I must disagree with your sentiments. Personally I feel the modern drive for more consistent grammar and spelling to be the result of a continuing cultural bias towards the superficial. Your right that proper presentation does help one in the world today. Yet I am far from convinced that the growing emphasis in society on presentation as opposed to content is a good thing. I do not think that is what you are advocating but such sentiments are evident in other posts made suggesting that sub par grammar in a post is suitable grounds for out right rejection of any ideas so presented.
Perhaps I am biased due to the fact in my studies I was often required to read original historical source materials. In general the worst/. hack writes with more consistency than some of the greatest luminaries in history. I find the notion that 'correct' grammatical structure and consistent dictionary spellings have any impact on the substance of writting to be rather humorous. Presentation and content rarely have more than a passing aquaintence. While good grammar and spelling is gerenally a good marker of education it by no means conveys intelligence beyond a good memory and a penchant for mimicry.
I could not agree more that ones prime courtesy to others in written discourse is to clearly and lucidly present your thoughts in a manner understandable to your audience. Can consistent grammar and spelling be benificial in that effort ? Most certainly. However there is a difference between grammatical and spelling inconsitencies which cause confusion and those which are undeniably superficial. In the case poor usage/spelling causes confusion then attacking those elements is key to the discussion. On the other hand, attacking superficial inconsistencies that have no bearing on the meaning of a passage is generally a wastefull excercise IMHO.
All in all I much preffer intelligent discussion to grammatical perfection. If I can have both great, if not I choose substance over presentation. I have seen many posts here indicating they would preffer presentation over substance which I find odd.
Having said all that, the parting shot by the original poster was certainly an invitation to return fire. Your suggestions are good ones for improoving ones grammar and spelling. However, in the end I must agree with the ultimate sentiment that there are better things to discuss than the order of ie/ei, double consonants and silent e's..... unless you are discussing the necessity of such things off topic as the case may be !!!
That merger tore the soul out of Mindspring. I had the best tech support experience back when there were a local isp in Atlanta. Installed a generic modem from some mom and pop custom shop that had a driver that was dumbed up. This was before I knew much more than how to turn the damn computer on. Wound up Spending more than 2 hours on the phone with a tech who finally resolved the problem using me as his eyes. It was a series of problems that would have caused an endless circle in todays tech support.
Mindspring died when the Earthlink elements ate it from the inside out after the merger and all hope of resurrection was lost when they bought out Charles Brewer. Scary thing is, by most indications they are still as good as it gets on the national ISP scene.
I don't disagree that there must be a force acting against change. I agree that context largely determines what is correct for the occasion.
However, in either case if you never allow change or you never break context the language becomes stale. Thus you must have those that forment change and at the opposing end you need people who are biased against change. That is not to say people who never accept a change, or conversely those who think any change is acceptable.
If you think we are largely in disagreement I think you should go read my post once more.
However, we perhaps have a disagreement if you think the character of Mr. Finn to be a 'Hayseed' in any but the most superficial of definitions. If you do I suggest you read the tale of his exploits at least once more. If such a superficial lack of polish inclines you to write him off as a simpleton then at least part of the messege presented by the masterfull Mr. Clemens has fallen on deaf ears in your case.
Perhaps you derived some mis-understanding from my term grammar Nazi. Perhaps you think I was implying that any correction of grammer is worthy of such a label of extreme intolerance. Perhaps it would clear your perception of my post if you stopped to consider the nature of the give and take in the English language of which you have indicated you are aware. In the change of the language there are the elements of change and the dogmatic deffense of the status quo aka. Grammar Nazi's. A grammar Nazi opposes reading Huckleberry Finn in an English class because it contains 'improper english'. A grammer Nazi quibles about a comma when it has zero bearing on the meaning of a passage. A grammer Nazi says aint isn't a word when they know perfectly well what it means.
I am no great fan of 133t. But in its proper context it is every bit as proper as Cambridge diction. A grammar Nazi opposes it simply on the grounds it does not conform.
Guns are not necesarrily the driver. The prime example shown in that documentary is Canada which has a higher gun per capita than the states and yet a small fraction of the gun crime.
Disclaimer: I far from agree with Moore on everything he says. But his implied significance of the news media in engendering a society of violence is one continually swept under the rug by the '5th estate'. After all no one likes telling on themselves... no indeed, its better to whip up the violence in fiction and video games rather than talk about the display of the carnage of real life violence because its 'The News'.
In the end I agree it plays a role. but in and of itself it is too simple. Somone else pointed out how the war on drugs crime stats resemebled the spike of crime during prohibition. Its like most anything, the more you dig into it the more complex it gets.
No they just generally gloss over how the event ended and focus ont the deaths involved. If it bleeds it leads. They don't want to talk about violent crime averted. They want to talk about what slipped through the wicket.
I have never understood the motivations of a grammar Nazi. English is a living language. As such, the rules governing its constant mutation are generally a decade or more behind, especially if the high and mighty decide some usage is beneath the dignity of recognition as official no matter how common the usage may be. The word ain't comes to mind. Say it ain't a word all you like, it ain't gonna make no difference.
The ultimate purpose of a language is to communicate. To me the definition of whether or not a written statement is literate or illiterate has to do with how well it conveys its message to its audience vrs the intent of the author. You can argue about misplaced commas, misspelled words and improper grammar all that you like. However the fact remains a language is about communication and communication does not always follow the rules. Classic example is literature written in dialect such as the ever popular Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens. If you chose to re-write that story according to 'Proper English' it would not convey anywhere near the same story.
English is like Perl, The Romance Languages are like C. Thus English is like TIMTOWTDI to the max. In the end it only matters if the interpreter Groks what you are trying to say.... some interpreters may force you to use strict, others will completely grok your 1 line million statement nth degree nested code.
So called 'Proper English' is merely a central dialect with a more highly regarded and formalized structure. As the central trunk of the language it also serves as the common frame work which keeps all the various sub formats ( such as AIM speak, Blog speak, Geek, even 133t ) linked. In addition, being fluent in 'Proper English' has come to bear a mark of social significance. I leave it to you to choose whether or not it is one of merit or disparagement.
In short blind adherence to 'proper english' is valuing form over substance. Sometimes 'proper' formating provides the best solution and in others it ain't gonna cut it.
2 seconds for 10 feet equates to 160 feet or there bouts sure enough. But the car in front is not stationary so generally it also covers most of the same distance.
Tailgating should be punishable by death I couldn't agree more. But the safe zone in front of you is not only about your reaction time. Almost as important in determing how far back you really need to be is the breaking capacity of both vehicles. 2 seconds won't do a Mack truck a damn bit of good against a Vette 2 seconds ahead applying full breaks.... not that the truck will give a shit as it rolls over the car.... but more important is the case of the SUV tailing a sports car or an average Sedan for that matter. The 2 seconds is a good rule of thumb... but at highway speeds you need to take into consideration what capability the vehicle has in front of you for suddenly stopping vrs your ability to react and your cars ability to slow down.
Generally speaking this is something that becomes more and more important as your mass increases and the ability to break declines. People driving Z-3's Miata's etc.. can out break most anything on the road so for them it is simply a question of reacting in time and they have the widest margin of error. Somone driving an Escalade tailing a Lexus at the 2 second mark is completely at the mercy of the Lexus driver in terms of a wreck happening no matter how alert the Escalade ( or insert other urban assault vehicle ) driver is.
To some extent you also need to be aware of how close people are behind you and some idea of their ability to stop... meaning the physcial capacity of the vehicle aside from the alertness of the driver. IE if I slam my breaks am I going to get slammed by the idiot behind me even if he is paying attention ? Would I preffer that or trying the shoulder/median in a pinch ? ID and rank your threats, then ID and rank your responses accordingly. The idea is to always make choices that reduce threats and give you more outs.
Some people laugh at thinking this 'deep' but if you constantly size up the options at the cardinal points and continually update your list of emergency responses you will be surprised how many fewer close calls you have because you avoided placing yourself in the situation to begin with.
If you think your not car savvy enough to make these kinds of call don't worry its really simple... your not peforming math calculations here. A good rule of thumb is the faster a vehicle can accelerate the faster it can break. Exception of IDIOTS driving supercharged 3-500hp street rods with bone stock breaks. But you don't have to know reams of specs off the top of your head for this level of thinking to help you.
Really its more about size/mass than anything else. Rank the Vehicle in front of you as small ( civic ) Medium ( Crown Vick ) Large ( Escalade ). When you are equal or smaller, 2 seconds is probably all you need provided your paying attention. However, add a second for any difference in size where your bigger. IE 3 - 4 seconds.... For every 10mph over 65 add another second.
Granted its not always feasible to maintain safe gaps.... but even so you can jockey for position behind someone that gives you a better margin of error. For example if you have to be close to somone be close to someone you can out break.... Thus you can use all those insane SUV drivers to work for you as shields and blockers and your margin is really the gap between you and the car in front of your shield because you can stop faster than your shield.
What exactly is shuttle if not a rocket ??? And if your distinguishing between solid and liquid you must recall that the shuttle employs both... those two bosters on the side are not called SOLID Rocket Boosters for no reason.
Also the Deltas and Atlases use Keroseen and LOX ( Same as Apollo ) if memory serves and they also use differnt numbers of SRB's and extra liquid stages to provide the various configurations.
Solid Technology is good for producing MASSIVE thrust but they generally have low Isp which means their fuel weight is a real problem and once you get up around the SRB size you have run into a serious dimenishing returns problem.
So when combining the abilities of Solid and liquid systems you create essentially a first stage solid propelled system that pushes the liquid system untill it is sufficient to provide lift by itself. Thus the early MASSIVE thrust that can be achived more easily in Solid systems maximizes the longer lasting and higher Isp but lower overall thrust from liquid systems.
Before you denigrate shuttle remember that most of the compromises are in the form the orbiter took. Drop the cross range requirment, go with capsule return and expendable engines and the usefull payload capacity closes in rapidly on Apollo with half the number of launch engines.
I wonder what would have happend if at the time the program had adopted 1 or perhaps 2 F-1's and re-tained the more compact Keroseen LOX bi-prop instead of going with the re-useable concept of the SSME's with the higher ISP of LOH and LOX but with the bulk problem of the LOH.
This isn't Cameron's view of a mars mission... he just requested imaging of a current plan. One which is largely based on the Mars Direct Plan detailed by Robert Zubrin in 'The Case for Mars'. This seems to be mostly the NASA adopted version known as Mars Semi Direct and is the current baseline plan for a manned mission to mars.
As for how, well unlike the moon Mars has an atmosphere which means an internal combustion engine or Fuel cell will work ( albeit with a different gas, Methane Fuel cell in this case I believe ). So basically you land the crew with a rover with a full tank of gas to run an ICE or fuel cell with a considerable range... around 1000 miles or 500 mile radius which is far more versatile than a battery or solar powered rover.
For an idea of how accurately they can land ballistic loads the Mars Rovers provide an excellent example. IE they can draw a circle considerably smaller than 1000 miles and be relatively certain they can land payloads in it. back in the days of Capsule use in the US program they got it down to around 50 miles if memeory serves.
If you have a 3 launch system where you launch/land a cargo which successfully begins the fuel making process ( you know its there and working ) then you launch a Crew vehicle and another cargo/fuel producing pod. If you land the crew withen rover range the second cargo pod becomes the basis for the next mission. If you fail to land the crew near enough you then attempt to land the reserve cargo pod withen rover range of where the crew landed.
Thus you have a crew vehicle with roughly 1000 miles of range to reach the cargo pods and two chances to get them withen range of a cargo pod. The overall success rate of mars missions aside, the ballistic accuracy has only be way off once that I know of... that unfortunate incident involving poor measurment conversions or failure of conversion. one of the biggest errors in Earth Capsule return was the recent Soyouz landing of an ISS crew which was off a few hundred miles due to a steeper than planned re-entry triggered by a software failure.
In addition if access to water is found and you land the crew in a place where they can 'easily' access water then you can include a smaller ability to process its own fuel and suddenly the range is limited only by access to water with which to seed the process and life support for the crew.
They are in Utah.. most likely debris field would still be overland. I think they would probably have chosen to place the higest risk of debris over the ocean... Also you would need an ILS system to even hope for a remote landing, perhaps one could be installed in a hurry at a remote location, I have no idea. Edwards is in California and the most likely re-entry breakup would occur over the ocean... by the time you reached the coast you would be past the most likely point of catastrophic break up.... plus you would have the full emergency equipment support of Edwards available.
I have heard similar, and what I have heard indicates the quality would have been mnore than sufficient. That has also been the apparent line of thinking of the few military people that have made any comment on the issue at all. Probably the most asinine problem brought to light in the CAIB report is that the Ranking official that made the call to cancel the asset tasking for imaging request did not have clearence to know what the capabilities where. The assumption was made that no imaging would be sufficient to dicern any damage.
You could probably attempt to land Shuttle remotely, most of the descent profile is under computer control. But if you have a high suspicion of a break up on re-entry it would be interesting to see where they would have chosen to atempt the landing..... perhaps Edwards.
Columbia was capable of making ISS orbit. However to do so it had to tbe the goal from launch. And more importantly in the case of sts-107 the payload would have to have been severly lessend. In the configuration for 107 Columbia was incapable of making ISS orbit.
Even had it been launched as light as possible it could not have altered its orbit enough from shuttles nominal orbit to match ISS orbit & altitude. The OMS system simply does not have enough delta V capacity for such drastic changes in orbit. thus such plans suggested by some like jettisoning the space hab and thus the large protion of its payload weight on orbit would have been of no avail. However the lower weight upon re-entry may or may not have made a difference in the ability of the damaged wing to survive re-entry.. the question is would such a difference have been significant enough.
The two most promissing prospects for resuce of Columbia where
1) Going to minimum survival rations and atmosphere management. Launch Atlantis on an accelerated time scale. It was already slated for launch in about a month, Figure with around the clock work the time to launch could have been brought to a third with no loss of man hours ( assuming its prep work was only taking one shift of work a day ). That in addition to cutting some checks like its current payload complement being pulled for rescue gear and it could likely have been ready to launch in relatively short order. Easily withen the range of a stretched life support regimen aboard Columbia.
Concerns. Rushing a launch prep process that just put a critically wounded bird in orbit. The foam strikes were known and now that you decide to rush Atlantis launch you also know it could cause critical damage. Thus in deciding the situation is grave enough to launch Atlantis for rescue you know the threat of foam debris has been under estimated to date and Atlantis faces the exact same elevated risk.
Assumptions. You have managed to determine beyond a doubt Columbia cannot survive re-entry and that a rescue is the ONLY option. Again this assumption goes hand in hand with understanding the go to launch Atlantis will incur the same as yet under estimated risk of crippling Atlantis and thus stranding to birds in orbit with Two crews.
2) Repair. Ideas ranged from palcing all excess metal tools and bric a brac scavanged from the Mid deck and space hab into the breach in hopes of delaying the inevitable burn through presented by a carbon carbon panel breach. Second filling the breach with water which freezes into ice for similar purpose or some combination of the two posibilities.. IE all the metal then frozen into place by water.
Concerns. Requires EVA to the very un EVA friedly underwing area of the shuttle without the use of the 'Jet Pack' or Canada arm. If a sufficient teather was available the threat of a EVA floating away would have been minimal but such reveory would be exhausting and time consuming. Secondly there was some debate over whether placing material in the breach would make it more survivable or less surviveable during re-entry... IE may have just created molten slag that led to a quicker decintigration of the wing.
Assumptions. Again you have to determin beyond doubt the orbiter is breached to a sufficient degree to warrent a very dangerous EVA. Granted its a given if you know the danger exists. Hindsight tells us it did but that does not change the fact it was not known at the time. Perhaps Military assets could have sufficiently resolved the wing to determin the leading edge was breached.. perhaps not. We will not know until the military releases the resolving capability of its assests in regards to objects in LEO or when Atlantis Returns to flight and such capabilities are put to the test. Off hand I have heard rumors and old hands tales that the capacity would have been more than capable.
Personal Conclusions.
I would have sent Atlantis. The foam strike was almost literally a 1-100 crap shoot. Perhaps you draw the same c
The voice comm system works great. You have to understand this is not like using a phone at home. Every position in that room has an open loop ( open party line basically ). Same for the various "back room" teams. The TV feed I think is a combination of a commentator loop and the flight loop. There are probably dozens more and like I said they are all open party lines. There is a whole protocol behind how loop traffic is managed, for one its highly likely not all positions have talk capacity on the flight loop.
It helps somewhat if you understand the organization scheme. Flight is the peak of the pyramid under which you have the front room operators. The back room teams are generally related more or less to a front room position. Thus flight recieves reports from the front room and a few select remotes, the front room positions talk amongst themselves and recieve reports and have discussions with various back room teams. As the information under discussion gets finalized and or needs command decisions from flight they then bring it to the flight loop. Thus for most every status report you hear on the TV there has been a great deal of discussion going on you didn't hear on the various other loops.
You are not limited to monitoring one loop at a time... you can punch up several and the importance of various traffic then dictates what you pay attention too. Off hand I think the TV feed is made up of a commentator loop and the flight loop. Each of those people in the front room likely has numerous loops punched up and is listening to a chacaphony of traffic that most people would find all but impossible to follow. Its deffiantly an aquired skill.
The closest expereince I can ascociate to monitoring voice loops in a NASA flight ops environment is like IRC where you are simultaneously monitoring and occasionally addind to the traffic in multiple rooms.
Sometimes it would be nice if voice loops had the same easy access to the discussion history as online chat but by and by voice works much better than chat rooms could ever manage. However I grant one day I think you will see chat lines creeping into the process. Alot of loop traffic invovles long nuemonics, settings, serial numbers etc... and voice communication can often break down at that point and you wind up resorting to alpha Beta charlie lingo for clarity and multiple reads and read backs.
As for procedures the reason they are printed instead of on screen is due to the same issue that faces E-books. On screen procedures are not very friendly. Secondly screen real estate is at a premium.. if I want to look at multiple pages of a printed procedure its a matter of desk/floor/wall space. If I want to on a monitor I am limited to my screen real estate which is far less and far more expensive to add additional space.
Just going with quick back of the napkin calcs I don't know how likely this is. Electrolysis conversion rarely tops 50%, then recovery of power in a fuel cell is also 40-50% thus in the whole process you take a double hit in efficiency.
100 megawatt reactor could produce 50 megawatts worth of hydrogen ( 100% potential ) then you would recover 25 in the fuel cells when used. So 24*25 nets you 600 megawatt hours potential energy per day per 100 megawatts. Sounds like a lot but if you look into the needed energy for an expeditionary force on the move You would find it exceeds that by a fair margin.
Think of it in HP. 1mw is a million watts, 1hp is about 750w. So 25mw represents about 33,333 hp or about 22 maximum powered M1's. The loss due to inefficiencies of conversion are a gold plated biatch. Using the power directly generated is great, but converting to a storage medium and back takes a large chunk of it out thus in the end your tanker can't really supply a vary substabtial mobile force using typical sized navel reactors ( 50-200 MW range ). Probably need a terawatt or more of reactor capacity to support a batallion... and even then you would likely be playing a balancing act between storage capacity and generating capacity.
Not that it can't be done... uranium is certainly plentiful. And if you went for breeder reactors and nuclear battaries then making enough reactors to make it work is feasible... and available fuel where ever enough water is provides very important capacity for an armed force. But a hydrogen fuel source provided by fission reactors will requires a serious proliferation of reactors, and a military system will require numerous such mobile reactors.
I don't get yoru argument against the ( admittedly annoying ) SUV soccer mom. You know if the MPG is essentially the same in minivans and an SUV.. whats the big deal ?
Most people are not bitching about the platform of a Minivan vrs an SUV. What it seems to me they are really bitching about is the common option of a big powerful V-8 in SUV's. Case in point the Dodge Durango with its 5.7 litre HEMI getting a cool 14mpg. But its not like minivans do so much beter. Town and Countries get about 18mpg. Most all other SUV's do better than the Durango, Hell Expeditions get 18 or so and 20+ on the road with a 5.6 and do better with the 4.9 or V-6 option. SUV's tend to have much heavier duty frames as well which means more durable.
Why is it so surprising that people choose a vehicle with more power, better driveability, better re-sale value, and better status symbol ? Especially when in general the MPG gap is so small ? The question of get an Explorer/Cherokee/4runner etc... or get a cheap minivan is rather simple in my book.
Sure, Minivans have gads more storage space but in the end SUV's move your average family around in style and comfort. You can Carpool more people with a Minivan I grant but that is generally not going to be greater than 50% of your driving. In general for a family a Minivan will not be appealing till your are constantly carrying more than 3 sizeable passengers.
Everyone just take a deep breath regarding SUV's. When gas prices go through the roof people will be buying econo boxes left and right, remember the 80's ?
You want more people to drive minivans than urban assault vehicles ??? Its simple. Just find a way for doing so to make enough economic sense to compensate for the bruising your typical Male ego takes when crammed into a Minivan. An extra couple hundred bucks in gas a year aint gonna do it. Get up around a thousand and your in business. Not to mention you have to convince all those wonderfull soccer moms that have come to appreciate SUV's status value and sense of POWER. Again a couple hundred bucks savings a year in gas dosn't provide the incentive to go for the minivan, they spend more than that on new shoes for similar reasons. The storage space is in general meaningless as well becasue most SUV's have enough for the typical family.
Columbia was the only shuttle with a big enough cargo bay ?? Your smoking crack rock. The thing was launched by Discovery in the first place. I think your refering to the presence of the docking aparatus for ISS operations which is presently in all the other shuttles and which Columbia was about to be re-fitted with had it returned safely.
As for the orbit reaching thats equally nutz, Columbia was the LEAST capable of the shuttles due to the fact it was the heaviest shuttle. It was only capable of marginal payloads to the ISS orbit even after its re-fit.
All the shuttles can reach Hubble and if the docking apparatus is removed from the bay all are large enough to bring it home if it were so desired. Why you would want to subject the shuttle to the extra stress the extra mass would cause on re-entry I do not know. I personally thought the space hab mission by columbia was silly, partly for that reason and partly becasue we have a station, why fly around doing the same stuff just on columbia when it could have been done aboard station?? That mission was a make work mission for columbia because columbia's short commings made it marginal for operations to ISS. It probably should have been retired after the last hubble service mission or even before. Course hindsight is always 20/20.
Seniors choosing between food and medicine is horrible but the govn't paying for the medicine is not the only answer. Regulating costs would be a nice start. This whole fiasco with state gov'ts buying re-imported drugs from canada is a good example of just how horrible the proffiteering is amoung the drug companies regarding US sales.
But you make it sound like the government is doing nothing about health, spending nothing when in fact
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hhs. ht ml
Department of Health and human services
discretionary ~65 billion mandatory ~471 billion
As for a mission to moon/mars not possibly being a reality at 100billion I ask on what athourity you base that assumption. That insane price was based on a particular type of mission reliant on particular technologies which did not exist.. and in large part still do not exist. There is more than one way to do it, and more than one possible price tag. Not to mention the oft overlooked reality that budgets can be undershot as well as over shot.
I also find it hysterical to reffer to 100 billion dollars as 'For only'. Thats alot of damn money and well directed can be used to accomplish a great deal... as you point out re-directing it to buy medicine for those who can not afford it could be effective. It always amazes me how people poo poo that money will be wasted spent one way and yet not be wasted spent another however noble or for whatever reasons. Not really reffering to your comment here... thats just an inconsistency you often encounter in budget allocation debates.
You say there is no reason for man in space and to that I have one response which no doubt you fear not.
http://www.solarviews.com/cap/earth/chicxulb.htm
You know I wish those silly damn movies hadn't been made... it now permeates the discussion of impacts with the farcical images of Bruce Willis and company..... anway at a guess, assuming you do think another such event can happen, you think we should 'solve the problems of the world we are on before heading to space' and that anything like that is so far into the future that worrying about it now is silly and pointless as it will 'never affect us now'.
To which I can only say thinking 90 billion spent one way as opposed to the other in the face of trillions just by the US government alone can solve the worlds problem is equaly as asinine as you claim manned missions in space are. Also asinine in my opinion is thinking the worlds, or even a single countrys problems will ever be solved to perfection. All in all we live in damn good times and if you doubt it then I suggest a study in quality of life through the ages to present Day USA
As for needed a reason to fund manned missions.... hell if that picture of chicxulb does not make you understand the ultimate purpose of sending people to other planets I doubt anything will. For the 'its not a real threat' line of thought I pose a question. Again providing you belive it will happen again, when will be the the appropriate time to address the issue? How long will it take to mount a suitable answer to that particular problem ?
The problem with random events, even long term period random events, is that you don't know. Even considering the idea that large periodic objects intersecting the earths orbit we do know about present know immeidiate danger that we know of
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Three-Bo dy Problem.html
The problem of multiple body interactions in terms or precisely predicting such things is a real problem even for the objects we know about much less the ones we have yet to find or encounter.
I'm not chicken little and I am not suggesting the sky is falling. I am simply saying there is a very real known need for us to figure out how to live more places than just here on earth. The beginings of that knowledge is the humble first steps of small expeditions. Argue that now is not the time. Do not argue its imposisble becasue we have been accomplishing the 'impossible' throughout our history, generally speaking all we had to do was try to open open new realms of possibility.
Out of curiosity do you think all NASA spending should be cut or just manned exploration ?
The time delay makes telepresence a problem even on the Moon, Mars is pretty difficult.
"Boy, if something were to go wrong, we couldn't help the astronaut. Even travelling at the speed of light."
I have never understood that reasoning, peronally to me the idea of never sending people away from earth because something bad might happen to them is the moral equivalent of someone afraid to walk out their front door because something bad might happen to them.
And finally, yes we most certainly can foot a 90 billion dollar a year bill if we choose to do so. 90 billion does not represent even 1% of the national budget therefore we most deffinatly can afford it. The question is not can we afford it but should we buy it. But hell, by comparison if you have 10,000 dollars of spending money a year, your talking about the moral equivalent of a purcase of less than 100 dollars made 11 years in a row.
Having said that I really don't think that is what it would cost by a long shot. I subscribe to Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct idea which with horrible budget over runs likely wouldn't reach 100 billion all told.
I agree with the big picture of what your saying, but not with the insistence that the Moon rather than Mars is the preferable target for bootstrapping.
Mars is easier to bootstrap a permanent colony than the moon is. Also the moon represents more health risk with its essential lack of gravity. Mars 39% Earth gravity may well represent a problem to permanent settlement as well but its far better than almost none. If you have a case for the moon being better with more than its closer I'd love to hear it.
I also gather from what you said that you may not have read all of Zubrin's Case for mars or entering space. He is right there with you. The Mars direct plan is but the tip of the iceburg with that guy. Its the hook to get us started. Once your there and staying 500 days at a time its not that far of a stretch to staying 1000 days, then 2000, before you know it you have a permanent settlement. I am not sure I agree with the guy completly on the ultimate vision but his goal is man living on mars, not visiting and he thinks his plan will get us there in pretty short order. Hell if you design the initial mission based on easy access to water with little need for seed hydrogen then you could plan a mission that could survive a long time, say 5+ years without re-supply with the plan to send an ERV or re-supply to extend depending on how the mission goes with the plan of establishing a permanent outpost. Thus like the early explorers your goal isn't scientific, its homesteading. They could however provide a local control capacity for martian robotic missions ( take out the delay ), and if those devices are in rover range then they can re-pair/service those missions.
Thus the goal of the mission in my mind should be trying to stay as long as possible with as little support from earth as possible. That way you don't have to try justifying the mission with scientific discovery... but you do not forgo scientific discovery altogether, just the initial focus is going to be on the practical science of living. Thus the science is put to practical use keeping us there rather than providing the justification for being there in the first place.
Same way they propose leaving the moon if its a refuling station... you make your gas there for the return trip. True mars is harder to get off of than the moon but its also alot easier than getting off the earth. and making your own fuel is far easier on mars courtesy of the atmosphere and compratively abundant water. If you have access to water you can break it into H and O then use that for a rocket or continue to work with the hydrogen and co2 atmosphere to generate methane for a methane and oxygen engine. Methane is easier to contain than hydrogen ( boil off of hydrogen is a problem on the surface )... though that reaction has a lower ISP it makes storage easier and the lower gravity of mars makes the lower ISP a viable tradeoff.
Even if you can't access water you can take seed stock hydrogen ( deep space means far less boil off during outbound leg and you start processing asap once you hit the surface ) and generate roughly 18(?) pounds of fuel materials for every pound of feed stock hydrogen. I forget the checmical reactions ( sabatier ?? ) used but I am sure you can find it on the mars direct homepage.... it is well known and has been used for a long time in industrial processes.
The basic idea is you split the CO2 in the atmosphere and for every atom of H you bring along you bond 4 C's and release 8 O's so for each element of hydrogen you recieve a methane molecule and 4 O2 molecules. not to mention that forms a 4-1 ratio and I believe the CH4&O2 reaction is a 2 to 1 ratio so the 'waste' oxygen in the process is a very desireable thing to say the least.
All in all, a great deal easier than breaking down rocks which is what lunar regolith processing requires.
Yes and no. The X-prize contestants are working on much smaller budgets and competing for a 10 million dollar prize. I think in most cases the 10 million would be a profit. I am not so sure about the armadillo and rutan design efforts though.
In any case they are just going for altitude, 100 kilometers in this case. They never attain orbital velocities and thus never encounter the atmosphere at those velocities. I think the highest speed being proposed is over mach 2 which is roughly 1400mph. Orbital Velocity is roughly 17,500mph. Only prooven method for attaining that speed is a rocket and that means carrying a crap load of fuel, which means a BIG rocket. The rockets in that contest are not very big and scaling them gets tricky.
However, as you point out, We know how to make rockets But engines that produce in the 100klbs + range are still damned expensive and finiky bastards. Open sourcing the current designs and allowing anyone with the manufacturing capacity to have at it could make the larger scale designs already known cheaper... though for the most part to make them cheaper you need economy of scale and for that you need a large enough launch scehdule which people will pay for.
For a while it seemed commercial sattellites would provide such a demand but that all fell apart. Perhaps it will eventually provide such a schedule but right now it dosn't.
So private ventures have a problem.... we know how to make big rockets but they don't have access to the designs on the books so they currently would have to develop their own designs. No matter how you approach that its expensive.... thousands, possibly millions of man hours, high precision machining and equaly exacting construction. Building a house is easy, building a skyscraper is hard... But imagine building your first skyscraper after only having built a house. We are talking about a similar increase in difficulty from current smaller scale rocket designs to building rockets capable of accelerating manned mission mass levels to orbital velocity at an altitude higher than 100 kilometers ( the nominal boundary for 'space').
The other problem is the heat encounterd accelerating and returning. X-prize contestents are not encountering any heating that very mundane materials can not handle. Aluminum skin on airplanes has been surviving extended mach speeds for several decades and the x-prize flight profiles are pretty short. As you approach and pass mach 3 things get a little different. You either need an active cooling system or exotic materials like Titanium or carbon fibre composits. Machining Ti and carbon fibre is no easy task and machining them to exacting precise specifications is not a cheap process even at the most basic 'at cost level'.
Now having said all that my gut feeling is your right. 20 billion is a bit much... what really amazes me are the people that think its such a paltry sum and its insane to think we could ever even atempt a manned mission to mars/moon for that or less.
My guess is if a company with the needed expertise and access to existing design info could pull off a lunar mission mimicing apollo 'at cost' for less than 5 billion... possibly even less than a billion but that would be very slim and here is why.
Had we decided to keep saturn V production then a launch today is estimated at approximately 300 million based on our experiences with the delta and atlas lines. The problem is we don't have the tooling to make the bad boys anymore. Thus you have to re-tool for a heavy booster. Even if you manage to sidestep most of the experimental R&D cost incured in the initial design you have to keep in mind prototype cars and new factory line tooling are VERY expensive and they are generally incremental design improovements using equipment that exists. This would not be the case for a large booster... so not only do you re-tool for the stack, you have to re-tool the tools to re-tool for the stack with. And unless you have numerous launches the per launch cost of the system will ref
Thats not the article I wanted to refference but I can't find the one I liked so much right now.
In short start searching for actual new oil fields being found over the course of the last 20 years or so.
Demand is growing, finds of new sources have severely declined and exploration is getting more costly with less returns.. Ie we are spending more and more to find less and less. The idea represented in that discussion and others I have read is that discovery rate is not even close to keeping up with the current growth, and with India and China comming online as serious energy consumers that growth rate is going to expand in a hurry while all current indications are new sources/production will be declining, possible at an even greater rate. The two together will be devestating.
Thats where the close term predictions are comming from. Thats the worst case scenario. The more immediate fear is that even if we should find significant new fields all of the current major oil fields including those in the middle east are crossing the line, IE they have reached peak production and we will now see those oil fields decline as production rates go down as more and more effort must be made in the extraction process. The experiences with the north sea oil fields has shown that while technology allows us to get at the dregs it dosn't really help production all that much, IE its harder to get at and takes longer to get it, the technology just means we can get at it eventually but nothing replaces a natural gushing well for production.
Thus without finding new substatial fields our capacity to produce is going to be rapidly and continually outstripped by the increase in demand. Free market economy principles are pretty fuckin darwinnian in that scenario and it is a situation that will rapidly worsen until not only are new fields found but brought online.
The direst prediction of that scneario have it already begining, others think 2010-2020 time frame. In either case it is paramount to find new sources or a viable alternative primary energy source.
synthetic oils have a problem... they cost more energy to create than you recover. They also tie our biomass/foodstuff production into our energy needs. So far farming advances have kept us ahead of the nunmerous population crisis predictions with regards to providing food... but if the results of farming also has to provide the primary source of energy for machienary as well as for food will it be able to do so ?
I havn't completly given up on the idea.. waste recylcling shows promise and evidently not all of the synthetic production need take away from food stuffs. So it may work, but the discussions I have seen say its far from a certain thing. In the end regardless the problem of it taking more energy to make than it produces means it will always be a more expensive source of energy than naturally occuring oil.
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I must disagree with your sentiments. Personally I feel the modern drive for more consistent grammar and spelling to be the result of a continuing cultural bias towards the superficial. Your right that proper presentation does help one in the world today. Yet I am far from convinced that the growing emphasis in society on presentation as opposed to content is a good thing. I do not think that is what you are advocating but such sentiments are evident in other posts made suggesting that sub par grammar in a post is suitable grounds for out right rejection of any ideas so presented.
/. hack writes with more consistency than some of the greatest luminaries in history. I find the notion that 'correct' grammatical structure and consistent dictionary spellings have any impact on the substance of writting to be rather humorous. Presentation and content rarely have more than a passing aquaintence. While good grammar and spelling is gerenally a good marker of education it by no means conveys intelligence beyond a good memory and a penchant for mimicry.
Perhaps I am biased due to the fact in my studies I was often required to read original historical source materials. In general the worst
I could not agree more that ones prime courtesy to others in written discourse is to clearly and lucidly present your thoughts in a manner understandable to your audience. Can consistent grammar and spelling be benificial in that effort ? Most certainly. However there is a difference between grammatical and spelling inconsitencies which cause confusion and those which are undeniably superficial. In the case poor usage/spelling causes confusion then attacking those elements is key to the discussion. On the other hand, attacking superficial inconsistencies that have no bearing on the meaning of a passage is generally a wastefull excercise IMHO.
All in all I much preffer intelligent discussion to grammatical perfection. If I can have both great, if not I choose substance over presentation. I have seen many posts here indicating they would preffer presentation over substance which I find odd.
Having said all that, the parting shot by the original poster was certainly an invitation to return fire. Your suggestions are good ones for improoving ones grammar and spelling. However, in the end I must agree with the ultimate sentiment that there are better things to discuss than the order of ie/ei, double consonants and silent e's..... unless you are discussing the necessity of such things off topic as the case may be !!!
That merger tore the soul out of Mindspring. I had the best tech support experience back when there were a local isp in Atlanta. Installed a generic modem from some mom and pop custom shop that had a driver that was dumbed up. This was before I knew much more than how to turn the damn computer on. Wound up Spending more than 2 hours on the phone with a tech who finally resolved the problem using me as his eyes. It was a series of problems that would have caused an endless circle in todays tech support.
Mindspring died when the Earthlink elements ate it from the inside out after the merger and all hope of resurrection was lost when they bought out Charles Brewer. Scary thing is, by most indications they are still as good as it gets on the national ISP scene.
How so ?
I don't disagree that there must be a force acting against change.
I agree that context largely determines what is correct for the occasion.
However, in either case if you never allow change or you never break context the language becomes stale. Thus you must have those that forment change and at the opposing end you need people who are biased against change. That is not to say people who never accept a change, or conversely those who think any change is acceptable.
If you think we are largely in disagreement I think you should go read my post once more.
However, we perhaps have a disagreement if you think the character of Mr. Finn to be a 'Hayseed' in any but the most superficial of definitions. If you do I suggest you read the tale of his exploits at least once more. If such a superficial lack of polish inclines you to write him off as a simpleton then at least part of the messege presented by the masterfull Mr. Clemens has fallen on deaf ears in your case.
Perhaps you derived some mis-understanding from my term grammar Nazi. Perhaps you think I was implying that any correction of grammer is worthy of such a label of extreme intolerance. Perhaps it would clear your perception of my post if you stopped to consider the nature of the give and take in the English language of which you have indicated you are aware. In the change of the language there are the elements of change and the dogmatic deffense of the status quo aka. Grammar Nazi's. A grammar Nazi opposes reading Huckleberry Finn in an English class because it contains 'improper english'. A grammer Nazi quibles about a comma when it has zero bearing on the meaning of a passage. A grammer Nazi says aint isn't a word when they know perfectly well what it means.
I am no great fan of 133t. But in its proper context it is every bit as proper as Cambridge diction. A grammar Nazi opposes it simply on the grounds it does not conform.
Go rent bowling for columbine.
Guns are not necesarrily the driver. The prime example shown in that documentary is Canada which has a higher gun per capita than the states and yet a small fraction of the gun crime.
Disclaimer: I far from agree with Moore on everything he says. But his implied significance of the news media in engendering a society of violence is one continually swept under the rug by the '5th estate'. After all no one likes telling on themselves... no indeed, its better to whip up the violence in fiction and video games rather than talk about the display of the carnage of real life violence because its 'The News'.
In the end I agree it plays a role. but in and of itself it is too simple. Somone else pointed out how the war on drugs crime stats resemebled the spike of crime during prohibition. Its like most anything, the more you dig into it the more complex it gets.
No they just generally gloss over how the event ended and focus ont the deaths involved. If it bleeds it leads. They don't want to talk about violent crime averted. They want to talk about what slipped through the wicket.
I have never understood the motivations of a grammar Nazi. English is a living language. As such, the rules governing its constant mutation are generally a decade or more behind, especially if the high and mighty decide some usage is beneath the dignity of recognition as official no matter how common the usage may be. The word ain't comes to mind. Say it ain't a word all you like, it ain't gonna make no difference.
The ultimate purpose of a language is to communicate. To me the definition of whether or not a written statement is literate or illiterate has to do with how well it conveys its message to its audience vrs the intent of the author. You can argue about misplaced commas, misspelled words and improper grammar all that you like. However the fact remains a language is about communication and communication does not always follow the rules. Classic example is literature written in dialect such as the ever popular Huckleberry Finn by Samuel Clemens. If you chose to re-write that story according to 'Proper English' it would not convey anywhere near the same story.
English is like Perl, The Romance Languages are like C. Thus English is like TIMTOWTDI to the max. In the end it only matters if the interpreter Groks what you are trying to say.... some interpreters may force you to use strict, others will completely grok your 1 line million statement nth degree nested code.
So called 'Proper English' is merely a central dialect with a more highly regarded and formalized structure. As the central trunk of the language it also serves as the common frame work which keeps all the various sub formats ( such as AIM speak, Blog speak, Geek, even 133t ) linked. In addition, being fluent in 'Proper English' has come to bear a mark of social significance. I leave it to you to choose whether or not it is one of merit or disparagement.
In short blind adherence to 'proper english' is valuing form over substance. Sometimes 'proper' formating provides the best solution and in others it ain't gonna cut it.
2 seconds for 10 feet equates to 160 feet or there bouts sure enough. But the car in front is not stationary so generally it also covers most of the same distance.
Tailgating should be punishable by death I couldn't agree more. But the safe zone in front of you is not only about your reaction time. Almost as important in determing how far back you really need to be is the breaking capacity of both vehicles. 2 seconds won't do a Mack truck a damn bit of good against a Vette 2 seconds ahead applying full breaks.... not that the truck will give a shit as it rolls over the car.... but more important is the case of the SUV tailing a sports car or an average Sedan for that matter. The 2 seconds is a good rule of thumb... but at highway speeds you need to take into consideration what capability the vehicle has in front of you for suddenly stopping vrs your ability to react and your cars ability to slow down.
Generally speaking this is something that becomes more and more important as your mass increases and the ability to break declines. People driving Z-3's Miata's etc.. can out break most anything on the road so for them it is simply a question of reacting in time and they have the widest margin of error. Somone driving an Escalade tailing a Lexus at the 2 second mark is completely at the mercy of the Lexus driver in terms of a wreck happening no matter how alert the Escalade ( or insert other urban assault vehicle ) driver is.
To some extent you also need to be aware of how close people are behind you and some idea of their ability to stop... meaning the physcial capacity of the vehicle aside from the alertness of the driver. IE if I slam my breaks am I going to get slammed by the idiot behind me even if he is paying attention ? Would I preffer that or trying the shoulder/median in a pinch ? ID and rank your threats, then ID and rank your responses accordingly. The idea is to always make choices that reduce threats and give you more outs.
Some people laugh at thinking this 'deep' but if you constantly size up the options at the cardinal points and continually update your list of emergency responses you will be surprised how many fewer close calls you have because you avoided placing yourself in the situation to begin with.
If you think your not car savvy enough to make these kinds of call don't worry its really simple... your not peforming math calculations here. A good rule of thumb is the faster a vehicle can accelerate the faster it can break. Exception of IDIOTS driving supercharged 3-500hp street rods with bone stock breaks. But you don't have to know reams of specs off the top of your head for this level of thinking to help you.
Really its more about size/mass than anything else. Rank the Vehicle in front of you as small ( civic ) Medium ( Crown Vick ) Large ( Escalade ). When you are equal or smaller, 2 seconds is probably all you need provided your paying attention. However, add a second for any difference in size where your bigger. IE 3 - 4 seconds.... For every 10mph over 65 add another second.
Granted its not always feasible to maintain safe gaps.... but even so you can jockey for position behind someone that gives you a better margin of error. For example if you have to be close to somone be close to someone you can out break.... Thus you can use all those insane SUV drivers to work for you as shields and blockers and your margin is really the gap between you and the car in front of your shield because you can stop faster than your shield.
What exactly is shuttle if not a rocket ??? And if your distinguishing between solid and liquid you must recall that the shuttle employs both... those two bosters on the side are not called SOLID Rocket Boosters for no reason.
Also the Deltas and Atlases use Keroseen and LOX ( Same as Apollo ) if memory serves and they also use differnt numbers of SRB's and extra liquid stages to provide the various configurations.
Solid Technology is good for producing MASSIVE thrust but they generally have low Isp which means their fuel weight is a real problem and once you get up around the SRB size you have run into a serious dimenishing returns problem.
So when combining the abilities of Solid and liquid systems you create essentially a first stage solid propelled system that pushes the liquid system untill it is sufficient to provide lift by itself. Thus the early MASSIVE thrust that can be achived more easily in Solid systems maximizes the longer lasting and higher Isp but lower overall thrust from liquid systems.
Before you denigrate shuttle remember that most of the compromises are in the form the orbiter took. Drop the cross range requirment, go with capsule return and expendable engines and the usefull payload capacity closes in rapidly on Apollo with half the number of launch engines.
I wonder what would have happend if at the time the program had adopted 1 or perhaps 2 F-1's and re-tained the more compact Keroseen LOX bi-prop instead of going with the re-useable concept of the SSME's with the higher ISP of LOH and LOX but with the bulk problem of the LOH.
This isn't Cameron's view of a mars mission... he just requested imaging of a current plan. One which is largely based on the Mars Direct Plan detailed by Robert Zubrin in 'The Case for Mars'. This seems to be mostly the NASA adopted version known as Mars Semi Direct and is the current baseline plan for a manned mission to mars.
As for how, well unlike the moon Mars has an atmosphere which means an internal combustion engine or Fuel cell will work ( albeit with a different gas, Methane Fuel cell in this case I believe ). So basically you land the crew with a rover with a full tank of gas to run an ICE or fuel cell with a considerable range... around 1000 miles or 500 mile radius which is far more versatile than a battery or solar powered rover.
For an idea of how accurately they can land ballistic loads the Mars Rovers provide an excellent example. IE they can draw a circle considerably smaller than 1000 miles and be relatively certain they can land payloads in it. back in the days of Capsule use in the US program they got it down to around 50 miles if memeory serves.
If you have a 3 launch system where you launch/land a cargo which successfully begins the fuel making process ( you know its there and working ) then you launch a Crew vehicle and another cargo/fuel producing pod. If you land the crew withen rover range the second cargo pod becomes the basis for the next mission. If you fail to land the crew near enough you then attempt to land the reserve cargo pod withen rover range of where the crew landed.
Thus you have a crew vehicle with roughly 1000 miles of range to reach the cargo pods and two chances to get them withen range of a cargo pod. The overall success rate of mars missions aside, the ballistic accuracy has only be way off once that I know of... that unfortunate incident involving poor measurment conversions or failure of conversion. one of the biggest errors in Earth Capsule return was the recent Soyouz landing of an ISS crew which was off a few hundred miles due to a steeper than planned re-entry triggered by a software failure.
In addition if access to water is found and you land the crew in a place where they can 'easily' access water then you can include a smaller ability to process its own fuel and suddenly the range is limited only by access to water with which to seed the process and life support for the crew.
They are in Utah.. most likely debris field would still be overland. I think they would probably have chosen to place the higest risk of debris over the ocean... Also you would need an ILS system to even hope for a remote landing, perhaps one could be installed in a hurry at a remote location, I have no idea. Edwards is in California and the most likely re-entry breakup would occur over the ocean... by the time you reached the coast you would be past the most likely point of catastrophic break up.... plus you would have the full emergency equipment support of Edwards available.
I have heard similar, and what I have heard indicates the quality would have been mnore than sufficient. That has also been the apparent line of thinking of the few military people that have made any comment on the issue at all. Probably the most asinine problem brought to light in the CAIB report is that the Ranking official that made the call to cancel the asset tasking for imaging request did not have clearence to know what the capabilities where. The assumption was made that no imaging would be sufficient to dicern any damage.
You could probably attempt to land Shuttle remotely, most of the descent profile is under computer control. But if you have a high suspicion of a break up on re-entry it would be interesting to see where they would have chosen to atempt the landing..... perhaps Edwards.
Columbia was capable of making ISS orbit. However to do so it had to tbe the goal from launch. And more importantly in the case of sts-107 the payload would have to have been severly lessend. In the configuration for 107 Columbia was incapable of making ISS orbit.
Even had it been launched as light as possible it could not have altered its orbit enough from shuttles nominal orbit to match ISS orbit & altitude. The OMS system simply does not have enough delta V capacity for such drastic changes in orbit. thus such plans suggested by some like jettisoning the space hab and thus the large protion of its payload weight on orbit would have been of no avail. However the lower weight upon re-entry may or may not have made a difference in the ability of the damaged wing to survive re-entry.. the question is would such a difference have been significant enough.
The two most promissing prospects for resuce of Columbia where
1) Going to minimum survival rations and atmosphere management. Launch Atlantis on an accelerated time scale. It was already slated for launch in about a month, Figure with around the clock work the time to launch could have been brought to a third with no loss of man hours ( assuming its prep work was only taking one shift of work a day ). That in addition to cutting some checks like its current payload complement being pulled for rescue gear and it could likely have been ready to launch in relatively short order. Easily withen the range of a stretched life support regimen aboard Columbia.
Concerns. Rushing a launch prep process that just put a critically wounded bird in orbit. The foam strikes were known and now that you decide to rush Atlantis launch you also know it could cause critical damage. Thus in deciding the situation is grave enough to launch Atlantis for rescue you know the threat of foam debris has been under estimated to date and Atlantis faces the exact same elevated risk.
Assumptions. You have managed to determine beyond a doubt Columbia cannot survive re-entry and that a rescue is the ONLY option. Again this assumption goes hand in hand with understanding the go to launch Atlantis will incur the same as yet under estimated risk of crippling Atlantis and thus stranding to birds in orbit with Two crews.
2) Repair. Ideas ranged from palcing all excess metal tools and bric a brac scavanged from the Mid deck and space hab into the breach in hopes of delaying the inevitable burn through presented by a carbon carbon panel breach. Second filling the breach with water which freezes into ice for similar purpose or some combination of the two posibilities.. IE all the metal then frozen into place by water.
Concerns. Requires EVA to the very un EVA friedly underwing area of the shuttle without the use of the 'Jet Pack' or Canada arm. If a sufficient teather was available the threat of a EVA floating away would have been minimal but such reveory would be exhausting and time consuming.
Secondly there was some debate over whether placing material in the breach would make it more survivable or less surviveable during re-entry... IE may have just created molten slag that led to a quicker decintigration of the wing.
Assumptions. Again you have to determin beyond doubt the orbiter is breached to a sufficient degree to warrent a very dangerous EVA. Granted its a given if you know the danger exists. Hindsight tells us it did but that does not change the fact it was not known at the time. Perhaps Military assets could have sufficiently resolved the wing to determin the leading edge was breached.. perhaps not. We will not know until the military releases the resolving capability of its assests in regards to objects in LEO or when Atlantis Returns to flight and such capabilities are put to the test. Off hand I have heard rumors and old hands tales that the capacity would have been more than capable.
Personal Conclusions.
I would have sent Atlantis. The foam strike was almost literally a 1-100 crap shoot. Perhaps you draw the same c
The voice comm system works great. You have to understand this is not like using a phone at home. Every position in that room has an open loop ( open party line basically ). Same for the various "back room" teams. The TV feed I think is a combination of a commentator loop and the flight loop. There are probably dozens more and like I said they are all open party lines. There is a whole protocol behind how loop traffic is managed, for one its highly likely not all positions have talk capacity on the flight loop.
It helps somewhat if you understand the organization scheme. Flight is the peak of the pyramid under which you have the front room operators. The back room teams are generally related more or less to a front room position. Thus flight recieves reports from the front room and a few select remotes, the front room positions talk amongst themselves and recieve reports and have discussions with various back room teams. As the information under discussion gets finalized and or needs command decisions from flight they then bring it to the flight loop. Thus for most every status report you hear on the TV there has been a great deal of discussion going on you didn't hear on the various other loops.
You are not limited to monitoring one loop at a time... you can punch up several and the importance of various traffic then dictates what you pay attention too. Off hand I think the TV feed is made up of a commentator loop and the flight loop. Each of those people in the front room likely has numerous loops punched up and is listening to a chacaphony of traffic that most people would find all but impossible to follow. Its deffiantly an aquired skill.
The closest expereince I can ascociate to monitoring voice loops in a NASA flight ops environment is like IRC where you are simultaneously monitoring and occasionally addind to the traffic in multiple rooms.
Sometimes it would be nice if voice loops had the same easy access to the discussion history as online chat but by and by voice works much better than chat rooms could ever manage. However I grant one day I think you will see chat lines creeping into the process. Alot of loop traffic invovles long nuemonics, settings, serial numbers etc... and voice communication can often break down at that point and you wind up resorting to alpha Beta charlie lingo for clarity and multiple reads and read backs.
As for procedures the reason they are printed instead of on screen is due to the same issue that faces E-books. On screen procedures are not very friendly. Secondly screen real estate is at a premium.. if I want to look at multiple pages of a printed procedure its a matter of desk/floor/wall space. If I want to on a monitor I am limited to my screen real estate which is far less and far more expensive to add additional space.
Just going with quick back of the napkin calcs I don't know how likely this is. Electrolysis conversion rarely tops 50%, then recovery of power in a fuel cell is also 40-50% thus in the whole process you take a double hit in efficiency.
100 megawatt reactor could produce 50 megawatts worth of hydrogen ( 100% potential ) then you would recover 25 in the fuel cells when used. So 24*25 nets you 600 megawatt hours potential energy per day per 100 megawatts. Sounds like a lot but if you look into the needed energy for an expeditionary force on the move You would find it exceeds that by a fair margin.
Think of it in HP. 1mw is a million watts, 1hp is about 750w. So 25mw represents about 33,333 hp or about 22 maximum powered M1's. The loss due to inefficiencies of conversion are a gold plated biatch. Using the power directly generated is great, but converting to a storage medium and back takes a large chunk of it out thus in the end your tanker can't really supply a vary substabtial mobile force using typical sized navel reactors ( 50-200 MW range ). Probably need a terawatt or more of reactor capacity to support a batallion... and even then you would likely be playing a balancing act between storage capacity and generating capacity.
Not that it can't be done... uranium is certainly plentiful. And if you went for breeder reactors and nuclear battaries then making enough reactors to make it work is feasible... and available fuel where ever enough water is provides very important capacity for an armed force. But a hydrogen fuel source provided by fission reactors will requires a serious proliferation of reactors, and a military system will require numerous such mobile reactors.
I don't get yoru argument against the ( admittedly annoying ) SUV soccer mom. You know if the MPG is essentially the same in minivans and an SUV.. whats the big deal ?
Most people are not bitching about the platform of a Minivan vrs an SUV. What it seems to me they are really bitching about is the common option of a big powerful V-8 in SUV's. Case in point the Dodge Durango with its 5.7 litre HEMI getting a cool 14mpg. But its not like minivans do so much beter. Town and Countries get about 18mpg. Most all other SUV's do better than the Durango, Hell Expeditions get 18 or so and 20+ on the road with a 5.6 and do better with the 4.9 or V-6 option. SUV's tend to have much heavier duty frames as well which means more durable.
Why is it so surprising that people choose a vehicle with more power, better driveability, better re-sale value, and better status symbol ? Especially when in general the MPG gap is so small ? The question of get an Explorer/Cherokee/4runner etc... or get a cheap minivan is rather simple in my book.
Sure, Minivans have gads more storage space but in the end SUV's move your average family around in style and comfort. You can Carpool more people with a Minivan I grant but that is generally not going to be greater than 50% of your driving. In general for a family a Minivan will not be appealing till your are constantly carrying more than 3 sizeable passengers.
Everyone just take a deep breath regarding SUV's. When gas prices go through the roof people will be buying econo boxes left and right, remember the 80's ?
You want more people to drive minivans than urban assault vehicles ??? Its simple. Just find a way for doing so to make enough economic sense to compensate for the bruising your typical Male ego takes when crammed into a Minivan. An extra couple hundred bucks in gas a year aint gonna do it. Get up around a thousand and your in business. Not to mention you have to convince all those wonderfull soccer moms that have come to appreciate SUV's status value and sense of POWER. Again a couple hundred bucks savings a year in gas dosn't provide the incentive to go for the minivan, they spend more than that on new shoes for similar reasons. The storage space is in general meaningless as well becasue most SUV's have enough for the typical family.
Columbia was the only shuttle with a big enough cargo bay ?? Your smoking crack rock. The thing was launched by Discovery in the first place. I think your refering to the presence of the docking aparatus for ISS operations which is presently in all the other shuttles and which Columbia was about to be re-fitted with had it returned safely.
As for the orbit reaching thats equally nutz, Columbia was the LEAST capable of the shuttles due to the fact it was the heaviest shuttle. It was only capable of marginal payloads to the ISS orbit even after its re-fit.
All the shuttles can reach Hubble and if the docking apparatus is removed from the bay all are large enough to bring it home if it were so desired. Why you would want to subject the shuttle to the extra stress the extra mass would cause on re-entry I do not know. I personally thought the space hab mission by columbia was silly, partly for that reason and partly becasue we have a station, why fly around doing the same stuff just on columbia when it could have been done aboard station?? That mission was a make work mission for columbia because columbia's short commings made it marginal for operations to ISS. It probably should have been retired after the last hubble service mission or even before. Course hindsight is always 20/20.
Seniors choosing between food and medicine is horrible but the govn't paying for the medicine is not the only answer. Regulating costs would be a nice start. This whole fiasco with state gov'ts buying re-imported drugs from canada is a good example of just how horrible the proffiteering is amoung the drug companies regarding US sales.
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But you make it sound like the government is doing nothing about health, spending nothing when in fact
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hhs
Department of Health and human services
discretionary ~65 billion
mandatory ~471 billion
As for a mission to moon/mars not possibly being a reality at 100billion I ask on what athourity you base that assumption. That insane price was based on a particular type of mission reliant on particular technologies which did not exist.. and in large part still do not exist. There is more than one way to do it, and more than one possible price tag. Not to mention the oft overlooked reality that budgets can be undershot as well as over shot.
I also find it hysterical to reffer to 100 billion dollars as 'For only'. Thats alot of damn money and well directed can be used to accomplish a great deal... as you point out re-directing it to buy medicine for those who can not afford it could be effective. It always amazes me how people poo poo that money will be wasted spent one way and yet not be wasted spent another however noble or for whatever reasons. Not really reffering to your comment here... thats just an inconsistency you often encounter in budget allocation debates.
You say there is no reason for man in space and to that I have one response which no doubt you fear not.
http://www.solarviews.com/cap/earth/chicxulb.ht
You know I wish those silly damn movies hadn't been made... it now permeates the discussion of impacts with the farcical images of Bruce Willis and company..... anway at a guess, assuming you do think another such event can happen, you think we should 'solve the problems of the world we are on before heading to space' and that anything like that is so far into the future that worrying about it now is silly and pointless as it will 'never affect us now'.
To which I can only say thinking 90 billion spent one way as opposed to the other in the face of trillions just by the US government alone can solve the worlds problem is equaly as asinine as you claim manned missions in space are. Also asinine in my opinion is thinking the worlds, or even a single countrys problems will ever be solved to perfection. All in all we live in damn good times and if you doubt it then I suggest a study in quality of life through the ages to present Day USA
As for needed a reason to fund manned missions.... hell if that picture of chicxulb does not make you understand the ultimate purpose of sending people to other planets I doubt anything will. For the 'its not a real threat' line of thought I pose a question. Again providing you belive it will happen again, when will be the the appropriate time to address the issue? How long will it take to mount a suitable answer to that particular problem ?
The problem with random events, even long term period random events, is that you don't know. Even considering the idea that large periodic objects intersecting the earths orbit we do know about present know immeidiate danger that we know of
http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/physics/Three-B
The problem of multiple body interactions in terms or precisely predicting such things is a real problem even for the objects we know about much less the ones we have yet to find or encounter.
I'm not chicken little and I am not suggesting the sky is falling. I am simply saying there is a very real known need for us to figure out how to live more places than just here on earth. The beginings of that knowledge is the humble first steps of small expeditions. Argue that now is not the time. Do not argue its imposisble becasue we have been accomplishing the 'impossible' throughout our history, generally speaking all we had to do was try to open open new realms of possibility.
Out of curiosity do you think all NASA spending should be cut or just manned exploration ?
The time delay makes telepresence a problem even on the Moon, Mars is pretty difficult.
"Boy, if something were to go wrong, we couldn't help the astronaut. Even travelling at the speed of light."
I have never understood that reasoning, peronally to me the idea of never sending people away from earth because something bad might happen to them is the moral equivalent of someone afraid to walk out their front door because something bad might happen to them.
And finally, yes we most certainly can foot a 90 billion dollar a year bill if we choose to do so. 90 billion does not represent even 1% of the national budget therefore we most deffinatly can afford it. The question is not can we afford it but should we buy it. But hell, by comparison if you have 10,000 dollars of spending money a year, your talking about the moral equivalent of a purcase of less than 100 dollars made 11 years in a row.
Having said that I really don't think that is what it would cost by a long shot. I subscribe to Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct idea which with horrible budget over runs likely wouldn't reach 100 billion all told.
I agree with the big picture of what your saying, but not with the insistence that the Moon rather than Mars is the preferable target for bootstrapping.
Mars is easier to bootstrap a permanent colony than the moon is. Also the moon represents more health risk with its essential lack of gravity. Mars 39% Earth gravity may well represent a problem to permanent settlement as well but its far better than almost none. If you have a case for the moon being better with more than its closer I'd love to hear it.
I also gather from what you said that you may not have read all of Zubrin's Case for mars or entering space. He is right there with you. The Mars direct plan is but the tip of the iceburg with that guy. Its the hook to get us started. Once your there and staying 500 days at a time its not that far of a stretch to staying 1000 days, then 2000, before you know it you have a permanent settlement. I am not sure I agree with the guy completly on the ultimate vision but his goal is man living on mars, not visiting and he thinks his plan will get us there in pretty short order. Hell if you design the initial mission based on easy access to water with little need for seed hydrogen then you could plan a mission that could survive a long time, say 5+ years without re-supply with the plan to send an ERV or re-supply to extend depending on how the mission goes with the plan of establishing a permanent outpost. Thus like the early explorers your goal isn't scientific, its homesteading. They could however provide a local control capacity for martian robotic missions ( take out the delay ), and if those devices are in rover range then they can re-pair/service those missions.
Thus the goal of the mission in my mind should be trying to stay as long as possible with as little support from earth as possible. That way you don't have to try justifying the mission with scientific discovery... but you do not forgo scientific discovery altogether, just the initial focus is going to be on the practical science of living. Thus the science is put to practical use keeping us there rather than providing the justification for being there in the first place.
You mean you want to come back ???? J/K
Same way they propose leaving the moon if its a refuling station... you make your gas there for the return trip. True mars is harder to get off of than the moon but its also alot easier than getting off the earth. and making your own fuel is far easier on mars courtesy of the atmosphere and compratively abundant water. If you have access to water you can break it into H and O then use that for a rocket or continue to work with the hydrogen and co2 atmosphere to generate methane for a methane and oxygen engine. Methane is easier to contain than hydrogen ( boil off of hydrogen is a problem on the surface )... though that reaction has a lower ISP it makes storage easier and the lower gravity of mars makes the lower ISP a viable tradeoff.
Even if you can't access water you can take seed stock hydrogen ( deep space means far less boil off during outbound leg and you start processing asap once you hit the surface ) and generate roughly 18(?) pounds of fuel materials for every pound of feed stock hydrogen. I forget the checmical reactions ( sabatier ?? ) used but I am sure you can find it on the mars direct homepage.... it is well known and has been used for a long time in industrial processes.
The basic idea is you split the CO2 in the atmosphere and for every atom of H you bring along you bond 4 C's and release 8 O's so for each element of hydrogen you recieve a methane molecule and 4 O2 molecules. not to mention that forms a 4-1 ratio and I believe the CH4&O2 reaction is a 2 to 1 ratio so the 'waste' oxygen in the process is a very desireable thing to say the least.
All in all, a great deal easier than breaking down rocks which is what lunar regolith processing requires.
Yes and no. The X-prize contestants are working on much smaller budgets and competing for a 10 million dollar prize. I think in most cases the 10 million would be a profit. I am not so sure about the armadillo and rutan design efforts though.
In any case they are just going for altitude, 100 kilometers in this case. They never attain orbital velocities and thus never encounter the atmosphere at those velocities. I think the highest speed being proposed is over mach 2 which is roughly 1400mph. Orbital Velocity is roughly 17,500mph. Only prooven method for attaining that speed is a rocket and that means carrying a crap load of fuel, which means a BIG rocket. The rockets in that contest are not very big and scaling them gets tricky.
However, as you point out, We know how to make rockets But engines that produce in the 100klbs + range are still damned expensive and finiky bastards. Open sourcing the current designs and allowing anyone with the manufacturing capacity to have at it could make the larger scale designs already known cheaper... though for the most part to make them cheaper you need economy of scale and for that you need a large enough launch scehdule which people will pay for.
For a while it seemed commercial sattellites would provide such a demand but that all fell apart. Perhaps it will eventually provide such a schedule but right now it dosn't.
So private ventures have a problem.... we know how to make big rockets but they don't have access to the designs on the books so they currently would have to develop their own designs. No matter how you approach that its expensive.... thousands, possibly millions of man hours, high precision machining and equaly exacting construction. Building a house is easy, building a skyscraper is hard... But imagine building your first skyscraper after only having built a house. We are talking about a similar increase in difficulty from current smaller scale rocket designs to building rockets capable of accelerating manned mission mass levels to orbital velocity at an altitude higher than 100 kilometers ( the nominal boundary for 'space').
The other problem is the heat encounterd accelerating and returning. X-prize contestents are not encountering any heating that very mundane materials can not handle. Aluminum skin on airplanes has been surviving extended mach speeds for several decades and the x-prize flight profiles are pretty short. As you approach and pass mach 3 things get a little different. You either need an active cooling system or exotic materials like Titanium or carbon fibre composits. Machining Ti and carbon fibre is no easy task and machining them to exacting precise specifications is not a cheap process even at the most basic 'at cost level'.
Now having said all that my gut feeling is your right. 20 billion is a bit much... what really amazes me are the people that think its such a paltry sum and its insane to think we could ever even atempt a manned mission to mars/moon for that or less.
My guess is if a company with the needed expertise and access to existing design info could pull off a lunar mission mimicing apollo 'at cost' for less than 5 billion... possibly even less than a billion but that would be very slim and here is why.
Had we decided to keep saturn V production then a launch today is estimated at approximately 300 million based on our experiences with the delta and atlas lines. The problem is we don't have the tooling to make the bad boys anymore. Thus you have to re-tool for a heavy booster. Even if you manage to sidestep most of the experimental R&D cost incured in the initial design you have to keep in mind prototype cars and new factory line tooling are VERY expensive and they are generally incremental design improovements using equipment that exists. This would not be the case for a large booster... so not only do you re-tool for the stack, you have to re-tool the tools to re-tool for the stack with. And unless you have numerous launches the per launch cost of the system will ref
http://www.oilcrash.com/cheep.htm
Thats not the article I wanted to refference but I can't find the one I liked so much right now.
In short start searching for actual new oil fields being found over the course of the last 20 years or so.
Demand is growing, finds of new sources have severely declined and exploration is getting more costly with less returns.. Ie we are spending more and more to find less and less. The idea represented in that discussion and others I have read is that discovery rate is not even close to keeping up with the current growth, and with India and China comming online as serious energy consumers that growth rate is going to expand in a hurry while all current indications are new sources/production will be declining, possible at an even greater rate. The two together will be devestating.
Thats where the close term predictions are comming from. Thats the worst case scenario. The more immediate fear is that even if we should find significant new fields all of the current major oil fields including those in the middle east are crossing the line, IE they have reached peak production and we will now see those oil fields decline as production rates go down as more and more effort must be made in the extraction process. The experiences with the north sea oil fields has shown that while technology allows us to get at the dregs it dosn't really help production all that much, IE its harder to get at and takes longer to get it, the technology just means we can get at it eventually but nothing replaces a natural gushing well for production.
Thus without finding new substatial fields our capacity to produce is going to be rapidly and continually outstripped by the increase in demand. Free market economy principles are pretty fuckin darwinnian in that scenario and it is a situation that will rapidly worsen until not only are new fields found but brought online.
The direst prediction of that scneario have it already begining, others think 2010-2020 time frame. In either case it is paramount to find new sources or a viable alternative primary energy source.
synthetic oils have a problem... they cost more energy to create than you recover. They also tie our biomass/foodstuff production into our energy needs. So far farming advances have kept us ahead of the nunmerous population crisis predictions with regards to providing food... but if the results of farming also has to provide the primary source of energy for machienary as well as for food will it be able to do so ?
I havn't completly given up on the idea.. waste recylcling shows promise and evidently not all of the synthetic production need take away from food stuffs. So it may work, but the discussions I have seen say its far from a certain thing. In the end regardless the problem of it taking more energy to make than it produces means it will always be a more expensive source of energy than naturally occuring oil.
less than a penny of every tax dollar you provide goes to NASA.. much less actually. US budget is ~ 2 trillion, NASA budget is ~15 billion... or .0075%
2010 is construction completion for station. Inital plans are for the station to operate till 2015,and it could easily be extended if so desired.