This treaty has been in force since 2002. Lots of flights have occurred over Russia and over a lot of other people, including the United States. They happen pretty often, actually.
The protest has been filed (it just costs a stamp!) and the stop work either has or will soon be official direction from the contracting officer.
SpaceX and Boeing may use their own funding to work on whatever they like, but they CANNOT charge the Government for the work they perform during the stop work. If the protest is not sustained and the contracts are left in place, the net effect would then be that they would complete their contracts for less than the negotiated cost. I don't know what sort of contract they have with NASA, but for a fixed-price contract it will come out in the wash and they'll be reimbursed for the work they did on their own dime during the protest (in effect, but not strictly legally).
If the contract is instead cost-plus (incentive or fee), they will come in under their bid and be: 1) unable to recover their investment, because it's illegal to bill the work after the fact if you weren't authorized to do the work, and 2) in hot water with NASA, because it's illegal for the Government to accept the work for free.
In short, reputable contractors do NOT perform work on Government contracts when told to stop. It's bad all around.
It's not a bad theory, but the leading candidate relates to impact processes that leave what is called "remanent magnetization". The science is not settled. The abstract here gives you a feel for the kind of discussions taking place (but you probably have to pay to get to the article). Google will turn up more work along these lines, including tests in hypervelocity launcher facilities.
It's clear that our failure to respond to the extraterrestrials shorter burst of gamma rays have led them to try to get our attention with much bigger and more powerful technology.
When China finally reaches the modern era and actually lets its people have free access to information, such ignorant posts as yours might become less common. Well, no, this is Slashdot.
They were in talks to participate in the ISS. The ISS partners invited them in as potential responsible, collaborative partners in the future of manned space flight..
Then they conducted a reckless ASAT test at relatively high LEO altitudes and nearly doubled the number of trackable debris at that altitude [see Johnson Space Center's Orbital Debris Quarterly Newsletter for the chart]. At that altitude, the pieces of their defunct weather satellite will remain a hazard for many decades. That got them uninvited.
China needs to decide whether the PLA is running the show or not, and decide whether they want to be a responsible space-faring nation... or not.
An incredibly large number of things. People who don't do research for a living would be shocked to discover how many "facts" are taken on faith and never really subjected to any scrutiny. Then, one day, somebody does and it's a big discovery. The amazing part is how common it is.
What's somewhat related and very interesting is that the space shuttle often flies in the 200-300 km range of altitudes. We consider that "space", but it's right in the heart of the ionosphere in most places.
A thinner or closer ionosphere does not relate to scouring of the atmosphere by the solar wind. It is the Earth's natural magnetic field that protects the atmosphere from being stripped away by the supersonic solar wind.
A pending reversal of the Earth's magnetic dipole may somewhat increase atmospheric scouring, but you must remember that only the dipole moment is going to reverse direction. The higher order (e.g. quadrupole) moments won't go anywhere and will still deflect the solar wind. You'll just get aurora in unusual places for a while.
Right, and later on something will fail and it will explode unexpectedly.
The idea has been tried before (big surprise). The Russians used to deliberately blow up their satellites or rocket bodies, and in doing so produced an enormous amount of debris. They eventually saw that this wasn't the best idea.
This is typical of the shortsighted idiotic human being. Most people just seem incapable of thinking multiple steps ahead. It's a pretty obvious problem that clear thinking would have revealed from the get go. But, as is the human way, it was far easier to just forget about the problem until it interferes. Of course as soon as someone would have suggested that we find a way to clean up the space junk early on, they would have been derided for getting in the way and worrying about petty concerns. Humanity disgusts me.
Well, yes, and no. When we were originally sending things into space, we had no accurate models of atmospheric drag, which is highly variable and depends on many things, like how much the atmosphere is being "puffed up" by solar radiation.
But as you imply, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that blowing up your spent booster stages maybe wasn't the best way of disposing of them, even when you don't have good drag models.
The problem is, it creates enough floating crap in orbit that any real attempt to disable US orbital capabilities will effectively eliminate huge swaths of orbital real estate for hundreds and thousands of years.
Debris in LEO typically doesn't last more than a few weeks to months, and only occasionally for years. Nothing will last hundreds and thousands of years. Atmospheric drag is simply too great, and the bigger the piece of junk, the greater the drag.
MEO and GEO debris lasts longer, but the higher you go, the more real-estate there actually is in such orbits.
This guy did exactly what you say: tested what effect a single driver could have when trying to calm traffic waves. I've given it a shot on occasion (when traffic was heavy enough to prevent other drivers pulling around me), and it does work to some extent.
[...] designed to shoot down enemy missiles half a world away, at the speed of light
That's a pretty impressive feat. Does it shoot the laser straight through the Earth's core? Or have they managed to get the jumbo to fly at the speed of light?
You got modded funny, as you intended to be, I'm sure. But it seems to have launched a series of replies trying to theorize about how the laser is going to propagate halfway around the world. So let me rain on the parade.
The Airborne Laser is an in-theater weapon, designed to intercept ballistic missiles during the boost phase. It flies up at around 40,000 feet and can engage targets within range that appear above its horizon.
It doesn't bounce lasers off satellites or propagate a laser beam "halfway around the world", as TFA says. The author was being a bit grandiose but caused some confusion in the process. It is half-way around the world, if that is where the missiles are coming from. The plane is there with the missiles, though. So are the radars that help it target.
There has been a lot of research put into making this weapon functional (directed energy, targeting, adaptive optics), and the early results are promising. The upcoming tests should be very interesting indeed.
So if we're developing lasers that shoot down missiles "half a world away" why on earth are we also developing a missile defense system that uses other missiles to shoot down incoming ballistics?
Layered defense, for one thing. There are three places you can try to hit a ballistic missile. Boost phase -- when it is on its way up -- Mid-course phase -- when the warhead is separating from its booster and coasting -- and terminal phase, when it is on its way down.
The airborne laser is a boost-phase system for in-theater (it can only hit things above its horizon). The "missile defense" you are thinking of, using ground-based interceptors and radars, is also boost-phase, but is typically conceived as being located much farther away, using long-range interceptors.
There are also ideas to provide mid-course and terminal defenses. The hope is that anything that gets through one layer will get caught by the next one.
Only corporations and people without a teenage relative pay for Windows.
Always has been that way, always will.
Wow. This got modded up.
But do you really believe it?
I'm finding more and more that the Linux devotees are as ignorant of who uses Windows and why as many Windows users are of why they should consider Linux.
Energy is not just "energy", unfortunately. There is such a thing as the "quality" of that energy, which is essentially a measure of how easy it is to use.
Although energy is conserved in all processes, it is converted from higher quality to lower quality, typically ending up as heat. Heat is extremely difficult to use productively.
It is not as simple as just saying "use a heat engine". First, there are thermodynamic limits to the efficiency that can be attained using a heat engine. Second, such an engine must reject heat to a cold reservoir (i.e., something that has lower temperature). If you want to use space as that cold reservoir, you have the same problem as cooling your space station: how do you effectively reject heat into it?
Loved that game, even though I only got to play it for a week at my brother's place while visiting. I didn't own a computer at the time that would play it.
You know, you can just download it and play it on your PC. Start here and poke around the links. I don't know if anyone still enforces the copyright on it, but the sites that offer it for download appear to go untouched.
Or you can get a legitimate one off E-Bay, guilt-free, with box and manuals and everything (even the codewheel!).
It runs in CGA graphics, so you might install DOS in a Virtual PC just to run it. The nice thing is you can just suspend the virtual machine and pop right back in where you left off.
It doesn't quite hold one's attention like it did back in the day, but it reminds you of those aspects that made it such a great experience for the imagination.
It is just a case of the whole system does not meet the arbitrary pile of paperwork test required for NASA...
"arbitrary pile of paperwork test"?
I think you're taking your anti-NASA hyperbole a little far here. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to safely launch a person into space and bring them back again?
Does the firm have any ideas on how to avoid tremendous death and destruction if this immensely long cable were to fall to the Earth, possibly hitting certain areas twice as badly if it were long enough to wrap more than once around?
I've heard this concern before but I've never really understood why it is a concern.
When operating, the cable for the space elevator is all rotating at the same angular speed as the Earth's surface. That is, it isn't wrapping itself around the planet all the time, so it has the same angular velocity all the way up. Of course, this means the linear velocity grows as you go up the cable.
If it snaps, it is going to start falling down, because it is NOT in orbit. Only at the geosynchronous terminus does it have enough velocity to actually orbit, so it falls d..o..w..n....
And since the Earth's atmosphere at the equator essentially co-rotates with the Earth all the way out to about 24000 km, there won't be a strong tendency for the cable to move laterally due to its altitude. Sure, prevailing winds and such will move it some number of km in some direction, but that will really only happen to the lower 100 km or so. Everything above that will burn up as it falls into the atmosphere.
Above 24000 km and up to geosynchronous orbit, there will probably be further motion, recoil, etc., and the cable may go in an unpredictable direction. You could probably reel it back into the geosynchronous terminus, though. Dealing with the counterweight might be more interesting, but it would just stay in orbit somewhere above GEO.
So -- long story short -- I don't see how we need to worry about the cable falling on us.
Even though their prices are slightly higher, I know they will take any doa hardware back without asking too many questions or making me jump through hoops.
You are definitely right, and Newegg is great about MOST things... however...
you get "sorry, we can't take it back once it's opened, try the manufacturer" from some crappy dealer
You can also get this from Newegg. I ordered a great big Viewsonic CRT I couldn't get locally and it arrived with green spots showing permanently in the corners of the screen. Newegg said "sorry, we can't take it back. Try the manufacturer.".
So I had to haul it to Fedex way the hell out in Elbonia to ship it back to Viewsonic, who eventually sent me one that works.
Sometimes even the good companies are at the mercy of the manufacturers' return policies. It makes me wonder if some of the crappy companies are suffering as much from that as from their own crappiness...
Every time we do something trivial like this, it means cleaning it all up later is going to be that much more difficult.
The ISS is in a low enough orbit (~400km) that this thing will not be there for very long. The odds of it causing a problem before it re-enters are very very small. At most, it will "only" take a few years to re-enter.
It's the stuff that gets left higher up that poses real risk, hence the change in attitude about blowing things up when you are done with them, and the desire to save fuel on spacecraft with propulsion to facilitate a controlled re-entry if possible (although that is also for safety reasons with big stuff that might hit somebody).
Slashdot Mirror
But good for Finland!
SpaceX and Boeing may use their own funding to work on whatever they like, but they CANNOT charge the Government for the work they perform during the stop work. If the protest is not sustained and the contracts are left in place, the net effect would then be that they would complete their contracts for less than the negotiated cost. I don't know what sort of contract they have with NASA, but for a fixed-price contract it will come out in the wash and they'll be reimbursed for the work they did on their own dime during the protest (in effect, but not strictly legally).
If the contract is instead cost-plus (incentive or fee), they will come in under their bid and be: 1) unable to recover their investment, because it's illegal to bill the work after the fact if you weren't authorized to do the work, and 2) in hot water with NASA, because it's illegal for the Government to accept the work for free.
In short, reputable contractors do NOT perform work on Government contracts when told to stop. It's bad all around.
It's not a bad theory, but the leading candidate relates to impact processes that leave what is called "remanent magnetization". The science is not settled. The abstract here gives you a feel for the kind of discussions taking place (but you probably have to pay to get to the article). Google will turn up more work along these lines, including tests in hypervelocity launcher facilities.
It's clear that our failure to respond to the extraterrestrials shorter burst of gamma rays have led them to try to get our attention with much bigger and more powerful technology.
Will someone please answer that phone?!
... and buy insurance. Contract for immediate armed response to the alarm if you really want somebody to get hurt.
And they are complete and helpless victims of "open spying by satellites", with no spy satellites of their own.
When China finally reaches the modern era and actually lets its people have free access to information, such ignorant posts as yours might become less common. Well, no, this is Slashdot.
Then they conducted a reckless ASAT test at relatively high LEO altitudes and nearly doubled the number of trackable debris at that altitude [see Johnson Space Center's Orbital Debris Quarterly Newsletter for the chart]. At that altitude, the pieces of their defunct weather satellite will remain a hazard for many decades. That got them uninvited.
China needs to decide whether the PLA is running the show or not, and decide whether they want to be a responsible space-faring nation... or not.
An incredibly large number of things. People who don't do research for a living would be shocked to discover how many "facts" are taken on faith and never really subjected to any scrutiny. Then, one day, somebody does and it's a big discovery. The amazing part is how common it is.
It's all a matter of perspective.
A pending reversal of the Earth's magnetic dipole may somewhat increase atmospheric scouring, but you must remember that only the dipole moment is going to reverse direction. The higher order (e.g. quadrupole) moments won't go anywhere and will still deflect the solar wind. You'll just get aurora in unusual places for a while.
The idea has been tried before (big surprise). The Russians used to deliberately blow up their satellites or rocket bodies, and in doing so produced an enormous amount of debris. They eventually saw that this wasn't the best idea.
Well, yes, and no. When we were originally sending things into space, we had no accurate models of atmospheric drag, which is highly variable and depends on many things, like how much the atmosphere is being "puffed up" by solar radiation.
But as you imply, it didn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that blowing up your spent booster stages maybe wasn't the best way of disposing of them, even when you don't have good drag models.
There's certainly no excuse now, however.
Debris in LEO typically doesn't last more than a few weeks to months, and only occasionally for years. Nothing will last hundreds and thousands of years. Atmospheric drag is simply too great, and the bigger the piece of junk, the greater the drag.
MEO and GEO debris lasts longer, but the higher you go, the more real-estate there actually is in such orbits.
Traffic Waves
This guy did exactly what you say: tested what effect a single driver could have when trying to calm traffic waves. I've given it a shot on occasion (when traffic was heavy enough to prevent other drivers pulling around me), and it does work to some extent.
Well, that makes sense, except for the fact that the threats against which they are defending are not likely to diminish in any way.
I think they are in for the long haul. If anything, the problem will only get worse and security will be tightened further.
The Airborne Laser is an in-theater weapon, designed to intercept ballistic missiles during the boost phase. It flies up at around 40,000 feet and can engage targets within range that appear above its horizon.
It doesn't bounce lasers off satellites or propagate a laser beam "halfway around the world", as TFA says. The author was being a bit grandiose but caused some confusion in the process. It is half-way around the world, if that is where the missiles are coming from. The plane is there with the missiles, though. So are the radars that help it target.
There has been a lot of research put into making this weapon functional (directed energy, targeting, adaptive optics), and the early results are promising. The upcoming tests should be very interesting indeed.
OK. Resume speculating.
The airborne laser is a boost-phase system for in-theater (it can only hit things above its horizon). The "missile defense" you are thinking of, using ground-based interceptors and radars, is also boost-phase, but is typically conceived as being located much farther away, using long-range interceptors.
There are also ideas to provide mid-course and terminal defenses. The hope is that anything that gets through one layer will get caught by the next one.
But do you really believe it?
I'm finding more and more that the Linux devotees are as ignorant of who uses Windows and why as many Windows users are of why they should consider Linux.
Although energy is conserved in all processes, it is converted from higher quality to lower quality, typically ending up as heat. Heat is extremely difficult to use productively.
It is not as simple as just saying "use a heat engine". First, there are thermodynamic limits to the efficiency that can be attained using a heat engine. Second, such an engine must reject heat to a cold reservoir (i.e., something that has lower temperature). If you want to use space as that cold reservoir, you have the same problem as cooling your space station: how do you effectively reject heat into it?
You know, you can just download it and play it on your PC. Start here and poke around the links. I don't know if anyone still enforces the copyright on it, but the sites that offer it for download appear to go untouched.
Or you can get a legitimate one off E-Bay, guilt-free, with box and manuals and everything (even the codewheel!).
It runs in CGA graphics, so you might install DOS in a Virtual PC just to run it. The nice thing is you can just suspend the virtual machine and pop right back in where you left off.
It doesn't quite hold one's attention like it did back in the day, but it reminds you of those aspects that made it such a great experience for the imagination.
I think you're taking your anti-NASA hyperbole a little far here. Do you have any idea how difficult it is to safely launch a person into space and bring them back again?
Nevermind. You answered my question in your post.
Arbitrary pile of paperwork, indeed.
I've heard this concern before but I've never really understood why it is a concern.
When operating, the cable for the space elevator is all rotating at the same angular speed as the Earth's surface. That is, it isn't wrapping itself around the planet all the time, so it has the same angular velocity all the way up. Of course, this means the linear velocity grows as you go up the cable.
If it snaps, it is going to start falling down, because it is NOT in orbit. Only at the geosynchronous terminus does it have enough velocity to actually orbit, so it falls d..o..w..n....
And since the Earth's atmosphere at the equator essentially co-rotates with the Earth all the way out to about 24000 km, there won't be a strong tendency for the cable to move laterally due to its altitude. Sure, prevailing winds and such will move it some number of km in some direction, but that will really only happen to the lower 100 km or so. Everything above that will burn up as it falls into the atmosphere.
Above 24000 km and up to geosynchronous orbit, there will probably be further motion, recoil, etc., and the cable may go in an unpredictable direction. You could probably reel it back into the geosynchronous terminus, though. Dealing with the counterweight might be more interesting, but it would just stay in orbit somewhere above GEO.
So -- long story short -- I don't see how we need to worry about the cable falling on us.
You are definitely right, and Newegg is great about MOST things... however...
You can also get this from Newegg. I ordered a great big Viewsonic CRT I couldn't get locally and it arrived with green spots showing permanently in the corners of the screen. Newegg said "sorry, we can't take it back. Try the manufacturer.".
So I had to haul it to Fedex way the hell out in Elbonia to ship it back to Viewsonic, who eventually sent me one that works.
Sometimes even the good companies are at the mercy of the manufacturers' return policies. It makes me wonder if some of the crappy companies are suffering as much from that as from their own crappiness...
The ISS is in a low enough orbit (~400km) that this thing will not be there for very long. The odds of it causing a problem before it re-enters are very very small. At most, it will "only" take a few years to re-enter.
It's the stuff that gets left higher up that poses real risk, hence the change in attitude about blowing things up when you are done with them, and the desire to save fuel on spacecraft with propulsion to facilitate a controlled re-entry if possible (although that is also for safety reasons with big stuff that might hit somebody).