The wikipedia article you linked to only seems to mention one run achieving fusion, with 3 neutrons detected. That's with 12.5 kV running current through some rather large solenoids, which suggests quite a significant power investment. This is far, far, far below unity. In fact, I'm not sure how high of confidence 3 neutrons offers. He says it scales extremely well, but it seems to me an intermediate demonstrator is warranted before investing $200 million in a 100 MW prototype. He's trying to run before he walks.
He's a very long ways from extracting useful power. Assuming it actually does scale as well as he claims, an analogy for the stage he's at right is like striking flint on steel to get a spark, but he's not even very adept at that yet. That's where the Tokamak design was 20-30 years ago. Tokamak now has a rudimentary firepit built and they're using matches. They both need to get a roaring fire before the industry can take over and build something useful around it to capture the energy. Except Bussard is talking about induction or electron capture or something like that, which is another change of direction. Additionally, one Dr. Todd Rider has suggested (via his thesis) that there are fundamental limitations to electrostatic confinement that may prevent it from ever being practical.
Don't get me wrong. This seems perhaps the most promising design in electrostatic confinement I've seen. But don't get Bussard wrong either. He hasn't shown anything significant yet.
My thoughts: Navy or DOE through a university (preferrably the latter or both) should provide funding for a 7th generation prototype incorporating some of his advances. The main goals should be consistently initiating and detecting fusion and experimentally verifying the output levels. If all that works, then a major investment may be justified, but at this point, I just don't see it.
Pretty much anytime someone talks about a black hole observation they are actually talking about an accretion disk around a black hole. Just about the only exception I can think of gravitational lensing. Although the article does not go into much detail, it is likely that the theory implicates some coincidental activity of matter falling into the black holes from their accretion disks, the resulting release of energy being the cause of heating of this cloud of gas.
By the way, since scale can be hard to appreciate in space, the article says the cloud is 6 million light years accross. In comparison, the Milky Way is only about 80,000 light years in diameter.
In fairness to my post, I was referring to naval nuclear reactors, upon which this will be based. Now I admit, I cited US nuclear naval vessels, and the same record does not quite hold for Soviet vessels (there are several accidents on record, nothing even remotely close to the scale of Chernobyl, however). I also admit I am being a little free on the definition of an accident. For example, there have been numerous spills of low level waste, but the ramifications of these events are miniscule. They were all able to be contained or diluted to background levels.
The list you link to, on the other hand, is very broad, including events such the loss of nuclear warheads in plane crashes and the ditching of a small RTG in a deep ocean trench that was planned to be left on the moon by Apollo 13. Arguably, much of the list is irrelevant to a nuclear power plant on a barge.
First of all, the objections were noted last time Slashdot covered this topic. Secondly, the greens are always complaining about nuclear power plants.
Also I see a some discrepancies between this article and others. Aside from the obvious claim that this is the first floating nuclear power plant in history (I guess if you don't count 11 carriers, a couple dozen cruisers, and well over 100 submarines for the USN alone, none of which have had a nuclear accident, btw), the BBC quotes it as costing $336 million, not $2.7 billion...sorry strike that, I see this news article has a.hk TLD (is that Hong Kong?)...different currency.
They've definitely considered it, but the costs don't scale as well as you might think, and the preference has almost always been increased capability rather than increased coverage.
Remember economies of scale can be applied to increasing mass, not just increasing quantities. For one launch, one landing, one chassis you can carry more instruments. Not just more, but more complex. The MER's each carry a stereo high res camera, stereo navigation camera, 2 stereo hazard cameras, microscopic imager, mossbauer spectrometer, X-ray spectrometer, thermal emissions spectrometer, rock abrasion tool, and the ability to gather additional data using many of the above tools or even parts of the rover itself (soil consistency by observing clumping on the wheels, weather patterns with the cameras, dust and color calibration targets, etc). Compared to a tiny remote like Sojourner, which had a two small cameras and a smaller X-ray spectrometer and could only reach about a dozen rocks total, each of the $410 million MER's can do far more than $280 million Sojourner Pathfinder.
Don't forget that Sojourner was not self-sufficient. It relied on Pathfinder to relay all of its data and commands. They saved a little bit of mass by keeping a lot of the heavier components on the immobile Pathfinder.
The Mars Science Laboratory will blow them all away for capability. It's science payload at 65 kg will represent over 8% of it's weight, compared to 5 kg out 185 for the MER's (3%), and I don't know what for the tiny 11 kg Sojourner. Part of the much higher cost goes towards developing the currently non-existant precision landing techniques that will let NASA place it in driving range of specific targets of interest. Part also goes towards expanding its range of acceptable landing zones by using an RTG instead of solar and computer-controlled descent rockets instead of airbags. It will have basically all the science instruments of the MER's but also include a higher resolution color microscope, zoom on the pan cam with video capability (NASA is dying to study those dust devils MER's discovered in more detail), a really sweet laser chemical analyzer, a complete weather science station, and a mack-daddy onboard sample analysis chamber for in depth experiments on both gas and soil/rock samples.
So for 5 times the cost (about $2 billion), the MSL carries 13 times the mass in tools with perhaps as much as 10 times the range as an MER.
Now this brings up the biggest drawback of the this approach: They'll only have one. They can't afford any upside down accelerometers, unit conversion errors, or phantom engine cutoff signals. I believe the main reason they decided to expand the MER program to 2 rovers was redundancy in the face of the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter. There was an added bonus that the areas the two landed in are quite different geologically. However, when it comes down to the decision time, the only way for NASA to get the instruments they want on the ground for the next mission with the money they have is a single, big mission.
In fact, all the previous missions have effectively served as scouts for the follow up missions. The design of the MSL is a result of what NASA learned from the MRO, MGS, MER's, Pathfinder, and Odyssey.
I can't wait to see what we'll learn from this big boy.
The linked article, which has more useful information in each paragraph than the entire original article from the story submission, is a little technical. Lemme try and simplify the important parts:
preliminary indications are that structures supporting the inner "cold mass" of one of the three magnets within its enclosing cryostat broke at a pressure of 20 atmospheres, in response to asymmetric forces applied during the test.
The magnets are chilled with liquid helium to keep the temperature near absolute 0. Some of the support framework which holds one of the magnets inside the coolant pipes ("cryostat") failed at 300 psi because the loads did not line up in a way the framework was designed to hold.
Such forces are expected on occasion during normal operation of the LHC. The failure does not concern the magnets or the cold masses themselves, but rather their assembly in the cryostat.
These conditions do not happen often, but they were known and were apparently overlooked by the engineers. Fortunately, the functional design of the system appears sound, it's just the design of physical supports that needs to be modified.
While the full cause of the problem is not yet known, failure to account for the asymmetric loads in the engineering design of the magnet appears to be a likely cause.
Contrary to what the submission and article imply, the math was probably fine, but they engineered the design for a less stressful load than it actually experiences in the worst anticipated case.
From 1998 to 2002, Fermilab conducted four engineering reviews of the magnets by experts from Fermilab, other US national laboratories and CERN. The reviews do not appear to have addressed these asymmetric loads. Tests at Fermilab were done on single magnets where such loads do not develop.
Per common practice in large projects, other professionals checked their work, including the customer (CERN). Nobody else thought to account for this case, either. Internal tests did not naturally replicate the failure conditiosn.
Large teams at Fermilab and at CERN are working on understanding and addressing the problem. They are reviewing the documentation, redoing calculations, performing mechanical tests and analyzing the damage to the magnet triplet at CERN.
Stay tuned for more news, while they confirm their failure theory and come up with a fix.
The last 50 years of "just 20 more years" have been empty promises not based on any real analysis of the progress and remaining challenges. With the JET and other Tokamak projects, however, we do have measurable progress and a decent understanding of the challenges. Your linked article also never gives any reasons for saying it will stay 50 years other than that's what the skeptics say.
The ITER project will come online in about 10 years. At this point in time, I am unaware of any serious doubts that they will achieve useable Q (energy out over energy in) values. Their timeline gives about 20 years for proving out the design and testing related to commercial development, with the follow-up DEMO project coming online during the second half of this phase. It is possible to modify the ITER mid-program to produce electricity (but probably not worthwhile yet), and DEMO would actually run continuously and generate useable electricity. Meanwhile, the IFMIF facility would provide the necessary data on irradiated material properties for the engineering of commercial cores to take place. DEMO would prove out these designs.
Given adequate funding (about a $billion a year, or roughly what a major city spends annually on electricity, divided among 7 member nations), there is little reason to suspect that the ITER timeline showing the first commercial reactors coming online in the 2045-2050 timeline is not achievable.
In fact, economics is a huge driver of the current schedule. There is a big gap between the startup of DEMO and the first commercial plants coming online, because part of what DEMO will achieve is clear out any remaining bugs and prove out the long-term effectiveness of the materials chosen by IFMIF. The ITER team has proposed that the DEMO design could likely be immediately implemented as a commerical power plant, although not yet optimized with lessons from the DEMO project, and therefore with higher operational costs. This alone would cut 10-15 years off the projections.
Not to mention, currently the funding for ITER (not counting DEMO or IFMIF) stands at about $11 billion spread out over 30 years of construction and operation. Certainly if we really wanted to we could compress that schedule by spending more upfront to get it built in less than a decade and compress the research schedule by providing the resources to quickly transition from phase to phase of the program.
Congratulations to SpaceX, and kudos to Elon Musk for doing something worthwhile with his fortune!
I wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then the Powerball jackpot hits $300 million and everybody starts asking each other what they'd do if they won (I guess I'd have to buy a ticket first...). Until I heard about SpaceX, I really didn't know. Everybody else just spends it all trying to fill their time since they quit work. I don't think I could stand more than a couple months of no responsibility and no accomplishment. Musk decided to actually take a very big risk and join a difficult industry with his.
Now I know what I'd do if I came into a bunch of money: I'd find a field I'm interested in with a high price barrier to entry and start my own company. It's a win-win-win situation
I get something to keep me occupied and motivated.
I have at least some chance of return on my investment (as opposed to buying lots of fast cars, drugs, and prostitutes).
I contribute to society by developing new products, technologies, or competition.
I contribute further to society by creating jobs.
I have an excuse for ignoring freeloading relatives ("I spent it all on my company").
This is a pretty common misconception, usually brought up whenever NASA has a problem, but history shows it's misbegotten. In fact, there are only a few systems that have the kinks worked out really thoroughly (Soyuz is one, and believe it or not, the shuttle is another with 92 consecutive successful launches, 116 total. I'm counting re-entry seperately), but others still have occasional launch problems.
The Ariane 5 program, Europe's most successful heavy launcher, almost perfectly mirrored the Falcon on it's first two flights. The first was self-destructed 37 seconds into flight because of a critical software bug (Falcon 1, 29 seconds, fuel leak). The second shutdown early because of a roll control problem (Falcon 1, shutdown early due to roll control problem). Since then the Ariane 5 has had 27 successful launches and 2 failures.
Other recent rocket failures:
Last year Boeing launched their first Delta IV Heavy. A faulty fuel level sensor caused premature engine shut down and the payload didn't reach the intended orbit.
Just 2 months ago a Sea Launch Zenit exploded on the pad (google the video if you want to know what 500 tons of rocket fuel burning in 2 seconds looks like), for a 21/24 total record.
In July 2006 a Russian Dnepr booster crashed in Kazakstan. The Dnepr program is still on hold due to this.
Even the vaunted Soyuz, the king of rocket success stories with over 1700 flights by various versions, is not immune. A 2002 launch failure killed one ground crewman and injured 8. Another Soyuz failed to reach orbit in 2005.
So you can easily see the days of failures, even a occasional spectacular failures, are not yet behind us.
Don't get defensive. He wasn't trash talking the ESA or any other space agency. ESA in particular has performed well lately. He was trash talking the people who trash talk NASA without having a freaking clue what they're talking about.
Part of the reason a shuttle designed today would look very different is because of what we learned from the shuttle. Of course, partially due to limited budgets, we're moving away from the shuttle concept (google CEV if you're unfamiliar).
That said, I think there's some parts where you're flat out wrong. Rather than deal with the variety of architectures that are possible for a shuttle, I'm going to address them in the context of the shuttle we now have and why it is the way it is.
The orbiter is not made from steel, it's made from aluminum and titanium. Of course, CF was just budding at the time it was built and was not a feasible technology. It's only now becoming mainstream in planes, but you can expect to see significant amounts of it on future spacecraft, I will grant you that. It will not, however, offer any magical advantages. Merely a little weight-savings.
The shuttle main engines are liquid fueled because they are significantly more efficient than solid fueled boosters (ISP of about 420 compared to 250 for the SRB's). The solid rocket boosters are desirable because of their extremely high thrust for getting off the ground, but most of the delta V comes from the cryogenic liquid fuels. The wisdom of this choice is reflected in the fact that almost every commercial launcher uses liquid fuel for its core and upper stages, and I think most use LOX (but with kerosene instead of H2). Solid fuels are not without their faults. In addition to low efficiency, their throttling ability is fixed, they can't do a live abort (stop launch once ignition begins), and the fuel can be damaged by excess handling, meaning it needs replacing or the booster may fail.
The engines are mounted on the orbiter instead of the external tank (as per the Russian Buran shuttle) because NASA was counting on reusing them. At $50 million dollars each x 3 engines (~2005 dollars), reusing them saves $150 million per flight (The Russian engines were cheaper, slightly less efficient).
There's a lot of room for criticism of the heat shield, but for a winged re-entry vehicle, there wasn't much flexibility for achieving a light weight shield over such a large area. I believe quite a few alternative mounting methods were considered but found infeasible or higher risk, including mounting pins. The size of the tiles was largely affected by the need to flex in flight.
The Russian space shuttle was scrapped due to lack of money. Given the state of the Soviet Union at the time of its completion and the direction of their space program, it wasn't even worth making do with it after all the money they spent developing it.
I don't understand your proposal for a rearward entry or desire for the addition of engines. A rearward entry would not address any of the lessons learned from the shuttle and would only complicate aerodynamics and heat issues. The swing wing would increase mechanical complexity and be difficult to implement for a blunt body re-entry design. No landing attempt has ever come up short, and the size of engines required to enable a fly around would be a significant weight penalty.
I maintain the view that others have offered. While the shuttle was overly ambitious, represented a needlessly challenging architecture, and did not fit the needs of the space program well as it developed (the shuttle was never meant to be our only manned vehicle), it is an astounding marvel of technology and a fine piece of engineering.
We may someday see another vehicle like the shuttle, but probably smaller...designed for crew shuttling and maybe as a work platform only. Not for cargo. It will definitely not use the side stack configuration that places the re-entry vehicle at risk from launch damage. That's probably the biggest lesson of the shuttle program.
Well, nuclear bombs is a standard journalism unit. The best part is, it is interchangeable for power and energy without dividing by time! And space.com does tend to mix a little bit of technical with a little bit of sensational.
The quote that got me though, was this:
One day, EL2003 EL61 will cross the orbit of Neptune and become a comet itself. "That's going to be in about a billion years," Brown said. "It's a ways to wait."
Umm...what? I'm missing something here. An extremely long period for a comet is around 5-10,000 years. Beyond that, it's nearly impossible to even tell if it's gravitationally bound to our solar system or has an escape trajectory because the orbit would have to swing so far out from the sun. Certainly over a billion year period you could expect the state of net gravity along it's path from the sun and other stars to perturb so you can't even tell if it is in the solar system or has been stripped by another star.
The other possibility is that it's in a roughly circular orbit, in which case, it wouldn't ever wander into the inner solar system, unless he's counting on there being another major collision sometime in the next billion years. This after he's just theorized that the collision happened billions of years ago, when the solar system was a much more crowded place.
Oh, I should mention, the method of linking the large object to the smaller objects believed to be collision debris is based on similarities in orbit (they're close together) and reflected spectra (they're made of the same stuff). Also, an object that small should not have attained that great of a rotational speed simply through accretion, so an impact is definitely likely.
NASA (tag-teaming with fweeky): 1 Slashdot armchair cynic: 0
I don't suppose the GP has ever tried taking a picture of Jupiter with his fancy camera phone, either. He might find it a little blurry, very grainy, and surprisingly dark. Add in a little radiation and interference from moving through Jupiter's magnetic field and then transmit it 150 million miles, and layer on top of it spectrographic and radar data from the other instruments and you realize the OP's $450 (mass-produced price) cell phone with it's 3mm lens doesn't even count as a toy in comparison.
When you consider that the best images we have of Pluto currently (from the Hubble) are about 0.0005 megapixels of surface data and that New Horizons will pass a fraction of the distance from Pluto that it did from Jupiter, you begin to understand how much bang-for-the-buck this mission has to offer in understanding a body that may be one of the most numerous and least understood type of objects (KBO's) in our solar system.
I figured somebody better follow the joke up with some clarification. The optics on Spitzer, like Hubble, aren't focused that close. Plus it's infrared. Skin complexion would look like crap.
Also, they aren't directly seeing the planet. I don't know if Spitzer's cameras could theoretically resolve it, but I do know it can't pick it out of the glare from its star. The method is to use a spectrograph and note really carefully the spectra of light received from the observation. When the planet, which is emitting light at different wavelengths depending on the molecules present, goes behind the star, this spectra changes ever so slightly. From this you know which portions of the spectra are from the star and which are from the planet, and you can deduce the molecules based on characteristic spectral lines.
This is very much like colors on an LCD monitor. Let's say you have a switch that will let you turn off one pixel of a triad (the triad being the red, green, and blue pixels that make up a visible pixel), but you don't know what color it is. If you see a yellow pixel, you know there is actually a red pixel and green pixel turned on right next to each other, even though your eye can't resolve them. You flip the switch and the visible pixel turns red, so you know the pixel you control is green. The colors of the pixels are analogous to the molecules on the planet versus the star. The pixel you can control is like the planet, but instead of a switch it goes behind the star.
Since the article apparently likes big numbers over useful units, the 370 and 904 trillion mile figures for the distances to the two observed targets are equal to 63 and 153 light years respectively.
Completely different? So you're saying that they don't both involve challenges in the production of resources and maintaining a habitable environment? I suppose they aren't both far enough away that resupply becomes a significant challenge? Long-term low gravity effects on the human body on the moon suggests nothing about long-term gravity effects on the human body on Mars? Psychological isolation on the moon is radically different from psychological isolation on Mars?
Each has unique challenges, too. Mars is about 400 times as far away at best. It takes up to 6 months to get a crew there and at a lot more expense to land the same mass. It's only reasonably accessible once every 2 years, so you don't have the option of bringing a crew back anytime circumstances might warrant it. It receives a little over 1/4 the sunlight, complicating power issues. There's weather. Still, given the overall risk, it makes little sense to try to solve these challenges and the challenges Mars basing shares with moon basing simultaneously if we can solve the latter first.
Also, no ones talking anything that might be considered a "colony" yet. The first lunar base would be quite small and manned by a handful of astronauts. It would grow or be abandoned as is determined appropriate.
References to the unsuccessful biosphere projects are irrelevant. They attempted to create almost fully passive sealed environments. A Lunar or Mars base would utilize mechanical systems to maintain liveability. To call the biosphere drastically simpler is ill-considered. On some levels it is. There's little mechanically that can fail. I think there were some fans and pumps to simulate natural air and water movement, and automated sunshades to control the temperature. On other levels it's fair more complex. It attempted to create an equilibrated system with countless influencing factors (it was a particular bacteria that ended the Biosphere 2 project, btw) to replicate one that had over 4 billion years to stabilize. It also had much less interest and funding.
NASA has no where in it's mandate to do anything except research.
I would say that NASA's mandate, as a government agency, is whatever the people democratically choose for it to do. More tangibly, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which founded NASA, declares:
(1) plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities;
(2) arrange for participation by the scientific community in planning scientific measurements and observations to be made through use of aeronautical and space vehicles, and conduct or arrange for the conduct of such measurements and observations;
(3) provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and the results thereof;
(4) seek and encourage, to the maximum extent possible, the fullest commercial use of space; and
(5) encourage and provide for Federal Government use of commercially provided space services and hardware, consistent with the requirements of the Federal Government.
Plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities is rather open to interpretation, but exploration has always been considered an element of this. Actually, this does not counter your research point, because research involves both exploration and the development of necessary infrastructure (such as a moon base) to support it. I could detail some of the 100+ research proposals NASA has for the moon, but I'll leave it for another post
Number 3 and 4 are very relevant to your post, and also very clearly supported in the Exploration Systems Architecture Study, which guides much of the current development work. NASA is very open to cooperating with other friendly nations and private industry to use the systems they're developing to land additional payloads on the moon.
As far as how a permanent stay would pan out, since the article doesn't detail it, the Constellation program would conduct a handfull of missions up to two weeks in length to points of interest. One of these will likely be an already identified crater rim near one of the poles that receives almost constant sunlight. The constant sunlight simplifies many things.
NASA would then conduct several follow up missions to the same site, each one bringing more equipment. The proposed design for the lander makes the return stage as small as possible, which maximizes the amount of hardware left behind. Being modular, the lander could also fly missions to land several tons of cargo without a crew, such as prefabricated laboratories.
After 4 or 5 missions to the same location, there would be sufficient resources on the surface to support a permanent crew. From there NASA could conduct research that may really jumpstart commerical development, such as in situ resource utilization and low gravity excavation and health effects.
Physicists often over-simplify or inappropriately categorize things when trying to explain their papers to reporters (note that most journalism programs don't include courses on nuclear physics). Even if the reporter knows the difference between genuine cold fusion and sonofusion (keeping in mind that "cold" can be used somewhat ambiguously in regards to fusion), they might not expect their readers to and dumb it down themselves.
Most likely of all is the stereotypical Professor Frink sitting in his lab babbling excitedly away about how it works while the reporter sits there and nods. When he says something like, "While individual Alpha particles are created with energies of N electron-volts, the system temperatures are on par with hypothetical cold fusion scenarios," guess which two words out such a statement will actually get written down in the reporter's notes.
Taleyarkhan didn't claim he had caused cold fusion. He claimed sonofusion.
For all readers getting excited about Mr. Fusion and nuclear jetpacks, I hate to inform you that Taleyarkan's experiments, assuming they genuinely did induce fusion, fell far, far short of unity.
All the time this power increase has been happening, chips have been getting more efficient (in terms of power per operation). However, they're also doing a lot more work. 6 years ago a typical new computer was something like a 700-1000 MHz Pentium III (except for the Celeron cheapies) with 128-256 MB of RAM. The computer I built myself this last Christmas is 2.1 GHz dual core with a Gig (for now) of RAM. That's 4-6 times the clock cycles (at 64 bits, nonetheless) and 4-8 times the memory. Power supply capacity has only increased by something like 50%.
What am I saying? Every time hardware improves, we don't use it to cut down power or anything like that. We use it to increase the number of operations we perform. Instead of halving the power requirements of our computers every X months, we focus on doubling the performance.
And of course, Windows Vista is illustrative of this.
Wow. I just scanned the entire page (at +1, I admit), and it appears this is the closest thing to serious comment in the entire discussion, except perhaps for the irrelevant mention of space junk a few threads down.
I just wanted to comment on what an ambitious student project this is. Typically when schools do space-related projects, it's a tiny cubesat, a single component or experiment on a larger spacecraft, or assisting a NASA project, like interning at Jet Propulsion Lab. It sounds like the students are running the entire project under a NASA grant, as opposed to NASA or a faculty group running it.
They're actually talking about building a decent sized satellite that can simulate 0.38 G with life support systems capable of keeping 15 mice alive for 5 weeks and surviving re-entry. Fortunately, most of the labor will be free (yay student labor), so if this is successful, they'll have performed a very interesting new experiment for much less than NASA could have, and they'll have a great item on their resumes, too.
By the way, a 1 meter diameter capsule simulating 0.38 G at its outer radius must spin about 26 RPM. Thank goodness mice are small or Coriolis effect would be giving them a headache in the size capsule a school project could expect to afford. They can probably just arrange the entire wall as a floor, giving the mice room to move around comfortably while filling the center of the capsule with their cameras and life support gear.
As background, NASA is extremely interested in the effects of low gravity on health. Ironically, we know exactly what earth gravity does to a person over their life, and we have a really good idea what "zero" gravity does over extended periods, but we have basically no clue what intermediate levels do. For example, astronauts on board space stations for months at a time experience significant loss of bone mass to weightlessness. Does the rate of bone loss depend in a linear fashion on the magnitude of accelleration or is even a small level of gravity sufficient to prevent this loss?
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Portland, "20% chance of rain" does not mean that rain should be expected on 20% of the days with that forecast. It means that it will rain for 20% of the day.
The forecasters here are also fans of synonymous statements. Check out this week's forecast:
Fri: Mostly cloudy with a chance of rain
Sat: Showers likely
Sun: Occasional Showers
Mon: Rain and scattered sunbreaks
Tue: Scattered showers
Wed: Possible morning mist followed by afternoon drizzle
Thu: Sunny and 85 in the metro area. 30 with 6 inches of fresh powder on the mountain.
(They like to be wildly inaccurate every now and then just to piss us off. It will actually be 45 with possible light precipitation. Check the Portland evening news on Thursday to see who's more accurate: me or the weathermen).
It has to do something, thereby increasing entropy, and at the same not create adverse affects. What constitutes an adverse affect? Does contributing to the heat death of the universe?
Ok, perhaps just looking at entropy is a little extreme. I'm sure that's not actually written in the rules, and apparently there actually is some sort of judging involved here (oh look, Al Gore is a judge. Big surprise. "I took the initiative in solving global warming..."), but Branson's asking for a miracle here. Any work is going to require energy. If you don't just want to suck that billion tons CO2 out and store it somewhere, but actually break it down into more containable form, like graphite or useful hydrocarbons, it will take a lot more energy. This is effectively the same energy issue we've been flogging death for years, but in the guise of removing CO2, instead of avoiding creating it or just plain getting energy in the first place.
As Slashdot has been debating since...um, forever...every energy source we can come up with has adverse affects, not the least of which is cost. I don't know how much energy it takes per ton to filter CO2 out of the air and bury it in an abandoned gas well, but I would bet we're talking several orders of magnitude above the prize level just in energy costs. Not such concerns means much compared to "saving the planet" (TM), but that effectively makes the prize only a formality.
Beyond cost, there's also environmental affects with energy generation. Be it birds struck by wind turbine blades or disposal of the composites they're made out of at end-of-life, the chemicals used in making solar cells, nuclear waste, disrupted fish runs with hydroplants, altered ocean habitats for tidal solutions, possibly altered fault activity and limited supply from geothermal, and of course that practically irrelevant but still amusing increase of entropy problem from all of the above, they are there.
I'm not sure if the story should be flagged Catch-22, vaporware, or inthishouseweobeythelawsofthermodynamics.
As far as I can tell, this 1.9 number only addresses fossil fuel input compared to power output. It does not include energy invested in getting the waste material to the generator, which would be appropriate since the EROEI numbers you cite (I believe) include energy invested in production and transportation, etc.
Obviously, the goal here is an alternate source of power and waste disposal in a niche application, so that point is irrelevant to the applicability to that purpose, but if you're going to compare it to power or fuel use in general, it needs to be considered. The garbage truck driving around the neighborhood collecting burns fuel, too.
The 1.9 number confuses me, though. Are they saying that it still needs diesel to continue running with a mix of 10:9 diesel to reformed fuel (or accounting for the efficiency of the generator, perhaps 5:18 for 25%), or does it reform sufficient fuel to run entirely on waste? In that case, you can make that 1.9 number as big as you want just by running the engine longer and keeping a steady supply of trash in the reactors.
Who enters and who exits are seperate elements. There is prior case law ruling that once you have (legally) entered their property, a property owner can not prevent you from leaving their premises unless they have probable cause for making a citizen's arrest (such as suspicion of shoplifting).
I know this because a couple weeks ago it happened to my old man. When they told him they would not let him leave without seeing a receipt, he asked if he was being accused of stealing (to clarify probable cause). They said no and he continued walking towards the door.
Anyway, that's the principle. This case was notable because the greeter then physically restrained my dad, who (being a little hot headed at times) pushed him off. Technically, the greeter's actions were assault, and my dad's were self defense, but at that point a security guard did make a citizen's arrest based on the half of the encounter he saw and Walmart charged him with assault. The judge has concurred with my dad's case if evidence can be provided that the greeter initiated the contact. Not very surprisingly, the prosecutor is suddenly having trouble locating the security video of the encounter.
Of course, my dad is now banned from entering Walmart property, which is something a business can do if you refuse to let them check your bags.
You mean satellites which are primarily commercial and primarily launched on commercial launchers?
Exactly. My first and second points are closely related. Who developed the technology for those commercial launchers? Who disseminated the technology? Commercial satellites are a perfect example of NASA's work benefitting the public in the long term.
The NASA satellites show very little 'climate change' since the 1970s: you have to use flawed ground temperature measurements to create 'global warming' scare stories.
I should probably note that I wasn't arguing the global warming case, but the fact is that satellite data is relevant to the investigation, and a sizeable chunk of that comes from NASA. That includes atmospheric content and temperature data and elevation data that has been used to infer ocean level and ice mass trends. NASA has also done quite a bit of work related to modelling the climate (ref. Hansen) and contributed significantly to the science of meteorology. The latter of course has notable everyday benefits for the average person.
First of all, if you're going to bother perpetuating this discussion with an anonymous coward, you should take the time to point out that NASA research and development is required to be disseminated back to the public by its charter.
Second, this is exactly why we have communications, navigation, geological, and weather satellites and Google Earth. It's part of why the airline industry has been steadily progressing in safety, capability, and efficiency. It's part of why people are spending so much time debating climate change.
Third, the operations of the government are ideally, although to varying degrees in practice, the consensus of the people, who knowing that the votes they make affect the taxes they pay, choose to support various candidates or measures. In this way, the operations of NASA are a mandate of the people, just as the operations of the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Transportation, and Agriculture are.
It should be an issue now. Congress took too long to pass the 2007 spending bills, so now they're planning to shove it through with everything that didn't get allocated yet funded at the 2006 levels with the same 2006 mandates. This means NASA comes in $500 million below the level outlined in the budget the president originally submitted. It also means they don't have the discretion necessary to shift funds around between projects to properly adjust for the lower-than-promised budget. That means money forcefully allocated to aerospace can't be diverted to space science or exploration projects.
The Mars Science Laboratory should be far enough along to avoid being affected. The JWST has been delayed enough that NASA will probably make sure it gets what it needs, both to get it into action and avoid cost growth that has already plagued this program due to funding delays.
The biggest threat is probably to programs currently in the development stages, especially the Ares 1 second stage. NASA had planned to select the prime contractor for this in 2007, but may have to back off until they're sure they have the money to follow it through. A larger than planned budget increase in 2008 may help, but won't entirely make up for lost time, and there's no reason to expect congress to be any more competent next year than they were this year.
This is just months after the GAO warned NASA to keep the CEV on track to avoid delays in fielding the vehicle and the costs incurred by delays (paying 3rd party launch providers, maintaining infrastructure and trained workforce, etc).
Slashdot Mirror
The wikipedia article you linked to only seems to mention one run achieving fusion, with 3 neutrons detected. That's with 12.5 kV running current through some rather large solenoids, which suggests quite a significant power investment. This is far, far, far below unity. In fact, I'm not sure how high of confidence 3 neutrons offers. He says it scales extremely well, but it seems to me an intermediate demonstrator is warranted before investing $200 million in a 100 MW prototype. He's trying to run before he walks.
He's a very long ways from extracting useful power. Assuming it actually does scale as well as he claims, an analogy for the stage he's at right is like striking flint on steel to get a spark, but he's not even very adept at that yet. That's where the Tokamak design was 20-30 years ago. Tokamak now has a rudimentary firepit built and they're using matches. They both need to get a roaring fire before the industry can take over and build something useful around it to capture the energy. Except Bussard is talking about induction or electron capture or something like that, which is another change of direction. Additionally, one Dr. Todd Rider has suggested (via his thesis) that there are fundamental limitations to electrostatic confinement that may prevent it from ever being practical.
Don't get me wrong. This seems perhaps the most promising design in electrostatic confinement I've seen. But don't get Bussard wrong either. He hasn't shown anything significant yet.
My thoughts: Navy or DOE through a university (preferrably the latter or both) should provide funding for a 7th generation prototype incorporating some of his advances. The main goals should be consistently initiating and detecting fusion and experimentally verifying the output levels. If all that works, then a major investment may be justified, but at this point, I just don't see it.
Pretty much anytime someone talks about a black hole observation they are actually talking about an accretion disk around a black hole. Just about the only exception I can think of gravitational lensing. Although the article does not go into much detail, it is likely that the theory implicates some coincidental activity of matter falling into the black holes from their accretion disks, the resulting release of energy being the cause of heating of this cloud of gas.
By the way, since scale can be hard to appreciate in space, the article says the cloud is 6 million light years accross. In comparison, the Milky Way is only about 80,000 light years in diameter.
In fairness to my post, I was referring to naval nuclear reactors, upon which this will be based. Now I admit, I cited US nuclear naval vessels, and the same record does not quite hold for Soviet vessels (there are several accidents on record, nothing even remotely close to the scale of Chernobyl, however). I also admit I am being a little free on the definition of an accident. For example, there have been numerous spills of low level waste, but the ramifications of these events are miniscule. They were all able to be contained or diluted to background levels.
The list you link to, on the other hand, is very broad, including events such the loss of nuclear warheads in plane crashes and the ditching of a small RTG in a deep ocean trench that was planned to be left on the moon by Apollo 13. Arguably, much of the list is irrelevant to a nuclear power plant on a barge.
First of all, the objections were noted last time Slashdot covered this topic. Secondly, the greens are always complaining about nuclear power plants.
.hk TLD (is that Hong Kong?)...different currency.
Also I see a some discrepancies between this article and others. Aside from the obvious claim that this is the first floating nuclear power plant in history (I guess if you don't count 11 carriers, a couple dozen cruisers, and well over 100 submarines for the USN alone, none of which have had a nuclear accident, btw), the BBC quotes it as costing $336 million, not $2.7 billion...sorry strike that, I see this news article has a
They've definitely considered it, but the costs don't scale as well as you might think, and the preference has almost always been increased capability rather than increased coverage.
Remember economies of scale can be applied to increasing mass, not just increasing quantities. For one launch, one landing, one chassis you can carry more instruments. Not just more, but more complex. The MER's each carry a stereo high res camera, stereo navigation camera, 2 stereo hazard cameras, microscopic imager, mossbauer spectrometer, X-ray spectrometer, thermal emissions spectrometer, rock abrasion tool, and the ability to gather additional data using many of the above tools or even parts of the rover itself (soil consistency by observing clumping on the wheels, weather patterns with the cameras, dust and color calibration targets, etc). Compared to a tiny remote like Sojourner, which had a two small cameras and a smaller X-ray spectrometer and could only reach about a dozen rocks total, each of the $410 million MER's can do far more than $280 million Sojourner Pathfinder.
Don't forget that Sojourner was not self-sufficient. It relied on Pathfinder to relay all of its data and commands. They saved a little bit of mass by keeping a lot of the heavier components on the immobile Pathfinder.
The Mars Science Laboratory will blow them all away for capability. It's science payload at 65 kg will represent over 8% of it's weight, compared to 5 kg out 185 for the MER's (3%), and I don't know what for the tiny 11 kg Sojourner. Part of the much higher cost goes towards developing the currently non-existant precision landing techniques that will let NASA place it in driving range of specific targets of interest. Part also goes towards expanding its range of acceptable landing zones by using an RTG instead of solar and computer-controlled descent rockets instead of airbags. It will have basically all the science instruments of the MER's but also include a higher resolution color microscope, zoom on the pan cam with video capability (NASA is dying to study those dust devils MER's discovered in more detail), a really sweet laser chemical analyzer, a complete weather science station, and a mack-daddy onboard sample analysis chamber for in depth experiments on both gas and soil/rock samples.
So for 5 times the cost (about $2 billion), the MSL carries 13 times the mass in tools with perhaps as much as 10 times the range as an MER.
Now this brings up the biggest drawback of the this approach: They'll only have one. They can't afford any upside down accelerometers, unit conversion errors, or phantom engine cutoff signals. I believe the main reason they decided to expand the MER program to 2 rovers was redundancy in the face of the recent loss of the Mars Polar Lander and Mars Climate Orbiter. There was an added bonus that the areas the two landed in are quite different geologically. However, when it comes down to the decision time, the only way for NASA to get the instruments they want on the ground for the next mission with the money they have is a single, big mission.
In fact, all the previous missions have effectively served as scouts for the follow up missions. The design of the MSL is a result of what NASA learned from the MRO, MGS, MER's, Pathfinder, and Odyssey.
I can't wait to see what we'll learn from this big boy.
The linked article, which has more useful information in each paragraph than the entire original article from the story submission, is a little technical. Lemme try and simplify the important parts:
The magnets are chilled with liquid helium to keep the temperature near absolute 0. Some of the support framework which holds one of the magnets inside the coolant pipes ("cryostat") failed at 300 psi because the loads did not line up in a way the framework was designed to hold.
These conditions do not happen often, but they were known and were apparently overlooked by the engineers. Fortunately, the functional design of the system appears sound, it's just the design of physical supports that needs to be modified.
While the full cause of the problem is not yet known, failure to account for the asymmetric loads in the engineering design of the magnet appears to be a likely cause.Contrary to what the submission and article imply, the math was probably fine, but they engineered the design for a less stressful load than it actually experiences in the worst anticipated case.
Per common practice in large projects, other professionals checked their work, including the customer (CERN). Nobody else thought to account for this case, either. Internal tests did not naturally replicate the failure conditiosn.
Stay tuned for more news, while they confirm their failure theory and come up with a fix.
The last 50 years of "just 20 more years" have been empty promises not based on any real analysis of the progress and remaining challenges. With the JET and other Tokamak projects, however, we do have measurable progress and a decent understanding of the challenges. Your linked article also never gives any reasons for saying it will stay 50 years other than that's what the skeptics say.
The ITER project will come online in about 10 years. At this point in time, I am unaware of any serious doubts that they will achieve useable Q (energy out over energy in) values. Their timeline gives about 20 years for proving out the design and testing related to commercial development, with the follow-up DEMO project coming online during the second half of this phase. It is possible to modify the ITER mid-program to produce electricity (but probably not worthwhile yet), and DEMO would actually run continuously and generate useable electricity. Meanwhile, the IFMIF facility would provide the necessary data on irradiated material properties for the engineering of commercial cores to take place. DEMO would prove out these designs.
Given adequate funding (about a $billion a year, or roughly what a major city spends annually on electricity, divided among 7 member nations), there is little reason to suspect that the ITER timeline showing the first commercial reactors coming online in the 2045-2050 timeline is not achievable.
In fact, economics is a huge driver of the current schedule. There is a big gap between the startup of DEMO and the first commercial plants coming online, because part of what DEMO will achieve is clear out any remaining bugs and prove out the long-term effectiveness of the materials chosen by IFMIF. The ITER team has proposed that the DEMO design could likely be immediately implemented as a commerical power plant, although not yet optimized with lessons from the DEMO project, and therefore with higher operational costs. This alone would cut 10-15 years off the projections.
Not to mention, currently the funding for ITER (not counting DEMO or IFMIF) stands at about $11 billion spread out over 30 years of construction and operation. Certainly if we really wanted to we could compress that schedule by spending more upfront to get it built in less than a decade and compress the research schedule by providing the resources to quickly transition from phase to phase of the program.
I wholeheartedly agree. Every now and then the Powerball jackpot hits $300 million and everybody starts asking each other what they'd do if they won (I guess I'd have to buy a ticket first...). Until I heard about SpaceX, I really didn't know. Everybody else just spends it all trying to fill their time since they quit work. I don't think I could stand more than a couple months of no responsibility and no accomplishment. Musk decided to actually take a very big risk and join a difficult industry with his.
Now I know what I'd do if I came into a bunch of money: I'd find a field I'm interested in with a high price barrier to entry and start my own company. It's a win-win-win situation
This is a pretty common misconception, usually brought up whenever NASA has a problem, but history shows it's misbegotten. In fact, there are only a few systems that have the kinks worked out really thoroughly (Soyuz is one, and believe it or not, the shuttle is another with 92 consecutive successful launches, 116 total. I'm counting re-entry seperately), but others still have occasional launch problems.
The Ariane 5 program, Europe's most successful heavy launcher, almost perfectly mirrored the Falcon on it's first two flights. The first was self-destructed 37 seconds into flight because of a critical software bug (Falcon 1, 29 seconds, fuel leak). The second shutdown early because of a roll control problem (Falcon 1, shutdown early due to roll control problem). Since then the Ariane 5 has had 27 successful launches and 2 failures.
Other recent rocket failures:
Last year Boeing launched their first Delta IV Heavy. A faulty fuel level sensor caused premature engine shut down and the payload didn't reach the intended orbit.
Just 2 months ago a Sea Launch Zenit exploded on the pad (google the video if you want to know what 500 tons of rocket fuel burning in 2 seconds looks like), for a 21/24 total record.
In July 2006 a Russian Dnepr booster crashed in Kazakstan. The Dnepr program is still on hold due to this.
Even the vaunted Soyuz, the king of rocket success stories with over 1700 flights by various versions, is not immune. A 2002 launch failure killed one ground crewman and injured 8. Another Soyuz failed to reach orbit in 2005.
So you can easily see the days of failures, even a occasional spectacular failures, are not yet behind us.
Don't get defensive. He wasn't trash talking the ESA or any other space agency. ESA in particular has performed well lately. He was trash talking the people who trash talk NASA without having a freaking clue what they're talking about.
Part of the reason a shuttle designed today would look very different is because of what we learned from the shuttle. Of course, partially due to limited budgets, we're moving away from the shuttle concept (google CEV if you're unfamiliar).
That said, I think there's some parts where you're flat out wrong. Rather than deal with the variety of architectures that are possible for a shuttle, I'm going to address them in the context of the shuttle we now have and why it is the way it is.
The orbiter is not made from steel, it's made from aluminum and titanium. Of course, CF was just budding at the time it was built and was not a feasible technology. It's only now becoming mainstream in planes, but you can expect to see significant amounts of it on future spacecraft, I will grant you that. It will not, however, offer any magical advantages. Merely a little weight-savings.
The shuttle main engines are liquid fueled because they are significantly more efficient than solid fueled boosters (ISP of about 420 compared to 250 for the SRB's). The solid rocket boosters are desirable because of their extremely high thrust for getting off the ground, but most of the delta V comes from the cryogenic liquid fuels. The wisdom of this choice is reflected in the fact that almost every commercial launcher uses liquid fuel for its core and upper stages, and I think most use LOX (but with kerosene instead of H2). Solid fuels are not without their faults. In addition to low efficiency, their throttling ability is fixed, they can't do a live abort (stop launch once ignition begins), and the fuel can be damaged by excess handling, meaning it needs replacing or the booster may fail.
The engines are mounted on the orbiter instead of the external tank (as per the Russian Buran shuttle) because NASA was counting on reusing them. At $50 million dollars each x 3 engines (~2005 dollars), reusing them saves $150 million per flight (The Russian engines were cheaper, slightly less efficient).
There's a lot of room for criticism of the heat shield, but for a winged re-entry vehicle, there wasn't much flexibility for achieving a light weight shield over such a large area. I believe quite a few alternative mounting methods were considered but found infeasible or higher risk, including mounting pins. The size of the tiles was largely affected by the need to flex in flight.
The Russian space shuttle was scrapped due to lack of money. Given the state of the Soviet Union at the time of its completion and the direction of their space program, it wasn't even worth making do with it after all the money they spent developing it. I don't understand your proposal for a rearward entry or desire for the addition of engines. A rearward entry would not address any of the lessons learned from the shuttle and would only complicate aerodynamics and heat issues. The swing wing would increase mechanical complexity and be difficult to implement for a blunt body re-entry design. No landing attempt has ever come up short, and the size of engines required to enable a fly around would be a significant weight penalty.
I maintain the view that others have offered. While the shuttle was overly ambitious, represented a needlessly challenging architecture, and did not fit the needs of the space program well as it developed (the shuttle was never meant to be our only manned vehicle), it is an astounding marvel of technology and a fine piece of engineering.
We may someday see another vehicle like the shuttle, but probably smaller...designed for crew shuttling and maybe as a work platform only. Not for cargo. It will definitely not use the side stack configuration that places the re-entry vehicle at risk from launch damage. That's probably the biggest lesson of the shuttle program.
Well, nuclear bombs is a standard journalism unit. The best part is, it is interchangeable for power and energy without dividing by time! And space.com does tend to mix a little bit of technical with a little bit of sensational.
The quote that got me though, was this:
Umm...what? I'm missing something here. An extremely long period for a comet is around 5-10,000 years. Beyond that, it's nearly impossible to even tell if it's gravitationally bound to our solar system or has an escape trajectory because the orbit would have to swing so far out from the sun. Certainly over a billion year period you could expect the state of net gravity along it's path from the sun and other stars to perturb so you can't even tell if it is in the solar system or has been stripped by another star.
The other possibility is that it's in a roughly circular orbit, in which case, it wouldn't ever wander into the inner solar system, unless he's counting on there being another major collision sometime in the next billion years. This after he's just theorized that the collision happened billions of years ago, when the solar system was a much more crowded place.
Oh, I should mention, the method of linking the large object to the smaller objects believed to be collision debris is based on similarities in orbit (they're close together) and reflected spectra (they're made of the same stuff). Also, an object that small should not have attained that great of a rotational speed simply through accretion, so an impact is definitely likely.
Ding, ding, ding!
NASA (tag-teaming with fweeky): 1
Slashdot armchair cynic: 0
I don't suppose the GP has ever tried taking a picture of Jupiter with his fancy camera phone, either. He might find it a little blurry, very grainy, and surprisingly dark. Add in a little radiation and interference from moving through Jupiter's magnetic field and then transmit it 150 million miles, and layer on top of it spectrographic and radar data from the other instruments and you realize the OP's $450 (mass-produced price) cell phone with it's 3mm lens doesn't even count as a toy in comparison.
When you consider that the best images we have of Pluto currently (from the Hubble) are about 0.0005 megapixels of surface data and that New Horizons will pass a fraction of the distance from Pluto that it did from Jupiter, you begin to understand how much bang-for-the-buck this mission has to offer in understanding a body that may be one of the most numerous and least understood type of objects (KBO's) in our solar system.
I figured somebody better follow the joke up with some clarification. The optics on Spitzer, like Hubble, aren't focused that close. Plus it's infrared. Skin complexion would look like crap.
Also, they aren't directly seeing the planet. I don't know if Spitzer's cameras could theoretically resolve it, but I do know it can't pick it out of the glare from its star. The method is to use a spectrograph and note really carefully the spectra of light received from the observation. When the planet, which is emitting light at different wavelengths depending on the molecules present, goes behind the star, this spectra changes ever so slightly. From this you know which portions of the spectra are from the star and which are from the planet, and you can deduce the molecules based on characteristic spectral lines.
This is very much like colors on an LCD monitor. Let's say you have a switch that will let you turn off one pixel of a triad (the triad being the red, green, and blue pixels that make up a visible pixel), but you don't know what color it is. If you see a yellow pixel, you know there is actually a red pixel and green pixel turned on right next to each other, even though your eye can't resolve them. You flip the switch and the visible pixel turns red, so you know the pixel you control is green. The colors of the pixels are analogous to the molecules on the planet versus the star. The pixel you can control is like the planet, but instead of a switch it goes behind the star.
Since the article apparently likes big numbers over useful units, the 370 and 904 trillion mile figures for the distances to the two observed targets are equal to 63 and 153 light years respectively.
Completely different? So you're saying that they don't both involve challenges in the production of resources and maintaining a habitable environment? I suppose they aren't both far enough away that resupply becomes a significant challenge? Long-term low gravity effects on the human body on the moon suggests nothing about long-term gravity effects on the human body on Mars? Psychological isolation on the moon is radically different from psychological isolation on Mars?
Each has unique challenges, too. Mars is about 400 times as far away at best. It takes up to 6 months to get a crew there and at a lot more expense to land the same mass. It's only reasonably accessible once every 2 years, so you don't have the option of bringing a crew back anytime circumstances might warrant it. It receives a little over 1/4 the sunlight, complicating power issues. There's weather. Still, given the overall risk, it makes little sense to try to solve these challenges and the challenges Mars basing shares with moon basing simultaneously if we can solve the latter first.
Also, no ones talking anything that might be considered a "colony" yet. The first lunar base would be quite small and manned by a handful of astronauts. It would grow or be abandoned as is determined appropriate. References to the unsuccessful biosphere projects are irrelevant. They attempted to create almost fully passive sealed environments. A Lunar or Mars base would utilize mechanical systems to maintain liveability. To call the biosphere drastically simpler is ill-considered. On some levels it is. There's little mechanically that can fail. I think there were some fans and pumps to simulate natural air and water movement, and automated sunshades to control the temperature. On other levels it's fair more complex. It attempted to create an equilibrated system with countless influencing factors (it was a particular bacteria that ended the Biosphere 2 project, btw) to replicate one that had over 4 billion years to stabilize. It also had much less interest and funding.
I would say that NASA's mandate, as a government agency, is whatever the people democratically choose for it to do. More tangibly, the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, which founded NASA, declares:
Plan, direct, and conduct aeronautical and space activities is rather open to interpretation, but exploration has always been considered an element of this. Actually, this does not counter your research point, because research involves both exploration and the development of necessary infrastructure (such as a moon base) to support it. I could detail some of the 100+ research proposals NASA has for the moon, but I'll leave it for another post
Number 3 and 4 are very relevant to your post, and also very clearly supported in the Exploration Systems Architecture Study, which guides much of the current development work. NASA is very open to cooperating with other friendly nations and private industry to use the systems they're developing to land additional payloads on the moon.
As far as how a permanent stay would pan out, since the article doesn't detail it, the Constellation program would conduct a handfull of missions up to two weeks in length to points of interest. One of these will likely be an already identified crater rim near one of the poles that receives almost constant sunlight. The constant sunlight simplifies many things.
NASA would then conduct several follow up missions to the same site, each one bringing more equipment. The proposed design for the lander makes the return stage as small as possible, which maximizes the amount of hardware left behind. Being modular, the lander could also fly missions to land several tons of cargo without a crew, such as prefabricated laboratories.
After 4 or 5 missions to the same location, there would be sufficient resources on the surface to support a permanent crew. From there NASA could conduct research that may really jumpstart commerical development, such as in situ resource utilization and low gravity excavation and health effects.
Or maybe it's been dumbed down for/by the press.
Physicists often over-simplify or inappropriately categorize things when trying to explain their papers to reporters (note that most journalism programs don't include courses on nuclear physics). Even if the reporter knows the difference between genuine cold fusion and sonofusion (keeping in mind that "cold" can be used somewhat ambiguously in regards to fusion), they might not expect their readers to and dumb it down themselves.
Most likely of all is the stereotypical Professor Frink sitting in his lab babbling excitedly away about how it works while the reporter sits there and nods. When he says something like, "While individual Alpha particles are created with energies of N electron-volts, the system temperatures are on par with hypothetical cold fusion scenarios," guess which two words out such a statement will actually get written down in the reporter's notes.
Taleyarkhan didn't claim he had caused cold fusion. He claimed sonofusion.
For all readers getting excited about Mr. Fusion and nuclear jetpacks, I hate to inform you that Taleyarkan's experiments, assuming they genuinely did induce fusion, fell far, far short of unity.
How about not buying Windows Vista?
All the time this power increase has been happening, chips have been getting more efficient (in terms of power per operation). However, they're also doing a lot more work. 6 years ago a typical new computer was something like a 700-1000 MHz Pentium III (except for the Celeron cheapies) with 128-256 MB of RAM. The computer I built myself this last Christmas is 2.1 GHz dual core with a Gig (for now) of RAM. That's 4-6 times the clock cycles (at 64 bits, nonetheless) and 4-8 times the memory. Power supply capacity has only increased by something like 50%.
What am I saying? Every time hardware improves, we don't use it to cut down power or anything like that. We use it to increase the number of operations we perform. Instead of halving the power requirements of our computers every X months, we focus on doubling the performance.
And of course, Windows Vista is illustrative of this.
Wow. I just scanned the entire page (at +1, I admit), and it appears this is the closest thing to serious comment in the entire discussion, except perhaps for the irrelevant mention of space junk a few threads down.
I just wanted to comment on what an ambitious student project this is. Typically when schools do space-related projects, it's a tiny cubesat, a single component or experiment on a larger spacecraft, or assisting a NASA project, like interning at Jet Propulsion Lab. It sounds like the students are running the entire project under a NASA grant, as opposed to NASA or a faculty group running it.
They're actually talking about building a decent sized satellite that can simulate 0.38 G with life support systems capable of keeping 15 mice alive for 5 weeks and surviving re-entry. Fortunately, most of the labor will be free (yay student labor), so if this is successful, they'll have performed a very interesting new experiment for much less than NASA could have, and they'll have a great item on their resumes, too.
By the way, a 1 meter diameter capsule simulating 0.38 G at its outer radius must spin about 26 RPM. Thank goodness mice are small or Coriolis effect would be giving them a headache in the size capsule a school project could expect to afford. They can probably just arrange the entire wall as a floor, giving the mice room to move around comfortably while filling the center of the capsule with their cameras and life support gear.
As background, NASA is extremely interested in the effects of low gravity on health. Ironically, we know exactly what earth gravity does to a person over their life, and we have a really good idea what "zero" gravity does over extended periods, but we have basically no clue what intermediate levels do. For example, astronauts on board space stations for months at a time experience significant loss of bone mass to weightlessness. Does the rate of bone loss depend in a linear fashion on the magnitude of accelleration or is even a small level of gravity sufficient to prevent this loss?
I don't know about the rest of the world, but here in Portland, "20% chance of rain" does not mean that rain should be expected on 20% of the days with that forecast. It means that it will rain for 20% of the day.
The forecasters here are also fans of synonymous statements. Check out this week's forecast:
Fri: Mostly cloudy with a chance of rain
Sat: Showers likely
Sun: Occasional Showers
Mon: Rain and scattered sunbreaks
Tue: Scattered showers
Wed: Possible morning mist followed by afternoon drizzle
Thu: Sunny and 85 in the metro area. 30 with 6 inches of fresh powder on the mountain.
(They like to be wildly inaccurate every now and then just to piss us off. It will actually be 45 with possible light precipitation. Check the Portland evening news on Thursday to see who's more accurate: me or the weathermen).
This is definitely a Catch-22.
It has to do something, thereby increasing entropy, and at the same not create adverse affects. What constitutes an adverse affect? Does contributing to the heat death of the universe?
Ok, perhaps just looking at entropy is a little extreme. I'm sure that's not actually written in the rules, and apparently there actually is some sort of judging involved here (oh look, Al Gore is a judge. Big surprise. "I took the initiative in solving global warming..."), but Branson's asking for a miracle here. Any work is going to require energy. If you don't just want to suck that billion tons CO2 out and store it somewhere, but actually break it down into more containable form, like graphite or useful hydrocarbons, it will take a lot more energy. This is effectively the same energy issue we've been flogging death for years, but in the guise of removing CO2, instead of avoiding creating it or just plain getting energy in the first place.
As Slashdot has been debating since...um, forever...every energy source we can come up with has adverse affects, not the least of which is cost. I don't know how much energy it takes per ton to filter CO2 out of the air and bury it in an abandoned gas well, but I would bet we're talking several orders of magnitude above the prize level just in energy costs. Not such concerns means much compared to "saving the planet" (TM), but that effectively makes the prize only a formality.
Beyond cost, there's also environmental affects with energy generation. Be it birds struck by wind turbine blades or disposal of the composites they're made out of at end-of-life, the chemicals used in making solar cells, nuclear waste, disrupted fish runs with hydroplants, altered ocean habitats for tidal solutions, possibly altered fault activity and limited supply from geothermal, and of course that practically irrelevant but still amusing increase of entropy problem from all of the above, they are there.
I'm not sure if the story should be flagged Catch-22, vaporware, or inthishouseweobeythelawsofthermodynamics.
As far as I can tell, this 1.9 number only addresses fossil fuel input compared to power output. It does not include energy invested in getting the waste material to the generator, which would be appropriate since the EROEI numbers you cite (I believe) include energy invested in production and transportation, etc.
Obviously, the goal here is an alternate source of power and waste disposal in a niche application, so that point is irrelevant to the applicability to that purpose, but if you're going to compare it to power or fuel use in general, it needs to be considered. The garbage truck driving around the neighborhood collecting burns fuel, too.
The 1.9 number confuses me, though. Are they saying that it still needs diesel to continue running with a mix of 10:9 diesel to reformed fuel (or accounting for the efficiency of the generator, perhaps 5:18 for 25%), or does it reform sufficient fuel to run entirely on waste? In that case, you can make that 1.9 number as big as you want just by running the engine longer and keeping a steady supply of trash in the reactors.
Is my question clear? Comments?
Who enters and who exits are seperate elements. There is prior case law ruling that once you have (legally) entered their property, a property owner can not prevent you from leaving their premises unless they have probable cause for making a citizen's arrest (such as suspicion of shoplifting).
I know this because a couple weeks ago it happened to my old man. When they told him they would not let him leave without seeing a receipt, he asked if he was being accused of stealing (to clarify probable cause). They said no and he continued walking towards the door.
Anyway, that's the principle. This case was notable because the greeter then physically restrained my dad, who (being a little hot headed at times) pushed him off. Technically, the greeter's actions were assault, and my dad's were self defense, but at that point a security guard did make a citizen's arrest based on the half of the encounter he saw and Walmart charged him with assault. The judge has concurred with my dad's case if evidence can be provided that the greeter initiated the contact. Not very surprisingly, the prosecutor is suddenly having trouble locating the security video of the encounter.
Of course, my dad is now banned from entering Walmart property, which is something a business can do if you refuse to let them check your bags.
Exactly. My first and second points are closely related. Who developed the technology for those commercial launchers? Who disseminated the technology? Commercial satellites are a perfect example of NASA's work benefitting the public in the long term.
I should probably note that I wasn't arguing the global warming case, but the fact is that satellite data is relevant to the investigation, and a sizeable chunk of that comes from NASA. That includes atmospheric content and temperature data and elevation data that has been used to infer ocean level and ice mass trends. NASA has also done quite a bit of work related to modelling the climate (ref. Hansen) and contributed significantly to the science of meteorology. The latter of course has notable everyday benefits for the average person.
First of all, if you're going to bother perpetuating this discussion with an anonymous coward, you should take the time to point out that NASA research and development is required to be disseminated back to the public by its charter.
Second, this is exactly why we have communications, navigation, geological, and weather satellites and Google Earth. It's part of why the airline industry has been steadily progressing in safety, capability, and efficiency. It's part of why people are spending so much time debating climate change.
Third, the operations of the government are ideally, although to varying degrees in practice, the consensus of the people, who knowing that the votes they make affect the taxes they pay, choose to support various candidates or measures. In this way, the operations of NASA are a mandate of the people, just as the operations of the Departments of Defense, State, Energy, Transportation, and Agriculture are.
It should be an issue now. Congress took too long to pass the 2007 spending bills, so now they're planning to shove it through with everything that didn't get allocated yet funded at the 2006 levels with the same 2006 mandates. This means NASA comes in $500 million below the level outlined in the budget the president originally submitted. It also means they don't have the discretion necessary to shift funds around between projects to properly adjust for the lower-than-promised budget. That means money forcefully allocated to aerospace can't be diverted to space science or exploration projects.
The Mars Science Laboratory should be far enough along to avoid being affected. The JWST has been delayed enough that NASA will probably make sure it gets what it needs, both to get it into action and avoid cost growth that has already plagued this program due to funding delays.
The biggest threat is probably to programs currently in the development stages, especially the Ares 1 second stage. NASA had planned to select the prime contractor for this in 2007, but may have to back off until they're sure they have the money to follow it through. A larger than planned budget increase in 2008 may help, but won't entirely make up for lost time, and there's no reason to expect congress to be any more competent next year than they were this year.
This is just months after the GAO warned NASA to keep the CEV on track to avoid delays in fielding the vehicle and the costs incurred by delays (paying 3rd party launch providers, maintaining infrastructure and trained workforce, etc).