the paint might prevent the popcorning, which is no threat to the shuttle anyway since the pieces are too small and usually occur after the majority of the atmosphere has been exited. However, no amount of paint would have prevented the large chunks from falling off during STS 107 or 114. The forces from the air escaping the voids in the hand laid foam is too great, which is why removing most of the hand laid foam whenever possible has already been done.
for the browncoats among us, this flight also marks the maiden voyage of Firefly into the black, courtesy Mission Specialist Steve Swanson. Hopefully the mission planners on the ground are scheduling a full day off while the DVDs get watched....:)
You're right, accelerating aerogel applied to the outside of a tank to mach 25 is a dicey proposition at best. It's a great insulator, but making sure it stays affixed to the side of the tank would be a definite obstacle to flight certifying it, not to mention the porosity. It would have to be protected from rain on the pad and air humidity prior to launch, or it could soak up so much water that the vehicle would be too heavy to lift off. This protection also adds to the weight of the vehicle. Besides, relative to many ground based cryogenic systems, the foam's service life on an ET is pretty short. It doesn't necessarily see cryo temperatures long enough to justify the use of aerogel.
That said, it's neat stuff. We've been experimenting with it where I work. A colleague of mine had some left over from some work he was doing and replaced the foam in his coffee travel mug with it. He now doesn't have to worry about his coffee getting cold for a Very. Long. Time.... (Hmmmm....ThinkGeek licensing opportunity perhaps?;) )
1. Materials. The alloys used to make the tank are designed for cryogenic service. they will not exhibit metal fatigue or stresses. They are also designed not to react with they hydrogen or the oxygen. many materials start acting funny (funny boom, not funny haha) when exposed to pure environments of either propellant. thermal cycling on an ET is very limited anyway, perhaps a handful of tankings ahead of a launch depending on the number of scrubs, so the shrinking and reexpansion of the tank when cryo temperatures are applied or removed does not occur enough to cause metal fatigue. they have people keeping track of such things.
2. Manufacturing complexity. Most of the ET foam is applied with a robotic sprayer once the tank is completely built. Retooling the assembly line to spray the inside of the tank would be an expensive proposition in and of itself, not to mention requiring the tanks to not be completely assembled when the foam is applied. the tank seams would thus not be as well insulated, causing ice to form. The spray on insulation isn't what killed Columbia anyway. the robotic process allows the foam to be sprayed uniformly with few voids in the foam. the CAIB concluded that hand applied foam applied to reduce aerodynamic loading at the orbiter attach points as well as prevent orbiter killing ice formation at those same points is what brought down Columbia. the hand applied foam cannot be applied with nearly the same uniformity as the spray on foam. The tanks were redesigned to eliminate most of the need for hand applied foam. This doesn't prevent mission managers from being paranoid about anything coming off the tank and causing a problem.
3. Foreign object debris. the popcorning seen on liftoff is due to aerodynamic stress and vibration that the vehicle experiences during the climb. there is no reason to believe this won't happen if the foam is inside the tank. (an additional cause of foam shedding in this case is mentioned in 1 above)
The turbopumps on a shuttle engine are very powerful and built to tight tolerances. Even a very small piece of debris entering these pumps can tear an engine apart when it is operating at full capacity. Filters are placed in the fuel lines ahead of the pumps to help prevent such things from happening, but they're meant to catch the odd piece or two. You can see from the launch video how much popcorning can occur during a flight, so placing the foam inside the tank where it can access the fuel line creates one of two scenarios. 1. the filter clogs, starving the engine of fuel, shutting it down and creating at best an abort scenario, which, depending on the point of the climb at which it happens increases the risk to the crew and at best forcing NASA to spend extra money from its dwindling budget to retrieve the shuttle from Africa. 2. the filter fails, allowing FOD into the engine, blowing the back end of the orbiter off and creating a very bad day for everybody.
In order to prevent this FOD, a liner, perhaps made of a metal alloy would be needed. This 1. increases manufacturing complexity even more. 2. to borrow your argument, increases risk due to metal fatigue and stresses. and 3. adds a gigantic amount of mass to the vehicle, reducing the payload capacity. when you're getting to orbit, payload is king. the more payload you can get to orbit the better. the success of many programs, manned or otherwise, can hinge on tens of pounds in the mass budget either way. that's the nature of the game. the first few flights of the shuttle, the tank was painted white. This created a nice, pretty, uniformly white vehicle. Then someone pointed out that the paint served no engineering purpose and was costing 500 pounds. The paint requirement was then deleted and 500 pounds more payload could be sent to orbit.
I can probably think of more engineering arguments, but it's late and Iv'e had to retype this once already.
Hooray gross generalizations. Have a counterexample: A few years ago my wife (who until that point had been a stick all her life) suddenly started gaining weight with no change in her reasonably healthy eating habits. She tried all the usual methods of losing weight (eat less, exercise, blah blah blah) but still kept gaining. Many people, including the majority of her doctors, had the same asshole attitude as yours and assumed it was her fault. The doctors finally figured out that her body had reacted to her asthma medication causing a form of Cushing's Syndrome. Her body stopped producing the hormone cortisol, which regulates weight. It was no self-discipline issue.
She remains a brilliant (slightly biased opinion, but not by much) chemist (pretty much disproving the original article), and now that the hormone is regulated, she has lost most of the weight she gained, though she remains scarred from the experience. And trust me, were she looking for a job from you, you bet your butt you would be sued under EEO and ADA laws. You can probably plan on that anyway. Hope you've got a good lawyer.
There have been pipelines in space since the beginning of the use of liquid fueled rocket engines. Propellant has to get from the tanks to the engines somehow...
They mean it, there really is no way of knowing. They know there's a leak based on pressure readings. They know it's not an instrumentation issue because those pressure readings are redundant (i.e. if one sensor started trending down and it's backup didn't, then the sensor's bad). Based on those same pressure readings they know what the leak rate is (drops per hour was probably the guy's attempt at making it make sense to the layperson by analogy to a dripping faucet. Sadly that analogy seems to have fallen flat.) Since the fuel tank (hydrazine) is connected to the pressurant system (nitrogen), the entire system is at the same pressure, so since there is a leak, every pressure sensor monitoring the system is trending down.
(Time for my own bad analogy) Let's say you've got a Super Soaker with a pressure gauge in the water reservoir. You pump up the Super Soaker and put it in a box so that the only thing you can see is the pressure gauge. Now, somehow a hole forms in the reservoir. Because you can't see the reservoir, you don't know if it's your fuel (the water) or the pressurant (the air you pumped into the thing) that's leaking, but you know from the decreasing pressure reading that there's a leak present. That's essentially what's going on with Discovery. Hence, they're playing it safe and assuming the leak is fuel, when more likely it is the smaller nitrogen molecule that's escaping the system.
1. If the thing explodes on ascent, launching from Florida absolutely ensures that no debris will fall on a populated area. This fact can extend for hundreds of miles. A recent unmanned launch out of Cape Canaveral had Canada up in arms because an ascent trajectory had the rocket coming too close to Newfoundland for their comfort.
2. There is an enormous benefit to most missions for launching as close to the Equator as you can, so that the missions can take advantage of the extra velocity boost from Earth's rotational velocity. This translates into less fuel needed and a higher payload capacity. This is why the ESA flies the majority of their missions out of Kourou, French Guiana and why a market exists for Sea Launch. Cape Canaveral, Florida is about as close to the equator as you can get and still be in the continental US. (Further south than that and you get uncomfortably close to Miami...) Yes, the weather sucks. Yes, the salt bearing sea breeze is corrosive to the launch structures. Those are contingencies that can be dealt with. In the end it's a trade-off to ensure the most effective space program possible.
3. Management (i.e. Griffin) felt that the risks had been sufficiently mitigated. The two "No-Gos" did so to go on record because there was still a risk, but if you look at their penciled-in comments they had little bite to them (rummage around space.com, spaceflightnow.com, or nasawatch.com...they've got copies). Weather, on the other hand, cannot be mitigated easily. Though rain isn't great, particularly if an emergency landing has to be performed, lightning is a huge concern. Unlike a passenger jet, which is relatively safe from lightning strikes, an ascending rocket is still effectively connected to the ground by the pillar of exhaust it is leaving in its wake. This makes the rocket a very, very tall lightning rod. An inopportune lightning strike can cause severe damage to the flight avionics of the vehicle and render it unusable.
OK, point. I neglected to mention the solar array requirement. The ISS will get a total of 110 kW from four pairs of 112'x39' solar arrays when completed. Those are very large solar arrays. I'm guessing significantly more of these arrays will be needed to let the "gigantic ball of fire" meet this depot's energy needs. Then what do you do when the depot enters it's eclipse period and it can't see the sun? Do you shut down operations every hour or so until you can see the sun again or do you send up batteries (== even more mass!) to maintain constant power?
Of course sending up a nuke reactor to power the thing is always an option. Good luck convincing the quivering greenies of that though.
Interesting concept, but it would be very difficult to use on current rockets. The structure on most rockets is pretty bare bones to begin with, for example only about 10% of the gross liftoff weight of the Saturn I-B first stage is structure/engines. The rest is fuel. The structure is important because it is what transfers the thrust of the engines from the engines at the aft of the vehicle to the payload at the other end. Having the structure eat itself away as extra fuel would cut this thrust transfer, defeating the purpose of the vehicle. Even in a solid rocket booster, the structure is important as it provides containment for the reaction. Most people around in 1986 know the consequences of an SRB losing containment.
If it were possible, it would really only be useful for solid engines. Liquid-fueled engines would be severely damaged by even molten materials that had been structural.
If we go to mars any time soon it might make sense to launch the cruise stage unmanned and then hook it to the command module in earth orbit. That would be a kind of fuel dump.
Effectively that's what's being planned with the earth departure stage for the proposed lunar missions. That stage would be launched on the Cargo Launch Vehicle into earth orbit, where a CEV launch would rendezvous with it for a trip to the moon. See the Project Constellation article here.
A lot of people are suggesting using water, either launched up or from icy body capture (comet, asteroid, whatever) and then separating the two via electrolysis. Great idea, since water is much easier to work with and store, but once you have separated it into H2 and O2, those gases must be liquefied to be usable by most rocket engines. Liquefaction is a very energy intensive process, particularly for hydrogen, so suddenly the depot's energy requirements have gone up, plus you have to have space for water handling equipment (including melters if it's being handled as ice), water storage, the liquefaction equipment, and storage tanks for enough fuel to service a customer's rocket stage. This could be a very large station.
The last thing I haven't seen considered is the orbit for this thing. In which orbit do we put it to maximize it's utility to exploration vehicles? Having to stop off at this station could severely limit mission profiles that require refueling to orbits within a few degrees of inclination to that of the depot itself, since orbital inclination changes require a lot of energy. We can get around that by placing multiple depots into orbit, but that's more money.
You're right on most of your points for why inducing spin in this sort of depot would be a problem. (That's one of the many, many reasons that Armageddon is so painful to watch). Acquisition devices for cryogenic upper stages have been used on flights for years, so it's nothing we don't know how to do. Not sure why the guy in the article is making such a big deal out of it, unless he's making sure that's something that people chasing after the prize are considering.
Gotta love the "hero shot." Captain Copyright dedicates his life to defending the rights of artists and everyone in between. Hey, at least he's honest.
Depending on the needs and constraints of the program, individual engines can be tested either horizontally or vertically on test stands without being attached to the full up vehicle. This was a flight readiness firing; essentially a dress rehearsal for the launch where they did everything except release the hold down clamps.
You can find some information on NASA engine testing here.
No they aren't. That flap came up a couple of years ago when cowen was threatening to shut the football program down. Intercollegiate sports at Tulane is a money losing proposition. They regularly raid the funds of academic programs to keep the sports teams afloat.
Here's the kicker, I'm no native... I'm from Missouri. i came down here to go to school, saw, and stayed. It just felt like the natural place to be.
As a junior, it'll probably be a lot harder for you to transfer, though it can be done. It sounds like, though, you should be able to structure your curriculum so that you get your CS requirements out of the way before they close the engineering school and then spend your last year working on your history degree. Friend of mine at school did that with a CS/Poli sci double major and it worked fairly well. talk to your professors though. assuming cowen's not bluffing for some stupid reason, the best thing to do may be to get a feel for whether or not they'll be leaving and if they think it's worth staying. If you're particularly close to one or two professors that are leaving, you may be able to talk them into letting you follow them, especially if you've been doing research work under them. Sometimes profs being hired by a new school can insist they let student x in with them to continue their research. Might be worth looking into.
I was speaking of getting screwed in terms of the school of engineering in general, not just the submitter in particular. for students younger than he, having to transfer means an unnecessary disruption in their academic careers as they switch majors/schools. Reasons why I try to never post to slashdot under emotional duress. i tend to be unclear....
It's not just CS that they're cutting either. Mechanical, civil and most every other discipline of engineering that tulane offers is disappearing (not to mention the 180 MD's from their teaching hospital downtown), so let's not extrapolate the state of the IT industry to unrelated careers.
I understand that Tulane is $200 million in the hole right now. They did take a lot of damage. I've seen the pictures; driven through it. Moderate cuts to every program, so that everyone has to carry some of the load (including, oh, I donno, some of cowen's overblown salary...) would seem to be more reasonable than telling an entire school to ship out. Heck, I might've been talked into giving some money (granted I don't have much; I lost a lot in the storm too... thank $deity for good insurance). not anymore.
sure sports draw people to a college, but if the college doesn't have any academic substance, what's the point? Besides, we don't have fans that riot when we win a championship anyway...our teams aren't that good.
you know, I hope they are. can never quite tell what's a moneymaking scheme and what's not with cowen. he's known for floating crap likely to be unpopular around the holidays and after finals when no one's looking. if he is faking it, it's a lot of ill will to kindle, though, and could backfire. i as an alum (ME '04) am furious and feeling alienated. like hell am i going to contribute any money to the tulane general fund. At least not until cowen is run out of town on a rail. were i a faculty member, i'd be polishing my resume anyway, not wanting to put up with this shit forever. and what does this say to the students? that you're not valued? apparently so.
because some of us who post to slashdot actually are alumni. And because it should be news for nerds when some of their fellow nerds are getting screwed. I graduated from Tulane in 2004 with a degree in mechanical engineering, one of the programs that is due to be cut.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I heard about this today and I am furious. How does eliminating a quality engineering school strengthen the university? How does it strengthen the community? New Orleans is trying to rebuild. I know, my house in Metairie (jefferson parish, next door) got flooded. Life sucks, but ultimately we will rebuild. And guess what? engineers will be needed to rebuild the city and make it a better place in the long term. who better than engineers with a personal investment in the area? seriously, i have to wonder, with cowen making foolhardy decisions like this for the university he's paid to run, what business does he have running the mayor's rebuilding commission?
Switching gears, as an alumnus, what does this say about my degree? does this mean it's worthless? if so, i want a refund, mr. cowen. every single penny i've given to the university. every single bit of blood, sweat, and tears i gave to earn my degree and try to make the university and the community a better place for it. every year you complain that alumni donation rates are down. it adversely affects your precious us news and world report rankings. want to know why we alumni aren't giving the university a dime? because of shit like this. i'm tired of being alienated at every turn.
As for the submitter, being eligible to graduate in 2007 makes you, what? A sophomore? You still have time. Run. the good faculty will be jumping ship and if you think the tightwad financial twits will give any money for design projects to a doomed program, think again. Half the time it was like pulling teeth even before the storm. and do what I'm going to do. tell everyone you know thinking about attending tulane not to bother, regardless of major. You can't be world class without students, and you can't be world class without the support of the alumni.
was good to see B5, the new Battlestar Galactica and two incarnations of Star Trek in the top ten, but Voyager beating Firefly??? And they clearly had to have cut DS9 to make room for the injustice they did in honoring Atlantis at all.
Hey, Boston.com, there's more to good SciFi than Jeri Ryan's boobs. (Like Kaylee....:-D)
D-IV Heavy is 3 liquid propellant cores strapped together. There are no solid boosters in that configuration. Makes an awesome looking flying paintbrush though...:)
Well...they have been fairly tightly entwined, so I can maybe see some of the confusion. Off the top of my head: Von Braun's early work after he defected was bankrolled by the Army and the Air Force before NASA was formed in '58. (That's why Marshall Space Flight Center is where it is; it's right next to the Army's Redstone Arsenal where the Army holed him up and had him show them how the V-2's worked) As far as the shuttle goes, up until the Challenger accident, when the shuttle was being billed as the only vehicle the US needed to carry satellites into space, it did fly some classified DOD birds to orbit. That stopped fairly soon after the first return to flight and DOD started investing more effort into expendable launch vehicles, which is how we have the Delta IV and the Atlas V of today.
Your best bet would probably be to root around the NASA history office's website for the "official" story about NASA's origins.;)
Great comment, just a little nitpick: NASA is in no way a part of the DOD. They will play nice with each other for satellite launches and such, and military types are often selected to be astronauts (Cmdr. Collins is retired Air Force), but NASA is an independent agency. Up until last year it was funded under the budget heading "Health and Human Services and Independent Agencies." That's right, Health and Human Services. It got bumped into a different category for this FY (reports to a different congressional committee, cant remember which), but is still in no way connected to the military budget.
The mission continues. Likely, if a problem surfaces, Atlantis would still be sent up after them. There's no sense in bringing down the orbiter until the assessments they already had planned for this mission can be completed. Right now, the shuttle does not appear to be damaged; it was a close call. Once Discovery lands, though, that's it until the tank's fixed.
Slashdot Mirror
the paint might prevent the popcorning, which is no threat to the shuttle anyway since the pieces are too small and usually occur after the majority of the atmosphere has been exited. However, no amount of paint would have prevented the large chunks from falling off during STS 107 or 114. The forces from the air escaping the voids in the hand laid foam is too great, which is why removing most of the hand laid foam whenever possible has already been done.
for the browncoats among us, this flight also marks the maiden voyage of Firefly into the black, courtesy Mission Specialist Steve Swanson. Hopefully the mission planners on the ground are scheduling a full day off while the DVDs get watched.... :)
That said, it's neat stuff. We've been experimenting with it where I work. A colleague of mine had some left over from some work he was doing and replaced the foam in his coffee travel mug with it. He now doesn't have to worry about his coffee getting cold for a Very. Long. Time.... (Hmmmm....ThinkGeek licensing opportunity perhaps? ;) )
1. Materials. The alloys used to make the tank are designed for cryogenic service. they will not exhibit metal fatigue or stresses. They are also designed not to react with they hydrogen or the oxygen. many materials start acting funny (funny boom, not funny haha) when exposed to pure environments of either propellant. thermal cycling on an ET is very limited anyway, perhaps a handful of tankings ahead of a launch depending on the number of scrubs, so the shrinking and reexpansion of the tank when cryo temperatures are applied or removed does not occur enough to cause metal fatigue. they have people keeping track of such things.
2. Manufacturing complexity. Most of the ET foam is applied with a robotic sprayer once the tank is completely built. Retooling the assembly line to spray the inside of the tank would be an expensive proposition in and of itself, not to mention requiring the tanks to not be completely assembled when the foam is applied. the tank seams would thus not be as well insulated, causing ice to form. The spray on insulation isn't what killed Columbia anyway. the robotic process allows the foam to be sprayed uniformly with few voids in the foam. the CAIB concluded that hand applied foam applied to reduce aerodynamic loading at the orbiter attach points as well as prevent orbiter killing ice formation at those same points is what brought down Columbia. the hand applied foam cannot be applied with nearly the same uniformity as the spray on foam. The tanks were redesigned to eliminate most of the need for hand applied foam. This doesn't prevent mission managers from being paranoid about anything coming off the tank and causing a problem.
3. Foreign object debris. the popcorning seen on liftoff is due to aerodynamic stress and vibration that the vehicle experiences during the climb. there is no reason to believe this won't happen if the foam is inside the tank. (an additional cause of foam shedding in this case is mentioned in 1 above)
The turbopumps on a shuttle engine are very powerful and built to tight tolerances. Even a very small piece of debris entering these pumps can tear an engine apart when it is operating at full capacity. Filters are placed in the fuel lines ahead of the pumps to help prevent such things from happening, but they're meant to catch the odd piece or two. You can see from the launch video how much popcorning can occur during a flight, so placing the foam inside the tank where it can access the fuel line creates one of two scenarios. 1. the filter clogs, starving the engine of fuel, shutting it down and creating at best an abort scenario, which, depending on the point of the climb at which it happens increases the risk to the crew and at best forcing NASA to spend extra money from its dwindling budget to retrieve the shuttle from Africa. 2. the filter fails, allowing FOD into the engine, blowing the back end of the orbiter off and creating a very bad day for everybody.
In order to prevent this FOD, a liner, perhaps made of a metal alloy would be needed. This 1. increases manufacturing complexity even more. 2. to borrow your argument, increases risk due to metal fatigue and stresses. and 3. adds a gigantic amount of mass to the vehicle, reducing the payload capacity. when you're getting to orbit, payload is king. the more payload you can get to orbit the better. the success of many programs, manned or otherwise, can hinge on tens of pounds in the mass budget either way. that's the nature of the game. the first few flights of the shuttle, the tank was painted white. This created a nice, pretty, uniformly white vehicle. Then someone pointed out that the paint served no engineering purpose and was costing 500 pounds. The paint requirement was then deleted and 500 pounds more payload could be sent to orbit.
I can probably think of more engineering arguments, but it's late and Iv'e had to retype this once already.
She remains a brilliant (slightly biased opinion, but not by much) chemist (pretty much disproving the original article), and now that the hormone is regulated, she has lost most of the weight she gained, though she remains scarred from the experience. And trust me, were she looking for a job from you, you bet your butt you would be sued under EEO and ADA laws. You can probably plan on that anyway. Hope you've got a good lawyer.
I stand corrected. Shoulda looked at your nickname, I'dve been more careful. This the part where we go lynch the submitter?
They mean it, there really is no way of knowing. They know there's a leak based on pressure readings. They know it's not an instrumentation issue because those pressure readings are redundant (i.e. if one sensor started trending down and it's backup didn't, then the sensor's bad). Based on those same pressure readings they know what the leak rate is (drops per hour was probably the guy's attempt at making it make sense to the layperson by analogy to a dripping faucet. Sadly that analogy seems to have fallen flat.) Since the fuel tank (hydrazine) is connected to the pressurant system (nitrogen), the entire system is at the same pressure, so since there is a leak, every pressure sensor monitoring the system is trending down.
(Time for my own bad analogy) Let's say you've got a Super Soaker with a pressure gauge in the water reservoir. You pump up the Super Soaker and put it in a box so that the only thing you can see is the pressure gauge. Now, somehow a hole forms in the reservoir. Because you can't see the reservoir, you don't know if it's your fuel (the water) or the pressurant (the air you pumped into the thing) that's leaking, but you know from the decreasing pressure reading that there's a leak present. That's essentially what's going on with Discovery. Hence, they're playing it safe and assuming the leak is fuel, when more likely it is the smaller nitrogen molecule that's escaping the system.
2. There is an enormous benefit to most missions for launching as close to the Equator as you can, so that the missions can take advantage of the extra velocity boost from Earth's rotational velocity. This translates into less fuel needed and a higher payload capacity. This is why the ESA flies the majority of their missions out of Kourou, French Guiana and why a market exists for Sea Launch. Cape Canaveral, Florida is about as close to the equator as you can get and still be in the continental US. (Further south than that and you get uncomfortably close to Miami...) Yes, the weather sucks. Yes, the salt bearing sea breeze is corrosive to the launch structures. Those are contingencies that can be dealt with. In the end it's a trade-off to ensure the most effective space program possible.
3. Management (i.e. Griffin) felt that the risks had been sufficiently mitigated. The two "No-Gos" did so to go on record because there was still a risk, but if you look at their penciled-in comments they had little bite to them (rummage around space.com, spaceflightnow.com, or nasawatch.com...they've got copies). Weather, on the other hand, cannot be mitigated easily. Though rain isn't great, particularly if an emergency landing has to be performed, lightning is a huge concern. Unlike a passenger jet, which is relatively safe from lightning strikes, an ascending rocket is still effectively connected to the ground by the pillar of exhaust it is leaving in its wake. This makes the rocket a very, very tall lightning rod. An inopportune lightning strike can cause severe damage to the flight avionics of the vehicle and render it unusable.
Of course sending up a nuke reactor to power the thing is always an option. Good luck convincing the quivering greenies of that though.
If it were possible, it would really only be useful for solid engines. Liquid-fueled engines would be severely damaged by even molten materials that had been structural.
Effectively that's what's being planned with the earth departure stage for the proposed lunar missions. That stage would be launched on the Cargo Launch Vehicle into earth orbit, where a CEV launch would rendezvous with it for a trip to the moon. See the Project Constellation article here.
The last thing I haven't seen considered is the orbit for this thing. In which orbit do we put it to maximize it's utility to exploration vehicles? Having to stop off at this station could severely limit mission profiles that require refueling to orbits within a few degrees of inclination to that of the depot itself, since orbital inclination changes require a lot of energy. We can get around that by placing multiple depots into orbit, but that's more money.
You're right on most of your points for why inducing spin in this sort of depot would be a problem. (That's one of the many, many reasons that Armageddon is so painful to watch). Acquisition devices for cryogenic upper stages have been used on flights for years, so it's nothing we don't know how to do. Not sure why the guy in the article is making such a big deal out of it, unless he's making sure that's something that people chasing after the prize are considering.
Gotta love the "hero shot." Captain Copyright dedicates his life to defending the rights of artists and everyone in between. Hey, at least he's honest.
You can find some information on NASA engine testing here.
No they aren't. That flap came up a couple of years ago when cowen was threatening to shut the football program down. Intercollegiate sports at Tulane is a money losing proposition. They regularly raid the funds of academic programs to keep the sports teams afloat.
As a junior, it'll probably be a lot harder for you to transfer, though it can be done. It sounds like, though, you should be able to structure your curriculum so that you get your CS requirements out of the way before they close the engineering school and then spend your last year working on your history degree. Friend of mine at school did that with a CS/Poli sci double major and it worked fairly well. talk to your professors though. assuming cowen's not bluffing for some stupid reason, the best thing to do may be to get a feel for whether or not they'll be leaving and if they think it's worth staying. If you're particularly close to one or two professors that are leaving, you may be able to talk them into letting you follow them, especially if you've been doing research work under them. Sometimes profs being hired by a new school can insist they let student x in with them to continue their research. Might be worth looking into.
It's not just CS that they're cutting either. Mechanical, civil and most every other discipline of engineering that tulane offers is disappearing (not to mention the 180 MD's from their teaching hospital downtown), so let's not extrapolate the state of the IT industry to unrelated careers.
I understand that Tulane is $200 million in the hole right now. They did take a lot of damage. I've seen the pictures; driven through it. Moderate cuts to every program, so that everyone has to carry some of the load (including, oh, I donno, some of cowen's overblown salary...) would seem to be more reasonable than telling an entire school to ship out. Heck, I might've been talked into giving some money (granted I don't have much; I lost a lot in the storm too... thank $deity for good insurance). not anymore.
sure sports draw people to a college, but if the college doesn't have any academic substance, what's the point? Besides, we don't have fans that riot when we win a championship anyway...our teams aren't that good.
you know, I hope they are. can never quite tell what's a moneymaking scheme and what's not with cowen. he's known for floating crap likely to be unpopular around the holidays and after finals when no one's looking. if he is faking it, it's a lot of ill will to kindle, though, and could backfire. i as an alum (ME '04) am furious and feeling alienated. like hell am i going to contribute any money to the tulane general fund. At least not until cowen is run out of town on a rail. were i a faculty member, i'd be polishing my resume anyway, not wanting to put up with this shit forever. and what does this say to the students? that you're not valued? apparently so.
If you haven't figured it out yet, I heard about this today and I am furious. How does eliminating a quality engineering school strengthen the university? How does it strengthen the community? New Orleans is trying to rebuild. I know, my house in Metairie (jefferson parish, next door) got flooded. Life sucks, but ultimately we will rebuild. And guess what? engineers will be needed to rebuild the city and make it a better place in the long term. who better than engineers with a personal investment in the area? seriously, i have to wonder, with cowen making foolhardy decisions like this for the university he's paid to run, what business does he have running the mayor's rebuilding commission?
Switching gears, as an alumnus, what does this say about my degree? does this mean it's worthless? if so, i want a refund, mr. cowen. every single penny i've given to the university. every single bit of blood, sweat, and tears i gave to earn my degree and try to make the university and the community a better place for it. every year you complain that alumni donation rates are down. it adversely affects your precious us news and world report rankings. want to know why we alumni aren't giving the university a dime? because of shit like this. i'm tired of being alienated at every turn.
As for the submitter, being eligible to graduate in 2007 makes you, what? A sophomore? You still have time. Run. the good faculty will be jumping ship and if you think the tightwad financial twits will give any money for design projects to a doomed program, think again. Half the time it was like pulling teeth even before the storm. and do what I'm going to do. tell everyone you know thinking about attending tulane not to bother, regardless of major. You can't be world class without students, and you can't be world class without the support of the alumni.
sorry about the rant. had to vent
Hey, Boston.com, there's more to good SciFi than Jeri Ryan's boobs. (Like Kaylee....:-D)
D-IV Heavy is 3 liquid propellant cores strapped together. There are no solid boosters in that configuration. Makes an awesome looking flying paintbrush though... :)
Your best bet would probably be to root around the NASA history office's website for the "official" story about NASA's origins. ;)
Great comment, just a little nitpick: NASA is in no way a part of the DOD. They will play nice with each other for satellite launches and such, and military types are often selected to be astronauts (Cmdr. Collins is retired Air Force), but NASA is an independent agency. Up until last year it was funded under the budget heading "Health and Human Services and Independent Agencies." That's right, Health and Human Services. It got bumped into a different category for this FY (reports to a different congressional committee, cant remember which), but is still in no way connected to the military budget.
The mission continues. Likely, if a problem surfaces, Atlantis would still be sent up after them. There's no sense in bringing down the orbiter until the assessments they already had planned for this mission can be completed. Right now, the shuttle does not appear to be damaged; it was a close call. Once Discovery lands, though, that's it until the tank's fixed.