The language that effectively ties NASA's hands was inserted in the bill by Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from...drum roll please.... Alabama. Where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located.
It's also worth noting that Alabama's NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which is the center most responsible for the Ares I and Constellation, has a strong tradition of mass incompetence for the past 30 years or so. While I'm sure the engineers there are quite good, the MSFC management is incredibly horrible and has a reputation for clamping down on any sort of dissent from their engineers. They literally haven't had a single successful launch development project during the time that many slashdotters have been alive, but quite a few failures: the X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, Orbital Space Plane, and so forth. Having MSFC in charge of a large project is pretty much a guarantee that it will suffer from feature/incompetency bloat and end up going massively overbudget, and have to be eventually canceled.
Of course, Senator Shelby is quite good at what he does, and manages to get them pork barrel funding regardless of their actual performance.
There are two numbers which are not changing: the energy in chemical rocket fuel and the mass of the earth. Those two dictate that about 90% of a rocket's liftoff mass be fuel.... (and yes, I was a rocket scientist, with Boeing, in Huntsville AL for many years, but retired now)
As a rocket scientist then, I'm sure you realize that fuel is ~1% of the total cost of launching a rocket. By far most of the cost goes to paying the personnel working on the ground who assemble and maintain the rocket. Much of why the Ares I costs so much is because it intentionally doesn't do anything to maximize personnel efficiency (more people required == more jobs).
Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches.
And many in NASA management intended (and claimed that) the Space Shuttle would have a failure rate of one in 100,000 launches. Then Challenger happened. It turns out that the error rate you get from probabilistic risk assessment often ends up being very different from reality. In fact, it was stated during the Augustine Commission hearings that the sort of factors which go into the sort of "one in a thousand" failure rate you describe for the Ares I in actuality only account for an absurdly small percentage of actual launch failures.
One man with a decent rifle (like an AR-15, AK, M16 whatever (even a bolt action hunting rifle))can sink them. The ship's sniper can take cover at a high point in the ship, as the "skiff" starts getting closer and not heading warning to leave, the sniper starts shooting down into the boat when they get within several hundred yards. One hit on the boat and the pirates will likely stop the pursuit and commence with bailing water before they sink.
This reminds me of one of my favorite parts of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash":
"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way." He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it." Boom. "Correction. They're not headed our way anymore." Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat."
And if they want to do all this at minimum cost, they could just buy Soyuz vehicles, the world's safest, most reliable manned space transportation system.
And they'd have to do 3x the number of launches in order to send the same number of people that the shuttle can carry with one launch. And they'd have to send up a few other launches to carry all the gear that the shuttle carries to the ISS.
Sure, and with those multiple launches it'd still be cheaper and safer than the Shuttle. What's your point?
I also have to say that the general feeling around here that astronauts are expendable is pretty fucking reprehensible.
I wouldn't consider an astronaut any less expendable than the billion-dollar space probes launched on the commercial rockets which many at NASA (especially Marshall Spaceflight Center and the contractor ATK) are currently trying to malign.
If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it.
This is especially the case when you consider that the committee meeting will probably only be discussing launch ascent safety, with perhaps a small portion devoted to reentry safety. Considering that NASA's plans for the new vehicles are for beyond-LEO exploration, it's a good bet that the most dangerous part of exploration won't be the launch, but the time that you spend voyaging to (e.g. Apollo 13's near-disaster) and exploring the Moon, Lagrange Points, Near-Earth Asteroids, comets, Phobos, Mars, or whatever. If you assume that there's even just a 1 in 50 chance of loss of life during the period of time after you've launched but while transiting to or exploring the Moon/Mars/whatever, the 1:1000 launch vehicle gives you an overall probability of dying of 2.1%, while the 1:129 vehicle gives you a death probability of 2.8%.
I guess that's worth something, but I'm not sure if it's worth tens of billions of dollars for a launch vehicle like the Ares I which will only launch a few dozen times at most. This is particularly so when you consider that the same money could be spent on launching commercial space vehicles many more times (with both unmanned and manned payloads), leading to improvements in safety and potentially creating much safer vehicles overall.
This point was well-stated on page 78 of the Augustine Committee's report:
Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?
Because unfortunately, it's quite likely that the main reason this is being done is to shut out competitors in private spaceflight. It goes something like this:
* Although the Astronaut Corps is full of brave and intelligent individuals, the fact of the matter is that they have a huge revolving door with ATK, an aerospace/defense contractor which specializes in solid motors. Astronauts know it's quite likely that they'll become an executive at ATK after their astronaut gig is up, and quite a few gigs will be up once the Space Shuttle is retired.
* ATK is a major contractor on the Ares I rocket, which has claims of being 100x-1000x safer than the alternatives, due to the fact that it uses a single large ATK solid motor as its first stage. Of course, quite a few aerospace engineers believe that these claims are total bullshit, and it's quite possible that despite NASA and ATK's publicized calculations, in practice the Ares I will actually be more dangerous than the alternatives (EELVs, DIRECT, SpaceX, etc.). There's a number of potential problems with the Ares I which aren't accounted for in the calculations: thrust oscillation, solid propellant debris clouds, the added difficulty of escaping from a solid rocket, the fact that safety systems have had to be cut out due to mass constraints, etc. Also, the sort of accident factors which go into the Ares I's supposed super-safe accident probability calculations actually only account for an absurdly small percentage of launch accidents in practice.
* Recently the fate of the Ares I has become uncertain, as people are questioning if its wise for NASA to spend $35 billion of its limited funding to develop a new medium-lift rocket which won't be ready until 2017-2019, when plenty of other medium-lift rockets already exist and could become equipped for manned launch for prices ranging from a few hundred million to $3 billion.
* It remains to be seen what'll happen at the hearing, but my guess is that a number of those testifying from NASA will claim that Ares I will be dramatically safer than commercial alternatives, and therefore Ares should continue getting funding instead of looking at alternatives. They'll probably cite the bullshit safety figures again to try to bolster their case. I believe there's one person testifying who's a proponent of commercial spaceflight, and I suspect he'll be beaten down by Congress.
* It's looking like Rep. Jim Oberstar might be heading the hearing. Back in 2004 Oberstar tried (in the interest of safety, of course) to kill off commercial suborbital spaceflight companies like Virgin Galactic by having them regulated at the same sort of levels that mature commercial airlines are regulated.
It's not really about you recording the fact that someone came to your website. The article says that there are worries that Google could further use the data, and eg connect it with the data they might have from Google Mail or other sites using Google Analytics, thus generating profiles about habits and preferences etc.
So collecting data is ok, but it's forbidden to run certain algorithms on the collected data? Something tells me this isn't a particularly sustainable arrangement.
We should then get some management that actually has a pair, and can deal with the politics to find practical solutions without worry what congressional district parts are made in or which NASA center does the work.
That's nice in theory, but unfortunately when it comes down to it, Congress has all of the funding power. If an administrator tried to rock the boat too much, they'd just find that politically-powerful and fiscally threatened Congressmen would remove funding for whatever they were trying to do. Example:
In the end, the real question is not the cut. The real question is, what will he replace this with? Will he push towards commercial space COMBINED with Direct (which COULD get by with less money)?
Another major question is whether or not it's truly necessary for NASA to spend tens of billions of dollars developing a new heavy-lift vehicle. For example, this proposal by the ULA uses commercial launchers and propellant depots instead of heavy-lift to create an exploration architecture suitable for NEO, Lunar, and ultimately Martian exploration, at a fraction of the cost:
The present ESAS architecture for lunar exploration is dependent on a large launcher. It has been assumed that either the ARES V or something similar, such as the proposed Jupiter "Direct" lifters are mandatory for serious lunar exploration. These launch vehicles require extensive development with costs ranging into the tens of billions of dollars and with first flight likely most of a decade away. In the end they will mimic the Saturn V programmatically: a single-purpose lifter with a single user who must bear all costs. This programmatic structure has not been shown to be effective in the long term. It is characterized by low demonstrated reliability, ballooning costs and a glacial pace of improvements.
The use of smaller, commercial launchers coupled with orbital depots eliminates the need for a large launch vehicle. Much is made of the need for more launches- this is perceived as a detriment. However since 75% of all the mass lifted to low earth orbit is merely propellant with no intrinsic value it represents the optimal cargo for low-cost, strictly commercial launch operations. These commercial launch vehicles, lifting a simple payload to a repeatable location, can be operated on regular, predictable schedules. Relieved of the burden of hauling propellants, the mass of the Altair and Orion vehicles for a lunar mission is very small and can also be easily carried on existing launch vehicles. This strategy leads to high infrastructure utilization, economic production rates, high demonstrated reliability and the lowest possible costs.
This architecture encourages the exploration of the moon to be conducted not in single, disconnected missions, but in a continuous process which builds orbital and surface resources year by year. The architecture and vehicles themselves are directly applicable to Near Earth Object and Mars exploration and the establishment of a functioning depot at earth-moon L2 provides a gateway for future high-mass spacecraft venturing to the rest of the solar system.
FYI, it's not a directed budget cut towards NASA -- every single non-military agency has been told by the Obama administration that they may see cuts of 5-10% in order to reduce the deficit.
On the plus side, if there is in fact a budget cut, it'd hopefully be the cover NASA needs to shut down/reduce its politically well-guarded Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), which uses up a huge part of NASA's budget, but due to its chronically incompetent management has spectacularly failed in basically all of its large projects over the past 30 years.
It actually isn't just space the two countries are planning on cooperating on. Not sure how much beef is behind this statement, but here's a snippet of the joint statement by Presidents Obama and Hu during Obama's visit to China:
The complementing departments of China and the United States have already signed a number of cooperation agreements, including the MOU to enhanced cooperation on climate change, energy and environment. The two sides have also officially launched the initiative of developing a China-U.S. clean energy research center.
Both President Obama and I said that we are willing to act on the basis of mutual benefit and reciprocity to deepen our cooperation on counterterrorism, law enforcement, science, technology, outer space, civil aviation, and engage in cooperation in space exploration, high-speed railway infrastructure, in agriculture, health, and other fields. And we also agreed to work together to continue to promote even greater progress in the growth of military-to-military ties.
I'm confused as to exactly how the Russians invade America. Without, y'know, getting their asses handed to them on the high seas.
If you're curious and don't mind spoilers, there's youtube video of the cinematics and gameplay for the "Wolverines" level (a tribute to "Red Dawn," I assume), which covers the first part of the Russian invasion:
Basically, on an earlier mission you find out that the Russians have captured an American satellite component which allows them to spoof the satellite surveillance system so that it looks like there's a big invasion force coming in from the west, while concealing the actual invasion force coming in to attack the eastern US.
Speaking of videos, here's video of the "No Russian" level which has been causing all of the controversy. The player takes the role of an undercover operative which is attempting to infiltrate a terrorist group operating inside Russia:
Apparently since doing their lunar lander run Armadillo Aerospace has been keeping itself busy with "boosted hops," where they fire the rocket up to a certain altitude, and then land back down under the rocket's own power. Here's a neat video of them boosting up to ~1000 feet:
Starting with lower altitudes, each time they run they're going for an incrementally higher altitude. They've gone up to about 1932 feet (589m) so far, with the plan to go all the way up to 6000 feet, which is the highest their FAA permit allows them to currently launch. I believe both Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have a number of customers in the scientific community who want to use these sorts of controlled boosted hops for running things like microgravity experiments.
What protectionism is in place? The only thing that we have is that any space tech can not be shared with China.
ITAR restrictions (where pretty much anything, however mundane, related to satellites is classified as a munition) are actually rather more problematic than you describe for space industry, although there fortunately seems to be some progress on that:
A decade-long concern for the US space industry has been export control regulations. Since satellites and related components were put under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), space businesses, including manufacturers or commercial satellites and their subsystems, have raised the alarm that the stricter ITAR rules were hurting their ability to sell to customers outside the US, even to close allies. Companies, industry organizations, and their supporters have sought for much of this time to at least partially roll back those changes to enhance their competitiveness.
While the drumbeat for reform isn't necessarily as loud as it was a few years ago, thanks in part to procedural changes that have reduced the backlog of, and waiting time for, export license applications, there is now real evidence of progress towards the reforms the industry has sought. A section of HR 2410, a State Department authorization bill that the House approved in June, deals with export control and includes a number of key reforms that the industry has been seeking.
"It accomplishes many, if not almost all, of the things that people in the export control reform movement have been dreaming of for quite a while," said Mike Gold, director of the Washington office of Bigelow Aerospace and a leading advocate for export control reform, during a presentation at the COMSTAC meeting last week.
One key component is what Gold called a "review and revision" of the US Munitions List (USML), the compilation of components that are subject to ITAR. The bill would require a review of at least 20 percent of the USML every year for five years to determine if items should be removed from the list. After the five-year period the review would start over to allow updates based on advances in technology.
Another aspect of the bill would give the President the ability to remove satellites and related components from the USML, although it would still not allow the export of such items to China. The bill language would also require the public release of what are known as commodity jurisdiction determinations, when the State Department evaluates whether a specific technology belongs on the USML or not.
The good news for export control reform advocates is that the bill has passed the House. The bad news, as Gold explained, is that the Senate has taken no action on the bill yet, and there's no indication when--or even if--they will take up the legislation before the end of the next year. "To be honest, we haven't even heard any good rumors as to if this is something that rises to the level of priority" that the Senate will take action on, Gold said.
Key to the future of the bill is Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If Senator Kerry chooses to prioritize export control reform, it most likely will get done," Gold said.
Gold also noted there is a review of export control policy going on within the new administration, although that may be of limited effectiveness for the space industry since the inclusion of satellites and related components on the USML was done in legislation and therefore must be undone that way. However, he said that the actual law does provide some "wiggle room" for the administration to change how it implements that law, if it so chooses. "If there isn't a legislative fix, there is still the possibility--certainly not a strong possibility, but the potential anyway--of the executive branch doing something helpful
They would do well to put the moon and Mars on the back burner and focus on the asteroids.
This is basically the finding of a report by Wesley Huntress (see "The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space"), who was just named as head of the NASA Science Advisory Committee.
Then set aside a few hundred million a year in x-prize style incentives open to *everyone* not just US companies. Focus on alternative propulsion and energy systems as chemical engines are not going to get us very far. Get NASA out of Earth to LEO and focused toward targets that are farther out and harder to reach. Let SpaceX and friends take care of launch costs to LEO.
Bretton Alexander, the newly appointed head of the Commercial Spaceflight Advisory Committee, is also President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a group which includes private spaceflight companies like SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, and the X Prize Foundation. I suspect he'll be advocating pretty much exactly the sorts of things you describe.
* Commercial Space Committee: Bretton Alexander, current head of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation * Education and Public Outreach: Miles O'Brien, pretty much the best and most clueful space journalist around * Technology and Innovation Committee: Esther Dyson, well known for her tech entrepreneurship work * (IT Infrastructure Committee chair seems to be pending)
All in all, they seem to be rather good picks. It also seems that Wesley Huntress has been chosen as the chair of the Science Committee. In 2004 he was head of a study, The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space, a rather fascinating report proposing a space exploration infrastructure which would initially focus on Lagrange points and Near-Earth Objects, quite similar to the Flexible Path option proposed by the Augustine Commission.
And yet they didn't see fit to spend an extra few months on their guidance system to be sure they came in first. Why did they fly in September if they could have worked another month?
Basically, after qualifying for the prize he wanted to focus on other aspects of the rocket which would be more useful for the (rather more lucrative) commercial operations they have planned, and spending a load of money and time to buy and rerun with a differential RTK GPS system would mostly only be useful for getting a better contest score.
It's really worthwhile to read through the statement from John Carmack. He definitely doesn't hold anything against Masten (he says he would have done the same thing in their place and also said that it would be "probably also beneficial to the nascent New Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have other resources to draw upon"), but does hold some bitterness towards the decision of the judges:
For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real shot at completing the level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy. If they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit of a sheepish mea culpa. Nobody to be upset at except myself. We could have probably made a second flight in the drizzle on our scheduled days, and once we had the roll thruster issue sorted out, our landing accuracy would have been in the 20cm range. I never thought it was worth investing in differential RTK GPS systems, because it has no bearing on our commercial operations.
The current situation, where Masten was allowed a third active day of competition, after trying and failing on both scheduled days, is different. I don't hold anything against Masten for using an additional time window that has been offered, since we wouldn't have passed it up if we were in their situation, but I do think this was a mistake on the judges part.
I recognize that it is in the best interests of both the NASA Centennial Challenges department and the X-Prize Foundation to award all the prize money this year, and that will likely have indirect benefits for us all in coming years. It is probably also beneficial to the nascent New Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have other resources to draw upon. Permit me to be petty enough to be upset and bitter about a half million dollars being taken from me and given to my competitor.
The rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything up to and including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it necessary, so there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do feel that we have been robbed. I was going to argue that if Masten was allowed to take a window on an unscheduled day with no notice, the judges should come back to Texas on Sunday and let us take our unused second window to try for a better accuracy, but our FAA waiver for the LLC vehicle was only valid for the weekend of our scheduled attempt.
think Google Wave is a great platform but adds nothing for roleplaying. It even has an unwanted feature : logs accessible to newcomers. I used to game through IRC, creating a channel for each room and a general discussion channel. Players going from room to romm to meet people or act separately. It was crucial that when arriving in a room, players did not know what happened before as the game (Amber DRPG) focuses a lot on PvP conspiracies.
Remember that although the initial Wave servers are operated by Google, their eventual plan is to release the code as open source and encourage others to run their own Wave servers. I'm suspect that eventually people will modify the code or create plugins so they can run their own role-playing oriented servers with the sort of feature set you describe.
Now the $445 million price tag may be from development that has been done already for the entire program.
Actually, Ares I development costs has been $3 billion spent so far, and Orion development has been another $3 billion. The $445 million was specifically for the Ares I-X.
It is true that a Delta IV would be about $10 million or so, but these aren't man rated. To get to that level with anything is costly.
According to the Augustine Committee, man-rating and developing crew capsules and LES for commercial rockets like the Delta IV would cost $300 million - $2 billion, depending on the rocket.
With all of the mergers, what other company cold deliver a working booster beside Thiokol?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's plenty of companies that can produce a first stage with performance comparable to or superior to the Ares I's thiokol stage.
The Atlas or Deltas will not take you to the moon.
Sure they can. Many of pre-ESAS plans for lunar exploration used the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets. I don't think all of them even relied on propellant depots, which makes it even easier.
As far as I know ATK is the only company really building solid rockets right now.
First, this isn't the case -- Aerojet builds solid rockets for the Atlas V. More importantly, you seem to be under the strange assumption that solid rockets are necessary for a manned system, when the evidence seems to indicate that (when compared to liquid propellant) they actually result in a considerably more dangerous launch environment for crew.
The Soviets were a lot more willing to shove nuclear reactors in places we were politically unwilling/unable to. The Russians may even have some Soviet prototypes around. It would be the same barely-post-war era tech all their stuff was, and it would be really, really, REALLY dangerous to use, but the very well might have gotten beyond blueprints.
As a matter of fact, the Soviets had a large number of nuclear reactors on satellites satellites (actual nuclear fission reactors, not radioisotope generators):
A number of them broke down and crashed back down to Earth, including one which crashed into Canada in 1978 and spread a decent amount of radioactive debris. Their nuclear-powered RORSAT series unfortunately also "had the lowest reliability and most quality problems of any Soviet space system."
See my other comment. Any reasonable cost estimate will include the cost of developing a system and its fixed annual costs. The development cost is $35-$45 billion, which contributes to a very high per-launch cost, especially when it'll only be launching a few times a year.
Considering that it shared lineage with the (cancelled) X-38 program, I'm not wildly optimistic about it's likelihood of success.
Could you elaborate on this? Everything I've been able to find about the X-38 is that it was a well-managed low-cost program, which met its milestones and performed several flight tests, but was only canceled due to ISS budget overruns.
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The language that effectively ties NASA's hands was inserted in the bill by Senator Richard Shelby, a Republican from...drum roll please.... Alabama. Where NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center is located.
It's also worth noting that Alabama's NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, which is the center most responsible for the Ares I and Constellation, has a strong tradition of mass incompetence for the past 30 years or so. While I'm sure the engineers there are quite good, the MSFC management is incredibly horrible and has a reputation for clamping down on any sort of dissent from their engineers. They literally haven't had a single successful launch development project during the time that many slashdotters have been alive, but quite a few failures: the X-33, X-34, National Launch System, Space Launch Initiative, Advanced Solid Rocket Motor, Orbital Space Plane, and so forth. Having MSFC in charge of a large project is pretty much a guarantee that it will suffer from feature/incompetency bloat and end up going massively overbudget, and have to be eventually canceled.
Of course, Senator Shelby is quite good at what he does, and manages to get them pork barrel funding regardless of their actual performance.
There are two numbers which are not changing: the energy in chemical rocket fuel and the mass of the earth. Those two dictate that about 90% of a rocket's liftoff mass be fuel. ... (and yes, I was a rocket scientist, with Boeing, in Huntsville AL for many years, but retired now)
As a rocket scientist then, I'm sure you realize that fuel is ~1% of the total cost of launching a rocket. By far most of the cost goes to paying the personnel working on the ground who assemble and maintain the rocket. Much of why the Ares I costs so much is because it intentionally doesn't do anything to maximize personnel efficiency (more people required == more jobs).
Ares I is intended to have a safety record of one failure in a thousand launches.
And many in NASA management intended (and claimed that) the Space Shuttle would have a failure rate of one in 100,000 launches. Then Challenger happened. It turns out that the error rate you get from probabilistic risk assessment often ends up being very different from reality. In fact, it was stated during the Augustine Commission hearings that the sort of factors which go into the sort of "one in a thousand" failure rate you describe for the Ares I in actuality only account for an absurdly small percentage of actual launch failures.
One man with a decent rifle (like an AR-15, AK, M16 whatever (even a bolt action hunting rifle))can sink them. The ship's sniper can take cover at a high point in the ship, as the "skiff" starts getting closer and not heading warning to leave, the sniper starts shooting down into the boat when they get within several hundred yards. One hit on the boat and the pirates will likely stop the pursuit and commence with bailing water before they sink.
This reminds me of one of my favorite parts of Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash":
"It's, like, one of them drug dealer boats," Vic says, looking through his magic sight. "Five guys on it. Headed our way."
He fires another round. "Correction. Four guys on it."
Boom. "Correction. They're not headed our way anymore."
Boom. A fireball erupts from the ocean two hundred feet away. "Correction. No boat."
And if they want to do all this at minimum cost, they could just buy Soyuz vehicles, the world's safest, most reliable manned space transportation system.
And they'd have to do 3x the number of launches in order to send the same number of people that the shuttle can carry with one launch. And they'd have to send up a few other launches to carry all the gear that the shuttle carries to the ISS.
Sure, and with those multiple launches it'd still be cheaper and safer than the Shuttle. What's your point?
I also have to say that the general feeling around here that astronauts are expendable is pretty fucking reprehensible.
I wouldn't consider an astronaut any less expendable than the billion-dollar space probes launched on the commercial rockets which many at NASA (especially Marshall Spaceflight Center and the contractor ATK) are currently trying to malign.
If 1:1000 is achievable with the same budget as 1:129 then it'd be evil not to do it - but if it increases costs by even 2:1 it is stupid to even suggest it.
This is especially the case when you consider that the committee meeting will probably only be discussing launch ascent safety, with perhaps a small portion devoted to reentry safety. Considering that NASA's plans for the new vehicles are for beyond-LEO exploration, it's a good bet that the most dangerous part of exploration won't be the launch, but the time that you spend voyaging to (e.g. Apollo 13's near-disaster) and exploring the Moon, Lagrange Points, Near-Earth Asteroids, comets, Phobos, Mars, or whatever. If you assume that there's even just a 1 in 50 chance of loss of life during the period of time after you've launched but while transiting to or exploring the Moon/Mars/whatever, the 1:1000 launch vehicle gives you an overall probability of dying of 2.1%, while the 1:129 vehicle gives you a death probability of 2.8%.
I guess that's worth something, but I'm not sure if it's worth tens of billions of dollars for a launch vehicle like the Ares I which will only launch a few dozen times at most. This is particularly so when you consider that the same money could be spent on launching commercial space vehicles many more times (with both unmanned and manned payloads), leading to improvements in safety and potentially creating much safer vehicles overall.
This point was well-stated on page 78 of the Augustine Committee's report:
http://www.nasa.gov/offices/hsf/home/index.html
Why does NASA have to campaign for greater safety standards? Why can't they implement them without the "politicians" approval?
Because unfortunately, it's quite likely that the main reason this is being done is to shut out competitors in private spaceflight. It goes something like this:
* Although the Astronaut Corps is full of brave and intelligent individuals, the fact of the matter is that they have a huge revolving door with ATK, an aerospace/defense contractor which specializes in solid motors. Astronauts know it's quite likely that they'll become an executive at ATK after their astronaut gig is up, and quite a few gigs will be up once the Space Shuttle is retired.
* ATK is a major contractor on the Ares I rocket, which has claims of being 100x-1000x safer than the alternatives, due to the fact that it uses a single large ATK solid motor as its first stage. Of course, quite a few aerospace engineers believe that these claims are total bullshit, and it's quite possible that despite NASA and ATK's publicized calculations, in practice the Ares I will actually be more dangerous than the alternatives (EELVs, DIRECT, SpaceX, etc.). There's a number of potential problems with the Ares I which aren't accounted for in the calculations: thrust oscillation, solid propellant debris clouds, the added difficulty of escaping from a solid rocket, the fact that safety systems have had to be cut out due to mass constraints, etc. Also, the sort of accident factors which go into the Ares I's supposed super-safe accident probability calculations actually only account for an absurdly small percentage of launch accidents in practice.
* Recently the fate of the Ares I has become uncertain, as people are questioning if its wise for NASA to spend $35 billion of its limited funding to develop a new medium-lift rocket which won't be ready until 2017-2019, when plenty of other medium-lift rockets already exist and could become equipped for manned launch for prices ranging from a few hundred million to $3 billion.
* It remains to be seen what'll happen at the hearing, but my guess is that a number of those testifying from NASA will claim that Ares I will be dramatically safer than commercial alternatives, and therefore Ares should continue getting funding instead of looking at alternatives. They'll probably cite the bullshit safety figures again to try to bolster their case. I believe there's one person testifying who's a proponent of commercial spaceflight, and I suspect he'll be beaten down by Congress.
* It's looking like Rep. Jim Oberstar might be heading the hearing. Back in 2004 Oberstar tried (in the interest of safety, of course) to kill off commercial suborbital spaceflight companies like Virgin Galactic by having them regulated at the same sort of levels that mature commercial airlines are regulated.
It's not really about you recording the fact that someone came to your website. The article says that there are worries that Google could further use the data, and eg connect it with the data they might have from Google Mail or other sites using Google Analytics, thus generating profiles about habits and preferences etc.
So collecting data is ok, but it's forbidden to run certain algorithms on the collected data? Something tells me this isn't a particularly sustainable arrangement.
We should then get some management that actually has a pair, and can deal with the politics to find practical solutions without worry what congressional district parts are made in or which NASA center does the work.
That's nice in theory, but unfortunately when it comes down to it, Congress has all of the funding power. If an administrator tried to rock the boat too much, they'd just find that politically-powerful and fiscally threatened Congressmen would remove funding for whatever they were trying to do. Example:
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2009/06/sen-shelbys-crusade-against-commercial-space.html
In the end, the real question is not the cut. The real question is, what will he replace this with? Will he push towards commercial space COMBINED with Direct (which COULD get by with less money)?
Another major question is whether or not it's truly necessary for NASA to spend tens of billions of dollars developing a new heavy-lift vehicle. For example, this proposal by the ULA uses commercial launchers and propellant depots instead of heavy-lift to create an exploration architecture suitable for NEO, Lunar, and ultimately Martian exploration, at a fraction of the cost:
http://ulalaunch.com/docs/publications/AffordableExplorationArchitecture2009.pdf
Abstract:
A Commercially Based Lunar Architecture
Frank Zegler1, Bernard F. Kutter2, Jon Barr3
The present ESAS architecture for lunar exploration is dependent on a large launcher. It has
been assumed that either the ARES V or something similar, such as the proposed Jupiter
"Direct" lifters are mandatory for serious lunar exploration. These launch vehicles require
extensive development with costs ranging into the tens of billions of dollars and with first
flight likely most of a decade away. In the end they will mimic the Saturn V
programmatically: a single-purpose lifter with a single user who must bear all costs. This
programmatic structure has not been shown to be effective in the long term. It is
characterized by low demonstrated reliability, ballooning costs and a glacial pace of
improvements.
The use of smaller, commercial launchers coupled with orbital depots eliminates the need for a
large launch vehicle. Much is made of the need for more launches- this is perceived as a
detriment. However since 75% of all the mass lifted to low earth orbit is merely propellant
with no intrinsic value it represents the optimal cargo for low-cost, strictly commercial launch
operations. These commercial launch vehicles, lifting a simple payload to a repeatable
location, can be operated on regular, predictable schedules. Relieved of the burden of hauling
propellants, the mass of the Altair and Orion vehicles for a lunar mission is very small and can
also be easily carried on existing launch vehicles. This strategy leads to high infrastructure
utilization, economic production rates, high demonstrated reliability and the lowest possible
costs.
This architecture encourages the exploration of the moon to be conducted not in single,
disconnected missions, but in a continuous process which builds orbital and surface resources
year by year. The architecture and vehicles themselves are directly applicable to Near Earth
Object and Mars exploration and the establishment of a functioning depot at earth-moon L2
provides a gateway for future high-mass spacecraft venturing to the rest of the solar system.
FYI, it's not a directed budget cut towards NASA -- every single non-military agency has been told by the Obama administration that they may see cuts of 5-10% in order to reduce the deficit.
http://www.spacepolitics.com/2009/11/17/sharpening-the-budget-cleaver/
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5hBr0LFXMFF1HE6-n_ZTN1829QS1QD9BUTPVG0
On the plus side, if there is in fact a budget cut, it'd hopefully be the cover NASA needs to shut down/reduce its politically well-guarded Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), which uses up a huge part of NASA's budget, but due to its chronically incompetent management has spectacularly failed in basically all of its large projects over the past 30 years.
It actually isn't just space the two countries are planning on cooperating on. Not sure how much beef is behind this statement, but here's a snippet of the joint statement by Presidents Obama and Hu during Obama's visit to China:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/joint-press-statement-president-obama-and-president-hu-china
http://nasawatch.com/archives/2009/11/china-and-us-to.html
The complementing departments of China and the United States have already signed a number of cooperation agreements, including the MOU to enhanced cooperation on climate change, energy and environment. The two sides have also officially launched the initiative of developing a China-U.S. clean energy research center.
Both President Obama and I said that we are willing to act on the basis of mutual benefit and reciprocity to deepen our cooperation on counterterrorism, law enforcement, science, technology, outer space, civil aviation, and engage in cooperation in space exploration, high-speed railway infrastructure, in agriculture, health, and other fields. And we also agreed to work together to continue to promote even greater progress in the growth of military-to-military ties.
I'm confused as to exactly how the Russians invade America. Without, y'know, getting their asses handed to them on the high seas.
If you're curious and don't mind spoilers, there's youtube video of the cinematics and gameplay for the "Wolverines" level (a tribute to "Red Dawn," I assume), which covers the first part of the Russian invasion:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG7vxlbpeVg
Basically, on an earlier mission you find out that the Russians have captured an American satellite component which allows them to spoof the satellite surveillance system so that it looks like there's a big invasion force coming in from the west, while concealing the actual invasion force coming in to attack the eastern US.
Speaking of videos, here's video of the "No Russian" level which has been causing all of the controversy. The player takes the role of an undercover operative which is attempting to infiltrate a terrorist group operating inside Russia:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gXBDkevx5lM
Apparently since doing their lunar lander run Armadillo Aerospace has been keeping itself busy with "boosted hops," where they fire the rocket up to a certain altitude, and then land back down under the rocket's own power. Here's a neat video of them boosting up to ~1000 feet:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gYk9uGrAqn8
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=16628
Starting with lower altitudes, each time they run they're going for an incrementally higher altitude. They've gone up to about 1932 feet (589m) so far, with the plan to go all the way up to 6000 feet, which is the highest their FAA permit allows them to currently launch. I believe both Armadillo Aerospace and Masten Space Systems have a number of customers in the scientific community who want to use these sorts of controlled boosted hops for running things like microgravity experiments.
What protectionism is in place? The only thing that we have is that any space tech can not be shared with China.
ITAR restrictions (where pretty much anything, however mundane, related to satellites is classified as a munition) are actually rather more problematic than you describe for space industry, although there fortunately seems to be some progress on that:
http://thespacereview.com/article/1503/1
A decade-long concern for the US space industry has been export control regulations. Since satellites and related components were put under the jurisdiction of the International Traffic in Arms Regulations (ITAR), space businesses, including manufacturers or commercial satellites and their subsystems, have raised the alarm that the stricter ITAR rules were hurting their ability to sell to customers outside the US, even to close allies. Companies, industry organizations, and their supporters have sought for much of this time to at least partially roll back those changes to enhance their competitiveness.
While the drumbeat for reform isn't necessarily as loud as it was a few years ago, thanks in part to procedural changes that have reduced the backlog of, and waiting time for, export license applications, there is now real evidence of progress towards the reforms the industry has sought. A section of HR 2410, a State Department authorization bill that the House approved in June, deals with export control and includes a number of key reforms that the industry has been seeking.
"It accomplishes many, if not almost all, of the things that people in the export control reform movement have been dreaming of for quite a while," said Mike Gold, director of the Washington office of Bigelow Aerospace and a leading advocate for export control reform, during a presentation at the COMSTAC meeting last week.
One key component is what Gold called a "review and revision" of the US Munitions List (USML), the compilation of components that are subject to ITAR. The bill would require a review of at least 20 percent of the USML every year for five years to determine if items should be removed from the list. After the five-year period the review would start over to allow updates based on advances in technology.
Another aspect of the bill would give the President the ability to remove satellites and related components from the USML, although it would still not allow the export of such items to China. The bill language would also require the public release of what are known as commodity jurisdiction determinations, when the State Department evaluates whether a specific technology belongs on the USML or not.
The good news for export control reform advocates is that the bill has passed the House. The bad news, as Gold explained, is that the Senate has taken no action on the bill yet, and there's no indication when--or even if--they will take up the legislation before the end of the next year. "To be honest, we haven't even heard any good rumors as to if this is something that rises to the level of priority" that the Senate will take action on, Gold said.
Key to the future of the bill is Senator John Kerry (D-MA), chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. "If Senator Kerry chooses to prioritize export control reform, it most likely will get done," Gold said.
Gold also noted there is a review of export control policy going on within the new administration, although that may be of limited effectiveness for the space industry since the inclusion of satellites and related components on the USML was done in legislation and therefore must be undone that way. However, he said that the actual law does provide some "wiggle room" for the administration to change how it implements that law, if it so chooses. "If there isn't a legislative fix, there is still the possibility--certainly not a strong possibility, but the potential anyway--of the executive branch doing something helpful
They would do well to put the moon and Mars on the back burner and focus on the asteroids.
This is basically the finding of a report by Wesley Huntress (see "The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space"), who was just named as head of the NASA Science Advisory Committee.
Then set aside a few hundred million a year in x-prize style incentives open to *everyone* not just US companies.
Focus on alternative propulsion and energy systems as chemical engines are not going to get us very far. Get NASA out of Earth to LEO and focused toward targets that are farther out and harder to reach. Let SpaceX and friends take care of launch costs to LEO.
Bretton Alexander, the newly appointed head of the Commercial Spaceflight Advisory Committee, is also President of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation, a group which includes private spaceflight companies like SpaceX, Armadillo Aerospace, Scaled Composites, and the X Prize Foundation. I suspect he'll be advocating pretty much exactly the sorts of things you describe.
The linked article didn't seem to mention it anywhere, but it's worth noting who the heads of the new committees are:
http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=29537
http://www.spacenews.com/civil/091030-bolden-revamps-nasa-advisory-council.html
* Commercial Space Committee: Bretton Alexander, current head of the Commercial Spaceflight Federation
* Education and Public Outreach: Miles O'Brien, pretty much the best and most clueful space journalist around
* Technology and Innovation Committee: Esther Dyson, well known for her tech entrepreneurship work
* (IT Infrastructure Committee chair seems to be pending)
All in all, they seem to be rather good picks. It also seems that Wesley Huntress has been chosen as the chair of the Science Committee. In 2004 he was head of a study, The Next Steps in Exploring Deep Space, a rather fascinating report proposing a space exploration infrastructure which would initially focus on Lagrange points and Near-Earth Objects, quite similar to the Flexible Path option proposed by the Augustine Commission.
And yet they didn't see fit to spend an extra few months on their guidance system to be sure they came in first. Why did they fly in September if they could have worked another month?
Basically, after qualifying for the prize he wanted to focus on other aspects of the rocket which would be more useful for the (rather more lucrative) commercial operations they have planned, and spending a load of money and time to buy and rerun with a differential RTK GPS system would mostly only be useful for getting a better contest score.
It's really worthwhile to read through the statement from John Carmack. He definitely doesn't hold anything against Masten (he says he would have done the same thing in their place and also said that it would be "probably also beneficial to the nascent New Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have other resources to draw upon"), but does hold some bitterness towards the decision of the judges:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemid=16507
For the past couple weeks, as it became clear that Masten had a real shot at completing the level 2 Lunar Lander Challenge and bettering our landing accuracy, I have been kicking myself for not taking the competition more seriously and working on a better landing accuracy. If they pulled it off, I was prepared to congratulate them and give a bit of a sheepish mea culpa. Nobody to be upset at except myself. We could have probably made a second flight in the drizzle on our scheduled days, and once we had the roll thruster issue sorted out, our landing accuracy would have been in the 20cm range. I never thought it was worth investing in differential RTK GPS systems, because it has no bearing on our commercial operations.
The current situation, where Masten was allowed a third active day of competition, after trying and failing on both scheduled days, is different. I don't hold anything against Masten for using an additional time window that has been offered, since we wouldn't have passed it up if we were in their situation, but I do think this was a mistake on the judges part.
I recognize that it is in the best interests of both the NASA Centennial Challenges department and the X-Prize Foundation to award all the prize money this year, and that will likely have indirect benefits for us all in coming years. It is probably also beneficial to the nascent New Space industry to get more money to Masten than Armadillo, since we have other resources to draw upon. Permit me to be petty enough to be upset and bitter about a half million dollars being taken from me and given to my competitor.
The rules have given the judges the discretion to do just about anything up to and including awarding prize money for best effort if they felt it necessary, so there may not be any grounds to challenge this, but I do feel that we have been robbed. I was going to argue that if Masten was allowed to take a window on an unscheduled day with no notice, the judges should come back to Texas on Sunday and let us take our unused second window to try for a better accuracy, but our FAA waiver for the LLC vehicle was only valid for the weekend of our scheduled attempt.
think Google Wave is a great platform but adds nothing for roleplaying. It even has an unwanted feature : logs accessible to newcomers. I used to game through IRC, creating a channel for each room and a general discussion channel. Players going from room to romm to meet people or act separately. It was crucial that when arriving in a room, players did not know what happened before as the game (Amber DRPG) focuses a lot on PvP conspiracies.
Remember that although the initial Wave servers are operated by Google, their eventual plan is to release the code as open source and encourage others to run their own Wave servers. I'm suspect that eventually people will modify the code or create plugins so they can run their own role-playing oriented servers with the sort of feature set you describe.
Now the $445 million price tag may be from development that has been done already for the entire program.
Actually, Ares I development costs has been $3 billion spent so far, and Orion development has been another $3 billion. The $445 million was specifically for the Ares I-X.
http://articles.orlandosentinel.com/2009-09-06/news/0909050169_1_ares-1-rocket-astronauts
It is true that a Delta IV would be about $10 million or so, but these aren't man rated. To get to that level with anything is costly.
According to the Augustine Committee, man-rating and developing crew capsules and LES for commercial rockets like the Delta IV would cost $300 million - $2 billion, depending on the rocket.
With all of the mergers, what other company cold deliver a working booster beside Thiokol?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. There's plenty of companies that can produce a first stage with performance comparable to or superior to the Ares I's thiokol stage.
The Atlas or Deltas will not take you to the moon.
Sure they can. Many of pre-ESAS plans for lunar exploration used the Atlas V or Delta IV rockets. I don't think all of them even relied on propellant depots, which makes it even easier.
As far as I know ATK is the only company really building solid rockets right now.
First, this isn't the case -- Aerojet builds solid rockets for the Atlas V. More importantly, you seem to be under the strange assumption that solid rockets are necessary for a manned system, when the evidence seems to indicate that (when compared to liquid propellant) they actually result in a considerably more dangerous launch environment for crew.
The Soviets were a lot more willing to shove nuclear reactors in places we were politically unwilling/unable to. The Russians may even have some Soviet prototypes around. It would be the same barely-post-war era tech all their stuff was, and it would be really, really, REALLY dangerous to use, but the very well might have gotten beyond blueprints.
As a matter of fact, the Soviets had a large number of nuclear reactors on satellites satellites (actual nuclear fission reactors, not radioisotope generators):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RORSAT
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/usa.htm
A number of them broke down and crashed back down to Earth, including one which crashed into Canada in 1978 and spread a decent amount of radioactive debris. Their nuclear-powered RORSAT series unfortunately also "had the lowest reliability and most quality problems of any Soviet space system."
See my other comment. Any reasonable cost estimate will include the cost of developing a system and its fixed annual costs. The development cost is $35-$45 billion, which contributes to a very high per-launch cost, especially when it'll only be launching a few times a year.
Considering that it shared lineage with the (cancelled) X-38 program, I'm not wildly optimistic about it's likelihood of success.
Could you elaborate on this? Everything I've been able to find about the X-38 is that it was a well-managed low-cost program, which met its milestones and performed several flight tests, but was only canceled due to ISS budget overruns.