"Cheaper for a space station to get water from an asteroid mine than it is to ship it up from earth."
based on..what, exactly? are knowledge of the cost to move the satellite? mine it? purify it?
It's going to take billions to do this. So, how big of a rock do they need to get before it has enough material to e cheaper then lifting it from earth?
If we assume current prices (~$10K per kg to leo), and assume that only 30% of any particular asteroid is usable (probably an underestimate, since even rock can be used for radiation shielding), and assume a cost to move the rock of $5 billion, then you'd need to move a 500 ton rock to break even.
Note, for reference, that a 500 ton rock is only about 10 meters across. Might make a good testbed, unlikely to be commercially viable.
The question is, to what degree the cost to move the rock scales with the mass of the rock. If ten times the rock requires only three times the up-front cost (it may require less, if we assume that moving the rock with a lower acceleration is acceptable), then you're going to make around $50 billion on your initial investment of $15 billion.
And get rich.
On the other hand, if it scales pretty linearly, then you might make some money, but not a mind-numbingly large amount.
Wow, another slashdotter who knows some history. I'm impressed.
It should also be remembered that Douglas MacArthur was, in the period leading up to WW2, NOT a US Army General, but a Field Marshal in the Philippine Army. His US Army rank was reactivated at the beginning of the war in the Pacific.
Which put him in the odd position of being junior to General Marshall, who was a colonel when MacArthur was Chief of Staff of the US Army (the position Marshall held in WW2), while at the same time outranking him (MacArthur's date of rank was decades before Marshall's, and in the US Army, two people of the same rank determine relative position by date of rank).
What are they going to find on a rock in space that is not already available on THIS rock in space?
Nothing.
And so on and so forth.
What they WILL find, however, is a bunch of metal and such that doesn't have to be lifted out of a deep gravity well to be useful in orbit.
Given that the cost to lift things into orbit is in the thousands of dollars per kg, a 500 ton rock is worth billions in Earth orbit, given that we have something useful to do with that much metal/whatever....
Which means we need to come up with a reason why things work one way "way over there", and another way "right around here"....
Would the existence of Kardashev Type 2 or 3 civilizations "way over there" present a valid hypothesis, or should I put the foil hat back on?
At this point, invoking Type2+ civilizations as the cause of the observations is effectively the same as invoking God - neither is testable, neither allows us to make predictions.
What's the difference between a nuke and a conventional bomb? Oh yeah, the nuke is more likely to end your life completely, via just blowing some arms and limbs off so you'll have scars to remember us by.
What's the difference between a nuke and ten thousand conventional bombs? Oh, yeah, the nuke does a lot less damage, and kills a lot fewer people.
Do remember that we were dropping thousands (shading up into the ten-thousand-plus range on busy days) of bombs on Japan (and Germany) pretty much daily. If we hadn't had the nukes, we'd have just used more conventional bombs, and wrecked more cities and killed more people.
Any non flying bird is at a serious competetive disadvantage to birds that do fly unless its some niche ecosystem such as new zealand with few competitors or they've learned to "fly" underwater , eg penguins. Sure, ostriches are fairly big , but they haven't exactly taken over the world have they?
Note that for ten or so million years after the asteroid, the dominant land animals were...great big non-flying birds.
Is Java "open"? I don't even know if Oracle's lawyers know the specific answer to that question, because what is open? In a PURELY legal stand point, is open about source distribution? Is open about the licensing? Is it about the JDK APIs? What IS open?
Well, if he didn't know the answer, he shouldn't have sued Google for billions of dollars until he learned the answer.
He might have known a hell of a lot at the time leading up to the acquisition, but it's been a few years. I'm sure other things have been occupying his time between then and now. No one can possibly remember every detail forever.
This trial hasn't been a secret. He's known it was coming, and he's known he had to testify at it.
Don't you think he'd bother to brush up on little details that might make his lawsuit look a little bit less like patent-trolling?
Also, why didn't those small juvenile dinosaurs just grow up and repopulate the world?
It's not like there would have been a shortage of them post-asteroid. If anything, the juveniles would have had an unusual edge, since they were growing up into a vacuum where the big predators used to be.
Given the disappointing lifespan I've been seeing with the CFL lights in my home I really have a difficult time believing their claims.
I've been using CFL's since they became available, replacing each incandescent in the house as it burned out with a CFL equivalent.
And in that time, I've had exactly ONE burn out (this past Sunday, the second one I ever put in) due to any cause but bad wiring.
Apparently the previous owners weren't as up on wiring standards as they thought when they converted the garage into a den, but outside the den, my CFL's have been working wonderfully well.
Ho hum, so a commission created by the democratically controlled executive branch somehow determines the republican controlled congress is not doing a good job. I wish I could believe this was relevant, but I am too jaded to believe this report is anything but political maneuvering 6 months before an election.
My first thought on reading the summary was "Obama's commission said that Obama did good, and his political enemies did bad - big surprise there, eh?"
That problem is quite easily remediable. Quite simply take schools from local government budgets and shift them to state budgets.
Here in Australia schools are run by the states, and people are talking about shifting control to the Federal level as 6 states worth of administration is considered 6 times too many.
The notion that you'll get LESS administrative overhead by creating a higher-level control organization is simply mind-boggling.
Moving school control to State won't eliminate local admins, it'll just add State admins. And move school control from State to National will result in National, State, and Local admins....
Even the Soyuz capsules, which have almost no redundant systems whatsoever, have a reputation as being reliable.
And, oddly enough, have had loss-of-crew accidents twice, just like Shuttle (which translates to a higher percentage loss rate, since there have been fewer Soyuz missions than Shuttle missions, in spite of Shuttle being developed a decade later).
There was a/. story last year (one year ago today, in fact) mentioning this. Guy from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., speaking "not for attribution".
SpaceX has already put up satellites (on Falcon 1) for people other than NASA. Second flight of Falcon 1 carried a satellite on spec, as I recall.
In addition, SpaceX already has contracts over the next couple of years to put up satellites for MDA (Canada), SES (Europe), Thaicom (Thailand), NSPO (Taiwan), Asiasat (two launches), CONAE (Argentina).
Of course, there's the problem that they're Limited Liability Corporations, which are a creation of government.
So, any abuses you claim are caused by out-of-control corporations are really caused by governments giving them get-out-of-jail-free cards on some amount of legal liability for misdeeds.
Fragile, inconsistent state of Politicians who seek to reinstate God as Creator and consider any Science as heresy is the REAL cause of lack of space exploration.
So, when was the last time a Democratic President did anything meaningful in the way of space exploration? Kennedy?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, Platinum is about three times as dense as steel.
And it's NOT three times as strong.
One use for water is to break it down into H2 and O2, then liquefy the results, and burn it in a rocket engine.
Hard to recycle that way...
If we assume current prices (~$10K per kg to leo), and assume that only 30% of any particular asteroid is usable (probably an underestimate, since even rock can be used for radiation shielding), and assume a cost to move the rock of $5 billion, then you'd need to move a 500 ton rock to break even.
Note, for reference, that a 500 ton rock is only about 10 meters across. Might make a good testbed, unlikely to be commercially viable.
The question is, to what degree the cost to move the rock scales with the mass of the rock. If ten times the rock requires only three times the up-front cost (it may require less, if we assume that moving the rock with a lower acceleration is acceptable), then you're going to make around $50 billion on your initial investment of $15 billion.
And get rich.
On the other hand, if it scales pretty linearly, then you might make some money, but not a mind-numbingly large amount.
Umm, for starters, dinosaurs didn't roam the planet in the Pliocene (which only started 5 million years ago, give or take).
I see you managed to answer your own question nicely....
Wow, another slashdotter who knows some history. I'm impressed.
It should also be remembered that Douglas MacArthur was, in the period leading up to WW2, NOT a US Army General, but a Field Marshal in the Philippine Army. His US Army rank was reactivated at the beginning of the war in the Pacific.
Which put him in the odd position of being junior to General Marshall, who was a colonel when MacArthur was Chief of Staff of the US Army (the position Marshall held in WW2), while at the same time outranking him (MacArthur's date of rank was decades before Marshall's, and in the US Army, two people of the same rank determine relative position by date of rank).
Nothing.
What they WILL find, however, is a bunch of metal and such that doesn't have to be lifted out of a deep gravity well to be useful in orbit.
Given that the cost to lift things into orbit is in the thousands of dollars per kg, a 500 ton rock is worth billions in Earth orbit, given that we have something useful to do with that much metal/whatever....
At this point, invoking Type2+ civilizations as the cause of the observations is effectively the same as invoking God - neither is testable, neither allows us to make predictions.
And now there's evidence that there's not any in our immediate vicinity (article I read mentioned 13000 ly).
Which means we need to come up with a reason why things work one way "way over there", and another way "right around here"....
What's the difference between a nuke and ten thousand conventional bombs? Oh, yeah, the nuke does a lot less damage, and kills a lot fewer people.
Do remember that we were dropping thousands (shading up into the ten-thousand-plus range on busy days) of bombs on Japan (and Germany) pretty much daily. If we hadn't had the nukes, we'd have just used more conventional bombs, and wrecked more cities and killed more people.
Note that for ten or so million years after the asteroid, the dominant land animals were...great big non-flying birds.
No, it's not. Average height for a human male is about 5'10" in the USA. Worldwide, it's shorter than that...
Human height has increased somewhat since the 19th century, mostly due to better childhood nutrition.
Well, if he didn't know the answer, he shouldn't have sued Google for billions of dollars until he learned the answer.
This trial hasn't been a secret. He's known it was coming, and he's known he had to testify at it.
Don't you think he'd bother to brush up on little details that might make his lawsuit look a little bit less like patent-trolling?
Also, why didn't those small juvenile dinosaurs just grow up and repopulate the world?
It's not like there would have been a shortage of them post-asteroid. If anything, the juveniles would have had an unusual edge, since they were growing up into a vacuum where the big predators used to be.
Well, in context:
This is apparently significant because in his deposition, he answered those questions with "That's correct"....
"hundreds of billion"?? Citation, if you please
I've been using CFL's since they became available, replacing each incandescent in the house as it burned out with a CFL equivalent.
And in that time, I've had exactly ONE burn out (this past Sunday, the second one I ever put in) due to any cause but bad wiring.
Apparently the previous owners weren't as up on wiring standards as they thought when they converted the garage into a den, but outside the den, my CFL's have been working wonderfully well.
My first thought on reading the summary was "Obama's commission said that Obama did good, and his political enemies did bad - big surprise there, eh?"
The notion that you'll get LESS administrative overhead by creating a higher-level control organization is simply mind-boggling.
Moving school control to State won't eliminate local admins, it'll just add State admins. And move school control from State to National will result in National, State, and Local admins....
And, oddly enough, have had loss-of-crew accidents twice, just like Shuttle (which translates to a higher percentage loss rate, since there have been fewer Soyuz missions than Shuttle missions, in spite of Shuttle being developed a decade later).
There was a /. story last year (one year ago today, in fact) mentioning this. Guy from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp., speaking "not for attribution".
SpaceX has already put up satellites (on Falcon 1) for people other than NASA. Second flight of Falcon 1 carried a satellite on spec, as I recall.
In addition, SpaceX already has contracts over the next couple of years to put up satellites for MDA (Canada), SES (Europe), Thaicom (Thailand), NSPO (Taiwan), Asiasat (two launches), CONAE (Argentina).
Among others.
I like your list above.
Of course, there's the problem that they're Limited Liability Corporations, which are a creation of government.
So, any abuses you claim are caused by out-of-control corporations are really caused by governments giving them get-out-of-jail-free cards on some amount of legal liability for misdeeds.
So, when was the last time a Democratic President did anything meaningful in the way of space exploration? Kennedy?