Spent fuel rods are not really a problem. They can be reprocessed, sent through breeder reactors, and if they are being efficiently used the half lives of the final by-products are on the order of mere weeks or months, not even years.
The way most nuclear power plants are designed at the moment is like operating an internal combustion engine with a lousy design.... sort of like the original Newcomen steam engine. The design works after a fashion, but the efficiency is lousy and the ideas could be considerably refined to do a much better job.
The one problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more political than technical. Any facility capable of safely disposing spent nuclear reactor fuel rods in this fashion is also easily capable of enriching nuclear isotopes to produce "bomb grade" fissile material. What is more, as you get the techniques down for reprocessing the fuel rods, it becomes even cheaper and easier to make the bombs. You can put some procedural safeguards to keep that from happening, but it would have to be a government which does not want bombs to be made at that facility which goes out of their way to ensure it won't happen. Essentially, it is purely a political question in terms of if we want the materials safely disposed in exchange for perhaps widespread availability of bomb-grade materials.
France has been doing this reprocessing for many years, and it has been done experimentally at the Idaho National Laboratory facilities for some time as well. If you dig around, there is even a really cool 60 Minutes news report which shows the details of this reprocessing.... which is about as "mainstream media" as you can get with stuff like this.
The whole theater with Yucca Mountain in Nevada is just for show to make 3rd world countries fear reactors so they won't try to build that reprocessing facility. For governments without a nuclear bomb, building these plants is a huge temptation. Then again, why do you think Iran is building one of these reprocessing plants right now?
For locals near the Cape, a launch is the sound of money being poured into the area. Yeah, I can see why the locals don't mind the launches and besides the marshes around the Cape are real pretty too.
In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record. The risk/benefit trade-off of launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere does not seem to be worth it, not when solar energy on the Moon is a readily available alternative.
I don't buy your first argument at all. Why would you have to launch the material on a rocket in the first place? Why does it even have to be launched from the Earth at all? There might be a need to launch some reactors to bootstrap industry on the Moon, but the materials for making these reactors could also be derived entirely from Lunar materials.
On top of that, the reactor and the fissile material don't have to be shipped together, and the fissile material can be put into storage containers which can survive a rocket explosion and have such safety protection that you really don't ever have to worry about its loss. Material sent up in that manner might even be recovered and sent on another attempt even if the rocket blew up completely in a situation like the Challenger disaster.
Also, solar energy, while abundant on the Moon, is not available for the roughly 14 "earth day" nights on the Moon. You might be able to get some photovoltaic cells to generate electricity from "earthshine" assuming you were at an area of the Moon which faced the Earth, but it would be a fair bit less than sunshine. There is a real role for this to play. No doubt that solar panels will still be used on the Moon for an additional power source, but you need a "baseline power" generator which can be de-coupled from the current daylight conditions.
The problems you encounter is that you would have to use something other than water for a moderator, so designs would by necessity be a little different. You also can't build a plant with the theory of using tons of concrete can act as a shield, as limestone-based concrete is not going to be cheap nor easy to get to the Moon. So instead, you use local materials which do essentially the same thing. This reactor is to be partially buried beneath the surface of the Moon (a bulldozer pushing material on top of the reactor to act as the radiation shield).
There are some differences in terms of the environment, so it is a real technical challenge. Still, the raw physics of the whole thing doesn't stop it from happening on the Moon or elsewhere, it just has to be built differently than you would here on the Earth.
While the concept is related, the reactor is going to offer much more power production per kilogram than an RTG and last longer as well in terms of useful production lifetime.
It should also be of note that every Apollo mission (except Apollo 11) to the Moon brought up RTGs to power some of the monitoring equipment left behind with the ALSEP experiments. Nuclear devices wouldn't even be something new on the Moon.
I knew of a couple of folks working with the Google Lunar X-Prize competition who had strongly considered trying to land devices near the Apollo landing sites explicitly to tap into these power modules and at the very least use them as sources for heat during a lunar night. I don't even know remotely what legal issues might be in play there, but I think they were talked out of the idea simply because those sites are now considered important for historical preservation.
My response to that comment would be to simply mine the Uranium on the Moon. There is plenty of that stuff up on the Moon, since according to current theories the Moon pretty much is the Earth anyway, or at least the same materials. There is no reason to suspect you can't find "yellowcake" or other similar concentrations of Uranium ore on the Moon.
These nuts simply don't care, they just hate humanity in general and just are trying to find an excuse to shut down technology.
Just wait when somehow a colony of microbes is found somewhere under the surface of the Moon. Then the eco-nuts will really go crazy and demand we shut down further Lunar exploration except for an exploration model like is being done in Antarctica.
Groups which complain about nuclear devices on rockets are purely modern Luddites in the most literal and complete sense. Courts should routinely dismiss them as the ignorant fools that they are, and the only serious threat they pose is as potential terrorists or that their ignorance may contaminate our children.
The wingnuts who complain about people spoiling the Moon are in my opinion perhaps even more dangerous because their argument is much more seductive to many people. The visual appearance of the Moon will most likely change over the next couple hundred years as people travel there, build homes, mine resources, and in general work to industrialize the Moon. Then again, these same wingnuts would rather that we return to be a society of hunter-gatherers and that a genocide of 99.9% of the world's population (but not them) is a desirable thing. They are folks who hate their own species.
I would rather that the Moon be industrialized with heavy industries so we could in theory stop some of that destructive industry here on the Earth. Besides, what environment are you going to damage on the Moon?
But won't a pile of enriched Uranium go "boom" in the night if too much of it is put together? (just kidding.... I know better about that too).
The problem is really ignorance of nuclear physics, coupled with a sanctification and consecration of THE HOLY WRIT that anything nuclear must be reserved for the exclusive province of just a few specialized priests (aka researchers) who have gone through a sacred refinement and ordination by the ONE TRUE LEADER (aka a series of national security clearance reviews) in order to be even allowed to gaze upon the sacred texts which permit you to even begin to comprehend all of that most terrible knowledge. Forget about experimentation, all of the knowledge we really need to know can be obtained through simulation with our trusty supercomputers.
I call that utter bullshit, where there is an irrational fear of anything nuclear. There are legitimate concerns about radioactive materials and it can become dangerous under certain conditions. The same can be said about water, dirt, molten steel, and a large number of other things in our environment. Far more people die of Dihydrogen Monoxide poisoning than die from excessive radiation, so should we ban that chemical from society too? I'd love to see an activist try.... seriously!
If you are worried about contamination from uranium dust, just don't live downwind from a coal-powered electric generating plant. That is by far and away a much more dangerous proposition in terms of radiation contamination alone (forget the "greenhouse gasses) than even being literally next door to a multi-gigawatt nuclear power plant.
BTW, getting back to the meat of the actual article rather than responding to obviously clueless people (not really trolls, they are just ignorant) one thing I like about this particular proposal is that it is a small scale nuclear power plant. I wish we has more plants like that here on the Earth, where literally every small town had their own municipal nuclear power plant generating perhaps a couple hundred kilowatts rather than having these major gigawatt plants. While there are economies of scale that I'll admit, the problem with big plants is the concentration of material where an accident is much harder to clean up. A much smaller plant like is suggested in this article could be cleaned up by just a small team or even entirely by robots and easily contained even if you had a Chernobyl or Fukushima situation, both of which represented lousy reactor designs in the first place. Current generation nuclear power plants simply can't have a melt-down due to raw physics being applied to the design.
Once you get down to a deep enough level and finally start getting redstone, it usually isn't (from my own experience) all that difficult to keep getting more. The trick is getting down to it in the first place and staying alive when you open a new underground chamber filled with critters or monster spawners if you are really challenged.
Yes, you can cheat too, in a huge variety of ways. There isn't even just one "cheat" as even that is customizable.
Elon could probably solve that problem by announcing that he's personally going to be the Dragon's first passenger, camp out as a guest at the ISS for a couple of months, and ride it home if it ends up being unneeded for a return trip. However, IMHO it would be reckless and irresponsible for Elon to do that.
Elon Musk has gone on record that he will unlikely be flying on the Dragon at any time prior to his retirement. The reasoning for that is he is both financing and managing the company of thousands of people, many of whom he considers friends and certainly associates with families that he has concern about. If he were to die doing something foolish like flying to space, he would feel responsible for what would happen after all that happened.
That said, Musk has suggested he wouldn't mind retiring to Mars someday. If he gets this company going the way I think he certainly could, that may end up being a real possibility unless he faces the issues that Robert Heinlein suggested that D. Delos Harriman faced in the fictional account of Harriman Industries: insurance attorneys and lawsuits by suppliers prevented him from going into space until his health failed so awfully that the FAA simply refused to grant permission for him to go into space at all. Considering that America has become more litigious since Heinlein wrote that story, it wouldn't surprise me this is a real issue for Musk.
There were also six NASA astronauts who died flying the T-38 aircraft while performing official duties on behalf of NASA, and IMHO should be counted with any list of deceased astronauts in the service of the United States. Furthermore, the three crews mentioned in the above vehicles totaled 17 people, which should matter as larger vehicles ought to be safer vehicles too.
While perhaps a bit morbid, there is a List of all flight and training deaths of astronauts on the wiki if you really want to get the full count of astronauts and cosmonauts who have died in the service of their respective countries.
The Dragon capsule is being designed with human spaceflight in mind. That said, the crewed version of the Dragon is still under development as the launch escape system is still being worked upon as well as a few additional flights are being requested to test the equipment before crews are using that spacecraft. On top of that, I don't believe that the Dragon has an independent capability of docking to an unmanned space station and requires at least somebody in the station to use the construction arm to position the Dragon for docking.
Orbital is also looking at upgrading their Cygnus spacecraft for making a crewed version as well, and Boeing is building their CST-100, so even here SpaceX isn't the only game in town. The problem with these other spacecraft is that they are even further behind in terms of development for crewed spaceflight than the Dragon is at the moment. A couple billion dollars might speed up their development, but it still will take some time. It won't be the end of the world as American astronauts flying on American hardware will happen again and relatively soon, but it isn't quite ready for prime time yet.
Look at the greenhouse-gas emissions from a shuttle launch sometime
... The shuttle's main propulsion is liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. Its exhaust product is water vapor.
Which is also a greenhouse gas. Still, by far and away the largest "carbon footprint" of most current rocket launches is the construction of the thing in the first place, from the mines that have to extract the minerals to make the body of the rocket to the petroleum used to create the rocket fuel (or at least power the electrical generating plants used to make the fuel). Not to mention the thousands of workers making these vehicles over the years and their driving to and from their place of employment every day.
Also, the Shuttle used Ammonium perchlorate with the SRBs, which produces a few more by products than just water vapor.
Still, I'd agree that a self-sustaining population of people living off of the Earth would be a good thing so far as an insurance policy, not to mention that people living in another environment often do come up with solutions to problems that are different if for no other reason than they encounter different kinds of problems. The richness of human society would be so much larger with people living on Mars, the Moon, and elsewhere if for no other reason than the ideas coming back to the Earth to solve problems here on the Earth in some very new ways. This can be technology or simply music and literature. All of that can make the lives of everybody better in ways that right now are literally incomprehensible because it currently isn't being done.
well the old shuttle was getting old and the newer spaceX stuff is now ready yet also Constellation was not going to be ready by 2011 any ways. If not for the Columbia disaster we may still be useing the shuttles to day.
Correction, the Constellation program wasn't really going to be ready until 2015 at the earliest, and the more realistic projection was that it wouldn't be ready until 2020. There was a wish that perhaps the Ares I might have been ready this year (2011) when it was originally proposed, but there were a number of engineering issues that came up in part because they had an extended number of sections in the solid rocket stack where vibrations from the rocket would make the vehicle unusable for any astronauts riding it. The solution was to increase the weight of the capsule and add some heavy duty shock absorbers to make the ride easier for somebody on the vehicle. This vibration issue also impacted any unmanned applications of the rocket as well.
The fate of the Shuttle was pretty much sealed when production of new orbiters was halted. The Endeavor was really a test article (as was Challenger) which was refurbished to bring it up to flight status. With the loss of the Challenger, the handwriting for the end of the Shuttle program should have been apparent to anybody and many of the envisioned applications of the Shuttle simply never happened. All that the loss of the Columbia did was to speed up the end and drive the point home that the loss of the Challenger wasn't a one time fluke. We got lucky we didn't lose another orbiter before the program was finally terminated.
Low-cost is relative, although for a typical cell tower the cost is about $50,000-$100,000 just for the raw hardware, sometimes a fair bit more. By offering a much cheaper alternative, it become easier to amortize the cost of the equipment for what may be seasonal use only (like in remote areas like the Burning Man gathering or some mountain resort) or perhaps for a 3rd world village where you may only reasonably expect a couple of thousand dollars per year of revenue from a whole village or even small city. A conventional cell tower simply is never going to be built in those areas simply because the money isn't there.
It is notable that the original article is explicitly using the OpenBTS software and hardware recommendations for their project. It is a good project to look through and something I'd love to experiment with myself in a couple of more remote areas that I know don't have cell phone coverage yet I know have on the order of hundreds of cell phone users who could legitimately be using this technology if it was available.
Correction: Once the FCC has issued a license to somebody and they are otherwise complying with the terms of that license by staying withing the frequency spectrum allocated and are being technically proficient (proper wattage and signal footprint), there is little the FCC can do to the license holder. It doesn't matter if they are a corporation or private individual.
Pirate radio stations are shut down because they cause interference with "legitimate" broadcasters and spectrum users. There is a legitimate public need being served here. Companies who hire a broadcast engineer who doesn't comply with the license or has broken equipment is also similarly dealt with by the FCC. Most commercial broadcasters or cell tower operators will bend over backwards to comply with such regulations on a technical level. It is the non-technical issues like call letter allocation, obscenity, or children's programming issues where the FCC has almost no teeth.
While this may seem a bit far fetched, there is a precedent for a small but determined group of people who I think will eventually be able to get some vehicles above the Kármán line and perhaps even eventually into orbital spaceflight. While not mentioned in the article, these groups have been able to do some impressive things.
The groups I'd compare to this effort include:
Armadillo Aerospace - a couple of Texans with big dreams and a comparatively small budget (compared to NASA)
Copenhagen Suborbitals - a bunch of crazy Danes who can't keep still. BTW, check out their submarine they built earlier... gives a whole new meaning to a ballistic missile submarine.
ARCA - The European continent holds more than a few nut groups. These are the Romanians who have really gone out on a limb to redefine what spaceflight even means.
Unreasonable Rocket - Just when you've seen it all, along comes a group who does even more with less. And these guys are from California.
My point here is that a small group with limited finances can put stuff together if they care, provided that they make the effort, experiment a whole bunch, and keep working at the issues. The nice thing about all of the above groups is that they've been around for a few years, seem to be pretty stable, and have all flown vehicles of various kinds to prove they are legitimate. These are not groups with pretty power point presentations, but rather folks that have more than a couple smoking craters from experiments gone bad as well as some amazing success stories too. I expect every one of these groups to be above the Kármán line within this next decade, and quite possibly one or two of them could achieve orbit in the next 20-40 years if they stay persistent with their business plans.
I certainly see nothing special about these groups, and it is entirely possible that a group in Uganda could join their ranks in their quest to build a cheap but quality rocket. There are some amazing resources to draw upon as well as a whole bunch of experience. Besides, Uganda doesn't have to deal with ITAR restrictions, so there may even be an advantage for them over some of their competitors.
That didn't happen with the previous Centennial Prize competitions, but when "big bucks" seem to be on the line that does tend to happen in Washington. Most of the previous Centennial Prizes are typically less than a million dollars, but it has been a very successful program thus far and I do believe it could be used for something this large. See also: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/centennial_challenges/index.html
The advantage here is that not only will we have more than one telescope if something like this is tried, but America will have a whole space telescope construction industry capable of both civilian and military applications. Since it is a competition, it would get done on time simply because of redundant efforts, and we can also be certain that it would not go further over budget because no additional money would ever be allocated.
Besides, just getting rid of bureaucratic overhead alone is more than enough to cut the actual cost of building this thing in half, on top of a group focused on trying to get this to work.
As you suggest, too many members of congress who love earmarks for their home district would get annoyed that they can't get the pork they feel is rightfully belongs to their constituents. As such, this competition concept would never happen. Members of congress would rather that the work for the JWST happen in their district and really don't care if it ever flies or gets used. That is precisely what is happening with the SLS rocket system.
While this thread is going off-topic from discussing the politics of space-based telescopes, self-duplication is a critical issue in terms of the fact that it is through this process that modern society exists. You had better believe that it is very helpful.
In a world where machines can't ultimately duplicate themselves (with trained technicians operating those machines), you simply would not be able to create new machines, and the entire concept of a machine would be "magic". At some fundamental level, you need to have tools which can make other tools like itself. That is the very basis for technology in the first place.
Why this whole thread is being modded down seems a bit odd to me, especially as the modding is not being made off-topic. I suppose I should try to dovetail the discussion back, with the idea that without self-replicating machines that neither the Hubble nor JWST would be possible.
The JWST is a nightmare in terms of the management of that project, where engineering changes alone due to a lack of vision about what exactly it was supposed to do in the first place are causing enormous grief and huge budgetary problems. There reaches a point where you simply have a pull the plug on a poorly run project.
I would argue that killing the JWST and instead taking the current design goals, sending it out to bid on a new project with new construction, would bring the project in at a cheaper price than simply trying to "salvage" what is left of this current project even if the mission itself was something worth keeping. If done under the right contracting model, you might even get it done sooner and at a much cheaper price.
Heck, it would be huge if NASA decided to make something like a Centennial Prize competition for this telescope: $3 billion for the first telescope, $2 billion for the second and third, and $1 billion split up among anybody left. As an extra incentive, all money awarded would be free of all federal taxes. Convince me there would be no takers for such a competition, where the prize money could only be awarded if the telescope got to space and met specific objective criteria such as being able to obtain data from specific stars and other known objects. For the same price as the JWST, we could have not just one but several telescopes.... even if we completely shut down the existing project and considered all of the money spent to date as water under the bridge.
Yes, I know that technology has improved and there are some changes in scientific objectives which are different than was the case when the Hubble was first built. But there are better ways to get this disaster of a project off the ground.
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Perhaps the TSA would be so worried about patting down grandmothers and toddlers that they wouldn't notice a suitcase full of explosives.
Spent fuel rods are not really a problem. They can be reprocessed, sent through breeder reactors, and if they are being efficiently used the half lives of the final by-products are on the order of mere weeks or months, not even years.
The way most nuclear power plants are designed at the moment is like operating an internal combustion engine with a lousy design.... sort of like the original Newcomen steam engine. The design works after a fashion, but the efficiency is lousy and the ideas could be considerably refined to do a much better job.
The one problem with breeder reactor designs and facilities reprocessing nuclear materials on the scale to get rid of these "spent fuel rods" is more political than technical. Any facility capable of safely disposing spent nuclear reactor fuel rods in this fashion is also easily capable of enriching nuclear isotopes to produce "bomb grade" fissile material. What is more, as you get the techniques down for reprocessing the fuel rods, it becomes even cheaper and easier to make the bombs. You can put some procedural safeguards to keep that from happening, but it would have to be a government which does not want bombs to be made at that facility which goes out of their way to ensure it won't happen. Essentially, it is purely a political question in terms of if we want the materials safely disposed in exchange for perhaps widespread availability of bomb-grade materials.
France has been doing this reprocessing for many years, and it has been done experimentally at the Idaho National Laboratory facilities for some time as well. If you dig around, there is even a really cool 60 Minutes news report which shows the details of this reprocessing.... which is about as "mainstream media" as you can get with stuff like this.
The whole theater with Yucca Mountain in Nevada is just for show to make 3rd world countries fear reactors so they won't try to build that reprocessing facility. For governments without a nuclear bomb, building these plants is a huge temptation. Then again, why do you think Iran is building one of these reprocessing plants right now?
For locals near the Cape, a launch is the sound of money being poured into the area. Yeah, I can see why the locals don't mind the launches and besides the marshes around the Cape are real pretty too.
In order to get a reactor to the moon you have to launch it on a rocket, and rockets do not have a really great safety record. The risk/benefit trade-off of launching nuclear fuel through our atmosphere does not seem to be worth it, not when solar energy on the Moon is a readily available alternative.
I don't buy your first argument at all. Why would you have to launch the material on a rocket in the first place? Why does it even have to be launched from the Earth at all? There might be a need to launch some reactors to bootstrap industry on the Moon, but the materials for making these reactors could also be derived entirely from Lunar materials.
On top of that, the reactor and the fissile material don't have to be shipped together, and the fissile material can be put into storage containers which can survive a rocket explosion and have such safety protection that you really don't ever have to worry about its loss. Material sent up in that manner might even be recovered and sent on another attempt even if the rocket blew up completely in a situation like the Challenger disaster.
Also, solar energy, while abundant on the Moon, is not available for the roughly 14 "earth day" nights on the Moon. You might be able to get some photovoltaic cells to generate electricity from "earthshine" assuming you were at an area of the Moon which faced the Earth, but it would be a fair bit less than sunshine. There is a real role for this to play. No doubt that solar panels will still be used on the Moon for an additional power source, but you need a "baseline power" generator which can be de-coupled from the current daylight conditions.
Why would it not work?
The problems you encounter is that you would have to use something other than water for a moderator, so designs would by necessity be a little different. You also can't build a plant with the theory of using tons of concrete can act as a shield, as limestone-based concrete is not going to be cheap nor easy to get to the Moon. So instead, you use local materials which do essentially the same thing. This reactor is to be partially buried beneath the surface of the Moon (a bulldozer pushing material on top of the reactor to act as the radiation shield).
There are some differences in terms of the environment, so it is a real technical challenge. Still, the raw physics of the whole thing doesn't stop it from happening on the Moon or elsewhere, it just has to be built differently than you would here on the Earth.
While the concept is related, the reactor is going to offer much more power production per kilogram than an RTG and last longer as well in terms of useful production lifetime.
It should also be of note that every Apollo mission (except Apollo 11) to the Moon brought up RTGs to power some of the monitoring equipment left behind with the ALSEP experiments. Nuclear devices wouldn't even be something new on the Moon.
I knew of a couple of folks working with the Google Lunar X-Prize competition who had strongly considered trying to land devices near the Apollo landing sites explicitly to tap into these power modules and at the very least use them as sources for heat during a lunar night. I don't even know remotely what legal issues might be in play there, but I think they were talked out of the idea simply because those sites are now considered important for historical preservation.
My response to that comment would be to simply mine the Uranium on the Moon. There is plenty of that stuff up on the Moon, since according to current theories the Moon pretty much is the Earth anyway, or at least the same materials. There is no reason to suspect you can't find "yellowcake" or other similar concentrations of Uranium ore on the Moon.
These nuts simply don't care, they just hate humanity in general and just are trying to find an excuse to shut down technology.
Just wait when somehow a colony of microbes is found somewhere under the surface of the Moon. Then the eco-nuts will really go crazy and demand we shut down further Lunar exploration except for an exploration model like is being done in Antarctica.
Groups which complain about nuclear devices on rockets are purely modern Luddites in the most literal and complete sense. Courts should routinely dismiss them as the ignorant fools that they are, and the only serious threat they pose is as potential terrorists or that their ignorance may contaminate our children.
The wingnuts who complain about people spoiling the Moon are in my opinion perhaps even more dangerous because their argument is much more seductive to many people. The visual appearance of the Moon will most likely change over the next couple hundred years as people travel there, build homes, mine resources, and in general work to industrialize the Moon. Then again, these same wingnuts would rather that we return to be a society of hunter-gatherers and that a genocide of 99.9% of the world's population (but not them) is a desirable thing. They are folks who hate their own species.
I would rather that the Moon be industrialized with heavy industries so we could in theory stop some of that destructive industry here on the Earth. Besides, what environment are you going to damage on the Moon?
But won't a pile of enriched Uranium go "boom" in the night if too much of it is put together? (just kidding.... I know better about that too).
The problem is really ignorance of nuclear physics, coupled with a sanctification and consecration of THE HOLY WRIT that anything nuclear must be reserved for the exclusive province of just a few specialized priests (aka researchers) who have gone through a sacred refinement and ordination by the ONE TRUE LEADER (aka a series of national security clearance reviews) in order to be even allowed to gaze upon the sacred texts which permit you to even begin to comprehend all of that most terrible knowledge. Forget about experimentation, all of the knowledge we really need to know can be obtained through simulation with our trusty supercomputers.
I call that utter bullshit, where there is an irrational fear of anything nuclear. There are legitimate concerns about radioactive materials and it can become dangerous under certain conditions. The same can be said about water, dirt, molten steel, and a large number of other things in our environment. Far more people die of Dihydrogen Monoxide poisoning than die from excessive radiation, so should we ban that chemical from society too? I'd love to see an activist try.... seriously!
If you are worried about contamination from uranium dust, just don't live downwind from a coal-powered electric generating plant. That is by far and away a much more dangerous proposition in terms of radiation contamination alone (forget the "greenhouse gasses) than even being literally next door to a multi-gigawatt nuclear power plant.
BTW, getting back to the meat of the actual article rather than responding to obviously clueless people (not really trolls, they are just ignorant) one thing I like about this particular proposal is that it is a small scale nuclear power plant. I wish we has more plants like that here on the Earth, where literally every small town had their own municipal nuclear power plant generating perhaps a couple hundred kilowatts rather than having these major gigawatt plants. While there are economies of scale that I'll admit, the problem with big plants is the concentration of material where an accident is much harder to clean up. A much smaller plant like is suggested in this article could be cleaned up by just a small team or even entirely by robots and easily contained even if you had a Chernobyl or Fukushima situation, both of which represented lousy reactor designs in the first place. Current generation nuclear power plants simply can't have a melt-down due to raw physics being applied to the design.
Once you get down to a deep enough level and finally start getting redstone, it usually isn't (from my own experience) all that difficult to keep getting more. The trick is getting down to it in the first place and staying alive when you open a new underground chamber filled with critters or monster spawners if you are really challenged.
Yes, you can cheat too, in a huge variety of ways. There isn't even just one "cheat" as even that is customizable.
Elon could probably solve that problem by announcing that he's personally going to be the Dragon's first passenger, camp out as a guest at the ISS for a couple of months, and ride it home if it ends up being unneeded for a return trip. However, IMHO it would be reckless and irresponsible for Elon to do that.
Elon Musk has gone on record that he will unlikely be flying on the Dragon at any time prior to his retirement. The reasoning for that is he is both financing and managing the company of thousands of people, many of whom he considers friends and certainly associates with families that he has concern about. If he were to die doing something foolish like flying to space, he would feel responsible for what would happen after all that happened.
That said, Musk has suggested he wouldn't mind retiring to Mars someday. If he gets this company going the way I think he certainly could, that may end up being a real possibility unless he faces the issues that Robert Heinlein suggested that D. Delos Harriman faced in the fictional account of Harriman Industries: insurance attorneys and lawsuits by suppliers prevented him from going into space until his health failed so awfully that the FAA simply refused to grant permission for him to go into space at all. Considering that America has become more litigious since Heinlein wrote that story, it wouldn't surprise me this is a real issue for Musk.
There were also six NASA astronauts who died flying the T-38 aircraft while performing official duties on behalf of NASA, and IMHO should be counted with any list of deceased astronauts in the service of the United States. Furthermore, the three crews mentioned in the above vehicles totaled 17 people, which should matter as larger vehicles ought to be safer vehicles too.
While perhaps a bit morbid, there is a List of all flight and training deaths of astronauts on the wiki if you really want to get the full count of astronauts and cosmonauts who have died in the service of their respective countries.
So not, SpaceX can not come to the rescue....
The Dragon capsule is being designed with human spaceflight in mind. That said, the crewed version of the Dragon is still under development as the launch escape system is still being worked upon as well as a few additional flights are being requested to test the equipment before crews are using that spacecraft. On top of that, I don't believe that the Dragon has an independent capability of docking to an unmanned space station and requires at least somebody in the station to use the construction arm to position the Dragon for docking.
Orbital is also looking at upgrading their Cygnus spacecraft for making a crewed version as well, and Boeing is building their CST-100, so even here SpaceX isn't the only game in town. The problem with these other spacecraft is that they are even further behind in terms of development for crewed spaceflight than the Dragon is at the moment. A couple billion dollars might speed up their development, but it still will take some time. It won't be the end of the world as American astronauts flying on American hardware will happen again and relatively soon, but it isn't quite ready for prime time yet.
Which is also a greenhouse gas. Still, by far and away the largest "carbon footprint" of most current rocket launches is the construction of the thing in the first place, from the mines that have to extract the minerals to make the body of the rocket to the petroleum used to create the rocket fuel (or at least power the electrical generating plants used to make the fuel). Not to mention the thousands of workers making these vehicles over the years and their driving to and from their place of employment every day.
Also, the Shuttle used Ammonium perchlorate with the SRBs, which produces a few more by products than just water vapor.
Still, I'd agree that a self-sustaining population of people living off of the Earth would be a good thing so far as an insurance policy, not to mention that people living in another environment often do come up with solutions to problems that are different if for no other reason than they encounter different kinds of problems. The richness of human society would be so much larger with people living on Mars, the Moon, and elsewhere if for no other reason than the ideas coming back to the Earth to solve problems here on the Earth in some very new ways. This can be technology or simply music and literature. All of that can make the lives of everybody better in ways that right now are literally incomprehensible because it currently isn't being done.
well the old shuttle was getting old and the newer spaceX stuff is now ready yet also Constellation was not going to be ready by 2011 any ways. If not for the Columbia disaster we may still be useing the shuttles to day.
Correction, the Constellation program wasn't really going to be ready until 2015 at the earliest, and the more realistic projection was that it wouldn't be ready until 2020. There was a wish that perhaps the Ares I might have been ready this year (2011) when it was originally proposed, but there were a number of engineering issues that came up in part because they had an extended number of sections in the solid rocket stack where vibrations from the rocket would make the vehicle unusable for any astronauts riding it. The solution was to increase the weight of the capsule and add some heavy duty shock absorbers to make the ride easier for somebody on the vehicle. This vibration issue also impacted any unmanned applications of the rocket as well.
The fate of the Shuttle was pretty much sealed when production of new orbiters was halted. The Endeavor was really a test article (as was Challenger) which was refurbished to bring it up to flight status. With the loss of the Challenger, the handwriting for the end of the Shuttle program should have been apparent to anybody and many of the envisioned applications of the Shuttle simply never happened. All that the loss of the Columbia did was to speed up the end and drive the point home that the loss of the Challenger wasn't a one time fluke. We got lucky we didn't lose another orbiter before the program was finally terminated.
OMG! WFT, RTFA PDQ!
Low-cost is relative, although for a typical cell tower the cost is about $50,000-$100,000 just for the raw hardware, sometimes a fair bit more. By offering a much cheaper alternative, it become easier to amortize the cost of the equipment for what may be seasonal use only (like in remote areas like the Burning Man gathering or some mountain resort) or perhaps for a 3rd world village where you may only reasonably expect a couple of thousand dollars per year of revenue from a whole village or even small city. A conventional cell tower simply is never going to be built in those areas simply because the money isn't there.
It is notable that the original article is explicitly using the OpenBTS software and hardware recommendations for their project. It is a good project to look through and something I'd love to experiment with myself in a couple of more remote areas that I know don't have cell phone coverage yet I know have on the order of hundreds of cell phone users who could legitimately be using this technology if it was available.
Correction: Once the FCC has issued a license to somebody and they are otherwise complying with the terms of that license by staying withing the frequency spectrum allocated and are being technically proficient (proper wattage and signal footprint), there is little the FCC can do to the license holder. It doesn't matter if they are a corporation or private individual.
Pirate radio stations are shut down because they cause interference with "legitimate" broadcasters and spectrum users. There is a legitimate public need being served here. Companies who hire a broadcast engineer who doesn't comply with the license or has broken equipment is also similarly dealt with by the FCC. Most commercial broadcasters or cell tower operators will bend over backwards to comply with such regulations on a technical level. It is the non-technical issues like call letter allocation, obscenity, or children's programming issues where the FCC has almost no teeth.
While this may seem a bit far fetched, there is a precedent for a small but determined group of people who I think will eventually be able to get some vehicles above the Kármán line and perhaps even eventually into orbital spaceflight. While not mentioned in the article, these groups have been able to do some impressive things.
The groups I'd compare to this effort include:
My point here is that a small group with limited finances can put stuff together if they care, provided that they make the effort, experiment a whole bunch, and keep working at the issues. The nice thing about all of the above groups is that they've been around for a few years, seem to be pretty stable, and have all flown vehicles of various kinds to prove they are legitimate. These are not groups with pretty power point presentations, but rather folks that have more than a couple smoking craters from experiments gone bad as well as some amazing success stories too. I expect every one of these groups to be above the Kármán line within this next decade, and quite possibly one or two of them could achieve orbit in the next 20-40 years if they stay persistent with their business plans.
I certainly see nothing special about these groups, and it is entirely possible that a group in Uganda could join their ranks in their quest to build a cheap but quality rocket. There are some amazing resources to draw upon as well as a whole bunch of experience. Besides, Uganda doesn't have to deal with ITAR restrictions, so there may even be an advantage for them over some of their competitors.
That didn't happen with the previous Centennial Prize competitions, but when "big bucks" seem to be on the line that does tend to happen in Washington. Most of the previous Centennial Prizes are typically less than a million dollars, but it has been a very successful program thus far and I do believe it could be used for something this large. See also: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/oct/early_stage_innovation/centennial_challenges/index.html
The advantage here is that not only will we have more than one telescope if something like this is tried, but America will have a whole space telescope construction industry capable of both civilian and military applications. Since it is a competition, it would get done on time simply because of redundant efforts, and we can also be certain that it would not go further over budget because no additional money would ever be allocated.
Besides, just getting rid of bureaucratic overhead alone is more than enough to cut the actual cost of building this thing in half, on top of a group focused on trying to get this to work.
As you suggest, too many members of congress who love earmarks for their home district would get annoyed that they can't get the pork they feel is rightfully belongs to their constituents. As such, this competition concept would never happen. Members of congress would rather that the work for the JWST happen in their district and really don't care if it ever flies or gets used. That is precisely what is happening with the SLS rocket system.
While this thread is going off-topic from discussing the politics of space-based telescopes, self-duplication is a critical issue in terms of the fact that it is through this process that modern society exists. You had better believe that it is very helpful.
In a world where machines can't ultimately duplicate themselves (with trained technicians operating those machines), you simply would not be able to create new machines, and the entire concept of a machine would be "magic". At some fundamental level, you need to have tools which can make other tools like itself. That is the very basis for technology in the first place.
Why this whole thread is being modded down seems a bit odd to me, especially as the modding is not being made off-topic. I suppose I should try to dovetail the discussion back, with the idea that without self-replicating machines that neither the Hubble nor JWST would be possible.
The JWST is a nightmare in terms of the management of that project, where engineering changes alone due to a lack of vision about what exactly it was supposed to do in the first place are causing enormous grief and huge budgetary problems. There reaches a point where you simply have a pull the plug on a poorly run project.
I would argue that killing the JWST and instead taking the current design goals, sending it out to bid on a new project with new construction, would bring the project in at a cheaper price than simply trying to "salvage" what is left of this current project even if the mission itself was something worth keeping. If done under the right contracting model, you might even get it done sooner and at a much cheaper price.
Heck, it would be huge if NASA decided to make something like a Centennial Prize competition for this telescope: $3 billion for the first telescope, $2 billion for the second and third, and $1 billion split up among anybody left. As an extra incentive, all money awarded would be free of all federal taxes. Convince me there would be no takers for such a competition, where the prize money could only be awarded if the telescope got to space and met specific objective criteria such as being able to obtain data from specific stars and other known objects. For the same price as the JWST, we could have not just one but several telescopes.... even if we completely shut down the existing project and considered all of the money spent to date as water under the bridge.
Yes, I know that technology has improved and there are some changes in scientific objectives which are different than was the case when the Hubble was first built. But there are better ways to get this disaster of a project off the ground.
Romney just wants to be the president of the council of the twelve sealing a couple in the celestial room while orbiting above Kobol.
Oh wait, Loren Green already beat him to that, didn't he?