Not sure how this is a groundbreaking achievement. ComputerCraft already provides a LUA interpreter and turtles, and has a lot more documentation. There's also RedPower'sControl module, that gives you an emulated 6502-based 8 bit computer. A FORTH boot disk can be crafted in-game, or you can edit your save files to bring in either an BASIC boot disk or your own assembler code. (Previous/.coverage of the 6502 emulator blocks)
This is why Russia and the ESA recently built a Soyuz launch pad at the Guiana Space Centre; They get nearly double the performance to GEO there, from 1.7 tonnes out of Baikonur to 3 out of Kourou. Russia's still dependent on Kazakhstan for Proton launches, though, and that's what they're currently using for most of their communication satellite launches.
I first found JoCo from the original Slashdot post; I was quite excited to find out he was playing at the first PAX I attended (2008). I think I bounced from him to quite a few other geek-friendly music acts now in my iPod, Paul and Storm, Molly Lewis, Marian Call, the Doubleclicks... So, thanks, Slashdot!
They were doing this with pretty lightweight acrobatic planes. Perhaps the big cargo planes put off enough of a wake that the following planes don't have to be quite as close? Still going to be a bumpy ride though.
Mostly because they want to reuse as much of the existing infrastructure at KSC as they can, and it was built around the idea of static buildings & launch pads with mobile launch platforms. When they were building a west coast shuttle launching facility in the 80's, they were reusing SLC-6, a Titan III facility built around having a mobile service tower, so they wound up building a mobile assembly building.
Wait, west coast shuttle facilities, you ask? Yup, they were planing on launching Discovery from Vandenberg Air Force Base in October 1986. Unfortunately, Challenger exploded in January 1986, putting a moratorium on shuttle launches, and it was deemed prohibitively expensive to make all of the safety-related upgrades required once they started flying again, and, at that point, the Air Force had already decided they were better off with unmanned expendable launchers.
And think how much economic stimulus Batman has pumped into the economy over the years acquiring all his wonderful toys. If you believe in trickle down effect, this should be good for everyone.
The various press releases are forgetting something. The Falcon Heavy is third in lift capability behind the Saturn V and the Energia. Granted, the Energia only had two flights before the collapse of the Soviet Union made it too expensive to operate, and on one of the the payload malfunctioned after separation and deorbited itself almost immediately, but in both cases, the booster functioned just fine. It was capable of lifting 100 metric tons to LEO (which was more than enough to give the Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, a piggy back ride to orbit), which puts it just shy of Saturn V's 118 tons, and is almost double the Falcon Heavy's 53 tons.
8KB in the base computer block with up to seven 8KB memory expansion blocks behind it. There are peripherals that do in fact connect via memory windows; Eloraam has implemented a custom MMU instruction to map in whatever you've connected with RedBus wire. Currently, there are only three of them, though: the disk drive, the terminal, and the IOX box, which lets you interface with redstone signals. I think you can also connect multiple CPUs up over Red Bus; you just have to give them different bus IDs. Bus IDs are 8 bits long, so if you wanted to, you COULD build a Beowulf cluster.
Wow, I hadn't realized there has only been 112 manned Soyuz flights. You'd think, with a 15 year head start on the Shuttle, they would have had more flights than the Shuttle's 135. Not sure if this is a point in the Shuttle's favor, for having a higher flight rate, or Soyuz's, for having a longer on-orbit lifespan, allowing them to keep their space stations manned with fewer flights.
There was a Atlas V scheduled to go up on the 5th, but that's now bumped up to the 3rd. I read over at NASASpaceFlight that Falcon 9 has a launch window approximately every three days from the Cape to ISS. Spaceflightnow.com has a worldwide launch calender; you can see how many times this flight has been delayed. It was originally scheduled for June 6th of last year, so it'll be just a day shy of 11 months behind schedule, if there aren't any further reschedules.
Not only that, but when NASA runs out of SMEs for the SLS rocket, they will have to come up with a new engine at huge expense, put it through a testing regime, and more or less redesign the rest of the rocket as a whole new vehicle anyway.
Not quite. Once the stock of RS-25D engines left over from the space shuttle program are used up, they'll be replaced by RS-25Es, a cheaper one-time-use version of the space shuttle main engine. They may need to produce two more sets of the 25Ds before the E's are ready, though. They're reusing the old shuttle engines on a disposable rocket for two reasons: they're already a man-rated design, and the engines themselves are already paid for.
...astronauts wearing an ACES, Sokol or some private sector pressure suit...
I sort of hope they use Sokol suits, or something with compatible valves, making it easier for astronauts to go up in one type of space craft and, if necessary, return in a different one. Of course, the seat liners would also have to be compatible with the ones used in Soyuz, but it'd be nice to be able to switch crafts without having to send up a second pressure suite and seat liner, like we did when we had astronauts switching between the shuttle and a Soyuz mid flight.
The main engines and associated plumbing were removed at NASA's behest, not the museums. NASA plans on reusing the them (and, unfortunately, disposing of them) on the first three flights of the new SLS rocket.
I believe they removed most of the tanks and plumbing from the RCS and OMS systems because the fuel they use is particularly nasty (they have to wear heavy-duty hazmat suits when working on them), and they were worried that the equipment would still be contaminated, even after it was purged, and most museums don't toxic self-igniting chemicals in their exhibit halls anyway, so it was safer just to completely remove all the interior components. It's not like they'd be on display anyway, unless you went crawling around in the interior, or the museum did a cut away (which, in this case, just makes me shudder).
But I thought there were no beginnings or endings to the Wheel of Time?
Sanderson's been doing a wonderful job; his stuff has probalby been the best we've seen since book five or six. (Yes, there were cool bits here in there in 7-12, but they're diamonds in a whole lot of rough.) I'm sort of sad we don't get a few more Sanderson books.
No, berthing is to be standard operating procedure for cargo flights; Common Berthing Mechanism connectors, such as the one found on the nose of the Dragon, don't have any of the shock absorbers required for docking. As it also requires the Canada arm to unberth, CBM isn't well suited for manned flights, as in an evacuation scenario, there'd be no one left on the station to operate the arm, so crewed version of the Dragon will probably feature either APAS or NDS/LIDS docking connectors. CBM is preferred for cargo transfer, however, because it has a larger hatch, big enough to move fully assembled equipment racks through them. Japan's HTV cargo vehicles are also berthed via Canada Arm.
The title of this story is misleading. It isn't the rockets that are grounded, its the spacecraft that sits on top of them.
Also, for what it's worth, the shuttle wouldn't have been help matters much if the Russian's can't fly a Soyuz. While the shuttle is fine for swapping crews (in fact, the shuttle's runway landings are gentler than the Soyuz's parachute landings, a good thing for people who have spent the last six months in 0g), the shuttle can only fly a two week mission, meaning without a Soyuz attached to the station, we'd have to leave people in orbit without an immediate way home, a risk that neither NASA nor Roscomos is willing to take. The Soyuz itself is only rated for six months in orbit, giving them a limited window to fix the problems before we have to talk about unmanning the station.
Oh, and apparently they're trying for some sort of record on how fast they can turn over doctors.
Actually, the median per regeneration seems to be somewhere around three years, ignoring the gaps between the old run and the movie, and the movie to the new run, so even if Matt Smith leaves after next year, he isn't leaving unusually early. Granted, the 8th and 9th both were exceptionally short lived, but Tennant actually had the second longest run at 4 years, 6 months, after Tom Baker's 6 years 9 months. Granted, the modern Doctors don't stack up as well in episode count. Even when you account for the fact that they are making longer episodes then they did back when, the older Doctors still were making more content per year.
Does it need to talk to the cloud for tasks that were already available for voice control on the 3GS or 4? iPod controls, placing calls, and "What time is it?" shouldn't need the cloud. Well, other than the call itself, at least.
There's actually a "dock only" version of APAS (well, really, its successor, LIDS) in orbit already. The soft capture mechanism, with a LIDS, was attached to the bottom of Hubble on the final servicing mission, so a spacecraft can later dock with Hubble and deoribit it when we're done with it, so we aren't left playing UARS/Skylab roulette.
Wouldn't be the first time the Chinese have borrowed space technology from the Russians; the Shenzhou spacecraft is awfully similar to Soyuz. On the other hand, physics are physics, regardless of what country your in, so and there really are only a few useful hull configurations. No one is surprised when a fighter jet looks like externally similar to a Russian or American one.
By the way, the Salyut design is still alive and well. Zvezda, the ISS service module, is a direct decedent. Salyut 6, which you linked to, had a hull number of DOS-5. Mir was DOS-7, Zvezda is DOS-8. DOS in this case is Durable Orbital Station, not Disk Operating System. Salyut numbers don't match up because both civilian DOS stations and military OPS (Orbital Piloted Station) stations flew under the Salyut banner, in order to hide the military nature of the OPS program. Additionally, Salyut numbers were not assigned stations that failed before they could be made operational, in the typical Soviet style of covering up mistakes.
Unfortunately, Progress is one of only two vehicles that can deliver fuel to the station and the other, ESA's ATV, only has a flight rate of about one per year. While SpaceX can make up for the lost cargo, they dock (well, berth) at the US end of the station, so there's no way to transfer fuel to the Russian segment. Same story with Japan's operational HTV program (also one flight per year) and the other various commercial project NASA has contracts with. Using the cargo ship's own engines for reboost isn't the most practical option in the station's current configuration, either. You'd want to dock the boosting craft to the CBM on Node 2 forward, the nose of the station, so you'd be more or less lined up with the station's center of gravity. Unfortunately, that port is currently tied up with PMA2, the now-unneeded shuttle docking adapter. None of the upcoming space ships have plans to be compatible with the old docking interface.
Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight was suborbital space flight, a feat that has been repeated by a US company, Scaled Composites, on the three SpaceShipOne flights. Unfortunately, about the only use of a suborbital flight is to validate your spacecraft design before an orbital launch. However, neither SpaceShipOne nor Two were designed to reach orbit, so really they're only good for wining the X-Prize (SS1) and joyriding (SS2).
It is true noone is ready for a John Glen-style orbital flight, but hopefully the three-way competition between SpaceX's Dragon, Boeing's CST-100, and SpaceDev's Dream Chaser will keep them motivated.
Slashdot Mirror
Not sure how this is a groundbreaking achievement. ComputerCraft already provides a LUA interpreter and turtles, and has a lot more documentation. There's also RedPower's Control module, that gives you an emulated 6502-based 8 bit computer. A FORTH boot disk can be crafted in-game, or you can edit your save files to bring in either an BASIC boot disk or your own assembler code. (Previous /.coverage of the 6502 emulator blocks)
This is why Russia and the ESA recently built a Soyuz launch pad at the Guiana Space Centre; They get nearly double the performance to GEO there, from 1.7 tonnes out of Baikonur to 3 out of Kourou. Russia's still dependent on Kazakhstan for Proton launches, though, and that's what they're currently using for most of their communication satellite launches.
I first found JoCo from the original Slashdot post; I was quite excited to find out he was playing at the first PAX I attended (2008). I think I bounced from him to quite a few other geek-friendly music acts now in my iPod, Paul and Storm, Molly Lewis, Marian Call, the Doubleclicks... So, thanks, Slashdot!
They were doing this with pretty lightweight acrobatic planes. Perhaps the big cargo planes put off enough of a wake that the following planes don't have to be quite as close? Still going to be a bumpy ride though.
Mostly because they want to reuse as much of the existing infrastructure at KSC as they can, and it was built around the idea of static buildings & launch pads with mobile launch platforms. When they were building a west coast shuttle launching facility in the 80's, they were reusing SLC-6, a Titan III facility built around having a mobile service tower, so they wound up building a mobile assembly building.
Wait, west coast shuttle facilities, you ask? Yup, they were planing on launching Discovery from Vandenberg Air Force Base in October 1986. Unfortunately, Challenger exploded in January 1986, putting a moratorium on shuttle launches, and it was deemed prohibitively expensive to make all of the safety-related upgrades required once they started flying again, and, at that point, the Air Force had already decided they were better off with unmanned expendable launchers.
And think how much economic stimulus Batman has pumped into the economy over the years acquiring all his wonderful toys. If you believe in trickle down effect, this should be good for everyone.
The various press releases are forgetting something. The Falcon Heavy is third in lift capability behind the Saturn V and the Energia . Granted, the Energia only had two flights before the collapse of the Soviet Union made it too expensive to operate, and on one of the the payload malfunctioned after separation and deorbited itself almost immediately, but in both cases, the booster functioned just fine. It was capable of lifting 100 metric tons to LEO (which was more than enough to give the Buran, the Soviet space shuttle, a piggy back ride to orbit), which puts it just shy of Saturn V's 118 tons, and is almost double the Falcon Heavy's 53 tons.
8KB in the base computer block with up to seven 8KB memory expansion blocks behind it. There are peripherals that do in fact connect via memory windows; Eloraam has implemented a custom MMU instruction to map in whatever you've connected with RedBus wire. Currently, there are only three of them, though: the disk drive, the terminal, and the IOX box, which lets you interface with redstone signals. I think you can also connect multiple CPUs up over Red Bus; you just have to give them different bus IDs. Bus IDs are 8 bits long, so if you wanted to, you COULD build a Beowulf cluster.
It's supposed to run 1000 instructions per Minecraft tick, which is 1/20th of a second. Note that that's instructions, which on a traditional 6502 can take multiple clock cycles.
Wow, I hadn't realized there has only been 112 manned Soyuz flights. You'd think, with a 15 year head start on the Shuttle, they would have had more flights than the Shuttle's 135. Not sure if this is a point in the Shuttle's favor, for having a higher flight rate, or Soyuz's, for having a longer on-orbit lifespan, allowing them to keep their space stations manned with fewer flights.
Only from the weight of all the lead-based paint they're "not" going to use on it.
There was a Atlas V scheduled to go up on the 5th, but that's now bumped up to the 3rd. I read over at NASASpaceFlight that Falcon 9 has a launch window approximately every three days from the Cape to ISS. Spaceflightnow.com has a worldwide launch calender; you can see how many times this flight has been delayed. It was originally scheduled for June 6th of last year, so it'll be just a day shy of 11 months behind schedule, if there aren't any further reschedules.
Not only that, but when NASA runs out of SMEs for the SLS rocket, they will have to come up with a new engine at huge expense, put it through a testing regime, and more or less redesign the rest of the rocket as a whole new vehicle anyway.
Not quite. Once the stock of RS-25D engines left over from the space shuttle program are used up, they'll be replaced by RS-25Es, a cheaper one-time-use version of the space shuttle main engine. They may need to produce two more sets of the 25Ds before the E's are ready, though. They're reusing the old shuttle engines on a disposable rocket for two reasons: they're already a man-rated design, and the engines themselves are already paid for.
Interesting note, Discovery's engines, at least, may make it to museum some day; looks like they're being earmarked for ground test structures, rather than flight.
...astronauts wearing an ACES, Sokol or some private sector pressure suit...
I sort of hope they use Sokol suits, or something with compatible valves, making it easier for astronauts to go up in one type of space craft and, if necessary, return in a different one. Of course, the seat liners would also have to be compatible with the ones used in Soyuz, but it'd be nice to be able to switch crafts without having to send up a second pressure suite and seat liner, like we did when we had astronauts switching between the shuttle and a Soyuz mid flight.
The main engines and associated plumbing were removed at NASA's behest, not the museums. NASA plans on reusing the them (and, unfortunately, disposing of them) on the first three flights of the new SLS rocket.
I believe they removed most of the tanks and plumbing from the RCS and OMS systems because the fuel they use is particularly nasty (they have to wear heavy-duty hazmat suits when working on them), and they were worried that the equipment would still be contaminated, even after it was purged, and most museums don't toxic self-igniting chemicals in their exhibit halls anyway, so it was safer just to completely remove all the interior components. It's not like they'd be on display anyway, unless you went crawling around in the interior, or the museum did a cut away (which, in this case, just makes me shudder).
But I thought there were no beginnings or endings to the Wheel of Time?
Sanderson's been doing a wonderful job; his stuff has probalby been the best we've seen since book five or six. (Yes, there were cool bits here in there in 7-12, but they're diamonds in a whole lot of rough.) I'm sort of sad we don't get a few more Sanderson books.
No, berthing is to be standard operating procedure for cargo flights; Common Berthing Mechanism connectors, such as the one found on the nose of the Dragon, don't have any of the shock absorbers required for docking. As it also requires the Canada arm to unberth, CBM isn't well suited for manned flights, as in an evacuation scenario, there'd be no one left on the station to operate the arm, so crewed version of the Dragon will probably feature either APAS or NDS/LIDS docking connectors. CBM is preferred for cargo transfer, however, because it has a larger hatch, big enough to move fully assembled equipment racks through them. Japan's HTV cargo vehicles are also berthed via Canada Arm.
The title of this story is misleading. It isn't the rockets that are grounded, its the spacecraft that sits on top of them.
Also, for what it's worth, the shuttle wouldn't have been help matters much if the Russian's can't fly a Soyuz. While the shuttle is fine for swapping crews (in fact, the shuttle's runway landings are gentler than the Soyuz's parachute landings, a good thing for people who have spent the last six months in 0g), the shuttle can only fly a two week mission, meaning without a Soyuz attached to the station, we'd have to leave people in orbit without an immediate way home, a risk that neither NASA nor Roscomos is willing to take. The Soyuz itself is only rated for six months in orbit, giving them a limited window to fix the problems before we have to talk about unmanning the station.
Oh, and apparently they're trying for some sort of record on how fast they can turn over doctors.
Actually, the median per regeneration seems to be somewhere around three years, ignoring the gaps between the old run and the movie, and the movie to the new run, so even if Matt Smith leaves after next year, he isn't leaving unusually early. Granted, the 8th and 9th both were exceptionally short lived, but Tennant actually had the second longest run at 4 years, 6 months, after Tom Baker's 6 years 9 months. Granted, the modern Doctors don't stack up as well in episode count. Even when you account for the fact that they are making longer episodes then they did back when, the older Doctors still were making more content per year.
If your interested in how long each Doctor lasted...
Does it need to talk to the cloud for tasks that were already available for voice control on the 3GS or 4? iPod controls, placing calls, and "What time is it?" shouldn't need the cloud. Well, other than the call itself, at least.
There's actually a "dock only" version of APAS (well, really, its successor, LIDS) in orbit already. The soft capture mechanism, with a LIDS, was attached to the bottom of Hubble on the final servicing mission, so a spacecraft can later dock with Hubble and deoribit it when we're done with it, so we aren't left playing UARS/Skylab roulette.
Wouldn't be the first time the Chinese have borrowed space technology from the Russians; the Shenzhou spacecraft is awfully similar to Soyuz. On the other hand, physics are physics, regardless of what country your in, so and there really are only a few useful hull configurations. No one is surprised when a fighter jet looks like externally similar to a Russian or American one.
By the way, the Salyut design is still alive and well. Zvezda, the ISS service module, is a direct decedent. Salyut 6, which you linked to, had a hull number of DOS-5. Mir was DOS-7, Zvezda is DOS-8. DOS in this case is Durable Orbital Station, not Disk Operating System. Salyut numbers don't match up because both civilian DOS stations and military OPS (Orbital Piloted Station) stations flew under the Salyut banner, in order to hide the military nature of the OPS program. Additionally, Salyut numbers were not assigned stations that failed before they could be made operational, in the typical Soviet style of covering up mistakes.
Actually, Ron Garan is active on Twitter, not Facebook. The last few months, he's has one of the coolest twipic accounts I've seen.
Unfortunately, Progress is one of only two vehicles that can deliver fuel to the station and the other, ESA's ATV, only has a flight rate of about one per year. While SpaceX can make up for the lost cargo, they dock (well, berth) at the US end of the station, so there's no way to transfer fuel to the Russian segment. Same story with Japan's operational HTV program (also one flight per year) and the other various commercial project NASA has contracts with. Using the cargo ship's own engines for reboost isn't the most practical option in the station's current configuration, either. You'd want to dock the boosting craft to the CBM on Node 2 forward, the nose of the station, so you'd be more or less lined up with the station's center of gravity. Unfortunately, that port is currently tied up with PMA2, the now-unneeded shuttle docking adapter. None of the upcoming space ships have plans to be compatible with the old docking interface.
Alan Shepard's Freedom 7 flight was suborbital space flight, a feat that has been repeated by a US company, Scaled Composites, on the three SpaceShipOne flights. Unfortunately, about the only use of a suborbital flight is to validate your spacecraft design before an orbital launch. However, neither SpaceShipOne nor Two were designed to reach orbit, so really they're only good for wining the X-Prize (SS1) and joyriding (SS2). It is true noone is ready for a John Glen-style orbital flight, but hopefully the three-way competition between SpaceX's Dragon, Boeing's CST-100, and SpaceDev's Dream Chaser will keep them motivated.