As many of you know, the pilot of SpaceShipOne released a bunch of M&M's near the top of his historic spaceflight. Scaled just recently released video of the launch, which includes chase plane and in-cockpit views. The floating M&M's are near the end. It's incredibly cool to watch -- one of the M&M's flies right by the camera! This video doesn't have sound, as I believe the "full" version is licensed for an upcoming Discovery Channel special.
I wonder if Mars, Inc. is going to try to license that video for a commercial.
Not only that, but it's also thought that the impacts of comets of asteroids may create pockets of heated water for extended periods of time, where life might emerge.
I would certainly tend to hope that people at NASA read large amounts of sci-fi. Many of the most useful concepts in spaceflight have come from science fiction, e.g. geosynchronous satellites.
In this particular case though, I'm not so sure. It just seems that you would take too much of a hit on cost and reliability to make up for any possible benefits. For one, a mobile base can't be built into the regolith for insulation, a feature one hopes a lunar base would have.
For the most part, I suspect that the grad students who were previously doing drudge work would instead be directed towards more interesting things to do.
Actually, robotics is one of the expected areas that NASA's under-development Centennial Challenges Program for cash-prize contests will cover. I'm quite excited to see what sorts of results we'll see from that.
This reminds me a lot of the robot scientist from earlier this year, which was able to formulate hypotheses and perform experiments to determine the metabolic pathways of yeast. I'm quite excited about where this sort of technology can take us in the future, removing much of the drudgery that grad students/technicians have to do and accelerating the advance of scientific progress.
Are there any photos or videos available from inside the cockpit, or from one of the chase planes? I've been looking all over for them, but to no avail.
> Read or Die(watch the OVA first) is a fun series about three detective-sisters(named after martial arts starts, incidentally- Anita, Maggie, Michelle; there's also a Lee, a dove named Woo, etc:-) who are "paper-users" like the famous bibliomaniac Yoriko "The Paper" Readman, who worked for (heh) the British Library Special Forces. The OVA is particularly strange in a fun way. Kinda girly and -very- moving towards the end.
I watched the Read or Die OVA and absolutely loved it. Now you're telling me there's a full series?!? Holy crap!
Presumably, in the near future we'll be seeing a variant of the X Prize for orbital flights; perhaps in the interim we'll see things like X Prizes for transcontinental flights.
I'm curious though: How can contestants be able to deal with all the liabilities which that entails? With the test flights of Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace, before being allowed to fly they've had to make various government official certain that in a worst-case scenario their craft would remain within the testing zone. With orbital (or even transcontinental) flights, their flight range will have to extend beyond the testing zone and into inhabited areas (even other countries). Governments are able to test things like this because they can deal with the liability, but what about private companies?
I can't help but wonder if NASA would be more effective if it took on a model much more like NSF's or DARPA's. Instead of splitting up tasks between their own field centers and painstakingly managing everything, it could become more focused on providing funding to foster the nation's space infrastructure and using programs like Centennial Challenges to accomplish specific tasks. Existing NASA centers could compete for this funding just like other organizations like universities and private companies. Doing things in this manner would also limit NASA's PR liability in the event of catastrophe, keeping the space program from becoming completely paralyzed every time a disaster happens.
Of course, this would also limit the potential for pork-barrel spending, and would thus experience difficulties in actually becoming enacted.
Here's the official and wikipedia links to information on NASA's Centennial Challenges Program, which is what the article is presumably referring to. The contests haven't been decided on yet, but currently things like "very low cost spacecraft missions", "breakthrough robotic capability competitions", and "revolutionary technology demonstrations" are under consideration.
Speaking of, has anybody heard about what happened at the Centennial Challenges Workshop on June 15-16? I haven't been able to find any reports on it. Hopefully at least one slashdotter attended...
I'd be a little wary about that though -- a friend of mine who was mugged was patted down after he gave his wallet. If he had a second wallet, they might not react very well.
> What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome.
It probably isn't exactly what you're thinking of, but similar things have been done using artificial life techniques to simulate things like the Anasazi disappearance and genocide.
On the topic of interesting things that they probably won't teach in a standard history course, a great book is An Underground Education, "The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge."
It seems like something like this is an ideal candidate for a volunteer-based effort. Volunteers could try to catalog as many addresses as they could, and upload them to a server. This would be somewhat like a similar effort to take photographs of as many gps-marked areas of the world as possible (can't recall the name off-hand).
Only problem might be that people often get quite testy when they see you photographing their property...
Does anybody know how feasible it would be to combine something like this with a walking cane, to create a stun cane? I imagine one could pack quite a few batteries and capacitors into a cane's staff. It'd be quite a way to defend yourself while still looking fashionable.
I'm not so sure. Liberal arts graduates may be a bad example, but I'd like to think that anyone instructed in rational thinking would be at least somewhat more resistant to propaganda and group-think.
Slashdot Mirror
As many of you know, the pilot of SpaceShipOne released a bunch of M&M's near the top of his historic spaceflight. Scaled just recently released video of the launch, which includes chase plane and in-cockpit views. The floating M&M's are near the end. It's incredibly cool to watch -- one of the M&M's flies right by the camera! This video doesn't have sound, as I believe the "full" version is licensed for an upcoming Discovery Channel special.
I wonder if Mars, Inc. is going to try to license that video for a commercial.
Not only that, but it's also thought that the impacts of comets of asteroids may create pockets of heated water for extended periods of time, where life might emerge.
I haven't seen them linked to yet, so here's some info pages with pics of this:
"Habot" mobile lunary base
Mobitat (mobile lander?)
Does anybody know if scientists in Antartica use mobile habitats? If they do, then this would seem much more plausible.
I would certainly tend to hope that people at NASA read large amounts of sci-fi. Many of the most useful concepts in spaceflight have come from science fiction, e.g. geosynchronous satellites.
In this particular case though, I'm not so sure. It just seems that you would take too much of a hit on cost and reliability to make up for any possible benefits. For one, a mobile base can't be built into the regolith for insulation, a feature one hopes a lunar base would have.
For the most part, I suspect that the grad students who were previously doing drudge work would instead be directed towards more interesting things to do.
Actually, robotics is one of the expected areas that NASA's under-development Centennial Challenges Program for cash-prize contests will cover. I'm quite excited to see what sorts of results we'll see from that.
This reminds me a lot of the robot scientist from earlier this year, which was able to formulate hypotheses and perform experiments to determine the metabolic pathways of yeast. I'm quite excited about where this sort of technology can take us in the future, removing much of the drudgery that grad students/technicians have to do and accelerating the advance of scientific progress.
Actually, according to a federal mandate, all cell phones are/will be required to include GPS receivers to aid with 911 calls.
Here's the FCC page.
Are there any photos or videos available from inside the cockpit, or from one of the chase planes? I've been looking all over for them, but to no avail.
> Read or Die(watch the OVA first) is a fun series about three detective-sisters(named after martial arts starts, incidentally- Anita, Maggie, Michelle; there's also a Lee, a dove named Woo, etc :-) who are "paper-users" like the famous bibliomaniac Yoriko "The Paper" Readman, who worked for (heh) the British Library Special Forces. The OVA is particularly strange in a fun way. Kinda girly and -very- moving towards the end.
I watched the Read or Die OVA and absolutely loved it. Now you're telling me there's a full series?!? Holy crap!
Presumably, in the near future we'll be seeing a variant of the X Prize for orbital flights; perhaps in the interim we'll see things like X Prizes for transcontinental flights.
I'm curious though: How can contestants be able to deal with all the liabilities which that entails? With the test flights of Scaled Composites and Armadillo Aerospace, before being allowed to fly they've had to make various government official certain that in a worst-case scenario their craft would remain within the testing zone. With orbital (or even transcontinental) flights, their flight range will have to extend beyond the testing zone and into inhabited areas (even other countries). Governments are able to test things like this because they can deal with the liability, but what about private companies?
I can't help but wonder if NASA would be more effective if it took on a model much more like NSF's or DARPA's. Instead of splitting up tasks between their own field centers and painstakingly managing everything, it could become more focused on providing funding to foster the nation's space infrastructure and using programs like Centennial Challenges to accomplish specific tasks. Existing NASA centers could compete for this funding just like other organizations like universities and private companies. Doing things in this manner would also limit NASA's PR liability in the event of catastrophe, keeping the space program from becoming completely paralyzed every time a disaster happens.
Of course, this would also limit the potential for pork-barrel spending, and would thus experience difficulties in actually becoming enacted.
> The true elegance of this scenario, it's a results oriented system, that precludes any opportunity to pork barrel with the money.
Sadly, this is also why things like this are probably going to end up being extremely limited, at least coming from the government.
Here's the official and wikipedia links to information on NASA's Centennial Challenges Program, which is what the article is presumably referring to. The contests haven't been decided on yet, but currently things like "very low cost spacecraft missions", "breakthrough robotic capability competitions", and "revolutionary technology demonstrations" are under consideration.
Speaking of, has anybody heard about what happened at the Centennial Challenges Workshop on June 15-16? I haven't been able to find any reports on it. Hopefully at least one slashdotter attended...
I'd be a little wary about that though -- a friend of mine who was mugged was patted down after he gave his wallet. If he had a second wallet, they might not react very well.
The biggest E2 feature I miss having in Wikipedia is probably softlinks. I wonder if there are any plans to implement softlinks in wiki...
Wasn't he still partially eaten? I could've sworn he lost a leg or something.
> What I'd like to see is better history simulation. Get a program that can take certain factors and use it to predict the outcome.
It probably isn't exactly what you're thinking of, but similar things have been done using artificial life techniques to simulate things like the Anasazi disappearance and genocide.
On the topic of interesting things that they probably won't teach in a standard history course, a great book is An Underground Education, "The Unauthorized and Outrageous Supplement to Everything You Thought You Knew About Art, Sex, Business, Crime, Science, Medicine, and Other Fields of Human Knowledge."
It seems like something like this is an ideal candidate for a volunteer-based effort. Volunteers could try to catalog as many addresses as they could, and upload them to a server. This would be somewhat like a similar effort to take photographs of as many gps-marked areas of the world as possible (can't recall the name off-hand).
Only problem might be that people often get quite testy when they see you photographing their property...
Ask, and you shall receive.
Does anybody know how feasible it would be to combine something like this with a walking cane, to create a stun cane? I imagine one could pack quite a few batteries and capacitors into a cane's staff. It'd be quite a way to defend yourself while still looking fashionable.
Would such a thing be illegal to carry?
"I'm sure they'll listen to Reason"
I'm not so sure. Liberal arts graduates may be a bad example, but I'd like to think that anyone instructed in rational thinking would be at least somewhat more resistant to propaganda and group-think.
Not completely sure what the tone in this comment is supposed to be, but the group Seriously Ill for Medical Research has a great site.