Interestingly enough, the shuttle engines COULD be reused without teardowns between each flight if the controls apparatus had been designed differently.
If you go to the MIT OpenCourseware site and look for the Aerospace Engineering classes lectures on the shuttle, the shuttle was designed before CAD, and if the wiring had been included to test the engines, they could put the whole shuttle in the test harness to test fire the engines.
There is a lot they would do differently if they were trying to redesign the shuttle today, this makes me hopeful for whatever follows the X-37.
Every government agency has an Inspector General who's job it is to seek out Fraud, Waste and Abuse. Of these folks that I have met, most are very sincere about their jobs.
Because if they say no, then ALL government agencies are not only free to choose any other database company on the GSA schedule, it'll become harder for them to buy Oracle at any price if its not on the Schedule.
We've already established the government market for Oracle or something like it is more than tens of millions of dollars.
Just to demonstrate I priced a monster server a few years back, on the vendor's website where I specced it out it cost $40k, using our Blanket Purchase Agreement with the same vendor, the same machine was only $28k.
Sometimes we paid more than we needed to for Desktops though as we were still buying the models on the contract when newer models were available for the same rate on their website. That mostly came as you replaced 1 or 2 machines out of cycle in the middle of the contract, not replacing 1/3rd of your desktops while the ink on the contract is still drying.
Yeah, they may handle deals like this for the DoD, but the existing market players cost so much to launch this deal would have cost Iridium more than twice as much.
I'm guessing it would have been cost prohibitive to launch with Boeing/Lockheed at about $10,000 a kilo to LEO, SpaceX is charging $10,000 a kilo to GEO, which is where Iridium needs their sattelites.
So no, the biggest commercial deal ever, (about 1/3 the size of the SpaceX NASA contract) is the sign that the market for low cost entry to space is there.
If this works for Iridium, I can see the Satellite TV folks getting in line, if they ever want their Digital channel lineups to be anywhere near as diverse as Cable/FIOS, then they need to put up higher capacity sata.
Also there's Galileo, the European competiting GPS variant not dependent on US DoD Sats. They might have to use a Euro launch capability for prestige, jobs reasons, but if they're serious about Austerity in Europe, lowest cost should win the day.
Its also worth noting that the value of the Iridium contract is worth more than has ever been invested in SpaceX from its startup to today. Add that to the NASA contract and I think it was quite worth the money.
Now they need just 1 more low cost launch company to keep them competitive.
Maybe sad and ironic because freedom of the press had been one of our hard fought for and cherished American institutions. This was back when journalists investigated and reported on stories, not just plagarized them, or made them up entirely. This was also before News who's job was to inform became Entertainment who's job was to grab ratings from other reality shows.
Similar institutions include the now crumbling protections formerly afforded to whistleblowers.
The cost of a Soyuz mission is $50 million, I don't have any figures for a Progress mission.
The USA paid for at least one of the Russian built modules to be completed.
If the USA retired from the program, the ESA and Japan could continue to fund Progress and Soyuz missions, the ESA might even get a Man Rated version of their ATV Cargo module up to the ISS, the Crew Transport Variant is slated to carry 4 or 5 people. SpaceX might even sell flights to the ISS to ESA/Japan, including a Man Rated Dragon capsule for 7 people. So food, water, orbital boosts and crew rotations are fine. What everyone loses from NASA and the shuttle program is the ability to boost large modules into space. Since the shuttles are being retired, they're losing this anyway, so then IF it happened it would just be Dollars, possibly some expertise and intangible resources.
43+% of the people in the US pay no income taxes, over 50 million of them are families that make over $50,000 a year.
If you're worried about people being sick, reform the FDA and USDA to better regulate what we put into our bodies. Pass laws to reform how much drug companies can overcharge for those antibiotics to recover research costs before they become generics. Pass laws to contain healthcare costs like they do in Canada and the UK who pay much less for the same drugs that we use.
Pass laws that forbid hospitals from charging to treat secondary infections they caused. There ARE hospitals giving patients $20 worth of topical antibiotics before surgery to prevent thousands of dollars in secondary infections after the surgery.
We have more diagnostic information available to us now, and the doctors are using it to make poorer decisions, or to protect them from lawsuits. Doctors with too much info perform surgery to remove small cysts that they would have left harmlessly in the patient using older lower resolution scans. Defensive tests cost us Billions of dollars in unnecessary costs every year.
Use of hospital protocols (continuous process imporovement) uses data to greatly increase patient outcomes, and reduce hospital costs. Lookup Intermountain Healthcare, the Cleveland clinic, or Mayo Clininc if you need examples.
Pass laws to require doctors and hospitals to declare their patient success/survival rates, secondary infection rates, etc. If we're all free marketers, maybe Doctors should be incentivised to do better if they want customers.
A better idea from the last is to let the doctors work for Hospitals, and not worry about running a small business, and spend more time being doctors. Let the Hospitals compete for business on the merits of their treatment. Certainly there is some other Entrepeneurial Practice management that can remove being an administrator (accounting/HR/payroll) from the Doctor's schedule.
None of these things costs any more than what we are doing now. The problem is the Doctors/Hospitals/Insurance companies get to bill more $$$ for doing a bad job, then taking care of you while they fix their mistakes and extend your recovery time and outside of the state of Mass, there is hardly anyone calling them out on it.
The other thing to know about Socialized Medicine is that stealing every dollar of NASA's budget will not fix even medicare, much less healthcare costs increasing many times the rate of inflation.
The only way to have socialized medicine, or just affordable healthcare with private insurers is with comprehensive healthcare reform.
More money paid into an inefficient system will not fix the problems it is having.
I bought the Jawbone Prime for my Droid and its been fabulous.
Supposedly it was desighned for Helicopter and tank crews, there is a sensor on the earpiece that sits on your cheek, it it can't match a noise from the microphone with a vibration from your mouth, it filters it out. If your jaw loses contact with the sensor it uses normal noise cancelling tech.
I ask everyone I talk to on it how it sounds and they say that I come through clearly.
The question is will they bother to get the encryption of the video and data feeds right one the domestic models or continue with the lousy comms methods already in place?
Also will the Police fly these, to hunt down dangerous criminals like they use Helicopters for now, or will they be flown by the same type of people that install Red Light speeding cameras, and just mail you tickets.
Unless you have the air in your car recycling air from inside the car, the air confditioner or heater will be pulling in outside air, even when the windows are up.
Even with in-cabin recycling I still get whiffs of skunk and other powerful scents when driving on the highway.
I use it mostly to avoid other people's exhaust fumes in slow traffic.
New Mexico has an Alien problem, Arizona will profile and interrogate any little green men, or Grays they find wandering around, and believe to be in the country illegally.
From TFA McKinnon was surprised at how easy it was to enter the US networks. There were no firewalls and many government staff did not even have passwords. He left notes as he went, pointing out security deficiencies. One said: "US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days? It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year . . . I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels."
Its more than halfway down the story AFTER they talk about how they tried to select 2 women for this latest outing, but none of them passed all the test criteria.
Humans AT Mars would either need to land ON Mars and tunnel underground to hide from the Radiation they would be exposed to due to the lack of a Magnetic field on Mars.
OR
Land on Phobos or Deimos and tunnel inside to hide from the radiation.
Mars has more gravity, CO2 ice and some Water Ice that we know of, if we could plant a dome over an ice patch and use a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator to warm a greenhouse, pump it full of CO2, and derive water from the water ice, you could grow UV resistant plants that produce Oxygen.
So even for teleoperating your fleet of surface robots, and maybe running a tow-truck-bot out ot help the stuck ones out of Sand Dunes, the Martian surface is a better place for your operator because more of what he or she needs to live is there on the surface.
Although honestly I think we'd do better sending rovers all over the Utah desert, and Antartica and fine tuning ComputerVision and Intelligent Agent routines here, so that the rovers could be given goals based on Satellite imagery and feed back data from interesting scenery on their way. When they show up to the site they take high rez pictures of interesting features, and a team of geologists back on Earth tell it which sites to whack with its little rockhammer first.
Then send 50 of them to Mars, not 2. Ask AAA if they'd like to sponsor the tow-truck-rover.
Are you perhaps familiar to one of the previous attempts where one of the Russian volunteers tried to force himself on a Female Canadian memeber of the crew.
There is a research university that recommended growing a Dwarf wheat as a Mars mission strategy, instead of trying to take all the food you need with you, you cultivate the grain, burn the stalks to turn them into a bio-char that can be used first to filter the air, and then later as fertilizer for to grow more wheat. If their premise is right and you can't possibly carry enough food for the trip then I'd want to see multiple crews practicing their farming skills here on Earth and get it right for 18 months at a time before I sent up anyone who was totally dependent on the system.
There is plenty of work we can down here to get ready to go out there.
Some lumber plants down in Georgia are making wood pellets to sell to European Coal plants as "renewable" fuels under cap and trade rules and actually get carbon credits for using them.
Some economists predict that US timber companies will not bother selling these pellets to Europe when US cap and trade rules go into effect.
As to you and the poster below this talking about forests vs tree farms, we need to do more sustainable harvesting in real forests, and encourage more diversity in tree farms. As old growth forests left completely alone add more CO2 to the air through decomposition, than they take in with new growth, and they unattended they also become a wildfire risk.
Consequently for the birds and animals habitats, golf courses in Georgia and other drought areas have had to take the lead in water conservation techniques, and as an industry have added more wildlife habitat than other sectors of the economy.
Christian Bishops convened with Emperor Constantine, and later Councils convened with later Emperors, I can't speak to any popes, but the Bible that is known today came through many revisions and was changed for many reasons.
I used to have a 1984 Honda Accord, I loved the car, 86 Horsepower, 4 cylinder, 5 speed stick shift, and the ONLY car I ever owned that I could reach everything in the cabin including the back window from the driver's seat.
It got 36 miles to the gallon, it had a 3-barrel carb and ran around like a go cart. I had 214k miles on it before I sold it.
It had air conditioning and a radio, but manual windows and door locks. It was a small car and weighed around 2,000 lbs.
If you look at a modern Accord anytime in the 1990s or later they are more like what we'd call a Sedan, electric everything, nicer interiors, the 1984 Accord is a tricked out skateboard in comparison. The 1990-something Accord I looked at buying years later got high 20s mpg on the highway, but it was a lot more car with a v6 IIRC.
If you look into the history of the Arrow, you'll find that the soviets had infiltrated Avro pretty heavily and the secrets they stole including specific Titanium parts appeared in the MiG-25.
So if you want to talk conspiracy theory at least get the right one.
If you want to talk about shaking folks out of complacency and need a plane analogy try Burt Rutan's Starship, first plane to be built with Carbon Fiber, All Glass cockpit, typical Rutan Wings, Winglets, Pusher Props and Canards... FAA wouldn't certify the plane for years, and now everybody uses some or all of these technologies.
For Car analogies try all the Big 3 and other car companies that told Elon Musk of Tesla motors he couldn't build a full electric vehicle, because they couldn't do it. Toyota (Prius and Electric RAV4) just gave Tesla $50 million to help Toyota with their new electric vehicles.
Slashdot Mirror
Interestingly enough, the shuttle engines COULD be reused without teardowns between each flight if the controls apparatus had been designed differently.
If you go to the MIT OpenCourseware site and look for the Aerospace Engineering classes lectures on the shuttle, the shuttle was designed before CAD, and if the wiring had been included to test the engines, they could put the whole shuttle in the test harness to test fire the engines.
There is a lot they would do differently if they were trying to redesign the shuttle today, this makes me hopeful for whatever follows the X-37.
Ok, I did do a Google search to be sure and some article said they wer ein GEO.
SpaceX Falcon 9 costs to LEO are $3,500 per kilo. So still a 3 to 1 cost savings.
Every government agency has an Inspector General who's job it is to seek out Fraud, Waste and Abuse. Of these folks that I have met, most are very sincere about their jobs.
Because if they say no, then ALL government agencies are not only free to choose any other database company on the GSA schedule, it'll become harder for them to buy Oracle at any price if its not on the Schedule.
We've already established the government market for Oracle or something like it is more than tens of millions of dollars.
Just to demonstrate I priced a monster server a few years back, on the vendor's website where I specced it out it cost $40k, using our Blanket Purchase Agreement with the same vendor, the same machine was only $28k.
Sometimes we paid more than we needed to for Desktops though as we were still buying the models on the contract when newer models were available for the same rate on their website. That mostly came as you replaced 1 or 2 machines out of cycle in the middle of the contract, not replacing 1/3rd of your desktops while the ink on the contract is still drying.
Yeah, they may handle deals like this for the DoD, but the existing market players cost so much to launch this deal would have cost Iridium more than twice as much.
I'm guessing it would have been cost prohibitive to launch with Boeing/Lockheed at about $10,000 a kilo to LEO, SpaceX is charging $10,000 a kilo to GEO, which is where Iridium needs their sattelites.
So no, the biggest commercial deal ever, (about 1/3 the size of the SpaceX NASA contract) is the sign that the market for low cost entry to space is there.
If this works for Iridium, I can see the Satellite TV folks getting in line, if they ever want their Digital channel lineups to be anywhere near as diverse as Cable/FIOS, then they need to put up higher capacity sata.
Also there's Galileo, the European competiting GPS variant not dependent on US DoD Sats. They might have to use a Euro launch capability for prestige, jobs reasons, but if they're serious about Austerity in Europe, lowest cost should win the day.
Its also worth noting that the value of the Iridium contract is worth more than has ever been invested in SpaceX from its startup to today. Add that to the NASA contract and I think it was quite worth the money.
Now they need just 1 more low cost launch company to keep them competitive.
So where DO you keep the Icebears?
Maybe sad and ironic because freedom of the press had been one of our hard fought for and cherished American institutions. This was back when journalists investigated and reported on stories, not just plagarized them, or made them up entirely. This was also before News who's job was to inform became Entertainment who's job was to grab ratings from other reality shows.
Similar institutions include the now crumbling protections formerly afforded to whistleblowers.
Seems like the should promote themselves as a location for "passive cooling" and offer carbon credits or something equivalent.
The cost of a Soyuz mission is $50 million, I don't have any figures for a Progress mission.
The USA paid for at least one of the Russian built modules to be completed.
If the USA retired from the program, the ESA and Japan could continue to fund Progress and Soyuz missions, the ESA might even get a Man Rated version of their ATV Cargo module up to the ISS, the Crew Transport Variant is slated to carry 4 or 5 people. SpaceX might even sell flights to the ISS to ESA/Japan, including a Man Rated Dragon capsule for 7 people. So food, water, orbital boosts and crew rotations are fine. What everyone loses from NASA and the shuttle program is the ability to boost large modules into space. Since the shuttles are being retired, they're losing this anyway, so then IF it happened it would just be Dollars, possibly some expertise and intangible resources.
43+% of the people in the US pay no income taxes, over 50 million of them are families that make over $50,000 a year.
If you're worried about people being sick, reform the FDA and USDA to better regulate what we put into our bodies. Pass laws to reform how much drug companies can overcharge for those antibiotics to recover research costs before they become generics. Pass laws to contain healthcare costs like they do in Canada and the UK who pay much less for the same drugs that we use.
Pass laws that forbid hospitals from charging to treat secondary infections they caused. There ARE hospitals giving patients $20 worth of topical antibiotics before surgery to prevent thousands of dollars in secondary infections after the surgery.
We have more diagnostic information available to us now, and the doctors are using it to make poorer decisions, or to protect them from lawsuits. Doctors with too much info perform surgery to remove small cysts that they would have left harmlessly in the patient using older lower resolution scans. Defensive tests cost us Billions of dollars in unnecessary costs every year.
Use of hospital protocols (continuous process imporovement) uses data to greatly increase patient outcomes, and reduce hospital costs. Lookup Intermountain Healthcare, the Cleveland clinic, or Mayo Clininc if you need examples.
Pass laws to require doctors and hospitals to declare their patient success/survival rates, secondary infection rates, etc. If we're all free marketers, maybe Doctors should be incentivised to do better if they want customers.
A better idea from the last is to let the doctors work for Hospitals, and not worry about running a small business, and spend more time being doctors. Let the Hospitals compete for business on the merits of their treatment. Certainly there is some other Entrepeneurial Practice management that can remove being an administrator (accounting/HR/payroll) from the Doctor's schedule.
None of these things costs any more than what we are doing now. The problem is the Doctors/Hospitals/Insurance companies get to bill more $$$ for doing a bad job, then taking care of you while they fix their mistakes and extend your recovery time and outside of the state of Mass, there is hardly anyone calling them out on it.
The other thing to know about Socialized Medicine is that stealing every dollar of NASA's budget will not fix even medicare, much less healthcare costs increasing many times the rate of inflation.
The only way to have socialized medicine, or just affordable healthcare with private insurers is with comprehensive healthcare reform.
More money paid into an inefficient system will not fix the problems it is having.
You forgot the inevitible SONY rootkit...
I bought the Jawbone Prime for my Droid and its been fabulous.
Supposedly it was desighned for Helicopter and tank crews, there is a sensor on the earpiece that sits on your cheek, it it can't match a noise from the microphone with a vibration from your mouth, it filters it out. If your jaw loses contact with the sensor it uses normal noise cancelling tech.
I ask everyone I talk to on it how it sounds and they say that I come through clearly.
The question is will they bother to get the encryption of the video and data feeds right one the domestic models or continue with the lousy comms methods already in place?
Also will the Police fly these, to hunt down dangerous criminals like they use Helicopters for now, or will they be flown by the same type of people that install Red Light speeding cameras, and just mail you tickets.
Unless you have the air in your car recycling air from inside the car, the air confditioner or heater will be pulling in outside air, even when the windows are up.
Even with in-cabin recycling I still get whiffs of skunk and other powerful scents when driving on the highway.
I use it mostly to avoid other people's exhaust fumes in slow traffic.
New Mexico has an Alien problem, Arizona will profile and interrogate any little green men, or Grays they find wandering around, and believe to be in the country illegally.
He embarassed people, and made 'threats'
From TFA
McKinnon was surprised at how easy it was to enter the US networks. There were no firewalls and many government staff did not even have passwords. He left notes as he went, pointing out security deficiencies. One said: "US foreign policy is akin to government-sponsored terrorism these days? It was not a mistake that there was a huge security stand-down on September 11 last year . . . I am SOLO. I will continue to disrupt at the highest levels."
You are not alone.
Did NOBODY read the story about the previous attempt where the Russian forced himself on the sole Canadian Woman volunteer at the New Year's party.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1283145/Discrimination-row-Russia-bans-women-18-month-mock-mission-Mars.html
Its more than halfway down the story AFTER they talk about how they tried to select 2 women for this latest outing, but none of them passed all the test criteria.
Humans AT Mars would either need to land ON Mars and tunnel underground to hide from the Radiation they would be exposed to due to the lack of a Magnetic field on Mars.
OR
Land on Phobos or Deimos and tunnel inside to hide from the radiation.
Mars has more gravity, CO2 ice and some Water Ice that we know of, if we could plant a dome over an ice patch and use a Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generator to warm a greenhouse, pump it full of CO2, and derive water from the water ice, you could grow UV resistant plants that produce Oxygen.
So even for teleoperating your fleet of surface robots, and maybe running a tow-truck-bot out ot help the stuck ones out of Sand Dunes, the Martian surface is a better place for your operator because more of what he or she needs to live is there on the surface.
Although honestly I think we'd do better sending rovers all over the Utah desert, and Antartica and fine tuning ComputerVision and Intelligent Agent routines here, so that the rovers could be given goals based on Satellite imagery and feed back data from interesting scenery on their way. When they show up to the site they take high rez pictures of interesting features, and a team of geologists back on Earth tell it which sites to whack with its little rockhammer first.
Then send 50 of them to Mars, not 2. Ask AAA if they'd like to sponsor the tow-truck-rover.
Are you perhaps familiar to one of the previous attempts where one of the Russian volunteers tried to force himself on a Female Canadian memeber of the crew.
There is a research university that recommended growing a Dwarf wheat as a Mars mission strategy, instead of trying to take all the food you need with you, you cultivate the grain, burn the stalks to turn them into a bio-char that can be used first to filter the air, and then later as fertilizer for to grow more wheat. If their premise is right and you can't possibly carry enough food for the trip then I'd want to see multiple crews practicing their farming skills here on Earth and get it right for 18 months at a time before I sent up anyone who was totally dependent on the system.
There is plenty of work we can down here to get ready to go out there.
Some lumber plants down in Georgia are making wood pellets to sell to European Coal plants as "renewable" fuels under cap and trade rules and actually get carbon credits for using them.
Some economists predict that US timber companies will not bother selling these pellets to Europe when US cap and trade rules go into effect.
As to you and the poster below this talking about forests vs tree farms, we need to do more sustainable harvesting in real forests, and encourage more diversity in tree farms. As old growth forests left completely alone add more CO2 to the air through decomposition, than they take in with new growth, and they unattended they also become a wildfire risk.
Consequently for the birds and animals habitats, golf courses in Georgia and other drought areas have had to take the lead in water conservation techniques, and as an industry have added more wildlife habitat than other sectors of the economy.
4 years to the nearest Star, not 7 Minutes?
Call the Forensic Astronomers, somebody stole the Sun!
But even taking that example, if you look at the sun (not directly at the sun) you're still looking at where the sun was 7 minutes ago.
Christian Bishops convened with Emperor Constantine, and later Councils convened with later Emperors, I can't speak to any popes, but the Bible that is known today came through many revisions and was changed for many reasons.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Council_of_Nicaea 325 AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Council_of_Nicaea 787 AD
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douay-Rheims_Bible 1609 AD 73 Books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_James_Bible in with 66 only books
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synod_of_Dort Dutch translation in 1637 inspired by the KJV
I used to have a 1984 Honda Accord, I loved the car, 86 Horsepower, 4 cylinder, 5 speed stick shift, and the ONLY car I ever owned that I could reach everything in the cabin including the back window from the driver's seat.
It got 36 miles to the gallon, it had a 3-barrel carb and ran around like a go cart. I had 214k miles on it before I sold it.
It had air conditioning and a radio, but manual windows and door locks. It was a small car and weighed around 2,000 lbs.
If you look at a modern Accord anytime in the 1990s or later they are more like what we'd call a Sedan, electric everything, nicer interiors, the 1984 Accord is a tricked out skateboard in comparison. The 1990-something Accord I looked at buying years later got high 20s mpg on the highway, but it was a lot more car with a v6 IIRC.
If you look into the history of the Arrow, you'll find that the soviets had infiltrated Avro pretty heavily and the secrets they stole including specific Titanium parts appeared in the MiG-25.
So if you want to talk conspiracy theory at least get the right one.
If you want to talk about shaking folks out of complacency and need a plane analogy try Burt Rutan's Starship, first plane to be built with Carbon Fiber, All Glass cockpit, typical Rutan Wings, Winglets, Pusher Props and Canards... FAA wouldn't certify the plane for years, and now everybody uses some or all of these technologies.
For Car analogies try all the Big 3 and other car companies that told Elon Musk of Tesla motors he couldn't build a full electric vehicle, because they couldn't do it. Toyota (Prius and Electric RAV4) just gave Tesla $50 million to help Toyota with their new electric vehicles.