Great idea! They are putting a lot of faith in an organisation that has exactly one successful orbital launch of a dummy spacecraft to their credit. SpaceX is an admirable organisation, but it is a decade away from being able to launch large payloads. The Falcon 9 has never flown. Given the track record of the Falcon 1 we can expect failures. And when they lose a mission to ISS, what then? Will failure be tolerated?
Uncontrolled immigration is the obvious problem. Encouraging illegals with free government services adds to it. Keep the disease ridden out and the problem goes away.
Neither the Delta IV or Atlas V are suitable to launch an Orion vehicle. Talk about under powered. An Atlas V with five solid boosters would provide a wild ride! The Delta IV without cross feed is utterly useless. And it is a far more complex vehicle than the Ares I. Is it safer to launch humans on 4 complex hydrogen stages or 1? The vibrational dynamics of the Ares I first stage are well understood. Harping further on the issue is a canard. Direct is a decent launch architecture but grossly inappropriate for the Orion lunar mission. The payload capability is gross overkill for the Orion LEO mission, and it is underpowered for the lunar mission. Furthermore, the architecture is so similar to the Ares V why not build the larger more versatile vehicle? Your point about the increased tank diameter of the Ares V is trivial. The construction and insulation are very similar to the shuttle ET. Sadly, due to a lack of political leadership, we will have a space program designed by committee, and the feckless indecision will continue.
To me that means that they need to consider EELV's or truly shuttle-derived systems, limited-but-new goals such as Mars orbit or asteroids, and new contracting methods that involve purchasing services, not funding development.
Now there is an exciting vision for a space program. NASA should purchase space transportation services from private industry that doesn't exist. The Delta IV and Atlas V are not man rated vehicles and are to small for the task. Ares I and V are shuttle and EELV derived, using shuttle SRB's, tankage, and infrastructure and EELV and Apollo derived engines. Please understand what you are talking about before you post.
Plus I wouldn't say 'cash for clunkers' was setting the money alight. It improved the fuel economy of the average car in the US (not by much, but its something
In making that microscopic gain in fuel economy C4C resulted in the distruction of $10's of billions of used car assets, whose loss will be felt in the used car industry. This will adversely effect poor people who cannot afford new government cars. How is it in the interest of a used car salesman to use his tax contribution to destroy his own business? Rank ignorance. Think!
The $3 billion that Obama just set alight with the 'cash for clunkers' program could have been used to accelerate the Constellation program, not to mention the hundreds of billions pissed away on the 'porkulus'. Perhaps some of it can be rescinded by the next congress and transfered to NASA.
Great. More far-sitted planning by Norm Augustine, the same guy that wrote the same report in 1990. Umm. L1 and and L2 are great destinations, except there is nothing there! Is it suprising that Obama is throwing sand in NASA's gears? He wasn't bashful about hijacking the American car and banking industries, so why shouldn't he think he can run NASA as well? He is a Harvard lawyer after all.
Why would the US want to participate in a skank, low class mission like this when we have an armada of successful spacecraft already operating on Mars and more advanced ones on the way? It would just lend prestige to the backward Russian and the Chinese effort.
Is anyone else uncomfortable with Obama's lawyers and bean counters architecting America's space program now that it is on a reasonable course? Reengineering a Delta IV heavy to carry a manned Orion would be like developing an entire new rocket.
Scientists think they can make predict climate through their dynamic models. It is reasonable to ask what they hope to accomplish through geoengineering? Is the Earth climate system controlable, from an optimal control standpoint with the single constrained variable CO2 partial pressure? What would be the goal of the geoengineering? Before they start the political onslaught perhaps proponents of this should answer the question.
The valuable materials are refractory metals, like Ti, Mg, Ni, Cr, Mn. The lunar surface is relatively Aluminum poor. The lunar highlands are made up of anorthosite which contains some aluminum, but it is tighly bound no more a useful ore there than it is on earth. We don't need to go to the moon to mine silica. The mare and highlands ate silica poor. The moon would yield strategic metals.
By this logic we should irradicate the great whales, or any large size fauna for their impact on the environment. Nature will select large individuals in the coming ice age that cuts in CO2 emissions will bring. It would be wise to keep them around.
Great question! I said oceanic crust. Mount Everest sits atop a *double* thickness of continental crust - the Indian plate thrusting atop Asia to form the Himalaya. This crust is relatively bouyant on the mantle, resulting in mountains about double the height of what is usual. Another curiosity is the height of the high Andes at about 20000'. These mountains sit atop a thickened, bouyent accretion wedge from the Nazca subduction zone. So they are a bit higher than the norm on the continents. The theory is simple isostacy. A mountain's height depends on the density of the material beneath it
This was already suspected. The giant volcanic pile of Tharis fails to cause significant flexure of the lithosphere. This has been known since the Viking days. On earth 14000' feet (the height of Mona Loa) is about how much you can load oceanic crust on earth without causing it to sag. On Mars no such sagging occurs, and Olympus Mons is nearly 90000' above the planetary mean! This has been known since the Viking days. The polar observations add another data point, but the result is not a surprise.
Cassini was supposed to be NASA's last Battlestar Galactica. But Mars Science Laboratory is scope creeping and soaking up much of the Mars funding these days. As smartly designed and surprising as the previous Mars Rovers missions have been run, the most successful planetary missions of all time, Mars Science Laboratory is a bloated monster. For the same $1G+ we could have had 4 improved rovers of the earlier model covering the planet. The new rover had better cover a lot of ground and land in an interesting place for it to be worth the cost. Unfortunately mission planners will have to be cautious because there is only one.
You most definitely can park a spacecraft in the same orbit as ISS. Where did you learn your orbotal mechanics, on a CrackerJack box? That craft and ISS will undergo similar nongravitational forces. Some station keeping is always necessary. This is what the ATV will be doing for the next month.
NASA was sane enough to allow Russia and Europe to participate. NASA was also sane enough to launch over 90% of the station mass. Part of the cost overrun problem was coordinating so many more participants than were originally planned. As for the cosmic ray detector - don't you think that is a mission that might best be accomplished unmanned?
You don't know what you are talking about. A grapple arm has never been used to dock a craft to ISS and never will. You may complain that the shuttle uses a human in the loop to dock with the ISS. I think the caution is warranted considering the orbiter weighs 285000 lbs and carries 7 crew. Orion will have a standard docking adapter and can fly unmanned. So will SpaceX and Taurus II.
Perhaps is says something about the ultimate utility of single use ships as opposed to reusable.
Strip mining followed by dissociation, yah right
on
New Radar Maps of Moon
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Not to mention that the sparse ice regolith deposits would have to be extensively strip mined, presumably by nuclear powered equipment, and then chemically dissociated, another energy intensive process, to produce a minute amount of fuel and oxidizer. All this on a topography with 37,000 feet of elevation change. It is surprising how silly ideas like this persist.
Wow! We certainly made good capitalists out of the Russians. Too bad they are now so cynical and utterly devoid of idealism. Stallman's ideas about software freedom are just an extension of concepts of intellectual freedom that come from the ancient Greeks. It is inceasingly obvious that Russia is not western civilization.
To be even more frank, the ESA has since made it to Titan
Well, they did have a little help hitching a ride on the NASA/JPL Cassini spacecraft and the Lockmart Titan IV Centaur. With all that they screwed up development of Huygen's radio transmitter ignoring the doppler effect between Cassini and the probe. This was fixed by NASA by redesigning the Huygen's landing. ESA still screwed up the entry losing half of the returned data. If you aren't impressed by the US program one wonders whose you are impressed with? China? NASA has an absolute armada of spacecraft throughout the solar system. No other nation comes close.
I'm not an engineer, but I think they went with B/W images to actually get better results with the camera.
The surface is nearly colorless (gray), like the moon. So images in all wavelengths they look about the same. Particulate surfaces that are highly gardened by meterite strikes tend to be like that. Perhaps thermal IR or X ray florescence would show more variation.
Slashdot Mirror
Great idea! They are putting a lot of faith in an organisation that has exactly one successful orbital launch of a dummy spacecraft to their credit. SpaceX is an admirable organisation, but it is a decade away from being able to launch large payloads. The Falcon 9 has never flown. Given the track record of the Falcon 1 we can expect failures. And when they lose a mission to ISS, what then? Will failure be tolerated?
Obama is a madman. He wants to nationalize heathcare and privatize NASA, to the utter ruinment of both. How's that change workin' for ya?
Uncontrolled immigration is the obvious problem. Encouraging illegals with free government services adds to it. Keep the disease ridden out and the problem goes away.
Neither the Delta IV or Atlas V are suitable to launch an Orion vehicle. Talk about under powered. An Atlas V with five solid boosters would provide a wild ride! The Delta IV without cross feed is utterly useless. And it is a far more complex vehicle than the Ares I. Is it safer to launch humans on 4 complex hydrogen stages or 1? The vibrational dynamics of the Ares I first stage are well understood. Harping further on the issue is a canard. Direct is a decent launch architecture but grossly inappropriate for the Orion lunar mission. The payload capability is gross overkill for the Orion LEO mission, and it is underpowered for the lunar mission. Furthermore, the architecture is so similar to the Ares V why not build the larger more versatile vehicle? Your point about the increased tank diameter of the Ares V is trivial. The construction and insulation are very similar to the shuttle ET. Sadly, due to a lack of political leadership, we will have a space program designed by committee, and the feckless indecision will continue.
To me that means that they need to consider EELV's or truly shuttle-derived systems, limited-but-new goals such as Mars orbit or asteroids, and new contracting methods that involve purchasing services, not funding development.
Now there is an exciting vision for a space program. NASA should purchase space transportation services from private industry that doesn't exist. The Delta IV and Atlas V are not man rated vehicles and are to small for the task. Ares I and V are shuttle and EELV derived, using shuttle SRB's, tankage, and infrastructure and EELV and Apollo derived engines. Please understand what you are talking about before you post.
Plus I wouldn't say 'cash for clunkers' was setting the money alight. It improved the fuel economy of the average car in the US (not by much, but its something
In making that microscopic gain in fuel economy C4C resulted in the distruction of $10's of billions of used car assets, whose loss will be felt in the used car industry. This will adversely effect poor people who cannot afford new government cars. How is it in the interest of a used car salesman to use his tax contribution to destroy his own business? Rank ignorance. Think!
The $3 billion that Obama just set alight with the 'cash for clunkers' program could have been used to accelerate the Constellation program, not to mention the hundreds of billions pissed away on the 'porkulus'. Perhaps some of it can be rescinded by the next congress and transfered to NASA.
Great. More far-sitted planning by Norm Augustine, the same guy that wrote the same report in 1990. Umm. L1 and and L2 are great destinations, except there is nothing there! Is it suprising that Obama is throwing sand in NASA's gears? He wasn't bashful about hijacking the American car and banking industries, so why shouldn't he think he can run NASA as well? He is a Harvard lawyer after all.
A Life of the Genious Ramanujan by Robert Kanagel
Why would the US want to participate in a skank, low class mission like this when we have an armada of successful spacecraft already operating on Mars and more advanced ones on the way? It would just lend prestige to the backward Russian and the Chinese effort.
Is anyone else uncomfortable with Obama's lawyers and bean counters architecting America's space program now that it is on a reasonable course? Reengineering a Delta IV heavy to carry a manned Orion would be like developing an entire new rocket.
Scientists think they can make predict climate through their dynamic models. It is reasonable to ask what they hope to accomplish through geoengineering? Is the Earth climate system controlable, from an optimal control standpoint with the single constrained variable CO2 partial pressure? What would be the goal of the geoengineering? Before they start the political onslaught perhaps proponents of this should answer the question.
Agreed. Technological waste is some of the richest metal ore known.
The valuable materials are refractory metals, like Ti, Mg, Ni, Cr, Mn. The lunar surface is relatively Aluminum poor. The lunar highlands are made up of anorthosite which contains some aluminum, but it is tighly bound no more a useful ore there than it is on earth. We don't need to go to the moon to mine silica. The mare and highlands ate silica poor. The moon would yield strategic metals.
By this logic we should irradicate the great whales, or any large size fauna for their impact on the environment. Nature will select large individuals in the coming ice age that cuts in CO2 emissions will bring. It would be wise to keep them around.
Great question! I said oceanic crust. Mount Everest sits atop a *double* thickness of continental crust - the Indian plate thrusting atop Asia to form the Himalaya. This crust is relatively bouyant on the mantle, resulting in mountains about double the height of what is usual. Another curiosity is the height of the high Andes at about 20000'. These mountains sit atop a thickened, bouyent accretion wedge from the Nazca subduction zone. So they are a bit higher than the norm on the continents. The theory is simple isostacy. A mountain's height depends on the density of the material beneath it
This was already suspected. The giant volcanic pile of Tharis fails to cause significant flexure of the lithosphere. This has been known since the Viking days. On earth 14000' feet (the height of Mona Loa) is about how much you can load oceanic crust on earth without causing it to sag. On Mars no such sagging occurs, and Olympus Mons is nearly 90000' above the planetary mean! This has been known since the Viking days. The polar observations add another data point, but the result is not a surprise.
Cassini was supposed to be NASA's last Battlestar Galactica. But Mars Science Laboratory is scope creeping and soaking up much of the Mars funding these days. As smartly designed and surprising as the previous Mars Rovers missions have been run, the most successful planetary missions of all time, Mars Science Laboratory is a bloated monster. For the same $1G+ we could have had 4 improved rovers of the earlier model covering the planet. The new rover had better cover a lot of ground and land in an interesting place for it to be worth the cost. Unfortunately mission planners will have to be cautious because there is only one.
You most definitely can park a spacecraft in the same orbit as ISS. Where did you learn your orbotal mechanics, on a CrackerJack box? That craft and ISS will undergo similar nongravitational forces. Some station keeping is always necessary. This is what the ATV will be doing for the next month.
NASA was sane enough to allow Russia and Europe to participate. NASA was also sane enough to launch over 90% of the station mass. Part of the cost overrun problem was coordinating so many more participants than were originally planned. As for the cosmic ray detector - don't you think that is a mission that might best be accomplished unmanned?
You don't know what you are talking about. A grapple arm has never been used to dock a craft to ISS and never will. You may complain that the shuttle uses a human in the loop to dock with the ISS. I think the caution is warranted considering the orbiter weighs 285000 lbs and carries 7 crew. Orion will have a standard docking adapter and can fly unmanned. So will SpaceX and Taurus II.
Perhaps is says something about the ultimate utility of single use ships as opposed to reusable.
Not to mention that the sparse ice regolith deposits would have to be extensively strip mined, presumably by nuclear powered equipment, and then chemically dissociated, another energy intensive process, to produce a minute amount of fuel and oxidizer. All this on a topography with 37,000 feet of elevation change. It is surprising how silly ideas like this persist.
Wow! We certainly made good capitalists out of the Russians. Too bad they are now so cynical and utterly devoid of idealism. Stallman's ideas about software freedom are just an extension of concepts of intellectual freedom that come from the ancient Greeks. It is inceasingly obvious that Russia is not western civilization.
Next time you might try something other than wikipedia.
Well, they did have a little help hitching a ride on the NASA/JPL Cassini spacecraft and the Lockmart Titan IV Centaur. With all that they screwed up development of Huygen's radio transmitter ignoring the doppler effect between Cassini and the probe. This was fixed by NASA by redesigning the Huygen's landing. ESA still screwed up the entry losing half of the returned data. If you aren't impressed by the US program one wonders whose you are impressed with? China? NASA has an absolute armada of spacecraft throughout the solar system. No other nation comes close.
The surface is nearly colorless (gray), like the moon. So images in all wavelengths they look about the same. Particulate surfaces that are highly gardened by meterite strikes tend to be like that. Perhaps thermal IR or X ray florescence would show more variation.