The original grandparent was talking about SpaceX, who has indeed been able to get to orbital velocities and furthermore even been able to "recover" a vehicle through re-entry.
Yes, I'm completely aware that it is 25x the energy, but that is suggesting it is impossible to get up to to higher speeds and larger rockets to get that fast. The fact that rockets have done it sort of implies it is at least possible, and there is no reason it must be a government agency who can perform that action.
Virgin Galactic is planning on going higher and faster, and this way they can do that incrementally rather than having to build the grand mission all at once. If anything, that is the problem with government programs as they are trying to bite off the whole thing at once, like the Apollo missions ended up doing. You certainly don't need to build something the size of the Empire State Building for a mission to Mars.... unless you intend to launch the entire thing all at once in some multi-trillion dollar boondoggle that nobody would realistically be willing to pay for even if you have the resources of a major government.
I'll grudgingly acknowledge that NASA was heavily involved with "High Level Language" development, particular in terms of supporting financially some of the early FORTRAN compiler development efforts. Then again the field was so new that almost anything they did would be beneficial.
The problem here is in part that NASA has been resting on their laurels and not really the same agency they were in the 1960's. It would be wonderful if NASA was pushing the envelope and really advancing technology in some meaningful way and doing something that has never been tried before. Sadly, that doesn't happen at NASA any more but rather is happening in private industry.
NASA isn't working on reusable spacecraft like what SpaceX is doing with the Falcon 9. They bailed out on the DC-X project that Jeff Bezos picked up and is now being used by Blue Origin. NASA also dumped the Trans-Hab module on the ISS, and so Robert Bigelow picked that one up, refined the technology considerably, sent on his own dime (no government contract at all... at least not with any American government agency) sent two of those modules into space and tested them out. Burt Rutan has developed SpaceShip One and introduced the "Shuttlecock" re-entry system which makes that vehicle work in a way far safer than anything NASA has ever come up with. And I'm just starting to get on a roll here with many other people involved in space research who is breaking new ground... all of with without support from NASA or picking up the pieces of failed programs that NASA started then dropped the ball on to be forgotten like yesterday's bad news.
My point here is that NASA isn't really helping out, and by any objective measure it isn't where the real action is in terms of new advances in spaceflight technology. If I were a 20-something year old aerospace engineering graduate, I sure wouldn't want to work for NASA or any of its major subcontractors. Heck, I wouldn't want to be recruited by NASA to become an astronaut at the moment.... because private astronauts are going to be much more likely to actually get into space and do all sorts of interesting things once they get up there. Indeed the current NASA astronaut corps is jumping ship and moving to the private sector so fast that it is just the raw recruits at NASA and old has-beens who can't get jobs elsewhere.
You really don't need to worry about how much more efficient the private sector is right now, because that issue is a moot point. If you are young and ambitious, you don't work for NASA in the 21st Century.
It sounds like the Mr. Fusion might be coming to a store near you by 2015.... just like the movie said it would. Or perhaps not. The hover mod also keeps being talked about, but I think that is still a few more years away before it gets built. Isn't the future grand!
When DeLorean Motors was liquidated, the naming rights along with the spare parts inventory and a few unfinished chassis went to some group of investors in Texas where they continued to "hand-build" a few cars at a time based off of the original DMC-12 model design. They also purchased the production certificate, with some restrictions that didn't really matter due to the low production volume.
So the company, in one form or another, has been around awhile even if they haven't exactly been thumping their chest about what it is that they are doing except to existing owners (buy genuine DeLorean parts for your cars!) and to the hobby car/car mod market.
It isn't as if this is something new. Louis Chevrolet originally established the company that bears his name, did some fancy racing with cars, sold the company to General Motors, then blew his money where he finally ended up becoming a mechanic.... working on Chevrolet vehicles including on the engine he designed himself. Then again Chrysler isn't exactly under the same management team they were operated under two decades ago... with several incarnations of that company over the years.
What in the field of Software Engineering depends heavily on public funds financed from NASA? I'll grant how DARPA and the NSA have done some substantial contributions to the software industry (notably with the internet and cryptographic research from the respective agencies) but NASA?
About the only thing I can think of that was genuinely ground breaking by NASA was the development of time-share computer systems and real-time operating systems done in the 1960's. The Space Shuttle guidance computers developed what I'd call the gold standard of software reliability through an insane level of debugging and testing that no other software team could possibly afford, much less duplicate. There is also the development of deep space (beyond the Moon) communications protocols sometimes referred to as the "interplanetary internet" which may have some practical applications in the future for non-government work.
Besides those few items, what has NASA done for software engineering? Much of their development works with yesterday's technologies operating on computer systems that your grandparents likely would be more familiar with than you are. For crying out loud, they are still working with core memory systems in some of the still active spacecraft. The reason for that very archaic memory system is that it happens to be resistant to cosmic rays and radiation in general.... but I wouldn't call any of that effort to be "groundbreaking" or something that the computer industry "leans heavily upon" for upcoming technologies used in the industry or even for consumer electronics for that matter.
Engineering management..... there you might have a strong case to say that NASA shows what not to do in terms of managing a team of engineers. Perhaps something can be learned from their experience after all.
But they also haven't put a single person into, or back out of, orbit.
But they have put more than a few spacecraft into orbit, and brought one of them back in one piece.
It was argued that with the last flight all they would have needed to do is to put somebody in some SCUBA gear with a skin suit and a bean bag and they would have had a great ride. I grant it was a bit of a risk and there certainly could be some improved accommodations including a launch escape system that would be very useful, but the basic vehicle is already built by SpaceX.
As for Virgin Galactic..... they have put people into space and brought them back (or at least Scaled Composites has). That it wasn't to orbit.... is that all you are complaining about? What are you expecting for $4.5 million spread out over multiple flights?
Considering that Richard Branson is going to be taking his family up on the inaugural (for regular commercial service) flight of his spacecraft, I think he has a vested interest in making sure the thing will work very well before NASA astronauts get on board. They aren't going into low-earth orbit, but merely re-creating the original Freedom 7 flight profile that Alan Shepard did back in 1961. They are going to get past the Kármán line, however, and certainly be in what will be on the fringe of the atmosphere of the Earth.
There will also be dozens, perhaps hundreds of flights into space by SS2 before this contract is to be done, so the reliability of this vehicle certainly is going to have a proven track record before anybody from NASA steps on board. Indeed that is where Richard Branson is going to be making his money, because he is going to have very regular service which will be operated more like an airline than a typical rocketry venture. A launch might be postponed a day or two, but not several months or years into the future because of "technical difficulties" once the service becomes regular. There is also going to be a whole fleet of these vehicles... all told there will likely be as much actual spaceflight experience by the Virgin Galactic astronauts as the NASA astronaut corps will have when this whole operations starts to happen.
The KC-135 was a plane that NASA themselves owned and the pilots flying the planes were on the NASA payroll. Zero-G Corporation has signed a contract with NASA to do some flights using Zero-G's airplanes that normally would have been done the original Vomit Comet, so I agree this isn't exactly new even if you consider that the company who they are contracting out has other business on the side besides NASA. The KC-135 plane was dedicated exclusively to NASA, and when Ron Howard wanted to film Apollo 13 on that vehicle, he had to go through NASA first to get their permission to use that airplane... even if they may have "privatized" some of the support services like the ULA contract to launch the Space Shuttle.
It wasn't like you could earlier put some money down with ULA to fly your own private Shuttle mission. That never was even remotely a possibility even though there were some people who were willing to pay the bill for such a flight. BTW, even the Shuttle used to be completely operated by NASA employees, where they were very much involved with building the vehicle with NASA-payroll engineers involved with the development of that vehicle as well as other aspects of NASA. NASA-payroll engineers were also involved with the development of the Constellation program and the SLS architecture, so it isn't quite like buying light bulbs or toilet paper for some of these issues.
NASA is moving away from that sort of completely in-house development and moving more toward simple fixed-price contracts with outside vendors, which is indeed more like buying light bulbs or toilet paper. This contract with Virgin Galactic is such a contract where it won't even be NASA astronauts who are at the controls of the vehicle. That will be a first when it happens, however. I don't think even that is a settled question.
While they may be doing things that normally would take place on the KC-135 (aka the "Vomit Comet") that NASA has operated in the past, it mainly is being used to replace the sounding rocket research.... which often went to the same altitudes which SS2 is expected to be reaching.
The use of SS2 offers a number of advantages, most significant is that it is simply cheaper than sounding rockets, and furthermore the principle investigator (or somebody working for the investigator) can even ride along with the experiments being used. The acceleration stress loads are also less with SS2, and in terms of continuous zero-g time the duration is considerably longer than it is on something like the KC-135 or the replacement plane which NASA is using.
I agree that the Shuttle was a red-herring, as NASA does and has done other kinds of research on other platforms even when the Space Shuttle was running.
The one area this might have a little bit of influence over is to give some of the newer members of the NASA astronaut corps their "astronaut wings" a bit earlier than they would otherwise get them (at least the gold vs. silver wings) and give something for astronauts to actually work for instead of sitting in an office in Houston. I can certainly envision how a couple hundred thousand dollars being dumped on an astronaut candidate doing research on something like SS2 first for NASA management to figure out if they have the "right stuff" before sending them on a critical assignment like going to a near-Earth asteroid. For the price of a typical Shuttle mission (depending on how you measure that price), you could send hundreds of astronauts into real space situations with real scientific experiments. That sounds like a good thing to me.
I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
Most self-proclaimed "conservatives" in Congress usually insist that they want a socialized space program with a central government authority which has exclusive rights for access to space... private companies are neither needed nor wanted except in a support role where cost-plus contracts are handed out to the lobbyist who has schmoozed them with the best campaign contributions. Of course all of this is good because it helps out the local congressional district with billions of dollars of "stimulus money" to help keep local bureaucrats employed.
The "liberal Democrat" answer: privatized spaceflight from companies competing for fixed-price contracts open to competition and demonstrating that they are able to actually accomplish the task before they are awarded any money.
It was former senators William Proxmire and Walter Mondale who were most in favor of cancelling the "space program" in earlier eras. Guess which political party they belonged to, if you don't already know?
No, I don't get space politics either, just don't let your head get warped out on this issue.
I guess somebody else in this universe actually read the book by Carl Sagan besides me? That aspect of the book was never put into the movie, if some here don't get the reference. Dr. Arroway supposedly finds a message in the number pi itself as a sign of intelligence that created this universe. The message was a series of digits which formed a circle when printed out as ASCII art.
Because the computational resources must be tested anyway for some kind of test, often extreme calculations like this are used as a part of the "break-in" process for computing equipment. If used in that manner, you can confirm the quality of the equipment when you start comparing previous attempts at calculating pi and then perhaps contribute something for the greater good simply by running the tests.
If I recall correctly, one of the early tests that Steve Wozniak performed on the original Apple ][ computer was an assembly language calculation which ended up using all 64k RAM in that computer with just enough room left to display the results. He did it in part to test the equipment, and to say he could do it. Other computer developers/engineers have performed similar tests for many of the same reasons.
As a break-in/burn-in test, calculating pi sounds like a really neat exercise and certainly isn't wasting either time nor resources which would have to be used anyway.
Sadly, you know little about what it takes to go up on a Soyuz spacecraft. Those who go up in that spacecraft have to be able to take over any position on that spacecraft and be able to fly it not just to orbit but also through re-entry and landing. They have to know all of the emergency procedures and become qualified in every way like any other cosmonaut.
Don't get my started on the chimps and dogs. Those capsules are certainly not "crewed spaceflight" rated and it only shows even more your sheer ignorance as to what a professional astronaut even does. I dare you to say such a statement straight in the face of somebody like Buzz Aldrin. If you can live to see the next day. If you did that in Texas, they might even call that justifiable manslaughter.
The analogy doesn't quite fit, although comparing Space Adventures to an airline might. Certainly they don't build the rockets, but Space Adventures does deal with the "leasing" of the rocket complex and paying for the launch itself.
Airbus also is mostly "government owned" in terms of being a manufacturer, but I don't think companies like jetBlue who uses their airplanes can be considered a "government agency". A company like Space Adventures is mostly the same.
BTW, the spacecraft used for the Space Adventure flights were privately built (by RKK Energia), and privately financed by Space Adventures. No, it isn't like buying a ticket on Amtrak, unless you are contracting a whole train from Amtrack for a private run outside of their normal schedules. RKK Energia and Roscomos were making a profit off of those private flights, even if the need to "swap" Soyuz capsules on the ISS gave extra motivation for those flights. Certainly Dennis Tito didn't go up to the ISS out of the generosity of the Russian government as a goodwill gesture to western businessmen.
These "private" astronauts most certainly did pay their way on those trips. The fact that such "private astronauts" are willing to pay such amounts is proof that a market exists and is being exploited if you can build other vehicles to carry those same astronauts.
A private manned spacecraft into orbit? Not yet. SpaceX and Blue Origin sure are trying, as is XCor. Yes, I'll admit that Dennis Tito went into orbit riding a Soyuz spacecraft.... sold to him because Russia allowed capitalism to enter their country and permit this to happen, unlike in America. It still was a privately-financed orbital flight with people as the crew.
BTW, the Dragon spacecraft, which was originally developed with private funds and even with the COTS money still isn't a "national-level spacecraft" by any definition of the term certainly could have sent an astronaut to orbit and safely brought them back. The trick is to get the costs down so it can be done for a somewhat reasonable price.
Some of this is definitions here, but private orbital spaceflight is currently possible. You do need to currently train to become an astronaut/cosmonaut which takes at least six months of intense study and a physical exam that not everybody with that kind of money can pass, but assuming you are in good physical shape and have the money to place on taking a trip into orbit, it can be done. Space Adventures is willing to take your money and allow you to contact previous customers who are quite satisfied with the quality of service from that company. A list of previous customers is available upon request and also found on Wikipedia if you aren't sure of the accuracy.
Wake me when one of the "private" space outfits finally puts a human being in space
So you are suggesting that the efforts of Burt Rutan didn't qualify as "putting people into space? You also think that "Space Adventures" is a science fiction magazine?
While I'll admit it has taken longer for regular sub-orbital flights to happen since the Ansari X-Prize, private citizens have been able to get into space and even orbit. And of those who have been able to into space on their own dime (or that of a private employer), passenger spacecraft have been able to get above the Kármán line.
I agree, this particular rocket, the Qu8k, isn't especially amazing other than it has done something that few have done before on their own. 100k feet is a remarkable accomplishment, and the fact that these guys did that accomplishment on a rather limited budget is all that more amazing. Assuming they could put this into production, they have a viable sounding rocket if they care.... something which has an established market if they would care to get into that kind of business.
The interesting thing here is likely how cheap it was to build this rocket, at least compared to other vehicles of this size and performance.
The "free nationwide roaming" is relatively new.... in part because of these prepaid cell phones I was talking about.
I've seen the phone bills, and all three carriers you are talking about here (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint) have all done this in the past. That customers jumped ship when that happened is understandable that such "free roaming" plans came up eventually due to customer complaints. Just make sure your plan is one of them before you get into that situation.
Cell phones bills are very much "buyer beware". Know your plan before you get caught in that situation.
In USA I presume you can use your phone in Texas or New York and pay the same rates. Not so In RU, a change was made a few years ago with some sort of internal roaming.
I know this isn't true for all carriers, but I do know this isn't universal in America. One of the worst places for "roaming" that I've encountered is Las Vegas, where a cell phone charge that normally is about $3 or perhaps even a buck almost anywhere else can cost nearly a hundred dollars or more. A good friend of mine was shocked when after a trip to a trade convention in Las Vegas discovered nearly $1500 in cell phone charges for the couple of days that he spend in that city.
For myself, I used a pre-paid cellphone where I paid the fees up front before hand (about $40 is all I spent), so when I was in Las Vegas I didn't have to worry about those extra fees. My buddy who pretty much never left my side and used his cell phone for about the same amount of airtime but used a more traditional carrier and was screwed. No, I don't remember his carrier, but I've heard the same story from several other sources and multiple carriers.
Roaming charges are not consistent even in America, and it is buyer beware. This is particularly true if you have a "dual mode" cell phone that can work on frequencies in both America and Europe (those do exist).
I also tried to get a network connection when I was in Vegas, and the best deal I could come up with was to take my laptop to the public library. Almost anywhere else was insanely expensive, including the local Starbucks restaurant.
Still, I feel your pain here with what you are going through in Russia. That same buddy of mine lived in Moscow for a couple years and told me a little bit about what life was like in modern Russia... oddly because he served in the U.S. Army for a number of years and even was in the Soviet Union back in the bad old days for a much shorter period of time.
The problem is thinking somehow that there are some "special" classes of data and other "not so special" classes of data. Net neutrality isn't even really a political game, but rather an arbitrary designation that has no basis in reality.
Seriously think about it if you have any knowledge of network protocols: Does it really matter what you call the data as long as eventually the end users simply see the interpretation of that data? You can put a telephone conversation wrapped up into an MPEG movie requested via HTTP and the end users wouldn't know the difference as long as the software can pull that conversation out of the data stream. Turn it into a PNG image (or series of images) if you have to. TCP/IP ports numbers.... and those mean anything at all? Instead the firewalls pervert everything to squeeze through port 80 so the whole concept is meaningless in the first place.
This goes doubly so for China, as many of those who are skillful in the art of getting around the "Great Firewall of China" have used this concept of data encapsulation for a great many years. You can even do acts of Steganography to "hide in plain sight" data if you really care to in a multitude of manners.
All that attempts to put in classes of service actually accomplish is to raise the bar for an ever escalating arms race where all those who are attempting to control the internet will accomplish is to choke network bandwidth with needless protocols and extra layers of useless routing data that accomplishes nothing in the end. Data simply is data, and if you are being honest as a carrier as well as wanting to actually care about your customers, you would accept net neutrality as a basic business plan because economics would keep you from mucking up your service with all that extra useless data to encapsulate what customers really want to accomplish. Bandwidth goes down along with "quality of service".... not just for those who are playing games to get around the restrictions but also for the rest of us who have to use that same network for "proper" activities recognized by the network carriers. We all lose when this game is played, including the carriers themselves.
If only this argument could be explained to members of parliaments/congresses/legislatures as well as corporate boards of directors... but those folks like to be able to manipulate people for their own ends. Trying to explain liberty to folks like that is like trying to convince a brick wall that it can fly like a bird.
The real tipoff that this is fake is that they haven't been bought out by one of the big energy producers.
Contrary to most people who believe in conspiracy theories, there isn't a secret organization of oil producers who is buying up alternative energy concepts and burying the ideas. Indeed I would think there is at least a secretary if not a whole legal team for many of the "big oil" companies who does nothing but turn down requests from crackpots who claim to have some new technology that is going to save the world from "peak oil".
The reality is that before a "big oil" company or for that matter any group of investors put a dime into any project, they have to see that the thing works at all. So far, this guy hasn't proven that.
Sure, some of the rumors of oil companies buying technologies and squashing those ideas out of fear of competition might have some basis in fact, but this concept seems more as a crackpot than anything else.
The Polywell is a great concept but Bussard kept awful lab notes and that makes me wary. The scientific process is done the way it is for a good reason.
Bussard kept very good lab notes. The problem is that the Department of Defense kept him from publishing those notes on a regular basis and attempted to classify his research... at least demanded first rights of refusal over anything he discovered as they were the people paying for his research. The "embargo" on publishing anything they were doing for more than a decade meant that anybody studying the concept had to go over a decade of lab notes just to confirm what they were doing. Of course the "hurry up because our funding is cut anyway" last minute lab study of the WB-6 certainly had its problems, although the earlier prototypes did have more detailed analysis.
The problems with Polywell result mainly from a relatively small team who has studied the concept in detail and they haven't had the ability to collaborate with the greater scientific community over the results they have discovered in any meaningful manner. On top of that, the death of Robert Bussard has sort of thrown a monkey wrench into the operation on top of a further change-over in the management of the research project.
There are now some independent researchers who are finally starting to study the Polywell reactor concept, and luckily that is a project which costs mere millions to reproduce rather than the billions it takes to work on current Tokamak reactor designs. That the Polywell is a substantial refinement of the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor design and uses many of the same basic principles sort of helps in terms of who is working on the idea, and the Fusor concept certainly has been studied in detail. The idea that the Fusor is producing actual fusion isn't under dispute and the same can be said about the Polywell. The issue under dispute in the scientific community with the Polywell is if net power generation can happen and what will go on if the Polywell is built to larger scales of physical size as well as power usage.
The same can't be said about this E-cat device as even the idea that fusion is taking place hasn't been confirmed on any level, and the design seem to have more in common with the Pons-Fleischmann fusion apparatus than other approaches to fusion. That certainly doesn't instill confidence in the design.
"Black boxes" of the device have been given to independent researchers for analysis, where they are free to provide the inputs and measure the outputs of the device according to whatever criteria they choose. Non-disclosure agreements are signed that essentially says they won't open the boxes up or try to figure out what is inside, so it is a true "black box" experiment.
What measurements are attempted is to both calculate the temperature of the input as well as the output devices, and attempting to calculate the difference in energy being provided for the input as well as trying to calculate the energy being released by the device. There is a net energy gain in terms of the thermal energy being released compared to the energy input (primarily electricity). While not listed on this graph, the volume of the steam being released was also measured, as well as residual water being released as an output.
Somehow the device is producing more energy than it is consuming. Why it is doing that is certainly subject to questions and it could be anything from a coil inside the box with energy supplemented by some Li-ion batteries (or other energy storage device/source like gasoline) to perhaps the real claim that fusion is happening. My concern here is that the testing period is far too short as some enterprising soul could certainly build a "black box" with these performance characteristics if they cared, as the insides aren't independently verified. If this was operated for a longer period of time non-stop with similar kinds of net energy gain over the inputs, it might suggest that a hoax is much less likely.
Skepticism is certainly appropriate here, particularly given how this concept flies in the face of previous experiments which have attempted to do the same thing but failed.
He has negotiated a deal to build power plants using his device in the USA and a couple of other deals that are pending, although presumably those deals are contingent upon a working device and "deposits" haven't been put down on the devices as forward payment... so is claimed.
He is hoping to make some money off of this whole thing somehow, and it still looks a little like a scam with what I've seen. I'm somewhat hopeful that I'm wrong about this suspicion, but it does feel so much like so many other scams that I've seen in the past.
I saw Pons & Fleischmann scam the State of Utah out of a whole bunch of money due to their "invention" of cold fusion with a "Cold Fusion Institute" financed with state tax dollars. Heck, they were published in Nature with supposedly reproducible experimental evidence of their invention, and confirmation from the "sister school" of Brigham Young University backing up their claims. There is plenty of reason to doubt folks with even good intentions in matters like this. There are also many good reasons why cold fusion research is generally discredited along with anything that even whiffs of garage-based fusion experimentation.
Heinlein doesn't (fictionally) claim it is a prefect energy source, but rather a very, very good energy storage device. Essentially an excellent battery with incredible energy densities. Some of them are small enough to use in watches or calculators and others are huge when used for interstellar transport. There are physical limits to the amount of energy they can store, but it is huge.
The devices is called a "Shipstone". Yes, Heinlein also speculated about the legal environment (a common theme of his) for inventors and for this device went through all of the legal hassles inventors with patents went through including a government inquiry demanding that the company reveal the secret on how the devices are made. They simply pack up and move elsewhere, destroying the manufacturing plant in the process. In that instance, Heinlein writes that even coercion isn't enough to spill the beans on the invention, where the company makes the devices for several centuries in Heinlein's universes with a near perfect monopoly over the device. The reverse-engineering problems happened because trying to dismantle the device once it had a charge of almost any amount resulted in it becoming a bomb.
Another "perfect energy" system is discussed in Heinlein's novels, however, in the form of solar energy panels that are more efficient than the Silicon photo-electric cells that we currently use today. The inventors were so paranoid about the "big energy" companies that they employed the opposite tactic to get the device built, where they published the full details of the device in the form of a press release including detailed instructions on how to manufacture the device. They sent the press release to nearly every newspaper in the country, and disclaimed any patent on the device.... essentially placing the invention into the public domain. These were the solar panels used to power the "rolling roads" used in later novels, where the inventors were mentioned in several novels by Heinline.... living about the same time as D. Delos Harriman and Maureen Johnson in Heinlein's future history.
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The original grandparent was talking about SpaceX, who has indeed been able to get to orbital velocities and furthermore even been able to "recover" a vehicle through re-entry.
Yes, I'm completely aware that it is 25x the energy, but that is suggesting it is impossible to get up to to higher speeds and larger rockets to get that fast. The fact that rockets have done it sort of implies it is at least possible, and there is no reason it must be a government agency who can perform that action.
Virgin Galactic is planning on going higher and faster, and this way they can do that incrementally rather than having to build the grand mission all at once. If anything, that is the problem with government programs as they are trying to bite off the whole thing at once, like the Apollo missions ended up doing. You certainly don't need to build something the size of the Empire State Building for a mission to Mars.... unless you intend to launch the entire thing all at once in some multi-trillion dollar boondoggle that nobody would realistically be willing to pay for even if you have the resources of a major government.
I'll grudgingly acknowledge that NASA was heavily involved with "High Level Language" development, particular in terms of supporting financially some of the early FORTRAN compiler development efforts. Then again the field was so new that almost anything they did would be beneficial.
The problem here is in part that NASA has been resting on their laurels and not really the same agency they were in the 1960's. It would be wonderful if NASA was pushing the envelope and really advancing technology in some meaningful way and doing something that has never been tried before. Sadly, that doesn't happen at NASA any more but rather is happening in private industry.
NASA isn't working on reusable spacecraft like what SpaceX is doing with the Falcon 9. They bailed out on the DC-X project that Jeff Bezos picked up and is now being used by Blue Origin. NASA also dumped the Trans-Hab module on the ISS, and so Robert Bigelow picked that one up, refined the technology considerably, sent on his own dime (no government contract at all... at least not with any American government agency) sent two of those modules into space and tested them out. Burt Rutan has developed SpaceShip One and introduced the "Shuttlecock" re-entry system which makes that vehicle work in a way far safer than anything NASA has ever come up with. And I'm just starting to get on a roll here with many other people involved in space research who is breaking new ground... all of with without support from NASA or picking up the pieces of failed programs that NASA started then dropped the ball on to be forgotten like yesterday's bad news.
My point here is that NASA isn't really helping out, and by any objective measure it isn't where the real action is in terms of new advances in spaceflight technology. If I were a 20-something year old aerospace engineering graduate, I sure wouldn't want to work for NASA or any of its major subcontractors. Heck, I wouldn't want to be recruited by NASA to become an astronaut at the moment.... because private astronauts are going to be much more likely to actually get into space and do all sorts of interesting things once they get up there. Indeed the current NASA astronaut corps is jumping ship and moving to the private sector so fast that it is just the raw recruits at NASA and old has-beens who can't get jobs elsewhere.
You really don't need to worry about how much more efficient the private sector is right now, because that issue is a moot point. If you are young and ambitious, you don't work for NASA in the 21st Century.
It sounds like the Mr. Fusion might be coming to a store near you by 2015.... just like the movie said it would. Or perhaps not. The hover mod also keeps being talked about, but I think that is still a few more years away before it gets built. Isn't the future grand!
When DeLorean Motors was liquidated, the naming rights along with the spare parts inventory and a few unfinished chassis went to some group of investors in Texas where they continued to "hand-build" a few cars at a time based off of the original DMC-12 model design. They also purchased the production certificate, with some restrictions that didn't really matter due to the low production volume.
So the company, in one form or another, has been around awhile even if they haven't exactly been thumping their chest about what it is that they are doing except to existing owners (buy genuine DeLorean parts for your cars!) and to the hobby car/car mod market.
It isn't as if this is something new. Louis Chevrolet originally established the company that bears his name, did some fancy racing with cars, sold the company to General Motors, then blew his money where he finally ended up becoming a mechanic.... working on Chevrolet vehicles including on the engine he designed himself. Then again Chrysler isn't exactly under the same management team they were operated under two decades ago... with several incarnations of that company over the years.
What in the field of Software Engineering depends heavily on public funds financed from NASA? I'll grant how DARPA and the NSA have done some substantial contributions to the software industry (notably with the internet and cryptographic research from the respective agencies) but NASA?
About the only thing I can think of that was genuinely ground breaking by NASA was the development of time-share computer systems and real-time operating systems done in the 1960's. The Space Shuttle guidance computers developed what I'd call the gold standard of software reliability through an insane level of debugging and testing that no other software team could possibly afford, much less duplicate. There is also the development of deep space (beyond the Moon) communications protocols sometimes referred to as the "interplanetary internet" which may have some practical applications in the future for non-government work.
Besides those few items, what has NASA done for software engineering? Much of their development works with yesterday's technologies operating on computer systems that your grandparents likely would be more familiar with than you are. For crying out loud, they are still working with core memory systems in some of the still active spacecraft. The reason for that very archaic memory system is that it happens to be resistant to cosmic rays and radiation in general.... but I wouldn't call any of that effort to be "groundbreaking" or something that the computer industry "leans heavily upon" for upcoming technologies used in the industry or even for consumer electronics for that matter.
Engineering management..... there you might have a strong case to say that NASA shows what not to do in terms of managing a team of engineers. Perhaps something can be learned from their experience after all.
But they also haven't put a single person into, or back out of, orbit.
But they have put more than a few spacecraft into orbit, and brought one of them back in one piece.
It was argued that with the last flight all they would have needed to do is to put somebody in some SCUBA gear with a skin suit and a bean bag and they would have had a great ride. I grant it was a bit of a risk and there certainly could be some improved accommodations including a launch escape system that would be very useful, but the basic vehicle is already built by SpaceX.
As for Virgin Galactic..... they have put people into space and brought them back (or at least Scaled Composites has). That it wasn't to orbit.... is that all you are complaining about? What are you expecting for $4.5 million spread out over multiple flights?
Considering that Richard Branson is going to be taking his family up on the inaugural (for regular commercial service) flight of his spacecraft, I think he has a vested interest in making sure the thing will work very well before NASA astronauts get on board. They aren't going into low-earth orbit, but merely re-creating the original Freedom 7 flight profile that Alan Shepard did back in 1961. They are going to get past the Kármán line, however, and certainly be in what will be on the fringe of the atmosphere of the Earth.
There will also be dozens, perhaps hundreds of flights into space by SS2 before this contract is to be done, so the reliability of this vehicle certainly is going to have a proven track record before anybody from NASA steps on board. Indeed that is where Richard Branson is going to be making his money, because he is going to have very regular service which will be operated more like an airline than a typical rocketry venture. A launch might be postponed a day or two, but not several months or years into the future because of "technical difficulties" once the service becomes regular. There is also going to be a whole fleet of these vehicles... all told there will likely be as much actual spaceflight experience by the Virgin Galactic astronauts as the NASA astronaut corps will have when this whole operations starts to happen.
The KC-135 was a plane that NASA themselves owned and the pilots flying the planes were on the NASA payroll. Zero-G Corporation has signed a contract with NASA to do some flights using Zero-G's airplanes that normally would have been done the original Vomit Comet, so I agree this isn't exactly new even if you consider that the company who they are contracting out has other business on the side besides NASA. The KC-135 plane was dedicated exclusively to NASA, and when Ron Howard wanted to film Apollo 13 on that vehicle, he had to go through NASA first to get their permission to use that airplane... even if they may have "privatized" some of the support services like the ULA contract to launch the Space Shuttle.
It wasn't like you could earlier put some money down with ULA to fly your own private Shuttle mission. That never was even remotely a possibility even though there were some people who were willing to pay the bill for such a flight. BTW, even the Shuttle used to be completely operated by NASA employees, where they were very much involved with building the vehicle with NASA-payroll engineers involved with the development of that vehicle as well as other aspects of NASA. NASA-payroll engineers were also involved with the development of the Constellation program and the SLS architecture, so it isn't quite like buying light bulbs or toilet paper for some of these issues.
NASA is moving away from that sort of completely in-house development and moving more toward simple fixed-price contracts with outside vendors, which is indeed more like buying light bulbs or toilet paper. This contract with Virgin Galactic is such a contract where it won't even be NASA astronauts who are at the controls of the vehicle. That will be a first when it happens, however. I don't think even that is a settled question.
While they may be doing things that normally would take place on the KC-135 (aka the "Vomit Comet") that NASA has operated in the past, it mainly is being used to replace the sounding rocket research.... which often went to the same altitudes which SS2 is expected to be reaching.
The use of SS2 offers a number of advantages, most significant is that it is simply cheaper than sounding rockets, and furthermore the principle investigator (or somebody working for the investigator) can even ride along with the experiments being used. The acceleration stress loads are also less with SS2, and in terms of continuous zero-g time the duration is considerably longer than it is on something like the KC-135 or the replacement plane which NASA is using.
I agree that the Shuttle was a red-herring, as NASA does and has done other kinds of research on other platforms even when the Space Shuttle was running.
The one area this might have a little bit of influence over is to give some of the newer members of the NASA astronaut corps their "astronaut wings" a bit earlier than they would otherwise get them (at least the gold vs. silver wings) and give something for astronauts to actually work for instead of sitting in an office in Houston. I can certainly envision how a couple hundred thousand dollars being dumped on an astronaut candidate doing research on something like SS2 first for NASA management to figure out if they have the "right stuff" before sending them on a critical assignment like going to a near-Earth asteroid. For the price of a typical Shuttle mission (depending on how you measure that price), you could send hundreds of astronauts into real space situations with real scientific experiments. That sounds like a good thing to me.
I'm waiting to hear from the fiscal conservatives who want to cancel the space program and asteroid-hunting programs because the Federal Government shouldn't be spending taxpayer money on such useless endeavors.
Most self-proclaimed "conservatives" in Congress usually insist that they want a socialized space program with a central government authority which has exclusive rights for access to space... private companies are neither needed nor wanted except in a support role where cost-plus contracts are handed out to the lobbyist who has schmoozed them with the best campaign contributions. Of course all of this is good because it helps out the local congressional district with billions of dollars of "stimulus money" to help keep local bureaucrats employed.
The "liberal Democrat" answer: privatized spaceflight from companies competing for fixed-price contracts open to competition and demonstrating that they are able to actually accomplish the task before they are awarded any money.
It was former senators William Proxmire and Walter Mondale who were most in favor of cancelling the "space program" in earlier eras. Guess which political party they belonged to, if you don't already know?
No, I don't get space politics either, just don't let your head get warped out on this issue.
I guess somebody else in this universe actually read the book by Carl Sagan besides me? That aspect of the book was never put into the movie, if some here don't get the reference. Dr. Arroway supposedly finds a message in the number pi itself as a sign of intelligence that created this universe. The message was a series of digits which formed a circle when printed out as ASCII art.
Because the computational resources must be tested anyway for some kind of test, often extreme calculations like this are used as a part of the "break-in" process for computing equipment. If used in that manner, you can confirm the quality of the equipment when you start comparing previous attempts at calculating pi and then perhaps contribute something for the greater good simply by running the tests.
If I recall correctly, one of the early tests that Steve Wozniak performed on the original Apple ][ computer was an assembly language calculation which ended up using all 64k RAM in that computer with just enough room left to display the results. He did it in part to test the equipment, and to say he could do it. Other computer developers/engineers have performed similar tests for many of the same reasons.
As a break-in/burn-in test, calculating pi sounds like a really neat exercise and certainly isn't wasting either time nor resources which would have to be used anyway.
Sadly, you know little about what it takes to go up on a Soyuz spacecraft. Those who go up in that spacecraft have to be able to take over any position on that spacecraft and be able to fly it not just to orbit but also through re-entry and landing. They have to know all of the emergency procedures and become qualified in every way like any other cosmonaut.
Don't get my started on the chimps and dogs. Those capsules are certainly not "crewed spaceflight" rated and it only shows even more your sheer ignorance as to what a professional astronaut even does. I dare you to say such a statement straight in the face of somebody like Buzz Aldrin. If you can live to see the next day. If you did that in Texas, they might even call that justifiable manslaughter.
The analogy doesn't quite fit, although comparing Space Adventures to an airline might. Certainly they don't build the rockets, but Space Adventures does deal with the "leasing" of the rocket complex and paying for the launch itself.
Airbus also is mostly "government owned" in terms of being a manufacturer, but I don't think companies like jetBlue who uses their airplanes can be considered a "government agency". A company like Space Adventures is mostly the same.
BTW, the spacecraft used for the Space Adventure flights were privately built (by RKK Energia), and privately financed by Space Adventures. No, it isn't like buying a ticket on Amtrak, unless you are contracting a whole train from Amtrack for a private run outside of their normal schedules. RKK Energia and Roscomos were making a profit off of those private flights, even if the need to "swap" Soyuz capsules on the ISS gave extra motivation for those flights. Certainly Dennis Tito didn't go up to the ISS out of the generosity of the Russian government as a goodwill gesture to western businessmen.
These "private" astronauts most certainly did pay their way on those trips. The fact that such "private astronauts" are willing to pay such amounts is proof that a market exists and is being exploited if you can build other vehicles to carry those same astronauts.
When has there been a private project which put a human into orbit? Did I miss a week's worth of headlines?
Yup, I think you did.
See: http://www.spaceadventures.com/
For future "private" spaceflights, see also: http://www.popularmechanics.com/science/space/rockets/elon-musk-and-spacex-are-launching-a-new-era-of-private-spaceflight
A private manned spacecraft into orbit? Not yet. SpaceX and Blue Origin sure are trying, as is XCor. Yes, I'll admit that Dennis Tito went into orbit riding a Soyuz spacecraft.... sold to him because Russia allowed capitalism to enter their country and permit this to happen, unlike in America. It still was a privately-financed orbital flight with people as the crew.
BTW, the Dragon spacecraft, which was originally developed with private funds and even with the COTS money still isn't a "national-level spacecraft" by any definition of the term certainly could have sent an astronaut to orbit and safely brought them back. The trick is to get the costs down so it can be done for a somewhat reasonable price.
Some of this is definitions here, but private orbital spaceflight is currently possible. You do need to currently train to become an astronaut/cosmonaut which takes at least six months of intense study and a physical exam that not everybody with that kind of money can pass, but assuming you are in good physical shape and have the money to place on taking a trip into orbit, it can be done. Space Adventures is willing to take your money and allow you to contact previous customers who are quite satisfied with the quality of service from that company. A list of previous customers is available upon request and also found on Wikipedia if you aren't sure of the accuracy.
Wake me when one of the "private" space outfits finally puts a human being in space
So you are suggesting that the efforts of Burt Rutan didn't qualify as "putting people into space? You also think that "Space Adventures" is a science fiction magazine?
While I'll admit it has taken longer for regular sub-orbital flights to happen since the Ansari X-Prize, private citizens have been able to get into space and even orbit. And of those who have been able to into space on their own dime (or that of a private employer), passenger spacecraft have been able to get above the Kármán line.
I agree, this particular rocket, the Qu8k, isn't especially amazing other than it has done something that few have done before on their own. 100k feet is a remarkable accomplishment, and the fact that these guys did that accomplishment on a rather limited budget is all that more amazing. Assuming they could put this into production, they have a viable sounding rocket if they care.... something which has an established market if they would care to get into that kind of business.
The interesting thing here is likely how cheap it was to build this rocket, at least compared to other vehicles of this size and performance.
The "free nationwide roaming" is relatively new.... in part because of these prepaid cell phones I was talking about.
I've seen the phone bills, and all three carriers you are talking about here (AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint) have all done this in the past. That customers jumped ship when that happened is understandable that such "free roaming" plans came up eventually due to customer complaints. Just make sure your plan is one of them before you get into that situation.
Cell phones bills are very much "buyer beware". Know your plan before you get caught in that situation.
In USA I presume you can use your phone in Texas or New York and pay the same rates. Not so In RU, a change was made a few years ago with some sort of internal roaming.
I know this isn't true for all carriers, but I do know this isn't universal in America. One of the worst places for "roaming" that I've encountered is Las Vegas, where a cell phone charge that normally is about $3 or perhaps even a buck almost anywhere else can cost nearly a hundred dollars or more. A good friend of mine was shocked when after a trip to a trade convention in Las Vegas discovered nearly $1500 in cell phone charges for the couple of days that he spend in that city.
For myself, I used a pre-paid cellphone where I paid the fees up front before hand (about $40 is all I spent), so when I was in Las Vegas I didn't have to worry about those extra fees. My buddy who pretty much never left my side and used his cell phone for about the same amount of airtime but used a more traditional carrier and was screwed. No, I don't remember his carrier, but I've heard the same story from several other sources and multiple carriers.
Roaming charges are not consistent even in America, and it is buyer beware. This is particularly true if you have a "dual mode" cell phone that can work on frequencies in both America and Europe (those do exist).
I also tried to get a network connection when I was in Vegas, and the best deal I could come up with was to take my laptop to the public library. Almost anywhere else was insanely expensive, including the local Starbucks restaurant.
Still, I feel your pain here with what you are going through in Russia. That same buddy of mine lived in Moscow for a couple years and told me a little bit about what life was like in modern Russia... oddly because he served in the U.S. Army for a number of years and even was in the Soviet Union back in the bad old days for a much shorter period of time.
The problem is thinking somehow that there are some "special" classes of data and other "not so special" classes of data. Net neutrality isn't even really a political game, but rather an arbitrary designation that has no basis in reality.
Seriously think about it if you have any knowledge of network protocols: Does it really matter what you call the data as long as eventually the end users simply see the interpretation of that data? You can put a telephone conversation wrapped up into an MPEG movie requested via HTTP and the end users wouldn't know the difference as long as the software can pull that conversation out of the data stream. Turn it into a PNG image (or series of images) if you have to. TCP/IP ports numbers.... and those mean anything at all? Instead the firewalls pervert everything to squeeze through port 80 so the whole concept is meaningless in the first place.
This goes doubly so for China, as many of those who are skillful in the art of getting around the "Great Firewall of China" have used this concept of data encapsulation for a great many years. You can even do acts of Steganography to "hide in plain sight" data if you really care to in a multitude of manners.
All that attempts to put in classes of service actually accomplish is to raise the bar for an ever escalating arms race where all those who are attempting to control the internet will accomplish is to choke network bandwidth with needless protocols and extra layers of useless routing data that accomplishes nothing in the end. Data simply is data, and if you are being honest as a carrier as well as wanting to actually care about your customers, you would accept net neutrality as a basic business plan because economics would keep you from mucking up your service with all that extra useless data to encapsulate what customers really want to accomplish. Bandwidth goes down along with "quality of service".... not just for those who are playing games to get around the restrictions but also for the rest of us who have to use that same network for "proper" activities recognized by the network carriers. We all lose when this game is played, including the carriers themselves.
If only this argument could be explained to members of parliaments/congresses/legislatures as well as corporate boards of directors... but those folks like to be able to manipulate people for their own ends. Trying to explain liberty to folks like that is like trying to convince a brick wall that it can fly like a bird.
The real tipoff that this is fake is that they haven't been bought out by one of the big energy producers.
Contrary to most people who believe in conspiracy theories, there isn't a secret organization of oil producers who is buying up alternative energy concepts and burying the ideas. Indeed I would think there is at least a secretary if not a whole legal team for many of the "big oil" companies who does nothing but turn down requests from crackpots who claim to have some new technology that is going to save the world from "peak oil".
The reality is that before a "big oil" company or for that matter any group of investors put a dime into any project, they have to see that the thing works at all. So far, this guy hasn't proven that.
Sure, some of the rumors of oil companies buying technologies and squashing those ideas out of fear of competition might have some basis in fact, but this concept seems more as a crackpot than anything else.
The Polywell is a great concept but Bussard kept awful lab notes and that makes me wary. The scientific process is done the way it is for a good reason.
Bussard kept very good lab notes. The problem is that the Department of Defense kept him from publishing those notes on a regular basis and attempted to classify his research... at least demanded first rights of refusal over anything he discovered as they were the people paying for his research. The "embargo" on publishing anything they were doing for more than a decade meant that anybody studying the concept had to go over a decade of lab notes just to confirm what they were doing. Of course the "hurry up because our funding is cut anyway" last minute lab study of the WB-6 certainly had its problems, although the earlier prototypes did have more detailed analysis.
The problems with Polywell result mainly from a relatively small team who has studied the concept in detail and they haven't had the ability to collaborate with the greater scientific community over the results they have discovered in any meaningful manner. On top of that, the death of Robert Bussard has sort of thrown a monkey wrench into the operation on top of a further change-over in the management of the research project.
There are now some independent researchers who are finally starting to study the Polywell reactor concept, and luckily that is a project which costs mere millions to reproduce rather than the billions it takes to work on current Tokamak reactor designs. That the Polywell is a substantial refinement of the Farnsworth-Hirsch Fusor design and uses many of the same basic principles sort of helps in terms of who is working on the idea, and the Fusor concept certainly has been studied in detail. The idea that the Fusor is producing actual fusion isn't under dispute and the same can be said about the Polywell. The issue under dispute in the scientific community with the Polywell is if net power generation can happen and what will go on if the Polywell is built to larger scales of physical size as well as power usage.
The same can't be said about this E-cat device as even the idea that fusion is taking place hasn't been confirmed on any level, and the design seem to have more in common with the Pons-Fleischmann fusion apparatus than other approaches to fusion. That certainly doesn't instill confidence in the design.
"Black boxes" of the device have been given to independent researchers for analysis, where they are free to provide the inputs and measure the outputs of the device according to whatever criteria they choose. Non-disclosure agreements are signed that essentially says they won't open the boxes up or try to figure out what is inside, so it is a true "black box" experiment.
What measurements are attempted is to both calculate the temperature of the input as well as the output devices, and attempting to calculate the difference in energy being provided for the input as well as trying to calculate the energy being released by the device. There is a net energy gain in terms of the thermal energy being released compared to the energy input (primarily electricity). While not listed on this graph, the volume of the steam being released was also measured, as well as residual water being released as an output.
Somehow the device is producing more energy than it is consuming. Why it is doing that is certainly subject to questions and it could be anything from a coil inside the box with energy supplemented by some Li-ion batteries (or other energy storage device/source like gasoline) to perhaps the real claim that fusion is happening. My concern here is that the testing period is far too short as some enterprising soul could certainly build a "black box" with these performance characteristics if they cared, as the insides aren't independently verified. If this was operated for a longer period of time non-stop with similar kinds of net energy gain over the inputs, it might suggest that a hoax is much less likely.
Skepticism is certainly appropriate here, particularly given how this concept flies in the face of previous experiments which have attempted to do the same thing but failed.
Rossi ... has never asked for money...
Yet.
He has negotiated a deal to build power plants using his device in the USA and a couple of other deals that are pending, although presumably those deals are contingent upon a working device and "deposits" haven't been put down on the devices as forward payment... so is claimed.
He is hoping to make some money off of this whole thing somehow, and it still looks a little like a scam with what I've seen. I'm somewhat hopeful that I'm wrong about this suspicion, but it does feel so much like so many other scams that I've seen in the past.
I saw Pons & Fleischmann scam the State of Utah out of a whole bunch of money due to their "invention" of cold fusion with a "Cold Fusion Institute" financed with state tax dollars. Heck, they were published in Nature with supposedly reproducible experimental evidence of their invention, and confirmation from the "sister school" of Brigham Young University backing up their claims. There is plenty of reason to doubt folks with even good intentions in matters like this. There are also many good reasons why cold fusion research is generally discredited along with anything that even whiffs of garage-based fusion experimentation.
Heinlein doesn't (fictionally) claim it is a prefect energy source, but rather a very, very good energy storage device. Essentially an excellent battery with incredible energy densities. Some of them are small enough to use in watches or calculators and others are huge when used for interstellar transport. There are physical limits to the amount of energy they can store, but it is huge.
The devices is called a "Shipstone". Yes, Heinlein also speculated about the legal environment (a common theme of his) for inventors and for this device went through all of the legal hassles inventors with patents went through including a government inquiry demanding that the company reveal the secret on how the devices are made. They simply pack up and move elsewhere, destroying the manufacturing plant in the process. In that instance, Heinlein writes that even coercion isn't enough to spill the beans on the invention, where the company makes the devices for several centuries in Heinlein's universes with a near perfect monopoly over the device. The reverse-engineering problems happened because trying to dismantle the device once it had a charge of almost any amount resulted in it becoming a bomb.
Another "perfect energy" system is discussed in Heinlein's novels, however, in the form of solar energy panels that are more efficient than the Silicon photo-electric cells that we currently use today. The inventors were so paranoid about the "big energy" companies that they employed the opposite tactic to get the device built, where they published the full details of the device in the form of a press release including detailed instructions on how to manufacture the device. They sent the press release to nearly every newspaper in the country, and disclaimed any patent on the device.... essentially placing the invention into the public domain. These were the solar panels used to power the "rolling roads" used in later novels, where the inventors were mentioned in several novels by Heinline.... living about the same time as D. Delos Harriman and Maureen Johnson in Heinlein's future history.