Keep in mind, this is not a NASA project. This is a privately funded experiment. NASA has no interest in really pursuing new propulsion techniques. That's why the ISS hasn't been (or isn't even planned to) outfitted with a MEDS style electrodynamic tether for orbital maintenance. An EDT would reduce (if not remove) the dependance on costly space shuttle and Progress space freighter flights to boost its orbit against atmospheric drag.
An interesting note, this solar sail is to be launched atop a former ICBM from a submarine. That, my friend, is the essence of cool.
This is absolutely incorrect. To launch a person into space at that time required an R7 booster. The use and fate of each of those R7s is fully documented and known and the number of people required to keep this a secret is immense.
Yuri Gagarin WAS the first human into space. The origin of this rumor about dead cosmonauts is mostly a result of cold war propaganda.
One neat thing about the ISS is that whenever their system problems get really bad, the logs talk about them using Norton Ghost to restore a fresh image of the boot partition on one of their machines.
Their comments on the movies they watch are neat too. They watch 'Used Cars' and comment that they are definately getting into the kind of movies that Blockbuster doesn't carry.
In the logs they talk about restoring a boot partition using Symantec Ghost. Sweet. First NAV and NU are used in orbit, now Ghost. Peter Norton is astronaut by proxy, yee haw!
The tidbit about the Indian GSLV is incorrect. The rocket did not actually launch. The GSLV launch vehicle has four strap on booster stages (liquid fueled) and a solid first stage. Typical launch profile is to ignite the liquid boosters 4.5 seconds before launch and run engines up to operating thrust. If they have met thrust levels within that time period, the solid propellent center stage (which cannot be extinguished) is ignited and the launch hold bolts released.
What happened w/ the GSLV is that their launch computer ignited the booster stages but one of them failed to reach operating thrust when it was supposed to, so it aborted the launch by shutting down those engines before the solid core was ignited.
The rocket did NOT take off, despite the overenthusiastic announcer who initially yelled 'Takeoff!'. The launch was properly aborted and safed by their computers (which operated exactly as designed) and the rocket (with payload) is intact and ready for future launch (once the engines on the booster stages are replaced or certified for use and the problem is fixed).
There was no flop, no crash, no nuthin.
Mirpool.com - Guess where it lands
on
Mir Deathwatch
·
· Score: 3
Don't forget to visit http://mirpool.com to put your vote on which latitude and longitude Mir will land.
This technique was used in the 1960's on parts of the Saturn V rocket. It was ideal for shaping the super thin aluminum pressure vessels at the front of each stage (and, in the case of the first stage) the back pressure vessels (the different in temperature between the kerosene and the LOX was so high that they couldn't use integral tanks).
Engineers used to demonstrate how this worked without touching anything by putting pieces of tissue paper between the former and the surface being formed. After they were done, they would take out the unscarred piece of paper and show it.
The Saturn CII stage needed to get the forward tank pressure vessels into the basic shape to be magnaformed, but it was tricky because they didn't have anything that could create perfect curved pie slices that would be welded together to make the item, so they suspended the pieces of metal in water tanks and set off explosives. This allowed them to shape the metal using the shockwaves.
The problem with these technologies is the amount of money it takes to develop them to working examples. The solution? Make it _worth_ investing the large sums of money.
The current launching market is too small to support large R&D efforts. The rate of commercial launches is dropping steadilly with the dissolution of market drivers like Iridium. To make it worth the while of companies like Lockmart to spend big bucks on space you need to make space appealing to the industries that would purchase cheap access to space.
The first step is not to spend $10 billion for a Venturestar (which will never get congressional approval). The real step is to make the Space Shuttle as cheap as possible in the short term so that business in space can get started. Here's how:
1. Remove government restrictions on using the shuttle fleet for commercial operations. This reactionary restriction that came in the wake of the Challenger incident hurts our future in space and forces companies to use expensive ELVs.
2. Give NASA the chance to profit. Any commercial money NASA ever makes is funneled straight back into a general slush fund. If they had a direct incentive to operate more like a business, they would start innovating.
3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.
4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.
5. Convert the Enterprise into an unmanned cargo launcher. Removing the life support, crew cabin insides and so on and automating it would drop the between flight costs and increase payload significantly. Use this to deliver things that don't need human interaction to orbit.
6. Re-activate the Centaur upper stage project and install the plumbing in at least two of the OV fleet. Cryogenic upper stages increase your payload to geosynchronous orbit and let you build things like transfer vehicles to the moon. The shuttle uses IUS solid upper stages that have a fraction of the performance.
7. Last and more importantly, commission the development and construction of LFBB (Liquid FlyBack Boosters) to replace the dangerous and low performance SRBs. Liquid fueled boosters would increase the payload to orbit, offer abort modes during the first 2.5 minutes that the SRBs don't (see the Challenger disaster for an example of where this would have helped) and could be a lot cheaper then dragging the solid steel SRBs out of the ocean and rebuilding them. Boeing wants to make LFBBs. They would land themselves on a runway and be ready for launch shortly afterwards. LFBBs could lower costs for other boosters like the Titan V, the EELV, Ariane 5 and more.
Once companies can afford to get stuff to orbit, the market will exist to develop the new space craft that will drop costs to where we want. Until then, it will be entirely dependent on how much pork a congressman will get.
Do you really think we're gonna sue anybody? Probably not. Heck, apparently our legal department doesn't care about www.liveupdate.com, a Crescendo site named after our updater (the name of which we have trademarked).
I know you're looking for an example of some huge evil corporation intent on squashing everybody like bugs using a mighty system of patents, but Symantec is a company run by and composed of people. Darth Vader does not roam the halls.
Right, but unlike you and most of the FP'ers, I actually KNOW what this is about because I was involved. Plus, I _did_ take the time to read the article before I posted.
I used to be involved in the development of LiveUpdate, and the technology that has the patent here is not simply the updating of programs over the internet, it's a patent on the specific method of how the virus definitions are updated. It's not a simple file replacement methodology, it's closer to a structured delta-based updating technology.
But I don't expect most of the FP'ers to read the article before they scramble to get a post up in the lucrative first 5 minutes of KarmaHeaven....
Not useful? Remember, unthethered robotics is a near and expanding field. This kind of stuff is needed to get to the cool stuff.
If you think about it, your first 'Hello World!' program probably wasn't 'useful' by any conventional definition of the word, but it was a required step to learning how to do more interesting.
Combining untethered robotics with induction charging (so they can charge without having to use complex plugs or by flying/crawling past induction outlets) is the key here. Anything else requires putting the development of super efficient energy storage in your critical path.
I wouldn't mind having a small flock of fingernail sized robots circling me, charging via induction by swooping past my cell phone, and taking out mosquitos or bees that came within a foot of me.
Just a matter of time before real printed circuits
on
Plastic Valley?
·
· Score: 5
Up until 10 years ago, electronics hobbyists would get circuit diagrams from magazines and 'transcribe' them onto breadboards. In the last 10 years, PCB layouts have started showing up more often in magazines and websites that would be printed to a transparency to make a professional looking PCB to plug components into.
10 years from now, perhaps circuits will be downloadable and printable straight to paper, without needing any components! Think about it, using primer coats in between, you could potentially print 10+ layers on a single piece of paper. If this is what the hobbyists will be doing, imagine what the rest of electronics will look like?
Perhaps solid state will mean exactly that, dense bricks of integrated electronics.
'No user servicable parts' will be more then a casual discouragement to warranty breakers, it'll be a way of life.
The free-floater is going to be dependant on ISS and won't have indepentant docking mechanisms for anything other then the ISS. It's supposed to be a free floating factory without crew for generating things that need extreme microgravity (eg, any manned vessel is not usable for growing certain crystals and making certain measurements because people are always shaking the station).
This is NOT an alternative to Mir, sadly. That, and since MirCorp is behind it, it's unlikely to see the light of day. They started strong w/ Mir, but they didn't use enough sense and oversold themselves before they got METS.
This is really too bad. 100+ tons of equipment are basically being thrown away, and that's a damn shame. If US export restrictions hadn't stopped MirCorp from exporting the METS electrodynamic tether to Russia for launch to the Mir, Mir could have been put into a high storage orbit.
METS uses an electrical cable that's deployed a few kilometers towards the earth that has an electrical charge run through it to act against the Earth's magnetic field and push whatever it's attached to upwards. Using this, Mir could be at 400 or 500 miles up now, safe from danger of atmospheric drag and all at the cost of one Progress launch (METS fits on one Progress).
They're doing this because Shep keeps saying interesting stuff without the PAO filtering him down to an acceptable level. You can thank him for forcing the issue on a station name, for instance, and calling it Alpha during radio communications. This forced Dan Goldin to acknowledge it as station Alpha, something he was really trying to avoid.
What they DON'T realize is that Shep can just start transmitting using the Ham radio setup, so they can't keeo him down.
Go Shep!
Re:Solar wind will kill this thing
on
Macs In Space II
·
· Score: 3
Most of these (very valid)concerns can be addressed cheaply. He probably intends to shield most of the hardware. He can avoid most of the plastics problems by removing the Cubes from their boxes and putting the components in a special case, and by filling the sealed case with nitrogen at low pressure, he can avoid having too large of a pressure differential between the components and their surroundings. He'll need to do this anyhow so he can install special heat transfer sinks to pull heat out to radiators.
Finally, by choosing a super-low albedo material for the outside (polished silver or white, for instance) he can reduce the mechanical stressing (which is caused by the temperature differential) by a lot, making this a viable cheap satellite.
When Tito goes up this year, there is going to be a lot of attention unless MirCorp screws it up. NASA is very pissed off about him going to the ISS because they're worried that people will start realizing that "hey, normal people can survive a trip into space and why the HELL haven't you boys at NASA made space flight anywhere near as safe and cheap as the Russians yet?"
A space shuttle launch costs $500 million or so, $1 billion if you amortize the whole development into the cost. A Soyuz launch (most reliable manned spacecraft in the world) costs as low as $10 million and possibly as high as $50 million, depending on who you talk to. NASA needs to put some beef into man-rating the X-38 derivative CRV and certifying it for launch aboard an ELV (like a Delta) so that we can have a cheap way to put people in orbit.
Something that article doesn't mention is that Rotary Rocket claims to have wired the money this week to cover the back taxes. Kern County officials say that they'll hold the auction unless they can verify funds being in receipt. So the auction might be cancelled, it's hard to tell. If it isn't I'm gonna be there.
This is so sad, Rotary Rocket has such a cool cool concept for a re-usable manned SSTO that could have serviced the International Space Station. Iridium's failure is to blame for Rotary's problems. If Iridium hadn't failed, the launcher market wouldn't have dropped out from under companies like Rotary, Kistler and Beal.
If they don't have weapons, why the heck would we want to buy them?
Darnit, I thought I had finally found a 'parts' hard suit to use in restoring mine, damaged in battle with the Gamalons... Alas, back to Schucks autoparts to pay their outrageous prices for NEW Shojin Blaster firing coils and Yamasuka! brand wrist to air missiles....
In the interest of efficiency, I suggest the immediate implementation of pneumatic tubes to transport floppy & ZIP disks containing data from computer to computer. Use of proven pneumatic technology is superior to untested 'copper wire' and 'fiber optic' technology for the transfer of data.
Additionally, money being spent on creating larger monitors should be redirected to productive tasks such as maintaining the nationwide Pneumatic Tube Network. Those seeking larger screens for their comp-uters should simply use Fresnel lenses.
- Central Services
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.
Slashdot Mirror
Keep in mind, this is not a NASA project. This is a privately funded experiment. NASA has no interest in really pursuing new propulsion techniques. That's why the ISS hasn't been (or isn't even planned to) outfitted with a MEDS style electrodynamic tether for orbital maintenance. An EDT would reduce (if not remove) the dependance on costly space shuttle and Progress space freighter flights to boost its orbit against atmospheric drag.
An interesting note, this solar sail is to be launched atop a former ICBM from a submarine. That, my friend, is the essence of cool.
This is absolutely incorrect. To launch a person into space at that time required an R7 booster. The use and fate of each of those R7s is fully documented and known and the number of people required to keep this a secret is immense.
Yuri Gagarin WAS the first human into space. The origin of this rumor about dead cosmonauts is mostly a result of cold war propaganda.
One neat thing about the ISS is that whenever their system problems get really bad, the logs talk about them using Norton Ghost to restore a fresh image of the boot partition on one of their machines.
Their comments on the movies they watch are neat too. They watch 'Used Cars' and comment that they are definately getting into the kind of movies that Blockbuster doesn't carry.
In the logs they talk about restoring a boot partition using Symantec Ghost. Sweet. First NAV and NU are used in orbit, now Ghost. Peter Norton is astronaut by proxy, yee haw!
4 Cosmonauts have died in flight. 7 US astronauts have died in flight.
The US has a safety record worse then the Soviet Union/Russia. Get over it.
The tidbit about the Indian GSLV is incorrect. The rocket did not actually launch. The GSLV launch vehicle has four strap on booster stages (liquid fueled) and a solid first stage. Typical launch profile is to ignite the liquid boosters 4.5 seconds before launch and run engines up to operating thrust. If they have met thrust levels within that time period, the solid propellent center stage (which cannot be extinguished) is ignited and the launch hold bolts released.
What happened w/ the GSLV is that their launch computer ignited the booster stages but one of them failed to reach operating thrust when it was supposed to, so it aborted the launch by shutting down those engines before the solid core was ignited.
The rocket did NOT take off, despite the overenthusiastic announcer who initially yelled 'Takeoff!'. The launch was properly aborted and safed by their computers (which operated exactly as designed) and the rocket (with payload) is intact and ready for future launch (once the engines on the booster stages are replaced or certified for use and the problem is fixed).
There was no flop, no crash, no nuthin.
Don't forget to visit http://mirpool.com to put your vote on which latitude and longitude Mir will land.
This technique was used in the 1960's on parts of the Saturn V rocket. It was ideal for shaping the super thin aluminum pressure vessels at the front of each stage (and, in the case of the first stage) the back pressure vessels (the different in temperature between the kerosene and the LOX was so high that they couldn't use integral tanks).
Engineers used to demonstrate how this worked without touching anything by putting pieces of tissue paper between the former and the surface being formed. After they were done, they would take out the unscarred piece of paper and show it.
The Saturn CII stage needed to get the forward tank pressure vessels into the basic shape to be magnaformed, but it was tricky because they didn't have anything that could create perfect curved pie slices that would be welded together to make the item, so they suspended the pieces of metal in water tanks and set off explosives. This allowed them to shape the metal using the shockwaves.
Sweet.
The problem with these technologies is the amount of money it takes to develop them to working examples. The solution? Make it _worth_ investing the large sums of money.
The current launching market is too small to support large R&D efforts. The rate of commercial launches is dropping steadilly with the dissolution of market drivers like Iridium. To make it worth the while of companies like Lockmart to spend big bucks on space you need to make space appealing to the industries that would purchase cheap access to space.
The first step is not to spend $10 billion for a Venturestar (which will never get congressional approval). The real step is to make the Space Shuttle as cheap as possible in the short term so that business in space can get started. Here's how:
1. Remove government restrictions on using the shuttle fleet for commercial operations. This reactionary restriction that came in the wake of the Challenger incident hurts our future in space and forces companies to use expensive ELVs.
2. Give NASA the chance to profit. Any commercial money NASA ever makes is funneled straight back into a general slush fund. If they had a direct incentive to operate more like a business, they would start innovating.
3. Switch from toxic hydrazine to high energy cryogenics for the OMS. Hydrazine safing is part of the huge delay and costs in maintaining the shuttle. Insulative technology has progressed in the 30 years since Hydrazine was chosen to a point where LOX and Hydrogen (or higher temperature fuels) can be stored on orbit for the duration of a shuttle flight.
4. Remove the expensive to maintain and toxic fueled APUs that (among other things) run the hydraulics that power the control surfaces during gliding flight. Use electric pumps powered off of fuel cells instead. After this, Hydrazine would be limited to the RCS and much easier to safe.
5. Convert the Enterprise into an unmanned cargo launcher. Removing the life support, crew cabin insides and so on and automating it would drop the between flight costs and increase payload significantly. Use this to deliver things that don't need human interaction to orbit.
6. Re-activate the Centaur upper stage project and install the plumbing in at least two of the OV fleet. Cryogenic upper stages increase your payload to geosynchronous orbit and let you build things like transfer vehicles to the moon. The shuttle uses IUS solid upper stages that have a fraction of the performance.
7. Last and more importantly, commission the development and construction of LFBB (Liquid FlyBack Boosters) to replace the dangerous and low performance SRBs. Liquid fueled boosters would increase the payload to orbit, offer abort modes during the first 2.5 minutes that the SRBs don't (see the Challenger disaster for an example of where this would have helped) and could be a lot cheaper then dragging the solid steel SRBs out of the ocean and rebuilding them. Boeing wants to make LFBBs. They would land themselves on a runway and be ready for launch shortly afterwards. LFBBs could lower costs for other boosters like the Titan V, the EELV, Ariane 5 and more.
Once companies can afford to get stuff to orbit, the market will exist to develop the new space craft that will drop costs to where we want. Until then, it will be entirely dependent on how much pork a congressman will get.
Do you really think we're gonna sue anybody? Probably not. Heck, apparently our legal department doesn't care about www.liveupdate.com, a Crescendo site named after our updater (the name of which we have trademarked).
I know you're looking for an example of some huge evil corporation intent on squashing everybody like bugs using a mighty system of patents, but Symantec is a company run by and composed of people. Darth Vader does not roam the halls.
Right, but unlike you and most of the FP'ers, I actually KNOW what this is about because I was involved. Plus, I _did_ take the time to read the article before I posted.
Run Norton and Symantec at the same time? Norton Antivirus is MADE by Symantec.
Difficult to seperate the two....
I used to be involved in the development of LiveUpdate, and the technology that has the patent here is not simply the updating of programs over the internet, it's a patent on the specific method of how the virus definitions are updated. It's not a simple file replacement methodology, it's closer to a structured delta-based updating technology.
But I don't expect most of the FP'ers to read the article before they scramble to get a post up in the lucrative first 5 minutes of KarmaHeaven....
Not useful? Remember, unthethered robotics is a near and expanding field. This kind of stuff is needed to get to the cool stuff.
If you think about it, your first 'Hello World!' program probably wasn't 'useful' by any conventional definition of the word, but it was a required step to learning how to do more interesting.
Combining untethered robotics with induction charging (so they can charge without having to use complex plugs or by flying/crawling past induction outlets) is the key here. Anything else requires putting the development of super efficient energy storage in your critical path.
I wouldn't mind having a small flock of fingernail sized robots circling me, charging via induction by swooping past my cell phone, and taking out mosquitos or bees that came within a foot of me.
Up until 10 years ago, electronics hobbyists would get circuit diagrams from magazines and 'transcribe' them onto breadboards. In the last 10 years, PCB layouts have started showing up more often in magazines and websites that would be printed to a transparency to make a professional looking PCB to plug components into.
10 years from now, perhaps circuits will be downloadable and printable straight to paper, without needing any components! Think about it, using primer coats in between, you could potentially print 10+ layers on a single piece of paper. If this is what the hobbyists will be doing, imagine what the rest of electronics will look like?
Perhaps solid state will mean exactly that, dense bricks of integrated electronics.
'No user servicable parts' will be more then a casual discouragement to warranty breakers, it'll be a way of life.
The free-floater is going to be dependant on ISS and won't have indepentant docking mechanisms for anything other then the ISS. It's supposed to be a free floating factory without crew for generating things that need extreme microgravity (eg, any manned vessel is not usable for growing certain crystals and making certain measurements because people are always shaking the station).
This is NOT an alternative to Mir, sadly. That, and since MirCorp is behind it, it's unlikely to see the light of day. They started strong w/ Mir, but they didn't use enough sense and oversold themselves before they got METS.
This is really too bad. 100+ tons of equipment are basically being thrown away, and that's a damn shame. If US export restrictions hadn't stopped MirCorp from exporting the METS electrodynamic tether to Russia for launch to the Mir, Mir could have been put into a high storage orbit.
METS uses an electrical cable that's deployed a few kilometers towards the earth that has an electrical charge run through it to act against the Earth's magnetic field and push whatever it's attached to upwards. Using this, Mir could be at 400 or 500 miles up now, safe from danger of atmospheric drag and all at the cost of one Progress launch (METS fits on one Progress).
Sigh....
They're doing this because Shep keeps saying interesting stuff without the PAO filtering him down to an acceptable level. You can thank him for forcing the issue on a station name, for instance, and calling it Alpha during radio communications. This forced Dan Goldin to acknowledge it as station Alpha, something he was really trying to avoid.
What they DON'T realize is that Shep can just start transmitting using the Ham radio setup, so they can't keeo him down.
Go Shep!
Most of these (very valid)concerns can be addressed cheaply. He probably intends to shield most of the hardware. He can avoid most of the plastics problems by removing the Cubes from their boxes and putting the components in a special case, and by filling the sealed case with nitrogen at low pressure, he can avoid having too large of a pressure differential between the components and their surroundings. He'll need to do this anyhow so he can install special heat transfer sinks to pull heat out to radiators.
Finally, by choosing a super-low albedo material for the outside (polished silver or white, for instance) he can reduce the mechanical stressing (which is caused by the temperature differential) by a lot, making this a viable cheap satellite.
A possible solution for dealing with NASA budget cuts.
When Tito goes up this year, there is going to be a lot of attention unless MirCorp screws it up. NASA is very pissed off about him going to the ISS because they're worried that people will start realizing that "hey, normal people can survive a trip into space and why the HELL haven't you boys at NASA made space flight anywhere near as safe and cheap as the Russians yet?"
A space shuttle launch costs $500 million or so, $1 billion if you amortize the whole development into the cost. A Soyuz launch (most reliable manned spacecraft in the world) costs as low as $10 million and possibly as high as $50 million, depending on who you talk to. NASA needs to put some beef into man-rating the X-38 derivative CRV and certifying it for launch aboard an ELV (like a Delta) so that we can have a cheap way to put people in orbit.
Something that article doesn't mention is that Rotary Rocket claims to have wired the money this week to cover the back taxes. Kern County officials say that they'll hold the auction unless they can verify funds being in receipt. So the auction might be cancelled, it's hard to tell. If it isn't I'm gonna be there.
This is so sad, Rotary Rocket has such a cool cool concept for a re-usable manned SSTO that could have serviced the International Space Station. Iridium's failure is to blame for Rotary's problems. If Iridium hadn't failed, the launcher market wouldn't have dropped out from under companies like Rotary, Kistler and Beal.
Yes, d_force, there is a Santa Claus. (Virginia?)
If they don't have weapons, why the heck would we want to buy them?
Darnit, I thought I had finally found a 'parts' hard suit to use in restoring mine, damaged in battle with the Gamalons... Alas, back to Schucks autoparts to pay their outrageous prices for NEW Shojin Blaster firing coils and Yamasuka! brand wrist to air missiles....
In the interest of efficiency, I suggest the immediate implementation of pneumatic tubes to transport floppy & ZIP disks containing data from computer to computer. Use of proven pneumatic technology is superior to untested 'copper wire' and 'fiber optic' technology for the transfer of data.
Additionally, money being spent on creating larger monitors should be redirected to productive tasks such as maintaining the nationwide Pneumatic Tube Network. Those seeking larger screens for their comp-uters should simply use Fresnel lenses.
- Central Services
Listen, kid, we're all in it together.