You are putting words into my mouth, but I will note that the U.S. Constitution enumerates only a few very specific things over which the U.S. Congress has any authority over which it may act. Either that document has any meaning at all or it is a worthless scrap of paper which needs to be discarded with yesterday's trash. Most of that authority is spelled out in Article I, Section 8 although a few other things are found elsewhere in that document.
As to if members of Congress have exceeded that authority, I will be the first to admit that they have. It doesn't matter if nine grumpy old men in robes say it is legal or constitutional, they can and have been wrong.... or did you miss reading about the Dred Scott decision? Yeah, that was a stellar case of legal reasoning which was beneficial to our republic.
Just because members of congress are elected by the people doesn't give them the authority to do anything they please. There are rules and laws under which even members of congress must act, and the process to change the constitution is very clear. If Congress wants additional authority not granted in the constitution, they can and indeed have asked for this authority from the states through the amendment process to extend their authority.... if "we the people" were willing to give it to them. The ability to tax our incomes is one of those explicitly granted authorities which was extended by amendment. Good luck with changing the constitution to get that happen for trivial things, as it requires justifiably many more people in agreement to get something like that to happen. It isn't impossible as amendments have been ratified even recently like the 27th Amendment, but it takes a great consensus for that to happen.
BTW, I do consider the TVA to be patently unconstitutional, but that is besides the point. I can actually read the document in question and I do understand the language of the framers having read plenty of 18th and 19th century documents as well. The language we are using has changed a bit in the past couple of centuries, but not enough so that the words of this document are not understood. There are explicit limits in the scope of federal authority, and philosophically I think that is a pretty good thing too.
Too much control of our lives from just a few people is ultimately a bad thing, and that is precisely one of the objectives in setting up the American Republic that no single tyrant or even group of people in a tyrannical legislative body could ever have 100% control over our lives. If you want to live under the rule of a king or dictator, there are plenty of places in the world you can move to in order to have that privilege. I don't want a king or dictator, and think the government needs to stay out of our lives on almost every issue. There are a few basic things such as much of what is in the U.S. Constitution that I think is proper for a government, such as setting up an army, establishing a navy, building roads, and establishing a postal system. I'm not for a complete elimination of government, but that authority ought to be sparse and very limited.
I have nothing against government sponsored scientific inquiry, but you are advocating for far more than that. I just don't think the government ought to be in the business of building spaceships, and that it is foolish to try and build a new one when there are plenty of commercial options available to get the job done without having to build a competing design. Certainly the exploitation of space is not something ever envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, although they did envision that America would expand its borders and that new territory could be included that would be extended to private individuals to pursue their dreams. There certainly isn't a reason to think that territory would have to be limited to just the Earth. It was a successful pattern of development in terms of creating cities and farms as America grew we
And in case you haven't read the U.S. Constitution, the government is us.
And in case you haven't read the U.S. Constitution, developing space or even building transportation systems isn't even an enumerated power delegated to the United States Congress, essentially making all of those contracts with "big corporations" unconstitutional. Certainly building mines or doing anything in space other than simply gazing at it is unconstitutional.... other than perhaps setting up new American states in space on additional territory claimed by America.
Yeah, I've read the U.S. Constitution lately, have you?
I really wonder what would happen - I guess I just don't see how a private company is ever going to make money on this, space tourism will make a little off of a select rich few until the day that a major accident happens and people die - then the government will crack down on it.
The question is how would the government crack down on space tourism? Literally banning the ability for individuals to go into space on their own dime? How would they stop it, at least from somebody determined to go up? If not America, there are other countries (notably Denmark and Romania at the moment) who want to get into this game with several other countries willing to get involved too. Bahrain and Qatar are two other countries seriously thinking of getting set up as space ports as well. Is there going to be a coordinated and concentrated effort to block this in all countries simultaneously?
I think your fear here is completely unfounded, and that time has passed since the creation of the FAA-AST in terms of a "big government agency" swatting this down. We'll see when the first fatality happens with private manned commercial spaceflight (it will eventually happen, I'll admit that), but I don't think it would be anything different than what happened with Challenger, Columbia, or for that matter with any fatal aviation accident. A board of inquiry will certainly be called and a particular kind of spacecraft will have their flight worthiness certificate pulled until the cause of the accident is determined. I don't think it will shut down the entire industry.
BTW, Virgin Galactic has already sold more than 1000 tickets with their vehicles. I'd say that is more than a "few rich people".
I don't think you can legally build an aircraft past a certain size without the government (FAA) getting involved - I'll bet if I built a jet and went flying someone WOULD shoot me down as you suggest
I don't know what the formal size limits are for experimental aircraft, but I think the largest problem is that you can't use it for commercial service under an experimental permit.... which puts an economic limit on how large of an aircraft you can operate. I know John Travolta has his own Boeing 737 with an airstrip and hanger on his homestead, and there are several other people that I've heard about owning rather large aircraft. It isn't as off the wall as you are suggesting and I don't think somebody would shoot you down merely for flying a very large aircraft. The FAA and perhaps even the USAF may insist upon a flight plan and you sticking to it in a populated area or near "sensitive sites", but that is the case now even for commercial airliners or chartered air flights.
I grew up on the space coast of Florida watching Saturn V's and space shuttles launch, I worked out at CCAFS launching expendable rockets for 10 years, I sat in Burt Rutan's Space Ship 1 BEFORE it won the X-prize. I would dearly love for space travel to be successful but it is not a trivial venture and I will maintain that if it was going to make any money that we would have seen the privatization a LONG time ago.
There are a number of reasons why commercial spaceflight hasn't taken off until now, and in this case the government intervention is a huge issue. Perhaps the most significant was the Conestoga rocket lead by none other than Deke Slayton (part owner, part spokesman for the group putting it together) which was the first privately built spacecraft to reach space..... well before SpaceShip One. What killed this program as well as Jim Benson's private spaceflight efforts was a deliberate or coincidental (depending on who you talk to) pricing scheme by NASA on the Space Shuttle for about $2000/kg to orbit. It made their business case completely untenable and investors bailed on most of the private spaceflight projects for the next two decades as a result even though no more than about
I would love to see you point to a single private commercial spaceflight company who has declared bankruptcy and then proceeded to reorganize itself with the same investors to go out and do the same thing. That may have happened with other companies, but I have never, I repeat never have seen it happen with spaceflight.
Your absolutes here just astound me to no end.
I also don't think you understand capitalism at all, or for that matter economic theory either. Please convince me otherwise.
I will admit that some corporations are out of control and act as a government unto themselves. The solution there is to chop those companies down to size and increase competition. I am all for busting up big corporations and to encourage entrepreneurial development as much as possible. That is in fact happening with spaceflight, where people of relatively meager means are developing some amazing machines and are putting forth new ideas in the industry and creating brand new organizations, including for-profit corporations. Getting government into the picture only causes these small companies to go bankrupt while the government confiscates their markets and gives it to the big corporations you claim to hate.
Government more often than not increases barriers to trade and creates monopolies for the benefit of a few well connected people. Getting the government out of the game entirely leaves the opportunity for mere mortals to get into the game and be involved.
In addition, almost any government spending steals money at gunpoint from those least able to afford it and gives that money to some of the wealthiest and most politically connected "friends" of the government officials. This is especially true for spaceflight where the end result is that this money goes into the coffers of big companies that can perform the contracts that those companies have written for themselves anyway. Why else do you think most of the big aerospace companies all have a legal office located in Washington DC? If you hate these big companies, you really don't want to see more government spending on spaceflight. That is precisely why it has taken 40 years for us to return to the Moon. Waiting on the government is going to take us another century or more to get there.
With Niobium currently going for about $50/kg and Titanium going for about $3/kg, the scrap metal value of several metric tons of the stuff would be worth the effort to call up a scrap metal company to haul it out of your yard and potentially could buy you a new automobile. That is on top of the insurance claim you could file against the "billionaire" or whoever dropped the thing onto your house where you could also sue for damage.
If you live outside of the country where the launch happened, there is an international treaty where the "host country" promises to reimburse any damages done by spaceflight (presumably taking a pound or two of flesh from the company who did the screw-up). Every single spacefaring nation has signed this treaty, so unless the company is doing something like launching a rocket from Monaco or Tuvalu you are pretty much covered. Most of these small countries have also signed the treaty because they get to collect the potential damages if one of these big countries makes a mistake.
No, what was said is that it will be cheaper to be using private companies, who have a built-in incentive to minimize such failures and a reason to reduce cost. Governments don't care about cost because they can just confiscate it from somebody else (usually you and me) if they start to run out of money and therefore have no incentive at all to reduce costs. Ditto for quality, but quality of the product follows because it is mainly a way to reduce costs as low quality stuff is always more expensive in the long run.
That is why Tsiolkovskii went and developed the rocket equation, as it does require a bit more than Newton's second law of motion. Not much though and this is considered a "special case" of Newton's law.
Most of rocketry is pretty simply. The nozzle must be made out of some exotic materials to withstand the exhaust temperatures, of which alloys of Niobium are commonly used. If you are working with solid fuels, the trick is to get the fuel to burn evenly and in a controlled manner with the draw-back that you can't throttle the burn nor stop the burning once it starts. Liquid fueled vehicles have that added control (some rockets can go down to 50% max thrust or even lower), the ability to stop and restart the engines, and other advantages with the complication that you have to build a really good pump which pushes the fuel into the ignition chamber.
In other words, that "very complicated machine" is really just a glorified liquid pump that just has to be optimized to be light weight and not break down when moving a massive amount of material. It is the pumps which are most likely to fail and cause problems during the flight, particularly given the fact that they often use cryogenic fuels (liquid Hydrogen needs to be at 252.87C) and other extreme environments that require some special engineering. You also have to be able to steer the vehicle in some fashion, so that also requires a gimbal of some sort that can ever so slightly move the direction of the thrust compared to the current flight direction of the vehicle. The rest of the complexity is either monitoring this whole system or software to be able to direct the order of events to get it all to work in an efficient fashion.
Basically most rocket engineers are glorified hydrological engineers just building fancier pumps and storage devices. I'm not saying it is very easy, but the basic principles aren't really all that complicated. Automobiles are far more complicated and a desktop computer beats that complexity several times over.
Engineering is trying to design something so it doesn't blow up. The science is trying to figure out why it went boom in spite of your best efforts to the contrary.
Engineers use science to develop their products, but the quest for a better product doesn't necessarily require a perfect understanding of how everything works. Far too often engineers simply throw stuff together with a wink and a prayer and see if the thing works.
A careful engineer does try to understand underlying principles to whatever discipline they are working in and refine ideas in incremental and testable ways... often through experimentation as well when the problem domain isn't completely understood. A bleeding edge engineer will be designing stuff where the principles for which it works simply aren't known so it takes a good scientist to figure out what the heck an engineer has just created because it just smashed all previous operational theories into dust.
With a good engineer, science follows the engineering and not the other way around. It is a very rare theoretical scientist who comes up with a working theory before an engineer has developed the device to which the theory would explain.
Your story doesn't explain why it would be impossible for a company to make a profit from sending rockets into space, and in fact seems to assert that it is impossible to earn a profit from aviation.... a fact that seem to smack as a complete fabrication of fact. There are thousands of companies who make money either by directly selling aviation services, aircraft, or have a major portion of their business rely upon an air transportation network.
Yes, getting equipment certified by the FAA is a real PITA and you do need a team of lawyers to be able to navigate through the red tape that the FAA throws your way. I get that, and for those companies who are even involved in just the supply chain of the aviation industry need to do all kinds of crazy things to get some of their equipment into actual aircraft. My point, however, is that many people do it and are successful at it.
Ditto for companies going into space. As I pointed out, there is an already existing industry which is either based in space or services those who go into space that has billions of dollars in revenue just from this space-based activity. That isn't something minor but rather represents a significant portion of the American economy even today. I am not even talking about government-sponsored projects but stuff that is end-to-end from a private company to an individual consumer of the services provided and has assets which are currently in space which are completely owned by private individuals and making a profit off of that stuff. This isn't science fiction, unless you consider the pages of the Wall Street Journal to be science fiction. These are real companies making real money today.
In terms of protection from litigation, there was some immunity granted to companies who engage in commercial space tourism and fly private passengers into space, where liability is waived on the part of the participants. If you are silly enough to step into a spacecraft and fly into space, you should be completely aware that such activity is dangerous and can cause death or significant disabilities merely by taking the flight. Liability insurance for innocent bystanders, such as somebody on the ground near a launch site, is required by the FAA before a launch license is issued by these companies. This liability includes coverage of "the product" itself in terms of the launch vehicle plus any payload on that vehicle. Furthermore, liability for anything launched from American is covered by the U.S. government to any other country if something from America falls upon them by treaty (which can in turn be taken from the companies doing this stuff by the U.S. government... hence the insurance requirement by the FAA).
My gripe here is really one of freedom. If somebody wants to build a spacecraft on their own dime and fly it into space, that should be their right to do so. The government can and ought to regulate that activity so far as to make sure innocent people are protected and that some basic safety requirements are met by anybody engaging in this activity, but as long as you meet those safety requirements there should be nobody stopping you from going up into space. If you can make a profit doing with such an activity, that is a something you have to decide for yourself as it is your money to do so.
It sounds like you don't care to invest into any current commercial space launch companies. That is entirely your right to do so, and I certainly don't want to force you to make any such investment. Just don't force me into making any sort of investment either or point a gun at my head telling me I can't invest into any of these companies either. I'll stay out of your business as long as you stay out of mine. The assertion that I am flat out prohibited from ever going into space on my own dime if I care to make that effort is something that seems to violate very basic human rights and even goes against almost everything I see myself as being human at all.
I believe that in time private companies can be not just a lit
Since the original USS Enterprise model NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D) is currently in the Smithsonian, I highly doubt that Jeff Bezos got access to that model. While there were several models created for the subsequent starships, I'd have to guess either the -A or the -D models, both of which were blown up at various times in more than one episode and movie. Then again, I think every Starship Enterprise eventually met a gruesome end of some sort where it blew up or was whacked real good in a way that caused substantial death or damage to both ship and crew.
It makes for wonderful drama to blow things up, so I'd have to agree it doesn't really thin out the field.
Yeah, I'd rather so much to have a government running stuff that can land on your house where some government bureaucrat say "so sue me.... oh that's right, you can't!"
There is a concept called government immunity which pretty much allows the government to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants. While some may claim otherwise, private corporations and individuals don't have that option. If you are worried about a private company being a "proper steward" or even worried about them taking out your house from a rocket that isn't properly designed, they can and should be taken to task through the government to correct their ways and for you to get just compensation for any harm they may have done to you, your family, your property, or to others you care about.
I'd hardly call governments to be all that good in terms of stewardship of resources or the environment either, and indeed governments which aren't responsive to their citizens have an absolutely horrible track record when it comes to the environment. China and the former Soviet Union come to mind, where their environmental records are absolutely hideous, far worse than all of "big oil" combined. Instead of a selfish corporate agenda where they are worried about their profits, governments have instead political agendas that don't even care about profits at all as they can simply confiscate any wealthy they need and don't have to be held accountable for whatever it is that they do. When governments are held accountable for their actions (such as through open elections where government officials can be replaced by the citizens among other routes) they tend to act a little bit more responsibly, but even then government track records are just as bad if not worse than almost any corporation you can't point to in terms of environmental pollution, lax standards, and even sheer graft and corruption.
I suppose the argument here is that spaceflight is just a bad idea that shouldn't have ever been tried. Then again, mankind should never have left East Africa, or for that matter even crawling out of the ocean was a bad idea in the first place. Yeah, that makes logical sense.
I wouldn't even call it a disappointment. It's a learning opportunity.
If private corporations were developing new technology on the edge of the unknown then I would agree. Unfortunately this is not new tech, this science, technology, and research has been around and in use for decades. Delays and failures such as this are a serious blow to the idea that we are ready for space flight based on the for profit model.
Private corporations, ad hoc groups, and even social clubs (such as rocketry groups) can and are developing new technology on the edge of the unknown quite frequently. They simply aren't getting into the news either because they are deliberately trying to stay low-key precisely because of critics like this AC or because not all of those experiments really work out.
I hate to break the news, but "big corporations" rarely do anything at all to develop new technologies in any industry. It goes against their corporate charters to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity" if they are risking capital on an unknown concept that will result in a loss and a decrease in shareholder equity if they fail. That is a nearly guaranteed way to lose your job as a CEO if you do too much experimentation.
Most experimentation happens by "garage tinkers" or somebody who has a crazy idea and tries for something new. People like Jeff Bezos who have a little bit of money to spare and can afford to spend his own money on technological research because he has no shareholders to worry about can afford to experiment much more and try some much more outlandish ideas. I don't think it should be a shock to see that a whole bunch of the "dot com" millionaires and billionaires are now turning to other areas of society and seeing what else they might do, including getting into rocketry. That they are also making some progress with some of their designs speaks more about persistence than anything else.
That Jeff Bezos has no shareholders to report to also shows why this setback doesn't matter at all and isn't even really a serious blow.... other than the fact that the engineers have discovered something which doesn't work. If anything, that is a good sign as it shows they are trying new ideas and pushing the envelope precisely as this AC claims they are not doing. The problem is when you have an accident and then do the same thing over and over again thinking you will get different results when nothing fundamental has really changed. That was the problem with the Space Shuttle, as it was a proven bad design yet NASA tried to keep making it work. There still are people who insist it should work.
The idea that profits from space tourism will be the driving force behind manned space travel and exploration versus the quest for scientific knowledge with profitable discoveries as a fringe benefit seems to be a long way off in the future and today is a mere pipe dream for billionaires.
While I will admit that I hope profits from space tourism will work out in the long run, and that space tourism is definitely an income stream for rocket companies to tap into that hasn't really been exploited in the past, it is hardly the only potential source of income for companies working in space. Already proven income streams for spaceflight include telecommunications (satellite television broadcasts, telephones in very remote areas, long distance data links, etc.), reconnaissance (military and civilian applications like Google Maps), and general "remote sensing" of various kinds. So much of our modern economy depends on spaceflight at the moment that a formal office of space weather has been established just to provide forecasts of upcoming solar storms so backup satellites can be readied or other remedies can be put into place when those flare or other events in space happen.
This represents already billions of dollars in revenue every year, and is established markets. There is also little reason to th
The problem is the basic reality of the universe, the forces and energies involved, and the fact that we have only 92 or so elements to play with. This is isn't like software where you can just whip up a new language and CPU architecture depending on the problem.
There simply are no other materials and no other ways of going into space. Period.
This shows such utter ignorance of the topic that it astounds me. This is equivalent to saying there are only four elements that matter for food, therefore there are only so many ways you can make breakfast in the morning out of a combination of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen.
Actually, with spaceflight it is precisely like trying to come up with a new language and new CPU architecture, especially with what Blue Origin is doing. They are doing a clean sheet redesign of the DC-X architecture where they are trying new fuels and flight performance techniques as well as trying to get the vehicle to places the original DC-X project never got before.
I can think of literally hundreds of ideas on how to get into space that have not ever been tried or at least haven't been pushed to some point where the technology can be said to have been explored. There is indeed room for innovation in spaceflight where new ideas can be created which haven't been tried before.
In terms of why people and stuff should go into space, all I can say there is if it wasn't for spaceflight activities, you would likely be dead already. The current commercial activity in space-related industries already exceeds many billions of dollars per year, and I'm not talking government-funded projects in space either which is on top of that already existing commercial activity. Then again, I think those who criticize spaceflight are just a bunch of Luddites who hate their own species and wish for extinction.
"Look and feel" legal issues are a copyright infringement, not a trademark infringement.
The issues of "intellectual property" are very well spelled out in this article by Richard Stallman:
It is definitely worth a read and a philosophy I embrace completely to the point I rarely if ever even use the term "intellectual property" and have even corrected law makers when they've used the term in a general sense.
Furthermore, "look and feel" is so vague as to not really be enforceable except in a broad sense. That in this case the LCARS interface isn't even a competing product to anything being produced by CBS/Paramount, so there could be little claimed in terms of copyright infringement. Since nobody at the studio can possibly claim to have actually written any of the code itself, as a copyright claim this is so weak as to be laughable. Perhaps (and this is a real stretch) there might be a font copyright issue (also very weak), but I doubt CBS owns that copyright. So all they are trying to enforce is a bended curve on a black background with words on the curve through copyright? Yeah, I'd love to see a judge accept that as a valid concept worthy of copyright. It would be precedent setting if a theme could be copyrighted purely as a theme appearance and nothing more.
The trademark issues are much more substantial, where a trademark infringement can certainly be made, perhaps even with the LCARS theme... assuming that again the bended curve might be considered a trademark instead of merely a theme. The trick there is that I doubt CBS has even attempted to register the LCARS "theme" as a trademark (I could be mistaken), so they are merely stuck with term "tricorder" as the only possible infringement.
What CBS doesn't want to have happen here is to get this whole thing to backfire in a legal sense as well. I don't think this particular group making the tricorder app is claiming that it is official "Star Trek" merchandise implying some sort of branding and official sanctioning from CBS/Paramount Studios. It also demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of trademark law as well.... other than one teeny tiny part which is that trademarks must be enforced or lost.
Star Trek is clearly a brand, and it is important to note that proper trademarks are adjectives and not nouns. There are "Band-aid" bandages and "Coca-Cola" soft drinks which you can clearly identify what is the brand, and there is certainly a useful role for these trademarks to play in terms of identifying an organization which makes these products where the brand differentiates the quality of components, ingredients, distribution, and a great many other factors included in legitimate trade. Claiming to be producing a product under that brand when you are in fact not that organization damages trade because you can potentially tarnish the reputation of that brand and certainly are riding on the coattails of that organization pretending you are something you really aren't.
On the other hand, in the case of a tricorder, it is a noun, not an adjective. You can have an "Apple" tricorder, or an "HP" tricorder, where the branding is the organization making the device. In the case of the movies, you have a "Star Trek" tricorder, where everybody knows what you are talking about even though it is fiction. There is already a legal precedent for this in terms of several previous trademarks where this exact thing happened, and courts ruled that the trademarks were made "generic" because of their widespread usage in this manner. Two that come to mind where even trademark enforcement was even done are "aspirin" (formerly owned by Bayer AG) and "elevator" (formerly owned by the Otis Elevator Company). I can easily see this happening in the case of tricorder on the same grounds.
CBS/Paramount's claim to a trademark is further weakened by the fact that they really don't produce a device or product using the trademark. About the only exception I can think of are some licensed toys which are also branded with the name "Star Trek" or using the term "Star Trek tricorder", only pounding home the lack of an actual brand here. In the case of the elevator and aspirin, there were at least products being produced by the respective companies which were released to the general public and being used in general trade.... yet even there they lost the trademark usage.
This is a situation where the DMCA might even backfire on CBS as well, as the network service or app store which takes the product down must also respond to a counter-claim where the app must be restored on their service. Failure to restore the app in this case could strip them of the "common carrier" status and besides is a part of the same DMCA law. This backfires for CBS as it forces their hand to instead proceed to an actual lawsuit in order enforce the trademark.
The question here is if the developers of this app really want to stick their necks out on a copyright infringement lawsuit, where there is the possibility that they could lose? I think they have a pretty strong case here that the term "tricorder" is a generic term, but all they have is a strong legal defense and not a proven legal fact. It is something I would likely donate a few bucks to in terms of a legal defense fund, but I'm an outsider looking in with this situation. I really don't know what I would do in this situation if I were one of the developers.... although I certainly would have thought about this issue a long time ago that by using the term "tricorder" that this could have been a real possibility. The ethical thing here is to fight CBS, and in the long run it would help out many other people by establishing yet again a legal precedent which would be beneficial if the term "tricorder" was made generic.
Then again, CBS might just avoid the whole hassle if these guys are polite and seek a license of the term. That would save the expense of a lawsuit, even if it kicks the issue down the road for the next abuse of trademark law like this.
Who says that amino acids and proteins are the only possible form of life? I have to clean out digital lifeforms out of my computer at least once a month, sometimes much more often.
The issue that comes from stellar spectra is that you have different layers emitting/absorbing light, so you get different characteristics depending on the temperature of the star and the temperature of its surface. So you get both absorption and emission lines, sometimes of the same element and certainly a healthy mixture of a great many elements simultaneously.
A whole lot of information is packed into stellar spectra together with the ability to "repeat" the measurement literally billions of times for other stars that you have a pretty good body of data available for comparison as well... or to crunch through if you come up with a strong theory to explain what it is that you are seeing. One thing astronomy generally doesn't have a problem with is a lack of data for comparison or refining theories.
Horribly off-topic, but gravity acceleration on Earth is 9.8ish m/s2, isn't it?
Or has my memory of high school physics failed me?
It does vary a little bit from location to location due to altitude, physical geography, presence of mountains (or lack thereof), and other factors, but in general you are correct with that measurement.
BTW, that makes for a great high school physics assignment to calculate within 2-3 decimal points the local gravitational acceleration rate. Using a sports timer or photo-optical timing device, or even simple stop watch and dropping something off a roof can give you some pretty accurate values for calculation.
Or, our capacity to detect elements is not as sharp as we thought.
Considering that Helium (derived from the Greek name for the Sun, Helios) was first detected on the Sun and other stars well before it was found on the Earth, I would say that the ability to detect elements from an incandescent body to be rather good. We certainly know more about the minerals inside distant stars better than we do rocks underneath us more than a mile or two deep.
The detection of elements in stars is as close to an exact science as you can get, where the mathematical relationship for how that detection happens is also well defined. Or perhaps you have never taken any chemistry classes nor studied even in outline electron orbital patterns? Yes, that is related to the issue of stellar spectra and element detection.
If those basic principles are somehow being challenged, you can pretty much kiss almost all "hard" science goodbye as pure mythology.
All things come at a cost, and in the case of "gravitational assists" with either braking or acceleration, it comes at the cost of slightly increased or decreased rotational velocity of the respective planet being tapped. In the case of most spacecraft or even a small asteroid, that is trivial in comparison to the object doing that assisting.
The one thing you trade off by doing a maneuver like that is simply time, and a heck of a good computer which can time the trajectories of everything to make sure you slip into the proper position to do what it is that you want to accomplish. Supercomputers of the 1970's were just good enough to plot a course for the Voyager spacecraft, and they were using the largest planets of the Solar System to perform those maneuvers where you didn't need to be so precise with refinements along the way when new computers were built that could do a better job. Regardless, you still need to be able to make "fine" adjustments along the way in terms of at least setting the trajectory even if you don't significantly impact the velocity with those adjustments. Timing is everything.
In terms of what to do with an asteroid when you are done with it, assuming that you have something like an L-5 colony being built by the time such asteroid mining happens, it would make excellent radiation shielding to protect you from all kinds of stuff that happens to be in deep space. Since you don't have to ship it up into space (as it already is there), just having a big blob of tailings alone might have some value. Parking it at L-5 or L-4 would have plenty of uses without having to deal with trying to pull it out of the Earth's gravity well to send it to another planet.
If you owe enough money, you are the one who ends up owning the bank rather than the shareholders. For ordinary folks like your or I who owe money to a bank for an amount which compared to their overall assets is trivial, they can strong-arm you into paying that money back through a variety of means, including black listing you for non payment (credit agency reporting), extracting that money out of you at gunpoint (legal system/law enforcement), and taking stuff from you (foreclosures/repossession).
For China to do that to America, they can do black listing (sending around bad PR about America), taking money at gunpoint (involving acts of war), and taking stuff (occupation of territory). Only the "blacklisting" is something which can really be done with just a pen in either case.
The issue in both cases as an individual and as a sovereign nation is that if you owe a whole bunch of money, the ability to collect on those debts is entirely dependent upon the ability of the person holding the debt to pay it back. If for some really stupid reason a bank has put a huge portion of its assets into a particular debtor, there is the very real possibility that the debt can't be repaid, where perhaps even a "scorched earth" policy will prevent coercive means to regain that debt. If the amount actually owed is small, they simply write that debt off as bad and then charge more to everybody else in the form of interest. For a major debtor, that simply isn't an option at all because doing so will end up bankrupting the financial institution (unless you get government bail-outs).
Sometimes a debtor kind of sneaks up on you and grows their debt without the institution realizing that they've become a monster. Usually it is being done by some bank officer who doesn't give a damn about his company and is only interested in the huge commissions that come from landing such loans in the first place. For a bank to do this is really a bad thing, and even worse for a country.
On top of these other issues, China made another critical mistake in terms of the debt that America owes China: The debt is denominated in U.S. Dollars. America can simply pay that debt back by "printing" additional dollars (actually just typing in a fund transfer from the Federal Reserve) and the debt will be technically repaid in full. That the U.S. Dollar would be essentially worthless if such a trick was actually employed is irrelevant other than it might trigger an international incident where the only option would be for China to declare war upon the United States in an attempt to collect on that debt in other ways.
For national security reasons alone, I think it was a pretty damn foolish thing for the elected officials of America to have even permitted the borrowing of "national debt" from foreign governments and institutions, even to the point that I think a formal constitutional amendment ought to be passed prohibiting such practice. That foreign invasion is a real possibility on the mainland of the United States because of this policy just shows how stupid it can be. Since China is the manufacturing center for America now, they can't even take our factories as they already have them.
On the other hand, China may just write off their debt to America as bad debt and move on (with a thousand year grudge to eventually be settled). Don't count on it though. Warfare can also take on many forms, and not all of it so overt as people with guns, tanks, and jet fighters.
I wasn't aware that there was any sort of standard on the minimum diameter for an asteroid? There is the estimation of a size of an asteroid given its position and luminosity where a maximum and minimum size can be roughly calculated, but the size is very rough and can be off by several orders of magnitude unless you can find another object in orbit around it or it is a commonly watched large asteroid where the movement of other asteroids can be monitored and watched for gravitational perturbations (that only works for very large asteroids). Estimating the spectral classification of an asteroid can help to determine albedo which in turn can help refine the size estimate, but even that is really just a rough guess.
There certainly have been enough asteroids which have been discovered and techniques refined to the point that more than likely very small objects are currently being tracked and cataloged. As to if the IAU is rejecting these small bodies from asteroid catalogs purely because they are small and insignificant, that would be news to me. I'm not an expert on these matters, so you may surprise me on this issue.
I'd suggest you actually look up a real impact calculator before you start to spout off silly drivel and way overestimating the impact damage of a meteor like you are suggesting here.
A typical 10 meter asteroid wouldn't even make it to the ground, even if it was essentially a solid chunk of iron. If you were standing somewhere within 100 km of the impact site (or what would be the impact site) you would definitely hear the shock wave of the thing hitting the atmosphere, and if you were at ground zero you would hear a boom about as loud as a truck horn going off near you or roughly equivalent to heavy traffic noises.
There would most definitely be chunks of this meteor which make landfall, but the sonic boom and other factors would significantly absorb the energy of impact where these minor chunks would not do nearly so much damage. They might knock out a windshield of a car or perhaps even plow through the roof of a house (it has happened in the not too distant past), but it would be very localized danger that even a direct hit by a meteor would be survivable by somebody on the ground doing something like watching television at ground zero. It would be worth calling paramedics to help out the "victims".
I'm not saying that the danger from incoming rocks needs to be completely ignored, but at least speak from authority and realize that our atmosphere does a pretty good job of protecting us from "small stuff", where a 10m diameter rock is still one of the small ones. I've personally been a witness to a meteor which made a sonic boom as it went over my head, which I saw during one of the Perseids several years ago while on a camping trip in a remote part of eastern Nevada. Or perhaps that was something from Area 51 for those who are really paranoid, and if so that was one impressive weapon test as it exploded like some fireworks on the 4th of July.
I basically disagree with nearly every point you are making here. While a space elevator would certainly be useful, I consider it to be wishful thinking and at best a technology more than a millenia away, even assuming current technological development. A neat idea, but unrealistic to the point of absurdity that it should even be brought up in a thoughtful discussion other than talking about far-off futuristic technologies like fusion power and genuine artificial intelligence.
I also think that the retirement of the Space Shuttle was not only well deserved but perhaps even a couple of decades late. It should have been retired after the loss of Challenger, or certainly a legitimate and organized successor project with real political backing from both major parties should have happened to get something going.
Neither Constellation, Orion, nor the "replacement" of SLS ever was going to or ever will make it into space. They are all horrible programs and the worst of all possible worlds in terms of getting something done. At best they are all welfare programs for unemployed rocket engineers to keep people busy in key congressional districts until something serious comes along that has actual presidential backing along with something more urgent that can get genuine consensus in Congress. Our current president thought so little about space policy that took Obama four months after his inauguration to even name Bolden as administrator.... nearly one of the last top-level appointments for any federal agency in his administration. Genuinely, it was a complete afterthought except perhaps to earn electoral votes in Florida.
It would be nice to see more money spent toward actual space infrastructure for America and getting Americans into space. I admit that NASA's current budget is statistical noise in comparison to the rest of the U.S. federal budget. Still, if you are going to spend money on spaceflight, at least make it for something that goes into space rather than providing subsidies for a non-existent ICBM program that the Air Force may or may not need in a decade or so. That is the only real issue that has come up due to the cancellation of Constellation, as the Air Force may have to get Ammonium Perchlorate from China when the next generation of ICBMs get built. I think there are cheaper and easier ways to keep domestic production of that chemical sustained.
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You are putting words into my mouth, but I will note that the U.S. Constitution enumerates only a few very specific things over which the U.S. Congress has any authority over which it may act. Either that document has any meaning at all or it is a worthless scrap of paper which needs to be discarded with yesterday's trash. Most of that authority is spelled out in Article I, Section 8 although a few other things are found elsewhere in that document.
As to if members of Congress have exceeded that authority, I will be the first to admit that they have. It doesn't matter if nine grumpy old men in robes say it is legal or constitutional, they can and have been wrong.... or did you miss reading about the Dred Scott decision? Yeah, that was a stellar case of legal reasoning which was beneficial to our republic.
Just because members of congress are elected by the people doesn't give them the authority to do anything they please. There are rules and laws under which even members of congress must act, and the process to change the constitution is very clear. If Congress wants additional authority not granted in the constitution, they can and indeed have asked for this authority from the states through the amendment process to extend their authority.... if "we the people" were willing to give it to them. The ability to tax our incomes is one of those explicitly granted authorities which was extended by amendment. Good luck with changing the constitution to get that happen for trivial things, as it requires justifiably many more people in agreement to get something like that to happen. It isn't impossible as amendments have been ratified even recently like the 27th Amendment, but it takes a great consensus for that to happen.
BTW, I do consider the TVA to be patently unconstitutional, but that is besides the point. I can actually read the document in question and I do understand the language of the framers having read plenty of 18th and 19th century documents as well. The language we are using has changed a bit in the past couple of centuries, but not enough so that the words of this document are not understood. There are explicit limits in the scope of federal authority, and philosophically I think that is a pretty good thing too.
Too much control of our lives from just a few people is ultimately a bad thing, and that is precisely one of the objectives in setting up the American Republic that no single tyrant or even group of people in a tyrannical legislative body could ever have 100% control over our lives. If you want to live under the rule of a king or dictator, there are plenty of places in the world you can move to in order to have that privilege. I don't want a king or dictator, and think the government needs to stay out of our lives on almost every issue. There are a few basic things such as much of what is in the U.S. Constitution that I think is proper for a government, such as setting up an army, establishing a navy, building roads, and establishing a postal system. I'm not for a complete elimination of government, but that authority ought to be sparse and very limited.
I have nothing against government sponsored scientific inquiry, but you are advocating for far more than that. I just don't think the government ought to be in the business of building spaceships, and that it is foolish to try and build a new one when there are plenty of commercial options available to get the job done without having to build a competing design. Certainly the exploitation of space is not something ever envisioned by the framers of the U.S. Constitution, although they did envision that America would expand its borders and that new territory could be included that would be extended to private individuals to pursue their dreams. There certainly isn't a reason to think that territory would have to be limited to just the Earth. It was a successful pattern of development in terms of creating cities and farms as America grew we
And in case you haven't read the U.S. Constitution, the government is us.
And in case you haven't read the U.S. Constitution, developing space or even building transportation systems isn't even an enumerated power delegated to the United States Congress, essentially making all of those contracts with "big corporations" unconstitutional. Certainly building mines or doing anything in space other than simply gazing at it is unconstitutional.... other than perhaps setting up new American states in space on additional territory claimed by America.
Yeah, I've read the U.S. Constitution lately, have you?
I really wonder what would happen - I guess I just don't see how a private company is ever going to make money on this, space tourism will make a little off of a select rich few until the day that a major accident happens and people die - then the government will crack down on it.
The question is how would the government crack down on space tourism? Literally banning the ability for individuals to go into space on their own dime? How would they stop it, at least from somebody determined to go up? If not America, there are other countries (notably Denmark and Romania at the moment) who want to get into this game with several other countries willing to get involved too. Bahrain and Qatar are two other countries seriously thinking of getting set up as space ports as well. Is there going to be a coordinated and concentrated effort to block this in all countries simultaneously?
I think your fear here is completely unfounded, and that time has passed since the creation of the FAA-AST in terms of a "big government agency" swatting this down. We'll see when the first fatality happens with private manned commercial spaceflight (it will eventually happen, I'll admit that), but I don't think it would be anything different than what happened with Challenger, Columbia, or for that matter with any fatal aviation accident. A board of inquiry will certainly be called and a particular kind of spacecraft will have their flight worthiness certificate pulled until the cause of the accident is determined. I don't think it will shut down the entire industry.
BTW, Virgin Galactic has already sold more than 1000 tickets with their vehicles. I'd say that is more than a "few rich people".
I don't think you can legally build an aircraft past a certain size without the government (FAA) getting involved - I'll bet if I built a jet and went flying someone WOULD shoot me down as you suggest
I don't know what the formal size limits are for experimental aircraft, but I think the largest problem is that you can't use it for commercial service under an experimental permit.... which puts an economic limit on how large of an aircraft you can operate. I know John Travolta has his own Boeing 737 with an airstrip and hanger on his homestead, and there are several other people that I've heard about owning rather large aircraft. It isn't as off the wall as you are suggesting and I don't think somebody would shoot you down merely for flying a very large aircraft. The FAA and perhaps even the USAF may insist upon a flight plan and you sticking to it in a populated area or near "sensitive sites", but that is the case now even for commercial airliners or chartered air flights.
I grew up on the space coast of Florida watching Saturn V's and space shuttles launch, I worked out at CCAFS launching expendable rockets for 10 years, I sat in Burt Rutan's Space Ship 1 BEFORE it won the X-prize. I would dearly love for space travel to be successful but it is not a trivial venture and I will maintain that if it was going to make any money that we would have seen the privatization a LONG time ago.
There are a number of reasons why commercial spaceflight hasn't taken off until now, and in this case the government intervention is a huge issue. Perhaps the most significant was the Conestoga rocket lead by none other than Deke Slayton (part owner, part spokesman for the group putting it together) which was the first privately built spacecraft to reach space..... well before SpaceShip One. What killed this program as well as Jim Benson's private spaceflight efforts was a deliberate or coincidental (depending on who you talk to) pricing scheme by NASA on the Space Shuttle for about $2000/kg to orbit. It made their business case completely untenable and investors bailed on most of the private spaceflight projects for the next two decades as a result even though no more than about
I would love to see you point to a single private commercial spaceflight company who has declared bankruptcy and then proceeded to reorganize itself with the same investors to go out and do the same thing. That may have happened with other companies, but I have never, I repeat never have seen it happen with spaceflight.
Your absolutes here just astound me to no end.
I also don't think you understand capitalism at all, or for that matter economic theory either. Please convince me otherwise.
I will admit that some corporations are out of control and act as a government unto themselves. The solution there is to chop those companies down to size and increase competition. I am all for busting up big corporations and to encourage entrepreneurial development as much as possible. That is in fact happening with spaceflight, where people of relatively meager means are developing some amazing machines and are putting forth new ideas in the industry and creating brand new organizations, including for-profit corporations. Getting government into the picture only causes these small companies to go bankrupt while the government confiscates their markets and gives it to the big corporations you claim to hate.
Government more often than not increases barriers to trade and creates monopolies for the benefit of a few well connected people. Getting the government out of the game entirely leaves the opportunity for mere mortals to get into the game and be involved.
In addition, almost any government spending steals money at gunpoint from those least able to afford it and gives that money to some of the wealthiest and most politically connected "friends" of the government officials. This is especially true for spaceflight where the end result is that this money goes into the coffers of big companies that can perform the contracts that those companies have written for themselves anyway. Why else do you think most of the big aerospace companies all have a legal office located in Washington DC? If you hate these big companies, you really don't want to see more government spending on spaceflight. That is precisely why it has taken 40 years for us to return to the Moon. Waiting on the government is going to take us another century or more to get there.
With Niobium currently going for about $50/kg and Titanium going for about $3/kg, the scrap metal value of several metric tons of the stuff would be worth the effort to call up a scrap metal company to haul it out of your yard and potentially could buy you a new automobile. That is on top of the insurance claim you could file against the "billionaire" or whoever dropped the thing onto your house where you could also sue for damage.
If you live outside of the country where the launch happened, there is an international treaty where the "host country" promises to reimburse any damages done by spaceflight (presumably taking a pound or two of flesh from the company who did the screw-up). Every single spacefaring nation has signed this treaty, so unless the company is doing something like launching a rocket from Monaco or Tuvalu you are pretty much covered. Most of these small countries have also signed the treaty because they get to collect the potential damages if one of these big countries makes a mistake.
No, what was said is that it will be cheaper to be using private companies, who have a built-in incentive to minimize such failures and a reason to reduce cost. Governments don't care about cost because they can just confiscate it from somebody else (usually you and me) if they start to run out of money and therefore have no incentive at all to reduce costs. Ditto for quality, but quality of the product follows because it is mainly a way to reduce costs as low quality stuff is always more expensive in the long run.
P.S. There should be a minus sign on the temperature of the liquid Hydrogen
That is why Tsiolkovskii went and developed the rocket equation, as it does require a bit more than Newton's second law of motion. Not much though and this is considered a "special case" of Newton's law.
Most of rocketry is pretty simply. The nozzle must be made out of some exotic materials to withstand the exhaust temperatures, of which alloys of Niobium are commonly used. If you are working with solid fuels, the trick is to get the fuel to burn evenly and in a controlled manner with the draw-back that you can't throttle the burn nor stop the burning once it starts. Liquid fueled vehicles have that added control (some rockets can go down to 50% max thrust or even lower), the ability to stop and restart the engines, and other advantages with the complication that you have to build a really good pump which pushes the fuel into the ignition chamber.
In other words, that "very complicated machine" is really just a glorified liquid pump that just has to be optimized to be light weight and not break down when moving a massive amount of material. It is the pumps which are most likely to fail and cause problems during the flight, particularly given the fact that they often use cryogenic fuels (liquid Hydrogen needs to be at 252.87C) and other extreme environments that require some special engineering. You also have to be able to steer the vehicle in some fashion, so that also requires a gimbal of some sort that can ever so slightly move the direction of the thrust compared to the current flight direction of the vehicle. The rest of the complexity is either monitoring this whole system or software to be able to direct the order of events to get it all to work in an efficient fashion.
Basically most rocket engineers are glorified hydrological engineers just building fancier pumps and storage devices. I'm not saying it is very easy, but the basic principles aren't really all that complicated. Automobiles are far more complicated and a desktop computer beats that complexity several times over.
Engineering is trying to design something so it doesn't blow up. The science is trying to figure out why it went boom in spite of your best efforts to the contrary.
Engineers use science to develop their products, but the quest for a better product doesn't necessarily require a perfect understanding of how everything works. Far too often engineers simply throw stuff together with a wink and a prayer and see if the thing works.
A careful engineer does try to understand underlying principles to whatever discipline they are working in and refine ideas in incremental and testable ways... often through experimentation as well when the problem domain isn't completely understood. A bleeding edge engineer will be designing stuff where the principles for which it works simply aren't known so it takes a good scientist to figure out what the heck an engineer has just created because it just smashed all previous operational theories into dust.
With a good engineer, science follows the engineering and not the other way around. It is a very rare theoretical scientist who comes up with a working theory before an engineer has developed the device to which the theory would explain.
Your story doesn't explain why it would be impossible for a company to make a profit from sending rockets into space, and in fact seems to assert that it is impossible to earn a profit from aviation.... a fact that seem to smack as a complete fabrication of fact. There are thousands of companies who make money either by directly selling aviation services, aircraft, or have a major portion of their business rely upon an air transportation network.
Yes, getting equipment certified by the FAA is a real PITA and you do need a team of lawyers to be able to navigate through the red tape that the FAA throws your way. I get that, and for those companies who are even involved in just the supply chain of the aviation industry need to do all kinds of crazy things to get some of their equipment into actual aircraft. My point, however, is that many people do it and are successful at it.
Ditto for companies going into space. As I pointed out, there is an already existing industry which is either based in space or services those who go into space that has billions of dollars in revenue just from this space-based activity. That isn't something minor but rather represents a significant portion of the American economy even today. I am not even talking about government-sponsored projects but stuff that is end-to-end from a private company to an individual consumer of the services provided and has assets which are currently in space which are completely owned by private individuals and making a profit off of that stuff. This isn't science fiction, unless you consider the pages of the Wall Street Journal to be science fiction. These are real companies making real money today.
In terms of protection from litigation, there was some immunity granted to companies who engage in commercial space tourism and fly private passengers into space, where liability is waived on the part of the participants. If you are silly enough to step into a spacecraft and fly into space, you should be completely aware that such activity is dangerous and can cause death or significant disabilities merely by taking the flight. Liability insurance for innocent bystanders, such as somebody on the ground near a launch site, is required by the FAA before a launch license is issued by these companies. This liability includes coverage of "the product" itself in terms of the launch vehicle plus any payload on that vehicle. Furthermore, liability for anything launched from American is covered by the U.S. government to any other country if something from America falls upon them by treaty (which can in turn be taken from the companies doing this stuff by the U.S. government... hence the insurance requirement by the FAA).
My gripe here is really one of freedom. If somebody wants to build a spacecraft on their own dime and fly it into space, that should be their right to do so. The government can and ought to regulate that activity so far as to make sure innocent people are protected and that some basic safety requirements are met by anybody engaging in this activity, but as long as you meet those safety requirements there should be nobody stopping you from going up into space. If you can make a profit doing with such an activity, that is a something you have to decide for yourself as it is your money to do so.
It sounds like you don't care to invest into any current commercial space launch companies. That is entirely your right to do so, and I certainly don't want to force you to make any such investment. Just don't force me into making any sort of investment either or point a gun at my head telling me I can't invest into any of these companies either. I'll stay out of your business as long as you stay out of mine. The assertion that I am flat out prohibited from ever going into space on my own dime if I care to make that effort is something that seems to violate very basic human rights and even goes against almost everything I see myself as being human at all.
I believe that in time private companies can be not just a lit
Since the original USS Enterprise model NCC-1701 (no bloody A, B, C, or D) is currently in the Smithsonian, I highly doubt that Jeff Bezos got access to that model. While there were several models created for the subsequent starships, I'd have to guess either the -A or the -D models, both of which were blown up at various times in more than one episode and movie. Then again, I think every Starship Enterprise eventually met a gruesome end of some sort where it blew up or was whacked real good in a way that caused substantial death or damage to both ship and crew.
It makes for wonderful drama to blow things up, so I'd have to agree it doesn't really thin out the field.
Yeah, I'd rather so much to have a government running stuff that can land on your house where some government bureaucrat say "so sue me.... oh that's right, you can't!"
There is a concept called government immunity which pretty much allows the government to do whatever it wants to whomever it wants. While some may claim otherwise, private corporations and individuals don't have that option. If you are worried about a private company being a "proper steward" or even worried about them taking out your house from a rocket that isn't properly designed, they can and should be taken to task through the government to correct their ways and for you to get just compensation for any harm they may have done to you, your family, your property, or to others you care about.
I'd hardly call governments to be all that good in terms of stewardship of resources or the environment either, and indeed governments which aren't responsive to their citizens have an absolutely horrible track record when it comes to the environment. China and the former Soviet Union come to mind, where their environmental records are absolutely hideous, far worse than all of "big oil" combined. Instead of a selfish corporate agenda where they are worried about their profits, governments have instead political agendas that don't even care about profits at all as they can simply confiscate any wealthy they need and don't have to be held accountable for whatever it is that they do. When governments are held accountable for their actions (such as through open elections where government officials can be replaced by the citizens among other routes) they tend to act a little bit more responsibly, but even then government track records are just as bad if not worse than almost any corporation you can't point to in terms of environmental pollution, lax standards, and even sheer graft and corruption.
I suppose the argument here is that spaceflight is just a bad idea that shouldn't have ever been tried. Then again, mankind should never have left East Africa, or for that matter even crawling out of the ocean was a bad idea in the first place. Yeah, that makes logical sense.
If private corporations were developing new technology on the edge of the unknown then I would agree. Unfortunately this is not new tech, this science, technology, and research has been around and in use for decades. Delays and failures such as this are a serious blow to the idea that we are ready for space flight based on the for profit model.
Private corporations, ad hoc groups, and even social clubs (such as rocketry groups) can and are developing new technology on the edge of the unknown quite frequently. They simply aren't getting into the news either because they are deliberately trying to stay low-key precisely because of critics like this AC or because not all of those experiments really work out.
I hate to break the news, but "big corporations" rarely do anything at all to develop new technologies in any industry. It goes against their corporate charters to "maximize profits and increase shareholder equity" if they are risking capital on an unknown concept that will result in a loss and a decrease in shareholder equity if they fail. That is a nearly guaranteed way to lose your job as a CEO if you do too much experimentation.
Most experimentation happens by "garage tinkers" or somebody who has a crazy idea and tries for something new. People like Jeff Bezos who have a little bit of money to spare and can afford to spend his own money on technological research because he has no shareholders to worry about can afford to experiment much more and try some much more outlandish ideas. I don't think it should be a shock to see that a whole bunch of the "dot com" millionaires and billionaires are now turning to other areas of society and seeing what else they might do, including getting into rocketry. That they are also making some progress with some of their designs speaks more about persistence than anything else.
That Jeff Bezos has no shareholders to report to also shows why this setback doesn't matter at all and isn't even really a serious blow.... other than the fact that the engineers have discovered something which doesn't work. If anything, that is a good sign as it shows they are trying new ideas and pushing the envelope precisely as this AC claims they are not doing. The problem is when you have an accident and then do the same thing over and over again thinking you will get different results when nothing fundamental has really changed. That was the problem with the Space Shuttle, as it was a proven bad design yet NASA tried to keep making it work. There still are people who insist it should work.
The idea that profits from space tourism will be the driving force behind manned space travel and exploration versus the quest for scientific knowledge with profitable discoveries as a fringe benefit seems to be a long way off in the future and today is a mere pipe dream for billionaires.
While I will admit that I hope profits from space tourism will work out in the long run, and that space tourism is definitely an income stream for rocket companies to tap into that hasn't really been exploited in the past, it is hardly the only potential source of income for companies working in space. Already proven income streams for spaceflight include telecommunications (satellite television broadcasts, telephones in very remote areas, long distance data links, etc.), reconnaissance (military and civilian applications like Google Maps), and general "remote sensing" of various kinds. So much of our modern economy depends on spaceflight at the moment that a formal office of space weather has been established just to provide forecasts of upcoming solar storms so backup satellites can be readied or other remedies can be put into place when those flare or other events in space happen.
This represents already billions of dollars in revenue every year, and is established markets. There is also little reason to th
The problem is the basic reality of the universe, the forces and energies involved, and the fact that we have only 92 or so elements to play with. This is isn't like software where you can just whip up a new language and CPU architecture depending on the problem.
There simply are no other materials and no other ways of going into space. Period.
This shows such utter ignorance of the topic that it astounds me. This is equivalent to saying there are only four elements that matter for food, therefore there are only so many ways you can make breakfast in the morning out of a combination of Carbon, Hydrogen, Oxygen, and Nitrogen.
Actually, with spaceflight it is precisely like trying to come up with a new language and new CPU architecture, especially with what Blue Origin is doing. They are doing a clean sheet redesign of the DC-X architecture where they are trying new fuels and flight performance techniques as well as trying to get the vehicle to places the original DC-X project never got before.
I can think of literally hundreds of ideas on how to get into space that have not ever been tried or at least haven't been pushed to some point where the technology can be said to have been explored. There is indeed room for innovation in spaceflight where new ideas can be created which haven't been tried before.
In terms of why people and stuff should go into space, all I can say there is if it wasn't for spaceflight activities, you would likely be dead already. The current commercial activity in space-related industries already exceeds many billions of dollars per year, and I'm not talking government-funded projects in space either which is on top of that already existing commercial activity. Then again, I think those who criticize spaceflight are just a bunch of Luddites who hate their own species and wish for extinction.
"Look and feel" legal issues are a copyright infringement, not a trademark infringement.
The issues of "intellectual property" are very well spelled out in this article by Richard Stallman:
It is definitely worth a read and a philosophy I embrace completely to the point I rarely if ever even use the term "intellectual property" and have even corrected law makers when they've used the term in a general sense.
Furthermore, "look and feel" is so vague as to not really be enforceable except in a broad sense. That in this case the LCARS interface isn't even a competing product to anything being produced by CBS/Paramount, so there could be little claimed in terms of copyright infringement. Since nobody at the studio can possibly claim to have actually written any of the code itself, as a copyright claim this is so weak as to be laughable. Perhaps (and this is a real stretch) there might be a font copyright issue (also very weak), but I doubt CBS owns that copyright. So all they are trying to enforce is a bended curve on a black background with words on the curve through copyright? Yeah, I'd love to see a judge accept that as a valid concept worthy of copyright. It would be precedent setting if a theme could be copyrighted purely as a theme appearance and nothing more.
The trademark issues are much more substantial, where a trademark infringement can certainly be made, perhaps even with the LCARS theme... assuming that again the bended curve might be considered a trademark instead of merely a theme. The trick there is that I doubt CBS has even attempted to register the LCARS "theme" as a trademark (I could be mistaken), so they are merely stuck with term "tricorder" as the only possible infringement.
What CBS doesn't want to have happen here is to get this whole thing to backfire in a legal sense as well. I don't think this particular group making the tricorder app is claiming that it is official "Star Trek" merchandise implying some sort of branding and official sanctioning from CBS/Paramount Studios. It also demonstrates a profound lack of understanding of trademark law as well.... other than one teeny tiny part which is that trademarks must be enforced or lost.
Star Trek is clearly a brand, and it is important to note that proper trademarks are adjectives and not nouns. There are "Band-aid" bandages and "Coca-Cola" soft drinks which you can clearly identify what is the brand, and there is certainly a useful role for these trademarks to play in terms of identifying an organization which makes these products where the brand differentiates the quality of components, ingredients, distribution, and a great many other factors included in legitimate trade. Claiming to be producing a product under that brand when you are in fact not that organization damages trade because you can potentially tarnish the reputation of that brand and certainly are riding on the coattails of that organization pretending you are something you really aren't.
On the other hand, in the case of a tricorder, it is a noun, not an adjective. You can have an "Apple" tricorder, or an "HP" tricorder, where the branding is the organization making the device. In the case of the movies, you have a "Star Trek" tricorder, where everybody knows what you are talking about even though it is fiction. There is already a legal precedent for this in terms of several previous trademarks where this exact thing happened, and courts ruled that the trademarks were made "generic" because of their widespread usage in this manner. Two that come to mind where even trademark enforcement was even done are "aspirin" (formerly owned by Bayer AG) and "elevator" (formerly owned by the Otis Elevator Company). I can easily see this happening in the case of tricorder on the same grounds.
CBS/Paramount's claim to a trademark is further weakened by the fact that they really don't produce a device or product using the trademark. About the only exception I can think of are some licensed toys which are also branded with the name "Star Trek" or using the term "Star Trek tricorder", only pounding home the lack of an actual brand here. In the case of the elevator and aspirin, there were at least products being produced by the respective companies which were released to the general public and being used in general trade.... yet even there they lost the trademark usage.
This is a situation where the DMCA might even backfire on CBS as well, as the network service or app store which takes the product down must also respond to a counter-claim where the app must be restored on their service. Failure to restore the app in this case could strip them of the "common carrier" status and besides is a part of the same DMCA law. This backfires for CBS as it forces their hand to instead proceed to an actual lawsuit in order enforce the trademark.
The question here is if the developers of this app really want to stick their necks out on a copyright infringement lawsuit, where there is the possibility that they could lose? I think they have a pretty strong case here that the term "tricorder" is a generic term, but all they have is a strong legal defense and not a proven legal fact. It is something I would likely donate a few bucks to in terms of a legal defense fund, but I'm an outsider looking in with this situation. I really don't know what I would do in this situation if I were one of the developers.... although I certainly would have thought about this issue a long time ago that by using the term "tricorder" that this could have been a real possibility. The ethical thing here is to fight CBS, and in the long run it would help out many other people by establishing yet again a legal precedent which would be beneficial if the term "tricorder" was made generic.
Then again, CBS might just avoid the whole hassle if these guys are polite and seek a license of the term. That would save the expense of a lawsuit, even if it kicks the issue down the road for the next abuse of trademark law like this.
Who says that amino acids and proteins are the only possible form of life? I have to clean out digital lifeforms out of my computer at least once a month, sometimes much more often.
The issue that comes from stellar spectra is that you have different layers emitting/absorbing light, so you get different characteristics depending on the temperature of the star and the temperature of its surface. So you get both absorption and emission lines, sometimes of the same element and certainly a healthy mixture of a great many elements simultaneously.
A whole lot of information is packed into stellar spectra together with the ability to "repeat" the measurement literally billions of times for other stars that you have a pretty good body of data available for comparison as well... or to crunch through if you come up with a strong theory to explain what it is that you are seeing. One thing astronomy generally doesn't have a problem with is a lack of data for comparison or refining theories.
Horribly off-topic, but gravity acceleration on Earth is 9.8ish m/s2, isn't it?
Or has my memory of high school physics failed me?
It does vary a little bit from location to location due to altitude, physical geography, presence of mountains (or lack thereof), and other factors, but in general you are correct with that measurement.
BTW, that makes for a great high school physics assignment to calculate within 2-3 decimal points the local gravitational acceleration rate. Using a sports timer or photo-optical timing device, or even simple stop watch and dropping something off a roof can give you some pretty accurate values for calculation.
Or, our capacity to detect elements is not as sharp as we thought.
Considering that Helium (derived from the Greek name for the Sun, Helios) was first detected on the Sun and other stars well before it was found on the Earth, I would say that the ability to detect elements from an incandescent body to be rather good. We certainly know more about the minerals inside distant stars better than we do rocks underneath us more than a mile or two deep.
The detection of elements in stars is as close to an exact science as you can get, where the mathematical relationship for how that detection happens is also well defined. Or perhaps you have never taken any chemistry classes nor studied even in outline electron orbital patterns? Yes, that is related to the issue of stellar spectra and element detection.
If those basic principles are somehow being challenged, you can pretty much kiss almost all "hard" science goodbye as pure mythology.
All things come at a cost, and in the case of "gravitational assists" with either braking or acceleration, it comes at the cost of slightly increased or decreased rotational velocity of the respective planet being tapped. In the case of most spacecraft or even a small asteroid, that is trivial in comparison to the object doing that assisting.
The one thing you trade off by doing a maneuver like that is simply time, and a heck of a good computer which can time the trajectories of everything to make sure you slip into the proper position to do what it is that you want to accomplish. Supercomputers of the 1970's were just good enough to plot a course for the Voyager spacecraft, and they were using the largest planets of the Solar System to perform those maneuvers where you didn't need to be so precise with refinements along the way when new computers were built that could do a better job. Regardless, you still need to be able to make "fine" adjustments along the way in terms of at least setting the trajectory even if you don't significantly impact the velocity with those adjustments. Timing is everything.
In terms of what to do with an asteroid when you are done with it, assuming that you have something like an L-5 colony being built by the time such asteroid mining happens, it would make excellent radiation shielding to protect you from all kinds of stuff that happens to be in deep space. Since you don't have to ship it up into space (as it already is there), just having a big blob of tailings alone might have some value. Parking it at L-5 or L-4 would have plenty of uses without having to deal with trying to pull it out of the Earth's gravity well to send it to another planet.
There is a funny thing about debt:
If you owe enough money, you are the one who ends up owning the bank rather than the shareholders. For ordinary folks like your or I who owe money to a bank for an amount which compared to their overall assets is trivial, they can strong-arm you into paying that money back through a variety of means, including black listing you for non payment (credit agency reporting), extracting that money out of you at gunpoint (legal system/law enforcement), and taking stuff from you (foreclosures/repossession).
For China to do that to America, they can do black listing (sending around bad PR about America), taking money at gunpoint (involving acts of war), and taking stuff (occupation of territory). Only the "blacklisting" is something which can really be done with just a pen in either case.
The issue in both cases as an individual and as a sovereign nation is that if you owe a whole bunch of money, the ability to collect on those debts is entirely dependent upon the ability of the person holding the debt to pay it back. If for some really stupid reason a bank has put a huge portion of its assets into a particular debtor, there is the very real possibility that the debt can't be repaid, where perhaps even a "scorched earth" policy will prevent coercive means to regain that debt. If the amount actually owed is small, they simply write that debt off as bad and then charge more to everybody else in the form of interest. For a major debtor, that simply isn't an option at all because doing so will end up bankrupting the financial institution (unless you get government bail-outs).
Sometimes a debtor kind of sneaks up on you and grows their debt without the institution realizing that they've become a monster. Usually it is being done by some bank officer who doesn't give a damn about his company and is only interested in the huge commissions that come from landing such loans in the first place. For a bank to do this is really a bad thing, and even worse for a country.
On top of these other issues, China made another critical mistake in terms of the debt that America owes China: The debt is denominated in U.S. Dollars. America can simply pay that debt back by "printing" additional dollars (actually just typing in a fund transfer from the Federal Reserve) and the debt will be technically repaid in full. That the U.S. Dollar would be essentially worthless if such a trick was actually employed is irrelevant other than it might trigger an international incident where the only option would be for China to declare war upon the United States in an attempt to collect on that debt in other ways.
For national security reasons alone, I think it was a pretty damn foolish thing for the elected officials of America to have even permitted the borrowing of "national debt" from foreign governments and institutions, even to the point that I think a formal constitutional amendment ought to be passed prohibiting such practice. That foreign invasion is a real possibility on the mainland of the United States because of this policy just shows how stupid it can be. Since China is the manufacturing center for America now, they can't even take our factories as they already have them.
On the other hand, China may just write off their debt to America as bad debt and move on (with a thousand year grudge to eventually be settled). Don't count on it though. Warfare can also take on many forms, and not all of it so overt as people with guns, tanks, and jet fighters.
I wasn't aware that there was any sort of standard on the minimum diameter for an asteroid? There is the estimation of a size of an asteroid given its position and luminosity where a maximum and minimum size can be roughly calculated, but the size is very rough and can be off by several orders of magnitude unless you can find another object in orbit around it or it is a commonly watched large asteroid where the movement of other asteroids can be monitored and watched for gravitational perturbations (that only works for very large asteroids). Estimating the spectral classification of an asteroid can help to determine albedo which in turn can help refine the size estimate, but even that is really just a rough guess.
There certainly have been enough asteroids which have been discovered and techniques refined to the point that more than likely very small objects are currently being tracked and cataloged. As to if the IAU is rejecting these small bodies from asteroid catalogs purely because they are small and insignificant, that would be news to me. I'm not an expert on these matters, so you may surprise me on this issue.
I'd suggest you actually look up a real impact calculator before you start to spout off silly drivel and way overestimating the impact damage of a meteor like you are suggesting here.
A typical 10 meter asteroid wouldn't even make it to the ground, even if it was essentially a solid chunk of iron. If you were standing somewhere within 100 km of the impact site (or what would be the impact site) you would definitely hear the shock wave of the thing hitting the atmosphere, and if you were at ground zero you would hear a boom about as loud as a truck horn going off near you or roughly equivalent to heavy traffic noises.
There would most definitely be chunks of this meteor which make landfall, but the sonic boom and other factors would significantly absorb the energy of impact where these minor chunks would not do nearly so much damage. They might knock out a windshield of a car or perhaps even plow through the roof of a house (it has happened in the not too distant past), but it would be very localized danger that even a direct hit by a meteor would be survivable by somebody on the ground doing something like watching television at ground zero. It would be worth calling paramedics to help out the "victims".
I'm not saying that the danger from incoming rocks needs to be completely ignored, but at least speak from authority and realize that our atmosphere does a pretty good job of protecting us from "small stuff", where a 10m diameter rock is still one of the small ones. I've personally been a witness to a meteor which made a sonic boom as it went over my head, which I saw during one of the Perseids several years ago while on a camping trip in a remote part of eastern Nevada. Or perhaps that was something from Area 51 for those who are really paranoid, and if so that was one impressive weapon test as it exploded like some fireworks on the 4th of July.
I basically disagree with nearly every point you are making here. While a space elevator would certainly be useful, I consider it to be wishful thinking and at best a technology more than a millenia away, even assuming current technological development. A neat idea, but unrealistic to the point of absurdity that it should even be brought up in a thoughtful discussion other than talking about far-off futuristic technologies like fusion power and genuine artificial intelligence.
I also think that the retirement of the Space Shuttle was not only well deserved but perhaps even a couple of decades late. It should have been retired after the loss of Challenger, or certainly a legitimate and organized successor project with real political backing from both major parties should have happened to get something going.
Neither Constellation, Orion, nor the "replacement" of SLS ever was going to or ever will make it into space. They are all horrible programs and the worst of all possible worlds in terms of getting something done. At best they are all welfare programs for unemployed rocket engineers to keep people busy in key congressional districts until something serious comes along that has actual presidential backing along with something more urgent that can get genuine consensus in Congress. Our current president thought so little about space policy that took Obama four months after his inauguration to even name Bolden as administrator.... nearly one of the last top-level appointments for any federal agency in his administration. Genuinely, it was a complete afterthought except perhaps to earn electoral votes in Florida.
It would be nice to see more money spent toward actual space infrastructure for America and getting Americans into space. I admit that NASA's current budget is statistical noise in comparison to the rest of the U.S. federal budget. Still, if you are going to spend money on spaceflight, at least make it for something that goes into space rather than providing subsidies for a non-existent ICBM program that the Air Force may or may not need in a decade or so. That is the only real issue that has come up due to the cancellation of Constellation, as the Air Force may have to get Ammonium Perchlorate from China when the next generation of ICBMs get built. I think there are cheaper and easier ways to keep domestic production of that chemical sustained.