NASA should have just bought the Buran after the fall of the Soviet Union (I imagine the price would be Alaska level) and only use crews for complex missions, satellites should be sent without the need of astronauts.
The crew that makes spaceflight so costly isn't the one flying on it, but the one on the ground that builds and maintains the craft. As far as I know, Buran wouldn't have been much cheaper in that regard.
I can definitely see the fun in full sized aerobatic aircraft racing, though I'd probably still enjoy rally driving a lot more, unless someone figures out how to do handbrake turns in a plane
Something similar might actually be feasible with the rocketplanes... I know Armadillo Aerospace (one of the engine providers for the Rocket Racing League) has been working with redirecting the rocket nozzle exhaust to control flight. It would be neat if you could redirect the exhaust to the side to rapidly rotate the rocketplane.
You know, I live just far enough away from Oshkosh (coupld miles) to not worry too much when I hear a plane fly by every 5 minutes during the EAA airventure event but now if something goes wrong, I think a rocket engine could reach me:( I wouldn't be too worried -- the max speed of these aircraft is 200-300mph. I think what sets them apart is their ability to accelerate, but the max velocity is similar to jet-powered aircraft with the same sort of airframe.
The summary mentions the article but doesn't seem to actually link to it. I think it's referring to this one.
Here's the summary I submitted earlier, which includes a link to a different (IMHO more informative) article, mentions the surprise involvement of Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack's company), and a liveblogging of the press conference:
Armadillo Aerospace Building Racing Rocket Engines
The Rocket Racing League made several announcements today, including a partnership with Armadillo Aerospace, the rocketry company run by game programming demigod John Carmack. The first exhibition races will be at the EAA AirVenture air show in early August, where League rocketplanes using engines produced by both XCOR and Armadillo will fly. The RRL hopes that the rocketplanes will be a testbed for new technologies which will feed into the wider aviation and aerospace market. There's also a pretty spiffy photo showing Armadillo's rocket firing
For the curious, here's the research abstract for the original article the Wired news bit is based on (unfortunately the article itself is behind a pay/subscription-wall):
Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain
Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 & John-Dylan Haynes
There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.
Building anything in space is horrendously complex and expensive.
I think Bigelow Aerospace would disagree. They already have prototype space station modules in orbit, and in the next few years they'll be launching up more of them and linking them together into larger stations. Robert Bigelow seems to think he can make a profit on it, and is betting a few hundred million of his own dollars on it.
> It's actually the first major thing I have disagreed with Obama on.
I like Obama too, but his math here is just plain weird. The pre-K initiative he's proposing would cost $18 billion a year. NASA's total funding is $16 billion a year. Project Constellation, which he's planning to gut, is currently a small fraction of this total and will eventually rise to less than half of it.
I mean, I have lots of problems with the way Project Constellation is being implemented. A big part of the reason that NASA is going with the more-costly shuttle-derived route is so that they can keep around many of their experienced shuttle engineers, especially the "greybeards" who'd otherwise probably go into retirement. Cutting the program for 5 years means that all those people go away.
Economics blogger Megan McArdle had a great post about this recently which elaborates on just how dangerous the anti-vaccination craze is:
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/correlation_causation_vaccinat.php
The anti-vaccination websites sustain their belief by systematically excluding anyone offering counterevidence from the domain of acceptable sources. Pharma studies can't be trusted because they have a profit motive. The CDC is in hock to big business. The "medical establishment" wants to make money giving your children unnecessary shots. In fact, the only person you can trust is the guy writing the website.
This is the sure sign of a crank. It is possible that all these people are wrong--science has had much more spectacular failures in the face of clear evidence. But there is no such thing as a multi-million person conspiracy....
Looking for those links is entirely natural. But fingering vaccines has real and terrible consequences. Millions of children die worldwide every year from childhood diseases that we've eliminated here through vaccination. Now, because these websites are frightening people about vaccination, we're seeing a resurgence of those diseases. People are dying from them again, and others are being left with permanent health impairment. Leaving children unvaccinated means going back to
* Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)
* Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s)
* Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy.
* Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US before vaccines).
* Encephalitis and pulmonary hypertension for people with whooping cough--thanks to people who don't vaccinate their kids, in 2001, 17 people, mostly infants, died of pertussis (200,000 cases in 1940).
* Cardiac arrest and paralysis for people with diptheria (207,000 cases and about 15,000 deaths in 1920).
The vaccines scare us because the diseases don't. And they don't because of the vaccines.
As someone who majored in psychology, worked in two labs, and read countless psychology papers, I can tell you that 99% of psychologists avoid math when possible, and the other 10% try to use it but make obvious errors.
I hadn't really thought about it before, but it actually seems like nowadays social psychologists who are good at math tend to call themselves neuroeconomists. Cognitive psychologists who are good at math nowadays tend to call themselves psychophysicists, computational neuroscientists, or cognitive neuroscientists.
Rapunzel is back! Not only that, but the classic story will be done in full CGI.
I'm actually pretty interested in Rapunzel, due to the rendering methods they're implementing for it. From the wikipedia page:
The film will be made in CGI, though Rapunzel will resemble traditional oil paintings on canvas: "There's no photoreal hair. I want luscious hair, and we are inventing new ways of doing that. I want to bring the warmth and intuitive feel of hand-drawn to CGI. [5]
"For inspiration, Keane and his animators are referencing a painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing, applying a certain richness that they have never attained in animation before.
"A fairy tale world has to feel romantic and lush. So we were able to duplicate the shot with the girl on the swing in 3D, to do a dimensional tree where the leaves turn, but it still feels like it has calories if you look at it too long. Very painterly.
"The next step was to do an animated human character: to get a softness, a feel of blood in the veins. I want skin moving across bone and tendon and there's a subtlety to this. The thing is, I don't want realism.
"Kyle Strawitz really helped me start to believe that the things I wanted to see were possible... that you could move in a Disney painterly world. He took the house from Snow White and built it and painted it so that it looked like a flat painting that suddenly started to move, and it had dimension and kept all of the soft, round curves of the brushstrokes of watercolor. Kyle helped us get that Fragonard look of that girl on the swing... We are using subsurface scattering and global illumination and all of the latest techniques to pull off convincing human characters and rich environments." [6]
One of the main ambitions of the makers of Rapunzel is to create movements that are just as soft and fluid as of that in the old Disney Classics.
I miss Asimov, Clarke, and all the greats. I've already read all their works, I'm ready for some new authors!
In that vein: Neal Stephenson, Stephen Baxter, KIm Stanley Robinson, Greg Benford.
I'd also personally add in Charles Stross. He's written some great hard sci fi (much of it freely-downloadable), and as an added bonus he's the only sci-fi author I can think of who has a 3-digit slashdot ID#.
I still do not understand why everything is left/right. Reality tends to be complicated and every story has a lot more aspects than left/right (even if you manage to define those two terms).
Of course it doesn't cover all possible variances. However, to put it in statistical terms, the left/right axis is a useful principal component which characterizes much (perhaps even the majority) of political differences.
Not sure if you've seen this already, but the folks at RLV News and Transterrestrial Musings have been doing liveblogging of XCOR's press conference and their talk at the ongoing Space Access conference, which provides many new juicy bits of information:
Lots of good stuff, but I thought this was the most interesting:
Transterrestrial: Mark II will have hard points on outside. Will carry upper stage dorsally, that can put 10-20 kg payload into LEO.
RLV News: Put a 10-20kg payload into LEO. A target price of $500k. Having that kind of lower-bound for putting a payload into LEO could really revolutionize the nanosat market.
I will give XCOR credit for this. While I'm not the biggest fan of LOX/Methane (assuming that's what Lynx is going to use, since I know it's something XCOR has messed with; I prefer LOX/Propane because it has almost as much ISP, much higher density at 100K, and can share a common bulkhead), it does have enough ISP to reach orbit without a ridiculous scaling factor.
Actually, according to their FAQ, they'll be using LOX/Kerosene. If I understand correctly this is the same sort of fuel SpaceX uses, although of course operating on a rather different order of magnitude. It seems that the largest LOX/Kerosene engine XCOR has constructed so far was a 1,800 lbf engine back in 2003 -- anybody have back-of-the-envelope calculations on what sort of thrust XCOR needs for a suborbital spaceplane?
Now, I'm not asserting that there is no market for these launches. I just question the size of the market.
If I recall correctly the market for suborbital sounding rocket research flights is something like $400 million a year, and even besides space tourism I imagine the emerging suborbital vehicles could take a decent bite of that market.
My mistake! I had meant to mention that XCOR and the Rocket Racing League would be starting rocketplane exhibition races this year, but forgot about it while looking up articles. Thanks for the reminder.
I mostly agree. I am curious about who's going to build the airframe for XCOR's new suborbital craft, though. Unless they're going to massively increase the size of the company, I suspect they won't be building it themselves. (The EZ-Rocket apparently used a Rutan Long-EZ as its frame)
This is wonderful, but impractical for anything but a joy ride. How about creating something that lands you at some other place on the earth's surface?
I'd bet this is in XCOR's eventual plans, perhaps with a future craft. In fact, in 2005 their EZ-Rocket made the first delivery of US mail by a manned rocketplane, albeit over a relatively small distance.
XCOR isn't just some random wannabe company which recently hopped onto the "space tourism" bandwagon. They're a small (30-person) but well-respected private company noted for their expertise in building reusable liquid-fueled rocket engines.
In 2001 they first flew their XCOR EZ-Rocket, which made regular demonstration flights at air shows for a few years and in 2005 set the distance record for a point-to-point rocket powered takeoff and landing.
XCOR has a reputation for not tooting its own horn, instead working quietly and being rather conservative about its announcements.
Their first version will go up to 61km, and they're planning on making incremental improvements to produce a second version that goes to 110km.
Estimated total project cost is $10 million, with a passenger ticket price of ~$100K (half of Virgin Galactic). XCOR isn't planning on selling tickets directly to customers though, instead selling to ride operators who will deal with customer themselves.
They already have a deal with a private research lab to fly multiple research flights for them each year.
This quote from XCOR chief Jeff Greason explains their philosophy quite nicely: Lynx is seen by XCOR Aerospace as one piece of a larger roadmap of vehicles -- a start small and then add performance approach -- eventually culminating in a piloted orbital system, Greason said. "We've selected the basket of technologies... technologies that we believe position us very well for the suborbital market, but also put us on the road for later, higher-performance systems," he explained.
This Will Be Newsworthy... When they have more than "Artist's Conception" drawings.
I want very badly to be excited about the private space race, but with only three serious "New Space" firms with hardware in the sky (Bigelow, SpaceX, and Scaled Composites), I'm still not sure I'll ride a spaceship before I'm dead, at least not at a price I can afford.
Technically speaking, XCOR has had "hardware in the sky" since 2001, when they first flew the XCOR EZ-Rocket rocketplane. A couple years ago the EZ-Rocket set the point-to-point distance record for a rocket-powered take-off and landing. XCOR is basically building on the experience they gained from the EZ-Rocket and their currently Rocket Racing League efforts to create the suborbital spacecraft the current article is talking about. XCOR has historically been incredibly conservative in their predictions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actually have new hardware flying faster than their predicted timescale.
Slashdot Mirror
NASA should have just bought the Buran after the fall of the Soviet Union (I imagine the price would be Alaska level) and only use crews for complex missions, satellites should be sent without the need of astronauts.
The crew that makes spaceflight so costly isn't the one flying on it, but the one on the ground that builds and maintains the craft. As far as I know, Buran wouldn't have been much cheaper in that regard.
So you're saying the reason to not do it is because it is difficult and expensive?
Difficult and expensive enough that the cost would be more than the expected benefit, yes.
I can definitely see the fun in full sized aerobatic aircraft racing, though I'd probably still enjoy rally driving a lot more, unless someone figures out how to do handbrake turns in a plane
Something similar might actually be feasible with the rocketplanes... I know Armadillo Aerospace (one of the engine providers for the Rocket Racing League) has been working with redirecting the rocket nozzle exhaust to control flight. It would be neat if you could redirect the exhaust to the side to rapidly rotate the rocketplane.
Here's the summary I submitted earlier, which includes a link to a different (IMHO more informative) article, mentions the surprise involvement of Armadillo Aerospace (John Carmack's company), and a liveblogging of the press conference: Armadillo Aerospace Building Racing Rocket Engines
The Rocket Racing League made several announcements today, including a partnership with Armadillo Aerospace, the rocketry company run by game programming demigod John Carmack. The first exhibition races will be at the EAA AirVenture air show in early August, where League rocketplanes using engines produced by both XCOR and Armadillo will fly. The RRL hopes that the rocketplanes will be a testbed for new technologies which will feed into the wider aviation and aerospace market. There's also a pretty spiffy photo showing Armadillo's rocket firing
For the curious, here's the research abstract for the original article the Wired news bit is based on (unfortunately the article itself is behind a pay/subscription-wall):
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/vaop/ncurrent/abs/nn.2112.html
Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain
Chun Siong Soon1,2, Marcel Brass1,3, Hans-Jochen Heinze4 & John-Dylan Haynes
There has been a long controversy as to whether subjectively 'free' decisions are determined by brain activity ahead of time. We found that the outcome of a decision can be encoded in brain activity of prefrontal and parietal cortex up to 10 s before it enters awareness. This delay presumably reflects the operation of a network of high-level control areas that begin to prepare an upcoming decision long before it enters awareness.
Building anything in space is horrendously complex and expensive.
I think Bigelow Aerospace would disagree. They already have prototype space station modules in orbit, and in the next few years they'll be launching up more of them and linking them together into larger stations. Robert Bigelow seems to think he can make a profit on it, and is betting a few hundred million of his own dollars on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bigelow_Aerospace
> It's actually the first major thing I have disagreed with Obama on.
I like Obama too, but his math here is just plain weird. The pre-K initiative he's proposing would cost $18 billion a year. NASA's total funding is $16 billion a year. Project Constellation, which he's planning to gut, is currently a small fraction of this total and will eventually rise to less than half of it.
I mean, I have lots of problems with the way Project Constellation is being implemented. A big part of the reason that NASA is going with the more-costly shuttle-derived route is so that they can keep around many of their experienced shuttle engineers, especially the "greybeards" who'd otherwise probably go into retirement. Cutting the program for 5 years means that all those people go away.
> Even the national autism association agrees that it's the cause the only probable cause of the current autism EPIDEMIC:
The "National Autism Association" was founded by anti-vaccination advocates, so they're not exactly an objective party.
http://meganmcardle.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/correlation_causation_vaccinat.php The anti-vaccination websites sustain their belief by systematically excluding anyone offering counterevidence from the domain of acceptable sources. Pharma studies can't be trusted because they have a profit motive. The CDC is in hock to big business. The "medical establishment" wants to make money giving your children unnecessary shots. In fact, the only person you can trust is the guy writing the website.
This is the sure sign of a crank. It is possible that all these people are wrong--science has had much more spectacular failures in the face of clear evidence. But there is no such thing as a multi-million person conspiracy.
Looking for those links is entirely natural. But fingering vaccines has real and terrible consequences. Millions of children die worldwide every year from childhood diseases that we've eliminated here through vaccination. Now, because these websites are frightening people about vaccination, we're seeing a resurgence of those diseases. People are dying from them again, and others are being left with permanent health impairment. Leaving children unvaccinated means going back to
* Leg braces and iron lungs for people with polio (57,628 cases in 1952)
* Encephalitis and sterility for people with mumps (200,000 cases a year in the 1960s)
* Congenital rubella syndrome for children whose mothers contracted the illness during pregnancy.
* Blindness, pneumonia, encephalitis, and death--one per thousand--for people with measles (nearly 1 million cases a year in the US before vaccines).
* Encephalitis and pulmonary hypertension for people with whooping cough--thanks to people who don't vaccinate their kids, in 2001, 17 people, mostly infants, died of pertussis (200,000 cases in 1940).
* Cardiac arrest and paralysis for people with diptheria (207,000 cases and about 15,000 deaths in 1920).
The vaccines scare us because the diseases don't. And they don't because of the vaccines.
As someone who majored in psychology, worked in two labs, and read countless psychology papers, I can tell you that 99% of psychologists avoid math when possible, and the other 10% try to use it but make obvious errors.
I hadn't really thought about it before, but it actually seems like nowadays social psychologists who are good at math tend to call themselves neuroeconomists. Cognitive psychologists who are good at math nowadays tend to call themselves psychophysicists, computational neuroscientists, or cognitive neuroscientists.
Anyone else in the field care to agree/disagree?
This news image over on engadget has got to be one of the creepiest things I've seen in a while.
I'm actually pretty interested in Rapunzel, due to the rendering methods they're implementing for it. From the wikipedia page: The film will be made in CGI, though Rapunzel will resemble traditional oil paintings on canvas: "There's no photoreal hair. I want luscious hair, and we are inventing new ways of doing that. I want to bring the warmth and intuitive feel of hand-drawn to CGI. [5]
"For inspiration, Keane and his animators are referencing a painting by French Rococo artist Jean-Honore Fragonard, The Swing, applying a certain richness that they have never attained in animation before.
"A fairy tale world has to feel romantic and lush. So we were able to duplicate the shot with the girl on the swing in 3D, to do a dimensional tree where the leaves turn, but it still feels like it has calories if you look at it too long. Very painterly.
"The next step was to do an animated human character: to get a softness, a feel of blood in the veins. I want skin moving across bone and tendon and there's a subtlety to this. The thing is, I don't want realism.
"Kyle Strawitz really helped me start to believe that the things I wanted to see were possible... that you could move in a Disney painterly world. He took the house from Snow White and built it and painted it so that it looked like a flat painting that suddenly started to move, and it had dimension and kept all of the soft, round curves of the brushstrokes of watercolor. Kyle helped us get that Fragonard look of that girl on the swing... We are using subsurface scattering and global illumination and all of the latest techniques to pull off convincing human characters and rich environments." [6]
One of the main ambitions of the makers of Rapunzel is to create movements that are just as soft and fluid as of that in the old Disney Classics.
Particularly since the news article seems to be down, here's the official site, which has some neat photos of RepRap:
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome
Here's their main blog, where you can keep track of progress on RepRap:
http://blog.reprap.org/
I miss Asimov, Clarke, and all the greats. I've already read all their works, I'm ready for some new authors!
In that vein: Neal Stephenson, Stephen Baxter, KIm Stanley Robinson, Greg Benford.
I'd also personally add in Charles Stross. He's written some great hard sci fi (much of it freely-downloadable), and as an added bonus he's the only sci-fi author I can think of who has a 3-digit slashdot ID#.
I still do not understand why everything is left/right. Reality tends to be complicated and every story has a lot more aspects than left/right (even if you manage to define those two terms).
Of course it doesn't cover all possible variances. However, to put it in statistical terms, the left/right axis is a useful principal component which characterizes much (perhaps even the majority) of political differences.
I don't get it. What makes this news? Some dude wrote a book. So what? It happens every day.
What am I missing? That's a genuine question.
He's Neal Stephenson. If you want an idea of why Slashdotters enjoy him, check out his (free to read) non-fiction piece In the Beginning was the Command Line.
Lots of good stuff, but I thought this was the most interesting: Transterrestrial: Mark II will have hard points on outside. Will carry upper stage dorsally, that can put 10-20 kg payload into LEO.
RLV News: Put a 10-20kg payload into LEO. A target price of $500k. Having that kind of lower-bound for putting a payload into LEO could really revolutionize the nanosat market.
I will give XCOR credit for this. While I'm not the biggest fan of LOX/Methane (assuming that's what Lynx is going to use, since I know it's something XCOR has messed with; I prefer LOX/Propane because it has almost as much ISP, much higher density at 100K, and can share a common bulkhead), it does have enough ISP to reach orbit without a ridiculous scaling factor.
Actually, according to their FAQ, they'll be using LOX/Kerosene. If I understand correctly this is the same sort of fuel SpaceX uses, although of course operating on a rather different order of magnitude. It seems that the largest LOX/Kerosene engine XCOR has constructed so far was a 1,800 lbf engine back in 2003 -- anybody have back-of-the-envelope calculations on what sort of thrust XCOR needs for a suborbital spaceplane?
Now, I'm not asserting that there is no market for these launches. I just question the size of the market.
If I recall correctly the market for suborbital sounding rocket research flights is something like $400 million a year, and even besides space tourism I imagine the emerging suborbital vehicles could take a decent bite of that market.
My mistake! I had meant to mention that XCOR and the Rocket Racing League would be starting rocketplane exhibition races this year, but forgot about it while looking up articles. Thanks for the reminder.
I mostly agree. I am curious about who's going to build the airframe for XCOR's new suborbital craft, though. Unless they're going to massively increase the size of the company, I suspect they won't be building it themselves. (The EZ-Rocket apparently used a Rutan Long-EZ as its frame)
This is wonderful, but impractical for anything but a joy ride. How about creating something that lands you at some other place on the earth's surface?
I'd bet this is in XCOR's eventual plans, perhaps with a future craft. In fact, in 2005 their EZ-Rocket made the first delivery of US mail by a manned rocketplane, albeit over a relatively small distance.
Also, some additional points worth noting:
This Will Be Newsworthy... When they have more than "Artist's Conception" drawings.
I want very badly to be excited about the private space race, but with only three serious "New Space" firms with hardware in the sky (Bigelow, SpaceX, and Scaled Composites), I'm still not sure I'll ride a spaceship before I'm dead, at least not at a price I can afford.
Technically speaking, XCOR has had "hardware in the sky" since 2001, when they first flew the XCOR EZ-Rocket rocketplane. A couple years ago the EZ-Rocket set the point-to-point distance record for a rocket-powered take-off and landing. XCOR is basically building on the experience they gained from the EZ-Rocket and their currently Rocket Racing League efforts to create the suborbital spacecraft the current article is talking about. XCOR has historically been incredibly conservative in their predictions, and I wouldn't be surprised if they actually have new hardware flying faster than their predicted timescale.