> The point is, it is not inhabitable (for humans) without technological interventions.
Go tell your nonsense to the Eskimo populations.
Ummm, you do know that clothing, houses, harpoons, fishhooks, sleds, and other things like that are, well, TECHNOLOGY?
Alas, it's not true that technology is appropriate only to describe the products of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We've been doing "technology" since one of our ancestors first banged two rocks together to produce an edge to cut through a deer's hide.
So, that's (on average) 480 million dollars per year for all carriers in the US. Assuming there are 180 million active cell phones in the US (accurate as of 2005), this is $2.70 per phone per year, or 23 cents a month. I think the total of hidden (read: fake) subcharges added to my bill are well over 23 cents a month. In other words, this charge really isn't noteworthy.
That might be true over the next ten years. When they're still phasing in this new tax.
At some point, it's going to reach that "eventually reaching $550 million per carrier per year". At that time, since there are more than one carrier, it's safe to assume we're talking, say, $1.65 billion per year. Which still isn't bad, I know.
But have you ever known a stealth tax to go down? Once people are used to it, they'll adjust the fit to get a few more billions out of it....
What would you call the stuck thruster on Gemini 8, causing the spacecraft to tumble out of control, nearly killing the crew, and requiring an emergency re-entry?
Forgot that one, I'm ashamed to say.
Counting that one, Shuttle has the smallest failure rate of any manned system. With the exception of the Chinese system, which has been flown twice (that they've admitted to).
If the vehicle does its job and the crew survives, then it isn't counted as a failure. The Mercury program didn't have a failure during the manned missions since the heatshield incident doesn't count as a failure. This also means that Soyuz is comparable to the Shuttle in terms of safety (especially once you consider the Shuttle's close calls).
With this fairly narrow view of "failure", this is true. Personally, I consider it a "failure" when your Soyuz blows up on launch, even if it tosses the capsule free and the crew survives.
Note that if "failure" includes "doing its job", the Soyuz has had four of them to the Shuttle's two. And the Soyuz had fewer flights than Shuttle.
The Russian Soyuz is a modern version of Apollo and built like a freaking tank so just buy the damned thing and be done with it.
Soyuz isn't a modern version of Apollo. It lacks many of the capabilities of Apollo (the obvious one is not enough deltaV to enter orbit around the moon, then to go back to Earth)). It's also much smaller than Apollo, and thus not really suitable for extended length missions.
Uhm... Do the initials "JFK" and "LBJ" ring any bells for you?
I think I've heard of them. Wasn't "JFK" the guy who invented "trickle down economics"? Or at least the one who used it to justify the largest taxcut in American history?
And "LBJ". Hmm, he's the guy who closed an important airforce base (important, in this case, in having capabilities that weren't duplicated anywhere else), which by an amazing coincidence was in the only congressional district in its particular State to vote against him, right?
For what its worth, I think that Kennedy's moonshot was misguided - we should have stuck to NASA's outline - low orbital flights to learn our way around the environment, followed by space station, followed by flights to the moon, followed by base on the moon, followed by flights to Mars, etc.
Alas, the plant-the-flag six times exercise we did was completely wasted when we didn't go back....
If you want to be in office, you need a clean record.
Senator Burris may disprove that theory.
And Mayor Marion Barry (Washington DC), who was elected in a landslide as soon as he got out of prison on corruption charges from his previous stint as Mayor of DC, might also disagree.
Anyone suggesting extending the shuttle program is advocating extending a clearly unsafe and inefficient program.
Oddly enough, the Shuttle has had fewer failures per flight than any other manned spacecraft (with the exception of Gemini, which had no failures at all in its ten whole launches). It has also had more launches than ALL other manned spacecraft.
Note, though, that the Shuttle failures have both been catastrophic. Some of the non-shuttle failures (the mercury one where the heat shield came unstuck comes to mind) didn't do much more than give the Mission Control guys white hair.
Finishing Orion and Ares I is the politically easy thing to do because without it Obama would have to explain the end of US manned space flight, which is politically difficult.
Nope. They'll likely cancel Orion along about 2013. The Dems have never been terribly thrilled by "spending money in outer space", and this is their big chance to end it. If they wait till 2013, it'll be forgotten by the next presidential election (and Obama won't be running then anyway).
No, the dictionary agrees 100% with what I was always taught in science class, from the time I was a small child up to and including college physics.
And you've just demonstrated my point. the world is full of clueless dolts. Specifically, the dolts in your example are the teachers who said that rocket engines carry their own oxidizer.
I should point out, by the way, that it doesn't actually matter whether the rocket engine gets its oxidizer from a tank or from the output of a compressor. Which seems to be what the Sabre engine does, in air-breathing mode.
Ultimately, there is going to be more people shot by the police in a country that has more people with guns and a much higher number of killings with guns in general.
Like, say, in Myanmar? Oh, wait, they don't have more people with guns, do they?
Personally I agree with you, but I looked it up and the dictionary disagrees. The definition of "rocket" is rather vague. The definition of "rocket engine", however, is very specific and includes the specification of its intake.
Dictionaries are written by clueless dolts about as often as anything else is. Especially about technical matters. A "Rocket Engine" does not carry its own oxidizer, even if the Holy Dictionary says it does.
How is this different from the X-30 [wikipedia.org] space plane of the mid80s that we were told could be operational in 10 years?
Well, that depends on the funding. If they fund this one to completion, instead of cancelling the funding (as was done for the X-30), then it'll be different. Otherwise, both will end up being names attached to a whole lot of spent money.
A rocket engine, by definition, carries its own oxidizer, and does NOT obtain that oxidizer (or fuel) from the medium through with it travels.
Umm, no. A ROCKET carries its own oxidizer. Traditionally in a FUEL TANK.
The rocket ENGINE is the device that burns fuel and oxidizer (or, sometimes, a single monopropellant, of course). But the rocket engine does not carry its own oxidizer.
and the surface area is equal to 4*pi*r squared (4 * 3.14 * 0.955/2) squared which actually equals 36.005 square inches then take 36.005 and multiple that by your 125 GB and its actually higher then 4375 not smaller. But maybe my Canadian quarter is a bit bigger then yours lol.
4*pi*r squared is the surface of a sphere not a circle.
And even if it were the surface of a circle, the formula would properly be written 4*pi*(r squared), which is NOT the same as (4*pi*r) squared.
In other words, your Canadian quarter may be a bit bigger than my American quarter, but your brain seems to be a bit smaller than your Canadian quarter.
I understand that "space debris" is the evil du jour, but please try to imagine that you can count. 100kg of "space debris" hitting a million ton SPS isn't going to send the satellite careening about the sky, nor is it going to rotate the satellite to any meaningful degree.
Note that the satellite, while massing a million tons or so, will be, how to put this, thin. A piece of "space debris" will punch a small hole in it, and do damn all else.
If, on the other hand, we want to assume that ALL of the energy of the "space debris" is transferred to the SPS...
Hmm, worst case would be "space debris" moving in a direction opposite to the SPS (basically impossible, since all of our GEO satellites move in the same direction, but go with me here). So relative speed will be about 6100 m/s. Momentum transfer we're assuming is 100%, so that 100 kg piece of "space debris" would change the speed of the million ton satellite by about 0.0006 mm/s.
Which would change the orbit from (theoretically) circular to one with a perigee about 8 mm lower than before the impact.
Keep in mind that these are both (a) absolute worst case, and (b) heavily rounded. The actual deviation might be as much as half again my estimate above, which would mean as much as 1/2 inch deviation in a worst case scenario. In a more typical case, of course we're talking about 1/100000th my "worst case" estimate. You figure out what that is.
20TW of energy is nothing to sneeze at, and it's got to heat up the air it's passing thru, causing significant (remember, 20TW of energy is a lot)) localized changes to the whole weather column, which can't help but reverberate all around the glob
Well, actually it's not. Solar energy hitting the Earth at any given moment is about 166000 TW. So it increases solar energy input to the earth by 0.013%....
Your statement would be roughly similar to saying that increasing atmospheric CO2 from the current 384 ppm to 384.05 ppm would produce significant changes to global weather. Which is ludicrous - there are seasonal variations in CO2 that are roughly 80 times as large as this.
What if we build an orbiting "overcoat" which had the necessary shielding and a space inside to accomodate the spacecraft. Then you launch as light as you can and dock with your overcoat.
Alternatively, build that OTV that was supposed to be part of the shuttle system, park it at the ISS, and do repairs using it, instead of the shuttle.
That way, we could use the shuttle to, well, shuttle parts and fuel up for missions of this sort...
An orbiter is needed before you send a lander for a few reasons. First, our global map of Europa is pretty rough, with only 13% of Europa was imaged at resolutions better than 1 kilometer. That is not good enough if you want to find a good spot to land on. While Europa may have a reputation for having the smoothest surface in the solar system, at the meter-decameter scales (on the size order of a lander), Europa is quite rough, with tectonics grooves criss-crossing the surface and no erosion to wear these features down. So high resolution imaging is need to find relatively smooth areas where it would be safe to land (global coverage at pixel scales of 100 meters is planned for the Jupiter Europa Orbiter with 1-10% coverage at 10 meters per pixel of targets of particular interest).
Secondly, an orbiter is needed to determine the thickness of the ice shell, which is important if you want to access the ocean. Designing a mission that needs to dig down through 2-5 km of ice is quite a bit different than digging through 20-30km. Plus, an orbiter might be able to find areas where the shell is thinner, further helping later lander developers pick a landing site.
First, we can send a lander along on the orbiter, let the orbiter do its mapping, and then choose a landing site of interest.
Secondly, if we design for the worst case we can afford to deal with, the lander will still be useful if a less-than-worst-case situation occurs. Sure, it would be overengineered, but so what?
Yes, adding a lander to the mission would be more expensive. Live with it.
Most importantly of all, we put an orbiter around Europa, decide we want to send a lander next time, and the lander arrives in 2045 or so. By which time I'll be dead. I really don't want to miss that....
And while most people know that you don't have to go HDTV for digital, I doubt many retailers are losing much sleep over customers buying new sets because they don't know any better.
I don't think there's anyone who believes you need HDTV for digital.
I do think there are a fair number of guys who've told their wives this, to justify the HDTV that they'll be watching the NFL, NBA, MLB on in the coming years.
Wow. I didn't think people would be inept enough to not look past the first page of a website, or even read the text for that matter. I guess I was wrong.
America's problems are even bigger than I thought.
FYI, the full text is right there on the front page. As well as all sorts of other tools, like state-by-state job breakdowns And as the site states, as contracts are given out, they'll show up, as well as projects down to the district level.
Well, a link to a link to a link to the full text is on the front page. When I tried to follow the links, things hung up on the text of the conference report.
On the other hand, Thomas.gov worked just fine, as usual. Always nice to have the official version.
Note that the state-by-state job breakdowns are guesses.
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Ummm, you do know that clothing, houses, harpoons, fishhooks, sleds, and other things like that are, well, TECHNOLOGY?
Alas, it's not true that technology is appropriate only to describe the products of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We've been doing "technology" since one of our ancestors first banged two rocks together to produce an edge to cut through a deer's hide.
For those of you who don't have a solid grasp of the language, "many" is not actually synonymous with "most", as is asserted here.
It should be pointed out that wildfires are "normal" conditions in southern California a distressing amount of the year.
That might be true over the next ten years. When they're still phasing in this new tax.
At some point, it's going to reach that "eventually reaching $550 million per carrier per year". At that time, since there are more than one carrier, it's safe to assume we're talking, say, $1.65 billion per year. Which still isn't bad, I know.
But have you ever known a stealth tax to go down? Once people are used to it, they'll adjust the fit to get a few more billions out of it....
Forgot that one, I'm ashamed to say.
Counting that one, Shuttle has the smallest failure rate of any manned system. With the exception of the Chinese system, which has been flown twice (that they've admitted to).
With this fairly narrow view of "failure", this is true. Personally, I consider it a "failure" when your Soyuz blows up on launch, even if it tosses the capsule free and the crew survives.
Note that if "failure" includes "doing its job", the Soyuz has had four of them to the Shuttle's two. And the Soyuz had fewer flights than Shuttle.
Soyuz isn't a modern version of Apollo. It lacks many of the capabilities of Apollo (the obvious one is not enough deltaV to enter orbit around the moon, then to go back to Earth)). It's also much smaller than Apollo, and thus not really suitable for extended length missions.
I think I've heard of them. Wasn't "JFK" the guy who invented "trickle down economics"? Or at least the one who used it to justify the largest taxcut in American history?
And "LBJ". Hmm, he's the guy who closed an important airforce base (important, in this case, in having capabilities that weren't duplicated anywhere else), which by an amazing coincidence was in the only congressional district in its particular State to vote against him, right?
For what its worth, I think that Kennedy's moonshot was misguided - we should have stuck to NASA's outline - low orbital flights to learn our way around the environment, followed by space station, followed by flights to the moon, followed by base on the moon, followed by flights to Mars, etc.
Alas, the plant-the-flag six times exercise we did was completely wasted when we didn't go back....
Senator Burris may disprove that theory.
And Mayor Marion Barry (Washington DC), who was elected in a landslide as soon as he got out of prison on corruption charges from his previous stint as Mayor of DC, might also disagree.
Oddly enough, the Shuttle has had fewer failures per flight than any other manned spacecraft (with the exception of Gemini, which had no failures at all in its ten whole launches). It has also had more launches than ALL other manned spacecraft.
Note, though, that the Shuttle failures have both been catastrophic. Some of the non-shuttle failures (the mercury one where the heat shield came unstuck comes to mind) didn't do much more than give the Mission Control guys white hair.
Nope. They'll likely cancel Orion along about 2013. The Dems have never been terribly thrilled by "spending money in outer space", and this is their big chance to end it. If they wait till 2013, it'll be forgotten by the next presidential election (and Obama won't be running then anyway).
Relative to what?
The ground, yes.
Each other? No. Tens of meters per second, at most.
And you've just demonstrated my point. the world is full of clueless dolts. Specifically, the dolts in your example are the teachers who said that rocket engines carry their own oxidizer.
I should point out, by the way, that it doesn't actually matter whether the rocket engine gets its oxidizer from a tank or from the output of a compressor. Which seems to be what the Sabre engine does, in air-breathing mode.
Like, say, in Myanmar? Oh, wait, they don't have more people with guns, do they?
I'll bite.
Exile them to where, exactly?
Dictionaries are written by clueless dolts about as often as anything else is. Especially about technical matters. A "Rocket Engine" does not carry its own oxidizer, even if the Holy Dictionary says it does.
Well, that depends on the funding. If they fund this one to completion, instead of cancelling the funding (as was done for the X-30), then it'll be different. Otherwise, both will end up being names attached to a whole lot of spent money.
Umm, no. A ROCKET carries its own oxidizer. Traditionally in a FUEL TANK.
The rocket ENGINE is the device that burns fuel and oxidizer (or, sometimes, a single monopropellant, of course). But the rocket engine does not carry its own oxidizer.
4*pi*r squared is the surface of a sphere not a circle.
And even if it were the surface of a circle, the formula would properly be written 4*pi*(r squared), which is NOT the same as (4*pi*r) squared.
In other words, your Canadian quarter may be a bit bigger than my American quarter, but your brain seems to be a bit smaller than your Canadian quarter.
Well, the out-of-power Democrats were great at talking tough. And people believed them.
I understand that "space debris" is the evil du jour, but please try to imagine that you can count. 100kg of "space debris" hitting a million ton SPS isn't going to send the satellite careening about the sky, nor is it going to rotate the satellite to any meaningful degree.
Note that the satellite, while massing a million tons or so, will be, how to put this, thin. A piece of "space debris" will punch a small hole in it, and do damn all else.
If, on the other hand, we want to assume that ALL of the energy of the "space debris" is transferred to the SPS...
Hmm, worst case would be "space debris" moving in a direction opposite to the SPS (basically impossible, since all of our GEO satellites move in the same direction, but go with me here). So relative speed will be about 6100 m/s. Momentum transfer we're assuming is 100%, so that 100 kg piece of "space debris" would change the speed of the million ton satellite by about 0.0006 mm/s.
Which would change the orbit from (theoretically) circular to one with a perigee about 8 mm lower than before the impact.
Keep in mind that these are both (a) absolute worst case, and (b) heavily rounded. The actual deviation might be as much as half again my estimate above, which would mean as much as 1/2 inch deviation in a worst case scenario. In a more typical case, of course we're talking about 1/100000th my "worst case" estimate. You figure out what that is.
Well, actually it's not. Solar energy hitting the Earth at any given moment is about 166000 TW. So it increases solar energy input to the earth by 0.013%....
Your statement would be roughly similar to saying that increasing atmospheric CO2 from the current 384 ppm to 384.05 ppm would produce significant changes to global weather. Which is ludicrous - there are seasonal variations in CO2 that are roughly 80 times as large as this.
Alternatively, build that OTV that was supposed to be part of the shuttle system, park it at the ISS, and do repairs using it, instead of the shuttle.
That way, we could use the shuttle to, well, shuttle parts and fuel up for missions of this sort...
First, we can send a lander along on the orbiter, let the orbiter do its mapping, and then choose a landing site of interest.
Secondly, if we design for the worst case we can afford to deal with, the lander will still be useful if a less-than-worst-case situation occurs. Sure, it would be overengineered, but so what?
Yes, adding a lander to the mission would be more expensive. Live with it.
Most importantly of all, we put an orbiter around Europa, decide we want to send a lander next time, and the lander arrives in 2045 or so. By which time I'll be dead. I really don't want to miss that....
I don't think there's anyone who believes you need HDTV for digital.
I do think there are a fair number of guys who've told their wives this, to justify the HDTV that they'll be watching the NFL, NBA, MLB on in the coming years.
Well, a link to a link to a link to the full text is on the front page. When I tried to follow the links, things hung up on the text of the conference report.
On the other hand, Thomas.gov worked just fine, as usual. Always nice to have the official version.
Note that the state-by-state job breakdowns are guesses.