The closest anybody could have gotten to getting it right, would have been to develop reusable boosters; those are the things that the Russian design threw away! The advantage of putting the engines on the US Shuttle is that those expensive engines live to fly again and again. The rest of the US Shuttle stack is largely propellant tanks which are relatively cheap.
Not quite. The Zenith first stage was meant to be retrieved by parachutes + retro-rockets, as well as the second stage. While the second stage was never recovered using this mechanism, the engines of the second stage, below the main tank, were recovered in one of the test flights for inspection. But it seems the whole thing was uneconomic.
...By contrast the RD-170 engine for the booster stage was a purely Soviet design and experienced a slow and difficult development program. These were exactly the kind of closed-cycle liquid oxygen/kerosene engines that Glushko had opposed developing in the 1960's. In addition the TTZ required that they be reusable for ten missions...
...The Block A 11S25 booster stages were the responsibility of KB Yuzhnoye in the Ukraine, F Utkin, General Constructor. They were to be reused ten times, and were therefore fitted with parachute containers. Solid fuel soft landing rockets in the parachute lines provided a soft landing downrange. It's not clear how the 35 tonne boosters were to be transported back to base for reuse...
Yup. It's a rule of thumb in the industry that heavy craft are more expensive to design and maintain than light craft. Ask any aeronautical engineer. Like me.
Your rule of thumb is a broken fallacy. Both the auto industry and the software industry use matrixes which depend on both complexity (usually number of parts) and size. Size being the least significant of both.
Don't take my word for it, see the costs of Shuttle maintenance. Things like RCS (which use toxic hydrazine fuel) and SSME (which is hard to inspect and has many small parts) are right on top.
Yeah, but they use parachutes. Remember those? The other thing I mentioned that are a better idea than Flash Gordon?
Sort of. Soyuz also uses retro-rockets on landing. Just the parachute is not enough to ensure a soft landing (although you will survive just fine, perhaps minus some broken teeth). VTVL vehicles would also de-delerate a bit from friction, besides engine de-celeration.
Runways and landing gear are trivial. Parachutes work great. Vertical rocket-borne landing is good for stunts, and for landing on places with no atmosphere. Anywhere else, it is not optimal.
Yes, I guess that is why helicopters are so useless.
This is the more complex first stage engine, which uses a turbopump. They had some problems with it, but I guess they fixed them. The second stage engine is simpler and pressure fed. They did not find any major problems with it.
Whenever doing something new there is an element of uncertainty attached. Elon said before that teething problems could happen, but that there was enough funding to cover them. Even with the delays, this project has developed a launch vehicle in record time, just a couple of years, on a tiny budget. Often in the old days it took 10 years just to design and prototype an engine.
Yes, VentureStar was VTHL, which is way way way better for orbital vehicles than vertical landings for the reasons I've already explained.
I see no advantage from horizontal landing. You need larger, more expensive runways, reentry is a long roast instead of a short burn, etc. In fact, one of the reasons X-33 (VentureStar precursor) failed was the complex shape tanks, required to fit the floating body shape volume better. Apollo and Soyuz do not use horizontal landing either.
Wings are good when your vehicle is meant to cruise on the atmosphere most of the time. This is not the case here. You want to spend as little time in the atmosphere as possible.
You still haven't addressed my basic concern: Why carry fuel to do what you can get air to do with no weight penalty?
That is a bogus argument. You cannot just use air without special design changes, which will increase vehicle weight. The winged design will be the one using more vehicle weight for the air surfaces, floating body uses less weight, but you still need more complex multi-lobed tanks. Not to mention a more robust inner structure.
Why is burning fuel better than using air?
The fuel is cheap. If you are a rocket scientist, you know that. LOX costs the same as milk and Kerosene, Methane or even LH2 are pretty cheap. Not to mention you will use a 6:1 LOX to LH2 mass ratio or similar. You are reusing the heavy engine you need for ascent in descent. Using air requires more expensive and heavy parts.
Most of the cost in reusable space launch today is not fuel, but design and maintenance costs. A single stage vehicle is appealing because it would reduce both. A VTVL is appealing because it reduces the number of parts, which reduces design and maintenance costs, as any Japanese auto manufacturer will be glad to tell you.
If you feel a SSTO VTVL is too risky and think you need an extra stage, then add drop tanks or even make it TSTO VTVL. Although this will increase costs and may increase failure modes on separation and second stage ignition, as for any TSTO vehicle (which is one reason why the Shuttle ignites the second stage engines on the pad).
Personally, I would go for a single vehicle. If it cannot be made orbital, make it quasi-orbital and add a powerful, expendable kick stage using an RL-10 or something to inject the payload into orbit.
VentureStar was VTHL. Not VTVL. It was dangerously close to the realm of the impossible, because it required quite complex fuel tanks and heat shielding vs a simple VTVL with spherical tanks, and it ended up being impossible given the current tech of the day.
A winged ship has 3.6x the dry mass of SASSTO? I find that extremely hard to believe. Considering the state of modern composite fabrication, I think it's ridiculous.
If you apply composites to lower the dry mass of a winged vehicle, what makes you think you cannot use them to lower the dry mass of a wingless vehicle? The ratio may end up being similar. Smarter people than me have bandied numbers, from Bono to Truax, etc. Truax made some calculations based on Shuttle component weight and came to some scary numbers of his own.
Although now we have to have a massive infrastructure on orbit.
Not really. You can just launch two or more vehicles, some will be tankers and one will be moon bound. The tankers refuel the moon vehicle and just reenter back to Earth.
Do you really think wings weigh more than your Flash Gordon rocket landing fuel?
I'm not saying it weights more, but some people have made calculations, including for SASSTO, which showed that an equivalent winged TSTO would have 3.6x the dry mass of SASSTO on touchdown. Not to mention that winged vehicles need more complex heatshields, because they spend more time on reentry. While Bono's original concept didn't even need a heatshield : the engine plume on descent was the heatshield. The wings are nothing more than dead weight for most of the trip, they are only useful on reentry.
DC-X was a technology demonstrator. It was not an efficient way of moving payloads to orbit. VentureStar had some serious possibilities, but since it's not Shuttle or ISS, NASA's not interested.
DC-X was a concept demonstrator vehicle by McDonnell-Douglas. Some people did not believe you could make VTVL reliable enough with automated computer control (IIRC they even used modified F-15 avionics). Others did not believe you could execute the weird flip-over on descent (to meet the military requirement of landing back at the same launch pad). DC-X proved these were possible, with a rocket engine using cryogenic liquid fuels. DC-Y aka Delta Clipper was supposed to be the orbital capable follow on vehicle, using mostly off-the shelf technology.
Instead of funding DC-Y, when NASA took over the project from SDIO, they basically canned it and funded a new more expensive project, using bleeding edge technology from LockMart (X-33, the prototype for VentureStar). Guess what, the bleeding edge technology failed (composite fuel tank cracks) and development costs kept increasing.
Do the math. Carrying your landing-on-earth fuel to the Moon means that you have to lift it out of Earth's gravity well, land it on the moon, lift it off the moon, and slow it down for landing. Guess what all those things take? LOTS of fuel.
Bono's original proposals for a trip to the Moon involved in-orbit refueling. Once you have cheap, regular access to orbit, this is easily doable. I do not know why you are interested in going to the Moon though, I mean, the Shuttle definitively cannot land in the Moon either. The wings certainly do not help it. The Apollo Command Module didn't have wings either.
I felt better before I knew there were Boeing people involved. That company seems to think that, with enough lobbying muscle in Washington, they can paper over all sorts of engineering and management problems. Maybe they're right, but I'd rather fly with a product that got the engineering right in the first place.
Do not assume too much. That same article said Boeing swallowed McDonnell Douglas. Well, that same corporation was responsible for DC-X. I suspect this is what they are talking about.
DC-X fullfilled all its objectives, but DC-Y, the real vehicle, never got funded because once the Democrats got in power they dropped the Brilliant Pebbles NMD project.
Look at some SASSTO and BETA information. It was probably possible to make a SSTO vehicle in the 60s. It is even more possible now. The DC-X people tried, but couldn't get funding for DC-Y. Now that NMD is getting billions pumped into it once more, perhaps someone will get Brilliant Pebbles out of the drawer again.
The fact is, wings and the structure reinforcement to allow wings costs weight. Weight which could as well be fuel.
You still need to provide incentive for people to work, and I consider threat or use of physical force to be the worst kind of way of achieving this. Medals and things like that will only work upto a point. In capitalism you can simply layoff unproductive workers and return them to the unemployed pool (which certainly beats forcing people to do something they do not want to do instead). Provided social security is in place, people will be fine until they can find the job which they want (given the available possibilities).
An even more serious issue is that any economic system requires transparency, accountability and free competition to be efficient.
You can minimize capital accumulation, seemingly your main concern, via variable rate taxes and re-distribution as much as you wish (assuming such things as tax havens do not exist). The Nordic countries did this for quite some time, it worked great, but people always want more. The opening up of the world economy with globalization, the lessening of trade barriers and free flow of capital, not to mention the ageing of the population in the Western world due to declining birthrates, are making the task of sustaining such a model pretty hard. I do not condone the idea of removing trade barriers per se. It makes the global economy richer as a result, because there are more people trading in the market. But issues such as tax havens and stock market speculation must be solved.
State control of the economy is very resource inneficient, as is the control by any other monopoly. In the end you will have the unelected state bureaucrats instead of capitalists siphoning off wealth from the generators of wealth.
So far I have not seen a reasonably good alternative economic model to the ones we already use in the Western world. I disagree with the communist maxim:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Extreme application of this principle would debase the economy from the generators of wealth as much as capitalism does.
Even if they manage to get the same gene via selective breeding, if it is patented, they probably can get sued anyway. This is why such monopolies are dangerous.
I'm ok with patenting physical things and putting copyrights on expressions of ideas, despite considering it a poor solution to the problem of how to create incentive for creators, but for limited times only. 14 years + 14 years renewal like it used to be in the USA sounds good to me. I wouldn't even mind if it was 20 years + 20 years.
Life of author + 20 years or whatever is simply inane. If they want social security, pay for it like everyone else.
These musicians were most often comissioned (read: paid) to produce music on demand. Other times they charged listeners, like is done on concerts today. So either they produced good music, or they starved. Still, the really good ones like Beethoven were so prolific that they did not have financial problems. Quite the contrary. So no wonder their music is so good. Either you produced in quality and quantity, or you would go into the street like everyone else.
There should be a time limit for copyright. Period. This could be established per product. 20 years seems a quite reasonable timeframe to me.
No, I do not think you should get paid by me when you are 80 years old because you came up with Mickey Mouse when you were 30. Contribute to a pension fund like everyone else.
Would you define profit as not paying the worker the full value of his work? I think most reasonable people would. What is profit but the unpaid wages of the laborer who actually made the product?
This is a simplistic view of how the economy works. There are more people involved in getting a product from the producer to the consumer, and interpreting the consumer's needs to figure out what to produce, not just the labourer. Pay for goods and materials. You also need to raise resources, probably via capital, to start your company and get the tooling and space required. There are a limited amount of resources, so there must be a selection of what to do at some point. Theoretically a good system will select those activities which will provide the greatest benefit. The problem is defining what benefit really means.
But yes, it is a bad idea to debase earnings from the generators of wealth. For one it may disfranchise them from society, making it poorer in general, for another if capital is accumulated instead of actually used, it will eventually lead to mass unemployment and social strife.
In Europe, Socialism has most often quite different conotations. One could say Marx (the one which started communism) tried to hijack the pre-existent labour rights movement of the XIXth century (from where the EU Socialists also come, including Tony Blair's Labour Party or Gerhard Schröder's SPD) to promote his own agenda. The legacy from Marx has proved somewhat hard to completely exorcise from fringe elements, but the mainline parties I am aware of in Europe economically promote limited government intervention market capitalism, social security and representative governments via direct and universal suffrage. A definition which would also apply to the USA.
The word communist is reserved to the ones which followed the lead and orientation of the USSR.
Cases like Enron, Worldcom or the scandal following the death of Robert Maxwell in the UK during the XXth century and other cases (like the air companies), only make me realize that capitalism, if left to its own devices, will end up imploding under social duress. Like someone else in this topic said, both Marx and Rand provided lasting, but insidiously deceptive, views of how an economic system should work.
In politics, transparency, accountability and free competition are the annihilators of corruption and inneficiency. The same applies to economics.
Soviet Marxism economics suffer from lack of transparency, accountability and free competition (unless you have NKVD spies infiltrated in every production facility, make people accountable by sending them to Siberia for low productivity and create competition via antagonist military design bureaus as Stalin did during WWII). Not a pretty picture.
Ayn Randite economics as proposed by her acolytes suffer from lack of transparency (companies are not forced by the state to do anything they do not wish, even disclose their performance figures), accountability (corporations provide a shell that insulates the people making the decisions from a lot of the consequences of their actions) and free competition (via the use and promotion of pernicious monopolies such as copyrights and patents).
a motivation factor, such as greed, does play an important part in human motivation. in a world without scarcity, you can hope that humans could find better motivation than fear of not being able to survive.
as for the "class struggle nonsense", of course there is a class struggle, and there always will be.
the best that you can hope for is to keep the class struggle solely to non-violent tactics, and the way you do this is the social safety nets high enough that the proles are just comfortable enough that they will never consider dying for their economic benefit.
Social Safety nets are, at their core, an insurance policy against violent revolution by the lower classes. Talk of dismantling them, or weakening them to the point where they are no longer effective is foolish and self-destructive.
I have no use for any extreme economic or political system. Rand leads to as many problems as Marx, both are as foolish as the other, and yet both have value to add to any economic discussion.
the answer lies somewhere in the middle, and will constantly be changing.
I could not agree more. The social security mechanisms are basic institutionalized charity and will save more money and grief than trying to supress genuine and reasonable discontentment via force. It is not only a safety network for the poor, but also for the rich. The fact that the charity exists and works prevents a generalized violent rift between the poor and the rich from happening. As did happen so very often in the past.
RMS has spoken against soviet style communism more than once. I think he is a liberal, pure and simple. Since he is socially concerned with other people's well being and doesn't care much about money, this will make some brand him as left-oriented.
I suppose next you are going to tell me that ESR is a communist as well?
The monopolists of today would like to incarcerate you for doing a simple copy. They create artificial scarcity to better control and bend prices and profits in their favour, like in the past. This is not just reward for merit or work. I much prefer the Open Source market capitalism way of rewarding people per task accomplished, rather than granting imbecile monopolies for near perpetuity. You pay a contractor to build you a house. You get your house. You do not pay what is basically a tax to him for the house during his natural life, to his children, etc. This is essentially what copyright and patent law achieve.
Anything that involves a proven carcinogen isn't safe.
You mean like the dioxins produced by biomass burning? One of the so-called green renewables? Please give me a break.
I didn't say there was zero emission of radioactivity. Just that it is negligible compared to what exists in nature, during normal operations.
The nuclear industry files their own paperwork on how much radiation they are emitting to the atmosphere and to the water effluent -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't monitor it. Just because you can't see, smell or detect it with any human senses, the pollution from nuclear power plants is still there.
The NRC requires licensees to report plant discharges and results of environmental monitoring around their plants to ensure that potential impacts are detected and reviewed. Licensees must also participate in an interlaboratory comparison program which provides an independent check of the accuracy and precision of environmental measurements.
In annual reports, licensees identify the amount of liquid and airborne radioactive effluents discharged from plants and the associated doses. Licensees also must report environmental radioactivity levels around their plants annually. These reports, available to the public, cover sampling from TLDs (thermoluminescent dosimeters); airborne radioiodine and particulate samplers; samples of surface, groundwater, and drinking water and downstream shoreline sediment from existing or potential recreational facilities; and samples of ingestion sources such as milk, fish, invertebrates, and broad leaf vegetation. The NRC conducts periodic onsite inspections of each licensee's effluent and environmental monitoring programs to ensure compliance with NRC requirements. The NRC documents licensee effluent releases and the results of their environmental monitoring and assessment effort in inspection reports that are available to the public.
Regarding U-238 tailings, the U-238 would still exist at the mine even if it wasn't mined from it in the first place.
In 2002, the Paducah uranium enrichment plant in Kentucky and the Piketon uranium enrichment plant in Ohio emitted 91% of the nation's reported CFC-114 emissions, a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone depleter. As a greenhouse gas, CFC-114 is 9,800 times more potent than C02.
Don't use chemical separation processes (gaseous diffusion) then. Mechanical processes (centrifuges) work just fine for producing fuel. Guess what: Piketon is going to use centrifuges in the future.
Half of our federal budget is spent on the military (~$935 billion/year). If half of that were spent on clean energy research tremendous technological breakthroughs would be made.
And in the meantime, I guess we are supposed to freeze in the cold?
A large part of the problem with solar and wind is that it isn't being mass produced. Mass production would significantly bring the costs down.
Not really. Not to mention nuclear power generators are even less mass produced and yet they manage to be less expensive. Mass production can produce major cost reductions, but not infinite cost reductions. Sometimes a substantive change in the technological base, or just plain dismissal of what will not work properly is required. Solar cells for one have had massive investments since the 1970s and they still do not achieve net positive energy. Nuclear fusion power has had massive investments since the 1950s and it still has not achieved net positive energy either. Quick technological development will not happen just because you throw money at it, despite it being helpful most of the time. Read The Mythical Man-Month for more details.
The nuclear industry has been given its chance and it has failed miserably.
Hundreds of thousands globally have also died of cancer from the radioactive fallout of the accident.
Excuse me? No reasonable person would say crap like this. The most inflated claims for early fatalities I have heard go like 3000-6000 and that is coming based on statistical "evidence" for people dying before they were supposed to die, or some vacuous claim like that. Without any direct link being established whatsoever. Likewise it goes for the inflated claims of early thyroid cancers. The number of direct deaths caused by Chernobyl is well known, like the other poster said. The numbers for indirect deaths I have heard mostly consist of rampant speculation. For all I know the deaths could have been caused by famine from rampant unemployment after the USSR collapsed.
Radon gas is but one of the sources of radiation exposure. Nuclear proponents mention the coal radiation because it vastly surpasses that generated by human production of nuclear power. Regarding Strontium-90 it will only be released into the biosphere if an accident occurs. While that coal power plant will release the radiation even when working regularly.
Accidents will happen with any technology, but the fact remains that nuclear power is the safest way of generating baseline power we got, per GWhr generated.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the
fact remains there is no 100% safe way of generating power. Our only option is to choose the safest means of generating power at our disposal. Which is nuclear power.
Many studies show that particulate emission from burning carbon containing fuels is a major risk for developing vascular health problems, just as much as smoking is. Vascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the Western world today. Nucler power is but a mere footnote.
What has the Department of Defense provided the private sector? How silly! Most DoD stuff is private sector built (Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc.) for the government. That shows how little you know!
Today it is. But in the old times the Army had the Arsenals. Like the Redstone Arsenal...
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Not quite. The Zenith first stage was meant to be retrieved by parachutes + retro-rockets, as well as the second stage. While the second stage was never recovered using this mechanism, the engines of the second stage, below the main tank, were recovered in one of the test flights for inspection. But it seems the whole thing was uneconomic.
See more information here and here. Quote:
Your rule of thumb is a broken fallacy. Both the auto industry and the software industry use matrixes which depend on both complexity (usually number of parts) and size. Size being the least significant of both.
Don't take my word for it, see the costs of Shuttle maintenance. Things like RCS (which use toxic hydrazine fuel) and SSME (which is hard to inspect and has many small parts) are right on top.
Yeah, but they use parachutes. Remember those? The other thing I mentioned that are a better idea than Flash Gordon?
Sort of. Soyuz also uses retro-rockets on landing. Just the parachute is not enough to ensure a soft landing (although you will survive just fine, perhaps minus some broken teeth). VTVL vehicles would also de-delerate a bit from friction, besides engine de-celeration.
Runways and landing gear are trivial. Parachutes work great. Vertical rocket-borne landing is good for stunts, and for landing on places with no atmosphere. Anywhere else, it is not optimal.
Yes, I guess that is why helicopters are so useless.
Whenever doing something new there is an element of uncertainty attached. Elon said before that teething problems could happen, but that there was enough funding to cover them. Even with the delays, this project has developed a launch vehicle in record time, just a couple of years, on a tiny budget. Often in the old days it took 10 years just to design and prototype an engine.
I see no advantage from horizontal landing. You need larger, more expensive runways, reentry is a long roast instead of a short burn, etc. In fact, one of the reasons X-33 (VentureStar precursor) failed was the complex shape tanks, required to fit the floating body shape volume better. Apollo and Soyuz do not use horizontal landing either.
Wings are good when your vehicle is meant to cruise on the atmosphere most of the time. This is not the case here. You want to spend as little time in the atmosphere as possible.
You still haven't addressed my basic concern: Why carry fuel to do what you can get air to do with no weight penalty?
That is a bogus argument. You cannot just use air without special design changes, which will increase vehicle weight. The winged design will be the one using more vehicle weight for the air surfaces, floating body uses less weight, but you still need more complex multi-lobed tanks. Not to mention a more robust inner structure.
Why is burning fuel better than using air?
The fuel is cheap. If you are a rocket scientist, you know that. LOX costs the same as milk and Kerosene, Methane or even LH2 are pretty cheap. Not to mention you will use a 6:1 LOX to LH2 mass ratio or similar. You are reusing the heavy engine you need for ascent in descent. Using air requires more expensive and heavy parts.
Most of the cost in reusable space launch today is not fuel, but design and maintenance costs. A single stage vehicle is appealing because it would reduce both. A VTVL is appealing because it reduces the number of parts, which reduces design and maintenance costs, as any Japanese auto manufacturer will be glad to tell you.
If you feel a SSTO VTVL is too risky and think you need an extra stage, then add drop tanks or even make it TSTO VTVL. Although this will increase costs and may increase failure modes on separation and second stage ignition, as for any TSTO vehicle (which is one reason why the Shuttle ignites the second stage engines on the pad).
Personally, I would go for a single vehicle. If it cannot be made orbital, make it quasi-orbital and add a powerful, expendable kick stage using an RL-10 or something to inject the payload into orbit.
VentureStar was VTHL. Not VTVL. It was dangerously close to the realm of the impossible, because it required quite complex fuel tanks and heat shielding vs a simple VTVL with spherical tanks, and it ended up being impossible given the current tech of the day.
A winged ship has 3.6x the dry mass of SASSTO? I find that extremely hard to believe. Considering the state of modern composite fabrication, I think it's ridiculous.
If you apply composites to lower the dry mass of a winged vehicle, what makes you think you cannot use them to lower the dry mass of a wingless vehicle? The ratio may end up being similar. Smarter people than me have bandied numbers, from Bono to Truax, etc. Truax made some calculations based on Shuttle component weight and came to some scary numbers of his own.
Although now we have to have a massive infrastructure on orbit.
Not really. You can just launch two or more vehicles, some will be tankers and one will be moon bound. The tankers refuel the moon vehicle and just reenter back to Earth.
I'm not saying it weights more, but some people have made calculations, including for SASSTO, which showed that an equivalent winged TSTO would have 3.6x the dry mass of SASSTO on touchdown. Not to mention that winged vehicles need more complex heatshields, because they spend more time on reentry. While Bono's original concept didn't even need a heatshield : the engine plume on descent was the heatshield. The wings are nothing more than dead weight for most of the trip, they are only useful on reentry.
DC-X was a technology demonstrator. It was not an efficient way of moving payloads to orbit. VentureStar had some serious possibilities, but since it's not Shuttle or ISS, NASA's not interested.
DC-X was a concept demonstrator vehicle by McDonnell-Douglas. Some people did not believe you could make VTVL reliable enough with automated computer control (IIRC they even used modified F-15 avionics). Others did not believe you could execute the weird flip-over on descent (to meet the military requirement of landing back at the same launch pad). DC-X proved these were possible, with a rocket engine using cryogenic liquid fuels. DC-Y aka Delta Clipper was supposed to be the orbital capable follow on vehicle, using mostly off-the shelf technology.
Instead of funding DC-Y, when NASA took over the project from SDIO, they basically canned it and funded a new more expensive project, using bleeding edge technology from LockMart (X-33, the prototype for VentureStar). Guess what, the bleeding edge technology failed (composite fuel tank cracks) and development costs kept increasing.
Do the math. Carrying your landing-on-earth fuel to the Moon means that you have to lift it out of Earth's gravity well, land it on the moon, lift it off the moon, and slow it down for landing. Guess what all those things take? LOTS of fuel.
Bono's original proposals for a trip to the Moon involved in-orbit refueling. Once you have cheap, regular access to orbit, this is easily doable. I do not know why you are interested in going to the Moon though, I mean, the Shuttle definitively cannot land in the Moon either. The wings certainly do not help it. The Apollo Command Module didn't have wings either.
Do not assume too much. That same article said Boeing swallowed McDonnell Douglas. Well, that same corporation was responsible for DC-X. I suspect this is what they are talking about.
DC-X fullfilled all its objectives, but DC-Y, the real vehicle, never got funded because once the Democrats got in power they dropped the Brilliant Pebbles NMD project.
The fact is, wings and the structure reinforcement to allow wings costs weight. Weight which could as well be fuel.
There are some articles on SSTOs here and here.
An even more serious issue is that any economic system requires transparency, accountability and free competition to be efficient.
You can minimize capital accumulation, seemingly your main concern, via variable rate taxes and re-distribution as much as you wish (assuming such things as tax havens do not exist). The Nordic countries did this for quite some time, it worked great, but people always want more. The opening up of the world economy with globalization, the lessening of trade barriers and free flow of capital, not to mention the ageing of the population in the Western world due to declining birthrates, are making the task of sustaining such a model pretty hard. I do not condone the idea of removing trade barriers per se. It makes the global economy richer as a result, because there are more people trading in the market. But issues such as tax havens and stock market speculation must be solved.
State control of the economy is very resource inneficient, as is the control by any other monopoly. In the end you will have the unelected state bureaucrats instead of capitalists siphoning off wealth from the generators of wealth.
So far I have not seen a reasonably good alternative economic model to the ones we already use in the Western world. I disagree with the communist maxim:
From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.
Extreme application of this principle would debase the economy from the generators of wealth as much as capitalism does.
Even if they manage to get the same gene via selective breeding, if it is patented, they probably can get sued anyway. This is why such monopolies are dangerous.
Yet they keep getting paid more, and performing worse. Perhaps they problem isn't that they are being poorly paid after all?
Life of author + 20 years or whatever is simply inane. If they want social security, pay for it like everyone else.
These musicians were most often comissioned (read: paid) to produce music on demand. Other times they charged listeners, like is done on concerts today. So either they produced good music, or they starved. Still, the really good ones like Beethoven were so prolific that they did not have financial problems. Quite the contrary. So no wonder their music is so good. Either you produced in quality and quantity, or you would go into the street like everyone else.
Which made much more sense.
No, I do not think you should get paid by me when you are 80 years old because you came up with Mickey Mouse when you were 30. Contribute to a pension fund like everyone else.
This is a simplistic view of how the economy works. There are more people involved in getting a product from the producer to the consumer, and interpreting the consumer's needs to figure out what to produce, not just the labourer. Pay for goods and materials. You also need to raise resources, probably via capital, to start your company and get the tooling and space required. There are a limited amount of resources, so there must be a selection of what to do at some point. Theoretically a good system will select those activities which will provide the greatest benefit. The problem is defining what benefit really means.
But yes, it is a bad idea to debase earnings from the generators of wealth. For one it may disfranchise them from society, making it poorer in general, for another if capital is accumulated instead of actually used, it will eventually lead to mass unemployment and social strife.
The word communist is reserved to the ones which followed the lead and orientation of the USSR.
Cases like Enron, Worldcom or the scandal following the death of Robert Maxwell in the UK during the XXth century and other cases (like the air companies), only make me realize that capitalism, if left to its own devices, will end up imploding under social duress. Like someone else in this topic said, both Marx and Rand provided lasting, but insidiously deceptive, views of how an economic system should work.
In politics, transparency, accountability and free competition are the annihilators of corruption and inneficiency. The same applies to economics.
Soviet Marxism economics suffer from lack of transparency, accountability and free competition (unless you have NKVD spies infiltrated in every production facility, make people accountable by sending them to Siberia for low productivity and create competition via antagonist military design bureaus as Stalin did during WWII). Not a pretty picture.
Ayn Randite economics as proposed by her acolytes suffer from lack of transparency (companies are not forced by the state to do anything they do not wish, even disclose their performance figures), accountability (corporations provide a shell that insulates the people making the decisions from a lot of the consequences of their actions) and free competition (via the use and promotion of pernicious monopolies such as copyrights and patents).
The sea is closer than the asteroids and presently nearly unexplored for mineral resources (oil excluded).
Suborbital VTVL with 3 passengers (including pilot I expect). I already had heard rumours that it was a suborbital VTVL, but not much else.
as for the "class struggle nonsense", of course there is a class struggle, and there always will be.
the best that you can hope for is to keep the class struggle solely to non-violent tactics, and the way you do this is the social safety nets high enough that the proles are just comfortable enough that they will never consider dying for their economic benefit.
Social Safety nets are, at their core, an insurance policy against violent revolution by the lower classes. Talk of dismantling them, or weakening them to the point where they are no longer effective is foolish and self-destructive.
I have no use for any extreme economic or political system. Rand leads to as many problems as Marx, both are as foolish as the other, and yet both have value to add to any economic discussion.
the answer lies somewhere in the middle, and will constantly be changing.
I could not agree more. The social security mechanisms are basic institutionalized charity and will save more money and grief than trying to supress genuine and reasonable discontentment via force. It is not only a safety network for the poor, but also for the rich. The fact that the charity exists and works prevents a generalized violent rift between the poor and the rich from happening. As did happen so very often in the past.
I suppose next you are going to tell me that ESR is a communist as well?
All of this keeps reminding me of Gandhi. In colonial India, there was a salt monopoly granted by the British government. It was basically indirect taxation and a mockery of market capitalism. Gandhi proposed that people would venture to the sea and make their own salt using nothing but their bare hands. For this he was incarcerated.
The monopolists of today would like to incarcerate you for doing a simple copy. They create artificial scarcity to better control and bend prices and profits in their favour, like in the past. This is not just reward for merit or work. I much prefer the Open Source market capitalism way of rewarding people per task accomplished, rather than granting imbecile monopolies for near perpetuity. You pay a contractor to build you a house. You get your house. You do not pay what is basically a tax to him for the house during his natural life, to his children, etc. This is essentially what copyright and patent law achieve.
You mean like the dioxins produced by biomass burning? One of the so-called green renewables? Please give me a break.
I didn't say there was zero emission of radioactivity. Just that it is negligible compared to what exists in nature, during normal operations.
The nuclear industry files their own paperwork on how much radiation they are emitting to the atmosphere and to the water effluent -- the Nuclear Regulatory Commission doesn't monitor it. Just because you can't see, smell or detect it with any human senses, the pollution from nuclear power plants is still there.
I quote from this NRC page:
The NRC requires licensees to report plant discharges and results of environmental monitoring around their plants to ensure that potential impacts are detected and reviewed. Licensees must also participate in an interlaboratory comparison program which provides an independent check of the accuracy and precision of environmental measurements. In annual reports, licensees identify the amount of liquid and airborne radioactive effluents discharged from plants and the associated doses. Licensees also must report environmental radioactivity levels around their plants annually. These reports, available to the public, cover sampling from TLDs (thermoluminescent dosimeters); airborne radioiodine and particulate samplers; samples of surface, groundwater, and drinking water and downstream shoreline sediment from existing or potential recreational facilities; and samples of ingestion sources such as milk, fish, invertebrates, and broad leaf vegetation.
The NRC conducts periodic onsite inspections of each licensee's effluent and environmental monitoring programs to ensure compliance with NRC requirements. The NRC documents licensee effluent releases and the results of their environmental monitoring and assessment effort in inspection reports that are available to the public.
Regarding U-238 tailings, the U-238 would still exist at the mine even if it wasn't mined from it in the first place.
In 2002, the Paducah uranium enrichment plant in Kentucky and the Piketon uranium enrichment plant in Ohio emitted 91% of the nation's reported CFC-114 emissions, a potent greenhouse gas and an ozone depleter. As a greenhouse gas, CFC-114 is 9,800 times more potent than C02.
Don't use chemical separation processes (gaseous diffusion) then. Mechanical processes (centrifuges) work just fine for producing fuel. Guess what: Piketon is going to use centrifuges in the future.
Half of our federal budget is spent on the military (~$935 billion/year). If half of that were spent on clean energy research tremendous technological breakthroughs would be made.
And in the meantime, I guess we are supposed to freeze in the cold?
A large part of the problem with solar and wind is that it isn't being mass produced. Mass production would significantly bring the costs down.
Not really. Not to mention nuclear power generators are even less mass produced and yet they manage to be less expensive. Mass production can produce major cost reductions, but not infinite cost reductions. Sometimes a substantive change in the technological base, or just plain dismissal of what will not work properly is required. Solar cells for one have had massive investments since the 1970s and they still do not achieve net positive energy. Nuclear fusion power has had massive investments since the 1950s and it still has not achieved net positive energy either. Quick technological development will not happen just because you throw money at it, despite it being helpful most of the time. Read The Mythical Man-Month for more details.
The nuclear industry has been given its chance and it has failed miserably.
Cheap
Excuse me? No reasonable person would say crap like this. The most inflated claims for early fatalities I have heard go like 3000-6000 and that is coming based on statistical "evidence" for people dying before they were supposed to die, or some vacuous claim like that. Without any direct link being established whatsoever. Likewise it goes for the inflated claims of early thyroid cancers. The number of direct deaths caused by Chernobyl is well known, like the other poster said. The numbers for indirect deaths I have heard mostly consist of rampant speculation. For all I know the deaths could have been caused by famine from rampant unemployment after the USSR collapsed.
Radon gas is but one of the sources of radiation exposure. Nuclear proponents mention the coal radiation because it vastly surpasses that generated by human production of nuclear power. Regarding Strontium-90 it will only be released into the biosphere if an accident occurs. While that coal power plant will release the radiation even when working regularly.
Accidents will happen with any technology, but the fact remains that nuclear power is the safest way of generating baseline power we got, per GWhr generated.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but the fact remains there is no 100% safe way of generating power. Our only option is to choose the safest means of generating power at our disposal. Which is nuclear power.
Many studies show that particulate emission from burning carbon containing fuels is a major risk for developing vascular health problems, just as much as smoking is. Vascular diseases are the leading cause of death in the Western world today. Nucler power is but a mere footnote.
Zip disks? How quaint. I thought anyone would have a DVD or CD recorder by now. Heck they are dirt cheap.
Today it is. But in the old times the Army had the Arsenals. Like the Redstone Arsenal...