If you combine the two theories, a very simple point of observation comes into hilight. You see the proposed dates pushing back at a rate with convergence in the November timeframe. When does the Nasa budget come up for review in congress?
I'll take your november prediction, and modify it to become 'at the last available launch window prior to congressional budget review'. Not sure when that actually happens, but, some online research can probably pin it down to a weeklong timeframe. I suspect that the percieved risk of program cancellation if a shuttle has not been launched by the next budget review will be larger than the 2% risk of vehicle loss from an actual launch.
Checkbox already does it. It's turnkey, painless, and simple. Print the access tickets in your web browser, set any timeframe you want on them, 30 minutes to a year. Hand em out to your paying customers. The non-customers can stare at a login screen. I've put a dozen of these things in various locations, site owners love em. Dont need to be a computer geek to know how to use it, and you can _easily_ restrict your wifi to customers, without all the fuss of encryption keys.
It's all risk management on the part of nasa administrators. If they push back to far, they run the risk of losing the program, and the budget that goes with it. If they fly it, there's a 2% chance it wont complete the mission, and the program will be scrapped. Prudent risk management dictates delay of the launch until the risk of losing the program due to non launch is equivalent to the risk of losing the program due to launch.
It's all about keeping that multi billion dollar budget. Actual safety issues wth the next launch are good press fodder, but not the real driving force. The next launch will be delayed until the percieved risk to the program thru budget cuts due to non performance is on par with the risk of vehicle loss. Until then, the money will flow, and the orbiters will soak it up, without actually presenting any risk to anybody, by simply delaying proposed launches as they approach.
that's one way, altho I prefer to use stuff that comes out of the box with pxe enabled. Just remote boot it, and away to the races.
Guess it says something about legacy bios if you really need to have a video system in a machine that will never have a monitor/keyboard attached in normal operation. The other detail that really irritates when it comes to off the shelf pc equipment, cant count how many times I've seen a bios post screen sitting there saying 'keyboard error, keyboard not attached - hit F6 to continue'. Then you have to attach a keyboard, just to set the bios up to ignore keyboard errors during boot. I guess it would be just to logical for the folks making bios to think, and realize, if there's not keyboard, and no video, there is nothing to lose (and lots to gain) by directing i/o to a serial port.
The moon may have an inordinate amount of he3, and it's a common fallicay here on slashdot that's a reason to go there. The reality is, he3 does exist in small quanties in sea water. It'll be WAY cheaper, and far less risky (finacial risk) to build a plant to process a few million cubic kilometers of seawater, and extract it from there, than it would be to fund an excursion to go pick the stuff up on the moon.
Space travel today is akin to alchemy in the middle ages. Everybody wants to believe that somehow, by some grace of magic, it'll become practical and economical. The harsh reality is, we live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, and until our technology provides us with a propulsion mechanism that has an energy density an order of magnitude better than what we have to work with today, space travel just isn't going to be practical/economical for anything except a few communications satellites.
The reality is, every element we know about, comes from seeing it here on earth. Even if it's much more abundant on the moon, it's going to be more cost effective to process every last drop of seawater, or strip mine an entire continent, than it is to set up any kind of production facility on the lunar surface, along with the associated transportation infrastructure required to get the stuff back here to earth. And for going beyond the moon, our technology as it exists today is not reliable enough to send a manned craft anywhere farther out. Our robotics are not advanced enough to do the job without human help.
The time and money is better spent tackling the propulsion problem. When we have a propulsion mechanism that can go earth->moon->earth and only use up 50% of it's launch mass as fuel for the round trip, then, and only then, will it actually start to become practical/economical. Until that time, the money is better spent developing an infrastructure (research propulsion) than it is trying to go places.
you are confusing 'made in america' with 'american companies manufacturing overseas'. Go take a good look at where the actual fabrication facilities are located, and you'll see that your chipset, cpu, and memory dont qualify.
Pretty much the only thing the US has a clear edge in manufactring these days is commercial aircraft.
Airbus sells more 'big aluminum' than boeing these days. Nobody in the usa even makes 'medium aluminum', that's a market held by Bombardier (Canada) and Embraer (Brazil). In terms of the number of airframes delivered annualy, Bombardier is the biggest. In terms of dollars sold annually, Airbus is the biggest. airbus is rolling out the new 'big boy' with the A380, and on the same day it made it's first flight, Boeing had a quarterly conference call, in which they announced the end of the 747 line. 29 orders left to fill, nothing else on the books, and without a substantial number of new orders for the -400, they wont continue development of the -700 through to production.
Aviation has tremendous lead times on the product cycle, and product lifecycles are still measured in decades, where most other products have cycles measured in months/years. The trend in aviation over the last decade has been very clear, 'american made' doesn't even exist in the mid range anymore, and it's been on the decline in the big stuff for a while, a decline that's starting to accelerate.
The writing is very clear on the wall these days, heck, even Boeing is ramping up component production in China now. USA has no edge over the world in commercial aviation, it just has assembly plants for airframes that _were_ the bleeding edge 15 years ago, and are only halfway thru thier life cycle. 787 is going to be assembled in the usa, but most of the components will come from offshore.
Commercial aviation is making the exodus, just like every other industry, just taking longer due to 30 year product life cycles.
I'm curious as to why video is even relavent, never mind essential, for a cluster node? Just another part generating heat, that is serving no purpose other than to possibly pacify a brain dead bios at boot time. Brain dead bios is fixable, heat takes real effort to get rid of it. Seems like a total waste to put video into a machine that's gonna sit in a rack, and likely never have a monitor plugged into it. Seems like an even bigger waste to actually plug some sort of video output device into it.
So, get autonomous driving working, get people used to it on the ground, then going airborne is just a next step.
You've got it very backwards. Airplanes have been flying autonomously for more than a decade. Flying is very well suited to automation, driving is a much more difficult problem. The aviation industry has reached the point now, under recent reduced separation rules, there's a lot of pieces of airspace where manually flying the airplanes isn't even permitted anymore.
I'm not aware of prior art in this one - do you know of an email client that visually differentiated between internet based email addresses and ones from the address book?
I see the root of the problem in this comment, it's obvious you have never dealt with clients that use methods other than 'internet' to send and recieve email. That's likely because the smtp protocol has become ubiquitous, and anybody that's been introduced to the concept in the last 10 years, knows nothing else. On the other hand, if you deal with mixed systems, as was common 15 years ago, it was _normal_ for a client to differentiate between different addresses based on thier source/destination. I can clearly remember the days of addresses having different coloring/presentation based on which route would be travelled to deliver the correspondance, with the options being lan/uucp/fidonet/inmarsat with a few other more obscure options available. Differentiating was important, because each route had a different cost involved in the delivery.
Even today, the setup I use categorizes addresses based on delivery method. It goes much farther than that, and when I compose a large note for delivery over inmarsat, I even get an 'are you sure you want to send this' popup, with a requirement for password entry to enable the send of that note. When a 1kbyte note can cost on the order of $20 to deliver, it's rather important that you deploy a system that makes damn sure folks do not accidently click on the wrong address, and send large file attaches over a data link that charges per bit, vs going out over a flat rate broadband connection that's totally unmetered.
Go take a good look at the pricing of inmarsat c data cairrage, and you'll realize immediately, when the costs are 'per bit', it becomes blatantly obvious to any developer, addresses on that system require special treatment, part of which is color coding and hilight fonts.
It's wonderful to see the USPTO continue down the road of granting patents for obvious things, so obvious we've been using it for 15 years. I love it every time I see this, it's one more nail in the coffin. I'm involved in a very active political movement to have my country abandon it's agreements with the USA involving patent recognition, this is just more cannon fodder to make our cause even more reasonable.
It's only a matter of time at this rate, and the rest of the world is going to abandon the concept of recognizing IP as defined by the USA, and move to standards that are reasonable. That's going to be a rather catastrophic event for the american economy. Patents like this make it inevitable.
Thats for the work to actually design/build the unit. Now, to cover the bearocracy of a Nasa project, gonna have to add a few dollars to that estimate. Pork aint cheap these days, and costplus pork is never sliced thin....
Naturally it won't be any use, but since your company already has volume license to Win XP Pro,
If you company has a volume license for Pro, and your buyer is paying for Starter, then you have a problem of incompetence in the purchasing department. At a minimum, your buyers should be negotiating for purchases with no preload, but any smart buyer will negotiate a 'no charge' preload of a 'buyer provided image' based on the buyers existing license.
Makes one wonder, if the technically literate crowd here has no real interest in black holes, then I'm sure John Q. Public is considerably less interested, and probably wondering why his tax dollars get pissed away on stuff like the equipment used to find them.
Re-read the original post. Pay particular attention to the part about 'I operate airplanes'. Explain to me again, why I need to go read somebody elses statements? Then again, our fleet is not operating under bankruptcy protection, so, I'm sure our statements look substantially different than those of most major carriers.
Spaceplanes, in the near future ? I want some of the stuff you are smoking.
I remember hearing this kind of talk in the late 60's too.
The closest thing there is to a space plane today, is called a 'shuttle'. Seems they are scared of launching it these days because it's so expensive to build, and has a habit of blowing up when they do use it.
There is a little bit of experimentation going on these days with differing propulsion methods, ie scram jets etc, but, for the most part, it's all still based on variations of combustion, resulting in reactions based on newtonian physics (f=ma). With the fuels available today, the mass fraction to orbit on such vehicles is so tiny that it's not gonna be practical, ever.
Before travel to/from space becomes commonplace, we need technolgy advances such that the mass fraction to orbit is on par with long haul jetliners of today. that means 30% of the all up launch weight can be fuel, 30% structure, and 40% payload. It doesn't matter what you do with materials to lighten todays orbital lauchers, the fuel fraction is on the order of 80% of launch weight, so it'll never become 'common'.
No matter how you twist it, the energy density of current propulsion techniques just isn't there, and no amount of incremental improvements in structures/engines will solve the problem. The solution requires an order of magnitude improvement in fuel energy density, which implies a major breakthru in propulsion technology. This breakthru needs to be on the order of the move from steam to internal combustion, which replaced the 'coal car' on trains with a 'tank of diesel'. Aviation didn't become efficient enough to become common until the incremental improvement happened that took internal combustion from the piston engine to the continuous flow jet, but that was only an incremental improvement on the technology, not a major new propulsion source. A modern high bypass fanjet operating at high altitude still extracts less than 50% of the available energy in it's fuel, and directs it toward propulsion. the rest disappears into compression and waste heat.
Rockets are horribly inefficient things, the vast majority of the energy stored in the fuel tanks gets thrown away as waste heat, but that heat has a side effect, gas expansion. Rockets utilize this side effect to create massive amounts of force, for a very short period of time. Internal combustion engines are more efficient, and depending on the cycle in use, anywhere from 20 to 35% of the energy stored in the fuel can be recovered for actual propulsion, the rest is expended on compression of the incoming gasses, and waste heat.
Space travel can become commonplace, and economical, when we figure out how to extract all the energy available in the stored fuels of today, or we come up with a fuel with a much higher energy density. As long as we rely on extraction methods where the actual proplusion energy is just a side effect of the main reaction, and are using fuels available today, it's not going to happen. Science fiction writers, and the tv shows can talk/show all they want, but the limiting factors are the phyiscs of propulsion. All the talk in the world isn't going to change that, only a breakthru in propulsion technology that gives us an order of magnitude of improvement in energy density will solve the real problems.
This is/., dont go temper the enthusiasm for Liftport with reality, it's bad for business on the 'donations' buttons at thier website. Besides, LP has found a way to overcome the detail of materials, where it's physically impossible with todays technology to create what they need. There's an easy solution, get a little office space, hang a shingle out front that says 'factory', and announce to the world that you will now open a facility to manufacture what's needed. Rest assured, they will build a very nice display to show off the little bit of material that's been donated, and they will utilize that exposure to secure yet more 'investors' and probably more grants.
I must admit tho, thier business model is interesting (assuming they actually do get enough money to operate). I've been considering upstaging them, and starting a company to operate a transporter, but I haven't had time to make the website yet. I'm sure I can do a partnership with Liftport, because my transporter will provide the cheapest way to put thier carbon nanotubes into geostationary orbit, so they can create the elevator. They can make press releases about how they will use innovative technology to kickstart the elevator business, and I can make press releases about the lead customer for the transporter business. We can both use this pr to gather up yet more investors...
- The lady was caught in a firefight unexpectedly, and the person shielding her from bullets was killed.
- She makes statements in another language, leaving plenty of room for the american press to 'interpret'.
- For a person confused, in the dark, hearing shots coming thier direction, there's not a lot of difference between a bradley and a 'tank'.
- An average american on the street in broad daylight will call a bradley a 'tank' when they see it go by.
Some confusion is understandable.
All the rhetoric aside, one really needs to step back and take a look at the big picture. The mission in Iraq is supposedly to 'free' the people of that country. Before the us soldiers arrived, a drive to the airport was a total non event. Today, it appears that speeding on that road is now a capital offense.
Kidnapping has become the norm over there. Some countries have different attitudes than the us, and actually care enough about thier citizens to try do something about it if they are kidnapped. In return, they get shot for thier efforts.
From both the point of view of the Iraqi people, and the italians, the age old question does honestly arise. With 'friends' like america, who needs enemies ?
Hate to break the news to the _supposedly_ technically literate slashdot editors, but podcasting is not radio. Podcasts are nothing more than compressed audio data, typically downloaded onto an mp3 device for later playback. Radio involves actual broadcasting of electromagnetic waves on rf frequencies, normally at substantially high power levels.
This whole fad of calling various forms of digital audio distributed over the internet 'radio', just goes to emphasize the technical illiteracy of the current crop of 'nerds'.
If that was your car... would you just buy a build a new one becuase it was out of gas and needed new shocks and you wanted to add a new a satilite radio?
That would depend entirely on your location. If you car was in the back yard, in the middle of a densly populated area, just down the street from <insert major chain store name here>, probably not. It would be very cost effective to walk to the store, buy the parts, then fix the car.
OTOH, if your car is located at a research camp, on the icecap at one of the poles, far enough away from 'civilization' that the _only_ way to bring in those spare parts is to fly a ski equipped C-130 3000 miles to deliver the parts, you will rethink the whole thing. The cost of transportation far exceeds the cost of the equipment being transported, by a couple of orders of magnitude. If the C-130 is going to be sent anyways, it may well be more efficient to just load up a new car in the back, and deliver that.
If one goes on the assumption there is budget for a shuttle trip, then the real question _should be_, what is the appropriate payload to carry? Should it be carrying spare parts for the existing old hubble, or should it be carrying a brand new telescope of some kind. In either case, the 500 million launch budget will be used.
In the case of hubble, pork politics, and budget line items get in the way. It's really silly, because the arguement to decide if the old one is fixed, or a new one is launched, has nothing to do with final cost, and everything to do with 'which budget does it come from?'. Launching a new modern replacement would entail creating a new mission line item in the budget, a process that's not likely to happen. Fixing the old one would shift funds into an existing line item, a process that may well be able to be pushed thru. The amount of funds in each case doesn't even enter the equation, it's all about what can be achieved politically.
Dropping 500 million into an existing line item is possible, but creating a new line item instead, with a value of 300 million, not gonna happen. That's how the 'efficiency' of a beaurocracy works, in particular one that's designed to entice voters with financial mumbo-jumbo. Joe congress-critter knows it's cheaper to fix an old car, than to buy a new one, so it's _gotta_ be cheaper to fix hubble than to launch a new telescope.
The real problem with a system that works this way, it's so damn full of pork. When you sit back and ask 'wheres the beef?', you'll discover, the politicians live an a diet of pork. The congress critters have become so adept at slicing and dicing pork for serving to the constituents, dont think they even remember how to throw some beef on the grille and serve up a steak.
This has nothing to do with how many incidents there are, and everything to do with the court system. The courts have demonstrated that they are quite willing to bankrupt an aircraft manufacturer when an airplane they produce is involved in an incident, even if that incident is shown to be negligence or incompetence on the part of the pilots flying at the time. Just go google for 'cessna 185 lawsuit' and you will find lots of details.
ofc, the final proof is in the pudding. During the early 1980's the entire fleet of commercially operated planes in the usa was 'made in the usa'. Take a look today, in terms of dollars, the market share held by embraer and bombardier is on par with that of boeing and airbus. there are no american made 'equivalent' options for aircraft buyers. When airframe manufacturers saw 480 million dollar settlements going to folks over an incident involving 3 passengers, they gagged. They gagged even harder when it came time to renew product liability insurance, in a lot of cases it was impossible, insurance companies flat out refused to provide coverage. then they voted with thier feet, and took the billions of dollars of economic value they provide for the economy, and went elsewhere.
They dont. They disallow aircraft based on thier noise level certifications. Without engine upgrades, the older airplanes dont meet the various noise certification levels, and become excluded from those airports. The same airplane with engine upgrades to meet stage2 or stage3 noise level requirements becomes welcome at those same airports.
Boeing had a conference call today. There's 29 orders on the books for 747's, and, unless somebody steps up and orders a stack of them, they have already started to plan the closing of the 747 manufacturing lines.
Turns out today is the dawn of the A380 era, AND the end of the 747 era, and it's bascially been confirmed by both companies today.
Dunno what planet you live on, but here on planet earth, where I live, and operate airplanes commercially, fuel is the single largest expense in operating a plane. Second to fuel comes maintanence, followed closely by the reserves required for overhaul schedules. Depending on the form of financing used, financing costs may exceed overhaul reserves, rarely exceed scheduled maintanence, and pale beside fuel. Insurance is another major expense, and like financing, how it's amortized on a per flight basis depends on just how much you actually fly the equipment.
On small aircraft, crew costs become very significant, but as the aircraft get larger, the cost of crew does increase, but pales beside things like the fuel bill. Annual training requirements for flight crew actually cost more than the salaries of the folks in question.
I know the costs of things like C checks for an airframe, and hot sections on the engines, as well as the cost of fuel for those things. Every time I travel on a sub 200 dollar ticket, it just amazes me, it's just not possible for the airline to be paying all the bills, even with seats full at those prices. I cant understand why all the major carriers in the states are not bankrupt.
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I'll take your november prediction, and modify it to become 'at the last available launch window prior to congressional budget review'. Not sure when that actually happens, but, some online research can probably pin it down to a weeklong timeframe. I suspect that the percieved risk of program cancellation if a shuttle has not been launched by the next budget review will be larger than the 2% risk of vehicle loss from an actual launch.
Checkbox already does it. It's turnkey, painless, and simple. Print the access tickets in your web browser, set any timeframe you want on them, 30 minutes to a year. Hand em out to your paying customers. The non-customers can stare at a login screen. I've put a dozen of these things in various locations, site owners love em. Dont need to be a computer geek to know how to use it, and you can _easily_ restrict your wifi to customers, without all the fuss of encryption keys.
It's all about keeping that multi billion dollar budget. Actual safety issues wth the next launch are good press fodder, but not the real driving force. The next launch will be delayed until the percieved risk to the program thru budget cuts due to non performance is on par with the risk of vehicle loss. Until then, the money will flow, and the orbiters will soak it up, without actually presenting any risk to anybody, by simply delaying proposed launches as they approach.
Guess it says something about legacy bios if you really need to have a video system in a machine that will never have a monitor/keyboard attached in normal operation. The other detail that really irritates when it comes to off the shelf pc equipment, cant count how many times I've seen a bios post screen sitting there saying 'keyboard error, keyboard not attached - hit F6 to continue'. Then you have to attach a keyboard, just to set the bios up to ignore keyboard errors during boot. I guess it would be just to logical for the folks making bios to think, and realize, if there's not keyboard, and no video, there is nothing to lose (and lots to gain) by directing i/o to a serial port.
The primary purpose is to serve pork, thinly sliced, and widely distributed. Space exploration is the garnish, to make the plate look more appetizing.
Space travel today is akin to alchemy in the middle ages. Everybody wants to believe that somehow, by some grace of magic, it'll become practical and economical. The harsh reality is, we live at the bottom of a very deep gravity well, and until our technology provides us with a propulsion mechanism that has an energy density an order of magnitude better than what we have to work with today, space travel just isn't going to be practical/economical for anything except a few communications satellites.
The reality is, every element we know about, comes from seeing it here on earth. Even if it's much more abundant on the moon, it's going to be more cost effective to process every last drop of seawater, or strip mine an entire continent, than it is to set up any kind of production facility on the lunar surface, along with the associated transportation infrastructure required to get the stuff back here to earth. And for going beyond the moon, our technology as it exists today is not reliable enough to send a manned craft anywhere farther out. Our robotics are not advanced enough to do the job without human help.
The time and money is better spent tackling the propulsion problem. When we have a propulsion mechanism that can go earth->moon->earth and only use up 50% of it's launch mass as fuel for the round trip, then, and only then, will it actually start to become practical/economical. Until that time, the money is better spent developing an infrastructure (research propulsion) than it is trying to go places.
you are confusing 'made in america' with 'american companies manufacturing overseas'. Go take a good look at where the actual fabrication facilities are located, and you'll see that your chipset, cpu, and memory dont qualify.
Airbus sells more 'big aluminum' than boeing these days. Nobody in the usa even makes 'medium aluminum', that's a market held by Bombardier (Canada) and Embraer (Brazil). In terms of the number of airframes delivered annualy, Bombardier is the biggest. In terms of dollars sold annually, Airbus is the biggest. airbus is rolling out the new 'big boy' with the A380, and on the same day it made it's first flight, Boeing had a quarterly conference call, in which they announced the end of the 747 line. 29 orders left to fill, nothing else on the books, and without a substantial number of new orders for the -400, they wont continue development of the -700 through to production.
Aviation has tremendous lead times on the product cycle, and product lifecycles are still measured in decades, where most other products have cycles measured in months/years. The trend in aviation over the last decade has been very clear, 'american made' doesn't even exist in the mid range anymore, and it's been on the decline in the big stuff for a while, a decline that's starting to accelerate.
The writing is very clear on the wall these days, heck, even Boeing is ramping up component production in China now. USA has no edge over the world in commercial aviation, it just has assembly plants for airframes that _were_ the bleeding edge 15 years ago, and are only halfway thru thier life cycle. 787 is going to be assembled in the usa, but most of the components will come from offshore.
Commercial aviation is making the exodus, just like every other industry, just taking longer due to 30 year product life cycles.
I'm curious as to why video is even relavent, never mind essential, for a cluster node? Just another part generating heat, that is serving no purpose other than to possibly pacify a brain dead bios at boot time. Brain dead bios is fixable, heat takes real effort to get rid of it. Seems like a total waste to put video into a machine that's gonna sit in a rack, and likely never have a monitor plugged into it. Seems like an even bigger waste to actually plug some sort of video output device into it.
You've got it very backwards. Airplanes have been flying autonomously for more than a decade. Flying is very well suited to automation, driving is a much more difficult problem. The aviation industry has reached the point now, under recent reduced separation rules, there's a lot of pieces of airspace where manually flying the airplanes isn't even permitted anymore.
I see the root of the problem in this comment, it's obvious you have never dealt with clients that use methods other than 'internet' to send and recieve email. That's likely because the smtp protocol has become ubiquitous, and anybody that's been introduced to the concept in the last 10 years, knows nothing else. On the other hand, if you deal with mixed systems, as was common 15 years ago, it was _normal_ for a client to differentiate between different addresses based on thier source/destination. I can clearly remember the days of addresses having different coloring/presentation based on which route would be travelled to deliver the correspondance, with the options being lan/uucp/fidonet/inmarsat with a few other more obscure options available. Differentiating was important, because each route had a different cost involved in the delivery.
Even today, the setup I use categorizes addresses based on delivery method. It goes much farther than that, and when I compose a large note for delivery over inmarsat, I even get an 'are you sure you want to send this' popup, with a requirement for password entry to enable the send of that note. When a 1kbyte note can cost on the order of $20 to deliver, it's rather important that you deploy a system that makes damn sure folks do not accidently click on the wrong address, and send large file attaches over a data link that charges per bit, vs going out over a flat rate broadband connection that's totally unmetered.
Go take a good look at the pricing of inmarsat c data cairrage, and you'll realize immediately, when the costs are 'per bit', it becomes blatantly obvious to any developer, addresses on that system require special treatment, part of which is color coding and hilight fonts.
It's wonderful to see the USPTO continue down the road of granting patents for obvious things, so obvious we've been using it for 15 years. I love it every time I see this, it's one more nail in the coffin. I'm involved in a very active political movement to have my country abandon it's agreements with the USA involving patent recognition, this is just more cannon fodder to make our cause even more reasonable.
It's only a matter of time at this rate, and the rest of the world is going to abandon the concept of recognizing IP as defined by the USA, and move to standards that are reasonable. That's going to be a rather catastrophic event for the american economy. Patents like this make it inevitable.
Thats for the work to actually design/build the unit. Now, to cover the bearocracy of a Nasa project, gonna have to add a few dollars to that estimate. Pork aint cheap these days, and costplus pork is never sliced thin....
If you company has a volume license for Pro, and your buyer is paying for Starter, then you have a problem of incompetence in the purchasing department. At a minimum, your buyers should be negotiating for purchases with no preload, but any smart buyer will negotiate a 'no charge' preload of a 'buyer provided image' based on the buyers existing license.
Makes one wonder, if the technically literate crowd here has no real interest in black holes, then I'm sure John Q. Public is considerably less interested, and probably wondering why his tax dollars get pissed away on stuff like the equipment used to find them.
Re-read the original post. Pay particular attention to the part about 'I operate airplanes'. Explain to me again, why I need to go read somebody elses statements? Then again, our fleet is not operating under bankruptcy protection, so, I'm sure our statements look substantially different than those of most major carriers.
I remember hearing this kind of talk in the late 60's too.
The closest thing there is to a space plane today, is called a 'shuttle'. Seems they are scared of launching it these days because it's so expensive to build, and has a habit of blowing up when they do use it.
There is a little bit of experimentation going on these days with differing propulsion methods, ie scram jets etc, but, for the most part, it's all still based on variations of combustion, resulting in reactions based on newtonian physics (f=ma). With the fuels available today, the mass fraction to orbit on such vehicles is so tiny that it's not gonna be practical, ever.
Before travel to/from space becomes commonplace, we need technolgy advances such that the mass fraction to orbit is on par with long haul jetliners of today. that means 30% of the all up launch weight can be fuel, 30% structure, and 40% payload. It doesn't matter what you do with materials to lighten todays orbital lauchers, the fuel fraction is on the order of 80% of launch weight, so it'll never become 'common'.
No matter how you twist it, the energy density of current propulsion techniques just isn't there, and no amount of incremental improvements in structures/engines will solve the problem. The solution requires an order of magnitude improvement in fuel energy density, which implies a major breakthru in propulsion technology. This breakthru needs to be on the order of the move from steam to internal combustion, which replaced the 'coal car' on trains with a 'tank of diesel'. Aviation didn't become efficient enough to become common until the incremental improvement happened that took internal combustion from the piston engine to the continuous flow jet, but that was only an incremental improvement on the technology, not a major new propulsion source. A modern high bypass fanjet operating at high altitude still extracts less than 50% of the available energy in it's fuel, and directs it toward propulsion. the rest disappears into compression and waste heat.
Rockets are horribly inefficient things, the vast majority of the energy stored in the fuel tanks gets thrown away as waste heat, but that heat has a side effect, gas expansion. Rockets utilize this side effect to create massive amounts of force, for a very short period of time. Internal combustion engines are more efficient, and depending on the cycle in use, anywhere from 20 to 35% of the energy stored in the fuel can be recovered for actual propulsion, the rest is expended on compression of the incoming gasses, and waste heat.
Space travel can become commonplace, and economical, when we figure out how to extract all the energy available in the stored fuels of today, or we come up with a fuel with a much higher energy density. As long as we rely on extraction methods where the actual proplusion energy is just a side effect of the main reaction, and are using fuels available today, it's not going to happen. Science fiction writers, and the tv shows can talk/show all they want, but the limiting factors are the phyiscs of propulsion. All the talk in the world isn't going to change that, only a breakthru in propulsion technology that gives us an order of magnitude of improvement in energy density will solve the real problems.
I must admit tho, thier business model is interesting (assuming they actually do get enough money to operate). I've been considering upstaging them, and starting a company to operate a transporter, but I haven't had time to make the website yet. I'm sure I can do a partnership with Liftport, because my transporter will provide the cheapest way to put thier carbon nanotubes into geostationary orbit, so they can create the elevator. They can make press releases about how they will use innovative technology to kickstart the elevator business, and I can make press releases about the lead customer for the transporter business. We can both use this pr to gather up yet more investors...
- The lady was caught in a firefight unexpectedly, and the person shielding her from bullets was killed.
- She makes statements in another language, leaving plenty of room for the american press to 'interpret'.
- For a person confused, in the dark, hearing shots coming thier direction, there's not a lot of difference between a bradley and a 'tank'.
- An average american on the street in broad daylight will call a bradley a 'tank' when they see it go by.
Some confusion is understandable.
All the rhetoric aside, one really needs to step back and take a look at the big picture. The mission in Iraq is supposedly to 'free' the people of that country. Before the us soldiers arrived, a drive to the airport was a total non event. Today, it appears that speeding on that road is now a capital offense.
Kidnapping has become the norm over there. Some countries have different attitudes than the us, and actually care enough about thier citizens to try do something about it if they are kidnapped. In return, they get shot for thier efforts.
From both the point of view of the Iraqi people, and the italians, the age old question does honestly arise. With 'friends' like america, who needs enemies ?
This whole fad of calling various forms of digital audio distributed over the internet 'radio', just goes to emphasize the technical illiteracy of the current crop of 'nerds'.
For 'mission failures per passenger mile' they will look atrocious.
For 'crew deaths per mission mile' they will look pretty damn good.
The beauty of statistics, they always hold the answer you want to press your cause, just gotta know how to manipulate them.
That would depend entirely on your location. If you car was in the back yard, in the middle of a densly populated area, just down the street from <insert major chain store name here>, probably not. It would be very cost effective to walk to the store, buy the parts, then fix the car.
OTOH, if your car is located at a research camp, on the icecap at one of the poles, far enough away from 'civilization' that the _only_ way to bring in those spare parts is to fly a ski equipped C-130 3000 miles to deliver the parts, you will rethink the whole thing. The cost of transportation far exceeds the cost of the equipment being transported, by a couple of orders of magnitude. If the C-130 is going to be sent anyways, it may well be more efficient to just load up a new car in the back, and deliver that.
If one goes on the assumption there is budget for a shuttle trip, then the real question _should be_, what is the appropriate payload to carry? Should it be carrying spare parts for the existing old hubble, or should it be carrying a brand new telescope of some kind. In either case, the 500 million launch budget will be used.
In the case of hubble, pork politics, and budget line items get in the way. It's really silly, because the arguement to decide if the old one is fixed, or a new one is launched, has nothing to do with final cost, and everything to do with 'which budget does it come from?'. Launching a new modern replacement would entail creating a new mission line item in the budget, a process that's not likely to happen. Fixing the old one would shift funds into an existing line item, a process that may well be able to be pushed thru. The amount of funds in each case doesn't even enter the equation, it's all about what can be achieved politically.
Dropping 500 million into an existing line item is possible, but creating a new line item instead, with a value of 300 million, not gonna happen. That's how the 'efficiency' of a beaurocracy works, in particular one that's designed to entice voters with financial mumbo-jumbo. Joe congress-critter knows it's cheaper to fix an old car, than to buy a new one, so it's _gotta_ be cheaper to fix hubble than to launch a new telescope.
The real problem with a system that works this way, it's so damn full of pork. When you sit back and ask 'wheres the beef?', you'll discover, the politicians live an a diet of pork. The congress critters have become so adept at slicing and dicing pork for serving to the constituents, dont think they even remember how to throw some beef on the grille and serve up a steak.
ofc, the final proof is in the pudding. During the early 1980's the entire fleet of commercially operated planes in the usa was 'made in the usa'. Take a look today, in terms of dollars, the market share held by embraer and bombardier is on par with that of boeing and airbus. there are no american made 'equivalent' options for aircraft buyers. When airframe manufacturers saw 480 million dollar settlements going to folks over an incident involving 3 passengers, they gagged. They gagged even harder when it came time to renew product liability insurance, in a lot of cases it was impossible, insurance companies flat out refused to provide coverage. then they voted with thier feet, and took the billions of dollars of economic value they provide for the economy, and went elsewhere.
Glad you think so, but, there's a few folks at Boeing that actually think otherwise, folks that probably know a _little_ more than you do.
Read the article
Boeing had a conference call today. There's 29 orders on the books for 747's, and, unless somebody steps up and orders a stack of them, they have already started to plan the closing of the 747 manufacturing lines.
Turns out today is the dawn of the A380 era, AND the end of the 747 era, and it's bascially been confirmed by both companies today.
On small aircraft, crew costs become very significant, but as the aircraft get larger, the cost of crew does increase, but pales beside things like the fuel bill. Annual training requirements for flight crew actually cost more than the salaries of the folks in question.
I know the costs of things like C checks for an airframe, and hot sections on the engines, as well as the cost of fuel for those things. Every time I travel on a sub 200 dollar ticket, it just amazes me, it's just not possible for the airline to be paying all the bills, even with seats full at those prices. I cant understand why all the major carriers in the states are not bankrupt.
oh wait... they are....