Well, they didn't breach the airspace / that's essentially the same thing as US exercising the naval (and aerial too, I'm sure) "right of navigation" - I hear they do it with Canadian Arctic, too...
OTOH that touches on what I brought up, how Russians are quite paranoid about having a defensive buffer / our double standard about it / etc. - we basically told them quite clearly, not a long time ago, that it is OK to perform illegal overflights deep into their territory (as long those flight can be simply denied, as long as they don't shot them down)
I wasn't saying it was, regarding second group - but those are either quite general subsystems which (while mostly non-trivial) the Soviets had a good hang of. Not very defining.
OTOH, to be more exact, it was a successful test of defining flight regime for such vehicle. And not exactly remote control (not like STS is typically piloted manually BTW - IIRC only one reentry was like that, and none of the launches of course)
The whole concept of such vehicle was intended for short hops, that's why both of them have huge crossrange. A characteristic which perhaps only one of them fully used...
(OTOH I don't know how non-installed life support (not to mention displays...) can be treated as indicative of whether or not a design is successful - especially for a space organisation demonstrating at the same time a capability of very long manned stays in orbit)
It might end up as another exercise in futility, in the style of STS, for a long time.
Problem is, advances in material technology/etc. which could make a single-stage-to-orbit merely doable...also benefit "dumb rockets" greatly. "Dumb rockets" which know that the majority of kinetic energy gain must happen outside the atmosphere - so it gets out as quickly as possible. Which, when we take a take a serious look at any proposed spaceplane meant to replace them, end up at least as good.
I'd take such non-fatal failure rate any day... (especially when comparing at which points in the timeline of given program a fatal or serious failures happened)
"Few orbits flight" was EXACTLY the whole supposed point of Shuttle-like vehicle (as advertised and as far as its form & capabilities are concerned); to launch, quickly perform military mission and immediately deorbit while returning to the area of launch.
It's not too much of a stretch to ponder if Buran demonstrated this intended / defining capability of such space vehicle much more fully, and all it took was one flight vs. 100+... (also, only displays didn't have software / remember that during this time Russians had two other operational manned vehicles, and a space station)
I'd say - unfortunately. The Buran project was pursued primarily because of some misplaced notion of "strategic parity" - mostly pushed by some ignorant Soviet generals paranoid about (nonexistent...) advantage given by the Space Transportation System. Even within the concept of reusable spaceplane (not necessarily a good idea in general), the Soviet engineers wanted to go elsewhere.
They did do it more sensibly - Energia-approach was basically an Ares V-like one, from the start. But it also meant cancellation of N-1 - second version of which was almost ready (with problems of the first one understood, so maybe v2 would be fine) - before it could give any results. And I wouldn't be too surprised if the Soviets / Russians could maintain (using less than what what Buran cost them) a small Lunar base for the last ~3 decades, if not for few setbacks which meant they lost the Moon Race (as a bonus: in such case US would probably try to reach for the next "big mission", so we would possibly had an Apollo-style Mars landings by now; more fun all-around)
Well, one could say that provoking them to do the Buran (with its costs) was the true goal of STS. In which case it has done its job a long time ago / why was it allowed to suck NASA dry for the past 2 decades? (while not providing anything as advertised)
At least we got Zenit out of Energia-Buran, appears to be most cost-effective launcher around...
Probably because it's from the Guardian / more and more publications outside of N. America use such spelling now (also because many languages have more lax guidelines for capitalization... (*))
Not without some merit - the word is now perceived as being in the same category as television or telephone, is becoming a generic term ((*)...or - many countries became really connected only when viewing the network in generic way already common); Phonograph was written like I just did. Plus - initially "internet" was a common noun, too.
There wasn't a moment that the Iraqi population wanted us there. At all times they want us out. That means any people fighting us can't be assumed to be "extremists" (but fits with how, even in 2006, 85% of US forces in Iraq still believed that the latter had anything to do with 9/11 - now, I know cannon fodder anywhere isn't made out of the sharpest minds, but if you're that "blind", your want to believe in lies)
I surely see possible extremists there BTW - at least two families of people needlessly killed.
IR665 is a great examples because it shows how "training taking over" can happen even in situation which are obviously far from combat ones.
Inherently bad when compared to what we should be doing (well, few manage it) already for our already quite long lifespans. It's not clear we learned and adapted to our present quite long life. Generally we don't plan 5 decades into the future, well within our lives.
It reveals efficiency in utilization of propellant, specific impulse. It doesn't lead directly to much higher speeds of the vehicle (particularly not in "an order of magnitude" way) - this depends on few more factors (like scalability or energy source/density aboard the vehicle; rocket equation means that "thrust duration" isn't free)
Referencing, as you said, "good old Wiki" - the current record holder for practical implementation of Hall effect thruster apparently made a delta-V of less than 4 km/s. I believe when I said "dozen km/s" I was being generous enough for our present tech.
Not quite an order of magnitude; able to effect delta-v change of few to dozen km/s. And actually - might be not the best way to explore outer system, with quick flybys and harder to affect trajectories.
Really mass production could get interesting, maybe with solar sails.
I'm not sure. Our minds are inherently very bad at this game, didn't evolve to it. Hardly any "in a decade" evolutionary pressures (except the usual breeding and related; which actually seems to be suppressed by effects of progress)
We still operate largely in the mental framework which promoted survival of small hunter-gatherer groups. It just had to be effective - how a lot of what surrounds the very idea of "ourselves" is an illusion didn't matter. You say, basically, how we need to change - but, for example, look how the widespread belief in largely unbroken, monolithic, unchanging consciousness is itself a myth. We change dramatically throughout the few decades we have (being closer to our peers at given point than to ourselves at different stage; we barely remember the latter, barely keep track of what we really were more than a few years ago), barely noticing it / telling ourselves how we don't, not too much...
Heck, split-brain patients appear mostly unaffected. There's also one very revealing symptom, a result of particularly localized brain trauma - in which the affected go blind but don't realize it, claiming (and trying to act on it) that they can see. This is our grip on "ourselves"...
(not saying it's an insurmountable barrier of course, and that longer lifespans aren't (yes, already) a part of changing status quo - but they are not enough; if anything, they might be largely a symptom of societal dynamics in place which manage to promote long-term well-being)
Or "harmful" ideologies ("" - no reason to rigidly attach values, ideologies are here for the same game: survival). Heck, consider one straightforward example: the most technologically plausible approach might be embryo / egg / sperm colonization.
But can you imagine the furor this would cause now and still for some time?
"Some fractions will do it anyway" might be not enough. Impactor will be always insanely easier to launch (and will attain much higher speed) than colonization ship...
(FTL seems quite implausible, considering it's also a trip to the past)
Of course the other side of that is - we would be fairly hard to notice for a long time, too. No reason to avoid Earth... probably one of more attractive targets in the system, all things considered. Quite weird, quite "wrong" - free oxygen?! (but if Eris is more attractive to you, then so are all Oort clouds - no reason to get anywhere near; though, considering the timescales and probable scale of "production", we could notice something weird with the spectra of comets by now)
But this gets dangerously close to Daniken or UFOs;)
Technological civilizations might be exceedingly rare, even if it seems like life might be very, very widespread.
Ours is a blink of an eye on the timescale of life on Earth. Most of that time completelly dominated by microbes (would be funny if, via our recent efforts in sixth great extinction/etc., we're working to remove any ambiguity to their continuing domination), which possibly can travel interstellar distances...
Earth had/has few other fairly intelligent lineages, but they generally ended up in a sort of evolutionary dead end (probably; as far as civilization goes). Octopus - wrong environmental pressures / too short lifespan / non-social. Magpies / crows / etc. - limits on early development due to eggs, harder scaling up of body plan, lack of "free" limbs. Dolphins / whales - again limbs and environment putting limits.
We were lucky. A fairly large brain with room to grow, free set of prehensile limbs, living in close social groups and in an environment which at the time promoted "progress".
Not much of a difference - large part of the speed of Voyagers came from gravitational slingshots (not done in a way to strictly maximize speed, but to maximize science return)
Which revolves virtually exclusively around merely convincing ourselves into thinking how we are not small (don't get me wrong, generally quite useful survival trait and why our evolution strengthened it, but...)
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Oh, you were almost on track of noticing how Manhattan != NYC...
Well, they didn't breach the airspace / that's essentially the same thing as US exercising the naval (and aerial too, I'm sure) "right of navigation" - I hear they do it with Canadian Arctic, too...
OTOH that touches on what I brought up, how Russians are quite paranoid about having a defensive buffer / our double standard about it / etc. - we basically told them quite clearly, not a long time ago, that it is OK to perform illegal overflights deep into their territory (as long those flight can be simply denied, as long as they don't shot them down)
1 Mbit/s access at any home is a legal right in Finland... (apparently with plans to increase it to 100 Mbit/s by the middle of the decade)
I wasn't saying it was, regarding second group - but those are either quite general subsystems which (while mostly non-trivial) the Soviets had a good hang of. Not very defining.
OTOH, to be more exact, it was a successful test of defining flight regime for such vehicle. And not exactly remote control (not like STS is typically piloted manually BTW - IIRC only one reentry was like that, and none of the launches of course)
The whole concept of such vehicle was intended for short hops, that's why both of them have huge crossrange. A characteristic which perhaps only one of them fully used...
(OTOH I don't know how non-installed life support (not to mention displays...) can be treated as indicative of whether or not a design is successful - especially for a space organisation demonstrating at the same time a capability of very long manned stays in orbit)
It might end up as another exercise in futility, in the style of STS, for a long time.
Problem is, advances in material technology/etc. which could make a single-stage-to-orbit merely doable...also benefit "dumb rockets" greatly. "Dumb rockets" which know that the majority of kinetic energy gain must happen outside the atmosphere - so it gets out as quickly as possible. Which, when we take a take a serious look at any proposed spaceplane meant to replace them, end up at least as good.
I'd take such non-fatal failure rate any day... (especially when comparing at which points in the timeline of given program a fatal or serious failures happened)
"Few orbits flight" was EXACTLY the whole supposed point of Shuttle-like vehicle (as advertised and as far as its form & capabilities are concerned); to launch, quickly perform military mission and immediately deorbit while returning to the area of launch.
It's not too much of a stretch to ponder if Buran demonstrated this intended / defining capability of such space vehicle much more fully, and all it took was one flight vs. 100+... (also, only displays didn't have software / remember that during this time Russians had two other operational manned vehicles, and a space station)
Doing essentially the same thing in a needlessly complex way is not exactly a virtue.
(BTW, why the latest US Air Force "Shuttle", X-37, was launched using Russian engines?...)
I'd say - unfortunately. The Buran project was pursued primarily because of some misplaced notion of "strategic parity" - mostly pushed by some ignorant Soviet generals paranoid about (nonexistent...) advantage given by the Space Transportation System. Even within the concept of reusable spaceplane (not necessarily a good idea in general), the Soviet engineers wanted to go elsewhere.
They did do it more sensibly - Energia-approach was basically an Ares V-like one, from the start. But it also meant cancellation of N-1 - second version of which was almost ready (with problems of the first one understood, so maybe v2 would be fine) - before it could give any results. And I wouldn't be too surprised if the Soviets / Russians could maintain (using less than what what Buran cost them) a small Lunar base for the last ~3 decades, if not for few setbacks which meant they lost the Moon Race (as a bonus: in such case US would probably try to reach for the next "big mission", so we would possibly had an Apollo-style Mars landings by now; more fun all-around)
Well, one could say that provoking them to do the Buran (with its costs) was the true goal of STS. In which case it has done its job a long time ago / why was it allowed to suck NASA dry for the past 2 decades? (while not providing anything as advertised)
At least we got Zenit out of Energia-Buran, appears to be most cost-effective launcher around...
Probably because it's from the Guardian / more and more publications outside of N. America use such spelling now (also because many languages have more lax guidelines for capitalization... (*))
Not without some merit - the word is now perceived as being in the same category as television or telephone, is becoming a generic term ((*) ...or - many countries became really connected only when viewing the network in generic way already common); Phonograph was written like I just did. Plus - initially "internet" was a common noun, too.
Good thing XM25 is largely German... (and what, no computerization? Plus you know, a hybrid has a chance of increasing costs)
There wasn't a moment that the Iraqi population wanted us there. At all times they want us out. That means any people fighting us can't be assumed to be "extremists" (but fits with how, even in 2006, 85% of US forces in Iraq still believed that the latter had anything to do with 9/11 - now, I know cannon fodder anywhere isn't made out of the sharpest minds, but if you're that "blind", your want to believe in lies)
I surely see possible extremists there BTW - at least two families of people needlessly killed.
IR665 is a great examples because it shows how "training taking over" can happen even in situation which are obviously far from combat ones.
Inherently bad when compared to what we should be doing (well, few manage it) already for our already quite long lifespans. It's not clear we learned and adapted to our present quite long life. Generally we don't plan 5 decades into the future, well within our lives.
It reveals efficiency in utilization of propellant, specific impulse. It doesn't lead directly to much higher speeds of the vehicle (particularly not in "an order of magnitude" way) - this depends on few more factors (like scalability or energy source/density aboard the vehicle; rocket equation means that "thrust duration" isn't free)
Referencing, as you said, "good old Wiki" - the current record holder for practical implementation of Hall effect thruster apparently made a delta-V of less than 4 km/s. I believe when I said "dozen km/s" I was being generous enough for our present tech.
That's just the speed of their exhaust, not attainable delta-v of the vehicle carrying the engine.
I, for one, welcome our alive, independent, distributed, all-knowing, immortal, evolving, soon-of-superhuman-intelligence overlord.
Not quite an order of magnitude; able to effect delta-v change of few to dozen km/s. And actually - might be not the best way to explore outer system, with quick flybys and harder to affect trajectories.
Really mass production could get interesting, maybe with solar sails.
It doesn't seem very cheerful, considering how the meaningful frame of reference around us moves in the same way...
I'm not sure. Our minds are inherently very bad at this game, didn't evolve to it. Hardly any "in a decade" evolutionary pressures (except the usual breeding and related; which actually seems to be suppressed by effects of progress)
We still operate largely in the mental framework which promoted survival of small hunter-gatherer groups. It just had to be effective - how a lot of what surrounds the very idea of "ourselves" is an illusion didn't matter. You say, basically, how we need to change - but, for example, look how the widespread belief in largely unbroken, monolithic, unchanging consciousness is itself a myth. We change dramatically throughout the few decades we have (being closer to our peers at given point than to ourselves at different stage; we barely remember the latter, barely keep track of what we really were more than a few years ago), barely noticing it / telling ourselves how we don't, not too much...
Heck, split-brain patients appear mostly unaffected. There's also one very revealing symptom, a result of particularly localized brain trauma - in which the affected go blind but don't realize it, claiming (and trying to act on it) that they can see. This is our grip on "ourselves"...
(not saying it's an insurmountable barrier of course, and that longer lifespans aren't (yes, already) a part of changing status quo - but they are not enough; if anything, they might be largely a symptom of societal dynamics in place which manage to promote long-term well-being)
Or "harmful" ideologies ("" - no reason to rigidly attach values, ideologies are here for the same game: survival). Heck, consider one straightforward example: the most technologically plausible approach might be embryo / egg / sperm colonization.
But can you imagine the furor this would cause now and still for some time?
"Some fractions will do it anyway" might be not enough. Impactor will be always insanely easier to launch (and will attain much higher speed) than colonization ship...
(FTL seems quite implausible, considering it's also a trip to the past)
Of course the other side of that is - we would be fairly hard to notice for a long time, too. No reason to avoid Earth... probably one of more attractive targets in the system, all things considered. Quite weird, quite "wrong" - free oxygen?! (but if Eris is more attractive to you, then so are all Oort clouds - no reason to get anywhere near; though, considering the timescales and probable scale of "production", we could notice something weird with the spectra of comets by now)
But this gets dangerously close to Daniken or UFOs ;)
Technological civilizations might be exceedingly rare, even if it seems like life might be very, very widespread.
Ours is a blink of an eye on the timescale of life on Earth. Most of that time completelly dominated by microbes (would be funny if, via our recent efforts in sixth great extinction/etc., we're working to remove any ambiguity to their continuing domination), which possibly can travel interstellar distances...
Earth had/has few other fairly intelligent lineages, but they generally ended up in a sort of evolutionary dead end (probably; as far as civilization goes). Octopus - wrong environmental pressures / too short lifespan / non-social. Magpies / crows / etc. - limits on early development due to eggs, harder scaling up of body plan, lack of "free" limbs. Dolphins / whales - again limbs and environment putting limits.
We were lucky. A fairly large brain with room to grow, free set of prehensile limbs, living in close social groups and in an environment which at the time promoted "progress".
Not much of a difference - large part of the speed of Voyagers came from gravitational slingshots (not done in a way to strictly maximize speed, but to maximize science return)
We humans may be small but we think big.
Which revolves virtually exclusively around merely convincing ourselves into thinking how we are not small (don't get me wrong, generally quite useful survival trait and why our evolution strengthened it, but...)