I think Zubrin does a good job of prooving the moon a rather poor choice as a stepping stone to MARS.
Moon has almost no gravity, Mars is 1/3 earth normal which is a serious problem for long duration habitation. Moon has 28 day cycle of day/night, mars has almost a 24 hour day. Moon has no atmosphere to provide UV filtering Mars has a substantial atmosphere by comparison which significantly (along with greater distance from the sun ) reduces cosmic radiation exposure. Also mars atmosphere means suit designs for Lunar surface exploration and Martian surface exploration are very different. One similarity however may be longevity regarding dust wear and tear on the suit joints/seals.
One of the biggest fallacies is that the Moon is easier to reach. It is in some ways more difficult due to its lack of gravity/atmosphere. The moon offers little to help you slow down. The delta V needed from your engines to reach the lunar surface is actually more than that needed to reach the surface of mars thanks to gravity capture and aero breaking avaialble at mars. Thus total delta V to the surface is in the 6k/s. Hohman transfer delta V to mars is 4.5km/s and Mars slows you down, thus you actually have greater delta V on the mars mission but less of it is supplied by rockets which require fuel which is heavy.
In otherwords the reality of orbital mechanics and checmical rocket technology means it takes more gas to go from the earth to the moon than it does from the earth to mars. In simpler terms refuling on the moon is like driving from Atlanta to new york to get gas for a trip to D.C. Duration is longer, but energy expended is greater.
The other problem is the lunar refuling proposition still has not acounted for both elements of the rocket fuel. Oxygen is bound up in the regolith in large quantities.. 50% or more by mass in many cases. But you need something to burn with it and that is not as easily found. The best hope for this is finding ICE gathered in the craters. Otherwise you have to process regolith for elements found in the parts per million range rathere than signifigant portions. That takes some serious equipment, all of which takes more energy to land on the moon than it takes to land it on Mars directly from earth. Or of course you could lift it from earth. Thus if your reason for a lunar base is a staging point for Mars it dosn't make a whole hell of alot of sense. You could have put all that mass on Mars to begin with if you had enough energy to land it on the moon. Not to mention making rocket fuel on Mars is a hell of alot easier than making it on the Moon.
Don't get me wrong. The moon is a good destination for exploration in and of itself. I just want to point out the 'common sense' idea of using the Moon to get to mars is flawed.
Lets go to the moon to go to the moon and go to mars to go to mars. One does not require the other. I for one would love to see the plan of establishing an observatory ( a telescope or series of scopes ) on the moon. In such a mission there are some mission elements that would be germain to both ventures ( habitats, shielding, some elements of long duration mission suit design ). SO going to the moon could provide some insight for a mars mission but its not a pre-requisit by any stretch of the imagination.
Ok lets use the martian rover mission cost of 800 million for two launches with Delta II's.
I say give NASA 5 billion over the next 4 years or 20 billion dollars. That includes 20 times the research development money for the mars rovers, 40 times the launch budget.. IE 40 delta II launches. Lets see How much weight that is.
http://www.losangeles.af.mil/SMC/PA/Fact_Sheets/ bo eing_delta_2_fs.htm
Is that enough weight for a lunar mission ? Apollo 17, the heaviest lunar landing mission wieghed in at 107,161lbs at EOI ( earth orbit insertion ).
*** just as a side note how stupid were we to let the saturn V go.... more than 8 delta II launches to put the same amount weight into LEO as a single Sat V launch. Delta II's cost ~50 million a launch, Sat V would cost about 300 million not to mention with new composites and engine design streamlining would probably have increased its payload a fair amount meaning that 300 million a pop would launch even more mass into orbit, by comparison Shuttle tosses 50k lbs of PAYLOAD into orbit to the tune of about 500 million a launch ***
So YES 512,800lbs is more than 4 times as much mission mass as was available for the heaviest Lunar mission. Your going to tell me that 107klbs was enough in the 60's and not enough now ? Hell we should be able to cut the weight if anything and do MORE. Inflatable habitats, carbon fiber technology, computer design.
I am sure some amalgamation of snap together modules launched aboard deltas could be arranged to create a very capable manned lunar expedition.
Oh but wait we can't possibly develop a mission for that amount ? Why the hell not. Its not an unknown, we have done it. We know what is needed, we have better space technology and we can damn sure make something as capable as what we made 40 years ago. We just have to DECIDE that is what we want to do and set a reasonable goal.
I am sick and tired of the defeatist waffle position. OH it can't work, it can't be done for less than a zillion dollars. 23 billion in the 60's over 10 years sent us to the moon the first time. 20 billion in 4 years with what we now know should be MORE than enough to send us back.
I call your attention to point number four regarding Gas Core.
4) is Hydrogen the best propelent ?
They use different reaction means for transfering the heat to the propellent. IE both are nuclear thermal rockets. one uses solid reactor core the other a gaseous core.... BUT BOTH ARE FOR TRANSFERING THE HEAT OF A FISSION REATION TO A PROPELLENT AND USING THE RESULTANT EXPANSION FOR THRUST IE NUCLEAR THERMAL ROCKETS
Thus they ARE the same thing, saying they are not is like saying a wankle rotary engine isn't a combustion engine because it dosn't have reciprocating pistons to provide the motive force. They use differnt means of generating/sustaining a fission reaction but that is ALL that is different. They are both tea kettle rockets, gas core does however promise to provide more bang for the buck because the transfer of the heat from the gaseous reaction to the propellent should be far more efficient than doing the same in a solid core reactor, in addition if you get the flows right you don't spew out gads of radioactive exhaust.
Ummmmmm NERVA was the genesis of the gas core concept, ie its a better way of doing the same thing thus it is very relavent what the performance of the NERVA engines were. After all they are both nuclear thermal rocket designs, They both use transfer of thermal energy from a fission chain reaction to excite/expand a prop to such a degree that it is suitable for rocket applications.
In laymans terms they both are hellacious teakettles that shoot off like missles instead of just whistling on the stove.
Second, as I noted they never really talk about using them for launch BECAUSE of the nuclear issue even though the exhaust is multitudes less radioactive than that of the NERVA designs. Which is very different from saying they cannot be used for launch.
You don't often hear about nuclear powered locamotives.. does that mean you couldn't power a locamotive with a nuclear reactor ?
Hell the biggest NERVA rocket they tested before shutting the program down had 200k lbs of thrust. For refernce a Shuttle Main Engine develops in the neighborhood of 400k depending on the altitude your checking, its higher in vacume lower at sea level. In otherwords a highly experimental engine far less understood than chemical rocket systems at the time could produce roughly half as much thrust as a shuttle main engine which is often thought of as a pinnicle of rocket engineering.. though some would argue for the F-1.
The only real problem in that department is the weight of the engine. Shuttle engines come in at about 7k lbs.. I belive the largest of the old NERVA rockets were considerably heavier. Granted with higher specific impulse rates you don't need as much fuel. Last I checked the gas Core concept had more than enough performance to function as a launch system. But it was considered unlikely it would ever be cleared for atmospheric operation due to nuclear concerns.
Damned public school science !!!! Yes of course your right..
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/coriolis_ef fe ct.html
Hot air rising affected by the coriolis effect creates weather. Our teacher used a demonstration with a pot of water and stated the forces at work with the water boiling was the coriolis effect.... DOUGHT !!! Or perhaps I wasn't paying very close attention, actually I rather hope that was the case.
No, just the fact the crew is 'rated' to lower pressures for operation. There is a flight reg for a repress to 14.4 psia if the pressure drops to 13.9. The 13.9 is not the crew danger redline. There are several pieces of equipment on board that have the lower pressure operational limit set at 13.9... ie thats as low as they are certified to work with no problem. at 13.95 or so they start to be powered down in case the pressure continues to drop.
The reason is due to thermal buildup. Without gravity you have no coreolis effect, most commonly recognised as the idea that hot air rises. In ziggy hot air does not rise it just gets hot, thus you have to have thermal transfer by contact of some sort, IE air blowing or contact with a heatsink ( water loop ) etc... which is the reason for those huge radiators on the station.
At lower pressure there is less thermal transfer with the air which means greater heat buildup in the electronics could cause a problem or possibly an unrecoverable malfunction.
Genrenally speaking these limits are VERY CAUTIOUS. Much of the equipment has no redundancy and could only be replaced by flying it up from the ground... something very difficult to manage payload scheduling wise even if shuttle were making flights and next to impossible with Soyuz/Progress launches. Thus you don't risk even the possibility of an equipment failure even though much of the equipment would likely operate just fine in near vacume conditions.
To have an idea regarding crew limits consider the fact suit pressure for EVA's is 4.3-5 psia, the new hard suit concept allows for 8.3 ( no pre-breathing ). Either consisting of an environment which could be created in very short order on the station. Of course this requires shifting the concentration of oxygen... close to 100% in the case of the 4.3 I belive, which is dangerous. The 8psia range requires ~32psia which is only a few percentage points above nominal environment on the station.
Thus the pressure drop at that slow of a rate presented a far more immediate danger to the equipment than it did to the crew. The crew was not worried nor were the flight control teams worried about the crew for the simple reason the crew was as yet not in any immidiate danger as it would have taken weeks at the recorded rate of loss to place the crew in danger just had they not undertaken to replace what was lost... they also have plenty of spare oxygen to add and thus it would have taken months for this leak to depleat stores to the point where the crew would have been at risk.
The engineers didn't have the head in the clouds or no concern for the Crew. Crew safety on the station takes precedent over EVERYTHING else.
People seem to think the NASA budget is insane and the money used on space ventures could accomplish so much more used somewhere else. Here is the NASA budget outlay for 2004.
http://www.nasa.gov/about/budget/
15.469 billion
Here are the individual portions of military spending which is alloted more money than NASA. individiual elements.
All told these elements account for 350.1 billion of 399.1 billion for the total 2004 military budget. The 2003 budget was 282.2. In otherwords deffense spending was increased from 2003 to 2004 by more than the entire budget alloted to NASA for 2004.
arguments about the course of our present military activities aside I am not saying the military spending should be altered. Simply using it as an example to show the scale of the NASA budget in comparison. It pales in comparison to the social works budget by a greater margain.
consider the following examples.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/educ at ion.html
DOE discretionary budget ~53 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hhs. ht ml
Department of Health and human services
discretionary ~65 billion mandatory ~471 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hud. ht ml
Frankly people we are not spending all that much on space. Considering its visibility most people think NASA is on par with Defense which is why I used that comparison initially. Hell the Air Force spends more on gas in a year than NASA gets for its entire budget.
Health , HUD, and education comprise 784 billion dollars. NASA's budget represents a value of.019% of those three budget line items and I am not counting social security which weighs in at a cool 513 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/ssa. ht ml
People our hearts and our money are in the right place in terms of percentage of the budget going to help the people of this Nation versus that spend to explore Space to the tune of 15 billion to 1,297 billion.
So puuulease spare me the space costs to much bullshit. And sure as hell don't shit bricks if Jr suggest increasing the budget a little.
Here are two resources without even really looking hard including one from space.com and niether from the lone gunman. This isn't a conspiracy theory, its a well known fact russia used fission reactors for many sattelites. The only consipiracy element is wethere or not they used them in more than the admited. As you may notice in the second article the US sent and operated one reactor in orbit as well.
http://www.uic.com.au/nip82.htm
"Between 1967 and 1988 the former Soviet Union launched 31 low-powered fission reactors in Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellites (RORSATs) on Cosmos missions. They utilised thermoelectric converters to produce electricity, as with the RTGs. Romashka reactors were their initial nuclear power source, a fast spectrum graphite reactor with 90%-enriched uranium carbide fuel operating at high temperature. Then the Bouk fast reactor produced 3 kW for up to 4 months. Later reactors, such as on Cosmos-954 which re-entered over Canada in 1978, had U-Mo fuel rods and a layout similar to the US heatpipe reactors described below."
"...Although the former Soviet Union/Russia has placed over 30 reactors in Earth orbit to support sophisticated high-power spacecraft, the U.S. has flown only one - SNAP-10A in 1965, which was shut down after only 43 days of operation."
I'm sorry I don't follow your logic in that first comment.... Zubrin needs to much NEW stuff and yet he isn't 'cool' enough for NASA ? Nasa needs big 'NEW' frikin space ships ? And they don't have to work right the first time ? And you must not have read were NASA has already adopted some of his ideas. Go search for Mars Semi-Direct. It is the current baseline mars mission..
Using an artificial gravity system by rotating the habitat against the upper statge is the only NEW flight operation and its an optional part of the mission. Fuel production would simply be the first time those checmical reactions were performed on another planet. The only thing even remotely new in that process is tying the reactions together into a single device which was prooven under mars atmospheric content/pressure to work on a budget of about 50k.
Reviving saturn V might be expensive since it would in large part have to be re-worked. Adapting shuttle is on the books ( Shuttle C that is, shuttle Z/ARES would cost more but again uses off the shelf engines SSME and only redesigns the orbiter to a simpler heatshiled less piggyback or statged element on top of the ET ) and the Energia designs are also available, Russia would GLADLY build the things for some cold hard cash for FAR less than it would cost us in home grown HLV re-development and is also key in his 20 billion estimate.
Regarding budget why is that simply because it happend with ISS it MUST happen with any other project ?
Did it escape your attention that for 800 some odd million we just put a golf cart on mars ? That if the second system works that will be two golf carts on mars ? Just going by mission cost per weight inserted in TMI ( trans mars insertion ) you can come in well under Zubrin's 20 billion estimate for 4-5 launches/2 500 day missions and that price tag includes the development of entirely new rovers. At 20 times (which would be less than 20billion mind you) the cost you get 20 times the weight ( and more with HLV's ) and 20 times the development budget. Using Energia means you have a given launch cost and don't have to 'develop' a non-existent HLV from new or current hardware.
When given a clear unchanging goal and sufficient funds NASA has proven a very capable organization. Do not blame the tool for failing when it is used improperly, blame the wielders. Just because some of its programs were allowed to be subject of an uncertain political landscape in the past does not mean that trend has to continue.
Read up on Mars Direct before you speak to the impossibility. 20 billion is Zurbins most optomistic estimate based on getting away from the absurd cost plus contract system in place.
If you want to know how much weight his estimate has ponder on this little tidbit. That insane 500+ billion price tag in response to Bush Sr.'s desire for a mars mission is one of the things that got him working on his plan in the first place. Once he had fleshed mars direct out- including a small scale demonstration of his fuel production method- his plan became somewhat co-opted by NASA as their current plan of choice for a mars mission and a lower price estimate for a manned mars mission was revised down from the 500+ price tag to around 60-80 billion as a direct result of adopting some of the ideas he proposed.
That 500+ billion dollar plan figured on the development of new technology and a massive expedition in the vision of Werner Von Braun, new technolgy everywhere. In short it was A bonaza for space contractors that made the commitee proposal acceptable to all parties that took place in its creation.. ie they all got a nice slice of the pie. Hell its entirely possible the 500billion was a woefully lowballed estimate of what that plan would have ultimately cost had we actually persued it.
The Zurbin plan uses known hardware. The fuel creation process is a very well established set of checmical reactions that has been in use since the 1800's and as I mentioned already demonstrated ( in martian atmosphere conditions ) by Zurbin. He proposes a return of a heavy lift booster either by reviving saturn V, using the russian energia design or adapting shuttle hardware to lift payload mass rather than a heatshield/landing gear/control surfaces for the shuttle. IE its not new.
One of two 'new' elements is the length of time. He proposes a 500 day long stay on the surface of mars instead of the roughly two weeks proposed by most other proposals. With roughly 6 months travel time both ways the equipment then has to be sufficiently reliable or backed up by redundancies for a 3-4 year period. The other and probably only truly new element to his plan is to utilize artificial gravity via rotation of the habitat against the counterweight of the final launch stage during the trip to Mars. An element that is optional but desirable to avoid the loss of bone density during prolonged exposure to zero G.
Lastly he has one very contraversial element and that is a small nuclear reactor as part of the mission. By the way, if you think reactors havn't gotten to space you don't know much about Soviet sattelites.
Now before you question this price tag again I ask you do two things. One research the proposal ( Mars Direct ) presented as being atainable for 20billion. It has been reviewed enough by those who know their stuff that it has slowly gained acceptance in the space industry. 2, instead of stating that a program will over run because other programs have state specifically why it will happen in this case. Overuns are not mandatory and they are not magical. They happen for a reason.
As a side note I will simply say Station is a very poor example for you to use as a program that suffered over runs. If all you know about the station program is that it suffered over runs but not WHY you need to look into what happend, and you need to dig deeper than the generally shallow and politically motivated attacks on stations budget overun.
First we get the robotic Dog/Mule/Horse then we get the Robotic Marine, Robotic Pilot ( already in limited use ). Wars become telecomuting jobs from underground bunkers in Kansas.
Afterall this seems the logical direction for american military might to take due to the ever increasing desire to spare human life even while we take it.
This way we can project our might (noses?) without ever leaving home.
If this prooves successfull it looks like the military will bankroll the creation of mechanical slave labor. Afterall once you have inspect/repair capacity AND real world manouvering capacity you have the pieces needed to form a self sufficient robot poulation.... just so long as we don't let them form SKYNET !!! wait we already elected the terminator.... run for the hills AHHHHH.
Ok the last bit got silly, but seriously if you can make robots work in the real world... and I don't think it gets more real than something that can autonomously keep up with soldiers in the bush... and Robots capable of a wide range of diagnostic/repair actions you really can put them to work from the begining of the production cycle to the end. Thus they becomes our slaves or our overlords.
Do we control or welcome them ? After all a mechanical labor pool could well kill capitalisim as a viable system.
One has to ask if this idea is truly about safety or about avoiding 9/11. If you have a system in place like this It will have an overide, otherwise you wouldn't have a pilot in the first place. The overide will be easy to implement because first on the list of possible situations it will be needed will be time critical decisions thus a lengthy/dificult invovled overide process will not work.
In the end you can't defend against human decision making unless you remove the human from the process.... which means you used canned human decision making in the form of code which to my knowledge is not and cannot ( to date ) be made self-correcting. Thus if there is an unforseen circumstance for the code to encounter you don't know what will happen. The code can't think on the fly for itself. So choose your poison. A plane that will be consistently flown even if that consistency invovles a bug that flys into the ground given the proper circumstances or a pilot that can think for itself and do unthinkable things such as fly into a huge skyscraper, or come up with an inovative way to control a plane with differential thrust due to the failure of control surface hydraulics ( actual real world example ). In fact both of those examples are being subjected to CODE fixes for making such actions easier or more difficult, this being an example of 9/11 ( or mountain ) avoidence and the new implementation of a backup directional control system utilizing dissimilar engine thrust rates. But its impossible to account for all scenarios and untill code can be sufficiently capable to deal with unforseen circumstances you have an overide. You draw your own conclusions on what a pilot will decide to trust in an odd situation when presented with loss of control of the aircraft. If your response to that is not to allow that decision then why the hell do you have a pilot in the cockpit to begin with ?
First off I grant you make very valid points. However, I feel they are for the most part a reflection of the lack of thought which went into the decision making process ( both here and in general ) where there was a lack of understanding about what an OPEN field really means.
IE they chose an open format instead of a limited format. I can't see logically how this means something other than they must have WANTED as many people to show up as possible. When they got an 'overwhelming' response they should have been jumping up and down with excitment. They are seeking inovation and limiting the field is not a great way of doing this.
On the other hand if logic wasn't the driver then perhaps some dip-shits decided hey we can say its open when we don't expect anyone but the big boys and a couple of kooks show up and we get an image boost for theoretically allowing anyone to participate..... oooooops people actually do want to participate, DOUGHT.
I suggest applying a test. If the new competition which has sprung up in the wake of this fiasco were to make a similar change in its competition rules on the fly what would happen? If its not the same screaming but can't do anything about it then something is wrong.
Now having said all that I applaud DARPA for awarding the at large berths as they did providing they actually did choose the most promising of the smaller competitors. But I have to say, why could they not have judged the technical papers as a whole after the initial deadline and then awarded the berths rather than simply awarding to the early submitters without ( apparently ) the same screening used to pick the remaining slots ? That is what seems unfair to me more than the choice to limit the field due to the 'unexpected' response. So long as such selection actually went to the most deserving design concepts then it dosn't matter WHO got them. I couldn't agree more this was not an issue of salving ego's but a search for the most inovative and capable free range roving vehicle design.
At the very least the decision give prefference to the early selections smacked of contractor prefference, which in and of itself is not wrong. But if thats what they wanted then why didn't they announce an open defense contractor competition ? I really do not think this is an issue of hindsight. I truly think this is the discussion that should have been had when deciding if the format was an 'OPEN' or 'LIMITED FIELD' competition to begin with.
ummmmm..... The point is DARPA had this to begin with. There was no reason to not include the smaller teams. After all if they geenrate a superior design you just have to find somone to make it. As for chaos in the race... isn't that sort of the point ? They don't want bots that work under ideal cicumstances, they want bots that can legitimately operate in the real world.
What were they afraid of ? A mom and pop low budget garage organization making a contractor or prestigious university team look silly ? Oh the horror.
Would be nice to see this done but 2007 is an apolloesqe time scale ( meaning lack of time ) for deploying a scramjet and sufficent shielding for atmospheric hypersonic speeds for any significant duration flight.
The flight profile for a space launch by an Air breathing engine requires a great deal of acceleration to be done where there is still significant amounts of atmosphere to provide friction... the vehicle would essentially go through re-entry twice on a mission rather than just once ( shuttle does most of its hypersonic acceleration outside the atmostphere.
Last I heard talks about this there was a great deal of uncertainty if scramjets dealing with atmospheric friction would be any more efficient than carrying your oxidizer and accelerating above the atmosphere. Basically the friction requires more energy which requires more fuel which requires more fuel tanks which increases size which increases friction... and its an exponential increase as I recall which is what ate into the wieght advatage of not carry the oxidizer.
Granted. It is not a quantifiable/consumable good in the same sense as the Common grazing grounds. In fact OSS suffers if not enough people use it as, the more the merrier as far as that goes. So no, it does not qualify point by point in that traditional sense. However, I hope you don't take that to mean it dosn't suffer the tragedy of the commons at all ? What of the problem of the freeloader ? Not to mention I might say there are cases where pollute=fork would be a valid statement.
There is nothing saying the 'commons' have to be consumable. A common good is something available to all. The tragedy of the commons does not only have to occur because of greed and the finite limitations of a consumable good. A tragedy of the commons is simply where a common good can be abused out of existence by its nature as a common good, IE lack of control of its use. There is more than one way to do this. People not caring enough to provide or support code generation is probably the chief concern.. Thankfully OSS can survive higher than 90% freeloaders quite easily.. hell 99%+ is probably status quo and thats because its not consumable. Once its created people can freeload thier little hearts out and never spoil it. But it can't survive 100% or in otherwords everyone waiting for someone else to do the dirty work so they can benifit from it.
There is more than one way to skin a Cat, and more than one way to spoil the Commons.
Interesting take. Open Source is a good of the commons, like water. And is subject to the same abuses and subject to the same advantages. If available and viable its an enabler.
The primary difference of course is that open source code is the result of man hours spent coding, it is a processed product. It is very difficult for alot of people to concieve of a contributed common good. However, difficult as it may be, open source is obviously a reality. There does exist in the common, a base of computer code as 'freely' available as that water in the stream. How this has come to be is another story, but think of it as the proverbial Gift Horse and the Golden Goose wrapped up in one. Its there, don't look at it to closely and damn sure don't kill it. Encourage it, let it do its thing, and reap the rewards.
So what exactly is that reward ?
Seems simple to me, the problem so many people have is they are trying to figure out how to capitlize on open source in a conventional way. The money to be made from open source is not to be had in selling the code. Its made from utilizing the code and freeing up costs that until now have been assumed. Think of it this way. How many billions of dollars have gone to Redmond, IBM, Novell etc in the form of software licensing fees ? What could have been accomplished with that money had it never left the industries from which it came ? That is the benifit of open source. That is its potential bottom line contribution.
I think the last real stumbling block for the public is getting over the adage of 'You Get what you Pay for'. But for people who think along such lines I have to ask what is the value of the latest version of Office versus the previous one ? If there was no compatability issue due to other people upgrading.. and no loss of support due to decalring an old version no longer supported etc... or *insert any remaining Micro Shaft technique for pushing upgrades*. What if software evolution was driven more by peoples desire for a capability and less by a companies bottom line ? I don't begrudge M$ making money, but it creates a conflict of interest that quality control/competition only does so much to balance due to their success in controlling the OS basic utility software market.
For cost software will not die if Open Source moves to the fore. It simply will move to places where Open Source prooves ineffective. IE it will provide what does not exist in Open Source and, hopefully, it eventually will serve to increase what is available in the Open community. Thus you PAY to move back the frontier of what you can do with Hardare, rather than just to access hardware period.
Correction, there is no need to reverse it in Austrailia. Thus while there exist fish with this altered Gene in Austrailia there exists the possibility it will be introduced somewhere else either intentionally or un-intentionally to the detriment of indigenous Carp habitats elsewhere.
Unless someone for some reason someone imports affected carp breed stock from austrailia that caries this gene. Just as the fish was introduced it can be returned and introduced somewhere elese. Though granted its next to impossible by the carps themselves without some assitence.
Dosn't matter how likely such a scenario is. It dosn't have to happen alot. It just has to happen under the right circumstances. It just takes one willfull ignoramous with an austrailian carp fetish or some idiot that hates carp and decides to spread this thing as far and wide as possible.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a gene tech chicken little by any stretch of the imagination... but introducing this kind of irreversible(? or is it reversible ?) element into a wild population brings chaos theory into play. IE it can't be controled. Most likely it dosn't escape the land down under, but is most likely safe enough ? Personally can't say I know what the loss of the carp would be. I imagine other fish breed populations, perhaps some more desireable, would expand to take their place.
If the shows are on demand and commercial free ??? Dosn't sound all that bad to me.
Lets say your average half hour sitcom episode costs $1.. so a season runs what, $27 ?? A show watched on average in a million households per episode makes 27 million. However, You can watch them on your schedule. People selling product placement know exactly how large their specific audience is. The concept of 'PRIME TIME' takes a huge hit other than for live programming. But it means no more schedule shuffling to accomadate large releases like a "miniseries", or major events like the state of the union speech.
In other words you finally get a home box office and TV can work on a model much more similar to movies. Popular shows can be viewed more than one time. They don't have to fight for 'Prime Time'. Niche shows can cater to a specific audience so long as its large enough and loyal enough to support the production. Even live productions can be provided later for viewing, IE sports fans could watch all the games they wanted to and not just the one that was on in their area etc... No need to miss Sports Overtimes because of contractual obligations.
Does this mean the end of 'free tv'? Not necesarrily. If you kill the typical 30 second commercial spot form of advertisement don't forget that while that kills the major established revenue stream for broadcasters it also frees up that money in the product pushers budgets. They still have to advertise and TV still remains the most attractive medium. One obvious move is to greater product placement. Some shows will likely still proove popular enough that they could be viable just on selling product placement, or having banner ads or some such and these shows would be available to all... given a public access method to on demand shows. Hell that could be done with a broadband connection and a Net/Tv ( LAN connection and a hardrive/OS for the TV ).
IE lets say your local TV station invests in an on-demand content server for which you register and are charged per event or perhaps monthly for access to the content. However, in addition to the on demand content that is charged per viewing lets say some distributers think the typical commercial break still has legs and decides to make some content available freely with commercial breaks, they then sell the commercial time to people who think that is a viable way to push their product. Some other shows may proove profitable by marketing product palcement. In addition independent shows may proove profitable since people are not reduced to just 'whats on' but by what they want. In effect they vote with their dollars and specific requests, results are instant. No need for statistical ratings, you know exactly how many people requested the show, where and when.
Its not very viable right now I grant, but broadband and broadband wireless are expanding pretty rapidly. Most cable companies are already rolling out on demand services. To me on demand per viewing cost or flat fee access to a constantly changing library of shows seems inevitable given the current state of affairs.
Typical commercials are dying. Every year they find it takes more and more exposuer to get name recognition because every year we get better and better at ignoring them or, as is the case with PVR's, getting more tech savy in methods for avoiding them altogether. I don't know anyone who cares for commercials. Occasinally they are amusing but as has been mentioned that quickly wears off when you see that amusing 30 seconds for the Nth time in the last 2 hours.
In the end I think your going to see a move away from commercial broadcast TV as we know it today. Perhaps it will die completely and that spectrum will be used for other means of comminication or perhaps it is like pen and paper, something that will be with us for a very long time. However I think its likely to change. The draw of choice as opposed to a set schedule is huge and at last all the technology is here to implement entertainment on demand. In addition that also p
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I think Zubrin does a good job of prooving the moon a rather poor choice as a stepping stone to MARS.
Moon has almost no gravity, Mars is 1/3 earth normal which is a serious problem for long duration habitation. Moon has 28 day cycle of day/night, mars has almost a 24 hour day. Moon has no atmosphere to provide UV filtering Mars has a substantial atmosphere by comparison which significantly (along with greater distance from the sun ) reduces cosmic radiation exposure. Also mars atmosphere means suit designs for Lunar surface exploration and Martian surface exploration are very different. One similarity however may be longevity regarding dust wear and tear on the suit joints/seals.
One of the biggest fallacies is that the Moon is easier to reach. It is in some ways more difficult due to its lack of gravity/atmosphere. The moon offers little to help you slow down. The delta V needed from your engines to reach the lunar surface is actually more than that needed to reach the surface of mars thanks to gravity capture and aero breaking avaialble at mars. Thus total delta V to the surface is in the 6k/s. Hohman transfer delta V to mars is 4.5km/s and Mars slows you down, thus you actually have greater delta V on the mars mission but less of it is supplied by rockets which require fuel which is heavy.
In otherwords the reality of orbital mechanics and checmical rocket technology means it takes more gas to go from the earth to the moon than it does from the earth to mars. In simpler terms refuling on the moon is like driving from Atlanta to new york to get gas for a trip to D.C. Duration is longer, but energy expended is greater.
The other problem is the lunar refuling proposition still has not acounted for both elements of the rocket fuel. Oxygen is bound up in the regolith in large quantities.. 50% or more by mass in many cases. But you need something to burn with it and that is not as easily found. The best hope for this is finding ICE gathered in the craters. Otherwise you have to process regolith for elements found in the parts per million range rathere than signifigant portions. That takes some serious equipment, all of which takes more energy to land on the moon than it takes to land it on Mars directly from earth. Or of course you could lift it from earth. Thus if your reason for a lunar base is a staging point for Mars it dosn't make a whole hell of alot of sense. You could have put all that mass on Mars to begin with if you had enough energy to land it on the moon. Not to mention making rocket fuel on Mars is a hell of alot easier than making it on the Moon.
Don't get me wrong. The moon is a good destination for exploration in and of itself. I just want to point out the 'common sense' idea of using the Moon to get to mars is flawed.
Lets go to the moon to go to the moon and go to mars to go to mars. One does not require the other. I for one would love to see the plan of establishing an observatory ( a telescope or series of scopes ) on the moon. In such a mission there are some mission elements that would be germain to both ventures ( habitats, shielding, some elements of long duration mission suit design ). SO going to the moon could provide some insight for a mars mission but its not a pre-requisit by any stretch of the imagination.
Ok lets use the martian rover mission cost of 800 million for two launches with Delta II's.
/ bo eing_delta_2_fs.htm
l ec ted_Mission_Weights.htm
I say give NASA 5 billion over the next 4 years or 20 billion dollars. That includes 20 times the research development money for the mars rovers, 40 times the launch budget.. IE 40 delta II launches. Lets see How much weight that is.
http://www.losangeles.af.mil/SMC/PA/Fact_Sheets
12,820 pounds to LEO.
40 launches represents 512,800lbs to LEO.
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4029/Apollo_18-37_Se
Is that enough weight for a lunar mission ? Apollo 17, the heaviest lunar landing mission wieghed in at 107,161lbs at EOI ( earth orbit insertion ).
*** just as a side note how stupid were we to let the saturn V go.... more than 8 delta II launches to put the same amount weight into LEO as a single Sat V launch. Delta II's cost ~50 million a launch, Sat V would cost about 300 million not to mention with new composites and engine design streamlining would probably have increased its payload a fair amount meaning that 300 million a pop would launch even more mass into orbit, by comparison Shuttle tosses 50k lbs of PAYLOAD into orbit to the tune of about 500 million a launch ***
So YES 512,800lbs is more than 4 times as much mission mass as was available for the heaviest Lunar mission. Your going to tell me that 107klbs was enough in the 60's and not enough now ? Hell we should be able to cut the weight if anything and do MORE. Inflatable habitats, carbon fiber technology, computer design.
I am sure some amalgamation of snap together modules launched aboard deltas could be arranged to create a very capable manned lunar expedition.
Oh but wait we can't possibly develop a mission for that amount ? Why the hell not. Its not an unknown, we have done it. We know what is needed, we have better space technology and we can damn sure make something as capable as what we made 40 years ago. We just have to DECIDE that is what we want to do and set a reasonable goal.
I am sick and tired of the defeatist waffle position. OH it can't work, it can't be done for less than a zillion dollars. 23 billion in the 60's over 10 years sent us to the moon the first time. 20 billion in 4 years with what we now know should be MORE than enough to send us back.
http://www.lascruces.com/~mrpbar/rocket.html
I call your attention to point number four regarding Gas Core.
4) is Hydrogen the best propelent ?
They use different reaction means for transfering the heat to the propellent. IE both are nuclear thermal rockets. one uses solid reactor core the other a gaseous core.... BUT BOTH ARE FOR TRANSFERING THE HEAT OF A FISSION REATION TO A PROPELLENT AND USING THE RESULTANT EXPANSION FOR THRUST IE NUCLEAR THERMAL ROCKETS
Thus they ARE the same thing, saying they are not is like saying a wankle rotary engine isn't a combustion engine because it dosn't have reciprocating pistons to provide the motive force. They use differnt means of generating/sustaining a fission reaction but that is ALL that is different. They are both tea kettle rockets, gas core does however promise to provide more bang for the buck because the transfer of the heat from the gaseous reaction to the propellent should be far more efficient than doing the same in a solid core reactor, in addition if you get the flows right you don't spew out gads of radioactive exhaust.
Ummmmmm NERVA was the genesis of the gas core concept, ie its a better way of doing the same thing thus it is very relavent what the performance of the NERVA engines were. After all they are both nuclear thermal rocket designs, They both use transfer of thermal energy from a fission chain reaction to excite/expand a prop to such a degree that it is suitable for rocket applications.
In laymans terms they both are hellacious teakettles that shoot off like missles instead of just whistling on the stove.
Second, as I noted they never really talk about using them for launch BECAUSE of the nuclear issue even though the exhaust is multitudes less radioactive than that of the NERVA designs. Which is very different from saying they cannot be used for launch.
You don't often hear about nuclear powered locamotives.. does that mean you couldn't power a locamotive with a nuclear reactor ?
Incorect.
Hell the biggest NERVA rocket they tested before shutting the program down had 200k lbs of thrust. For refernce a Shuttle Main Engine develops in the neighborhood of 400k depending on the altitude your checking, its higher in vacume lower at sea level. In otherwords a highly experimental engine far less understood than chemical rocket systems at the time could produce roughly half as much thrust as a shuttle main engine which is often thought of as a pinnicle of rocket engineering.. though some would argue for the F-1.
The only real problem in that department is the weight of the engine. Shuttle engines come in at about 7k lbs.. I belive the largest of the old NERVA rockets were considerably heavier. Granted with higher specific impulse rates you don't need as much fuel. Last I checked the gas Core concept had more than enough performance to function as a launch system. But it was considered unlikely it would ever be cleared for atmospheric operation due to nuclear concerns.
Damned public school science !!!! Yes of course your right..
f fe ct.html
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/glossary/coriolis_e
Hot air rising affected by the coriolis effect creates weather. Our teacher used a demonstration with a pot of water and stated the forces at work with the water boiling was the coriolis effect.... DOUGHT !!! Or perhaps I wasn't paying very close attention, actually I rather hope that was the case.
Thanks for the clarification.
dought... 8psia requires 32% oxygen, not 32psia oxygen.. and I used preview, silly me.
No, just the fact the crew is 'rated' to lower pressures for operation. There is a flight reg for a repress to 14.4 psia if the pressure drops to 13.9. The 13.9 is not the crew danger redline. There are several pieces of equipment on board that have the lower pressure operational limit set at 13.9... ie thats as low as they are certified to work with no problem. at 13.95 or so they start to be powered down in case the pressure continues to drop.
The reason is due to thermal buildup. Without gravity you have no coreolis effect, most commonly recognised as the idea that hot air rises. In ziggy hot air does not rise it just gets hot, thus you have to have thermal transfer by contact of some sort, IE air blowing or contact with a heatsink ( water loop ) etc... which is the reason for those huge radiators on the station.
At lower pressure there is less thermal transfer with the air which means greater heat buildup in the electronics could cause a problem or possibly an unrecoverable malfunction.
Genrenally speaking these limits are VERY CAUTIOUS. Much of the equipment has no redundancy and could only be replaced by flying it up from the ground... something very difficult to manage payload scheduling wise even if shuttle were making flights and next to impossible with Soyuz/Progress launches. Thus you don't risk even the possibility of an equipment failure even though much of the equipment would likely operate just fine in near vacume conditions.
To have an idea regarding crew limits consider the fact suit pressure for EVA's is 4.3-5 psia, the new hard suit concept allows for 8.3 ( no pre-breathing ). Either consisting of an environment which could be created in very short order on the station. Of course this requires shifting the concentration of oxygen... close to 100% in the case of the 4.3 I belive, which is dangerous. The 8psia range requires ~32psia which is only a few percentage points above nominal environment on the station.
Thus the pressure drop at that slow of a rate presented a far more immediate danger to the equipment than it did to the crew. The crew was not worried nor were the flight control teams worried about the crew for the simple reason the crew was as yet not in any immidiate danger as it would have taken weeks at the recorded rate of loss to place the crew in danger just had they not undertaken to replace what was lost... they also have plenty of spare oxygen to add and thus it would have taken months for this leak to depleat stores to the point where the crew would have been at risk.
The engineers didn't have the head in the clouds or no concern for the Crew. Crew safety on the station takes precedent over EVERYTHING else.
People seem to think the NASA budget is insane and the money used on space ventures could accomplish so much more used somewhere else. Here is the NASA budget outlay for 2004.
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.019% of those three budget line items and I am not counting social security which weighs in at a cool 513 billion
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http://www.nasa.gov/about/budget/
15.469 billion
Here are the individual portions of military spending which is alloted more money than NASA. individiual elements.
http://www.cdi.org/budget/2004/topline.cfm
Military Personnel - $98.6 billion (6 percent increase)
Operations & Maintenance - $117.0 billion (3 percent increase)
Procurement - $72.7 billion (4 percent increase)
Research & Development - $61.8 billion (9 percent increase)
All told these elements account for 350.1 billion of 399.1 billion for the total 2004 military budget. The 2003 budget was 282.2. In otherwords deffense spending was increased from 2003 to 2004 by more than the entire budget alloted to NASA for 2004.
arguments about the course of our present military activities aside I am not saying the military spending should be altered. Simply using it as an example to show the scale of the NASA budget in comparison. It pales in comparison to the social works budget by a greater margain.
consider the following examples.
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/edu
DOE discretionary budget ~53 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hhs
Department of Health and human services
discretionary ~65 billion
mandatory ~471 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/hud
Housing and urban development
Discretionary ~31 billion
mandatory ~164 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/tra
Department of Transportation
Discretionary ~53 billion
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/va.
Veterent Affairs
discretionary ~28 billion
mandatory ~34 billion
And now back to NASA
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/nas
Discretionary ~15 billion
no mandatory outlays.
Frankly people we are not spending all that much on space. Considering its visibility most people think NASA is on par with Defense which is why I used that comparison initially. Hell the Air Force spends more on gas in a year than NASA gets for its entire budget.
Health , HUD, and education comprise 784 billion dollars. NASA's budget represents a value of
http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/budget/fy2004/ssa
People our hearts and our money are in the right place in terms of percentage of the budget going to help the people of this Nation versus that spend to explore Space to the tune of 15 billion to 1,297 billion.
So puuulease spare me the space costs to much bullshit. And sure as hell don't shit bricks if Jr suggest increasing the budget a little.
Mindspring rocked back when it was just a local ISP... they were doing ptetty good keeping the service in ISP till the whole earthlink buyout debacle.
Here are two resources without even really looking hard including one from space.com and niether from the lone gunman. This isn't a conspiracy theory, its a well known fact russia used fission reactors for many sattelites. The only consipiracy element is wethere or not they used them in more than the admited. As you may notice in the second article the US sent and operated one reactor in orbit as well.
_ sp ace_010625-5.html
http://www.uic.com.au/nip82.htm
"Between 1967 and 1988 the former Soviet Union launched 31 low-powered fission reactors in Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellites (RORSATs) on Cosmos missions. They utilised thermoelectric converters to produce electricity, as with the RTGs. Romashka reactors were their initial nuclear power source, a fast spectrum graphite reactor with 90%-enriched uranium carbide fuel operating at high temperature. Then the Bouk fast reactor produced 3 kW for up to 4 months. Later reactors, such as on Cosmos-954 which re-entered over Canada in 1978, had U-Mo fuel rods and a layout similar to the US heatpipe reactors described below."
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/nuclear
"...Although the former Soviet Union/Russia has placed over 30 reactors in Earth orbit to support sophisticated high-power spacecraft, the U.S. has flown only one - SNAP-10A in 1965, which was shut down after only 43 days of operation."
My appologies, hell I have the guys books sitting right here *smack to forhead*
I'm sorry I don't follow your logic in that first comment.... Zubrin needs to much NEW stuff and yet he isn't 'cool' enough for NASA ? Nasa needs big 'NEW' frikin space ships ? And they don't have to work right the first time ? And you must not have read were NASA has already adopted some of his ideas. Go search for Mars Semi-Direct. It is the current baseline mars mission..
Using an artificial gravity system by rotating the habitat against the upper statge is the only NEW flight operation and its an optional part of the mission. Fuel production would simply be the first time those checmical reactions were performed on another planet. The only thing even remotely new in that process is tying the reactions together into a single device which was prooven under mars atmospheric content/pressure to work on a budget of about 50k.
Reviving saturn V might be expensive since it would in large part have to be re-worked. Adapting shuttle is on the books ( Shuttle C that is, shuttle Z/ARES would cost more but again uses off the shelf engines SSME and only redesigns the orbiter to a simpler heatshiled less piggyback or statged element on top of the ET ) and the Energia designs are also available, Russia would GLADLY build the things for some cold hard cash for FAR less than it would cost us in home grown HLV re-development and is also key in his 20 billion estimate.
Regarding budget why is that simply because it happend with ISS it MUST happen with any other project ?
Did it escape your attention that for 800 some odd million we just put a golf cart on mars ? That if the second system works that will be two golf carts on mars ? Just going by mission cost per weight inserted in TMI ( trans mars insertion ) you can come in well under Zubrin's 20 billion estimate for 4-5 launches/2 500 day missions and that price tag includes the development of entirely new rovers. At 20 times (which would be less than 20billion mind you) the cost you get 20 times the weight ( and more with HLV's ) and 20 times the development budget. Using Energia means you have a given launch cost and don't have to 'develop' a non-existent HLV from new or current hardware.
When given a clear unchanging goal and sufficient funds NASA has proven a very capable organization. Do not blame the tool for failing when it is used improperly, blame the wielders. Just because some of its programs were allowed to be subject of an uncertain political landscape in the past does not mean that trend has to continue.
Read up on Mars Direct before you speak to the impossibility. 20 billion is Zurbins most optomistic estimate based on getting away from the absurd cost plus contract system in place.
If you want to know how much weight his estimate has ponder on this little tidbit. That insane 500+ billion price tag in response to Bush Sr.'s desire for a mars mission is one of the things that got him working on his plan in the first place. Once he had fleshed mars direct out- including a small scale demonstration of his fuel production method- his plan became somewhat co-opted by NASA as their current plan of choice for a mars mission and a lower price estimate for a manned mars mission was revised down from the 500+ price tag to around 60-80 billion as a direct result of adopting some of the ideas he proposed.
That 500+ billion dollar plan figured on the development of new technology and a massive expedition in the vision of Werner Von Braun, new technolgy everywhere. In short it was A bonaza for space contractors that made the commitee proposal acceptable to all parties that took place in its creation.. ie they all got a nice slice of the pie. Hell its entirely possible the 500billion was a woefully lowballed estimate of what that plan would have ultimately cost had we actually persued it.
The Zurbin plan uses known hardware. The fuel creation process is a very well established set of checmical reactions that has been in use since the 1800's and as I mentioned already demonstrated ( in martian atmosphere conditions ) by Zurbin. He proposes a return of a heavy lift booster either by reviving saturn V, using the russian energia design or adapting shuttle hardware to lift payload mass rather than a heatshield/landing gear/control surfaces for the shuttle. IE its not new.
One of two 'new' elements is the length of time. He proposes a 500 day long stay on the surface of mars instead of the roughly two weeks proposed by most other proposals. With roughly 6 months travel time both ways the equipment then has to be sufficiently reliable or backed up by redundancies for a 3-4 year period. The other and probably only truly new element to his plan is to utilize artificial gravity via rotation of the habitat against the counterweight of the final launch stage during the trip to Mars. An element that is optional but desirable to avoid the loss of bone density during prolonged exposure to zero G.
Lastly he has one very contraversial element and that is a small nuclear reactor as part of the mission. By the way, if you think reactors havn't gotten to space you don't know much about Soviet sattelites.
Now before you question this price tag again I ask you do two things. One research the proposal ( Mars Direct ) presented as being atainable for 20billion. It has been reviewed enough by those who know their stuff that it has slowly gained acceptance in the space industry. 2, instead of stating that a program will over run because other programs have state specifically why it will happen in this case. Overuns are not mandatory and they are not magical. They happen for a reason.
As a side note I will simply say Station is a very poor example for you to use as a program that suffered over runs. If all you know about the station program is that it suffered over runs but not WHY you need to look into what happend, and you need to dig deeper than the generally shallow and politically motivated attacks on stations budget overun.
First we get the robotic Dog/Mule/Horse then we get the Robotic Marine, Robotic Pilot ( already in limited use ). Wars become telecomuting jobs from underground bunkers in Kansas.
Afterall this seems the logical direction for american military might to take due to the ever increasing desire to spare human life even while we take it.
This way we can project our might (noses?) without ever leaving home.
If this prooves successfull it looks like the military will bankroll the creation of mechanical slave labor. Afterall once you have inspect/repair capacity AND real world manouvering capacity you have the pieces needed to form a self sufficient robot poulation.... just so long as we don't let them form SKYNET !!! wait we already elected the terminator.... run for the hills AHHHHH.
Ok the last bit got silly, but seriously if you can make robots work in the real world... and I don't think it gets more real than something that can autonomously keep up with soldiers in the bush... and Robots capable of a wide range of diagnostic/repair actions you really can put them to work from the begining of the production cycle to the end. Thus they becomes our slaves or our overlords.
Do we control or welcome them ? After all a mechanical labor pool could well kill capitalisim as a viable system.
One has to ask if this idea is truly about safety or about avoiding 9/11. If you have a system in place like this It will have an overide, otherwise you wouldn't have a pilot in the first place. The overide will be easy to implement because first on the list of possible situations it will be needed will be time critical decisions thus a lengthy/dificult invovled overide process will not work.
In the end you can't defend against human decision making unless you remove the human from the process.... which means you used canned human decision making in the form of code which to my knowledge is not and cannot ( to date ) be made self-correcting. Thus if there is an unforseen circumstance for the code to encounter you don't know what will happen. The code can't think on the fly for itself. So choose your poison. A plane that will be consistently flown even if that consistency invovles a bug that flys into the ground given the proper circumstances or a pilot that can think for itself and do unthinkable things such as fly into a huge skyscraper, or come up with an inovative way to control a plane with differential thrust due to the failure of control surface hydraulics ( actual real world example ). In fact both of those examples are being subjected to CODE fixes for making such actions easier or more difficult, this being an example of 9/11 ( or mountain ) avoidence and the new implementation of a backup directional control system utilizing dissimilar engine thrust rates. But its impossible to account for all scenarios and untill code can be sufficiently capable to deal with unforseen circumstances you have an overide. You draw your own conclusions on what a pilot will decide to trust in an odd situation when presented with loss of control of the aircraft. If your response to that is not to allow that decision then why the hell do you have a pilot in the cockpit to begin with ?
First off I grant you make very valid points. However, I feel they are for the most part a reflection of the lack of thought which went into the decision making process ( both here and in general ) where there was a lack of understanding about what an OPEN field really means.
IE they chose an open format instead of a limited format. I can't see logically how this means something other than they must have WANTED as many people to show up as possible. When they got an 'overwhelming' response they should have been jumping up and down with excitment. They are seeking inovation and limiting the field is not a great way of doing this.
On the other hand if logic wasn't the driver then perhaps some dip-shits decided hey we can say its open when we don't expect anyone but the big boys and a couple of kooks show up and we get an image boost for theoretically allowing anyone to participate..... oooooops people actually do want to participate, DOUGHT.
I suggest applying a test. If the new competition which has sprung up in the wake of this fiasco were to make a similar change in its competition rules on the fly what would happen? If its not the same screaming but can't do anything about it then something is wrong.
Now having said all that I applaud DARPA for awarding the at large berths as they did providing they actually did choose the most promising of the smaller competitors. But I have to say, why could they not have judged the technical papers as a whole after the initial deadline and then awarded the berths rather than simply awarding to the early submitters without ( apparently ) the same screening used to pick the remaining slots ? That is what seems unfair to me more than the choice to limit the field due to the 'unexpected' response. So long as such selection actually went to the most deserving design concepts then it dosn't matter WHO got them. I couldn't agree more this was not an issue of salving ego's but a search for the most inovative and capable free range roving vehicle design.
At the very least the decision give prefference to the early selections smacked of contractor prefference, which in and of itself is not wrong. But if thats what they wanted then why didn't they announce an open defense contractor competition ? I really do not think this is an issue of hindsight. I truly think this is the discussion that should have been had when deciding if the format was an 'OPEN' or 'LIMITED FIELD' competition to begin with.
ummmmm..... The point is DARPA had this to begin with. There was no reason to not include the smaller teams. After all if they geenrate a superior design you just have to find somone to make it. As for chaos in the race... isn't that sort of the point ? They don't want bots that work under ideal cicumstances, they want bots that can legitimately operate in the real world.
What were they afraid of ? A mom and pop low budget garage organization making a contractor or prestigious university team look silly ? Oh the horror.
Would be nice to see this done but 2007 is an apolloesqe time scale ( meaning lack of time ) for deploying a scramjet and sufficent shielding for atmospheric hypersonic speeds for any significant duration flight.
The flight profile for a space launch by an Air breathing engine requires a great deal of acceleration to be done where there is still significant amounts of atmosphere to provide friction... the vehicle would essentially go through re-entry twice on a mission rather than just once ( shuttle does most of its hypersonic acceleration outside the atmostphere.
Last I heard talks about this there was a great deal of uncertainty if scramjets dealing with atmospheric friction would be any more efficient than carrying your oxidizer and accelerating above the atmosphere. Basically the friction requires more energy which requires more fuel which requires more fuel tanks which increases size which increases friction... and its an exponential increase as I recall which is what ate into the wieght advatage of not carry the oxidizer.
Granted. It is not a quantifiable/consumable good in the same sense as the Common grazing grounds. In fact OSS suffers if not enough people use it as, the more the merrier as far as that goes. So no, it does not qualify point by point in that traditional sense. However, I hope you don't take that to mean it dosn't suffer the tragedy of the commons at all ? What of the problem of the freeloader ? Not to mention I might say there are cases where pollute=fork would be a valid statement.
There is nothing saying the 'commons' have to be consumable. A common good is something available to all. The tragedy of the commons does not only have to occur because of greed and the finite limitations of a consumable good. A tragedy of the commons is simply where a common good can be abused out of existence by its nature as a common good, IE lack of control of its use. There is more than one way to do this. People not caring enough to provide or support code generation is probably the chief concern.. Thankfully OSS can survive higher than 90% freeloaders quite easily.. hell 99%+ is probably status quo and thats because its not consumable. Once its created people can freeload thier little hearts out and never spoil it. But it can't survive 100% or in otherwords everyone waiting for someone else to do the dirty work so they can benifit from it.
There is more than one way to skin a Cat, and more than one way to spoil the Commons.
Interesting take. Open Source is a good of the commons, like water. And is subject to the same abuses and subject to the same advantages. If available and viable its an enabler.
The primary difference of course is that open source code is the result of man hours spent coding, it is a processed product. It is very difficult for alot of people to concieve of a contributed common good. However, difficult as it may be, open source is obviously a reality. There does exist in the common, a base of computer code as 'freely' available as that water in the stream. How this has come to be is another story, but think of it as the proverbial Gift Horse and the Golden Goose wrapped up in one. Its there, don't look at it to closely and damn sure don't kill it. Encourage it, let it do its thing, and reap the rewards.
So what exactly is that reward ?
Seems simple to me, the problem so many people have is they are trying to figure out how to capitlize on open source in a conventional way. The money to be made from open source is not to be had in selling the code. Its made from utilizing the code and freeing up costs that until now have been assumed. Think of it this way. How many billions of dollars have gone to Redmond, IBM, Novell etc in the form of software licensing fees ? What could have been accomplished with that money had it never left the industries from which it came ? That is the benifit of open source. That is its potential bottom line contribution.
I think the last real stumbling block for the public is getting over the adage of 'You Get what you Pay for'. But for people who think along such lines I have to ask what is the value of the latest version of Office versus the previous one ? If there was no compatability issue due to other people upgrading.. and no loss of support due to decalring an old version no longer supported etc... or *insert any remaining Micro Shaft technique for pushing upgrades*. What if software evolution was driven more by peoples desire for a capability and less by a companies bottom line ? I don't begrudge M$ making money, but it creates a conflict of interest that quality control/competition only does so much to balance due to their success in controlling the OS basic utility software market.
For cost software will not die if Open Source moves to the fore. It simply will move to places where Open Source prooves ineffective. IE it will provide what does not exist in Open Source and, hopefully, it eventually will serve to increase what is available in the Open community. Thus you PAY to move back the frontier of what you can do with Hardare, rather than just to access hardware period.
Correction, there is no need to reverse it in Austrailia. Thus while there exist fish with this altered Gene in Austrailia there exists the possibility it will be introduced somewhere else either intentionally or un-intentionally to the detriment of indigenous Carp habitats elsewhere.
Unless someone for some reason someone imports affected carp breed stock from austrailia that caries this gene. Just as the fish was introduced it can be returned and introduced somewhere elese. Though granted its next to impossible by the carps themselves without some assitence.
Dosn't matter how likely such a scenario is. It dosn't have to happen alot. It just has to happen under the right circumstances. It just takes one willfull ignoramous with an austrailian carp fetish or some idiot that hates carp and decides to spread this thing as far and wide as possible.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a gene tech chicken little by any stretch of the imagination... but introducing this kind of irreversible(? or is it reversible ?) element into a wild population brings chaos theory into play. IE it can't be controled. Most likely it dosn't escape the land down under, but is most likely safe enough ? Personally can't say I know what the loss of the carp would be. I imagine other fish breed populations, perhaps some more desireable, would expand to take their place.
If the shows are on demand and commercial free ??? Dosn't sound all that bad to me.
Lets say your average half hour sitcom episode costs $1.. so a season runs what, $27 ?? A show watched on average in a million households per episode makes 27 million. However, You can watch them on your schedule. People selling product placement know exactly how large their specific audience is. The concept of 'PRIME TIME' takes a huge hit other than for live programming. But it means no more schedule shuffling to accomadate large releases like a "miniseries", or major events like the state of the union speech.
In other words you finally get a home box office and TV can work on a model much more similar to movies. Popular shows can be viewed more than one time. They don't have to fight for 'Prime Time'. Niche shows can cater to a specific audience so long as its large enough and loyal enough to support the production. Even live productions can be provided later for viewing, IE sports fans could watch all the games they wanted to and not just the one that was on in their area etc... No need to miss Sports Overtimes because of contractual obligations.
Does this mean the end of 'free tv'? Not necesarrily. If you kill the typical 30 second commercial spot form of advertisement don't forget that while that kills the major established revenue stream for broadcasters it also frees up that money in the product pushers budgets. They still have to advertise and TV still remains the most attractive medium. One obvious move is to greater product placement. Some shows will likely still proove popular enough that they could be viable just on selling product placement, or having banner ads or some such and these shows would be available to all... given a public access method to on demand shows. Hell that could be done with a broadband connection and a Net/Tv ( LAN connection and a hardrive/OS for the TV ).
IE lets say your local TV station invests in an on-demand content server for which you register and are charged per event or perhaps monthly for access to the content. However, in addition to the on demand content that is charged per viewing lets say some distributers think the typical commercial break still has legs and decides to make some content available freely with commercial breaks, they then sell the commercial time to people who think that is a viable way to push their product. Some other shows may proove profitable by marketing product palcement. In addition independent shows may proove profitable since people are not reduced to just 'whats on' but by what they want. In effect they vote with their dollars and specific requests, results are instant. No need for statistical ratings, you know exactly how many people requested the show, where and when.
Its not very viable right now I grant, but broadband and broadband wireless are expanding pretty rapidly. Most cable companies are already rolling out on demand services. To me on demand per viewing cost or flat fee access to a constantly changing library of shows seems inevitable given the current state of affairs.
Typical commercials are dying. Every year they find it takes more and more exposuer to get name recognition because every year we get better and better at ignoring them or, as is the case with PVR's, getting more tech savy in methods for avoiding them altogether. I don't know anyone who cares for commercials. Occasinally they are amusing but as has been mentioned that quickly wears off when you see that amusing 30 seconds for the Nth time in the last 2 hours.
In the end I think your going to see a move away from commercial broadcast TV as we know it today. Perhaps it will die completely and that spectrum will be used for other means of comminication or perhaps it is like pen and paper, something that will be with us for a very long time. However I think its likely to change. The draw of choice as opposed to a set schedule is huge and at last all the technology is here to implement entertainment on demand. In addition that also p
That was an excellent article. Thanks for the link.