There were likely thousands of people on just Manhattan Island alone prior to 1492. Being next to a major fertile river and food sources from Atlantic Ocean fishing certainly could support a significant population in its own right, not to mention existing cultivation of corn (maize), squash, and beans that were a staple of North American diet in the past couple of millenia. When Manhattan was finally "purchased", it was after significant plagues from European diseases had already depopulated huge portions of New England and other parts of the Atlantic coast of North America.
This is not how commercially viable megastructures work though! and that's my point!
Modern commercial structures are bipartite, consisting of a permanent shell and a modular interior. Think of any modern office building or strip mall. When one company moves out its a matter of simple retrofitting to get the next tenant company at home and functioning.
I don't think you realize how much maintenance goes into nearly any building you work or live in. As a homeowner, I guarantee that my house would fall apart if I didn't do a regular effort to try and repair/"improve" parts of my house at a regular interval. The same can be said about nearly any human structure.... including the Pyramids of Giza. Yes, the Egyptian government has spent a considerable amount of effort and money on simply maintaining the Pyramids and keeping tourists from running off with pieces of that ancient structure.
Admittedly, it could be argued that the particular model that has been used on the ISS could be improved and designed in such a way to significantly reduce the maintenance costs associated with its operation. The most significant issue is the life-support equipment, which is also something that most "megastructures" don't have to contend with here on the Earth... or have to deal with entire environment systems like liquid waste recycling. Imagine if a mall had to not only deal with the toilets, but it also had to have the sewage treatment plant and water reclamation system to put water into the drinking fountains.... it would cost a whole lot more money to operate and maintain those buildings. Those are also things that enjoy economies of scale as well, where a larger station/building can be more efficient in its resource consumption while a small building like a single-family home must depend on a much larger urban infrastructure for its needs.
If anything, one of the problems with the ISS is that NASA thought too small and didn't build a larger structure to take advantage of these economies of scale.
One of the problems with the ISS is that it isn't really technically in space. Yeah, the "atmosphere" is quite thin at that altitude and you wouldn't want to breath that stuff, but it still technically is flying through the Earth's atmosphere. There is atmospheric drag to the ISS, which is why it has to be periodically boosted up to a higher orbit from time to time. If left to itself, the ISS would eventually come crashing down entirely due to atmospheric drag.
As for artificial gravity, the ISS isn't designed nor built for the stresses which would occur from that kind of ad-hoc design change. There was a module built for the ISS (it is completed and sitting in a warehouse) which would include a slow centrifuge to simulate partial gravity environments like conditions on the Moon or Mars.
The issue of moving the ISS to one of the L-points (hopefully L-4 or L-5) is a matter of thrust energy to get there. While not nearly as significant as getting something from the ground into LEO, it still is a rather significant amount of energy to go from LEO to one of the Lagrangian points around the Moon.
Rehashed from a previous posting I did on a similar/. thread, this is something that would take weeks or months to perform if you were to use something like a VASMIR or ion thrust engine. That could be done, and ion engines are being used with the Dawn spacecraft currently enroute to Vesta (an asteroid), but it is something that would take a bit of an effort to build such an engine in the first place. It might be something fun to try, especially if you wanted to have a habitable structure to seed development at one of the L-points, but it wouldn't be an easy solution to simply letting the whole thing crash into the Earth.
This said, if the MIR space station is any kind of comparison, there would be private individuals willing to at least try and keep the ISS going beyond government projects.
More to the point, SpaceX is going to launch the first flight of the Falcon 9 sometime later this year. It is the next flight on their manifest, and has passed several key performance tests including pressure tests of the first stage and full simulated mission tests for both stages and their engines. The device that simulates the operation of the second stage engine in a vacuum is one incredible piece of engineering in its own right.
At least I haven't forgotten about this vehicle. As to the price to get up to the ISS, that isn't something as easily determined. The Falcon 9 will cost about $50 million, but that figure doesn't include support services for manned spaceflight. A reasonable guess is that a flight of the Dragon capsule will cost on the order of about $100 million, but with seven seats if you want the figure per astronaut. SpaceX plans to make a profit at this price figure too, and the price is a flat fee.
As for Orbital's vehicle, that was originally intended to be an unmanned carrier. That is still useful and it is important to maintenance of the ISS, but it can't quite be compared to the Ares/Shuttle/Apollo heritage vehicles.
The original COTS contract was only for unmanned cargo, but it was Elon Musk who raised the stakes and decided that he would push for a manned vehicle rating on his own dime. His intention for the Falcon 9 and the Dragon (planned even before the COTS contract was offered) was for manned spaceflight, but the extra NASA money certainly helped to keep the company profitable, especially now that he has met contract goals and has cashed a few of the NASA checks already.
Incidentally, nobody has announced that the ISS would be de-orbited in 2016 or any other year. It's standard procedure for a government agency not to make assumptions about the future. The original plan for the ISS had the station in orbit through 2016.
Actually, it was the director of the ISS program at NASA who made the proclamation to deorbit the ISS in 2016. I consider that to be a "somebody" worthy of being more significant than nobody.
Even so, I think the decision to deorbit the ISS is something well above the paygrade of even the ISS manager. The decision to keep or deorbit the ISS is going to be made at the highest levels... in other words it will be a decision made by the President of the United States together with the various science/aerospace budget committees in the U.S. Congress that will make the real decision here, not some bureaucrat at NASA. That advise for such a decision may be sought from such bureaucrats and by people more familiar with the ISS is true, but it isn't theirs to make.
Arguably, you can't really even be sure who is going to be President of the USA in 2016, and it won't likely be Obama... even assuming that he loses in 2012 and tries to run again in 2016 for his second term. Political pressure is certainly going to be there to at least try to extend ISS operations for a couple of years beyond 2016 at the very least and kick it down the road to whomever will be Obama's successor.
And just as importantly, what experiments have been done up there that were not possible with robotics.
A fair bit more than you realize. The main advantage of having a human researcher is that you can improvise an experiment and make changes on the spot that you can't do with a robotic mission. The iteration of the research cycle can be done in days or even minutes if you have a human researcher, where as with a robotic device each cycle will take years or decades from when you get results to sending up another package to test a new hypothesis.
This isn't to say that robotic exploration of space is moot and shouldn't be done (on the contrary) but that a complete and total dismissal of manned spaceflight is equally as illogical. Both have value, and getting people into space has more value in and of itself as well.
The point of the grandparent post was that such scientific research.... which has happened and has appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals of various fields... is usually discussed in narrow terms and regarding specific discoveries and not trumpeted in mainstream media outlets.
While I'm not as familiar with the ISS research as with previous manned spaceflight knowledge, there certainly has been value with manned exploration to make these critical decisions. Explicitly the research conducted by Harrison Schmidt during the Apollo 17 mission engaged in more discoveries about the Moon in particular and the Solar System in general than all of the robotic missions either there or to the rest of the planets of the Solar System combined. Yeah, that is a tall order, but if you read the scientific literature that came from that mission and the value of having a trained geologist performing a field survey in person and using his own eyes to make the determination of what samples to select.... it made a huge difference compared to the haphazard method of sending a probe there and having blind luck to find useful samples. And that is for going through the expense of getting somebody on the surface of the Moon.
Part of the problem with the ISS is that essential parts like the Trans-Hab module (built but not flown or schedule to fly up there) that would have provided the necessary living space for additional researchers got cut out at the last moment. In theory up to a dozen people could be on the ISS, but at the moment only 3 can live on it for long periods of time, and only two can be there with only Progress resupply modules. It also takes at least two and usually three people just to maintain the equipment. The lab modules were sent up, but there isn't a place to put the researchers that would be required to fine-tune and operate the equipment in a manner that would take advantage of a human researcher.... hence the favorable comparison of research done by robotic devices. That is an unjustified viewpoint, although it is a shortfall of this particular design for the station that was designed for political and not scientific purposes.
Exactly!. Why do they insist it needs de-orbiting in 2016? This seems to be the ultimate stupidity! (Sell it to Hilton as the ultimate (for now) tourist destination!)
Please explain how you expect Hilton to keep it in orbit without a means to boost it....
Why is that an issue? Mircorp was able to successfully launch both a manned and an unmanned mission to the MIR station before the U.S. government chopped the legs out from underneath the company. Getting companies and other folks who would be willing to send up propellant to maintain the station is not really an issue here.
On the other hand, getting the government's permission to use something that they intend to simply send to a junkyard isn't the easiest thing to do either.
BTW, that was the U.S. government that killed Mircorp, even though MIR was owned by the Russian government and all of the resupply contracts were also done with Russian Soyuz vehicles. It was a political decision to deliberately try and kill commercial space enterprises that caused MIR to crash and burn, not a lack of people willing to spend money to keep the thing up there. If that kind of effort was made for the MIR, why do you think the ISS would be less attractive to keep and maintain?
That's a lot of the same factors that went into the F-22 program decision. The point was to keep the program running in case we needed it; the marginal value of a couple more F-22s was nil. The average cost assigned to the F-22s inflated the cost of the final couple of units, but so would the very low production volume. And there was the issue of the F-35. If we had the F-35 deployed now and knew exactly how well it might augment the F-22 fleet if we needed more air superiority power, it have been a simpler decision.
In the case of the F-22s, there is also the assumption that the USA is not going to be going to war against a technologically competent opponent in aerial combat operations at any time in the near future. Afghani rebels and folks supported by the Taliban certainly aren't necessary for elaborate radar-evading aircraft that were originally designed to engage in combat operations over the former Soviet Union.
In this case, I sure pray that these decision makers are correct that such aircraft are not needed in any larger numbers. In order to drop additional bombs on southern Afghanistan, you are certainly correct that additional F-22s are hardly needed and the marginal value of a couple more is essentially nil. On the other hand, if for some reason a military opponent of the USA emerges in the next couple of decades, can a new line of fighters with either similar or better characteristics of the F-22 be created without huge fixed costs to restart the line? Is there a war in the future we may not have anticipated, and perhaps producing a couple more fighters might have made a difference? It is something hard to decide, also realizing that spending money now also keeps money from going to other places where it is also needed.
The same issue applies here in terms of the Shuttle program, with an even larger problem of the Ares/Constellation program development chewing up ever larger hunks of money in order to get built. At this point, NASA is between a rock and a hard place, with the rock being the shuttle program and the hard place compared to trying to find a replacement vehicle that won't take a decade before astronauts can go up into space again.
The problem with the shuttle is that it has relatively low per flight cost (hence the $60 million mention in several places... I've heard more along the lines of $150 million, but that is irrelevant in this case), but it has very high fixed costs that simply must be paid regardless of how many flights are made with the shuttle.
At the moment, it costs about $2-3 billion per year to maintain the standing army of workers who are involved with the shuttle preparation, external tank fabrication, booster refurbishment, and to actually get the thing launched from pad 39 A&B. All of this money must be spent to have a shuttle program at all, even if only one or a dozen launches happen. After the Columbia broke up over Texas, this army of workers continued to get paid even though for several years afterward there wasn't even a single launch.
What is really sad is that the shuttles themselves, when they were originally built, only cost about $1 billion to be manufactured in the first place, and arguably with a production line going could have pushed each shuttle down to about $100 million each for additional vehicles. All that kind of makes you wonder why they even bothered to make the shuttles even partially reusable in the first place, with all of the extra problems that come with that and the lives lost in pursuit of that goal.
Actually, this has been tested in court. The output of compilers and word processors in particular has legal precedence in terms of copyright that the creator of the software has a copyright claim to the output.
Some compiler publishers, notably Borland from back in the 1980's and 1990's, used to explicitly grant an unlimited license explicitly for computer software developed using their development tools. Microsoft has a similar kind of license, but it is much more complex and filled with legalese and all kinds of exceptions that ought to concern a for-profit company using MS tools for software development.... if they really understood that all software developed using Microsoft software (technically even the operating system under some precedents that go back to the 1960's ad 1970's) can have Microsoft asserting copyright over anything produced.
Lack of enforcement of such "copyright" doesn't mean that it can't be enforced at some future date.
Macromedia... the creators of both "Authorware" and "Flash" files... does assert a copyright claim to content produced with their tools, and you have to go out of your way to explicitly buy a license for republishing software produced with those tools on a commercial basis. I'm not as familiar with their policies after their merger with Adobe, which is another story altogether, as I have generally avoided Macromedia tools due to this practice.
To the best of my knowledge, I believe that the Free Software Foundation doesn't expect nor have they written their licenses like the GPL to be viral in nature to force the output of GPL'd software to also be GPL'd, but then again on that point I don't think there is any legal precedence to the contrary on open source software. I have read explicit opinions made in a casual manner, including at "geek" conventions of various types, where Richard Stallman doesn't want the GPL to cover copyright that broadly. I'll leave that for armchair lawyers to fight over.
But the issue here is that such precedence has occurred, and even beyond compilers. The issue with word processors is mainly in terms of the output and mark-up codes... the output to the printer explicitly covered under copyright. With such legal precedence to back you up, I sure wouldn't hold my breath for a judge to simply dismiss the case. The legal precedence goes back to the 1960's at the very least.
The issue with academic researchers, at least in terms of the journals where the results of the research are published, is to ask who is going to pay for producing the journals?
If you want to have a professional looking journal that has full-time editors, administrative staff, and reviewers (perhaps not full time, but at least willing to take the time to do an honest review and make it worth their time), you need to have paid staff. A good editor who not only knows the field but also has a strong command of language (English for most American and frankly international journals) are worth every penny you put on them. None of this is cheap and these are expenses well above and beyond the cost of simply printing the journal or operating a website (requiring other technical skills as well).
The "business model" used in most academic journals at the moment is to use the power of copyright to be able to help pay for the staff in this case, even if ultimately the organization producing the journals is even officially a non-profit organization, nor are all academic journals are non-profits either. If you want to abolish the role of copyright in regards to academic journals, you need to come up with a financial model that will help pay for these journals through some alternative method. BTW, most academic researchers also pay the journal for the privilege of even publishing their research, and even then that doesn't pay for everything.
It doesn't matter if it is government supported research or not in this case, although admittedly government funded research ought to have sufficient funds in whatever research grants are done to be able to pay for the publication of that research, including publication in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, that isn't something popular with congressmen trying to cut costs and thinking such publication costs are a waste of taxpayer money. More to the point, in terms of academic research paid for by government funds, it is the responsibility of the constituents to demand that research and get their elected representatives to insist that the citizens who pay for the research should have access to it.
The performance group above was quite controversial explicitly because they were "playing" the performance of somebody else. "Canned" music at a supposedly live performance is still something that invokes continued controversy, even when a musician is pantomiming their own previous performance.
This not withstanding (and Milli Vanilli did get a "license" from the musicians who actually performed the music), there is more from performance rights of musicians as well.
The issue is mainly who can control what happens when a performance is recorded, and how can somebody who make musical performance rather than composition earn an income. One of the most famous stories is with Davy Jones who performed music in thousands of concerts (I'm not making this up... it was over decades) and made millions for the music companies he worked for. Davy Jones, on the other hand, got a pathetic return for all of his effort.
Another musician, Billy Joel is another musician that got screwed over with some early performance contracts.
The point is that there is value to the performance copyright, and musicians can and do earn money from recordings of their performance, but the music business unfortunately has a lousy history of actually paying musicians who create the performances in the first place. That is what needs to change, and unfortunately only the top tier and oldest musicians are able to negotiate contracts that allow them a reasonable return on their effort.
Contracts like Davy Jones or Billy Joel signed should have been declared invalid, and those kind of recording contracts ought to be made illegal.
One of the things that amazes me with the Scrach development community is the drive to push the environment for programming concepts that the environment wasn't originally intended to handle. Among the items (surprisingly added is after the community got them working in previous incarnations of the environment) included multi-dimensional arrays, trignometric function, variable sorting, and calculating the square root of a number. Scratch is arguably Turing complete, although it does lack (for a good reason) access to I/O functions that would make it a more functional language... mainly being able to perform hard drive read/write access.
Still, I would argue that for those folks who are only interested in seeing how computers and getting a small taste of programming, this is a good way to get started without having to learn one of the "traditional" programming languages.
A beginning programmer should stay away from threads. In fact, most programmers, beginning and old, should stay away from threads.
I couldn't disagree more. Multi-threaded and multi-processor programming is only going to be more common in the future, not less. I'll admit that trying to debug multiple threrads in a traditional programming environment is something that is difficult to nearly impossible (in some cases) to do, but you don't have to be living in abject fear of the topic.
IMHO one of the best introductory environments for programming is Scratch, developed by the MIT Media lab. While it is geared more for kids rather than adults, developing software in that programming language uses multiple threads as if it was the very air that you breathe. Except for all but the most simple examples, code written in that language simply must use multiple threads in order to work. And yes, I've seen 8 year olds be successful in writing what would be in most other programming languages a nightmare from hell itself with hardly even a second thought.
That really is the issue: The thread behavior of a language, if it is to be done right, needs to be something inherent in the language itself and not something tacked onto it ad-hoc after the fact. Most software developers working with threads use operating system calls and tend to work at it on too low of a level to make it work properly without some significant headaches.
Amen! I love Pascal as a programming environment, and I've done enough challenges head-to-head with C developers to know that there is little if anything that can't be done with Delphi.
The only real issue is how Borland screwed up the product line and how Delphi is now incredibly expensive to get that only a serious Delphi programming team would bother buying the compiler in its current incarnation. How I miss the $50 student editions of Turbo Pascal from back elsewhen (something a mere mortal can afford if they have a limited budget, like most college students and casual experimenters).
Free Pascal and Lazarus do a pretty fair job, but they have all of the rough edges of a volunteer software project.
For myself and based on years of experience, C is a hideous language for an introductory environment for programmers. Mainly, this is due to the fact that C (and the derivatives like C++ or even C# and perhaps even Java) allows so much flexibility for software design that young programmers learn awful habits that they can't break later on in their development careers.
In addition, it is a bit of a big thing to chew off that is just starting out and trying to get their feet wet, not to mention some scary (for beginners) reference material that is written for masters of the art of programming and not mere novices.
Mind you, I'm not an anti-C developer, and it does a very good job for what it was designed to do: write compilers and operating systems. On this point it does a fantastic job, but not for introducing programming concepts to start out with.
If you are going to talk about amperage, you need to mention the voltage as well. In the USA with 220 volt AC service, older homes typically have about 40 amp service, and really old homes may even be 30 amps. Most single-family homes are about 100 amps in new construction. Homes with electric heating systems (mostly pre-1970's stuff there, as natural gas and other alternatives are more economical) may have slightly more amperage.
I'm not suggesting that this is a total fib about having a 400 amp home that isn't a mansion, but it usually isn't that much and isn't typical.
BTW, the typical "rule-of-thumb" when estimating how much power consumption a typical residential home uses off of a power grid is about 35 kilowatts (more or less). That is about 80 amps with 220 volt service.
BTW, you may gasp with 30 amps to a whole house as too low. It is, and it is often recommended that you upgrade your electrical service if it is that low. You'd still shouldn't be surprised to find 80 year old homes that have the original electrical service when built, including homes with 220 volt service. Back elsewhen, you didn't usually need much and just running a few light bulbs and perhaps a toaster or a radio was sufficient. At least that was the thinking when some of the electric wiring systems were installed into homes in the 1920's and just a little bit later.
Certainly most homes that are going to be set up for charging up batteries in electric automobiles will likely need to upgrade their electrical service from the utility company in some significant way unless it was designed explicitly to support electric vehicles. Don't even get me started on what happens to the national electrical grid is over say a 10 year period of time significant upgrading of home power circuits come on line. The capital outlays for such an increase in generation capacity will nearly bankrupt the country, and can't be met entirely or even substantially from "green" energy production (discounting nuclear energy sources).
I can only hope that the Polywell reactor is proven successful and can be manufactured for a reasonable price.
As a post-script. I'll buy that a typical automobile gets only 30% efficiency in burning gasoline, and that a typical range of a standard automobile is around 400 miles, so you can cut down on a really efficient electric automobile to roughly 100 kilowatt-hours of energy (there still is rolling and air resistance in electric vehicles). That cuts down the power circuit to a much more manageable 600 kilowatt connection. I've dealt with power on that level, and it isn't something you want to casually be shoving into a socket on your car.
I worked on outdoor electric signs found in sports stadiums, where they really did use about 600 kilowatts of power (one sign I worked on consumed 1.2 megawatts.... fun to play with and cause instant black-outs in the surrounding neighborhoods). Every time we plugged the signs in... just for testing the equipment in the factory.... we needed a licensed electrician to make the connection. The installations in stadiums didn't need an electrician to turn them on, but then again they didn't have to be plugged in each time either as this is a permanent installation.
These guys are genuinely clueless about how much energy is required here, and buying the BS from several battery companies that are scam artists of the worst kind.
I realize that the article and the press release claim that the vehicle can be recharged in 10 minutes.
I say that is complete and utter bullshit. What are they doing, connecting the vehicle to a nuclear power plant with 4-inch thick cables?
Seriously, anybody who suggest that you can power an all-electric vehicle in less than a couple of hours is smoking some really good weed or is not knowledgeable about how much energy that a motor vehicle actually consumes. Oh, if you are only going to travel a dozen miles or so I suppose you can recharge quickly, but we are talking the raw transfer of energy, and a simple 110 volt standard plug just won't do. Even a 220 volt electric clothes dryer plug or even the fancy adaptor that Tesla Motors uses to recharge their vehicles still takes on the order of hours to recharge a high-performance electric vehicle. Again, this is due to simply transferring the raw power.
Also, most ordinary homes are rated with between 40 to 100 amps of service. @220 volts, this translates from 8 kilowatts to 20 kilowatts. Yes, that is significant, but I do presume that most people also would like to operate a home theater, air conditioner, stove, and other appliances simultaneously while their car is recharging, even with slightly beefed up service. Remember, 1 kilowatt-hour is 1 kilowatt of power drawn for a whole hour. 1 gallon of gasoline is the rough equivalent of 35 kilowatt-hours @ 100% conversion of energy to raw electricity. You do the math from here, as a vehicle taking 8-12 hours to recharge may actually be quite efficient from an energy perspective. Extracting 350 kilowatt-hours of electricity in 10 minutes (the energy equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline) would require a 2.1 megawatt circuit. That is some power station at your home, or even your friendly "fuel station" where technicians trained on how to attach megawatt power cables to a vehicle (certainly not minimum wage jobs if I ever heard of it) are available. And who is going to invest the money to build these monster recharging stations?
Back to the point, I'll believe it when I see it, but a 10 minute electric vehicle recharge (assuming electric batteries as the energy storage medium) is never going to happen, unless you change the basic laws of physics in this universe. Electrical energy at these densities necessary to pull this off are dangerous and not part of the current industrial infrastructure anywhere in the world at the moment.... for a good reason.
Prior to 9/11, Iraq was indeed throwing around huge amounts of money to hire folks to build nuclear weapons. In spite of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction that mostly turned up empty (and very debatable about what may have been found or not found), there is significant evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein did indeed try to build nuclear weapons, and certainly built biological and chemical weapons... as he used them. Building missiles was a major component of this effort, particularly to build a missile that could hit Israel from within Iraqi borders. Into the environment when the ISS was proposed, this was a very real concern and Iraq was certainly throwing that kind of money around (in the 1990's and earlier). Russian rocket scientists were among those who were leading the effort to make these missiles too.
As for writing a check to RKK Energia and calling it done.... I didn't make the policy or decision. Yes, in hindsight it may have seemed like a good idea, but at the same time why not get something out of them as well? Engineers like making things, which is one way to keep them happy, which was the main point. Building the ISS was one way to keep them in Russia and not even want to go elsewhere.
Could this have been done somehow in a manner much more productive than building the ISS? Perhaps, but it was one of the major rationales for building the station.
When the ISS was originally sent up (aka the first module, Unity, was added to the Russian module Zarya) nearly every article mentioned that the ISS was going to be a permanent structure. When NASA officials were asked what that meant (going back to 1988 mind you), they responded that the ISS was going to be so large that it would be impossible and even dangerous to consider deorbiting the space station.
To give an interesting size comparison, the following graphic compares the ISS to the fictional sizes of the USS Enterprise, the Corellian Corvette that Princess Leia was in at the beginning of Star Wars ep IV, and the Battlestar Galactica (2004 reimagined version):
In short, the ISS is the single largest structure that has ever been put together by mankind for use in space. It also will likely to continue to have that distinction for a great many years into the future.
Also, I have not heard of any significant breakthrough in celestial mechanics that has happened in the past 40 years. The computers of 1970 were certainly capable of being able to plot the trajectories and paths of an incoming body, and I would lay a challenge to any rocket scientist to come up with any such calculation that couldn't be performed nearly as quickly on a PDP-11 (in terms of results returned from a human time frame). The variables that would cause an error of hitting Australia vs. somewhere in the Pacific are still there (variations in solar activity, storm activity, sea water temperatures, and atmospheric density on a local level). The primary reason for the margin of error with Skylab was because it had no guidance system whatever. Please educate me if I'm mistaken, but I don't know what new stuff has been added to this discipline that wasn't already known in the 1960s, including Einstein's theory of relativity.
The ISS is a huge structure, and even with the best and most careful planning it would be a major accomplishment to be able to bring it safely back to the Earth. I suppose that the ISS could take advantage of the vehicle that brought everything up there: The Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, that is being retired and no other space vehicle has the capability of being able to bring things from orbit back to the Earth as efficiently as the shuttle.
Bringing the ISS down in multiple pieces with some sort of control module on each piece to provide guidance is going to take not only a whole bunch of extra hardware, it is also going to require sending up at least a dozen or more astronauts to perform the labor of performing the demolition. For this reason alone, I believe it to be vastly cheaper and IMHO safer for both those on the ground as well as mitigating the potential loss of life from just having astronauts make the trip up to space (spaceflight is hardly 100% assurance you will even make it to orbit alive or return safely).
An ion drive is currently being used with the Dawn Mission, where the delta-v requirements are certainly as comparable to going from LEO to L-5. That mission started in 1997 (yes, it is in space right now and flying with the engine running and producing thrust right now) and it will ultimately last until at least 2015, reaching Vesta in 2011. Using that as a rule of thumb, I would expect at a maximum of a similar duration of time to get the ISS to L5... about 3-4 years if you use this comparison. I would expect it to happen much faster, and certainly not take decades.
The ISS is clearly intended to be boosted up into a higher orbit, and the hardpoints to keep the vehicle together are well understood... at least with moderate thrust velocities. I would expect accelerations similar to that provided by Progress boosters to be similar, and there are designs to put the engines directly on the ISS for altitude control. An ESA resupply module docket to the ISS and provided a delta-v that accelerated to an additional 2.65 m/s. I don't know how long that took (giving some idea on the acceleration tolerances of the ISS), but it was a conventional rocket. Surprisingly, this is nearly half of the delta-v that is necessary to get to L-5.
Using the previous example, I don't think the ISS would spend all that much time in the Van Allen belts, and to leave it unmanned for a brief period of time wouldn't be the end of the world either. This is something that certainly could happen if there was an objective to make it happen, and even just moving the ISS to L-5 as a place to "park" the structure as a historical monument to future generations rather than having it crash into the Earth causing potential damage or even death may make the effort worthwhile.
Heck, it may even be cheaper in terms of boosting the ISS to a very high altitude rather than using a similar booster to attempt a more controlled re-entry over what would be presumably an uninhabited part of the Earth like the Pacific Ocean. Sending a crew up to the ISS to perform the dismantling process, getting multiple boosters onto each ISS module, and simply trying to deal with the thing may on the whole be easier to even crash it on the Moon.
Is the environment at L-5 really all that much different than LEO? Redesigning the software is something trivial, and simply takes a team on the ground here on Earth to make the changes. I don't consider a software change to be (for the price of the ISS) a big deal. Give me a few million dollars, and I'll make the changes myself and hire the team to get it done.
The main environmental difference is that at L-5 you no longer have protection of the Van Allen belts (most of the time), and the day/night cycles for each orbit would give way to 24/7/365 sunlight with only minor exceptions during an eclipse that would happen roughly as often as a Lunar Eclipse. Batteries wouldn't be as critical as they are now (about half of the time the ISS is in shadow in LEO) but the radiators might have to be beefed up a little bit.
Even with all this, I don't think it would be as difficult as you would think. An ion drive like you are suggesting might be all that is necessary in order to get the delta-v to move to L-5.... and moving between L-5 and the Moon is comparatively trivial in comparison. This Wikipedia article gives a pretty good overview of how much energy is needed for moving from place to place in the Solar System. Moving from LEO to L-5 takes as much energy (actually more) than going from L-5 to Phobos. Now that is something to think about.
Provided a subsidy to RKK Energia that would ensure rocket scientists remain employed in the Russian Republic and not run off to other countries like Iran, Iraq, or North Korea where they could do a whole lot more damage.
Provide a "vehicle" where orbital construction techniques learned by the Russians in the development of the Salyut and MIR programs could be transferred to the NASA Astronaut corps.
Both of these objectives have been crucial, and IMHO in some ways quite cost effective. Note that neither mission has anything to do with science, study of human physiology in a prolonged exposure to zero-G environments, or even being an employment program for aerospace engineers in various critical congressional districts.
This is not to say that perhaps money could be better spent elsewhere, and I would have to agree that scientific investigations may be performed better with unmanned equipment. But to say that the ISS has accomplished nothing is forgetting why, exactly, the thing was put up in the first place.
As to if it would be worth sending up even a cheap launcher (like the SpaceX Dragon capsule) with astronauts and an additional unmanned cargo ship with supplies and instruments for scientific investigation.... assuming an operational ISS..... that is something which you could debate much more effectively and likely show a robotic investigation will still be cost effective. I do think it would be a harder case to make, however, and there is something to be said for having an astronaut that can "tweak" instruments to do something different, or be able to do something as simple as running a hammer on the antenna in order to get it to work.
I would like to know why the Galileo spacecraft didn't have an astronaut do an in-space checkout of the systems before it left the Shuttle payload, to give an example of where having astronauts would have helped in an expensive scientific investigation. A minor repair to the main antenna while in space seems like it could have been a useful task.
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There were likely thousands of people on just Manhattan Island alone prior to 1492. Being next to a major fertile river and food sources from Atlantic Ocean fishing certainly could support a significant population in its own right, not to mention existing cultivation of corn (maize), squash, and beans that were a staple of North American diet in the past couple of millenia. When Manhattan was finally "purchased", it was after significant plagues from European diseases had already depopulated huge portions of New England and other parts of the Atlantic coast of North America.
This is not how commercially viable megastructures work though! and that's my point!
Modern commercial structures are bipartite, consisting of a permanent shell and a modular interior. Think of any modern office building or strip mall. When one company moves out its a matter of simple retrofitting to get the next tenant company at home and functioning.
I don't think you realize how much maintenance goes into nearly any building you work or live in. As a homeowner, I guarantee that my house would fall apart if I didn't do a regular effort to try and repair/"improve" parts of my house at a regular interval. The same can be said about nearly any human structure.... including the Pyramids of Giza. Yes, the Egyptian government has spent a considerable amount of effort and money on simply maintaining the Pyramids and keeping tourists from running off with pieces of that ancient structure.
Admittedly, it could be argued that the particular model that has been used on the ISS could be improved and designed in such a way to significantly reduce the maintenance costs associated with its operation. The most significant issue is the life-support equipment, which is also something that most "megastructures" don't have to contend with here on the Earth... or have to deal with entire environment systems like liquid waste recycling. Imagine if a mall had to not only deal with the toilets, but it also had to have the sewage treatment plant and water reclamation system to put water into the drinking fountains.... it would cost a whole lot more money to operate and maintain those buildings. Those are also things that enjoy economies of scale as well, where a larger station/building can be more efficient in its resource consumption while a small building like a single-family home must depend on a much larger urban infrastructure for its needs.
If anything, one of the problems with the ISS is that NASA thought too small and didn't build a larger structure to take advantage of these economies of scale.
One of the problems with the ISS is that it isn't really technically in space. Yeah, the "atmosphere" is quite thin at that altitude and you wouldn't want to breath that stuff, but it still technically is flying through the Earth's atmosphere. There is atmospheric drag to the ISS, which is why it has to be periodically boosted up to a higher orbit from time to time. If left to itself, the ISS would eventually come crashing down entirely due to atmospheric drag.
As for artificial gravity, the ISS isn't designed nor built for the stresses which would occur from that kind of ad-hoc design change. There was a module built for the ISS (it is completed and sitting in a warehouse) which would include a slow centrifuge to simulate partial gravity environments like conditions on the Moon or Mars.
The issue of moving the ISS to one of the L-points (hopefully L-4 or L-5) is a matter of thrust energy to get there. While not nearly as significant as getting something from the ground into LEO, it still is a rather significant amount of energy to go from LEO to one of the Lagrangian points around the Moon.
Rehashed from a previous posting I did on a similar /. thread, this is something that would take weeks or months to perform if you were to use something like a VASMIR or ion thrust engine. That could be done, and ion engines are being used with the Dawn spacecraft currently enroute to Vesta (an asteroid), but it is something that would take a bit of an effort to build such an engine in the first place. It might be something fun to try, especially if you wanted to have a habitable structure to seed development at one of the L-points, but it wouldn't be an easy solution to simply letting the whole thing crash into the Earth.
This said, if the MIR space station is any kind of comparison, there would be private individuals willing to at least try and keep the ISS going beyond government projects.
More to the point, SpaceX is going to launch the first flight of the Falcon 9 sometime later this year. It is the next flight on their manifest, and has passed several key performance tests including pressure tests of the first stage and full simulated mission tests for both stages and their engines. The device that simulates the operation of the second stage engine in a vacuum is one incredible piece of engineering in its own right.
At least I haven't forgotten about this vehicle. As to the price to get up to the ISS, that isn't something as easily determined. The Falcon 9 will cost about $50 million, but that figure doesn't include support services for manned spaceflight. A reasonable guess is that a flight of the Dragon capsule will cost on the order of about $100 million, but with seven seats if you want the figure per astronaut. SpaceX plans to make a profit at this price figure too, and the price is a flat fee.
As for Orbital's vehicle, that was originally intended to be an unmanned carrier. That is still useful and it is important to maintenance of the ISS, but it can't quite be compared to the Ares/Shuttle/Apollo heritage vehicles.
The original COTS contract was only for unmanned cargo, but it was Elon Musk who raised the stakes and decided that he would push for a manned vehicle rating on his own dime. His intention for the Falcon 9 and the Dragon (planned even before the COTS contract was offered) was for manned spaceflight, but the extra NASA money certainly helped to keep the company profitable, especially now that he has met contract goals and has cashed a few of the NASA checks already.
Incidentally, nobody has announced that the ISS would be de-orbited in 2016 or any other year. It's standard procedure for a government agency not to make assumptions about the future. The original plan for the ISS had the station in orbit through 2016.
Actually, it was the director of the ISS program at NASA who made the proclamation to deorbit the ISS in 2016. I consider that to be a "somebody" worthy of being more significant than nobody.
Even so, I think the decision to deorbit the ISS is something well above the paygrade of even the ISS manager. The decision to keep or deorbit the ISS is going to be made at the highest levels... in other words it will be a decision made by the President of the United States together with the various science/aerospace budget committees in the U.S. Congress that will make the real decision here, not some bureaucrat at NASA. That advise for such a decision may be sought from such bureaucrats and by people more familiar with the ISS is true, but it isn't theirs to make.
Arguably, you can't really even be sure who is going to be President of the USA in 2016, and it won't likely be Obama... even assuming that he loses in 2012 and tries to run again in 2016 for his second term. Political pressure is certainly going to be there to at least try to extend ISS operations for a couple of years beyond 2016 at the very least and kick it down the road to whomever will be Obama's successor.
And just as importantly, what experiments have been done up there that were not possible with robotics.
A fair bit more than you realize. The main advantage of having a human researcher is that you can improvise an experiment and make changes on the spot that you can't do with a robotic mission. The iteration of the research cycle can be done in days or even minutes if you have a human researcher, where as with a robotic device each cycle will take years or decades from when you get results to sending up another package to test a new hypothesis.
This isn't to say that robotic exploration of space is moot and shouldn't be done (on the contrary) but that a complete and total dismissal of manned spaceflight is equally as illogical. Both have value, and getting people into space has more value in and of itself as well.
The point of the grandparent post was that such scientific research.... which has happened and has appeared in peer-reviewed scientific journals of various fields... is usually discussed in narrow terms and regarding specific discoveries and not trumpeted in mainstream media outlets.
While I'm not as familiar with the ISS research as with previous manned spaceflight knowledge, there certainly has been value with manned exploration to make these critical decisions. Explicitly the research conducted by Harrison Schmidt during the Apollo 17 mission engaged in more discoveries about the Moon in particular and the Solar System in general than all of the robotic missions either there or to the rest of the planets of the Solar System combined. Yeah, that is a tall order, but if you read the scientific literature that came from that mission and the value of having a trained geologist performing a field survey in person and using his own eyes to make the determination of what samples to select.... it made a huge difference compared to the haphazard method of sending a probe there and having blind luck to find useful samples. And that is for going through the expense of getting somebody on the surface of the Moon.
Part of the problem with the ISS is that essential parts like the Trans-Hab module (built but not flown or schedule to fly up there) that would have provided the necessary living space for additional researchers got cut out at the last moment. In theory up to a dozen people could be on the ISS, but at the moment only 3 can live on it for long periods of time, and only two can be there with only Progress resupply modules. It also takes at least two and usually three people just to maintain the equipment. The lab modules were sent up, but there isn't a place to put the researchers that would be required to fine-tune and operate the equipment in a manner that would take advantage of a human researcher.... hence the favorable comparison of research done by robotic devices. That is an unjustified viewpoint, although it is a shortfall of this particular design for the station that was designed for political and not scientific purposes.
Exactly!. Why do they insist it needs de-orbiting in 2016? This seems to be the ultimate stupidity! (Sell it to Hilton as the ultimate (for now) tourist destination!)
Please explain how you expect Hilton to keep it in orbit without a means to boost it....
Why is that an issue? Mircorp was able to successfully launch both a manned and an unmanned mission to the MIR station before the U.S. government chopped the legs out from underneath the company. Getting companies and other folks who would be willing to send up propellant to maintain the station is not really an issue here.
On the other hand, getting the government's permission to use something that they intend to simply send to a junkyard isn't the easiest thing to do either.
BTW, that was the U.S. government that killed Mircorp, even though MIR was owned by the Russian government and all of the resupply contracts were also done with Russian Soyuz vehicles. It was a political decision to deliberately try and kill commercial space enterprises that caused MIR to crash and burn, not a lack of people willing to spend money to keep the thing up there. If that kind of effort was made for the MIR, why do you think the ISS would be less attractive to keep and maintain?
That's a lot of the same factors that went into the F-22 program decision. The point was to keep the program running in case we needed it; the marginal value of a couple more F-22s was nil. The average cost assigned to the F-22s inflated the cost of the final couple of units, but so would the very low production volume. And there was the issue of the F-35. If we had the F-35 deployed now and knew exactly how well it might augment the F-22 fleet if we needed more air superiority power, it have been a simpler decision.
In the case of the F-22s, there is also the assumption that the USA is not going to be going to war against a technologically competent opponent in aerial combat operations at any time in the near future. Afghani rebels and folks supported by the Taliban certainly aren't necessary for elaborate radar-evading aircraft that were originally designed to engage in combat operations over the former Soviet Union.
In this case, I sure pray that these decision makers are correct that such aircraft are not needed in any larger numbers. In order to drop additional bombs on southern Afghanistan, you are certainly correct that additional F-22s are hardly needed and the marginal value of a couple more is essentially nil. On the other hand, if for some reason a military opponent of the USA emerges in the next couple of decades, can a new line of fighters with either similar or better characteristics of the F-22 be created without huge fixed costs to restart the line? Is there a war in the future we may not have anticipated, and perhaps producing a couple more fighters might have made a difference? It is something hard to decide, also realizing that spending money now also keeps money from going to other places where it is also needed.
The same issue applies here in terms of the Shuttle program, with an even larger problem of the Ares/Constellation program development chewing up ever larger hunks of money in order to get built. At this point, NASA is between a rock and a hard place, with the rock being the shuttle program and the hard place compared to trying to find a replacement vehicle that won't take a decade before astronauts can go up into space again.
The problem with the shuttle is that it has relatively low per flight cost (hence the $60 million mention in several places... I've heard more along the lines of $150 million, but that is irrelevant in this case), but it has very high fixed costs that simply must be paid regardless of how many flights are made with the shuttle.
At the moment, it costs about $2-3 billion per year to maintain the standing army of workers who are involved with the shuttle preparation, external tank fabrication, booster refurbishment, and to actually get the thing launched from pad 39 A&B. All of this money must be spent to have a shuttle program at all, even if only one or a dozen launches happen. After the Columbia broke up over Texas, this army of workers continued to get paid even though for several years afterward there wasn't even a single launch.
What is really sad is that the shuttles themselves, when they were originally built, only cost about $1 billion to be manufactured in the first place, and arguably with a production line going could have pushed each shuttle down to about $100 million each for additional vehicles. All that kind of makes you wonder why they even bothered to make the shuttles even partially reusable in the first place, with all of the extra problems that come with that and the lives lost in pursuit of that goal.
Actually, this has been tested in court. The output of compilers and word processors in particular has legal precedence in terms of copyright that the creator of the software has a copyright claim to the output.
Some compiler publishers, notably Borland from back in the 1980's and 1990's, used to explicitly grant an unlimited license explicitly for computer software developed using their development tools. Microsoft has a similar kind of license, but it is much more complex and filled with legalese and all kinds of exceptions that ought to concern a for-profit company using MS tools for software development.... if they really understood that all software developed using Microsoft software (technically even the operating system under some precedents that go back to the 1960's ad 1970's) can have Microsoft asserting copyright over anything produced.
Lack of enforcement of such "copyright" doesn't mean that it can't be enforced at some future date.
Macromedia... the creators of both "Authorware" and "Flash" files... does assert a copyright claim to content produced with their tools, and you have to go out of your way to explicitly buy a license for republishing software produced with those tools on a commercial basis. I'm not as familiar with their policies after their merger with Adobe, which is another story altogether, as I have generally avoided Macromedia tools due to this practice.
To the best of my knowledge, I believe that the Free Software Foundation doesn't expect nor have they written their licenses like the GPL to be viral in nature to force the output of GPL'd software to also be GPL'd, but then again on that point I don't think there is any legal precedence to the contrary on open source software. I have read explicit opinions made in a casual manner, including at "geek" conventions of various types, where Richard Stallman doesn't want the GPL to cover copyright that broadly. I'll leave that for armchair lawyers to fight over.
But the issue here is that such precedence has occurred, and even beyond compilers. The issue with word processors is mainly in terms of the output and mark-up codes... the output to the printer explicitly covered under copyright. With such legal precedence to back you up, I sure wouldn't hold my breath for a judge to simply dismiss the case. The legal precedence goes back to the 1960's at the very least.
The issue with academic researchers, at least in terms of the journals where the results of the research are published, is to ask who is going to pay for producing the journals?
If you want to have a professional looking journal that has full-time editors, administrative staff, and reviewers (perhaps not full time, but at least willing to take the time to do an honest review and make it worth their time), you need to have paid staff. A good editor who not only knows the field but also has a strong command of language (English for most American and frankly international journals) are worth every penny you put on them. None of this is cheap and these are expenses well above and beyond the cost of simply printing the journal or operating a website (requiring other technical skills as well).
The "business model" used in most academic journals at the moment is to use the power of copyright to be able to help pay for the staff in this case, even if ultimately the organization producing the journals is even officially a non-profit organization, nor are all academic journals are non-profits either. If you want to abolish the role of copyright in regards to academic journals, you need to come up with a financial model that will help pay for these journals through some alternative method. BTW, most academic researchers also pay the journal for the privilege of even publishing their research, and even then that doesn't pay for everything.
It doesn't matter if it is government supported research or not in this case, although admittedly government funded research ought to have sufficient funds in whatever research grants are done to be able to pay for the publication of that research, including publication in peer-reviewed journals. Unfortunately, that isn't something popular with congressmen trying to cut costs and thinking such publication costs are a waste of taxpayer money. More to the point, in terms of academic research paid for by government funds, it is the responsibility of the constituents to demand that research and get their elected representatives to insist that the citizens who pay for the research should have access to it.
The GP was pointing out that there's little value in performance copyright, because no one else can play your performance.
That isn't quite true:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milli_Vanilli
The performance group above was quite controversial explicitly because they were "playing" the performance of somebody else. "Canned" music at a supposedly live performance is still something that invokes continued controversy, even when a musician is pantomiming their own previous performance.
This not withstanding (and Milli Vanilli did get a "license" from the musicians who actually performed the music), there is more from performance rights of musicians as well.
The issue is mainly who can control what happens when a performance is recorded, and how can somebody who make musical performance rather than composition earn an income. One of the most famous stories is with Davy Jones who performed music in thousands of concerts (I'm not making this up... it was over decades) and made millions for the music companies he worked for. Davy Jones, on the other hand, got a pathetic return for all of his effort.
Another musician, Billy Joel is another musician that got screwed over with some early performance contracts.
The point is that there is value to the performance copyright, and musicians can and do earn money from recordings of their performance, but the music business unfortunately has a lousy history of actually paying musicians who create the performances in the first place. That is what needs to change, and unfortunately only the top tier and oldest musicians are able to negotiate contracts that allow them a reasonable return on their effort.
Contracts like Davy Jones or Billy Joel signed should have been declared invalid, and those kind of recording contracts ought to be made illegal.
One of the things that amazes me with the Scrach development community is the drive to push the environment for programming concepts that the environment wasn't originally intended to handle. Among the items (surprisingly added is after the community got them working in previous incarnations of the environment) included multi-dimensional arrays, trignometric function, variable sorting, and calculating the square root of a number. Scratch is arguably Turing complete, although it does lack (for a good reason) access to I/O functions that would make it a more functional language... mainly being able to perform hard drive read/write access.
Still, I would argue that for those folks who are only interested in seeing how computers and getting a small taste of programming, this is a good way to get started without having to learn one of the "traditional" programming languages.
A beginning programmer should stay away from threads. In fact, most programmers, beginning and old, should stay away from threads.
I couldn't disagree more. Multi-threaded and multi-processor programming is only going to be more common in the future, not less. I'll admit that trying to debug multiple threrads in a traditional programming environment is something that is difficult to nearly impossible (in some cases) to do, but you don't have to be living in abject fear of the topic.
IMHO one of the best introductory environments for programming is Scratch, developed by the MIT Media lab. While it is geared more for kids rather than adults, developing software in that programming language uses multiple threads as if it was the very air that you breathe. Except for all but the most simple examples, code written in that language simply must use multiple threads in order to work. And yes, I've seen 8 year olds be successful in writing what would be in most other programming languages a nightmare from hell itself with hardly even a second thought.
That really is the issue: The thread behavior of a language, if it is to be done right, needs to be something inherent in the language itself and not something tacked onto it ad-hoc after the fact. Most software developers working with threads use operating system calls and tend to work at it on too low of a level to make it work properly without some significant headaches.
Amen! I love Pascal as a programming environment, and I've done enough challenges head-to-head with C developers to know that there is little if anything that can't be done with Delphi.
The only real issue is how Borland screwed up the product line and how Delphi is now incredibly expensive to get that only a serious Delphi programming team would bother buying the compiler in its current incarnation. How I miss the $50 student editions of Turbo Pascal from back elsewhen (something a mere mortal can afford if they have a limited budget, like most college students and casual experimenters).
Free Pascal and Lazarus do a pretty fair job, but they have all of the rough edges of a volunteer software project.
For myself and based on years of experience, C is a hideous language for an introductory environment for programmers. Mainly, this is due to the fact that C (and the derivatives like C++ or even C# and perhaps even Java) allows so much flexibility for software design that young programmers learn awful habits that they can't break later on in their development careers.
In addition, it is a bit of a big thing to chew off that is just starting out and trying to get their feet wet, not to mention some scary (for beginners) reference material that is written for masters of the art of programming and not mere novices.
Mind you, I'm not an anti-C developer, and it does a very good job for what it was designed to do: write compilers and operating systems. On this point it does a fantastic job, but not for introducing programming concepts to start out with.
If you are going to talk about amperage, you need to mention the voltage as well. In the USA with 220 volt AC service, older homes typically have about 40 amp service, and really old homes may even be 30 amps. Most single-family homes are about 100 amps in new construction. Homes with electric heating systems (mostly pre-1970's stuff there, as natural gas and other alternatives are more economical) may have slightly more amperage.
I'm not suggesting that this is a total fib about having a 400 amp home that isn't a mansion, but it usually isn't that much and isn't typical.
BTW, the typical "rule-of-thumb" when estimating how much power consumption a typical residential home uses off of a power grid is about 35 kilowatts (more or less). That is about 80 amps with 220 volt service.
BTW, you may gasp with 30 amps to a whole house as too low. It is, and it is often recommended that you upgrade your electrical service if it is that low. You'd still shouldn't be surprised to find 80 year old homes that have the original electrical service when built, including homes with 220 volt service. Back elsewhen, you didn't usually need much and just running a few light bulbs and perhaps a toaster or a radio was sufficient. At least that was the thinking when some of the electric wiring systems were installed into homes in the 1920's and just a little bit later.
Certainly most homes that are going to be set up for charging up batteries in electric automobiles will likely need to upgrade their electrical service from the utility company in some significant way unless it was designed explicitly to support electric vehicles. Don't even get me started on what happens to the national electrical grid is over say a 10 year period of time significant upgrading of home power circuits come on line. The capital outlays for such an increase in generation capacity will nearly bankrupt the country, and can't be met entirely or even substantially from "green" energy production (discounting nuclear energy sources).
I can only hope that the Polywell reactor is proven successful and can be manufactured for a reasonable price.
As a post-script. I'll buy that a typical automobile gets only 30% efficiency in burning gasoline, and that a typical range of a standard automobile is around 400 miles, so you can cut down on a really efficient electric automobile to roughly 100 kilowatt-hours of energy (there still is rolling and air resistance in electric vehicles). That cuts down the power circuit to a much more manageable 600 kilowatt connection. I've dealt with power on that level, and it isn't something you want to casually be shoving into a socket on your car.
I worked on outdoor electric signs found in sports stadiums, where they really did use about 600 kilowatts of power (one sign I worked on consumed 1.2 megawatts.... fun to play with and cause instant black-outs in the surrounding neighborhoods). Every time we plugged the signs in... just for testing the equipment in the factory.... we needed a licensed electrician to make the connection. The installations in stadiums didn't need an electrician to turn them on, but then again they didn't have to be plugged in each time either as this is a permanent installation.
These guys are genuinely clueless about how much energy is required here, and buying the BS from several battery companies that are scam artists of the worst kind.
I realize that the article and the press release claim that the vehicle can be recharged in 10 minutes.
I say that is complete and utter bullshit. What are they doing, connecting the vehicle to a nuclear power plant with 4-inch thick cables?
Seriously, anybody who suggest that you can power an all-electric vehicle in less than a couple of hours is smoking some really good weed or is not knowledgeable about how much energy that a motor vehicle actually consumes. Oh, if you are only going to travel a dozen miles or so I suppose you can recharge quickly, but we are talking the raw transfer of energy, and a simple 110 volt standard plug just won't do. Even a 220 volt electric clothes dryer plug or even the fancy adaptor that Tesla Motors uses to recharge their vehicles still takes on the order of hours to recharge a high-performance electric vehicle. Again, this is due to simply transferring the raw power.
Also, most ordinary homes are rated with between 40 to 100 amps of service. @220 volts, this translates from 8 kilowatts to 20 kilowatts. Yes, that is significant, but I do presume that most people also would like to operate a home theater, air conditioner, stove, and other appliances simultaneously while their car is recharging, even with slightly beefed up service. Remember, 1 kilowatt-hour is 1 kilowatt of power drawn for a whole hour. 1 gallon of gasoline is the rough equivalent of 35 kilowatt-hours @ 100% conversion of energy to raw electricity. You do the math from here, as a vehicle taking 8-12 hours to recharge may actually be quite efficient from an energy perspective. Extracting 350 kilowatt-hours of electricity in 10 minutes (the energy equivalent of 10 gallons of gasoline) would require a 2.1 megawatt circuit. That is some power station at your home, or even your friendly "fuel station" where technicians trained on how to attach megawatt power cables to a vehicle (certainly not minimum wage jobs if I ever heard of it) are available. And who is going to invest the money to build these monster recharging stations?
Back to the point, I'll believe it when I see it, but a 10 minute electric vehicle recharge (assuming electric batteries as the energy storage medium) is never going to happen, unless you change the basic laws of physics in this universe. Electrical energy at these densities necessary to pull this off are dangerous and not part of the current industrial infrastructure anywhere in the world at the moment.... for a good reason.
Prior to 9/11, Iraq was indeed throwing around huge amounts of money to hire folks to build nuclear weapons. In spite of the hunt for weapons of mass destruction that mostly turned up empty (and very debatable about what may have been found or not found), there is significant evidence that Iraq under Saddam Hussein did indeed try to build nuclear weapons, and certainly built biological and chemical weapons... as he used them. Building missiles was a major component of this effort, particularly to build a missile that could hit Israel from within Iraqi borders. Into the environment when the ISS was proposed, this was a very real concern and Iraq was certainly throwing that kind of money around (in the 1990's and earlier). Russian rocket scientists were among those who were leading the effort to make these missiles too.
As for writing a check to RKK Energia and calling it done.... I didn't make the policy or decision. Yes, in hindsight it may have seemed like a good idea, but at the same time why not get something out of them as well? Engineers like making things, which is one way to keep them happy, which was the main point. Building the ISS was one way to keep them in Russia and not even want to go elsewhere.
Could this have been done somehow in a manner much more productive than building the ISS? Perhaps, but it was one of the major rationales for building the station.
When the ISS was originally sent up (aka the first module, Unity, was added to the Russian module Zarya) nearly every article mentioned that the ISS was going to be a permanent structure. When NASA officials were asked what that meant (going back to 1988 mind you), they responded that the ISS was going to be so large that it would be impossible and even dangerous to consider deorbiting the space station.
To give an interesting size comparison, the following graphic compares the ISS to the fictional sizes of the USS Enterprise, the Corellian Corvette that Princess Leia was in at the beginning of Star Wars ep IV, and the Battlestar Galactica (2004 reimagined version):
http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/ISS-size-comparison.jpg
In short, the ISS is the single largest structure that has ever been put together by mankind for use in space. It also will likely to continue to have that distinction for a great many years into the future.
Also, I have not heard of any significant breakthrough in celestial mechanics that has happened in the past 40 years. The computers of 1970 were certainly capable of being able to plot the trajectories and paths of an incoming body, and I would lay a challenge to any rocket scientist to come up with any such calculation that couldn't be performed nearly as quickly on a PDP-11 (in terms of results returned from a human time frame). The variables that would cause an error of hitting Australia vs. somewhere in the Pacific are still there (variations in solar activity, storm activity, sea water temperatures, and atmospheric density on a local level). The primary reason for the margin of error with Skylab was because it had no guidance system whatever. Please educate me if I'm mistaken, but I don't know what new stuff has been added to this discipline that wasn't already known in the 1960s, including Einstein's theory of relativity.
The ISS is a huge structure, and even with the best and most careful planning it would be a major accomplishment to be able to bring it safely back to the Earth. I suppose that the ISS could take advantage of the vehicle that brought everything up there: The Space Shuttle. Unfortunately, that is being retired and no other space vehicle has the capability of being able to bring things from orbit back to the Earth as efficiently as the shuttle.
Bringing the ISS down in multiple pieces with some sort of control module on each piece to provide guidance is going to take not only a whole bunch of extra hardware, it is also going to require sending up at least a dozen or more astronauts to perform the labor of performing the demolition. For this reason alone, I believe it to be vastly cheaper and IMHO safer for both those on the ground as well as mitigating the potential loss of life from just having astronauts make the trip up to space (spaceflight is hardly 100% assurance you will even make it to orbit alive or return safely).
An ion drive is currently being used with the Dawn Mission, where the delta-v requirements are certainly as comparable to going from LEO to L-5. That mission started in 1997 (yes, it is in space right now and flying with the engine running and producing thrust right now) and it will ultimately last until at least 2015, reaching Vesta in 2011. Using that as a rule of thumb, I would expect at a maximum of a similar duration of time to get the ISS to L5... about 3-4 years if you use this comparison. I would expect it to happen much faster, and certainly not take decades.
The ISS is clearly intended to be boosted up into a higher orbit, and the hardpoints to keep the vehicle together are well understood... at least with moderate thrust velocities. I would expect accelerations similar to that provided by Progress boosters to be similar, and there are designs to put the engines directly on the ISS for altitude control. An ESA resupply module docket to the ISS and provided a delta-v that accelerated to an additional 2.65 m/s. I don't know how long that took (giving some idea on the acceleration tolerances of the ISS), but it was a conventional rocket. Surprisingly, this is nearly half of the delta-v that is necessary to get to L-5.
Using the previous example, I don't think the ISS would spend all that much time in the Van Allen belts, and to leave it unmanned for a brief period of time wouldn't be the end of the world either. This is something that certainly could happen if there was an objective to make it happen, and even just moving the ISS to L-5 as a place to "park" the structure as a historical monument to future generations rather than having it crash into the Earth causing potential damage or even death may make the effort worthwhile.
Heck, it may even be cheaper in terms of boosting the ISS to a very high altitude rather than using a similar booster to attempt a more controlled re-entry over what would be presumably an uninhabited part of the Earth like the Pacific Ocean. Sending a crew up to the ISS to perform the dismantling process, getting multiple boosters onto each ISS module, and simply trying to deal with the thing may on the whole be easier to even crash it on the Moon.
Is the environment at L-5 really all that much different than LEO? Redesigning the software is something trivial, and simply takes a team on the ground here on Earth to make the changes. I don't consider a software change to be (for the price of the ISS) a big deal. Give me a few million dollars, and I'll make the changes myself and hire the team to get it done.
The main environmental difference is that at L-5 you no longer have protection of the Van Allen belts (most of the time), and the day/night cycles for each orbit would give way to 24/7/365 sunlight with only minor exceptions during an eclipse that would happen roughly as often as a Lunar Eclipse. Batteries wouldn't be as critical as they are now (about half of the time the ISS is in shadow in LEO) but the radiators might have to be beefed up a little bit.
Even with all this, I don't think it would be as difficult as you would think. An ion drive like you are suggesting might be all that is necessary in order to get the delta-v to move to L-5.... and moving between L-5 and the Moon is comparatively trivial in comparison. This Wikipedia article gives a pretty good overview of how much energy is needed for moving from place to place in the Solar System. Moving from LEO to L-5 takes as much energy (actually more) than going from L-5 to Phobos. Now that is something to think about.
The ISS has done two things that were important:
Both of these objectives have been crucial, and IMHO in some ways quite cost effective. Note that neither mission has anything to do with science, study of human physiology in a prolonged exposure to zero-G environments, or even being an employment program for aerospace engineers in various critical congressional districts.
This is not to say that perhaps money could be better spent elsewhere, and I would have to agree that scientific investigations may be performed better with unmanned equipment. But to say that the ISS has accomplished nothing is forgetting why, exactly, the thing was put up in the first place.
As to if it would be worth sending up even a cheap launcher (like the SpaceX Dragon capsule) with astronauts and an additional unmanned cargo ship with supplies and instruments for scientific investigation.... assuming an operational ISS..... that is something which you could debate much more effectively and likely show a robotic investigation will still be cost effective. I do think it would be a harder case to make, however, and there is something to be said for having an astronaut that can "tweak" instruments to do something different, or be able to do something as simple as running a hammer on the antenna in order to get it to work.
I would like to know why the Galileo spacecraft didn't have an astronaut do an in-space checkout of the systems before it left the Shuttle payload, to give an example of where having astronauts would have helped in an expensive scientific investigation. A minor repair to the main antenna while in space seems like it could have been a useful task.