Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down.
Every year, a great many people shell out upwards of $60,000 to be given an attempt to climb Mount Everest. Many of these don't make it all the way, and a large number actually end up losing their lives in the process. I think it's safe to say that a large number of the climbers go through an immense amount of misery. Despite this, there is a constant demand to climb the mountain.
In the wake of the dot-com days, we have a odd situation where we have a large number of very rich individuals who are also quite clueful and interested in technology. Many of them read lots of sci-fi books when they were kids, and are hoping to make a mark on the future by funding space endeavours.
HS: Private rocket development by startup companies in the post-Apollo era includes projects such as Truax's Volksrocket in the late 70s, Conestoga I and AMROC in the 80s, Beal Aerospace and several other ELV and RLV companies in the 1990s. They all came up short of space and many see their history as nothing but a tale of woe and failure. To me, though, they each appear to build on what was learned before them and to provide significant advancements in the technical and strategic knowledge needed to develop a rocket business from scratch.
It looks like SpaceX will be the startup company that finally makes it to orbit. When you studied prior efforts, what were some of the lessons [you] learned on what to do and, perhaps most importantly, what not to do?
Musk: Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts. If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way:)
The ones I'm familiar with failed on one or more of the following:
1. Lacked a critical mass of technical skill.
2. Insufficient capital to reach the finish line, particularly if an unexpected setback occurred.
3. Success was reliant on a series of technology breakthroughs that did not happen.
The above modes can obviously cross-feed one another.
HS: John Carmack has said something to the effect that the gap between what could be done versus what is being done is bigger in aerospace than in any other industry. Gary Hudson said that he was "amazed by how much easier the job of getting to orbit is today than even a few years go"..."Software, avionics and manufacturing technology have all improved measurably" and drastically reduced the number of people needed to design a launcher.
Now that you've gone through the rocket vehicle design phase and are well into construction, does your experience support their views or has the Falcon development perhaps been more difficult than you initially expected?
Musk: Well, hard and easy are somewhat nebulous terms. I think I have high standards and would classify getting Falcon to orbit as quite difficult. Overall though, I think we have had quite a smooth development so far, which is a credit to the hard work of the SpaceX engineering team.
The design tools, such as solid modeling and finite element analysis software are substantially more powerful than ten years ago, so that's a clear advantage. Obviously, most electronics have improved a lot too, except gyroscopes and flight termination systems.
Right now, launch costs are the biggest barrier to having lots of cool things (orbital hotels, factories, lunar bases, etc.) zipping around in space. According to this interview, Musk was previously planning on self-funding a mission to put an experimental greenhouse on Mars, but decided to start SpaceX when he realized that the overall mission cost would be dominated by the launch price.
SpaceX's Falcon I is designed to compete with the Pegasus rocket, which currently dominates the "low-cost" launch market. The Pegasus costs around $20 million to launch 375kg into space. The Falcon I will cost $6 million to launch 670kg into space. Stated differently, the Pegasus costs around $53,000 per kg, while the Falcon I will cost around $9000 per kg.
Things change even more with SpaceX's larger Falcon V rocket, scheduled for a launch this November. This will compete directly with the Delta IV Medium, which costs $90 million to lift 8600kg to LEO. The Falcon V will cost $12 million to lift 6020kg to LEO. That's around $10000 per kg for the Delta IV Medium and around $2000 per kg for the Falcon V.
One of SpaceX's goals is to reuse as much in terms of engines, components, and software as they build larger and larger rocket. As they benefit from economies of scale and build larger rockets, the costs will only drop.
Coincidentally, the same researchers have a paper on Detecting Dance Motion Structure through Music Analysis. So yes, it is possible that these same researchers could have a robot in the future that can make up decent dance moves to ogg files. From the paper, it looks like they already have some rough computer-generated figures dancing to music files.
I'm an avid swing dancer. In order to effectively learn new moves, I either have to see a video or have somebody teach me. With the video, I can replay it as many times as I want, but I only get one 2D angle. With a teacher I can appreciate the full 3D movement, but if I try to get them to replay too many times they get annoyed and smack me.
Perhaps motion capture could be the best of both worlds? I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to capture the moves of expert swing dancers, and then have a piece of software to replay their movements in 3D. A user of the software could replay moves to their heart's content, switching to arbitrary angles. If robots like the HRP-2 ever become cheap and flexible enough, such motion capture could even be used to replay moves on the bots.
Some folks at MIT made a very rudimentary "swing dancing" robot arm, which provides swing dance leads. I wonder how long it'll be until we see humanoid robots capable of leading, or maybe even interpreting hand signals from a human and being capable of following.
How would multiple video angles provide anything more than motion capture as far as a robot is concerned, which would give 3D joint angles and positions?
In theory it wouldn't, but in practice it's pretty darned difficult to accurately motion-capture things like facial expressions and eye movements.
As I've said in another thread, the two approaches complement each other.
I really think that video and robot-played motion capture complement each other nicely. If an actual person who knows the dance form isn't available, the video allows one to get a better sense of things like emotion and expressions. The motion captured allows one to get a better sense of overall body movements from all possible angles.
Ideally of course you'd have an actual person teaching you, but that isn't always feasible.
Again, here's my rejected submission from the last time this story was run. The info in it is somewhat better, IMHO.
After years of secrecy and much speculation, Blue Origin has finally announced its plans to build and operate a privately-funded aerospace testing and operations center in West Texas. The company, run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is "currently developing a sub-orbital space vehicle that will take off and land vertically to take three or more astronauts to the edge of space." Flight operations could begin as soon as six years from now. Hopefully this will be a significant step towards Bezos's dream of enabling "an enduring human presence in space."
I'd also like to remind the reader that Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and many pieces of quality sci-fi literature) works for Blue Origin. Here's what he said when asked about it in a slashdot interview from last year:
Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.
Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.
As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.
I'm already linked to on this page, but I've taken the liberty of cropping out and separating the individual camera views, which should make them more suitable for creating composites and panoramas:
It should be interesting to try doing different sorts of processing on them, like panoramas, contrast-corrected animations, etc. The individual images are triplets, composed of the three camera views.
Because Jeff thinks that his approach (VTVL) will be better than Rutan's winged carry. Time and the market will show which is better in the long run.
Besides, money really isn't a constraining factor here -- both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are only putting a tiny fraction of their available funds into the endeavor.
I'd like to point out again that Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is running a blog from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. The blog is being updated as events happen.
I particularly enjoyed this quote from the blog:
He [John Zarnecki, the PI on the Surface Science Package] also said that it looks like the probe lasted about 147 minutes, which is 12 minutes longer than the predicted 135, but is "well within the error bars" of the predictions. However, he said this was still an early result--he didn't want to say for certain, because the members of a team had a bet on, and the number "looked suspiciously like the one I picked," Zarnecki said....
But, when pushed, scientists can't help doing just a little bit of speculating. That's how they work. So here are a couple of little initial tidbits of speculative potential facts that they have mentioned.
Number 1: Since the probe lasted for a really long time, it's "probably a good conclusion" that the probe landed on a solid, not a liquid surface, Lebreton said when he was pushed. Of course, that doesn't rule out John Zarnecki's "squelchy" surface prediction.
Number 2: One thing that may have helped the probe last a long time was that it appeared to stay unexpectedly warm. At an elevation of only 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) above the surface, her interior was still at a balmy 25 C (77 F), despite the outside temperature being a frigid -180 C (-290 F). Lebreton wasn't ready to say what this might mean. It could be overperformance of the spacecraft, but it could also mean a wide variety of unexpected things about the atmosphere. For those of you who like instant results, I think you'll be disappointed on an answer to this question, because after all Huygens was a mission focused almost entirely on Titan's atmosphere, so it's going to take a very long time to synthesize scientific conclusions from all of this.
Orally, plutonium is less toxic than caffeine. It -is- dangerous when it reaches critical mass, but besides that, there are far more dangerous things around which are handled every day. A physicist once volunteered to eat as much plutonium as Ralph Nader (who had been campaigning against plutonium) would caffeine in an attempt to demonstrate the folly of the severe toxicity claims. Ralph Nader declined.
Here's my submission, which has some more information:
After years of secrecy and much speculation, Blue Origin has finally announced its plans to build and operate a privately-funded aerospace testing and operations center in West Texas. The company, run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is "currently developing a sub-orbital space vehicle that will take off and land vertically to take three or more astronauts to the edge of space." Flight operations could begin as soon as six years from now. Hopefully this will be a significant step towards Bezos's dream of enabling "an enduring human presence in space."
There are no habitable planets within reach (unless you count Mars or Venus, but as wastelands go, Antartica is paradise in comparison with either of those in terms of human habitation).
In space discussions, people often raise the point of "If space settlement and resource extraction is so great, why haven't we already done this in Antarctica"? Actually, there are plenty of people and companies who would love to get ahold on regions of Antarctica, but are prevented from doing so by the Antarctic Treaty.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike the Concords, which were also expensive and could actually transport you to useful places in small amounts of time, no celebrity or politicial figure would ever want to spend a couple thousand dollars just go up high in a potentially unsafe civilian spacecrat for the sole purpose of floating around in their seat and coming back down.
Every year, a great many people shell out upwards of $60,000 to be given an attempt to climb Mount Everest. Many of these don't make it all the way, and a large number actually end up losing their lives in the process. I think it's safe to say that a large number of the climbers go through an immense amount of misery. Despite this, there is a constant demand to climb the mountain.
Yup.
In the wake of the dot-com days, we have a odd situation where we have a large number of very rich individuals who are also quite clueful and interested in technology. Many of them read lots of sci-fi books when they were kids, and are hoping to make a mark on the future by funding space endeavours.
I've mentioned it elsewhere in this discussion, but a couple years ago HobbySpace's RLV News had a very good interview with Elon Musk.
:)
Here's a quote:
HS: Private rocket development by startup companies in the post-Apollo era includes projects such as Truax's Volksrocket in the late 70s, Conestoga I and AMROC in the 80s, Beal Aerospace and several other ELV and RLV companies in the 1990s. They all came up short of space and many see their history as nothing but a tale of woe and failure. To me, though, they each appear to build on what was learned before them and to provide significant advancements in the technical and strategic knowledge needed to develop a rocket business from scratch.
It looks like SpaceX will be the startup company that finally makes it to orbit. When you studied prior efforts, what were some of the lessons [you] learned on what to do and, perhaps most importantly, what not to do?
Musk: Well, I have tried to learn as much as possible from prior attempts. If nothing else, we are committed to failing in a new way
The ones I'm familiar with failed on one or more of the following:
1. Lacked a critical mass of technical skill.
2. Insufficient capital to reach the finish line, particularly if an unexpected setback occurred.
3. Success was reliant on a series of technology breakthroughs that did not happen.
The above modes can obviously cross-feed one another.
HS: John Carmack has said something to the effect that the gap between what could be done versus what is being done is bigger in aerospace than in any other industry. Gary Hudson said that he was "amazed by how much easier the job of getting to orbit is today than even a few years go"..."Software, avionics and manufacturing technology have all improved measurably" and drastically reduced the number of people needed to design a launcher.
Now that you've gone through the rocket vehicle design phase and are well into construction, does your experience support their views or has the Falcon development perhaps been more difficult than you initially expected?
Musk: Well, hard and easy are somewhat nebulous terms. I think I have high standards and would classify getting Falcon to orbit as quite difficult. Overall though, I think we have had quite a smooth development so far, which is a credit to the hard work of the SpaceX engineering team.
The design tools, such as solid modeling and finite element analysis software are substantially more powerful than ten years ago, so that's a clear advantage. Obviously, most electronics have improved a lot too, except gyroscopes and flight termination systems.
First, read this article.
Right now, launch costs are the biggest barrier to having lots of cool things (orbital hotels, factories, lunar bases, etc.) zipping around in space. According to this interview, Musk was previously planning on self-funding a mission to put an experimental greenhouse on Mars, but decided to start SpaceX when he realized that the overall mission cost would be dominated by the launch price.
SpaceX's Falcon I is designed to compete with the Pegasus rocket, which currently dominates the "low-cost" launch market. The Pegasus costs around $20 million to launch 375kg into space. The Falcon I will cost $6 million to launch 670kg into space. Stated differently, the Pegasus costs around $53,000 per kg, while the Falcon I will cost around $9000 per kg.
Things change even more with SpaceX's larger Falcon V rocket, scheduled for a launch this November. This will compete directly with the Delta IV Medium, which costs $90 million to lift 8600kg to LEO. The Falcon V will cost $12 million to lift 6020kg to LEO. That's around $10000 per kg for the Delta IV Medium and around $2000 per kg for the Falcon V.
One of SpaceX's goals is to reuse as much in terms of engines, components, and software as they build larger and larger rocket. As they benefit from economies of scale and build larger rockets, the costs will only drop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SpaceX
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_I (their $6 million, 670 kg payload rocket, being launched in March)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_V (their $12 million, 6020 kg payload rocket, scheduled for a November launch)
Yup. That's why I linked to that page in the original submission. :)
Coincidentally, the same researchers have a paper on Detecting Dance Motion Structure through Music Analysis. So yes, it is possible that these same researchers could have a robot in the future that can make up decent dance moves to ogg files. From the paper, it looks like they already have some rough computer-generated figures dancing to music files.
Quick correction about the "Sudden IQ drop among the 'tech-bloggers' when robots are mentioned..." post: the link is actually here.
It's amazing how accurately the plyojump blog entry describes the posts in this discussion. I really should've linked to it in my original submission.
Hah! I wish I'd thought of that when I wrote the submission.
Reading this article gave me an idea:
I'm an avid swing dancer. In order to effectively learn new moves, I either have to see a video or have somebody teach me. With the video, I can replay it as many times as I want, but I only get one 2D angle. With a teacher I can appreciate the full 3D movement, but if I try to get them to replay too many times they get annoyed and smack me.
There's things like the Jiveoholic Dance Step Database, which is useful by limited to 2D.
Perhaps motion capture could be the best of both worlds? I imagine it wouldn't be too hard to capture the moves of expert swing dancers, and then have a piece of software to replay their movements in 3D. A user of the software could replay moves to their heart's content, switching to arbitrary angles. If robots like the HRP-2 ever become cheap and flexible enough, such motion capture could even be used to replay moves on the bots.
Some folks at MIT made a very rudimentary "swing dancing" robot arm, which provides swing dance leads. I wonder how long it'll be until we see humanoid robots capable of leading, or maybe even interpreting hand signals from a human and being capable of following.
How would multiple video angles provide anything more than motion capture as far as a robot is concerned, which would give 3D joint angles and positions?
In theory it wouldn't, but in practice it's pretty darned difficult to accurately motion-capture things like facial expressions and eye movements.
As I've said in another thread, the two approaches complement each other.
I think that's the plan. I believe the motion-captured movements are stored in a manner which should be portable to future robots.
I really think that video and robot-played motion capture complement each other nicely. If an actual person who knows the dance form isn't available, the video allows one to get a better sense of things like emotion and expressions. The motion captured allows one to get a better sense of overall body movements from all possible angles.
Ideally of course you'd have an actual person teaching you, but that isn't always feasible.
If nothing else - the thought of 'dancing robots' really freaks me out
In that case, I heartily suggest that you don't watch this video.
Again, here's my rejected submission from the last time this story was run. The info in it is somewhat better, IMHO.
After years of secrecy and much speculation, Blue Origin has finally announced its plans to build and operate a privately-funded aerospace testing and operations center in West Texas. The company, run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is "currently developing a sub-orbital space vehicle that will take off and land vertically to take three or more astronauts to the edge of space." Flight operations could begin as soon as six years from now. Hopefully this will be a significant step towards Bezos's dream of enabling "an enduring human presence in space."
I'd also like to remind the reader that Neal Stephenson (author of Cryptonomicon, Quicksilver, and many pieces of quality sci-fi literature) works for Blue Origin. Here's what he said when asked about it in a slashdot interview from last year:
Like Spock on the deck of the Enterprise, I sit in the corner and await opportunities to jump out and yammer about Science. Unlike Spock, I don't have anyone reporting to me and I never get to sit in the captain's chair and aim the phasers. This is probably good.
Though the X-Prize is cool and good, Blue Origin never intended to compete for it. Consequently, it has had no effect, other than destroying productivity whenever a SpaceShipOne flight is being broadcast.
As for my visions of future private space flight: here I have to remind you of something, which is that, up to this point in the interview, I have been wearing my novelist hat, meaning that I talk freely about whatever I please. But private space flight is an area where I wear a different hat (or helmet). I do not freely disseminate my thoughts on this one topic because I have agreed to sell those thoughts to Blue Origin. Admittedly, this feels a little strange to a novelist who is accustomed to running his mouth whenever he feels like it. But it is a small price to pay for the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become a minor character in a Robert Heinlein novel.
I'm already linked to on this page, but I've taken the liberty of cropping out and separating the individual
_ image_triplets_separated.zip (13 meg file)
camera views, which should make them more suitable for creating composites and panoramas:
http://www.its.caltech.edu/~neilh/huygens/huygens
Besides panoramas and animations, it might also be interesting to try to subtract out image artifacts and dust.
Unfortunately, Saturn is below the horizon. Even if it was above the horizon, it'd be nigh-impossible to spot it through the atmosphere.
This page has some raw images from the Huygens probe descent onto Titan:
http://spacescience.ca/titan/raw/
This page has the images in more of a gallery format:
http://mars.lyle.org/titan/file1.html
It should be interesting to try doing different sorts of processing on them, like panoramas, contrast-corrected animations, etc. The individual images are triplets, composed of the three camera views.
Because Jeff thinks that his approach (VTVL) will be better than Rutan's winged carry. Time and the market will show which is better in the long run.
Besides, money really isn't a constraining factor here -- both Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson are only putting a tiny fraction of their available funds into the endeavor.
That certainly seems to be the consensus. :)
Crap, I'm an idiot and forgot the actual blog link. Here you go:
http://planetary.org/news/2005/huygens_blog.html
I'd like to point out again that Emily Lakdawalla of the Planetary Society is running a blog from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. The blog is being updated as events happen.
...
I particularly enjoyed this quote from the blog:
He [John Zarnecki, the PI on the Surface Science Package] also said that it looks like the probe lasted about 147 minutes, which is 12 minutes longer than the predicted 135, but is "well within the error bars" of the predictions. However, he said this was still an early result--he didn't want to say for certain, because the members of a team had a bet on, and the number "looked suspiciously like the one I picked," Zarnecki said.
But, when pushed, scientists can't help doing just a little bit of speculating. That's how they work. So here are a couple of little initial tidbits of speculative potential facts that they have mentioned.
Number 1: Since the probe lasted for a really long time, it's "probably a good conclusion" that the probe landed on a solid, not a liquid surface, Lebreton said when he was pushed. Of course, that doesn't rule out John Zarnecki's "squelchy" surface prediction.
Number 2: One thing that may have helped the probe last a long time was that it appeared to stay unexpectedly warm. At an elevation of only 50 kilometers (about 30 miles) above the surface, her interior was still at a balmy 25 C (77 F), despite the outside temperature being a frigid -180 C (-290 F). Lebreton wasn't ready to say what this might mean. It could be overperformance of the spacecraft, but it could also mean a wide variety of unexpected things about the atmosphere. For those of you who like instant results, I think you'll be disappointed on an answer to this question, because after all Huygens was a mission focused almost entirely on Titan's atmosphere, so it's going to take a very long time to synthesize scientific conclusions from all of this.
Orally, plutonium is less toxic than caffeine. It -is- dangerous when it reaches critical mass, but besides that, there are far more dangerous things around which are handled every day. A physicist once volunteered to eat as much plutonium as Ralph Nader (who had been campaigning against plutonium) would caffeine in an attempt to demonstrate the folly of the severe toxicity claims. Ralph Nader declined.
Here's my submission, which has some more information:
After years of secrecy and much speculation, Blue Origin has finally announced its plans to build and operate a privately-funded aerospace testing and operations center in West Texas. The company, run by Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, is "currently developing a sub-orbital space vehicle that will take off and land vertically to take three or more astronauts to the edge of space." Flight operations could begin as soon as six years from now. Hopefully this will be a significant step towards Bezos's dream of enabling "an enduring human presence in space."
There are no habitable planets within reach (unless you count Mars or Venus, but as wastelands go, Antartica is paradise in comparison with either of those in terms of human habitation).
In space discussions, people often raise the point of "If space settlement and resource extraction is so great, why haven't we already done this in Antarctica"? Actually, there are plenty of people and companies who would love to get ahold on regions of Antarctica, but are prevented from doing so by the Antarctic Treaty.