Its all a giant shuffle anyway. The country is going bankrupt at so large a rate that in a few years Nasa will be shut down anyway. After all if we can't put money into rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast because our leaders are stark raving nuts baboons who would rather spend a trillion dollars in a pointless war than put that trillion into the general economy energy independence.
Its the end of the age. And it will be thousands of years before it restarts.
Being in Portland it is easier to get to the mountains to ski and to the coast for the oceans than if you live in Seattle. Plus you will not be exposed to the 'Seattle Process' which makes it impossible accomplish anything important up here without a million revotes. People in Portland actually get things done.
I have a 7 year old 100 Mhz 6320 with 16g drive running 8.6 and an ibook 500 running 9.2. Both thru smc wireless barricade router and dsl. I have friends with 230 Mhz imac running OS9.2 and completely happy. For the money you spend on computers they should last 10 years. Otherwise you are getting screwed.
I still have not switched over to OSX and wont until I can justify getting another laptop. I really dont consider OSX to be well adjusted to the consumer yet and I never want to dig into the innerd of os's. Total waste of my lifes time.
My main reason for staying in OS8,9 is that I have had zero viruses etc. My router shows an average of 200 attacks a day.
I have never owned a winpc and have no intention of ever starting. Everybody I know who owns one has had theirs taken out by viruses and worms.
There should be a class action taken against MS for selling such trash.
Happened to me once a few months ago at a Wells Fargo atm. I took out x dollars but it failed to give me the cash. The machine showed the debit but refused to give me cash. Luckily they were open and I went in to file a complaint. The tellers could not find an on line record of the transaction. I had to get them to take money from another account, file a written complaint, contact a phone number, and it took 2 weeks before the bank rolled back the screwed up transaction.
Nasa is very much in the mode to cancel everything that doesnt match with the new moon mars space initiative. However its a suckers game. There will be no money for the moon/mars program because it will cost about a trillion dollars at about the time that 1/2 of the working population wants to retire. Myself included. All we will care about is getting our meds and doctors appointments. And we will be taxed high enough for that alone. We will vote down any increase of space budget as older people tend to get out and vote against things that interfere with the rights of older people.
Face it: NASA is a Dead Agency Walking.
A manned mission to mars would take a spaceship weighing at least 300 tons to escape earth orbit to coast to mars. During the moon landing era the Saturn V could put 125 tons in earth orbit and send a 45 ton payload on escape. If the russians are designing a 660 ton spaceship to go to mars that means that, if using conventional chemical propulsion, the payload to orbit would have to weigh about 2000 tons. No one on this planet has the capacity to do this today. Witness the enormous effort to build the space station which weighs 200 tons. Its doable but probably at a cost of about a trillion dollars. Unless their are aliens on mars trying to take us over, it is not going to happen.
The Moon/Mars mission is ploy. The costs were high 40 years ago but would be greater than the entire budget of the US now, on a yearly basis. Therefore this is just a gut and run that is being performed and in a couple years, if they get their way, Nasa's budget will be 1/2 to 1/3 of what it is now and the rest will have disappeared into a black project that gets no congressional oversite.
I work for a company that makes various displays for the avaition industry. Many of the processes in making them are proprietary and also export controlled. Because they are export controlled the company still manufactures all of the product in the US and is vertically integrated. The products sell well all over the world and have a high margin of profit.
There is no doubt in my mind that if the export controls were lifted or modified to be less constrictive that the corporate officers of the holding company would move production to mainland china within 2 years and instead of having 450 employees in this division there would only be about 25 management types.
I think that the rules for small, medium and large companies should have more export controlls, and tax advantages should be geared to those business who employ 80% of their workers in the US of A.
Those who move their business off shore for reduced cost but claim to be US business should have all tax benefits sundered, should have their products directly tariffed and to hell with the European Union meddling in US internal laws.
I used to be a conservative voter and god knows both sides of the political thin coin that is our 2 party minority takes all system have great guilt in decimating our economy but Ross Perot was right all along. The giant sucking sound is the sound of all the decent paying jobs not only going south of the border but even leaving North America entirely. I will be voting very left wing in the next years as I head toward the vanishing goal or retirement.
Our economy is ill served if we all work for mainland China ( excuse me: I meant Wall Mart).
It is clear to me that after the election the bush admin will have to make 'hard choices' and nasa will be cut back from 15 billion to 5 billion, just enough to do a couple more mars probes for show and tell. Abandon the shuttle, abandon the space station and siphon the money off to black projects and more wars. More wars used to mean more business in the US and that helped the economy but these days even the means of war material production is being outsourced from the US.
I can see the future now:
Rogue ( unlicensed) hacker ( software developer) arrested for using untrustworthy (open source linux ) operating systems. Sentenced to 20 years for adulterating the international bit stream ( internet).
And if we had thrown our money to trying to make a small colony on the moon we would also have a uncompleted colony and a couple of space disasters along the way.
If we had managed to throw our money on going to mars the situation would be the same, minimal colony and several disasters.
face it. The basic missing factor in all this is the total lack of a high thrust, high efficiency rocket engine of isp greater than 100,000. All this is necessary to shorten the travel time and up the mass being sent.
If we do not develop such technology we will remain at the ballistic rock flinging mode forever and there will be no colonies, ever.
A person I know was originally assigned to support engineering at the Guadalajara plant in 2001. I heard of production rates of 100,000 a week. 2 years later that person went to mainland china for the startup of the replacement xbox plant and later in 2003 he helped shut down the mexico plant, which had been in operation barely 2 years. Thats how they cut the costs.
So I mixed my historical contexts a bit. Both japanese and chinese had great exploratory/military sailing fleets and chose to eliminate them and become closed societies. As for the the rocket information, I have followed closely the space program since the days of the mercury flights, have attended shuttle landings at edwards afb and all of my tech data is verifiable.
The following data is based on the technology available at the time of the design of the Saturn V and technology developed in the following years. Folks we had the means to colonize the moon and mars and we threw it away. It can be redeveloped with the proper political attitude and money. But will it? Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.
Part one: Capability of original Saturn V. Part two: With improved efficiency F1 main engines. Part 3: Improved F1 engines burning high efficiency kerosene/nanoaluminum powder fuels.
Saturn V basic specs: Empty weight: 250 tons. Empty weight of first stage: 100 tons. Fueled weight 3000 tons. Takeoff thrust: 3750 tons. Takeoff weight / thrust ratio: 80/100. Thrust of each main first F1 engine: 750 tons. Efficiency of each F1 engine: 250:1 Fuel consumption of each F1 engine: 3 tons/second. Ratio of LO2/Kerosene: 2 tons/1 ton/ second. Total mass of fuel consumed at and of first stage cutoff: 2250 tons Mass of all upper stages at seperation:650 tons. Thrust of second stage:600 tons. Net weight of two stage orbit capability, based on skylab data: 90 tons. Net weight of 2.5 stage orbit capability, based on moon launches: 150 tons. Net capacity escape to moon: 45-50 tons.
Part two: Improved F1 engines: The russians designed during the Moon landing era LO2/kerosene engines with efficiencies of 333, sea level, which is 33% greater than the existing F1. That means the redesigned F1 engines could have produced 2 million pounds of thrust ( 1000 tons) at the same 3 tons per second consumption. That means that take off thrust of 5000 tons versus 3750 tons, an increased thow upper stage total weight jumping from 650 tons to 1650 tons and a probable doubling of mass to orbit: 2 stage mass: 180-200 tons. 2.5 stage mass: 300 tons 3 stage escape mass to moon: 90-100 tons. So a conventional but improved F1 engine could hav e allowed supporting an early small manned colony on the moon.
Part three: Use of NanoAlumimum powder in Kerosene fuels: Link: http://www.argonide.com/gun_propellants.html
Based on the article, efficiency could increase at least 50%. If so then the 333 ISP of the 1970's technology could have been raised to 450.
Thus, a possible F3 engine, designed for high efficiency and high energy fuels could have an efficiency rating of 450-500. That means that the Saturn V could have evolved into a rocket that could have placed: 2 stage orbit: 300 tons 2.5 stage orbit: 450 tons. 3 stage escape: 150 tons.
All this without resorting to adding side boosters to the Saturn vehicle. If side boosters of equal or better design than that used by the current space shuttle could have been added to the Saturn V then that vehicle could have evolved to place in orbit perhaps 600 to 1000 tons and have capacity to put into escape 300 tons.
The mass of the current space station is now 200 tons and if core completed will weight 300 tons. It is estimated that the requried mass of a mars expedition space ship will be 300 tons.
The world could have been colonizing the moon right now and be on the verge this year of making the jump to mars.
Hundreds of years ago the Chinese sent a huge fleet to colonize the world. It went entirely around the world leaving historical evidence everywhere and bring home innformation. The Mandarins then dismantled the entire fleet, forbid exploration and became a closed society until Admiral Perry forcibly opened them up to the world.
Why does the high sounding Bush administration's new space vision really feel like a mandarins sleight of hand maneuver to gut the space program like they are gutting everything else.
Folks, the technology exists NOW. The means is there. But will the politicos actually allow the opportunity?
Its a shell game. Bush announces new space plan: ' I hold a silver dollar in my hand'. Nasa immediately organizes and abandons hubble telescope mission. Nasa decides to abandon space station after completing it. Nasa decides to abandon shuttle replacement because the US wont be using the station after completing it and retiring shuttle
Expect the following: To go the moon will require reinventing a rocket similiar to saturn 5 but at least twice the capacity. Money wont be found for this and that will kill the moon lander and mars landers. Nasa gets reduced by 1/2 or 2/3rds and will only launch small robotic vehicles to moon and mars. After awhile Nasa can't get budget for even those, because we've been there and done that. End of Nasa. End of US space program. Year 2012.
Supposedly www.platform.com has a complete suite of software that manages every distributed computing request from top to bottom. They claim to to run on windows, linux, bad and OSX. And claim to have been installed in large installations. Or so I have read from their website.
Does anybody have any real experience with them?
The current administration knows that there will not be a space future. They intend to abandon the space station by 2010 after possibly finishing core complete by 2008. It is highly unlikely that the Russians will continue to support it as they have no means to repair any US modules. Eventually the Russians will abandon their support of their 1/4 of the space station, the part that maintains the stations attitude and more importantly altitude. The space station currently loses 1.5 miles per day and needs daily boosting by the russian modules and also boosting provided by the shuttle when it is finished visiting. If the station is assembled to core complete it will lose 2.0 miles per day. Within 2 years of the Russians abandoning the station the station will lose enough altitude to be too late to save it and it will burn up. The Chinese may improve their capacity by then but will probably be more interested in going it alone. The US will not have spent the money to return to the Moon and Mars due to increasing demands on paying for health care and retirements. These demands will suck up all expenses not related to military. Sometime about 2012 the US will have turned its back on space, not even interested in send any more silly horribly expensive robots to the moon or mars. And that will be that. The US will not dominate the century except thru various military campaigns whose intent will be to control oil fields. By 2020 the world will be run and owned by the Chinese.
I think that it is inevitable that Google will be swallowed up by MS for the simple reason that Google has a terrific hardware/software search asset and MS has 50 Billion Dollars. This will cause other services companies such as AOL and Apple to devise cluster computing farms of their own to provide internet search and data computing services. After Google gets swallowed another of the many search engines in the market will try to become top dog but the internet will become more and more of a.NET internet and everyone else comes third. Eventually their will be a MS/Intel internet and everyone else. Somewhere along there I will no longer have much interest in using the internet anymore as it will resemble the great wasteland of repeating garbage that now describes television and radio.
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Its all a giant shuffle anyway. The country is going bankrupt at so large a rate that in a few years Nasa will be shut down anyway. After all if we can't put money into rebuilding New Orleans and the Gulf Coast because our leaders are stark raving nuts baboons who would rather spend a trillion dollars in a pointless war than put that trillion into the general economy energy independence. Its the end of the age. And it will be thousands of years before it restarts.
Being in Portland it is easier to get to the mountains to ski and to the coast for the oceans than if you live in Seattle. Plus you will not be exposed to the 'Seattle Process' which makes it impossible accomplish anything important up here without a million revotes. People in Portland actually get things done.
I have a 7 year old 100 Mhz 6320 with 16g drive running 8.6 and an ibook 500 running 9.2. Both thru smc wireless barricade router and dsl. I have friends with 230 Mhz imac running OS9.2 and completely happy. For the money you spend on computers they should last 10 years. Otherwise you are getting screwed. I still have not switched over to OSX and wont until I can justify getting another laptop. I really dont consider OSX to be well adjusted to the consumer yet and I never want to dig into the innerd of os's. Total waste of my lifes time. My main reason for staying in OS8,9 is that I have had zero viruses etc. My router shows an average of 200 attacks a day. I have never owned a winpc and have no intention of ever starting. Everybody I know who owns one has had theirs taken out by viruses and worms. There should be a class action taken against MS for selling such trash.
Happened to me once a few months ago at a Wells Fargo atm. I took out x dollars but it failed to give me the cash. The machine showed the debit but refused to give me cash. Luckily they were open and I went in to file a complaint. The tellers could not find an on line record of the transaction. I had to get them to take money from another account, file a written complaint, contact a phone number, and it took 2 weeks before the bank rolled back the screwed up transaction.
Nasa is very much in the mode to cancel everything that doesnt match with the new moon mars space initiative. However its a suckers game. There will be no money for the moon/mars program because it will cost about a trillion dollars at about the time that 1/2 of the working population wants to retire. Myself included. All we will care about is getting our meds and doctors appointments. And we will be taxed high enough for that alone. We will vote down any increase of space budget as older people tend to get out and vote against things that interfere with the rights of older people. Face it: NASA is a Dead Agency Walking.
A manned mission to mars would take a spaceship weighing at least 300 tons to escape earth orbit to coast to mars. During the moon landing era the Saturn V could put 125 tons in earth orbit and send a 45 ton payload on escape. If the russians are designing a 660 ton spaceship to go to mars that means that, if using conventional chemical propulsion, the payload to orbit would have to weigh about 2000 tons. No one on this planet has the capacity to do this today. Witness the enormous effort to build the space station which weighs 200 tons. Its doable but probably at a cost of about a trillion dollars. Unless their are aliens on mars trying to take us over, it is not going to happen.
The Moon/Mars mission is ploy. The costs were high 40 years ago but would be greater than the entire budget of the US now, on a yearly basis. Therefore this is just a gut and run that is being performed and in a couple years, if they get their way, Nasa's budget will be 1/2 to 1/3 of what it is now and the rest will have disappeared into a black project that gets no congressional oversite.
I work for a company that makes various displays for the avaition industry. Many of the processes in making them are proprietary and also export controlled. Because they are export controlled the company still manufactures all of the product in the US and is vertically integrated. The products sell well all over the world and have a high margin of profit. There is no doubt in my mind that if the export controls were lifted or modified to be less constrictive that the corporate officers of the holding company would move production to mainland china within 2 years and instead of having 450 employees in this division there would only be about 25 management types. I think that the rules for small, medium and large companies should have more export controlls, and tax advantages should be geared to those business who employ 80% of their workers in the US of A. Those who move their business off shore for reduced cost but claim to be US business should have all tax benefits sundered, should have their products directly tariffed and to hell with the European Union meddling in US internal laws. I used to be a conservative voter and god knows both sides of the political thin coin that is our 2 party minority takes all system have great guilt in decimating our economy but Ross Perot was right all along. The giant sucking sound is the sound of all the decent paying jobs not only going south of the border but even leaving North America entirely. I will be voting very left wing in the next years as I head toward the vanishing goal or retirement. Our economy is ill served if we all work for mainland China ( excuse me: I meant Wall Mart).
It is clear to me that after the election the bush admin will have to make 'hard choices' and nasa will be cut back from 15 billion to 5 billion, just enough to do a couple more mars probes for show and tell. Abandon the shuttle, abandon the space station and siphon the money off to black projects and more wars. More wars used to mean more business in the US and that helped the economy but these days even the means of war material production is being outsourced from the US.
I can see the future now: Rogue ( unlicensed) hacker ( software developer) arrested for using untrustworthy (open source linux ) operating systems. Sentenced to 20 years for adulterating the international bit stream ( internet).
And if we had thrown our money to trying to make a small colony on the moon we would also have a uncompleted colony and a couple of space disasters along the way. If we had managed to throw our money on going to mars the situation would be the same, minimal colony and several disasters. face it. The basic missing factor in all this is the total lack of a high thrust, high efficiency rocket engine of isp greater than 100,000. All this is necessary to shorten the travel time and up the mass being sent. If we do not develop such technology we will remain at the ballistic rock flinging mode forever and there will be no colonies, ever.
A person I know was originally assigned to support engineering at the Guadalajara plant in 2001. I heard of production rates of 100,000 a week. 2 years later that person went to mainland china for the startup of the replacement xbox plant and later in 2003 he helped shut down the mexico plant, which had been in operation barely 2 years. Thats how they cut the costs.
So I mixed my historical contexts a bit. Both japanese and chinese had great exploratory/military sailing fleets and chose to eliminate them and become closed societies. As for the the rocket information, I have followed closely the space program since the days of the mercury flights, have attended shuttle landings at edwards afb and all of my tech data is verifiable.
The following data is based on the technology available at the time of the design of the Saturn V and technology developed in the following years. Folks we had the means to colonize the moon and mars and we threw it away. It can be redeveloped with the proper political attitude and money. But will it? Woulda, Coulda, Shoulda.
Part one: Capability of original Saturn V.
Part two: With improved efficiency F1 main engines.
Part 3: Improved F1 engines burning high efficiency kerosene/nanoaluminum powder fuels.
Saturn V basic specs:
Empty weight: 250 tons.
Empty weight of first stage: 100 tons.
Fueled weight 3000 tons.
Takeoff thrust: 3750 tons.
Takeoff weight / thrust ratio: 80/100.
Thrust of each main first F1 engine: 750 tons.
Efficiency of each F1 engine: 250:1
Fuel consumption of each F1 engine: 3 tons/second.
Ratio of LO2/Kerosene: 2 tons/1 ton/ second.
Total mass of fuel consumed at and of first stage cutoff: 2250 tons
Mass of all upper stages at seperation:650 tons.
Thrust of second stage:600 tons.
Net weight of two stage orbit capability, based on skylab data: 90 tons.
Net weight of 2.5 stage orbit capability, based on moon launches: 150 tons.
Net capacity escape to moon: 45-50 tons.
Part two: Improved F1 engines:
The russians designed during the Moon landing era LO2/kerosene engines with efficiencies of 333, sea level, which is 33% greater than the existing F1.
That means the redesigned F1 engines could have produced 2 million pounds of thrust ( 1000 tons) at the same 3 tons per second consumption. That means that take off thrust of 5000 tons versus 3750 tons, an increased thow upper stage total weight jumping from 650 tons to 1650 tons and a probable doubling of mass to orbit:
2 stage mass: 180-200 tons.
2.5 stage mass: 300 tons
3 stage escape mass to moon: 90-100 tons.
So a conventional but improved F1 engine could hav e allowed supporting an early small manned colony on the moon.
Part three: Use of NanoAlumimum powder in Kerosene fuels: Link: http://www.argonide.com/gun_propellants.html
Based on the article, efficiency could increase at least 50%. If so then the 333 ISP of the 1970's technology could have been raised to 450.
Thus, a possible F3 engine, designed for high efficiency and high energy fuels could have an efficiency rating of 450-500. That means that the Saturn V could have evolved into a rocket that could have placed:
2 stage orbit: 300 tons
2.5 stage orbit: 450 tons.
3 stage escape: 150 tons.
All this without resorting to adding side boosters to the Saturn vehicle. If side boosters of equal or better design than that used by the current space shuttle could have been added to the Saturn V then that vehicle could have evolved to place in orbit perhaps 600 to 1000 tons and have capacity to put into escape 300 tons.
The mass of the current space station is now 200 tons and if core completed will weight 300 tons. It is estimated that the requried mass of a mars expedition space ship will be 300 tons.
The world could have been colonizing the moon right now and be on the verge this year of making the jump to mars.
Hundreds of years ago the Chinese sent a huge fleet to colonize the world. It went entirely around the world leaving historical evidence everywhere and bring home innformation. The Mandarins then dismantled the entire fleet, forbid exploration and became a closed society until Admiral Perry forcibly opened them up to the world.
Why does the high sounding Bush administration's new space vision really feel like a mandarins sleight of hand maneuver to gut the space program like they are gutting everything else.
Folks, the technology exists NOW. The means is there. But will the politicos actually allow the opportunity?
Its a shell game. Bush announces new space plan: ' I hold a silver dollar in my hand'. Nasa immediately organizes and abandons hubble telescope mission. Nasa decides to abandon space station after completing it. Nasa decides to abandon shuttle replacement because the US wont be using the station after completing it and retiring shuttle Expect the following: To go the moon will require reinventing a rocket similiar to saturn 5 but at least twice the capacity. Money wont be found for this and that will kill the moon lander and mars landers. Nasa gets reduced by 1/2 or 2/3rds and will only launch small robotic vehicles to moon and mars. After awhile Nasa can't get budget for even those, because we've been there and done that. End of Nasa. End of US space program. Year 2012.
Supposedly www.platform.com has a complete suite of software that manages every distributed computing request from top to bottom. They claim to to run on windows, linux, bad and OSX. And claim to have been installed in large installations. Or so I have read from their website. Does anybody have any real experience with them?
The current administration knows that there will not be a space future. They intend to abandon the space station by 2010 after possibly finishing core complete by 2008. It is highly unlikely that the Russians will continue to support it as they have no means to repair any US modules. Eventually the Russians will abandon their support of their 1/4 of the space station, the part that maintains the stations attitude and more importantly altitude. The space station currently loses 1.5 miles per day and needs daily boosting by the russian modules and also boosting provided by the shuttle when it is finished visiting. If the station is assembled to core complete it will lose 2.0 miles per day. Within 2 years of the Russians abandoning the station the station will lose enough altitude to be too late to save it and it will burn up. The Chinese may improve their capacity by then but will probably be more interested in going it alone. The US will not have spent the money to return to the Moon and Mars due to increasing demands on paying for health care and retirements. These demands will suck up all expenses not related to military. Sometime about 2012 the US will have turned its back on space, not even interested in send any more silly horribly expensive robots to the moon or mars. And that will be that. The US will not dominate the century except thru various military campaigns whose intent will be to control oil fields. By 2020 the world will be run and owned by the Chinese.
I think that it is inevitable that Google will be swallowed up by MS for the simple reason that Google has a terrific hardware/software search asset and MS has 50 Billion Dollars. This will cause other services companies such as AOL and Apple to devise cluster computing farms of their own to provide internet search and data computing services. After Google gets swallowed another of the many search engines in the market will try to become top dog but the internet will become more and more of a .NET internet and everyone else comes third. Eventually their will be a MS/Intel internet and everyone else. Somewhere along there I will no longer have much interest in using the internet anymore as it will resemble the great wasteland of repeating garbage that now describes television and radio.