Actually, Project Apollo cost 25.4 billion, spread over 9 years, roughly 2.8 billion a year, in 1969 dollars. That translates into 135 billion in 2005 dollars, so about 15 billion dollars per year (2005 dollars).
Explain to me again, how today's budget is so much smaller than it was back then...
Spending that kind of money to 'deflect' is probably not going to be considered 'well spent'. OTOH, if that kind of expenditure gave a group the power to 'aim', i'm sure the US military would jump at the chance to be the one. I'm sure there's a few organizations around the world (some recognized governments, others informal organizations) that would jump at the possibility of aiming this to land in the vicinity of 1600 Pensylvania Avenue.
The reality is, we dont have the technology to 'get off this rock' in any significant way, and its not likely to be here for 2035. If survival of the species is truely the goal, we better learn how to use what we have, and create an environment that can survive.
Surprisingly enough, if you look carefully, we have both the technology, and the location to do the job, it's just not as 'sexy' as space travel. Undersea colonies are well within reach of todays technology, fully self contained ecosystems. Marine life did a decent job surviving the last 'extinction event', and a thousand feet under the sea will hardly notice the next one either (unless it's right at the point of impact).
Actually, some of it would. The rest would likely get captured into various earth orbits, rendering the lower realms of space totally inaccessible to humanity for a few hundred years. The orbiting gravel storm would destroy everything we currently have in orbit, and make any missions in the near future, sure suicide.
I have no way of knowing, but at the rate technology is going right now, we'll probably have something capable of blowing the thing into gravel by 2035.
Check out the timeline for the us space program, and you plot the trend.
5 may, 1961 - Freedom 7, first manned sub-orbital flight
20 feb, 1962 - Friendship 7, first manned orbital flight
21 Dec, 1968 - launch Apollo 8, first manned lunar orbit
21 July, 1969 - First manned lunar landing
12 April, 1981 - First launch of space shuttle
1 feb, 2003 - shuttle fleet grounded
There isn't much advancement in this curve, and there is a whole lot of retreat. A once proud program, that had the capability to put a man on the moon, just last week, outsourced to get one of thier folks into low orbit. That is a rather telling 'detail' as to just how much advancement is really happening.
Technology may be advancing, but I wouldn't be counting on anything the usa is developing to be useful in dealing with an asteroid collision scenario. The current administration has priorities higher than space travel, and, the debts they are running up to achieve those goals, will prevent future generations from persueing any meaningful space program during the timeframe in question.
You are confusing a soyuz landing on terra-firma with an apollo capsule splashing into the ocean. The impact with the ground is abrupt, resulting in a shock load of many thousands of g's, for a very very short period of time. The water impact will be hard, but, it will spread the energy dissipation over a short period of time as the capsule submerges. There is a world of difference between the forces involved in the hard landing where energy is dissipated virtually instantaneously, vs those involved in a water landing where the energy is dissipated over a measureable period of time.
Terminal velocity of the capsule would run in the 240mph range. Take a look at the race track for real world examples. Head on to the concrete wall is not surviveable in most cases. In accidents where the deceleration is spread out over 100 feet or so, drivers wearing the appropriate restraining gear for head/neck tend to survive. Those not wearing it, tend to die. Capsule astronauts actually have an advantage over race drivers, they are seated back to the impact, in an accelleration couch molded to fit thier body, with solid head/neck support. The water impact is equivalent to a modern race car going into modern track barriers designed to absorb energy. The ground impact is equivalent to modern race cars going into the concrete wall, head on, full speed. Amazingly, drivers tend to walk away from the former, but rarely the latter.
This ofc pre-supposes the capsule itself survived the impact. Not really a big assumption, it was a design criteria for those capsules. The water landing without parachutes would have resulted in badly bruised astronauts, probably some broken bones, but they had a very good chance of survival. There were many reasons for choosing ocean landings for those programs, even tho it was many orders of magnitude more expensive to mount recovery operations. This was one of the biggies in that decision tree.
The second problem is that, even if you assume that your "black box" design can reduce the accleration of its contents to something survivable, you still have to find a way to make a large-enough black-box to contain the crew without the black-box being too heavy or too big to be launched into space.
It's called a 'capsule'. They built a bunch of them in the 60's, worked quite well. There were a few minor system failures on the capsules, example, a hatch blew on one, causing it to sink after impact. As a whole, the capsules performed this task quite well overall, there were no fatalities attributed to riding a capsule thru re-entry. The only fatal failure mode occurred when it was pressurized with pure o2, well beyond the design limits of the unit for pressurization, and then they put some sparks into the mix. Net result, a fire.
It's interesting to note, that the capsules in that era were basically failsafe devices. As long as they hit the atmosphere within the correct range of contact angles, just sit back and enjoy the ride, the aerodynamics of the unit kept it on a surviveable trajectory. Parachutes were a nice touch to reduce final impact loads, but as long as astronauts were properly seated in thier accelleration couches, the impact without parachutes would be surviveable (albeit, some astronaut damage was likely).
Nasa has had 50 years of technology advances to improve on this design. The 'improvements' have no end of failure modes, and somewhere along the line, they discarded the concepts of failsafe. Ahh, the joys of mixing 50 years of beaurocracy into the pie.
The "informed people" are the astronomers who use Hubble
The problem with this group of 'informed' people, is they are an elite group who have a skewed opinion. Astronomy is thier passion, therefore they will place a much higher value on the data returned from hubble, than that data really has in the 'big picture'. You need to temper the opinion of this group with the opinions of other informed professionals (professionals, not scientists) from other fields, to get a better relative value of the hubble and it's mission. The reality of it is, while hubble does provide absolutely unique scientific data, that's invaluable to folks in the field, it's a rather esoteric field, that really doesn't contribute practical knowledge back to the 'whole' in relation to the amount of resource spent obtaining that data. If hubble was a resource available to 'just anybody' in the field, this may be a different case, but it's not. Hubble observation time is only available to those in the inner circles of the elitist clique in the upper levels of the 'hierarchy' of the scientific group. It then gets justified to the masses by taking raw data, completely altering it to create 'pretty pictures', and publishing those to the masses. Most of the hubble data that gets published for public consumption is borderline fraud, cuz those pretty pictures bear little/no resemblance to the actual observed data.
The hubble itself is nothing more than a modified KH-11. If you go take a look at the NRO inventory (including the classified stuff), you'll probably find a few of those that were never launched, sitting somewhere gathering dust. On conventional expendable boosters, one of those can be launched for about 200 million. The hubble repair mission will cost 500 million. I'm pretty sure, starting with an unused KH-11, it can be modified the same way as hubble was, for less than 300 million, keeping in mind that there is already an inventory of spare parts for hubble sitting at the KSC. The whole thing could be built, and launched, for less than the cost of a hubble service mission. This is likely a far better alternative to servicing the unit currently in orbit.
Hubble was designed to be serviced and upgraded on station, on the premise that shuttle flights would be cheap. That premise has failed, and turned hubble into a huge cash sink. It just doesn't make sense to service it, when there's plenty of parts already kicking around to build another, and that new one could be in orbit for a total expenditure less than servicing of the existing unit.
All of this pre-supposes, that space based visible spectrum observations continue to be worth the 500+ million it's going to cost to service it, and the ongoing operating budget to operate it. But that's another debate, for another time. I would love to sit down with folks that actually use the hubble, and ask the simple question, 'show me data from the hubble that is worth the billions of dollars spent on it today, real data, not color corrected public consumption images'. It would be an interesting debate, i'm sure I'd learn a lot about where the real value of the data lies, and I'm sure folks on the other side of the table, would gain an appreciation for just how little that data actually contributes to the big picture, outside the circle of 'astronomy professionals'.
Then again, politics enter the equations too. Many would gladly concede the astronomers a dozen hubbles, if it came with the guarantee that the military would stay within it's allocated budget, and not go begging to congress for 80 billion dollar overruns. with those kind of overruns in the politicians minds, something has to give, and hubble is a pretty easy target.
Take a look at the license involved with BK for the kernel folks using it. Then you'll know why 2 is an unviable solution. Using the 'free' bk precludes working on any form of version control system, and continues to do so for some time after he stops using it.
Sacrificing your life in war is honorable and deserves recognition
Sacrificing your life defending your country is honorable. There is no honor doing so invading another country. the honor belongs to those who die defending against the invader.
/. can say what they want, but, there was only one pinball wizard, and the one in the headline was not it Problem is, most here are to young to remember the real one quoted in the parent.
The country already has gone down the tubes, and they cant afford it. They spent the farm, and the kids future, blowing up a piece of desert.
The only americans heading to the moon during our lifetime, will be those buying passage on vehicles from another country, sorta like how they go into orbit today, on russian vehicles.
There is no excuse for reading the article. The only excuse for even going and loading it, is to try and cut/paste into a posting here, trolling for karma. You should damn well know better by now, actually making intelligent comments based on the articles content is a sure sign of total incompetence with regard to how/. works.
It won't happen again.
It damn well better not, this kind of behaviour can only result in intelligent and <shudder>informed</shudder> commentary. Thats NOT what/. is all about...
I can remember when it was normal for myself, and all of my friends, to upgrade computers on an annual basis. As software developers, the increase in speed always paid for itself rather quickly in time saved waiting for compiles to finish. When I left 'big corp' and struck out on my own full time, I bought the fastest development workstation money could buy at the time, a 486dx2 running at a whopping 66mhz internally. My friends were in awe, it was the first time any of us had seen a desktop that needed a fan on the cpu. This was a group of geeks that were already earning a living in pc software during the days of the 8088 and 80286, we all stayed on the bleeding edge.
The story was the same for a typical office worker, the upgrade in those days actually made a person more productive, less time spent waiting for the computer, so it was a regularily scheduled event. this went on for a lot of years, and the market was driven by the desire for higher performance, and a plethora of money available for sales into that upgrade market.
About the time 'run of the mill' processors were hitting the 700mhz mark, a lot of business started to question the upgrade cycle. For typical office work, the 700mhz machine does the job just as well as a fancy new 2.5ghz. Middle of the road performance is 'good enough' for the majority of the market, demand for high end processing improvements is not like it used to be, and it's starting to show in the market. Morre's law is being displaced by the economics of supply and demand. the demand for improvements in the high end no longer justifies the r&d costs involved, the majority of the market is satisfied with mid range equipment.
Moores law is not dead, it's just been trumped by supply/demand cycles. the market has reached a point where it's not willing to pay for more performance every day, 3 year old technology is 'good enough'. Development in the high end is slowing, not because of technology barriers, but because of financial barriers. The market is no longer clamoring to replace it's entire inventory of in use pc's every 3 years, it's voting with the chequebook, by keeping the machines in service.
A few decades ago, when I watched the first human moon landing, I would have agreed. July 1969 was the peak of achievments for the american empire, and it's been downhill from there. In the 60's, americans had the will, and determination to go to the moon. Today, they go to Iraq. The humorous part, even after accounting for inflation, the moon was a cheaper trip, and a lot of good actually came out of that program.
You have to put a little more perspective on it all. In the 60's, when vaccuum tubes were 'modern electronics', they started with _nothing_, designed, built, and executed a lunar landing program in 9 years. Today, even something as simple as a feasability study for a return trip will take more than 9 years, and the grand master bush plan has it taking 20+ years just to get back. The real proof of the pudding, is when you go visit the space center in florida, and after taking a couple of the tours, you realize, its not a showcase of modern technology, it's a museum. the whole place is basking in the glory of half a century ago, the good old days, when nasa actually did something, and the space program was something to be proud of.
I really dont think anybody reading/. today has anything to worry about in terms of health problems from breathing moon dust. Most of you will die of old age before america returns to the moon.
like i said, it makes a great movie script. For reality tho, come back when the stuff you talk about is actually feasable with technology available.
The low energy transfer trajectories you are suggesting will take years to reach destination. Factor time into your roi equation, and the economics just got a lot worse.
De-orbiting a ton of material, with no heat shielding, and 'little loss'. You need to go read up a little on the physics of re-entry. One ton rocks hit our atmosphere on a regular basis. The vast majority of them never get anywhere near the surface. For a really good example of what happens to something during re-entry, without 'really good' shielding, go read up on the last attempt at re-entry by the challenger shuttle. Between heat and aerodynamic forces, it turned into lots of little pieces, and scattered itself over a thousand miles length impact area. A lot of it survived, because most of the thing actually had good shielding, before it came apart, and once that happened, it was thru the worst of the process anyways.
A one ton rock will survive very well, if the intercept trajectory with the atmosphere is vertical, at least 25% of the mass will survive the trip down, assuming it is relatively streamlined, and not some odd irregular shape. On a shallow angle entry, a few pieces will likely survive, but most of the damage is going to be done by heat and aerodynamic loading, long before it's slowed to the point a parachute could be deployed. Temperature will build during the initial entry, and the leading surface will literally melt. Uneven surfaces on the leading edge will introduce a high spin rate due to aerodynamic forces, then the entire rock is going to get soft from the heat, and then the aerodynamic loads are going to shatter it, most of those loads coming from the pressure gradient on the leading shock. All that's left at that point, is molten fragments, most of which turn into upper atmosphere dust. the whole process has the appearance of an explosion, but, what you are really seeing is the rock heat up, then shatter due to forces. the noise is the sonic boom from the velocity it's travelling at. The end result is the same, a pretty little fireball in the upper atmosphere, and if it's big enough, a bang that actually reaches the ground.
It makes a great script for a movie, where energy is unlimited, g-forces non existant, folks can travel faster than light, and economics are not a factor. In the real world, till we have a quantum breakthru in propulsion technology, it's going to be way cheaper, and practical, to just dig this stuff out of the ground here on mother earth.
you seem to miss the important detail of physics. If you have that ton of platinum ready to go in the asteroid orbit, you now have to apply a delta-v to it, to put it on an earth intercept trajectory. that's gonna take a whole lotta energy that your little 1 ton asteroid miner just doesn't have. Assuming you found some magic, that does actually get you from asteroid trajectory to earth orbit for free, you are suggesting de-orbit with the shuttle. You just added 500 million to the cost of getting that stuff back.
I love sci-fi movies, they can ignore economics and physics. Need an unlimited amount of energy, just grab another dilithium crystal, and all fixed up. Need to go somewhere fast, they accelerate from a standstill to super-light speeds, and the actors dont even get hit with the mildest of g forces on the set.
Your plan will make a good basis for a script, but, once the plan is modified so that the physics work, the economics are gonna be way out to lunch.
Actually, there are regulations in this area. It's been a lot of years, but i do remember having to jump thru a LOT of hoops to legally acquire gps equipment that would operate correctly in velocity regimes above 600 knots. Ultimately we got the approval, but that was 6 months after we finished doing the work, using equipment that was bought overseas grey market.
Actually, you are way off here. Simply boosting it is a lot more expensive than you would think. Hubble's orbit is rather low, necessitated by needing to be in shuttle range. It needs to be boosted a LOT to reach an orbit that'll be stable for a large number of years. Once there, it's just more space junk, cuz without new batteries and gyros on a regular basis, it cant be kept functional. As well, the ground end of collecting the data from hubble doesn't come cheap, it's a government program with way more than it's fair share of pork, resulting in many millions of waste.
A lot of people here on/. are quite confused about the cost of servicing the hubble. It's not just the cost of the mission into orbit to service it, widely reported in the 500 million range, it's also the increased cost of another 5 years of operations after that mission. The political pork involved with hubble operations earthside is easily burning up 200 million a year, so that adds another billion dollars to the tab.
Hubble is political pork of a bygone generation. It does some cool stuff, but, no sane person can say it actually produces unique data worth a billion and a half dollars. In the political world, that money can buy a lot more votes directed elsewhere.
If hubble had a de-orbit pack on it, it would be down already. The ONLY reason it's being debated at this point, is because they cant de-orbit it today, and nasa is bound by international agreement to prevent an uncontrolled re-entry of something that large. It wont take a very large delta-v to put it on a trajectory that guarantees a mid ocean impact. It will take a fairly substantial delta-v, over multiple burns, to lift it and cicularize the orbit such that it's in an orbit that'll be stable for 50+ years. And what you get for that, is 25 year old technology, parked in orbit. When the time comes that systems are available to actually go service it, nobody will want to, it'll be cheaper to just lift something new and modern. It's kinda like if you were buying a car today, if you had $35K to spend, would you buy a nicely restored model T, or would you buy a modern vehicle, for your commute to/from work?
_IF_ hubble actually had a good mirror, things would be different. A good optical surface of that size, will have value today, and the same value in the future, but, that's not the case. The optical surface in the hubble is flawed. the systems have been kludged to try salvage the original investment, but, it's never been as good as it should be, and anybody 'starting over' in the future, will want to start fresh with a mirror that's actually ground correctly. But that's another whole debate, for another time. It still amazes me to no end that they could actually get to the point of launching the thing, and having it in orbit, and nobody ever actually checked that the mirror was correct. that in itself says all you need to know about just how good the entire project was run, from day one, and why it needs to be scrapped.
Actually, you are partially right. The payment is for a vehicle (rocket) that's rather strong, and rather light (before fueling). The engineering that got it that way was expensive. There is also a very expensive engine, designed to be used once, for about 5 minutes. Then there's a huge amount of very expensive rocket fuel. The actual payload, is an almost insgnificant part of the whole package, yet that's all the gets into orbit.
Your millions of dollars are not in the capsule, they are in the rocket under it, and will get nowhere near orbit. The majority of it is going to be burned up and discarded long before reaching orbit.
I remember once as a lark, we did some experiments. We burned a $us1 bill in an almost pure oxygen environment, and measured the heat output. We used that data to calculate how a compound system would perform, if it used money instead of rubber compounds. The final conclusion was, it wouldn't have the specific impulse needed as a launcher, but as a maneuvering system in orbit, we'd have to load it with $100 bills before it became more expensive than liquid hydrogen/oxygen system.
Rockets are wonderful things, not many ways to burn more money, in a shorter timeframe, than by using rockets.
Slashdot Mirror
Explain to me again, how today's budget is so much smaller than it was back then...
note the heading, it references 'us space program', not 'space programs in general'.
Spending that kind of money to 'deflect' is probably not going to be considered 'well spent'. OTOH, if that kind of expenditure gave a group the power to 'aim', i'm sure the US military would jump at the chance to be the one. I'm sure there's a few organizations around the world (some recognized governments, others informal organizations) that would jump at the possibility of aiming this to land in the vicinity of 1600 Pensylvania Avenue.
Surprisingly enough, if you look carefully, we have both the technology, and the location to do the job, it's just not as 'sexy' as space travel. Undersea colonies are well within reach of todays technology, fully self contained ecosystems. Marine life did a decent job surviving the last 'extinction event', and a thousand feet under the sea will hardly notice the next one either (unless it's right at the point of impact).
Actually, some of it would. The rest would likely get captured into various earth orbits, rendering the lower realms of space totally inaccessible to humanity for a few hundred years. The orbiting gravel storm would destroy everything we currently have in orbit, and make any missions in the near future, sure suicide.
Check out the timeline for the us space program, and you plot the trend.
5 may, 1961 - Freedom 7, first manned sub-orbital flight
20 feb, 1962 - Friendship 7, first manned orbital flight
21 Dec, 1968 - launch Apollo 8, first manned lunar orbit
21 July, 1969 - First manned lunar landing
12 April, 1981 - First launch of space shuttle
1 feb, 2003 - shuttle fleet grounded
There isn't much advancement in this curve, and there is a whole lot of retreat. A once proud program, that had the capability to put a man on the moon, just last week, outsourced to get one of thier folks into low orbit. That is a rather telling 'detail' as to just how much advancement is really happening.
Technology may be advancing, but I wouldn't be counting on anything the usa is developing to be useful in dealing with an asteroid collision scenario. The current administration has priorities higher than space travel, and, the debts they are running up to achieve those goals, will prevent future generations from persueing any meaningful space program during the timeframe in question.
Terminal velocity of the capsule would run in the 240mph range. Take a look at the race track for real world examples. Head on to the concrete wall is not surviveable in most cases. In accidents where the deceleration is spread out over 100 feet or so, drivers wearing the appropriate restraining gear for head/neck tend to survive. Those not wearing it, tend to die. Capsule astronauts actually have an advantage over race drivers, they are seated back to the impact, in an accelleration couch molded to fit thier body, with solid head/neck support. The water impact is equivalent to a modern race car going into modern track barriers designed to absorb energy. The ground impact is equivalent to modern race cars going into the concrete wall, head on, full speed. Amazingly, drivers tend to walk away from the former, but rarely the latter.
This ofc pre-supposes the capsule itself survived the impact. Not really a big assumption, it was a design criteria for those capsules. The water landing without parachutes would have resulted in badly bruised astronauts, probably some broken bones, but they had a very good chance of survival. There were many reasons for choosing ocean landings for those programs, even tho it was many orders of magnitude more expensive to mount recovery operations. This was one of the biggies in that decision tree.
It's called a 'capsule'. They built a bunch of them in the 60's, worked quite well. There were a few minor system failures on the capsules, example, a hatch blew on one, causing it to sink after impact. As a whole, the capsules performed this task quite well overall, there were no fatalities attributed to riding a capsule thru re-entry. The only fatal failure mode occurred when it was pressurized with pure o2, well beyond the design limits of the unit for pressurization, and then they put some sparks into the mix. Net result, a fire.
It's interesting to note, that the capsules in that era were basically failsafe devices. As long as they hit the atmosphere within the correct range of contact angles, just sit back and enjoy the ride, the aerodynamics of the unit kept it on a surviveable trajectory. Parachutes were a nice touch to reduce final impact loads, but as long as astronauts were properly seated in thier accelleration couches, the impact without parachutes would be surviveable (albeit, some astronaut damage was likely).
Nasa has had 50 years of technology advances to improve on this design. The 'improvements' have no end of failure modes, and somewhere along the line, they discarded the concepts of failsafe. Ahh, the joys of mixing 50 years of beaurocracy into the pie.
Take a close look at the article, they are using irridium for the backhaul. Irridium is 2400 baud dialup on a satellite phone.
The problem with this group of 'informed' people, is they are an elite group who have a skewed opinion. Astronomy is thier passion, therefore they will place a much higher value on the data returned from hubble, than that data really has in the 'big picture'. You need to temper the opinion of this group with the opinions of other informed professionals (professionals, not scientists) from other fields, to get a better relative value of the hubble and it's mission. The reality of it is, while hubble does provide absolutely unique scientific data, that's invaluable to folks in the field, it's a rather esoteric field, that really doesn't contribute practical knowledge back to the 'whole' in relation to the amount of resource spent obtaining that data. If hubble was a resource available to 'just anybody' in the field, this may be a different case, but it's not. Hubble observation time is only available to those in the inner circles of the elitist clique in the upper levels of the 'hierarchy' of the scientific group. It then gets justified to the masses by taking raw data, completely altering it to create 'pretty pictures', and publishing those to the masses. Most of the hubble data that gets published for public consumption is borderline fraud, cuz those pretty pictures bear little/no resemblance to the actual observed data.
The hubble itself is nothing more than a modified KH-11. If you go take a look at the NRO inventory (including the classified stuff), you'll probably find a few of those that were never launched, sitting somewhere gathering dust. On conventional expendable boosters, one of those can be launched for about 200 million. The hubble repair mission will cost 500 million. I'm pretty sure, starting with an unused KH-11, it can be modified the same way as hubble was, for less than 300 million, keeping in mind that there is already an inventory of spare parts for hubble sitting at the KSC. The whole thing could be built, and launched, for less than the cost of a hubble service mission. This is likely a far better alternative to servicing the unit currently in orbit.
Hubble was designed to be serviced and upgraded on station, on the premise that shuttle flights would be cheap. That premise has failed, and turned hubble into a huge cash sink. It just doesn't make sense to service it, when there's plenty of parts already kicking around to build another, and that new one could be in orbit for a total expenditure less than servicing of the existing unit.
All of this pre-supposes, that space based visible spectrum observations continue to be worth the 500+ million it's going to cost to service it, and the ongoing operating budget to operate it. But that's another debate, for another time. I would love to sit down with folks that actually use the hubble, and ask the simple question, 'show me data from the hubble that is worth the billions of dollars spent on it today, real data, not color corrected public consumption images'. It would be an interesting debate, i'm sure I'd learn a lot about where the real value of the data lies, and I'm sure folks on the other side of the table, would gain an appreciation for just how little that data actually contributes to the big picture, outside the circle of 'astronomy professionals'.
Then again, politics enter the equations too. Many would gladly concede the astronomers a dozen hubbles, if it came with the guarantee that the military would stay within it's allocated budget, and not go begging to congress for 80 billion dollar overruns. with those kind of overruns in the politicians minds, something has to give, and hubble is a pretty easy target.
Take a look at the license involved with BK for the kernel folks using it. Then you'll know why 2 is an unviable solution. Using the 'free' bk precludes working on any form of version control system, and continues to do so for some time after he stops using it.
The cost of one smart bomb will more than cover the bandwidth needs of nasa for the shuttle coverage. hmmm, says a lot about priorities.
it turns out, pumping oil out of Iraq is more expensive than a space program, and far more dangerous....
Sacrificing your life defending your country is honorable. There is no honor doing so invading another country. the honor belongs to those who die defending against the invader.
/. can say what they want, but, there was only one pinball wizard, and the one in the headline was not it Problem is, most here are to young to remember the real one quoted in the parent.
The only americans heading to the moon during our lifetime, will be those buying passage on vehicles from another country, sorta like how they go into orbit today, on russian vehicles.
There is no excuse for reading the article. The only excuse for even going and loading it, is to try and cut/paste into a posting here, trolling for karma. You should damn well know better by now, actually making intelligent comments based on the articles content is a sure sign of total incompetence with regard to how /. works.
It won't happen again.
It damn well better not, this kind of behaviour can only result in intelligent and <shudder>informed</shudder> commentary. Thats NOT what /. is all about...
The story was the same for a typical office worker, the upgrade in those days actually made a person more productive, less time spent waiting for the computer, so it was a regularily scheduled event. this went on for a lot of years, and the market was driven by the desire for higher performance, and a plethora of money available for sales into that upgrade market.
About the time 'run of the mill' processors were hitting the 700mhz mark, a lot of business started to question the upgrade cycle. For typical office work, the 700mhz machine does the job just as well as a fancy new 2.5ghz. Middle of the road performance is 'good enough' for the majority of the market, demand for high end processing improvements is not like it used to be, and it's starting to show in the market. Morre's law is being displaced by the economics of supply and demand. the demand for improvements in the high end no longer justifies the r&d costs involved, the majority of the market is satisfied with mid range equipment.
Moores law is not dead, it's just been trumped by supply/demand cycles. the market has reached a point where it's not willing to pay for more performance every day, 3 year old technology is 'good enough'. Development in the high end is slowing, not because of technology barriers, but because of financial barriers. The market is no longer clamoring to replace it's entire inventory of in use pc's every 3 years, it's voting with the chequebook, by keeping the machines in service.
Actually, they came up with a far more effective solution, dont go there...
You have to put a little more perspective on it all. In the 60's, when vaccuum tubes were 'modern electronics', they started with _nothing_, designed, built, and executed a lunar landing program in 9 years. Today, even something as simple as a feasability study for a return trip will take more than 9 years, and the grand master bush plan has it taking 20+ years just to get back. The real proof of the pudding, is when you go visit the space center in florida, and after taking a couple of the tours, you realize, its not a showcase of modern technology, it's a museum. the whole place is basking in the glory of half a century ago, the good old days, when nasa actually did something, and the space program was something to be proud of.
I really dont think anybody reading /. today has anything to worry about in terms of health problems from breathing moon dust. Most of you will die of old age before america returns to the moon.
The low energy transfer trajectories you are suggesting will take years to reach destination. Factor time into your roi equation, and the economics just got a lot worse.
De-orbiting a ton of material, with no heat shielding, and 'little loss'. You need to go read up a little on the physics of re-entry. One ton rocks hit our atmosphere on a regular basis. The vast majority of them never get anywhere near the surface. For a really good example of what happens to something during re-entry, without 'really good' shielding, go read up on the last attempt at re-entry by the challenger shuttle. Between heat and aerodynamic forces, it turned into lots of little pieces, and scattered itself over a thousand miles length impact area. A lot of it survived, because most of the thing actually had good shielding, before it came apart, and once that happened, it was thru the worst of the process anyways.
A one ton rock will survive very well, if the intercept trajectory with the atmosphere is vertical, at least 25% of the mass will survive the trip down, assuming it is relatively streamlined, and not some odd irregular shape. On a shallow angle entry, a few pieces will likely survive, but most of the damage is going to be done by heat and aerodynamic loading, long before it's slowed to the point a parachute could be deployed. Temperature will build during the initial entry, and the leading surface will literally melt. Uneven surfaces on the leading edge will introduce a high spin rate due to aerodynamic forces, then the entire rock is going to get soft from the heat, and then the aerodynamic loads are going to shatter it, most of those loads coming from the pressure gradient on the leading shock. All that's left at that point, is molten fragments, most of which turn into upper atmosphere dust. the whole process has the appearance of an explosion, but, what you are really seeing is the rock heat up, then shatter due to forces. the noise is the sonic boom from the velocity it's travelling at. The end result is the same, a pretty little fireball in the upper atmosphere, and if it's big enough, a bang that actually reaches the ground.
It makes a great script for a movie, where energy is unlimited, g-forces non existant, folks can travel faster than light, and economics are not a factor. In the real world, till we have a quantum breakthru in propulsion technology, it's going to be way cheaper, and practical, to just dig this stuff out of the ground here on mother earth.
I love sci-fi movies, they can ignore economics and physics. Need an unlimited amount of energy, just grab another dilithium crystal, and all fixed up. Need to go somewhere fast, they accelerate from a standstill to super-light speeds, and the actors dont even get hit with the mildest of g forces on the set.
Your plan will make a good basis for a script, but, once the plan is modified so that the physics work, the economics are gonna be way out to lunch.
Actually, there are regulations in this area. It's been a lot of years, but i do remember having to jump thru a LOT of hoops to legally acquire gps equipment that would operate correctly in velocity regimes above 600 knots. Ultimately we got the approval, but that was 6 months after we finished doing the work, using equipment that was bought overseas grey market.
A lot of people here on /. are quite confused about the cost of servicing the hubble. It's not just the cost of the mission into orbit to service it, widely reported in the 500 million range, it's also the increased cost of another 5 years of operations after that mission. The political pork involved with hubble operations earthside is easily burning up 200 million a year, so that adds another billion dollars to the tab.
Hubble is political pork of a bygone generation. It does some cool stuff, but, no sane person can say it actually produces unique data worth a billion and a half dollars. In the political world, that money can buy a lot more votes directed elsewhere.
If hubble had a de-orbit pack on it, it would be down already. The ONLY reason it's being debated at this point, is because they cant de-orbit it today, and nasa is bound by international agreement to prevent an uncontrolled re-entry of something that large. It wont take a very large delta-v to put it on a trajectory that guarantees a mid ocean impact. It will take a fairly substantial delta-v, over multiple burns, to lift it and cicularize the orbit such that it's in an orbit that'll be stable for 50+ years. And what you get for that, is 25 year old technology, parked in orbit. When the time comes that systems are available to actually go service it, nobody will want to, it'll be cheaper to just lift something new and modern. It's kinda like if you were buying a car today, if you had $35K to spend, would you buy a nicely restored model T, or would you buy a modern vehicle, for your commute to/from work?
_IF_ hubble actually had a good mirror, things would be different. A good optical surface of that size, will have value today, and the same value in the future, but, that's not the case. The optical surface in the hubble is flawed. the systems have been kludged to try salvage the original investment, but, it's never been as good as it should be, and anybody 'starting over' in the future, will want to start fresh with a mirror that's actually ground correctly. But that's another whole debate, for another time. It still amazes me to no end that they could actually get to the point of launching the thing, and having it in orbit, and nobody ever actually checked that the mirror was correct. that in itself says all you need to know about just how good the entire project was run, from day one, and why it needs to be scrapped.
Your millions of dollars are not in the capsule, they are in the rocket under it, and will get nowhere near orbit. The majority of it is going to be burned up and discarded long before reaching orbit.
I remember once as a lark, we did some experiments. We burned a $us1 bill in an almost pure oxygen environment, and measured the heat output. We used that data to calculate how a compound system would perform, if it used money instead of rubber compounds. The final conclusion was, it wouldn't have the specific impulse needed as a launcher, but as a maneuvering system in orbit, we'd have to load it with $100 bills before it became more expensive than liquid hydrogen/oxygen system.
Rockets are wonderful things, not many ways to burn more money, in a shorter timeframe, than by using rockets.