton foreign policy. And actually, this really WAS good for America, for Russia, and for the world.
But it was TERRIBLE for the ISS. The Russians with their spunky but primative Soyuz modules were totally unable to reach the original orbit planned for the US Space Station. So we obliged and changed the planned station cruise orbit to THEIR optimal Soyuz launch orbit, which OUR Space Shuttle could reach ONLY if WE took a 30,000 pound payload reduction on every flight. Thus began a totally insane, I-can't-detail-it-all technical death march of cutting the module sizes from 42 to 27 feet to trim weight (wonder why there's no US potty up there?), lauching the modules empty without equipment or experiment racks to save weight, risking crews on launches that ran the Shuttle main engines at a heart-stopping 109% of thrust presented to the public like that was a routine maneuver, and launching far fewer modules and missions than planned because we can't afford to get everything up from Florida to the 57 degree inclined Russian orbit. And once its up there and needs to be resupplied, we can get only 10,000 pounds of resupply payload to ISS instead of the 40,000 pounds a Suttle used to carrry to a normal 28 degree Florida-style, and most of that 10,000 pounds goes to the airlock and docking adapter in the payload bay. Read the newspaper articles carefully. "The shuttle delivered a ton (2000 pounds) of frozen pizzas and clean underwear to the astronauts". To those who know what was originally planned, and what has been tossed overboard to get this all to work, such a statement is a true tragedy. You cannot run this stati
The Jules Verne used the remainder of its unused docking fuel to raise ISS less than 5 km, and that one time kick that cannot be counted on to be there every time. Docking fuel is supposed to be allocated to docking, not reboost, during mission planning. JV also transferred less than a ton of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide to Zevzda. THis is primarily intended for attitude control, not reboost. Even if it wasn't, final completed weight of ISS in 2010 is slated to be 460 tons, so fuel being transferred from JV to Z will be only 1/460 of total ISS mass. When I get home from work today I'll get my textbooks out and calculate delta V between two concentric circular orbits at 300 and 320 km and then use ideal rocket equation to figure up the required specific impulse to get said delta V from a 1:460 mass fraction, but I already know the answer in my heart - Zvezda ain't runnin' that hydrazine thru no ion drive. This totally ignores that it is even dumber to launch resupply to a 57 degree Russian space station from an equatorial European launch site on an expendable rocket than it is from a 28 degree American launch site in Florida on a reusable one. Do the math. Houston, after 2010, we have a problem.
Oh, dude, you've gotten me started. I worked on Space Station in the early 1990s and still haven't recovered from the bad taste that experience has left in my mouth. Political boondoggle white elephant doesn't even begin to cover what a stupid mess the ISS is. The only thing worse than setting it up in its shuttle-payload-upmass-hostile 57 degree inclined orbit to allow Russian participation is totally cutting off Shuttle participation in 2010. ISS was DESIGNED for Shuttle resupply during its lifetime and that resupply was first strangled and then totally cut off. Soyuz and Orion taking astronauts to this thing is a joke, and doing resupply by Jules Verne is a criminal waste. The dirty little secret about ISS is that at full mass and max solar array deployment upon completion, this thing is going to deorbit even faster from atmospheric drag than it is now and no way can Progress or Jules Verne is keep the completed assembly reboosted - only the Shuttle could. Do your homework about how far that thing fell during the years following Columbia when no shuttle visited, and that's without the full solar arrays. Once the Shuttle stops going, ISS is heading straight for the Pacific even if it takes a few years to deorbit and get there. And secretly if not in public, NASA will breathe a sigh of relief when it splashes. But I digress. Nobody even knows anymore how much ISS costs anymore because of crooked accounting hiding the drawing of funds from everywhere within NASA, but nobody argues it's at least $100 billion dollars. I cannot prove an absence of good science. Instead, YOU tell ME what the top three discoveries on ISS have been. Hell, just tell me one thing we have learned on ISS that we didn't already know. "Bones decalcify in zero G"? This was new info worth $100 billion?
Here's a less sexist explanation. In Texas Hold'Em poker, everybody tries to tell lies (sell bluffs) about what their secret cards are when paired with public community cards that are true and visible to everyone. Level II screens are a different form of poker where the public cards (bids and asks) shown by each of the market makers are the lies being told and the secrets of their true intentions are kept solely to themselves.
Here, read this Investopedia article, which is about at the same level as saying women are complicated but interesting. Always remember that f*cked has two meanings, and Level II screens and women will eventually show you both.
ARCA (AKA Archipelago) is a commercial electronic trading system and competitor or ISLD (AKA Island, get it?) and other so-called ECNs that "shadow" the NASDAQ, which is the true major market. Think ARCA=Yahoo, ISLD=Google and NASDAQ=Microsoft, sort of. ECNs allow a subset of users to make trades faster (under 1 second) than the NASDAQ market as a whole (maybe 5 seconds), but at a greater price and risk in that the stock shares may not be available at all (thinly traded). They are useful in saving your butt if you are on the wrong side of a suddenly moving market and need to bail out RIGHT NOW.
And everybody else, yes, I realize this is a vast oversimplification. But understanding gotta start somewhere...
That's easy. In 20 more years, the prices will be in Euros.
Roger that. C400s totally rock.
I own several Dell Latitude C400s and I think they are the greatest laptop ever. Lightweight, very sturdy, USB, PCCard, internal wifi card, no internal drive and best of all, a 6 hour add-on battery pack is out there if you can grab one when they show up. Plus lots of other pros, Get one.
Actually, the data we have for the Crab Nebula shows it at age 2008 - 1054 = 954 years vs. at age 140 years for the new supernova. You should compare the 6500 year "real" date to the new nova's 28,000 year date, not the 140 year date. No wonder they use stardates in star Trek. The NASA press release talks about the new nova being pretty special, but the Crab Nebula is no slouch. It expanded to over 10 light years in size in under 1000 years. That's 1% of the speed of light. Plus it is over four times closer and not obscured by dust, so both the larger angular size and visible light availability still means the Crab Nebula is still "the people's supernova".
NASA is wrong in saying this new supernova is the "youngest" - it is actually just the MOST RECENTLY OBSERVED. The Crab Nebula supernova has it beat as "youngest", exploding occuring only 6500 years ago (and observed less than 300 years ago, in 1731) instead of exploding 28,000 years ago (and observed in 2008).
Oops. Wrong link in the above post.
Agreed that this is a non-news and there have been similar range destruct packages on EVERY shuttle launched since 1981 in case she starts heading for Disney World.
The cherry on top in your scenario would be utterly wasted. Highly enriched uranium is not highly radioactive. We can only hope that terrorists will be dumb enough to waste precious nuclear weapon material by using it as mere debris in a chemical bomb.
Agreed. True WMD (as opposed to dirty bomb) detection is even worse. Turns out you're not looking for the U-235 but instead the easier-to-see U-238 that was not removed during the enrichment process. It's still trivially easy to shield your small fissile core during transport with a couple of hundred pounds of lead. See this and this and this for interesting details.
...Are Yours. Except for 2001 - attempt no more sequels there.
RIP, ACC.
What is the current / projected budget for Cyber Command, and what percentage / amount of that budget do you plan to offer to either the SBIR Program or X-Prize style challenge competitions?
Superworms such as Storm represent perhaps the greatest threat to the internet becasue their stealthy natures allows the organization of millions of computers into a covert zombie botnet before their true exploit is finally launched. Will Cyber Command launch offensive operations to hunt down and destroy superworms already imbedded in cyberspace civilian computers, or create supermilworms (new word for CC use if you wish, with zero Google hits) that covertly draft millions of civilian cyberspace computers as secret War Reserve resources available for future callup and deployment in a future cyberspace battle?
Interesting story from NASAwatch: "The planned launch of 50 Juno I model rockets from Cape Canaveral to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Explorer I launch has now been cancelled by the station's wing commander. Although the CCAFS has no quams about launching Deltas, Atlas and other massive rockets, they go into a complete tither when it comes down to launching a 12 inch long model rocket made of balsa wood and paper weighing just under 2 oz. The intended launching was to be used as a fund raiser for the CCAFS Museum with each of the rockets being armed with the smallest engine they can carry, an A8-3. This engine would have propelled each of these 2 oz. Juno I replicas the a computer calculated altitude and or range of only 239 feet and each is recovered with a 12 inch parachute. The Air Force, however, upon discovery of the planned flights felt that these rockets could pose a hazard to the nearby Delta pads- which are made of concrete and steel and are more than 10 times farther from the model's launch site than the rockets can fly. With that as their reason, the Air Force started the red tape machine. Soon the USAF Jags got involved and wanted a held harmless form signed by everyone near the launch site. Next, a USAF person of non-importance decided to contact NASA and tell them that the rockets would be firing from the actual Explorer I launch site, which was on their property. Now enters the NASA red tape machine, which demanded a full safety review (keep in mind that kids have been flying such rockets since before NASA was even created). With this red tape storm in full swing, the CCAFS wing commander's office had heard enough and scrubbed all 50 launches. Thus, all over America on January 31, 2008 school kids and adults will celebrate the the day that the US Army launched Explorer I into space by launching model rockets. In spite of the winter conditions, the launches will take place in parks and school yards and back yards all over the United States- every place EXCEPT for Cape Canaveral. In 1958, the US Army restored the nation's pride following Sputnik, but it seems that in 2008, the Air Force and NASA cannot even get out of their own red taped way to launch a simple rocket made of balsa wood and paper.