Anybody who knows chemistry knows, corrosion is the biggest problem when dissimilar metals come in contact. The edge connectors on most expansion cards are gold plated to provide a better electrical connection. Therefore, it goes without saying, if chemical reactions are your main concern, it's a no brainer, just make the case out of gold, problem solved. It has benefits of being shiny, you dont want it to be lightweight (to easy for somebody to walk away with), and it'll have PLENTY of awe factor, assuming you keep it properly polished.
Just imagine if a car manufacturer tried to prevent you from putting any brand of tires on the car you pleased, even threatening to void the warranty if you bought tires from a third party. There should be a law against such things, oh wait..... there is....
Can't you just put aside your cynical nature for ten freakin minutes and actually be excited about the fact that humans were just in space for two weeks in a vehicle we built? Come on!
I can remember being excited about a shuttle launch in 1981. I was a young energetic grad, fresh out of an aerospace engineering program, and the shuttle was a foundation technology that was going to pave the way for our industry to make a space station just another stop on the airline schedules.
It's 24 years later, and about all the shuttle has done is soak up all the funds for space exploration over that time, preventing any real advances in the field. After all that time, now it's gone on a flight that seems to be even more 'experimental' than the first one was.
I like to compare the shuttle program to it's predecessors. As a child, I watched the space program go from 'no functional capacity' to 'walking on the moon' in less than a decade. It was an exciting time to grow up with an interest in science and exploration. In the 3 decades since then, we watched the program go from 'walking on the moon' to 'cant go to orbit without a lifeboat and once again all grounded'.
Please remind me one more time, just what is exciting about this ?
If you are going to go on about fanciful stuff that's impossible to build, why suggest something as dumb as a space elevator? Just build a transporter and be done with it. They both require about equivalent leaps in technology to actually build.
Only from folks that dont truely understand the physics and mechanics of it. those who do, just sit back and chuckle, space elevator is the 21st century version of snake oil.
This has got to be the most 'uninformed' vote I've ever seen, even for/.
Just so you understand a few things, there have been 2 loss of vehicle accidents involving the shuttle, one of them was an explosion. The vehicle that exploded was BEFORE the change in insulations. Since the change, there have been no explosions. There was one breakup during re-entry. it's assumed that breakup had a foam strike as it's root cause. There is no evidence to suggest this could not have happened with the older foam systems.
Regarding the issue of pollutants, the majority of pollutants created by the shuttle come from the solid rocket boosters. In the lower portions of the troposphere, these pollutants have little effect, but they tend to last a lot longer, and have a much more dramatic effect when thier exhausts are dumped into the stratosphere. The vehicle that exploded did so before the srb's reached the stratosphere, so, it effectively had LESS pollution impact than those which launched successfully.
Based on empirical measurements, there have been 7 astronauts killed by shuttles using the old foam system, and 7 killed by the new foam system. If there's any correlation to be drawn from these numbers, it's that the change in foam had no effect on astronaut death rates.
I wonder if it's possible for you to get more things wrong in such a short post? I'm glad you cant vote in my part of the world. I'm amazed this got insightful mods.
or a space elevator or some other alternative means of getting mass to orbit.
A 'space elevator' is snake oil, and it never ceases to amaze me how many supposedly 'intelligent nerds' here on/. fall for it. But take a good hard look at it. To make it work, we need a breakthru in materials to manufacture the cable, and we need a breakthru in propulsion/energy transfer to power the climbers. Now assume both of those have occurred, take a step back and look at the big picture. The materials and propulsion can be deployed without the long cable, they will make the concept of a spaceplane practical.
The whole concept of the space elevator will be made obsolete by the technology required to build it. Once that technology is available, we dont need the long cable to do the job, and it's a MASSIVE point of failure in the system, that'll make the whole concept impractical anyways.
Space elevator is nothing more than the 21st century version of snake oil, and its mind boggling that there are folks actually falling for the pitch of a few companies promoting the concept as a way of relieving investors of thier cash.
As for the shuttle, yes, it's in orbit, and has a few folks on board. Most of them aren't old enough to remember the last time there was real manned exploration happening in space, cuz the shuttle program isn't exploring anything new, except the realms of unpowered flight at hypersonic speeds during re-entry.
Autodesk saw the schools as a 'market builder' early on. When I did my second stint in post secondary institutions (pc's were not common during the first), the school had a site license for AutoCad, and we all got copies to take home and use on our own pc.
A whole crop of sudents entered the workforce at a time when the move to CAD was in it's infancy, all familiar with, and able to use AutoCad. They were put in charge of the move to automation, and they all purchased AutoCad when they entered industry.
A very effective marketing strategy for a company looking beyond the next quarter.
Actually, it's a lot closer than you think. In another year, if you want to fly internationally, you will require a passport, with biometric information encoded on it. It is only a matter of time before some jerk-ass in the department of homeland security decides that an implant chip like this will be mandatory for folks to climb into airplanes in the us for domestic travel. Once that's happened, half the population will be voluntarily tagged.
Once half of the population is tagged voluntarily, a bill to enforce tagging on the other half will pass easily. That tagging will be masqueraded as voluntary, but, lack of a tag will prevent access to all sorts of facilities. After they push it thru for air travel, the next step will be public transit, and then after that, it'll be for access to stadiums etc. Again, all voluntary, but only in an abstract sense.
When they have everybody tagged who flies, commutes on transit, or goes to the ball game, who will be left?
The government of China, for example, already has national "citizen identification" cards,
Yah, but on this side of the pond they are called 'social security card', so that makes them completely different, and 'good' because a 'citizen identification' card is 'bad'.
I cant help but wonder, if the medical system wasn't pumping people full of various magic cocktails of drugs, would you still have this problem. Never ceases to amaze me when I see the adds on tv, how many people see those adds, have no clue what they mean, but go to the doctors saying 'i need drug x', and when the doc says 'no you dont', they go find another one, who will give it to them.
Seems to me, you are actually misunderstanding your own problem. If you dont know the cocktail of drugs a specific patient is already recieving, then what are you doing prescribing stuff that is potentially dangerous for them? Shouldn't you be referring them back to folks that actually have the records, or possibly getting a copy of those records BEFORE you prescribe yet more drugs into the cocktail?
In the case you describe, prescribing potentially dangerous drugs to patients that you dont have adaquate records for, is a systemic problem. You are not the victim of that problem, you are part of the root cause.
Executive Summary: Marketing to the traditional 'hot button' market bullets of efficiency and ecological awareness is no longer effective in the marketplace. Recent changes in marketplace mindset require an adjustment in marketing philosophy that will allow for increased margins on traditional commodity items. Initial trials of the new marketing concepts have proven very effective, and an overall shift of marketing strategy is necessary for the company to continue operations.
Problem: Domestically produced commodity items are no longer cost competetive in the marketplace. Increased competition from overseas manufacturing is producing insurmountable pricing pressure on commodity items. Company is approaching insolvency.
Solution: Minor cosmetic changes to commodity product manufacturing process. Re-write marketing material to reflect the change, emphasis on the 'terrorist' application. Increase sale price dramatically to reflect the new 'terrorist' application.
Results: Small increase in sales volume, substantial improvement of product margins. Financial insolvency averted.
Conclusions: Terrorist hysteria is an effective marketing tool. Properly exploited in the marketing literature, the terrorist hysteria can breath new financial life into any product that is no longer producing adaquate margins through traditional channels.
Future Risk Analysis: A fundamental shift in marketing strategy brings with it inherent market risks. The major risk of this conceptual change is that the public mindset will begin to discard the 'terrorist threat', rendering increased marketing efforts in this area ineffective. This risk is deemed minimal at this time, the majority of the expenditures required to maintain the public mindset are being undertaken by the federal government, with a virtually unlimited budget for this marketing effort. This paradigm shift by our company is essentially parasite marketing where our relatively small marketing budget is being used to leverage the expenditures of the federal government. This strategy should remain effective for a minimum of one election cycle, so we should see improvements in the bottom line for at least the next 10 quarters. The primary risk moving forward is that the federal government expenditures to promote terrorist hysteria are reduced, with a resultant loss of marketplace mindset for this strategy. This is a relatively small risk moving forward, and partially offset by hundreds of companies such as our own, all focussed on re-working marketing strategies to promote and extend the terrorist hysteria.
Recommendations: Marketing budget needs to be re-allocated. Television advertising should only be purchased on networks whose news organizations properly emphasize the terrorist threat. The same for print media advertising. The marketing department needs to re-allocate human resources, emphasis on 'product efficiency' needs to be lowered, with appropriate staffing reductions. A new team needs to be established to emphasize the 'security' aspect of the product. A 'threat analyst' should be hired, and put in charge of this new team, who will be responsible for producing white papers emphasizing the 'security' aspect of the product, with particular detail on the 'terrorist' aspect.
The guy in question was Dale Earnhardt, an icon of nascar. The device in question was the Hans (sp?) device, basically a device that restrains the helmet to help prevent neck injuries in an impact type accident. Early on it was reported that there were problems with the seat belts, something strongly contested by the manufacturers of the belts. In the end, independant investigations showed, the belts were problematic, but, because they were improperly installed to make them more comfortable. This was a moot point, cause of death was due to forces on the neck, bascially breaking the neck. For more details, try this
The whole issue was quite controversial since earnhardt was a 'god' of the racetrack, and went many years, winning a lot of races, scoffing at the safety devices, refusing to use them. After he died because of it, this type of restraint quickly became compulsory for nascar, and was already compulsory in most other major racing series.
Absolutely amazing, this still keeps coming up in almost every shuttle related thread. I swear, the 'nerds' these day must be so lost in thier fantasy computer games, they can no longer distinguish reality from fantasy and science fiction.
The space elevator is a great concept, cept for 2 minor details. First, it requires a breakthru in materials, not just a bunch of incremental upgrades, and honest to goodness breakthru. You know, one of those things that happens by accident every few hundred years, on which folks then go to build with incremental upgrades for a few hundred years.
After the breakthru in materials, so that a structure can actually be built with the appropriate strength/weight ratio to make the elevator concept work, next, we need a breakthru (again, a real breakthru, not just a bunch of incremental upgrades) in either power transfer, or propulsion, to actually power those little 'climbers' up and down the silly thing.
Then, when you take a big step back, and look at the big picture, once we have the breakthru in materials, and in propulsion, it still doesn't make sense to build the elevator. The combination of new propulsion and new materials make an honest to goodness runway to orbit and back space plane not just viable, but practical. The technology advances required to enable construction of the elevator, in themselves, will make the elevator obsolete.
Now toss in the second part of the reality check. Current materials are just fine for the job of space plane, if we get the propulsion breakthru. That can be accomplished with just one breakthru, no need for the second one, while the elevator requires both.
A space elevator is the 21st century form of snake oil. The scary part, so many folks here on/. buy into it blindly, without even really looking at just how much technology advance is needed to build the thing, and then look at the big picture, what ELSE can be built if those advances happen.
The space elevator will NEVER be built, it's a silly concept. It's prone to all sorts of issues, like meteorite strikes etc etc etc. The materials required to build it can be far better deployed building practical methods of transport, once those materials are actually invented and available. the materials themselves (including new propulsion) will negate the need for the concept of the elevator.
A school science experiment in the form of an amateur radio satellite. Shuttle to deliver it, ISS to 'hold it up', finally, the pair of them actually doing something useful....
I love this space elevator concept, because I've recently staked out claims in an area that's got tons of unobtanium just waiting to be mined. When somebody does finally sell this concept to enough investors, and they have enough cash, we'll develop the unobtanium mine, and happily take all thier money.
The great thing about mining unobtanium, there's a couple by-products during production. For every ton of unobtanium we produce, we'll end up with more than a million gallons of snake oil in the tailings ponds. I'm currently working on attracting investors to that portion of the project as well. I'm confident anybody willing to invest the billions required for a space elevator project will be more than happy to dump an extra few million into snake oil production, it'll be a tremendously profitable by-product.
Re:Whatever happened to single-stage-to-orbit?
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NASA's Shuttle Plans
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Fact: EVEN if you use Burt's solution for only one launch; Its STILL cheaper than the apollo solution.
Fact: Even today, at a geeky place like/. folks are still confused by the difference between a vertical shot to altitude, and an orbital shot.
A full launch to / from orbit consists of 4 phases. Phase 1, lift out of the atmosphere. Phase 2, accelerate to orbital velocity. Phase 3, decellerate from orbital velocity. Phase 4, descent to landing.
Compared to Phase 2, 1 and 4 are trivial. If you choose to use aerobraking for phase 3, phase 2 is trivial in comparison to the engineering problems of phase 3. Rutan's SS1 only dealt with phase 1 and 4, the two 'trivial' components of the problem. While they are not actually trivial, they appear trivial in comparison to the engineering required for the rest of the phases.
This is all about orders of magnitude of difficulty from an engineering perspective. Accelerating to orbital velocity is an order of magnitude more difficult than the lift out of the atmosphere. Aerobraking to decelerate from orbital velocity (assuming you want the vehicle to remain intact) is an order of magnitude more difficult than the acceleration problem. When you add all the structure/fuels required to accomplish phase 2/3, you increase the difficulty of phase 1 by an order of magnitude. Choose any decleratioin method other than aerobraking, and the problems of the lift phase go up 2 orders of magnitude because you now just quadrupled the fuel requirements for initial lift, if you can even figure out a way to lift that much at all.
To make cost comparisons between rutans 'solution' and the shuttle solution is (in terms/. folks should understand) equivalent to saying this. It costs 2 cents to make a transistor that can switch at 100khz, so it should only cost a few cents more to make a cpu that runs at 4ghz with a meg of on board cache. In terms of differences in engineering difficulty, comparing SS1 to an orbital return vehicle (carrying people) is equivalent to comparing a 2 cent transistor to a modern top of the line cpu.
If your boxes are hacked and you go into court and you can't demonstrate that your log timestamps have anything to do with reality, you might not be able to use them as evidence.
Unless you are logging to write once media, or something other than a text file that you can manually edit, aren't many courts that'll consider logs as evidence. Police may like them, and use them as pointers for a trail to 'real evidence', but logfiles themselves wont stand up to cross examination, unless they are proven to be written initially to indellible media, which cannot be altered after the fact. timestamps are the least of your concerns in this area.
putting up an appearance of being ahead in space flight can only last for a few more years.
Discovery is in orbit right now, it was the first launch after Nasa spent a billion dollars and a couple years 'fixing' a problem. The problem is not fixed. I dont think congress (or the public) is willing to risk another billion dollars on the hope the folks at nasa can get it right with another go at it. There is a very high likelihood that the shuttle will not fly again after this flight.
The current agreement with Russia for soyuz equipment expires next spring. It cannot be renewed for silly political agenda reasons. In another year, nasa will not have access to soyuz vehicles to use taking crew to/from space.
The 'appearance' of being ahead in the space game wont last another year, never mind a few years. The full reality will hit home for joe american public when nasa no longer has a means to send astronauts to/from the iss. Note the 'i' in iss, it is an 'international' station, with many other countries participating in various roles. The usa will not have the option to unilaterally de-orbit the station.
The station will continue to operate, but, staffing will change. It's going to be the domain of those countries that have a means to put folks up there, and that's going to be limited to those doing business with Russia to purchase launch capacity.
When the last american astronaut comes home from the station, and is replace by a european, the illusion of being ahead in the space flight will be over. That's about a year down the road on the current path.
If the server is outside the USA, it will be blocked. Just like a tarriff, if a company does not pay, they can not sell their product inside this country.
And therein lies the real reason for this bill. To implement it will require setting up the 'great firewall of the usa', and nobody will dare complain.
This is not a bill that takes a step toward the slippery slope, it's a bill that takes 300 million lemmings, and has them jumping off a cliff.
If you've ever watched a submarine movie, they always seem to have to surface to send a signal, gotta get the antenna above the water.
As my second point of reference, I have a friend/client that operates his business from a 116 foot boat. About once a year, one of the notebooks on board gets dropped in the water. I can say quite definitevly that the wifi does not work when the notebook is under water.
The folks using gps as an excuse to make this adjustment obviously dont understand how gps works. There are some satellites orbiting the earth, in known orbits. The earth is rotating at a known rotational velocity. Signals propogate from the satellites to recievers, and time deltas are used to calculate a position. Precise knowledge of the earths physical shape, and rotational velocity are required to complete the solution, because even that stationary item on the earths surface is still moving around (the earth is rotating, remember?).
Current gps systems work on the assumption that satellite orbits change slightly over time, and corrections to the orbital data are transmitted to the recievers from the satellites themselves, along with a time reference. That time reference takes into account the changing of the earths rotational velocity, so gps recievers assume it's constant.
This change in standard would require now that all gps reciever software get adjustments on earths rotational velocity sent to them, because it's no longer constant. It doesn't matter how you twist it, satellites are moving in an intertial reference frame, earth is rotating at a velocity that changes within that reference frame, the adjustment MUST be made somewhere in the system. This change just means the recievers have to be reprogrammed for a different 'earth model' and then they will work with 'fixed time', and a changing rotational velocity. since that firmware isn't in all the recievers out there, gps recievers will be left as they are, and the time reference transmitted from the gps satellites will continue to be adjusted to account for rotational changes.
If they really want to make this so that the programmers dont have to deal with the issue, re-define lattitude and longitude to be reference the gps satellites instead of reference the earths surface, and this problem goes away. But, as long as the satellites obey physics, and lat/lon lines are fixed in space relative the earths surface, this correction needs to be made, no matter WHAT the politicians say.
Bush and crowd may be able to trump the constitution and laws of the usa, they still cannot trump the laws of physics, no matter how badly they may want to.
There's nothing interesting about this except the media circus.
Actually, there is something interesting. Nasa just spent untold amounts of taxpayer money to fix the problem of foam in one spot. That's the exact same spot the foam broke loose again on this launch.
The real question that's going to be raised is one of competence. After all that effort to fix one specific problem, and it turns out to be not fixed, this raises very specific questions regarding compentency. There's likely to be some accountability issues raised as well, someoby is going to be brought to task to explain why the problem is not fixed after the huge expenditure of resources on that specific item.
This is a huge problem for nasa administrators suddenly. They were tasked specifically with fixing the foam problem at the struts. The program was halted, and a billion or so dollars spent 'fixing the problem'. The problem isn't fixed. The reality is, the whole shuttle program is now at risk. Congress is not going to give them another 2 years of blank cheques to solve this problem again, and, its likely they aren't going to be allowed to fly it again if it's not fixed. The ducks are now lined up in a row, this foam break is the excuse needed by congress to pull the funding plug on the whole program.
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Anybody who knows chemistry knows, corrosion is the biggest problem when dissimilar metals come in contact. The edge connectors on most expansion cards are gold plated to provide a better electrical connection. Therefore, it goes without saying, if chemical reactions are your main concern, it's a no brainer, just make the case out of gold, problem solved. It has benefits of being shiny, you dont want it to be lightweight (to easy for somebody to walk away with), and it'll have PLENTY of awe factor, assuming you keep it properly polished.
I can remember being excited about a shuttle launch in 1981. I was a young energetic grad, fresh out of an aerospace engineering program, and the shuttle was a foundation technology that was going to pave the way for our industry to make a space station just another stop on the airline schedules.
It's 24 years later, and about all the shuttle has done is soak up all the funds for space exploration over that time, preventing any real advances in the field. After all that time, now it's gone on a flight that seems to be even more 'experimental' than the first one was.
I like to compare the shuttle program to it's predecessors. As a child, I watched the space program go from 'no functional capacity' to 'walking on the moon' in less than a decade. It was an exciting time to grow up with an interest in science and exploration. In the 3 decades since then, we watched the program go from 'walking on the moon' to 'cant go to orbit without a lifeboat and once again all grounded'.
Please remind me one more time, just what is exciting about this ?
If you are going to go on about fanciful stuff that's impossible to build, why suggest something as dumb as a space elevator? Just build a transporter and be done with it. They both require about equivalent leaps in technology to actually build.
Only from folks that dont truely understand the physics and mechanics of it. those who do, just sit back and chuckle, space elevator is the 21st century version of snake oil.
This has got to be the most 'uninformed' vote I've ever seen, even for /.
Just so you understand a few things, there have been 2 loss of vehicle accidents involving the shuttle, one of them was an explosion. The vehicle that exploded was BEFORE the change in insulations. Since the change, there have been no explosions. There was one breakup during re-entry. it's assumed that breakup had a foam strike as it's root cause. There is no evidence to suggest this could not have happened with the older foam systems.
Regarding the issue of pollutants, the majority of pollutants created by the shuttle come from the solid rocket boosters. In the lower portions of the troposphere, these pollutants have little effect, but they tend to last a lot longer, and have a much more dramatic effect when thier exhausts are dumped into the stratosphere. The vehicle that exploded did so before the srb's reached the stratosphere, so, it effectively had LESS pollution impact than those which launched successfully.
Based on empirical measurements, there have been 7 astronauts killed by shuttles using the old foam system, and 7 killed by the new foam system. If there's any correlation to be drawn from these numbers, it's that the change in foam had no effect on astronaut death rates.
I wonder if it's possible for you to get more things wrong in such a short post? I'm glad you cant vote in my part of the world. I'm amazed this got insightful mods.
A 'space elevator' is snake oil, and it never ceases to amaze me how many supposedly 'intelligent nerds' here on /. fall for it. But take a good hard look at it. To make it work, we need a breakthru in materials to manufacture the cable, and we need a breakthru in propulsion/energy transfer to power the climbers. Now assume both of those have occurred, take a step back and look at the big picture. The materials and propulsion can be deployed without the long cable, they will make the concept of a spaceplane practical.
The whole concept of the space elevator will be made obsolete by the technology required to build it. Once that technology is available, we dont need the long cable to do the job, and it's a MASSIVE point of failure in the system, that'll make the whole concept impractical anyways.
Space elevator is nothing more than the 21st century version of snake oil, and its mind boggling that there are folks actually falling for the pitch of a few companies promoting the concept as a way of relieving investors of thier cash.
As for the shuttle, yes, it's in orbit, and has a few folks on board. Most of them aren't old enough to remember the last time there was real manned exploration happening in space, cuz the shuttle program isn't exploring anything new, except the realms of unpowered flight at hypersonic speeds during re-entry.
A whole crop of sudents entered the workforce at a time when the move to CAD was in it's infancy, all familiar with, and able to use AutoCad. They were put in charge of the move to automation, and they all purchased AutoCad when they entered industry.
A very effective marketing strategy for a company looking beyond the next quarter.
hahaha. Shoulda posted ac I guess. In reality, it's just some musings over a wake up coffee, but seemed sooooo appropriate...
Once half of the population is tagged voluntarily, a bill to enforce tagging on the other half will pass easily. That tagging will be masqueraded as voluntary, but, lack of a tag will prevent access to all sorts of facilities. After they push it thru for air travel, the next step will be public transit, and then after that, it'll be for access to stadiums etc. Again, all voluntary, but only in an abstract sense.
When they have everybody tagged who flies, commutes on transit, or goes to the ball game, who will be left?
Yah, but on this side of the pond they are called 'social security card', so that makes them completely different, and 'good' because a 'citizen identification' card is 'bad'.
Seems to me, you are actually misunderstanding your own problem. If you dont know the cocktail of drugs a specific patient is already recieving, then what are you doing prescribing stuff that is potentially dangerous for them? Shouldn't you be referring them back to folks that actually have the records, or possibly getting a copy of those records BEFORE you prescribe yet more drugs into the cocktail?
In the case you describe, prescribing potentially dangerous drugs to patients that you dont have adaquate records for, is a systemic problem. You are not the victim of that problem, you are part of the root cause.
Problem: Domestically produced commodity items are no longer cost competetive in the marketplace. Increased competition from overseas manufacturing is producing insurmountable pricing pressure on commodity items. Company is approaching insolvency.
Solution: Minor cosmetic changes to commodity product manufacturing process. Re-write marketing material to reflect the change, emphasis on the 'terrorist' application. Increase sale price dramatically to reflect the new 'terrorist' application.
Results: Small increase in sales volume, substantial improvement of product margins. Financial insolvency averted.
Conclusions: Terrorist hysteria is an effective marketing tool. Properly exploited in the marketing literature, the terrorist hysteria can breath new financial life into any product that is no longer producing adaquate margins through traditional channels.
Future Risk Analysis: A fundamental shift in marketing strategy brings with it inherent market risks. The major risk of this conceptual change is that the public mindset will begin to discard the 'terrorist threat', rendering increased marketing efforts in this area ineffective. This risk is deemed minimal at this time, the majority of the expenditures required to maintain the public mindset are being undertaken by the federal government, with a virtually unlimited budget for this marketing effort. This paradigm shift by our company is essentially parasite marketing where our relatively small marketing budget is being used to leverage the expenditures of the federal government. This strategy should remain effective for a minimum of one election cycle, so we should see improvements in the bottom line for at least the next 10 quarters. The primary risk moving forward is that the federal government expenditures to promote terrorist hysteria are reduced, with a resultant loss of marketplace mindset for this strategy. This is a relatively small risk moving forward, and partially offset by hundreds of companies such as our own, all focussed on re-working marketing strategies to promote and extend the terrorist hysteria.
Recommendations: Marketing budget needs to be re-allocated. Television advertising should only be purchased on networks whose news organizations properly emphasize the terrorist threat. The same for print media advertising. The marketing department needs to re-allocate human resources, emphasis on 'product efficiency' needs to be lowered, with appropriate staffing reductions. A new team needs to be established to emphasize the 'security' aspect of the product. A 'threat analyst' should be hired, and put in charge of this new team, who will be responsible for producing white papers emphasizing the 'security' aspect of the product, with particular detail on the 'terrorist' aspect.
The whole issue was quite controversial since earnhardt was a 'god' of the racetrack, and went many years, winning a lot of races, scoffing at the safety devices, refusing to use them. After he died because of it, this type of restraint quickly became compulsory for nascar, and was already compulsory in most other major racing series.
The space elevator is a great concept, cept for 2 minor details. First, it requires a breakthru in materials, not just a bunch of incremental upgrades, and honest to goodness breakthru. You know, one of those things that happens by accident every few hundred years, on which folks then go to build with incremental upgrades for a few hundred years.
After the breakthru in materials, so that a structure can actually be built with the appropriate strength/weight ratio to make the elevator concept work, next, we need a breakthru (again, a real breakthru, not just a bunch of incremental upgrades) in either power transfer, or propulsion, to actually power those little 'climbers' up and down the silly thing.
Then, when you take a big step back, and look at the big picture, once we have the breakthru in materials, and in propulsion, it still doesn't make sense to build the elevator. The combination of new propulsion and new materials make an honest to goodness runway to orbit and back space plane not just viable, but practical. The technology advances required to enable construction of the elevator, in themselves, will make the elevator obsolete.
Now toss in the second part of the reality check. Current materials are just fine for the job of space plane, if we get the propulsion breakthru. That can be accomplished with just one breakthru, no need for the second one, while the elevator requires both.
A space elevator is the 21st century form of snake oil. The scary part, so many folks here on /. buy into it blindly, without even really looking at just how much technology advance is needed to build the thing, and then look at the big picture, what ELSE can be built if those advances happen.
The space elevator will NEVER be built, it's a silly concept. It's prone to all sorts of issues, like meteorite strikes etc etc etc. The materials required to build it can be far better deployed building practical methods of transport, once those materials are actually invented and available. the materials themselves (including new propulsion) will negate the need for the concept of the elevator.
A school science experiment in the form of an amateur radio satellite. Shuttle to deliver it, ISS to 'hold it up', finally, the pair of them actually doing something useful....
The great thing about mining unobtanium, there's a couple by-products during production. For every ton of unobtanium we produce, we'll end up with more than a million gallons of snake oil in the tailings ponds. I'm currently working on attracting investors to that portion of the project as well. I'm confident anybody willing to invest the billions required for a space elevator project will be more than happy to dump an extra few million into snake oil production, it'll be a tremendously profitable by-product.
Fact: Even today, at a geeky place like /. folks are still confused by the difference between a vertical shot to altitude, and an orbital shot.
A full launch to / from orbit consists of 4 phases. Phase 1, lift out of the atmosphere. Phase 2, accelerate to orbital velocity. Phase 3, decellerate from orbital velocity. Phase 4, descent to landing.
Compared to Phase 2, 1 and 4 are trivial. If you choose to use aerobraking for phase 3, phase 2 is trivial in comparison to the engineering problems of phase 3. Rutan's SS1 only dealt with phase 1 and 4, the two 'trivial' components of the problem. While they are not actually trivial, they appear trivial in comparison to the engineering required for the rest of the phases.
This is all about orders of magnitude of difficulty from an engineering perspective. Accelerating to orbital velocity is an order of magnitude more difficult than the lift out of the atmosphere. Aerobraking to decelerate from orbital velocity (assuming you want the vehicle to remain intact) is an order of magnitude more difficult than the acceleration problem. When you add all the structure/fuels required to accomplish phase 2/3, you increase the difficulty of phase 1 by an order of magnitude. Choose any decleratioin method other than aerobraking, and the problems of the lift phase go up 2 orders of magnitude because you now just quadrupled the fuel requirements for initial lift, if you can even figure out a way to lift that much at all.
To make cost comparisons between rutans 'solution' and the shuttle solution is (in terms /. folks should understand) equivalent to saying this. It costs 2 cents to make a transistor that can switch at 100khz, so it should only cost a few cents more to make a cpu that runs at 4ghz with a meg of on board cache. In terms of differences in engineering difficulty, comparing SS1 to an orbital return vehicle (carrying people) is equivalent to comparing a 2 cent transistor to a modern top of the line cpu.
Unless you are logging to write once media, or something other than a text file that you can manually edit, aren't many courts that'll consider logs as evidence. Police may like them, and use them as pointers for a trail to 'real evidence', but logfiles themselves wont stand up to cross examination, unless they are proven to be written initially to indellible media, which cannot be altered after the fact. timestamps are the least of your concerns in this area.
They speak spanish just fine, problem is, /. runs in english.
Discovery is in orbit right now, it was the first launch after Nasa spent a billion dollars and a couple years 'fixing' a problem. The problem is not fixed. I dont think congress (or the public) is willing to risk another billion dollars on the hope the folks at nasa can get it right with another go at it. There is a very high likelihood that the shuttle will not fly again after this flight.
The current agreement with Russia for soyuz equipment expires next spring. It cannot be renewed for silly political agenda reasons. In another year, nasa will not have access to soyuz vehicles to use taking crew to/from space.
The 'appearance' of being ahead in the space game wont last another year, never mind a few years. The full reality will hit home for joe american public when nasa no longer has a means to send astronauts to/from the iss. Note the 'i' in iss, it is an 'international' station, with many other countries participating in various roles. The usa will not have the option to unilaterally de-orbit the station.
The station will continue to operate, but, staffing will change. It's going to be the domain of those countries that have a means to put folks up there, and that's going to be limited to those doing business with Russia to purchase launch capacity.
When the last american astronaut comes home from the station, and is replace by a european, the illusion of being ahead in the space flight will be over. That's about a year down the road on the current path.
And therein lies the real reason for this bill. To implement it will require setting up the 'great firewall of the usa', and nobody will dare complain.
This is not a bill that takes a step toward the slippery slope, it's a bill that takes 300 million lemmings, and has them jumping off a cliff.
As my second point of reference, I have a friend/client that operates his business from a 116 foot boat. About once a year, one of the notebooks on board gets dropped in the water. I can say quite definitevly that the wifi does not work when the notebook is under water.
Current gps systems work on the assumption that satellite orbits change slightly over time, and corrections to the orbital data are transmitted to the recievers from the satellites themselves, along with a time reference. That time reference takes into account the changing of the earths rotational velocity, so gps recievers assume it's constant.
This change in standard would require now that all gps reciever software get adjustments on earths rotational velocity sent to them, because it's no longer constant. It doesn't matter how you twist it, satellites are moving in an intertial reference frame, earth is rotating at a velocity that changes within that reference frame, the adjustment MUST be made somewhere in the system. This change just means the recievers have to be reprogrammed for a different 'earth model' and then they will work with 'fixed time', and a changing rotational velocity. since that firmware isn't in all the recievers out there, gps recievers will be left as they are, and the time reference transmitted from the gps satellites will continue to be adjusted to account for rotational changes.
If they really want to make this so that the programmers dont have to deal with the issue, re-define lattitude and longitude to be reference the gps satellites instead of reference the earths surface, and this problem goes away. But, as long as the satellites obey physics, and lat/lon lines are fixed in space relative the earths surface, this correction needs to be made, no matter WHAT the politicians say.
Bush and crowd may be able to trump the constitution and laws of the usa, they still cannot trump the laws of physics, no matter how badly they may want to.
Actually, there is something interesting. Nasa just spent untold amounts of taxpayer money to fix the problem of foam in one spot. That's the exact same spot the foam broke loose again on this launch.
The real question that's going to be raised is one of competence. After all that effort to fix one specific problem, and it turns out to be not fixed, this raises very specific questions regarding compentency. There's likely to be some accountability issues raised as well, someoby is going to be brought to task to explain why the problem is not fixed after the huge expenditure of resources on that specific item.
This is a huge problem for nasa administrators suddenly. They were tasked specifically with fixing the foam problem at the struts. The program was halted, and a billion or so dollars spent 'fixing the problem'. The problem isn't fixed. The reality is, the whole shuttle program is now at risk. Congress is not going to give them another 2 years of blank cheques to solve this problem again, and, its likely they aren't going to be allowed to fly it again if it's not fixed. The ducks are now lined up in a row, this foam break is the excuse needed by congress to pull the funding plug on the whole program.