It should be noted that this is basicaly the same story as the article earlier today on "Space Race 2.0 has Begun". It's an interesting story, though, and I don't mind seeing another link on it.
Also, for anybody ogling at the $265 million price for the spaceport, this is also about how much an airport might cost. It should also be noted that the UAE is a country where people are spending $1.8 billion on a chain of artificial islands arranged to look like a map of the world.
I wonder why some are trying to sell suborbital fly and (almost) noone is selling 'vomit comet' rides to the normal guys: this should be a lot more affordable!
Peter Diamandis, the organizer of the X-Prize, recently started a company called ZERO-G which sells "vomit comet" rides for $3,750 each. Flights leave from Fort Lauderdale, Florida every month or so, with 15 low-gravity or zero-gravity flight parabolas. A number of notable folks have already flown on it, such as Buzz Aldrin, Burt Rutan, and id Software's John Carmack.
I'll let the police chief put cameras in my home if I can put cameras in his home. Likewise, if political officials want to put cameras in all of our homes, we should be able to put cameras in theirs and be able to watch their political dealings.
In David Brin's Transparent Society he argues that not only is such a system of mutual and ubiquitous surveillance/sousveillance inevitable with continuing advances in technology, it would also reduce government abuses of power. I'm not completely decided on this yet (I've long considered privacy to be of the utmost importance), but I think such a system would be a better society overall.
No private company is going to fund MERs. No private company is going to fund Gravity Probe B. No private company is going to fund Cassini.
Sort of like how no private organization would fund a solar sail or experimental Martian greenhouse? Granted, the solar sail's rocket failed and the Mars Oasis project was suspended (for the time being), but hopefully we'll see such private space research projects become more common as launch costs decrease. I'd love to see a space-based equivalent of the Howards Hughes Medical Institute, funded by geeks raised on sci-fi.
This makes me wonder what the legality will be (or is) of gambling in MMORPGs and other virtual realities, particularly those like Second Life where in-game items and currency can be bought and sold with real-world money. If you make in-game gambling illegal, that seems like an unreasonable (and perhaps unconstitutional?) constraint placed on creators of games. On the other hand, if in-game gambling is legal, that's a pretty big loophole for the "evils of gambling" to get through.
On that note, couldn't all for-pay MMORPGs be considered a form of gambling? Players pay a certain amount each month, and there's a certain chance that you'll be able to accumulate in-game items which can be sold for real-world money. There's of course an entertainment aspect to the game, but there's also an entertainment aspect for going to a casino.
(This is from something I wrote up a couple months ago, regarding a question I asked Professor Deffeyes during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2011, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.
If somebody was obsessed with their car and went randomly cruising around in it so much that it severely impeded other areas of their life, then yes, I'd call that an addiction.
Unless the Borg are coming, Starship Troopers are recruiting, or the Asgard have gone Maverick on us, this isn't gonna be useful as a weapon.
Yeah, you're probably right. These sorts of things are sometimes called relativistic kill vehicles in sci-fi, and come in handy during fictional interstellar warfare:
A relativistic kill vehicle (RKV) or relativistic bomb is a hypothetical weapon system sometimes found in science fiction. The details of such systems vary widely, but the key common feature is the use of a massive impactor travelling at a significant fraction of light speed to strike the target. At these relativistic velocities the mass could carry immense amounts of kinetic energy, potentially several times that of its rest mass energy equivalent (ie, the amount of energy that would be released if its rest mass were totally converted into free energy).
RKVs have been proposed as a method of interstellar warfare, especially in settings where faster than light travel or sensors are impossible. By travelling near the speed of light an RKV could substantially limit the amount of early warning detection time. Furthermore, since the destructive effects of the RKV are carried by its kinetic energy, destroying the vehicle near its target would do little to reduce the damage; the cloud of particles or vapor would still be travelling at nearly the same speed and would have little time to disperse. Indeed, some versions of the RKV concept call for the RKV to explode shortly before impact to shower a wide region of space.
Since they would likely be difficult to provide much terminal guidance to, RKVs are usually proposed as a strategic weapon targeted against large and relatively immobile targets such as planets. Accelerating a mass to such velocities in the first place will likely require vast amounts of energy and large, unwieldy accelerators.
NASA is also looking ahead to future challenges. Sponberg told New Scientist that the programme has already commissioned two studies - one by the X-Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, California, and one by Paragon Space Development Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, both in the US - to look into a possible challenge for the first private human orbital flight.
"These studies have recommended setting a prize for developing a three-person spacecraft at a relatively low cost of $100 to 150 million," Sponberg says. But he adds: "There are funding and safety issues associated with such a prize that we are still working on."
He says the programme will also soon release a request for proposals for studies of a prize for the first private lunar robotics lander.
Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.
In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.
Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?
By creating these lowball prizes, instead of creating new jobs in-house, which are good government jobs, which pay high salaries and have good benefits, NASA wants to outsource its labor.
Was DARPA "outsourcing its labor" when it ran the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles?
Regarding the long term rechargeable power system they are looking for, is that for planetary and lunar exploration or will it be used in a zero-gravity environment. Without the restrictions of gravity perhaps a very efficient flywheel could be used.
It's intended for lunar exploration. From their rules draft:
The Lunar Night Power Source Challenge is designed to promote the development of power systems and technologies that can operate for long periods in a harsh environment. Historically, planetary surface power technologies have relied primarily upon radioisotopes or available solar energy, providing limited options for operating during planetary nights. The specific objective of this Challenge is to develop rechargeable power system technologies that could support a rover during the lunar night and that have other potential space- and Earth-based applications.
and what NASA challenge participant would do after e.g. pressure suit competition is over? Open space suit shop?
Precisely. Actually, selling a number of pressure suits on the open market is one of the requirements for winning that competition. I suspect there's going to be a fairly large demand for such suits in the future, particularly for suborbital spaceflight.
Indeed, I once saw a talk by one of the X Prize contestants (XCOR) mentioning that, somewhat unexpectedly, acquiring the necessary pressure suits was one of the major costs they were worried about.
* Elon Musk has spent about $100M so far on developing the line of SpaceX Falcon launchers. The first Falcon 9 launch is scheduled for 2007. He hasn't said how much more money it will take to reach that launch but I doubt it could be more than another $100M.
* Kistler says it needs a few hundred million dollars to finish its fully reusable two stage K-1 vehicle.
* T/Space said it can build a CEV system capable of taking crews and cargo to the ISS for around $500M.
* LockMart once promised to build the VentureStar for $6B. If they had a 100% overrun that would still be less than $13B.
I think we'll see a private version of Mercury within 20 years, then things will start getting really wild.
I think it'll be sooner than that. SpaceX has already announced its intent to compete for the $50 million America's Space Prize for orbital flight, which has a 2010 deadline. SpaceX is set to launch their first orbital rocket on Friday, and the Falcon 9 (which will be man-rated and large enough to lift a Mercury-style capsule) is scheduled to launch in 2007.
Last year an activist group called THONG (Topless Humans Organized for Natural Genetics) apparently organized a topless protest against the use of this material in clothing.
While we are talking about the moon, I can understand and see the scientific payoffs of sending people back to the moon, but I am much less clear on the whole Mars thing.
Although science is a nice side-benefit, the main reason for going to the Moon this time around is to learn how to live there and make use of the local resources, as a step towards making humanity a space-faring species.
It will bring the equivalent of free/open source to the physical world and thus to everyone who can download it, and there will be editors to modify them at one's discretion.
Not only that, but what about the physical parallels to information which is illegal nowadays, like child pornography? For example, what do gun control laws mean if anybody can trivially construct their own firearms?
We found dozens, if not hundreds, of new species..
Dozens? Hundreds? Do you mean to tell me that nobody actually counted?
I think the problem is that you can't always tell two organisms are of different species with a quick glance. Sometimes you actually need to do things like behavioral or genetic studies to be sure. Also, until they've had time to sort through the records, there's also the possibility that some of the species they've discovered have already been found elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
But in the future, when the Gulf has less income, due to less oil, won't their economies die?
This is precisely why the UAE is diversifying into things like tourism.
It should be noted that this is basicaly the same story as the article earlier today on "Space Race 2.0 has Begun". It's an interesting story, though, and I don't mind seeing another link on it.
Also, for anybody ogling at the $265 million price for the spaceport, this is also about how much an airport might cost. It should also be noted that the UAE is a country where people are spending $1.8 billion on a chain of artificial islands arranged to look like a map of the world.
I wonder why some are trying to sell suborbital fly and (almost) noone is selling 'vomit comet' rides to the normal guys: this should be a lot more affordable!
Peter Diamandis, the organizer of the X-Prize, recently started a company called ZERO-G which sells "vomit comet" rides for $3,750 each. Flights leave from Fort Lauderdale, Florida every month or so, with 15 low-gravity or zero-gravity flight parabolas. A number of notable folks have already flown on it, such as Buzz Aldrin, Burt Rutan, and id Software's John Carmack.
I'll let the police chief put cameras in my home if I can put cameras in his home. Likewise, if political officials want to put cameras in all of our homes, we should be able to put cameras in theirs and be able to watch their political dealings.
In David Brin's Transparent Society he argues that not only is such a system of mutual and ubiquitous surveillance/sousveillance inevitable with continuing advances in technology, it would also reduce government abuses of power. I'm not completely decided on this yet (I've long considered privacy to be of the utmost importance), but I think such a system would be a better society overall.
No private company is going to fund MERs. No private company is going to fund Gravity Probe B. No private company is going to fund Cassini.
Sort of like how no private organization would fund a solar sail or experimental Martian greenhouse? Granted, the solar sail's rocket failed and the Mars Oasis project was suspended (for the time being), but hopefully we'll see such private space research projects become more common as launch costs decrease. I'd love to see a space-based equivalent of the Howards Hughes Medical Institute, funded by geeks raised on sci-fi.
This makes me wonder what the legality will be (or is) of gambling in MMORPGs and other virtual realities, particularly those like Second Life where in-game items and currency can be bought and sold with real-world money. If you make in-game gambling illegal, that seems like an unreasonable (and perhaps unconstitutional?) constraint placed on creators of games. On the other hand, if in-game gambling is legal, that's a pretty big loophole for the "evils of gambling" to get through.
On that note, couldn't all for-pay MMORPGs be considered a form of gambling? Players pay a certain amount each month, and there's a certain chance that you'll be able to accumulate in-game items which can be sold for real-world money. There's of course an entertainment aspect to the game, but there's also an entertainment aspect for going to a casino.
(This is from something I wrote up a couple months ago, regarding a question I asked Professor Deffeyes during a Q&A session after a talk he gave at my university. If anybody has a better answer, I'd honestly be interested in hearing it.)
Today there was a talk in Beckman Auditorium by Kenneth Deffeyes, Princeton professor emeritus and author of one of the more popular books on that ever-popular meme, peak oil. He discussed his belief that we had hit peak oil sometime around this past Thanksgiving, and that oil prices are going to fluctuate wildly and rise in the next 5 years of so.
During the Q&A period I went up to the microphone and asked the following: During your talk you briefly mentioned the futures market. Currently on the oil futures market, you can purchase a contract for a barrel of oil to be delivered in, say, the year 2010 or 2011 which is actually cheaper than a barrel of oil today. What are your thoughts on why this is the case?
In his response, he had mentioned that he had been asked a similar question after he gave his talk at Merrill Lynch, basically: "If you really think oil prices are going to rise, why don't you put your money where your mouth is and buy up futures contracts?" He said to them that he wasn't too knowledgeable about futures contracts, and afterwards read up on them a little and found some of their intricacies bewildering. He said that he would want to purchase futures options for the coming few years, due to the extreme price fluctuations he expects, followed by regular futures in the longer term.
I'm not sure I bought his answer. Although I'm not sure about how far ahead one can purchase futures options, regular futures can definitely be purchased for 2011, which should be well into the period of soaring prices he predicts.
If somebody was obsessed with their car and went randomly cruising around in it so much that it severely impeded other areas of their life, then yes, I'd call that an addiction.
Unless the Borg are coming, Starship Troopers are recruiting, or the Asgard have gone Maverick on us, this isn't gonna be useful as a weapon.
h icle
Yeah, you're probably right. These sorts of things are sometimes called relativistic kill vehicles in sci-fi, and come in handy during fictional interstellar warfare:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativistic_kill_ve
A relativistic kill vehicle (RKV) or relativistic bomb is a hypothetical weapon system sometimes found in science fiction. The details of such systems vary widely, but the key common feature is the use of a massive impactor travelling at a significant fraction of light speed to strike the target. At these relativistic velocities the mass could carry immense amounts of kinetic energy, potentially several times that of its rest mass energy equivalent (ie, the amount of energy that would be released if its rest mass were totally converted into free energy).
RKVs have been proposed as a method of interstellar warfare, especially in settings where faster than light travel or sensors are impossible. By travelling near the speed of light an RKV could substantially limit the amount of early warning detection time. Furthermore, since the destructive effects of the RKV are carried by its kinetic energy, destroying the vehicle near its target would do little to reduce the damage; the cloud of particles or vapor would still be travelling at nearly the same speed and would have little time to disperse. Indeed, some versions of the RKV concept call for the RKV to explode shortly before impact to shower a wide region of space.
Since they would likely be difficult to provide much terminal guidance to, RKVs are usually proposed as a strategic weapon targeted against large and relatively immobile targets such as planets. Accelerating a mass to such velocities in the first place will likely require vast amounts of energy and large, unwieldy accelerators.
There's also an article on this in New Scientist, which has the following interesting quote:
8 701&feedId=online-news_rss20
http://www.newscientistspace.com/article.ns?id=dn
NASA is also looking ahead to future challenges. Sponberg told New Scientist that the programme has already commissioned two studies - one by the X-Prize Foundation in Santa Monica, California, and one by Paragon Space Development Corporation in Tucson, Arizona, both in the US - to look into a possible challenge for the first private human orbital flight.
"These studies have recommended setting a prize for developing a three-person spacecraft at a relatively low cost of $100 to 150 million," Sponberg says. But he adds: "There are funding and safety issues associated with such a prize that we are still working on."
He says the programme will also soon release a request for proposals for studies of a prize for the first private lunar robotics lander.
In David Brin's book "Earth" he talks about a future society with zero privacy.
He also discusses it in great detail in his non-fiction book The Transparent Society. A sample chapter is available online. A quote:
Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.
In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.
Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?
By creating these lowball prizes, instead of creating new jobs in-house, which are good government jobs, which pay high salaries and have good benefits, NASA wants to outsource its labor.
Was DARPA "outsourcing its labor" when it ran the DARPA Grand Challenge for autonomous vehicles?
Regarding the long term rechargeable power system they are looking for, is that for planetary and lunar exploration or will it be used in a zero-gravity environment. Without the restrictions of gravity perhaps a very efficient flywheel could be used.
It's intended for lunar exploration. From their rules draft:
The Lunar Night Power Source Challenge is designed to promote the development of power systems and technologies that can operate for long periods in a harsh environment. Historically, planetary surface power technologies have relied primarily upon radioisotopes or available solar energy, providing limited options for operating during planetary nights. The specific objective of this Challenge is to develop rechargeable power system technologies that could support a rover during the lunar night and that have other potential space- and Earth-based applications.
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up presenting such a challenge in the future, after the micro reentry vehicle challenge is successful.
and what NASA challenge participant would do after e.g. pressure suit competition is over? Open space suit shop?
Precisely. Actually, selling a number of pressure suits on the open market is one of the requirements for winning that competition. I suspect there's going to be a fairly large demand for such suits in the future, particularly for suborbital spaceflight.
Indeed, I once saw a talk by one of the X Prize contestants (XCOR) mentioning that, somewhat unexpectedly, acquiring the necessary pressure suits was one of the major costs they were worried about.
There's an interesting post over on Clark Lindsay's RLV and Space Transport News, part of which I've pasted below:
d =894
http://www.hobbyspace.com/nucleus/index.php?itemi
* Florida Today points out that "In the past three years, Congress has given the [Shuttle] program $13 billion, and all that money has resulted in just two flights". Sword of Damocles: NASA must safely launch the space shuttles this year, or the program wont survive - Florida Today - Feb.5.06.
To put that into perspective:
* Elon Musk has spent about $100M so far on developing the line of SpaceX Falcon launchers. The first Falcon 9 launch is scheduled for 2007. He hasn't said how much more money it will take to reach that launch but I doubt it could be more than another $100M.
* Kistler says it needs a few hundred million dollars to finish its fully reusable two stage K-1 vehicle.
* T/Space said it can build a CEV system capable of taking crews and cargo to the ISS for around $500M.
* LockMart once promised to build the VentureStar for $6B. If they had a 100% overrun that would still be less than $13B.
But your money isn't insured.
I wonder how long it'll be until Second Life has an in-game monetary insurance business...
I think we'll see a private version of Mercury within 20 years, then things will start getting really wild.
I think it'll be sooner than that. SpaceX has already announced its intent to compete for the $50 million America's Space Prize for orbital flight, which has a 2010 deadline. SpaceX is set to launch their first orbital rocket on Friday, and the Falcon 9 (which will be man-rated and large enough to lift a Mercury-style capsule) is scheduled to launch in 2007.
Nowhere is particularly exciting
I beg to differ. The solar system is a pretty exciting place.
Did I miss the announcement where we're going back to the moon? I thought that had to come before we decide where we're going to land.
l oration
The announcement was back on January 14, 2004:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vision_for_Space_Exp
You can already get pants which are kind of like that. The fabric goes by the brand-name Nano-Tex.
n st_eddi.html
Article: Cutting-edge science creates stain-free pants
Last year an activist group called THONG (Topless Humans Organized for Natural Genetics) apparently organized a topless protest against the use of this material in clothing.
http://www.boingboing.net/2005/05/09/protest_agai
you think sending someone into 'space' for a few minutes is the same as going to the moon and taking a survey?
o pics/toSpaceTimeLine.html
Private spaceflight entails much more than Rutan's suborbital flights:
http://www.hobbyspace.com/AAdmin/archive/SpecialT
While we are talking about the moon, I can understand and see the scientific payoffs of sending people back to the moon, but I am much less clear on the whole Mars thing.
Although science is a nice side-benefit, the main reason for going to the Moon this time around is to learn how to live there and make use of the local resources, as a step towards making humanity a space-faring species.
It will bring the equivalent of free/open source to the physical world and thus to everyone who can download it, and there will be editors to modify them at one's discretion.
Not only that, but what about the physical parallels to information which is illegal nowadays, like child pornography? For example, what do gun control laws mean if anybody can trivially construct their own firearms?
We found dozens, if not hundreds, of new species ..
Dozens? Hundreds? Do you mean to tell me that nobody actually counted?
I think the problem is that you can't always tell two organisms are of different species with a quick glance. Sometimes you actually need to do things like behavioral or genetic studies to be sure. Also, until they've had time to sort through the records, there's also the possibility that some of the species they've discovered have already been found elsewhere.