PS - The theme song and the nude credits on the opening were kinds sub-par this time around, I thought...Oh well.
Re:Bond, James Bond.
on
Review: Solaris
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hey, I thought Die Another Day was a very respectable addition to the Bond franchise. I enjoyed it and may go see it again. Pierce does a great job as Bond, not as good as Sean The Ultimate, but much better than the rest of the pack of wanna-bes. The plot, the locales, the bad guys, the set pieces, the girls - all great. A little weak on the gizmos, too much reliance on just the invisible car to cover the gizmo angle, but hey, that was cool too. The sword fight and the fight on the jet as it's falling apart were especially good. Maybe I was enjoying the popcorn too much and not thinking it through as the movie unfolded, but I was actually surprised by the resolution of the traitor angle as well as the true ID of the main bad guy, so I gotta say there was a pretty good surprise factor in it for me, too. Nice to see Bond behind the power curve and on his own for a while, too - that was actually the one angle of Bond that Timothy did well in one of his films. They're trying to set Halley up with her own franchise as Jinx and considering how commercial and crass such a thing COULD have been, they did a pretty good job of that too. Overall, I give DAD an 8 out of 10. If ytou haven't seen it, you should.
"I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it."-- Pete Conrad
Another prime example of bacterial space survival was found by Apollo 12 when it brought back parts of the unmanned Surveyor 3. Conrad's quote here has been censored, incidentally; his original quote was a little pithier...
The minimum number of genes required for an organism to survive has been a topic of interest for several years. An excellent semi-technical overview of this effort was produced by The National Academy of Sciences...
I'm pro-genetic engineering, but we've gotta be careful while we tamper with the forces of nature. Genes CAN apparently jump species barriers, see for example this...
I agree that as soon as you open the door to ion or nuclear rockets as SSME replacements then the whole ballgame changes for the better. The problem is, I was kinda hoping to see a moonbase and manned Mars mission and first steps to expanding on into the solar system in my lifetime. SSMEs could do that NOW. If we wait for ion or nuclear to be developed in the cash-starved NASA environment dominated by ISS we have today, it's gonna be another twenty years before we even START to develop nuclear/ion/VASIMR as a viable manned system as opposed to lab toys and small prototypes on Deep Space One. By that time the RUSH OF EXCITEMENT that was the REAL fuel behind Apollo will be long gone...and whatever the driving force is behind planetary expansion is at that time (if it happens at all), I won't be here to see it...
I agree that kerosene has density and especially cost advantages over liquid hydrogen, and that, for launches from Earth-based facilities to low earth orbit, LOX-kerosene could indeed be a viable alternative. For solar system exploration, tho, LOX-liquid hydrogen is king for two reasons. One, it IS the lowest mass alternative when it's done right, and on planetary missions "lowest possible weight" is a BIG deal. Two, if you take along a small nuclear reactor to generate electricity for hydrolosis (sp?), you can refuel a LOX-liquid hydrogen engine anywhere in the solar system you can find water ice - the poles of the Moon or Mars, Europa, comets, lots of places. There ain't no kerosene out there.
You are absolutely correct, I should be quoting exact numbers instead of off-the-top-of-my-head estimates. So check out the Shuttle Press Kit site for details....
The Russians have launched two major components of the Space Station - the Zarya at 44,000 pounds and the Zvezda at 42,000 pounds, both on expendable Proton boosters. Total Russian contribution - 86,000 pounds.
The major US hardware contributions delivered to Space Station were the Unity Node on STS-88 at 25,600 pounds and the Destiny lab module on STS-98 at 31,000 pounds. This is 13 tons and 15.5 tons respectively which is above my estimate of 10 tons but well below yours of 17-20 tons. And remember, these CONSTRUCTION flights carried minimal crew, no docking adapter or airlock, and were streamlined one-time run-the-SSMEs-at-109%-to get-the-job-done-and-cross-your-fingers missions.
The majority of the Maintenance / Logistics / Crew Transfer flights like STS-96, 101, 102, 106 etc. and the ones planned from now on carry a lot LESS than 10 tons to the Space Station - it's probably closer to 2 tons delivered. That's because NOW when the Shuttle goes to the Space Station it's carrying CREW that has to be transferred and that means they have to launch with the airlock and docking adapter and associated support cradles in the payload bay that STAY in the payload bay and eventually land back on the runway. There's a Space Shuttle, and there's a Space Shuttle outfitted to run a Space Station mission. Those are two different birds. The latter is MUCH heavier (in fact, Columbia the oldest shuttle is too heavy to do this and has never been to Space Station) and the extra crap in the Payload Bay to run a Space Station mission comes RIGHT OFF THE TOP of deliverable payload weight to the space station.
The sad tale is all right there in the Shuttle Press Kits. Ignore the hype, just look at the numbers and use a calculator....
And the majority of the cargo capacity of 25 tons is never used - half of it winds up being cradle weight supporting the other half that is TRULY payload that and get left in orbit.
And then there is the absolutely CRIMINAL hit on payload weight the Shuttle takes to get to the Space Station orbit. The Space Station was originally planned to be flown in what's called a 28 degree inclined orbit - that's the orbit you get to if you launch due east out of Florida, which is at 28 degrees North latitude, and is the max payload launch profile for the Shuttle. Fly it in any other direction out of Florida than due east and the total payload weight that can be carried is reduced. So when the Cold War ended and we "invited" the Russians to join us in the Space Station project, THE BASELINE SPACE STATION ORBIT WAS CHANGED FROM 28 DEGREE INCLINED TO 53 DEGREE INCLINED SO THE RUSSIANS COULD GET TO IT FROM RUSSIAN LAUNCH SITES. This was a TECHNICAL DEATHKNELL FOR SPACE STATION - IT WAS A POLITICAL SHOWCASE AND ONLY A POLITICAL SHOWCASE FROM THAT DECISION FORWARD. PERIOD. I DEFY ANYBODY IN NASA TO CONTRADICT THAT STATEMENT. OOOOOOhhhhh, it gets my blood pressure up just thinking about it.
Now instead of flying due east out of Florida and carrying 25 tons of payload to the Space Station, the Shuttle launches UP THE EAST COAST OF THE US AND FLYS OVER CAPE HATTERAS NORTH CAROLINA to get only 10 TONS to the space station. Want to know why there's only three crew and no science? Because by inviting the Russians to join we killed 60% of our ability to get Space Station infrastructure in place - crew, equipment, supplies. So there's just a skeleton crew aboard a ghost ship. And the public has NO IDEA how stupid this all is, NASA just keeps feeding them pretty videos of their Space Heros...
I've got no problem with SSME2:The Sequel. Certainly there are a lot of new alloys and computer gear and stuff that could be integrated into it...but that stuff is in the same category as the turbopump upgrades and heat exchanger upgrades...it is for reliability and cost, not performance. The SSME is currently optimized for perfomance. Plus, there has to be a warehouse of (admittedly overly-complex) SSME Classics that have accumulated over the past twenty years that are no longer man-rated after 10 or 15 flights but have still got one last flight left in them as components in a one-way expendable heavy lift vehicle...for a Mars ship...if we only had the nerve and will and vision...
There are three Saturn 5 flight vehicles - one at the Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville AL (where I live), one outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, and one at the Banana Creek Viewing Site at Kennedy Space Center, the closest you can get to watch a Shuttle launch. The ones in Alabama and Texas have been stored outdoors in the rain and sun and you would have to scrape tons of bird poop off of them to send them to the moon - basically, no way those puppies are ever gonna be launch-worthy. The one in Florida is BEAUTIFULLY preserved indoors - but still, even if a meteor was gonna hit Earth and it were an emergency, I'll bet you'd find it couldn't be made ready to fly no matter how motivated you were.
Whatever we do has GOT to be based on our Number One resource, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME). This is an absolutely FANTASTIC piece of machinery that is as much an American Classic as a 1964 Mustang convertible. A Saturn 5 launched with five F-1 engines that burned liquid oxygen and kerosene - got the job done, but by far not the most efficient chemical reaction to get the job done. Thus it needed to be MUCH bigger and carry LOTS more fuel. The SSME burns liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen which is MUCH more chemically efficient - you get LOTS more energy out of much LESS fuel. In fact, the liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen combination, and the way the SSME burns it at an almost theoretically perfect specific impulse of 480 seconds, is the BEST chemical propulsion engine that is EVER going to be built. They will still be using SSMEs in Star Trek time - Scotty would sing their praises. You can't build a "better" rocket engine than the SSME unless you go nuclear - and in our current political environment, development of a nuclear rocket seems doubtful. (Proposed changes to the turbopumps and heat exchangers address RELIABILITY concerns, not ENGINEERING IMPROVEMENTS...). So any plan to get out of Earth orbit has first GOT to include SSMEs as the core component...
The next step in an improved NASA is to use SSMEs WISELY. Here's the facts. Conquering the solar system is a numbers game. You've got to put up infrastructure to do the job you want done and that infrastructure is first and foremost WEIGHT. A good space program by definition gets the maximum infrastructure weight into space - the more you've got up there, the more you can do.
Now look at what NASA has done with the shuttle. Every Shuttle launch has three dry weights of interest - a payload weight of 20,000 pounds, an Orbiter dry weight of 180,000 pounds and an External tank empty weight of 80,000 pounds. The payload gets left in orbit. The Orbiter achieves orbital velocity and then gives that hard-won velocity up to land on a runway. The External Tank acheives 97% of orbital velocity and then is allowed to burn up and crash into the Indian Ocean because NASA has no ability established to use an ET in orbit if they went ahead and put it there - which NASA could, they just don't. So far there's been around 110 shuttle flights.
So what has NASA done with the SSMEs it's flown so far? They (could have) left 20,000 * 110 = 2.2 million pounds in orbit, they've put 80,000 * 110 = 8.8 million pounds into the Indian Ocean and they've brought 180,000 * 110 = 19.8 million pounds BACK from orbit and landed it on a runway. Of the 30.8 million pounds launched by NASA using SSMEs that could have been placed in orbit and left there, only 2.2 million pounds actuall WAS - only around 7%. So 93% of what SSMEs actually sent to orbit NEVER GOT TO STAY THERE under current NASA utilization policies....
Because of its greater efficiency, the Space Shuttle is capable of putting as much mass into low earth orbit as an old Saturn 5. The problem is that 93% of the weight put up by a space shuttle COMES BACK AND LANDS ON A RUNWAY OR FALLS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN. This is STUPID. The dream of the 1970s or routine cheap Shuttle flights with astronauts being a combination of an interstate trucker crossed with a souped-up fighter/test/commercial pilots HAS NOT COME TRUE and NASA MUST ABANDON THIS DREAM TO PROGRESS. Shuttle launches are SO expensive and the on-orbit stay time is SO limited (a week or maybe two if you REALLY stretch it) and the destination so boring (low Earth orbit) that there is NOTHING an astronaut can do in a week that's worth the cost of putting her there to do it.
Bottom line - NASA needs to abandon the manned-flight tunnel vision mentality it currently has and build an expendable heavy lift unmanned cargo vehicle based on SSMEs that it can fly IN CONJUNCTION WITH existing manned Shuttle flights. The sooner NASA acknowledges this, the sooner we can conquer the solar system...
Basically we are going "back to the future" under the new NASA plan. Money that was supposed to go to a next-generation Space Shuttle is being divided up into three piles - one to support current shuttle ops, one to support current Space Station ops, and one to build a glorified Apollo capsule with wings that can be launched on expendable Delta and Atlas rockets. So in 2015 we are going to fly three guys on an expendable rocket - just like we did in last did in 1975, 40 years before. Folks, this is NOT how to get back to the moon and on to Mars....
Firefly in my book is the sleeper hit of the season by the creator of Buffy, and it has only gotten better with each of its first five episodes. Unfortunately, ratings continue to dwindle. Nielsons for first 4 eps have been in order: 4.0, 3.6, 3.3 and 2.7 for the "Jaynestown" ep after a two-week gap. Folks, this is bad. USA Today ran an article on droopy shows on Wed Oct 23 which had a Firefly photo and wrote it up pretty good; also Robert Bianco who writes up the USA TV stuff has given Firefly two recommendations this week, one in an article about which shows to watch at what time during the week and also on last Fri's "Best Picks" box over the TV schedule. If this press didn't help "Out of Gas" when the ratings come out next Wed, then that title may be prophetic....(sniff). This show is TOO GOOD to let this happen!!! Watch it!!! Spread the word about it!!!
What depresses me is that for the Almathea flyby they've left the camera off to save the expense of the photo team salaries. About the only science that's gonna happen is measuring doppler shift change of the carrier signal from the probe as it gets close to the moon to refine its mass estimate. This is a real shame; Almathea has some kind of interesting chemistry going on that creates unusual bright red and green patches on its surface we have glimpsed only from afar 20 years ago with Voyager...
Immediate US Security Threat...Tempest Everywhere
on
First US Camera/Phone
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
After thinking about this some more, I have gone from amused to extremely worried. A staple in the spy biz is sneaking in the tiny spy camera to photo the secret documents and / or the dead drop of the paper copies of those documents. As of this week, spies among us can just waltz in with their routine cell phones, zap the photos of the Iraq attack plan over the air, and nobody is the wiser. We have just gone from needing Tempest level security around just computers to needing that level of security whereever there is a safe.
Remeber the old belief (maybe true?) that telephones could be activated without a ring and so serve as covert microphones? With GPS and video cameras in these new cell phones, what sinister new uses could a covert turn-on enable? (Insert obvious p0rn reference here...)
Boy, I really feel shafted by all of this. I listen to several channels at Live365 and received a notice from them asking for emergency short-fuse support of the ORIGINAL HR 5469 which was supposed to go to a vote in only 72 hours or so. I went thru the email-my-congressmen-and-senators routine and felt smug that I had done my part to help. Now the original bill has been rewritten so that it's not the one I asked to be supported. This whole thing is so unfair when compared to the sweetheart deal the over-the-air broadcast radio stations operate under because they are effectively commercials to go buy a CD. So who is the Gang of Bigwigs that has circumvented this whole mess by arranging the rewrite? Despite my distaste for them, I've got to admit they sure know how to work the system...
Guess that shows how smart humans are - we ARE trying to find THEM. A new project starting up along this line is at TransitSearch, where they're trying to recruit amateur astronomers to hlep look for extrasolar planets using 8 inch scopes and CCD cameras to take light curve measurements of target stars. If you're an amateur astronomer, check it out...
One reason everybody likes TiVo so much that they can't verbalize is that the skip feature prevents the commercials from interrupting the dramatic flow of a program. This makes the program you're watching seemm SO much more emotionally intense it's like watching a movie, not a TV program. And that enhancement ALONE is worth the cost of the TiVo. Without Tivo, the dramatic flow of a program is so washed out....tense buildup and turningpoint followed by shampoo automobile diaper hamburger news-at-11-teaser next-show-promo CLIMAX! Give me a break, watch that cycle a thousand times and you think TV is crap. Tivo gives it all the emotional impact back to you. I love my Tivo.
OK, here goes. 3 hrs per week * 22 weeks is 66 hours. A third of this time is commercials - roughly 24 hours or a solid day per year of wasting your life sitting there listening to CRAP. You spend $400 to reclaim this commercial wasted time by skipping it with a Tivo at about $16 per hour. If you are making $32K per year or more, your time is worth more than $16 per hour. So the TiVO saves you valuable time at a bargain price. PLUS, the second and subsequent years it's "free" and trust me, once you get it you're gonna enjoy those three shows a LOT more than you would setting the VCR 66 times, missing a few times, rewinding the tapes, etc etc...ugh, to think I used to have to mess with that!!! And trust me, once you get the TiVo, you will enjoy other shows, TV in general and your leisure TV time SO MUCH MORE...you just can't understand without trying it. Treat yourself and get one, sell it on EBay if you don't like it. Ha ha ha, like THAT's gonna happen...
Slashdot Mirror
PS - The theme song and the nude credits on the opening were kinds sub-par this time around, I thought...Oh well.
Hey, I thought Die Another Day was a very respectable addition to the Bond franchise. I enjoyed it and may go see it again. Pierce does a great job as Bond, not as good as Sean The Ultimate, but much better than the rest of the pack of wanna-bes. The plot, the locales, the bad guys, the set pieces, the girls - all great. A little weak on the gizmos, too much reliance on just the invisible car to cover the gizmo angle, but hey, that was cool too. The sword fight and the fight on the jet as it's falling apart were especially good. Maybe I was enjoying the popcorn too much and not thinking it through as the movie unfolded, but I was actually surprised by the resolution of the traitor angle as well as the true ID of the main bad guy, so I gotta say there was a pretty good surprise factor in it for me, too. Nice to see Bond behind the power curve and on his own for a while, too - that was actually the one angle of Bond that Timothy did well in one of his films. They're trying to set Halley up with her own franchise as Jinx and considering how commercial and crass such a thing COULD have been, they did a pretty good job of that too. Overall, I give DAD an 8 out of 10. If ytou haven't seen it, you should.
"I always thought the most significant thing that we ever found on the whole goddamn Moon was that little bacteria who came back and lived and nobody ever said shit about it."-- Pete Conrad
Another prime example of bacterial space survival was found by Apollo 12 when it brought back parts of the unmanned Surveyor 3. Conrad's quote here has been censored, incidentally; his original quote was a little pithier...
An excellent overview of minimum-gene-set research is here...
The minimum number of genes required for an organism to survive has been a topic of interest for several years. An excellent semi-technical overview of this effort was produced by The National Academy of Sciences...
I meant to say, Another example...
Another example...
I'm pro-genetic engineering, but we've gotta be careful while we tamper with the forces of nature. Genes CAN apparently jump species barriers, see for example this...
I agree that as soon as you open the door to ion or nuclear rockets as SSME replacements then the whole ballgame changes for the better. The problem is, I was kinda hoping to see a moonbase and manned Mars mission and first steps to expanding on into the solar system in my lifetime. SSMEs could do that NOW. If we wait for ion or nuclear to be developed in the cash-starved NASA environment dominated by ISS we have today, it's gonna be another twenty years before we even START to develop nuclear/ion/VASIMR as a viable manned system as opposed to lab toys and small prototypes on Deep Space One. By that time the RUSH OF EXCITEMENT that was the REAL fuel behind Apollo will be long gone...and whatever the driving force is behind planetary expansion is at that time (if it happens at all), I won't be here to see it...
I agree that kerosene has density and especially cost advantages over liquid hydrogen, and that, for launches from Earth-based facilities to low earth orbit, LOX-kerosene could indeed be a viable alternative. For solar system exploration, tho, LOX-liquid hydrogen is king for two reasons. One, it IS the lowest mass alternative when it's done right, and on planetary missions "lowest possible weight" is a BIG deal. Two, if you take along a small nuclear reactor to generate electricity for hydrolosis (sp?), you can refuel a LOX-liquid hydrogen engine anywhere in the solar system you can find water ice - the poles of the Moon or Mars, Europa, comets, lots of places. There ain't no kerosene out there.
You are absolutely correct, I should be quoting exact numbers instead of off-the-top-of-my-head estimates. So check out the Shuttle Press Kit site for details....
The Russians have launched two major components of the Space Station - the Zarya at 44,000 pounds and the Zvezda at 42,000 pounds, both on expendable Proton boosters. Total Russian contribution - 86,000 pounds.
The major US hardware contributions delivered to Space Station were the Unity Node on STS-88 at 25,600 pounds and the Destiny lab module on STS-98 at 31,000 pounds. This is 13 tons and 15.5 tons respectively which is above my estimate of 10 tons but well below yours of 17-20 tons. And remember, these CONSTRUCTION flights carried minimal crew, no docking adapter or airlock, and were streamlined one-time run-the-SSMEs-at-109%-to get-the-job-done-and-cross-your-fingers missions.
The majority of the Maintenance / Logistics / Crew Transfer flights like STS-96, 101, 102, 106 etc. and the ones planned from now on carry a lot LESS than 10 tons to the Space Station - it's probably closer to 2 tons delivered. That's because NOW when the Shuttle goes to the Space Station it's carrying CREW that has to be transferred and that means they have to launch with the airlock and docking adapter and associated support cradles in the payload bay that STAY in the payload bay and eventually land back on the runway. There's a Space Shuttle, and there's a Space Shuttle outfitted to run a Space Station mission. Those are two different birds. The latter is MUCH heavier (in fact, Columbia the oldest shuttle is too heavy to do this and has never been to Space Station) and the extra crap in the Payload Bay to run a Space Station mission comes RIGHT OFF THE TOP of deliverable payload weight to the space station.
The sad tale is all right there in the Shuttle Press Kits. Ignore the hype, just look at the numbers and use a calculator....
And the majority of the cargo capacity of 25 tons is never used - half of it winds up being cradle weight supporting the other half that is TRULY payload that and get left in orbit.
And then there is the absolutely CRIMINAL hit on payload weight the Shuttle takes to get to the Space Station orbit. The Space Station was originally planned to be flown in what's called a 28 degree inclined orbit - that's the orbit you get to if you launch due east out of Florida, which is at 28 degrees North latitude, and is the max payload launch profile for the Shuttle. Fly it in any other direction out of Florida than due east and the total payload weight that can be carried is reduced. So when the Cold War ended and we "invited" the Russians to join us in the Space Station project, THE BASELINE SPACE STATION ORBIT WAS CHANGED FROM 28 DEGREE INCLINED TO 53 DEGREE INCLINED SO THE RUSSIANS COULD GET TO IT FROM RUSSIAN LAUNCH SITES. This was a TECHNICAL DEATHKNELL FOR SPACE STATION - IT WAS A POLITICAL SHOWCASE AND ONLY A POLITICAL SHOWCASE FROM THAT DECISION FORWARD. PERIOD. I DEFY ANYBODY IN NASA TO CONTRADICT THAT STATEMENT. OOOOOOhhhhh, it gets my blood pressure up just thinking about it.
Now instead of flying due east out of Florida and carrying 25 tons of payload to the Space Station, the Shuttle launches UP THE EAST COAST OF THE US AND FLYS OVER CAPE HATTERAS NORTH CAROLINA to get only 10 TONS to the space station. Want to know why there's only three crew and no science? Because by inviting the Russians to join we killed 60% of our ability to get Space Station infrastructure in place - crew, equipment, supplies. So there's just a skeleton crew aboard a ghost ship. And the public has NO IDEA how stupid this all is, NASA just keeps feeding them pretty videos of their Space Heros...
I've got no problem with SSME2:The Sequel. Certainly there are a lot of new alloys and computer gear and stuff that could be integrated into it...but that stuff is in the same category as the turbopump upgrades and heat exchanger upgrades...it is for reliability and cost, not performance. The SSME is currently optimized for perfomance. Plus, there has to be a warehouse of (admittedly overly-complex) SSME Classics that have accumulated over the past twenty years that are no longer man-rated after 10 or 15 flights but have still got one last flight left in them as components in a one-way expendable heavy lift vehicle...for a Mars ship...if we only had the nerve and will and vision...
There are three Saturn 5 flight vehicles - one at the Space and Rocket Museum in Huntsville AL (where I live), one outside Johnson Space Center in Houston, and one at the Banana Creek Viewing Site at Kennedy Space Center, the closest you can get to watch a Shuttle launch. The ones in Alabama and Texas have been stored outdoors in the rain and sun and you would have to scrape tons of bird poop off of them to send them to the moon - basically, no way those puppies are ever gonna be launch-worthy. The one in Florida is BEAUTIFULLY preserved indoors - but still, even if a meteor was gonna hit Earth and it were an emergency, I'll bet you'd find it couldn't be made ready to fly no matter how motivated you were.
Whatever we do has GOT to be based on our Number One resource, the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME). This is an absolutely FANTASTIC piece of machinery that is as much an American Classic as a 1964 Mustang convertible. A Saturn 5 launched with five F-1 engines that burned liquid oxygen and kerosene - got the job done, but by far not the most efficient chemical reaction to get the job done. Thus it needed to be MUCH bigger and carry LOTS more fuel. The SSME burns liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen which is MUCH more chemically efficient - you get LOTS more energy out of much LESS fuel. In fact, the liquid oxygen / liquid hydrogen combination, and the way the SSME burns it at an almost theoretically perfect specific impulse of 480 seconds, is the BEST chemical propulsion engine that is EVER going to be built. They will still be using SSMEs in Star Trek time - Scotty would sing their praises. You can't build a "better" rocket engine than the SSME unless you go nuclear - and in our current political environment, development of a nuclear rocket seems doubtful. (Proposed changes to the turbopumps and heat exchangers address RELIABILITY concerns, not ENGINEERING IMPROVEMENTS...). So any plan to get out of Earth orbit has first GOT to include SSMEs as the core component...
The next step in an improved NASA is to use SSMEs WISELY. Here's the facts. Conquering the solar system is a numbers game. You've got to put up infrastructure to do the job you want done and that infrastructure is first and foremost WEIGHT. A good space program by definition gets the maximum infrastructure weight into space - the more you've got up there, the more you can do.
Now look at what NASA has done with the shuttle. Every Shuttle launch has three dry weights of interest - a payload weight of 20,000 pounds, an Orbiter dry weight of 180,000 pounds and an External tank empty weight of 80,000 pounds. The payload gets left in orbit. The Orbiter achieves orbital velocity and then gives that hard-won velocity up to land on a runway. The External Tank acheives 97% of orbital velocity and then is allowed to burn up and crash into the Indian Ocean because NASA has no ability established to use an ET in orbit if they went ahead and put it there - which NASA could, they just don't. So far there's been around 110 shuttle flights.
So what has NASA done with the SSMEs it's flown so far? They (could have) left 20,000 * 110 = 2.2 million pounds in orbit, they've put 80,000 * 110 = 8.8 million pounds into the Indian Ocean and they've brought 180,000 * 110 = 19.8 million pounds BACK from orbit and landed it on a runway. Of the 30.8 million pounds launched by NASA using SSMEs that could have been placed in orbit and left there, only 2.2 million pounds actuall WAS - only around 7%. So 93% of what SSMEs actually sent to orbit NEVER GOT TO STAY THERE under current NASA utilization policies....
Because of its greater efficiency, the Space Shuttle is capable of putting as much mass into low earth orbit as an old Saturn 5. The problem is that 93% of the weight put up by a space shuttle COMES BACK AND LANDS ON A RUNWAY OR FALLS IN THE INDIAN OCEAN. This is STUPID. The dream of the 1970s or routine cheap Shuttle flights with astronauts being a combination of an interstate trucker crossed with a souped-up fighter/test/commercial pilots HAS NOT COME TRUE and NASA MUST ABANDON THIS DREAM TO PROGRESS. Shuttle launches are SO expensive and the on-orbit stay time is SO limited (a week or maybe two if you REALLY stretch it) and the destination so boring (low Earth orbit) that there is NOTHING an astronaut can do in a week that's worth the cost of putting her there to do it.
Bottom line - NASA needs to abandon the manned-flight tunnel vision mentality it currently has and build an expendable heavy lift unmanned cargo vehicle based on SSMEs that it can fly IN CONJUNCTION WITH existing manned Shuttle flights. The sooner NASA acknowledges this, the sooner we can conquer the solar system...
Basically we are going "back to the future" under the new NASA plan. Money that was supposed to go to a next-generation Space Shuttle is being divided up into three piles - one to support current shuttle ops, one to support current Space Station ops, and one to build a glorified Apollo capsule with wings that can be launched on expendable Delta and Atlas rockets. So in 2015 we are going to fly three guys on an expendable rocket - just like we did in last did in 1975, 40 years before. Folks, this is NOT how to get back to the moon and on to Mars....
Firefly in my book is the sleeper hit of the season by the creator of Buffy, and it has only gotten better with each of its first five episodes. Unfortunately, ratings continue to dwindle. Nielsons for first 4 eps have been in order: 4.0, 3.6, 3.3 and 2.7 for the "Jaynestown" ep after a two-week gap. Folks, this is bad. USA Today ran an article on droopy shows on Wed Oct 23 which had a Firefly photo and wrote it up pretty good; also Robert Bianco who writes up the USA TV stuff has given Firefly two recommendations this week, one in an article about which shows to watch at what time during the week and also on last Fri's "Best Picks" box over the TV schedule. If this press didn't help "Out of Gas" when the ratings come out next Wed, then that title may be prophetic....(sniff). This show is TOO GOOD to let this happen!!! Watch it!!! Spread the word about it!!!
What depresses me is that for the Almathea flyby they've left the camera off to save the expense of the photo team salaries. About the only science that's gonna happen is measuring doppler shift change of the carrier signal from the probe as it gets close to the moon to refine its mass estimate. This is a real shame; Almathea has some kind of interesting chemistry going on that creates unusual bright red and green patches on its surface we have glimpsed only from afar 20 years ago with Voyager...
After thinking about this some more, I have gone from amused to extremely worried. A staple in the spy biz is sneaking in the tiny spy camera to photo the secret documents and / or the dead drop of the paper copies of those documents. As of this week, spies among us can just waltz in with their routine cell phones, zap the photos of the Iraq attack plan over the air, and nobody is the wiser. We have just gone from needing Tempest level security around just computers to needing that level of security whereever there is a safe.
Remeber the old belief (maybe true?) that telephones could be activated without a ring and so serve as covert microphones? With GPS and video cameras in these new cell phones, what sinister new uses could a covert turn-on enable? (Insert obvious p0rn reference here...)
Boy, I really feel shafted by all of this. I listen to several channels at Live365 and received a notice from them asking for emergency short-fuse support of the ORIGINAL HR 5469 which was supposed to go to a vote in only 72 hours or so. I went thru the email-my-congressmen-and-senators routine and felt smug that I had done my part to help. Now the original bill has been rewritten so that it's not the one I asked to be supported. This whole thing is so unfair when compared to the sweetheart deal the over-the-air broadcast radio stations operate under because they are effectively commercials to go buy a CD. So who is the Gang of Bigwigs that has circumvented this whole mess by arranging the rewrite? Despite my distaste for them, I've got to admit they sure know how to work the system...
Guess that shows how smart humans are - we ARE trying to find THEM. A new project starting up along this line is at TransitSearch, where they're trying to recruit amateur astronomers to hlep look for extrasolar planets using 8 inch scopes and CCD cameras to take light curve measurements of target stars. If you're an amateur astronomer, check it out...
One reason everybody likes TiVo so much that they can't verbalize is that the skip feature prevents the commercials from interrupting the dramatic flow of a program. This makes the program you're watching seemm SO much more emotionally intense it's like watching a movie, not a TV program. And that enhancement ALONE is worth the cost of the TiVo. Without Tivo, the dramatic flow of a program is so washed out....tense buildup and turningpoint followed by shampoo automobile diaper hamburger news-at-11-teaser next-show-promo CLIMAX! Give me a break, watch that cycle a thousand times and you think TV is crap. Tivo gives it all the emotional impact back to you. I love my Tivo.
OK, here goes. 3 hrs per week * 22 weeks is 66 hours. A third of this time is commercials - roughly 24 hours or a solid day per year of wasting your life sitting there listening to CRAP. You spend $400 to reclaim this commercial wasted time by skipping it with a Tivo at about $16 per hour. If you are making $32K per year or more, your time is worth more than $16 per hour. So the TiVO saves you valuable time at a bargain price. PLUS, the second and subsequent years it's "free" and trust me, once you get it you're gonna enjoy those three shows a LOT more than you would setting the VCR 66 times, missing a few times, rewinding the tapes, etc etc...ugh, to think I used to have to mess with that!!! And trust me, once you get the TiVo, you will enjoy other shows, TV in general and your leisure TV time SO MUCH MORE...you just can't understand without trying it. Treat yourself and get one, sell it on EBay if you don't like it. Ha ha ha, like THAT's gonna happen...