The problem is that most or all of these have failed to produce a working spacecraft even though they were bank rolled by millionaires.
A recent HobbySpace interview with Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX after his financial success with Paypal, explores some of the reasons behind why these prior companies failed. Here's the relevant 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.
The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla is running a weblog from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. This weblog will be updated as events happen, so it should be interesting to watch.
It also looks like NASA TV will have live coverage for much of Friday. You can access their video and audio streams here.
According to Wikipedia, "the total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90 day primary mission was about US $820 million." Presumably, this means that constructing and launching a new rover based on the old designs could conceivably done for a few hundred million dollars. This places it well within the realm of billionaire space enthusiasts and companies looking for creative advertising opportunities. As an example, Procter Gamble has an annual ad budget of $4.5 billion and Microsoft has an annual ad budget of almost $2 billion. Being the first company to launch a planetary rover and having your name associated with all the discoveries the rover makes seems quite lucrative from an advertising perspective.
Is it possible/legal for someone to just contract or partner with the JPL to build and operate a rover for them, perhaps using alternative launch sources to further lower the cost? My suspicion is no, due to JPL being a quasi-governmental organization. Barring the above possibility, are there any mechanisms in place for technology transfer to a private organization which -would- be able to contract with non-government parties?
Has anybody gotten this working in Wine or WineX? Whenever I try to run it wine just immediately executes, reporting that the program exited with a successful status.
There's somewhat of a difference between artificial intelligence and neural/cognitive modeling, which I think is what you're thinking of.
Artificial intelligence is, well, the study (and implementation) of intelligent behavior in artificial constructs. Robots coordinating their activities in real time is an intelligent behavior.
We will someday, but as of today, science and medicine is rather "oversold", meaning we have been led to believe that it is more capable than it really is.
I assure you that this is because of how the media reports things, and not because of the scientists themselves. Talk to just about any scientist, and one of the first things they'll emphasize is how much is left to discover. For many scientists, the frequency of surprises in the field is a big reason for why they're scientists in the first place. A typical phrase for scientists is that "a discovery usually raises more questions than it solves."
So what worries me is that this will be an excuse for environmentalists to rally against space exploration, even when it's fueled by liquid rockets. As as I see it, this is just a good reason to use liquid rockets instead of solid rockets.
I thought the article needed some more "meat" to it, but Jordan Pollack actually does some really cool research.
The lab is best known for it's work with using evolutionary algorithms to do things like evolve robot walking patterns, lego structures, neural controllers, Tron AIs, and so on. They've also got a peer to peer spelling game which pairs kids up with each other to help learn words.
While your points on ethics is valid, what's the practical use of humanoid robots anyway?
One "killer app" is helping the infirm and elderly live independently, without having to hire a live-in nurse. Every year the percentage of people who are infirm/elderly increases.
Many of these questions are discussed (and partial solutions proposed) in the Creating Friendly AI essay. I don't have time to comment on the specifics at the moment, but it's an interesting read.
Planetary Society event on Thursday in Pasadena
on
Imagining Titan
·
· Score: 1
[I just got this in my email]
Planetary Society Event: Get Ready for a New Moon Landing!
Huygens Arrives at Titan, sponsored by The Planetary Society
Date: Thursday, January 13, 2005
Time: 6:30-9:30 p.m.
Description: Join The Planetary Society the night before Huygens' historic plunge into Titan's atmosphere for a look at that mission as well as a Voyager retrospective, a lively discussion of Saturn's place in the popular imagination, a Cassini overview and a live update from Huygens mission control in Germany.
Speakers:
* former JPL Director Ed Stone
* actor Robert Picardo, Star Trek Voyager [i.e. "The Doctor" from Voyager]
* Bill Nye the Science Guy
* Huygens engineer Shaun Standley
* Cassini Deputy Project Scientist Linda Spilker
* Planetary Society President Wes Huntress
* and more
Tickets: $10 for Students, $12 for Planetary Society Members and members of the Skeptics Society, and $15 General Admission. Tickets can be obtained at 626-793-5100, planetary.org/exploringtitan.html, or at the door.
A less snake-oil-ish approach would have been to set out more or less achievable tasks and start with those as competitions, e.g. dribbling, penalty kicking (without goalie, simply to understand the mechanics of ball control).
With the different leagues, I think they've already got very achievable tasks, it's just that they're running in parallel with the less achievable ones. For example, the simulation league and the small-size league do quite well, because people competing in those leagues mostly only need to worry about multi-agent coordination, with some simple visual perception in the small-size league. The 4-legged league introduces some more difficult tasks, with the humanoid league introducing even more difficult tasks.
An even better approach would have been to avoid the publicity seeking soccer competition altogether and use more wortwhile tasks such as search and rescue among the rubble or a robot server in a restaurant (as in fact they did in IJCAI 2003).
From the RoboCup page, it looks like this is now a more-or-less integral part of the RoboCup event. The set of challenges though is very different though: They're typically isn't any multi-agent aspect, the environment is much more chaotic, and there's typically a human remote-controlling the robot.
Could you elaborate on what's overly ambitious about Robocup? To my knowledge, it's been a great testing ground for ideas in robotics, and competing entries have performed quite well.
In many cases the Scaled team had to create the tools and features needed to make SpaceShipOne work. As an example, Gionta explained how the reinvented reaction control system on SpaceShipOne works:
When we're out in space, all you need to do is release a puff of air in a direction to give you a reaction force to push you the other way. That's pretty much what [a reaction control system] is. We have high-pressure air stored in bottles on the ship, and we release a little blast of air for about one second on, say, the right wing tip pointing up. And that is enough when you're in space to push that wingtip down. So it effectively rolls the aircraft, and that's your controls when you're out in space. It's the same thing a spaceship or the shuttle uses, except on a much, much smaller scale and much more economical. So we had to develop that. We created a fixed-based, full-mission simulation of the craft so we could size our reaction control system.
Live coverage on NASA TV on Friday
on
Imagining Titan
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hi, I'm the person who made the submission. Since making the submission, it's come to my attention that there will indeed be at least some sort of live coverage on NASA TV -- I suspect the article I linked to may be in error.
January 14, Friday 3 a.m. - 3:30 a.m. - Live Coverage and Commentary "Cassini Turns Towards Titan - Interruption of Radio Contact" - JPL/ESA 5 a.m. - 6 a.m. - Live Coverage and Commentary "The Huygens Probe Enters the Atmosphere of Titan" - JPL/ESA 7:30 a.m. - 8 a.m. - ESA News Briefing "Mission Status" - JPL/ESA 8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m. - ESA Commentary on Huygens Probe Mission - JPL/ESA (Mission Coverage) 10 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. - ESA Commentary "Cassini Turns Back to Earth - Data Transmission Begins" - JPL/ESA 11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. - Huygens Probe News Briefing (will confirm if we are receiving data from Huygens via relay by Cassini) 1 p.m. - NASA Update with Sean O'Keefe - KSC 5 p.m. - 6 p.m. - ESA Commentary and "Presentation of First Triplet Image of/data from Titan" - JPL/ESA
In December, Inc. Magazine also selected Burt Rutan as Entrepreneur of the Year. The article is a very good read, and gives a lot of details about Rutan's management style.
A snippet:
As a manager, Rutan has proven intuitively adept at inspiring loyalty and extraordinary work. He doesn't worry so much about the formal background of the engineers he hires. He looks for people who share his passion for aircraft design and gives those who have it free rein. Instead of the specialists sought by aerospace companies, he encourages his staffers to remain generalists who can design anything from a fuselage to a door handle and then go into the shop and build it. Chief engineer Matthew Gionta recalls starting off at the company right out of graduate school in 1994 and being handed the project-leader slot on an ultra-high-tech unmanned aircraft. "What I had to learn on the job made my formal education pale in comparison, but I had to learn it because no one else was going to do it for me," Gionta says. "The stress took years off my life, but when you get that kind of responsibility, it's hard not to feel ownership."
Rutan is loath to codify his approach to managing. "I don't like rules," he says. "Things are so easy to change if you don't write them down." But one way or another, he has communicated a few simple principles to employees. One is that when it comes to safety issues -- and in aircraft design, almost everything is a safety issue -- everyone should be quick to raise questions. Rutan makes sure that when people at Scaled point out their own mistakes, they're applauded rather than reprimanded. And instead of extensively analyzing a design before building it, a notion that's axiomatic in the aerospace industry, Rutan pushes his people to get a first version built quickly, test it, and fix it. Says Gionta: "Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding."
I don't want marketing, I want real space travel, and that requires being a little harsh on all the marketing that surrounds this.
How would you define "real space travel"?
Judging by the cockpit view, this sure seems like space travel as far as I'm concerned.
The Wright Brother's big advance was controlled, powered flight. Lots of people could shoot a projectile from one end of the field to the other, which is all (effectively) that was accomplished by Burt Rutan.
SpaceShipOne is equipped with (and makes heavy use of) a reaction control system, which operates in the same general fashion as the reaction control systems on otherspacecraft.
Yeah, and with good maintainance you'll get ~40,000 takeoff and landing cycles with that A340-600, and it usually carries around 380 passengers. You do the math.
In all fairness, since it's so early in the game Branson is also paying for a large chunk of the development costs per unit. I can't find stats for the A340-600, but it looks like the A380 has cost around $10.7 billion so far. Of course, this is still very much an apples-and-oranges comparison.
In terms of capacities, it's possible that a marginally better comparison might be something like a Gulfstream V jet, which cost $46 million apiece and hold a max of 19 passengers. I'd be interested to see if Scaled and/or Virgin tries targetting a similar market in the future, offering a point-to-point rocket for wealthy business travelers who need to get there ASAP, and wouldn't mind an extraordinary ride (and possibly a higher-than-average degree of danger) in the process.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that most or all of these have failed to produce a working spacecraft even though they were bank rolled by millionaires.
:)
A recent HobbySpace interview with Elon Musk, who founded SpaceX after his financial success with Paypal, explores some of the reasons behind why these prior companies failed. Here's the relevant 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.
If this were the case, you'd see logical *investment* firms investing in space, which is pretty rare.
Ideally, yes. The thing with investment firms though is that they tend to be very conservative, and have a bit of a herd mentality.
The Planetary Society's Emily Lakdawalla is running a weblog from Huygens mission control in Darmstadt, Germany. This weblog will be updated as events happen, so it should be interesting to watch.
It also looks like NASA TV will have live coverage for much of Friday. You can access their video and audio streams here.
According to Wikipedia, "the total cost of building, launching, landing and operating the rovers on the surface for the initial 90 day primary mission was about US $820 million." Presumably, this means that constructing and launching a new rover based on the old designs could conceivably done for a few hundred million dollars. This places it well within the realm of billionaire space enthusiasts and companies looking for creative advertising opportunities. As an example, Procter Gamble has an annual ad budget of $4.5 billion and Microsoft has an annual ad budget of almost $2 billion. Being the first company to launch a planetary rover and having your name associated with all the discoveries the rover makes seems quite lucrative from an advertising perspective.
Is it possible/legal for someone to just contract or partner with the JPL to build and operate a rover for them, perhaps using alternative launch sources to further lower the cost? My suspicion is no, due to JPL being a quasi-governmental organization. Barring the above possibility, are there any mechanisms in place for technology transfer to a private organization which -would- be able to contract with non-government parties?
How are you defining intelligence?
Has anybody gotten this working in Wine or WineX? Whenever I try to run it wine just immediately executes, reporting that the program exited with a successful status.
There's somewhat of a difference between artificial intelligence and neural/cognitive modeling, which I think is what you're thinking of.
Artificial intelligence is, well, the study (and implementation) of intelligent behavior in artificial constructs. Robots coordinating their activities in real time is an intelligent behavior.
We will someday, but as of today, science and medicine is rather "oversold", meaning we have been led to believe that it is more capable than it really is.
I assure you that this is because of how the media reports things, and not because of the scientists themselves. Talk to just about any scientist, and one of the first things they'll emphasize is how much is left to discover. For many scientists, the frequency of surprises in the field is a big reason for why they're scientists in the first place. A typical phrase for scientists is that "a discovery usually raises more questions than it solves."
The really silly bit in this soccer thing is the association with AI. It's clearly not AI any more.
Actually, a big part of soccer is coordinating with a group, which is arguably an important part of AI.
So what worries me is that this will be an excuse for environmentalists to rally against space exploration, even when it's fueled by liquid rockets. As as I see it, this is just a good reason to use liquid rockets instead of solid rockets.
I thought the article needed some more "meat" to it, but Jordan Pollack actually does some really cool research.
The lab is best known for it's work with using evolutionary algorithms to do things like evolve robot walking patterns, lego structures, neural controllers, Tron AIs, and so on. They've also got a peer to peer spelling game which pairs kids up with each other to help learn words.
While your points on ethics is valid, what's the practical use of humanoid robots anyway?
One "killer app" is helping the infirm and elderly live independently, without having to hire a live-in nurse. Every year the percentage of people who are infirm/elderly increases.
Does anybody have information on what types of rocket fuels contain perchlorate? Is it only solid rockets?
Many of these questions are discussed (and partial solutions proposed) in the Creating Friendly AI essay. I don't have time to comment on the specifics at the moment, but it's an interesting read.
[I just got this in my email]
Planetary Society Event:
Get Ready for a New Moon Landing!
Huygens Arrives at Titan, sponsored by The Planetary Society
Date: Thursday, January 13, 2005
Time: 6:30-9:30 p.m.
Description: Join The Planetary Society the night before Huygens' historic plunge into Titan's atmosphere for a look at that mission as well as a Voyager retrospective, a lively discussion of Saturn's place in the popular imagination, a Cassini overview and a live update from Huygens mission control in Germany.
Speakers:
* former JPL Director Ed Stone
* actor Robert Picardo, Star Trek Voyager [i.e. "The Doctor" from Voyager]
* Bill Nye the Science Guy
* Huygens engineer Shaun Standley
* Cassini Deputy Project Scientist Linda Spilker
* Planetary Society President Wes Huntress
* and more
Location: Pasadena Hilton, 150 S Los Robles, Pasadena, CA
Tickets: $10 for Students, $12 for Planetary Society Members and members of the Skeptics Society, and $15 General Admission. Tickets can be obtained at 626-793-5100, planetary.org/exploringtitan.html, or at the door.
A less snake-oil-ish approach would have been to set out more or less achievable tasks and start with those as competitions, e.g. dribbling, penalty kicking (without goalie, simply to understand the mechanics of ball control).
With the different leagues, I think they've already got very achievable tasks, it's just that they're running in parallel with the less achievable ones. For example, the simulation league and the small-size league do quite well, because people competing in those leagues mostly only need to worry about multi-agent coordination, with some simple visual perception in the small-size league. The 4-legged league introduces some more difficult tasks, with the humanoid league introducing even more difficult tasks.
An even better approach would have been to avoid the publicity seeking soccer competition altogether and use more wortwhile tasks such as search and rescue among the rubble or a robot server in a restaurant (as in fact they did in IJCAI 2003).
From the RoboCup page, it looks like this is now a more-or-less integral part of the RoboCup event. The set of challenges though is very different though: They're typically isn't any multi-agent aspect, the environment is much more chaotic, and there's typically a human remote-controlling the robot.
Could you elaborate on what's overly ambitious about Robocup? To my knowledge, it's been a great testing ground for ideas in robotics, and competing entries have performed quite well.
Now they want them to play soccer? This is flying cars all over again.
Psst... they already do play soccer:
http://www.robocup.org/02.html
From the "How Things Work" link:
In many cases the Scaled team had to create the tools and features needed to make SpaceShipOne work. As an example, Gionta explained how the reinvented reaction control system on SpaceShipOne works:
When we're out in space, all you need to do is release a puff of air in a direction to give you a reaction force to push you the other way. That's pretty much what [a reaction control system] is. We have high-pressure air stored in bottles on the ship, and we release a little blast of air for about one second on, say, the right wing tip pointing up. And that is enough when you're in space to push that wingtip down. So it effectively rolls the aircraft, and that's your controls when you're out in space. It's the same thing a spaceship or the shuttle uses, except on a much, much smaller scale and much more economical. So we had to develop that. We created a fixed-based, full-mission simulation of the craft so we could size our reaction control system.
Hi, I'm the person who made the submission. Since making the submission, it's come to my attention that there will indeed be at least some sort of live coverage on NASA TV -- I suspect the article I linked to may be in error.
From the NASA TV schedule:
January 14, Friday
3 a.m. - 3:30 a.m. - Live Coverage and Commentary "Cassini Turns Towards Titan - Interruption of Radio Contact" - JPL/ESA
5 a.m. - 6 a.m. - Live Coverage and Commentary "The Huygens Probe Enters the Atmosphere of Titan" - JPL/ESA
7:30 a.m. - 8 a.m. - ESA News Briefing "Mission Status" - JPL/ESA
8:30 a.m. - 9:15 a.m. - ESA Commentary on Huygens Probe Mission - JPL/ESA (Mission Coverage)
10 a.m. - 10:30 a.m. - ESA Commentary "Cassini Turns Back to Earth - Data Transmission Begins" - JPL/ESA
11:15 a.m. - 12:15 p.m. - Huygens Probe News Briefing (will confirm if we are receiving data from Huygens via relay by Cassini)
1 p.m. - NASA Update with Sean O'Keefe - KSC
5 p.m. - 6 p.m. - ESA Commentary and "Presentation of First Triplet Image of/data from Titan" - JPL/ESA
The only thing we're having problems with is restarting the kernel, or building a new one...
Not just that, but we're also unable to make arbitrary changes to the code or hardware. And you can't make backups or restore a saved state.
Yep, although our abilities to hack them are somewhat limited.
In December, Inc. Magazine also selected Burt Rutan as Entrepreneur of the Year. The article is a very good read, and gives a lot of details about Rutan's management style.
A snippet:
As a manager, Rutan has proven intuitively adept at inspiring loyalty and extraordinary work. He doesn't worry so much about the formal background of the engineers he hires. He looks for people who share his passion for aircraft design and gives those who have it free rein. Instead of the specialists sought by aerospace companies, he encourages his staffers to remain generalists who can design anything from a fuselage to a door handle and then go into the shop and build it. Chief engineer Matthew Gionta recalls starting off at the company right out of graduate school in 1994 and being handed the project-leader slot on an ultra-high-tech unmanned aircraft. "What I had to learn on the job made my formal education pale in comparison, but I had to learn it because no one else was going to do it for me," Gionta says. "The stress took years off my life, but when you get that kind of responsibility, it's hard not to feel ownership."
Rutan is loath to codify his approach to managing. "I don't like rules," he says. "Things are so easy to change if you don't write them down." But one way or another, he has communicated a few simple principles to employees. One is that when it comes to safety issues -- and in aircraft design, almost everything is a safety issue -- everyone should be quick to raise questions. Rutan makes sure that when people at Scaled point out their own mistakes, they're applauded rather than reprimanded. And instead of extensively analyzing a design before building it, a notion that's axiomatic in the aerospace industry, Rutan pushes his people to get a first version built quickly, test it, and fix it. Says Gionta: "Testing leads to failure, and failure leads to understanding."
I don't want marketing, I want real space travel, and that requires being a little harsh on all the marketing that surrounds this.
How would you define "real space travel"?
Judging by the cockpit view, this sure seems like space travel as far as I'm concerned.
The Wright Brother's big advance was controlled, powered flight. Lots of people could shoot a projectile from one end of the field to the other, which is all (effectively) that was accomplished by Burt Rutan.
SpaceShipOne is equipped with (and makes heavy use of) a reaction control system, which operates in the same general fashion as the reaction control systems on other spacecraft.
Yeah, and with good maintainance you'll get ~40,000 takeoff and landing cycles with that A340-600, and it usually carries around 380 passengers. You do the math.
In all fairness, since it's so early in the game Branson is also paying for a large chunk of the development costs per unit. I can't find stats for the A340-600, but it looks like the A380 has cost around $10.7 billion so far. Of course, this is still very much an apples-and-oranges comparison.
In terms of capacities, it's possible that a marginally better comparison might be something like a Gulfstream V jet, which cost $46 million apiece and hold a max of 19 passengers. I'd be interested to see if Scaled and/or Virgin tries targetting a similar market in the future, offering a point-to-point rocket for wealthy business travelers who need to get there ASAP, and wouldn't mind an extraordinary ride (and possibly a higher-than-average degree of danger) in the process.