I take it you havn't read Robert A. Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon. D. Delos Harriman is a person hero of mine, and this is an interesting book by itself. It also gets into the legal issues of owning non-terrestial real-estate and a very interesting view on how American business really works, not just how it should on paper.
In this book, Heinlein specifically mentions a 7-up ad on the moon (he called it a 6+ soft drink, which I suppose could be anything), and to make things really fun (keep in mind this was written in the 1950's) the protaganist throws a hammer and sickle on a overlay over the moon during a board meeting that includes some FAA representatives.
Of any of the early science fiction that is inspiring the X-Prize and private commercial spaceflight, I would have to say that this book is clearly very influential, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a company called "Harriman Industries" get involved with spaceflight some time in the future, if only to invoke the flavor of Heinlein's future history.
A sad footnote in the book was that the main guy behind the whole project, Harriman, was denied from going into space due to poor health, and the FAA wouldn't give him clearance to get on a spaceship.
I'm not even sure that a single penny of Ansari money is going to even be in the $10 Million check that will be awarded to Scaled Composites. Instead, this money is being used to help fund the next projects that the X-Prize Foundation wants to move on to.
The concept of a NASCAR type competition is a cool idea in some ways, but I don't see that directly translating into space-based industries like He-3 mining or power satellites.
I am not critical of the NASA programs of the 1960's and 1970's. I am, however, very critical of the manned NASA programs of the 1980's and 1990's. The Space Shuttle has turned out to be a white elephant, and the #1 reason to have the current shuttle program is that it can haul a tremendous amount of "stuff" from LEO to the ground without having it all burn up. Unfortunately it is rarely used for that purpose. It would be cool if the Hubble Telescope were brought back to the Earth without burning up, but somehow I doubt that it would ever get funding. The ISS obviously did try to take advantage of having a trash hauler available, but even that wasn't strictly necessary to fulfill that mission.
I do hope that NASA can move back into "deep space" manned exploration like the popular viewpoint of what "Moon, Mars, & Beyond" should be rather than what it really is at the moment: A distraction to make you think our government is making progress with NASA. When I see astronauts planning for specific landings and named flight numbers (Like Apollo 17...obviously with some name other than Apollo) with a return trip to the moon and a recapture of Lunar flight capabilities, I will be impressed with NASA. Until then, they are just blowing hot air.
"Well, pulling off something a bit more useful than barnstorming flights requires a much greater team of engineers and scientists. I mean, sending miltary reconnisance planes--not even think of ordinary passengers--is a problem much greater than a flight to "cross the atlantic". Let's see: First you need a global radio network that can talk to pilots in flight across the Atlantic. Expensive, but feasable. You need special propulsion and a special landing system. VERY expensive but still feasable. Doing science in Antarctica would need money for instruments, a ground-team and scientists. But getting that plane on a course across the South Pole needs a VERY accurate tracking system, a very experienced team and a bunch of top scientist. You could still get that for a vast amount of more money...but I doubt you would be doing a missing much cheaper than the Royal Navy that leading science organizations would dump the Royal Navy's 400 year experience in major scientific exploration with your yet un-proved, never-tested, we-don't-need-quality-because-we-are-cheaper aircraft company."
Not exactly like it would have been almost 100 years ago, but pretty close.
I think the problem is that Scaled Composites is making space travel seem routine and ordinary. In this case, I think this is a very good thing.
Also, the major news media outlets have already covered the "novelty" of the whole project earlier, particularly when they made their first test flight into space before the official attempts. To a non-techy person, what is different? Really not much.
However, I would have to agree that the significance of the fact that the X-Prize has been awarded really is a much bigger deal than the major media outlets are really giving credit for. This is something that our kids and grandkids are going to be reading about in history books many years from now, and ordinary folks living now really don't grasp just how significant this is.
While much can be said about telecommunications systems, the telephone has been around for what...150 years now? Trans-oceanic telephone cables for close to 100 and telecomm satellites for almost 50 years?
Business travelers have to sometimes get somewhere as soon as possible. I've even been in that position myself where I had a two hour notice to get on an airplane and fly 2000 miles by that very same evening before a customer trashed a $2 Million deal. I know for a fact that had the Concorde been available when that happened to me they would have authorized the extra expense to get there earlier.
Also, there are times when you really need to meet face-to-face with somebody, looking at their sweat, especially when you are closing a deal. In my case I had some technical skills that litterally only 3 other people in the world could have solved (at least in a short term solution), so I had to be on site, and the emergencies usually couldn't be predicted ahead of time. Things like that will never change.
In terms of the "untapped market", I would point to sales of Concorde flight service. The #1 thing that unfortunately killed it (besides the plane crashes) was the hyper security found in airports now, together with the fact that it was outlawed in most domestic airports in the USA for several reasons. How that translates to the space market is unknown, but the Concorde passengers are clearly people who did "sign the check" and it did get used quite a bit...enough for regular service.
In terms of making it available to ordinary people, I think this is going quite a bit futher than what people like Dennis Tito did in the past, and at least there is the possibility I could put together $100,000 to go into space. $20 Million was never even a possibility.
When tanks are rolling and people are getting killed, bombs are dropping to the ground, and a foreign nation's flag is flying over territory against the wishes of the government who controlled that territory yesterday or the day before, I would call that war. The technical and legal definition be damned at that point. And that clearly happened in 1991 regardless of your viewpoint in Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War.
The "Authorization for the Use of Force" granted by the U.S. Congress back in 1990 was considered by most legal scholars as adequate for what happened back then. BTW, my position on this matter hasn't changed since even before the Gulf War, and I think George H.W. Bush should have sought a declaration of a state of war back then for exactly the very same reasons I stated in the previous post. That Bush I openly proclaimed that he didn't even need congressional authority of any kind going into Iraq back then was IMHO one of the worst blunders he made during his entire Presidency, and by itself worthy of impeachment had he gone into Iraq without any congressional approval.
I'm not on both sides of the fence. Instead I would perfer the proper vetting of what it means to mobilize our nation if we go on the offensive, and I don't think President George W. Bush did that going into Iraq this last time around. The problem here is, who is going to enforce the constitution? The Supreme Court? They wouldn't even dare touch that issue because they don't even have juristiction on that point and would be pointless anyway, like allowing deserters to constantly second-guess the commander-in-chief of the military. Congress also refused to step up to the bat and politically slap the executive branch from violating the Constitution. So who is left? Voters? I would only hope so.
The fact is that indeed we were in a state of war against Iraq since 1991, and that did not end until after U.S. troops entered into Baghdad. The stuff that is going on now really is a new conflict, as nobody can point to any organized military units that are following orders from an Iraqi government going back to Saddam Hussein or his natural successors. That pauses in open hostile combat occured may be true, but that also happened between German and American soldiers during WWII, and is also happening right now between North Korea and American troops on the Korean penninsula.
The reason why the Constititution clearly spells out that war making powers reside exclusively with Congress is precisely to stop hot idiots (like I guess in your opinion George W. Bush) from being an arbitrary tyrant and puting our nation into danger by starting a war when widespread support of the American people is not there. Frankly I don't know who is more politically correct, George W. Bush or John F. Kerry, and I think both are totally out to lunch in terms of what was going on in Iraq. I am critical of Bush in Iraq, but I would have him do things that I am pretty certain Kerry would not be doing either, like taking out a mosque if armed soldiers are holed up inside. Plenty of Cathedials were sacked during WWII, and I don't see much of a difference.
I also consider most of the War Powers Act to be totally unconstitutional as well. It was put together under the fear that if the Warsaw Pact went into the Fulda Gap plowing into France that Paris would be speaking Russian before Congress could even get together to even vote on a war declaration. Or even worse yet that 90% of the USA would no longer even exist as a functional country. In the case of Iraq that certainly was not an issue, and I blame equally both the Democrats as well as the Republicans for refusing to follow the Constitution in this case.
Fox News does have a pretty good proportion of both liberal and conservative commentators, and ordinary Fox News is only slightly more conservative than say CBS News. Still, it can be argued that a major portion of their viewers and supporters do tend to be considerably more conservative than CBS News or even Pacifica News (a clearly liberal radio news network). BTW, I do enjoy listening to Pacifica, and I know their bias when I turn on the radio to listen to them.
As far as O'Reilly is concerned, there is no way you can have a "No Spin Zone". People have political opinions and I'm sick of people claiming that they are unbiased when it is clear that they are displaying clear sympathy toward a certain political philosophy. Do you really think that CBS News does a fair job of discussing issues of Software Patents or P2P data servers? What about DeCSS? Strong data encryption? Computer "Hackers" in general? SCO? Why do you think they get anything else correct?
At least right-winged news sources openly proclaim that they are biased, and openly support a given political candidate.
One thing I will say about Michael Moore in his defense is that he is openly proclaiming that he supports John Kerry. I don't think you can question if he is opposed to Bush... that should be obvious by what he has written and published, including the silver screen. When you read his commentaries or see his movies, you know how he is biased, and you can deal with what you read or see.
The problem here lies in the fact that many new journalists don't know the difference between the front page and the editorial page any more. You can be an objective jouralist, report nothing but the facts, and do a good job covering a story of interest. The problem comes when you start to inject your opinion ("Bush has lied about WMDs") rather than report an objective fact, intelligence reports from the British Government have been discredited.
In the interest of disclosure, I want to mention that I am proclaiming that the following is an editorial, and strictly my opinion.
This story is primarily trying to suggest that the USA went to war on the presumption that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction that were going to be used on American soil. Specifically, that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear bombs that would then be smuggled into the USA.
The truth of the matter is that the United States of America was already in a state of war with Iraq due to the earlier invasion of Kuwait, and we had only signed a cease-fire agreement with Iraq. This is not a peace treaty, and when you are dealing with a military power like the USA I would hope that the country on the other side realizes that there is good reason to be afraid of the guns being used again. The cease-fire agreement was violated on the part of Iraq in numerous areas, and Hussein essentially felt he could challenge the American military directly. Basically, "bring on the war, we are ready for it."
That Saddam had used WMDs in the past is a matter of historical record. Thousands of Iraqis had been attacked and killed with both chemical and biological weapons, and there are strong reasons to believe that once used there wouldn't be more in some stock piles somewhere. The problem here is a definition of WMDs, and the popular news media wants to belive that the only WMD is a nuclear bomb.
It is also a matter of historical record that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain nuclear weapons, even before the Iran-Iraq war. Nuclear power plants capable of producing and refining plutonium had already been built, and if not for Israeli bombing of those plants Iraq would have had nukes a long time ago.
Wheither Iraq had these weapons immediately before the USA invasion of Iraq is a matter that can be debated, but there is no doubt that it was a matter of policy in Saddam Hussein's government to produce these weapons and have them available. There were other compelling reasons for going into Iraq even beyond the WMDs, and the WMDs were only a minor factor in the decision to go to war.
I felt back in 2002 that going into Iraq was a very good thing to do, and I feel now that it was a very good thing that happened. The one area I am upset with Bush over is that instead of a "authorization for the use of force", President Bush should have recieved a formal declaration of a state of war from Congress. Had this final step been taken, with the full implications of a declaration of war going across the world political stage, and these issues fully vetted on the floor of Congress in both houses, I don't think this would be as big of a deal. Had Congress turned down President Bush, then he could have been impeached on the grounds of going to war without authorization from Congress. Had Congress declared war, many of the anti-war protests after that declaration could be declared treasonous, and the subsequent actions with catching prisoners of war would have been justified.
The American news media doesn't have that big of a lock (yet) on things like this.
Yeah, this is incredibly old news, and looks like the New York Times is holding back to deliberately affect the election through a pure political endorsement of John Kerry.
I just wish the New York Times would openly admit that they endorse Kerry for President and be done with it. Proclaim it loudly and put the endorsement on the front page in a small box from now until the elections so that you are certain to know just how their news stories are slanted. Pretending that they are "unbiased" and "objective journalists" is pure BS and the folks at that newspaper know it.
When listening to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, at least you know that they openly endorse Geroge W. Bush from the get go, and their programs are justifiably biased in that direction.
Besides, this has already been beaten to death in blogs as well, and is only a big deal now on/. due to the fact that I don't think it is a duplicate story.... not that that happens much here on/.;)
This should not have even made the front page of/., much less the New York Times. I guess that OSTN (OSTG?) is "raking in the dough" because of the huge number of posts to this article. This should have been kept in the "Politics" section only. What is/. becoming now, a political news website?
There are a number of companies that produce stuff that goes into space, true, but they are not really privately financed projects in the strictest sense.
One of the things that groups like Orbital Sciences were betting on was the supposed boom in launching business from projects like Iridium and other communications constellations. Investors thought it would be cell phone stations in orbit, and the coming boom for servicing and sending up those constellations would provide plenty of market for launch carriers. It ends up that at least with current technologies the concept of a satellite constellation is a bust, and the constellation operators simply can't afford to keep it going, at least for a reasonable price to an ordinary user. I've heard prices as high as $5000 per user per month, with modem baud rates as low as 9600 baud. Useful if you are in Anarctica or Afghanistan, but not useful in downtown NYC.
BTW, when the original constellation boom happened, there was so much entheusiasm that some launchs were done in China, because it was anticipated that there would be so much demand that all existing launch capacity was used. This situation existed for barely two years, and then went totally dead.
It has also been abundantly mentioned that the price per pound for launches has been kept artificially high through government contracts. Companies like Boeing or Lockheed-Martin don't want to bring their prices down because frankly they are making a very healthy profit off of the existing contracts, and the market for launches at the next price level is an order of magnatude cheaper, and the big companies don't want to lose their current profits to gamble for what is now only a potential market at substantially cheaper prices. If I were a shareholder in those companies, I would encourage this current practice as well, and the income is comparatively speaking rather predictable... also good for established businesses.
Space tourism is a whole new market, and with the demise of the Concorde it opens up a whole proven category where sub-orbital flight will be incredibly profitable: Intercontinental flight. There are some very compelling business reasons for paying $100,000 for a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney in 4 hours. Even the Concorde going between NYC and London proved to be financially useful at $10,000 per ticket for some classes of passengers, even taking the "coolness" factor out of it. I would imagine that Tokyo to London would also have some very well financed passengers using it on a regular basis if they could beat substantially conventional commercial aircraft with time.
The point here is that this is a market that can be documented to exist, but has nothing currently available to point to that will fill that niche. I really think Richard Branson is going to make off like a bandit and get a couple more billion into his personal bank account. Once you get a Tokyo to London flight going, it really won't be too much more speed to get into low-orbit. What is also neat about this market is that incremental technology development and investment is also possible, with the first few passenger flights just going up and down like Space Ship One. A flight from Mojave to Hawaii would seem to me like a good goal to shoot for in the next generation of spacecraft, and be useful at the same time.
It is precisely because most people who discuss environmental policies in the light that "We must do something NOW!" usually throw science and hard figures out the window and throw up ideology right away. The topic subject is "Scientist don't know EVERTHING=lets do NOTHING?", and then went into a huge argument that criticized that most people suggest we do nothing to affect the CO2 levels in the atmoshpere. And then further threw up the whole SUV issue as if getting rid of all SUVs are going to stop the global rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. If that isn't ideology, I don't know what is.
I am not ill informed, and there are certainly changes to the overall atmosphere due to modern society. I think though that the way to solve these issues is not to dismantle our industrial society (getting rid of SUVs and other CO2 emission sources), nor do I think that this is an unsolvable problem. While I will admit and conceed that there is global warming, I will not admit that the primary and chief cause of this is due to human activity... there are far to many variables and the models that are used are by scientists with an axe to grind.
Also, two huge sources of CO2 emissions include volcanoes and forest fires. Forest fires are pretty much self-regulating, as a good healthy forest will pretty much output as much carbon as it absorbs, perhaps even bury some in the ground for future time periods. There are also some chemical processes in the ocean and with some geological processes that also can release CO2 under the right circumstances (although I'll admit that the ocean is more likely to absorb the CO2 than release it at the moment.) All of these processes can release C14 depleted CO2, just as you are citing.
Environmental monitoring is also suspect, as the methods used to obtain the numbers often involve political sensationalism and can be skewed by picking monitoring locations that best serve a political agenda, particularly if the scientists involved are trying to push for increased pollution regulation.
It is very difficult to obtain objectively very good numbers, as the consequences of what happens when those numbers get published can influence policy decisions that affect ordinary people like myself who is struggling to simply raise a family and to be honest sound like alarmist freaks trying to rob money from me. There are people pushing for environmental policies that have frankly done some very poor science, and there is a huge backlash going on against all environmental scientists because of this, even those scientists who really are using the scientific method properly and doing some remarkable and worthy work. If you can show me some hard numbers, explain very clearly how the method used to obtain those numbers is totally objective, and most importantly, that the numbers used contain more than simply 50 years of climate data, I am very impressed.
I am also very familiar with the schools for environmental science, and they tend to have students and professors with a slightly more liberal viewpoint, even compared to a typical college campus. I don't think you will too many Bush/Cheeny stickers on students in those schools, and indeed you will see many "Anybody but Bush" instead. Locally the Natural Resource College is a very good place to find a Kerry supporter if you wanted to find one in a hurry, even though the college Republicans on campus are quite strong in general. It is precisely this political leaning that also pushes ideological values that go straight to environmental policies as well, as these are the "experts" that come up with these numbers.
If you assume that the United States of America is directly responsible for the massive increase in CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale (a bunch of ifs so far I don't support)
I never mentioned the USA once in my post. Who exatly are you arguing with? As it turns out, I would like the US to be the world leader in cleaner, less wasteful technologies; Not only could we help keep the planet liveable for humans, but I think we could make a lot of money. But I didn't mention that in my post...weird.
America is a very popular target for many reasons, not the least of which is the desire to deep-six the Kyoto Treaty. Signing that treaty is a very bad idea for America, and will do far more harm than good. I know that you specifically didn't mention the USA by name, but often because America is a big target and in one place with one government, therefore capable of actually doing something as a group and influence the rest of the world, is made to be the bad guy and responsible for much of the world's ills, particularly in regards to global pollution.
Just don't tell me to become a hunter/gatherer again like my ancestors were many years ago and force me to choose which of my neighbors are going to get killed in the coming genocide, if your philosophies prevail.
What the hell are you talking about?
The logical conclusion of trying to be an environmentalist is in many ways a reactionary movement to disband industrial technologies, or even agriculture-based economies. That means that we, as a people, will return to a time when we "lived in harmony with nature", and lived a subsistance hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Only by doing this can nature takes it proper course and impact of humanity is minimized. Also, by going to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle population pressures will be greatly diminished, simply because a given parcel of land can only support so many people.
If you accept that you must be allowed to have your cool gadgets, farm grown food, and enjoy a lifestyle similar to a 1st World country in the 21st Century, you must permit at least some burning of fossil fuels and the production of CO2 in some significant quantities. The only way out then is to apply more technology, not less, and be able to come up with some energy soruce that will diminish pollution. Nuclear Energy is a good alternative, but its pollution effects are in some ways even worse than fossil fuels. Solar Energy is proven to consume more energy in the manufacture of its components (particularly photovoltaic) than it produces over its lifetime. There are other environmental issues with solar energy sources as well. Wind energy kills birs and affects local climates as well. Hydroelectric systems are the best for air quality, but they do their own sort of damage to the environment.
Basically, I'm trying to point out that there are some tremendous compromises that will have to be done if you switch to anything. This is something that is going to have to be done gradually, and there is no single magical energy source that we can use to maintain our current lifestyles that will not also have a tremendous impact on the global environment in a negative way.
Should we be responsible stewards? Yes. I hope that we can make this world a cleaner place that my children and grandchildren can enjoy as much as I have been able to.
You are very quick to openly dismiss the potential for sources other than industrial pollution causing an increase in CO2. Even if you assume that the global increase is due to industrial pollution, most environmentalist are quick to point straight to 1st World countries, and most specifically the United States of America.
If you assume that the United States of America is directly responsible for the massive increase in CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale (a bunch of ifs so far I don't support), you are also presuming that giant wastful SUVs are the largest component of the production of CO2 in the USA. Truth be told, all of the SUVs in the entire USA amount to less than 1% of the total CO2 production in the USA. OK, I'll try to back that up with some hard figures, but this is somewhat hard to come by.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics does have some interesting numbers to compare, that can give some hard values. Basically, all categories of SUVs combined account for about 49% of all trucks sold. Trucks only account for 42% of all new vehicles sold, giving you about 20% of all new vehicles sold by dealerships in the USA are SUVs. OK, a major portion of vehicles, and certainly you can see them driven around near you, but not the #1 source of pollution. I'll also tell you that a light pickup will put out just as much if nor more pollution than an SUV, so are you trying to get them banned as well? If you look at this page, car & truck pollution is hardly even the single source of air pollution either. I feel very confident that if you take into account mass transit systems, bulk goods shipment, energy production systems (like coal fired power plants), agriculture production equipment (tractors, harvesters, irrigation pumps, etc.), industrial production equipment, and even other personal transportation equipment, you would find SUVs to be well less than 1% of all CO2 production in the USA. Statistically it is insignificant even if all SUVs were made illegal to use or own tomorrow.
Also, going back to the stats pages, The USA isn't even a majority of auto production It is barely even #1, with many interesting countries that are making significant gains for presumably domestic production, including China and Brazil.
The fact is that if the USA were to suddenly cease to exist (we all got in our rockets and went to Mars, or nuked ourselves in a Civil War when Bush and Kerry deadlock in the Presidential election), CO2 production will continue to grow, and grow substantially for the next century, and even make up for everything the USA is currently producing.
This is not even to mention that there may be other causes for global warming besides just CO2 production. Please think before you start throwing stats around, even if you think you are promoting a proper philosophy. I would agree that as individuals we can try to avoid messing up our environment. Just don't tell me to become a hunter/gatherer again like my ancestors were many years ago and force me to choose which of my neighbors are going to get killed in the coming genocide, if your philosophies prevail.
I will say that the guys trying to sell tickets are depending on the fact that this general airframe, or something very similar, is going to be certified for a production run of small spacecraft with full FAA commercial certification. So I think the experimental status will soon be changed, but that won't happen by Monday, that is for certain.
I do know Paul Allen and Burt Rutan were suggesting strongly that they may be passengers in the final flight. Wheither this happens or not I bet will depend largely on the investigation of what caused the roll in the last flight.
The 40+ flight hours of testing I think has already been made, at least as far as general typical high-altitude (10,000 + feet) flight manuvers are concerned and landing tests. Obviously there have only been two other flights into space, so extream high altitude testing has been rather limited. What the FAA says about that is another story. That this is under so much media scrutiny I think the FAA is going to bend over backwards to see certification occurs, unless there is some serious egg in the face of Scaled Composites. (Like having SSO crash & burn on Monday).
The average person "on the street" frankly is totally clueless about what is even happening. Frankly, they are asking the average geek/nerd/astro guy they happen to know and ask them just what all this hoopla is really all about, and wondering why the geek is wetting his pants. (well, some of them at least)
This is a cool thing, and credit should be given where credit is due. With the announcement of the "America's Prize" (I guess yet to be announced) a new round in the competition for going into space will soon be at hand. If you are correct about Space Ship One, that Burton Rutan can't get it (or a similar ship) into orbit, then it looks like Armadillo Aerospace and the Romanians are going to be much more in the running for that prize.
The ships from those two groups appear to be more upgradeable to make it to orbit, although I would have to agree that reentry issues have not been fully explored. Still, there are a number of private groups now that have working propulsion systems going, and have been at least sending things up a few hundred feet, if not more, and are dealing with scalability issues as well.
I appreciate the fact that the X-Prize has set the tone of the current attitude toward space exploration. While it is more than likely driving nails into the coffin of NASA, there is much more to what is happening in the space industry than even cute rocket stunts. And don't think the big aerospace companies aren't paying attention to what is going on either.
Right now the rocket industry is in a renasannce that looks very much like the early days of the automobile industry or the early aviation industry. There are a couple of very well financed companies (like XCOR, for example) that I would be surprised if they went belly up, but still anything is possible. Boeing certainly struggled in their early days when they were first starting out, and it was a construction team smaller than Armadillo Aerospace, with far less financial backing.
I predict that private commercial space enterprises (like Virgin Galactic) will be within 10 years bringing in more cashflow than the entire computer industry. One reason in particular is because there is much more room to grow into space than there is for the computer industry to penetrate into 3rd World nations. Private space companies "going public" will be the next darling on Wall Street, and will create the next round of Billionaires for those who are getting in right now.
I don't think it is too hard to simply ask that if you start making wild assertions regarding a massive increase in the number of earthquakes in the Ring of Fire, that you need to back it up with solid statistics. And demonstrate that there is indeed a definite upward and consistant trend for the number of earthquakes rather than simply a statistical anomoly.
Just as you can occasionally roll snake eyes with a pair of dice, unusual events can also occur near simltaneously and not be related to each other... or be part of a larger trend. Perhaps that is all that is going on right now? Prove me wrong if you think otherwise, but at least try to use real statistics rather that quotes from the National Inquirer or George Carlin's Seven Deadly Words.
The only problem I see with this sort of fictional concept is that most people writing such stories don't have a clue about the sheer amount of energy released by one of these events.
The most you could do with some sort of bomb is speed events up, and at most only by a day or two at that. At other times of the life cycle of a volcano, I doubt that even exploding a nuke would be able to trigger an eruption. Keep in mind that even the comparatively minor eruption of Mount St. Helens (which was even less than Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines) was a couple of orders of magnitude more explosive than the bomb on Hiroshima. Except for the radioactive junk from the bomb, you wouldn't have even noticed anything different had a nuke gone off during the eruption.
On the flip side of this, I also don't think that you could stop one of these eruptions even if you tried either. Drilling wells or somehow "cooling off" a volcano isn't going to work either. Mainly, if it is going to blow, it will, and it is simply best if you move and get away from the darned thing unless you are trying to commit suicide.
This observatory is on the edge of the approach zone to the SLC airport (like Disneyland is on the approach zone to LAX... don't read too much into that), so it is possible that they had it shine in their face during decent. Still, it wasn't being tracked on them, they just happened to foolishly fly over the darned thing at the wrong time.
First of all, I have seen several posters here to/. that frankly don't know jack. I am serious here.
Now to explain why this laser was so powerful that it could be seen from the air at 40,000 feet or more, this is an incredibly powerful laser that is used by the Utah State University Department of Physics to study the upper atmosphere air temperature. BTW, that laser beam is a beautiful sight, and watching it go straight up to the zenith (apparently... just a few arc seconds of zenith if you are standing near the building) makes your mind follow the light and wander up to infinity (or at least 100 km up into the atmosphere).
My (almost... just two doors down the block from me) next door neighbor is one of the research scientist involved in the project. This is an ongoing project that has been running off and on for almost eleven years. If this were something brand new I might see the pilot having a right to complain, but this is something that is very old (well, comparatively old... it was approved under the Bush I administration for funding).
Frankly I don't know why the pilot didn't read his stinking charts. What were they, over 12 years old? If that were true the pilot should have his pilots license suspended anyway for that very reason alone. For those not in the know, just don't fly an airplane over Utah State University if you don't want to get blinded by the light.
The physics of this are also pretty cool. There are two parts, the laser that shoots out, and a light reciever that measures the intensity of the light coming back, and the timing of that light. From this information the temperature of the upper atmosphere can be obtained +/- about 1 degree C for the whole range of altitudes, and they don't even have to send up a sounding rocket to get the data.
I'm kinda curious if everybody here is really thinking of the long-term consequences of space tourism. Tourists have a tendancy to show up and be places they really shouldn't (like the inside of a military base, the floor of the NYSE, in a swamp fishing next to lanuch pad 49A of KSC, or even wandering around aimlessly in Antarctica).
There are enough people that somehow make it on their own to the South Pole that the South Pole Research Station has established policies on how to deal with them, including a no refueling policy for airplanes that get stuck down there. This is only going to get worse over time.
Dispite the best intentions of everybody involved, I see little to stop wandering idiots from going to Mars now and writing their initials on the Viking 1 & 2 probes, or picking up as souviners pieces of the Mars Rover craft. It is just a matter of time before they show up there on their own.
Wouldn't it be a blast if the first people on Mars weren't an organized governmental program, but rather somebody with a lawn chair, a bunch of bottles of oxygen, and a space suit landing their instead? Well, maybe a little bit more stuff than that, but certainly not a full-blown Apollo style landing and return military mission. Once a substantial number of LEO space stations are up and running, I don't see how any governmental agency is going to be able to stop anybody from sneaking up some extra rocket boosters and pushing out further from the Earth.
Basically, the clock is ticking for NASA to get off their hind end and get to Mars first, if they really want to be there. I'll also say that if a private group is the first to land on Mars, the entire justification for having NASA will have expired and they should be disbanded as an agency altogether.
What the X-Prize foundation does next year is going to be the real issue, not the co-opting of the name. The Ansari family has pushed a huge pile of case to the foundation for the rights to add their name onto the X-Prize... enough to set up one or more new prizes.
If the foundation takes the money and runs to Argentina or Pakistan you have a right to be pissed (I will be too.) If instead they announce a prize to get people to orbit, I would be incredibly impressed. It is just in that case Robert Bigelow is going to beat them to the punch with his own prize.
Orbital (LEO) flight: The next major frontier for private spaceflight. Keep in mind the quote from R.A. Heinlein: "Low Earth Orbit is half-way to the rest of the solar system." If you can get there, getting the rest of the way to places like the moon or Mars or even Europa is going to be comparatively easy.
I would say that patents should be eliminated for just about everything except mechanical devices (what the patent system seems to work best for anyway). Even then, there are needed areas of patent reform, including IMHO the requirement that in order for a patent to be issued, that an actual prodcut or proof of the technology must be completed showing the concept in actual use with a further requirement that the concept of the patent actually causes legitimate "progress for the useful arts and sciences". In otherwords, something truly innovative and advancing science and knowledge in general, not merely something that hasn't been patented before.
From my viewpoint I'm still undecided if pharmaceutical patents ought to be allowed, and for what term. Trying to get a new drug through the FDA approval process is incredibly difficult, and using current rules it is possible for some drugs to have the patent expire before the clinical trials are over, which defeats the purpose of the patent in the first place. And that is with a 24 year patent lifetime, not seven year. The solution of the pharmaceutical companies is to extent the lifetime of the patent. I think the clock should begin to tick after the drug has FDA approval. That could also be made law very easily for that particular class of patents which are rather unique in nature anyway.
How drug patent philosophies relate to patenting DNA is yet another whole can of worms and gets deep into just how you "discover" a chemical formula. Still, if you somehow identify a very useful chemical which has otherwise not been noticed before (even if it is encoded in your DNA) you should be recognized for that fact somehow and given financial incentives to try and find more chemicals that have actual uses. Simplying throwing the entirety of the Human Genome Project into a patent is absolutely silly or any other such frivilous attempt to patent every chemical combination that you can think of even if you have no idea what it does. That is the point of the reform I mentioned that you have to produce the chemical (like the same substance produced by a given DNA strand in a typical cell), document what it does, how it interacts with other chemicals, and typical uses for that chemical.
In regards for Software patents, I see absolutely no need for them, and what patents have been granted are far from innovative anyway. Copyright is more than sufficient for most purposes in regards to protecting software ideas, and even that needs some reform. Software engineers do not need the patent system to earn money and in most cases actually prevent them from earning money on projects they have worked very hard and independently to create.
BTW, if you read the main website for Bigelow Aerospace, you will discover that they are working off of some discarded NASA technologies as it is. The ISS wasn't a total waste, and some of the skills and technology that was used in its creation will be helping to build the new space stations that will be built in the near future.
Still, at a cost of close to $500 Billion (in inflation adjusted money spread out over 3 decades, true, but pretty close to that figure) it could be argued that NASA could have come up with something a little more than what they currently have to show for their space program:
3 Space Shuttles
1 half-compleated space station (but in operating condition at the moment).
One very cool orbiting satellite, but near the end of its expected lifetime.
3 Space Lanuching Bases (Edwards, KSC, and Vandenburg...now mainly USAF)
Several major research institutions (JPL, Ames, etc.) each capable of performing considerable aerospace research projects and widely acknowledged as the top of their field in the world.
Several robots on Mars
A couple of probes on Venus (not really intended to land on the surface, but a couple did anyway)
A few spaces probes in deep interstellar space (Voyager and Pioneer)
Several other minor astronomical and Earth Observing satellites still providing new data.
6 plaques on the Moon.
500 kg of lunar soil available for Earth-based research laboratories.
And about 1 Petabyte of raw data collected regarding everything in the Universe above 100 km altitude above the Earth, and some interesting data about the Earth itself as well.
Taking out the Apollo stuff, you begin to wonder just what NASA has been up to. The cool pictures (some of that 1 Petabyte of data) and crazy stories by astronauts certainly have some value, but could that money have been better spent? I guess that is the real question. The above are BTW current resources that can be used to develops some future space program, including the ISS. The problem there is to decide what to do with that white elephant, and if instead it would be cheaper to boost it up to an L-5 position and abandon the hunk of metal. Letting it crash and burn in the atmosphere is simply too much metal to worry about.
Slashdot Mirror
I take it you havn't read Robert A. Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold the Moon. D. Delos Harriman is a person hero of mine, and this is an interesting book by itself. It also gets into the legal issues of owning non-terrestial real-estate and a very interesting view on how American business really works, not just how it should on paper.
In this book, Heinlein specifically mentions a 7-up ad on the moon (he called it a 6+ soft drink, which I suppose could be anything), and to make things really fun (keep in mind this was written in the 1950's) the protaganist throws a hammer and sickle on a overlay over the moon during a board meeting that includes some FAA representatives.
Of any of the early science fiction that is inspiring the X-Prize and private commercial spaceflight, I would have to say that this book is clearly very influential, and it wouldn't surprise me to see a company called "Harriman Industries" get involved with spaceflight some time in the future, if only to invoke the flavor of Heinlein's future history.
A sad footnote in the book was that the main guy behind the whole project, Harriman, was denied from going into space due to poor health, and the FAA wouldn't give him clearance to get on a spaceship.
I'm not even sure that a single penny of Ansari money is going to even be in the $10 Million check that will be awarded to Scaled Composites. Instead, this money is being used to help fund the next projects that the X-Prize Foundation wants to move on to.
The concept of a NASCAR type competition is a cool idea in some ways, but I don't see that directly translating into space-based industries like He-3 mining or power satellites.
I am not critical of the NASA programs of the 1960's and 1970's. I am, however, very critical of the manned NASA programs of the 1980's and 1990's. The Space Shuttle has turned out to be a white elephant, and the #1 reason to have the current shuttle program is that it can haul a tremendous amount of "stuff" from LEO to the ground without having it all burn up. Unfortunately it is rarely used for that purpose. It would be cool if the Hubble Telescope were brought back to the Earth without burning up, but somehow I doubt that it would ever get funding. The ISS obviously did try to take advantage of having a trash hauler available, but even that wasn't strictly necessary to fulfill that mission.
I do hope that NASA can move back into "deep space" manned exploration like the popular viewpoint of what "Moon, Mars, & Beyond" should be rather than what it really is at the moment: A distraction to make you think our government is making progress with NASA. When I see astronauts planning for specific landings and named flight numbers (Like Apollo 17...obviously with some name other than Apollo) with a return trip to the moon and a recapture of Lunar flight capabilities, I will be impressed with NASA. Until then, they are just blowing hot air.
Had this been the Ortig prize....
"Well, pulling off something a bit more useful than barnstorming flights requires a much greater team of engineers and scientists. I mean, sending miltary reconnisance planes--not even think of ordinary passengers--is a problem much greater than a flight to "cross the atlantic". Let's see: First you need a global radio network that can talk to pilots in flight across the Atlantic. Expensive, but feasable. You need special propulsion and a special landing system. VERY expensive but still feasable. Doing science in Antarctica would need money for instruments, a ground-team and scientists. But getting that plane on a course across the South Pole needs a VERY accurate tracking system, a very experienced team and a bunch of top scientist. You could still get that for a vast amount of more money...but I doubt you would be doing a missing much cheaper than the Royal Navy that leading science organizations would dump the Royal Navy's 400 year experience in major scientific exploration with your yet un-proved, never-tested, we-don't-need-quality-because-we-are-cheaper aircraft company."
Not exactly like it would have been almost 100 years ago, but pretty close.
I think the problem is that Scaled Composites is making space travel seem routine and ordinary. In this case, I think this is a very good thing.
Also, the major news media outlets have already covered the "novelty" of the whole project earlier, particularly when they made their first test flight into space before the official attempts. To a non-techy person, what is different? Really not much.
However, I would have to agree that the significance of the fact that the X-Prize has been awarded really is a much bigger deal than the major media outlets are really giving credit for. This is something that our kids and grandkids are going to be reading about in history books many years from now, and ordinary folks living now really don't grasp just how significant this is.
While much can be said about telecommunications systems, the telephone has been around for what...150 years now? Trans-oceanic telephone cables for close to 100 and telecomm satellites for almost 50 years?
Business travelers have to sometimes get somewhere as soon as possible. I've even been in that position myself where I had a two hour notice to get on an airplane and fly 2000 miles by that very same evening before a customer trashed a $2 Million deal. I know for a fact that had the Concorde been available when that happened to me they would have authorized the extra expense to get there earlier.
Also, there are times when you really need to meet face-to-face with somebody, looking at their sweat, especially when you are closing a deal. In my case I had some technical skills that litterally only 3 other people in the world could have solved (at least in a short term solution), so I had to be on site, and the emergencies usually couldn't be predicted ahead of time. Things like that will never change.
In terms of the "untapped market", I would point to sales of Concorde flight service. The #1 thing that unfortunately killed it (besides the plane crashes) was the hyper security found in airports now, together with the fact that it was outlawed in most domestic airports in the USA for several reasons. How that translates to the space market is unknown, but the Concorde passengers are clearly people who did "sign the check" and it did get used quite a bit...enough for regular service.
In terms of making it available to ordinary people, I think this is going quite a bit futher than what people like Dennis Tito did in the past, and at least there is the possibility I could put together $100,000 to go into space. $20 Million was never even a possibility.
When tanks are rolling and people are getting killed, bombs are dropping to the ground, and a foreign nation's flag is flying over territory against the wishes of the government who controlled that territory yesterday or the day before, I would call that war. The technical and legal definition be damned at that point. And that clearly happened in 1991 regardless of your viewpoint in Kuwait and Iraq during the Gulf War.
The "Authorization for the Use of Force" granted by the U.S. Congress back in 1990 was considered by most legal scholars as adequate for what happened back then. BTW, my position on this matter hasn't changed since even before the Gulf War, and I think George H.W. Bush should have sought a declaration of a state of war back then for exactly the very same reasons I stated in the previous post. That Bush I openly proclaimed that he didn't even need congressional authority of any kind going into Iraq back then was IMHO one of the worst blunders he made during his entire Presidency, and by itself worthy of impeachment had he gone into Iraq without any congressional approval.
I'm not on both sides of the fence. Instead I would perfer the proper vetting of what it means to mobilize our nation if we go on the offensive, and I don't think President George W. Bush did that going into Iraq this last time around. The problem here is, who is going to enforce the constitution? The Supreme Court? They wouldn't even dare touch that issue because they don't even have juristiction on that point and would be pointless anyway, like allowing deserters to constantly second-guess the commander-in-chief of the military. Congress also refused to step up to the bat and politically slap the executive branch from violating the Constitution. So who is left? Voters? I would only hope so.
The fact is that indeed we were in a state of war against Iraq since 1991, and that did not end until after U.S. troops entered into Baghdad. The stuff that is going on now really is a new conflict, as nobody can point to any organized military units that are following orders from an Iraqi government going back to Saddam Hussein or his natural successors. That pauses in open hostile combat occured may be true, but that also happened between German and American soldiers during WWII, and is also happening right now between North Korea and American troops on the Korean penninsula.
The reason why the Constititution clearly spells out that war making powers reside exclusively with Congress is precisely to stop hot idiots (like I guess in your opinion George W. Bush) from being an arbitrary tyrant and puting our nation into danger by starting a war when widespread support of the American people is not there. Frankly I don't know who is more politically correct, George W. Bush or John F. Kerry, and I think both are totally out to lunch in terms of what was going on in Iraq. I am critical of Bush in Iraq, but I would have him do things that I am pretty certain Kerry would not be doing either, like taking out a mosque if armed soldiers are holed up inside. Plenty of Cathedials were sacked during WWII, and I don't see much of a difference.
I also consider most of the War Powers Act to be totally unconstitutional as well. It was put together under the fear that if the Warsaw Pact went into the Fulda Gap plowing into France that Paris would be speaking Russian before Congress could even get together to even vote on a war declaration. Or even worse yet that 90% of the USA would no longer even exist as a functional country. In the case of Iraq that certainly was not an issue, and I blame equally both the Democrats as well as the Republicans for refusing to follow the Constitution in this case.
Fox News does have a pretty good proportion of both liberal and conservative commentators, and ordinary Fox News is only slightly more conservative than say CBS News. Still, it can be argued that a major portion of their viewers and supporters do tend to be considerably more conservative than CBS News or even Pacifica News (a clearly liberal radio news network). BTW, I do enjoy listening to Pacifica, and I know their bias when I turn on the radio to listen to them.
As far as O'Reilly is concerned, there is no way you can have a "No Spin Zone". People have political opinions and I'm sick of people claiming that they are unbiased when it is clear that they are displaying clear sympathy toward a certain political philosophy. Do you really think that CBS News does a fair job of discussing issues of Software Patents or P2P data servers? What about DeCSS? Strong data encryption? Computer "Hackers" in general? SCO? Why do you think they get anything else correct?
At least right-winged news sources openly proclaim that they are biased, and openly support a given political candidate.
One thing I will say about Michael Moore in his defense is that he is openly proclaiming that he supports John Kerry. I don't think you can question if he is opposed to Bush... that should be obvious by what he has written and published, including the silver screen. When you read his commentaries or see his movies, you know how he is biased, and you can deal with what you read or see.
The problem here lies in the fact that many new journalists don't know the difference between the front page and the editorial page any more. You can be an objective jouralist, report nothing but the facts, and do a good job covering a story of interest. The problem comes when you start to inject your opinion ("Bush has lied about WMDs") rather than report an objective fact, intelligence reports from the British Government have been discredited.
In the interest of disclosure, I want to mention that I am proclaiming that the following is an editorial, and strictly my opinion.
This story is primarily trying to suggest that the USA went to war on the presumption that Iraq had Weapons of Mass Destruction that were going to be used on American soil. Specifically, that Saddam Hussein was building nuclear bombs that would then be smuggled into the USA.
The truth of the matter is that the United States of America was already in a state of war with Iraq due to the earlier invasion of Kuwait, and we had only signed a cease-fire agreement with Iraq. This is not a peace treaty, and when you are dealing with a military power like the USA I would hope that the country on the other side realizes that there is good reason to be afraid of the guns being used again. The cease-fire agreement was violated on the part of Iraq in numerous areas, and Hussein essentially felt he could challenge the American military directly. Basically, "bring on the war, we are ready for it."
That Saddam had used WMDs in the past is a matter of historical record. Thousands of Iraqis had been attacked and killed with both chemical and biological weapons, and there are strong reasons to believe that once used there wouldn't be more in some stock piles somewhere. The problem here is a definition of WMDs, and the popular news media wants to belive that the only WMD is a nuclear bomb.
It is also a matter of historical record that the Iraqi government under Saddam Hussein was trying to obtain nuclear weapons, even before the Iran-Iraq war. Nuclear power plants capable of producing and refining plutonium had already been built, and if not for Israeli bombing of those plants Iraq would have had nukes a long time ago.
Wheither Iraq had these weapons immediately before the USA invasion of Iraq is a matter that can be debated, but there is no doubt that it was a matter of policy in Saddam Hussein's government to produce these weapons and have them available. There were other compelling reasons for going into Iraq even beyond the WMDs, and the WMDs were only a minor factor in the decision to go to war.
I felt back in 2002 that going into Iraq was a very good thing to do, and I feel now that it was a very good thing that happened. The one area I am upset with Bush over is that instead of a "authorization for the use of force", President Bush should have recieved a formal declaration of a state of war from Congress. Had this final step been taken, with the full implications of a declaration of war going across the world political stage, and these issues fully vetted on the floor of Congress in both houses, I don't think this would be as big of a deal. Had Congress turned down President Bush, then he could have been impeached on the grounds of going to war without authorization from Congress. Had Congress declared war, many of the anti-war protests after that declaration could be declared treasonous, and the subsequent actions with catching prisoners of war would have been justified.
The American news media doesn't have that big of a lock (yet) on things like this.
/. due to the fact that I don't think it is a duplicate story.... not that that happens much here on /. ;)
/., much less the New York Times. I guess that OSTN (OSTG?) is "raking in the dough" because of the huge number of posts to this article. This should have been kept in the "Politics" section only. What is /. becoming now, a political news website?
Yeah, this is incredibly old news, and looks like the New York Times is holding back to deliberately affect the election through a pure political endorsement of John Kerry.
I just wish the New York Times would openly admit that they endorse Kerry for President and be done with it. Proclaim it loudly and put the endorsement on the front page in a small box from now until the elections so that you are certain to know just how their news stories are slanted. Pretending that they are "unbiased" and "objective journalists" is pure BS and the folks at that newspaper know it.
When listening to Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, at least you know that they openly endorse Geroge W. Bush from the get go, and their programs are justifiably biased in that direction.
Besides, this has already been beaten to death in blogs as well, and is only a big deal now on
This should not have even made the front page of
There are a number of companies that produce stuff that goes into space, true, but they are not really privately financed projects in the strictest sense.
One of the things that groups like Orbital Sciences were betting on was the supposed boom in launching business from projects like Iridium and other communications constellations. Investors thought it would be cell phone stations in orbit, and the coming boom for servicing and sending up those constellations would provide plenty of market for launch carriers. It ends up that at least with current technologies the concept of a satellite constellation is a bust, and the constellation operators simply can't afford to keep it going, at least for a reasonable price to an ordinary user. I've heard prices as high as $5000 per user per month, with modem baud rates as low as 9600 baud. Useful if you are in Anarctica or Afghanistan, but not useful in downtown NYC.
BTW, when the original constellation boom happened, there was so much entheusiasm that some launchs were done in China, because it was anticipated that there would be so much demand that all existing launch capacity was used. This situation existed for barely two years, and then went totally dead.
It has also been abundantly mentioned that the price per pound for launches has been kept artificially high through government contracts. Companies like Boeing or Lockheed-Martin don't want to bring their prices down because frankly they are making a very healthy profit off of the existing contracts, and the market for launches at the next price level is an order of magnatude cheaper, and the big companies don't want to lose their current profits to gamble for what is now only a potential market at substantially cheaper prices. If I were a shareholder in those companies, I would encourage this current practice as well, and the income is comparatively speaking rather predictable... also good for established businesses.
Space tourism is a whole new market, and with the demise of the Concorde it opens up a whole proven category where sub-orbital flight will be incredibly profitable: Intercontinental flight. There are some very compelling business reasons for paying $100,000 for a flight from Los Angeles to Sydney in 4 hours. Even the Concorde going between NYC and London proved to be financially useful at $10,000 per ticket for some classes of passengers, even taking the "coolness" factor out of it. I would imagine that Tokyo to London would also have some very well financed passengers using it on a regular basis if they could beat substantially conventional commercial aircraft with time.
The point here is that this is a market that can be documented to exist, but has nothing currently available to point to that will fill that niche. I really think Richard Branson is going to make off like a bandit and get a couple more billion into his personal bank account. Once you get a Tokyo to London flight going, it really won't be too much more speed to get into low-orbit. What is also neat about this market is that incremental technology development and investment is also possible, with the first few passenger flights just going up and down like Space Ship One. A flight from Mojave to Hawaii would seem to me like a good goal to shoot for in the next generation of spacecraft, and be useful at the same time.
It is precisely because most people who discuss environmental policies in the light that "We must do something NOW!" usually throw science and hard figures out the window and throw up ideology right away. The topic subject is "Scientist don't know EVERTHING=lets do NOTHING?", and then went into a huge argument that criticized that most people suggest we do nothing to affect the CO2 levels in the atmoshpere. And then further threw up the whole SUV issue as if getting rid of all SUVs are going to stop the global rise of CO2 in the atmosphere. If that isn't ideology, I don't know what is.
I am not ill informed, and there are certainly changes to the overall atmosphere due to modern society. I think though that the way to solve these issues is not to dismantle our industrial society (getting rid of SUVs and other CO2 emission sources), nor do I think that this is an unsolvable problem. While I will admit and conceed that there is global warming, I will not admit that the primary and chief cause of this is due to human activity... there are far to many variables and the models that are used are by scientists with an axe to grind.
Also, two huge sources of CO2 emissions include volcanoes and forest fires. Forest fires are pretty much self-regulating, as a good healthy forest will pretty much output as much carbon as it absorbs, perhaps even bury some in the ground for future time periods. There are also some chemical processes in the ocean and with some geological processes that also can release CO2 under the right circumstances (although I'll admit that the ocean is more likely to absorb the CO2 than release it at the moment.) All of these processes can release C14 depleted CO2, just as you are citing.
Environmental monitoring is also suspect, as the methods used to obtain the numbers often involve political sensationalism and can be skewed by picking monitoring locations that best serve a political agenda, particularly if the scientists involved are trying to push for increased pollution regulation.
It is very difficult to obtain objectively very good numbers, as the consequences of what happens when those numbers get published can influence policy decisions that affect ordinary people like myself who is struggling to simply raise a family and to be honest sound like alarmist freaks trying to rob money from me. There are people pushing for environmental policies that have frankly done some very poor science, and there is a huge backlash going on against all environmental scientists because of this, even those scientists who really are using the scientific method properly and doing some remarkable and worthy work. If you can show me some hard numbers, explain very clearly how the method used to obtain those numbers is totally objective, and most importantly, that the numbers used contain more than simply 50 years of climate data, I am very impressed.
I am also very familiar with the schools for environmental science, and they tend to have students and professors with a slightly more liberal viewpoint, even compared to a typical college campus. I don't think you will too many Bush/Cheeny stickers on students in those schools, and indeed you will see many "Anybody but Bush" instead. Locally the Natural Resource College is a very good place to find a Kerry supporter if you wanted to find one in a hurry, even though the college Republicans on campus are quite strong in general. It is precisely this political leaning that also pushes ideological values that go straight to environmental policies as well, as these are the "experts" that come up with these numbers.
America is a very popular target for many reasons, not the least of which is the desire to deep-six the Kyoto Treaty. Signing that treaty is a very bad idea for America, and will do far more harm than good. I know that you specifically didn't mention the USA by name, but often because America is a big target and in one place with one government, therefore capable of actually doing something as a group and influence the rest of the world, is made to be the bad guy and responsible for much of the world's ills, particularly in regards to global pollution.
The logical conclusion of trying to be an environmentalist is in many ways a reactionary movement to disband industrial technologies, or even agriculture-based economies. That means that we, as a people, will return to a time when we "lived in harmony with nature", and lived a subsistance hunter/gatherer lifestyle. Only by doing this can nature takes it proper course and impact of humanity is minimized. Also, by going to a hunter/gatherer lifestyle population pressures will be greatly diminished, simply because a given parcel of land can only support so many people.
If you accept that you must be allowed to have your cool gadgets, farm grown food, and enjoy a lifestyle similar to a 1st World country in the 21st Century, you must permit at least some burning of fossil fuels and the production of CO2 in some significant quantities. The only way out then is to apply more technology, not less, and be able to come up with some energy soruce that will diminish pollution. Nuclear Energy is a good alternative, but its pollution effects are in some ways even worse than fossil fuels. Solar Energy is proven to consume more energy in the manufacture of its components (particularly photovoltaic) than it produces over its lifetime. There are other environmental issues with solar energy sources as well. Wind energy kills birs and affects local climates as well. Hydroelectric systems are the best for air quality, but they do their own sort of damage to the environment.
Basically, I'm trying to point out that there are some tremendous compromises that will have to be done if you switch to anything. This is something that is going to have to be done gradually, and there is no single magical energy source that we can use to maintain our current lifestyles that will not also have a tremendous impact on the global environment in a negative way.
Should we be responsible stewards? Yes. I hope that we can make this world a cleaner place that my children and grandchildren can enjoy as much as I have been able to.
You are very quick to openly dismiss the potential for sources other than industrial pollution causing an increase in CO2. Even if you assume that the global increase is due to industrial pollution, most environmentalist are quick to point straight to 1st World countries, and most specifically the United States of America.
If you assume that the United States of America is directly responsible for the massive increase in CO2 in the atmosphere on a global scale (a bunch of ifs so far I don't support), you are also presuming that giant wastful SUVs are the largest component of the production of CO2 in the USA. Truth be told, all of the SUVs in the entire USA amount to less than 1% of the total CO2 production in the USA. OK, I'll try to back that up with some hard figures, but this is somewhat hard to come by.
The Bureau of Transportation Statistics does have some interesting numbers to compare, that can give some hard values. Basically, all categories of SUVs combined account for about 49% of all trucks sold. Trucks only account for 42% of all new vehicles sold, giving you about 20% of all new vehicles sold by dealerships in the USA are SUVs. OK, a major portion of vehicles, and certainly you can see them driven around near you, but not the #1 source of pollution. I'll also tell you that a light pickup will put out just as much if nor more pollution than an SUV, so are you trying to get them banned as well? If you look at this page, car & truck pollution is hardly even the single source of air pollution either. I feel very confident that if you take into account mass transit systems, bulk goods shipment, energy production systems (like coal fired power plants), agriculture production equipment (tractors, harvesters, irrigation pumps, etc.), industrial production equipment, and even other personal transportation equipment, you would find SUVs to be well less than 1% of all CO2 production in the USA. Statistically it is insignificant even if all SUVs were made illegal to use or own tomorrow.
Also, going back to the stats pages, The USA isn't even a majority of auto production It is barely even #1, with many interesting countries that are making significant gains for presumably domestic production, including China and Brazil.
The fact is that if the USA were to suddenly cease to exist (we all got in our rockets and went to Mars, or nuked ourselves in a Civil War when Bush and Kerry deadlock in the Presidential election), CO2 production will continue to grow, and grow substantially for the next century, and even make up for everything the USA is currently producing.
This is not even to mention that there may be other causes for global warming besides just CO2 production. Please think before you start throwing stats around, even if you think you are promoting a proper philosophy. I would agree that as individuals we can try to avoid messing up our environment. Just don't tell me to become a hunter/gatherer again like my ancestors were many years ago and force me to choose which of my neighbors are going to get killed in the coming genocide, if your philosophies prevail.
I will say that the guys trying to sell tickets are depending on the fact that this general airframe, or something very similar, is going to be certified for a production run of small spacecraft with full FAA commercial certification. So I think the experimental status will soon be changed, but that won't happen by Monday, that is for certain.
I do know Paul Allen and Burt Rutan were suggesting strongly that they may be passengers in the final flight. Wheither this happens or not I bet will depend largely on the investigation of what caused the roll in the last flight.
The 40+ flight hours of testing I think has already been made, at least as far as general typical high-altitude (10,000 + feet) flight manuvers are concerned and landing tests. Obviously there have only been two other flights into space, so extream high altitude testing has been rather limited. What the FAA says about that is another story. That this is under so much media scrutiny I think the FAA is going to bend over backwards to see certification occurs, unless there is some serious egg in the face of Scaled Composites. (Like having SSO crash & burn on Monday).
*Sigh*
The average person "on the street" frankly is totally clueless about what is even happening. Frankly, they are asking the average geek/nerd/astro guy they happen to know and ask them just what all this hoopla is really all about, and wondering why the geek is wetting his pants. (well, some of them at least)
This is a cool thing, and credit should be given where credit is due. With the announcement of the "America's Prize" (I guess yet to be announced) a new round in the competition for going into space will soon be at hand. If you are correct about Space Ship One, that Burton Rutan can't get it (or a similar ship) into orbit, then it looks like Armadillo Aerospace and the Romanians are going to be much more in the running for that prize.
The ships from those two groups appear to be more upgradeable to make it to orbit, although I would have to agree that reentry issues have not been fully explored. Still, there are a number of private groups now that have working propulsion systems going, and have been at least sending things up a few hundred feet, if not more, and are dealing with scalability issues as well.
I appreciate the fact that the X-Prize has set the tone of the current attitude toward space exploration. While it is more than likely driving nails into the coffin of NASA, there is much more to what is happening in the space industry than even cute rocket stunts. And don't think the big aerospace companies aren't paying attention to what is going on either.
Right now the rocket industry is in a renasannce that looks very much like the early days of the automobile industry or the early aviation industry. There are a couple of very well financed companies (like XCOR, for example) that I would be surprised if they went belly up, but still anything is possible. Boeing certainly struggled in their early days when they were first starting out, and it was a construction team smaller than Armadillo Aerospace, with far less financial backing.
I predict that private commercial space enterprises (like Virgin Galactic) will be within 10 years bringing in more cashflow than the entire computer industry. One reason in particular is because there is much more room to grow into space than there is for the computer industry to penetrate into 3rd World nations. Private space companies "going public" will be the next darling on Wall Street, and will create the next round of Billionaires for those who are getting in right now.
I don't think it is too hard to simply ask that if you start making wild assertions regarding a massive increase in the number of earthquakes in the Ring of Fire, that you need to back it up with solid statistics. And demonstrate that there is indeed a definite upward and consistant trend for the number of earthquakes rather than simply a statistical anomoly.
Just as you can occasionally roll snake eyes with a pair of dice, unusual events can also occur near simltaneously and not be related to each other... or be part of a larger trend. Perhaps that is all that is going on right now? Prove me wrong if you think otherwise, but at least try to use real statistics rather that quotes from the National Inquirer or George Carlin's Seven Deadly Words.
The only problem I see with this sort of fictional concept is that most people writing such stories don't have a clue about the sheer amount of energy released by one of these events.
The most you could do with some sort of bomb is speed events up, and at most only by a day or two at that. At other times of the life cycle of a volcano, I doubt that even exploding a nuke would be able to trigger an eruption. Keep in mind that even the comparatively minor eruption of Mount St. Helens (which was even less than Mt. Pinatubo in the Phillipines) was a couple of orders of magnitude more explosive than the bomb on Hiroshima. Except for the radioactive junk from the bomb, you wouldn't have even noticed anything different had a nuke gone off during the eruption.
On the flip side of this, I also don't think that you could stop one of these eruptions even if you tried either. Drilling wells or somehow "cooling off" a volcano isn't going to work either. Mainly, if it is going to blow, it will, and it is simply best if you move and get away from the darned thing unless you are trying to commit suicide.
No, this was not something from nearby but from directly underneath
This observatory is on the edge of the approach zone to the SLC airport (like Disneyland is on the approach zone to LAX... don't read too much into that), so it is possible that they had it shine in their face during decent. Still, it wasn't being tracked on them, they just happened to foolishly fly over the darned thing at the wrong time.
FYI, it was a LIDAR. This is clearly a case where the /. editors aren't doing their job and running off half cocked.
First of all, I have seen several posters here to /. that frankly don't know jack. I am serious here.
Now to explain why this laser was so powerful that it could be seen from the air at 40,000 feet or more, this is an incredibly powerful laser that is used by the Utah State University Department of Physics to study the upper atmosphere air temperature. BTW, that laser beam is a beautiful sight, and watching it go straight up to the zenith (apparently... just a few arc seconds of zenith if you are standing near the building) makes your mind follow the light and wander up to infinity (or at least 100 km up into the atmosphere).
My (almost... just two doors down the block from me) next door neighbor is one of the research scientist involved in the project. This is an ongoing project that has been running off and on for almost eleven years. If this were something brand new I might see the pilot having a right to complain, but this is something that is very old (well, comparatively old... it was approved under the Bush I administration for funding).
Frankly I don't know why the pilot didn't read his stinking charts. What were they, over 12 years old? If that were true the pilot should have his pilots license suspended anyway for that very reason alone. For those not in the know, just don't fly an airplane over Utah State University if you don't want to get blinded by the light.
The physics of this are also pretty cool. There are two parts, the laser that shoots out, and a light reciever that measures the intensity of the light coming back, and the timing of that light. From this information the temperature of the upper atmosphere can be obtained +/- about 1 degree C for the whole range of altitudes, and they don't even have to send up a sounding rocket to get the data.
I'm kinda curious if everybody here is really thinking of the long-term consequences of space tourism. Tourists have a tendancy to show up and be places they really shouldn't (like the inside of a military base, the floor of the NYSE, in a swamp fishing next to lanuch pad 49A of KSC, or even wandering around aimlessly in Antarctica).
There are enough people that somehow make it on their own to the South Pole that the South Pole Research Station has established policies on how to deal with them, including a no refueling policy for airplanes that get stuck down there. This is only going to get worse over time.
Dispite the best intentions of everybody involved, I see little to stop wandering idiots from going to Mars now and writing their initials on the Viking 1 & 2 probes, or picking up as souviners pieces of the Mars Rover craft. It is just a matter of time before they show up there on their own.
Wouldn't it be a blast if the first people on Mars weren't an organized governmental program, but rather somebody with a lawn chair, a bunch of bottles of oxygen, and a space suit landing their instead? Well, maybe a little bit more stuff than that, but certainly not a full-blown Apollo style landing and return military mission. Once a substantial number of LEO space stations are up and running, I don't see how any governmental agency is going to be able to stop anybody from sneaking up some extra rocket boosters and pushing out further from the Earth.
Basically, the clock is ticking for NASA to get off their hind end and get to Mars first, if they really want to be there. I'll also say that if a private group is the first to land on Mars, the entire justification for having NASA will have expired and they should be disbanded as an agency altogether.
What the X-Prize foundation does next year is going to be the real issue, not the co-opting of the name. The Ansari family has pushed a huge pile of case to the foundation for the rights to add their name onto the X-Prize... enough to set up one or more new prizes.
If the foundation takes the money and runs to Argentina or Pakistan you have a right to be pissed (I will be too.) If instead they announce a prize to get people to orbit, I would be incredibly impressed. It is just in that case Robert Bigelow is going to beat them to the punch with his own prize.
Orbital (LEO) flight: The next major frontier for private spaceflight. Keep in mind the quote from R.A. Heinlein: "Low Earth Orbit is half-way to the rest of the solar system." If you can get there, getting the rest of the way to places like the moon or Mars or even Europa is going to be comparatively easy.
I would say that patents should be eliminated for just about everything except mechanical devices (what the patent system seems to work best for anyway). Even then, there are needed areas of patent reform, including IMHO the requirement that in order for a patent to be issued, that an actual prodcut or proof of the technology must be completed showing the concept in actual use with a further requirement that the concept of the patent actually causes legitimate "progress for the useful arts and sciences". In otherwords, something truly innovative and advancing science and knowledge in general, not merely something that hasn't been patented before.
From my viewpoint I'm still undecided if pharmaceutical patents ought to be allowed, and for what term. Trying to get a new drug through the FDA approval process is incredibly difficult, and using current rules it is possible for some drugs to have the patent expire before the clinical trials are over, which defeats the purpose of the patent in the first place. And that is with a 24 year patent lifetime, not seven year. The solution of the pharmaceutical companies is to extent the lifetime of the patent. I think the clock should begin to tick after the drug has FDA approval. That could also be made law very easily for that particular class of patents which are rather unique in nature anyway.
How drug patent philosophies relate to patenting DNA is yet another whole can of worms and gets deep into just how you "discover" a chemical formula. Still, if you somehow identify a very useful chemical which has otherwise not been noticed before (even if it is encoded in your DNA) you should be recognized for that fact somehow and given financial incentives to try and find more chemicals that have actual uses. Simplying throwing the entirety of the Human Genome Project into a patent is absolutely silly or any other such frivilous attempt to patent every chemical combination that you can think of even if you have no idea what it does. That is the point of the reform I mentioned that you have to produce the chemical (like the same substance produced by a given DNA strand in a typical cell), document what it does, how it interacts with other chemicals, and typical uses for that chemical.
In regards for Software patents, I see absolutely no need for them, and what patents have been granted are far from innovative anyway. Copyright is more than sufficient for most purposes in regards to protecting software ideas, and even that needs some reform. Software engineers do not need the patent system to earn money and in most cases actually prevent them from earning money on projects they have worked very hard and independently to create.
Still, at a cost of close to $500 Billion (in inflation adjusted money spread out over 3 decades, true, but pretty close to that figure) it could be argued that NASA could have come up with something a little more than what they currently have to show for their space program:
Taking out the Apollo stuff, you begin to wonder just what NASA has been up to. The cool pictures (some of that 1 Petabyte of data) and crazy stories by astronauts certainly have some value, but could that money have been better spent? I guess that is the real question. The above are BTW current resources that can be used to develops some future space program, including the ISS. The problem there is to decide what to do with that white elephant, and if instead it would be cheaper to boost it up to an L-5 position and abandon the hunk of metal. Letting it crash and burn in the atmosphere is simply too much metal to worry about.