...Landing something on Mars you at least have the option of aerobraking, reducing the amount of mass that needs to be sent.
I have heard this point made lately. What is its source? Doesn't the larger size required for a Mars ascent rocket and the large delta-v required to establish a return Mars/Earth transfer orbit require vastly more energy than a return lunar orbit? It seems to me that if you want the ultimate low energy exploration target we should be sending manned missions to nearby asteroids.
Cringely says that M$ earns $600M per month in interest on their cash hoard. They can easily afford to make this payment and continue to torture Sun outside of court unencumbered.
The most interesting thing about the Falcon X
second stage is that it is pressure fed. This simplifies the rocket design at the expense of increasing its size.
Check out this old
but interesting article which discusses many ideas which the folks at FalconX seemed to have taken to heart.
Let's see, there's the invasion of Iraq (against the wishes of the U.N.)
Yes, the U.N. tried to protect its oil for food skim. The war disrupted that.
...and withdrawl from the Kyoto Protocol [vexen.co.uk] to name a couple.
Junk science at its worse. A thinly veiled attempt by the "world community" to hobble the economic growth of the U.S.
Armchair explorers
on
The Wrong Stuff
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Legacy? I hope so. The alternative to
is for the U.S. to submit to eggheads like Mr. Weinberg - armchair explorers, who thrill at reducing the wonders of the universe to a few bits on a computer screen. They risk nothing, and gain nothing. Not a vision I share.
The key here is if they can get the funding. The shuttle will be retired in 2010 and with no credible replacement on the horizon...why doesn't NASA give the Russians a chance?"
This might be a better opportunity for the Europeans. They have long had good launch capability but no manned program beyond tagging along on shuttle missions. Russian knowhow with manned spaceflight combined with Europe's Arianne
launcher and equatorial launch site would be a strong combination.
Perceived US failures to replace the shuttle were due to the desire to create a single stage to orbit vehicle with similar palyload capacity to the shuttle (X-33/Venture Star) - a tall order. The Bush administration has wisely called for the abandonment of the shuttle philosophy and seeks
to build on Apollo's successes more directly.
Boeing concepts of the Crew Exploration Vehicle are much more capable than the Russian proposal.
What the hell does this mean? Any U.S. astronomer can apply for Hubble time. Yes, astronomers would like to retain and upgrade an excellent observatory that offers a unique window to the universe. Why do you consider astronomers who want to continue to use a telescope 'entrenched'?
I consider Senator Mikulski's grandstanding with the STSCI director in her home state to be an example of entrenched Hubble interests.
Do you throw away a perfectly good printer just because it lived longer than its 'mean time before failure' estimate? Do you toss unused batteries that are beyond their 'best if used by' date?
Your reasoning is utterly simplistic and goes both ways. Do you fix a broken printer at more cost than buying a new one? Most NASA missions are sold to congress with a nominal mission time period and financial commitment with a wink and nod then morph into perpetual spending programs with diminishing returns.
But that said, I have never developed software more rapidly than in C#..NET has trippled my productivity (on the Windows platform) and my approval rating at work has skyrocketed as I have rolled out several solutions on.NET that are stable, solid, and effective.
This often happens when you rewrite a system 4 times. M$C, C++, COM, C#.Net, did I forget any?
You can not do any UV spectroscopy from the ground. Period. JWST will not fill this gap.
If UV spectrascopy was a requirement for JWST the capability would be there. IR requirements apparently superceded it. Is the UV capability worth a $1G shuttle flight?
Ending Hubble's life early will seriously restrict the amount of physics that we can learn from all the pretty pictures that have come out. Such an action nullifies the large investment we've already made.
Hubble is used by a large community of scientists whose interests are entrenched. Whether the physics is worth the continuing investment is debatable.
When someone effectively cancels the last 20-25% of the lifetime of your current mission, you're supposed to be planning for that years in advance.
Hubble is currently in the 14th year of a 10 year mission.
The whole controversy arose is because the next Hubble servicing mission would have cost $1G. That is a lot of money for such an "innovation". It was not deemed to be worth the price.
You are correct. For several years now there has been a diminishing of Hubble science. No knock against Hubble. The instrument has been used to its full capability. There is not much more to be got out of it. The recent release of the Ultra Deep Field will yield no greater insights than the original. Worse, the release of UDF data was clearly staged to garner political support. What comes after, the 2,000,000 second exposure Super Ultra Deep Field? I'm am sure the folks at STSCI have more eye candy held in reserve. The real shame for the astronomical community is the delay and poor planning for the Hubble successor. That can hardly be blamed on O'Keefe or President Bush.
Thanks to China coming in where many growing pains, suffered by the west, have already passed or obstacles such as competing vested interests aren't as influential, so internet infrastructure is going in at a rapid pace.
What good is the growth of network infrastructure when users cannot communicate freely or visit unapproved websites? "Vested interests" of Chinese citizens are routinely trampled by a gang of Communist cronies. Why is that so great? Seems to me that the network simply another way to enhance the Orwellian nature of the state.
Then why isn't the US invading North Korea? There is much evidence of the same kind of Human Rights violations and atrocities that existed in Iraq. Well, the answer is that North Korea is not the World's Second Largest Producer of Oil...
Kim Jong Il is simply not as accessable as Saddam. A surgical operation of the kind that was applied to Iraq could not work in Korea. War with North Korea would mean bloody mayhem for everyone involved, and a huge refugee problem on the Korean peninsula. The US wrecked Saddam's regime because it was vulnerable. He was a bad guy who deserved to come to a bad end. The vast majority of Iraqis would agree. As for the oil, the US will get it like everyone else: at market prices. That is more than I can say for the currupt French and Russian officials who profited from the oil for food shame.
I think your comment deserves more than a 3. I have wondered myself how much it would cost to clone Hubble and launch it on one of the new boosters (Delta IV heavy or Atlas V). Both have 5m payload sections and a state of the art visual light telescope with a segmented mirror would be lighter and less expensive than Hubble.
Hubble needs about $100 million for a single shuttle launch. $200 million in equipment has already been constructed and is only waiting in a warehouse for a mission.
If the shuttle cost $100M per launch there would be no need for alternative boosters for the next 30 years. $100M for 55000lbs of payload to LEO is super cheap. I have never seen that low number for even crack pipe estimates of the 1980's. A Delta 2 costs in the high 80's and it only lifts 3000lbs to LEO. But the shuttle really costs over $500M per launch, more if you consider the depreciation of NASA facilities and the loss of 2 orbiters. It may be closer to $700M. Then figure in the cost of new Hubble instruments and gyros and other electronics. My number of $1G is pretty close.
Hubble is amazing. You don't need to convince me. I would happily vote to abandon IIS now and fix Hubble. I don't see that happening because the US made commitments. Cancellation of IIS would wipe out the manned programs for Russia, Europe, Japan.
The horrible truth is that we are simply losing the collective will to achieve great things in the name of achieving cockamamie political boondoggles, both terrestrial and otherwise.
The James Webb Telescope will be launched in 2010. It will greatly exceed Hubble in capability, especially in the infrared. Without servicing the Hubble shouldn't fail until 2007. Is it regretable the there is a gap between the two missions? Yes. Is it worth $1G to service Hubble with a shuttle flight? No.
In just 2 decades, this idea has gone from being impossible to far-out to design studies [sciencentral.com].
Only 2 decades your say? Wow what progress. At this rate a space elevator may take over controlled nuclear fusion over as the technology most likely to revolutionize the world "real soon now."
The trade deficit is not a problem. You want good things from the rest of the world, you pay for it. It is your choice.
Free trade is predicated on the idea that there is a free flow of goods and services between partners. This is currently not the case. Asian economies are no where near as open to American imports. China and Japan blatantly distort (lower) the value of their currencies by buying dollars in order to keep their products cheap here. This money could be used to better the lives of their citizens.
Why wouldn't people in the US want the rest of the world to have more prosperity? There might be fewer radicals wanting to terrorise us if that were the case. I fully agree that the current regime of aggressive patents and copyrights hobble growth in the developing world. For some corporations a head start is not enough in an competition, they want to be assured to win.
Radio Astronomy is an interesting field but can it possibly be worth the untold $100G that would be
spent to build a lunar antenna farm just to be free of noise? What science returns are we missing due to noise? Arguably, not much. If noise free environment is
really needed I would suggest that a free flying telescope, similar in mission design to SIRTF, would make a lot more sense.
Bush's plan 'pulls the rug out from under our scientists' and that 'It just seems to me the direct-to-Mars [route] is the way to go...
Which translated means Lewis Reasearch Center in Ohio has entrenched interests in the Space Station and stands to loose funding in the short term with President Bush's initiative. What Senator Glenn doesn't make clear is how a direct Mars effort can be funded concurrently with Shuttle/IIS. It can't.
I am a fan of the Bush administration and I say they should think twice about the potential sudden, massive economic dislocations in this country that can result from wholesale globalisation. Lower incomes and the inability to rapidly retrain workers can counteract the positive results of lower prices. The US should globalize at a rate that is politically tolerable, that is slowly.
Another thing. Economists tend to greatly
exaggerate their ideas by cloaking them in misleading and inexact language.
Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since.
Postulate: A statement, also known as an axiom, which is taken to be true without proof. Economists would be wiser to use the word "principle" in this case instead of "law". Use of the word law leads one to believe that people like Mankiw actually know what they are doing.
Slashdot Mirror
I have heard this point made lately. What is its source? Doesn't the larger size required for a Mars ascent rocket and the large delta-v required to establish a return Mars/Earth transfer orbit require vastly more energy than a return lunar orbit? It seems to me that if you want the ultimate low energy exploration target we should be sending manned missions to nearby asteroids.
Cringely says that M$ earns $600M per month in interest on their cash hoard. They can easily afford to make this payment and continue to torture Sun outside of court unencumbered.
The most interesting thing about the Falcon X second stage is that it is pressure fed. This simplifies the rocket design at the expense of increasing its size. Check out this old but interesting article which discusses many ideas which the folks at FalconX seemed to have taken to heart.
Let's see, there's the invasion of Iraq (against the wishes of the U.N.)
Yes, the U.N. tried to protect its oil for food skim. The war disrupted that.
Junk science at its worse. A thinly veiled attempt by the "world community" to hobble the economic growth of the U.S.
Legacy? I hope so. The alternative to is for the U.S. to submit to eggheads like Mr. Weinberg - armchair explorers, who thrill at reducing the wonders of the universe to a few bits on a computer screen. They risk nothing, and gain nothing. Not a vision I share.
The key here is if they can get the funding. The shuttle will be retired in 2010 and with no credible replacement on the horizon...why doesn't NASA give the Russians a chance?"
This might be a better opportunity for the Europeans. They have long had good launch capability but no manned program beyond tagging along on shuttle missions. Russian knowhow with manned spaceflight combined with Europe's Arianne launcher and equatorial launch site would be a strong combination.
Perceived US failures to replace the shuttle were due to the desire to create a single stage to orbit vehicle with similar palyload capacity to the shuttle (X-33/Venture Star) - a tall order. The Bush administration has wisely called for the abandonment of the shuttle philosophy and seeks to build on Apollo's successes more directly. Boeing concepts of the Crew Exploration Vehicle are much more capable than the Russian proposal.
"He who can destroy a thing, controls a thing." -- Muad'dib
Havoc Pennington once called Haskell 'the least-broken programming language available today.
Dubious praise, since he is a collaborater on the most-broken desktop available today, Gnome. Scheme is today's foremost computer language.
What the hell does this mean? Any U.S. astronomer can apply for Hubble time. Yes, astronomers would like to retain and upgrade an excellent observatory that offers a unique window to the universe. Why do you consider astronomers who want to continue to use a telescope 'entrenched'?
I consider Senator Mikulski's grandstanding with the STSCI director in her home state to be an example of entrenched Hubble interests.
Do you throw away a perfectly good printer just because it lived longer than its 'mean time before failure' estimate? Do you toss unused batteries that are beyond their 'best if used by' date?
Your reasoning is utterly simplistic and goes both ways. Do you fix a broken printer at more cost than buying a new one? Most NASA missions are sold to congress with a nominal mission time period and financial commitment with a wink and nod then morph into perpetual spending programs with diminishing returns.
But that said, I have never developed software more rapidly than in C#. .NET has trippled my productivity (on the Windows platform) and my approval rating at work has skyrocketed as I have rolled out several solutions on .NET that are stable, solid, and effective.
This often happens when you rewrite a system 4 times. M$C, C++, COM, C#.Net, did I forget any?
You can not do any UV spectroscopy from the ground. Period. JWST will not fill this gap.
If UV spectrascopy was a requirement for JWST the capability would be there. IR requirements apparently superceded it. Is the UV capability worth a $1G shuttle flight?
Ending Hubble's life early will seriously restrict the amount of physics that we can learn from all the pretty pictures that have come out. Such an action nullifies the large investment we've already made.
Hubble is used by a large community of scientists whose interests are entrenched. Whether the physics is worth the continuing investment is debatable.
When someone effectively cancels the last 20-25% of the lifetime of your current mission, you're supposed to be planning for that years in advance.
Hubble is currently in the 14th year of a 10 year mission.
The whole controversy arose is because the next Hubble servicing mission would have cost $1G. That is a lot of money for such an "innovation". It was not deemed to be worth the price.
You are correct. For several years now there has been a diminishing of Hubble science. No knock against Hubble. The instrument has been used to its full capability. There is not much more to be got out of it. The recent release of the Ultra Deep Field will yield no greater insights than the original. Worse, the release of UDF data was clearly staged to garner political support. What comes after, the 2,000,000 second exposure Super Ultra Deep Field? I'm am sure the folks at STSCI have more eye candy held in reserve. The real shame for the astronomical community is the delay and poor planning for the Hubble successor. That can hardly be blamed on O'Keefe or President Bush.
Thanks to China coming in where many growing pains, suffered by the west, have already passed or obstacles such as competing vested interests aren't as influential, so internet infrastructure is going in at a rapid pace.
What good is the growth of network infrastructure when users cannot communicate freely or visit unapproved websites? "Vested interests" of Chinese citizens are routinely trampled by a gang of Communist cronies. Why is that so great? Seems to me that the network simply another way to enhance the Orwellian nature of the state.
Then why isn't the US invading North Korea? There is much evidence of the same kind of Human Rights violations and atrocities that existed in Iraq. Well, the answer is that North Korea is not the World's Second Largest Producer of Oil...
Kim Jong Il is simply not as accessable as Saddam. A surgical operation of the kind that was applied to Iraq could not work in Korea. War with North Korea would mean bloody mayhem for everyone involved, and a huge refugee problem on the Korean peninsula. The US wrecked Saddam's regime because it was vulnerable. He was a bad guy who deserved to come to a bad end. The vast majority of Iraqis would agree. As for the oil, the US will get it like everyone else: at market prices. That is more than I can say for the currupt French and Russian officials who profited from the oil for food shame.
I think your comment deserves more than a 3. I have wondered myself how much it would cost to clone Hubble and launch it on one of the new boosters (Delta IV heavy or Atlas V). Both have 5m payload sections and a state of the art visual light telescope with a segmented mirror would be lighter and less expensive than Hubble.
Hubble needs about $100 million for a single shuttle launch. $200 million in equipment has already been constructed and is only waiting in a warehouse for a mission.
If the shuttle cost $100M per launch there would be no need for alternative boosters for the next 30 years. $100M for 55000lbs of payload to LEO is super cheap. I have never seen that low number for even crack pipe estimates of the 1980's. A Delta 2 costs in the high 80's and it only lifts 3000lbs to LEO. But the shuttle really costs over $500M per launch, more if you consider the depreciation of NASA facilities and the loss of 2 orbiters. It may be closer to $700M. Then figure in the cost of new Hubble instruments and gyros and other electronics. My number of $1G is pretty close.
Hubble is amazing. You don't need to convince me. I would happily vote to abandon IIS now and fix Hubble. I don't see that happening because the US made commitments. Cancellation of IIS would wipe out the manned programs for Russia, Europe, Japan.
The horrible truth is that we are simply losing the collective will to achieve great things in the name of achieving cockamamie political boondoggles, both terrestrial and otherwise.
The James Webb Telescope will be launched in 2010. It will greatly exceed Hubble in capability, especially in the infrared. Without servicing the Hubble shouldn't fail until 2007. Is it regretable the there is a gap between the two missions? Yes. Is it worth $1G to service Hubble with a shuttle flight? No.
In just 2 decades, this idea has gone from being impossible to far-out to design studies [sciencentral.com].
Only 2 decades your say? Wow what progress. At this rate a space elevator may take over controlled nuclear fusion over as the technology most likely to revolutionize the world "real soon now."
The trade deficit is not a problem. You want good things from the rest of the world, you pay for it. It is your choice.
Free trade is predicated on the idea that there is a free flow of goods and services between partners. This is currently not the case. Asian economies are no where near as open to American imports. China and Japan blatantly distort (lower) the value of their currencies by buying dollars in order to keep their products cheap here. This money could be used to better the lives of their citizens.
Why wouldn't people in the US want the rest of the world to have more prosperity? There might be fewer radicals wanting to terrorise us if that were the case. I fully agree that the current regime of aggressive patents and copyrights hobble growth in the developing world. For some corporations a head start is not enough in an competition, they want to be assured to win.
Radio Astronomy is an interesting field but can it possibly be worth the untold $100G that would be spent to build a lunar antenna farm just to be free of noise? What science returns are we missing due to noise? Arguably, not much. If noise free environment is really needed I would suggest that a free flying telescope, similar in mission design to SIRTF, would make a lot more sense.
Bush's plan 'pulls the rug out from under our scientists' and that 'It just seems to me the direct-to-Mars [route] is the way to go...
Which translated means Lewis Reasearch Center in Ohio has entrenched interests in the Space Station and stands to loose funding in the short term with President Bush's initiative. What Senator Glenn doesn't make clear is how a direct Mars effort can be funded concurrently with Shuttle/IIS. It can't.
The New York Times reports that Al Qaeda operatives were tracked using the ID of the GSM phone chips sold by a Swiss company named Swisscom
I would have been more impressed if they had dropped a bomb on these guys using the same signals
I am a fan of the Bush administration and I say they should think twice about the potential sudden, massive economic dislocations in this country that can result from wholesale globalisation. Lower incomes and the inability to rapidly retrain workers can counteract the positive results of lower prices. The US should globalize at a rate that is politically tolerable, that is slowly.
Another thing. Economists tend to greatly exaggerate their ideas by cloaking them in misleading and inexact language.
Mr Mankiw's proposition, in essence, is the law of comparative advantage, first postulated by David Ricardo two centuries ago and demonstrated to astonishing effect since.
Postulate: A statement, also known as an axiom, which is taken to be true without proof. Economists would be wiser to use the word "principle" in this case instead of "law". Use of the word law leads one to believe that people like Mankiw actually know what they are doing.
Whine? Certainly not. I am trying to right a profound injustice.