I think you misunderstand me. You will not find a single piece of pirated software on my computer or iPod. I was just trying to point out something that the parent poster (who was scoffing that a party that supported a different idea of legality was running in an election) might not have thought of.
And yes, I was saying that art would be funded by taxes. Other forms of art are already funded by taxes, so your argument that "Sweeden or the US don't need this now" is a bit beside the point, don't you think?
And, finally, if copyright and IP laws work in favor of the little guy as well as big corporations, then why is it only large artists and big corporations that are fighting downloads? The little artists seem, by and large, to be for free downloads. And some of the "medium guys" too--you can download Weird Al's single off of his website, for instance.
Wow. What an idiot.
How about "I want fun games"? It seems to me that PS3 is going to keep me from buying $350 worth of games just so that I can buy the system...
Sony and M$ also tell you what you want--you want better graphics and faster processor speeds, despite the fact that it will not do a thing for true game enjoyability! I mean, I can only play "Doom" so many times...whether or not it's called "Halo" or "Doom" or whatever. I've never been interested in Madden, and it's on version, what, 27?
But wait, Madden for the 360 or the PS3 will LOOK AMAZING!!!
Who cares. I haven't played a football game since 1992. It was boring then and it's boring now.
"Pirating music" is only illegal because we humans say that it is illegal.
I can imagine a world where the state pays a recording artist for every download and provides music for its citizens for free. Something like state supported arts.
The point is that WE define what legal and illegal mean, and they don't have to continue meaning what they mean now. In fact, the meaning of "own" has changed already--we don't "own" software, despite the fact that we hold a shiny disc in our hands. We only own the "right to use" the software.
You obviously don't know many engineers and scientists. Most of them have serious problems creating a document without errors in it. I like to think that most of us are thinking about things that are more important than spelling or grammar.
You say that "engineers and scientists...must be able to communicate in an efficient, effective manner." Why do you think that powerpoint is overused? Most of us train in technical skills, not in writing or communication.
You erroneously state that "engineers and scientists are required to study such communication skills." At MIT (possibly the most highly respected technical school in the world) for a master's degree all you have to do is pass a writing and grammar test.
Don't be stupid--engineers are concerned with building things that work: bridges that don't fall down, rockets that don't blow up, and doing that really doesn't need much in the way of language skills. You have to be able to communicate requirements, and there's a set format for those. Scientists want to discover things. To set up and operate a labratory requires very little in the way of language skills.
That's why we hire technical writers for our important papers. A technical writer has studied language and communication and has enough technical knowledge to understand what's being said and put it into an intelligible form. They get paid about half as much as an engineer. Engineers are NOT paid to write; they're paid to build. Scientists are NOT paid to write; they're paid to run a program.
Stop obsessing over language; it is simply a tool to convey ideas, whether you're Shakespeare or writing on slashdot. The parent post conveyed his ideas well enough for you to get all snotty.
Interesting stuff, Derek...where are you getting your information from? You're technically correct, the Hubble could be returned if all you look at is weight.
When I spoke to one of the Hubble scientists at an internal conference last year, he told me that it wasn't the weight that keeps Hubble from being returned--it's the replacement parts. Due to the upgrades it's had over the years, Hubble no longer fits into the Shuttle's payload bay.
Um..Ted Kacynski wasn't Muslim. He was born in Chicago, graduated from Harvard, and Timothy McVeigh was certainly not Muslim either. He was possibly Catholic, possibly agnostic.
I think if you think about it, what's scaring you about the Muslim terrorists isn't the fact that they're Muslim, but rather that they are believers, by which I mean that their faith exceeds their reason.
That can happen regardless of religion or birthplace or color...the fear of Japanese people in the US during WWII comes to mind. These people, by and large, supported the US, yet the US threw them in internment camps because of fear.
I think you should reexamine your beliefs before you start throwing people who support you into the same category as people who wish to kill you--you're doing yourself a disservice.
Actually, you missed the point of the whole discussion. Of course you are absolutely correct: most of these are non-issues, technologically. The point is that these technologies still need to be developed (and tested!) simply to go to the Moon, and they still need to be paid for, although some of them are probably nearing completion already.
You should look up more on the dust, though. I thought it was a non-issue, but eventually some folks convinced me that this may be the biggest challenge NASA faces. Your solution might be the right one, it's certainly the most likely one for astronaut suits--but that's only the suits, it's not going to stop damage to the hardware that's exposed. The Apollo hardware was torn up pretty badly. Again, there may be a simple answer to that, too, but whatever it is will have to be developed, and that takes time and money...which was the main point. Sorry that I didn't convey that point well.
You're right about the reactors. I was wrong. Thanks for the correction!
Your comments on the new vehicle are interesting. The point, I think, of the new CEV is to make it more simple, not necessarily to take a step backwards, but to make the vehicle 100 times more reliable than the Shuttle. I can see what you mean, though. It's like NASA is going back to the 60's...the only think that reassures me is that the Apollo engineers and scientists were amazingly smart. Maybe they got it so right that their concept is still correct?
I personally love the Shuttle, and wish that the engineers had listened to the operations people while doing the design. It might have been a lot cheaper to operate and upgrade.
Of course I do not speak of the "Lost Cities of Gold." I have been told by numerous people that the detailed engineering drawings have been lost. Nobody can be more accurate than the information that they have been given, and the people who told me this had every reason to know what they were talking about. However, if I'm wrong, I apologise.
Of course NASA's resources for developing new technologies are less now than in the 1960s--in a very real way! NASA's yearly spending power for exploration is something like 1/3 to 1/5 of what it was in the Apollo program, depending on how you count. That's one reason why it's going to take more than 10 years to return to the Moon. This is mitigated, of course, by the advances in engineering technology that you mention. Those advances, by the way, are part of why new vehicles would be needed even if we had the detailed engineering drawings.
Also, the point that was being made really had nothing to do with the lunar program, the point was to show the immense technological challenges facing a lunar base to be built by the Japanese by 2030. I was only mentioning the challenges that NASA faces now as an analogy for the challenges for something far more complex.
As far as your personal comments about me, they are lovely rhetorical distractions. You managed several attempts at insulting me while simultaneously making no contribution to the discussion at hand.
Many of the comments above point out an "attitude" of NASA people. This may in fact be true; however, I believe that my "attitude" is one of understanding the difficulties involved. Perhpas I came across too negatively, though: I believe that we can and will go to the Moon...it's just a problem of expense driving us to a long period of time to design and build the spacecraft and develop the technologies needed.
It's important to understand the challenge that NASA is up against: During Apollo, NASA had approximately 2.5% of the national budget. Today, NASA has less than 1%, and they've been asked to do the same job while having to cover the expense of the International Space Station ($4B per year) and the Shuttle (~$2B per year, perhaps more--it depends on whose numbers you believe). That leaves (very approximately) 1/5 the spending power as what was available in Apollo.
I chose to respond to this particular response because I thought it was the most interesting and thoughtful. Here are some more things to think about:
1) You're absolutely correct, and that's why NASA is using as much existing hardware as possible. However, I was in the Air and Space museum the other day and saw folks with NASA badges physically measuring the old Apollo equipment with a 12" ruler. Kind of frightening.
2) Not true. You're forgetting that Mars has an atmosphere and the Moon does not. The Moon's surface is pummeled by asteroids; this liquefies the surface (or so the theory goes) and turns it into something like volcanic glass. The next time that an asteroid strikes the surface, this glass shatters, and the microparticles are very small. They are also very sharp, with edges so sharp that air molecules would break them--but there's no air. So those jagged little crystals get into and on everything. Mars dust isn't nearly as bad, as evidenced by the rovers. There are some excellent resources on the web about the problems of lunar dust. Here's one for your enjoyment.
3) Heat shields are extremely tricky. The center of gravity and the shape of the heatshield determine how large the heatshield can be built. These are lift-producing shapes, so that the capsule can steer a bit while its coming down. No capsule has ever been as large as 5m (Apollo's was 3.9m) and the materials simply don't exist. There are several good candidates, but the best one (far outperforming the others) is made by a small company of ~8 people. Unless that company licenses the material, NASA will never go with it--it would be a real problem if the supplier went out of business. Bottom line is that we can't use the one from Stardust. Not only is it the wrong shape and size, but even if it were, it's not human-rated.
4) I completely agree with you: rocket engine throttling is well known, it's just that a capable has to be developed. That's expensive, and takes time, and NASA has approximately 1/5 the spending power that it did in the Apollo program.
5) I believe that if you check the record, no nuclear *reactor* has ever flown in space. There have been numerous nuclear power generators, such as the ones on Apollo, but they have all been sub-critical. The SP-100 project for having a nuclear reactor in space was cancelled by Clinton in the early 90s, right before they were to build a prototype. Almost all of the development knowledge has been lost from that, unfortunately. Cancelling a project of any sort tends to mean you have to start over (facilities are converted, drawings are lost, people with knowledge and experience go to other fields) but it's very true of technology development. If you stand down a tech development, it's very difficult to start it up again.
That said, I am not a nuke (what nuclear engineers are fond of calling themselves), but I know one, and she tells me that 1/6g is actually the worst case. It's more difficult to get the coolant to flow properly or something, I'm not a nuke.:)
Again, let me stress that I b
Umm....no? I'm not a "rocket scientist," but I am an engineer who specializes in technology development at NASA...and, in fact, we don't have a lot of the technologies that we used to have.
Here's a "for instance" -- you need a deeply throtleable rocket engine to safely land a vehicle on the Moon. We had one on the LEM in Apollo, but it hasn't been built in 35 years. There are no CAD models of such an engine; the plans have been lost; the manufacturing isn't around; the rocket will be made with different materials, and will need a complete redesign anyway.
Another "for instance" -- space suits have been made for in-space only use. We need to develop a space suit that can walk on the Moon again. There are no plans, the materials are all different, and the suit will need to be designed and tested. As noted by a later post, this is a particularly difficult technology, as it has to deal with lunar dust--basically microscopic shards of volcanic glass that have never had their edges dulled by contact with air. Some of the Apollo astronauts were barely able to move their suits by the end of a 3 day long stay on the surface of the Moon--how would a lunar astronaut survive a six-month stay?
Another "for instance" -- no Saturn 5? how are we supposed to launch something into lunar transit?
Another "for instance" -- the Earth reentry vehicle will be travelling at 10-12 km/s. That's kilometers per second! Even if we had the drawings, the materials used in Apollo's heat shield have been deemed unsafe for the environment. We've got to find and test a replacement.
And those are the critical technologies from off the top of my head, not counting the technologies needed for a human habitat for use on the Moon...which would likely require a nuclear fission power plant to make it through the 14 day lunar night. Besides the technical problems of designing and building a fission power system to operate in 1/6g, can you imagine what would happen if NASA tried to launch a nuclear fission power plant? Cassini had large protests, and it had only radioisotope power, a nuclear power system that has survived a launch failure!
Bottom line is that we do not have the technologies needed for a lunar base, and it will cost a LOT of money and take quite a lot of time to develop them.
Well, and the fact of the matter is, we can see these things for free--your local library probably loans out DVDs. Book stores never went out of business because of libraries. And, of course, even though people can record songs off of radios, there were still CDs sold.
I used to pay to see movies in a movie theater, now I have my own "theater" at home. Once a film has been filmed, produced, and distributed, it costs the movie studio virtually nothing to distribute that film over the internet.
I find it disturbing that TV shows cost more to buy from iTunes than if you wait and buy the DVD set at Best Buy, which had to be made, distributed to the Best Buy warehouse, then shipped to the store, then taken out of a box by hand, scanned, and put on a shelf...and then someone had to run the cash register, and of course the lights to the building had to be turned on, the rent had to be paid, etc. etc....when distributing a TV show by computer, only the servers, bandwidth, and Apple have to be paid for...why should it cost $44 for a 22 episode season by iTunes and cost $39.99 for the physical boxed set from Best Buy?
Well, I did what I could: I told one of my managers who has worked with space operations before, she may be able to pass it along. By the way, she thought yours was a good idea too...I couldn't credit you directly, but told her where it came from.
Of course, the problem is that most engineers here at NASA are a bit slow on the uptake of new technology...to get something not only space qualified, but also human rated...well, it could take years and many $. The environment is much harsher up there than most people (including me!) realize, and naturally they want to protect the astronauts. We'll see if it goes anywhere, though, thanks for the idea!
Y'know, that's not a bad idea. I don't know much about RFIDs, but there should be a way of tagging items (don't know how hard that is) and keeping a database in a computer...I'll have to see if I can pass that along to someone, thanks!
Well, ya' know, there probably IS a process/proceedure for this. Everything about the station is carefully controlled. Still, it's in space, things float (I understand that *everything* floats, which means there's a layer of brown goop on the inside the Shuttle that has to be cleaned off after every flight), and there are tons of little cubbys where you keep everything. The astronauts' labor is some of the most expensive labor ever--if they can't find something in a few minutes, I'd ask them to improvise, too, since it costs (depending on how you calculate) between $500,000,000 and $8,000,000,000 per Shuttle launch to get them up there in the first place...that's a lot of $/hour once they're there...
uh...actually, with a magnetic field, you get pressure on the "wake" and you end up compressing it into an ever thinning stream...rather like a tail. Technically, it never closes, but I figure by the heliopause it's close enough.
And both Rovers and both Voyagers were built by JPL, which the current NASA Administrator is cutting over and over and over...JPL is the ONLY NASA CENTER who has had to lay people off....
That's very likely. The Earth's magnetic field is shaped like a comet's tail--the Solar Wind pushes it over to one side, squishing the front and making a tail out of the back...I wouldn't be at all suprised if the same were true of the Sun's field, with a tail out away from the center of the galaxy...
There's a great article with pictures of the Earth's magnetic field at:
this UK physics site...scroll down to see the "bow shock," but there's no picture of the tail, they cut the picture off early. A great animation of the Sun's impact on the rotating magnetic field of the Earth can be seen at this NASA site.
but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it,
Way out of the ballpark. NERVA-2 (the spacecraft) was expected to cost 266m$ per 870k kg rocket in 1985 dollars (perhaps 400m$ today).
Okay, now you're off the deep end here. Do you know what *catalyzed* means? The amount of antimatter is miniscule.
No, my point was not that we would be using a lot. The point is that, politically speaking, if you're launching a single positron, there will be no way to launch it. The next point that I made was that you're dreaming if you think that we can have a space-qualified rocket using these technologies within 15 years' time.
Penning trap + pellet injector + antimatter injector + bell nozzle + pellet tank = antimatter catalyzed microfission/microfusion rocket. Which component, may I ask, are you picturing as being huge/heavy?
You're probably right about this. I thought that a penning trap was, right now, about the size of a desk, perhaps 1m on each side...but I haven't looked in a while.
the Cassini protests were pretty darn small
You're absolutely right, and the New Horizons launch was even smaller...so we're getting there.
Um, no. The entire JIMO probe was slated to cost 400m$, which included a gas-cooled nuclear reactor.
Really? I was under the impression that JIMO was cancelled because its costs were going through the roof. The technology program alone was in the hundreds of millions. After all, SP-100 did most of the work for an in-space reactor, and that was 100's of millions just for the reactor.
I'm almost surprised that you didn't rail against HEDM, cryogenic solids/hybrids, OTRAG, or any of the other things I mentioned
I din't have time...and I think that my first point of inspiring future engineers and scientists is a real one, as is the political nature of the program. Your answers are good and well-thought out, though--you obviously work in the industry and know more than I.
Cheers,
These are only workable if they are politically viable. None of them are politically viable. It is not in the United States' interests to lose the capacity for human spaceflight.
We can't launch the CEV on an EELV; man-rating any of those vehicles would be a nightmare. We can't launch only on foreign launch vehicles, as said above. Technology development will NOT inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, which is one of NASA's ultimate goals--human spaceflight is inspirational and helped us with the cold war, after all.
The fact that you know so much but know so little is shown by your desires for NTP -- not only is Nuclear Thermal Propulsion going to cost billions of dollars and take years to finish, it really doesn't help that much for going to the Moon. Sure, you could launch a more capable system and take the same time to get there (or you could get there faster), but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it, you're not going to have a space program left to train the astronauts, much less build the spacecraft.
And don't get me started with the "high-density nuclear power plants"! Sheesh, that's ANOTHER $5 billion--and if we're successful, we'll have the largest ever nuclear protest group at the launch site...ASSUMING that we can get launch approval! Never mind that it'll only be politically viable for 2 more years (6, if we get another republican, or maybe 10 if we get two) and the system will take at least 15 years to build. Look at SP-100's future if you don't believe me.
"Antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion"?!?!?! What are you smoking? If we have problems launching something like New Frontiers, which had an RTG on it, how are we going to launch the most dangerous thing known to mankind? Oh, and that's forgetting that a project manager is incentivized to put things on his mission that will WORK...which means TRL 7, minimum, and this is, what, TRL 2? I doubt that there's a workable science bench microfission...and even if there were, it's got to fit on a conventional launch vehicle to get into space.
Technologists always forget to think of things like a project manager: A project manager wants a piece of equipment on his spacecraft to 1) work, 2) fit, 3) weigh as little as possible, and 4) take up as little electricity as possible. PERFORMANCE IS SECONDARY to all of these.
A technologist, on the other hand, is looking for a new, more powerful, more efficient thing. He usually thinks that, once performance is achieved, then putting it into the package that will fit on the spacecraft is no big deal. It's usually the most technically challenging part! Look at how long it took the MER rovers to unfold...well, all of those mechanisms had to be designed and built, which cost a lot of money--if a larger aeroshell could have been used (technically difficult, reentry is tough) then the rovers could well have been less expensive.
In the end, though, the real problem is political viability--and none of your suggestions take that into account. If you're going to spend $17,000,000,000 of the taxpayer's money, then it has to be acceptible to their elected representatives, or it's not going to fly.
(arg!)Styopa,
You can buy a HD antenna for your HD TV for about $180 and get hi-def broadcasts for free...and since it's a digital signal, the signal should either come in crystal clear or not at all. If you don't mind commercials, it's not a bad deal--especially if you like sports. (I don't, so I haven't gotten an antenna yet.)
Of course, commercials used to be good, that's when you'd go get more food from the fridge!
I am completely with you. There are many good games out there that fail becuase the interface is poor; there are many poor games that succeed only because the interface is good. Allowing a more complete, natural interface to a game can do nothing but improve the experience--as long as that interface is used well.
To completely discount something like the Revolution controller (and before you get the chance to actually use it) is a bit...limiting.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, I was saying that art would be funded by taxes. Other forms of art are already funded by taxes, so your argument that "Sweeden or the US don't need this now" is a bit beside the point, don't you think?
And, finally, if copyright and IP laws work in favor of the little guy as well as big corporations, then why is it only large artists and big corporations that are fighting downloads? The little artists seem, by and large, to be for free downloads. And some of the "medium guys" too--you can download Weird Al's single off of his website, for instance.
Sony and M$ also tell you what you want--you want better graphics and faster processor speeds, despite the fact that it will not do a thing for true game enjoyability! I mean, I can only play "Doom" so many times...whether or not it's called "Halo" or "Doom" or whatever. I've never been interested in Madden, and it's on version, what, 27?
But wait, Madden for the 360 or the PS3 will LOOK AMAZING!!!
Who cares. I haven't played a football game since 1992. It was boring then and it's boring now.
I can imagine a world where the state pays a recording artist for every download and provides music for its citizens for free. Something like state supported arts.
The point is that WE define what legal and illegal mean, and they don't have to continue meaning what they mean now. In fact, the meaning of "own" has changed already--we don't "own" software, despite the fact that we hold a shiny disc in our hands. We only own the "right to use" the software.
You say that "engineers and scientists...must be able to communicate in an efficient, effective manner." Why do you think that powerpoint is overused? Most of us train in technical skills, not in writing or communication.
You erroneously state that "engineers and scientists are required to study such communication skills." At MIT (possibly the most highly respected technical school in the world) for a master's degree all you have to do is pass a writing and grammar test.
Don't be stupid--engineers are concerned with building things that work: bridges that don't fall down, rockets that don't blow up, and doing that really doesn't need much in the way of language skills. You have to be able to communicate requirements, and there's a set format for those. Scientists want to discover things. To set up and operate a labratory requires very little in the way of language skills.
That's why we hire technical writers for our important papers. A technical writer has studied language and communication and has enough technical knowledge to understand what's being said and put it into an intelligible form. They get paid about half as much as an engineer. Engineers are NOT paid to write; they're paid to build. Scientists are NOT paid to write; they're paid to run a program.
Stop obsessing over language; it is simply a tool to convey ideas, whether you're Shakespeare or writing on slashdot. The parent post conveyed his ideas well enough for you to get all snotty.
Interesting stuff, Derek...where are you getting your information from? You're technically correct, the Hubble could be returned if all you look at is weight. When I spoke to one of the Hubble scientists at an internal conference last year, he told me that it wasn't the weight that keeps Hubble from being returned--it's the replacement parts. Due to the upgrades it's had over the years, Hubble no longer fits into the Shuttle's payload bay.
I think if you think about it, what's scaring you about the Muslim terrorists isn't the fact that they're Muslim, but rather that they are believers, by which I mean that their faith exceeds their reason.
That can happen regardless of religion or birthplace or color...the fear of Japanese people in the US during WWII comes to mind. These people, by and large, supported the US, yet the US threw them in internment camps because of fear.
I think you should reexamine your beliefs before you start throwing people who support you into the same category as people who wish to kill you--you're doing yourself a disservice.
The technologies are already largely developed. There are no 'unknown unknowns' and vanishingly few 'known unknowns'.
We NEVER know if we've found all the unknowns. If you EVER think you know all of the unknowns, think again, and think carefully of:
Commander Husband, Pilot McCool, Payload Commander Anderson, Mission Specialists Brown, Chawla, Clark, and Payload Specialist Ramon.
They died because of a failed technology.
Or Perhaps you'd prefer to think of:
Commander Scobee, Pilot Smith, Mission Specialists Resnik, McNair, Onizuka, Payload Specialist Jarvis, or Christa McAuliffe.
They died because of a failed technology.
Of course, you could think of:
Gus Grissom, Ed White, or Roger Chaffee.
This accident happened because the spacecraft was built properly, but the design was poor.
We NEVER know all of the unknowns.
You should look up more on the dust, though. I thought it was a non-issue, but eventually some folks convinced me that this may be the biggest challenge NASA faces. Your solution might be the right one, it's certainly the most likely one for astronaut suits--but that's only the suits, it's not going to stop damage to the hardware that's exposed. The Apollo hardware was torn up pretty badly. Again, there may be a simple answer to that, too, but whatever it is will have to be developed, and that takes time and money...which was the main point. Sorry that I didn't convey that point well.
Your comments on the new vehicle are interesting. The point, I think, of the new CEV is to make it more simple, not necessarily to take a step backwards, but to make the vehicle 100 times more reliable than the Shuttle. I can see what you mean, though. It's like NASA is going back to the 60's...the only think that reassures me is that the Apollo engineers and scientists were amazingly smart. Maybe they got it so right that their concept is still correct?
I personally love the Shuttle, and wish that the engineers had listened to the operations people while doing the design. It might have been a lot cheaper to operate and upgrade.
Of course NASA's resources for developing new technologies are less now than in the 1960s--in a very real way! NASA's yearly spending power for exploration is something like 1/3 to 1/5 of what it was in the Apollo program, depending on how you count. That's one reason why it's going to take more than 10 years to return to the Moon. This is mitigated, of course, by the advances in engineering technology that you mention. Those advances, by the way, are part of why new vehicles would be needed even if we had the detailed engineering drawings.
Also, the point that was being made really had nothing to do with the lunar program, the point was to show the immense technological challenges facing a lunar base to be built by the Japanese by 2030. I was only mentioning the challenges that NASA faces now as an analogy for the challenges for something far more complex.
As far as your personal comments about me, they are lovely rhetorical distractions. You managed several attempts at insulting me while simultaneously making no contribution to the discussion at hand.
It's important to understand the challenge that NASA is up against: During Apollo, NASA had approximately 2.5% of the national budget. Today, NASA has less than 1%, and they've been asked to do the same job while having to cover the expense of the International Space Station ($4B per year) and the Shuttle (~$2B per year, perhaps more--it depends on whose numbers you believe). That leaves (very approximately) 1/5 the spending power as what was available in Apollo.
I chose to respond to this particular response because I thought it was the most interesting and thoughtful. Here are some more things to think about:
1) You're absolutely correct, and that's why NASA is using as much existing hardware as possible. However, I was in the Air and Space museum the other day and saw folks with NASA badges physically measuring the old Apollo equipment with a 12" ruler. Kind of frightening. 2) Not true. You're forgetting that Mars has an atmosphere and the Moon does not. The Moon's surface is pummeled by asteroids; this liquefies the surface (or so the theory goes) and turns it into something like volcanic glass. The next time that an asteroid strikes the surface, this glass shatters, and the microparticles are very small. They are also very sharp, with edges so sharp that air molecules would break them--but there's no air. So those jagged little crystals get into and on everything. Mars dust isn't nearly as bad, as evidenced by the rovers. There are some excellent resources on the web about the problems of lunar dust. Here's one for your enjoyment.
3) Heat shields are extremely tricky. The center of gravity and the shape of the heatshield determine how large the heatshield can be built. These are lift-producing shapes, so that the capsule can steer a bit while its coming down. No capsule has ever been as large as 5m (Apollo's was 3.9m) and the materials simply don't exist. There are several good candidates, but the best one (far outperforming the others) is made by a small company of ~8 people. Unless that company licenses the material, NASA will never go with it--it would be a real problem if the supplier went out of business. Bottom line is that we can't use the one from Stardust. Not only is it the wrong shape and size, but even if it were, it's not human-rated.
4) I completely agree with you: rocket engine throttling is well known, it's just that a capable has to be developed. That's expensive, and takes time, and NASA has approximately 1/5 the spending power that it did in the Apollo program.
5) I believe that if you check the record, no nuclear *reactor* has ever flown in space. There have been numerous nuclear power generators, such as the ones on Apollo, but they have all been sub-critical. The SP-100 project for having a nuclear reactor in space was cancelled by Clinton in the early 90s, right before they were to build a prototype. Almost all of the development knowledge has been lost from that, unfortunately. Cancelling a project of any sort tends to mean you have to start over (facilities are converted, drawings are lost, people with knowledge and experience go to other fields) but it's very true of technology development. If you stand down a tech development, it's very difficult to start it up again.
That said, I am not a nuke (what nuclear engineers are fond of calling themselves), but I know one, and she tells me that 1/6g is actually the worst case. It's more difficult to get the coolant to flow properly or something, I'm not a nuke. :)
Again, let me stress that I b
Absolutely correct. I mean, with the advances in computer graphics, it's suprising that it took so long for NASA to fake landing *robots* on Mars!
Here's a "for instance" -- you need a deeply throtleable rocket engine to safely land a vehicle on the Moon. We had one on the LEM in Apollo, but it hasn't been built in 35 years. There are no CAD models of such an engine; the plans have been lost; the manufacturing isn't around; the rocket will be made with different materials, and will need a complete redesign anyway.
Another "for instance" -- space suits have been made for in-space only use. We need to develop a space suit that can walk on the Moon again. There are no plans, the materials are all different, and the suit will need to be designed and tested. As noted by a later post, this is a particularly difficult technology, as it has to deal with lunar dust--basically microscopic shards of volcanic glass that have never had their edges dulled by contact with air. Some of the Apollo astronauts were barely able to move their suits by the end of a 3 day long stay on the surface of the Moon--how would a lunar astronaut survive a six-month stay?
Another "for instance" -- no Saturn 5? how are we supposed to launch something into lunar transit?
Another "for instance" -- the Earth reentry vehicle will be travelling at 10-12 km/s. That's kilometers per second! Even if we had the drawings, the materials used in Apollo's heat shield have been deemed unsafe for the environment. We've got to find and test a replacement.
And those are the critical technologies from off the top of my head, not counting the technologies needed for a human habitat for use on the Moon...which would likely require a nuclear fission power plant to make it through the 14 day lunar night. Besides the technical problems of designing and building a fission power system to operate in 1/6g, can you imagine what would happen if NASA tried to launch a nuclear fission power plant? Cassini had large protests, and it had only radioisotope power, a nuclear power system that has survived a launch failure!
Bottom line is that we do not have the technologies needed for a lunar base, and it will cost a LOT of money and take quite a lot of time to develop them.
Then episodes that have boxed sets available should cost less...but that won't be the case!
I used to pay to see movies in a movie theater, now I have my own "theater" at home. Once a film has been filmed, produced, and distributed, it costs the movie studio virtually nothing to distribute that film over the internet.
I find it disturbing that TV shows cost more to buy from iTunes than if you wait and buy the DVD set at Best Buy, which had to be made, distributed to the Best Buy warehouse, then shipped to the store, then taken out of a box by hand, scanned, and put on a shelf...and then someone had to run the cash register, and of course the lights to the building had to be turned on, the rent had to be paid, etc. etc....when distributing a TV show by computer, only the servers, bandwidth, and Apple have to be paid for...why should it cost $44 for a 22 episode season by iTunes and cost $39.99 for the physical boxed set from Best Buy?
Of course, the problem is that most engineers here at NASA are a bit slow on the uptake of new technology...to get something not only space qualified, but also human rated...well, it could take years and many $. The environment is much harsher up there than most people (including me!) realize, and naturally they want to protect the astronauts. We'll see if it goes anywhere, though, thanks for the idea!
Y'know, that's not a bad idea. I don't know much about RFIDs, but there should be a way of tagging items (don't know how hard that is) and keeping a database in a computer...I'll have to see if I can pass that along to someone, thanks!
Well, ya' know, there probably IS a process/proceedure for this. Everything about the station is carefully controlled. Still, it's in space, things float (I understand that *everything* floats, which means there's a layer of brown goop on the inside the Shuttle that has to be cleaned off after every flight), and there are tons of little cubbys where you keep everything. The astronauts' labor is some of the most expensive labor ever--if they can't find something in a few minutes, I'd ask them to improvise, too, since it costs (depending on how you calculate) between $500,000,000 and $8,000,000,000 per Shuttle launch to get them up there in the first place...that's a lot of $/hour once they're there...
uh...actually, with a magnetic field, you get pressure on the "wake" and you end up compressing it into an ever thinning stream...rather like a tail. Technically, it never closes, but I figure by the heliopause it's close enough.
And both Rovers and both Voyagers were built by JPL, which the current NASA Administrator is cutting over and over and over...JPL is the ONLY NASA CENTER who has had to lay people off....
There's a great article with pictures of the Earth's magnetic field at: this UK physics site...scroll down to see the "bow shock," but there's no picture of the tail, they cut the picture off early. A great animation of the Sun's impact on the rotating magnetic field of the Earth can be seen at this NASA site.
but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it, Way out of the ballpark. NERVA-2 (the spacecraft) was expected to cost 266m$ per 870k kg rocket in 1985 dollars (perhaps 400m$ today). Okay, now you're off the deep end here. Do you know what *catalyzed* means? The amount of antimatter is miniscule. No, my point was not that we would be using a lot. The point is that, politically speaking, if you're launching a single positron, there will be no way to launch it. The next point that I made was that you're dreaming if you think that we can have a space-qualified rocket using these technologies within 15 years' time. Penning trap + pellet injector + antimatter injector + bell nozzle + pellet tank = antimatter catalyzed microfission/microfusion rocket. Which component, may I ask, are you picturing as being huge/heavy? You're probably right about this. I thought that a penning trap was, right now, about the size of a desk, perhaps 1m on each side...but I haven't looked in a while. the Cassini protests were pretty darn small You're absolutely right, and the New Horizons launch was even smaller...so we're getting there. Um, no. The entire JIMO probe was slated to cost 400m$, which included a gas-cooled nuclear reactor. Really? I was under the impression that JIMO was cancelled because its costs were going through the roof. The technology program alone was in the hundreds of millions. After all, SP-100 did most of the work for an in-space reactor, and that was 100's of millions just for the reactor. I'm almost surprised that you didn't rail against HEDM, cryogenic solids/hybrids, OTRAG, or any of the other things I mentioned I din't have time...and I think that my first point of inspiring future engineers and scientists is a real one, as is the political nature of the program. Your answers are good and well-thought out, though--you obviously work in the industry and know more than I. Cheers,
These are only workable if they are politically viable. None of them are politically viable. It is not in the United States' interests to lose the capacity for human spaceflight.
We can't launch the CEV on an EELV; man-rating any of those vehicles would be a nightmare. We can't launch only on foreign launch vehicles, as said above. Technology development will NOT inspire the next generation of scientists and engineers, which is one of NASA's ultimate goals--human spaceflight is inspirational and helped us with the cold war, after all.
The fact that you know so much but know so little is shown by your desires for NTP -- not only is Nuclear Thermal Propulsion going to cost billions of dollars and take years to finish, it really doesn't help that much for going to the Moon. Sure, you could launch a more capable system and take the same time to get there (or you could get there faster), but if you have to spend $5B on the engine alone, and probably $B for each copy of it, you're not going to have a space program left to train the astronauts, much less build the spacecraft.
And don't get me started with the "high-density nuclear power plants"! Sheesh, that's ANOTHER $5 billion--and if we're successful, we'll have the largest ever nuclear protest group at the launch site...ASSUMING that we can get launch approval! Never mind that it'll only be politically viable for 2 more years (6, if we get another republican, or maybe 10 if we get two) and the system will take at least 15 years to build. Look at SP-100's future if you don't believe me.
"Antimatter-catalyzed microfission/microfusion"?!?!?! What are you smoking? If we have problems launching something like New Frontiers, which had an RTG on it, how are we going to launch the most dangerous thing known to mankind? Oh, and that's forgetting that a project manager is incentivized to put things on his mission that will WORK...which means TRL 7, minimum, and this is, what, TRL 2? I doubt that there's a workable science bench microfission...and even if there were, it's got to fit on a conventional launch vehicle to get into space.
Technologists always forget to think of things like a project manager: A project manager wants a piece of equipment on his spacecraft to 1) work, 2) fit, 3) weigh as little as possible, and 4) take up as little electricity as possible. PERFORMANCE IS SECONDARY to all of these.
A technologist, on the other hand, is looking for a new, more powerful, more efficient thing. He usually thinks that, once performance is achieved, then putting it into the package that will fit on the spacecraft is no big deal. It's usually the most technically challenging part! Look at how long it took the MER rovers to unfold...well, all of those mechanisms had to be designed and built, which cost a lot of money--if a larger aeroshell could have been used (technically difficult, reentry is tough) then the rovers could well have been less expensive.
In the end, though, the real problem is political viability--and none of your suggestions take that into account. If you're going to spend $17,000,000,000 of the taxpayer's money, then it has to be acceptible to their elected representatives, or it's not going to fly.
(arg!)Styopa, You can buy a HD antenna for your HD TV for about $180 and get hi-def broadcasts for free...and since it's a digital signal, the signal should either come in crystal clear or not at all. If you don't mind commercials, it's not a bad deal--especially if you like sports. (I don't, so I haven't gotten an antenna yet.) Of course, commercials used to be good, that's when you'd go get more food from the fridge!
To completely discount something like the Revolution controller (and before you get the chance to actually use it) is a bit...limiting.