Those are not lessons. They're not solutions to problems. They're solutions to symptoms of deeper problems.
To say that the only useful thing we learned from Challenger is that everything should be inspected more thoroughly on the ground before launch is missing the point. Perhaps the most illuminating writing on that particular incident came from Richard Feynman in his appendix to the Rogers Commission report, where he noted that NASA already knew about the problem of ring erosion from inspections performed on hardware from earlier flights. What NASA screwed up was fixing problems that they had already found. According to Feynman, it was the blind, irrational confidence that NASA management had in its hardware combined with a poor understanding of statistics and developing models from experimental data on the engineering side that led to disaster.
I have not read the report and analyses of the Columbia accident, but I imagine it also has deeper, more useful lessons in it than that which you are listing.
Dammit Jim, I'm a molecular biologist, NOT a structural engineer
Jesus, no kidding. Stick to molecular biology and let the engineers worry about whether this is a problem (it's not, you certainly can't get structural data from the outer dimensions of a building alone).
...but I'd rather see my tax dollars going to research to find cheaper, more efficient water purifying techniques...
Funny you should mention that, one of the problems they're working on on ISS right now involves the design of newer, better water purifiers to recycle onboard water. The ISS right now is functioning as a real zero-G test lab for equipment that may eventually accompany a team to Mars -- invaluable research because there is no other way to get that kind of performance data over an extended period of time without actually having it in orbit.
I don't think this approach would work with space sails for one single reason: you are neglecting the effect of a sailboat's keel or daggerboard in the mechanics of upwind sailing. Without a keel, you will slide sideways because there is nothing in the stationary medium of water to resist the pressure differential produced by the sails acting as airfoils.
Many lawyers specialize in a certain field of law and work in it for most of their professional careers. Some fields, like medical malpractice, demand this sort of specialization.
Not really. Unless carbon nanotubes have thermal expansion characteristics similar to those of concrete (like steel does), it would not be a very useful reinforcing material, as thermal fluctuations would cause fracturing.
I KNOW part of that was because they were underprivileged kids who weren't expected to do anything.
If by "underprivileged" you mean "did nearly everything MIT did on less than 1/10 of the budget", then you would be correct. That's good engineering, plain and simple. Of course MIT got more points in the objective category, they had all the money in the world to throw at a working solution. But that's not engineering, that's more like science.
There are some benefits, though. Impurities in titanium are very easy to spot, as they tend to discolor.
Why would you want to use pure titanium, or even commercially pure (CP) titanium? Pure titanium is more fragile than most commercially available alloys of titanium.
Yeah, MIT, you could make a robotic alarm clock that springs legs and runs off in the corner, or you could just disable the snooze button after the first use in a given alarm session.
I guess the second option is too simple and elegant and thus not flashy enough for MIT. Whatever - I know that good engineering is found when there is nothing left to remove.
What a waste of time. What are they trying to accomplish by still working on the HURD? Linux has already far surpassed it in every catagory (hardware support, software support, usability, performance, etc.) and is just as Free as the HURD, so what gives?
On the other hand, I guess I'm not the only one of this mind, as it obviously wouldn't have taken 20 years to get to the point where a program can finally run on it if everybody else with development skills didn't also believe it a total waste of their time.
I'm not robotics expert, I'm just an engineering student, but it seems to me that humanoid robots are a sort of marketing victory more than being a genuine breakthrough.
Most industrial robots I've seen don't need a humanoid form at all, and I can imagine several cases were the humanoid form is actually an impairment to getting work done. Why not go with more structurally efficient designs, like a spider, instead of focusing on bipedal bots for uses requiring ambulation?
This is a common fallacy. Shifting the burden of power generation from individual cars to power plants does save oil, simply because the power plants are larger operations that don't have to take factors such as weight into consideration and can run a much more efficient operation than the combustion that takes place in a car's engine. Car engines dump an absurd amount of waste heat to ambient and cannot reach combustion temperatures even close to that in, say, a gas turbine at a natural gas power plant.
At the same time, it is quite likely that the power generated in a particular area doesn't come from burning fossil fuels at all - many areas of the United States are serviced by hydroelectric, nuclear and even wind or solar power.
I would imagine in space you will be entering and exiting the structure a whole lot less than you would at 1 atm of air. Mechanisms for controlling pressure loss and for keeping pressure above ambient have to be taken into consideration. These are devices that will likely make the structure less portable.
Which isn't to say that positive internal air pressure isn't an integral part of some earth-bound structures. Several large sports domes (the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY, for example) use positive internal pressure to keep the roofs inflated. But, of course, these structures are quite a bit more permanent than the sort of "field hospital" structures being discussed in the article.
Well, speaking as an engineering student, the main problem I can see with making a structure where all load-bearing components are strictly made out of fiberglass is that fiber-reinforced plastics (the catagory into which fiberglass and carbon fiber composites, among others, fall) are only really strong in tension, and even then, only along the axes parallel or close to parallel to the fiber orientations. If you add in compressive loads to the structure (as is sure to happen in any structure I can think of), the material's strength is dramatically reduced, meaning you either have to use a whole lot more material (and thus add more weight that the structure has to support) or switch materials.
Concrete just happens to be very effective at handling compressive loads, and when reinforced with steel rebar or the like, can handle tensile loads in a reasonable manner as well. This is probably the reason that cement is used in lieu of epoxies and other plastics - it has better load-bearing characteristics under compression.
IMAP solved all these problems years ago, and isn't run by one big corporation in the business of information warehousing and other dubious practices. You can access all your mail from any client anywhere with a network connection and access to your IMAP server, and proper searching is taken care of by competently-programmed clients, anyway.
I personally have deep reservations about throwing all my personal data into GMail - there's no telling what exactly Google will be doing with that information in the future.
What on earth are they thinking? That by boosting the page rank of one particular page nobody will notice the other nine pages that link to online poker sites in a Google search? They are so locked in the mentality of link whoring and otherwise abusing Google's search results that they see everything in the world as how it is related to Google. Imagine a mechanical engineer trying to design an auto transmission by putting up a page with a bunch of links to the Wikipedia entry for "Automobile transmission" and hoping Google spiders it.
Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.
Slashdot Mirror
That is not science, it's engineering. It may be research engineering, but he's not discovering fundamentally new ways in which the universe works.
*YAWN*
Forced to agree to the terms of the BSD license? What is there to agree to? It's about as hands-off as you can get.
Come on, when have legitimate safety concerns stopped overzealous NASA management from meeting meaningless and arbitrary deadlines in the past?
To say that the only useful thing we learned from Challenger is that everything should be inspected more thoroughly on the ground before launch is missing the point. Perhaps the most illuminating writing on that particular incident came from Richard Feynman in his appendix to the Rogers Commission report, where he noted that NASA already knew about the problem of ring erosion from inspections performed on hardware from earlier flights. What NASA screwed up was fixing problems that they had already found. According to Feynman, it was the blind, irrational confidence that NASA management had in its hardware combined with a poor understanding of statistics and developing models from experimental data on the engineering side that led to disaster.
I have not read the report and analyses of the Columbia accident, but I imagine it also has deeper, more useful lessons in it than that which you are listing.
Jesus, no kidding. Stick to molecular biology and let the engineers worry about whether this is a problem (it's not, you certainly can't get structural data from the outer dimensions of a building alone).
Funny you should mention that, one of the problems they're working on on ISS right now involves the design of newer, better water purifiers to recycle onboard water. The ISS right now is functioning as a real zero-G test lab for equipment that may eventually accompany a team to Mars -- invaluable research because there is no other way to get that kind of performance data over an extended period of time without actually having it in orbit.
Nope... I'm not seeing it, and you haven't explained anything.
I don't think this approach would work with space sails for one single reason: you are neglecting the effect of a sailboat's keel or daggerboard in the mechanics of upwind sailing. Without a keel, you will slide sideways because there is nothing in the stationary medium of water to resist the pressure differential produced by the sails acting as airfoils.
I guess that would depend on whether spent shells are ejected from the right side or not.
Many lawyers specialize in a certain field of law and work in it for most of their professional careers. Some fields, like medical malpractice, demand this sort of specialization.
Why not just use a liquid-vapor phase evaporative cooling cycle?
Not really. Unless carbon nanotubes have thermal expansion characteristics similar to those of concrete (like steel does), it would not be a very useful reinforcing material, as thermal fluctuations would cause fracturing.
I do wish that they'd state whether that is thermal efficiency or second law (isentropic) efficiency.
If by "underprivileged" you mean "did nearly everything MIT did on less than 1/10 of the budget", then you would be correct. That's good engineering, plain and simple. Of course MIT got more points in the objective category, they had all the money in the world to throw at a working solution. But that's not engineering, that's more like science.
Why would you want to use pure titanium, or even commercially pure (CP) titanium? Pure titanium is more fragile than most commercially available alloys of titanium.
I guess the second option is too simple and elegant and thus not flashy enough for MIT. Whatever - I know that good engineering is found when there is nothing left to remove.
On the other hand, I guess I'm not the only one of this mind, as it obviously wouldn't have taken 20 years to get to the point where a program can finally run on it if everybody else with development skills didn't also believe it a total waste of their time.
Most industrial robots I've seen don't need a humanoid form at all, and I can imagine several cases were the humanoid form is actually an impairment to getting work done. Why not go with more structurally efficient designs, like a spider, instead of focusing on bipedal bots for uses requiring ambulation?
At the same time, it is quite likely that the power generated in a particular area doesn't come from burning fossil fuels at all - many areas of the United States are serviced by hydroelectric, nuclear and even wind or solar power.
Are we talking boron fibers? S-type glass fibers? High strength carbon fibers? Most of those seem rather heavy to be sending into orbit...
Which isn't to say that positive internal air pressure isn't an integral part of some earth-bound structures. Several large sports domes (the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY, for example) use positive internal pressure to keep the roofs inflated. But, of course, these structures are quite a bit more permanent than the sort of "field hospital" structures being discussed in the article.
Concrete just happens to be very effective at handling compressive loads, and when reinforced with steel rebar or the like, can handle tensile loads in a reasonable manner as well. This is probably the reason that cement is used in lieu of epoxies and other plastics - it has better load-bearing characteristics under compression.
I personally have deep reservations about throwing all my personal data into GMail - there's no telling what exactly Google will be doing with that information in the future.
Well, no surprises here: it turns out that the vapid tools who maintain "blogs" really are as stupid as they seem.