There are two points of view regarding the horrific events which occurred (and still may be occurring) during the course of nuclear power development and testing.
The first is; we should have known better, treated people better, realized sooner what the risks and dangers are, and acted quicker to stop the process of poison and contamination to our world and its people.
The second is; we did what we had to do. The birth of nuclear power was during a wartime period, where our enemies literally had plans to subdue the US mainland militarily - if not to completely command and conquer. Later, the Cold War did more to demonstrate the terror present in nuclear weapons than any peace protest. Mutually Assured Destruction is the most terrible consequence the world ever faced - keeping in mind that it takes two to tango. Had the US ceased or limited its nuclear production capability in the 50s and 60s, it is possible (even likely) that one of our Soviet counterparts might have tried to captitilize on the imbalance of power between the two superpower nations.
Regardless of your view on this matter, one does have to admit that EVERYTHING we know about the effects of radiation on human tissue has come from the unfortunate exposure of willing and unwilling participants in nuclear tests (and weapons deployment). Moreover, we know more than the general population realizes about harmful / leathal dose levels, long-term risk factors, and exposure consequences. It comes down to politics, mostly. If you think nuclear energy is bad, then it is bad. If you think it is good, then you appeal to a minority of mostly scientific types. If you vote your conscience, then what the majority thinks will be the accepted norm. That is why there hasn't been a new nuclear power plant commissioned in the US in almost 20 years - and the licensure process begins almost 15 years before that.
Yes, Chernobyl was the proverbial "nail in the coffin" for the US nuclear power industry. But don't rush to take an unbalanced view of history. Nuclear energy is with us forever. We can learn from our mistakes and experiences to make the future better than the past, or we can continue to live in fear and discord - not even trusting our neighbors and friends who might have jobs related to the nuclear industry. Either way, the future is ours to claim.
For those who sacrificed their lives for our current state of knowledge about nuclear power, I say, "rest peacefully, dear friends. Your sacrifice was not in vain." For those who are currently suffering as a result of a nuclear test, accident, or other type of inadvertant or intentional exposure, I say, "your pain matters, and the world should care about your condition and do everything possible to aid you and prevent the same kinds of things from happening to others." But, for those who would desire to capitilize on the real hurts and invent problems and issues that aren't truly real, I say, "may you realize the pain you are continuing to cause, and see that you really aren't helping anything. Selfishness at the expense of others is always wrong."
As far as finding great resources for determining your personality type, I haven't found a better book than The Spirit Controlled Temperament by Tim Lahaye. Yes, it's a Christian book, although I think it does a great job of explaining the wiring in our heads in a very straightforward manner. In other words, even Christians will be able to understand it and get something out of it.;-)
One thing Lahaye does a GREAT job of is explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each personality type - whether it be Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, or Phlegmatic. The thesis of the book is that we need to be "tempered" - meaning that we shouldn't flaunt our strengths, and we shouldn't use our weaknesses as a crutch or excuse for bad behavior. More than that, it is filled with a good measure of helpful principles for becoming more "tempered." A good read.
Actually, if you asked NASA to get you into a sub-orbital launch, they would point you to the National Scientific Balloon Facility located at Wallops Island. $500K will get you a two day flight above 120,000 feet - close enough for most science. If you need weightlessness, a sounding rocket can also get you there, but not for as long, of course. Not everything NASA does is an overpriced iron pig.
Re:No way. Unfortunately. Way too much drag
on
Blimps... In... Space...
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Good analysis. In reality, the drag coefficient is going to be more like.2 due to the "dirty" truss structure that supports the engine and keeps the v-shape - even that's giving them some leeway. So, at 100,000 ft, the average wind velocity is 40-knots (take my word for it). This produces a drag force on the balloon of:
This means that they would need four ion engines just to keep station over a geographic point. It also means that 40-knots is their terminal air-velocity with said engines. Ya ain't gonna to get to orbit that way! Plus, their actual "orbital" craft has a MUCH bigger planform. ..
You may be right, but I hope not. Everything is political these days. What China DID do was give the US a political reason to get excited about space again. Is that so bad? It was politics that sent us to the moon in the first place. Politics has even led to the frustration prevalent in private industry which will soon produce the first commercial astronaut.
Face it - if planting a giant neon US flag on the moon for the whole world to see would bring the world closer to a point of peace and harmony (and I'm not saying it would, mind you) - then "politically" every lawmaker and budget director would be standing in line to have their name attached to it.
Forest fires typically occur in mountains. Mountains are usually between 1,000 feet and 13,000 feet tall (300 - 4000 meters). Forest fires usually occur in the summertime. Forest fires make a lot of hot, dry air. The net result of this is a substantial increase in the density altitude in the region around a forest fire.
The density altitude is the altitude the airplane "sees" - taking into account air density, temperature, humidity, etc. Above a 5,000ft density altitude (~1,500m), most airplanes have a hard time just taking off with a full fuel load, much less performing high-g maneuvers close to the ground. At Las Cruces, New Mexico, the airport here is at about 4,500ft (1,370m) mean airfield elevation. Density altitudes above 7,000 feet (2,130m) are not uncommon - even early in the morning.
To operate under these conditions, pilots simply reduce their passenger and fuel loads. I haven't done the math, but I suspect that to make a 747 light enough to operate safely "down low" at a high density altitude, it wouldn't be able to carry much more water than the C-130 tankers we already use. Plus, a loaded 747 would tend to perform like an elephant on ice skates - a consequence of its swept wing and turbine engines - which don't "spool up" as fast as props. There would be zero margin for error.
Actually, if you have ever driven US-70 over San Augustin Pass toward White Sands, you'll notice that the base HQ for White Sands Missile Range looks EXACTLY like Mos Eisley from the vantage point Luke and Ben had when he made the comment.
I'd get the winning can while boarding an airplane.
(Me, opening can:) Hey - I think I won!
(Flight Attendant:) "At this time, please turn off all personal electronic devices. Your flight crew will inform you when it is safe to use approved electronic devices in flight."
That is a terrific question. The jet stream only is a factor in the 28,000 - 40,000 foot altitude range or so. Nevertheless, these vehicles will need to transit through on the way up and down, won't they?
The electric propellers need to be able to control the craft at all altitudes - a prop that is 80% efficient at sea-level is likely to only be 25% efficient at 80,000ft. The watts start adding up quick to keep these beasts moving against the wind. I think it's on the order of 10 to 30 kilowatts that they'll have to be able to turn - even if it is just for a short time to counter a wind gust.
Thanks for posting one of the few intelligent questions/comments on this thread today. I was beginning to get discouraged.
The laser is invisible - off in the infrared somewhere. You could only probably see the beam at night as it ionizes the trace amounts of noble gases in the atmosphere. Then again, a bird or a swarm of beetles flying through the beam would be pretty spectacular. ..
I don't have any personal experience with ingesting extreme amounts of coffee (unless you consider 8 cups/day extreme) - but a game we used to play with our church youth group was to get two gallon jugs of WHOLE milk, pick two (un)lucky participants from the crowd, and give them five minutes to polish off the gallon. The first to finish wins, although alternately, the last to puke also wins. Our chugger/puker ratio was 1:1 over the history of that game.
True about the Moon and all, but the easiest way to explain a term like escape velocity is to keep things simple - the classic 2-body problem. (Incidently, I only used the Sun as a distance reference.) Once you shut your engines off in a 2-body framespace, you are a ballistic object. Your possible trajectories are then either parabolic (moving away from the Earth, and falling back to the surface), elliptical (orbiting, counting a circle as a "perfect" ellipse), or hyperbolic (having achieved escape velocity, curving for awhile, but then proceeding on a straight, unimpeded line away from the Earth).
It just so happens that ballistic trajectories are the most efficient way to move from point A to point B in terms of fuel / mass. Currently, that is.
Indeed, all you would need to do to lift a 5-pound object above the Earth's atmosphere would be to supply an engine which can provide 5.1-pounds of thrust for a VERY long time. Trouble is, when you shut the engine off (or ran out of fuel) you would just fall back to Earth unless you somehow managed to achieve orbital trajectory and velocity. You do the math on how much fuel that would take (a lot - more than you could ever possibly carry). Without escape velocity, the Earth has you - forever! It doesn't matter if you travel as far as the Sun - unless you have escape velocity with respect to the Earth, you're going home. Gaining escape velocity with respect to the Sun is another problem. ..
For the more technically-mided folks out there, the idea is to achieve higher kinetic energy than you currently posess in gravitational potential energy with respect to the Earth. The farther away you go from Earth, the higher your potential energy is (the longer you "fall" to get back to our planet) - so you have to integrate from the surface of the Earth to infinity altitude to determine the total energy you would need to escape the Earth's gravity. The masses cancel each other out - and you're left with approximately 25,000 mph for your escape velocity.
Be nice to me - I haven't had my coffee yet today.
The "Golden Age" of Sci-Fi. . .
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
A whole Depleted Uranium (DU) bullet is about as radioactive as the tiny bit of Nickel-63 or Americium found in the smoke detector in your house. Lead paint is more toxic when ingested than DU. A smoke detector would kill you if you fired it from the main gun of an M1-A2 tank. ..
DU just happens to be a terrific tank killer, more due to its pyrophoric properties than its hardness - it burns in air when heated to 2000 degrees caused by the friction of busting through steel. This has the effect of cooking off any ammo and fuel left in the tank. The tank basically blows itself up. As for the DU ammo that our airplanes shoot - the bullets are very small, meaning our planes can carry a lot of them. Volume is usually a bigger problem on a fighter than weight.
DU isn't free, either. Most of the DU comes from the Department of Energy - they manage our nuke arsenal and our commercial nuke power programs. The Department of Defense owns our bullets and tank shells. They have to buy them just like any other item (toilet paper, hammers, etc.)
Did you know that when you fly in an airliner, you are jetting around with 500 pounds of DU? It is used as counterweights and balance arms for the control surfaces on most commercial jets. Its high density (weight/volume) makes it ideal for this. When a plane crashes, there is some risk for DU contamination at the crash site. But then, when the fuel burns, the plastic melts, all the other hazardous cargo that ordinary, unsuspecting passengers carry on every day without thinking about it goes down, there are problems, too.
It's kinda fun to bash DU, but more US citizens are killed every year by lead bullets than all the foreign military and civilians killed by DU. Ever.
Sextants are jammed in battlefield environments through the use of magnesium flares on parachutes. The bright lights in the sky prevent you from seeing stars (unless you look AT the flares, then you see lots of stars when you close your eyes.) It's an intersting fact (and well documented in Ron Howard's film) that the Apollo 13 crew couldn't use their sextant due to all the bright space debris floating around their capsule.
To have more than 10-degrees accuracy with a compass, you need to know where you are geographically in order to correct for magnetic-north offset. See point number 1 above.
It's imagination. The aviation industry used to have a handful of folks who could imagine and conceptualize the darndest vehicles - and a slew of brilliant engineers to turn those concepts into reality (or dis-prove the concept based on technical limitations, materiaks, etc.)
Nowadays, money issues and the eternal pursuit of higher profit margins has forced many of the dreamers out of the big aerospace companies and into places where there simply isn't the technical base to turn their ideas into anything at all. That's where the X-Prize will hopefully bear fruit - IF (when) the prize is claimed.
How long did it take for Trans-Atlantic airlines to start showing profits after Lindy made his flight? It's a rhetorical question, but the answer might be interesting, nonetheless.
FlightGear with the Jbsim Flight Dynamics Model (FDM) can do these things. Many researchers use it for just what you are looking for. Quoting from the Jbsim site;
The aircraft configuration file is in XML format (more or less), and contains information about mass properties, landing gear positioning, propulsion, etc. Of course, the aircraft aerodynamic characteristics must also be described. This is done by entering the stability derivative information on one of three ways:
A static value
A one-dimensional table (i.e. CDalpha as a function of mach)
A two dimensional table (i.e. Cnbeta as a function of mach and altitude
We are also looking at being able to specify stability derivatives given aircraft geometry, using standard equations you might find in a textbook, as well as being able to specify them as polynomial functions.
Moreover, FlightGear, because it is open source, can be tweaked, modified, optimized. ..whatever. There are several additional open-source tools available for FlightGear to aid in doing terrain modeling, aircraft design, etc.
In the next decade we will see the first of a totally new class of orbiting space telescopes - large arrays of sensors spanning many tens of miles across. These will be true orbiting interferometers which will bring amazing optical resolution to "near-earth" explorers.
The ramifications for earth-based planetary exploration are huge. Currently, work is being performed on how to keep such a satellite array in perfect alignment. Low-thrust ion engines and tide-stabilizing configurations are flying as we speak.
NASA has plans to launch the first Space-Based Interferometer in 2009. Taking into account the inevitable schedule slide, we should start seeing some really cool pictures in about 2012. AND, since the array will live relatively close to our "Big Blue Marble," it might also be a reason to keep the ISS and the manned space program in general running for another decade. All it takes is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
Slashdot Mirror
There are two points of view regarding the horrific events which occurred (and still may be occurring) during the course of nuclear power development and testing.
The first is; we should have known better, treated people better, realized sooner what the risks and dangers are, and acted quicker to stop the process of poison and contamination to our world and its people.
The second is; we did what we had to do. The birth of nuclear power was during a wartime period, where our enemies literally had plans to subdue the US mainland militarily - if not to completely command and conquer. Later, the Cold War did more to demonstrate the terror present in nuclear weapons than any peace protest. Mutually Assured Destruction is the most terrible consequence the world ever faced - keeping in mind that it takes two to tango. Had the US ceased or limited its nuclear production capability in the 50s and 60s, it is possible (even likely) that one of our Soviet counterparts might have tried to captitilize on the imbalance of power between the two superpower nations.
Regardless of your view on this matter, one does have to admit that EVERYTHING we know about the effects of radiation on human tissue has come from the unfortunate exposure of willing and unwilling participants in nuclear tests (and weapons deployment). Moreover, we know more than the general population realizes about harmful / leathal dose levels, long-term risk factors, and exposure consequences. It comes down to politics, mostly. If you think nuclear energy is bad, then it is bad. If you think it is good, then you appeal to a minority of mostly scientific types. If you vote your conscience, then what the majority thinks will be the accepted norm. That is why there hasn't been a new nuclear power plant commissioned in the US in almost 20 years - and the licensure process begins almost 15 years before that.
Yes, Chernobyl was the proverbial "nail in the coffin" for the US nuclear power industry. But don't rush to take an unbalanced view of history. Nuclear energy is with us forever. We can learn from our mistakes and experiences to make the future better than the past, or we can continue to live in fear and discord - not even trusting our neighbors and friends who might have jobs related to the nuclear industry. Either way, the future is ours to claim.
For those who sacrificed their lives for our current state of knowledge about nuclear power, I say, "rest peacefully, dear friends. Your sacrifice was not in vain." For those who are currently suffering as a result of a nuclear test, accident, or other type of inadvertant or intentional exposure, I say, "your pain matters, and the world should care about your condition and do everything possible to aid you and prevent the same kinds of things from happening to others." But, for those who would desire to capitilize on the real hurts and invent problems and issues that aren't truly real, I say, "may you realize the pain you are continuing to cause, and see that you really aren't helping anything. Selfishness at the expense of others is always wrong."
As far as finding great resources for determining your personality type, I haven't found a better book than The Spirit Controlled Temperament by Tim Lahaye. Yes, it's a Christian book, although I think it does a great job of explaining the wiring in our heads in a very straightforward manner. In other words, even Christians will be able to understand it and get something out of it. ;-)
One thing Lahaye does a GREAT job of is explaining the strengths and weaknesses of each personality type - whether it be Melancholy, Choleric, Sanguine, or Phlegmatic. The thesis of the book is that we need to be "tempered" - meaning that we shouldn't flaunt our strengths, and we shouldn't use our weaknesses as a crutch or excuse for bad behavior. More than that, it is filled with a good measure of helpful principles for becoming more "tempered." A good read.
Actually, if you asked NASA to get you into a sub-orbital launch, they would point you to the National Scientific Balloon Facility located at Wallops Island. $500K will get you a two day flight above 120,000 feet - close enough for most science. If you need weightlessness, a sounding rocket can also get you there, but not for as long, of course. Not everything NASA does is an overpriced iron pig.
Good analysis. In reality, the drag coefficient is going to be more like .2 due to the "dirty" truss structure that supports the engine and keeps the v-shape - even that's giving them some leeway. So, at 100,000 ft, the average wind velocity is 40-knots (take my word for it). This produces a drag force on the balloon of:
.5 * rho * Cd * A * V^2
.5 * 1.7E-5 * .2 * 50 * (40kt * 1.69(ft/sec)/kt)^2 = 0.4lb.
.
This means that they would need four ion engines just to keep station over a geographic point. It also means that 40-knots is their terminal air-velocity with said engines. Ya ain't gonna to get to orbit that way! Plus, their actual "orbital" craft has a MUCH bigger planform. .
You may be right, but I hope not. Everything is political these days. What China DID do was give the US a political reason to get excited about space again. Is that so bad? It was politics that sent us to the moon in the first place. Politics has even led to the frustration prevalent in private industry which will soon produce the first commercial astronaut.
Face it - if planting a giant neon US flag on the moon for the whole world to see would bring the world closer to a point of peace and harmony (and I'm not saying it would, mind you) - then "politically" every lawmaker and budget director would be standing in line to have their name attached to it.
Forest fires typically occur in mountains. Mountains are usually between 1,000 feet and 13,000 feet tall (300 - 4000 meters). Forest fires usually occur in the summertime. Forest fires make a lot of hot, dry air. The net result of this is a substantial increase in the density altitude in the region around a forest fire.
The density altitude is the altitude the airplane "sees" - taking into account air density, temperature, humidity, etc. Above a 5,000ft density altitude (~1,500m), most airplanes have a hard time just taking off with a full fuel load, much less performing high-g maneuvers close to the ground. At Las Cruces, New Mexico, the airport here is at about 4,500ft (1,370m) mean airfield elevation. Density altitudes above 7,000 feet (2,130m) are not uncommon - even early in the morning.
To operate under these conditions, pilots simply reduce their passenger and fuel loads. I haven't done the math, but I suspect that to make a 747 light enough to operate safely "down low" at a high density altitude, it wouldn't be able to carry much more water than the C-130 tankers we already use. Plus, a loaded 747 would tend to perform like an elephant on ice skates - a consequence of its swept wing and turbine engines - which don't "spool up" as fast as props. There would be zero margin for error.
Or perhaps "Microsoft presents Spaceship-One-XP competing for the Pepsi Ansari X-Prize!"
Actually, if you have ever driven US-70 over San Augustin Pass toward White Sands, you'll notice that the base HQ for White Sands Missile Range looks EXACTLY like Mos Eisley from the vantage point Luke and Ben had when he made the comment.
We must be cautious.
I'd get the winning can while boarding an airplane.
(Me, opening can:) Hey - I think I won!
(Flight Attendant:) "At this time, please turn off all personal electronic devices.
Your flight crew will inform you when it is safe to use approved electronic devices in flight."
(Me:) --AARRRGGGH!
That is a terrific question. The jet stream only is a factor in the 28,000 - 40,000 foot altitude range or so. Nevertheless, these vehicles will need to transit through on the way up and down, won't they?
The electric propellers need to be able to control the craft at all altitudes - a prop that is 80% efficient at sea-level is likely to only be 25% efficient at 80,000ft. The watts start adding up quick to keep these beasts moving against the wind. I think it's on the order of 10 to 30 kilowatts that they'll have to be able to turn - even if it is just for a short time to counter a wind gust.
Thanks for posting one of the few intelligent questions/comments on this thread today. I was beginning to get discouraged.
The laser is invisible - off in the infrared somewhere. You could only probably see the beam at night as it ionizes the trace amounts of noble gases in the atmosphere. Then again, a bird or a swarm of beetles flying through the beam would be pretty spectacular. . .
Don't look at laser with remaining eye.
Ya don't have to orbit to win the X-Prize. Ya just have to blast off and land, and do it again in two weeks.
I don't have any personal experience with ingesting extreme amounts of coffee (unless you consider 8 cups/day extreme) - but a game we used to play with our church youth group was to get two gallon jugs of WHOLE milk, pick two (un)lucky participants from the crowd, and give them five minutes to polish off the gallon. The first to finish wins, although alternately, the last to puke also wins. Our chugger/puker ratio was 1:1 over the history of that game.
True about the Moon and all, but the easiest way to explain a term like escape velocity is to keep things simple - the classic 2-body problem. (Incidently, I only used the Sun as a distance reference.) Once you shut your engines off in a 2-body framespace, you are a ballistic object. Your possible trajectories are then either parabolic (moving away from the Earth, and falling back to the surface), elliptical (orbiting, counting a circle as a "perfect" ellipse), or hyperbolic (having achieved escape velocity, curving for awhile, but then proceeding on a straight, unimpeded line away from the Earth).
It just so happens that ballistic trajectories are the most efficient way to move from point A to point B in terms of fuel / mass. Currently, that is.
Indeed, all you would need to do to lift a 5-pound object above the Earth's atmosphere would be to supply an engine which can provide 5.1-pounds of thrust for a VERY long time. Trouble is, when you shut the engine off (or ran out of fuel) you would just fall back to Earth unless you somehow managed to achieve orbital trajectory and velocity. You do the math on how much fuel that would take (a lot - more than you could ever possibly carry). Without escape velocity, the Earth has you - forever! It doesn't matter if you travel as far as the Sun - unless you have escape velocity with respect to the Earth, you're going home. Gaining escape velocity with respect to the Sun is another problem. . .
For the more technically-mided folks out there, the idea is to achieve higher kinetic energy than you currently posess in gravitational potential energy with respect to the Earth. The farther away you go from Earth, the higher your potential energy is (the longer you "fall" to get back to our planet) - so you have to integrate from the surface of the Earth to infinity altitude to determine the total energy you would need to escape the Earth's gravity. The masses cancel each other out - and you're left with approximately 25,000 mph for your escape velocity.
Be nice to me - I haven't had my coffee yet today.
is 14. Okay, maybe pre-teen.
A whole Depleted Uranium (DU) bullet is about as radioactive as the tiny bit of Nickel-63 or Americium found in the smoke detector in your house. Lead paint is more toxic when ingested than DU. A smoke detector would kill you if you fired it from the main gun of an M1-A2 tank. . .
DU just happens to be a terrific tank killer, more due to its pyrophoric properties than its hardness - it burns in air when heated to 2000 degrees caused by the friction of busting through steel. This has the effect of cooking off any ammo and fuel left in the tank. The tank basically blows itself up. As for the DU ammo that our airplanes shoot - the bullets are very small, meaning our planes can carry a lot of them. Volume is usually a bigger problem on a fighter than weight.
DU isn't free, either. Most of the DU comes from the Department of Energy - they manage our nuke arsenal and our commercial nuke power programs. The Department of Defense owns our bullets and tank shells. They have to buy them just like any other item (toilet paper, hammers, etc.)
Did you know that when you fly in an airliner, you are jetting around with 500 pounds of DU? It is used as counterweights and balance arms for the control surfaces on most commercial jets. Its high density (weight/volume) makes it ideal for this. When a plane crashes, there is some risk for DU contamination at the crash site. But then, when the fuel burns, the plastic melts, all the other hazardous cargo that ordinary, unsuspecting passengers carry on every day without thinking about it goes down, there are problems, too.
It's kinda fun to bash DU, but more US citizens are killed every year by lead bullets than all the foreign military and civilians killed by DU. Ever.
Sextants are jammed in battlefield environments through the use of magnesium flares on parachutes. The bright lights in the sky prevent you from seeing stars (unless you look AT the flares, then you see lots of stars when you close your eyes.) It's an intersting fact (and well documented in Ron Howard's film) that the Apollo 13 crew couldn't use their sextant due to all the bright space debris floating around their capsule.
To have more than 10-degrees accuracy with a compass, you need to know where you are geographically in order to correct for magnetic-north offset. See point number 1 above.
. .
You tried these guys?
Little PC's
It's imagination. The aviation industry used to have a handful of folks who could imagine and conceptualize the darndest vehicles - and a slew of brilliant engineers to turn those concepts into reality (or dis-prove the concept based on technical limitations, materiaks, etc.)
Nowadays, money issues and the eternal pursuit of higher profit margins has forced many of the dreamers out of the big aerospace companies and into places where there simply isn't the technical base to turn their ideas into anything at all. That's where the X-Prize will hopefully bear fruit - IF (when) the prize is claimed.
How long did it take for Trans-Atlantic airlines to start showing profits after Lindy made his flight? It's a rhetorical question, but the answer might be interesting, nonetheless.
Moreover, FlightGear, because it is open source, can be tweaked, modified, optimized. .
I still have the plastic "turbolaser blast" from a 70's vintage Colonial Viper up my nose.
I'm not old. I'm 37.
In the next decade we will see the first of a totally new class of orbiting space telescopes - large arrays of sensors spanning many tens of miles across. These will be true orbiting interferometers which will bring amazing optical resolution to "near-earth" explorers.
The ramifications for earth-based planetary exploration are huge. Currently, work is being performed on how to keep such a satellite array in perfect alignment. Low-thrust ion engines and tide-stabilizing configurations are flying as we speak.
NASA has plans to launch the first Space-Based Interferometer in 2009. Taking into account the inevitable schedule slide, we should start seeing some really cool pictures in about 2012. AND, since the array will live relatively close to our "Big Blue Marble," it might also be a reason to keep the ISS and the manned space program in general running for another decade. All it takes is $$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$.
A balanced view is typically the best one. HEAR HEAR for folks who know how to properly implement technology!