There appear to be several teams that are competing for the "Level 1" prize, so if Armadillo doesn't complete that challenge it may be taken by at least one of the other teams. Yeah, I'd expect at least a couple of teams to at least show up with some hardware capable of making the requirements for the competition.
Considering the issues that Armadillo has gone through, I would have to say that the level 2 challenge is going to be a tough nut for any team to crack the first time through, although a couple other teams claim to have something ready for at least display for the level-2 challenge at this year's competition.
One thing to keep in mind is that the FAA-AST is requiring contestants to submit an application for a license to fly at the competition at least 30-60 days prior to the event. This requires an "all up" test flight to be viewed by the FAA. Armadillo has completed this certification process for this year, but I'm not sure about the other teams.
That is the wrong competition that you are noting here. Robert Cringely pulled out of the Google Lunar X-Prize.
This one is the "Lunar Landing Challenge", which is quite a bit different. The entire competition is to take place here on the earth, and in fact is sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government through NASA, even though the prize money is now being administered by the X-Prize Foundation. It is a part of the "Centennial Challenges" that received some brief funding from congress as a result of the success of the original sub-orbital X-Prize.
Unlike the Lunar X-Prize, the Lunar Landing Challenge is primarily to test what kind of hardware would be needed if you are to make a lunar landing, with vertical take-off and landing requirements that only use rocket powered propulsion. As a matter of fact, some of the Lunar Landing Challenge participants may be using some of their hard-won knowledge to help with the much tougher Lunar X-Prize, but it remains to be seen what will exactly happen in that case.
I kind of agree with Robert Cringely's rationale for pulling out of the Lunar X-Prize, as his #1 complaint was in regards to getting the rules nailed down and shifting policies on things like logo requirements on the lunar lander itself (the Lunar X-Prize is expected to actually go to the Moon), and the ability to put team sponsors onto the vehicle. The article that you linked to goes into much better detail than I can go into, and there were some deep issues that brought him to pull out.
I would have to agree that the Shuttle design (STS) should have gone through several generations of improvements over the years in terms of its basic design philosophy and cutting back the the basic assumptions of its design.
There have been some significant changes to the Shuttle design in terms of internals, and most especially with the "glass cockpit" designs that have essentially gutted the interior of the Shuttle to be essentially a completely different spacecraft from the original Columbia flights. But none of those changes were indeed "sufficient" to really make a huge improvement in safety and reliability. Indeed some of the changes, such as the introduction of the "newer" foam used for insulation that ended up destroying the Columbia were introduced for reasons that had nothing to do with reliability but instead for other political reasons.
The foam in particular was changed because the original insulating foam at the connectors contained CFCs that could damage "the environment" and its replacement was heavier and clumped together more. I'm curious about which caused more harm to mankind: A newer foam that released some CfCs into the atmosphere, or the remains of several astronauts and their spacecraft also blowing a whole range of compounds into the very same "ozone layer" of the atmosphere?
The Apollo/Gemini workforce building and working on rockets for NASA did include a very sizable percentage of the scientists and engineers in the USA were in fact working for NASA.
When Nixon did the huge Apollo cut-backs and scaled NASA to its current level of funding (compared to the overall federal budget) there were so many electrical engineers laid off from the NASA contractors that there was a significant drop in engineering salaries all across the country.
It could be argued that this in the long run was beneficial to America, as a great many of these engineers became entrepreneurial instead of relying on government contracts in order to keep employed, and the glut of available engineers help to develop Silicon Valley as it is known today. People like Steve Wozniak would have been gobbled up a decade earlier in the space program, but instead he was forced to be a bit more imaginative instead to make a living.
If you had 10% of the U.S. Federal Budget at your disposal (which was the case in the 1960's), I'm fairly certain that nearly anybody with the will to make it to the Moon could get there.
There were also attempts by private industry to purchase spacecraft that were "in production", most notably several individuals who wanted to buy their own private shuttle. Congress simply wouldn't even give them the time of day to even be permitted to do that, hence any such private spaceflight has to be from vehicles built completely from scratch like SpaceX is doing.
It wasn't until very recently that even a regulatory agency (such as the FAA-AST) has even existed that could license American citizens developing their own spacecraft on their own dime.
It will be interesting to see what will happen once some of these private space launchers start to make regular flights, particularly if they can get a price point well below the current insane price levels for going into space at the moment.
While I might submit to the Gemini flights as "successful" with the ratios you have given, I won't agree at all with the Mercury flights.
There were numerous test flights of the Mercury program that resulted in decided and dramatic failures. One of the scariest was when the rocket lifted up about 1 meter and then came crashing down on the launch pad, wobbling back and forth while everybody wondered what would happen next. Or when another launch blew up just as it cleared the launch tower. There were about a dozen Mercury flights (all of them unmanned, thankfully) that were all dramatic failures, which is also why the first "passengers" on the Mercury flights weren't even astronauts but instead were monkeys.
I think you need to dig quite a bit deeper into the statistics to come out with the figures you are using here. Certainly the astronauts watching those early test flights had cause to pause about how dangerous it was for them to go up on top of those rockets. I'll admit that not all of the early test flights were labeled as "Mercury" flights, but they were nonetheless preparatory to manned spaceflight and an attempt to get something resembling a manned spaceflight rating before anything went up that was of value.
The cost of the fuel on a spacecraft is so minor that in most cases it is covered as a part of the "overhead" of the rocket instead of even being considered as a significant cost center for rocketry development. Something like about 1% of the cost of actually sending something up. Even if you triple the cost of kerosene, it will be something still so minor that it is hardly something to even bring up to the customer.
The expense of rocket design has do to with the engineers and exotic metals, as well as production workers who have specialized skill like aviation-grade aluminum welding experience. Paying somebody to do that sort of work doesn't come cheap.
Keep in mind the engineering adage that you can have things built:
1) sooner (or faster) 2) cheaper 3) reliably
Choose only two of the above options!
A great many consumer electronics tend to select options 1 & 2. Most of the major military contracts concentrated on options 1 & 3, with the idea that cost really isn't a huge concern for a government like the USA. It is far more important that we have an ICBM that can get up *NOW* instead of sometime next year. The Apollo program especially was one that was "screw the cost, let's just get it done now!"
SpaceX really is trying to see if they can build a rocket that may take a bit more time to develop, but can be done far cheaper and still maintain reliability. What I hope doesn't happen is that SpaceX engineers and technicians don't get under the pressure to get things done right now as well, in which case you simply end up with an expensive, delayed, and unreliable device. If you try all three approaches at once, you end up eating engineers and throwing lives away in one form or another.
One thing to keep in mind about the payloads that have been on the current set of falcon rockets:
All of the "customers" were well aware of the fact that these were experimental rockets on their first attempts at trying to get up. Essentially they were given a huge price break (even considering the lower advertised costs of the Falcon 1) and were essentially "throw-away" spacecraft that would otherwise not have a practical way of getting into space otherwise... at least without somebody else heavily subsidizing the cost in some other way.
The first two, and even this last flight, were intended to be sent up with a "dummy" payload of essentially just a tank of water. With the possibility that it could reach orbit and to do so cheaply, it seems reasonable to substitute the tank of water for something else that might have a little more value.
The upcoming scheduled "flights" of the Falcon 1 are scheduled to be carrying something of a bit more value, so I supposed that the next flight is likely going to be another cheap student project (such as was the case with last year's flight) or perhaps even the tank of water as was originally planned.
Considering that this is a whole new rocket design from a completely blank piece of paper, it isn't that surprising that there aren't a few problems that they've uncovered when reality hits theory.
With two huge failures at stage separation, I bet that is going to be something SpaceX is going to study real hard at over the next couple of months and come up with some more ingenious techniques to get that to happen without a flaw.
Apparently the two stages of the rocket failed to separate after the 1st stages "Main-engine cut off", and the rocket ended up plunging into the Pacific Ocean.
As for what caused the rocket to stay together at a point it should have come apart (intentionally), that will be the major focus of the engineering investigation. The new Merlin-C engine (1st stage engine) did a fantastic job.
If only SpaceX can get the 2nd stage to work, they might actually have a real working spacecraft.
In other words, this isn't even a part of the law, as you are implying, but an administrative interpretation of the law. Subject to change from one administration to the next. This language simply isn't even in the actual text of the law itself.
Still, I would have to grant you that *IF* somebody was fined for taking a quick snapshot out of Spaceship 2, they could go back to this "ruling" and provide evidence that such action was uncalled for.
I still need to grok this body of regulations, and it is not entirely clear under what authority NOAA has to regulate this activity as performed by private individuals operating from privately financed and launched spacecraft.
I've had plenty of TVP to be able to tell the difference. Yes, it was the "ham-flavored" TVP and not something ground up real finely from a quality cut.
I've even used finely ground ham before.... with a baby grinder when trying to feed a toddler. And I'll confess: I've even eaten that stuff (to convince the kid that it was safe to eat). It wasn't the same thing.
Also, this wasn't a gourmet pizza place in Europe. It was a small-town pizza bakery in the middle of America.... where all of the competitors served full sized slices of the meat and even the other toppings were generally full sized.... like pepperoni. It does seem quite odd to grind up ham in this way... especially so finely.
I've been digging really hard into not only the text of this law, but also the legislative history of it.
I think a constitutional challenge could be mounted here if you really wanted to try hard... and have common sense prevail.
The legislative comments (indeed only one house member even made any comments about it at all) was concerning the Landsat program and how data generated by government sponsored spacecraft or at least government launched spacecraft would be worked.
That is some sound reasoning: If the government is footing the bill, even partially, it ought to have a say in what goes "up there". Also, taxpayer-funded remote sensing activity ought to have the data shared with those who are helping pay the bill: The general public. This data ought to be shared as well.
BTW, I don't think regulating what a satellite is doing "up there" in this manner toward completely private ventures is necessarily productive and healthy. I can certainly imagine a whole bunch of reasons why privately collected data ought to remain private... if only for competitive advantages between other private individuals.
There are several ways you can read this law, and the interpretation of the current NOAA bureaucrats is just one of them.
The penalty for failure to comply with this law is $10k USD per day that you are out of compliance.
Assuming you decide to flip off NOAA, only to reverse course after you get a court summons to pay up the fine.... it could take up to 120 days just to get the license.
I don't know how long the Lunar XPrize folks plan to take in terms of getting to the Moon and what activities they plan on doing once they are there (like taking a picture of the Earth from the Moon), it could add up to quite a bit of money.
Somebody with sufficiently deep pockets may still want to challenge NOAA (and therefore the U.S. government as a whole) on this issue, but it wouldn't be cheap.
Interestingly, the actual text of the law seems to indicate that this may have been intended only for spacecraft launched on government vehicles. For example, Section 205(a) states:
A private sector party may apply for a license to operate a private remote sensing space system which utilizes, on a space-available basis, a civilian United States Government satellite or vehicle as a platform for such system.
Applying for a license from NOAA on a government satellite in this context makes total sense. You should ask permission if you are going to "piggyback" some of your components on a government vehicle.
What isn't clear in the text of the law is what this means if the launch vehicle is privately owned as well as the spacecraft. Other sections of this same law seem to ignore this sentiment and simply require all civilians to gain permission "from the Secretary" of Commerce.
I think it is more the concept that nobody in 1992 thought that a private individual could possibly get into space on their own without some sort of government assistance footing at least part of the bill.
In order for something to become law, it (usually) has to make sense to at least a fairly good number of people... and to be able to convince a majority of those on the committees involved as well as the majority of those in the main legislative body that it at least is "harmless" to their constituency.
Having served on several legislative bodies, it turns my stomach to think of some of the garbage that I have passed without really digging deeper into the consequences of the resolutions I've had a hand in approving. Some of it at the recommendation of the "staff" that is ultimately misguided, but sometimes because there is a herd mentality on legislative bodies to not try and rock the boat in case you need support for your next pet project.
I can only imagine this law was passed mainly due to the ignorance of those congressmen who didn't really pay close attention to the exact text of this bill, and that the "staff" who help to draft the law made some assumptions that clearly aren't true any more.
As I said.... you have to have a legal team and deep pockets if you want to get into using MPEG-4 as an application.
This isn't for the small garage start-up companies who want to tinker with a new technology and see where it might go. DirecTV is hardly some small start-up company.
What section is it that explicitly exempts small handheld cameras? I don't see it at all, and I'm reading the actual law that governs this policy.
I'm asking for section and subsection, such as Section 201(a) of the "Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992".
Indeed, it would seem to me, after reading the law, that NOAA requires you to send them a copy of all of the photos that you take after you have brought that equipment up into space, in addition to the license itself.
I'm not nearly as stupid as you seem to be implying here.
The very definition of a "Meteoroid" is implied from the definitions you just gave... as the "Meteoroid" is what a "Meteor" is before it enters the atmosphere. Geesh! I already accepted the definition you are implying here and attempted to demonstrate what (perhaps) the proper term should have been used.
As I was trying to say, and I'll say it again, I'm trying to not nit pick with the definition as used by the grandparent poster. You are attacking the wrong person here, as I was quoting a previous post before you got all hung up on the semantics here.
At the moment, I would have to agree with you. The "state of the art" with launching spacecraft has been several months or even years of lead time.
But the day will come, mark my words, that the technical capability of sending up a spacecraft with just a day's advance notice will come.
I certainly don't require a 4 month lead time from conception to "launch" if I go down to a nearby airport and to purchase a ticket to nearly any place on the planet. The reason I might have any delay from taking the next available flight has strictly to do with silly government regulations (missing a passport, security checkpoints, etc.) rather than anything which an airline would necessarily require.
I can and have even negotiated with a private pilot (aka no "business" was yet established other than normal FAA licensing requirements to fly the plane) to act as a courier for a package that had to beat FedEx. You certainly don't need a commercial airline in order to be a paying passenger in an airplane, although it does tend to be a bit cheaper.
Space law is really screwed up in a whole bunch of areas, and I will admit that this particular issue of being able to take a snapshot out the window of a spacecraft of the Earth is but one minor example.
The rationale for this law, I'm pretty sure, is one of good intentions to encourage the sharing of information gathered from what used to be very expensive missions into space and could only be afforded by major national governments (US, Russia, China, India, etc.) and major multi-national companies with deep pockets.
What is happening here is that access to space is getting cheap enough that an ordinary private citizen will soon have the purchasing power to send up their own private spacecraft of some kind, even if it was just a small 1 kg micro-satellite, or be going on (for now) a sub-orbital flight that could potentially cross several national jurisdictions. We are now at a point where concepts of personal freedom are pounding head-first into a realm that was previously deemed to be the realm of government employees alone.
This is just the beginning of such legal confrontations, not the end of them.
"In the case of a private space system that is used for remote sensing and other purposes, the authority of the Secretary under this subchapter shall be limited only to the remote sensing operations of such space system."
While land remote sensing is defined, the statutory authority is limited to private remote sensing, which is not defined. A clear english reading would seem to indicate space tourists snapping pictures with their cameras are not engaging in remote sensing.
I don't see a reason why the definition of "remote sensing" would allow an exception to a tourist carrying a hand-held camera. Indeed, a great many images that came from the Apollo program as well as the Space Shuttle were taken with a hand-held camera. The Skylab missions even used hand-held cameras for "remote sensing" at various wavelengths to measure crop production and a number of other interesting tasks that were used for Earth Science investigations.
Even more specific, a typical high-end consumer camera has perhaps better optic and higher resolution imaging elements than a great many dedicated unmanned remote sensing satellites. Where exactly do you draw the line? When exactly would a private citizen taking a quick snapshot out the window of Spaceship 2 turn into something more critical that this law would have to be applied?
So if some Texas oil developers hired Virgin Galactic to fly one of their employees to photograph from 100 km above the Earth (technically in space) and take a few of these "snapshots" that they in turn used with some of their geologists for oil exploration.... does that qualify as "remote sensing"? I would even see that as "commercial competition to the LandSat system". BTW, this sort of "remote sensing" is done by private contractors with aviation all of the time. It just isn't happening "in space" yet.
I, for one, also think that by the time a situation arises that has to go to court to figure this stuff out, that it is already a policy failure. Giving a single person (in this case the Secretary of Commerce) the authority to decide who may and may not take a picture of the Earth seems to border on the ludicrous.
I will admit, however, that space law is going to get a whole lot more interesting when it is private citizens thinking they can do any damn thing they want to do rather than a bunch of government employees following a strictly regimented schedule and worrying about keeping their job.
I think you are significantly confused about what the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution really says.
Your argument is akin to suggesting that Congress (or some other governmental body in the USA) has the authority to regulate who may or may not have access to computers or cameras for that matter... or a printing press.
If you print or write something using a computer or printing press that a government official objects to... for what ever reason... that license can be revoked and taken from you.
More to the point, I fail to see why a license like this is needed in the first place... so far as regulating what a private individual can do. Regulating the ability to take a picture is identical to controlling what can be done with those images later.
Also, I fail to see what part of "Congress shall make no law..." isn't clear here. Congress doesn't even have the authority to regulate this issue.
I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the parent post.... and not trying to get into a war of semantics like this one.
The "correct" term here would be "Meteoroid" and not "Meteor" as the context of the parent post was trying to imply something smallish that astronauts could look at but not necessarily so large as to imply that it is an asteroid.
These terms are much more fuzzy that you have implied here, and the spectrum of objects ranging from a grain of sand to an O-class star are not nearly so clearly defined as you implying. At what size, for example, does an object stop being just a rock in space and instead is something substantial that it deserves a name? Yeah, there are clearly objects that can be called "a planet" or "a star" with a given size, but the exact boundary for when that happens isn't quite so exact.
Yeah, I've heard about Xvid. And the developers of that project completely ignore the patent issues and licensing requirements. Perhaps the MPEG-4 patent holders won't care about some silly open source project, but some of the players in that game are such that I wouldn't want to play that game without having a good attorney on retainer.
This gets into the whole issue of software patents, their legality, and software that implements those patented algorithms. Copyright isn't an issue, but the GPL doesn't protect you from patent infringement... indeed the GPL becomes void (meaning you simply can't distribute the GPL'd software anymore) if there is a patent infringement on it or some other additional legal issue that is beyond the scope of the GPL.
I would certainly hate to see a major open source project get torpedoed because they ignored patent issues.
Some countries don't have software patents, so it doesn't matter... but just don't try to "distribute" software like that in countries like the USA where those patents are enforced.
Slashdot Mirror
There appear to be several teams that are competing for the "Level 1" prize, so if Armadillo doesn't complete that challenge it may be taken by at least one of the other teams. Yeah, I'd expect at least a couple of teams to at least show up with some hardware capable of making the requirements for the competition.
Considering the issues that Armadillo has gone through, I would have to say that the level 2 challenge is going to be a tough nut for any team to crack the first time through, although a couple other teams claim to have something ready for at least display for the level-2 challenge at this year's competition.
One thing to keep in mind is that the FAA-AST is requiring contestants to submit an application for a license to fly at the competition at least 30-60 days prior to the event. This requires an "all up" test flight to be viewed by the FAA. Armadillo has completed this certification process for this year, but I'm not sure about the other teams.
That is the wrong competition that you are noting here. Robert Cringely pulled out of the Google Lunar X-Prize.
This one is the "Lunar Landing Challenge", which is quite a bit different. The entire competition is to take place here on the earth, and in fact is sponsored by the U.S. Federal Government through NASA, even though the prize money is now being administered by the X-Prize Foundation. It is a part of the "Centennial Challenges" that received some brief funding from congress as a result of the success of the original sub-orbital X-Prize.
Unlike the Lunar X-Prize, the Lunar Landing Challenge is primarily to test what kind of hardware would be needed if you are to make a lunar landing, with vertical take-off and landing requirements that only use rocket powered propulsion. As a matter of fact, some of the Lunar Landing Challenge participants may be using some of their hard-won knowledge to help with the much tougher Lunar X-Prize, but it remains to be seen what will exactly happen in that case.
I kind of agree with Robert Cringely's rationale for pulling out of the Lunar X-Prize, as his #1 complaint was in regards to getting the rules nailed down and shifting policies on things like logo requirements on the lunar lander itself (the Lunar X-Prize is expected to actually go to the Moon), and the ability to put team sponsors onto the vehicle. The article that you linked to goes into much better detail than I can go into, and there were some deep issues that brought him to pull out.
I would have to agree that the Shuttle design (STS) should have gone through several generations of improvements over the years in terms of its basic design philosophy and cutting back the the basic assumptions of its design.
There have been some significant changes to the Shuttle design in terms of internals, and most especially with the "glass cockpit" designs that have essentially gutted the interior of the Shuttle to be essentially a completely different spacecraft from the original Columbia flights. But none of those changes were indeed "sufficient" to really make a huge improvement in safety and reliability. Indeed some of the changes, such as the introduction of the "newer" foam used for insulation that ended up destroying the Columbia were introduced for reasons that had nothing to do with reliability but instead for other political reasons.
The foam in particular was changed because the original insulating foam at the connectors contained CFCs that could damage "the environment" and its replacement was heavier and clumped together more. I'm curious about which caused more harm to mankind: A newer foam that released some CfCs into the atmosphere, or the remains of several astronauts and their spacecraft also blowing a whole range of compounds into the very same "ozone layer" of the atmosphere?
The Apollo/Gemini workforce building and working on rockets for NASA did include a very sizable percentage of the scientists and engineers in the USA were in fact working for NASA.
When Nixon did the huge Apollo cut-backs and scaled NASA to its current level of funding (compared to the overall federal budget) there were so many electrical engineers laid off from the NASA contractors that there was a significant drop in engineering salaries all across the country.
It could be argued that this in the long run was beneficial to America, as a great many of these engineers became entrepreneurial instead of relying on government contracts in order to keep employed, and the glut of available engineers help to develop Silicon Valley as it is known today. People like Steve Wozniak would have been gobbled up a decade earlier in the space program, but instead he was forced to be a bit more imaginative instead to make a living.
If you had 10% of the U.S. Federal Budget at your disposal (which was the case in the 1960's), I'm fairly certain that nearly anybody with the will to make it to the Moon could get there.
There were also attempts by private industry to purchase spacecraft that were "in production", most notably several individuals who wanted to buy their own private shuttle. Congress simply wouldn't even give them the time of day to even be permitted to do that, hence any such private spaceflight has to be from vehicles built completely from scratch like SpaceX is doing.
It wasn't until very recently that even a regulatory agency (such as the FAA-AST) has even existed that could license American citizens developing their own spacecraft on their own dime.
It will be interesting to see what will happen once some of these private space launchers start to make regular flights, particularly if they can get a price point well below the current insane price levels for going into space at the moment.
While I might submit to the Gemini flights as "successful" with the ratios you have given, I won't agree at all with the Mercury flights.
There were numerous test flights of the Mercury program that resulted in decided and dramatic failures. One of the scariest was when the rocket lifted up about 1 meter and then came crashing down on the launch pad, wobbling back and forth while everybody wondered what would happen next. Or when another launch blew up just as it cleared the launch tower. There were about a dozen Mercury flights (all of them unmanned, thankfully) that were all dramatic failures, which is also why the first "passengers" on the Mercury flights weren't even astronauts but instead were monkeys.
I think you need to dig quite a bit deeper into the statistics to come out with the figures you are using here. Certainly the astronauts watching those early test flights had cause to pause about how dangerous it was for them to go up on top of those rockets. I'll admit that not all of the early test flights were labeled as "Mercury" flights, but they were nonetheless preparatory to manned spaceflight and an attempt to get something resembling a manned spaceflight rating before anything went up that was of value.
The cost of the fuel on a spacecraft is so minor that in most cases it is covered as a part of the "overhead" of the rocket instead of even being considered as a significant cost center for rocketry development. Something like about 1% of the cost of actually sending something up. Even if you triple the cost of kerosene, it will be something still so minor that it is hardly something to even bring up to the customer.
The expense of rocket design has do to with the engineers and exotic metals, as well as production workers who have specialized skill like aviation-grade aluminum welding experience. Paying somebody to do that sort of work doesn't come cheap.
Keep in mind the engineering adage that you can have things built:
1) sooner (or faster)
2) cheaper
3) reliably
Choose only two of the above options!
A great many consumer electronics tend to select options 1 & 2. Most of the major military contracts concentrated on options 1 & 3, with the idea that cost really isn't a huge concern for a government like the USA. It is far more important that we have an ICBM that can get up *NOW* instead of sometime next year. The Apollo program especially was one that was "screw the cost, let's just get it done now!"
SpaceX really is trying to see if they can build a rocket that may take a bit more time to develop, but can be done far cheaper and still maintain reliability. What I hope doesn't happen is that SpaceX engineers and technicians don't get under the pressure to get things done right now as well, in which case you simply end up with an expensive, delayed, and unreliable device. If you try all three approaches at once, you end up eating engineers and throwing lives away in one form or another.
One thing to keep in mind about the payloads that have been on the current set of falcon rockets:
All of the "customers" were well aware of the fact that these were experimental rockets on their first attempts at trying to get up. Essentially they were given a huge price break (even considering the lower advertised costs of the Falcon 1) and were essentially "throw-away" spacecraft that would otherwise not have a practical way of getting into space otherwise... at least without somebody else heavily subsidizing the cost in some other way.
The first two, and even this last flight, were intended to be sent up with a "dummy" payload of essentially just a tank of water. With the possibility that it could reach orbit and to do so cheaply, it seems reasonable to substitute the tank of water for something else that might have a little more value.
The upcoming scheduled "flights" of the Falcon 1 are scheduled to be carrying something of a bit more value, so I supposed that the next flight is likely going to be another cheap student project (such as was the case with last year's flight) or perhaps even the tank of water as was originally planned.
Considering that this is a whole new rocket design from a completely blank piece of paper, it isn't that surprising that there aren't a few problems that they've uncovered when reality hits theory.
With two huge failures at stage separation, I bet that is going to be something SpaceX is going to study real hard at over the next couple of months and come up with some more ingenious techniques to get that to happen without a flaw.
Apparently the two stages of the rocket failed to separate after the 1st stages "Main-engine cut off", and the rocket ended up plunging into the Pacific Ocean.
As for what caused the rocket to stay together at a point it should have come apart (intentionally), that will be the major focus of the engineering investigation. The new Merlin-C engine (1st stage engine) did a fantastic job.
If only SpaceX can get the 2nd stage to work, they might actually have a real working spacecraft.
In other words, this isn't even a part of the law, as you are implying, but an administrative interpretation of the law. Subject to change from one administration to the next. This language simply isn't even in the actual text of the law itself.
Still, I would have to grant you that *IF* somebody was fined for taking a quick snapshot out of Spaceship 2, they could go back to this "ruling" and provide evidence that such action was uncalled for.
I still need to grok this body of regulations, and it is not entirely clear under what authority NOAA has to regulate this activity as performed by private individuals operating from privately financed and launched spacecraft.
I've had plenty of TVP to be able to tell the difference. Yes, it was the "ham-flavored" TVP and not something ground up real finely from a quality cut.
I've even used finely ground ham before.... with a baby grinder when trying to feed a toddler. And I'll confess: I've even eaten that stuff (to convince the kid that it was safe to eat). It wasn't the same thing.
Also, this wasn't a gourmet pizza place in Europe. It was a small-town pizza bakery in the middle of America.... where all of the competitors served full sized slices of the meat and even the other toppings were generally full sized.... like pepperoni. It does seem quite odd to grind up ham in this way... especially so finely.
I've been digging really hard into not only the text of this law, but also the legislative history of it.
I think a constitutional challenge could be mounted here if you really wanted to try hard... and have common sense prevail.
The legislative comments (indeed only one house member even made any comments about it at all) was concerning the Landsat program and how data generated by government sponsored spacecraft or at least government launched spacecraft would be worked.
That is some sound reasoning: If the government is footing the bill, even partially, it ought to have a say in what goes "up there". Also, taxpayer-funded remote sensing activity ought to have the data shared with those who are helping pay the bill: The general public. This data ought to be shared as well.
BTW, I don't think regulating what a satellite is doing "up there" in this manner toward completely private ventures is necessarily productive and healthy. I can certainly imagine a whole bunch of reasons why privately collected data ought to remain private... if only for competitive advantages between other private individuals.
There are several ways you can read this law, and the interpretation of the current NOAA bureaucrats is just one of them.
Where the heck is section 960.3? I don't see it (unless you are trying to make a parody situation out of this).
Yeah, I'm calling your bluff. And I'm looking at USC 15-82 - "LAND REMOTE SENSING POLICY" and don't find these words in there.
The penalty for failure to comply with this law is $10k USD per day that you are out of compliance.
Assuming you decide to flip off NOAA, only to reverse course after you get a court summons to pay up the fine.... it could take up to 120 days just to get the license.
I don't know how long the Lunar XPrize folks plan to take in terms of getting to the Moon and what activities they plan on doing once they are there (like taking a picture of the Earth from the Moon), it could add up to quite a bit of money.
Somebody with sufficiently deep pockets may still want to challenge NOAA (and therefore the U.S. government as a whole) on this issue, but it wouldn't be cheap.
Interestingly, the actual text of the law seems to indicate that this may have been intended only for spacecraft launched on government vehicles. For example, Section 205(a) states:
Applying for a license from NOAA on a government satellite in this context makes total sense. You should ask permission if you are going to "piggyback" some of your components on a government vehicle.
What isn't clear in the text of the law is what this means if the launch vehicle is privately owned as well as the spacecraft. Other sections of this same law seem to ignore this sentiment and simply require all civilians to gain permission "from the Secretary" of Commerce.
I think it is more the concept that nobody in 1992 thought that a private individual could possibly get into space on their own without some sort of government assistance footing at least part of the bill.
In order for something to become law, it (usually) has to make sense to at least a fairly good number of people... and to be able to convince a majority of those on the committees involved as well as the majority of those in the main legislative body that it at least is "harmless" to their constituency.
Having served on several legislative bodies, it turns my stomach to think of some of the garbage that I have passed without really digging deeper into the consequences of the resolutions I've had a hand in approving. Some of it at the recommendation of the "staff" that is ultimately misguided, but sometimes because there is a herd mentality on legislative bodies to not try and rock the boat in case you need support for your next pet project.
I can only imagine this law was passed mainly due to the ignorance of those congressmen who didn't really pay close attention to the exact text of this bill, and that the "staff" who help to draft the law made some assumptions that clearly aren't true any more.
As I said.... you have to have a legal team and deep pockets if you want to get into using MPEG-4 as an application.
This isn't for the small garage start-up companies who want to tinker with a new technology and see where it might go. DirecTV is hardly some small start-up company.
What section is it that explicitly exempts small handheld cameras? I don't see it at all, and I'm reading the actual law that governs this policy.
I'm asking for section and subsection, such as Section 201(a) of the "Land Remote Sensing Policy Act of 1992".
Indeed, it would seem to me, after reading the law, that NOAA requires you to send them a copy of all of the photos that you take after you have brought that equipment up into space, in addition to the license itself.
I'm not nearly as stupid as you seem to be implying here.
The very definition of a "Meteoroid" is implied from the definitions you just gave... as the "Meteoroid" is what a "Meteor" is before it enters the atmosphere. Geesh! I already accepted the definition you are implying here and attempted to demonstrate what (perhaps) the proper term should have been used.
As I was trying to say, and I'll say it again, I'm trying to not nit pick with the definition as used by the grandparent poster. You are attacking the wrong person here, as I was quoting a previous post before you got all hung up on the semantics here.
At the moment, I would have to agree with you. The "state of the art" with launching spacecraft has been several months or even years of lead time.
But the day will come, mark my words, that the technical capability of sending up a spacecraft with just a day's advance notice will come.
I certainly don't require a 4 month lead time from conception to "launch" if I go down to a nearby airport and to purchase a ticket to nearly any place on the planet. The reason I might have any delay from taking the next available flight has strictly to do with silly government regulations (missing a passport, security checkpoints, etc.) rather than anything which an airline would necessarily require.
I can and have even negotiated with a private pilot (aka no "business" was yet established other than normal FAA licensing requirements to fly the plane) to act as a courier for a package that had to beat FedEx. You certainly don't need a commercial airline in order to be a paying passenger in an airplane, although it does tend to be a bit cheaper.
Space law is really screwed up in a whole bunch of areas, and I will admit that this particular issue of being able to take a snapshot out the window of a spacecraft of the Earth is but one minor example.
The rationale for this law, I'm pretty sure, is one of good intentions to encourage the sharing of information gathered from what used to be very expensive missions into space and could only be afforded by major national governments (US, Russia, China, India, etc.) and major multi-national companies with deep pockets.
What is happening here is that access to space is getting cheap enough that an ordinary private citizen will soon have the purchasing power to send up their own private spacecraft of some kind, even if it was just a small 1 kg micro-satellite, or be going on (for now) a sub-orbital flight that could potentially cross several national jurisdictions. We are now at a point where concepts of personal freedom are pounding head-first into a realm that was previously deemed to be the realm of government employees alone.
This is just the beginning of such legal confrontations, not the end of them.
"In the case of a private space system that is used for remote sensing and other purposes, the authority of the Secretary under this subchapter shall be limited only to the remote sensing operations of such space system."
While land remote sensing is defined, the statutory authority is limited to private remote sensing, which is not defined. A clear english reading would seem to indicate space tourists snapping pictures with their cameras are not engaging in remote sensing.
I don't see a reason why the definition of "remote sensing" would allow an exception to a tourist carrying a hand-held camera. Indeed, a great many images that came from the Apollo program as well as the Space Shuttle were taken with a hand-held camera. The Skylab missions even used hand-held cameras for "remote sensing" at various wavelengths to measure crop production and a number of other interesting tasks that were used for Earth Science investigations.
Even more specific, a typical high-end consumer camera has perhaps better optic and higher resolution imaging elements than a great many dedicated unmanned remote sensing satellites. Where exactly do you draw the line? When exactly would a private citizen taking a quick snapshot out the window of Spaceship 2 turn into something more critical that this law would have to be applied?
So if some Texas oil developers hired Virgin Galactic to fly one of their employees to photograph from 100 km above the Earth (technically in space) and take a few of these "snapshots" that they in turn used with some of their geologists for oil exploration.... does that qualify as "remote sensing"? I would even see that as "commercial competition to the LandSat system". BTW, this sort of "remote sensing" is done by private contractors with aviation all of the time. It just isn't happening "in space" yet.
I, for one, also think that by the time a situation arises that has to go to court to figure this stuff out, that it is already a policy failure. Giving a single person (in this case the Secretary of Commerce) the authority to decide who may and may not take a picture of the Earth seems to border on the ludicrous.
I will admit, however, that space law is going to get a whole lot more interesting when it is private citizens thinking they can do any damn thing they want to do rather than a bunch of government employees following a strictly regimented schedule and worrying about keeping their job.
I think you are significantly confused about what the 1st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution really says.
Your argument is akin to suggesting that Congress (or some other governmental body in the USA) has the authority to regulate who may or may not have access to computers or cameras for that matter... or a printing press.
If you print or write something using a computer or printing press that a government official objects to... for what ever reason... that license can be revoked and taken from you.
More to the point, I fail to see why a license like this is needed in the first place... so far as regulating what a private individual can do. Regulating the ability to take a picture is identical to controlling what can be done with those images later.
Also, I fail to see what part of "Congress shall make no law..." isn't clear here. Congress doesn't even have the authority to regulate this issue.
I was trying to give the benefit of the doubt to the parent post.... and not trying to get into a war of semantics like this one.
The "correct" term here would be "Meteoroid" and not "Meteor" as the context of the parent post was trying to imply something smallish that astronauts could look at but not necessarily so large as to imply that it is an asteroid.
These terms are much more fuzzy that you have implied here, and the spectrum of objects ranging from a grain of sand to an O-class star are not nearly so clearly defined as you implying. At what size, for example, does an object stop being just a rock in space and instead is something substantial that it deserves a name? Yeah, there are clearly objects that can be called "a planet" or "a star" with a given size, but the exact boundary for when that happens isn't quite so exact.
More to the point, what is there to look up here?
Yeah, I've heard about Xvid. And the developers of that project completely ignore the patent issues and licensing requirements. Perhaps the MPEG-4 patent holders won't care about some silly open source project, but some of the players in that game are such that I wouldn't want to play that game without having a good attorney on retainer.
This gets into the whole issue of software patents, their legality, and software that implements those patented algorithms. Copyright isn't an issue, but the GPL doesn't protect you from patent infringement... indeed the GPL becomes void (meaning you simply can't distribute the GPL'd software anymore) if there is a patent infringement on it or some other additional legal issue that is beyond the scope of the GPL.
I would certainly hate to see a major open source project get torpedoed because they ignored patent issues.
Some countries don't have software patents, so it doesn't matter... but just don't try to "distribute" software like that in countries like the USA where those patents are enforced.