I could go point by point with every single thing you have mentioned here and give a rebuttal, but so far you have not given any convincing evidence of how technology properly used is necessarily dangerous. Sometimes you need to be trained on how to use that technology and some of it is indeed very dangerous. If you want to concentrate on how dangerous the technology is instead of concentrating on on how to properly use the technology, go knock yourself out.
By your notion and logic here, perhaps it was a bad idea for mankind to even use tools in the first place. I'm talking even hunter-gatherer tribes with tools like knives, bows, arrows, and simple grinding tools are all potentially lethal so you need to go to a completely pre-technological lifestyle. BTW, even chimpanzees use technology and try a variety of tools to improve their lifestyles, so you need to go back in time to a point where chimpanzees and humans diverged from the rest of the primates before you get to a non-technological group of creatures.
Good luck trying to survive without technology. Our species has been using it for millions of years and we've even evolved to the point it is necessary for our survival.
And yes, you are being anti-technology here, of the sort that really doesn't seem to understand what these various kinds of technology you are ranting against even does, much less why the problems exist that you are complaining about. I do agree we need to be sometimes cautious with the use of technology and we should sometimes try to understand the adverse effects of that technology, but you also don't need to be a paranoid idiot who deliberately keeps yourself in ignorance about any of that technology as well.
Because of the mass of these objects and the attention they'll bring, not to mention the degree that celestial mechanics is now an exact science (with a great many significant digits of accuracy on any sort of result from measurements), the path that these rocks will take can be tracked very accurately including any minor changes in direction that a mining company might make to that rock as they "nudge" it to a place closer to the Earth.
Anybody stupid enough to even think about crashing an asteroid into the Earth would find themselves on the smallest target list of terrorists with millions if not billions of dollars of reward for your capture or death. Forget about any business assets you may have, your life would be over.
There is a role that "Human Resources" could play in a well run company, but I'd have to agree that the hiring/firing ought to be done by the direct managers rather than going through some "HR specialist". Back in times of old what is called "Human Resoruces" was simply called "Payroll Office" that dealt with paperwork and other things necessary between existing employees, the company, and the government.
Sadly, my experience in dealing with a typical "Human Resources" department even on that level tended to border on incompetence or at least indifference. Missing a paycheck? Sorry.... you'll have to wait until the next pay period. Screwups with a 401(k) program? Here is the "800 number" to work it out..... and other similar kinds of responses.
Californium is the most expensive metal currently in use with commercial applications. The cost is about $60 per microgram, or $60 billions dollar per kilogram. Typically it is sold in microgram quantities as larger amounts for current applications aren't really needed.... although in theory you could build a nuclear bomb out of the substance if you could put a few kilograms of the stuff together.
Admittedly part of the expense with Californium is that it must be manufactured through nuclear transmutation processes and that it has a relatively short half life on the order of a few years... enough to be useful but short enough that it needs to be replaced on a regular basis.
The problem is that the Luddites are currently in a position of political control where they are trying to point a gun and keep those of us who might want to put the resources together to make the trip off this rock to be prohibited from leaving.
I can understand some of these idiots who want to complain that their resources (read tax dollars) shouldn't be spent on such endeavors that they consider to be frivolous. A trillion dollar effort to send people a small group of people to Mars may even be something I can't stomach as a total waste of money (such as the current NASA plan for manned exploration of Mars).
Perhaps this is a futile effort and anybody even trying to establish a colony on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or elsewhere is going to result in utter disaster. Perhaps it is too expensive to be considered and the dangers found in space are too much to overcome. But one thing I would ask is this: if it is my own money that I am spending and I want to discover on my own if space is dangerous, why do you want to stop me from even trying in the first place? Why is my freedom of being able to leave the Earth if I choose being taken away from me before I can even start? If I can find a cheaper way to get off of the Earth, can I at least be permitted to experiment with the idea and try to leave... striving to reach for the stars instead of having some stupid bureaucrat telling me that I shouldn't even try or worse yet having a group of Marines being sent to my home forcing me to stay put here?
Noting of course that SpaceX is the current low-ball price for going into orbit. I've seen estimates for the cost of a Space Shuttle launch be more towards $50k/kg and higher.
I dispute that getting off Earth will solve our problems. Our problems go a whole lot deeper than that. In fact we seem far more likely to destroy ourselves than a meteor crashing anytime soon.
While getting off the Earth won't solve the problems, it will provide parallel opportunities for alternate solutions to be found. What a Luddite view of humanity might offer is simply one possible "solution" to the issues facing mankind, where the tendency on the Earth is more toward a single "global" solution to the issues facing mankind.
What has helped mankind to be able to solve problems it has faced in the past is the ability to have many different but parallel attempts to solve those problems being done by different groups of people. If one group of people has a political philosophy or social system that inhibits development, another group is likely going to be successful instead.
In this regard, having people in the Asteroid belt, the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere trying different ideas including perhaps even completely new political philosophies that don't need to be in the face of those on the Earth may be a good thing. Going into space at least allows the ability for people to be free to do whatever the hell they want to do. Trying to find a frontier on the Earth to get away from those who would squash your freedom is no longer possible.
GPL is viral so it will always tend to spread unless people duplicate the projects with other license terms
GPL is not viral. It can't "infect" code that isn't derived from GPL'd code. That makes it heredity, not viral.
The GPL is considered viral because mixing GPL'd code with more permissively licensed software pretty much makes the combined work GPL-only. In other words, once you've introduced GPL'd software into the project, the whole project becomes de facto GPL even if technically you can pull that GPL'd software out. GPL'd plug-ins might not be so bad, but if it is a critical feature covered by the GPL'd software, you might as well re-license the whole project under the GPL.
Copyright lawyers really have a heartburn over GPL'd software, in part because they are used to other proprietary NDAs and licensing models where they get paranoid about software developers who even look at GPL'd software. In theory and based upon legal precedence for proprietary software, if you have looked at GPL'd software in some detail to understand how it works, it is possible for that software to even be inadvertently introduced into other software produced by that developer. That makes software developers who have contributed to open source projects to be considered as "tainted" by some software studios.
So on a big project with lots of copyright holders, it is nearly impossible to switch to a more permissive license, but that's because it's so hard to get a big group of people to agree, not because the GPL doesn't allow it.
You could also go the route that the Wikimedia Foundation took for such a dilemma: Convince Richard Stallman that the license is worthless and put in an "escape clause" that allows a project to switch licenses through a rewrite of the next version of the GPL.
The fact that such a tactic was even permitted for the GFDL should give pause to anybody working with licenses produced by the Free Software Foundation. I admit that in the case of the Wikimedia Foundation they switched from the GFDL to a roughly similar license in the form of CC-by-SA, but it was a license change.
".... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it."
????
That is one terribly ineffective NDA.
You would recognize the project itself. I just can't get into specifics of the installation, and I'm choosing not to disclose any more than is necessary for this discussion because the issue of power management is something I can talk about and is not covered under the NDA. Other details like communications channels and protocols used, and security details are the kinds of things that I can't disclose. Those are also completely irrelevant to this discussion as well.
Shudder away you luddite myope. That you once participated in a (ill-conceived? poorly executed? student?) project that fucked-up hardly qualifies as damning evidence that a 1MW is technically infeasible or even impractical. There are LOTs of electrical grid users who merrily draw more than 1MW without any such problems. I'm an engineer for Honeywell and I'm sitting in one in one now. (And no: it's not some massive facility that you would even notice specially. It's simple, they run a medium voltage (13kV IIRC) line to it and make sure the grid to which it's connected has been designed and planned for it to be used!)
I've worked with installations in other cities besides San Francisco where adding an extra 1MW load wasn't nearly so much of a problem. The issue with the installation I talked about in my earlier post also illustrated how fragile some power grids have become though because of a decided lack of forethought and engineering, where utility companies sometimes let their power grids get built out to the physical limits of the infrastructure.
Yes, adding redundant cables and upgrading power transmission lines can solve a whole bunch of problems, but all of that requires investment into the infrastructure that sometimes may need a significant infusion of capital to get accomplished. That can happen from government subsidies of the utility company or showing the utility company that there will be demand for the power once they upgrade their facilities. Unfortunately it is usually more economical for utility companies to put forward a major public relations campaign for "energy conservation" than to install a new set of power transmission lines.
I'm not saying that solutions are impossible to find for getting high voltage power lines being brought to ordinary consumer devices like a personal automobile, but there are some significant challenges for making that happen and they can't all be waved away as if the real issues are irrelevant. The kind of infrastructure needed here is something that has never been built before, and other analogies simply don't exist for what is being asked for in terms of a quick recharge facility involving high voltage electricity being handled by low-skilled minimum wage workers or the general public under less than ideal situations.
What about the danger of explosion? As it recharges it release oxygen. You wouldn't want to leave your Lithium-oxygen EV in your garage but outside so the O2 can safely escape rather than build up.
The danger of high concentrations of Oxygen is not a concern about explosions, but rather fire. Oxygen in high enough concentrations can burn almost anything, which is where concerns about compressed Oxygen is treated as a hazardous material subject to special transport considerations.
Still, the partial pressure of Oxygen would need to be substantially higher than the already existing percentage of Oxygen in the air we are currently breathing, and for home recharging operations done in a typical garage... I just don't see that becoming a significant factor unless your garage is completely air tight.
For devices that produce Hydrogen (such as Lead-Acid batteries found in almost every internal combustion engine automobile and some electric vehicles due to the low cost to produce those batteries) such concerns about explosive mixtures of gasses are certainly much more legitimate. On the other hand, how many hydrogen gas explosions have you heard about from recharging lead acid batteries? There are enough of them around that I'm sure you could find a few news stories about the issue through sheer statistical probability, but they are quite rare. Oxygen would be much, much safer to work with than even the Hydrogen from this much older electric battery technology.
My bullshit meter is being pegged off the charts to even consider this. Yes, there might be some supposed "automated facilities' that could pull this off, but I shudder to think of the potential accidents, lawsuits, and other issues that could come from such a "fast recharger". "Training" might be able to help with the technicians who are at a filling station performing this task, but any kind of casual attitude will result in a great many deaths.
I'll also note that the example of a Nissan Leaf is hardly the best one to use as well, as it certainly isn't going to have this magical "500 mile range" as suggested in the original article.
As for grid impact.... I've seen first hand what the current infrastructure of California has for any kind of significant grid impact. I was involved with a.... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it.
The interesting thing about it for the purposes of this discussion is that it used 1 MW of energy off of the existing power grid in downtown San Francisco, and I was on the engineering team to get it set up. As a part of our testing process, we would "turn it on" and often use that full rated capacity of sucking the 1 MW off of the grid for relatively short periods of time and then turn it off after the test (usually about 15-20 minute test for what we were doing). At the same time we had the radio on tuned to a local station, and it made us sick to realize that when the device was turn on that it triggered blackouts throughout the city and those blackouts ended when we turned the device off.
Even if you use a power buffer like a huge capacitor bank to store the amount of energy needed to recharge a vehicle like a Tesla Roadster (which has roughly the quoted 500 mile range suggested in the original article) in a short period of time, that capacitor bank will need to be recharged in roughly a similar amount of time... with a power load for a heavily used recharging station to be roughly equivalent to this device I was using in San Francisco. I could easily see such a filling station be in the MegaWatt range for power consumption. In other words the overall electrical transmission infrastructure to get a whole series of stations like this built would require a substantial construction effort just to get those power transmission lines put to all of those station.
So do you like a future with high voltage power lines being built in your backyard? That is the future you are asking for here, where those become a much more common sight in almost everybody's neighborhood. The grid impact of these stations is going to be enormous with any kind of electric vehicle future.
This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)
For a website filled with electrical and computer engineers, the entire notion that you can recharge an electric battery quick with enough energy to be able to send an automobile over 500 miles in less than 15 minutes should seem totally ludicrous.
What are you expecting to have happen, somebody figure out how to discover news laws of physics akin to discovering how to travel faster than light?
The sheer amount of energy to perform this kind of action is going to require connectors to the recharging equipment to be in the kiloVolt range, or perhaps MegaVolt and have amperage with that voltage that can only be supplied by a direct power line to a nuclear power plant. What you are talking about doing here is to deliver a huge pile of energy in a very short period of time and then claiming that delivering that energy is not going to be lethal to the people who are performing the recharging.
The original names for quarks were based upon a poem by James Joyce. There are some other rather esoteric names that have come up in science over the years so such references really aren't totally unheard of.
American rocket builders have all but given up trying to seek private commercial spaceflight launches, even though America was where the concept originated. I am not talking about joy rides such as the "space tourism" flights done by the "rich dick swingers" (I presume such a reference is to Richard Gariott who is rich but not really a swinger and his dickhood is of personal opinion that I disagree with even if you may think he is one), but rather for businesses that already are making a profit off of activity in space.
Something that has become very popular in terms of using space-based assets is to have mapping services available which will photograph areas of the world using all kinds of different "filters" to photograph terrain in all kinds of colors including ultra violet and infrared bands. This is mainly being used by mining and oil drilling companies, but it is also used by food processors and other "argi-business" services to monitor the quality of farmland as well as estimate yields that will likely be obtained from a harvest. In the case of some farmland photography, it can even be used to reduce the application of pesticides and fertilizer as specific parts of an individual field can be targeted for treatment.... or the field can be monitored to see if they are compliant with "organic" standards as well. This isn't science fiction but something happening today and worth literally billions of dollars on its own.
Telecommunications has been a long time user of space, ever since AT&T sent the Telstar satellite into orbit in the early 1960's. Modern television broadcasts simply wouldn't be happening without it, and surprisingly the size of the satellites for telecommunications is getting larger and may even need in the near future some sort of manned servicing of those vehicles... or at least sending up astronauts to physically service satellites like this could make economic sense. "Constellations" of satellites like Iridium are currently in use... and in fact SpaceX landed a contract to replace the current generation of Iridium satellites. The satellites are going to be made by Iridium, but SpaceX is going to put them into space. This is already on their manifest.
In other words, your suggestion that SpaceX is only going to be doing government contract work is not only wrong but downright stupid to even be thinking that way. Yes, SpaceX is going to be bidding for government contracts as well... and you haven't given a good reason why they shouldn't either. Airlines also do services for the government including private charter flights for ferrying military personnel and equipment and other ways they get government money. Do you really think Delta Airlines should turn down that kind of money if it is offered to them?
As for launch failures, I expect there will be a few over the next few years too. If this next launch is a failure and the failure reveals some systemic engineering flaws in the design that didn't come up in the previous two launches, it is possible that SpaceX would go bankrupt. Nothing is sure in business and I'll admit that. but to say that they will disappear because of a launch failure is just silly to even suggest as well. Do airlines go bankrupt when one of their planes crash? Sometimes, but usually not. An accident investigation review board does get called and the reasons for the accident or failure are seriously reviewed... something that is no different for rockets failing as it is for aircraft that fail and have problems. In the case of SpaceX and a rocket failure, the lead agency to conduct such an investigation will be the Federal Aviation Administration as well, through their Office of Commercial Spaceflight.... who is the agency issuing the launch permits giving SpaceX the authority to perform this launch on April 30th. NASA is merely the customer paying for the trip.
There is also reason to believe that SpaceX is going to keep the launch prices right where they are at, or even drop them significantly. I won't get into the reasons here as it is pointless to continue the argument.
While I will admit that the ISS is doing some very impressive things, is it really worth the $100 Billion price tag to get it built? That is roughly the cost of about 4-5 nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and certainly more than has ever been spent on the entire cost of exploring Antarctica since Americans first went to that continent combined.
Then again there are several members of congress that would like to simply splash the thing into the Pacific Ocean and forget it ever existed in the first place. If it could be used as a multi-billion dollar toy rather than literally get thrown away as useless scrap metal that will never even be recycled, that certainly sounds like a much better use for the place. If it can be used as a laboratory for real science, perhaps that might be a still better use of the facility... but there certainly could be some practical engineering applications for the ISS as well.
Of course those computers are all made of components fabricated in other countries. While the link is interesting, the manufacturing base has left America some time ago to get stuff like that done.
If there are specific mission requirements, they should put those requirements into the RFP and subsequent contracts. There certainly could and likely would be other providers willing to step in if Zero-G can't get the job done. It isn't as if the ability to fly parabolic arcs in the sky is necessarily a new concept which is the subject of a patent.
Besides, it is in the official mission statement and federal charter for NASA that they will support private commercial efforts where possible. If you think that sucks, complain to your local member of Congress. Likely they won't care, but at least you can try or vote for "the other guy" instead.
What I love about Armadillo Aerospace is that they are one of the few companies whose budget for rocket fuel is larger than the budget for the construction of the vehicles they fly. They also are not afraid to admit they've gone down a blind alley and try something completely different, like completely different fuels, injector systems, and pretty much every part of their rockets. Of any group of rocket developers around today, I'd dare say they have more experience actually using rocket engines and coming up with innovative propulsion designs than almost anybody else around today. It isn't just one engine design they've built, but instead dozens including a whole group of utter failures they've looked at and moved on from. John Carmack has said that he wanted to apply some of the principles of software engineering to rockets in terms of doing many "small tests" and allowing engineering freedom to experiment on many different designs at once.
Other companies to look at include Masten Space Systems, X-Cor, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. For Europe you have Copenhagen Suborbital, ARCA (from Romania), and Starchaser Industries (UK) that all show some real potential and have been around for more than a couple years.
While SpaceX may be getting the headlines, they are hardly the only company doing rocket development, and I don't think they will be the only company sending rockets into orbit twenty years from now.
God, it is like some people think Elon Musk hired a bunch of high school rocket club kids and is being allowed to dock with the space station based on plans drawn on the back of a napkin.
I know quite a few very successful engineering designs that originated on the back of a bar napkin. In some ways that is a wonderful way to get inspiration as you get out of the office and get a chance to think about other stuff to hopefully jar your mind into thinking other kinds of thought patterns. There is also something very relaxing about spending time together with co-workers out of the office as well, even if "shop talk" works its way into the conversation or is even deliberate in terms of a "planning meeting".
The difference though, if I may be so bold here, is that the plan doesn't stay on that napkin when you get back to the office. We aren't talking some Red Green Show fan that thinks duct tape and a vacuum cleaner can solve every engineering problem in the world. Then again there has always been a roll of duct tape on every manned spaceflight by NASA since the early Gemini flights, and arguably was what saved the lives of the astronauts on Apollo 13.
It may be that the Chinese business leaders being quoted here were more upset that their profit margin was going to be cut on future flights and become something of a cost war between themselves and SpaceX rather than necessarily being unable to meet the price that SpaceX has been publishing on its websites for the cost of Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launches. It is remarkable at how much cheaper SpaceX has made launches already with their price point something that is generally viewed within the launch industry as a loss leader trying to drum up business and gain market share rather than real savings. At least that is how the Chinese would be doing things.
There are a number of things which has resulted in SpaceX becoming so much cheaper, and some of that comes from Elon Musk's experience at trying to manufacture automobiles that is being folded into the rocket business along with other improved manufacturing processes and a general attitude of trying to cut costs on nearly every step along the way. That doesn't mean to reduce the quality, but rather seriously considering if a process really needs to be done in one way and if there might be a cheaper way to get it done rather than saying "close enough for government work" and then just passing the costs on to the government or any potential customer who at the moment don't really care about the costs of the launch itself so much. It isn't just one thing that SpaceX is doing, but the whole attitude about what it will take to get into space for the lowest cost possible and still be safe.
As an example, for this upcoming launch at the end of this month, NASA put together a team to help "supervise" what SpaceX was doing for launch preparations. Most of that team had to be sent home because it turned out they outnumbered SpaceX personnel by something like a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. For a ULA launch, they would have been more in the minority sort of hiding in the background.
A very Chinese attitude toward manufacturing is to simply throw personnel at any sort of problem to see if that gets fixed or has the production rate needed. In other words there is a whole lot of hand crafting of things in China, certainly much more than is the case in western countries. While they aren't stupid and I admit they do know how to make machines quite well, I would certainly venture to guess that even the next generation of launchers by the Chinese will likely have many more man-hours of effort be put into the development, manufacturing, and launch of those rockets than what SpaceX is doing, and there are other costs associated with their methods as well.
Yes, fuel costs are something to look at in terms of launch costs, but for almost everybody doing a launch currently the fuel costs are so insignificant that it is statistical noise. The cost of the fuel for the Space Shuttle launches, to give another example, was actually less than the cost of the catering services provided for the press corps and the VIP dignitaries that attended the launch. In other words, something to not even look at for cost savings. If hypergolic fuels seem to work fine, then use them as even the cleanup costs are trivial compared to the rest of the costs performing a launch.
You can do some web searches on the topic if you want as well to get some other opinions on the topic, but it was in the news awhile back. Or perhaps Aviation Week is a two bit blog that doesn't matter much and is an unreliable source?
Considering that the Chinese have said that SpaceX is flying at a price point cheaper than they can provide launch services, I'm sort of curious who this "cheap knockoff" might be? The Mexican Space Agency?
You rant against "do-gooders" who seek to control the behavior of others, but you have nothing to say about the actions of the coal, oil and gas industries. Do you think they are naive businessmen who never thought of lobbying or buying legislators (or whole governments for that matter)? Do you really think the political impact of environmental lobbyists somehow outweighs that of the incredibly profitable fossil fuel industries?
No, you did that for me. Thank you for bringing this issue up as I would have to agree that subverting science in any fashion for political purposes is wrong. More to the point, it isn't science when you stop being objective and start advocating, or at least refuse to admit you might be wrong and have a closed mind refusing to accept or at least consider alternate ideas.
I don't even want to get started on lobbying efforts in government legislation efforts. Yes, I do think the political impact of environmentalists is in many ways much more effective than the "fossil fuel industries", at least in terms of overall public opinion. I won't say more as that would be justifiably flamebait.
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I could go point by point with every single thing you have mentioned here and give a rebuttal, but so far you have not given any convincing evidence of how technology properly used is necessarily dangerous. Sometimes you need to be trained on how to use that technology and some of it is indeed very dangerous. If you want to concentrate on how dangerous the technology is instead of concentrating on on how to properly use the technology, go knock yourself out.
By your notion and logic here, perhaps it was a bad idea for mankind to even use tools in the first place. I'm talking even hunter-gatherer tribes with tools like knives, bows, arrows, and simple grinding tools are all potentially lethal so you need to go to a completely pre-technological lifestyle. BTW, even chimpanzees use technology and try a variety of tools to improve their lifestyles, so you need to go back in time to a point where chimpanzees and humans diverged from the rest of the primates before you get to a non-technological group of creatures.
Good luck trying to survive without technology. Our species has been using it for millions of years and we've even evolved to the point it is necessary for our survival.
And yes, you are being anti-technology here, of the sort that really doesn't seem to understand what these various kinds of technology you are ranting against even does, much less why the problems exist that you are complaining about. I do agree we need to be sometimes cautious with the use of technology and we should sometimes try to understand the adverse effects of that technology, but you also don't need to be a paranoid idiot who deliberately keeps yourself in ignorance about any of that technology as well.
Because of the mass of these objects and the attention they'll bring, not to mention the degree that celestial mechanics is now an exact science (with a great many significant digits of accuracy on any sort of result from measurements), the path that these rocks will take can be tracked very accurately including any minor changes in direction that a mining company might make to that rock as they "nudge" it to a place closer to the Earth.
Anybody stupid enough to even think about crashing an asteroid into the Earth would find themselves on the smallest target list of terrorists with millions if not billions of dollars of reward for your capture or death. Forget about any business assets you may have, your life would be over.
There is a role that "Human Resources" could play in a well run company, but I'd have to agree that the hiring/firing ought to be done by the direct managers rather than going through some "HR specialist". Back in times of old what is called "Human Resoruces" was simply called "Payroll Office" that dealt with paperwork and other things necessary between existing employees, the company, and the government.
Sadly, my experience in dealing with a typical "Human Resources" department even on that level tended to border on incompetence or at least indifference. Missing a paycheck? Sorry.... you'll have to wait until the next pay period. Screwups with a 401(k) program? Here is the "800 number" to work it out..... and other similar kinds of responses.
Californium is the most expensive metal currently in use with commercial applications. The cost is about $60 per microgram, or $60 billions dollar per kilogram. Typically it is sold in microgram quantities as larger amounts for current applications aren't really needed.... although in theory you could build a nuclear bomb out of the substance if you could put a few kilograms of the stuff together.
Admittedly part of the expense with Californium is that it must be manufactured through nuclear transmutation processes and that it has a relatively short half life on the order of a few years... enough to be useful but short enough that it needs to be replaced on a regular basis.
The problem is that the Luddites are currently in a position of political control where they are trying to point a gun and keep those of us who might want to put the resources together to make the trip off this rock to be prohibited from leaving.
I can understand some of these idiots who want to complain that their resources (read tax dollars) shouldn't be spent on such endeavors that they consider to be frivolous. A trillion dollar effort to send people a small group of people to Mars may even be something I can't stomach as a total waste of money (such as the current NASA plan for manned exploration of Mars).
Perhaps this is a futile effort and anybody even trying to establish a colony on the Moon, Mars, the asteroids, or elsewhere is going to result in utter disaster. Perhaps it is too expensive to be considered and the dangers found in space are too much to overcome. But one thing I would ask is this: if it is my own money that I am spending and I want to discover on my own if space is dangerous, why do you want to stop me from even trying in the first place? Why is my freedom of being able to leave the Earth if I choose being taken away from me before I can even start? If I can find a cheaper way to get off of the Earth, can I at least be permitted to experiment with the idea and try to leave... striving to reach for the stars instead of having some stupid bureaucrat telling me that I shouldn't even try or worse yet having a group of Marines being sent to my home forcing me to stay put here?
Noting of course that SpaceX is the current low-ball price for going into orbit. I've seen estimates for the cost of a Space Shuttle launch be more towards $50k/kg and higher.
I dispute that getting off Earth will solve our problems. Our problems go a whole lot deeper than that. In fact we seem far more likely to destroy ourselves than a meteor crashing anytime soon.
While getting off the Earth won't solve the problems, it will provide parallel opportunities for alternate solutions to be found. What a Luddite view of humanity might offer is simply one possible "solution" to the issues facing mankind, where the tendency on the Earth is more toward a single "global" solution to the issues facing mankind.
What has helped mankind to be able to solve problems it has faced in the past is the ability to have many different but parallel attempts to solve those problems being done by different groups of people. If one group of people has a political philosophy or social system that inhibits development, another group is likely going to be successful instead.
In this regard, having people in the Asteroid belt, the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere trying different ideas including perhaps even completely new political philosophies that don't need to be in the face of those on the Earth may be a good thing. Going into space at least allows the ability for people to be free to do whatever the hell they want to do. Trying to find a frontier on the Earth to get away from those who would squash your freedom is no longer possible.
GPL is not viral. It can't "infect" code that isn't derived from GPL'd code. That makes it heredity, not viral.
The GPL is considered viral because mixing GPL'd code with more permissively licensed software pretty much makes the combined work GPL-only. In other words, once you've introduced GPL'd software into the project, the whole project becomes de facto GPL even if technically you can pull that GPL'd software out. GPL'd plug-ins might not be so bad, but if it is a critical feature covered by the GPL'd software, you might as well re-license the whole project under the GPL.
Copyright lawyers really have a heartburn over GPL'd software, in part because they are used to other proprietary NDAs and licensing models where they get paranoid about software developers who even look at GPL'd software. In theory and based upon legal precedence for proprietary software, if you have looked at GPL'd software in some detail to understand how it works, it is possible for that software to even be inadvertently introduced into other software produced by that developer. That makes software developers who have contributed to open source projects to be considered as "tainted" by some software studios.
So on a big project with lots of copyright holders, it is nearly impossible to switch to a more permissive license, but that's because it's so hard to get a big group of people to agree, not because the GPL doesn't allow it.
You could also go the route that the Wikimedia Foundation took for such a dilemma: Convince Richard Stallman that the license is worthless and put in an "escape clause" that allows a project to switch licenses through a rewrite of the next version of the GPL.
The fact that such a tactic was even permitted for the GFDL should give pause to anybody working with licenses produced by the Free Software Foundation. I admit that in the case of the Wikimedia Foundation they switched from the GFDL to a roughly similar license in the form of CC-by-SA, but it was a license change.
".... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it."
????
That is one terribly ineffective NDA.
You would recognize the project itself. I just can't get into specifics of the installation, and I'm choosing not to disclose any more than is necessary for this discussion because the issue of power management is something I can talk about and is not covered under the NDA. Other details like communications channels and protocols used, and security details are the kinds of things that I can't disclose. Those are also completely irrelevant to this discussion as well.
Shudder away you luddite myope. That you once participated in a (ill-conceived? poorly executed? student?) project that fucked-up hardly qualifies as damning evidence that a 1MW is technically infeasible or even impractical. There are LOTs of electrical grid users who merrily draw more than 1MW without any such problems. I'm an engineer for Honeywell and I'm sitting in one in one now. (And no: it's not some massive facility that you would even notice specially. It's simple, they run a medium voltage (13kV IIRC) line to it and make sure the grid to which it's connected has been designed and planned for it to be used!)
I've worked with installations in other cities besides San Francisco where adding an extra 1MW load wasn't nearly so much of a problem. The issue with the installation I talked about in my earlier post also illustrated how fragile some power grids have become though because of a decided lack of forethought and engineering, where utility companies sometimes let their power grids get built out to the physical limits of the infrastructure.
Yes, adding redundant cables and upgrading power transmission lines can solve a whole bunch of problems, but all of that requires investment into the infrastructure that sometimes may need a significant infusion of capital to get accomplished. That can happen from government subsidies of the utility company or showing the utility company that there will be demand for the power once they upgrade their facilities. Unfortunately it is usually more economical for utility companies to put forward a major public relations campaign for "energy conservation" than to install a new set of power transmission lines.
I'm not saying that solutions are impossible to find for getting high voltage power lines being brought to ordinary consumer devices like a personal automobile, but there are some significant challenges for making that happen and they can't all be waved away as if the real issues are irrelevant. The kind of infrastructure needed here is something that has never been built before, and other analogies simply don't exist for what is being asked for in terms of a quick recharge facility involving high voltage electricity being handled by low-skilled minimum wage workers or the general public under less than ideal situations.
What about the danger of explosion? As it recharges it release oxygen. You wouldn't want to leave your Lithium-oxygen EV in your garage but outside so the O2 can safely escape rather than build up.
The danger of high concentrations of Oxygen is not a concern about explosions, but rather fire. Oxygen in high enough concentrations can burn almost anything, which is where concerns about compressed Oxygen is treated as a hazardous material subject to special transport considerations.
Still, the partial pressure of Oxygen would need to be substantially higher than the already existing percentage of Oxygen in the air we are currently breathing, and for home recharging operations done in a typical garage... I just don't see that becoming a significant factor unless your garage is completely air tight.
For devices that produce Hydrogen (such as Lead-Acid batteries found in almost every internal combustion engine automobile and some electric vehicles due to the low cost to produce those batteries) such concerns about explosive mixtures of gasses are certainly much more legitimate. On the other hand, how many hydrogen gas explosions have you heard about from recharging lead acid batteries? There are enough of them around that I'm sure you could find a few news stories about the issue through sheer statistical probability, but they are quite rare. Oxygen would be much, much safer to work with than even the Hydrogen from this much older electric battery technology.
My bullshit meter is being pegged off the charts to even consider this. Yes, there might be some supposed "automated facilities' that could pull this off, but I shudder to think of the potential accidents, lawsuits, and other issues that could come from such a "fast recharger". "Training" might be able to help with the technicians who are at a filling station performing this task, but any kind of casual attitude will result in a great many deaths.
I'll also note that the example of a Nissan Leaf is hardly the best one to use as well, as it certainly isn't going to have this magical "500 mile range" as suggested in the original article.
As for grid impact.... I've seen first hand what the current infrastructure of California has for any kind of significant grid impact. I was involved with a.... interesting industrial scale engineering project (subject to NDAs for specifics that I can't go into right now). Let's just say almost everybody in the SF area would recognize it if I mentioned it.
The interesting thing about it for the purposes of this discussion is that it used 1 MW of energy off of the existing power grid in downtown San Francisco, and I was on the engineering team to get it set up. As a part of our testing process, we would "turn it on" and often use that full rated capacity of sucking the 1 MW off of the grid for relatively short periods of time and then turn it off after the test (usually about 15-20 minute test for what we were doing). At the same time we had the radio on tuned to a local station, and it made us sick to realize that when the device was turn on that it triggered blackouts throughout the city and those blackouts ended when we turned the device off.
Even if you use a power buffer like a huge capacitor bank to store the amount of energy needed to recharge a vehicle like a Tesla Roadster (which has roughly the quoted 500 mile range suggested in the original article) in a short period of time, that capacitor bank will need to be recharged in roughly a similar amount of time... with a power load for a heavily used recharging station to be roughly equivalent to this device I was using in San Francisco. I could easily see such a filling station be in the MegaWatt range for power consumption. In other words the overall electrical transmission infrastructure to get a whole series of stations like this built would require a substantial construction effort just to get those power transmission lines put to all of those station.
So do you like a future with high voltage power lines being built in your backyard? That is the future you are asking for here, where those become a much more common sight in almost everybody's neighborhood. The grid impact of these stations is going to be enormous with any kind of electric vehicle future.
This idea is going to seem ridiculously silly in the future when batteries can charge faster than a tank can fill (Even Gen. X'ers will live to see it, I'm sure). I will seem incredible forward-thinking B-)
For a website filled with electrical and computer engineers, the entire notion that you can recharge an electric battery quick with enough energy to be able to send an automobile over 500 miles in less than 15 minutes should seem totally ludicrous.
What are you expecting to have happen, somebody figure out how to discover news laws of physics akin to discovering how to travel faster than light?
The sheer amount of energy to perform this kind of action is going to require connectors to the recharging equipment to be in the kiloVolt range, or perhaps MegaVolt and have amperage with that voltage that can only be supplied by a direct power line to a nuclear power plant. What you are talking about doing here is to deliver a huge pile of energy in a very short period of time and then claiming that delivering that energy is not going to be lethal to the people who are performing the recharging.
The original names for quarks were based upon a poem by James Joyce. There are some other rather esoteric names that have come up in science over the years so such references really aren't totally unheard of.
American rocket builders have all but given up trying to seek private commercial spaceflight launches, even though America was where the concept originated. I am not talking about joy rides such as the "space tourism" flights done by the "rich dick swingers" (I presume such a reference is to Richard Gariott who is rich but not really a swinger and his dickhood is of personal opinion that I disagree with even if you may think he is one), but rather for businesses that already are making a profit off of activity in space.
Something that has become very popular in terms of using space-based assets is to have mapping services available which will photograph areas of the world using all kinds of different "filters" to photograph terrain in all kinds of colors including ultra violet and infrared bands. This is mainly being used by mining and oil drilling companies, but it is also used by food processors and other "argi-business" services to monitor the quality of farmland as well as estimate yields that will likely be obtained from a harvest. In the case of some farmland photography, it can even be used to reduce the application of pesticides and fertilizer as specific parts of an individual field can be targeted for treatment.... or the field can be monitored to see if they are compliant with "organic" standards as well. This isn't science fiction but something happening today and worth literally billions of dollars on its own.
Telecommunications has been a long time user of space, ever since AT&T sent the Telstar satellite into orbit in the early 1960's. Modern television broadcasts simply wouldn't be happening without it, and surprisingly the size of the satellites for telecommunications is getting larger and may even need in the near future some sort of manned servicing of those vehicles... or at least sending up astronauts to physically service satellites like this could make economic sense. "Constellations" of satellites like Iridium are currently in use... and in fact SpaceX landed a contract to replace the current generation of Iridium satellites. The satellites are going to be made by Iridium, but SpaceX is going to put them into space. This is already on their manifest.
In other words, your suggestion that SpaceX is only going to be doing government contract work is not only wrong but downright stupid to even be thinking that way. Yes, SpaceX is going to be bidding for government contracts as well... and you haven't given a good reason why they shouldn't either. Airlines also do services for the government including private charter flights for ferrying military personnel and equipment and other ways they get government money. Do you really think Delta Airlines should turn down that kind of money if it is offered to them?
As for launch failures, I expect there will be a few over the next few years too. If this next launch is a failure and the failure reveals some systemic engineering flaws in the design that didn't come up in the previous two launches, it is possible that SpaceX would go bankrupt. Nothing is sure in business and I'll admit that. but to say that they will disappear because of a launch failure is just silly to even suggest as well. Do airlines go bankrupt when one of their planes crash? Sometimes, but usually not. An accident investigation review board does get called and the reasons for the accident or failure are seriously reviewed... something that is no different for rockets failing as it is for aircraft that fail and have problems. In the case of SpaceX and a rocket failure, the lead agency to conduct such an investigation will be the Federal Aviation Administration as well, through their Office of Commercial Spaceflight.... who is the agency issuing the launch permits giving SpaceX the authority to perform this launch on April 30th. NASA is merely the customer paying for the trip.
There is also reason to believe that SpaceX is going to keep the launch prices right where they are at, or even drop them significantly. I won't get into the reasons here as it is pointless to continue the argument.
While I will admit that the ISS is doing some very impressive things, is it really worth the $100 Billion price tag to get it built? That is roughly the cost of about 4-5 nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and certainly more than has ever been spent on the entire cost of exploring Antarctica since Americans first went to that continent combined.
Then again there are several members of congress that would like to simply splash the thing into the Pacific Ocean and forget it ever existed in the first place. If it could be used as a multi-billion dollar toy rather than literally get thrown away as useless scrap metal that will never even be recycled, that certainly sounds like a much better use for the place. If it can be used as a laboratory for real science, perhaps that might be a still better use of the facility... but there certainly could be some practical engineering applications for the ISS as well.
Of course those computers are all made of components fabricated in other countries. While the link is interesting, the manufacturing base has left America some time ago to get stuff like that done.
If there are specific mission requirements, they should put those requirements into the RFP and subsequent contracts. There certainly could and likely would be other providers willing to step in if Zero-G can't get the job done. It isn't as if the ability to fly parabolic arcs in the sky is necessarily a new concept which is the subject of a patent.
Besides, it is in the official mission statement and federal charter for NASA that they will support private commercial efforts where possible. If you think that sucks, complain to your local member of Congress. Likely they won't care, but at least you can try or vote for "the other guy" instead.
What I love about Armadillo Aerospace is that they are one of the few companies whose budget for rocket fuel is larger than the budget for the construction of the vehicles they fly. They also are not afraid to admit they've gone down a blind alley and try something completely different, like completely different fuels, injector systems, and pretty much every part of their rockets. Of any group of rocket developers around today, I'd dare say they have more experience actually using rocket engines and coming up with innovative propulsion designs than almost anybody else around today. It isn't just one engine design they've built, but instead dozens including a whole group of utter failures they've looked at and moved on from. John Carmack has said that he wanted to apply some of the principles of software engineering to rockets in terms of doing many "small tests" and allowing engineering freedom to experiment on many different designs at once.
Other companies to look at include Masten Space Systems, X-Cor, and Sierra Nevada Corporation. For Europe you have Copenhagen Suborbital, ARCA (from Romania), and Starchaser Industries (UK) that all show some real potential and have been around for more than a couple years.
While SpaceX may be getting the headlines, they are hardly the only company doing rocket development, and I don't think they will be the only company sending rockets into orbit twenty years from now.
God, it is like some people think Elon Musk hired a bunch of high school rocket club kids and is being allowed to dock with the space station based on plans drawn on the back of a napkin.
I know quite a few very successful engineering designs that originated on the back of a bar napkin. In some ways that is a wonderful way to get inspiration as you get out of the office and get a chance to think about other stuff to hopefully jar your mind into thinking other kinds of thought patterns. There is also something very relaxing about spending time together with co-workers out of the office as well, even if "shop talk" works its way into the conversation or is even deliberate in terms of a "planning meeting".
The difference though, if I may be so bold here, is that the plan doesn't stay on that napkin when you get back to the office. We aren't talking some Red Green Show fan that thinks duct tape and a vacuum cleaner can solve every engineering problem in the world. Then again there has always been a roll of duct tape on every manned spaceflight by NASA since the early Gemini flights, and arguably was what saved the lives of the astronauts on Apollo 13.
It may be that the Chinese business leaders being quoted here were more upset that their profit margin was going to be cut on future flights and become something of a cost war between themselves and SpaceX rather than necessarily being unable to meet the price that SpaceX has been publishing on its websites for the cost of Falcon 1 and Falcon 9 launches. It is remarkable at how much cheaper SpaceX has made launches already with their price point something that is generally viewed within the launch industry as a loss leader trying to drum up business and gain market share rather than real savings. At least that is how the Chinese would be doing things.
There are a number of things which has resulted in SpaceX becoming so much cheaper, and some of that comes from Elon Musk's experience at trying to manufacture automobiles that is being folded into the rocket business along with other improved manufacturing processes and a general attitude of trying to cut costs on nearly every step along the way. That doesn't mean to reduce the quality, but rather seriously considering if a process really needs to be done in one way and if there might be a cheaper way to get it done rather than saying "close enough for government work" and then just passing the costs on to the government or any potential customer who at the moment don't really care about the costs of the launch itself so much. It isn't just one thing that SpaceX is doing, but the whole attitude about what it will take to get into space for the lowest cost possible and still be safe.
As an example, for this upcoming launch at the end of this month, NASA put together a team to help "supervise" what SpaceX was doing for launch preparations. Most of that team had to be sent home because it turned out they outnumbered SpaceX personnel by something like a 2:1 or even 3:1 ratio. For a ULA launch, they would have been more in the minority sort of hiding in the background.
A very Chinese attitude toward manufacturing is to simply throw personnel at any sort of problem to see if that gets fixed or has the production rate needed. In other words there is a whole lot of hand crafting of things in China, certainly much more than is the case in western countries. While they aren't stupid and I admit they do know how to make machines quite well, I would certainly venture to guess that even the next generation of launchers by the Chinese will likely have many more man-hours of effort be put into the development, manufacturing, and launch of those rockets than what SpaceX is doing, and there are other costs associated with their methods as well.
Yes, fuel costs are something to look at in terms of launch costs, but for almost everybody doing a launch currently the fuel costs are so insignificant that it is statistical noise. The cost of the fuel for the Space Shuttle launches, to give another example, was actually less than the cost of the catering services provided for the press corps and the VIP dignitaries that attended the launch. In other words, something to not even look at for cost savings. If hypergolic fuels seem to work fine, then use them as even the cleanup costs are trivial compared to the rest of the costs performing a launch.
This is but one of several articles about this topic:
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2011/05/spacex-explains.html
You can do some web searches on the topic if you want as well to get some other opinions on the topic, but it was in the news awhile back. Or perhaps Aviation Week is a two bit blog that doesn't matter much and is an unreliable source?
Considering that the Chinese have said that SpaceX is flying at a price point cheaper than they can provide launch services, I'm sort of curious who this "cheap knockoff" might be? The Mexican Space Agency?
You rant against "do-gooders" who seek to control the behavior of others, but you have nothing to say about the actions of the coal, oil and gas industries. Do you think they are naive businessmen who never thought of lobbying or buying legislators (or whole governments for that matter)? Do you really think the political impact of environmental lobbyists somehow outweighs that of the incredibly profitable fossil fuel industries?
No, you did that for me. Thank you for bringing this issue up as I would have to agree that subverting science in any fashion for political purposes is wrong. More to the point, it isn't science when you stop being objective and start advocating, or at least refuse to admit you might be wrong and have a closed mind refusing to accept or at least consider alternate ideas.
I don't even want to get started on lobbying efforts in government legislation efforts. Yes, I do think the political impact of environmentalists is in many ways much more effective than the "fossil fuel industries", at least in terms of overall public opinion. I won't say more as that would be justifiably flamebait.