The F-117 has a great history and it will be interesting to see it go. I'm not normally the military tech-fetishist type, but this was a supremely odd creature that got to fly. Embodied in this plane are so many examples of ingenuity and hubris, it makes a good vessel for late 20th century american history.
We developed this plane in secret, with borrowed theories from the russians. The plane itself came out of a corporate Manhattan project, built by a combination of old salts who could wave their hands and make grumpy generalizations about engine configuration that hours of calculations would bear out and younger engineers employing technology that wasn't readily available outside the united states.
It was kept secret until we felt the need to unveil it as the epitome of american superiority in Panama and the gulf war. We spent a decade lauding the precision strike capability, ignoring reports that smart bombs were only so smart. Only in the past 5 years have we grudgingly come to accept that there were limitations to the strategy of aerial bombardment, limitations that hampered our ability to fight and killed civilians on the ground. But that doesn't make this plane or its pilots evil or murderous. We just became caught up in the technology, the gritty night vision cameras resulting in static filled screens where buildings used to be.
In a lot of ways, that is similar to our love affair with this plane. Ugly, but elegant. Unflyable without computer aided control but possessing strangely beautiful lines. Born of american ingenuity and sullied by hubris. It is a wonderful aircraft, and a great story. Thanks to the men (and women) who built it and flew it throughout the years.
concrete =/= ceramics. But, concrete IS interesting as hell. There was a time when concrete manufacturers in the midwest used old cherry pits as the aglomerate (instead of rocks and pebbles), because they were next store to a maraschino canning plant. they built a bunch of buildings and what not....until the pits sprouted and broke the concrete open. No one figured out that crushing the pits would be a good idea.:)
The only problem with nuclear waste storage is politicians. Radioactive waste storage is a proven, safe technology. Even so, long-term geological storage is not the right solution, since we would be throwing away a lot of good, fissionable material that can be recycled for energy production in, e.g., fast reactors. In a sense. In another sense, it isn't true. If you act like a true environmentalist and have a discount factor of zero (future generations are worth just as much to you as current generations), then it IS still a problem. Deaths due to groundwater leakage 1500 years from now would deter you from using a potentially unsafe storage facility.
However, I don't understand why people are willing to damage the next generation while espousing concern for someone 10 generations from now. Global Warming will displace and impact millions of people within 100 years. Nuclear power represents a way to lessen that impact. how in the WORLD is that more important to these guys?
Helpful, but more so for disposal of nuclear waste than for nuclear plants. IIRC, most of the critical components that would see very high radiation over their lifetime have to be metal or plastic for other reasons. If a good portion of those pieces could be replaced by ceramics in all respects, this would be a great advance.
For disposal and vitrification this would be a great advance. A huge element of uncertainty in the Yucca mountain facility comes from the caskets the waste is stored in. Ceramics would be more corrosion resistant than stainless steel and a 'self-healing' property would allow them to avoid becoming too brittle. Brittleness might be a key problem in long term storage like that. It would be interesting to see if the materials used in vitrification could take advantage of this. That's kind of a solved problem but it would be cool to change things up.
An interesting thing to see would be to watch how the material handles swelling. In a lot of cases, changes in dimensions is MUCH more important (in the long term) than other changes (to materials like poly-eurethane, steel, glass, not rubber or other plastics). I can see cracks and what not being fixed, but how about interstitial pockets being formed? Or gas evolution/absorption? Anyone have any information on that?
right. to be clear, I'm not saying 100% that the cost curves point toward the Angara being the more economical launch vehicle all else equal. The point was specifically to say that they might be.
I suspect that there is a cost savings in doing 15 launches per year over three especially if the cost per launch (separate from the fixed cost) is kept low. I also STRONGLY suspect that the savings doesn't make up for the cost in building an orbital assembly platform.
Absolutely. Maybe you read me wrong, but I noted that the second point was an error better ascribed to the public than the engineers. They had a good idea of what needed to be done, but it wasn't clear to the public what that entailed and how long it might take.
All in all, thanks for the awesome comment. I wish I had more to say in response but there is little to disagree on and disagreement is the nature of discourse on the internet.:)
But I'm not talking about research generally. I'm not talking about whether or not Russia still has any worthwhile Phd/postdoc programs. I'm saying that, specifically with respect to the aerospace industry, Russia is a world leader. Period.
As I said in my previous post, it doesn't look like they will stay this way for too long. far too many of the principal talents are old and far too many promising students are leaving to the west. but that doesn't mean that current ability to deliver and current tech in the aerospace industry isn't top notch.
Oh, well if you are going to argue that the Russians should have been more faithful with our money and we should have negotiated a better deal then we are in agreement. However, I can only offer you my word as someone with some 2nd hand experience on the subject that those results were close to as good as we were going to get. We could spent much more time and effort negotiating a slightly better deal, but it would not have been significantly better.
And unfortunately, none of the NASA deals could have stopped putin from coming to power on top of a lake of oil and natural gas. That was outside the scope. Perhaps if we hadn't shilled so hard for Yeltsin all those years (check the Time Magazine cover article about it ca. Summer 1996, it is a sobering story. If we found out that Russians had as much influence on our elections as we did on theirs, we would be pissed) we would be in a better spot. But we were scared about the communists taking over...or whatever.
As for experience, not to pump the chest, but does 10 years of study/research on space-related programs in soviet institutions count for first hand? Not if it leads you to the concluson that their launch vehicle and space expertise is somehow correlated to their ability to build cars.
Yes, some (read: a lot) of their tech is old. A lot of ours is old, although not that old. A good portion of US satellite CPUs are (or were a bit ago) based on a rad hardened version of the PPC 601/603 (some modern satellites I know have 68k's in them). Plenty of other components are even older. In the case of Russia, the basic tech (like the Proton launch vehicle) is 40 years old, but they have made new revisions of it up until the present day. That old technology has a failure rate that is comparable or better than the equivalent US heavy launchers (even averaging the space shuttle in). For a customer, that is all that matters. Getting the satellite in the right orbit in one piece is the important part, and the Russians do it as well as anyone on the planet.
That doesn't mean they are going to be that way forever in the future. The infrastructure in that country is destroyed. The demographics are terrible. The income of the government is very much dependent on commodity prices. Talent (as you say) is emigrating at an alarming rate. In 20 years, unless there is a reversal of many, many things, Russia will not have a world class space program. However, as it stands, it isn't very ar behind at all.
But the Russian's aren't the bad guys. That is part of what I am saying.
Also, to be fair, part of those dollar transfers and contracts were for launch services that the US could not offer. In other words, Arianaspace (spelling), Lockheed and Boeing (and NASA, w/ the shuttle) couldn't fit a launch window, so we paid the russians to do it.
WEll, I think there are a lot of things going on here.
First: Space is not the bonanza we thought it was in the 1950's and 1960's. Part of the formulation of our space program was the terrible arms race with russia, but part of it was the modernist notion that we would remake space in our image and reap the dividends. Surprisingly this mindset not only impacted the laity but also the technological priesthood (engineers, scientists). We were going to have colonies on mars and the moon within 50 years, no question.
Second: We greatly underestimated the challenges we face. Here was an underestimation made by the public but not by the engineers. We saw that we went from heavier than air flight to being on the moon in inside 70 years and assumed that continued progress would follow the same track. As a matter of fact it couldn't (not least because of diminishing marginal returns but also because of the huge change in challenges between getting to LEO and getting to the moon). Once we got to the moon we realized that the next step wasn't right around the corner. This happened to coincide with a number of social changes that demystified the space race and caused people to be less inclined to pay for large government projects.
Third: We confused lack of public progress with lack of progress and we confused public achievements with scientific achievements. In the time between Apollo 11 and now, we have sent out Cassini, Hubble, Chandra, DS-1, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager, the mars rovers, the Venus probe, and hundreds of earth satellites. We have become much better (in many, though not all ways) at building spacecraft as a country and a species. But we have also glorified achievements that haven't been so monumental. The Space Shuttle wasn't as good a vehicle as it should have been and it should have been phased out long ago. the ISS, for all its good points, does not advance the state of the art as much as DS-1 did.
As a result, we have both an unrealistic expectation of space flight and an underestimation of our progress in the past 25 years. I think we need to be prepared to wait another 25 or 50 before we are talking about the Moon or Mars in any serious, consistent fashion. But we will also not be there in the same way. Corporate space flight WILL be a mainstay of the future and it probably will bring more people into space in the 21st century than government space flight.
So dont look at 4 year timelines. Look further down the road. Also, the 4 year comment of mine was snarky. The OP was complaining about Barack Obama's wish to cut nasa funding as though it would forever doom the US space program. I was pointing out what we happen to get a new president every so often and 4 years isn't the end of the world.
you obviously don't know it first hand. Aside from the site being a sham (it is) and the claim probably being hot air (it is) if your conclusion is that Russian space expertise is vastly overstated then I don't think you have too much experience with it.
The Russians have world class talent and technology when it comes to space. that doesn't mean that they make great cars. As a matter of fact, it comes from making the decision as a communist power to make rockets, not cars (That is a gross over simplification, but you get the idea).
and on top of what else I said, you aren't paying very much. Out of your income taxes this year NASA (and other net transfers to russia or the ESA) probably comprised less than 50 dollars. That's the whole of NASA. What was paid to the russians is probably on the order of 2-5 dollars per year over 10 years or so.
I'm not saying that stuff is a good use of taxpayer dollars just because it doesn't use that many taxpayer dollars. I'm just saying stuff needs to be kept in perspective.
the problem is that most things with lots of materials tend to bring their gravity well with them (planets and moons).:)
I think in a lot of cases, the economics dictates that the absolute minimum be launched from earth (so an orbital assembly plant would only be a good idea if the eventual product is too large to be brought up by itself and the consumables needed for assembly are very few).
Once you are up there it is much more a task of conserving resources you have than anything else. So there better be a good reason to travel millions of miles to the asteroid belt to grab some metal.
Also, I think that most of those space industry/near sci-fi books (even though I love them, esp. islands in the sky) REALLY underestimate the engineering needed to mine, process and fashion materials into products and overestimate the usefulness of raw materials. In other words, a hunk of iron is probably less useful than a hydraulic pump or a chip for a transceiver.
that isn't to say it can't be done, but it is akin to asking a Columbus to build a mechanical clock at sea using only the materials found around him. What might be an acceptable task in Spain becomes monstrously difficult in the Atlantic.
With a SSTO there is a little problem, though - nobody on this planet has a clue how to do it, even in theory. Funding has little to do with this, compared to physics. My personal bet is that we won't see SSTO until we get antigravity. Chemical rockets are just as ridiculous as hot air balloons in the age of supersonic jets.
I think you might be overestimating the russian space industry. they aren't "rocketing past" anyone, this press release is probably the same fluff as their manned flight to mars 10 years ago. As I posted elsewhere, this is a statement of national pride in a time of economic ease for Russia.
So all in all, we paid for them to keep their slight edge in some areas (launch vehicles, payload integration, manned space flight--although that is arguable) and paid for them not to drop too far behind in others.
All things aren't equal. he is arguing that there is a strong negative cost curve for spacecraft launches, that the FIRST launch costs bunches, but subsequent launches cost less than the one before it.
If that is true, then using more launches of smaller vehicles saves more money than doing one on a large vehicle (also spreads out risk).
We aren't saying that it IS true, necessarily. I think that the spacecraft industry does face a declining cost curve, but not THAT steep (not like chipmaking or electricity generation, with large fixed costs and no costs of production).
If there aren't economies of scale, then you are right. But if there are, then you are wrong.
I'm glad. That money meant that scientists and engineers from one of the foremost space powers in the world didn't starve or move to Iran. It meant that the AMAZING corporate memory at Krushnev and Energia (among many, many others) could be maintained when the country's ruling elite wrecked the place.
It meant that US companies and European companies could see lower costs to orbit for their products and that means that people in the US would face lower costs on things that required satellites in the first place.
It meant that the US got to get an official window into russian rocketry and that two former enemies could develop close ties between professionals and organizations.
It meant that for about 1/100th of the price of the Iraq war, we got all that, and a functioning Space Station to boot.
It meant that SOMEONE can get into space and push the species forward, who cares what language they speak when they get there.
Russians care about safety. The military didn't, or at least felt that the cost of human life was less what the west felt it was.
The current russian space agencies and companies care about safety but don't have the same apparatus as the US companies do, nor do they have the same litigation history. US companies may deal with safety in superficially different manners than russian companies but the underlying notions (sound engineering principles, learning from mistakes, valuing life) are the same.
Or more likely, because he felt that it was a city the represented a look ahead and was cosmopolitan enough to get a feel for what Roddenberry felt the future should look like?
Oh. Well that is an interesting problem. Keep in mind that the oort cloud isn't really as dense as we might think it would be. If we assume only regular matter (no dark matter), then the density of the oort cloud is fantastically low. It is higher than the density of space between the earth and Mars only because there isn't the tidal and graviational forces of a Jupiter like body to pull stuff out of it.
Then, from a gravitational standpoint, we are looking at VERY small curvature imposed by the comets and such floating around. Moreover, it is probably not something that translates well into some net field. We can abstract it, think of the oort cloud as a uniform density object, but that abstraction doesn't hold well to the truth.
If we WERE to abstract it, the well created by the oort cloud might just overcome that created by the sun at distances far away from the sun. But remember, that is a spherical cow evenly distributed with milk (har, har). The reason the oort cloud exists is because the comets and dust caught up in it are orbiting the sun. So we would have to imagine that the point where that influence wanes is very close to the edge of what we might call the oort cloud.
Even IF that is the case, we would see the impact of such a well (again, keeping with our assuption of a uniformally distributed Oort cloud) on light coming into the solar system from outside it. Much like seeing like passing a star (gets 'lensed') is sort of like seeing light emanating from that star seeing light from outside the solar system would be like seeing light from inside the oort cloud. We would have been able to find this anomaly by looking at any infra-solar source than comparing it to light from outside the solar system.
In the case of pioneer, we need to explain a slight red shift growing larger as pioneer gets further from earth. a red shift seen on BOTH probes but not from (as far as we can tell) any source other than those two probes. It's a pickle.:)
Slashdot Mirror
The F-117 has a great history and it will be interesting to see it go. I'm not normally the military tech-fetishist type, but this was a supremely odd creature that got to fly. Embodied in this plane are so many examples of ingenuity and hubris, it makes a good vessel for late 20th century american history.
We developed this plane in secret, with borrowed theories from the russians. The plane itself came out of a corporate Manhattan project, built by a combination of old salts who could wave their hands and make grumpy generalizations about engine configuration that hours of calculations would bear out and younger engineers employing technology that wasn't readily available outside the united states.
It was kept secret until we felt the need to unveil it as the epitome of american superiority in Panama and the gulf war. We spent a decade lauding the precision strike capability, ignoring reports that smart bombs were only so smart. Only in the past 5 years have we grudgingly come to accept that there were limitations to the strategy of aerial bombardment, limitations that hampered our ability to fight and killed civilians on the ground. But that doesn't make this plane or its pilots evil or murderous. We just became caught up in the technology, the gritty night vision cameras resulting in static filled screens where buildings used to be.
In a lot of ways, that is similar to our love affair with this plane. Ugly, but elegant. Unflyable without computer aided control but possessing strangely beautiful lines. Born of american ingenuity and sullied by hubris. It is a wonderful aircraft, and a great story. Thanks to the men (and women) who built it and flew it throughout the years.
concrete =/= ceramics. But, concrete IS interesting as hell. There was a time when concrete manufacturers in the midwest used old cherry pits as the aglomerate (instead of rocks and pebbles), because they were next store to a maraschino canning plant. they built a bunch of buildings and what not....until the pits sprouted and broke the concrete open. No one figured out that crushing the pits would be a good idea. :)
However, I don't understand why people are willing to damage the next generation while espousing concern for someone 10 generations from now. Global Warming will displace and impact millions of people within 100 years. Nuclear power represents a way to lessen that impact. how in the WORLD is that more important to these guys?
Helpful, but more so for disposal of nuclear waste than for nuclear plants. IIRC, most of the critical components that would see very high radiation over their lifetime have to be metal or plastic for other reasons. If a good portion of those pieces could be replaced by ceramics in all respects, this would be a great advance.
For disposal and vitrification this would be a great advance. A huge element of uncertainty in the Yucca mountain facility comes from the caskets the waste is stored in. Ceramics would be more corrosion resistant than stainless steel and a 'self-healing' property would allow them to avoid becoming too brittle. Brittleness might be a key problem in long term storage like that. It would be interesting to see if the materials used in vitrification could take advantage of this. That's kind of a solved problem but it would be cool to change things up.
An interesting thing to see would be to watch how the material handles swelling. In a lot of cases, changes in dimensions is MUCH more important (in the long term) than other changes (to materials like poly-eurethane, steel, glass, not rubber or other plastics). I can see cracks and what not being fixed, but how about interstitial pockets being formed? Or gas evolution/absorption? Anyone have any information on that?
right. to be clear, I'm not saying 100% that the cost curves point toward the Angara being the more economical launch vehicle all else equal. The point was specifically to say that they might be.
I suspect that there is a cost savings in doing 15 launches per year over three especially if the cost per launch (separate from the fixed cost) is kept low. I also STRONGLY suspect that the savings doesn't make up for the cost in building an orbital assembly platform.
Absolutely. Maybe you read me wrong, but I noted that the second point was an error better ascribed to the public than the engineers. They had a good idea of what needed to be done, but it wasn't clear to the public what that entailed and how long it might take.
:)
All in all, thanks for the awesome comment. I wish I had more to say in response but there is little to disagree on and disagreement is the nature of discourse on the internet.
But I'm not talking about research generally. I'm not talking about whether or not Russia still has any worthwhile Phd/postdoc programs. I'm saying that, specifically with respect to the aerospace industry, Russia is a world leader. Period.
As I said in my previous post, it doesn't look like they will stay this way for too long. far too many of the principal talents are old and far too many promising students are leaving to the west. but that doesn't mean that current ability to deliver and current tech in the aerospace industry isn't top notch.
Oh, well if you are going to argue that the Russians should have been more faithful with our money and we should have negotiated a better deal then we are in agreement. However, I can only offer you my word as someone with some 2nd hand experience on the subject that those results were close to as good as we were going to get. We could spent much more time and effort negotiating a slightly better deal, but it would not have been significantly better.
And unfortunately, none of the NASA deals could have stopped putin from coming to power on top of a lake of oil and natural gas. That was outside the scope. Perhaps if we hadn't shilled so hard for Yeltsin all those years (check the Time Magazine cover article about it ca. Summer 1996, it is a sobering story. If we found out that Russians had as much influence on our elections as we did on theirs, we would be pissed) we would be in a better spot. But we were scared about the communists taking over...or whatever.
Yes, some (read: a lot) of their tech is old. A lot of ours is old, although not that old. A good portion of US satellite CPUs are (or were a bit ago) based on a rad hardened version of the PPC 601/603 (some modern satellites I know have 68k's in them). Plenty of other components are even older. In the case of Russia, the basic tech (like the Proton launch vehicle) is 40 years old, but they have made new revisions of it up until the present day. That old technology has a failure rate that is comparable or better than the equivalent US heavy launchers (even averaging the space shuttle in). For a customer, that is all that matters. Getting the satellite in the right orbit in one piece is the important part, and the Russians do it as well as anyone on the planet.
That doesn't mean they are going to be that way forever in the future. The infrastructure in that country is destroyed. The demographics are terrible. The income of the government is very much dependent on commodity prices. Talent (as you say) is emigrating at an alarming rate. In 20 years, unless there is a reversal of many, many things, Russia will not have a world class space program. However, as it stands, it isn't very ar behind at all.
That's why the smiley face.
But the Russian's aren't the bad guys. That is part of what I am saying.
Also, to be fair, part of those dollar transfers and contracts were for launch services that the US could not offer. In other words, Arianaspace (spelling), Lockheed and Boeing (and NASA, w/ the shuttle) couldn't fit a launch window, so we paid the russians to do it.
WEll, I think there are a lot of things going on here.
First: Space is not the bonanza we thought it was in the 1950's and 1960's. Part of the formulation of our space program was the terrible arms race with russia, but part of it was the modernist notion that we would remake space in our image and reap the dividends. Surprisingly this mindset not only impacted the laity but also the technological priesthood (engineers, scientists). We were going to have colonies on mars and the moon within 50 years, no question.
Second: We greatly underestimated the challenges we face. Here was an underestimation made by the public but not by the engineers. We saw that we went from heavier than air flight to being on the moon in inside 70 years and assumed that continued progress would follow the same track. As a matter of fact it couldn't (not least because of diminishing marginal returns but also because of the huge change in challenges between getting to LEO and getting to the moon). Once we got to the moon we realized that the next step wasn't right around the corner. This happened to coincide with a number of social changes that demystified the space race and caused people to be less inclined to pay for large government projects.
Third: We confused lack of public progress with lack of progress and we confused public achievements with scientific achievements. In the time between Apollo 11 and now, we have sent out Cassini, Hubble, Chandra, DS-1, Pioneer 10 and 11 and Voyager, the mars rovers, the Venus probe, and hundreds of earth satellites. We have become much better (in many, though not all ways) at building spacecraft as a country and a species. But we have also glorified achievements that haven't been so monumental. The Space Shuttle wasn't as good a vehicle as it should have been and it should have been phased out long ago. the ISS, for all its good points, does not advance the state of the art as much as DS-1 did.
As a result, we have both an unrealistic expectation of space flight and an underestimation of our progress in the past 25 years. I think we need to be prepared to wait another 25 or 50 before we are talking about the Moon or Mars in any serious, consistent fashion. But we will also not be there in the same way. Corporate space flight WILL be a mainstay of the future and it probably will bring more people into space in the 21st century than government space flight.
So dont look at 4 year timelines. Look further down the road. Also, the 4 year comment of mine was snarky. The OP was complaining about Barack Obama's wish to cut nasa funding as though it would forever doom the US space program. I was pointing out what we happen to get a new president every so often and 4 years isn't the end of the world.
you obviously don't know it first hand. Aside from the site being a sham (it is) and the claim probably being hot air (it is) if your conclusion is that Russian space expertise is vastly overstated then I don't think you have too much experience with it.
The Russians have world class talent and technology when it comes to space. that doesn't mean that they make great cars. As a matter of fact, it comes from making the decision as a communist power to make rockets, not cars (That is a gross over simplification, but you get the idea).
and on top of what else I said, you aren't paying very much. Out of your income taxes this year NASA (and other net transfers to russia or the ESA) probably comprised less than 50 dollars. That's the whole of NASA. What was paid to the russians is probably on the order of 2-5 dollars per year over 10 years or so.
I'm not saying that stuff is a good use of taxpayer dollars just because it doesn't use that many taxpayer dollars. I'm just saying stuff needs to be kept in perspective.
the problem is that most things with lots of materials tend to bring their gravity well with them (planets and moons). :)
I think in a lot of cases, the economics dictates that the absolute minimum be launched from earth (so an orbital assembly plant would only be a good idea if the eventual product is too large to be brought up by itself and the consumables needed for assembly are very few).
Once you are up there it is much more a task of conserving resources you have than anything else. So there better be a good reason to travel millions of miles to the asteroid belt to grab some metal.
Also, I think that most of those space industry/near sci-fi books (even though I love them, esp. islands in the sky) REALLY underestimate the engineering needed to mine, process and fashion materials into products and overestimate the usefulness of raw materials. In other words, a hunk of iron is probably less useful than a hydraulic pump or a chip for a transceiver.
that isn't to say it can't be done, but it is akin to asking a Columbus to build a mechanical clock at sea using only the materials found around him. What might be an acceptable task in Spain becomes monstrously difficult in the Atlantic.
THAT's why it wasn't ringing a bell. Thanks.
yeah, I think they used to use Grease Pencils (China Markers, some people called them) for stuff. Don't knwo if they still do.
Or Orion.With a SSTO there is a little problem, though - nobody on this planet has a clue how to do it, even in theory. Funding has little to do with this, compared to physics. My personal bet is that we won't see SSTO until we get antigravity. Chemical rockets are just as ridiculous as hot air balloons in the age of supersonic jets.
because they don't make a new US president every 4 years and because commercial space travel will never happen, amright?
I think you might be overestimating the russian space industry. they aren't "rocketing past" anyone, this press release is probably the same fluff as their manned flight to mars 10 years ago. As I posted elsewhere, this is a statement of national pride in a time of economic ease for Russia.
So all in all, we paid for them to keep their slight edge in some areas (launch vehicles, payload integration, manned space flight--although that is arguable) and paid for them not to drop too far behind in others.
All things aren't equal. he is arguing that there is a strong negative cost curve for spacecraft launches, that the FIRST launch costs bunches, but subsequent launches cost less than the one before it.
If that is true, then using more launches of smaller vehicles saves more money than doing one on a large vehicle (also spreads out risk).
We aren't saying that it IS true, necessarily. I think that the spacecraft industry does face a declining cost curve, but not THAT steep (not like chipmaking or electricity generation, with large fixed costs and no costs of production).
If there aren't economies of scale, then you are right. But if there are, then you are wrong.
I'm glad. That money meant that scientists and engineers from one of the foremost space powers in the world didn't starve or move to Iran. It meant that the AMAZING corporate memory at Krushnev and Energia (among many, many others) could be maintained when the country's ruling elite wrecked the place.
It meant that US companies and European companies could see lower costs to orbit for their products and that means that people in the US would face lower costs on things that required satellites in the first place.
It meant that the US got to get an official window into russian rocketry and that two former enemies could develop close ties between professionals and organizations.
It meant that for about 1/100th of the price of the Iraq war, we got all that, and a functioning Space Station to boot.
It meant that SOMEONE can get into space and push the species forward, who cares what language they speak when they get there.
Russians care about safety. The military didn't, or at least felt that the cost of human life was less what the west felt it was.
The current russian space agencies and companies care about safety but don't have the same apparatus as the US companies do, nor do they have the same litigation history. US companies may deal with safety in superficially different manners than russian companies but the underlying notions (sound engineering principles, learning from mistakes, valuing life) are the same.
Because gene Roddenberry was a communist?
Or more likely, because he felt that it was a city the represented a look ahead and was cosmopolitan enough to get a feel for what Roddenberry felt the future should look like?
Oh. Well that is an interesting problem. Keep in mind that the oort cloud isn't really as dense as we might think it would be. If we assume only regular matter (no dark matter), then the density of the oort cloud is fantastically low. It is higher than the density of space between the earth and Mars only because there isn't the tidal and graviational forces of a Jupiter like body to pull stuff out of it.
:)
Then, from a gravitational standpoint, we are looking at VERY small curvature imposed by the comets and such floating around. Moreover, it is probably not something that translates well into some net field. We can abstract it, think of the oort cloud as a uniform density object, but that abstraction doesn't hold well to the truth.
If we WERE to abstract it, the well created by the oort cloud might just overcome that created by the sun at distances far away from the sun. But remember, that is a spherical cow evenly distributed with milk (har, har). The reason the oort cloud exists is because the comets and dust caught up in it are orbiting the sun. So we would have to imagine that the point where that influence wanes is very close to the edge of what we might call the oort cloud.
Even IF that is the case, we would see the impact of such a well (again, keeping with our assuption of a uniformally distributed Oort cloud) on light coming into the solar system from outside it. Much like seeing like passing a star (gets 'lensed') is sort of like seeing light emanating from that star seeing light from outside the solar system would be like seeing light from inside the oort cloud. We would have been able to find this anomaly by looking at any infra-solar source than comparing it to light from outside the solar system.
In the case of pioneer, we need to explain a slight red shift growing larger as pioneer gets further from earth. a red shift seen on BOTH probes but not from (as far as we can tell) any source other than those two probes. It's a pickle.