If we only get up to LEO, we'd need a smaller rocket (basically). We'd have, what, some sort of low orbit gas station or the like up there for refueling?
Yes, that's the idea. There'd be orbiting fuel depots, and maybe a 'ship yard' type deal with robot arms to assist orbital assembly of smaller vessel components into a larger one -- basically how the ISS was assembled (after acquiring the Canadarm).
There were already plans along these lines at NASA. Part of Obama's lighter, more capabilities-based plan for NASA. Unfortunately the Congressional mandate for a shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle, aka the Pork Launcher, puts these and other programs in jeopardy.
So we'd end up doing lots of small trips instead of one big trip, and the major advantage would be that we'd have no need to develop heavy lift capability as a result.
The major advantage is that you could send bigger missions to the Moon or Mars than you could ever do with a monolithic Apollo-style mission. If we're going to do more than a boots-and-flag mission -- and if we're going to bother with manned space exploration at all, then we should do more than that -- we won't be able to do it by launching the whole thing, fuel and all, out of earth's gravity well one a single rocket.
Not needing a heavy lift vehicle is a just a side benefit -- except for the part where it keeps the HLV from preventing you from ever realizing these capabilities in the near term. But an HLV would still be useful for lifting larger components of an even larger mission into orbit with less assembly required. Just not necessary. Nor would it be sufficient to replace the capabilities I'm talking about. So really it's a side issue at that point whether you want one.
LOL, you think it's when the company goes public that its executives decide to throw morals out the window?
Sure it's true that some sociopaths use the "fiduciary duty to shareholders" aspect of a public company to justify their pre-existing lack of ethics and morals (despite the lack of shareholder lawsuits against companies that don't behave unethically). Just how much have you bought into that narrative that you think that's when the problem actually starts?
Like, if Google was just as big but privately owned they wouldn't have wanted to make the extra money from these drug ads? Like private businesses aren't run by people with the same "American business school ethics"? As if a company like Freescale was taken private after being public so it could finally be run ethically again... rather than avoiding the extra visibility -- and thus scrutiny -- a public company has so the owners can suck the money out of it without the employees knowing how long the checks will keep cashing.
there isn't time to develop the heavy-lift capability, much less actually move hardware to the moon - we're actually behind where we were in 1962 right now, in that we're not even in working on a heavy lift vehicle yet....
Right, and we're even farther behind where we should be in the far flung future of the 21st century because we're still talking about needing a heavy-lift vehicle to launch everything from earth to the moon in one shot.
What we should be doing is treating it as two separate trips: Earth surface to Earth orbit, and Earth orbit to the Moon. Once you're in orbit, getting to the moon is pretty easy, energy-wise. You can do it with a pretty small rocket and fuel supply. The problem is when you have to carry that rocket and all its fuel and all it's payload up to earth orbit. That's when you need a Saturn V.
Instead, we should lift the fuel, vehicle components, and crew separately to LEO or GTO -- so you're already 2/3rds of the way to the moon in terms of delta-v -- load up and refuel the lunar vehicle in orbit, and operate it basically like a shuttle (not Space Shuttle, but a shuttle in space) between LEO and Luna orbit.
This will actually allow a vastly expanded mission profile for basically anything we want to do from inhabiting to the moon to go to Mars -- LEO is nearly halfway to Mars! The surface of Mars!
What we're lacking is not a heavy lift vehicle. It's the capabilities to do what I describe. A heavy lift vehicle would not allow significantly larger missions than have occurred before. Not without the capability to use LEO or GTO as a staging area. But with that capability, the need for a heavy lift vehicle is vastly reduced.
But development of the heavy lift vehicle prevents progress on the capabilities by dominating NASA's budget and time.
So that's how looking to the past is stymieing our progress. Who cares what we could do in 1962. What matters is what we could do today. And we could do much better than they had in 1962, if we just forget about trying to recreate what they had.
Any real viable candidate would be running right now.
Not really. Because they'd know that the incumbent always has the advantage in these races and wins a large majority of the time. To give themselves the best chance of winning, they'd wait until 2016. It's just basic strategy.
That's why the Republican field is so dominated with loonies and stunt-candidates who pretty much just want publicity. I mean Hermain Cain's campaign was basically just an advertisement for his business and his book. I think he was as shocked as anyone when he actually became the front-runner for a time.
Your implication the Ron Paul is a serious candidate just shows how weak the republican playing field is.
The implication was that Ron Paul is NOT a serious candidate. He doesn't expect to be nominated, much less win the Presidency. He's just running to continue raising awareness for his Libertarian viewpoint. Kinda like Santorum is running just so he can more easily get a national stage for his "Fuck the Queers" viewpoint.
What do you mean "liked"? Nothing about Pluto changed except our understanding of its place in the solar system. If the only thing you liked about it was that it was called a planet, then you're not much of a fan imo.
It's still awesome. I still like it. Despite 'just' being a large TNO, just like Ceres is a large asteroid.
Because if you're still burning coal to generate the electricity required to get the car moving then the whole exercise is both expensive and pointless.
Not pointless at all. Large, stationary fossil fuel power plants are much better than tiny, mobile fossil fuel power plants. They are significantly more efficient, and much easier to apply large environmental controls to since unlike a car they don't automatically pay an efficiency penalty for every added pollution control due to having to cart around the extra mass for it.
Coal electric power is not ideal, but it's better than millions of tiny gasoline engines. And that's today. In the future, if more renewable or cleaner power sources come online, then your electrical vehicle benefits automagically without having to pay the price of revamping the entire vehicle fleet.
DDT was strongly correlated to the thinning of Peregrine falcon eggs. So we banned DDT. What happened? Crops were ravaged by insects because we stopped using an effective pesticide, and the eggs kept thinning.
No they didn't you fool. Once you account for the time for DDT to get out of the food chain (the whole point of why it affected raptors), then the DDT ban worked, the egg shells thickened, breeding success increased, and the population recovered.
The side effect of banning DDT entirely where moderate and intelligent use would have been sensible (as opposed to the ridiculous overspraying that was going on before) is a fair point. But the fact is that for the intended purpose of saving the falcon and other raptors the DDT ban fucking worked. So, great example, nimrod.
So let me put it to you this way: The Earth's temperature is rising. So fucking what? It has been much higher in the past. Life not only survived - it kicked ass.
What are you, some kind of earth-mother-worshiping hippie?
Yeah, of course life will survive. It's survived far worse than we've thrown at it -- the KT event, the Oxygen Catastrophe -- and yet life kept on ticking.
"So fucking what?" says the dinosaurs, says the anaerobic bacteria, says every species that went extinct while life went on.
Life on earth is extremely robust. Individual species, not so much. Or just our societies. Frankly there's a wide range of consequences that I care about from the extinction of the human race to simple political upheaval as the locations of arable land change that I don't want to face; the fact that "life" will continue on blissfully uncaring not making one fucking bit of difference to me.
Ice ages, hot periods, floods, land scape changes, saltier oceans. The climate and Earth is always changing. Always has been and always will be. With or without us.
Yes. Obviously. The question is how much is it changing, and why. Is it a change that would happen without us anyway, or is it a change that is due to our behavior that can be changed? And is it sufficient that future changes will be occurring without us because we won't be around?
I have no idea how anyone can actually think this "the earth has always been changing" is an answer to anything. Would you say "People have always been dying" to either discount the existence of murderers, or to suggest murder isn't a big deal? It's insane!
This technology requires more energy to make and involves expensive mid-term disposable battery packs.
They aren't going to just dispose of a component that comprises a third of the price of the vehicle. Already all the electric vehicle makers are finding buyers for used battery packs when they don't have enough charge left to be useful in the car. And once that's gone they'll be recycled for the lithium.
Energy used for it has probably had 50% of it's already non-optimal conversion efficiency wasted in down-the-wire transmission.
That seems highly pessimistic. Transmission losses are less than 10% on the grid, and will be much less within the car.
Lets just get over to being a renewable power produced hydrogen economy already.
Hydrogen fuel cells also require high-tech manufacturing.
Optional rear facing mini-seats? This isn't a family car, this is just a roadster that can transport a family in a pinch.
Right, just like most other luxury sports sedans. It's for well-off folks who like fast cars but need something practical enough to justify owning when you have a family.
Guessing by the number of these kinds of cars by BMW, Lexus, etc I see as I drive around, this is not a tiny market.
I know trickle-down economics sorta works in cutting-edge technology, but Nissan already has an electric sedan for $20,000 less.
One third the price, one third the range.
The market for luxury sedans is pretty significant, and it's possible that the existence of the Model S will drive the costs of battery packs with ranges large enough for the masses to feel comfortable down enough that maybe the next generation of $20,000 electric sedan will be something everyone will want.
I just don't see why Tesla deserves our adulation.
Hey, I get your point and it's a fair one. There are other reasons to adulate the company other than them being a champion of the masses. For some of us, just making cool tech is enough.:)
You don't think coronal mass ejections -- a stream of plasma bigger than our planet and traveling at millions of miles an hour -- or other aspects of space weather are nerdy?
Um, okay.
Anyway, who cares? I care. This is very nerdy news which I am happy to have on/.
But from easily-frightened handwringing "ethicists", who had they been around in the time of the caveman would have taken away Ugh's flint for fear he'd burn down the forest were he to succeed in starting a fire.
Yes, and they explored the ramifications of that and other technology in Caveman Science Fiction!
Are you really implying that the physically fit have lower IQs than the physically weak or vulnerable? If so, I question your own IQ, my good sir.
I don't know what they were trying to imply. However I would agree that anytime you apply strong selective pressure for a specific trait that it is bad for the maintenance of every other trait, because now it's suddenly not as important that those traits be passed on as survival will be dominated by the strongly-selected trait.
For the sake of argument, imagine that there are easily defined "smart" and "fit" dominant genes, and a couple where each spouse possess a single copy of each of the genes. Their kids have a 75% chance of being fit, and a 75% chance of being smart. Then the influenza pandemic hits, and the surviving children are 100% fit, and 75% smart. If resistance to communicable disease remains the dominant selection pressure, then this will continue with subsequent generations.
Obviously reality is not that simple. However if you are of European or Middle Eastern descent then your genes passed through a major bottleneck where disease resistance was the primary criterion for survival.
Breaking evolution for humans... are we supposed to be for Darwin's Evolution or not? If we Evolve, then why are we trying so hard to stop it? Seems short sighted to me.
it doesn't break evolution any more than the first human who wore the skins of another animal to survive a cold winter night broke evolution. Our intelligence, our ability to invent and use technology, is an evolved survival skill -- our best survival skill.
It doesn't matter if we are "for" evolution or not -- evolution is not a religion, "evolving" is not some spiritual end-goal like Enlightenment. Evolution is something that happens, that is happening.
Everyone too stupid to take advantage of the abilities nature gave us dying from influenza being one possible example.
Meh. GOTO ruins the fun of finding it yourself, but a tracking motor greatly enhances enjoyment once the object is found. There's nothing like going to get a celebratory beer after having found Neptune (or to take a leak to get rid of previous celebratory beers), and still having it dead-center in the field when I get back.
Yes, but that singular noun could be used as a hypothetical instance to describe all such objects. For example: "A doctor makes a good living," or "A policeman is like a vampire: You don't invite him into your home."
Not that I agree with the OP that the headline is wrong or misleading! Because that's not necessarily what the headline means. My point is that it could mean that, or other things too, pretty much like 99% of all sentences in English. Seems like it's pretty easy to figure out which was meant in this context, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Or, in other words, Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
I don't know... I kind of get the feeling that when discussing politicians, this adage should be reversed.
I've always felt that adage was coined by a malicious sociopath clever enough to pass off their misdeeds as stupidity, should they be caught.
If we only get up to LEO, we'd need a smaller rocket (basically). We'd have, what, some sort of low orbit gas station or the like up there for refueling?
Yes, that's the idea. There'd be orbiting fuel depots, and maybe a 'ship yard' type deal with robot arms to assist orbital assembly of smaller vessel components into a larger one -- basically how the ISS was assembled (after acquiring the Canadarm).
There were already plans along these lines at NASA. Part of Obama's lighter, more capabilities-based plan for NASA. Unfortunately the Congressional mandate for a shuttle-derived heavy lift vehicle, aka the Pork Launcher, puts these and other programs in jeopardy.
So we'd end up doing lots of small trips instead of one big trip, and the major advantage would be that we'd have no need to develop heavy lift capability as a result.
The major advantage is that you could send bigger missions to the Moon or Mars than you could ever do with a monolithic Apollo-style mission. If we're going to do more than a boots-and-flag mission -- and if we're going to bother with manned space exploration at all, then we should do more than that -- we won't be able to do it by launching the whole thing, fuel and all, out of earth's gravity well one a single rocket.
Not needing a heavy lift vehicle is a just a side benefit -- except for the part where it keeps the HLV from preventing you from ever realizing these capabilities in the near term. But an HLV would still be useful for lifting larger components of an even larger mission into orbit with less assembly required. Just not necessary. Nor would it be sufficient to replace the capabilities I'm talking about. So really it's a side issue at that point whether you want one.
LOL, you think it's when the company goes public that its executives decide to throw morals out the window?
Sure it's true that some sociopaths use the "fiduciary duty to shareholders" aspect of a public company to justify their pre-existing lack of ethics and morals (despite the lack of shareholder lawsuits against companies that don't behave unethically). Just how much have you bought into that narrative that you think that's when the problem actually starts?
Like, if Google was just as big but privately owned they wouldn't have wanted to make the extra money from these drug ads? Like private businesses aren't run by people with the same "American business school ethics"? As if a company like Freescale was taken private after being public so it could finally be run ethically again... rather than avoiding the extra visibility -- and thus scrutiny -- a public company has so the owners can suck the money out of it without the employees knowing how long the checks will keep cashing.
there isn't time to develop the heavy-lift capability, much less actually move hardware to the moon - we're actually behind where we were in 1962 right now, in that we're not even in working on a heavy lift vehicle yet....
Right, and we're even farther behind where we should be in the far flung future of the 21st century because we're still talking about needing a heavy-lift vehicle to launch everything from earth to the moon in one shot.
What we should be doing is treating it as two separate trips: Earth surface to Earth orbit, and Earth orbit to the Moon. Once you're in orbit, getting to the moon is pretty easy, energy-wise. You can do it with a pretty small rocket and fuel supply. The problem is when you have to carry that rocket and all its fuel and all it's payload up to earth orbit. That's when you need a Saturn V.
Instead, we should lift the fuel, vehicle components, and crew separately to LEO or GTO -- so you're already 2/3rds of the way to the moon in terms of delta-v -- load up and refuel the lunar vehicle in orbit, and operate it basically like a shuttle (not Space Shuttle, but a shuttle in space) between LEO and Luna orbit.
This will actually allow a vastly expanded mission profile for basically anything we want to do from inhabiting to the moon to go to Mars -- LEO is nearly halfway to Mars! The surface of Mars!
What we're lacking is not a heavy lift vehicle. It's the capabilities to do what I describe. A heavy lift vehicle would not allow significantly larger missions than have occurred before. Not without the capability to use LEO or GTO as a staging area. But with that capability, the need for a heavy lift vehicle is vastly reduced.
But development of the heavy lift vehicle prevents progress on the capabilities by dominating NASA's budget and time.
So that's how looking to the past is stymieing our progress. Who cares what we could do in 1962. What matters is what we could do today. And we could do much better than they had in 1962, if we just forget about trying to recreate what they had.
Any real viable candidate would be running right now.
Not really. Because they'd know that the incumbent always has the advantage in these races and wins a large majority of the time. To give themselves the best chance of winning, they'd wait until 2016. It's just basic strategy.
That's why the Republican field is so dominated with loonies and stunt-candidates who pretty much just want publicity. I mean Hermain Cain's campaign was basically just an advertisement for his business and his book. I think he was as shocked as anyone when he actually became the front-runner for a time.
Your implication the Ron Paul is a serious candidate just shows how weak the republican playing field is.
The implication was that Ron Paul is NOT a serious candidate. He doesn't expect to be nominated, much less win the Presidency. He's just running to continue raising awareness for his Libertarian viewpoint. Kinda like Santorum is running just so he can more easily get a national stage for his "Fuck the Queers" viewpoint.
What do you mean "liked"? Nothing about Pluto changed except our understanding of its place in the solar system. If the only thing you liked about it was that it was called a planet, then you're not much of a fan imo.
It's still awesome. I still like it. Despite 'just' being a large TNO, just like Ceres is a large asteroid.
Oh man. And here I am, the D&D geek, who always thought a Black Pudding was a horrific, semi-sentient puddle of highly acidic ooze.
Turns out the reality is much worse.
I just hope that one day in the future they invent a small tracked robot to make us remember how to love again.
You mean like Lovebot?
Also, if it could collect and compact garbage then that'd be great too.
Erm... no, can't do that. How about Sex Lasers instead?
What, you thought they would just take the hit to their bottom line?
You think they aren't charging what the market will bear today? They're happy with their current bottom line, and want no more?
Bitcanoe?
You think "I judge Robert Blackburn is stabbed repeatedly" is correct grammar?
I judge your skill with the English language is somewhat deficient
I judge your skill with English to be somewhat deficient.
Because if you're still burning coal to generate the electricity required to get the car moving then the whole exercise is both expensive and pointless.
Not pointless at all. Large, stationary fossil fuel power plants are much better than tiny, mobile fossil fuel power plants. They are significantly more efficient, and much easier to apply large environmental controls to since unlike a car they don't automatically pay an efficiency penalty for every added pollution control due to having to cart around the extra mass for it.
Coal electric power is not ideal, but it's better than millions of tiny gasoline engines. And that's today. In the future, if more renewable or cleaner power sources come online, then your electrical vehicle benefits automagically without having to pay the price of revamping the entire vehicle fleet.
DDT was strongly correlated to the thinning of Peregrine falcon eggs. So we banned DDT. What happened? Crops were ravaged by insects because we stopped using an effective pesticide, and the eggs kept thinning.
No they didn't you fool. Once you account for the time for DDT to get out of the food chain (the whole point of why it affected raptors), then the DDT ban worked, the egg shells thickened, breeding success increased, and the population recovered.
The side effect of banning DDT entirely where moderate and intelligent use would have been sensible (as opposed to the ridiculous overspraying that was going on before) is a fair point. But the fact is that for the intended purpose of saving the falcon and other raptors the DDT ban fucking worked. So, great example, nimrod.
So let me put it to you this way: The Earth's temperature is rising. So fucking what? It has been much higher in the past. Life not only survived - it kicked ass.
What are you, some kind of earth-mother-worshiping hippie?
Yeah, of course life will survive. It's survived far worse than we've thrown at it -- the KT event, the Oxygen Catastrophe -- and yet life kept on ticking.
"So fucking what?" says the dinosaurs, says the anaerobic bacteria, says every species that went extinct while life went on.
Life on earth is extremely robust. Individual species, not so much. Or just our societies. Frankly there's a wide range of consequences that I care about from the extinction of the human race to simple political upheaval as the locations of arable land change that I don't want to face; the fact that "life" will continue on blissfully uncaring not making one fucking bit of difference to me.
Ice ages, hot periods, floods, land scape changes, saltier oceans. The climate and Earth is always changing. Always has been and always will be. With or without us.
Yes. Obviously. The question is how much is it changing, and why. Is it a change that would happen without us anyway, or is it a change that is due to our behavior that can be changed? And is it sufficient that future changes will be occurring without us because we won't be around?
I have no idea how anyone can actually think this "the earth has always been changing" is an answer to anything. Would you say "People have always been dying" to either discount the existence of murderers, or to suggest murder isn't a big deal? It's insane!
This technology requires more energy to make and involves expensive mid-term disposable battery packs.
They aren't going to just dispose of a component that comprises a third of the price of the vehicle. Already all the electric vehicle makers are finding buyers for used battery packs when they don't have enough charge left to be useful in the car. And once that's gone they'll be recycled for the lithium.
Energy used for it has probably had 50% of it's already non-optimal conversion efficiency wasted in down-the-wire transmission.
That seems highly pessimistic. Transmission losses are less than 10% on the grid, and will be much less within the car.
Lets just get over to being a renewable power produced hydrogen economy already.
Hydrogen fuel cells also require high-tech manufacturing.
Optional rear facing mini-seats? This isn't a family car, this is just a roadster that can transport a family in a pinch.
Right, just like most other luxury sports sedans. It's for well-off folks who like fast cars but need something practical enough to justify owning when you have a family.
Guessing by the number of these kinds of cars by BMW, Lexus, etc I see as I drive around, this is not a tiny market.
I know trickle-down economics sorta works in cutting-edge technology, but Nissan already has an electric sedan for $20,000 less.
One third the price, one third the range.
The market for luxury sedans is pretty significant, and it's possible that the existence of the Model S will drive the costs of battery packs with ranges large enough for the masses to feel comfortable down enough that maybe the next generation of $20,000 electric sedan will be something everyone will want.
I just don't see why Tesla deserves our adulation.
Hey, I get your point and it's a fair one. There are other reasons to adulate the company other than them being a champion of the masses. For some of us, just making cool tech is enough. :)
Ha! Now that's a technique for clearing up space junk that I haven't heard proposed before: Induce CMEs in the sun!
Somebody get to work on that. Preferably someone who isn't by appearance or name obviously a mad scientist.
You don't think coronal mass ejections -- a stream of plasma bigger than our planet and traveling at millions of miles an hour -- or other aspects of space weather are nerdy?
Um, okay.
Anyway, who cares? I care. This is very nerdy news which I am happy to have on /.
But from easily-frightened handwringing "ethicists", who had they been around in the time of the caveman would have taken away Ugh's flint for fear he'd burn down the forest were he to succeed in starting a fire.
Yes, and they explored the ramifications of that and other technology in Caveman Science Fiction!
Are you really implying that the physically fit have lower IQs than the physically weak or vulnerable? If so, I question your own IQ, my good sir.
I don't know what they were trying to imply. However I would agree that anytime you apply strong selective pressure for a specific trait that it is bad for the maintenance of every other trait, because now it's suddenly not as important that those traits be passed on as survival will be dominated by the strongly-selected trait.
For the sake of argument, imagine that there are easily defined "smart" and "fit" dominant genes, and a couple where each spouse possess a single copy of each of the genes. Their kids have a 75% chance of being fit, and a 75% chance of being smart. Then the influenza pandemic hits, and the surviving children are 100% fit, and 75% smart. If resistance to communicable disease remains the dominant selection pressure, then this will continue with subsequent generations.
Obviously reality is not that simple. However if you are of European or Middle Eastern descent then your genes passed through a major bottleneck where disease resistance was the primary criterion for survival.
Breaking evolution for humans ... are we supposed to be for Darwin's Evolution or not? If we Evolve, then why are we trying so hard to stop it? Seems short sighted to me.
it doesn't break evolution any more than the first human who wore the skins of another animal to survive a cold winter night broke evolution. Our intelligence, our ability to invent and use technology, is an evolved survival skill -- our best survival skill.
It doesn't matter if we are "for" evolution or not -- evolution is not a religion, "evolving" is not some spiritual end-goal like Enlightenment. Evolution is something that happens, that is happening.
Everyone too stupid to take advantage of the abilities nature gave us dying from influenza being one possible example.
Meh. GOTO ruins the fun of finding it yourself, but a tracking motor greatly enhances enjoyment once the object is found. There's nothing like going to get a celebratory beer after having found Neptune (or to take a leak to get rid of previous celebratory beers), and still having it dead-center in the field when I get back.
Yes, but that singular noun could be used as a hypothetical instance to describe all such objects. For example: "A doctor makes a good living," or "A policeman is like a vampire: You don't invite him into your home."
Not that I agree with the OP that the headline is wrong or misleading! Because that's not necessarily what the headline means. My point is that it could mean that, or other things too, pretty much like 99% of all sentences in English. Seems like it's pretty easy to figure out which was meant in this context, too.