If I remember correctly and am not just completely full of it:
The reason that pinpoint accuracy is important when looking at long range ballistic trajectories is for mid course corrections. When an ICBM leaves the Ukraine headed for Florida, it has to travel through a whole lot of poorly modelled atmosphere. Accordingly, at various points along the track, the missile has to make small adjustments to compensate for un-modelled forces in order to hit its target area. These mid-course corrections are very sensitive to small errors, so position inaccuracy at these critical points can lead to large errors in the missles final destination. Given this, a loss of precision of a few hundred meters means you hit Havana instead of Disney-Land. It does not mean that you hit Epcot instead of Space Mountain.
(ps. I like Disneyland and am not in any way condoning launching anything at in. )
Iridium will be deorbited because it is the only way that they can take the satellites as a tax write off, something which I just find damn funny.
If Iridium showed us anything, it's that the pace at which telecommunications technology is advancing is leaps and bounds beyond the pace at which you can build and put up a satellite constellation. Consider what we thought 5 to 10 years ago about the state of communications today and the problem becomes pretty evident.
More importantly though, Iridium clearly demonstrated that the market for cell phones on the top of Mt. Everest is not enough to support the huge overhead of putting up and maintaining a satellite constellation. I'm fairly confident that if the market in backwater Tibet was strong enought to support $5k phone service, Bell-South would have already run cable. The reality is If you look at ICO's target market, "Maritime, Remote fixed, Handheld, Transportation, and Government", it's no different than Iridium's. What Iridium found was that the only sub-market of any of these willing to fork over the cash for there service was the handheld market for relief workers. If none of these markets materialized for Iridium, I'm not sure why they will for ICO.
The real genius of the movie is its subtle political commentary:
NASA is waisting billions of OUR money on some stupid space station when all they need to do is go to REI and get some of those magic tents!
Stupid NASA - movie people types have to show you how to do your job right and stuff!
By the way, is anyone else amazed that they had computers on their wrists which could tell them random quantities like "POINT OF NO RETURN" but the ships computer couldn't tell them simple things like "I THINK THE FUEL LINE HAS BEEN CUT IN HALF AND IF YOU TRY TO START THE ENGINE I'M GONNA BLOW UP"?
Re:Considering Bertelsmann, A WHOLE LOT
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
Considering Bertelsmann, A WHOLE LOT
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
The holdings of the combined companies will be, (assuming that nothing is sold off): Time-Warner + AOL
What I find to be the more worrying is that Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, chairman of Bertelsmann AG (the company who wants to bring you a self "self-regulating" internet), sits on the board of AOL. Further, Bertelsmann is a major minority owner of AOL. This means that they will have a significant say in the direction of AOL-Time-Warner. So although they may not hold all the keys to all the media outlets in the US, the combined Bertelsmann-AOL-Time-Warner will hold enough of the outlets in in Hungary and elsewhere that they have the potential to set policy. Further, Bertelsmann will have more of a platform to launch its net censorship policies from ( wait for Time magazine to write "How the evil internet is poisining our youth and what we can do about").
Synopsis:   Internal divisions within the support team at Lockhead + Stone age management which leaves people covering their arses ------------------------------------------------- Lost spacecraft and a failing program
BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) owns Windham Hill Group which in turn supplies us with Yanni. The entire rating system is a secret ploy to support their evil elevator music empire. (insert maniacal laughing here).
More disturbingly (and seriously) though, take a look at exactly who this company is via their descriptive (but less complete) Company Profile or their 97/98 annual report. They have a major (~50%) stake in everything from barnesandnoble.com to AOL and CompuServe in Western Europe (the scoundrels even own The Science Fiction Book Club). I'm guessing that this ownership of almost every type of media outlet will give them some significant sway in their bid to play thought police and may be why they can make everyone jump.
The proposal to kill the Space Station comes up and is killed every year. It was never a serious threat. What is a serious threat is that the $1 billion in cuts to NASA's budget were included in the bill and passed (here). These were targeted specifically at the non-manned missions, so the NASA cuts we were all debating a few weeks ago went through.
According to barnes and noble (http://bn.com), the second edition is comming out on September 20th of this year. Hopefully they will update it to include coverage of the current APIs.
For all that we hear about the panicea of privitization, let's look at the most recent private space venture, Iridium. All of the backers of Iridium are in a panic. S&P downgraded it's corporate credit rating to "D". Motorola sees only 3 outcomes for it's future: "an out-of-court restructuring, in-court restructuring under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code or 'liquidation in bankruptcy.'" (http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/ 1999-07/15/199l-071599-idx.html)
The point is, space is not terribly profitable. There are a few ventures which will make some money in space, but these are a very few. For the types of missions that NASA flies, there is 0 short term profit. In the long run there are scientific payoffs, but try to tell your shareholders that when their stock is lossing value and watch the stampede.
Those who claim that privitization of the space program will solve all of its problems are living in dogma fantasy land. If it were so wonderfully profitable, all the major companies would be lobbying all over congress to privatize NASA to get at a new revenue source. You don't see that now do you? The reality is that if you eliminate NASA, the type of work that NASA does will die. Instead, you will be able to get satellite porn at any point in the world. That's progress.
Who is it that build the spacecraft, launch the satellites, plan the missions, man the trackers, analyze the data, and support most other phases of the space program? Lockheed Martin, Boeing, CSC, Allied Signal, GTE, and countless other companies. The NASA civil servant today serves as either a top level contract manager or is a research scientist.
As for one of the small ways in which basic research at NASA has impacted your life, see the June 1999 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. One of the recipients of the "Excellence in Programming" awards is Don Becker, who works with CESDIS at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The whole article can be found at http://www.ddj.com/articles/1999/9906/9906a/9906a. htm , but here is just a snippet:
"To implement such a system, however, Becker, who is a staff scientist with the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (or CESDIS, part of the University Space Research Association, a nonprofit consortium of universities that sponsors space-related research), had to come to grips with Linux's unstable networking capabilities, and the lack of Linux support for off-the-shelf network cards. Consequently, Becker ended up writing enhancements to the kernel network subsystem to support faster I/O on high-speed networks, device drivers for countless Ethernet cards(see http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/index.ht ml), and a distributed shared memory package."
In short, basic research rarely seems like a good investment in the face of countless current, legitimate priorities because it's payoffs aren't immediate or predictible. However, if we stop doing things just to test our own limits, then we are freezing our current state of advancement as a species and saying that we don't need to progress any further. Where would we be today if we made these decissions 50 years ago, or 100, etc.. ?
Slashdot Mirror
The reason that pinpoint accuracy is important when looking at long range ballistic trajectories is for mid course corrections. When an ICBM leaves the Ukraine headed for Florida, it has to travel through a whole lot of poorly modelled atmosphere. Accordingly, at various points along the track, the missile has to make small adjustments to compensate for un-modelled forces in order to hit its target area. These mid-course corrections are very sensitive to small errors, so position inaccuracy at these critical points can lead to large errors in the missles final destination. Given this, a loss of precision of a few hundred meters means you hit Havana instead of Disney-Land. It does not mean that you hit Epcot instead of Space Mountain.
(ps. I like Disneyland and am not in any way condoning launching anything at in. )
Iridium will be deorbited because it is the only way that they can take the satellites as a tax write off, something which I just find damn funny.
If Iridium showed us anything, it's that the pace at which telecommunications technology is advancing is leaps and bounds beyond the pace at which you can build and put up a satellite constellation. Consider what we thought 5 to 10 years ago about the state of communications today and the problem becomes pretty evident.
More importantly though, Iridium clearly demonstrated that the market for cell phones on the top of Mt. Everest is not enough to support the huge overhead of putting up and maintaining a satellite constellation. I'm fairly confident that if the market in backwater Tibet was strong enought to support $5k phone service, Bell-South would have already run cable. The reality is If you look at ICO's target market, "Maritime, Remote fixed, Handheld, Transportation, and Government", it's no different than Iridium's. What Iridium found was that the only sub-market of any of these willing to fork over the cash for there service was the handheld market for relief workers. If none of these markets materialized for Iridium, I'm not sure why they will for ICO.
The real genius of the movie is its subtle political commentary:
NASA is waisting billions of OUR money on some stupid space station when all they need to do is go to REI and get some of those magic tents!
Stupid NASA - movie people types have to show you how to do your job right and stuff!
By the way, is anyone else amazed that they had computers on their wrists which could tell them random quantities like "POINT OF NO RETURN" but the ships computer couldn't tell them simple things like "I THINK THE FUEL LINE HAS BEEN CUT IN HALF AND IF YOU TRY TO START THE ENGINE I'M GONNA BLOW UP"?
Portent:
AOL, Time Cite Social Goals
The holdings of the combined companies will be, (assuming that nothing is sold off):
Time-Warner + AOL
What I find to be the more worrying is that Dr. Thomas Middelhoff, chairman of Bertelsmann AG (the company who wants to bring you a self "self-regulating" internet), sits on the board of AOL. Further, Bertelsmann is a major minority owner of AOL. This means that they will have a significant say in the direction of AOL-Time-Warner. So although they may not hold all the keys to all the media outlets in the US, the combined Bertelsmann-AOL-Time-Warner will hold enough of the outlets in in Hungary and elsewhere that they have the potential to set policy. Further, Bertelsmann will have more of a platform to launch its net censorship policies from ( wait for Time magazine to write "How the evil internet is poisining our youth and what we can do about").
This article appeared in the recent issue of the NASA Academy Alumni Association newsletter:
What Happened to the Mars Polar Missions?
Synopsis:
  Internal divisions within the support team at Lockhead
+ Stone age management which leaves people covering their arses
-------------------------------------------------
Lost spacecraft and a failing program
THATS RIGHT!!
BMG (Bertelsmann Music Group) owns Windham Hill Group which in turn supplies us with Yanni. The entire rating system is a secret ploy to support their evil elevator music empire. (insert maniacal laughing here).
More disturbingly (and seriously) though, take a look at exactly who this company is via their descriptive (but less complete) Company Profile or their 97/98 annual report. They have a major (~50%) stake in everything from barnesandnoble.com to AOL and CompuServe in Western Europe (the scoundrels even own The Science Fiction Book Club). I'm guessing that this ownership of almost every type of media outlet will give them some significant sway in their bid to play thought police and may be why they can make everyone jump.
The proposal to kill the Space Station comes up and is killed every year. It was never a serious threat. What is a serious threat is that the $1 billion in cuts to NASA's budget were included in the bill and passed (here). These were targeted specifically at the non-manned missions, so the NASA cuts we were all debating a few weeks ago went through.
According to barnes and noble (http://bn.com), the second edition is comming out on September 20th of this year. Hopefully they will update it to include coverage of the current APIs.
For all that we hear about the panicea of privitization, let's look at the most recent private space venture, Iridium. All of the backers of Iridium are in a panic. S&P downgraded it's corporate credit rating to "D". Motorola sees only 3 outcomes for it's future: "an out-of-court restructuring, in-court restructuring under Chapter 11 of the bankruptcy code or 'liquidation in bankruptcy.'"/ 1999-07/15/199l-071599-idx.html)
(http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate
The point is, space is not terribly profitable. There are a few ventures which will make some money in space, but these are a very few. For the types of missions that NASA flies, there is 0 short term profit. In the long run there are scientific payoffs, but try to tell your shareholders that when their stock is lossing value and watch the stampede.
Those who claim that privitization of the space program will solve all of its problems are living in dogma fantasy land. If it were so wonderfully profitable, all the major companies would be lobbying all over congress to privatize NASA to get at a new revenue source. You don't see that now do you? The reality is that if you eliminate NASA, the type of work that NASA does will die. Instead, you will be able to get satellite porn at any point in the world. That's progress.
Who is it that build the spacecraft, launch the satellites, plan the missions, man the trackers, analyze the data, and support most other phases of the space program? Lockheed Martin, Boeing, CSC, Allied Signal, GTE, and countless other companies. The NASA civil servant today serves as either a top level contract manager or is a research scientist.
As for one of the small ways in which basic research at NASA has impacted your life, see the June 1999 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. One of the recipients of the "Excellence in Programming" awards is Don Becker, who works with CESDIS at the Goddard Space Flight Center. The whole article can be found at http://www.ddj.com/articles/1999/9906/9906a/9906a. htm , but here is just a snippet:
t ml), and a distributed shared memory package."
"To implement such a system, however, Becker, who is a staff scientist with the Center of Excellence in Space Data and Information Sciences (or CESDIS, part of the University Space Research Association, a nonprofit consortium of universities that sponsors space-related research), had to come to grips with Linux's unstable networking capabilities, and the lack of Linux support for off-the-shelf network cards. Consequently, Becker ended up writing enhancements to the kernel network subsystem to support faster I/O on high-speed networks, device drivers for countless Ethernet cards(see http://cesdis.gsfc.nasa.gov/linux/drivers/index.h
In short, basic research rarely seems like a good investment in the face of countless current, legitimate priorities because it's payoffs aren't immediate or predictible. However, if we stop doing things just to test our own limits, then we are freezing our current state of advancement as a species and saying that we don't need to progress any further. Where would we be today if we made these decissions 50 years ago, or 100, etc.. ?