Selling CPU time for money has been almost as old as computing itself, and most of the time you didn't worry about malicious code or anything silly of that nature. You certainly could build a CPU emulator (java/flash/mono) which will run executable code in a "sandbox"... and it is being done in various ways even now with virtual machines of various kinds. The Seti@Home project showed you could even queue jobs in various ways for a mass computation effort.
The only point of selling that for Bitcoins is that the Bitcoin becomes the currency instead of Dollars or Euros. There are some advantages of using Bitcoins (lower overhead for transactions and the ability to calculate micropayments in an easier fashion), but you aren't using CPU bandwidth as the currency. The whole point of the hashing algorithm which "mines" the coins is merely to introduce scarcity and to "spread the wealth" while the currency is being established.
Burt Rutan openly admits that SpaceShipOne is an advanced version of the X-15. That was also not a primitive vehicle but rather advanced and much of the development of the X-15 was contemporary with the Gemini and Apollo programs, with the final flight as late as 1970. Seriously, there is much to be gained by studying the technology developed for that program, and I wouldn't call it that "primitive", where it is unfortunate that more work wasn't done with that concept for potential spaceflight. I consider that a sort of compliment to Scaled Composites that you would claim that.
Mind you, I said nothing of a comparison to the Soyuz, as I know full well that Shenzhou represents a complete clean sheet spacecraft design even though it happens to look quite a bit like the Soyuz. My point is that an in-orbit rendezvous is nearly as complex and as large of a technological as getting into orbit in the first place, and could arguably be considered a much better technical milestone in terms of how advanced and capable a spaceflight system happens to be.
The Soviet Union didn't get an in-orbit rendezvous until early 1969, and that was one of the remarkable achievements of the Gemini program that was specifically required in order to be ready for the Apollo missions... done a mere couple of years earlier. It also very nearly cost the lives of a couple of astronauts when it was done.
As for the Chinese spacewalk of Shinzhou 7, it looks suspicious to me when I look at the footage as there are a number of things that don't look right in terms of what I would expect in a video of something from space. Still, what I'm trying to suggest here is that an EVA seems like a big deal, but doesn't really represent the technology necessary to go to the Moon... and even if you take the events as claimed by the Chinese at face value, what that astronaut did was little more than Ed White did in 1965. Heck, at least Ed White wasn't tied down to his spacecraft with the exception of the umbilical chord and he tested an early version of the MMU later used with the Shuttle program and accomplished much more with that spacewalk.
None of the accomplishments of the Chinese space program have done anything which wasn't already done by both the Soviet Union and the United States by 1970, which is why I said that they are still using 1960's technology. Perhaps the guidance computers for the Shinzhou spacecraft is more modern, but what else can you point to that is showing some groundbreaking technology? The Chinese have a long way to go, and their flight tempo isn't anywhere near what the Russian or American space programs were in the 1960's.... or for that matter aren't even at the current flight tempo of either NASA or the Russian Space Agency. Some of this stuff takes time and experience.... which is precisely why I do question the technical capabilities of the Chinese. I'd dare say that the ESA even has more experience with human spaceflight than China.
There certainly are enough billionaires building mega yachts that have a price tag similar to a genuine spaceship, if put up by a private company like Bigelow Aerospace. It isn't nearly as unknown as you are saying and there are people who wouldn't mind grabbing some extra-terrestrial real estate for themselves in a provable way.
The trillion dollars was in reference to the whole tourism industry, not space tourism, but the point is still there that there is a market for people wanting to get into space, and the number of people willing to pay at least a million dollars for the opportunity is a bit higher than you would think.
The real advantage of space tourism is that it is one of the few areas of spaceflight where lower costs bring about a huge increase in revenue. Let me explain in perhaps another way:
Communications and weather satellites are pretty rare things, and generally not too many of them are needed at any given time. As a result, they are big but expensive things costing billions of dollars to make. Ditto for "spy satellites" and even probes to other planets. For most of the existing "proven" markets for spaceflight, the "customers" are willing to pay a premium for getting into space, but generally not too many flights are necessary to get everything up. That is one of the reasons why spaceflight is so expensive, and has been stuck at about $10,000/kg (give or take) for almost 50 years. Any "competition" getting into the market mostly shoots themselves in the foot (like SpaceX) by grabbing market share, but once they start to land the big projects and have a flight tested piece of equipment, they start raising launch prices to meet the market of seldom flying rockets to LEO. Other companies go out of business, but essentially the price stays the same. These companies and government agencies have a pretty fixed budget for launches into space, and as long as it is a fraction of the price of the vehicle they are sending up, the cost of the launch itself is meaningless.
Space tourism, on the other hand, responds very well with lower cost where a 50% drop in the price more than doubles the overall revenue received. That is the key thing here, and a missing ingredient in terms of spaceflight financial models. You might have a dozen potential astronauts at $20 million each going to LEO, but a thousand or more with a price of $2 million and hundreds of thousands of customers at $200,000 for the same trip (perhaps even more). Even at $200,000 each, the cost of paying for fuel and the crew is trivial compared to the costs of the vehicle itself. Fuel costs for spaceflight right now are so trivial that the cost of the press conference catering service is usually more on most launches. The ground crew is generally expensive because most of the time they are doing nothing but training.... not launching vehicle. If you change that equation, you can see the cost for access to orbit drop considerably and still make some serious money for those companies wanting to get involved. It can be done, but it takes rethinking the market.
If you take an historical analogy, it cost on average about $3,000-$10,000 in order to buy a Conestoga Wagon with a couple of pair of oxen, some sheep, chickens, food, ammunition, and other supplies in order to cross the western plains in order to get to Oregon or California. Considering that an average laborer earned about a dollar a day, that represented about 10-15 years worth of life savings in order to get that kind of money together, or about 5 years worth of savings for a skilled tradesman. If you start to think in that fashion, with a "skilled worker" today earning about $100k/year, a $200k ticket to space is quite comparable to a trip across the great plains of America from a century and a half ago in terms of effort needed to make the trip. Sure, no 3rd world citizen is going to make a trip like that, but it is in the realm of an ordinary person in a 1st world country. Give those folk
I get the point you were making, but I do think there should be a small but important distinction here: A government entity who has the fiat ability to create money can spend money and not care if there is any return on investment. State governments (as opposed to federal) generally do care when they spend money, especially for big ticket items like spaceports. They aren't doing that for vanity but to get something back for their voters or taxpayers. They also can't print their way out of a deficit but instead have to rely upon tax receipts in a more direct fashion.
The distinction gets even more fuzzy than the dichotomy that you are proposing here too, as some flights involve some subsidies or even mixed "ownership" that includes both private and public funding where it is sometimes hard to tell if something really is either public or private.
The Constellation Program was doomed from the beginning and deserved to be shut down and replaced with something else. In the words of the Augustine Commission, even if the spaceflight vehicles were ready to fly today, their first recommendation would be to cancel the program as too expensive and dangerous. On top of that, it was billions of dollars over budget and years behind in terms of getting anything done. The earliest that the Ares V would be ready is 2020 with a very optimistic timeline.
It is also a project that keeps coming back from the dead, but I'll leave that zombie where I can shoot it from time to time... like this thread.
As for shutting down the Shuttle program, that is something which was decided by the Bush administration following the destruction of the Columbia. Simply put, there aren't enough orbiters for a viable Shuttle program, and the loss of any future shuttle orbiter would be its termination anyway. Perhaps a "next generation" shuttle could have been made to continue the lessons learned, but the Shuttle program as has been flying for the past 30 years simply can't continue as it has been flying. The loss of two orbiters is bad enough, and some serious reconsideration for its design was desperately needed. The Constellation Program was not a shuttle replacement but rather a return to.... something else. I'm not even sure what. George W. Bush is the person to blame, not Obama.... not that Obama is helping out here either but that is besides the point.
As for radioisotopic generators (RTGs), the largest problem there is that the nuclear bomb factories have been mostly shut down as the number of warheads in the U.S. arsenal have been gradually reduced through attrition (getting old and having to be refurbished) and various treaties with several countries, including the SALT treaties and the START treaty negotiations with the former USSR. If you are going to blame a U.S. President, you can blame Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Both are indirectly responsible for the current situation with regards to RTGs, unless you are also blaming the anti-nuclear activists who have kept domestic nuclear reactors from getting built. Breeder reactors in particular as a major solution to both RTGs and to reducing or eliminating nuclear waste. There is no need for Yucca Mountain, but for the fact that nuclear engineering is all but a dead discipline now in America.
While I'm not a fan of Barak Obama, his problem has been mainly one of apathy and benign neglect of NASA and U.S. space policy. It took him nearly a year to appoint Charles Bolden as NASA administrator, and Obama certainly hasn't been reining in people like Gabrielle Giffords (when she chaired the sub-committee with oversight of NASA and federal spaceflight policy.... yes the same lady who has been in the news more recently) nor has he really given Charles Bolden the political support necessary to make some of the really tough changes needed at NASA to put everything back on track either. He had the chance and blew it, but the problems remain. He had the chance to set American space policy for the next several decades, but instead has half-heartily reinstated George W. Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" by setting NASA into auto-pilot.
As demonstrated by this policy directive by the Department of Defense, if NASA doesn't "boldly go", the DoD will. About bloody time I might add. At least somebody is showing some leadership in the area. Such leadership certainly isn't coming from the White House. Obama has been transparent with regards to NASA.... he just isn't doing anything worth caring about and thus doesn't matter if it was published or not on Wikileaks or anywhere else for that matter.
What wasn't said is how much of the activity of that company is dependent upon state spending and allocations from the head of state (or the appropriate top government authority over finances and fiscal appropriations) and how much of the spaceflight activity by that company comes from private sources.
The real trick is to define and identify that private spaceflight activity, of which there is considerable now. Some countries like China clearly are almost completely "owned" by the government (actually by the Chinese "People's Liberation" Army), yet have some very clear commercial spaceflight activity, yet some "private" companies like SpaceX have a considerable portion of their sales to government entities (which in the case of SpaceX includes NASA, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies).
America does have companies like Blue Origin which to the best of my knowledge has yet to receive any government funding or sales at all and is completely private investment, but then again Jeff Bezos sort of goes to the beat of a different drummer. They also have yet to make it into space, so I don't think that counts. Blue Origin is well financed and is likely to make it into space, so they are certainly a company to watch. Armadillo Aerospace was a company who sort of fit in the same category, but they are now accepting a fairly substantial amount of government money... although winning the Lunar Lander Challenge is something that may or may not fit the narrative here. Armadillo is trying to get sales to private users accomplished too, including an inked deal with Space Adventures to fly passengers on their spacecraft.
Virgin Galactic is the real interesting as most of the money spent on their behalf has not come from the U.S. federal government but rather the State of New Mexico. Does that count as "state financing"? It remains to be seen if the New Mexican financing is going to pay off for the taxpayers of that state, but it was certainly done as a pure business proposition with the idea that eventually the taxpayers of New Mexico will recover the money spent in this way through increased economic activity. The State of Virginia has been doing something similar with a spaceport they are running including some support for Orbital Sciences, and Florida has their own "spaceport authority" who has been trying to go after commercial users and organizing available spaceports near Cape Canaveral. California has a smaller effort to do the same thing, as does Alaska. If you are talking "state customers", that puts it into a completely different category I suppose.
In short, Russia performed twice as many successful launches as the U. S.
And that means exactly what? Other than commenting upon the decided lack of interest by the U.S. Congress in funding pork barrel spaceflight projects that do nothing but chew up tax dollars, what has been useful for putting up into space? Most of the private spaceflight efforts are still in development and issues like ITAR have mostly shot American companies in the foot on the off chance that Iran or North Korea might get American "missile technology", so therefore American companies are prohibited by law from supplying parts or even consulting expertise to anybody else... including Canada or the United Kingdom. Yeah those are real threats there I might add, as Canadian nukes rain down on American cities.
That will be an interesting thing for a faithful Muslim to have to work out if they go to some extra-terrestrial location. Frederick Pohl mentioned the concept in one of his Gateway books where some group of Muslims landed on another planet and had to locate the Sun (Sol.... the Earth's Sun) in order to orient themselves properly to Mecca.
There have been a couple of Muslim astronauts who have already been in space, so the idea isn't completely theoretical. I'm sure the idea was at least addressed, as at least a few astronauts have discussed their religious experiences in an extraterrestrial setting. I know that Catholic Mass was held on the Moon at one point (wine and wafer previously blessed by a priest), as was a Mormon sacrament service in the Space Shuttle. Why is some faithful Muslim considered weird in that respect?
Considering that the Chinese have yet to complete an in-orbit rendezvous and some have argued that the "space walks" conducted by the Chinese astronauts may have even been faked or staged, they have a long way to go before I need to worry about the Chinese joining up with a secret Nazi Moon base in an attempt to start world conquest.
This isn't to say that China is completely backward, but don't ascribe more to them than is really true. Furthermore, all China has been doing is to essentially copy the efforts of other nations. There is very little new or original being done by China as they are now up to about 1960's technology for what Russia and America were doing.
As for the "American" space program, I'd give it a decade before private individuals are walking on the Moon. SpaceX already sent a capsule into orbit and now merely needs FAA approval to put some people into the capsule to start its own manned spaceflight program. With Bigelow Aerospace supplying the space stations and Moon bases along with a dozen more private companies nipping at the heels of SpaceX to get into space, it is just a matter of time before the Moon and elsewhere is covered with people and human constructs. A whole lot is happening with regards to American spaceflight, it just isn't being done by the bankrupt government who doesn't care to go into space any more.
I'm not as ignorant as you would think, nor am I confusing the two. If a Boy Scout is racing a Pinewood Derby car, it would be as a hobby and not as a "serious" competition.
Yes, there is a difference after a fashion between the two programs, especially as adults are much more involved in Cub Scouting... which is also why I was saying that it is more the dads that make the cars rather than the boys. Perhaps a Webelos (not Weblos, since you are being inane here) Scout might do quite a bit of it on their own, I am arguing that it would be a Boy Scout who would be most likely to make their own car. Supposedly it is a "joint" project between a father and his kid, but let's be serious here about who does most of the work. The Boy Scout in this case would be more than likely an older brother to a Cub or perhaps a Den Chief (an older scout assigned as a youth "helper" for youger scouts) joining in the race for fun. Sometimes there is a "family" competition for sisters and others in the family of the Cub to provide some extra excitement for those at a Pack Meeting.
While the original grandparent post may have sort of missed the mark, I sure didn't. My point was that by missing the mark and comparing the PhD students to Boy Scouts, that it was making the comparison to more proper amateurs rather than the more "professional" cars that sometimes show up as having been made by a Cub Scout.
While not encouraged by the BSA, such a race typically does become a chest thumping of adults more than casual play between kids.
Considering how often my cell phone has been "accidentally" left on in my baggage while I've taken a trip on an airplane, I hardly think that it really causes too many problems. I really don't think my experience is that unusual as I've read the same thing from other people, and it was cell phones on Flight 93 that alerted some of the passengers on that flight that there might have been a bit of a problem with terrorists on 9/11.
Yes, I can understand why the FCC wants to discourage the practice, but I'm sure it happens far more often than most would admit.
I predict that it will be home-brew nuclear reactors that will be the next big thing that will follow after these balloon stories stop getting submitted or posted. At least one guy that I know is building a homebrew Polywell reactor, and if others start to follow his lead, it could get interesting.
High school science fair projects have been building Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors for many years now, including this guy who is attempting a Polywell reactor. He already got a fusor going but building a Polywell reactor does seem at least a new step in the right direction.
It is mostly the dads of the Cub Scouts who make the pinewood derby cars, so I would argue that losing to a bunch of Boy Scouts is more likely something made by the actual kids.
Pinewood Derby competitions turn into flat out Pinewood Derby Engineering complete with wind tunnels to reduce drag from air turbulence, grinding axles with a lathe, and studies of various lubricants to beat out the competition. One interesting book I just read even went into the moment of inertia for the car to maximize the amount of energy obtained from the car dropping down the track (hint: put most of the weight of the car in the back to eek out a few extra joules of energy). Reducing the coefficient of friction on the wheels is the best way to win, however.
It is serious business, and real engineering does go into those cars.
What is sad is that a real story about a vehicle going to this altitude, but with technology that clearly can go much further, was simply ignored and forgotten. The difference? Pretty pictures.
Personally, I think the idea that a rocket that may go to the Moon eventually is something worth "news for nerds". Yet another "high altitude" balloon launch? Not really.
I thought the same thing.... More high altitude balloon pictures? I'll wait for the tourists who go up on the VSS Enterprise to bring back their snapshots on their cameras. Those will likely be higher quality even if it is a relatively cheap camera bought at Wal-Mart on the night before their launch, and from a little more than double the altitude.
The protests in China seemed to look like an "inevitable" revolution, yet the government was successful in suppressing not only the protests but even mention of them as if it never happened in the first place. Even now, the Chinese government is still "cleansing" the internet and shutting off websites simply because this protest is merely mentioned.
Trying to decide when something is inevitable is a difficult choice to make, and it is possible to get it wrong. What is more, being a military commander gives you the ability to choose sides and influence the final outcome.... although you must be careful when that happens. Benedict Arnold is infamous in American history for trying to do just that, where he even "switched back" and became essentially a double traitor. What is more, I completely understand why Arnold made the actions he did, not that I agree with his conclusions.
What made a difference between the web vs. Gopher was the ability to embed images into the content... which made all of the difference. Clickable images and mapped images really started to make some inroads, not to mention being able to select fonts and font sizes. Gopher allowed you to view the images, but not in context with text. Ditto for FTP sites. It took the web to put everything together.
Why do you think the 1st amendment was the first one ratified in America? Printing presses were one of the first things attacked by the English Crown in the 1770s, and in fact it was a stamp tax on American presses that was in part responsible for starting the American Revolution. Committees of correspondence was one of the key elements of the revolution in America, and one of the things that has been emulated in most other revolutionary movements that happened afterward as well. If you want to make changes, communication is a major key.
BTW, a printing press was "high tech" in the 1700's.
Most soldiers and military personnel swear an oath to follow any "lawful order" given by their superior officers. It gets real tricky trying to decide if something is a lawful order or not.
On the other hand, if a colonel or a general refuses to follow an order, it is likely that the men serving under those officers will follow the lead of their commanding officer and refuse to follow that order too. A private soldier is usually not paid enough to think such things through, but officers... especially senior officers are put in a position to consider the consequences of such actions. Such senior officers are also in a position to have some resources and political support for their actions too.
This seems to be the case in Egypt, where the senior officers are not openly showing support for Mubarak and in fact are staying "neutral" on the whole issue to the point of sort of supporting the protesters by inaction.
In terms of privates and ordinary seamen in America engaging in some sort of public protest like the Tea Party gatherings or the anti-war protests during the Vietnam War.... those have since become illegal by direct general order from the U.S. President. That started BTW under the Clinton Administration, where orders were specifically sent out that it was "conduct unbecoming" to be critical of the commander-in-chief. So far as I know, those orders are still in effect.
That is also why it seems so remarkable that the military isn't doing anything with these protests that seem to be pointing to an inevitable overthrow of the current government. For some reason, the general officers are not openly supporting Mubarak and only seem to be essentially doing emergency police work... and even that seems to be only so far as pointing a gun at folks who are pointing guns and not really doing any overt prosecution of criminal behavior.
This also happened in China as well during the Tiananmen Square protests... until the Chinese government brought in divisions from elsewhere in the country that weren't so sympathetic to the demonstrators. Similarly, the military coup which tried to take over in the last days of the Soviet Union failed when some of the divisions refused to follow orders.
What the end-game is that Mubarak is trying to follow here isn't exactly clear, but it seems like his big play to send in the military to stop the protests has failed because the Egyptian Army refuses to stop the protests. If orders to stop those protests were ever given, they sure aren't being followed.
Most likely, the cash is already in Switzerland... just like all good dictators do with their money.
Now if you send me a $1000 for assistance in releasing that money, properly sent to a bank in Nigeria, I'll make sure you can help in laundering that money for the Mubarak family to keep that out of the grubby hand of western governments. Those Nigerian bankers are very good at that thing, you know. You can even take online classes about how to ethically help out failing dictatorships.
I expect a branch campus of this university is soon to open up in Cairo just for this purpose.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I think the details and principles are there, although I do like the idea of specific legislation that somehow makes it a criminal offense for a government official to be specifically prosecuted for censorship in violation of these principles. It shouldn't matter if you are communicating via paper, newsprint, broadcast television, computer networks, pigeons, or from a soap box. Speech is speech and censorship is generally a stupid thing, especially if applies to ordinary citizens in general and prohibits somebody from acting.
Just wondering.... while it is curious that everybody is complaining about Mubarak here, does this apply to any freedoms that Julian Assange should enjoy too?
On the positive side, when the Aswan Dam fills up, it will provide a bunch of very fertile land that will be simply begging for agricultural usage and have fairly close access to irrigation resources too. The silt of the Nile will start to flow downstream again, and in the long run I think it will be a net gain for the Egyptian people. But in the meantime it is going to be a huge ouch for everybody involved.
The silt that is being blocked by the dam will eventually get to the delta, but it will simply take more time to get there.
As for the Mississippi River, the Army Corp of Engineers has sort of done the opposite: It has "improved" the ability of the river to send the silt downstream so in effect the Mississippi River Delta is getting larger, but unfortunately that is in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico where it doesn't really do anybody any good and certainly isn't helping to maintain the marshes on the southern coast of Louisiana, Texas, and the rest of the Gulf Coast region.
Hunting on the Oregon Trail. RTFA and realize that some of us are old enough to have played the original game on teletype machines. It was an old Control Data Cyber system computer.
If you had a 300 baud coupler, you were either in one of the rich school districts or close to the University of Minnesota. Most of the connections were 110 baud, or the "high speed" connections were a whopping 220 baud during that era (74-75). A few years later with some help from the good folks at AT&T (then Northwestern Bell Telephone Company that later became U.S. West and now Quest communications) the main trunk lines were upgraded and most of the connections were upgraded to 300 baud.... but that was about 1980 when that happened.
Most of the connections were routed to a dedicated phone line in an attempt to cut costs, where the connections were put through a multiplexer that was broken apart at the main computing facility at the University of Minnesota. This permitted most of the schools in a typical school district to use a local telephone number as it was in the local phone exchange too. Sometimes smaller school districts would share the same connections, and in my hometown the local community college and even a branch research lab of the University of Minnesota shared the connection.
When I was in high school, I discovered that the main telephone equipment for some reason was routed through the classroom where the computer science classes were held (Mr. Knudsen's 3rd floor classroom in Austin high school in Austin MN). I and a bunch of kids in the high school held what amounted to be a computer club, and often the teacher would lock the doors to the classroom and say "make sure you close the door when you leave" where we would sometimes stay for an hour or two after school... sometimes a bit longer than that.
We discovered a neat trick where if we unplugged the multiplexor, it would at least temporarily shut down the connections for everybody in the town. Keep in mind this was when phone lines were still somewhat unreliable, and typically when a connection dropped most people would re-dial the phone number to get back on and didn't think anything was really wrong with the equipment. In the meantime while everybody else in all of the other school districts (including I might add some college professors and college students trying to get major programming assignments finished) were busy redialing, my friends and I would quickly dial in and grab one of the temporary "empty" connections... essentially kicking other students off of the computer. Let's just say that the high school students never had to worry about a busy signal in the after-school club and sometimes even during class time. As for everybody else, their computer connections just seems a little less reliable than it really was... or rather they were depending on a bunch of high school students with selfish motives to keep the phone system going.
I had so much fun with that system where I can't possibly begin, and much of that began with playing Oregon Trail. Yes, I got bored with that game and moved on, but it ended up making me a computer professional with shall I say an unconventional educational experience. I'll also say that in particular with the Oregon Trail game, it motivated me to learn how to type in a big hurry.... which has helped me throughout life. I particularly learned how to type "POW" and "BANG" in a hurry.
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Selling CPU time for money has been almost as old as computing itself, and most of the time you didn't worry about malicious code or anything silly of that nature. You certainly could build a CPU emulator (java/flash/mono) which will run executable code in a "sandbox"... and it is being done in various ways even now with virtual machines of various kinds. The Seti@Home project showed you could even queue jobs in various ways for a mass computation effort.
The only point of selling that for Bitcoins is that the Bitcoin becomes the currency instead of Dollars or Euros. There are some advantages of using Bitcoins (lower overhead for transactions and the ability to calculate micropayments in an easier fashion), but you aren't using CPU bandwidth as the currency. The whole point of the hashing algorithm which "mines" the coins is merely to introduce scarcity and to "spread the wealth" while the currency is being established.
Burt Rutan openly admits that SpaceShipOne is an advanced version of the X-15. That was also not a primitive vehicle but rather advanced and much of the development of the X-15 was contemporary with the Gemini and Apollo programs, with the final flight as late as 1970. Seriously, there is much to be gained by studying the technology developed for that program, and I wouldn't call it that "primitive", where it is unfortunate that more work wasn't done with that concept for potential spaceflight. I consider that a sort of compliment to Scaled Composites that you would claim that.
Mind you, I said nothing of a comparison to the Soyuz, as I know full well that Shenzhou represents a complete clean sheet spacecraft design even though it happens to look quite a bit like the Soyuz. My point is that an in-orbit rendezvous is nearly as complex and as large of a technological as getting into orbit in the first place, and could arguably be considered a much better technical milestone in terms of how advanced and capable a spaceflight system happens to be.
The Soviet Union didn't get an in-orbit rendezvous until early 1969, and that was one of the remarkable achievements of the Gemini program that was specifically required in order to be ready for the Apollo missions... done a mere couple of years earlier. It also very nearly cost the lives of a couple of astronauts when it was done.
As for the Chinese spacewalk of Shinzhou 7, it looks suspicious to me when I look at the footage as there are a number of things that don't look right in terms of what I would expect in a video of something from space. Still, what I'm trying to suggest here is that an EVA seems like a big deal, but doesn't really represent the technology necessary to go to the Moon... and even if you take the events as claimed by the Chinese at face value, what that astronaut did was little more than Ed White did in 1965. Heck, at least Ed White wasn't tied down to his spacecraft with the exception of the umbilical chord and he tested an early version of the MMU later used with the Shuttle program and accomplished much more with that spacewalk.
None of the accomplishments of the Chinese space program have done anything which wasn't already done by both the Soviet Union and the United States by 1970, which is why I said that they are still using 1960's technology. Perhaps the guidance computers for the Shinzhou spacecraft is more modern, but what else can you point to that is showing some groundbreaking technology? The Chinese have a long way to go, and their flight tempo isn't anywhere near what the Russian or American space programs were in the 1960's.... or for that matter aren't even at the current flight tempo of either NASA or the Russian Space Agency. Some of this stuff takes time and experience.... which is precisely why I do question the technical capabilities of the Chinese. I'd dare say that the ESA even has more experience with human spaceflight than China.
There certainly are enough billionaires building mega yachts that have a price tag similar to a genuine spaceship, if put up by a private company like Bigelow Aerospace. It isn't nearly as unknown as you are saying and there are people who wouldn't mind grabbing some extra-terrestrial real estate for themselves in a provable way.
The trillion dollars was in reference to the whole tourism industry, not space tourism, but the point is still there that there is a market for people wanting to get into space, and the number of people willing to pay at least a million dollars for the opportunity is a bit higher than you would think.
The real advantage of space tourism is that it is one of the few areas of spaceflight where lower costs bring about a huge increase in revenue. Let me explain in perhaps another way:
Communications and weather satellites are pretty rare things, and generally not too many of them are needed at any given time. As a result, they are big but expensive things costing billions of dollars to make. Ditto for "spy satellites" and even probes to other planets. For most of the existing "proven" markets for spaceflight, the "customers" are willing to pay a premium for getting into space, but generally not too many flights are necessary to get everything up. That is one of the reasons why spaceflight is so expensive, and has been stuck at about $10,000/kg (give or take) for almost 50 years. Any "competition" getting into the market mostly shoots themselves in the foot (like SpaceX) by grabbing market share, but once they start to land the big projects and have a flight tested piece of equipment, they start raising launch prices to meet the market of seldom flying rockets to LEO. Other companies go out of business, but essentially the price stays the same. These companies and government agencies have a pretty fixed budget for launches into space, and as long as it is a fraction of the price of the vehicle they are sending up, the cost of the launch itself is meaningless.
Space tourism, on the other hand, responds very well with lower cost where a 50% drop in the price more than doubles the overall revenue received. That is the key thing here, and a missing ingredient in terms of spaceflight financial models. You might have a dozen potential astronauts at $20 million each going to LEO, but a thousand or more with a price of $2 million and hundreds of thousands of customers at $200,000 for the same trip (perhaps even more). Even at $200,000 each, the cost of paying for fuel and the crew is trivial compared to the costs of the vehicle itself. Fuel costs for spaceflight right now are so trivial that the cost of the press conference catering service is usually more on most launches. The ground crew is generally expensive because most of the time they are doing nothing but training.... not launching vehicle. If you change that equation, you can see the cost for access to orbit drop considerably and still make some serious money for those companies wanting to get involved. It can be done, but it takes rethinking the market.
If you take an historical analogy, it cost on average about $3,000-$10,000 in order to buy a Conestoga Wagon with a couple of pair of oxen, some sheep, chickens, food, ammunition, and other supplies in order to cross the western plains in order to get to Oregon or California. Considering that an average laborer earned about a dollar a day, that represented about 10-15 years worth of life savings in order to get that kind of money together, or about 5 years worth of savings for a skilled tradesman. If you start to think in that fashion, with a "skilled worker" today earning about $100k/year, a $200k ticket to space is quite comparable to a trip across the great plains of America from a century and a half ago in terms of effort needed to make the trip. Sure, no 3rd world citizen is going to make a trip like that, but it is in the realm of an ordinary person in a 1st world country. Give those folk
I get the point you were making, but I do think there should be a small but important distinction here: A government entity who has the fiat ability to create money can spend money and not care if there is any return on investment. State governments (as opposed to federal) generally do care when they spend money, especially for big ticket items like spaceports. They aren't doing that for vanity but to get something back for their voters or taxpayers. They also can't print their way out of a deficit but instead have to rely upon tax receipts in a more direct fashion.
The distinction gets even more fuzzy than the dichotomy that you are proposing here too, as some flights involve some subsidies or even mixed "ownership" that includes both private and public funding where it is sometimes hard to tell if something really is either public or private.
The Constellation Program was doomed from the beginning and deserved to be shut down and replaced with something else. In the words of the Augustine Commission, even if the spaceflight vehicles were ready to fly today, their first recommendation would be to cancel the program as too expensive and dangerous. On top of that, it was billions of dollars over budget and years behind in terms of getting anything done. The earliest that the Ares V would be ready is 2020 with a very optimistic timeline.
It is also a project that keeps coming back from the dead, but I'll leave that zombie where I can shoot it from time to time... like this thread.
As for shutting down the Shuttle program, that is something which was decided by the Bush administration following the destruction of the Columbia. Simply put, there aren't enough orbiters for a viable Shuttle program, and the loss of any future shuttle orbiter would be its termination anyway. Perhaps a "next generation" shuttle could have been made to continue the lessons learned, but the Shuttle program as has been flying for the past 30 years simply can't continue as it has been flying. The loss of two orbiters is bad enough, and some serious reconsideration for its design was desperately needed. The Constellation Program was not a shuttle replacement but rather a return to.... something else. I'm not even sure what. George W. Bush is the person to blame, not Obama.... not that Obama is helping out here either but that is besides the point.
As for radioisotopic generators (RTGs), the largest problem there is that the nuclear bomb factories have been mostly shut down as the number of warheads in the U.S. arsenal have been gradually reduced through attrition (getting old and having to be refurbished) and various treaties with several countries, including the SALT treaties and the START treaty negotiations with the former USSR. If you are going to blame a U.S. President, you can blame Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Both are indirectly responsible for the current situation with regards to RTGs, unless you are also blaming the anti-nuclear activists who have kept domestic nuclear reactors from getting built. Breeder reactors in particular as a major solution to both RTGs and to reducing or eliminating nuclear waste. There is no need for Yucca Mountain, but for the fact that nuclear engineering is all but a dead discipline now in America.
While I'm not a fan of Barak Obama, his problem has been mainly one of apathy and benign neglect of NASA and U.S. space policy. It took him nearly a year to appoint Charles Bolden as NASA administrator, and Obama certainly hasn't been reining in people like Gabrielle Giffords (when she chaired the sub-committee with oversight of NASA and federal spaceflight policy.... yes the same lady who has been in the news more recently) nor has he really given Charles Bolden the political support necessary to make some of the really tough changes needed at NASA to put everything back on track either. He had the chance and blew it, but the problems remain. He had the chance to set American space policy for the next several decades, but instead has half-heartily reinstated George W. Bush's "Vision for Space Exploration" by setting NASA into auto-pilot.
As demonstrated by this policy directive by the Department of Defense, if NASA doesn't "boldly go", the DoD will. About bloody time I might add. At least somebody is showing some leadership in the area. Such leadership certainly isn't coming from the White House. Obama has been transparent with regards to NASA.... he just isn't doing anything worth caring about and thus doesn't matter if it was published or not on Wikileaks or anywhere else for that matter.
What wasn't said is how much of the activity of that company is dependent upon state spending and allocations from the head of state (or the appropriate top government authority over finances and fiscal appropriations) and how much of the spaceflight activity by that company comes from private sources.
The real trick is to define and identify that private spaceflight activity, of which there is considerable now. Some countries like China clearly are almost completely "owned" by the government (actually by the Chinese "People's Liberation" Army), yet have some very clear commercial spaceflight activity, yet some "private" companies like SpaceX have a considerable portion of their sales to government entities (which in the case of SpaceX includes NASA, the Department of Defense, and other government agencies).
America does have companies like Blue Origin which to the best of my knowledge has yet to receive any government funding or sales at all and is completely private investment, but then again Jeff Bezos sort of goes to the beat of a different drummer. They also have yet to make it into space, so I don't think that counts. Blue Origin is well financed and is likely to make it into space, so they are certainly a company to watch. Armadillo Aerospace was a company who sort of fit in the same category, but they are now accepting a fairly substantial amount of government money... although winning the Lunar Lander Challenge is something that may or may not fit the narrative here. Armadillo is trying to get sales to private users accomplished too, including an inked deal with Space Adventures to fly passengers on their spacecraft.
Virgin Galactic is the real interesting as most of the money spent on their behalf has not come from the U.S. federal government but rather the State of New Mexico. Does that count as "state financing"? It remains to be seen if the New Mexican financing is going to pay off for the taxpayers of that state, but it was certainly done as a pure business proposition with the idea that eventually the taxpayers of New Mexico will recover the money spent in this way through increased economic activity. The State of Virginia has been doing something similar with a spaceport they are running including some support for Orbital Sciences, and Florida has their own "spaceport authority" who has been trying to go after commercial users and organizing available spaceports near Cape Canaveral. California has a smaller effort to do the same thing, as does Alaska. If you are talking "state customers", that puts it into a completely different category I suppose.
In short, Russia performed twice as many successful launches as the U. S.
And that means exactly what? Other than commenting upon the decided lack of interest by the U.S. Congress in funding pork barrel spaceflight projects that do nothing but chew up tax dollars, what has been useful for putting up into space? Most of the private spaceflight efforts are still in development and issues like ITAR have mostly shot American companies in the foot on the off chance that Iran or North Korea might get American "missile technology", so therefore American companies are prohibited by law from supplying parts or even consulting expertise to anybody else... including Canada or the United Kingdom. Yeah those are real threats there I might add, as Canadian nukes rain down on American cities.
That will be an interesting thing for a faithful Muslim to have to work out if they go to some extra-terrestrial location. Frederick Pohl mentioned the concept in one of his Gateway books where some group of Muslims landed on another planet and had to locate the Sun (Sol.... the Earth's Sun) in order to orient themselves properly to Mecca.
There have been a couple of Muslim astronauts who have already been in space, so the idea isn't completely theoretical. I'm sure the idea was at least addressed, as at least a few astronauts have discussed their religious experiences in an extraterrestrial setting. I know that Catholic Mass was held on the Moon at one point (wine and wafer previously blessed by a priest), as was a Mormon sacrament service in the Space Shuttle. Why is some faithful Muslim considered weird in that respect?
Considering that the Chinese have yet to complete an in-orbit rendezvous and some have argued that the "space walks" conducted by the Chinese astronauts may have even been faked or staged, they have a long way to go before I need to worry about the Chinese joining up with a secret Nazi Moon base in an attempt to start world conquest.
This isn't to say that China is completely backward, but don't ascribe more to them than is really true. Furthermore, all China has been doing is to essentially copy the efforts of other nations. There is very little new or original being done by China as they are now up to about 1960's technology for what Russia and America were doing.
As for the "American" space program, I'd give it a decade before private individuals are walking on the Moon. SpaceX already sent a capsule into orbit and now merely needs FAA approval to put some people into the capsule to start its own manned spaceflight program. With Bigelow Aerospace supplying the space stations and Moon bases along with a dozen more private companies nipping at the heels of SpaceX to get into space, it is just a matter of time before the Moon and elsewhere is covered with people and human constructs. A whole lot is happening with regards to American spaceflight, it just isn't being done by the bankrupt government who doesn't care to go into space any more.
I'm not as ignorant as you would think, nor am I confusing the two. If a Boy Scout is racing a Pinewood Derby car, it would be as a hobby and not as a "serious" competition.
Yes, there is a difference after a fashion between the two programs, especially as adults are much more involved in Cub Scouting... which is also why I was saying that it is more the dads that make the cars rather than the boys. Perhaps a Webelos (not Weblos, since you are being inane here) Scout might do quite a bit of it on their own, I am arguing that it would be a Boy Scout who would be most likely to make their own car. Supposedly it is a "joint" project between a father and his kid, but let's be serious here about who does most of the work. The Boy Scout in this case would be more than likely an older brother to a Cub or perhaps a Den Chief (an older scout assigned as a youth "helper" for youger scouts) joining in the race for fun. Sometimes there is a "family" competition for sisters and others in the family of the Cub to provide some extra excitement for those at a Pack Meeting.
While the original grandparent post may have sort of missed the mark, I sure didn't. My point was that by missing the mark and comparing the PhD students to Boy Scouts, that it was making the comparison to more proper amateurs rather than the more "professional" cars that sometimes show up as having been made by a Cub Scout.
While not encouraged by the BSA, such a race typically does become a chest thumping of adults more than casual play between kids.
Considering how often my cell phone has been "accidentally" left on in my baggage while I've taken a trip on an airplane, I hardly think that it really causes too many problems. I really don't think my experience is that unusual as I've read the same thing from other people, and it was cell phones on Flight 93 that alerted some of the passengers on that flight that there might have been a bit of a problem with terrorists on 9/11.
Yes, I can understand why the FCC wants to discourage the practice, but I'm sure it happens far more often than most would admit.
I predict that it will be home-brew nuclear reactors that will be the next big thing that will follow after these balloon stories stop getting submitted or posted. At least one guy that I know is building a homebrew Polywell reactor, and if others start to follow his lead, it could get interesting.
High school science fair projects have been building Farnsworth-Hirsch fusors for many years now, including this guy who is attempting a Polywell reactor. He already got a fusor going but building a Polywell reactor does seem at least a new step in the right direction.
It is mostly the dads of the Cub Scouts who make the pinewood derby cars, so I would argue that losing to a bunch of Boy Scouts is more likely something made by the actual kids.
Pinewood Derby competitions turn into flat out Pinewood Derby Engineering complete with wind tunnels to reduce drag from air turbulence, grinding axles with a lathe, and studies of various lubricants to beat out the competition. One interesting book I just read even went into the moment of inertia for the car to maximize the amount of energy obtained from the car dropping down the track (hint: put most of the weight of the car in the back to eek out a few extra joules of energy). Reducing the coefficient of friction on the wheels is the best way to win, however.
It is serious business, and real engineering does go into those cars.
What is sad is that a real story about a vehicle going to this altitude, but with technology that clearly can go much further, was simply ignored and forgotten. The difference? Pretty pictures.
Personally, I think the idea that a rocket that may go to the Moon eventually is something worth "news for nerds". Yet another "high altitude" balloon launch? Not really.
I thought the same thing.... More high altitude balloon pictures? I'll wait for the tourists who go up on the VSS Enterprise to bring back their snapshots on their cameras. Those will likely be higher quality even if it is a relatively cheap camera bought at Wal-Mart on the night before their launch, and from a little more than double the altitude.
The protests in China seemed to look like an "inevitable" revolution, yet the government was successful in suppressing not only the protests but even mention of them as if it never happened in the first place. Even now, the Chinese government is still "cleansing" the internet and shutting off websites simply because this protest is merely mentioned.
Trying to decide when something is inevitable is a difficult choice to make, and it is possible to get it wrong. What is more, being a military commander gives you the ability to choose sides and influence the final outcome.... although you must be careful when that happens. Benedict Arnold is infamous in American history for trying to do just that, where he even "switched back" and became essentially a double traitor. What is more, I completely understand why Arnold made the actions he did, not that I agree with his conclusions.
What made a difference between the web vs. Gopher was the ability to embed images into the content... which made all of the difference. Clickable images and mapped images really started to make some inroads, not to mention being able to select fonts and font sizes. Gopher allowed you to view the images, but not in context with text. Ditto for FTP sites. It took the web to put everything together.
Why do you think the 1st amendment was the first one ratified in America? Printing presses were one of the first things attacked by the English Crown in the 1770s, and in fact it was a stamp tax on American presses that was in part responsible for starting the American Revolution. Committees of correspondence was one of the key elements of the revolution in America, and one of the things that has been emulated in most other revolutionary movements that happened afterward as well. If you want to make changes, communication is a major key.
BTW, a printing press was "high tech" in the 1700's.
Most soldiers and military personnel swear an oath to follow any "lawful order" given by their superior officers. It gets real tricky trying to decide if something is a lawful order or not.
On the other hand, if a colonel or a general refuses to follow an order, it is likely that the men serving under those officers will follow the lead of their commanding officer and refuse to follow that order too. A private soldier is usually not paid enough to think such things through, but officers... especially senior officers are put in a position to consider the consequences of such actions. Such senior officers are also in a position to have some resources and political support for their actions too.
This seems to be the case in Egypt, where the senior officers are not openly showing support for Mubarak and in fact are staying "neutral" on the whole issue to the point of sort of supporting the protesters by inaction.
In terms of privates and ordinary seamen in America engaging in some sort of public protest like the Tea Party gatherings or the anti-war protests during the Vietnam War.... those have since become illegal by direct general order from the U.S. President. That started BTW under the Clinton Administration, where orders were specifically sent out that it was "conduct unbecoming" to be critical of the commander-in-chief. So far as I know, those orders are still in effect.
That is also why it seems so remarkable that the military isn't doing anything with these protests that seem to be pointing to an inevitable overthrow of the current government. For some reason, the general officers are not openly supporting Mubarak and only seem to be essentially doing emergency police work... and even that seems to be only so far as pointing a gun at folks who are pointing guns and not really doing any overt prosecution of criminal behavior.
This also happened in China as well during the Tiananmen Square protests... until the Chinese government brought in divisions from elsewhere in the country that weren't so sympathetic to the demonstrators. Similarly, the military coup which tried to take over in the last days of the Soviet Union failed when some of the divisions refused to follow orders.
What the end-game is that Mubarak is trying to follow here isn't exactly clear, but it seems like his big play to send in the military to stop the protests has failed because the Egyptian Army refuses to stop the protests. If orders to stop those protests were ever given, they sure aren't being followed.
Most likely, the cash is already in Switzerland... just like all good dictators do with their money.
Now if you send me a $1000 for assistance in releasing that money, properly sent to a bank in Nigeria, I'll make sure you can help in laundering that money for the Mubarak family to keep that out of the grubby hand of western governments. Those Nigerian bankers are very good at that thing, you know. You can even take online classes about how to ethically help out failing dictatorships.
I expect a branch campus of this university is soon to open up in Cairo just for this purpose.
"Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances."
I think the details and principles are there, although I do like the idea of specific legislation that somehow makes it a criminal offense for a government official to be specifically prosecuted for censorship in violation of these principles. It shouldn't matter if you are communicating via paper, newsprint, broadcast television, computer networks, pigeons, or from a soap box. Speech is speech and censorship is generally a stupid thing, especially if applies to ordinary citizens in general and prohibits somebody from acting.
Just wondering.... while it is curious that everybody is complaining about Mubarak here, does this apply to any freedoms that Julian Assange should enjoy too?
On the positive side, when the Aswan Dam fills up, it will provide a bunch of very fertile land that will be simply begging for agricultural usage and have fairly close access to irrigation resources too. The silt of the Nile will start to flow downstream again, and in the long run I think it will be a net gain for the Egyptian people. But in the meantime it is going to be a huge ouch for everybody involved.
The silt that is being blocked by the dam will eventually get to the delta, but it will simply take more time to get there.
As for the Mississippi River, the Army Corp of Engineers has sort of done the opposite: It has "improved" the ability of the river to send the silt downstream so in effect the Mississippi River Delta is getting larger, but unfortunately that is in the deep waters of the Gulf of Mexico where it doesn't really do anybody any good and certainly isn't helping to maintain the marshes on the southern coast of Louisiana, Texas, and the rest of the Gulf Coast region.
Hunting on the Oregon Trail. RTFA and realize that some of us are old enough to have played the original game on teletype machines. It was an old Control Data Cyber system computer.
If you had a 300 baud coupler, you were either in one of the rich school districts or close to the University of Minnesota. Most of the connections were 110 baud, or the "high speed" connections were a whopping 220 baud during that era (74-75). A few years later with some help from the good folks at AT&T (then Northwestern Bell Telephone Company that later became U.S. West and now Quest communications) the main trunk lines were upgraded and most of the connections were upgraded to 300 baud.... but that was about 1980 when that happened.
Most of the connections were routed to a dedicated phone line in an attempt to cut costs, where the connections were put through a multiplexer that was broken apart at the main computing facility at the University of Minnesota. This permitted most of the schools in a typical school district to use a local telephone number as it was in the local phone exchange too. Sometimes smaller school districts would share the same connections, and in my hometown the local community college and even a branch research lab of the University of Minnesota shared the connection.
When I was in high school, I discovered that the main telephone equipment for some reason was routed through the classroom where the computer science classes were held (Mr. Knudsen's 3rd floor classroom in Austin high school in Austin MN). I and a bunch of kids in the high school held what amounted to be a computer club, and often the teacher would lock the doors to the classroom and say "make sure you close the door when you leave" where we would sometimes stay for an hour or two after school... sometimes a bit longer than that.
We discovered a neat trick where if we unplugged the multiplexor, it would at least temporarily shut down the connections for everybody in the town. Keep in mind this was when phone lines were still somewhat unreliable, and typically when a connection dropped most people would re-dial the phone number to get back on and didn't think anything was really wrong with the equipment. In the meantime while everybody else in all of the other school districts (including I might add some college professors and college students trying to get major programming assignments finished) were busy redialing, my friends and I would quickly dial in and grab one of the temporary "empty" connections... essentially kicking other students off of the computer. Let's just say that the high school students never had to worry about a busy signal in the after-school club and sometimes even during class time. As for everybody else, their computer connections just seems a little less reliable than it really was... or rather they were depending on a bunch of high school students with selfish motives to keep the phone system going.
I had so much fun with that system where I can't possibly begin, and much of that began with playing Oregon Trail. Yes, I got bored with that game and moved on, but it ended up making me a computer professional with shall I say an unconventional educational experience. I'll also say that in particular with the Oregon Trail game, it motivated me to learn how to type in a big hurry.... which has helped me throughout life. I particularly learned how to type "POW" and "BANG" in a hurry.
YOU CAUGHT A BIG ONE!