Hmmm if you have an across the board Tax cut and the top 50% of tax payers generate 90% of tax revenue.. then ummmmmm who is going to reap the most savings ? The lower 50% ? sheeesh. Some people seem to think its a crime to be rich.
OK when I started out reading that I remebered the Geosync part and really started boggling. I have never heard the idea of manufacutre from the other end though. Still not easy but makes a hell of alot more sense.
That still creates some boggling big problems...
1) capturing soemthing thats a massive enough to anchor against. I'd have to say breaking off and assembling chunks of the moon woudl be more likely than an asteroid there, we would have to be very fortunate to find just the right kind of asteroid not to mention the shear amount of power needed for the capture. Where a construction process from the moon would be breaking it up into bite size chunks so to speak.
2) Station keeping for the mass.. IE how the hell do you keep something Geosync without it being in Geosync. If your using thrust I can't imagine it would be much less than needed to get out of the atmostphere in the fisrt place when pushing that kind of mass around. Perhaps you keep it in geosync untill you embed it in the earth and then use the tension to hold station makign the universes largest weed whacker. OH wait I get it.... the collective mass of the arangement is at geosync. Then once you have tension at both ends you can back it further out where the tension increases from the counterweight beyond geosync.
3) the obvious manufacturing infrastructure to create the chord needed to be launched before you have a working elevator, and if the acnhor isn't suitable raw material then raw material transportation. usign current means to move something massive isn't unthinkable.... but lifting the needed prop would be hella expensive unless we find a better way to motivate things. I don't see a mili thrust ION system doing this except for mabye a belt asteroid. and we have a long way ago just to reach that far with somethign massive enough to be a propulsion system for an even more massive object.
I have to think we have much less complicated problems to solve before really thinking about that. Probably something better than byprop rockets for starters so we can lift more up mass to begin with before thinking about capturing and or controling an anchor like this.
Also seems to be this would be far more doable around mars.. Phobos and Demos come to mind... perhaps we could we perhaps steal one of them ? COurse it woudl really suck if the got the orbital equations screwed up and crashed a moon into earth while trying to capture an elevator anchor:-D
Micro G research is valuable but I agree the overhead of simply getting there much less reaping rewards from it is almost prohibitavely expensive. But that is something which is tied to launch costs which is directly tied to desire to get to space.
Chicken and the egg... why would there be a serious push for cheap microgravity production facilities before you knew what you could get from micro gravity production facilities ? You have to put in the initial start up.. the catalyst effort to generate the sutainable drive.
You want to know somethin ironic ??? The information slowly forming from crystiline growth formation when not influenced by the forces of gravity is a very likely source for the materials breakthrough we need for a real reduction in the cost to access space. Of course that creates a real cart before the horse problem if you have to get to space to make the materials which make that access cheaper, and will have to be done at a severe beating economically speaking until you reach critical mass in production and reduce the acess cost enough to reap the rewards.
As for your first point... I agree that NASA shouldn't be the transit provider and that the trips they do take to orbit should be around experimentation instead of service providing whether they launch Humans or Probes. As far as propulsion goes, since shuttle came on line NASA is like Delta.. they want safe and reliable.. none of this new crap. They need to get back to research on how to get places as their primary task. Leave the rest up to people who want to get where they can go.
ummmm how about getting the damn ribbon long enough and getting into orbit in the first place ? We going to have a swammi play a flute to lift it ? I have tried my best to read through the space elevator proposals with an open mind but hell I just don't see it, to many practical hurldles like the one I just mentioned tend to be over looked becasue they assume by the time they solve the other problems we will have suitible enough launch ability to actually get the first one up there.
The theory seems sound enough but I have yet to see the solutions for the practical issues regarding construction... current launch mass is limited to around 50k pounds with shuttle.... 200k pounds is the limit of most design ideas using checmical... and even thrn I doubt you could launch a 200+ mile long cable into orbit. and it seems a single strand system that long is a fundamental requirement of the theory.
If anyone can explain better how to implement the theory I would love to hear it.
I think the key word is GO. Station is nice but we stripped the design of anything even remotely allowing it to serve as a stepping stone to GO anywhere else.
Perhaps this will jolt us out of the LEO rut we have been in since giving up Apollo. We need LEO access and there is microgravity research that may proove important. But we need more than that to keep the fire lit on the program. Lets go somwhere... lets reintroduce ourselves to The Moon, its probably forgoten it ever had visitors in the first place. How about a space station in LLO instead of LEO ( low lunar orbit instead of low earth orbit )?? Getting to LEO is the hard part. Dark side astronomical observation would be very valuable and communcations would be improoved over LEO operations. LLO is closer to LEO than the ground is the LEO from an energy needed to get there standpoint. It would be a better microgravity environment and would provide us a chance to study the moon more in depth and just possibly provide a staging point for landings and creating a lunar outpost.
Mars of course... heck people the biggest problem of space travel has been solved as far as mars goes. WATER. There is water on mars. WATER. The stuff of life. With access to water we can create a long term sustainable environment.. with enough effort we can create a self sufficient habitat.
I truly think as the reality of water on Mars sinks in we will see momentum building to mounst a mission to get there. Possibilities for Microbial life aside if water is there we can live there if we want to bad enough. As for why go ?? Hell its there and we havn't been there yet. There are alot of places we have yet to go.. the whole rest of the universe. Right now man kind is living on earth, it has never left it to go anywhere but just outside and to our nearest neighbor... we havn't even been everywhere in our neighborhood and we have been here for Thousands upon Thousands of years if not millions. Just like that 30 year old living in Moms basement its past time to start looking for other options.
I like your idea of a mini station but it probably is very impractical with current re-boost systems. THe low orbits generally used by shuttle are very very very fuel intensive orbits with high rates of decay, even station in its relatively high orbit ( according to general shuttle orbits ) encounters atmospheric drag which deteriorates its orbit and there is a great deal more the closer in you get... its an exponential increase if I remeber.. its realted the function governing gravitational attraction.
A simpler option is that shuttles should not be launched without the option of an emergency dock with Station now that it is available. However re-fuling ability etc was scratched from stations capability and the shuttles OMS system is not designed to be refulable on orbit. We would also need to add more escape vehicle ability to Station to make this of much use as well. So just being able to rendezvous is not enough. I really think we ought to modernize and maintain a capsule production ability. THey are relatively simple in comparison to the biconic space plane design of shuttle... also much more robust physcaly.
All in all I agree, I think in hindsight most people realize dropping Saturn V and Apollo production was not a good move. Had shuttle deliverd the promised savings it would have been great... but if you dig at the costs enough you will find that shuttle launch cost as they have developed realisticly are approximately the same as a Sat V launch and that is with having to build from scratch every time, this is allowing for inflation and not allowing for improovemnts in the production line that would have happend as a matter of course. Maintnence and facilities costs ascociated with Shuttle have never been balanced by economies of scale as was the initial plan. If we could operate on the initial turn around schedule envisioned and with a fleet of 50-100 shuttles per launch savings could still be a reality. However it would still be incredibly more expenisve than the current system from an overall program standpoint which is what eventually killed that idea anyway.
Since bringing the F-1 booster and the Sat V stack back is not an option I would love to see the ARES concept developed to fruition... however ARES would be horribly expensive if it used SSME's and we did not include a recovery option. Including the heat shield and a viable return ability would seriously eat into the payload gain of ARES. SSME's are incredibly expensive due to the engineering required to allow them to be reused. I would like to see an ARES concept which uses the newest single use booster from Boeing ( ~600k lbs thrust to SSME's ~400k ) designed for use with Delta stacks. This booster was still largely on the drawing board when Zurbin developed the concepts behind his 'Case for Mars'. Now it is a reality and could be fit to operate with a shuttle stack as it is a LOX LH engine same as the SSME. Its cost is much less than a SSME and it provides a higher thrust per engine to boot. Its roughly analogus to the Russian booster he considered in his concepts that is beyond mothballed at this point.
I would also love to see the rest of the Shuttle fleet "retired" to orbit as you suggest... but that refurb would have to be designed and implemented on the ground most likely and would be part of transforming them along the old Shuttle C concept with protrubances and heat shield removed.
The moon may well require a closed loop system but mars does not. There is water on mars and there is an atmosphere on mars ( largely C02 ) and the two combined with a source of power can be used to maintain living conditions. Go dig around and find info explaining the whole Mars Direct Concept. I would provide some but I find most people are more convinced if they take the time to find their own sources. Guy named Zurbin and 'mars direct' used as key words should give a good start.
Privitization is not a real option yet, though I agree NASA's organization needs to be better. Mostly I think they need to be seperated from the political process which surrounds the budget. NASA and its contractors spend so much time fighting for its budget money its impossible to focus on operations. Its like having to wory every year if your salary is going to be different. It makes it extrodinarily dificult to make any long term plans. NASA needs a stable budget that it does not have to worry constanly about. The larger the goals we want met the longer term the budget consistency needs to be. Not that there dosn't need to be some oversight but there are programs which start off knowing they are multi year ventures but they are asked to justify their expense EVERY YEAR... and experimental technology exploration does not lend itself well to to the budget justification processes so any program that meets with any difficulty especially early in its process is in danger of being cut. This leads to very very very short term near sighted goals. It also makes people very conservative in what they are willing to risk.
Would love to see NASA make a real run at a mars Direct plan ala Zurbin. Hell I would be happy just to see the Ares booster concpet wringing out some heavy lift capacity from current spaceflight components to get us back in the serious planet exploring buisness isntead of these multibillion dollar R/C tonka toys that would fit on my desk and get stuck two feet from where they land.
I think that says more than anything else.. Rick get some perspective, you ahve been on the inside of the creation process for too long.
Its one thing to remain inside established conventions of the created universe.. something else entirely to throw out cliche story line after cliche storyline and then create new conventions whole cloth with no explinations and run roughshod over everything built up over the years of the series..
TNG episodes built on each other. There were some running storylines that lasted the entire run of the program and they just seemed to toss it all out withthe movies.
To tell ya the damn truth I am willing to yell do over and let them say hey we fouled up and start over with the movie timeline.
The movies storylines didn't logiclally flow from the series. Your crystalized certain aspects about the characters and froze growth and then at the same time introduced entirely new chracteristics without letting us take the journey to those changes with them, just sprung them on us full grown and broke many fans ties that had been developed over the years.
When the movies came out it felt like running into your highschool classmates after not having seen them for 20 years and never having any explinatation of what occured in between. No stories, no explinations. So you create these changed characters who we didn't journey with through those changes and then have them react in ways consistent with those changes while we are still left thinking they are the same people we knew before. Very disconcerting and not conducive to a good movie.
Seems to me someone with a few name morphic bots and access to some extensive chat logs, you could spoof this easily... ie scan a chat log establish a bot log on for the top 5-10 msg generating ID's in the log and then have them doll out the chat log along with the other 'occasional' msg's advertising FTP server access etc...
In fact someone could simply mimick the chat going on in several channles at once and make it semi-sensible if they bothered to figure out a conversation following algorythm.. but purely random would work too for the most part for anything but close scrutiny..
Well if its an orbiter fundamental structural problem I agree, it would be much longer than Challenger... in fact it will likely mean no shuttle launch again ever of the current orbiters. I am kind of assuming that the fundamental structure is sound.... while a hundred flights isn't an overwhelming data set I think it would have turned up any fundamental structural flaws by now. The orbiters are by most accounts I am aware of immensly over engineered in that aspect and columbia by far and away the orbiter with the strongest structure. After they had real data of stresses experienced during launch and re-entry they were able to safely shave weight in the structures on the other orbiters.
I was thinking ( in my definatly finite wisdom ) if a design flaw is turned up it will revolve around the heat shield... something that was a contested issue with the initial design in the first place. I may be on a step out but in addition to the adminsitration snafuus it was the problems surrounding the development of the tiles/heat sheild that played a key roll in delaying the shuttle to the point where skylab's orbit deteriorated and could not be salvaged. The slight margin of error ( compared to capsule ablative designs ) and fagility of the tiles has long been known as a glaring weakpoint in shuttles design. And one that tends to be glossed over by the incredible achievement of designing anything capable of providing a reuseable re-entry shield and maintaining the aerodynamics required to land the orbiter like a plane..... weakpoint may be too harsh... Tile is an incredible aerospace achievement and without it shuttle wouldn't be possible, but it has a slim margin of error.It dosn't even have to completely fail as a capable heat shield if it alters the areodymanics enough to render the re-entry uncontrolable.
If thats the case the ability remains to try and create a better more resilient tile material, implement a more secure tile application or perhaps a more effective material application than thousands of small tiles placed by hand. Such things have been looked at before but action in that direction may have been stymied by the fact the tile system worked. In fact, untill saturday, it has been working flawlessly above and beyond expectations.
It could also revolve around the foam comming loose... ie tile is a perfectly capable design however we wind up learning it is to vulnerable to allow that risk any longer and a foam or insulation method will have to be found which we can assure will not come loose during launch.
Or something completely different of course... who knows I am not a NASA engineer, just a space program geek:-).
Hell they have sold 8 million units when essentially in competition with a system that had a year+ head start. Not to Mention Xbox figures to have a longer life than PSII and is in a great position to provide the higher value second tier system when PS3 hits the shelves and PSII game development falls off. Rough guess is at that point X-Box will be selling for 150 or less with a number of PC game ports hitting hard and heavy with alot of first efforts by primarily PC developers at the second teir game prices.
I think PSII is going to have a rough second tier life... I think they really goofed not having more memory or making it upgradable and the lack of an intialy integrated hard drive. Hard drive space is likely going to be very very necesarry in the console market before long and Xbox will be sitting pretty as a value system while it will cost to upgrade PSII and its system memory is fixed with less than Xbox.
Step two after PSIII hits the market they again hit the bleeding edge market late but this time with a system designed with all of their lessons learned ( IE better controller, smaller footprint ). They hope to break even but don't care if they take an ultimate loss again and take direct aim at whatever sony offers after the 3erd generation play station. The goal the next time around is to establish the system is worthy. Not to mention folks Xbox is not a garounteed loss yet, it may well break even or proove profitable in the long run.
Frankly I think MS could deal without penetrating the Japanese market so long as they can garner game design support for US titles or generate a stronger console content generation industry over here. My guess is they are after making the US market able to stand on its own feet in competition. at that point its anybodies game... however penetrating Japans very protective domestic market in an area with so much domestic pride is to me is a very very very difficult.
I am no Xbox fanboy.... my console system is a PSII and I love it... but it has its limitations and by all accounts it is a far more difficult system to develop for. X-box by contrast represents a set PC type of environment with similar development needs where you don't have to account for widely varying consumer hardware choices. This means given time and users the ease of porting PC titles will lead to more content from US game designers that have largely kept to the PC to date.
It will be interseting to see what Sony does to pre-emt these strengths.... a late market PSII with budget price ( no more than Xbox), upgraded memory, and with the hard drive/ network card included might deliver a real coup de grace to Xbox sales of any sort and put M$ at a severe disadvantage with Xbox V2 if they don't launch with PS3 in the battle for the next genration whether its worthy or not.
I hate M$ and little annoying things in their Xbox release like extra $$ on top of a too expensive release price to unlock DVD playback and an utter crap controller design seem to doom their venture. However, M$ is in it for the long haul and regardless of the people who back it I would love to see a stronger US console development market develop.
Have to disagree with that sentiment... I am certainly no dead head but my Brother was/is one so I had plenty of exposure to the music.. the secret of the Dead and many bands in their mold is extreme musical talent and free form jammin.
The drugs do not sustain the scene, the music sustains the scene... people were willing to go to 7 dead shows in a row because no show was the same. The selection was differnt, the way the songs where played varied. You got something new and unique every night.. thus creating a reason to return again and again which in turn created a community of people who certainly had/have a penchant for drug use. Could you imagine going to 7 Creed shows in a row irregardless of how 'cool' the scene was ? Don't get me wrong Creed is pretty good and fairly talented compared to most of the major air play aritists but their shows are pretty tightly coreographed and desinged to re-create the album sound. Listening to a CD 7 days in a row you have to buy once is one thing, but paying 30+ bucks 7 times to listen to the same show is quite another.
If you want a realtively drug free comparison try the parrot heads. Buffet is both highly succesful as a recording artist and has incredibly faithful fans who will attend multiple shows and follow his tours much the same as the Dead did.
Mostly the Dead didn't record because they didn't want to. They knew the problems of entanglment with the recording industry and knew that their style was not very conducive to recording success anyway. They liked jammin and they liked life on the road.... they didn't need recording and couldn't have given two flips about it.
Who here remembers Mindspring before they supposedly bought out Earthlink ? Still amazes me, the deal was considered a buy out seeing as the crap of Earthlink has managed to take that whole deal over. I was a mindspring subscriber back when they were only a local ISP in Atlanta. They had incredible tech support and would not sign up anyone if they were at their capacity. Busy signals were unheard of. You recieved notifications of possible outages, appologies and explinations for unexpected outages. These are things they carried with them when they expanded to provide national access. At the time they did the impossible. Took the combination of knowldegable tech savy support, with stellar access thought only to exist at the small scale local ISP level and went national with an incredible jump in subscriber base. And they pulled it off.... at least for a while.
Then they did something stupid, they 'bought' Earthlink. They then promptly changed their name to Earthlink since supposedly Earthlink had better west coast brand recognition. It may have been more widely known, but then it was widely known as a crap provider which cared far more about the bottom line than its customers or providing a good service. Unfortunately this attitude seems to have infected Mindspring. It has realy affected the broadband service offerings largely rolled out since the 'buyout'.
All in all I hear that the current service overall for Mindspring/Earthlink is still above average compared to most peoples experience with services like AOL or MSN and that frightens me. Perosnally I no longer recognize any elements of Mindspring in the interaction I have with my provider Earthlink. In fact the only thing remaining is I still have @mindspring.com on my e-mail adressess. Unfortunately it often seems that is all that remains of a once great company with a great mindset. My recent experiences with Earthlink Broadband services have completly shattered my once unassailable loyalty to the company it once was. I am curretly waiting until my yearlong contract agreement expires to shift broadband providers to comcast or a local service here in Huntsville where I now live.
They have access numbers for almost any area in the US due to a nice setup with phone companies. I know about them becasue my brother lives in steamboat where they are based and the service as I and he have had experience with them is excellent.
Da I agree for the most part. However when shuttle was designed we had to give up Saturn V stacks and to support sky lab we needed something capable of both. All in all though shuttle is a collection of comprimises it is ideal for station support. In many ways shuttle has not been used for what it was initially designed for until the past couple of years.
I think the cooperation with the Russians is the only thing that kept us from developing a domestic cargo delivery system using expendable boosters like deltas for ISS operations.
The service module has the abiltity to perform reboosts as well... part of the payload of progress launches is normally fuel for the service module boosters.. any excess prop from the progress vehicles are used as well.. same for shuttle. Actually shuttle rebopsts are very inefficient since it is not attached in a very good location for reboost.
I think bulk would be more of a problem than mass. you can double check me but I believe the heaviest Delta configuration has a greater payload capability than shuttle... shuttle only puts ~50k payload in orbit, I think Endeavor can toss 75k since its the lightest.. you have to remember that the original Shuttles are about 175k or so, Endeavor is around 150. may be discovery... which ever one the built most recently, I get them mixed up occasionally.
The heaviest delta config lauches around 100K or more if memory serves, A shuttle stack launches around 225k including the orbiter/engine/payload weight but the mass a Delta ( and arian ) put in orbit is almost enitrely payload. However their paloads tend to be relatively dense objects that pack their weight into a small area.. things like the truss segments are not very heavy but are bulky, the nodes are heavy and bulky. This means you would have to design and implement new payload shells to put on top of the Delta stacks that would have to be cleared from an aerodynamic standpoint. but now that I am thinking about it even that isn't the real problem
They real problem would be the lack of a sophisticated enough orbital manouevering to get the paylaod to ISS and then you have the problem of performing station construction with only the 3 memebers on board and no access to the shuttle RMS system to aide the stations RMS system which has been somewhat buggy.
If you could solve the problem of orbital manouvering ( very doable, you just have to make the system and fit it in the available launch mass ) you could probably solve the man power problem by doing it at crew exchanges with soyuz modules. However the station RMS would have to be sufficient by itself for manipulating the payload once the new piece it was close enough for capture. Hmmmmm double the two years and add another for good measure to do it that way. Station construction was mostly concieved and planned with the idea that you would have access to two RMS systems... I belive there are some operations where both are required.
I kind of hope they don't decide to build another orbiter. Right now the space plane idea has been recently revived but is still a little budget starved.... builiding a new orbiter will suck up alot of budget money. Even if we step up the schedule of the remaining 3 its likely shuttle fleet operating excpenses are going to be lighter than expected now. I refuse to claim that is a silver lining.... but we have to go on from here. shuttle is an aging system and sinking money into building another one is going to tie us to shuttle for that much longer.
Incidentally if we find this is a design flaw which applies only to re-entry and prooves to be one we can't solve I seriously hope they use it as an opportunity to revive the shuttle C concept rather than simply abandoning the current orbiters and no longer using them. Shuttle C is a one way trip design where they remove the abilily for a shuttle to ruturn in order to gain a much higher payload capability. We could design a shuttle to keep at Station that was a space tug and re add the ability to do satalite retrival and repair to ISS. In addition we would get a launch with roughly 3 times the payload capacity of a current launch for each orbiter we decided to use this way.
To make one a space tug The shuttles OMS would have to be re-designed to survive long term on orbit and be re-fuelable and replaceable on orbit. The ECLSS system would also have to be re-vamped.
Some might argue in that event we should put them in a museum... but personally the only one in the fleet I ever would have argued for that fate just met a far different fate. I think that once we decide to break away from the shuttle system ( be it in the after math of this tragedy or farther down the road ) converting the remaining to ships designed to stay in space for the rest of their service life would be far more useful and a far more fitting end to the shuttle program.
Da I actually found that not long after I posted my last. Columbias refurb allowed them to reduce a fair amount of weight. Though its not surprising it was a truss mission. The trusses are bulky but not heavy.. I think they mass around 30k if I remeber the last two right and that segment is probably even lighter since it dosn't have radiators like the last two that went up. I know even before the re-fit columbia could have made ISS orbit, however its paylaod mass to accomplish that was very restricted due to the high inclination orbit ISS is in in order to allow Soyuz launches to meet up with it.
I still don't think it affects them over much. They will have to scramble to shift the truss payload ( and thus others ) back on other ISS scheduled missions accordingly but this far out if the other 3 remain operational it would be very possible to completely skip that mission purely from a supply standpoint for the crew.
Well the short answer is that there is no way to know.
If its a design flaw like with Challenger then it could easily be a simlar kind of time scale which will likely have a ripple effect on ISS. Though if Soyuz and progress launches could be stepped up there is no reason to abbandon ISS. However construction efforts would cease as they have been the purview of shuttle and soyuz can't launch the mass. Perhaps some Heavy Delta or Arian launches could be substitued but I would imagine that would take a couple years at the least to set in motion.
On the other hand if its a unique failure related to say the foam break off at launch or to some uncharted space debris on re-entry then they might not even miss the next scheduled launch.
In either event shuttles plate was pretty full with only 4 orbiters. Losing columbia does not effect any of the scheuled ISS missions as it was incapable of making the ISS orbit with enough payload so long as the remaining 3 remained cleared for operations.
So ultimately the quetion is if this is a fundamental problem in shuttles design or if it was a unpredicatable and unavoidable risk which comes with spaceflight operations.
Lets just say the tiles caused it. That critical tiles where somehow displodged by the foam on take off.
There was nothing they could do about it. They could not repair any damage. They couldn't meet up with Station, They couldn't stay on orbit much longer, Certainly not long enough to mount a rescue. The only choice they had was attempting re-entry and landing. They couldn't launch the Soyuz on the pad for a rescue because soyuz is not capable of making shuttles normal orbit, not to mention that is a progres module and not one designed for re-entry and even if it were it could only hold 3 minus anyone needed for launch ( normally 2 )..Choices where
A) Stay in orbit and die when life support failed. B) Hope it held together on re-entry.
and thats if they discovered an issue before they went for de-orbit burn. If they found out after that there only choice was hoping it held together on re-entry.
The same applies to almost any problem which may have developed of a structural nature.
Well, for those of you wondering what good this is imagine this... Take halflife and instead of very well managed episodic sections of an essentially linear story and simply apply high level logic to the opposistion forces and then create a seamless gameworld without artificial choke points and closing rearward paths. AND THEN have the core sample melt down and you have to escape... but this time there are no endpoints and nothing keeping you from gathering groups of the surviving scientists and gaurds or going it on your own... and the Marines actually react intelligently. They were better than your average FPS fodder but they still didn't know when to retreat and re-group.
I have long thought FPS games have missed a very useful technique in re-using scenes... however re-using them requires some sort of fluid decicsion making like this to keep a scene fresh. Take Metal Gear Solid and MGSII, both took place in limited scenes acording to FPS standards but that was rarely a problem and that game was largely scripted. Also they need to add soemthing more to gameplay than shoot anything that moves... we continually see this growing but it is by dribs and drabs instead of leaps and bounds. Perhaps that mess of a game called Tekwar scared everyone away from a non shooting based FPS. I mean can nobody envision a twitchy version of Elder Scrolls instead of turn based ?
Da and there are several for MMORPG but they have become more and more annoying in that the games try to keep you from accessing stuff in the background or running programs in the back ground.... a few EULA's now go so far as to say you cannont decode the pakets being sent to your computer/network whether you do anything with the information or not. Stuff like that. No biggie, generally childs play to get around but technically places you in violation of the EULA. ( Somethign I find perposterous but thats another beef )
On the AI front however it would be an interesting project to enable a remote machine with no more input/insight into the game than a person to create action routines, and somewhat more widley applicable than Tetris. Of course you could bypass alot of pain in the ass visual recogintion routines by routing the txt msg's ascociated with MMORPG's but you would already have to be fairly sophisticated with recognising enemies etc... sort of like sniping bots. However when you get down to it MMORPG/MUDS are much more set peice action reaction games like tetris than say quake which is more fluid and freeform.
What would be really interesting here is if he created a feedback learning system where he could expose it tetris clones and the computer could figure out how to play by the results of its actions. What say the recognition algorythim could be abstacted enough that a change in grid size and piece shapes wouldn't bother but determin if it simply is processing a previously unseen grid/shape that is valid or if it is malfunctioning.. if its a new shape it places it in its memory and evaluates where it would go ( ie make its own placement rules regarding the new shape based on what it already does. ) IF its a new grid it recalculates to allow for the extra space.
Aagain the routines would have to be abstracted to the point the computer could define its parameters itself but say withen a loose guideline of rules.. IE Tetris is about falling blocks to be fit together in a seamless horizontal row to make them disapear and thus not fill up the grid and continue the game.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm if you have an across the board Tax cut and the top 50% of tax payers generate 90% of tax revenue.. then ummmmmm who is going to reap the most savings ? The lower 50% ? sheeesh. Some people seem to think its a crime to be rich.
OK when I started out reading that I remebered the Geosync part and really started boggling. I have never heard the idea of manufacutre from the other end though. Still not easy but makes a hell of alot more sense.
:-D
That still creates some boggling big problems...
1) capturing soemthing thats a massive enough to anchor against. I'd have to say breaking off and assembling chunks of the moon woudl be more likely than an asteroid there, we would have to be very fortunate to find just the right kind of asteroid not to mention the shear amount of power needed for the capture. Where a construction process from the moon would be breaking it up into bite size chunks so to speak.
2) Station keeping for the mass.. IE how the hell do you keep something Geosync without it being in Geosync. If your using thrust I can't imagine it would be much less than needed to get out of the atmostphere in the fisrt place when pushing that kind of mass around. Perhaps you keep it in geosync untill you embed it in the earth and then use the tension to hold station makign the universes largest weed whacker. OH wait I get it.... the collective mass of the arangement is at geosync. Then once you have tension at both ends you can back it further out where the tension increases from the counterweight beyond geosync.
3) the obvious manufacturing infrastructure to create the chord needed to be launched before you have a working elevator, and if the acnhor isn't suitable raw material then raw material transportation. usign current means to move something massive isn't unthinkable.... but lifting the needed prop would be hella expensive unless we find a better way to motivate things. I don't see a mili thrust ION system doing this except for mabye a belt asteroid. and we have a long way ago just to reach that far with somethign massive enough to be a propulsion system for an even more massive object.
I have to think we have much less complicated problems to solve before really thinking about that. Probably something better than byprop rockets for starters so we can lift more up mass to begin with before thinking about capturing and or controling an anchor like this.
Also seems to be this would be far more doable around mars.. Phobos and Demos come to mind... perhaps we could we perhaps steal one of them ? COurse it woudl really suck if the got the orbital equations screwed up and crashed a moon into earth while trying to capture an elevator anchor
Micro G research is valuable but I agree the overhead of simply getting there much less reaping rewards from it is almost prohibitavely expensive. But that is something which is tied to launch costs which is directly tied to desire to get to space.
Chicken and the egg... why would there be a serious push for cheap microgravity production facilities before you knew what you could get from micro gravity production facilities ? You have to put in the initial start up.. the catalyst effort to generate the sutainable drive.
You want to know somethin ironic ??? The information slowly forming from crystiline growth formation when not influenced by the forces of gravity is a very likely source for the materials breakthrough we need for a real reduction in the cost to access space. Of course that creates a real cart before the horse problem if you have to get to space to make the materials which make that access cheaper, and will have to be done at a severe beating economically speaking until you reach critical mass in production and reduce the acess cost enough to reap the rewards.
As for your first point... I agree that NASA shouldn't be the transit provider and that the trips they do take to orbit should be around experimentation instead of service providing whether they launch Humans or Probes. As far as propulsion goes, since shuttle came on line NASA is like Delta.. they want safe and reliable.. none of this new crap. They need to get back to research on how to get places as their primary task. Leave the rest up to people who want to get where they can go.
ummmm how about getting the damn ribbon long enough and getting into orbit in the first place ? We going to have a swammi play a flute to lift it ? I have tried my best to read through the space elevator proposals with an open mind but hell I just don't see it, to many practical hurldles like the one I just mentioned tend to be over looked becasue they assume by the time they solve the other problems we will have suitible enough launch ability to actually get the first one up there.
The theory seems sound enough but I have yet to see the solutions for the practical issues regarding construction... current launch mass is limited to around 50k pounds with shuttle.... 200k pounds is the limit of most design ideas using checmical... and even thrn I doubt you could launch a 200+ mile long cable into orbit. and it seems a single strand system that long is a fundamental requirement of the theory.
If anyone can explain better how to implement the theory I would love to hear it.
I think the key word is GO. Station is nice but we stripped the design of anything even remotely allowing it to serve as a stepping stone to GO anywhere else.
Perhaps this will jolt us out of the LEO rut we have been in since giving up Apollo. We need LEO access and there is microgravity research that may proove important. But we need more than that to keep the fire lit on the program. Lets go somwhere... lets reintroduce ourselves to The Moon, its probably forgoten it ever had visitors in the first place. How about a space station in LLO instead of LEO ( low lunar orbit instead of low earth orbit )?? Getting to LEO is the hard part. Dark side astronomical observation would be very valuable and communcations would be improoved over LEO operations. LLO is closer to LEO than the ground is the LEO from an energy needed to get there standpoint. It would be a better microgravity environment and would provide us a chance to study the moon more in depth and just possibly provide a staging point for landings and creating a lunar outpost.
Mars of course... heck people the biggest problem of space travel has been solved as far as mars goes. WATER. There is water on mars. WATER. The stuff of life. With access to water we can create a long term sustainable environment.. with enough effort we can create a self sufficient habitat.
I truly think as the reality of water on Mars sinks in we will see momentum building to mounst a mission to get there. Possibilities for Microbial life aside if water is there we can live there if we want to bad enough. As for why go ?? Hell its there and we havn't been there yet. There are alot of places we have yet to go.. the whole rest of the universe. Right now man kind is living on earth, it has never left it to go anywhere but just outside and to our nearest neighbor... we havn't even been everywhere in our neighborhood and we have been here for Thousands upon Thousands of years if not millions. Just like that 30 year old living in Moms basement its past time to start looking for other options.
I like your idea of a mini station but it probably is very impractical with current re-boost systems. THe low orbits generally used by shuttle are very very very fuel intensive orbits with high rates of decay, even station in its relatively high orbit ( according to general shuttle orbits ) encounters atmospheric drag which deteriorates its orbit and there is a great deal more the closer in you get... its an exponential increase if I remeber.. its realted the function governing gravitational attraction.
A simpler option is that shuttles should not be launched without the option of an emergency dock with Station now that it is available. However re-fuling ability etc was scratched from stations capability and the shuttles OMS system is not designed to be refulable on orbit. We would also need to add more escape vehicle ability to Station to make this of much use as well. So just being able to rendezvous is not enough. I really think we ought to modernize and maintain a capsule production ability. THey are relatively simple in comparison to the biconic space plane design of shuttle... also much more robust physcaly.
All in all I agree, I think in hindsight most people realize dropping Saturn V and Apollo production was not a good move. Had shuttle deliverd the promised savings it would have been great... but if you dig at the costs enough you will find that shuttle launch cost as they have developed realisticly are approximately the same as a Sat V launch and that is with having to build from scratch every time, this is allowing for inflation and not allowing for improovemnts in the production line that would have happend as a matter of course. Maintnence and facilities costs ascociated with Shuttle have never been balanced by economies of scale as was the initial plan. If we could operate on the initial turn around schedule envisioned and with a fleet of 50-100 shuttles per launch savings could still be a reality. However it would still be incredibly more expenisve than the current system from an overall program standpoint which is what eventually killed that idea anyway.
Since bringing the F-1 booster and the Sat V stack back is not an option I would love to see the ARES concept developed to fruition... however ARES would be horribly expensive if it used SSME's and we did not include a recovery option. Including the heat shield and a viable return ability would seriously eat into the payload gain of ARES. SSME's are incredibly expensive due to the engineering required to allow them to be reused. I would like to see an ARES concept which uses the newest single use booster from Boeing ( ~600k lbs thrust to SSME's ~400k ) designed for use with Delta stacks. This booster was still largely on the drawing board when Zurbin developed the concepts behind his 'Case for Mars'. Now it is a reality and could be fit to operate with a shuttle stack as it is a LOX LH engine same as the SSME. Its cost is much less than a SSME and it provides a higher thrust per engine to boot. Its roughly analogus to the Russian booster he considered in his concepts that is beyond mothballed at this point.
I would also love to see the rest of the Shuttle fleet "retired" to orbit as you suggest... but that refurb would have to be designed and implemented on the ground most likely and would be part of transforming them along the old Shuttle C concept with protrubances and heat shield removed.
The moon may well require a closed loop system but mars does not. There is water on mars and there is an atmosphere on mars ( largely C02 ) and the two combined with a source of power can be used to maintain living conditions. Go dig around and find info explaining the whole Mars Direct Concept. I would provide some but I find most people are more convinced if they take the time to find their own sources. Guy named Zurbin and 'mars direct' used as key words should give a good start.
Privitization is not a real option yet, though I agree NASA's organization needs to be better. Mostly I think they need to be seperated from the political process which surrounds the budget. NASA and its contractors spend so much time fighting for its budget money its impossible to focus on operations. Its like having to wory every year if your salary is going to be different. It makes it extrodinarily dificult to make any long term plans. NASA needs a stable budget that it does not have to worry constanly about. The larger the goals we want met the longer term the budget consistency needs to be. Not that there dosn't need to be some oversight but there are programs which start off knowing they are multi year ventures but they are asked to justify their expense EVERY YEAR... and experimental technology exploration does not lend itself well to to the budget justification processes so any program that meets with any difficulty especially early in its process is in danger of being cut. This leads to very very very short term near sighted goals. It also makes people very conservative in what they are willing to risk.
Would love to see NASA make a real run at a mars Direct plan ala Zurbin. Hell I would be happy just to see the Ares booster concpet wringing out some heavy lift capacity from current spaceflight components to get us back in the serious planet exploring buisness isntead of these multibillion dollar R/C tonka toys that would fit on my desk and get stuck two feet from where they land.
I think that says more than anything else.. Rick get some perspective, you ahve been on the inside of the creation process for too long.
Its one thing to remain inside established conventions of the created universe.. something else entirely to throw out cliche story line after cliche storyline and then create new conventions whole cloth with no explinations and run roughshod over everything built up over the years of the series..
TNG episodes built on each other. There were some running storylines that lasted the entire run of the program and they just seemed to toss it all out withthe movies.
To tell ya the damn truth I am willing to yell do over and let them say hey we fouled up and start over with the movie timeline.
The movies storylines didn't logiclally flow from the series. Your crystalized certain aspects about the characters and froze growth and then at the same time introduced entirely new chracteristics without letting us take the journey to those changes with them, just sprung them on us full grown and broke many fans ties that had been developed over the years.
When the movies came out it felt like running into your highschool classmates after not having seen them for 20 years and never having any explinatation of what occured in between. No stories, no explinations. So you create these changed characters who we didn't journey with through those changes and then have them react in ways consistent with those changes while we are still left thinking they are the same people we knew before. Very disconcerting and not conducive to a good movie.
Seems to me someone with a few name morphic bots and access to some extensive chat logs, you could spoof this easily... ie scan a chat log establish a bot log on for the top 5-10 msg generating ID's in the log and then have them doll out the chat log along with the other 'occasional' msg's advertising FTP server access etc...
In fact someone could simply mimick the chat going on in several channles at once and make it semi-sensible if they bothered to figure out a conversation following algorythm.. but purely random would work too for the most part for anything but close scrutiny..
Well if its an orbiter fundamental structural problem I agree, it would be much longer than Challenger... in fact it will likely mean no shuttle launch again ever of the current orbiters. I am kind of assuming that the fundamental structure is sound.... while a hundred flights isn't an overwhelming data set I think it would have turned up any fundamental structural flaws by now. The orbiters are by most accounts I am aware of immensly over engineered in that aspect and columbia by far and away the orbiter with the strongest structure. After they had real data of stresses experienced during launch and re-entry they were able to safely shave weight in the structures on the other orbiters.
.... weakpoint may be too harsh... Tile is an incredible aerospace achievement and without it shuttle wouldn't be possible, but it has a slim margin of error.It dosn't even have to completely fail as a capable heat shield if it alters the areodymanics enough to render the re-entry uncontrolable.
:-).
I was thinking ( in my definatly finite wisdom ) if a design flaw is turned up it will revolve around the heat shield... something that was a contested issue with the initial design in the first place. I may be on a step out but in addition to the adminsitration snafuus it was the problems surrounding the development of the tiles/heat sheild that played a key roll in delaying the shuttle to the point where skylab's orbit deteriorated and could not be salvaged. The slight margin of error ( compared to capsule ablative designs ) and fagility of the tiles has long been known as a glaring weakpoint in shuttles design. And one that tends to be glossed over by the incredible achievement of designing anything capable of providing a reuseable re-entry shield and maintaining the aerodynamics required to land the orbiter like a plane.
If thats the case the ability remains to try and create a better more resilient tile material, implement a more secure tile application or perhaps a more effective material application than thousands of small tiles placed by hand. Such things have been looked at before but action in that direction may have been stymied by the fact the tile system worked. In fact, untill saturday, it has been working flawlessly above and beyond expectations.
It could also revolve around the foam comming loose... ie tile is a perfectly capable design however we wind up learning it is to vulnerable to allow that risk any longer and a foam or insulation method will have to be found which we can assure will not come loose during launch.
Or something completely different of course... who knows I am not a NASA engineer, just a space program geek
Amen to that
Hell they have sold 8 million units when essentially in competition with a system that had a year+ head start. Not to Mention Xbox figures to have a longer life than PSII and is in a great position to provide the higher value second tier system when PS3 hits the shelves and PSII game development falls off. Rough guess is at that point X-Box will be selling for 150 or less with a number of PC game ports hitting hard and heavy with alot of first efforts by primarily PC developers at the second teir game prices.
I think PSII is going to have a rough second tier life... I think they really goofed not having more memory or making it upgradable and the lack of an intialy integrated hard drive. Hard drive space is likely going to be very very necesarry in the console market before long and Xbox will be sitting pretty as a value system while it will cost to upgrade PSII and its system memory is fixed with less than Xbox.
Step two after PSIII hits the market they again hit the bleeding edge market late but this time with a system designed with all of their lessons learned ( IE better controller, smaller footprint ). They hope to break even but don't care if they take an ultimate loss again and take direct aim at whatever sony offers after the 3erd generation play station. The goal the next time around is to establish the system is worthy. Not to mention folks Xbox is not a garounteed loss yet, it may well break even or proove profitable in the long run.
Frankly I think MS could deal without penetrating the Japanese market so long as they can garner game design support for US titles or generate a stronger console content generation industry over here. My guess is they are after making the US market able to stand on its own feet in competition. at that point its anybodies game... however penetrating Japans very protective domestic market in an area with so much domestic pride is to me is a very very very difficult.
I am no Xbox fanboy.... my console system is a PSII and I love it... but it has its limitations and by all accounts it is a far more difficult system to develop for. X-box by contrast represents a set PC type of environment with similar development needs where you don't have to account for widely varying consumer hardware choices. This means given time and users the ease of porting PC titles will lead to more content from US game designers that have largely kept to the PC to date.
It will be interseting to see what Sony does to pre-emt these strengths.... a late market PSII with budget price ( no more than Xbox), upgraded memory, and with the hard drive/ network card included might deliver a real coup de grace to Xbox sales of any sort and put M$ at a severe disadvantage with Xbox V2 if they don't launch with PS3 in the battle for the next genration whether its worthy or not.
I hate M$ and little annoying things in their Xbox release like extra $$ on top of a too expensive release price to unlock DVD playback and an utter crap controller design seem to doom their venture. However, M$ is in it for the long haul and regardless of the people who back it I would love to see a stronger US console development market develop.
Have to disagree with that sentiment... I am certainly no dead head but my Brother was/is one so I had plenty of exposure to the music.. the secret of the Dead and many bands in their mold is extreme musical talent and free form jammin.
The drugs do not sustain the scene, the music sustains the scene... people were willing to go to 7 dead shows in a row because no show was the same. The selection was differnt, the way the songs where played varied. You got something new and unique every night.. thus creating a reason to return again and again which in turn created a community of people who certainly had/have a penchant for drug use. Could you imagine going to 7 Creed shows in a row irregardless of how 'cool' the scene was ? Don't get me wrong Creed is pretty good and fairly talented compared to most of the major air play aritists but their shows are pretty tightly coreographed and desinged to re-create the album sound. Listening to a CD 7 days in a row you have to buy once is one thing, but paying 30+ bucks 7 times to listen to the same show is quite another.
If you want a realtively drug free comparison try the parrot heads. Buffet is both highly succesful as a recording artist and has incredibly faithful fans who will attend multiple shows and follow his tours much the same as the Dead did.
Mostly the Dead didn't record because they didn't want to. They knew the problems of entanglment with the recording industry and knew that their style was not very conducive to recording success anyway. They liked jammin and they liked life on the road.... they didn't need recording and couldn't have given two flips about it.
Who here remembers Mindspring before they supposedly bought out Earthlink ? Still amazes me, the deal was considered a buy out seeing as the crap of Earthlink has managed to take that whole deal over. I was a mindspring subscriber back when they were only a local ISP in Atlanta. They had incredible tech support and would not sign up anyone if they were at their capacity. Busy signals were unheard of. You recieved notifications of possible outages, appologies and explinations for unexpected outages. These are things they carried with them when they expanded to provide national access. At the time they did the impossible. Took the combination of knowldegable tech savy support, with stellar access thought only to exist at the small scale local ISP level and went national with an incredible jump in subscriber base. And they pulled it off.... at least for a while.
Then they did something stupid, they 'bought' Earthlink. They then promptly changed their name to Earthlink since supposedly Earthlink had better west coast brand recognition. It may have been more widely known, but then it was widely known as a crap provider which cared far more about the bottom line than its customers or providing a good service. Unfortunately this attitude seems to have infected Mindspring. It has realy affected the broadband service offerings largely rolled out since the 'buyout'.
All in all I hear that the current service overall for Mindspring/Earthlink is still above average compared to most peoples experience with services like AOL or MSN and that frightens me. Perosnally I no longer recognize any elements of Mindspring in the interaction I have with my provider Earthlink. In fact the only thing remaining is I still have @mindspring.com on my e-mail adressess. Unfortunately it often seems that is all that remains of a once great company with a great mindset. My recent experiences with Earthlink Broadband services have completly shattered my once unassailable loyalty to the company it once was. I am curretly waiting until my yearlong contract agreement expires to shift broadband providers to comcast or a local service here in Huntsville where I now live.
Another provider to check out is
www.screaminet.com
They have access numbers for almost any area in the US due to a nice setup with phone companies. I know about them becasue my brother lives in steamboat where they are based and the service as I and he have had experience with them is excellent.
"...We eat and make money to be able to enjoy life. That is what life means and what life is for."
Yep, that about sums it all up right there. Wish more people got that last bit.
Da I agree for the most part. However when shuttle was designed we had to give up Saturn V stacks and to support sky lab we needed something capable of both. All in all though shuttle is a collection of comprimises it is ideal for station support. In many ways shuttle has not been used for what it was initially designed for until the past couple of years.
I think the cooperation with the Russians is the only thing that kept us from developing a domestic cargo delivery system using expendable boosters like deltas for ISS operations.
The service module has the abiltity to perform reboosts as well... part of the payload of progress launches is normally fuel for the service module boosters.. any excess prop from the progress vehicles are used as well.. same for shuttle. Actually shuttle rebopsts are very inefficient since it is not attached in a very good location for reboost.
I think bulk would be more of a problem than mass. you can double check me but I believe the heaviest Delta configuration has a greater payload capability than shuttle... shuttle only puts ~50k payload in orbit, I think Endeavor can toss 75k since its the lightest.. you have to remember that the original Shuttles are about 175k or so, Endeavor is around 150. may be discovery... which ever one the built most recently, I get them mixed up occasionally.
The heaviest delta config lauches around 100K or more if memory serves, A shuttle stack launches around 225k including the orbiter/engine/payload weight but the mass a Delta ( and arian ) put in orbit is almost enitrely payload. However their paloads tend to be relatively dense objects that pack their weight into a small area.. things like the truss segments are not very heavy but are bulky, the nodes are heavy and bulky. This means you would have to design and implement new payload shells to put on top of the Delta stacks that would have to be cleared from an aerodynamic standpoint. but now that I am thinking about it even that isn't the real problem
They real problem would be the lack of a sophisticated enough orbital manouevering to get the paylaod to ISS and then you have the problem of performing station construction with only the 3 memebers on board and no access to the shuttle RMS system to aide the stations RMS system which has been somewhat buggy.
If you could solve the problem of orbital manouvering ( very doable, you just have to make the system and fit it in the available launch mass ) you could probably solve the man power problem by doing it at crew exchanges with soyuz modules. However the station RMS would have to be sufficient by itself for manipulating the payload once the new piece it was close enough for capture. Hmmmmm double the two years and add another for good measure to do it that way. Station construction was mostly concieved and planned with the idea that you would have access to two RMS systems... I belive there are some operations where both are required.
I kind of hope they don't decide to build another orbiter. Right now the space plane idea has been recently revived but is still a little budget starved.... builiding a new orbiter will suck up alot of budget money. Even if we step up the schedule of the remaining 3 its likely shuttle fleet operating excpenses are going to be lighter than expected now. I refuse to claim that is a silver lining.... but we have to go on from here. shuttle is an aging system and sinking money into building another one is going to tie us to shuttle for that much longer.
Incidentally if we find this is a design flaw which applies only to re-entry and prooves to be one we can't solve I seriously hope they use it as an opportunity to revive the shuttle C concept rather than simply abandoning the current orbiters and no longer using them. Shuttle C is a one way trip design where they remove the abilily for a shuttle to ruturn in order to gain a much higher payload capability. We could design a shuttle to keep at Station that was a space tug and re add the ability to do satalite retrival and repair to ISS. In addition we would get a launch with roughly 3 times the payload capacity of a current launch for each orbiter we decided to use this way.
To make one a space tug The shuttles OMS would have to be re-designed to survive long term on orbit and be re-fuelable and replaceable on orbit. The ECLSS system would also have to be re-vamped.
Some might argue in that event we should put them in a museum... but personally the only one in the fleet I ever would have argued for that fate just met a far different fate. I think that once we decide to break away from the shuttle system ( be it in the after math of this tragedy or farther down the road ) converting the remaining to ships designed to stay in space for the rest of their service life would be far more useful and a far more fitting end to the shuttle program.
Da I actually found that not long after I posted my last. Columbias refurb allowed them to reduce a fair amount of weight. Though its not surprising it was a truss mission. The trusses are bulky but not heavy.. I think they mass around 30k if I remeber the last two right and that segment is probably even lighter since it dosn't have radiators like the last two that went up. I know even before the re-fit columbia could have made ISS orbit, however its paylaod mass to accomplish that was very restricted due to the high inclination orbit ISS is in in order to allow Soyuz launches to meet up with it.
I still don't think it affects them over much. They will have to scramble to shift the truss payload ( and thus others ) back on other ISS scheduled missions accordingly but this far out if the other 3 remain operational it would be very possible to completely skip that mission purely from a supply standpoint for the crew.
Well the short answer is that there is no way to know.
If its a design flaw like with Challenger then it could easily be a simlar kind of time scale which will likely have a ripple effect on ISS. Though if Soyuz and progress launches could be stepped up there is no reason to abbandon ISS. However construction efforts would cease as they have been the purview of shuttle and soyuz can't launch the mass. Perhaps some Heavy Delta or Arian launches could be substitued but I would imagine that would take a couple years at the least to set in motion.
On the other hand if its a unique failure related to say the foam break off at launch or to some uncharted space debris on re-entry then they might not even miss the next scheduled launch.
In either event shuttles plate was pretty full with only 4 orbiters. Losing columbia does not effect any of the scheuled ISS missions as it was incapable of making the ISS orbit with enough payload so long as the remaining 3 remained cleared for operations.
So ultimately the quetion is if this is a fundamental problem in shuttles design or if it was a unpredicatable and unavoidable risk which comes with spaceflight operations.
Lets just say the tiles caused it. That critical tiles where somehow displodged by the foam on take off.
There was nothing they could do about it. They could not repair any damage. They couldn't meet up with Station, They couldn't stay on orbit much longer, Certainly not long enough to mount a rescue. The only choice they had was attempting re-entry and landing. They couldn't launch the Soyuz on the pad for a rescue because soyuz is not capable of making shuttles normal orbit, not to mention that is a progres module and not one designed for re-entry and even if it were it could only hold 3 minus anyone needed for launch ( normally 2 )..Choices where
A) Stay in orbit and die when life support failed. B) Hope it held together on re-entry.
and thats if they discovered an issue before they went for de-orbit burn. If they found out after that there only choice was hoping it held together on re-entry.
The same applies to almost any problem which may have developed of a structural nature.
Well, for those of you wondering what good this is imagine this... Take halflife and instead of very well managed episodic sections of an essentially linear story and simply apply high level logic to the opposistion forces and then create a seamless gameworld without artificial choke points and closing rearward paths. AND THEN have the core sample melt down and you have to escape... but this time there are no endpoints and nothing keeping you from gathering groups of the surviving scientists and gaurds or going it on your own... and the Marines actually react intelligently. They were better than your average FPS fodder but they still didn't know when to retreat and re-group.
I have long thought FPS games have missed a very useful technique in re-using scenes... however re-using them requires some sort of fluid decicsion making like this to keep a scene fresh. Take Metal Gear Solid and MGSII, both took place in limited scenes acording to FPS standards but that was rarely a problem and that game was largely scripted. Also they need to add soemthing more to gameplay than shoot anything that moves... we continually see this growing but it is by dribs and drabs instead of leaps and bounds. Perhaps that mess of a game called Tekwar scared everyone away from a non shooting based FPS. I mean can nobody envision a twitchy version of Elder Scrolls instead of turn based ?
Da and there are several for MMORPG but they have become more and more annoying in that the games try to keep you from accessing stuff in the background or running programs in the back ground.... a few EULA's now go so far as to say you cannont decode the pakets being sent to your computer/network whether you do anything with the information or not. Stuff like that. No biggie, generally childs play to get around but technically places you in violation of the EULA. ( Somethign I find perposterous but thats another beef )
On the AI front however it would be an interesting project to enable a remote machine with no more input/insight into the game than a person to create action routines, and somewhat more widley applicable than Tetris. Of course you could bypass alot of pain in the ass visual recogintion routines by routing the txt msg's ascociated with MMORPG's but you would already have to be fairly sophisticated with recognising enemies etc... sort of like sniping bots. However when you get down to it MMORPG/MUDS are much more set peice action reaction games like tetris than say quake which is more fluid and freeform.
What would be really interesting here is if he created a feedback learning system where he could expose it tetris clones and the computer could figure out how to play by the results of its actions. What say the recognition algorythim could be abstacted enough that a change in grid size and piece shapes wouldn't bother but determin if it simply is processing a previously unseen grid/shape that is valid or if it is malfunctioning.. if its a new shape it places it in its memory and evaluates where it would go ( ie make its own placement rules regarding the new shape based on what it already does. ) IF its a new grid it recalculates to allow for the extra space.
Aagain the routines would have to be abstracted to the point the computer could define its parameters itself but say withen a loose guideline of rules.. IE Tetris is about falling blocks to be fit together in a seamless horizontal row to make them disapear and thus not fill up the grid and continue the game.