What I'm complaining about here are people who buy into the kool-aid of establishing trade relations with countries and thinking that solves all potential problems..... just at the GP post was trying to suggest that there was no possible way that China would become a significant military threat or even flat-out enemy to America in a declared war with China capturing and holding American territory.
The sarcastic reply here could be countered as such: you really know how the social, political, and economic systems we have in place today are going to turn out in terms of "preventing war" in the future? Do you really think you have such a wonderful bead on reality that you are convinced that "peace on Earth" is going to break out with some sanity in terms of relations between groups of people with completely different cultural, social, and economic customs?
What has happened in the past is a very good indication of what can happen in the future, and you are simply a fool to think such patterns that happened in the past won't be repeated in the future. I won't promise that they will happen, but nobody can promise that global war between major countries is a thing of the past either.
The largest problem with the Chinese space program is mainly one of operational tempo. Other countries; notably Russia and even America.... if you consider commercial enterprises like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and other endeavors; are launching vehicles on a regular basis. The Soyuz rocket is flying at a rate of about one launch per month, and in the case of Virgin Galactic they are hoping for weekly flights when they get going. Contrast that to the Chinese who are launching one of their manned spaceflight rockets about once every year or two. When the Space Shuttle was being flown, it was at least flying at the rate of about 4-6 flights per year, with as many as eight in one year.
The reason why this matters is because you need to have people who are doing this kind of stuff the ability to practice their craft. Yes, rehearsals and "dry runs" are useful in some situations, but until you actually do it you won't really know what is going to be needed. Simulations can't substitute for the real thing, and without actually getting stuff done you won't know if your ideas will work or not.
I'm not saying that it is impossible for China to catch up or to even become a major spacefaring nation, but at the moment they aren't showing the commitment necessary to really pull it off. I see a whole bunch of press releases coming from China like this which can be used as a sort of "Red Menace" to try and scare people into action, but until the Chinese government stops flapping their jaws and decides to fund a real space program, I will continue to be underwhelmed by their capabilities. The current flight rate and operational tempo of their space program is soon going to be hitting the hard cold reality of physics that doesn't care about political philosophies or what the will of the "great leader" wants to have happen. Ultimately that means a commitment of a large amount of money and manpower to see that it happens.
By far and away I'm more impressed with the European spaceflight efforts, and I think it will be European countries that are ultimately going to be the real challengers to American and Russian efforts in space. No, I'm not talking just ESA (which is pretty impressive in its own right), but much of the commercial activity in Europe doing things in a very European way where I think more than a couple of those efforts are going to succeed. China might make it to the Moon before Europe, but I wouldn't count out a bunch of crazy Danes from making the trip to Mars before anybody else.
I guess ultimately the issue is an open society that is willing to tolerate a little bit of risk and let its citizens try new and crazy things. China is following the rocketry development cycle that America and Russia did in the Cold War and are trying to duplicate those efforts. Sadly, that is the most expensive and least productive way to get things done. Perhaps China will discover that for themselves, but I wonder how many Yuan are going to be dumped into that effort before they finally notice?
I don't buy the economic arguments. Here is some food for thought:
In the year 1938, who was the largest importer of goods from Germany? Would you believe France? #2 was Russia and #3 was Britain.
And in the same time period, who was Japan's largest trading partner? America, followed by China.
Yeah, all of those economic ties did a whole lot of good in terms of convincing the leaders of Germany and Japan to not bomb and destroy their leading customers.
If a country will go to war, they will have their reasons for doing that which has absolutely no relevance as to what economic ties may exist. Still, in regards to China, I think they are more likely to get involved in a conflict with India than to deal with America. At least they share a common border with India (even if it isn't all that large).
The problem with the American spaceflight effort wasn't the construction of the STS or ISS, it was the notion that they were the ultimate and final product and the pinnacle of what human spaceflight could ever achieve. More specifically, it was the problem of putting "all of the eggs in one basket" and hoping that a high flight rate would keep costs down for individual missions.
Just as important, once these programs were seen as fiscal black holes (which I will openly admit), they should have been shut down with other alternatives serious considered.
The jab at "capturing German technology" is patently unfair. Yes, the German rocket team that helped to develop the V-2 was brought to America and put to work for the U.S. Army (it wasn't even the Army Air Corps, it was the Artillery branch that ended up getting the missile program), but there were very much indigenous efforts for building rockets in America as well. This remark completely dismisses the efforts of Robert Goddard, not to mention the tens of thousands of engineers who ended up working for NASA and NASA contractors to help build the rockets that ended up going to the Moon and elsewhere.
For those so clueless to think that all you need is a modified ICBM in order to go into space, I need to point out that the problem domains are really quite different, and the "advanced" spaceflight rockets really can't be used for ICBMs or the other way around either. Yes, when rocketry was first being established you could have a "dual purpose" rocket that could both deliver a heavy warhead and put somebody into space, but even then it was design compromises that ultimately were unsustainable.
What needed to happen with both the ISS and the STS program was a series of iterative programs that would build upon the successes and failures of the previous designs. In other words, there should have been a Shuttle Mark II, version 3, 4, 5 and so forth. It also should have been a much smaller vehicle and there should have been an operational tempo to have many more flights removing the ego of having the perfect design.... which it never had. The Skylab program ended up putting into space a station that had about half of the volume of the ISS (and about the size of MIR) for a substantial fraction of the cost of the ISS. The question should not have been why the ISS, but why there wasn't a Skylab II mission built in the 1980's. Oh.... of course the Saturn V, arguably one of the most successful rockets produced by NASA, was dumped down a rat hole too in favor of the "one true program" that redid everything.
Otherwise, I'm trying to figure out why this post was modded anything but "troll" and "flamebait". It certainly deserves it.
Considering that Adolph Hitler was a member of the Communist Party in the Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic, I think the ties to socialism are a fair bit closer than you might think. Certainly at heart he was a socialist even if his methods may have been a bit extreme.
Then again, other socialist groups have sought totalitarian ideals as well. Just look at North Korea for how wonderful socialism seems to be working out.
I'd have to disagree, although the development of computing would have certainly taken a more "leisurely" pace than what it did in the late 20th Century.
What would have happened is that computers would have been seen as these big boxes or even completely separate buildings and have been used mostly for large organizations and governments. Keep in mind that most "Information Technology" departments owe at least some of their heritage to the "high priesthood of computer technicians" where only a select few were granted access to the computers.
I'm old enough to have been alive when programmers didn't even have a terminal on their desktop. Instead they have reams of paper that they carefully wrote software character by character with a pencil and then handed out sheets of code to transcriptionists who converted those sheets of paper into punch cards.... where you might be lucky to get the results of your software test in about a day or two unless your software was a high priority project. "The computer" was a place you could visit and go inside.
The question is how long that era of computer technology would have lasted. If Babbage had succeeded in getting funding from the British government in the 19th Century to complete his devices, their utility certainly would have been obvious and many of the suggestions made in this article would have occurred. Hinted at by the author would be the driving need to develop material science much earlier than actually happened, especially with the need to develop strong and lightweight materials in an attempt to miniaturize the devices. That would have in turn impacted the British military in some rather profound ways that might have pushed them into advancing in a great many other areas of scientific research.
For instance, how would World War One (not Two) have turned out differently with artillery that had the deadly accuracy that ended up being used in the Gulf War of 1990? Would Rudolf Diesel have developed a more efficient engine having those metal parts designed for computing available for internal combustion? How much earlier would aviation had developed with lightweight metals?
It is very hard to say what would have happened. Communications would have been slower (was slower) in the 19th Century, and that would have in turn slowed the development of computing compared to what we have today... but given a hundred year head start it certainly would have impacted more than just computing.
BTW, the integrated circuit didn't become used on a widespread basis until about 1970 or so. One of the very first significant applications of the technology was the Apollo Guidance Computers used for the lunar exploration program, where NASA ended up purchasing a substantial high two-digit percentage fraction of the total world-wide production (and one of the early sources of seed money for developing the semi-conductor industry). Most of the computers built in the 1960's used either vacuum tubes or discrete transistors when they were "improved versions". It is hard to say that computing technology hit a plateau until 1970.
Grammar checkers for formal languages like computer programming languages is trivial compared to natural language processing issues. Another problem is that often the grammar checker straight jackets you into forming sentences in a fashion that pulls feeling out of whatever it is that you are expressing.
Yes, there might be a role for an automated grammar checker, but like spell checkers they have a narrow application of usage. They are also not nearly as easy as you are suggesting in terms of how to write them, where natural language processing is one of the major sub-branches of artificial intelligence that has some extensive research but all of the typical problems of AI in general: an initial burst of excitement as the initial steps bear fruit, but eventual frustration over the lack of progress beyond the basic tools that seem to be created in the first few years.
I have seen articles on Wikipedia that stick around for any reasonable length of time (about six months to a year being typical) usually attract grammar nazis (or people who are annoyed by bad grammar in general) that do a copy edit and try to fix the article to make it read better. Longer articles tend to attract more people than stubs, particularly if they are well linked to other articles. The subject matter doesn't seem to make a difference, and there are a few bots on Wikipedia which try to scan articles for spelling errors and other minor issues.
The issue of British vs. American spellings has been a long resolved issue, and for the most part consistency is more the rule than anything else. Sometimes I've seen protracted edit wars over grammar usage between several editors, but even that tends to be rather harmless.
My point here is that the proofreading does happen, it just happens on a slower time scale and is something that usually only shows up for more mature articles, mature as in more well developed articles that seem to be trying to say something. Articles that are in a constant flux of revision will be less likely to see this kind of activity, or more accurately will tend to see such efforts wasted as the article content changes. Still, if you can get an article to "B quality" status or better, the grammar and quality of the article in terms of spelling and other aspects will be reviewed by at least somebody over time.
While I will admit that some of the "social network games" can be distracting (and certainly room to complain about Facebook), I disagree that Moodle is the best approach here either. Yes, I've used Moodle as well, and the problem is to me the "top down" control over the communication. Still, this particular software package is better than some approaches, and if the IT department of the school district forces a straight jacket on you then I guess you are stuck with it.
Some of this is the issue of "cheating" too. I am approaching this from the perspective of somebody who has been "in the real world" trying to develop applications and not hung up in academia in some sort of walled garden that tries to separate students from each other and zap their creative energies. It certainly is not cheating if multiple students collaborate with each other.
Yes, there is a need to evaluate students in some manner and to assign a "grade" to whatever it is that they are doing in the class. Lazy instructors (and educational policy makers as well) come up with standardized tests which often as not produce horrible results and don't translate very well to actual learning, or for that matter really prepare the students for how life will be like once they leave the classroom. I'm just suggesting here that I've seen some outstanding teachers over the years, now that I have children working their way through the education system themselves, and they use these techniques I am suggesting for other subjects and this concept certainly could be used for a computer science class as well.
In fairness to computer scientists who do discover new techniques and algorithms that can have a substantial impact upon humanity, what does adding a new element onto the end of the period table really accomplish any more? Dmitri Mendeleev has certainly been proven over and over again that his "discovery" was very useful and some profound insights can be found from a purposeful study of that table, but most of the new elements only have dozens or fewer atoms that you can play with.... assuming you are the lead researcher in a team which has access to the equipment necessary to push on toward the end of the periodic table anyway.
Heck, discovering a new element isn't even a place where you can make an impact in terms of physics. I would suggest that discovering a new planet is something a whole lot more worthwhile, and something that perhaps even a classroom full of kids in high school could accomplish with some of the tools that are available now for astronomical research. It certainly is a field with more data than researchers can keep up with, and something for which a room full of budding computer technicians and researchers might be able to come up with new ways to cope with that fire hose of data spewing forth. Folks who are working to find new elements are happy if they provide a new data point for some physical property of elements, like discovering that Bismuth actually has a half-life.
Along this line of thought, also get the "screen capture" utilities (they are available from multiple vendors) so the instructor can not only be "watching over the shoulder" while the student is writing code, but more importantly so an instructor can grab something the student is working on and show the software being developed to the whole class on a projector for everybody to see, and encourage class collaboration on fixing bugs or trying to resolve issues that come up in the development process. Don't restrict this to just between the teacher and student, but allow other students to "peek in" on what their classmates are doing as well or to even collaboratively write software from multiple stations simultaneously.
Another thing that would help here as well is to have "social network" tools available like instant messages and e-mails, with possibly the restriction that you can only contact other students within the school using those tools (various ways to accomplish that task). Include message boards or even a localized version of Diaspora (or something that approximates Facebook)... with the goal in mind that students can "network" with each other to solve assigned problems.
Hopefully with such tools available, you don't have a teacher who thinks "Hello World" is a major accomplishment for students in a high school classroom.
While this is perhaps a bit over the top for a High School lab, I think the ideal college computer lab would be one that puts an absolute prohibition on software going into the lab. The idea here is that competent computer science students ought to be capable of writing all of the software necessary for such a lab... including the operating system and even the TCP/IP stack and even the compilers. Since it is all being done there in the school.... document it and make sure that everybody knows what you are doing.
No, it wouldn't be something built in a single semester or term, but it would do a whole lot of good for people coming out of a college being exposed to actual hardware and working out the problems of how software is built, or why certain things are being done.
Of course this concept of a computer lab is something that professors and university administrators bent on producing an assembly line of future workers for IT companies would hate, because obviously they wouldn't be able to learn the "cool" tools being used elsewhere. But it would give them exposure to actual computer science and be able to understand how operating systems actually work rather than taking it on blind faith and assuming it is a black box.
In that lab, I'd also put paper copies of most of the RFCs from the IETF (or perhaps ASCII text files), as well as copies of the ACM and IEEE journals as well as other legitimate sources of information that competent programmers ought to be reading anyway. Games would be permitted, but it would have to be games that were developed inside the lab and not brought in from outside. Give access to this lab 24/7 to students, and see what some very creative people could actually come up with. Since the OS was just something thrown together by another student, encouraging students to rewrite parts of the OS would even be encouraged (and source code would be presumably available in such situations). Depending on school policies, encourage or even expect students to release everything developed in the lab under some sort of "open source" license (preferably GPL or MIT).
In a great many ways, Gemini was more advanced than Apollo. This shouldn't be surprising so far as it was established after the Apollo program was already running along very well and that the engineers behind Gemini were able to start with a "clean-sheet" design to build their vehicles. It was a small, very agile design team with a limited budget (unlike Apollo where the statement "waste anything but time" was plastered on the walls of many contractors) and a well defined scope to their vehicles. The total amount of money spent on the whole program was just a little over a billion dollars, which included the spacecraft costs, the launchers, and even the estimated cost of the recovery fleets involved (multiple U.S. Navy fleets assigned for a couple weeks on each mission).
All in all, this is really a tribute to SpaceX that they can even build something comparable, and you sir have given SpaceX a huge compliment by even making the comparison. There was even an attempt by McDonnell Douglas to continue the program with the Big Gemini project (more details can be found here), sadly only the first of a great many NASA manned spaceflight programs to be cancelled over the years even after hardware was created.
More importantly, the physics is still the same today as it was forty years ago, so it shouldn't be so surprising that similar solutions have been found to get the job done, at least from a superficial point of view.
The problem with this thinking is the presumption there is only two data points. There are currently at least 19 different planetary systems with at least three or more planets which can be used for a comparison, and almost everybody involved with extrasolar planets knows this is just the beginning of discoveries. All told, there have been over 700 different planets which have been confirmed outside of our little old Solar System.
I would say that is enough to begin some statistical models and try to come up with some general trends based upon real data besides the single data point of the Sun and its planets. More significantly, this seems to indicate that planetary systems around stars are quite common to the point that stars without planets seem to be an exception... particularly if those stars are solitary stars rather than in systems of multiple stars.
Admittedly we are still mostly blind about what is "out there", but the Kepler survey seems to be providing some real statistical information about how common planetary systems might be, and since so many of the Kepler telescope candidates seem to be found in groups of multiple planets, it seems very likely that one common presumption of planetary formation being in a disc-like structure seems to be holding out very well. What the Kepler survey is really good at doing is identifying candidates which can then be studied with better telescopes now that we know some properties of these particular planetary systems, or even that they exist at all.
Why does it matter what is "fuel" and what is technically "oxidizer"? If you had a tank full of LOX and were flying in the atmosphere of Titan, it indeed would be the "fuel" in a jet engine where the Methane would be pulled freely from the atmosphere.
It really doesn't matter when you are hauling all of the chemicals needed for a reaction anyway, nor is Oxygen really necessary as long as when you are combining two chemicals together to produce an exothermic reaction with a high ISP. It just happens that Oxygen reactions tend to work out very well for getting that high ISP.
I guess you are referring to a company like XCor, who is building that "liquid fueled space plane" from scratch?
It is happening, and XCor is hardly the only company doing stuff like this (or even the most famous of them). While their main vehicle is admittedly a sub-orbital vehicle, they are on track to be able to take this vehicle into orbit eventually or something like it using the same basic technology set. Jeff Greason is somebody who I've come to admire over the years and I think he is certainly capable (and does!) of understanding orbital mechanics, the rocket equation, and "critical safety systems" needed for manned spaceflight.
This is one of the things that really sort of makes my head scratch here, as there are so many other ways to get into space including companies who have been working on this problem in terms of a reasonable civilian solution to get it to work that I don't understand why any sort of group of private investors would want to resurrect the dead with restarting the Shuttle program again. It boggle my mind even thinking about it.
Why should "sunk costs" and other related "fixed costs" not be included with the launch cost of the Shuttle?
BTW, I agree that the Shuttle should have been flown more often, but there were a number of factors that kept the flight rate low as well. Even at the peak of the Shuttle program when everything seemed to be working and there was a huge backlog of launches to be made, there were never more than a dozen flights per year. Even with both pad 39A & 39B in full launch tempo and a theoretically unlimited budget from Congress could NASA have ever launched more than one shuttle every two weeks, with some months where the Shuttle program should have been shut down because they were operating outside of the design envelope in terms of environmental conditions (like during a Hurricane or other nasty weather that sometimes hits KSC).
The other problem is that the size of the Shuttle fleet needed to be expanded significantly to keep that kind of operational tempo going as well, which was more cost that needed to be addressed as well. While orbiters could have their costs spread out over multiple flights, they weren't exactly cheap to build either and was one of the problems that kept the Shuttle program from having a higher operational tempo as well. It is also one of the reasons why after the loss of the Columbia that NASA had to cut back even more on the flight rate.... hence driving up costs.
The issue isn't the engineering team, but rather the technicians who actually build the equipment. In spite of the thought you can simply train any random group of primates to build this stuff, the actual construction of rockets is a highly skilled task that frankly few aerospace engineers could actually accomplish without a whole lot of experience. If they have any experience at the process at all, it is likely something they've gained from doing rocketry as a hobby rather than something they've done sitting in come cubicle churning through the rocket equation trying to come up with a better design.
It is the assembly and deployment team that was lost with both the Apollo program as well as the Shuttle program. The people who worked for Rockwell International and actually built the orbiters themselves are not only retired but have been pushing up daisies for a couple of decades, and the assembly plant was reused for another task during the Reagan administration. Even the orbiters that are currently available were built upon test articles that were refurbished to make them flight worthy, most notably the Endeavor. When the Challenger was destroyed, the production line didn't "start up" again... NASA just took spare parts and cobbled something together that worked.
The suppliers who made the spare parts for the Shuttle had largely been shut down by the end of the George W. Bush administration, with one of the last of the major suppliers being the external tank manufacturing facility at Michoud, where again many of the technicians who built the thing have retired and those who haven't also moved onto other things in life. The workforce to build the Shuttle and make things happen simply isn't there any more.
Yes, that workforce was put together once upon a time, and it certainly could be reassembled for the right price. It sure won't be cheap.
BTW, in spite of what you may have read or seen from that MIT Opencourseware series, the termination of the Apollo program did result in a huge number of mechanical and electrical engineers losing their jobs in the early 1970's. It could be argued that it resulted in the "computer revolution" as many of these engineers had to come up something to do with their skills together with desperate college graduates entering a profession that had a glut of older and very experienced counterparts looking for work. This is one of the critical factors that created Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial culture seen in that part of the world and could be considered legitimately a "spin-off" of the Apollo program. While some of these engineers did find work with the Shuttle program when that program started to ramp up again by the end of the 1970's, not all of them came back. Even a "temporary lay-off" and the effects of the termination of the Apollo program were not mitigated by the creation of the Shuttle.
Perhaps the worst casualty of the termination of the Apollo program was how Werner Von Braun was cashiered through a series of "promotions" that brought him to Washington DC as an assistant administrator and eventual retirement, but kept him from doing any more rocket designs. He wasn't the only engineer who was dumped either.
For a great many years there has been an issue of even getting stuff into space, and there is a larger issue of the ICBM research that for a time was parallel to civilian rocketry efforts as both had roughly the same goal: to put something up high above the Earth.
The problem is that ICBM research ultimately has divergent goals from civilian rocketry, or in other words for putting stuff into orbit or into space far beyond the Earth. With an ICBM, the goal is to deliver the warhead as quickly as possible to the destination. Factors like cost per pound are generally irrelevant, and high acceleration rates are seen as a bonus and highly desired. Keep in mind that acceleration on some ICBMs can hit as high as 300-500 m/s^2 (about 30-50 "G's"), which is something decidedly not wanted when putting a satellite into orbit. Pushing the envelope in terms of the rocket performance is even encouraged in that kind of environment, on top of the fact that the ICBMs need a kind of fuel where the missiles can sit in a silo for years or even decades at a time ready to be launched at a moments notice.
None of that is necessary for a civilian rocket for putting something into space. For civilian rocketry, you need a rocket that can be reliably launched, but it doesn't have to sit on the launch pad all that long after being prepared, and can use volatile cryogenic fuels like liquid oxygen that an ICBM really doesn't use very well (even though some countries still use it for ballistic missiles). Another minor difference between ICBMs and civilian rockets is that you don't need dozens or even hundreds of launch sites, as just a small number of well-built and routinely used launch facilities are needed. An ICBM launch officer dreads the day that his skills are actually put into service, but a launch director at a civilian facility should have experience at launching dozens if not more rockets to be considered even marginally competent.
All of these differences and even more have influenced the launch market, and explain some of the problems facing civilian rocketry when in fact much of what NASA has been doing has been tangentially tied to keeping the military side of things going, or at least the suppliers for military hardware running. This is one of the reasons for the SLS project, as well as the earlier Constellation program and perhaps even arguably the Shuttle in an earlier time. The SRBs used the technology associated with ICBMs, and the production of Ammonium Perchlorate in particular is vital to the ICBM development in the future. Unfortunately civilian rocketry doesn't need that chemical in the same way and arguably it isn't needed at all. The use of solid fuel SRBs significantly improved the reliability and integrity of the ICBMs that the USAF are using, but at what cost? From the viewpoint of a NASA manager trying to justify his annual budget, subsidizing the Air Force doesn't seem to be a very wise use of civilian spaceflight funds.
There were more than a few sub-contractors that were doing some parts for SpaceX that Elon Musk simply offered instead to buy the whole company rather than have the option for some other company to bump them down in priority. While not all of the suppliers have taken the bait, quite a few of them have.
The other issue is that SpaceX, by having most of the production including the critical production (both quality and time-dependent parts) in-house, they are also able to control the reliability of the whole system as well. This isn't being done because some companies are "gouging", but rather to make sure they can get the parts when they need them. That by bringing it in house they are also getting cheaper parts which are of higher quality is just a side benefit that also lowers their production costs and can ensure a consistent Q/A standard throughout the whole process.
One other thing that SpaceX is working on as well is to see that the employees on the production line get to practice their skills. Tasks which you only perform every couple of years are likely to be rusty or perhaps you even repeat mistakes made in the past for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which is because it is often a whole new team doing those tasks as the "old guys" have moved on to other things. Instead, the production tempo that SpaceX is working for is to reduce that cycle time for most employees to less than a month (preferably about two weeks) to be repeating some given task in the production line. That gives them the opportunity to refine the production techniques and offer legitimate suggestions for improving the process by guys bending metal and making the essential parts of the rocket.
For instance, the Merlin engines are expected to have a production queue that to meet the upcoming launch manifest is going to need a new rocket engine every week, on average. Most other rocketry companies have never had a production rate that high except when the ICBMs were being built at the height of the Cold War.
Still, While Virgin Galactic won't get you very far, a SpaceX Dragon capsule can get you to LEO and quite possibly to Mars or the Moon as well (given some extra supplies and a secondary booster). If you dig up the costs that SpaceX claims, you can do a circumlunar trip (aka recreating Apollo 8) for about $50-$100 million per seat. Even at that huge price, it is still cheaper than most estimates given for the Space Shuttle.
So which route gets you to more exotic destinations again?
BTW, ditto for the Soyuz spacecraft, and RKK Energia is already building the modifications for destinations beyond LEO, and can get you to LEO with their proven designs.
Even there, that isn't the only game in town. Paul Allen just announced a new spacecraft design that could even get you up to LEO for a comparatively cheap price.... something I've done "back of the envelope" prices of about $10-$20 million per seat. Boeing is also producing a spacecraft (CST-100) that can be launched on an Atlas V or Delta IV. So why would you spend 10x that price to go up on the Shuttle again?
That was not a long-term study, but rather something done on the Space Shuttle (before the ISS was built.... in the SpaceLab module sometimes put in the cargo bay) and was really only a two week study that didn't prove a thing.
Nice try there, and perhaps some inference can be pulled from that study (something I was well aware of BTW and perhaps should have mentioned you need not respond with). It was a pregnant rat which gave birth in space to what appeared to be some healthy young ones even after the Shuttle landed, and there were some "longitudinal studies" done on those baby rats that suggest there is nothing to worry about in terms of gestational development.
Still, the actual knowledge of what goes on in terms of actually conceiving babies in space is non-existent, and it shouldn't be a problem to at least try and find out what is going on.
Venus is interesting because Oxygen can be considered a lifting gas there. A giant airship made with an oxygen interior would be sufficient for an object that could even be at an altitude near Earth "standard pressure & temperature", where even a tear in the envelope could be repaired on a human time scale.... it wouldn't even be an urgent repair. Making the skin of such a vehicle resistant to sulfuric acid might be more of a technical challenge, but not significantly so.
I don't know of a reason why you would want to build such a vehicle as a colony, but for a scientific research post similar to the Amundsen-Scott base in Antarctica, I would imagine Venus would offer some substantial appeal and might even be easier to operate than the South Pole. If such a "colony" evolved from a basic research post and expanded somehow, with even an internal "spit" for political reasons that created a second or third "colony" ship, it could be very interesting, particularly with some extended interplanetary commerce as you pointed out. All told, living on/near Venus, even in an airship, would be perhaps the most "Earth-like" environment in the Solar System, so it certainly could be an interesting endeavor from a fictional standpoint.
A very interesting place to start in terms of real vehicles traveling to Venus would be to look at the proposed Apollo Venus Flyby Mission that went as far as design work and even some preliminary testing of components that eventually were folded into the Skylab Missions. As an "alternative history" novel instead of necessarily Science Fiction, it would be interesting to see what manned flights to Venus might have done to American and world history if they had happened in the 1970's. That the idea was seriously considered at all and that the technology to perform that mission was available in the 1970's is even more amazing to me.
Since we haven't even taken up niches in the Solar System that we know can work for human habitation (aka Moon, Mars, Europa, etc.), I think even the need for worrying about interstellar travel is a non-existent issue. Once the rest of the Solar System is teeming with interplanetary politics and we are talking about a joint interplanetary mission to another star system (aka financed jointly by multiple planets in the Solar System) will any such discussion about interstellar flight even be worth worrying about.
Get people into space first. The furthest anybody has left the Earth in the 21st Century so far has been a few hundred miles above the surface, to the International Space Station as if that was a major accomplishment. The largest spacecraft that humanity has available right now is sufficient to hold a crew of just three people, and made only by one country at the moment, Russia. China doesn't count as they aren't even flying regularly, and America won't have a working spacecraft for anywhere from 5-10 years, assuming that Congress and/or the FAA will even permit those vehicles to fly with people.
Regardless, I agree with your basic premise here that most "colonization" trips will likely be one way ventures. They don't strictly have to, and you can use an Aldrin Cycler for the travel between two significant destinations (aka Earth-Mars) with something like an enlarged DIRECT-X spaceship in interplanetary space. If somehow you can get a nuclear rocket going that can provide continuous powered thrust, in theory you can get an Earth-Mars trip down to about two to three weeks without having to worry about stuff like relativistic travel or really trying to invent new kinds of physics to make the trip.
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What I'm complaining about here are people who buy into the kool-aid of establishing trade relations with countries and thinking that solves all potential problems..... just at the GP post was trying to suggest that there was no possible way that China would become a significant military threat or even flat-out enemy to America in a declared war with China capturing and holding American territory.
The sarcastic reply here could be countered as such: you really know how the social, political, and economic systems we have in place today are going to turn out in terms of "preventing war" in the future? Do you really think you have such a wonderful bead on reality that you are convinced that "peace on Earth" is going to break out with some sanity in terms of relations between groups of people with completely different cultural, social, and economic customs?
What has happened in the past is a very good indication of what can happen in the future, and you are simply a fool to think such patterns that happened in the past won't be repeated in the future. I won't promise that they will happen, but nobody can promise that global war between major countries is a thing of the past either.
The largest problem with the Chinese space program is mainly one of operational tempo. Other countries; notably Russia and even America.... if you consider commercial enterprises like SpaceX, Virgin Galactic, and other endeavors; are launching vehicles on a regular basis. The Soyuz rocket is flying at a rate of about one launch per month, and in the case of Virgin Galactic they are hoping for weekly flights when they get going. Contrast that to the Chinese who are launching one of their manned spaceflight rockets about once every year or two. When the Space Shuttle was being flown, it was at least flying at the rate of about 4-6 flights per year, with as many as eight in one year.
The reason why this matters is because you need to have people who are doing this kind of stuff the ability to practice their craft. Yes, rehearsals and "dry runs" are useful in some situations, but until you actually do it you won't really know what is going to be needed. Simulations can't substitute for the real thing, and without actually getting stuff done you won't know if your ideas will work or not.
I'm not saying that it is impossible for China to catch up or to even become a major spacefaring nation, but at the moment they aren't showing the commitment necessary to really pull it off. I see a whole bunch of press releases coming from China like this which can be used as a sort of "Red Menace" to try and scare people into action, but until the Chinese government stops flapping their jaws and decides to fund a real space program, I will continue to be underwhelmed by their capabilities. The current flight rate and operational tempo of their space program is soon going to be hitting the hard cold reality of physics that doesn't care about political philosophies or what the will of the "great leader" wants to have happen. Ultimately that means a commitment of a large amount of money and manpower to see that it happens.
By far and away I'm more impressed with the European spaceflight efforts, and I think it will be European countries that are ultimately going to be the real challengers to American and Russian efforts in space. No, I'm not talking just ESA (which is pretty impressive in its own right), but much of the commercial activity in Europe doing things in a very European way where I think more than a couple of those efforts are going to succeed. China might make it to the Moon before Europe, but I wouldn't count out a bunch of crazy Danes from making the trip to Mars before anybody else.
I guess ultimately the issue is an open society that is willing to tolerate a little bit of risk and let its citizens try new and crazy things. China is following the rocketry development cycle that America and Russia did in the Cold War and are trying to duplicate those efforts. Sadly, that is the most expensive and least productive way to get things done. Perhaps China will discover that for themselves, but I wonder how many Yuan are going to be dumped into that effort before they finally notice?
I don't buy the economic arguments. Here is some food for thought:
In the year 1938, who was the largest importer of goods from Germany? Would you believe France? #2 was Russia and #3 was Britain.
And in the same time period, who was Japan's largest trading partner? America, followed by China.
Yeah, all of those economic ties did a whole lot of good in terms of convincing the leaders of Germany and Japan to not bomb and destroy their leading customers.
If a country will go to war, they will have their reasons for doing that which has absolutely no relevance as to what economic ties may exist. Still, in regards to China, I think they are more likely to get involved in a conflict with India than to deal with America. At least they share a common border with India (even if it isn't all that large).
The problem with the American spaceflight effort wasn't the construction of the STS or ISS, it was the notion that they were the ultimate and final product and the pinnacle of what human spaceflight could ever achieve. More specifically, it was the problem of putting "all of the eggs in one basket" and hoping that a high flight rate would keep costs down for individual missions.
Just as important, once these programs were seen as fiscal black holes (which I will openly admit), they should have been shut down with other alternatives serious considered.
The jab at "capturing German technology" is patently unfair. Yes, the German rocket team that helped to develop the V-2 was brought to America and put to work for the U.S. Army (it wasn't even the Army Air Corps, it was the Artillery branch that ended up getting the missile program), but there were very much indigenous efforts for building rockets in America as well. This remark completely dismisses the efforts of Robert Goddard, not to mention the tens of thousands of engineers who ended up working for NASA and NASA contractors to help build the rockets that ended up going to the Moon and elsewhere.
For those so clueless to think that all you need is a modified ICBM in order to go into space, I need to point out that the problem domains are really quite different, and the "advanced" spaceflight rockets really can't be used for ICBMs or the other way around either. Yes, when rocketry was first being established you could have a "dual purpose" rocket that could both deliver a heavy warhead and put somebody into space, but even then it was design compromises that ultimately were unsustainable.
What needed to happen with both the ISS and the STS program was a series of iterative programs that would build upon the successes and failures of the previous designs. In other words, there should have been a Shuttle Mark II, version 3, 4, 5 and so forth. It also should have been a much smaller vehicle and there should have been an operational tempo to have many more flights removing the ego of having the perfect design.... which it never had. The Skylab program ended up putting into space a station that had about half of the volume of the ISS (and about the size of MIR) for a substantial fraction of the cost of the ISS. The question should not have been why the ISS, but why there wasn't a Skylab II mission built in the 1980's. Oh.... of course the Saturn V, arguably one of the most successful rockets produced by NASA, was dumped down a rat hole too in favor of the "one true program" that redid everything.
Otherwise, I'm trying to figure out why this post was modded anything but "troll" and "flamebait". It certainly deserves it.
Considering that Adolph Hitler was a member of the Communist Party in the Bavarian Soviet Socialist Republic, I think the ties to socialism are a fair bit closer than you might think. Certainly at heart he was a socialist even if his methods may have been a bit extreme.
Then again, other socialist groups have sought totalitarian ideals as well. Just look at North Korea for how wonderful socialism seems to be working out.
I'd have to disagree, although the development of computing would have certainly taken a more "leisurely" pace than what it did in the late 20th Century.
What would have happened is that computers would have been seen as these big boxes or even completely separate buildings and have been used mostly for large organizations and governments. Keep in mind that most "Information Technology" departments owe at least some of their heritage to the "high priesthood of computer technicians" where only a select few were granted access to the computers.
I'm old enough to have been alive when programmers didn't even have a terminal on their desktop. Instead they have reams of paper that they carefully wrote software character by character with a pencil and then handed out sheets of code to transcriptionists who converted those sheets of paper into punch cards.... where you might be lucky to get the results of your software test in about a day or two unless your software was a high priority project. "The computer" was a place you could visit and go inside.
The question is how long that era of computer technology would have lasted. If Babbage had succeeded in getting funding from the British government in the 19th Century to complete his devices, their utility certainly would have been obvious and many of the suggestions made in this article would have occurred. Hinted at by the author would be the driving need to develop material science much earlier than actually happened, especially with the need to develop strong and lightweight materials in an attempt to miniaturize the devices. That would have in turn impacted the British military in some rather profound ways that might have pushed them into advancing in a great many other areas of scientific research.
For instance, how would World War One (not Two) have turned out differently with artillery that had the deadly accuracy that ended up being used in the Gulf War of 1990? Would Rudolf Diesel have developed a more efficient engine having those metal parts designed for computing available for internal combustion? How much earlier would aviation had developed with lightweight metals?
It is very hard to say what would have happened. Communications would have been slower (was slower) in the 19th Century, and that would have in turn slowed the development of computing compared to what we have today... but given a hundred year head start it certainly would have impacted more than just computing.
BTW, the integrated circuit didn't become used on a widespread basis until about 1970 or so. One of the very first significant applications of the technology was the Apollo Guidance Computers used for the lunar exploration program, where NASA ended up purchasing a substantial high two-digit percentage fraction of the total world-wide production (and one of the early sources of seed money for developing the semi-conductor industry). Most of the computers built in the 1960's used either vacuum tubes or discrete transistors when they were "improved versions". It is hard to say that computing technology hit a plateau until 1970.
Grammar checkers for formal languages like computer programming languages is trivial compared to natural language processing issues. Another problem is that often the grammar checker straight jackets you into forming sentences in a fashion that pulls feeling out of whatever it is that you are expressing.
Yes, there might be a role for an automated grammar checker, but like spell checkers they have a narrow application of usage. They are also not nearly as easy as you are suggesting in terms of how to write them, where natural language processing is one of the major sub-branches of artificial intelligence that has some extensive research but all of the typical problems of AI in general: an initial burst of excitement as the initial steps bear fruit, but eventual frustration over the lack of progress beyond the basic tools that seem to be created in the first few years.
I have seen articles on Wikipedia that stick around for any reasonable length of time (about six months to a year being typical) usually attract grammar nazis (or people who are annoyed by bad grammar in general) that do a copy edit and try to fix the article to make it read better. Longer articles tend to attract more people than stubs, particularly if they are well linked to other articles. The subject matter doesn't seem to make a difference, and there are a few bots on Wikipedia which try to scan articles for spelling errors and other minor issues.
The issue of British vs. American spellings has been a long resolved issue, and for the most part consistency is more the rule than anything else. Sometimes I've seen protracted edit wars over grammar usage between several editors, but even that tends to be rather harmless.
My point here is that the proofreading does happen, it just happens on a slower time scale and is something that usually only shows up for more mature articles, mature as in more well developed articles that seem to be trying to say something. Articles that are in a constant flux of revision will be less likely to see this kind of activity, or more accurately will tend to see such efforts wasted as the article content changes. Still, if you can get an article to "B quality" status or better, the grammar and quality of the article in terms of spelling and other aspects will be reviewed by at least somebody over time.
While I will admit that some of the "social network games" can be distracting (and certainly room to complain about Facebook), I disagree that Moodle is the best approach here either. Yes, I've used Moodle as well, and the problem is to me the "top down" control over the communication. Still, this particular software package is better than some approaches, and if the IT department of the school district forces a straight jacket on you then I guess you are stuck with it.
Some of this is the issue of "cheating" too. I am approaching this from the perspective of somebody who has been "in the real world" trying to develop applications and not hung up in academia in some sort of walled garden that tries to separate students from each other and zap their creative energies. It certainly is not cheating if multiple students collaborate with each other.
Yes, there is a need to evaluate students in some manner and to assign a "grade" to whatever it is that they are doing in the class. Lazy instructors (and educational policy makers as well) come up with standardized tests which often as not produce horrible results and don't translate very well to actual learning, or for that matter really prepare the students for how life will be like once they leave the classroom. I'm just suggesting here that I've seen some outstanding teachers over the years, now that I have children working their way through the education system themselves, and they use these techniques I am suggesting for other subjects and this concept certainly could be used for a computer science class as well.
In fairness to computer scientists who do discover new techniques and algorithms that can have a substantial impact upon humanity, what does adding a new element onto the end of the period table really accomplish any more? Dmitri Mendeleev has certainly been proven over and over again that his "discovery" was very useful and some profound insights can be found from a purposeful study of that table, but most of the new elements only have dozens or fewer atoms that you can play with.... assuming you are the lead researcher in a team which has access to the equipment necessary to push on toward the end of the periodic table anyway.
Heck, discovering a new element isn't even a place where you can make an impact in terms of physics. I would suggest that discovering a new planet is something a whole lot more worthwhile, and something that perhaps even a classroom full of kids in high school could accomplish with some of the tools that are available now for astronomical research. It certainly is a field with more data than researchers can keep up with, and something for which a room full of budding computer technicians and researchers might be able to come up with new ways to cope with that fire hose of data spewing forth. Folks who are working to find new elements are happy if they provide a new data point for some physical property of elements, like discovering that Bismuth actually has a half-life.
Along this line of thought, also get the "screen capture" utilities (they are available from multiple vendors) so the instructor can not only be "watching over the shoulder" while the student is writing code, but more importantly so an instructor can grab something the student is working on and show the software being developed to the whole class on a projector for everybody to see, and encourage class collaboration on fixing bugs or trying to resolve issues that come up in the development process. Don't restrict this to just between the teacher and student, but allow other students to "peek in" on what their classmates are doing as well or to even collaboratively write software from multiple stations simultaneously.
Another thing that would help here as well is to have "social network" tools available like instant messages and e-mails, with possibly the restriction that you can only contact other students within the school using those tools (various ways to accomplish that task). Include message boards or even a localized version of Diaspora (or something that approximates Facebook)... with the goal in mind that students can "network" with each other to solve assigned problems.
Hopefully with such tools available, you don't have a teacher who thinks "Hello World" is a major accomplishment for students in a high school classroom.
While this is perhaps a bit over the top for a High School lab, I think the ideal college computer lab would be one that puts an absolute prohibition on software going into the lab. The idea here is that competent computer science students ought to be capable of writing all of the software necessary for such a lab... including the operating system and even the TCP/IP stack and even the compilers. Since it is all being done there in the school.... document it and make sure that everybody knows what you are doing.
No, it wouldn't be something built in a single semester or term, but it would do a whole lot of good for people coming out of a college being exposed to actual hardware and working out the problems of how software is built, or why certain things are being done.
Of course this concept of a computer lab is something that professors and university administrators bent on producing an assembly line of future workers for IT companies would hate, because obviously they wouldn't be able to learn the "cool" tools being used elsewhere. But it would give them exposure to actual computer science and be able to understand how operating systems actually work rather than taking it on blind faith and assuming it is a black box.
In that lab, I'd also put paper copies of most of the RFCs from the IETF (or perhaps ASCII text files), as well as copies of the ACM and IEEE journals as well as other legitimate sources of information that competent programmers ought to be reading anyway. Games would be permitted, but it would have to be games that were developed inside the lab and not brought in from outside. Give access to this lab 24/7 to students, and see what some very creative people could actually come up with. Since the OS was just something thrown together by another student, encouraging students to rewrite parts of the OS would even be encouraged (and source code would be presumably available in such situations). Depending on school policies, encourage or even expect students to release everything developed in the lab under some sort of "open source" license (preferably GPL or MIT).
That is an absolute must-have for the Middle-Earth Holiday Special!
If only they could get George Lucas to produce it, like his previous masterpiece
BTW, thank you for the link.... it was a great laugh!
In a great many ways, Gemini was more advanced than Apollo. This shouldn't be surprising so far as it was established after the Apollo program was already running along very well and that the engineers behind Gemini were able to start with a "clean-sheet" design to build their vehicles. It was a small, very agile design team with a limited budget (unlike Apollo where the statement "waste anything but time" was plastered on the walls of many contractors) and a well defined scope to their vehicles. The total amount of money spent on the whole program was just a little over a billion dollars, which included the spacecraft costs, the launchers, and even the estimated cost of the recovery fleets involved (multiple U.S. Navy fleets assigned for a couple weeks on each mission).
All in all, this is really a tribute to SpaceX that they can even build something comparable, and you sir have given SpaceX a huge compliment by even making the comparison. There was even an attempt by McDonnell Douglas to continue the program with the Big Gemini project (more details can be found here), sadly only the first of a great many NASA manned spaceflight programs to be cancelled over the years even after hardware was created.
More importantly, the physics is still the same today as it was forty years ago, so it shouldn't be so surprising that similar solutions have been found to get the job done, at least from a superficial point of view.
The problem with this thinking is the presumption there is only two data points. There are currently at least 19 different planetary systems with at least three or more planets which can be used for a comparison, and almost everybody involved with extrasolar planets knows this is just the beginning of discoveries. All told, there have been over 700 different planets which have been confirmed outside of our little old Solar System.
I would say that is enough to begin some statistical models and try to come up with some general trends based upon real data besides the single data point of the Sun and its planets. More significantly, this seems to indicate that planetary systems around stars are quite common to the point that stars without planets seem to be an exception... particularly if those stars are solitary stars rather than in systems of multiple stars.
Admittedly we are still mostly blind about what is "out there", but the Kepler survey seems to be providing some real statistical information about how common planetary systems might be, and since so many of the Kepler telescope candidates seem to be found in groups of multiple planets, it seems very likely that one common presumption of planetary formation being in a disc-like structure seems to be holding out very well. What the Kepler survey is really good at doing is identifying candidates which can then be studied with better telescopes now that we know some properties of these particular planetary systems, or even that they exist at all.
Why does it matter what is "fuel" and what is technically "oxidizer"? If you had a tank full of LOX and were flying in the atmosphere of Titan, it indeed would be the "fuel" in a jet engine where the Methane would be pulled freely from the atmosphere.
It really doesn't matter when you are hauling all of the chemicals needed for a reaction anyway, nor is Oxygen really necessary as long as when you are combining two chemicals together to produce an exothermic reaction with a high ISP. It just happens that Oxygen reactions tend to work out very well for getting that high ISP.
I guess you are referring to a company like XCor, who is building that "liquid fueled space plane" from scratch?
It is happening, and XCor is hardly the only company doing stuff like this (or even the most famous of them). While their main vehicle is admittedly a sub-orbital vehicle, they are on track to be able to take this vehicle into orbit eventually or something like it using the same basic technology set. Jeff Greason is somebody who I've come to admire over the years and I think he is certainly capable (and does!) of understanding orbital mechanics, the rocket equation, and "critical safety systems" needed for manned spaceflight.
This is one of the things that really sort of makes my head scratch here, as there are so many other ways to get into space including companies who have been working on this problem in terms of a reasonable civilian solution to get it to work that I don't understand why any sort of group of private investors would want to resurrect the dead with restarting the Shuttle program again. It boggle my mind even thinking about it.
Why should "sunk costs" and other related "fixed costs" not be included with the launch cost of the Shuttle?
BTW, I agree that the Shuttle should have been flown more often, but there were a number of factors that kept the flight rate low as well. Even at the peak of the Shuttle program when everything seemed to be working and there was a huge backlog of launches to be made, there were never more than a dozen flights per year. Even with both pad 39A & 39B in full launch tempo and a theoretically unlimited budget from Congress could NASA have ever launched more than one shuttle every two weeks, with some months where the Shuttle program should have been shut down because they were operating outside of the design envelope in terms of environmental conditions (like during a Hurricane or other nasty weather that sometimes hits KSC).
The other problem is that the size of the Shuttle fleet needed to be expanded significantly to keep that kind of operational tempo going as well, which was more cost that needed to be addressed as well. While orbiters could have their costs spread out over multiple flights, they weren't exactly cheap to build either and was one of the problems that kept the Shuttle program from having a higher operational tempo as well. It is also one of the reasons why after the loss of the Columbia that NASA had to cut back even more on the flight rate.... hence driving up costs.
The issue isn't the engineering team, but rather the technicians who actually build the equipment. In spite of the thought you can simply train any random group of primates to build this stuff, the actual construction of rockets is a highly skilled task that frankly few aerospace engineers could actually accomplish without a whole lot of experience. If they have any experience at the process at all, it is likely something they've gained from doing rocketry as a hobby rather than something they've done sitting in come cubicle churning through the rocket equation trying to come up with a better design.
It is the assembly and deployment team that was lost with both the Apollo program as well as the Shuttle program. The people who worked for Rockwell International and actually built the orbiters themselves are not only retired but have been pushing up daisies for a couple of decades, and the assembly plant was reused for another task during the Reagan administration. Even the orbiters that are currently available were built upon test articles that were refurbished to make them flight worthy, most notably the Endeavor. When the Challenger was destroyed, the production line didn't "start up" again... NASA just took spare parts and cobbled something together that worked.
The suppliers who made the spare parts for the Shuttle had largely been shut down by the end of the George W. Bush administration, with one of the last of the major suppliers being the external tank manufacturing facility at Michoud, where again many of the technicians who built the thing have retired and those who haven't also moved onto other things in life. The workforce to build the Shuttle and make things happen simply isn't there any more.
Yes, that workforce was put together once upon a time, and it certainly could be reassembled for the right price. It sure won't be cheap.
BTW, in spite of what you may have read or seen from that MIT Opencourseware series, the termination of the Apollo program did result in a huge number of mechanical and electrical engineers losing their jobs in the early 1970's. It could be argued that it resulted in the "computer revolution" as many of these engineers had to come up something to do with their skills together with desperate college graduates entering a profession that had a glut of older and very experienced counterparts looking for work. This is one of the critical factors that created Silicon Valley and the entrepreneurial culture seen in that part of the world and could be considered legitimately a "spin-off" of the Apollo program. While some of these engineers did find work with the Shuttle program when that program started to ramp up again by the end of the 1970's, not all of them came back. Even a "temporary lay-off" and the effects of the termination of the Apollo program were not mitigated by the creation of the Shuttle.
Perhaps the worst casualty of the termination of the Apollo program was how Werner Von Braun was cashiered through a series of "promotions" that brought him to Washington DC as an assistant administrator and eventual retirement, but kept him from doing any more rocket designs. He wasn't the only engineer who was dumped either.
For a great many years there has been an issue of even getting stuff into space, and there is a larger issue of the ICBM research that for a time was parallel to civilian rocketry efforts as both had roughly the same goal: to put something up high above the Earth.
The problem is that ICBM research ultimately has divergent goals from civilian rocketry, or in other words for putting stuff into orbit or into space far beyond the Earth. With an ICBM, the goal is to deliver the warhead as quickly as possible to the destination. Factors like cost per pound are generally irrelevant, and high acceleration rates are seen as a bonus and highly desired. Keep in mind that acceleration on some ICBMs can hit as high as 300-500 m/s^2 (about 30-50 "G's"), which is something decidedly not wanted when putting a satellite into orbit. Pushing the envelope in terms of the rocket performance is even encouraged in that kind of environment, on top of the fact that the ICBMs need a kind of fuel where the missiles can sit in a silo for years or even decades at a time ready to be launched at a moments notice.
None of that is necessary for a civilian rocket for putting something into space. For civilian rocketry, you need a rocket that can be reliably launched, but it doesn't have to sit on the launch pad all that long after being prepared, and can use volatile cryogenic fuels like liquid oxygen that an ICBM really doesn't use very well (even though some countries still use it for ballistic missiles). Another minor difference between ICBMs and civilian rockets is that you don't need dozens or even hundreds of launch sites, as just a small number of well-built and routinely used launch facilities are needed. An ICBM launch officer dreads the day that his skills are actually put into service, but a launch director at a civilian facility should have experience at launching dozens if not more rockets to be considered even marginally competent.
All of these differences and even more have influenced the launch market, and explain some of the problems facing civilian rocketry when in fact much of what NASA has been doing has been tangentially tied to keeping the military side of things going, or at least the suppliers for military hardware running. This is one of the reasons for the SLS project, as well as the earlier Constellation program and perhaps even arguably the Shuttle in an earlier time. The SRBs used the technology associated with ICBMs, and the production of Ammonium Perchlorate in particular is vital to the ICBM development in the future. Unfortunately civilian rocketry doesn't need that chemical in the same way and arguably it isn't needed at all. The use of solid fuel SRBs significantly improved the reliability and integrity of the ICBMs that the USAF are using, but at what cost? From the viewpoint of a NASA manager trying to justify his annual budget, subsidizing the Air Force doesn't seem to be a very wise use of civilian spaceflight funds.
There were more than a few sub-contractors that were doing some parts for SpaceX that Elon Musk simply offered instead to buy the whole company rather than have the option for some other company to bump them down in priority. While not all of the suppliers have taken the bait, quite a few of them have.
The other issue is that SpaceX, by having most of the production including the critical production (both quality and time-dependent parts) in-house, they are also able to control the reliability of the whole system as well. This isn't being done because some companies are "gouging", but rather to make sure they can get the parts when they need them. That by bringing it in house they are also getting cheaper parts which are of higher quality is just a side benefit that also lowers their production costs and can ensure a consistent Q/A standard throughout the whole process.
One other thing that SpaceX is working on as well is to see that the employees on the production line get to practice their skills. Tasks which you only perform every couple of years are likely to be rusty or perhaps you even repeat mistakes made in the past for a whole variety of reasons, not the least of which is because it is often a whole new team doing those tasks as the "old guys" have moved on to other things. Instead, the production tempo that SpaceX is working for is to reduce that cycle time for most employees to less than a month (preferably about two weeks) to be repeating some given task in the production line. That gives them the opportunity to refine the production techniques and offer legitimate suggestions for improving the process by guys bending metal and making the essential parts of the rocket.
For instance, the Merlin engines are expected to have a production queue that to meet the upcoming launch manifest is going to need a new rocket engine every week, on average. Most other rocketry companies have never had a production rate that high except when the ICBMs were being built at the height of the Cold War.
Still, While Virgin Galactic won't get you very far, a SpaceX Dragon capsule can get you to LEO and quite possibly to Mars or the Moon as well (given some extra supplies and a secondary booster). If you dig up the costs that SpaceX claims, you can do a circumlunar trip (aka recreating Apollo 8) for about $50-$100 million per seat. Even at that huge price, it is still cheaper than most estimates given for the Space Shuttle.
So which route gets you to more exotic destinations again?
BTW, ditto for the Soyuz spacecraft, and RKK Energia is already building the modifications for destinations beyond LEO, and can get you to LEO with their proven designs.
Even there, that isn't the only game in town. Paul Allen just announced a new spacecraft design that could even get you up to LEO for a comparatively cheap price.... something I've done "back of the envelope" prices of about $10-$20 million per seat. Boeing is also producing a spacecraft (CST-100) that can be launched on an Atlas V or Delta IV. So why would you spend 10x that price to go up on the Shuttle again?
That was not a long-term study, but rather something done on the Space Shuttle (before the ISS was built.... in the SpaceLab module sometimes put in the cargo bay) and was really only a two week study that didn't prove a thing.
Nice try there, and perhaps some inference can be pulled from that study (something I was well aware of BTW and perhaps should have mentioned you need not respond with). It was a pregnant rat which gave birth in space to what appeared to be some healthy young ones even after the Shuttle landed, and there were some "longitudinal studies" done on those baby rats that suggest there is nothing to worry about in terms of gestational development.
Still, the actual knowledge of what goes on in terms of actually conceiving babies in space is non-existent, and it shouldn't be a problem to at least try and find out what is going on.
Venus is interesting because Oxygen can be considered a lifting gas there. A giant airship made with an oxygen interior would be sufficient for an object that could even be at an altitude near Earth "standard pressure & temperature", where even a tear in the envelope could be repaired on a human time scale.... it wouldn't even be an urgent repair. Making the skin of such a vehicle resistant to sulfuric acid might be more of a technical challenge, but not significantly so.
I don't know of a reason why you would want to build such a vehicle as a colony, but for a scientific research post similar to the Amundsen-Scott base in Antarctica, I would imagine Venus would offer some substantial appeal and might even be easier to operate than the South Pole. If such a "colony" evolved from a basic research post and expanded somehow, with even an internal "spit" for political reasons that created a second or third "colony" ship, it could be very interesting, particularly with some extended interplanetary commerce as you pointed out. All told, living on/near Venus, even in an airship, would be perhaps the most "Earth-like" environment in the Solar System, so it certainly could be an interesting endeavor from a fictional standpoint.
A very interesting place to start in terms of real vehicles traveling to Venus would be to look at the proposed Apollo Venus Flyby Mission that went as far as design work and even some preliminary testing of components that eventually were folded into the Skylab Missions. As an "alternative history" novel instead of necessarily Science Fiction, it would be interesting to see what manned flights to Venus might have done to American and world history if they had happened in the 1970's. That the idea was seriously considered at all and that the technology to perform that mission was available in the 1970's is even more amazing to me.
Since we haven't even taken up niches in the Solar System that we know can work for human habitation (aka Moon, Mars, Europa, etc.), I think even the need for worrying about interstellar travel is a non-existent issue. Once the rest of the Solar System is teeming with interplanetary politics and we are talking about a joint interplanetary mission to another star system (aka financed jointly by multiple planets in the Solar System) will any such discussion about interstellar flight even be worth worrying about.
Get people into space first. The furthest anybody has left the Earth in the 21st Century so far has been a few hundred miles above the surface, to the International Space Station as if that was a major accomplishment. The largest spacecraft that humanity has available right now is sufficient to hold a crew of just three people, and made only by one country at the moment, Russia. China doesn't count as they aren't even flying regularly, and America won't have a working spacecraft for anywhere from 5-10 years, assuming that Congress and/or the FAA will even permit those vehicles to fly with people.
Regardless, I agree with your basic premise here that most "colonization" trips will likely be one way ventures. They don't strictly have to, and you can use an Aldrin Cycler for the travel between two significant destinations (aka Earth-Mars) with something like an enlarged DIRECT-X spaceship in interplanetary space. If somehow you can get a nuclear rocket going that can provide continuous powered thrust, in theory you can get an Earth-Mars trip down to about two to three weeks without having to worry about stuff like relativistic travel or really trying to invent new kinds of physics to make the trip.