It was a power envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, even though it wasn't explicitly spelled out. The point of ruling a law "unconstitutional" really is one of recognition: If the court system refuses to acknowledge the validity of a law and therefore doesn't even recognize that the law has been created through a constitutional process, that law really doesn't exist as far as the court system is concerned. Yes, it may appear on the books of statutory law, but effectively a single citation to a higher court judicial opinion (not even the supreme court) invalidating that law renders ineffective any prosecution under that law.
That was the whole point of Marbury v. Madison, so far as in that case even the filing of the case before the Supreme Court was unconstitutionally done and therefore it was unconstitutional for such a petition to have been granted in the first place. This was also a constitutional crises so far as the only legal means to enforce a law was to perform an act that in itself was contrary to the U.S. Constitution. The law under question in that case, the Judiciary Act of 1789, had several provisions that simply were ill advised to even be put into legislation and most significant was an unconstitutional expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court itself and its authority. To have ruled in favor of Marbury would have essentially forced the court to ignore the U.S. Constitution altogether and to have considered statutory law alone on the presumption that it was the domain exclusively of the U.S. Congress to determine the scope of the Constitution. In that sense, I think it was a very wise move for the court to have taken at the time, even if this decision might be abused in other contexts.
Considering that many of the changes to American copyright laws have been to address "conformity" to European copyright laws (especially the concept of automatic copyright upon publication and the "Life+term" philosophy), I have a hard time shedding a tear when it comes to European copyright being pushed along as well.
The problem isn't America, but the big corporate lobbyists and major media companies that are the problem. Many of the changes in copyright laws over the past 50 years or so really haven't been for consumer protection or even encouraging the ordinary content developer (author, composer, musician, programmer, artist, etc.) from creating new works but rather to help maintain monopolies over distribution or even preventing new content developers from entering the marketplace.
At least in America, the stated constitutional goal of copyright legislation is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". I wonder how successful most copyright legislation actually achieves that ultimate goal, or if the "useful arts" really are being promoted at all?
I claim that sovereign recognition of extra-terrestrial real estate is just a matter of time. The alternative is literally an absence of law of any kind in space where the only recognition of rights (including development rights) is simply whoever has the bigger gun. That is also the situation with Sealand, as the "owner" of Sealand doesn't really have a big gun. Such issues are a bit more of an issue when the nearest neighbor is a light-second or more distant and can't come running in an emergency, unlike Sealand which can get emergency services in a matter of minutes from England if push came to shove.
I think the situation would be much more like Somalia, where there is essentially an absence of government. Then again, it might just open up a new era of piracy, but this time in space. If satellite companies had to start dealing with idiots messing up broadcasting telecom pirates who knocked out a few satellites in GEO, they might start to pay attention to these issues as well. That is already a multi-billion dollar industry that is heavily dependent upon space-based assets.
Yes, the page looks shaky, but the people involved are real. Their marketing and website may leave a bit to the imagination, but they have some real engineers and folks who know what they are doing along with access to capital resources to get at least some major projects completed.
The problem here is that none of the guys involved are millionaires/billionaires like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos. Sadly, it will take somebody like that before these guys get much put together, so I'll admit it is a long shot at best. From a technical viewpoint, however, they certainly could get the job done if anybody can get it done.
Why they are going the route of the "donation" method to get something going is something I won't understand. For myself, I wish they would get rid of the silly little side projects like that, but there are others who have tried that route before. Sadly, I have never seen a project get built using that sort of financial model, at least in terms of rocketry or much of anything that dealt with devices that spent a prolonged period of time in space. The closest I can imagine that has been involved with projects on a similar scale is the Amsat satellites put up by amateur radio operators. There is also Team FREDNET who has been trying to compete with the Google Lunar X-Prize competition, who at the moment seem more likely to get something to the Moon before Shackleton Energy at least in terms of the resources being offered.
Still, this isn't a group that I would call a bunch of scam artists, but rather dreamers and wishful thinkers. If you really did want to go to the Moon, they would be the ones to make it happen.
Don't worry. The Lunar Sierra Society is going to be very active in the future with demonstrations by people complaining about all sorts of illnesses and climatological messes that are happening due to economic activity on the Moon. Forget of course that moving rocks around here on the Earth influences the gravity and the environment far more than blowing up a nuke on the Moon would ever do, these nuts are going to be some major heartburn in the future.
I hope they remain on the lunatic (literally) fringe of society, but never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
The Outer Space Treaty is going to be a joke of literally cosmic proportions in the long run. Its purpose was mainly to keep America from claiming the Moon due to the Apollo landings, under the fear that might have started an international conflict between the USSR and the USA in the 1970's over something seen as pointless at the time since America really couldn't build anything permanent for decades on the Moon anyway. How far the USSR might have gone in terms of challenging America is also something that can be disputed, but it was a nice sentiment at the time and really didn't cost America much in the long run.
Besides, there is a clause in the treaty that allows any nation who has signed the document to withdraw from the provisions of the treaty.... with a notification period of at least a year before that nation withdrawing no longer is bound to the terms. As such, it really is a completely worthless document other than the fact that the great "race to the Moon" in terms of land claims will have at least a year's notice before it is carved up politically. If given the right motivations, I'm sure any of the major spacefaring nations would have not only the ability but the desire to do that too.
There have been subsequent treaties that have tried to remove that clause, but the Moon Treaty that would have made a major substantive difference in terms of avoiding that opt-out clause has never been passed by a country which has been sending stuff into space. Since it hasn't been ratified by anybody that matters, it is an irrelevant document as well.
Of the various claims that private individuals may have in terms of actual ownership of the Moon, the one that has the best claim currently is Richard Garriott (aka "Lord British") who has a couple of former Soviet vehicles to which he now has formal title and thus actually owns objects sitting on the surface of the Moon. Since he was the first (and currently only) person with any such claim to personal artifacts sitting on the surface of the Moon and having never been a government employee subject to restrictions prohibiting himself from asserting any such claim, it could be argued from a legal standpoint that currently Richard Garriott owns the whole of the Moon as a personal fiefdom. As to if he will take personal possession of his devices and artifacts on the Moon may be debatable, but I wouldn't put it past him either. The Outer Space Treaty certainly doesn't stop private ownership, it just doesn't recognize such an act either.
No, the concept is essentially one and the same. It does relate to whoever can grant title to a hunk of real estate or an object (like a vehicle) in terms of instituting the rule of law into the situation rather than "might makes right" in terms of the actual ownership of that thing.
The problem with the Moon is that by treaty nobody wants to grant any sort of title to the land on the Moon, or at least no agency or organization that will have an army to back up the legal decisions made about that ownership. The reason I "own" a hunk of real state in America right now is in part because I have title to that chunk of land, and more significantly if somebody tries to kick me off that land that I can solicit the resources of my local police department and ultimately the resources of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps to make sure I can keep that land. They are the folks who back up the judiciary and make somebody trying to take my land by force of arms without going through the judiciary as nothing more than a joke and a common thief.
Perhaps folks who go to the Moon will set up their own government or governments to deal with that situation, so it isn't something that necessarily needs to be done on the Earth. Still, I don't see Earth-based governments giving up such authority so easily either.
It isn't just the deep connections that these guys have with NASA and elements of the space industry. It is the fact that they have already done several projects for NASA and other federal agencies, as well as some private foundation grants and even some work with for-profit companies. This TED talk shows some of the more impressive things that Bill Stone (one of the major investors in Shackleton Energy) has done and at least one other crazy off-the-wall idea that has a real shot at being built some time in the future.
This is a very legitimate group and of anybody who says they might be able to get to the Moon and make a profit off of what they are doing on the Moon, these guys would be it. The market for propellant from a location near the Moon would certainly be a valuable market, considering that a 1 liter bottle of water currently costs about $20,000 just to get it there with current rockets.
In this case, while I'm sure that they wouldn't mind having NASA/USAF/NRO/ESA/Roscosmos/JAXA as customers, there might be some other potential customers for their product as well. It isn't purely for government contracts. It does take a different attitude about how you go about launching stuff into space, however.
I think you a confusing sprites with objects. A sprite is a group of pixels that are put together and act as a unit. 3-D objects are a group of voxels that also put together and act as a single unit.
That Minecraft happens to be using 3-D objects (aka "blocks") as descriptions of each "volume element" is perhaps where you are getting confused. The same can also happen in 2-D graphical games where an image can be comprised of multiple "sprites" or "blocks" that are stamped over and over again to draw maps, buildings, or even creatures. It isn't anything new.
There was an attempt to leverage the engineering and technology developed under the Apollo program into something incredibly useful. It was called the Apollo Applications Program, of which only the space station portion ever got developed. Today that is known as Skylab.
If you want to see a NASA that could have been instead of what actually was, that Wikipedia article should at least give you a good glimpse into a very interesting alternate history of what NASA and America could have been doing.
I still argue that had the Space Shuttle not been developed but instead an aggressive development of the Saturn & Apollo family of vehicles happened over the same period of time.... with the exact same budget that NASA used to develop and fly the Shuttle program would have resulted in more astronauts actually going into space, more real science explored, and as a side benefit no real loss of capabilities that ended up being lost during the switch to the Shuttle program. I certainly see no reason why the ISS couldn't have been built with modules and components flown into space on Saturn V rockets instead of in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle.
Indeed the only real capability introduced by the Space Shuttle that would have been considerably more difficult with the Saturn/Apollo system would have been the ability to bring large bulky payloads from space back to the Earth. That was used so few times that any real need to perform such a mission could have been accomplished with special purpose vehicles or designs for that explicit mission. Such a capability is such a low priority that the current NASA design thinking doesn't even include that possibility in any upcoming design.
What happened on the Moon would have been like what we would know about Yellowstone National Park if it was completely fenced off and the only knowledge we had about the park would be the result of six weekend camping trips performed by some NPS researchers traveling by bus to the park, together with the reports of their bus drivers, with the first couple of expeditions being done by teams of bus drivers and mechanics because they were concerned that the bus would break down before even getting to to park in the first place. Yes, there is a whole lot we don't know about the Moon, and that is a most unfortunate situation too. Even if the schedule of trips back to the Moon wasn't as aggressive as it was during the initial missions, we should have had at least a follow-up mission every few years or even once every decade. Getting rid of the Saturn/Apollo hardware certainly hurt us significantly in that sense.
Iridium is able to make a small profit after admittedly a financial disaster over the previous decade. The next generation satellites look like they will finally have some real bandwidth as well.... being flown up into space on Falcon 9 rockets no less, so it looks like Elon Musk has that market cornered as well.
Really, commercial spaceflight currently falls into the following categories:
Telecommunications - including GEO orbits and stuff like Iridium. If anything this is a growth industry, and the stuff going into space has even become larger over time where it is definitely a growth market for heavy lift. It is also a pretty saturated market, however, with most of the players in this market segment very well known to each other. Another Ted Turner type could emerge here, but not likely. It is a multi-billion dollar industry though and something not to ignore.
Orbital reconnaissance - while government customers are painfully obvious, there are numerous commercial customers as well. Some of them are famous and can be found with Google Earth, but there are other commercial groups that have specialized remote sensing applications including agriculture and mining industries which aggressively use satellite data and will pay billions (collectively) for the data that these satellites produce. If mining leases come up, you had better believe that satellite views with different sequences of color filters (including multiple UV and IR filters) have been applied on potential plots to help identify potential mineral deposits. Included with this is weather observation data that has a similar kind of value... and isn't strictly GEO either.
Remote sensing sort of a combination of the two previous areas but with the need to have something on the ground. Basically this is sending data from very remote areas to be collected in a systematic fashion and sent to a central data warehouse. Some of this is now being done over fiber optic lines, but satellite transmission of data still serves the needs in many areas. Some surprising "customers" including Wal-Mart and other retailers, but it is a mainstay for mining and petroleum extraction. It certainly wouldn't be out of the question for a dedicated satellite being used to handle very sensitive information from remote sensing equipment, and having companies being willing to pay for the launch of a multi-million dollar satellite for the value of that information.
Navigation - obviously the governments of the world are heavily invested into this area of space economic activity, but the fact that there are huge economic benefits to nations that have space-based navigation systems is certainly a market that can arguably be called "commercial" as well. There is no possible way I could ever imagine the U.S. Congress ever cutting funding to the GPS constellation, although if that ever were to happen I would expect a commercial replacement to happen in a very short period of time. It certainly fits on a list of commercial enterprises directly related to space and utterly depend upon space-based assets. It is also a market for launchers as well.
To add to these areas, two other very likely and emergent areas of commercial spaceflight can be summed up in the two following areas:
Hypersonic Courier Services - if you have a package that absolutely positively has to get somewhere by yesterday (literally a possibility across the international date line), a very high speed courier service can be very beneficial. There are most definitely companies who would be willing to pay for a courier service that has the current rough price point per kilogram that spaceflight has at the moment (about $10k per kg).... if only it was dependable and regular between destinations. The trick here is to get a regular flight service going where you can be certain as to when something launches to within an hour or so rather than the current rough prediction of the neighborhood of several months of rel
Regardless of what other advances have come about through digital communications infrastructure, by far and away the fastest method of transferring large quantities of information is still via courier.... aka the postal system or related groups like FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc.
Nothing beats the transfer speed of dumping a whole bunch of data onto a hard drive/high capacity thumb drive and then mailing that data in a physical box to some other place. I wouldn't recommend sending it by cargo container on a ship going across the surface of the ocean, but otherwise the speed is hard to beat.
For small bits of data, sure you can send stuff "over the internet", but you still have bandwidth limits even with a dedicated optical fiber between you and the destination.
Right........ what is your source of information here? Really, I'm interested.
I am guessing it is the same people who have informed you about the Burbank studio where the Apollo 11 landing took place at. Please try to convince me otherwise, but I have to take the word of an AC as just a crank who is clueless about life and thinks grand conspiracy theories rule the universe.
Yes, I do realize that the stuff you see in the publicity reels about the landing is from the test drop that was done from a helicopter and not the actual Dragon capsule that was launched on the 2nd flight of the Falcon 9. Still, I don't see why SpaceX has a reason to lie about this. Again, I ask for a credible source of information. It doesn't have to be from SpaceX, but it had better be somebody "in the industry" or knowledgeable about spaceflight in general and not some random blog just making shit up.
SpaceX has been very up front about their failures. BTW, the person who said there was a cheese wheel that flew into space was Elon Musk, at a press conference and repeated elsewhere. I won't even go into who else has talked about it as that should be sufficient for anybody but an utter crank.
Eisenhower was clearly interested in space reconnaissance, and almost everything that the NSA does in space is something that Eisenhower not only would approve of, but was actively involved with pushing for in terms of rationale to encourage the development of rocketry and satellites.
That said, I don't think he even remotely considered the public relations impact of manned spaceflight nor even the "missile gap" issue that really was more smoke and mirrors than anything else at the time. There certainly was no reason to think that an ICBM was any better at delivering a nuclear warhead to a target than a veteran bomber crew, and indeed the bomber was much more likely to be accurate in its delivery than a missile of that era ever could be. That hasn't even really changed all that much either over the years, even though the technology to do either kind of delivery has certainly improved considerably over the past several decades.
The other issue is how Walt Disney (yes, the guy who gave us Snow White and Mickey Mouse) teamed up with Werner Von Braun and Willy Ley (a publisher of Science Fiction novels and magazines) to popularize the notion of manned spaceflight. Regardless of anything else that happened in the Cold War, I'd call that effort perhaps one of the best public relations moves ever made in American history, and it worked. That P.R. couldn't sustain itself past the 1960's and the Vietnam War.
It wasn't hard to recruit junior engineers with the following proposal: Do you want to spend the rest of your career building power point presentations and attending conferences, or do you want to work on a clean sheet engine design and actually fly stuff into space?
It doesn't take much brain power to figure out which career path will help you out both professionally and intellectually.
BTW, SpaceX didn't raid just JPL, but also Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and several other major aerospace companies. They also did a pretty good job of raiding the NASA astronaut corps (as have some other private commercial spaceflight companies) and have been picking up other people along the way that are also extremely talented, including some recent college graduates who also like working for companies that have an active production floor. The manufacturing plant at El Segundo is as busy as any factory was during the glory years of the Cold War when Atlas missiles (and others) were being built for ICBMs. SpaceX right now has more engines in its production queue than all other countries of the Earth combined, with an estimated completion of about one engine each week if the production line goes to full production as is anticipated.
Which place would you rather work for... a company where things are happening or a place where they are reliving the glory days and lamenting why it will never come back?
The main restriction to deep space travel is cost. When the estimate for a round-trip mission to Mars ended up being somewhere close to $100 billion (IMHO a gross underestimation for a government program of that scope), there is a reason why Congress had a huge sticker shock and decided to dump the whole program, especially for just a "flags and footprints" kind of mission to the Red Planet. Going back to the Moon seems even more pointless.
Still, the whole thing really rests upon somebody even getting to low-Earth orbit cheaply in the first place. At a price of somewhere close to $200 million (give or take another $150 million each way depending on how you calculate costs) per astronaut the Space Shuttle proved to be a horribly expensive way to get into space. At least the Soyuz spacecraft could take people into space for about $40 million each, but that is still hugely expensive and doesn't even deal with the costs of anything to take you elsewhere in space once you get up there. The Apollo flights were also similarly about a billion dollars each, and there is no reason to suspect that the cost is going to be much cheaper, at least if you depend on a government program to get you there.
If you can get that cost down, there will be a market for "deep space travel". If that cost stays high and at the current prices, I highly doubt that even a completely government-sponsored endeavor will do more than simply having a Chinese flag flying next to the Apollo 11 lander at the Sea of Tranquility.
Killing Orion/Ares is something that should have happened for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm glad that it was canned. It was a program grossly over budget and behind schedule and was something that should never have been proposed in the first place. It didn't even accomplish the primary goals of the endeavor, which was to keep as much of the Space Shuttle infrastructure (aka the assembly plants and spare parts delivery queues) going after the retirement of the Shuttle program.
For myself, I think the DIRECT approach is something that should have been done, and it might have even been able to use the Orion spacecraft. Indeed the Orion design was deliberately changed to make sure it couldn't fly on DIRECT or on existing EELVs like the Atlas V or Delta IV.
Really, the Ares program completely missed the objective of keeping Americans in space and only accomplished one real goal: keeping members of congress happy because money from that project flowed into their districts. Their main gripe is that the flow of money stopped, and unemployed constituents who were sucking off of the government teat are not happy voters when that flow of money ends. That doesn't justify why any other member of congress needs to support that program to continue other than to support their own crazy form of pork.
Certainly killing the Ares rockets has done nothing to American science, and indeed it might have even helped out.
Seriously, who ever posted this preceding post is simply clueless about what SpaceX has accomplished. Yes, they had a couple of spectacular failures with the Falcon 1, including one "loss of vehicle". Three flights that were clearly "test flights" that had some problems followed by two flights of the Falcon 1 that were clear successes including a delivered commercial payload. That isn't even a "partial" success but a complete success and the satellite is still in use.
As for the Falcon 9, it has had two successful launches, and the Dragon returned successfully. Please, if you are going to claim that the Dragon crashed upon re-entry, please prove it by a reasonable citation because I'm calling this utter bullshit. I've known people who ate some of the cheese wheel that flew into space and returned in the Dragon that is being claimed as "destroyed".
Yes, there is room for caution and the SpaceX fanbois do push the potential a bit more, but don't make up sheer lies out of whole cloth either when the facts completely contradict what you say. Then again, a poster like this likely believes that none of the Saturn Vs that launched out of KSC ever had astronauts on board either.
I don't know about your conclusion either. There is an economic presumption that there is a price/demand curve for spaceflight services where dropping the price for a launch is necessarily going to bring increased demand.
Yes, at a certain point there will be some markets that will grow exponentially with a drop in price, but here is the main question: If you drop the price of the launch in half, will you double (or more) the demand for launch services?
At the moment, I'd have to say the answer is a resounding "No". There is a slightly increased demand, but not really much more of one. That is one of the reasons why commercial space (I'm talking Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, ATK, etc.) has been stuck in a doldrums of gradually reducing numbers of launches from one year to the next and not much reduction in the price of their vehicles as well. There is no economic incentive to drop the price of their vehicles unless it is a huge drop in the price of their vehicles with a corresponding dramatic drop in their profits. From a pure profit standpoint, the traditional commercial launcher companies certainly have had no profit motive for dropping their prices.
I'm not convinced SpaceX has the incentive to substantially drop the price of their launches either, for much of the same reason. They had to have an angle to get into the market, which price is a good way to get customers interested. They are also able to sustain the company at those new lower prices, so in effect they are taking market share away from the traditional launcher companies and launching a few additional payloads because of the new lower price. Still, if SpaceX drops the price of their vehicles in half yet again, will they be selling enough in terms of volume to make up for the loss of profits?
For me, the "jury is still out" on that last question. Elon Musk has a political agenda he is trying to push through as well, but in the end he is a practical businessman and is acting more and more like the traditional launcher companies. Yes, he has pushed the price point for almost all commercial launches into orbit to a new lower rate, and I don't see that going up substantially, but I'm not convinced it is going to go down much either.
The real trick is to see what other commercial enterprises might start to require launch services, and if this new lower price is going to attract new kinds of business opportunities to open up that hasn't been tried earlier. Some other aspects of the SpaceX business model is a much more reliable launch schedule where they might be able to promise a launch within a few days instead of the current launch dates that can slip by several months or even years at the moment. The ability to recycle a launch abort and try again within an hour or so after a scrub is certainly something that puts SpaceX ahead of their competition. The Space Shuttle, by comparison, required a 24 hour recycle time before another attempt to launch under the same circumstances. If they can nail launch dates and make the process of launching rockets much more predictable, they may get even more customers.
Still, I'm not completely convinced the business model is in place for continued downward price pressure on access to space, even assuming that the technical capability of doing so might exist. Only if another billionaire is willing to risk their fortune to try and start up another rocket company might that happen, and even then it is a huge risky gamble. Even Elon Musk admitted that commercial rocketry is a good way to make millionaires out of billionaires.
Going to space is, however, more like some of the early flights that were done in aviation. Many of those early aircraft were incredibly flimsy and there were thousands of (non-military combat) related deaths each year in the early years. If anything it is the risk aversion that is to me something that is repugnant, other than the fact that nobody wants to be responsible for the death of somebody else.
In terms of some of those deaths on spaceflight, all 14 of the Shuttle-related deaths could have been prevented had NASA simply followed their own safety guidelines. Apollo 1 was also an unfortunate accident, and something which should have been preventable.... also something which didn't even happen during the course of the actual flight but during a ground test that could have even been inside of a factory. On top of that, the number 17, while technically accurate by figures that NASA claims, is only Americans and not deaths by other people who have attempted spaceflight or deaths by Russian Cosmonauts. It also doesn't include other astronauts who died "on the job" through other means, nor does it include deaths of ground personnel in many countries that can also be related to spaceflight.
Yes, it is dangerous, but so is simply living as a person. You take risks, but you also take measures to try and avoid the most serious injuries and hopefully take safety measures seriously. The trick is to learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others so you don't repeat them... particularly the most dangerous mistakes.
BTW, in terms of spaceflight, most vehicles have built into them the knowledge and experience of the previous generations of astronauts where those mistakes... especially fatal mistakes... are not likely to be repeated. That is true for anybody trying to push the boundaries of human experience. I certainly would assert that anybody going into space today on board any modern spacecraft is going to be far safer than their predecessors by an order of magnitude or better, and I expect that to improve over time. It certainly isn't a reason to fear going into space.
By far the largest problem in terms of going into space is simply the cost. That is, of course, what the whole point of commercializing spaceflight is all about. There is certainly room to make the trip to space much cheaper.
It all depends on what you want to accomplish. I would dare say that the "problem" of getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO, aka what the Space Shuttle did and what most other spacefaring countries are currently doing) is a "solved problem" and really something that needs to be handed over to private companies completely. Back in the 1950's, there still was doubt it could be done at all or at least reliably done. That isn't even a remote issue any more. LEO is hardly even a frontier any more and there are some serious traffic issues in terms of dealing with what is up there because so much stuff is up there at the moment.
Turning over actual launches to private companies seems like a very wise use of tax dollars, and try to set up the means for private individuals (or companies) to be able to launch their own payloads on the same vehicles.... just like is done currently with commercial aviation. The U.S. government often does buy flights on commercial carriers or even individual seats on regular commercial routes. Why can't that same business model be applied to spaceflight if you can get similar economies of scale?
As for going to the Moon, the notion that you have a disintegrating pyramid that absolutely must start on the ground here on the Earth is the first idea that needs to be killed. Once you give up that notion, it becomes much, much easier to design a vehicle and system which can go from LEO to the Moon and back. We certainly don't need a multi-billion (with a giant "B") dollar boondoggle that is only really designed to keep rocket engineers busy in key congressional districts that does more of the same and even duplicating services being done by private companies.
It isn't really so much we forgot how to go to the Moon, but that the cost of doing so with this massive disintegrating pyramid is so huge that designing a unique vehicle to accomplish that one task is cost prohibitive. The circumstances which created the original Apollo program won't be duplicated and currently don't exist either. We (as a country or even as a species) aren't in a particular hurry to get to the Moon either.
I agree with you to a point. SpaceX has been able to prove they can get stuff "up there" in one piece, and that they can nail orbital parameters that they set out to achieve.
This next year (2012) is going to be the big year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Either they are going to have several successful launches or they are going to have several spectacular failures including their collapse as a company. Assuming they get the NASA COTS demos completed, they will certainly have a proven track record including to paying customers.
There are several commercial customers that are taking a "wait and see" attitude toward SpaceX, and presuming these flights are successful there are more flights that will go onto their backlog of flights. It is also worth telling that SpaceX has already sold more flights this past year to new customers than all other spaceflight companies in the world, including the Chinese, Russians, Indians, and ESA combined. That should say something which should be worthy of notice, and also tell a sad tale of the incredibly small market that there currently is for commercial spaceflight. It isn't a completely dead market, but it is still incredibly small... and I'm talking about people willing to pay for telecom satellites and other proven commercial markets for spaceflight.
Considering that Deke Slayton was heavily involved with the construction of the Conestoga rocket system in the 1980's, I'd say he certainly has a foot in both the early days of Apollo (even being one of the original Mercury seven), and in some ways one of the very early pioneers of commercial rocketry. He embodies perhaps the whole of what was once upon a time NASA of a long ago era and what could have become of commercial spaceflight.... if America will only let it happen.
Yeah, the spirit of Deke Slayton would be of particular interest at the moment, and it would be good to invoke him in any such discussion of the intersections of NASA's past glories and what is happening now for spaceflight in America today.
Yes, I get the joke, but you also missed the point and were technically inaccurate all at the same time. Water vapor is just another way of describing steam, but with its partial pressure being much lower due to the fact that it hasn't condensed yet. On the Earth, water vapor is almost always a significant component in the air and is measured as "relative humidity".... also colorless and odorless like steam.
Clouds form (including the stuff in the sky) when the water starts to condense and forms the aerosol that the original GP post was talking about. That liquid water can even be found at temperatures below the freezing point.
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It was a power envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, even though it wasn't explicitly spelled out. The point of ruling a law "unconstitutional" really is one of recognition: If the court system refuses to acknowledge the validity of a law and therefore doesn't even recognize that the law has been created through a constitutional process, that law really doesn't exist as far as the court system is concerned. Yes, it may appear on the books of statutory law, but effectively a single citation to a higher court judicial opinion (not even the supreme court) invalidating that law renders ineffective any prosecution under that law.
That was the whole point of Marbury v. Madison, so far as in that case even the filing of the case before the Supreme Court was unconstitutionally done and therefore it was unconstitutional for such a petition to have been granted in the first place. This was also a constitutional crises so far as the only legal means to enforce a law was to perform an act that in itself was contrary to the U.S. Constitution. The law under question in that case, the Judiciary Act of 1789, had several provisions that simply were ill advised to even be put into legislation and most significant was an unconstitutional expansion of the U.S. Supreme Court itself and its authority. To have ruled in favor of Marbury would have essentially forced the court to ignore the U.S. Constitution altogether and to have considered statutory law alone on the presumption that it was the domain exclusively of the U.S. Congress to determine the scope of the Constitution. In that sense, I think it was a very wise move for the court to have taken at the time, even if this decision might be abused in other contexts.
Considering that many of the changes to American copyright laws have been to address "conformity" to European copyright laws (especially the concept of automatic copyright upon publication and the "Life+term" philosophy), I have a hard time shedding a tear when it comes to European copyright being pushed along as well.
The problem isn't America, but the big corporate lobbyists and major media companies that are the problem. Many of the changes in copyright laws over the past 50 years or so really haven't been for consumer protection or even encouraging the ordinary content developer (author, composer, musician, programmer, artist, etc.) from creating new works but rather to help maintain monopolies over distribution or even preventing new content developers from entering the marketplace.
At least in America, the stated constitutional goal of copyright legislation is "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". I wonder how successful most copyright legislation actually achieves that ultimate goal, or if the "useful arts" really are being promoted at all?
I claim that sovereign recognition of extra-terrestrial real estate is just a matter of time. The alternative is literally an absence of law of any kind in space where the only recognition of rights (including development rights) is simply whoever has the bigger gun. That is also the situation with Sealand, as the "owner" of Sealand doesn't really have a big gun. Such issues are a bit more of an issue when the nearest neighbor is a light-second or more distant and can't come running in an emergency, unlike Sealand which can get emergency services in a matter of minutes from England if push came to shove.
I think the situation would be much more like Somalia, where there is essentially an absence of government. Then again, it might just open up a new era of piracy, but this time in space. If satellite companies had to start dealing with idiots messing up broadcasting telecom pirates who knocked out a few satellites in GEO, they might start to pay attention to these issues as well. That is already a multi-billion dollar industry that is heavily dependent upon space-based assets.
Yes, the page looks shaky, but the people involved are real. Their marketing and website may leave a bit to the imagination, but they have some real engineers and folks who know what they are doing along with access to capital resources to get at least some major projects completed.
The problem here is that none of the guys involved are millionaires/billionaires like Richard Branson, Elon Musk, or Jeff Bezos. Sadly, it will take somebody like that before these guys get much put together, so I'll admit it is a long shot at best. From a technical viewpoint, however, they certainly could get the job done if anybody can get it done.
Why they are going the route of the "donation" method to get something going is something I won't understand. For myself, I wish they would get rid of the silly little side projects like that, but there are others who have tried that route before. Sadly, I have never seen a project get built using that sort of financial model, at least in terms of rocketry or much of anything that dealt with devices that spent a prolonged period of time in space. The closest I can imagine that has been involved with projects on a similar scale is the Amsat satellites put up by amateur radio operators. There is also Team FREDNET who has been trying to compete with the Google Lunar X-Prize competition, who at the moment seem more likely to get something to the Moon before Shackleton Energy at least in terms of the resources being offered.
Still, this isn't a group that I would call a bunch of scam artists, but rather dreamers and wishful thinkers. If you really did want to go to the Moon, they would be the ones to make it happen.
Don't worry. The Lunar Sierra Society is going to be very active in the future with demonstrations by people complaining about all sorts of illnesses and climatological messes that are happening due to economic activity on the Moon. Forget of course that moving rocks around here on the Earth influences the gravity and the environment far more than blowing up a nuke on the Moon would ever do, these nuts are going to be some major heartburn in the future.
I hope they remain on the lunatic (literally) fringe of society, but never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
The Outer Space Treaty is going to be a joke of literally cosmic proportions in the long run. Its purpose was mainly to keep America from claiming the Moon due to the Apollo landings, under the fear that might have started an international conflict between the USSR and the USA in the 1970's over something seen as pointless at the time since America really couldn't build anything permanent for decades on the Moon anyway. How far the USSR might have gone in terms of challenging America is also something that can be disputed, but it was a nice sentiment at the time and really didn't cost America much in the long run.
Besides, there is a clause in the treaty that allows any nation who has signed the document to withdraw from the provisions of the treaty.... with a notification period of at least a year before that nation withdrawing no longer is bound to the terms. As such, it really is a completely worthless document other than the fact that the great "race to the Moon" in terms of land claims will have at least a year's notice before it is carved up politically. If given the right motivations, I'm sure any of the major spacefaring nations would have not only the ability but the desire to do that too.
There have been subsequent treaties that have tried to remove that clause, but the Moon Treaty that would have made a major substantive difference in terms of avoiding that opt-out clause has never been passed by a country which has been sending stuff into space. Since it hasn't been ratified by anybody that matters, it is an irrelevant document as well.
Of the various claims that private individuals may have in terms of actual ownership of the Moon, the one that has the best claim currently is Richard Garriott (aka "Lord British") who has a couple of former Soviet vehicles to which he now has formal title and thus actually owns objects sitting on the surface of the Moon. Since he was the first (and currently only) person with any such claim to personal artifacts sitting on the surface of the Moon and having never been a government employee subject to restrictions prohibiting himself from asserting any such claim, it could be argued from a legal standpoint that currently Richard Garriott owns the whole of the Moon as a personal fiefdom. As to if he will take personal possession of his devices and artifacts on the Moon may be debatable, but I wouldn't put it past him either. The Outer Space Treaty certainly doesn't stop private ownership, it just doesn't recognize such an act either.
No, the concept is essentially one and the same. It does relate to whoever can grant title to a hunk of real estate or an object (like a vehicle) in terms of instituting the rule of law into the situation rather than "might makes right" in terms of the actual ownership of that thing.
The problem with the Moon is that by treaty nobody wants to grant any sort of title to the land on the Moon, or at least no agency or organization that will have an army to back up the legal decisions made about that ownership. The reason I "own" a hunk of real state in America right now is in part because I have title to that chunk of land, and more significantly if somebody tries to kick me off that land that I can solicit the resources of my local police department and ultimately the resources of the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps to make sure I can keep that land. They are the folks who back up the judiciary and make somebody trying to take my land by force of arms without going through the judiciary as nothing more than a joke and a common thief.
Perhaps folks who go to the Moon will set up their own government or governments to deal with that situation, so it isn't something that necessarily needs to be done on the Earth. Still, I don't see Earth-based governments giving up such authority so easily either.
It isn't just the deep connections that these guys have with NASA and elements of the space industry. It is the fact that they have already done several projects for NASA and other federal agencies, as well as some private foundation grants and even some work with for-profit companies. This TED talk shows some of the more impressive things that Bill Stone (one of the major investors in Shackleton Energy) has done and at least one other crazy off-the-wall idea that has a real shot at being built some time in the future.
This is a very legitimate group and of anybody who says they might be able to get to the Moon and make a profit off of what they are doing on the Moon, these guys would be it. The market for propellant from a location near the Moon would certainly be a valuable market, considering that a 1 liter bottle of water currently costs about $20,000 just to get it there with current rockets.
In this case, while I'm sure that they wouldn't mind having NASA/USAF/NRO/ESA/Roscosmos/JAXA as customers, there might be some other potential customers for their product as well. It isn't purely for government contracts. It does take a different attitude about how you go about launching stuff into space, however.
Voxels are analogous to sprites, not pixels.
I think you a confusing sprites with objects. A sprite is a group of pixels that are put together and act as a unit. 3-D objects are a group of voxels that also put together and act as a single unit.
That Minecraft happens to be using 3-D objects (aka "blocks") as descriptions of each "volume element" is perhaps where you are getting confused. The same can also happen in 2-D graphical games where an image can be comprised of multiple "sprites" or "blocks" that are stamped over and over again to draw maps, buildings, or even creatures. It isn't anything new.
There was an attempt to leverage the engineering and technology developed under the Apollo program into something incredibly useful. It was called the Apollo Applications Program, of which only the space station portion ever got developed. Today that is known as Skylab.
If you want to see a NASA that could have been instead of what actually was, that Wikipedia article should at least give you a good glimpse into a very interesting alternate history of what NASA and America could have been doing.
I still argue that had the Space Shuttle not been developed but instead an aggressive development of the Saturn & Apollo family of vehicles happened over the same period of time.... with the exact same budget that NASA used to develop and fly the Shuttle program would have resulted in more astronauts actually going into space, more real science explored, and as a side benefit no real loss of capabilities that ended up being lost during the switch to the Shuttle program. I certainly see no reason why the ISS couldn't have been built with modules and components flown into space on Saturn V rockets instead of in the cargo bay of the Space Shuttle.
Indeed the only real capability introduced by the Space Shuttle that would have been considerably more difficult with the Saturn/Apollo system would have been the ability to bring large bulky payloads from space back to the Earth. That was used so few times that any real need to perform such a mission could have been accomplished with special purpose vehicles or designs for that explicit mission. Such a capability is such a low priority that the current NASA design thinking doesn't even include that possibility in any upcoming design.
What happened on the Moon would have been like what we would know about Yellowstone National Park if it was completely fenced off and the only knowledge we had about the park would be the result of six weekend camping trips performed by some NPS researchers traveling by bus to the park, together with the reports of their bus drivers, with the first couple of expeditions being done by teams of bus drivers and mechanics because they were concerned that the bus would break down before even getting to to park in the first place. Yes, there is a whole lot we don't know about the Moon, and that is a most unfortunate situation too. Even if the schedule of trips back to the Moon wasn't as aggressive as it was during the initial missions, we should have had at least a follow-up mission every few years or even once every decade. Getting rid of the Saturn/Apollo hardware certainly hurt us significantly in that sense.
Iridium is able to make a small profit after admittedly a financial disaster over the previous decade. The next generation satellites look like they will finally have some real bandwidth as well.... being flown up into space on Falcon 9 rockets no less, so it looks like Elon Musk has that market cornered as well.
Really, commercial spaceflight currently falls into the following categories:
To add to these areas, two other very likely and emergent areas of commercial spaceflight can be summed up in the two following areas:
Regardless of what other advances have come about through digital communications infrastructure, by far and away the fastest method of transferring large quantities of information is still via courier.... aka the postal system or related groups like FedEx, DHL, UPS, etc.
Nothing beats the transfer speed of dumping a whole bunch of data onto a hard drive/high capacity thumb drive and then mailing that data in a physical box to some other place. I wouldn't recommend sending it by cargo container on a ship going across the surface of the ocean, but otherwise the speed is hard to beat.
For small bits of data, sure you can send stuff "over the internet", but you still have bandwidth limits even with a dedicated optical fiber between you and the destination.
Right........ what is your source of information here? Really, I'm interested.
I am guessing it is the same people who have informed you about the Burbank studio where the Apollo 11 landing took place at. Please try to convince me otherwise, but I have to take the word of an AC as just a crank who is clueless about life and thinks grand conspiracy theories rule the universe.
Yes, I do realize that the stuff you see in the publicity reels about the landing is from the test drop that was done from a helicopter and not the actual Dragon capsule that was launched on the 2nd flight of the Falcon 9. Still, I don't see why SpaceX has a reason to lie about this. Again, I ask for a credible source of information. It doesn't have to be from SpaceX, but it had better be somebody "in the industry" or knowledgeable about spaceflight in general and not some random blog just making shit up.
SpaceX has been very up front about their failures. BTW, the person who said there was a cheese wheel that flew into space was Elon Musk, at a press conference and repeated elsewhere. I won't even go into who else has talked about it as that should be sufficient for anybody but an utter crank.
Eisenhower was clearly interested in space reconnaissance, and almost everything that the NSA does in space is something that Eisenhower not only would approve of, but was actively involved with pushing for in terms of rationale to encourage the development of rocketry and satellites.
That said, I don't think he even remotely considered the public relations impact of manned spaceflight nor even the "missile gap" issue that really was more smoke and mirrors than anything else at the time. There certainly was no reason to think that an ICBM was any better at delivering a nuclear warhead to a target than a veteran bomber crew, and indeed the bomber was much more likely to be accurate in its delivery than a missile of that era ever could be. That hasn't even really changed all that much either over the years, even though the technology to do either kind of delivery has certainly improved considerably over the past several decades.
The other issue is how Walt Disney (yes, the guy who gave us Snow White and Mickey Mouse) teamed up with Werner Von Braun and Willy Ley (a publisher of Science Fiction novels and magazines) to popularize the notion of manned spaceflight. Regardless of anything else that happened in the Cold War, I'd call that effort perhaps one of the best public relations moves ever made in American history, and it worked. That P.R. couldn't sustain itself past the 1960's and the Vietnam War.
It wasn't hard to recruit junior engineers with the following proposal: Do you want to spend the rest of your career building power point presentations and attending conferences, or do you want to work on a clean sheet engine design and actually fly stuff into space?
It doesn't take much brain power to figure out which career path will help you out both professionally and intellectually.
BTW, SpaceX didn't raid just JPL, but also Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and several other major aerospace companies. They also did a pretty good job of raiding the NASA astronaut corps (as have some other private commercial spaceflight companies) and have been picking up other people along the way that are also extremely talented, including some recent college graduates who also like working for companies that have an active production floor. The manufacturing plant at El Segundo is as busy as any factory was during the glory years of the Cold War when Atlas missiles (and others) were being built for ICBMs. SpaceX right now has more engines in its production queue than all other countries of the Earth combined, with an estimated completion of about one engine each week if the production line goes to full production as is anticipated.
Which place would you rather work for... a company where things are happening or a place where they are reliving the glory days and lamenting why it will never come back?
The main restriction to deep space travel is cost. When the estimate for a round-trip mission to Mars ended up being somewhere close to $100 billion (IMHO a gross underestimation for a government program of that scope), there is a reason why Congress had a huge sticker shock and decided to dump the whole program, especially for just a "flags and footprints" kind of mission to the Red Planet. Going back to the Moon seems even more pointless.
Still, the whole thing really rests upon somebody even getting to low-Earth orbit cheaply in the first place. At a price of somewhere close to $200 million (give or take another $150 million each way depending on how you calculate costs) per astronaut the Space Shuttle proved to be a horribly expensive way to get into space. At least the Soyuz spacecraft could take people into space for about $40 million each, but that is still hugely expensive and doesn't even deal with the costs of anything to take you elsewhere in space once you get up there. The Apollo flights were also similarly about a billion dollars each, and there is no reason to suspect that the cost is going to be much cheaper, at least if you depend on a government program to get you there.
If you can get that cost down, there will be a market for "deep space travel". If that cost stays high and at the current prices, I highly doubt that even a completely government-sponsored endeavor will do more than simply having a Chinese flag flying next to the Apollo 11 lander at the Sea of Tranquility.
Killing Orion/Ares is something that should have happened for a whole bunch of reasons, and I'm glad that it was canned. It was a program grossly over budget and behind schedule and was something that should never have been proposed in the first place. It didn't even accomplish the primary goals of the endeavor, which was to keep as much of the Space Shuttle infrastructure (aka the assembly plants and spare parts delivery queues) going after the retirement of the Shuttle program.
For myself, I think the DIRECT approach is something that should have been done, and it might have even been able to use the Orion spacecraft. Indeed the Orion design was deliberately changed to make sure it couldn't fly on DIRECT or on existing EELVs like the Atlas V or Delta IV.
Really, the Ares program completely missed the objective of keeping Americans in space and only accomplished one real goal: keeping members of congress happy because money from that project flowed into their districts. Their main gripe is that the flow of money stopped, and unemployed constituents who were sucking off of the government teat are not happy voters when that flow of money ends. That doesn't justify why any other member of congress needs to support that program to continue other than to support their own crazy form of pork.
Certainly killing the Ares rockets has done nothing to American science, and indeed it might have even helped out.
WTF?
Seriously, who ever posted this preceding post is simply clueless about what SpaceX has accomplished. Yes, they had a couple of spectacular failures with the Falcon 1, including one "loss of vehicle". Three flights that were clearly "test flights" that had some problems followed by two flights of the Falcon 1 that were clear successes including a delivered commercial payload. That isn't even a "partial" success but a complete success and the satellite is still in use.
As for the Falcon 9, it has had two successful launches, and the Dragon returned successfully. Please, if you are going to claim that the Dragon crashed upon re-entry, please prove it by a reasonable citation because I'm calling this utter bullshit. I've known people who ate some of the cheese wheel that flew into space and returned in the Dragon that is being claimed as "destroyed".
Yes, there is room for caution and the SpaceX fanbois do push the potential a bit more, but don't make up sheer lies out of whole cloth either when the facts completely contradict what you say. Then again, a poster like this likely believes that none of the Saturn Vs that launched out of KSC ever had astronauts on board either.
I don't know about your conclusion either. There is an economic presumption that there is a price/demand curve for spaceflight services where dropping the price for a launch is necessarily going to bring increased demand.
Yes, at a certain point there will be some markets that will grow exponentially with a drop in price, but here is the main question: If you drop the price of the launch in half, will you double (or more) the demand for launch services?
At the moment, I'd have to say the answer is a resounding "No". There is a slightly increased demand, but not really much more of one. That is one of the reasons why commercial space (I'm talking Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, ATK, etc.) has been stuck in a doldrums of gradually reducing numbers of launches from one year to the next and not much reduction in the price of their vehicles as well. There is no economic incentive to drop the price of their vehicles unless it is a huge drop in the price of their vehicles with a corresponding dramatic drop in their profits. From a pure profit standpoint, the traditional commercial launcher companies certainly have had no profit motive for dropping their prices.
I'm not convinced SpaceX has the incentive to substantially drop the price of their launches either, for much of the same reason. They had to have an angle to get into the market, which price is a good way to get customers interested. They are also able to sustain the company at those new lower prices, so in effect they are taking market share away from the traditional launcher companies and launching a few additional payloads because of the new lower price. Still, if SpaceX drops the price of their vehicles in half yet again, will they be selling enough in terms of volume to make up for the loss of profits?
For me, the "jury is still out" on that last question. Elon Musk has a political agenda he is trying to push through as well, but in the end he is a practical businessman and is acting more and more like the traditional launcher companies. Yes, he has pushed the price point for almost all commercial launches into orbit to a new lower rate, and I don't see that going up substantially, but I'm not convinced it is going to go down much either.
The real trick is to see what other commercial enterprises might start to require launch services, and if this new lower price is going to attract new kinds of business opportunities to open up that hasn't been tried earlier. Some other aspects of the SpaceX business model is a much more reliable launch schedule where they might be able to promise a launch within a few days instead of the current launch dates that can slip by several months or even years at the moment. The ability to recycle a launch abort and try again within an hour or so after a scrub is certainly something that puts SpaceX ahead of their competition. The Space Shuttle, by comparison, required a 24 hour recycle time before another attempt to launch under the same circumstances. If they can nail launch dates and make the process of launching rockets much more predictable, they may get even more customers.
Still, I'm not completely convinced the business model is in place for continued downward price pressure on access to space, even assuming that the technical capability of doing so might exist. Only if another billionaire is willing to risk their fortune to try and start up another rocket company might that happen, and even then it is a huge risky gamble. Even Elon Musk admitted that commercial rocketry is a good way to make millionaires out of billionaires.
Going to space is, however, more like some of the early flights that were done in aviation. Many of those early aircraft were incredibly flimsy and there were thousands of (non-military combat) related deaths each year in the early years. If anything it is the risk aversion that is to me something that is repugnant, other than the fact that nobody wants to be responsible for the death of somebody else.
In terms of some of those deaths on spaceflight, all 14 of the Shuttle-related deaths could have been prevented had NASA simply followed their own safety guidelines. Apollo 1 was also an unfortunate accident, and something which should have been preventable.... also something which didn't even happen during the course of the actual flight but during a ground test that could have even been inside of a factory. On top of that, the number 17, while technically accurate by figures that NASA claims, is only Americans and not deaths by other people who have attempted spaceflight or deaths by Russian Cosmonauts. It also doesn't include other astronauts who died "on the job" through other means, nor does it include deaths of ground personnel in many countries that can also be related to spaceflight.
Yes, it is dangerous, but so is simply living as a person. You take risks, but you also take measures to try and avoid the most serious injuries and hopefully take safety measures seriously. The trick is to learn from your mistakes and the mistakes of others so you don't repeat them... particularly the most dangerous mistakes.
BTW, in terms of spaceflight, most vehicles have built into them the knowledge and experience of the previous generations of astronauts where those mistakes... especially fatal mistakes... are not likely to be repeated. That is true for anybody trying to push the boundaries of human experience. I certainly would assert that anybody going into space today on board any modern spacecraft is going to be far safer than their predecessors by an order of magnitude or better, and I expect that to improve over time. It certainly isn't a reason to fear going into space.
By far the largest problem in terms of going into space is simply the cost. That is, of course, what the whole point of commercializing spaceflight is all about. There is certainly room to make the trip to space much cheaper.
It all depends on what you want to accomplish. I would dare say that the "problem" of getting to low-Earth orbit (LEO, aka what the Space Shuttle did and what most other spacefaring countries are currently doing) is a "solved problem" and really something that needs to be handed over to private companies completely. Back in the 1950's, there still was doubt it could be done at all or at least reliably done. That isn't even a remote issue any more. LEO is hardly even a frontier any more and there are some serious traffic issues in terms of dealing with what is up there because so much stuff is up there at the moment.
Turning over actual launches to private companies seems like a very wise use of tax dollars, and try to set up the means for private individuals (or companies) to be able to launch their own payloads on the same vehicles.... just like is done currently with commercial aviation. The U.S. government often does buy flights on commercial carriers or even individual seats on regular commercial routes. Why can't that same business model be applied to spaceflight if you can get similar economies of scale?
As for going to the Moon, the notion that you have a disintegrating pyramid that absolutely must start on the ground here on the Earth is the first idea that needs to be killed. Once you give up that notion, it becomes much, much easier to design a vehicle and system which can go from LEO to the Moon and back. We certainly don't need a multi-billion (with a giant "B") dollar boondoggle that is only really designed to keep rocket engineers busy in key congressional districts that does more of the same and even duplicating services being done by private companies.
It isn't really so much we forgot how to go to the Moon, but that the cost of doing so with this massive disintegrating pyramid is so huge that designing a unique vehicle to accomplish that one task is cost prohibitive. The circumstances which created the original Apollo program won't be duplicated and currently don't exist either. We (as a country or even as a species) aren't in a particular hurry to get to the Moon either.
I agree with you to a point. SpaceX has been able to prove they can get stuff "up there" in one piece, and that they can nail orbital parameters that they set out to achieve.
This next year (2012) is going to be the big year for SpaceX to put up or shut up. Either they are going to have several successful launches or they are going to have several spectacular failures including their collapse as a company. Assuming they get the NASA COTS demos completed, they will certainly have a proven track record including to paying customers.
There are several commercial customers that are taking a "wait and see" attitude toward SpaceX, and presuming these flights are successful there are more flights that will go onto their backlog of flights. It is also worth telling that SpaceX has already sold more flights this past year to new customers than all other spaceflight companies in the world, including the Chinese, Russians, Indians, and ESA combined. That should say something which should be worthy of notice, and also tell a sad tale of the incredibly small market that there currently is for commercial spaceflight. It isn't a completely dead market, but it is still incredibly small... and I'm talking about people willing to pay for telecom satellites and other proven commercial markets for spaceflight.
Considering that Deke Slayton was heavily involved with the construction of the Conestoga rocket system in the 1980's, I'd say he certainly has a foot in both the early days of Apollo (even being one of the original Mercury seven), and in some ways one of the very early pioneers of commercial rocketry. He embodies perhaps the whole of what was once upon a time NASA of a long ago era and what could have become of commercial spaceflight.... if America will only let it happen.
Yeah, the spirit of Deke Slayton would be of particular interest at the moment, and it would be good to invoke him in any such discussion of the intersections of NASA's past glories and what is happening now for spaceflight in America today.
Thanks for the link. I watched the video and a couple more of the classes. It definitely is a different take on economic theory.
No, the term "mist" is more technically correct.
Yes, I get the joke, but you also missed the point and were technically inaccurate all at the same time. Water vapor is just another way of describing steam, but with its partial pressure being much lower due to the fact that it hasn't condensed yet. On the Earth, water vapor is almost always a significant component in the air and is measured as "relative humidity".... also colorless and odorless like steam.
Clouds form (including the stuff in the sky) when the water starts to condense and forms the aerosol that the original GP post was talking about. That liquid water can even be found at temperatures below the freezing point.