On the plus side, the DC-X concept has been refined by Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has dumped a fairly large chunk of his private fortune to see that the ideas as explored by the DC-X might have at least a follow-up. They have had enough success that they qualified for a share of the money in the 2nd round of the CCDEV commercial rocket contracts.
Jerry Pournelle has also commented a fair bit on the DC-X program as he was an advisor on the National Space Council at about the time the DC-X was cancelled. They very nearly got the thing working, but it suffered a sort of "not invented here" syndrome that is common unfortunately within NASA. Also, the Shuttle program simply gobbled up this and other similar projects over time.
The list of projects that NASA got almost there but then cancelled is astonishingly huge.
There were groups that tried. The X-37 is perhaps the most successful Shuttle-derived vehicle that has flown, but note that it is an Air Force project that has absolutely nothing to do with NASA other than it used the runway at KSC as a landing facility. The X-38 was a prototype that could have been developed into what was to be the Crew Return Vehicle but was cancelled. There is also the DIRECT launch system that actually was designed to re-use most of the parts and pieces of the Shuttle program with a minimal of fuss.
Of the various proposals that have come forward, I find it especially sad that DIRECT was never really followed. It sure would have been more likely to be flying now than the monster that was called the Constellation program, which really wasn't a shuttle-derived vehicle in spite of claims to the contrary. This also should show why the Shuttle wasn't redeveloped is because in spite of various attempts to try and get something going, the programs keep getting cut time after time after time again. The focus to get something done simply isn't at NASA any more.
Yeah, it is very sad that a "redsigned shuttle-type vehicle" has not been developed, in spite of some very valiant efforts and years of work on the part of a whole army of engineers on multiple occasions that tried over the past 30 years. In most cases, "metal was bent" to even see if the concepts would work so it wasn't just a paper study either.
It is already happening. If you mean when will there be astronauts sitting in a pilot seat of a commercial capsule capable of making it into orbit and staying in orbit for a sustainable period of time, that hasn't yet happened..... but that is also a much larger hurdle to be met.
Don't blame the commercial entities for not getting up there, as there are several who are trying and have made some remarkable progress. SpaceX of course has their Dragon capsule, where manned flights may happen as early as next year, perhaps the year after that. Boeing has their CST-100 capsule, Orbital has their Taurus II capsule, and there are numerous other companies who have other similar vehicles, some of which are intended for human orbital spaceflight. There are also about a dozen other companies working on sub-orbital vehicles as well that I won't bother going into right now.
If you really want a more extensive list, see it on the wiki:
It is not a tiny list, and most of the vehicles on this list have not been developed with taxpayer money. There has been some government money, but the big systems that define NASA are not on this list.
Is it a tall order to make a business case to go into space? Absolutely. The largest culprit in terms of why commercial spaceflight, at least in America and Europe, is at its current dismal state is largely due to the Space Shuttle. Congress and the NASA administrators in the early 1980s ripped the rug out of would-be commercial spaceflight companies by substantially underbidding commercial spaceflight projects and unrealistically claiming price points that the Shuttle was never able to deliver. As a result of these very public disasters in space policy, it has taken literally decades for gun-shy investors to be willing to get back into the game and put the big money necessary with a reasonable shot at being able to recover that money.
It wasn't until the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 that the legal recognition that this activity was even going to be considered an acceptable activity for Americans even happened. Note the date, and note that not only has it been less than a decade, before this became law there literally were no laws that really governed commercial spaceflight. You don't invest into a company where the government can arbitrarily shut you down because the "regulators" don't know what the heck you are doing.
It all takes time, and spouting off ignorant thinking like somebody should have been able to get something going by now is simply forgetting that this is, of course, rocket science too.
Projects that NASA has funded, both public and private, have resulted in pushing forward sciences. Like your cellphone, MP3 player, television, etc?
This must be one of the silliest posts I've ever seen here on Slashdot. You're seriously claiming that we wouldn't have cellphones and MP3 players if not for NASA?
I suppose that NASA was helping to finance the Diamond Rio, as obviously the astronauts who took a couple of them up in the Space Shuttle had them made just for the space program. Oh, and NASA lawyers defended them against the RIAA too, didn't they?
That makes as much sense as the "Space Pen" made by Fisher. At least they did make that for the astronauts, even if it was a marketing ploy and NASA never asked for it in the first place.
NASA did help jump-start the integrated circuit production industry as a result of buying nearly the entire world's production capacity of them when building the Apollo Guidance Computer back in the late 1960's. But that is pretty much the extent of what they had with the development of microelectronics. Other than that initial infusion of cash, NASA computers for spaceflight have actually been lagging significantly behind the rest of the computer industry. They certainly don't go for bleeding edge computers or push the technology much.
Yeah, NASA contractors may be getting piles of money and spinning their wheels, but they aren't getting anything accomplished. They might as well simply hire a bunch of people to bury the money in a hole, hire another group to dig it up and move it into an even bigger hole before they are done, then simply move it back before it is finally all spent.
If something useful was happening at NASA, if they actually were getting into space instead of cancelling program after program after program, if they were actually trying to make spaceflight affordable, if NASA was actually exploring space and doing something useful instead of repeating the same missions over again even when they finally get a hunk of metal flying, I might be much more supportive. Instead they are simply in a death spiral where the only thing that matters is whose congressional district or state gets the most of the ever dwindling amount of money they are receiving.
As if that mattered.
While the Democrats are hardly the most thrifty folks and the current round of supporting commercial spaceflight is mainly because previous administrations didn't go that route (Bush didn't do it, therefore it must by definition be good), I'm particularly galled at the Republican leadership in congress for essentially killing NASA.
Thankfully NASA isn't the only "space agency" in the federal government. Perhaps if a strong NASA administrator actually set some real goals and perhaps if the presidential administration actually backed him up, some good might come. But first of all they actually have to do something rather than throwing bad money after even worse money.
A shuttle launch costs a really, really large slice of a billion dollars.
The estimates about how much a shuttle launch costs are figures that I've seen vary by a whole order of magnitude and more.... with surprisingly all of those figures spot on too, depending on the methodology being used to pull those numbers out. You can quote recurring costs, add in processing costs, infrastructure costs, development costs (including the two "return to flight" efforts), and other ongoing costs that may or may not be included depending on who is being quoted.
All in all, the problem with the Shuttle is that a version 2.0 of the Space Shuttle was never made. All of the things you are complaining about here could have been solved with another iteration of the shuttle philosophy to cut out the things that obviously were never needed. When the Endeavor was built, they actually went back to a prototype test article rather than trying to build a new airframe. Essentially it is like a software developer who has bugs with their design to go back to the 0.5 version of the software and then re-fix a couple of bugs all over again to make it work right.
Yeah, I know that isn't completely fair, but there certainly was no attempt realistically to move the design forward. There is the X-37 (not even a NASA program sadly) and of course the cancelled CRV program that could have been something akin to a "Shuttle 2.0". Add in other projects like DC-X and a whole plethora of other cancelled NASA launcher programs which could have pushed the technology much further. Instead the prototype version is the only one that stuck.
How many people would be using computers today if the only operating system option they had available was PC-DOS 1.0?
Space is what I would describe of itself 'indirect research', in that the technology that you and I benefit from was a result of something done in space research, even if that wasn't the initial intent.
If that's the only argument you can come up with for funding NASA then you're screwed, because you could have done those things far more cheaply by, you know, funding research into them and forgetting the whole space thing.
Such research would never have happened because the design problems that resulted in the development of those concepts would never have been encountered. That is the whole point to space exploration, where completely new challenges will happen that have never been experienced before. Somebody who is in that environment or having to work with that environment will then be forced by necessity to deal with those situations. Only afterward can somebody say "oh, what if I did the same thing over here too!" That is where the real benefits of pushing frontiers can make a huge difference.
As to if the money spent by NASA over the past 30 years has been wisely spent, that is a whole separate discussion. I certainly can suggest that the payback from NASA diminished over the course of the past several decades where it certainly as big of a payoff as compared to the Apollo program in terms of how beneficial it has been. I'm really not convinced that the current programs, particularly the SLS, is going to be of any benefit to the country especially as they are doing a retread program to "boldly go where hundreds have gone before" and do so on gilded spacecraft on top of that.
I'm all for establishing international protocols for cooperative ventures, such as establishing a common docking mechanism for spacecraft or working on deep-space data sharing protocols. The problem is when you try to establish some sort of joint-venture that requires an additional layer of bureaucracy on top of existing and highly inefficient bureaucracies, so it just throws more money chasing an ever deeper fiscal black hole.
The foolish aspect is if you are trying to do it to "cut costs" that is the last thing which will actually happen. If it is done for other reasons that has some sort of diplomatic benefit, then there is perhaps a considerably better excuse for it to happen.
As for the claim that the reason why Congress didn't pull funding from the ISS is because of "international agreements", my BS detector is pegging out on that one. The only reason why the ISS hasn't had its funding cut is strictly due to domestic politics, not any sort of international agreement. America has paid dearly for that hunk of metal, and no congressman wants to go up for re-election on the campaign platform that he quite literally threw $100 billion into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If domestic support for the ISS ever dropped, no amount of diplomatic pressure is going to keep that station flying.
International joint ventures, particularly between governments, is a foolish and expensive thing unless the point is explicitly to improve diplomatic relations. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was precisely that, where the whole point of the mission was to increase the exchange of information between two nations that had spaceflight capabilities and learn how to help one another out if there was a reason for helping one another out.
Congressmen, the people who make the appropriations for NASA budgets, don't have many constituents in places like the UK, France, or Germany. Simply put, they don't care about international commitments as long as they can keep getting re-elected. A choice between killing their favorite pork project vs. some international space mission to Mars? The choice should be patently obvious.
BTW, Congress doesn't like to give up their political power all that much. Yes, they could make a long-term appropriation over multiple years, but they also like to micro-manage a whole lot, perhaps a bit too much. Why else is the SLS being called the "Senate Launch System" where not just the broad goals but the individual components and even the structural design are being designed by the wonderful aerospace engineers on Capitol Hill in the "upper chamber" of Congress? Even crazy details like the particular kinds of metal and the thickness of that metal in the engines to be used are even going to be prescribed by law. By the time funding is finalized, the contractors won't have to do anything but production work because the Senate will have designed the monster in such detail that they won't have to.
While I strongly disagree with you, my point is that throwing money down the hole for the SLS program is as bad if not worse in terms of being a money pit. If you think throwing money down the drain for something trivial like air conditioning in the middle of the Himalayas is a bad thing, why might you support doing the same thing in the middle of the Utah desert to build the next rocket that will never fly? The scenery at Promontory, Utah even looks like you are in Afghanistan for that matter.
Of course they are..... just look at the SLS system (otherwise dubbed the "Senate Launch System" in some circles).
The question about commercial spaceflight does beg this question: Would any of the current "commercial" companies want to go under that sort of regime, if it also required that they abandon all other customers beside the government?
That is precisely the net effect of that approach. Sure, we can go back to a cost-plus model, but we will also return to $20k/kg or more for vehicles going into space, which pretty much shuts down all other potential commercial customers. Between RKK Energia, Arianespace, China, India, and potentially even Iran (if you don't think their program is a joke) commercial spaceflight has essentially left America altogether anyway. The major spaceflight companies in America, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, ATK, ULA (yes, I know it is a joint-venture of a couple of the other companies on this list), and if you want to really stretch it perhaps Orbital...... so few commercial payloads are being flown now that completely shutting down commercial spaceflight would have essentially no impact and their only customers are virtually the U.S. government contracts alone.
By commercial contracts, I'm talking proven systems that we know have a successful business model in space, such as recon satellites (like what you see with Google Earth), telecom satellites, satellite telephone systems, and even commercial passenger flights into space. To date, the only private citizens who have gone into space have been on Russian spacecraft. Yeah, that is inspiring. There is a commercial spaceflight industry, but without really letting private companies like Blue Origin, XCor, SpaceX, and others really be able to compete on a global market for these payloads, this particular market may as well be completely written off.
I suppose laws can be written so commercial spaceflight in America can only be done with "approved carriers" on "NASA-designed equipment". Sort of like how PanAm got a government monopoly for international commercial airline service for many decades. That experiment worked out real well, didn't it?
The amount being spent here seems to be a whole lot, until you consider how much is going to be poured down the "back-up insurance plan" with the SLS program just in case the commercial spaceflight approach doesn't work. I've heard estimates of about $3-4 billion being spent just on that one program, something that still has yet to even be figured out in terms of who is even going to build it in the first place.
Since when do you pay 5x to 10x the cost for an insurance policy to cover the value of what you want to protect against failure? I guess that is government spending logic for you. I'd rather have another dozen companies be trying to build something using the CCDev funding model than a monolithic cost-plus uber project that will never fly anyway. Even the Blue Origin spacecraft has a higher likelihood chance of getting to space than anything being done by the NASA directorates... and they seem to be the furthest behind.
NASA just released the status update for the CCDEV program. Stuff is actually happening there, and there may even be flights by the end of this year, next year at the latest.
For a while there it seemed like everything under NASA was getting shut down while still in the design stage.
For awhile? When was the last rocket successfully put into service that was developed at NASA? Yeah, the Space Shuttle.... developed under the Nixon administration. So I guess we need Tricky Dick back in the game to actually get something developed?
The legacy of vehicles that have been canceled is insanely long, even when metal was "being bent" to try and get the thing up and going. Even a successful "test launch" like the Ares I-X and the DC-X wasn't enough to get either program going.
How many billions of dollars have been spent on failed launch systems? And we want to continue to pour money down that rat hole hoping it will change? We could do much better with that money, like provide air conditioning for our troops in Afghanistan. At least it would be better spent that way.
The original Atlas rockets had repeated failures, including one that blew up live on national network television. The Mercury astronauts were invited to attend that one live and in person, in hopes they would continue to support the rocket for when they would take a trip on it into space.... that was to happen just a couple of months later.
Don't go into how rocket manufacturing technology has improved so much since then, since it is still a crap shoot to see if the rocket actually works in the first place. There is some improvement in terms of new metallurgy and other stuff, but why is SpaceX singled out here from anybody else? Why does Boeing or ATK have a monopoly on the knowledge for how to get into space? (which they don't)
Building rockets is a tough business, and any new rocket is going to have problems. I sure don't know why the SLS is any better than the Falcon 9, other than the fact that it hasn't actually flown at all nor is the design even stable for that matter.
The problem with the definition of an asteroid is that telescopic surveys are not becoming good enough that smaller objects previously not studied are now being spotted, plotted, and designated by the IAU and the Minor Planet Center. The number of asteroids receiving a catalog number has exploded in recent years, to the point that very few are even being named any more. The current number of objects identified is now more than a half million.
It will be interesting to see when that catalog may be "closed" to a new object that don't meet some sort of size criteria, or what will start happening when more objects of man-made origin get mixed into the database. There are several abandoned vehicles (their power cells/solar panels no longer work and are therefore "dead") and stuff like the Apollo 8 3rd Stage engine (which went into solar orbit) that are "out there" and a few "asteroids" that may be some of this space junk. The Saturn V 3rd stage was identified because of the Titanium-Oxide paint on the outsize... something not normally found on "natural" bodies. Human interaction with especially the smaller asteroids is going to really start making a mess of these catalogs too.
If it were traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, it would not be something from our Solar System either. That would imply an extra-solar or even extra-galactic origin of object.
Yeah, that is possible although space is also big, so mind numbingly big that encountering even something like a grain of sand that had an extra-galactic origin is going to be highly unlikely. Not impossible but that would be an incredibly rare event. Most of the objects in the Solar System, and the stuff you have to really worry about, are things that were part of the original dust cloud that formed the Sun and the various planets. Absolutely none of that is going to be traveling at relativistic speeds compared to the Earth.
The new site is for this specific implementation of the clock. They are also likely to put another version up in their Nevada site, which is more of what the Long Now website focuses upon. It really is two projects where the one that Bezos is working on is also helping to finance the one in Nevada as well.
The reason for the interaction it to make sure that the location is something that people will want to preserve if they happen to stumble across it. If it is something mundane looking and ordinary, or perhaps appears incredibly valuable in terms of something that can be stripped for resources rather than being admired for what it does, then this project will have failed.
There was a huge push for "time capsules" in the 1950's, which a whole bunch of them that were scheduled to be opened at the beginning of the 21st century. It is interesting to see what people even just 50 years ago thought needed to be preserved for future generations, and oddly what they thought would even last for 50 years. In some cases, the people who put stuff in there are still alive, so in terms of what can be preserved and what ought to be preserved has at least some historical precedents that we can look at.
However, instead of focusing on building a clock, I'd focus on how to pass our current knowledge into the future so it may survive a possible collapse and re-building of civilization. This is of course a much harder problem than building a long-living clock, but also much more worthwhile.
I take it that you haven't bothered reading up on the Long Now Foundation.
Trying to pass on knowledge is in fact one of their earlier projects, where they are trying to create the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, but with modern languages and the ability to translate between all currently known written languages. They are betting that one of these languages is going to survive for another 10k years or more (in some form), but they aren't betting just on English or even a European language. In addition, they are trying to come up with some technologies for preserving knowledge in such a way that the information is preserved yet the media that the information is preserved upon isn't more valuable than the information itself.
Yeah, that is the real trick. It turns out that Gold and Silver are really some of the best metals to preserve information for a very long period of time, but unfortunately that is also valuable for other purposes, at least historically, and records made of the stuff have been smelted down destroying the information in the process, in spite of being sometimes preserved for hundreds or thousands of years.
One of the original versions was a preservation of the text of the Bible, translated into multiple languages. That version is still around for those who care about it, but the current text is much more secular in nature and agnostic toward religion of any kind.
I could get into more detail here, but there are a bunch of people way smarter than I am, who have also spent many years in deep thought about the issue. Concepts to expand upon the topic include somehow preserving copies of Wikipedia or something similar. They've also been able to put some of the discs they've created onto some spacecraft, so this information already is being seeded among various places in the solar system. Copies of these discs are expected to be a part of the clocks as well, sort of a part of the historical archives that are preserved with the clock so somebody dismantling the clock to see how it works will eventually uncover one of the Rosetta discs.
All of that goes into the basics of just linguistics. I'd agree that a basic series of engineering articles that go into depth about how to re-create everything might be just as useful. For example, how to make a lathe, machine screw, and other tools from nothing more than some tree branches and a pile of raw metal ore would be incredibly useful, not to mention going into more depth about how to progress from that to power generation of various kinds (basic steam engines that are efficient) to eventually building your own electronic fab lab from just those basic tools. I would guess such a book series could be quite valuable.
I've seen that impactor estimator before, and it is pretty interesting.
The sad thing is that those who are alarmist generally haven't been paying attention to the skies anyway. I've seen some spectacular meteor showers including some meteors that I've personally seen that have exploded and produced a shower of sparks that rival or even surpass anything I've seen from a commercial fireworks display (like a 4th of July celebration) and I've even heard a sonic boom before caused by one of these object passing by. You can play with the numbers to see how large of an object that would require (it did scare the crap out of me when I heard the boom) but it did happen where I was an eyewitness. I think that was one of the Leonid storms that I was watching (more than a decade ago), so it was a bit more unusual than an ordinary night.
Stuff like that happens with some regularity on the Earth, including some object that are even larger from time to time. Most people don't notice because they are blissfully ignorant. Perhaps that is for the better anyway.
The funny thing is that the suits were taken in to get cleaned, where presumably had the sample not been collected with tape the dust itself would have simply been flushed down into the sewer. In a manner of speaking, these guys did a huge service to mankind simply by collecting the sample in this manner and perhaps should have been thanked instead of treated like criminals.
For some of the later Apollo missions, the suits were not cleaned and therefore the dust is still on the suit fabric, so it is still possible to do a mineral comparison with some of the other missions based upon the dust samples.
Technically the person who collected this sample did not have "authorization" for the collection by NASA in the first place.
BTW, there are some meteors that have a high confidence of having come from the Moon, particularly when their mineral composition is compared with the Apollo samples. For stuff of that nature, your legal claim to the "Moon dust" is more more secure.
Sadly, if you dig a hole in your backyard, depending on where you live, you may not be able to claim the minerals that you find in that hole even if you made the effort to dig the hole and even if digging the hole itself was done for other legal purposes. I've heard of some diamond mines where workers do have to go through some extreme measures including sometimes a "full body cavity search" to make sure you aren't smuggling the gemstones out of the mine that somehow you were able to pick out by hand. It all is a matter of the size of the ditch and what policies are in place to deal with those doing the digging.
Also, once you brought back a ton of moon rocks to sell on the open market, their price would plummet due to availability. So traveling to the moon solely to sell moon rocks is not really a profitable venture.
If you want to look at what a more "mature" market for extra-terrestrial minerals might be, try looking up the prices for people who are selling meteor samples. I'm not going to provide links because you can use your favorite search engine to find them.
Still, I've seen prices at roughly $1000/kg for random meteor samples, and for samples that seem to have a high likelihood of coming from Mars or the Moon the price is much higher. Yes, it is possible to have a piece of moon rock even now. A seven gram sample I saw that claimed to be from the Moon was being offered for sale for about $10k.
While going to the Moon and bringing back a shipping container sized collection of samples might drive down the cost, it would be at least one way to recoup costs for some of the early commercial missions to the Moon, which I think is sort of the point here. Lunar rocks will continue to be a novelty for some time, and since the cost of going to the Moon is going to remain high for some time there will be little incentive to charge less than at least the cost of going there and bringing the samples back. Only if a "cheap" method of delivery was created like a rail gun powered with solar energy and a simple vehicle design for bringing stuff through the atmosphere was created (for targeted delivery from space on the cheap) would lunar rocks be considered candidates for landfill projects.
Who knows? Perhaps some future highway project will be paved with moon dust instead of gravel from a terrestrial gravel pit. Regardless of the price, there will always be at least some demand for the stuff.
Bringing back historical artifacts from the Moon would likely always have considerable value as they can't be mass-produced and are very limited in quantity. Some of them are even supposedly in private hands already, like a Soviet rover that was purchased from the Russian government by Richard Garriott. If somehow he got that back to the Earth, I'm sure he could sell it for several million dollars. NASA would likely have a cow if somebody returned the American flags from the Apollo missions, however.
From a statical and historical perspective, we've been in an unseasonably long drought of supernovas throughout the sky in general. There may be some reasons for that which can be speculated based upon some theories for the position of our sun through the Milky Way, but it could be like tossing a coin ten times in a row and getting heads all of the time. Several supernovas have been visible to the naked eye in the past, including a couple that could even be seen during the day or even bright enough to cast a shadow (you could see) at night.
The interesting thing about Betelgeuse is that it has already been a fairly well studied star for some time, in part because it is "relatively" close and one of the brighter stars in our night sky even without it going nova. I guarantee that if it would go supernova, it would be something that would be heavily studied.
That said, a really close supernova (within 1000 light-years) would likely cause some fits for many astronomers because their telescopes would be too sensitive to be able to accurately do much in terms of photographing the actual supernova. A supernova like SN 1987A is generally much more preferred as you can use high power telescopes where the light doesn't overwhelm the instruments yet the object can still be studied in some considerable detail.
An interesting list of supernova candidates is on the wiki where it is noted several stars that are anticipated to go supernova in the next million years or so. It is certainly an interesting list of stars, of which Betelgeuse is on that list.
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On the plus side, the DC-X concept has been refined by Blue Origin. Jeff Bezos has dumped a fairly large chunk of his private fortune to see that the ideas as explored by the DC-X might have at least a follow-up. They have had enough success that they qualified for a share of the money in the 2nd round of the CCDEV commercial rocket contracts.
Jerry Pournelle has also commented a fair bit on the DC-X program as he was an advisor on the National Space Council at about the time the DC-X was cancelled. They very nearly got the thing working, but it suffered a sort of "not invented here" syndrome that is common unfortunately within NASA. Also, the Shuttle program simply gobbled up this and other similar projects over time.
The list of projects that NASA got almost there but then cancelled is astonishingly huge.
There were groups that tried. The X-37 is perhaps the most successful Shuttle-derived vehicle that has flown, but note that it is an Air Force project that has absolutely nothing to do with NASA other than it used the runway at KSC as a landing facility. The X-38 was a prototype that could have been developed into what was to be the Crew Return Vehicle but was cancelled. There is also the DIRECT launch system that actually was designed to re-use most of the parts and pieces of the Shuttle program with a minimal of fuss.
Of the various proposals that have come forward, I find it especially sad that DIRECT was never really followed. It sure would have been more likely to be flying now than the monster that was called the Constellation program, which really wasn't a shuttle-derived vehicle in spite of claims to the contrary. This also should show why the Shuttle wasn't redeveloped is because in spite of various attempts to try and get something going, the programs keep getting cut time after time after time again. The focus to get something done simply isn't at NASA any more.
Yeah, it is very sad that a "redsigned shuttle-type vehicle" has not been developed, in spite of some very valiant efforts and years of work on the part of a whole army of engineers on multiple occasions that tried over the past 30 years. In most cases, "metal was bent" to even see if the concepts would work so it wasn't just a paper study either.
When will there be commercial spaceflights?
It is already happening. If you mean when will there be astronauts sitting in a pilot seat of a commercial capsule capable of making it into orbit and staying in orbit for a sustainable period of time, that hasn't yet happened..... but that is also a much larger hurdle to be met.
Don't blame the commercial entities for not getting up there, as there are several who are trying and have made some remarkable progress. SpaceX of course has their Dragon capsule, where manned flights may happen as early as next year, perhaps the year after that. Boeing has their CST-100 capsule, Orbital has their Taurus II capsule, and there are numerous other companies who have other similar vehicles, some of which are intended for human orbital spaceflight. There are also about a dozen other companies working on sub-orbital vehicles as well that I won't bother going into right now.
If you really want a more extensive list, see it on the wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_private_spaceflight_companies
It is not a tiny list, and most of the vehicles on this list have not been developed with taxpayer money. There has been some government money, but the big systems that define NASA are not on this list.
Is it a tall order to make a business case to go into space? Absolutely. The largest culprit in terms of why commercial spaceflight, at least in America and Europe, is at its current dismal state is largely due to the Space Shuttle. Congress and the NASA administrators in the early 1980s ripped the rug out of would-be commercial spaceflight companies by substantially underbidding commercial spaceflight projects and unrealistically claiming price points that the Shuttle was never able to deliver. As a result of these very public disasters in space policy, it has taken literally decades for gun-shy investors to be willing to get back into the game and put the big money necessary with a reasonable shot at being able to recover that money.
It wasn't until the Commercial Space Launch Amendments Act of 2004 that the legal recognition that this activity was even going to be considered an acceptable activity for Americans even happened. Note the date, and note that not only has it been less than a decade, before this became law there literally were no laws that really governed commercial spaceflight. You don't invest into a company where the government can arbitrarily shut you down because the "regulators" don't know what the heck you are doing.
It all takes time, and spouting off ignorant thinking like somebody should have been able to get something going by now is simply forgetting that this is, of course, rocket science too.
Projects that NASA has funded, both public and private, have resulted in pushing forward sciences. Like your cellphone, MP3 player, television, etc?
This must be one of the silliest posts I've ever seen here on Slashdot. You're seriously claiming that we wouldn't have cellphones and MP3 players if not for NASA?
I suppose that NASA was helping to finance the Diamond Rio, as obviously the astronauts who took a couple of them up in the Space Shuttle had them made just for the space program. Oh, and NASA lawyers defended them against the RIAA too, didn't they?
That makes as much sense as the "Space Pen" made by Fisher. At least they did make that for the astronauts, even if it was a marketing ploy and NASA never asked for it in the first place.
NASA did help jump-start the integrated circuit production industry as a result of buying nearly the entire world's production capacity of them when building the Apollo Guidance Computer back in the late 1960's. But that is pretty much the extent of what they had with the development of microelectronics. Other than that initial infusion of cash, NASA computers for spaceflight have actually been lagging significantly behind the rest of the computer industry. They certainly don't go for bleeding edge computers or push the technology much.
Yeah. Too bad they just dig a hole and bury that money instead of spending it on US companies that hire people.
For all the good that does. You might want to study this link if you think that does any good:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broken_window_fallacy
Yeah, NASA contractors may be getting piles of money and spinning their wheels, but they aren't getting anything accomplished. They might as well simply hire a bunch of people to bury the money in a hole, hire another group to dig it up and move it into an even bigger hole before they are done, then simply move it back before it is finally all spent.
If something useful was happening at NASA, if they actually were getting into space instead of cancelling program after program after program, if they were actually trying to make spaceflight affordable, if NASA was actually exploring space and doing something useful instead of repeating the same missions over again even when they finally get a hunk of metal flying, I might be much more supportive. Instead they are simply in a death spiral where the only thing that matters is whose congressional district or state gets the most of the ever dwindling amount of money they are receiving.
As if that mattered.
While the Democrats are hardly the most thrifty folks and the current round of supporting commercial spaceflight is mainly because previous administrations didn't go that route (Bush didn't do it, therefore it must by definition be good), I'm particularly galled at the Republican leadership in congress for essentially killing NASA.
Thankfully NASA isn't the only "space agency" in the federal government. Perhaps if a strong NASA administrator actually set some real goals and perhaps if the presidential administration actually backed him up, some good might come. But first of all they actually have to do something rather than throwing bad money after even worse money.
A shuttle launch costs a really, really large slice of a billion dollars.
The estimates about how much a shuttle launch costs are figures that I've seen vary by a whole order of magnitude and more.... with surprisingly all of those figures spot on too, depending on the methodology being used to pull those numbers out. You can quote recurring costs, add in processing costs, infrastructure costs, development costs (including the two "return to flight" efforts), and other ongoing costs that may or may not be included depending on who is being quoted.
All in all, the problem with the Shuttle is that a version 2.0 of the Space Shuttle was never made. All of the things you are complaining about here could have been solved with another iteration of the shuttle philosophy to cut out the things that obviously were never needed. When the Endeavor was built, they actually went back to a prototype test article rather than trying to build a new airframe. Essentially it is like a software developer who has bugs with their design to go back to the 0.5 version of the software and then re-fix a couple of bugs all over again to make it work right.
Yeah, I know that isn't completely fair, but there certainly was no attempt realistically to move the design forward. There is the X-37 (not even a NASA program sadly) and of course the cancelled CRV program that could have been something akin to a "Shuttle 2.0". Add in other projects like DC-X and a whole plethora of other cancelled NASA launcher programs which could have pushed the technology much further. Instead the prototype version is the only one that stuck.
How many people would be using computers today if the only operating system option they had available was PC-DOS 1.0?
Space is what I would describe of itself 'indirect research', in that the technology that you and I benefit from was a result of something done in space research, even if that wasn't the initial intent.
If that's the only argument you can come up with for funding NASA then you're screwed, because you could have done those things far more cheaply by, you know, funding research into them and forgetting the whole space thing.
Such research would never have happened because the design problems that resulted in the development of those concepts would never have been encountered. That is the whole point to space exploration, where completely new challenges will happen that have never been experienced before. Somebody who is in that environment or having to work with that environment will then be forced by necessity to deal with those situations. Only afterward can somebody say "oh, what if I did the same thing over here too!" That is where the real benefits of pushing frontiers can make a huge difference.
As to if the money spent by NASA over the past 30 years has been wisely spent, that is a whole separate discussion. I certainly can suggest that the payback from NASA diminished over the course of the past several decades where it certainly as big of a payoff as compared to the Apollo program in terms of how beneficial it has been. I'm really not convinced that the current programs, particularly the SLS, is going to be of any benefit to the country especially as they are doing a retread program to "boldly go where hundreds have gone before" and do so on gilded spacecraft on top of that.
I'm all for establishing international protocols for cooperative ventures, such as establishing a common docking mechanism for spacecraft or working on deep-space data sharing protocols. The problem is when you try to establish some sort of joint-venture that requires an additional layer of bureaucracy on top of existing and highly inefficient bureaucracies, so it just throws more money chasing an ever deeper fiscal black hole.
The foolish aspect is if you are trying to do it to "cut costs" that is the last thing which will actually happen. If it is done for other reasons that has some sort of diplomatic benefit, then there is perhaps a considerably better excuse for it to happen.
As for the claim that the reason why Congress didn't pull funding from the ISS is because of "international agreements", my BS detector is pegging out on that one. The only reason why the ISS hasn't had its funding cut is strictly due to domestic politics, not any sort of international agreement. America has paid dearly for that hunk of metal, and no congressman wants to go up for re-election on the campaign platform that he quite literally threw $100 billion into the middle of the Pacific Ocean. If domestic support for the ISS ever dropped, no amount of diplomatic pressure is going to keep that station flying.
International joint ventures, particularly between governments, is a foolish and expensive thing unless the point is explicitly to improve diplomatic relations. The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was precisely that, where the whole point of the mission was to increase the exchange of information between two nations that had spaceflight capabilities and learn how to help one another out if there was a reason for helping one another out.
Congressmen, the people who make the appropriations for NASA budgets, don't have many constituents in places like the UK, France, or Germany. Simply put, they don't care about international commitments as long as they can keep getting re-elected. A choice between killing their favorite pork project vs. some international space mission to Mars? The choice should be patently obvious.
BTW, Congress doesn't like to give up their political power all that much. Yes, they could make a long-term appropriation over multiple years, but they also like to micro-manage a whole lot, perhaps a bit too much. Why else is the SLS being called the "Senate Launch System" where not just the broad goals but the individual components and even the structural design are being designed by the wonderful aerospace engineers on Capitol Hill in the "upper chamber" of Congress? Even crazy details like the particular kinds of metal and the thickness of that metal in the engines to be used are even going to be prescribed by law. By the time funding is finalized, the contractors won't have to do anything but production work because the Senate will have designed the monster in such detail that they won't have to.
While I strongly disagree with you, my point is that throwing money down the hole for the SLS program is as bad if not worse in terms of being a money pit. If you think throwing money down the drain for something trivial like air conditioning in the middle of the Himalayas is a bad thing, why might you support doing the same thing in the middle of the Utah desert to build the next rocket that will never fly? The scenery at Promontory, Utah even looks like you are in Afghanistan for that matter.
Of course they are..... just look at the SLS system (otherwise dubbed the "Senate Launch System" in some circles).
The question about commercial spaceflight does beg this question: Would any of the current "commercial" companies want to go under that sort of regime, if it also required that they abandon all other customers beside the government?
That is precisely the net effect of that approach. Sure, we can go back to a cost-plus model, but we will also return to $20k/kg or more for vehicles going into space, which pretty much shuts down all other potential commercial customers. Between RKK Energia, Arianespace, China, India, and potentially even Iran (if you don't think their program is a joke) commercial spaceflight has essentially left America altogether anyway. The major spaceflight companies in America, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, ATK, ULA (yes, I know it is a joint-venture of a couple of the other companies on this list), and if you want to really stretch it perhaps Orbital...... so few commercial payloads are being flown now that completely shutting down commercial spaceflight would have essentially no impact and their only customers are virtually the U.S. government contracts alone.
By commercial contracts, I'm talking proven systems that we know have a successful business model in space, such as recon satellites (like what you see with Google Earth), telecom satellites, satellite telephone systems, and even commercial passenger flights into space. To date, the only private citizens who have gone into space have been on Russian spacecraft. Yeah, that is inspiring. There is a commercial spaceflight industry, but without really letting private companies like Blue Origin, XCor, SpaceX, and others really be able to compete on a global market for these payloads, this particular market may as well be completely written off.
I suppose laws can be written so commercial spaceflight in America can only be done with "approved carriers" on "NASA-designed equipment". Sort of like how PanAm got a government monopoly for international commercial airline service for many decades. That experiment worked out real well, didn't it?
The amount being spent here seems to be a whole lot, until you consider how much is going to be poured down the "back-up insurance plan" with the SLS program just in case the commercial spaceflight approach doesn't work. I've heard estimates of about $3-4 billion being spent just on that one program, something that still has yet to even be figured out in terms of who is even going to build it in the first place.
Since when do you pay 5x to 10x the cost for an insurance policy to cover the value of what you want to protect against failure? I guess that is government spending logic for you. I'd rather have another dozen companies be trying to build something using the CCDev funding model than a monolithic cost-plus uber project that will never fly anyway. Even the Blue Origin spacecraft has a higher likelihood chance of getting to space than anything being done by the NASA directorates... and they seem to be the furthest behind.
NASA just released the status update for the CCDEV program. Stuff is actually happening there, and there may even be flights by the end of this year, next year at the latest.
For a while there it seemed like everything under NASA was getting shut down while still in the design stage.
For awhile? When was the last rocket successfully put into service that was developed at NASA? Yeah, the Space Shuttle.... developed under the Nixon administration. So I guess we need Tricky Dick back in the game to actually get something developed?
The legacy of vehicles that have been canceled is insanely long, even when metal was "being bent" to try and get the thing up and going. Even a successful "test launch" like the Ares I-X and the DC-X wasn't enough to get either program going.
How many billions of dollars have been spent on failed launch systems? And we want to continue to pour money down that rat hole hoping it will change? We could do much better with that money, like provide air conditioning for our troops in Afghanistan. At least it would be better spent that way.
The original Atlas rockets had repeated failures, including one that blew up live on national network television. The Mercury astronauts were invited to attend that one live and in person, in hopes they would continue to support the rocket for when they would take a trip on it into space.... that was to happen just a couple of months later.
Don't go into how rocket manufacturing technology has improved so much since then, since it is still a crap shoot to see if the rocket actually works in the first place. There is some improvement in terms of new metallurgy and other stuff, but why is SpaceX singled out here from anybody else? Why does Boeing or ATK have a monopoly on the knowledge for how to get into space? (which they don't)
Building rockets is a tough business, and any new rocket is going to have problems. I sure don't know why the SLS is any better than the Falcon 9, other than the fact that it hasn't actually flown at all nor is the design even stable for that matter.
The problem with the definition of an asteroid is that telescopic surveys are not becoming good enough that smaller objects previously not studied are now being spotted, plotted, and designated by the IAU and the Minor Planet Center. The number of asteroids receiving a catalog number has exploded in recent years, to the point that very few are even being named any more. The current number of objects identified is now more than a half million.
It will be interesting to see when that catalog may be "closed" to a new object that don't meet some sort of size criteria, or what will start happening when more objects of man-made origin get mixed into the database. There are several abandoned vehicles (their power cells/solar panels no longer work and are therefore "dead") and stuff like the Apollo 8 3rd Stage engine (which went into solar orbit) that are "out there" and a few "asteroids" that may be some of this space junk. The Saturn V 3rd stage was identified because of the Titanium-Oxide paint on the outsize... something not normally found on "natural" bodies. Human interaction with especially the smaller asteroids is going to really start making a mess of these catalogs too.
If it were traveling at a substantial fraction of the speed of light, it would not be something from our Solar System either. That would imply an extra-solar or even extra-galactic origin of object.
Yeah, that is possible although space is also big, so mind numbingly big that encountering even something like a grain of sand that had an extra-galactic origin is going to be highly unlikely. Not impossible but that would be an incredibly rare event. Most of the objects in the Solar System, and the stuff you have to really worry about, are things that were part of the original dust cloud that formed the Sun and the various planets. Absolutely none of that is going to be traveling at relativistic speeds compared to the Earth.
The new site is for this specific implementation of the clock. They are also likely to put another version up in their Nevada site, which is more of what the Long Now website focuses upon. It really is two projects where the one that Bezos is working on is also helping to finance the one in Nevada as well.
The reason for the interaction it to make sure that the location is something that people will want to preserve if they happen to stumble across it. If it is something mundane looking and ordinary, or perhaps appears incredibly valuable in terms of something that can be stripped for resources rather than being admired for what it does, then this project will have failed.
There was a huge push for "time capsules" in the 1950's, which a whole bunch of them that were scheduled to be opened at the beginning of the 21st century. It is interesting to see what people even just 50 years ago thought needed to be preserved for future generations, and oddly what they thought would even last for 50 years. In some cases, the people who put stuff in there are still alive, so in terms of what can be preserved and what ought to be preserved has at least some historical precedents that we can look at.
It is in Texas because it is land that Jeff Bezos already owns. RTFA to see the details of why, but I'd argue.... why not?
However, instead of focusing on building a clock, I'd focus on how to pass our current knowledge into the future so it may survive a possible collapse and re-building of civilization. This is of course a much harder problem than building a long-living clock, but also much more worthwhile.
I take it that you haven't bothered reading up on the Long Now Foundation.
Trying to pass on knowledge is in fact one of their earlier projects, where they are trying to create the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone, but with modern languages and the ability to translate between all currently known written languages. They are betting that one of these languages is going to survive for another 10k years or more (in some form), but they aren't betting just on English or even a European language. In addition, they are trying to come up with some technologies for preserving knowledge in such a way that the information is preserved yet the media that the information is preserved upon isn't more valuable than the information itself.
Yeah, that is the real trick. It turns out that Gold and Silver are really some of the best metals to preserve information for a very long period of time, but unfortunately that is also valuable for other purposes, at least historically, and records made of the stuff have been smelted down destroying the information in the process, in spite of being sometimes preserved for hundreds or thousands of years.
One of the original versions was a preservation of the text of the Bible, translated into multiple languages. That version is still around for those who care about it, but the current text is much more secular in nature and agnostic toward religion of any kind.
I could get into more detail here, but there are a bunch of people way smarter than I am, who have also spent many years in deep thought about the issue. Concepts to expand upon the topic include somehow preserving copies of Wikipedia or something similar. They've also been able to put some of the discs they've created onto some spacecraft, so this information already is being seeded among various places in the solar system. Copies of these discs are expected to be a part of the clocks as well, sort of a part of the historical archives that are preserved with the clock so somebody dismantling the clock to see how it works will eventually uncover one of the Rosetta discs.
All of that goes into the basics of just linguistics. I'd agree that a basic series of engineering articles that go into depth about how to re-create everything might be just as useful. For example, how to make a lathe, machine screw, and other tools from nothing more than some tree branches and a pile of raw metal ore would be incredibly useful, not to mention going into more depth about how to progress from that to power generation of various kinds (basic steam engines that are efficient) to eventually building your own electronic fab lab from just those basic tools. I would guess such a book series could be quite valuable.
I've seen that impactor estimator before, and it is pretty interesting.
The sad thing is that those who are alarmist generally haven't been paying attention to the skies anyway. I've seen some spectacular meteor showers including some meteors that I've personally seen that have exploded and produced a shower of sparks that rival or even surpass anything I've seen from a commercial fireworks display (like a 4th of July celebration) and I've even heard a sonic boom before caused by one of these object passing by. You can play with the numbers to see how large of an object that would require (it did scare the crap out of me when I heard the boom) but it did happen where I was an eyewitness. I think that was one of the Leonid storms that I was watching (more than a decade ago), so it was a bit more unusual than an ordinary night.
Stuff like that happens with some regularity on the Earth, including some object that are even larger from time to time. Most people don't notice because they are blissfully ignorant. Perhaps that is for the better anyway.
The funny thing is that the suits were taken in to get cleaned, where presumably had the sample not been collected with tape the dust itself would have simply been flushed down into the sewer. In a manner of speaking, these guys did a huge service to mankind simply by collecting the sample in this manner and perhaps should have been thanked instead of treated like criminals.
For some of the later Apollo missions, the suits were not cleaned and therefore the dust is still on the suit fabric, so it is still possible to do a mineral comparison with some of the other missions based upon the dust samples.
Technically the person who collected this sample did not have "authorization" for the collection by NASA in the first place.
BTW, there are some meteors that have a high confidence of having come from the Moon, particularly when their mineral composition is compared with the Apollo samples. For stuff of that nature, your legal claim to the "Moon dust" is more more secure.
Sadly, if you dig a hole in your backyard, depending on where you live, you may not be able to claim the minerals that you find in that hole even if you made the effort to dig the hole and even if digging the hole itself was done for other legal purposes. I've heard of some diamond mines where workers do have to go through some extreme measures including sometimes a "full body cavity search" to make sure you aren't smuggling the gemstones out of the mine that somehow you were able to pick out by hand. It all is a matter of the size of the ditch and what policies are in place to deal with those doing the digging.
Also, once you brought back a ton of moon rocks to sell on the open market, their price would plummet due to availability. So traveling to the moon solely to sell moon rocks is not really a profitable venture.
If you want to look at what a more "mature" market for extra-terrestrial minerals might be, try looking up the prices for people who are selling meteor samples. I'm not going to provide links because you can use your favorite search engine to find them.
Still, I've seen prices at roughly $1000/kg for random meteor samples, and for samples that seem to have a high likelihood of coming from Mars or the Moon the price is much higher. Yes, it is possible to have a piece of moon rock even now. A seven gram sample I saw that claimed to be from the Moon was being offered for sale for about $10k.
While going to the Moon and bringing back a shipping container sized collection of samples might drive down the cost, it would be at least one way to recoup costs for some of the early commercial missions to the Moon, which I think is sort of the point here. Lunar rocks will continue to be a novelty for some time, and since the cost of going to the Moon is going to remain high for some time there will be little incentive to charge less than at least the cost of going there and bringing the samples back. Only if a "cheap" method of delivery was created like a rail gun powered with solar energy and a simple vehicle design for bringing stuff through the atmosphere was created (for targeted delivery from space on the cheap) would lunar rocks be considered candidates for landfill projects.
Who knows? Perhaps some future highway project will be paved with moon dust instead of gravel from a terrestrial gravel pit. Regardless of the price, there will always be at least some demand for the stuff.
Bringing back historical artifacts from the Moon would likely always have considerable value as they can't be mass-produced and are very limited in quantity. Some of them are even supposedly in private hands already, like a Soviet rover that was purchased from the Russian government by Richard Garriott. If somehow he got that back to the Earth, I'm sure he could sell it for several million dollars. NASA would likely have a cow if somebody returned the American flags from the Apollo missions, however.
From a statical and historical perspective, we've been in an unseasonably long drought of supernovas throughout the sky in general. There may be some reasons for that which can be speculated based upon some theories for the position of our sun through the Milky Way, but it could be like tossing a coin ten times in a row and getting heads all of the time. Several supernovas have been visible to the naked eye in the past, including a couple that could even be seen during the day or even bright enough to cast a shadow (you could see) at night.
The interesting thing about Betelgeuse is that it has already been a fairly well studied star for some time, in part because it is "relatively" close and one of the brighter stars in our night sky even without it going nova. I guarantee that if it would go supernova, it would be something that would be heavily studied.
That said, a really close supernova (within 1000 light-years) would likely cause some fits for many astronomers because their telescopes would be too sensitive to be able to accurately do much in terms of photographing the actual supernova. A supernova like SN 1987A is generally much more preferred as you can use high power telescopes where the light doesn't overwhelm the instruments yet the object can still be studied in some considerable detail.
An interesting list of supernova candidates is on the wiki where it is noted several stars that are anticipated to go supernova in the next million years or so. It is certainly an interesting list of stars, of which Betelgeuse is on that list.