I'd be happy with just a 10-person interplanetary spaceship more along the lines of the NAUTLUS-X (perhaps not that specific design, but something like it). That could be done with existing technology and using things like Bigelow habitat modules with some hard engineering work put into the thruster system.
I agree that getting a productive mine going in space is going to cost billions of dollars. The counter argument I have for that is opening up similar scale mines here on the Earth costs a similar amount of money. It certainly isn't out of the question for a large scale open pit mine to cost several billion dollars up front before it starts to turn a profit, and similar capital outlays toward off-short oil drilling platforms are fairly common as well. It is a tough business decision, but something that does have precedence here on the Earth for mineral acquisition, and ways to raise that kind of money to get things of that nature going.
The key part of getting something going in space is getting the cost of spaceflight from the Earth to low-Earth orbit to drop significantly from the $10k/kg that is pretty typical at the moment. If that cost can drop to less than $1k/kg, it opens up a whole bunch of other potential applications in space. That seems to be a reasonable price target at the moment as well... tough to accomplish but possible.
One other thing about Planetary Resources is that their operation can scale. They don't necessarily need to harvest a 10km asteroid immediately, and it may be possible to identify a 1m or 10m asteroid (more like a boulder in space) and try to bring that to the Earth. Building a spaceship to go out and grab a 1m asteroid is not necessarily going to cost billions of dollars. There is certainly "low hanging fruit" which can be grabbed that would have some significant value and can be obtained cheaply.
I will defend the Saturn rockets, as designed by Werner Von Braun, as some of the best rockets that any nation could have come up with and were superior to anything ever built before and arguably even since.
For myself, I think it is a crying shame that production on the Saturn rockets didn't continue. I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that for the money dumped on the Space Shuttle program alone, that if the same money had been spent on the Saturn rocket family (Saturn I and Saturn V) America would have sent more astronauts into space, would have built structures far more impressive than the International Space Station (Skylab was about half the volume of the ISS.... and that was sent up in one launch), and we would today have the capability of being able to return to the Moon whenever we felt like it.... and there never would have been a "spaceflight gap" like exists today.
In other words, the whole Space Shuttle program is to me a total waste, where I can't think of a single thing that the Space Shuttle accomplished that the Saturn + Apollo vehicles could not have done except for bringing large object from space down to the Earth. Even that could have been done quite a bit cheaper with a purpose-designed vehicle made to fit on top of the Saturn V vehicle stack and didn't require a whole new launcher to be built. Continued production of the Saturn rocket could have included changes in metallurgy and electronics where I'm sure you would find the AGC replaced by much more modern computers and even an "Apollo" glass cockpit like the Shuttle finally ended up with, but that the changes would have been evolutionary.
The test stand to build the F1 engines is now being used by SpaceX.... to make the Falcon 9 rockets. I'm glad that somebody is using that infrastructure for something positive.
They also envisioned a citizenry that was well trained in the martial arts at all levels and a very active component of the national military made up of state-level militias. Throughout most of American history, the national military was made up of a small core of a modest national army (usually about 30,000 soldiers during peacetime) supplemented with state organized regiments that would grow or shrink as needed. This continued until the end of World War II, when the national army started to dominate the state militias.
Standards of training, uniforms, and other "regulations" were to come from the national government (and is spelled out explicitly in the U.S. Constitution), but the idea was more of a highly trained citizenry more along how the Swiss Army is organized.
It is useful to know that Switzerland has been able to defend itself against much larger and more powerful countries, had two world wars rage all about them, yet never had to either capitulate to the demands of the major powers about them nor even get involved in any of those conflicts. Most citizens of Switzerland are armed (at least have weapons in their homes) because they are also members of that nation's military in some capacity, even though they are on "reserve status".
That was also the point of the 2nd Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, where armed citizens were expected to take the time to learn how to use weapons properly and there was even an assumption that nearly every citizens would take the time to go through at least some sort of military training. Even today I am a member of the "unorganized militia" in the state where I live (well... I was.... I'm a bit too old for that stuff now and the state constitution only requires people under 40 to be in that militia). Other states have similar clauses in their state constitutions and legal codes. How "organized" that "unorganized militia" actually can be is certainly subject to dispute, but it was never envisioned to have America be defenseless.
Did anybody say that Planetary Resources is building launchers? I didn't see that anywhere in their literature.
The big products they are building at the moment are space-based telescopes, where apparently they have a fully functional working prototype and a number of their Arkyd-100 spacecraft that have already been sold with some significant progress toward building their Arkyd-200 spacecraft. It is the "has already been sold" aspect that makes them profitable, even though I have no idea who the customers are (and Planetary Resources doesn't seem too eager to reveal either).
I don't know what sort of launch infrastructure you need to build if you aren't building a launcher, but perhaps I'm missing something here. Besides, there are a dozen different companies building launch vehicles, so why would they re-invent the wheel to do that again? Building a clean room for satellite integration and developing a mounting bracket for a payload faring system sounds somewhat reasonable, but I wasn't aware that kind of engineering required billions of dollars worth of investment.
Planetary Resoruces is also building thrusters that can move those spacecraft once they are already in space, but that is an entirely different engineering realm and also doesn't require billions of dollars worth of infrastructure investment, where many of the thruster systems needed can be purchased from existing rocket builders as well.
The problem with space elevators is that some sort of "unobtanium" must be found that can handle the tensile strength issues with the primary cables holding up the elevator. It is not a solved engineering problem and there is a suggestion that the raw physics of the endeavor may not even make such a device possible.
I think I'll be riding in a scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise before the space elevator is built, but I guess that is my own opinion of the thing.
Gene Roddenberry deliberately had a shape designed for the U.S.S. Enterprise because he knew that he didn't have the budget to be able to afford landing a spaceship on a planet in every episode like the old Buck Rodgers serial movies tried, or even like the more contemporary "Lost in Space". The "transporters" were thrown in because it was very easy to implement in film even if it added a bit of "science fantasy" look to the show.
More to the point, the shape was made explicitly so it couldn't land on a planetary surface so writers were not even tempted to try. That a couple of decades later somehow the state of the art for special effects advanced enough along with the budget for doing stuff like landing on a planetary surface were made available so they could occasionally land on a planet (aka the USS Voyager and her landing pylons) is sort of remarkable.
...because all resources collection occurs outside the well.
Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there unfortunately.
Other than the fact that Planetary Resoruces is already turning a profit. I don't know how much that justifies spending their corporate resources on building something like a 1:1 scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but I think the egg has been laid. The problem now is simply getting a big enough chicken to be able to do something useful.
I don't know.... America is throwing about $20 billion down a rathole call the SLS. If that same money was put toward building something like a 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 in orbit, I would think it would be money better spent. At least in theory the money spent towards the SLS program is supposed to go into space anyway, so why not build a monument to government corruption that everybody can see rather than somebody touring the western desert of Utah?
The proper SI unit for specific impulse is meters/seconds^3. That isn't an acceleration unit but something else entirely. In terms of why "seconds" is used, it does get to the "pound-seconds per pound".
Yes, it is some hand waving, and it isn't even a proper way to reduce the units, but it is used. Regardless, the "seconds of impulse" are based around pounds of force and mass as measured in pounds (even if a pound isn't properly a unit of mass). If the values were measured with Newtons and kilograms, you would end up with completely different numbers as the reported values in m/s^3. Instead, the "international standard" for reporting these numbers is in "pounds (force)-seconds per pound (mass)", usually shortened to just seconds of specific impulse.
My point is that the numbers being used for comparison between various rocket systems don't even use SI values for measuring this value, even though legitimate ways to measure this can be done using SI units. It was pounds, feet, and gallons that were used as units of measurment to send the astronauts to the Moon, which sort of defeats the notion that somehow sticking to these units of measurement is the reason why America is falling behind in terms of scientific leadership in the world. That is what I'm complaining about.
There may be legitimate reasons to stick with a common set of measurements so everybody is "on the same page" when trying to communicate various ideas, so there is some merit to sticking with something that is common. SI as a measurement system is well established and widely recognized, but there is nothing special about its use in particular, and noble reasons for its use are mostly irrelevant other than pure political reasons. Any appeal to pure logic for why SI is better than any other system is like trying to justify a political position or for that matter more akin to theology than anything else.
The problem here is with the notion that a free market is being used at all. That commercial entities are being involved should not confuse you with the idea that it is a free market where anybody can compete.
In the case of cell phone transmitters, I can't slap together a Linux box with some ham radio equipment and build a hobby cell phone tower without a ton of paperwork and the FCC breathing down my neck... assuming that there might even be remotely a way for me to have a prayer to get even a small slice of that spectrum to even try the experiment. Convince me that I might have a shot to even try something like that, regardless of the cost and the licensing paperwork involved, then I might be able to concede that it is properly a free market.
You are presuming that I'm trying to define a planet with the notion that clearing out its orbital path is a prerequisite. I'm suggesting that the whole notion is absurd in the first place that it should even be a part of the definition. Orbit clearing is simply not even necessary to be in the definition. Then again I'm also suggesting that the heliocentric definition by the IAU is just as absurd as it requires that planets also must orbit the Sun, and any object which does not orbit the Sun is thus not properly called a planet... even if it happens to orbit another star or simply orbits the center of the galaxy.
Specific impulse is not properly defined in seconds... or did you get the "pound-seconds per pound" issue? In SI units, it would be "Newton-seconds per kilogram", which does not reduce to seconds in terms of the units being properly used. The problem here is that a pound is simultaneously a unit of force and a unit of mass, which is one of the reasons why people using imperial measurements typical use a "slug" when trying to perform mass measurements... to keep absurd units like seconds of specific impulse from being reported.
I had sort of presumed that those talking about specific impulse would understand how seconds of impulse was simply not an SI unit of measurement even though I'll agree that the term "second" as a unit of time is properly measured in SI units. The surprising thing is that seconds of specific impulse is reported by most researchers doing rocket research in spite of the fact that it isn't an SI unit.
The current "imperial" system of measurement does not keep America "years behind other countries". It just is something different, and complaining about the lack of conversion to the metric system is just silly. America was able to industrialize without the metric system, which seems to be something remarkable for some weird reason.
Besides, there are good reasons to have a unit divisible by 12 instead of 10, as dividing something into thirds and quarters is much, much easier in base 12 than base 10. Babylonians used base 60 arithmetic, which is one reason why degrees, seconds, and minutes are still measured with a base 60 arithmetic.
There are flaws and drawbacks to the metric system, even though it does have some good parts as well. In terms of scientific research, I don't know of any major American institution that sticks with imperial units with perhaps the exception of rocket propulsion engineers, who still stick with ISP mesurements in seconds (being pound-seconds of thrust per pound of mass). Guess what... most rocket scientist outside of America report their thrust efficiency in seconds as well.
I just don't see what the worship of the Metric system is all about, and it helps to sometimes be aware that measurement systems are purely arbitrary, where a velocity in furlongs per fortnight is just as valid as meters per second.
I'm ragging on a faulty redefinition when previously there was none at all, other than a convention of simply calling the largest objects in the Solar System "planets".
For myself, I could care less if you call Pluto a planet or not, and in a way I look at the IAU definition as sort of "promoting" Ceres instead to be recognized as a planet and something unique instead of just being another asteroid. Vesta and Pallas fit into this sort of "promotion" category as well. The earlier description wasn't really a misunderstanding, but simply a lack of sufficient ontological discussion about how things like planets ought to be described and distinguished.
My issue with the heliocentric definition is that technically all of the "exo-solar planets" aren't really planets according to the IAU definition, as none of them orbit the Sun.... one of the major criteria to be called a planet from the definition itself. The definition also doesn't deal with the age of the star system (being early in the development of the star system may have many more objects for the "clearing orbit" definition) and other related issues. What is worse, when the IAU definition was being proposed, exo-solar planets had already been discovered.
Sure, we didn't know anything about exo-solar planets, but that just implied that the definition needed to be completely revamped at a future date, which looks like that may need to be the case sooner than later. Besides, you can't possibly point out other star systems as being very well explored as the smallest bodies being discovered now are roughly the size of the Earth. When you are talking about "orbit clearing" as per the IAU definition, it is involving objects considerably smaller.
We should try to modify the definition of non-stellar objects in the universe in some way that recognized the diversity of those objects. We now have identified several hundred thousand objects in our Solar System alone, not to mention about 500 exo-solar planets (using the definition of big ass things orbiting a distant star but not being a star as the definition of those objects) and a few independent brown dwarfs. A better way to describe these objects can be found than what the IAU currently uses for defining a planet. This does have relevance because studying some kinds of objects can give you legitimate areas of comparison. It is awesome that we now have a sample size greater than one of stellar planetary systems, but it can be improved upon.
What the IAU couldn't handle was promoting the Galilean satellites of Jupiter to the status of planets (along with Titan and Triton and the Moon). If they would have avoided a heliocentric definition for planet, all of those bodies would have been called dwarf planets along with stuff like Pluto.
That is 41 objects larger than 350 km in diameter, clearly large enough for hydrostatic equilibrium and stratification of interior resources, and another 48 (give or take... several Kuiper belt objects seem to fit this size and their size is still in dispute) that are over 200 km and thus borderline cases.
I would have to presume the IAU just didn't want to get into the business of demoting Mercury to dwarf planet status as well.
Pluto+Charon are a double dwarf planet system. On the other hand, I would call Luna (more correctly... The Moon, which is its proper Anglo-Saxon name) a dwarf planet as well.
If there is a term to be depreciated, it would be "moon", other than in connection with objects orbiting inside of the Hill sphere of a non-stellar body. A better term would be satellite, other than the fact that "artificial satellites" seem to have taken on the term. An object orbiting another object which is in turn orbiting a 3rd object (all within nested Hill Spheres of progressively larger objects) has not been discovered yet where the first object is "natural" (hasn't been put there by the hand of mankind) and all three are not stellar objects. A Moon of Ganymede or Titan seems a little far fetched, and their Hill spheres are pretty small due to their proximity to the planets they orbit respectively, even though the Hill spheres of Jupiter and Saturn in respect to the Sun certainly are large enough to incorporate those two objects.
The concept of a Hill sphere does work with asteroids that have satellites of their own, but the point here is that the definition of a planet doesn't need to even worry about the fact that it may or may not be a satellite of something else.
But that does get into the issue of "brown dwarfs" where fusion hasn't started, trying to distinguish them from objects like Jupiter.
Calling a "star" something that has actual fusion going on in its core should be sufficient to distinguish it from other smaller mass objects.
Besides, in the cosmological zoo, you could call white dwarfs kind of their own type of beast with its own unique area of classification. The problem with Vesta is that there has been some silly attempt to define a planet with a heliocentric definition that makes absolutely no sense at all in terms of trying to define other objects that may be called "planets". With new discoveries of exo-solar planets happening all of the time, the IAU definition of a planet seems more and more off the mark, especially its "orbit clearing" definition.
I don't mind a mass-based definition, or one that tries to include atmospheres into the calculation. For example, dwarf planets don't hold a "substantial" atmosphere (more than a few millibars of surface pressure) but do have some "geological" (however you define that term for other bodies) stratification in the interior and some "rounding" due to gravity, terrestrial planets (for want of a better term) have that atmosphere but the atmosphere still is a minority of the mass, and then gas giants are those bodies which the gaseous atmospheres dominate the mass of the object.
It is too bad the IAU didn't use such a definition, as it would work with exo-solar planets as well. I hope they do something like this even if Pluto remains a dwarf planet under such a definition.
The sad thing in all of the discussion here is that nobody has ever conducted any legitimate scientific experiments with conception by mammals in a microgravity environment. This is especially true for longitudinal studies to see what the effects of the offspring might bring.
There has been some "simulated zero-g" (using magnetic fields.... I don't think that is really all that accurate) where some researchers have tried to study the moment of conception itself, and there was one pregnant rat who gave birth aboard the Space Shuttle, but had conceived on the ground. The mom and kids seemed to be healthy in the experience... but my point is that we really don't know.
My own raw conjecture (not even a hypothesis) is that there will be absolutely no impact upon a developing fetus developing in a woman, although the problems of mineral loss in bones may accelerate for pregnant women in a microgravity environment.
I just wish that NASA wasn't such a prude about the whole topic and would at least try to let some mice or rats try to produce some kids in space before a human couple does the deed and we have an experiment on humans instead of other animals first. The whole talk about sterilizing astronauts going to Mars just makes my stomach flip in nausea simply because nobody has even figured out what the side effects might be so they don't want to take a chance. Assuming that the first flights to Mars by people is at least a decade away, why don't we send up a couple of mice this next month (or in a reasonable length of time between now and when the serious planning for a trip to Mars starts) to begin longitudinal studies to see what the impacts of microgravity could be? Acting on sheer ignorance seems to be idiot.
Yes, Microsoft was sued for doing that.... then they decided to simply say "screw it" and made dotNet instead where they didn't even care about compatibility to Java. Sort of a loss to the Java community too I might add, although I prefer C# over Java, and other languages besides C# work on the dotNet virtual machine... something that is largely not the case for the JVM.
While I will admit there might be some bad plants that needed to be shut down and that some changes needed to happen, was it necessary to shut all of them down at the same time?
Yes, without question.
I just don't get this attitude. The Japanese economy is far too dependent upon the energy being produced in this fashion, and conservation just isn't enough when you need to find ways to do things like run factories, trains, and communications systems.
More to the point, I am questioning the attitude.
I admit that there were some serious problems with the management of nuclear reactors in Japan (see the exchange I had with ewok85 above... somebody who definitely has a clue about what is going on in Japan), but I really don't see why such an austerity measure needed to happen. Certainly all of the reactors at Fukushima needed to be shut down (I really get that one!) and I can see shutting down all of the plants operated by TEPCO, as their repuation as an operator certainly can be called into question. But shutting down every last nuclear reactor? No, that doesn't make sense.
Reviewing safety protocols or trying to make some massive reforms in terms of how the government performs oversight on these reactors makes sense too, but it doesn't require a full lockdown of every nuclear power plant. I don't see these plants being decommissioned either, so all that really is happening is that they aren't currently contributing energy to the power grid. They are still a "danger" simply because they are still in tact and that the nuclear fuel is still sitting in the reactor cores.
I just see the full smash as an idiotic move. Furthermore, suggesting that this needs to be applied to nuclear power plants in other countries just goes beyond the pall. At least gain a little bit of understanding for how energy production happens and the issues involved if you are going to suggest such a drastic step.
I think some of this gets into the category of "too big to fail". There are far too many institutions that are getting so huge that they simply can't fail... at least until reality hits them hard in the face like what happened in Fukushima. There is no reason to think this is isolated to just Japan, so similar kinds of engineering management screw ups are likely to happen.
I used to live downstream from a large dam that was built right on a major earthquake fault line. What is worse, if that dam goes it will create a cascading failure of another dam further downstream... where the other dam is smaller (hence the reservoir simply couldn't contain the incoming water even if it was empty) and all of that water is going to be channeled into a narrow canyon that will act as an amplifier of the energy from those failures. Well, I guess a hundred thousand registered voters really doesn't matter to the politicians who planned the whole thing and ignored contrary engineering investigations that showed the dam should never have been built in the first place. You'll find out about the dam when the "big one" hits. I'm just glad that I moved.
I still live downstream from a couple of dams, but they are tiny ones (about 10 meters tall and about 60 meters across), and I think those dams get more review inspection than the big ones get. If they fail, they will take out a few homes and death tolls will likely be in the dozens, but life in the city will continue on in spite of that failure if it ever happens. They also survived a magnitude 6 earthquake about 50 years ago, so in a sense they've already been "proofed".
This isn't just isolated to nuclear engineering, but I agree these mega projects do tend to get out of hand and become a monster unto themselves. Projects and plants that are so big that shutting them down even for a "routine inspection" becomes a political issue rather than something related to actual engineering or safety.
That is just Visual BASIC rebranded in a number of ways. Then again Microsoft nerfed VB in a way that really stinks, particularly as it was redesigned by a bunch of folks who never were BASIC developers in the first place.
Well, Open Office uses Python, something already mentioned above.
The original post suggested they didn't want to deal with low level languages, which has some strong limits on where you can go.
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I'd be happy with just a 10-person interplanetary spaceship more along the lines of the NAUTLUS-X (perhaps not that specific design, but something like it). That could be done with existing technology and using things like Bigelow habitat modules with some hard engineering work put into the thruster system.
I agree that getting a productive mine going in space is going to cost billions of dollars. The counter argument I have for that is opening up similar scale mines here on the Earth costs a similar amount of money. It certainly isn't out of the question for a large scale open pit mine to cost several billion dollars up front before it starts to turn a profit, and similar capital outlays toward off-short oil drilling platforms are fairly common as well. It is a tough business decision, but something that does have precedence here on the Earth for mineral acquisition, and ways to raise that kind of money to get things of that nature going.
The key part of getting something going in space is getting the cost of spaceflight from the Earth to low-Earth orbit to drop significantly from the $10k/kg that is pretty typical at the moment. If that cost can drop to less than $1k/kg, it opens up a whole bunch of other potential applications in space. That seems to be a reasonable price target at the moment as well... tough to accomplish but possible.
One other thing about Planetary Resources is that their operation can scale. They don't necessarily need to harvest a 10km asteroid immediately, and it may be possible to identify a 1m or 10m asteroid (more like a boulder in space) and try to bring that to the Earth. Building a spaceship to go out and grab a 1m asteroid is not necessarily going to cost billions of dollars. There is certainly "low hanging fruit" which can be grabbed that would have some significant value and can be obtained cheaply.
I will defend the Saturn rockets, as designed by Werner Von Braun, as some of the best rockets that any nation could have come up with and were superior to anything ever built before and arguably even since.
For myself, I think it is a crying shame that production on the Saturn rockets didn't continue. I'll even go out on a limb and suggest that for the money dumped on the Space Shuttle program alone, that if the same money had been spent on the Saturn rocket family (Saturn I and Saturn V) America would have sent more astronauts into space, would have built structures far more impressive than the International Space Station (Skylab was about half the volume of the ISS.... and that was sent up in one launch), and we would today have the capability of being able to return to the Moon whenever we felt like it.... and there never would have been a "spaceflight gap" like exists today.
In other words, the whole Space Shuttle program is to me a total waste, where I can't think of a single thing that the Space Shuttle accomplished that the Saturn + Apollo vehicles could not have done except for bringing large object from space down to the Earth. Even that could have been done quite a bit cheaper with a purpose-designed vehicle made to fit on top of the Saturn V vehicle stack and didn't require a whole new launcher to be built. Continued production of the Saturn rocket could have included changes in metallurgy and electronics where I'm sure you would find the AGC replaced by much more modern computers and even an "Apollo" glass cockpit like the Shuttle finally ended up with, but that the changes would have been evolutionary.
The test stand to build the F1 engines is now being used by SpaceX.... to make the Falcon 9 rockets. I'm glad that somebody is using that infrastructure for something positive.
They also envisioned a citizenry that was well trained in the martial arts at all levels and a very active component of the national military made up of state-level militias. Throughout most of American history, the national military was made up of a small core of a modest national army (usually about 30,000 soldiers during peacetime) supplemented with state organized regiments that would grow or shrink as needed. This continued until the end of World War II, when the national army started to dominate the state militias.
Standards of training, uniforms, and other "regulations" were to come from the national government (and is spelled out explicitly in the U.S. Constitution), but the idea was more of a highly trained citizenry more along how the Swiss Army is organized.
It is useful to know that Switzerland has been able to defend itself against much larger and more powerful countries, had two world wars rage all about them, yet never had to either capitulate to the demands of the major powers about them nor even get involved in any of those conflicts. Most citizens of Switzerland are armed (at least have weapons in their homes) because they are also members of that nation's military in some capacity, even though they are on "reserve status".
That was also the point of the 2nd Amendment in the U.S. Constitution, where armed citizens were expected to take the time to learn how to use weapons properly and there was even an assumption that nearly every citizens would take the time to go through at least some sort of military training. Even today I am a member of the "unorganized militia" in the state where I live (well... I was.... I'm a bit too old for that stuff now and the state constitution only requires people under 40 to be in that militia). Other states have similar clauses in their state constitutions and legal codes. How "organized" that "unorganized militia" actually can be is certainly subject to dispute, but it was never envisioned to have America be defenseless.
Did anybody say that Planetary Resources is building launchers? I didn't see that anywhere in their literature.
The big products they are building at the moment are space-based telescopes, where apparently they have a fully functional working prototype and a number of their Arkyd-100 spacecraft that have already been sold with some significant progress toward building their Arkyd-200 spacecraft. It is the "has already been sold" aspect that makes them profitable, even though I have no idea who the customers are (and Planetary Resources doesn't seem too eager to reveal either).
I don't know what sort of launch infrastructure you need to build if you aren't building a launcher, but perhaps I'm missing something here. Besides, there are a dozen different companies building launch vehicles, so why would they re-invent the wheel to do that again? Building a clean room for satellite integration and developing a mounting bracket for a payload faring system sounds somewhat reasonable, but I wasn't aware that kind of engineering required billions of dollars worth of investment.
Planetary Resoruces is also building thrusters that can move those spacecraft once they are already in space, but that is an entirely different engineering realm and also doesn't require billions of dollars worth of infrastructure investment, where many of the thruster systems needed can be purchased from existing rocket builders as well.
The problem with space elevators is that some sort of "unobtanium" must be found that can handle the tensile strength issues with the primary cables holding up the elevator. It is not a solved engineering problem and there is a suggestion that the raw physics of the endeavor may not even make such a device possible.
I think I'll be riding in a scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise before the space elevator is built, but I guess that is my own opinion of the thing.
Gene Roddenberry deliberately had a shape designed for the U.S.S. Enterprise because he knew that he didn't have the budget to be able to afford landing a spaceship on a planet in every episode like the old Buck Rodgers serial movies tried, or even like the more contemporary "Lost in Space". The "transporters" were thrown in because it was very easy to implement in film even if it added a bit of "science fantasy" look to the show.
More to the point, the shape was made explicitly so it couldn't land on a planetary surface so writers were not even tempted to try. That a couple of decades later somehow the state of the art for special effects advanced enough along with the budget for doing stuff like landing on a planetary surface were made available so they could occasionally land on a planet (aka the USS Voyager and her landing pylons) is sort of remarkable.
Bit of a chicken-and-egg problem there unfortunately.
Other than the fact that Planetary Resoruces is already turning a profit. I don't know how much that justifies spending their corporate resources on building something like a 1:1 scale model of the U.S.S. Enterprise, but I think the egg has been laid. The problem now is simply getting a big enough chicken to be able to do something useful.
I don't know.... America is throwing about $20 billion down a rathole call the SLS. If that same money was put toward building something like a 1:1 scale model of the USS Enterprise NCC 1701 in orbit, I would think it would be money better spent. At least in theory the money spent towards the SLS program is supposed to go into space anyway, so why not build a monument to government corruption that everybody can see rather than somebody touring the western desert of Utah?
The proper SI unit for specific impulse is meters/seconds^3. That isn't an acceleration unit but something else entirely. In terms of why "seconds" is used, it does get to the "pound-seconds per pound".
Yes, it is some hand waving, and it isn't even a proper way to reduce the units, but it is used. Regardless, the "seconds of impulse" are based around pounds of force and mass as measured in pounds (even if a pound isn't properly a unit of mass). If the values were measured with Newtons and kilograms, you would end up with completely different numbers as the reported values in m/s^3. Instead, the "international standard" for reporting these numbers is in "pounds (force)-seconds per pound (mass)", usually shortened to just seconds of specific impulse.
My point is that the numbers being used for comparison between various rocket systems don't even use SI values for measuring this value, even though legitimate ways to measure this can be done using SI units. It was pounds, feet, and gallons that were used as units of measurment to send the astronauts to the Moon, which sort of defeats the notion that somehow sticking to these units of measurement is the reason why America is falling behind in terms of scientific leadership in the world. That is what I'm complaining about.
There may be legitimate reasons to stick with a common set of measurements so everybody is "on the same page" when trying to communicate various ideas, so there is some merit to sticking with something that is common. SI as a measurement system is well established and widely recognized, but there is nothing special about its use in particular, and noble reasons for its use are mostly irrelevant other than pure political reasons. Any appeal to pure logic for why SI is better than any other system is like trying to justify a political position or for that matter more akin to theology than anything else.
The problem here is with the notion that a free market is being used at all. That commercial entities are being involved should not confuse you with the idea that it is a free market where anybody can compete.
In the case of cell phone transmitters, I can't slap together a Linux box with some ham radio equipment and build a hobby cell phone tower without a ton of paperwork and the FCC breathing down my neck... assuming that there might even be remotely a way for me to have a prayer to get even a small slice of that spectrum to even try the experiment. Convince me that I might have a shot to even try something like that, regardless of the cost and the licensing paperwork involved, then I might be able to concede that it is properly a free market.
You are presuming that I'm trying to define a planet with the notion that clearing out its orbital path is a prerequisite. I'm suggesting that the whole notion is absurd in the first place that it should even be a part of the definition. Orbit clearing is simply not even necessary to be in the definition. Then again I'm also suggesting that the heliocentric definition by the IAU is just as absurd as it requires that planets also must orbit the Sun, and any object which does not orbit the Sun is thus not properly called a planet... even if it happens to orbit another star or simply orbits the center of the galaxy.
Specific impulse is not properly defined in seconds... or did you get the "pound-seconds per pound" issue? In SI units, it would be "Newton-seconds per kilogram", which does not reduce to seconds in terms of the units being properly used. The problem here is that a pound is simultaneously a unit of force and a unit of mass, which is one of the reasons why people using imperial measurements typical use a "slug" when trying to perform mass measurements... to keep absurd units like seconds of specific impulse from being reported.
I had sort of presumed that those talking about specific impulse would understand how seconds of impulse was simply not an SI unit of measurement even though I'll agree that the term "second" as a unit of time is properly measured in SI units. The surprising thing is that seconds of specific impulse is reported by most researchers doing rocket research in spite of the fact that it isn't an SI unit.
The current "imperial" system of measurement does not keep America "years behind other countries". It just is something different, and complaining about the lack of conversion to the metric system is just silly. America was able to industrialize without the metric system, which seems to be something remarkable for some weird reason.
Besides, there are good reasons to have a unit divisible by 12 instead of 10, as dividing something into thirds and quarters is much, much easier in base 12 than base 10. Babylonians used base 60 arithmetic, which is one reason why degrees, seconds, and minutes are still measured with a base 60 arithmetic.
There are flaws and drawbacks to the metric system, even though it does have some good parts as well. In terms of scientific research, I don't know of any major American institution that sticks with imperial units with perhaps the exception of rocket propulsion engineers, who still stick with ISP mesurements in seconds (being pound-seconds of thrust per pound of mass). Guess what... most rocket scientist outside of America report their thrust efficiency in seconds as well.
I just don't see what the worship of the Metric system is all about, and it helps to sometimes be aware that measurement systems are purely arbitrary, where a velocity in furlongs per fortnight is just as valid as meters per second.
I'm ragging on a faulty redefinition when previously there was none at all, other than a convention of simply calling the largest objects in the Solar System "planets".
For myself, I could care less if you call Pluto a planet or not, and in a way I look at the IAU definition as sort of "promoting" Ceres instead to be recognized as a planet and something unique instead of just being another asteroid. Vesta and Pallas fit into this sort of "promotion" category as well. The earlier description wasn't really a misunderstanding, but simply a lack of sufficient ontological discussion about how things like planets ought to be described and distinguished.
My issue with the heliocentric definition is that technically all of the "exo-solar planets" aren't really planets according to the IAU definition, as none of them orbit the Sun.... one of the major criteria to be called a planet from the definition itself. The definition also doesn't deal with the age of the star system (being early in the development of the star system may have many more objects for the "clearing orbit" definition) and other related issues. What is worse, when the IAU definition was being proposed, exo-solar planets had already been discovered.
Sure, we didn't know anything about exo-solar planets, but that just implied that the definition needed to be completely revamped at a future date, which looks like that may need to be the case sooner than later. Besides, you can't possibly point out other star systems as being very well explored as the smallest bodies being discovered now are roughly the size of the Earth. When you are talking about "orbit clearing" as per the IAU definition, it is involving objects considerably smaller.
We should try to modify the definition of non-stellar objects in the universe in some way that recognized the diversity of those objects. We now have identified several hundred thousand objects in our Solar System alone, not to mention about 500 exo-solar planets (using the definition of big ass things orbiting a distant star but not being a star as the definition of those objects) and a few independent brown dwarfs. A better way to describe these objects can be found than what the IAU currently uses for defining a planet. This does have relevance because studying some kinds of objects can give you legitimate areas of comparison. It is awesome that we now have a sample size greater than one of stellar planetary systems, but it can be improved upon.
Except by that definition, then the Earth has not cleared its orbit...
Neither has Jupiter, Saturn, or Mars, and arguably Neptune as well. Even Uranus has "large planetary-like objects" near it.
Is Venus genuinely the only real planet in the Solar System?
That is why the whole notion of clearing out the orbit is as silly as any other part of the IAU definition.
What the IAU couldn't handle was promoting the Galilean satellites of Jupiter to the status of planets (along with Titan and Triton and the Moon). If they would have avoided a heliocentric definition for planet, all of those bodies would have been called dwarf planets along with stuff like Pluto.
Yup... dozens of planets (plural dozens). Like this list of objects in the solar system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Solar_System_objects_by_size
That is 41 objects larger than 350 km in diameter, clearly large enough for hydrostatic equilibrium and stratification of interior resources, and another 48 (give or take... several Kuiper belt objects seem to fit this size and their size is still in dispute) that are over 200 km and thus borderline cases.
I would have to presume the IAU just didn't want to get into the business of demoting Mercury to dwarf planet status as well.
And why does clearing an orbit of debris mean anything, and how do that help in describing a planet in another star system?
Curse you nomenclature for not conforming to nature.
Wait a minute... I thought that was called science.... or something like that.
Pluto+Charon are a double dwarf planet system. On the other hand, I would call Luna (more correctly... The Moon, which is its proper Anglo-Saxon name) a dwarf planet as well.
If there is a term to be depreciated, it would be "moon", other than in connection with objects orbiting inside of the Hill sphere of a non-stellar body. A better term would be satellite, other than the fact that "artificial satellites" seem to have taken on the term. An object orbiting another object which is in turn orbiting a 3rd object (all within nested Hill Spheres of progressively larger objects) has not been discovered yet where the first object is "natural" (hasn't been put there by the hand of mankind) and all three are not stellar objects. A Moon of Ganymede or Titan seems a little far fetched, and their Hill spheres are pretty small due to their proximity to the planets they orbit respectively, even though the Hill spheres of Jupiter and Saturn in respect to the Sun certainly are large enough to incorporate those two objects.
The concept of a Hill sphere does work with asteroids that have satellites of their own, but the point here is that the definition of a planet doesn't need to even worry about the fact that it may or may not be a satellite of something else.
But that does get into the issue of "brown dwarfs" where fusion hasn't started, trying to distinguish them from objects like Jupiter.
Calling a "star" something that has actual fusion going on in its core should be sufficient to distinguish it from other smaller mass objects.
Besides, in the cosmological zoo, you could call white dwarfs kind of their own type of beast with its own unique area of classification. The problem with Vesta is that there has been some silly attempt to define a planet with a heliocentric definition that makes absolutely no sense at all in terms of trying to define other objects that may be called "planets". With new discoveries of exo-solar planets happening all of the time, the IAU definition of a planet seems more and more off the mark, especially its "orbit clearing" definition.
I don't mind a mass-based definition, or one that tries to include atmospheres into the calculation. For example, dwarf planets don't hold a "substantial" atmosphere (more than a few millibars of surface pressure) but do have some "geological" (however you define that term for other bodies) stratification in the interior and some "rounding" due to gravity, terrestrial planets (for want of a better term) have that atmosphere but the atmosphere still is a minority of the mass, and then gas giants are those bodies which the gaseous atmospheres dominate the mass of the object.
It is too bad the IAU didn't use such a definition, as it would work with exo-solar planets as well. I hope they do something like this even if Pluto remains a dwarf planet under such a definition.
The sad thing in all of the discussion here is that nobody has ever conducted any legitimate scientific experiments with conception by mammals in a microgravity environment. This is especially true for longitudinal studies to see what the effects of the offspring might bring.
There has been some "simulated zero-g" (using magnetic fields.... I don't think that is really all that accurate) where some researchers have tried to study the moment of conception itself, and there was one pregnant rat who gave birth aboard the Space Shuttle, but had conceived on the ground. The mom and kids seemed to be healthy in the experience... but my point is that we really don't know.
My own raw conjecture (not even a hypothesis) is that there will be absolutely no impact upon a developing fetus developing in a woman, although the problems of mineral loss in bones may accelerate for pregnant women in a microgravity environment.
I just wish that NASA wasn't such a prude about the whole topic and would at least try to let some mice or rats try to produce some kids in space before a human couple does the deed and we have an experiment on humans instead of other animals first. The whole talk about sterilizing astronauts going to Mars just makes my stomach flip in nausea simply because nobody has even figured out what the side effects might be so they don't want to take a chance. Assuming that the first flights to Mars by people is at least a decade away, why don't we send up a couple of mice this next month (or in a reasonable length of time between now and when the serious planning for a trip to Mars starts) to begin longitudinal studies to see what the impacts of microgravity could be? Acting on sheer ignorance seems to be idiot.
Yes, Microsoft was sued for doing that.... then they decided to simply say "screw it" and made dotNet instead where they didn't even care about compatibility to Java. Sort of a loss to the Java community too I might add, although I prefer C# over Java, and other languages besides C# work on the dotNet virtual machine... something that is largely not the case for the JVM.
I just don't get this attitude. The Japanese economy is far too dependent upon the energy being produced in this fashion, and conservation just isn't enough when you need to find ways to do things like run factories, trains, and communications systems.
More to the point, I am questioning the attitude.
I admit that there were some serious problems with the management of nuclear reactors in Japan (see the exchange I had with ewok85 above... somebody who definitely has a clue about what is going on in Japan), but I really don't see why such an austerity measure needed to happen. Certainly all of the reactors at Fukushima needed to be shut down (I really get that one!) and I can see shutting down all of the plants operated by TEPCO, as their repuation as an operator certainly can be called into question. But shutting down every last nuclear reactor? No, that doesn't make sense.
Reviewing safety protocols or trying to make some massive reforms in terms of how the government performs oversight on these reactors makes sense too, but it doesn't require a full lockdown of every nuclear power plant. I don't see these plants being decommissioned either, so all that really is happening is that they aren't currently contributing energy to the power grid. They are still a "danger" simply because they are still in tact and that the nuclear fuel is still sitting in the reactor cores.
I just see the full smash as an idiotic move. Furthermore, suggesting that this needs to be applied to nuclear power plants in other countries just goes beyond the pall. At least gain a little bit of understanding for how energy production happens and the issues involved if you are going to suggest such a drastic step.
I think some of this gets into the category of "too big to fail". There are far too many institutions that are getting so huge that they simply can't fail... at least until reality hits them hard in the face like what happened in Fukushima. There is no reason to think this is isolated to just Japan, so similar kinds of engineering management screw ups are likely to happen.
I used to live downstream from a large dam that was built right on a major earthquake fault line. What is worse, if that dam goes it will create a cascading failure of another dam further downstream... where the other dam is smaller (hence the reservoir simply couldn't contain the incoming water even if it was empty) and all of that water is going to be channeled into a narrow canyon that will act as an amplifier of the energy from those failures. Well, I guess a hundred thousand registered voters really doesn't matter to the politicians who planned the whole thing and ignored contrary engineering investigations that showed the dam should never have been built in the first place. You'll find out about the dam when the "big one" hits. I'm just glad that I moved.
I still live downstream from a couple of dams, but they are tiny ones (about 10 meters tall and about 60 meters across), and I think those dams get more review inspection than the big ones get. If they fail, they will take out a few homes and death tolls will likely be in the dozens, but life in the city will continue on in spite of that failure if it ever happens. They also survived a magnitude 6 earthquake about 50 years ago, so in a sense they've already been "proofed".
This isn't just isolated to nuclear engineering, but I agree these mega projects do tend to get out of hand and become a monster unto themselves. Projects and plants that are so big that shutting them down even for a "routine inspection" becomes a political issue rather than something related to actual engineering or safety.
That is just Visual BASIC rebranded in a number of ways. Then again Microsoft nerfed VB in a way that really stinks, particularly as it was redesigned by a bunch of folks who never were BASIC developers in the first place.
Well, Open Office uses Python, something already mentioned above.
The original post suggested they didn't want to deal with low level languages, which has some strong limits on where you can go.