John Walker of Fourmilab has a proposal to cut the costs drastically, which is called A rocket a day. John Walker is no lightweight. He is the writer of the imfamous Hacker Diet:-)
I have to say there are some serious environmental issues with his plan but it gives an interesting insight to the whole "launch costs" problem.
Key to the space is off-the-shelf technologies plus complete de-regulation. One thing everyone tends to forget is NASA pulled down its shuttle operational $/kg ratio by proposing doing every govermental/military/science and commercial launches which effectively locked everything down.
You can't launch even a nut&bolt pair to the space using a non-US organisation if it originates from good ol' USA without going through lots of red tape. Lots of companies like Sea-Launch does this by doing all sorts of strange things.
Correct. Even older laptops are much use. Right at this moment on my desk there are three laptops and a workstation. One of the laptops is a Digital Pentium-166, running RDP client against my Windows servers. The second one is a Dell Pentium-II 200 with Cygwin + XFree loaded, running X sessions to my Unix servers. The third one is a Fujitsu Pentium 3-500, just checking out code out of the repository and building it continuously. And I have the workstation to work with, although I find its VDU size quite small after what I have at home.
As you can see, you don't have to get the fastest laptop you can get, as long as it is good enough for its purpose (avoiding screen clutter by distributing windows to other available machines), I'm happy.
On the other hand, I have to admit, these were available and that's why I use them, not because they are my choice of hardware/platform.
Reminds me of a login page on my old BBS board page where it told people to hit ALT-H (which was the disconnect command in many terminal apps). I never wanted to serve such idiots in any case... Also I had variants of an ANSI boot page (which resulted in many idiots believing OS/2 installing on their own PCs...)
What!? Non technical hobby? Is there such a thing?
I am an amateur radio operator, which can be quite non-technical if you are limited with just using a hand held tranceiver but if you are into anything larger than that, it gets technical very quickly!
And when that head-admin finds out that a complex word document doesn't look the same when printed from an OpenOffice writer...
I try to use OpenOffice in the office but everytime I have to open a password protected Excell sheet or a document with images at headers&footers and heavy formatting, I really hate Microsoft.
The boosters are re-used. Go and read Feynmann's addendum to the Challenger accident report. He mentions a number of problems where the boosters were malformed when they splashed on the ocean and they have to be "rounded" again. Apparently there used to be a number of problems at this stage, mostly due to the manamagent layers and the low-paid workers.
Any hard facts behind this? James Oberg researched this very thoroughly and found none of those so-called missing cosmonauts were actually died during a launch.There is no more an opressive government trying to stop their people speak... Ops, apart from the good-ol' USA of course.
So who is stopping all these poeple leaking their "secret" info about their "space accidents"?
But are they a research business? They aren't doing any hard research whatsoever on new launc vehicles. They even junk the projects in conceptual phase.
I don't care if it is re-usable, if it is cheap enough, reliable, and will put us in space, permanently, I'm for it.
Not to mention the need of that thust to be throttable...
During shuttle launches the G forces rarely exceed 3g. In the good-old-days, they were in exceed of 10-12g's regularly, hence the need of specially moulded chairs for the Mercury astronauts.
I wondered about the same statistic. It is obvious that there is something wrong there. It must be 1 in 2000 for each person, then such a statistic is just rubbish.
If there are hundreds of millions of people living in those areas as they state, let's calculate. Let's make a very conservative guess: There will be 200 million people living under the impact probability path. 2^8/2^3=2^5. There will be hundred thousand people injured tomorrow.
With a very very conservative guess (2 million people) there will still be 1000 pople hit!
It's just typical : You can prove anything with statistics. Or just throw some random numbers to scare people.
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I have to say there are some serious environmental issues with his plan but it gives an interesting insight to the whole "launch costs" problem.
Baka...
Key to the space is off-the-shelf technologies plus complete de-regulation. One thing everyone tends to forget is NASA pulled down its shuttle operational $/kg ratio by proposing doing every govermental/military/science and commercial launches which effectively locked everything down.
You can't launch even a nut&bolt pair to the space using a non-US organisation if it originates from good ol' USA without going through lots of red tape. Lots of companies like Sea-Launch does this by doing all sorts of strange things.
As you can see, you don't have to get the fastest laptop you can get, as long as it is good enough for its purpose (avoiding screen clutter by distributing windows to other available machines), I'm happy.
On the other hand, I have to admit, these were available and that's why I use them, not because they are my choice of hardware/platform.
If I can get a nice Volvo for almost nothing, then I'll get it! Who cares it looks like a filing cabinet?
Japanese are one step closer to the powersuits of Bubblegum Crisis! Horraaaay!!
Strangely enough, in Kim Stanley Robinson's epic Red Mars, the nuclear reactor the Martian colonists set up in Mars was named Chernobyl! :-)
It was fun...
The code is open and vi is always waiting for you...
And burns very nicely...
What!? Non technical hobby? Is there such a thing? I am an amateur radio operator, which can be quite non-technical if you are limited with just using a hand held tranceiver but if you are into anything larger than that, it gets technical very quickly!
I try to use OpenOffice in the office but everytime I have to open a password protected Excell sheet or a document with images at headers&footers and heavy formatting, I really hate Microsoft.
Wait until MS gets their first ICBM, then we'll see who's da boss...
The boosters are re-used. Go and read Feynmann's addendum to the Challenger accident report. He mentions a number of problems where the boosters were malformed when they splashed on the ocean and they have to be "rounded" again. Apparently there used to be a number of problems at this stage, mostly due to the manamagent layers and the low-paid workers.
Just like the aviation industry and the pilots have (had)? When you think about it, an airliner pilot is nothing more than a glorified bus driver.
And never mention the pilots of the cargo aircrafts...
Any hard facts behind this? James Oberg researched this very thoroughly and found none of those so-called missing cosmonauts were actually died during a launch.There is no more an opressive government trying to stop their people speak... Ops, apart from the good-ol' USA of course.
So who is stopping all these poeple leaking their "secret" info about their "space accidents"?
But are they a research business? They aren't doing any hard research whatsoever on new launc vehicles. They even junk the projects in conceptual phase.
I don't care if it is re-usable, if it is cheap enough, reliable, and will put us in space, permanently, I'm for it.
They had less money...?
During shuttle launches the G forces rarely exceed 3g. In the good-old-days, they were in exceed of 10-12g's regularly, hence the need of specially moulded chairs for the Mercury astronauts.
What recover??
Americans, you really suprise me!
240-480 cd folders.
Obviously this reminds me of the famous, most beautifully written short story by a chemist, Isaac Asimov, Nightfall.
Maybe he was writing out of experience? Civilization burning in flames as masses go insane with the eclipse? Well, he was an American... :)
When the people of Most Advanced country in the world has such idiots in power, I wonder what the humanity end in.
If your friends were educated people, you should told them to get rid of their irrational fears.
Slackware 8 + Windowmaker + Opera... I have such a box for visitors right in front of me, Pentium 100 with 32MB, works like a dream.
So we are going to get all that ATARI crap games again... Go Spectrum 48 go!
If there are hundreds of millions of people living in those areas as they state, let's calculate. Let's make a very conservative guess: There will be 200 million people living under the impact probability path. 2^8/2^3=2^5. There will be hundred thousand people injured tomorrow.
With a very very conservative guess (2 million people) there will still be 1000 pople hit!
It's just typical : You can prove anything with statistics. Or just throw some random numbers to scare people.