Constellation was never going to happen, and neither will their current PR-only plans.
Actually a lot of the R&D they were talking about was already happening until the unfunded "Mars, btiches!" mandate, which Constellation is the mutated remnants of, caused them to be put on hold for budget reasons.
If all NASA manages to do is develop the technology and run proof-of-concept missions, that's fine with me. That's vastly superior than a plan whose ideal end-goal technology-wise is to take the Shuttle stack and make it suck slightly less.
I'm sad Constellation is canceled, but I was also expecting it from the moment it was announced.
Why would you be sad that piece of shit program was canceled, especially if you knew it was never going to result in its already mediocre ambitions?
Presidential initiatives that won't bear fruit for ten years or more aren't going to happen, period. They're scoring political points, that's all. (I'm skeptical of anything more than five years out to be honest, but those things actually happen on occasion)
Well gee, seems to me you should be pretty happy with a plan that focuses on near-term R&D in specific, but is intentionally vague and non-committal on long-term mission plans. There's no "Mars in 25 years or bust!" in this plan. It's "Develop new technologies and space-based capabilities, which could potentially lead to a future mission to Mars".
I mean we agree that NASA gets jerked around and Presidential initiatives with decade-plus timelines are unlikely to happen. This plan seems to realistically confront that reality.
Yet then at the same time you ding the plan because it doesn't include some specific plan to leave earth orbit on a decade-plus timeline and call that "nixing manned space flight".
Which is it? If we agree on the reality of NASA budgets and planning, then manned space flight by your definition was already nixed and the new plan just addresses that reality by not continuing to pour money down a useless hole. Hell, if we can actually develop some new technology, maybe the next time we decide to go to the moon it'll be a program that can be done within the constraints of political reality.
damn if they aren't doing a good job apologizing for putting NASA on the back burner. Effectively ending US leadership in space is about the sum of it, with all the required "forward looking" related buzzwords.
I don't understand how people can keep saying things like this. Specifically the part where you use the progressive tense, like you aren't describing the status quo.
NASA is already on the back burner! Hello? NASA's budget is increasing under the new plan. You can argue the increase is inadequate if you want, which is just another way of saying the current budget is even more inadequate yet.
So, uh, yeah, they have the resources now to develop x,y, and z. Well duh, your not doing any expensive launches your bound to have money for other things.
Yes, duh, having a program that is overbudget and underfunded to begin with means you can't do other interesting things. Constellation has already resulted in interesting projects being killed. Now we can develop the things we should have been developing all along. If we hadn't been wasting time on recreating Apollo just so nostalgia hounds can say that we're doing something, we might actually have some of the tech being talked about.
That people can actually try to paint developing new technology that will expand our space capabilities like it's a bad thing compared to doing the same thing as 40 years ago is just mind boggling.
The problem is, research is not exciting to the public. It does not capture the imagination.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but neither does the hypothetical future of recreating the past. Hell, people stopped caring about the Apollo missions before the project even ended.
On the other hand, the Mars rovers seem to have captured a lot of people's imagination.
Why? Because it's something we had never done before! I think you highly overestimate the PR value of re-doing the same thing we did half a century ago, just to prove we can.
Especially when it's still fifteen years off at best.
What those articles do is nothing more than spew a well rehearsed apology for going nowhere.
And I see this and every other defense of Constellation as nothing but a self-deluding apology for doing nothing we haven't already.
It's just a sad attempt to regain the lost glory of the 60s, when we truly were leaders, yet in reality an even sadder admission that we can't do any better than recreate the past.
Maybe the new plan won't pan out. Maybe none of the new technologies that will be developed will ever result in their actual use in a real mission. But I do know it's a plan that has the potential to expand our horizons. Constellation, even if it was a smashing success, would not.
If you say so. But we weren't doing any manned spaceflight anyway then. Oh yeah we had a plan to one day do the same thing we've already done, at the cost of most other interesting things NASA is doing, like developing a way to go beyond what we did 40 years ago.
If having an underfunded a underambitious boondoggle like Constellation on the books that will, at best, recreate the past in another 15 years assuming it doesn't keep slipping, is all you want, that's fine. But if that program's hypothetical future success counts as "not nixing manned space flight", then the new NASA plan to use new technology to plan a true successor to Apollo, one that follows its spirit of pushing beyond what mankind has done before, should count to.
And it won't do any good if we're not inspiring future scientists and engineers.
"Boy, I sure am inspired by the idea that maybe in fifteen years if we're really lucky, we just might send somebody to do the same thing we did in the 60's! Yeah, hypothetically leaving boot marks on the moon for the 7th time sure gets my imagination pumping. I dream of a future, recreating the past!"
You know why Apollo worked? We set goals and a date, and the figuring out took care of itself.
Is that how you think it works? The figuring takes care of itself? I'd say you have a bright future in middle management, but you forgot to mention budget.
Here's what setting a goal and a date got us: A program that was, at best, a rehash of Apollo which involved zero "figuring out" of the real problems facing space exploration today. Oh, but because the ones who created this program were also terrible managers they forgot to provide a budget and so it was behind schedule and it's doubtful it ever would have achieved it's decidedly mediocre goals.
Constellation is the mutated offspring of the unfunded 'Mars, Bitches!' plan. It was nothing but a weight dragging NASA down, preventing it from working on useful projects to focus on a sad recreation of our glory days.
LOL, I had completely the wrong idea when I read your post. I was like "What bizarre hexagonal oscillations could have been seen on the planet Mercury?!"
I don't think they were talking about sunflowers, they said origami, as in shape, not tracking, which is what these new panels are designed to obviate.
Still it's an interesting idea... except we did already adopt the technique in the same sense we adopted the technique of turning sunlight into usable energy. I'm not sure why you think sunflower's tracking ability is free. Any man-made replica is almost certainly not going to be, at least not existing ones. What are we supposed to learn from the sunflower?
If constellation hadn't been canceled, the perception of exclusivity for Russia would not be diminished in the silghtest since we still wouldn't have a new crew vehicle for the forseeable future.
Private industry is going to be providing rides to the ISS before the Constellation could have even hypothetically done so, with reality indicating it would be much much longer than that.
Neither situation would affect the prices Russia can charge for Soyuz rides today. As someone else indicated, they're probably just trying to milk the cash cow as much as they can while we have no other options, before e.g. SpaceX joins up and we have much cheaper options.
Or more accurately, we don't have a balanced budget, and we do have a space program that isn't just an underfunded boondoggle rehash of Apollo that would make nostalgiaphiles happy but do nothing to advance the state of the art, but rather designed to actually increase access to space and develop better things to do and ways to move around once there.
Seriously, am I the only one sitting here thinking, "Thanks, Obama for your generous budget slashing our manned space program"?
No, you're not the only one who incorrectly thinks he slashed the budget when he actually increased it. Lots of people wrongly think that canceling Constellation means abandoning manned space programs, when in reality there will be more need for manned space travel because of extending the ISS' life.
All it means is abandoning a stupid program that would have tried -- and failed -- to re-do Apollo. Why talk about the future if all we care about is recreating the past? The future is in the basic technological R&D that will make future things like landing on the moon seem easy in comparison to how Constellation was going to do it.
Yeah, he gutted the future that was planned and replaced it with something less retarded.
The future of the space program as embodied in Constellation was just more over-budget under-performing missions that failed to do anything to expand our horizons or solve the major problems making space exploration prohibitive.
To me the future of our space program looks brighter than ever.
It doesn't mean nothing, but it also doesn't mean that an actual invasion of the mainland was considered a serious option by the Commander in Chief. In fact, the President and his advisers were convinced that Japan would surrender once Russia entered the war, which would be before any actual invasion of the mainland would have been possible.
But just because it wasn't seriously considered doesn't mean they didn't try to make it look like it was! WWII is chock full of examples of doing things solely to provide a certain appearance to the enemy, including possible enemy spies. For example at the Battle of Midway we sent a scout plane to pretend to "accidentally" find the Japanese fleet, giving up the advantage of surprise, just so that they wouldn't realize we knew exactly where their fleet was because we cracked their codes.
Making it look like we were gearing up for a huge invasion was a necessary move. If we had taken all the atols and sunk Japan's navy, but then suddenly stopped any further war planning, that would have looked very weird. Manufacturing 500,000 Purple Hearts to cover the fact that our real strategy revolved around using the bomb to stop Japan from surrendering to Russia is nothing compared to the kind of counter-intelligence activities we engaged in.
Well if we aren't going to make the common-sense assumption that they meant largest nuclear power plant disaster, and simply open it up to anything nuclear at all...
Then I propose SN1004, the brightest supernova in recorded history, as largest nuclear disaster. Oh sure proximity matters as much to apparent brightness as size, but I have it on good authority that this was still one hell of a supernova and the scale of the disaster inconceivable. Losing a city or two? Ha! Losing your whole planet?! Double ha! Try an entire planetary system completely annihilated, and any life in nearby systems cooked!
Also, why you could say its occurrence was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, it was certainly unplanned and thus something you could call an accident.
I don't see how accurately measuring the frequency of a clock without using a reference clock is practical.
For the purposes of measuring how good a time-keeping signal a clock produces is, you don't actually care exactly what the frequency is in Hz. You only care that the frequency, whatever it is, doesn't change significantly. You can do this by comparing two clocks from the same source and simply counting cycles. You don't care exactly when each tick occurs so you don't need a reference clock, you only care that the two clocks stay in sync. The extent to which the cycle counts differ is your error.
It's hard to see how this kind of approach would be practical given the scale of the variations they're measuring.
It's hard to see how it would be practical to use a reference clock when the variation you're measuring is a couple orders of magnitude less than the error in your reference clock. Thus the original question.:)
They're all "true". You can truly measure the passage of time using any constant periodic signal. The frequency is never perfectly constant, though, and the more jitter there is in the signal then the more error there will be in your measurement. So the "truest" clock in the sense of most accurate is the one with the most regular frequency, and you don't need a "perfect" clock to find out which of the real clocks you have is better.
well first I was merely arguing an opposing viewpoint devil's advocate
I'm very glad to hear that. There have been some very scary posts in this story.
but for those afraid of eternal damnation anything that leads even in the smallest way to infinite punishment for finite reward is going to be bad and something they should clearly avoid.
That's great but that still doesn't make the act of teaching sex ed a form of sexual assault. If their values say "this is a sin" then that's fine, it can't make the act into something it isn't. They can believe that sex before marriage will lead to eternal damnation, that doesn't and can't make sex into genocide.
it is also poor reasoning to think that you are inherently right and anyone arguing against you is wrong, the exact kind of narcissistic viewpoint that these religious crazies believe.
LOL. I don't think I'm always right or automatically right. I think I'm right in this case because the arguments for my side are rational, and all the arguments for the other side are some combination of batshit insane and utterly stupid.
Deciding that one side is right and the other side is wrong based on the weight of their respective merits is not narcissism. It's called having a fucking brain and using it.
This new philosophy that says both sides of any argument are equally valid and that you can never pick one side over the other for any reason other than just assuming you're right out of vanity is wrong and stupid.
In other news, homeopathy is horseshit, and the the two sides of that argument are the side of reason and evidence, and the side of idiots and fraudsters taking advantage of them.
In most states and most cases, being young enough to be in high school is too young to consent to sex even if willing. That's called Statutory Rape.
In most states and most cases, if both are that young, then no it's not called Statutory Rape.
But I have just been informed that Wisconsin actually is a place whose laws are so fucked up that you can be both a rape victim and a rapeist at the same time.
Wisconsin consent laws are apparently that fucked up.
Wow. I've honestly never heard of a place so fucked up, and I didn't even need to go far from my home state to find it. That's depressing.
Thus, if you're 11 and you willingly choose to have completely nonviolent, consensual, loving sex with another person, you're a victim of sexual assault.
And apparently a perpetrator of sexual assault too, which is just highlights how retarded this is.
Slashdot Mirror
Constellation was never going to happen, and neither will their current PR-only plans.
Actually a lot of the R&D they were talking about was already happening until the unfunded "Mars, btiches!" mandate, which Constellation is the mutated remnants of, caused them to be put on hold for budget reasons.
If all NASA manages to do is develop the technology and run proof-of-concept missions, that's fine with me. That's vastly superior than a plan whose ideal end-goal technology-wise is to take the Shuttle stack and make it suck slightly less.
I'm sad Constellation is canceled, but I was also expecting it from the moment it was announced.
Why would you be sad that piece of shit program was canceled, especially if you knew it was never going to result in its already mediocre ambitions?
Presidential initiatives that won't bear fruit for ten years or more aren't going to happen, period. They're scoring political points, that's all. (I'm skeptical of anything more than five years out to be honest, but those things actually happen on occasion)
Well gee, seems to me you should be pretty happy with a plan that focuses on near-term R&D in specific, but is intentionally vague and non-committal on long-term mission plans. There's no "Mars in 25 years or bust!" in this plan. It's "Develop new technologies and space-based capabilities, which could potentially lead to a future mission to Mars".
I mean we agree that NASA gets jerked around and Presidential initiatives with decade-plus timelines are unlikely to happen. This plan seems to realistically confront that reality.
Yet then at the same time you ding the plan because it doesn't include some specific plan to leave earth orbit on a decade-plus timeline and call that "nixing manned space flight".
Which is it? If we agree on the reality of NASA budgets and planning, then manned space flight by your definition was already nixed and the new plan just addresses that reality by not continuing to pour money down a useless hole. Hell, if we can actually develop some new technology, maybe the next time we decide to go to the moon it'll be a program that can be done within the constraints of political reality.
damn if they aren't doing a good job apologizing for putting NASA on the back burner. Effectively ending US leadership in space is about the sum of it, with all the required "forward looking" related buzzwords.
I don't understand how people can keep saying things like this. Specifically the part where you use the progressive tense, like you aren't describing the status quo.
NASA is already on the back burner! Hello? NASA's budget is increasing under the new plan. You can argue the increase is inadequate if you want, which is just another way of saying the current budget is even more inadequate yet.
So, uh, yeah, they have the resources now to develop x,y, and z. Well duh, your not doing any expensive launches your bound to have money for other things.
Yes, duh, having a program that is overbudget and underfunded to begin with means you can't do other interesting things. Constellation has already resulted in interesting projects being killed. Now we can develop the things we should have been developing all along. If we hadn't been wasting time on recreating Apollo just so nostalgia hounds can say that we're doing something, we might actually have some of the tech being talked about.
That people can actually try to paint developing new technology that will expand our space capabilities like it's a bad thing compared to doing the same thing as 40 years ago is just mind boggling.
The problem is, research is not exciting to the public. It does not capture the imagination.
Maybe you haven't noticed, but neither does the hypothetical future of recreating the past. Hell, people stopped caring about the Apollo missions before the project even ended.
On the other hand, the Mars rovers seem to have captured a lot of people's imagination.
Why? Because it's something we had never done before! I think you highly overestimate the PR value of re-doing the same thing we did half a century ago, just to prove we can.
Especially when it's still fifteen years off at best.
What those articles do is nothing more than spew a well rehearsed apology for going nowhere.
And I see this and every other defense of Constellation as nothing but a self-deluding apology for doing nothing we haven't already.
It's just a sad attempt to regain the lost glory of the 60s, when we truly were leaders, yet in reality an even sadder admission that we can't do any better than recreate the past.
Maybe the new plan won't pan out. Maybe none of the new technologies that will be developed will ever result in their actual use in a real mission. But I do know it's a plan that has the potential to expand our horizons. Constellation, even if it was a smashing success, would not.
If you say so. But we weren't doing any manned spaceflight anyway then. Oh yeah we had a plan to one day do the same thing we've already done, at the cost of most other interesting things NASA is doing, like developing a way to go beyond what we did 40 years ago.
If having an underfunded a underambitious boondoggle like Constellation on the books that will, at best, recreate the past in another 15 years assuming it doesn't keep slipping, is all you want, that's fine. But if that program's hypothetical future success counts as "not nixing manned space flight", then the new NASA plan to use new technology to plan a true successor to Apollo, one that follows its spirit of pushing beyond what mankind has done before, should count to.
And it won't do any good if we're not inspiring future scientists and engineers.
"Boy, I sure am inspired by the idea that maybe in fifteen years if we're really lucky, we just might send somebody to do the same thing we did in the 60's! Yeah, hypothetically leaving boot marks on the moon for the 7th time sure gets my imagination pumping. I dream of a future, recreating the past!"
You know why Apollo worked? We set goals and a date, and the figuring out took care of itself.
Is that how you think it works? The figuring takes care of itself? I'd say you have a bright future in middle management, but you forgot to mention budget.
Here's what setting a goal and a date got us: A program that was, at best, a rehash of Apollo which involved zero "figuring out" of the real problems facing space exploration today. Oh, but because the ones who created this program were also terrible managers they forgot to provide a budget and so it was behind schedule and it's doubtful it ever would have achieved it's decidedly mediocre goals.
Constellation is the mutated offspring of the unfunded 'Mars, Bitches!' plan. It was nothing but a weight dragging NASA down, preventing it from working on useful projects to focus on a sad recreation of our glory days.
but nixing manned spaceflight entirely is worse.
Good thing we're not doing that, then.
Jesus this is getting ridiculous! When can Scandinavian scientists start to believe that UK/US researchers even scan their works before publishing?
As soon as it stops being a source of paper-publishing gold!
LOL, I had completely the wrong idea when I read your post. I was like "What bizarre hexagonal oscillations could have been seen on the planet Mercury?!"
That's what the TUCKS probe is supposed to find out!
Hmmm....
A regular hexagon of circumference C has an area A =~ 2.6(C/6)^2. A/C =~ 0.072*C
A circle of circumference C has an area A = pi ( C / 2pi)^2. A/C =~ 0.79*C
So, circles still win as far as "most area enclosed for least length of line".
I think tortoise shells are better explained by the fact that hexagons tile well. Tiling isn't really the issue with saturn; there's just the one.
NASA now pays half as much as the new price, which is double the old one, as one would expect.
Get it?
I don't think they were talking about sunflowers, they said origami, as in shape, not tracking, which is what these new panels are designed to obviate.
Still it's an interesting idea... except we did already adopt the technique in the same sense we adopted the technique of turning sunlight into usable energy. I'm not sure why you think sunflower's tracking ability is free. Any man-made replica is almost certainly not going to be, at least not existing ones. What are we supposed to learn from the sunflower?
If constellation hadn't been canceled, the perception of exclusivity for Russia would not be diminished in the silghtest since we still wouldn't have a new crew vehicle for the forseeable future.
Private industry is going to be providing rides to the ISS before the Constellation could have even hypothetically done so, with reality indicating it would be much much longer than that.
Neither situation would affect the prices Russia can charge for Soyuz rides today. As someone else indicated, they're probably just trying to milk the cash cow as much as they can while we have no other options, before e.g. SpaceX joins up and we have much cheaper options.
Or more accurately, we don't have a balanced budget, and we do have a space program that isn't just an underfunded boondoggle rehash of Apollo that would make nostalgiaphiles happy but do nothing to advance the state of the art, but rather designed to actually increase access to space and develop better things to do and ways to move around once there.
But yeah, it was a pretty pointless question.
Seriously, am I the only one sitting here thinking, "Thanks, Obama for your generous budget slashing our manned space program"?
No, you're not the only one who incorrectly thinks he slashed the budget when he actually increased it. Lots of people wrongly think that canceling Constellation means abandoning manned space programs, when in reality there will be more need for manned space travel because of extending the ISS' life.
All it means is abandoning a stupid program that would have tried -- and failed -- to re-do Apollo. Why talk about the future if all we care about is recreating the past? The future is in the basic technological R&D that will make future things like landing on the moon seem easy in comparison to how Constellation was going to do it.
Yeah, he gutted the future that was planned and replaced it with something less retarded.
The future of the space program as embodied in Constellation was just more over-budget under-performing missions that failed to do anything to expand our horizons or solve the major problems making space exploration prohibitive.
To me the future of our space program looks brighter than ever.
Maybe this means nothing
It doesn't mean nothing, but it also doesn't mean that an actual invasion of the mainland was considered a serious option by the Commander in Chief. In fact, the President and his advisers were convinced that Japan would surrender once Russia entered the war, which would be before any actual invasion of the mainland would have been possible.
But just because it wasn't seriously considered doesn't mean they didn't try to make it look like it was! WWII is chock full of examples of doing things solely to provide a certain appearance to the enemy, including possible enemy spies. For example at the Battle of Midway we sent a scout plane to pretend to "accidentally" find the Japanese fleet, giving up the advantage of surprise, just so that they wouldn't realize we knew exactly where their fleet was because we cracked their codes.
Making it look like we were gearing up for a huge invasion was a necessary move. If we had taken all the atols and sunk Japan's navy, but then suddenly stopped any further war planning, that would have looked very weird. Manufacturing 500,000 Purple Hearts to cover the fact that our real strategy revolved around using the bomb to stop Japan from surrendering to Russia is nothing compared to the kind of counter-intelligence activities we engaged in.
Well if we aren't going to make the common-sense assumption that they meant largest nuclear power plant disaster, and simply open it up to anything nuclear at all...
Then I propose SN1004, the brightest supernova in recorded history, as largest nuclear disaster. Oh sure proximity matters as much to apparent brightness as size, but I have it on good authority that this was still one hell of a supernova and the scale of the disaster inconceivable. Losing a city or two? Ha! Losing your whole planet?! Double ha! Try an entire planetary system completely annihilated, and any life in nearby systems cooked!
Also, why you could say its occurrence was an inevitable consequence of the laws of physics, it was certainly unplanned and thus something you could call an accident.
I don't see how accurately measuring the frequency of a clock without using a reference clock is practical.
For the purposes of measuring how good a time-keeping signal a clock produces is, you don't actually care exactly what the frequency is in Hz. You only care that the frequency, whatever it is, doesn't change significantly. You can do this by comparing two clocks from the same source and simply counting cycles. You don't care exactly when each tick occurs so you don't need a reference clock, you only care that the two clocks stay in sync. The extent to which the cycle counts differ is your error.
It's hard to see how this kind of approach would be practical given the scale of the variations they're measuring.
It's hard to see how it would be practical to use a reference clock when the variation you're measuring is a couple orders of magnitude less than the error in your reference clock. Thus the original question. :)
They're all "true". You can truly measure the passage of time using any constant periodic signal. The frequency is never perfectly constant, though, and the more jitter there is in the signal then the more error there will be in your measurement. So the "truest" clock in the sense of most accurate is the one with the most regular frequency, and you don't need a "perfect" clock to find out which of the real clocks you have is better.
I do keep making that mistake, yes.
well first I was merely arguing an opposing viewpoint devil's advocate
I'm very glad to hear that. There have been some very scary posts in this story.
but for those afraid of eternal damnation anything that leads even in the smallest way to infinite punishment for finite reward is going to be bad and something they should clearly avoid.
That's great but that still doesn't make the act of teaching sex ed a form of sexual assault. If their values say "this is a sin" then that's fine, it can't make the act into something it isn't. They can believe that sex before marriage will lead to eternal damnation, that doesn't and can't make sex into genocide.
it is also poor reasoning to think that you are inherently right and anyone arguing against you is wrong, the exact kind of narcissistic viewpoint that these religious crazies believe.
LOL. I don't think I'm always right or automatically right. I think I'm right in this case because the arguments for my side are rational, and all the arguments for the other side are some combination of batshit insane and utterly stupid.
Deciding that one side is right and the other side is wrong based on the weight of their respective merits is not narcissism. It's called having a fucking brain and using it.
This new philosophy that says both sides of any argument are equally valid and that you can never pick one side over the other for any reason other than just assuming you're right out of vanity is wrong and stupid.
In other news, homeopathy is horseshit, and the the two sides of that argument are the side of reason and evidence, and the side of idiots and fraudsters taking advantage of them.
Sure. The point is that two underage people having sex isn't automatically illegal, and if they're actually the same age it rarely is.
But it appears that in Wisconsin this isn't the case! It's actually true that two 16-yr-olds having sex are both guilty of statutory rape!
I guess if I was the DA of a state like that, I'd go insane and make statements like the ones quoted too.
In most states and most cases, being young enough to be in high school is too young to consent to sex even if willing. That's called Statutory Rape.
In most states and most cases, if both are that young, then no it's not called Statutory Rape.
But I have just been informed that Wisconsin actually is a place whose laws are so fucked up that you can be both a rape victim and a rapeist at the same time.
Wisconsin consent laws are apparently that fucked up.
Wow. I've honestly never heard of a place so fucked up, and I didn't even need to go far from my home state to find it. That's depressing.
Thus, if you're 11 and you willingly choose to have completely nonviolent, consensual, loving sex with another person, you're a victim of sexual assault.
And apparently a perpetrator of sexual assault too, which is just highlights how retarded this is.