I do something similar to what your looking for with a combination of Synergy (http://synergy-project.org/), which uses your network to send the keyboard/mouse inputs to the correct computer based on your mouse position), and multiple inputs on my monitors.
In other words:
PC1 would be your base computer, and would have the keyboard/mouse you want to use with everything attached. PC1 would be attached to the primary port of both monitors (HDMI, for instance)
PC2 would also have a keyboard/mouse, but they wouldn't be used. It would be hooked up to the secondary port of both monitors (maybe displayport)
DOCK1 will obviously have the laptops built-in keyboard/mouse, but that wouldn't be used. It would be hooked up to the third port of both monitors (maybe DVI or RGB)
In this setup, you'll need to manually change the monitor inputs, and synergy will direct the keyboard/mouse to the correct places.
As far as I know, your only other option would be the matrix KVM (as mentioned above a few times)
Yeah but NASA are fantastic engineers. Their interface design and validation are orders of magnitude ahead of anybody else.
NASA didn't design the LEM, Northrop Grumman did. Spacecraft are designed by aerospace companies (like Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, and now SpaceX), and then NASA picks the design they like best. The best engineers are typically at the private companies because the pay is better than at government run NASA.
Consider the first shuttle flight. [...] And it worked first time. They were hot at the time, coming off the experience of Apollo.
Well, the first space shuttle, the Enterprise, never went to space. It's easy to have a successful first flight when you have the resources to build a full size scale model to 'test' with. And they weren't coming hot off Apollo; the space shuttle was about a decade later.
The most complex and unlikely machine (pretty much) ever built.
They made it needlessly complex. This is why they have had, and continue to have, so many problems. The designers promised several launches each month and a payload cost in $50-$100 per pound range.
The scientific community at the time said much the same things about the shuttle design that they currently say about the ISS; that it's too much money for too little return. Some even go so far as to suggest these overly-complex plans, pushed on the unsupportive science community are essentially aerospace company welfare.
By far the hardest part about launching humans into orbit is building a rocket capable of getting them up there. All the stuff necessary to sustain life adds a lot of weight, but it's no more (or less) difficult to engineer than any other satellite launched into orbit. Look at the Apollo lunar lander. That thing had panels you could *punch* through. The astronauts during testing were told that the flimsiness of the lander wouldn't be a problem in space when they were weightless....
In any case, thorough testing of the launch vehicle is absolutely necessary if for no other reason than to know the weight limit for the manned payload. But the design of the launch vehicle is robust (it can withstand various failures without scrubbing). Also, they'll be using these same engines (the Merlin 1C) in smaller launch vehicles, so they'll have plenty of reliability information.
To top it off, they're running a couple months early. As far as I see, they shouldn't have too many difficulties for a 2009 launch. *
* - God willing and the creek don't rise. **
** - Er, that is, God willing and the funding don't dry up.
-fsh
PS - Although I don't have personal experience in the aerospace industry, I'm doing research at an observatory right now. Not that that means anything, I just like telling people that I'm working at an observatory right now!
Heating it up in this case is just slang for turning it on before actually using it; there's not really a heater per se. I did find this from a NASA white paper:
Low-noise CCD performance was attained at a rate of 16 Mpix/s. 128 levels of time delay and integration (TDI) is used to achieve a signal-to-noise ratio of >150:1, but requires precision timing in the electronics and a quiet spacecraft.
The fact that the problem is semi-harmonic certainly seems to indicate some sort of short (like a ground-hum in a poorly installed car radio). The bad news is that the project leaders do not seem optimistic about correcting this problem (or even finding the cause). The first part to fail was one of the IR sensors, and IIRC it failed after orbit insertion (ie, after aerobraking), while the other problems are more recent.
Earlier in this same paper they also mention that a temperature of 20 Celsius is kept throughout the spacecraft, so there should be no fogging problems at all. Cassini had to run around Venus twice to get to Saturn, and hence had to worry with both heating and cooling; it was far more complex beastie.
In this case, the problem isn't the optics involved (like when they showed before and after pictures of the Hubble problem), but in the circuitry to transmit the images from the CCD to the antenna. Check out this schematic. If you look at the top picture, all the way on the right, you'll see 14 stylized circuit boards; that's where the problem is.
Because it's a circuitry/transmission problem, they can essentially recover the image from a particular detector or not. For the 'ringing' problem they've mentioned, if it's a small enough effect they can subtract it from the data.
Also in that picture, they show the 'focal plane assembly'; this is essentially a separate CCD for each color filter used (except the red color which goes all the way across). The problem is very bad in one of the IR chips; bad enough that they can't use the data at all.
In other words, it's a problem with the digital transmission. Just like for digital phone, radio, or TV; you either get a usable signal (perhaps with some drops) or no signal at all.
First off, inside NASA, all projects are referred to by particular names and acronyms, and you'll often see people that aren't aware of the 'street name' of a particular project.
Second, the office of operations is more into the financial stuff than the technical stuff. That'd be like asking Linus Torvald's banker about the next Linux release.
Third, although NASA is a governmental agency, is has a disproportionate number of extremely intelligent and driven engineers and scientists on board. This is evidenced by the simple fact that although we have put millions of dollars into orbit around Mars, people *expect* it to work perfectly every time. The reason we're looking up there is that we *don't* know everything; perhaps these problems indicate an unexpected radiation belt or dust belt around Mars; maybe the problem was during the aerobraking which somehow didn't go as expected.
To simply blame it on the bureaucracy inherent in any large organization is intellectually indolent at best. Any undertaking this huge will, by its very nature, involve many people doing many different things, and as such will be infested with bureaucracy. This does not mean that all such projects are doomed to failure by way of miscommunication;quite the opposite in fact.
From your post: I used to date the daughter of the Vice President of Operations at Nasa.
Please do not take your failings in communication out on NASA.
Although the rovers are certainly the superstars of Mars research, the MRO has provided more usable data than any other Mars mission so far. I certainly hope they can fix this problem, or at least work around it; the MRO should have many years of good science left in its system. I believe that the primary mission is scheduled to run through 2008 and then extended missions will be tacked on after that.
Incidentally, this is the camera that could pick out the
rovers from orbit. Losing definition on this camera would certainly impact one of the missions objectives, which is to look for good landing spots for future missions (robotic and human).
Every time another AD&D ruleset game comes out, you see the same thing:
The game, still in Beta, disappointed him by falling short of the pen-and-paper roots he was hoping for.
I don't think some people will be happy until the games start printing out character sheets after every round.
Hmmm....
Play the new AD&D ruleset based online game! Follows the rules so closely that you'll think you were playing with pen and paper!
Features for the new AD&D online game:
-Use your webcam to scan the number from the actual die you just rolled! (dice not included)
-Must wait 5 minutes after every command to see what happens next!
-Get actual PrintOuts(tm) of your updated character sheet after every round, showing your new hit point totals along with everything else that didn't change!
-Electromagnetic hex board moves your crappy little miniatures for you! (crappy little miniatures not included)
-GameMaster personality plugins! Watch your computer grab it's stuff and walk out of your house in a big huff! (What happened to all the Cheetos?)
And so much more!
If you can launch men into orbit, you can launch weapons there. Everytime they demonstrate their ability to put a manned craft into orbit, they are also showing that they are gaining in technological ability by leaps and bounds. It's nice to be able to do real science in space, but it's far more important to be able to get there in the first place.
BTW - China *does* have plans to go to the moon and establish a base there.
From the horse's mouth, this is site referring to a Chinese white paper outlining their plans for lunar exploration.
I hope we see a lot more of this. It's like when airplanes became common, and suddenly lots of great archeaological sites were found, like the Nasca desert drawings.
I'm sure Google isn't exactly hurt by the excellent free press, either.
This first table shows the Apollo Budget over its entire lifespan, including, at the bottom, the percentage Apollo made of the entire NASA budget: Apollo Budget
Make sure you convert the numbers given into 2005 dollars: Inflation
This link give the entire budgeting report from last year for NASA. About halfway down, you'll find Figure 1-1 : the second graph has the numbers calculated in terms of 2005 dollars. While these numbers don't explicitly separate manned spaceflight from robotic missions, there's a table near the bottom that does. Current Budget
To answer your question, at the height of Apollo, NASA was running at $26 billion 2005 dollars, while today they're running at about $16 billion. We have launches on a regular basis, and are monitoring not only the new stuff (like Cassini around Saturn), but also the stuff launched in the 60's (like certain Moon experiments, the Voyager satellites, etc). In short, NASA is *far* more efficient now than they could possibly have been back then. We're doing much more science for far less money.
I understand that it can happen every once in a while, but the whole reason they could make a movie out of the counterfeiter was because it was so unusual.
The problem with hiring a criminal for law enforcement is simply that the techniques the criminal would be most comfortable with are against the law. Sure, he might be able to track down more criminals than the trained enforcement personel, but he also wouldn't be able to back it up in court, and wouldn't be able to get the convictions.
Certainly, law enforcement will interview known felons in order to help break a case, but the felons are rarely put in a position of trust, where they will be required to testify, simply because it's way too easy for the defense to pick them apart.
This is one idea that I really don't understand. Why would the security firms want to hire someone who has hacked into computers? Homicide detectives don't hire murderers, the SEC doesn't hire fraudsters, the ATF doesn't hire drunk smokers w/ unregistered firearm violations....
I wouldn't hire this kid simply because he would open me up to lawsuits from my stockholders.
There is almost always political will to do space exploration (at least on the republican side), because the money goes to the Boeings and Lockheed-Martins. It's all a question of whether they can do it quietly enough or, as in this case, inexpensively enough, to avoid pissing off the voting public.
Half a billion dollar prize for a lunar orbiter? That simply means that whoever does it will only be $4.5 billion in debt. A couple billion dollar prize for a freakin' lunar base? That's like offering someone $10 if they'll shoot themselves in the head.
Burt Rutan? Never. There's no way he could raise the scratch necessary for such a huge undertaking.
The Chinese are certainly interested in putting men on the moon, however, as is JAXA.
The ESA , on the other hand, is looking to go directly to Mars.
We could do this in a short time frame again, but the projects that we're competing against, namely the Chinese, Japanese, and European, are all operating under longer timescales, making ours the most likely to finish first. Also, the current Lunar exploration budget has been designed to require very little in the way of extra funding. They're cutting out other programs that cost losts of money (read Space Shuttle, ISS, and some exploration missions), but the overall budget is very similar.
For these two reasons, it seems liekly that this will actually work, and that we will land men on the moon again in the very near future.
Nah, it's more like modern budgeting. We're simply not willing to put 3-5% of the federal budget behind such a program, like we did with Apollo. NASA *as a whole* now comprises less than 1% of the federal budget.
If you look about halfway down, you'll see that the budget of the CEV is far outweighed by NASA's other activities, as well as being less than the amount budgeted for the Space Shuttle.
If you're really interested, you can see exactly what NASA's budget entails for the Space Shuttle here: A Budgetary Analysis of NASA's New Vision for Space Exploration
The link for the next five years is the interesting one: NASA's Current Five-Year Plan and Extended Budget Projection
You can see how the funding for the shuttle is decreased fairly quickly while the funding for the Crew Exploration Vehicle increases. The main reason the shuttle hasn't already been dismantled is because of our commitment to the International Space Station. The Russian Progress ship is okay, but can only ferry a couple people at once. In order to fully staff the ISS, the Space Shuttle is required.
Several elements will be carried in Discovery's payload bay for delivery to the Station. These include the Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello, containing racks of supplies, food and water, and the Human Research Facility-2 rack. Also, the External Stowage Platform and a replacement Control Moment Gyroscope will be carried in Discovery's payload bay.
During Mission STS-114, mission specialists will perform spacewalks to install the External Stowage Platform and the Control Moment Gyroscope onto the Station. They will unberth the logistics module and attach it to the Station to transfer several tons of supplies and equipment, including food and water, for use by the Expedition 11 crew.
As much as I wish they were putting money into something other than the ISS, it's fantastic to see that the shuttle is fully operational again.
About halfway down is a comparison of the 2004 and 2005 budgets. You can see that the increase is only $292 million, a small fraction of the overall budget. If you compare NASA's current funding with the funding from the Apollo Era (adjusting for inflation) you'll see that the funding levels are on a very similar footing. Of course in those days NASA's funding was about 4% of the federal budget, while today NASA is significantly less than 1%.
The point, however, is that this program is not increasing NASA's funding by much at all, which is its main selling point. That's why Bush Sr.'s plan failed miserably; it would have required about a 33% increase in NASA's funding. So yes, it's a very long range plan, but most analysts believe it has a very high chance of success.
Pete Conrad, commander of Apollo 12, made a bet with a reporter who thought that Armstrong's words had been written by PR flacks. He told her exactly what he was going to say months before the launch:
"Whoopee! That may have been one small step for Neil, but it was a big one for me!"
He was also the shortest of all the Apollo Astronauts.
If you assume that you're going from Earth's orbit to Mars' orbit (1AU to 1.5AU) straight out (about 75 million km), then it would indeed take about 48 hours the way you describe.
In the real world you also have to get out of Earth's gravity, fight against the Sun's gravity, and then push against Mars' gravity to avoid crashing.
You also have to consider that when leaving Earth, you still have Earth's tangential velocity, which is much greater than Mars' (via Kepler's third law). The best way to go from Earth's orbit to Mars' orbit is a Hohmann transfer (about 400 million km). Say an object in orbit needs to go to a higher orbit. You don't fire your thrusters against gravity, you fire them in the direction of your orbit. Of course it's impossible for a chemical rocket to fire that long; the heat buildup would destroy the engine. That's why all current missions get the necessary velocity in one quick push.
And of course the new technologies will be better, but they either don't exist or they are being tested (SMART-1 had several problems in it's 14 *month* journey to the moon). While NASA hasn't launched an ion-drive mission they most certainly *have* tested such engines, as well as the nuclear thermal propulsion engines. The problem is, as I said, economics. There's absolutely no reason to get a scientific mission to mars in a two week timeline.
Finally, when you say We should be testing new technologies, you make it seem like we aren't testing new technologies. For a list of just the projects that NASA is funding, check out the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts That page shows projects working on all of the propulsion technologies you mentioned. Other independent researchers are looking into all of the concepts you mentioned, and more.
Slashdot Mirror
I do something similar to what your looking for with a combination of Synergy (http://synergy-project.org/), which uses your network to send the keyboard/mouse inputs to the correct computer based on your mouse position), and multiple inputs on my monitors. In other words: PC1 would be your base computer, and would have the keyboard/mouse you want to use with everything attached. PC1 would be attached to the primary port of both monitors (HDMI, for instance) PC2 would also have a keyboard/mouse, but they wouldn't be used. It would be hooked up to the secondary port of both monitors (maybe displayport) DOCK1 will obviously have the laptops built-in keyboard/mouse, but that wouldn't be used. It would be hooked up to the third port of both monitors (maybe DVI or RGB) In this setup, you'll need to manually change the monitor inputs, and synergy will direct the keyboard/mouse to the correct places. As far as I know, your only other option would be the matrix KVM (as mentioned above a few times)
Yeah but NASA are fantastic engineers. Their interface design and validation are orders of magnitude ahead of anybody else.
NASA didn't design the LEM, Northrop Grumman did. Spacecraft are designed by aerospace companies (like Northrop-Grumman, Boeing, Rockwell, and now SpaceX), and then NASA picks the design they like best. The best engineers are typically at the private companies because the pay is better than at government run NASA.
Consider the first shuttle flight. [...] And it worked first time. They were hot at the time, coming off the experience of Apollo.
Well, the first space shuttle, the Enterprise, never went to space. It's easy to have a successful first flight when you have the resources to build a full size scale model to 'test' with. And they weren't coming hot off Apollo; the space shuttle was about a decade later.
The most complex and unlikely machine (pretty much) ever built.
They made it needlessly complex. This is why they have had, and continue to have, so many problems. The designers promised several launches each month and a payload cost in $50-$100 per pound range.
The scientific community at the time said much the same things about the shuttle design that they currently say about the ISS; that it's too much money for too little return. Some even go so far as to suggest these overly-complex plans, pushed on the unsupportive science community are essentially aerospace company welfare.
In any case, thorough testing of the launch vehicle is absolutely necessary if for no other reason than to know the weight limit for the manned payload. But the design of the launch vehicle is robust (it can withstand various failures without scrubbing). Also, they'll be using these same engines (the Merlin 1C) in smaller launch vehicles, so they'll have plenty of reliability information.
To top it off, they're running a couple months early. As far as I see, they shouldn't have too many difficulties for a 2009 launch. *
* - God willing and the creek don't rise. **
** - Er, that is, God willing and the funding don't dry up.
-fsh PS - Although I don't have personal experience in the aerospace industry, I'm doing research at an observatory right now. Not that that means anything, I just like telling people that I'm working at an observatory right now!
Earlier in this same paper they also mention that a temperature of 20 Celsius is kept throughout the spacecraft, so there should be no fogging problems at all. Cassini had to run around Venus twice to get to Saturn, and hence had to worry with both heating and cooling; it was far more complex beastie.
Because it's a circuitry/transmission problem, they can essentially recover the image from a particular detector or not. For the 'ringing' problem they've mentioned, if it's a small enough effect they can subtract it from the data.
Also in that picture, they show the 'focal plane assembly'; this is essentially a separate CCD for each color filter used (except the red color which goes all the way across). The problem is very bad in one of the IR chips; bad enough that they can't use the data at all.
In other words, it's a problem with the digital transmission. Just like for digital phone, radio, or TV; you either get a usable signal (perhaps with some drops) or no signal at all.
Second, the office of operations is more into the financial stuff than the technical stuff. That'd be like asking Linus Torvald's banker about the next Linux release.
Third, although NASA is a governmental agency, is has a disproportionate number of extremely intelligent and driven engineers and scientists on board. This is evidenced by the simple fact that although we have put millions of dollars into orbit around Mars, people *expect* it to work perfectly every time. The reason we're looking up there is that we *don't* know everything; perhaps these problems indicate an unexpected radiation belt or dust belt around Mars; maybe the problem was during the aerobraking which somehow didn't go as expected.
To simply blame it on the bureaucracy inherent in any large organization is intellectually indolent at best. Any undertaking this huge will, by its very nature, involve many people doing many different things, and as such will be infested with bureaucracy. This does not mean that all such projects are doomed to failure by way of miscommunication;quite the opposite in fact.
From your post:
I used to date the daughter of the Vice President of Operations at Nasa.
Please do not take your failings in communication out on NASA.
Incidentally, this is the camera that could pick out the rovers from orbit. Losing definition on this camera would certainly impact one of the missions objectives, which is to look for good landing spots for future missions (robotic and human).
The game, still in Beta, disappointed him by falling short of the pen-and-paper roots he was hoping for.
I don't think some people will be happy until the games start printing out character sheets after every round.
Hmmm....
Play the new AD&D ruleset based online game! Follows the rules so closely that you'll think you were playing with pen and paper!
Features for the new AD&D online game:
-Use your webcam to scan the number from the actual die you just rolled! (dice not included)
-Must wait 5 minutes after every command to see what happens next!
-Get actual PrintOuts(tm) of your updated character sheet after every round, showing your new hit point totals along with everything else that didn't change!
-Electromagnetic hex board moves your crappy little miniatures for you! (crappy little miniatures not included)
-GameMaster personality plugins! Watch your computer grab it's stuff and walk out of your house in a big huff! (What happened to all the Cheetos?)
And so much more!
BTW - China *does* have plans to go to the moon and establish a base there. From the horse's mouth, this is site referring to a Chinese white paper outlining their plans for lunar exploration.
I, for one, welcome our new Taikonaut overlords....
I'm sure Google isn't exactly hurt by the excellent free press, either.
This first table shows the Apollo Budget over its entire lifespan, including, at the bottom, the percentage Apollo made of the entire NASA budget:
Apollo Budget
Make sure you convert the numbers given into 2005 dollars:
Inflation
This link give the entire budgeting report from last year for NASA. About halfway down, you'll find Figure 1-1 : the second graph has the numbers calculated in terms of 2005 dollars. While these numbers don't explicitly separate manned spaceflight from robotic missions, there's a table near the bottom that does.
Current Budget
To answer your question, at the height of Apollo, NASA was running at $26 billion 2005 dollars, while today they're running at about $16 billion. We have launches on a regular basis, and are monitoring not only the new stuff (like Cassini around Saturn), but also the stuff launched in the 60's (like certain Moon experiments, the Voyager satellites, etc). In short, NASA is *far* more efficient now than they could possibly have been back then. We're doing much more science for far less money.
The problem with hiring a criminal for law enforcement is simply that the techniques the criminal would be most comfortable with are against the law. Sure, he might be able to track down more criminals than the trained enforcement personel, but he also wouldn't be able to back it up in court, and wouldn't be able to get the convictions.
Certainly, law enforcement will interview known felons in order to help break a case, but the felons are rarely put in a position of trust, where they will be required to testify, simply because it's way too easy for the defense to pick them apart.
This is one idea that I really don't understand. Why would the security firms want to hire someone who has hacked into computers? Homicide detectives don't hire murderers, the SEC doesn't hire fraudsters, the ATF doesn't hire drunk smokers w/ unregistered firearm violations....
I wouldn't hire this kid simply because he would open me up to lawsuits from my stockholders.
There is almost always political will to do space exploration (at least on the republican side), because the money goes to the Boeings and Lockheed-Martins. It's all a question of whether they can do it quietly enough or, as in this case, inexpensively enough, to avoid pissing off the voting public.
Half a billion dollar prize for a lunar orbiter? That simply means that whoever does it will only be $4.5 billion in debt. A couple billion dollar prize for a freakin' lunar base? That's like offering someone $10 if they'll shoot themselves in the head.
The Chinese are certainly interested in putting men on the moon, however, as is JAXA.
The ESA , on the other hand, is looking to go directly to Mars.
We could do this in a short time frame again, but the projects that we're competing against, namely the Chinese, Japanese, and European, are all operating under longer timescales, making ours the most likely to finish first. Also, the current Lunar exploration budget has been designed to require very little in the way of extra funding. They're cutting out other programs that cost losts of money (read Space Shuttle, ISS, and some exploration missions), but the overall budget is very similar.
For these two reasons, it seems liekly that this will actually work, and that we will land men on the moon again in the very near future.
Nah, it's more like modern budgeting. We're simply not willing to put 3-5% of the federal budget behind such a program, like we did with Apollo. NASA *as a whole* now comprises less than 1% of the federal budget.
Bush's Vision for Space Exploration never gave a date for going to Mars. He said the Moon by 2020, and then Mars, well, sometime after that.
If you look about halfway down, you'll see that the budget of the CEV is far outweighed by NASA's other activities, as well as being less than the amount budgeted for the Space Shuttle.
If you're really interested, you can see exactly what NASA's budget entails for the Space Shuttle here:
A Budgetary Analysis of NASA's New Vision for Space Exploration
The link for the next five years is the interesting one:
NASA's Current Five-Year Plan and Extended Budget Projection
You can see how the funding for the shuttle is decreased fairly quickly while the funding for the Crew Exploration Vehicle increases. The main reason the shuttle hasn't already been dismantled is because of our commitment to the International Space Station. The Russian Progress ship is okay, but can only ferry a couple people at once. In order to fully staff the ISS, the Space Shuttle is required.
From the Mission Briefing
As much as I wish they were putting money into something other than the ISS, it's fantastic to see that the shuttle is fully operational again.A Budgetary Analysis of NASA's New Vision for Space Exploration
The link for the next five years is the interesting one:
NASA's Current Five-Year Plan and Extended Budget Projection
About halfway down is a comparison of the 2004 and 2005 budgets. You can see that the increase is only $292 million, a small fraction of the overall budget. If you compare NASA's current funding with the funding from the Apollo Era (adjusting for inflation) you'll see that the funding levels are on a very similar footing. Of course in those days NASA's funding was about 4% of the federal budget, while today NASA is significantly less than 1%.
The point, however, is that this program is not increasing NASA's funding by much at all, which is its main selling point. That's why Bush Sr.'s plan failed miserably; it would have required about a 33% increase in NASA's funding. So yes, it's a very long range plan, but most analysts believe it has a very high chance of success.
Pete Conrad, commander of Apollo 12, made a bet with a reporter who thought that Armstrong's words had been written by PR flacks. He told her exactly what he was going to say months before the launch:
"Whoopee! That may have been one small step for Neil, but it was a big one for me!"
He was also the shortest of all the Apollo Astronauts.
Why is drinking American beer like making love in a canoe?
They're both fucking close to water!
The Bruces, Live at the Hollywood Bowl
In the real world you also have to get out of Earth's gravity, fight against the Sun's gravity, and then push against Mars' gravity to avoid crashing.
You also have to consider that when leaving Earth, you still have Earth's tangential velocity, which is much greater than Mars' (via Kepler's third law). The best way to go from Earth's orbit to Mars' orbit is a Hohmann transfer (about 400 million km). Say an object in orbit needs to go to a higher orbit. You don't fire your thrusters against gravity, you fire them in the direction of your orbit. Of course it's impossible for a chemical rocket to fire that long; the heat buildup would destroy the engine. That's why all current missions get the necessary velocity in one quick push.
And of course the new technologies will be better, but they either don't exist or they are being tested (SMART-1 had several problems in it's 14 *month* journey to the moon). While NASA hasn't launched an ion-drive mission they most certainly *have* tested such engines, as well as the nuclear thermal propulsion engines. The problem is, as I said, economics. There's absolutely no reason to get a scientific mission to mars in a two week timeline.
Finally, when you say We should be testing new technologies, you make it seem like we aren't testing new technologies. For a list of just the projects that NASA is funding, check out the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts That page shows projects working on all of the propulsion technologies you mentioned. Other independent researchers are looking into all of the concepts you mentioned, and more.