The one-way volunteers, or people from the sustainable off planet colony. See the first post of the thread.
The post I was replying to was talking about 'acquiring another planet's resources'. What value do those resources have to the people on Earth who are apparently going to pay for these 'volunteers' to go there?
You can't use Mars resources to justify the cost of going to Mars if the only use for those resources is to sustain those people who are going to Mars.
Yeah, that Wernher von Braun... always concerned with profits and personally designing boondoggle after boondoggle.
Indeed. A large part of the problem with manned spaceflight is that people continue to follow von Braun's dreams even though experience has shown that he was wrong.
We had something like that, and it's going to cease to exist in June. It could carry quite a bit of cargo, but not enough for a lunar or martian mission.
The shuttle was at best refurbishable and required huge amounts of labour and lots of new hardware for each flight. Falcon 9 Heavy should cost about a tenth of the price of a shuttle launch while carrying the same payload, and that's even before they start recovering the stages for refurbishment.
Yeah, but is that technology going to get cheaper? The fundamentals of rocket science haven't changed since the days of Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun. There's no Moore's law in effect here.
The fundamentals of flight haven't changed since the Wright Brothers and the cost of the aircraft has increased, but the cost of travel is much lower.
To give an obvious example of where improvements will come from, the Falcon rockets are designed to be reusable; there's little point doing that if you fly twice a year, but there's a lot of point if you fly a thousand per year. Few people would be able to afford to fly across the Atlantic if the airliner could only make one trip.
Similarly, having to launch a thousand ton spacecraft for every trip to Mars is extremely inefficient compared to launching something small that docks with an Earth/Mars cycler full of space hookers. But again only makes sense if you're using it a lot.
Fundamentally the reason why space travel is so expensive is that we don't do it much, and the reason why we don't do it much is because it's so expensive. Somehow we need to break out of that trap.
Well, part of the cost is the *time* involved. It's doubtful a Mars tourist trip would be feasible in even a dozen generation's time.
Bill Gates could probably afford it today if he was willing to take significant risks; NASA might need a trillion dollars to fly to Mars and back, but a private company could do it for much less. Falcon-9 is supposed to cost about $100,000,000 to put 32 tons into LEO, so you could launch a thousand ton spacecraft (most of which would be fuel) for about $3 billion... even if that ship costs $10 billion itself, that totals less than a quarter of what Gates is reportedly worth. And while 'the richest few people on the planet' is a small market for a tour company, over time that technology is only going to get cheaper.
I agree it would be more popular in a ship full of space hookers though.
P.S. The new slashdot with its random line breaks really sucks.
The potential payoff is acquiring an entire planets worth of resources.
What resources exist on Mars that would justify the cost of bringing them back to Earth?
So long as a trip between Mars and Earth costs millions of dollars a kilo, we're extremely unlikely to find anything that has enough value to justify the cost.
On the other hand, the atmosphere is too thin for aerobraking with a heat shield or parachutes.
That'll be news to the probes that have landed there using aerobraking and parachutes.
Ok, they needed either rockets or inflatable balloons for the final touchdown, but most of the braking was performed by the atmosphere. Similarly, you can use the atmosphere to perform much of the braking required to get into orbit, which further reduces fuel requirements.
"There does not seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage" -Sagan
No, it will be because the cost of getting there has dropped into a range that rich tourists can afford. Otherwise there's no particularly good reason to go to Mars when all the resources we need to live in space are floating around waiting for us in asteroids and comets.
Well... except for the fact that we don't HAVE the heavy lift tech anymore...
Heavy lift is a crazy boondoggle; there's very little market for it and as a consequence it ends up far more expensive than using multiple smaller launchers.
The way to reduce costs is to increase flight rates so that reusability becomes worthwhile and viable, not to stick everything on top of a huge rocket that flies twice a year, costs billions of dollars every time, and destroys your entire multi-billion dollar spacecraft if it fails. That's particularly true for fuel, where you don't much care whether you're launching a hundred tons in one go or ten tons a time in ten flights.
You know, people keep saying that like it has some kind of power, as if their saying it alone will make it true if they are self-assured enough.
When was the last time you saw people get excited about a new Microsoft product? Fifteen years ago people lined up around the block to get the next new Microsoft OS, now they don't give a crap.
That doesn't mean Microsoft are going bust any time soon, but it does mean they're irrelevant to the majority who'd have been quite happy to continue running XP. Forcing said majority to run some crappy touchscreen interface or use their phone to replace a mouse is not going to make them any more relevant.
The x86 and x86_64 carry around a lot of transistor baggage needed to be maintain 4 decades worth of backwards compatibility
Not really. More and more of the CPU is cache, so the size of the instruction decoders becomes less important all the time. Plus I believe I read that Intel can now turn off the instruction decoder when it's not required (e.g. running tight loops from the micro-ops cache) so that reduces the power usage too.
Why do giants like Intel and AMD continue throwing money into improving what will always suck?
EG, Pentinum 2ghz compared to atom D525 or amd E250
Not sure about current Atoms, but the 330 dual-core benchmarked about the same as a 3GHz P4 when running multithreaded apps (and quite a bit slower when single-threaded).
Or, if you prefer big iron, if I remember correctly it gets about the same as a Cray Y-MP.
...yes. Just don't do anything remotely interesting computationally like play a game or watch/edit a video.
The dual-core Atom is faster than the systems I used to use to edit feature-length movies a few years ago. It does suck at HD H.264 playback without GPU assist, but then so did those.
there is no use in trying to argue with someone with such a complete lack of wonder and curiosity about the value of a pursuit that is all about wonder and curiosity.
So long as it's 'all about wonder and curiosity', spaceflight will be restricted to a tiny number of people who can raise the money to indulge their curiosity. If you want to get a lot of people into space, you need to figure out how to make money up there.
And making enough money from manned spaceflight to justify the cost of the trip is much harder than making enough money in America was for Columbus and friends. Figure out how to do it and you'll have investors lining up.
"a few pieces of foam insulation [breaking] free of the external fuel tank on the way up" weren't expected to be a safety concern on Columbia's final mission, too.
This time it hit the underside of the shuttle at a low relative velocity, in Columbia's case it hit the leading edge of the wing (the most delicate part of the heat shield) at a few hundred miles per hour. Not only that, but this time we have pretty good video from the external tank showing no obvious significant damage.
Plus, as mentioned, it will be inspected in orbit just in case.
IIRC, the Soviets had a rocket blow up and kill not only all cosmonauts, but dozens of ground observers who were too close.
They didn't kill anyone in the rocket, because no-one was dumb enough to sit in there while they tried to fix it.
I don't believe the Soviets ever lost a crew during launch, even the one time they had to use the escape tower. All their losses were during re-entry, and I believe those were all due to design flaws or manufacturing defects.
Fine, no problem, because to you there is no such thing as a scam targeting children, only the parent can be responsible.
The world has been full of scams targeting children for decades at least; when I was young it was cartoons which encouraged kids to demand the latest action figures from their parents, because so many parents are unable to say 'no'.
The difference is that in those days parents weren't giving kids instant access to their credit cards or phone bills to pay for it.
Not a whole lot of fighter plane stuff going on there.
What exactly do you think 'fighter plane stuff' is, if it's not shooting down the bad guys?
I believe the YF-12 had about an 80% kill rate on drones down to 150 feet altitude in tests, which is a lot more effective than flying around in circles hoping that you can shoot the guy in front before he gets on your tail.
You can't 'park' a shuttle in orbit; the orbit will decay and they'll need a reboost.
And from what I've read they leak air like crazy, so they're useless for long-term space habitation. They only need to survive a couple of weeks in space with a reasonable supply of replacement oxygen, so they're not designed to do any better than that.
Makes sense that they would throw more money at the Xbox. They get a fee for every game sold on the Xbox whereas they get absolutely nothing for almost everything sold on the PC.
But, uh, they lose money on consoles and make money on almost every PC sold. If Joe Sixpack buys an iPad and an Xbox, Microsoft's profit streams just disappear.
Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it.
If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they wouldn't be trying to move people onto consoles.
Their problem is that they've been successful enough at doing so to reduce most people's need for a new Windows PC -- gaming is about the only thing Joe Sixpack does which could stress a modern system -- without making any money from consoles.
Slashdot Mirror
The one-way volunteers, or people from the sustainable off planet colony. See the first post of the thread.
The post I was replying to was talking about 'acquiring another planet's resources'. What value do those resources have to the people on Earth who are apparently going to pay for these 'volunteers' to go there?
You can't use Mars resources to justify the cost of going to Mars if the only use for those resources is to sustain those people who are going to Mars.
Yeah, that Wernher von Braun... always concerned with profits and personally designing boondoggle after boondoggle.
Indeed. A large part of the problem with manned spaceflight is that people continue to follow von Braun's dreams even though experience has shown that he was wrong.
We had something like that, and it's going to cease to exist in June. It could carry quite a bit of cargo, but not enough for a lunar or martian mission.
The shuttle was at best refurbishable and required huge amounts of labour and lots of new hardware for each flight. Falcon 9 Heavy should cost about a tenth of the price of a shuttle launch while carrying the same payload, and that's even before they start recovering the stages for refurbishment.
Yeah, but is that technology going to get cheaper? The fundamentals of rocket science haven't changed since the days of Sergei Korolev and Wernher von Braun. There's no Moore's law in effect here.
The fundamentals of flight haven't changed since the Wright Brothers and the cost of the aircraft has increased, but the cost of travel is much lower.
To give an obvious example of where improvements will come from, the Falcon rockets are designed to be reusable; there's little point doing that if you fly twice a year, but there's a lot of point if you fly a thousand per year. Few people would be able to afford to fly across the Atlantic if the airliner could only make one trip.
Similarly, having to launch a thousand ton spacecraft for every trip to Mars is extremely inefficient compared to launching something small that docks with an Earth/Mars cycler full of space hookers. But again only makes sense if you're using it a lot.
Fundamentally the reason why space travel is so expensive is that we don't do it much, and the reason why we don't do it much is because it's so expensive. Somehow we need to break out of that trap.
Well, part of the cost is the *time* involved. It's doubtful a Mars tourist trip would be feasible in even a dozen generation's time.
Bill Gates could probably afford it today if he was willing to take significant risks; NASA might need a trillion dollars to fly to Mars and back, but a private company could do it for much less. Falcon-9 is supposed to cost about $100,000,000 to put 32 tons into LEO, so you could launch a thousand ton spacecraft (most of which would be fuel) for about $3 billion... even if that ship costs $10 billion itself, that totals less than a quarter of what Gates is reportedly worth. And while 'the richest few people on the planet' is a small market for a tour company, over time that technology is only going to get cheaper.
I agree it would be more popular in a ship full of space hookers though.
P.S. The new slashdot with its random line breaks really sucks.
There is no need to ship anything -- the resources will have value for people who are on Mars.
What 'people who are on Mars'?
No.
The potential payoff is acquiring an entire planets worth of resources.
What resources exist on Mars that would justify the cost of bringing them back to Earth?
So long as a trip between Mars and Earth costs millions of dollars a kilo, we're extremely unlikely to find anything that has enough value to justify the cost.
On the other hand, the atmosphere is too thin for aerobraking with a heat shield or parachutes.
That'll be news to the probes that have landed there using aerobraking and parachutes.
Ok, they needed either rockets or inflatable balloons for the final touchdown, but most of the braking was performed by the atmosphere. Similarly, you can use the atmosphere to perform much of the braking required to get into orbit, which further reduces fuel requirements.
"There does not seem to be sufficient short-term profit to motivate private industry. If we humans ever go to these worlds, then, it will be because a nation or a consortium of them believes it to be to its advantage" -Sagan
No, it will be because the cost of getting there has dropped into a range that rich tourists can afford. Otherwise there's no particularly good reason to go to Mars when all the resources we need to live in space are floating around waiting for us in asteroids and comets.
Well... except for the fact that we don't HAVE the heavy lift tech anymore...
Heavy lift is a crazy boondoggle; there's very little market for it and as a consequence it ends up far more expensive than using multiple smaller launchers.
The way to reduce costs is to increase flight rates so that reusability becomes worthwhile and viable, not to stick everything on top of a huge rocket that flies twice a year, costs billions of dollars every time, and destroys your entire multi-billion dollar spacecraft if it fails. That's particularly true for fuel, where you don't much care whether you're launching a hundred tons in one go or ten tons a time in ten flights.
You know, people keep saying that like it has some kind of power, as if their saying it alone will make it true if they are self-assured enough.
When was the last time you saw people get excited about a new Microsoft product? Fifteen years ago people lined up around the block to get the next new Microsoft OS, now they don't give a crap.
That doesn't mean Microsoft are going bust any time soon, but it does mean they're irrelevant to the majority who'd have been quite happy to continue running XP. Forcing said majority to run some crappy touchscreen interface or use their phone to replace a mouse is not going to make them any more relevant.
The x86 and x86_64 carry around a lot of transistor baggage needed to be maintain 4 decades worth of backwards compatibility
Not really. More and more of the CPU is cache, so the size of the instruction decoders becomes less important all the time. Plus I believe I read that Intel can now turn off the instruction decoder when it's not required (e.g. running tight loops from the micro-ops cache) so that reduces the power usage too.
Why do giants like Intel and AMD continue throwing money into improving what will always suck?
Because they want to run Windows apps.
EG, Pentinum 2ghz compared to atom D525 or amd E250
Not sure about current Atoms, but the 330 dual-core benchmarked about the same as a 3GHz P4 when running multithreaded apps (and quite a bit slower when single-threaded).
Or, if you prefer big iron, if I remember correctly it gets about the same as a Cray Y-MP.
...yes. Just don't do anything remotely interesting computationally like play a game or watch/edit a video.
The dual-core Atom is faster than the systems I used to use to edit feature-length movies a few years ago. It does suck at HD H.264 playback without GPU assist, but then so did those.
there is no use in trying to argue with someone with such a complete lack of wonder and curiosity about the value of a pursuit that is all about wonder and curiosity.
So long as it's 'all about wonder and curiosity', spaceflight will be restricted to a tiny number of people who can raise the money to indulge their curiosity. If you want to get a lot of people into space, you need to figure out how to make money up there.
And making enough money from manned spaceflight to justify the cost of the trip is much harder than making enough money in America was for Columbus and friends. Figure out how to do it and you'll have investors lining up.
"a few pieces of foam insulation [breaking] free of the external fuel tank on the way up" weren't expected to be a safety concern on Columbia's final mission, too.
This time it hit the underside of the shuttle at a low relative velocity, in Columbia's case it hit the leading edge of the wing (the most delicate part of the heat shield) at a few hundred miles per hour. Not only that, but this time we have pretty good video from the external tank showing no obvious significant damage.
Plus, as mentioned, it will be inspected in orbit just in case.
IIRC, the Soviets had a rocket blow up and kill not only all cosmonauts, but dozens of ground observers who were too close.
They didn't kill anyone in the rocket, because no-one was dumb enough to sit in there while they tried to fix it.
I don't believe the Soviets ever lost a crew during launch, even the one time they had to use the escape tower. All their losses were during re-entry, and I believe those were all due to design flaws or manufacturing defects.
Let people tag sites they've found as a result of a search. Build a tagging system which will allow people to exclude linkspam for example.
Because no spammer could write a program to repeatedly search for and tag their site.
Fine, no problem, because to you there is no such thing as a scam targeting children, only the parent can be responsible.
The world has been full of scams targeting children for decades at least; when I was young it was cartoons which encouraged kids to demand the latest action figures from their parents, because so many parents are unable to say 'no'.
The difference is that in those days parents weren't giving kids instant access to their credit cards or phone bills to pay for it.
Not a whole lot of fighter plane stuff going on there.
What exactly do you think 'fighter plane stuff' is, if it's not shooting down the bad guys?
I believe the YF-12 had about an 80% kill rate on drones down to 150 feet altitude in tests, which is a lot more effective than flying around in circles hoping that you can shoot the guy in front before he gets on your tail.
Nobody has had any sort of heavy lifter like that since the Saturn V.
Have you considered that there might be a reason for that?
It would be like repurposing SR-71s to be fighters.
You mean very effective but insanely expensive, like the YF-12? I'm not sure that would apply here.
You can't 'park' a shuttle in orbit; the orbit will decay and they'll need a reboost.
And from what I've read they leak air like crazy, so they're useless for long-term space habitation. They only need to survive a couple of weeks in space with a reasonable supply of replacement oxygen, so they're not designed to do any better than that.
Makes sense that they would throw more money at the Xbox. They get a fee for every game sold on the Xbox whereas they get absolutely nothing for almost everything sold on the PC.
But, uh, they lose money on consoles and make money on almost every PC sold. If Joe Sixpack buys an iPad and an Xbox, Microsoft's profit streams just disappear.
Exactly. If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they would produce a new XBOX with an x64 processor in it.
If Microsoft wanted to improve the status of PC gaming, they wouldn't be trying to move people onto consoles.
Their problem is that they've been successful enough at doing so to reduce most people's need for a new Windows PC -- gaming is about the only thing Joe Sixpack does which could stress a modern system -- without making any money from consoles.