JPL is a NASA facility operated by CalTech. While it originated before NASA (1949 I believe), it is currently a central fixture of NASA's unmanned exploration efforts, and isn't somehow distinct from it.
I think the difference you're looking for is the manned program vs. the unmanned program. The unmanned program has diversified a lot lately - while JPL is still the leader in the field (I may be biased, I'm starting there next month), Ames and Goddard have both been doing a lot of impressive work lately as well. Only the human spaceflight program, which uses many robots and teleoperation devices as well, is the bureaucratic nightmare you envision, and even then, the robotic portions seem to be the most impressive things coming out of HSF right now.
While those quotes are correct, and I agree with them, they don't disagree with what I'm saying.
There was a mismatch between goals and funds. You can interpret this to mean that they need more money, but hoping that Congress opens the purse-strings for something that doesn't get many votes isn't a proper plan for exploration. NASA has funding, they just need to use it more wisely. Something like Constellation is only going to happen with Apollo-level funding, which while as you and I know would be very good and not too draining, this is not politically viable.
And the comment about a lack of mismanagement is referring to the program managers at NASA. They were given a task, and they performed admirably to do the best they could do at what was an impossible task. The mismanagement I refer to is from the political leadership going back 30 years. Post-shuttle NASA history is littered with cancelled programs that attempted to do ridiculously hard things without getting the basics right. The Constellation program (which never really sought to fulfill the goals set out by Bush, who never called Griffin on his shenanigans) was only feasible under Bush's promise to get more money out of Congress -- a promise he never came through on and didn't try very hard for. Griffin took him at his word and never had a descope option to handle the inevitable problems when that didn't go smoothly. All of this leaves us trying to build something to go to the moon on a shoestring budget when NASA seems to have forgotten how to build a manned spacecraft at all.
We need to step out of the shadow of Apollo and figure out what actually works under modern budgets with modern political pressures.
The space program is funded. The reason for the gap isn't a lack of funding, its a matter of extremely poor management. The new direction for the budget is probably going to get our manned program back off the ground, if it ever passes.
Additionally, we have plenty of ways to get unmanned stuff off the ground, only manned vehicles are an issue. The unmanned space program should be (and is) a source of pride for the country, and is doing quite well.
Of course it can happen here. Unfortunately hiding your contacts isn't a good way to avoid it. Because, if someones really interested there are many other avenues to find that information.
The way to stop McCarthyism in the future is political. If you're hiding so much you can't actually live your life then what is the point? Of course its risky, but then again life is a giant risk.
From what I've seen (we had a seminar at my university about it recently) the JPL system for trajectory planning and spacecraft simulation all looks like Python.
They have a backend framework of compiled C/C++ code with general components for building spacecraft, including different physics components (everything from standard gravity models to solar influences to atmospheric drag), and applying controls. Then they use Python to combine these into practical models for testing.
Its probably not as impressive looking as in the movies, but they're able to pull out 'porkchop' plots (contour plots that indicate the minimum launch energy vs. launch time) and design complex trajectories in less than an hour.
The beauty of the proposed FY2011 budget is that it moves NASA in a direction to avoid this in the future. A few years of startup funding for designing multiple vehicles that are ultimately 'owned' by private groups will make the basic infrastructure more robust against the political vagaries inherent to a large government program. HLV may be in trouble if Obama isn't reelected, but as long as a more sustainable LEO infrastructure is in place (or has enough momentum to get there), we'll be in a much better place to do this all over again.
We're never going to solve all the issues we face. The relatively small amount of money and effort used by the space program is not enough to make a dent in the serious issues we face. We can't wait for the world to be perfect before we try to advance ourselves because we won't get anywhere. Rather, we should advance ourselves in as many ways as possible and hope that the synergies between different fields raise everyone up and help us make the world a better place.
The lack of a 'plan' seems to be taking a lot of flak, but I think sometimes a bit of lightly moderated chaos can be far more productive than a rigid plan. To paraphrase a comment from the "The West Wing," a government directed program on polio will give you the best iron lung ever designed, but some grad students messing around in their lab will give you a polio vaccine.
Since you acknowledge the failures of NASA HSF over the past 30 years, particularly the fact that the procurement methods from Apollo and the Shuttle have been completely incapable of producing a successor vehicle, doesn't it make sense to try something new? If the NASA designed cost-plus contracts move slowly, tend to be cancelled, don't move technology forward, and represent a single-point of failure in our HSF capabilities, then the only sane thing to do is try something new. The fact that the proposed fixed-price 'commercial' procurement system will hopefully be cheaper is just gravy.
Without the ability to get to LEO, and without an external political threat to motivate huge amounts of spending, the idea of planning to go to the Moon or Mars is fairly ridiculous. Under the current environment, you could only conceivably expect to be able to do that after 30 years of work. With an average presidential term of 6 years, there are five chances for it to be cancelled before then. The only alternative is to hope that congress becomes more cooperative, and that doesn't sound like a good bet to make to me. However, if the new proposal does manage to create a robust, multi-vendor LEO infrastructure, then future 'grand plans' can be carried out on shorter time scales and within the expected budget. Short term goals that can be built upon are much more sustainable -- right now our short term goals need to be getting our LEO capability back, and in a stronger way.
In other words, our human space program is in rehab now after the past 30 years of mismanagement. We need to get back on our feet before we can talk about truly advancing the frontier.
They do have a monopoly on MP3 players, but you'll notice that there aren't many abuses of that platform. In fact, the biggest changes in the non-touch ipod/itunes ecosystem in the past few years has been the removal of DRM. In smartphones, Apple may dominate in mindshare, but RIM and Symbian still rack up more sales, and MS and Android aren't terribly far behind -- no one has a monopoly in the smart phone market at this point.
The real danger of a monopoly is that you're locked in by external factors, and that in order to to interact with the rest of the world you're subjected to the whims of a CEO somewhere. Most Mac and Linux users I know keep a spare copy of Windows around on a partition or a virtual machine because there are times you just can't go without it. I would happily never use MS Office ever again, except that makes it extremely difficult to interoperate with people I work with. I can't escape from Microsoft. However, I can perfectly well avoid using an Apple product if I wanted to. While the iPod dominates the market, there is very little keeping me from using another MP3 player -- the file format is even more dominant, and I could buy myself a Creative player tomorrow, sync it up with my MP3s, and be good to go. I can just as easily do without an iPhone. While Apple does apply a lot more lock-in mechanisms with iPhone OS (this latest stuff is getting more and more inexcusable), there are no external factors, just simply the fact that I currently have it, have invested in some Apps, and like the platform. If this stuff keeps going and I get myself a Nexus One at the end of the year, I'll continue to be able to interact with people and work and the web exactly as I was before. Anyone not buying into the platform is in no way disadvantaged as far as I know.
Since the proposed FY2011 NASA budget has about $6B allocated for helping fund the development of these new vehicles.... it sounds like they're going to get exactly what they're asking for. I'm not sure I see what the problem is.
They just have to compete for the money like everyone else (their experience should help there,) and they'll need to be more careful with their budget, since the whole idea is to eliminate the cost-plus contracts that allows them to lowball their estimate and ask for more money later.
I think the question is one of precision more than accuracy. You're correct, the standard is infinitely accurate by definition (well, more precisely the expectation or mean of your standard is infinitely accurate).
What this is saying, though, is that the variance of the standard from its own mean is smaller for man-made atomic clocks than it is for celestial clocks such as pulsars.
That requires more thought to understand. If you say "the size of a mini cooper" you get it in less than a second, with dimensions it takes me 5 or 10 seconds to process it all and get an understanding. As much as football fields, mini coopers and libraries of congress are ridiculous and imprecise, they are pretty decent references for public, non-technical descriptions.
While 5 or 10 seconds may not be much in the grand scheme of things, if you're reading a news article, you're likely to ignore measurements but a reference to an everyday object will get the point across very easily. And having seen both Mini Coopers and MSL, its a pretty apt comparison.
The thing that gets me the most (I'm severely red-green colorblind) is the inability to determine when meat is done cooking. If I'm cooking for others, I often ask "Am I going to poison us?" and if I'm cooking for myself I usually overcook it.
A few other items that are amusing in hindsight: - I bought a pink flashlight camping on spring break a few years ago - According to my girlfriend, I have quite a few pieces of clothing with light red stains on them - Settlers of Catan is a difficult game to play - sheep and grain have to be distinguished based on texture not color - Older board games with poor color choices (my copy of Diplomacy stands out) leads to confusion.
These are of course in addition to the more serious (potentially professionally and personally hazardous) concerns of reading maps and charts, setting color schemes for websites, being able to pick clothes that actually match, and distinguishing dim green lights on horizontal stoplights.
Not to say that any of these things seriously hinder quality of life, and can be corrected with a little bit of thinking ahead -- still very inconvenient. Of course, one nice thing is the ability to purchase monitors that don't show red. I've picked up quite a few for less than $10 and I can't tell the difference.
They can do both, and the two goals reinforce each other -- the skills to do both are pretty non-overlapping anyway. For me, the streaming has been a non-starter so far because I run a MythTV media center and own a Wii -- the only place I can use the streaming right now is on my laptop (a Mac), which is not the best movie viewing machine.
This brings me into the market now, and makes me think that when I move out of my current place (the account is in my roommates name) I'll get my own subscription as well. Assuming I'm not a total outlier (not many people will have MythTV, but there are many people with only a Wii, DVD player, and crappy cable box attached to their TV,) this greatly expands the number of people using streaming, and will thus encourage content producers to see that they need to find a good way to monetize streaming video.
Just because this doesn't benefit you directly and in particular, that doesn't mean its not worthwhile, and in this case a rising tide raises all boats.
As an engineer who does astronomical optics rather than a photographer, I can say with certainty with absolute certainty that all else being equal (i.e. diffraction limited case) a larger aperture is sharper. This is simply a matter of physics. The resolution is inversely proportional to diameter of the aperture due to the wave-like nature of light.
Now, if by 'crisper' you don't mean sharper, but rather a fuzzy measure of how you think it looks, its not surprising because smaller lenses of good quality are easier to make, and will thus approach the ideal diffraction limit. But this isn't a case of all other things being equal, and won't be as capable.
Actually, its currently a terrible time to be an entry-level engineer trying to find an Aerospace job. The fact that the current Obama plan (which I fully support) is still only proposed, no one knows whats going to happen, and none of the established companies are hiring -- most of the job postings are not being actively pursued by Boeing, LockMart, etc. SpaceX has job postings up, and I think they mean to fill them, but they're a small company and they're busy right now so most of those are standing still too.
Combine this with the generally lackluster economy, which has led most companies to go on a hiring freeze anyway, and you get a situation where I know of only one person from my department who's gotten a job offer this year, and the pay was so poor for it that the person was better off staying in school with a stipend and a low cost of living than moving to LA where the job was.
Of course, once the budget passes I expect it will be a much better time, I hope. I was unwilling to work in the pork-filled behemoth that was CxP, but if the new plan survives unscathed there are a lot of interesting and rewarding opportunities.
This would be a terrible way to do a single vehicle. However, they want to 'swarm' these instead. While each individual vehicle may be limited, if you have hundreds canvasing a region, correlating the data between each 'tumbleweed' would make the information more valuable than the mere sum of its parts.
I don't think this replaces something like the MERs, but rather complements them.
We actually had this idea (I'm a grad student in aerospace engineering) a few years ago, and one guy managed to throw together a small 'roll-bot' that bhas a motor attached to the axis of a spherical shell, and a weight on a servo that hanges below that axis. The motor controls the speed, and you can turn it by moving the weight so it causes the wheel to tilt. Works pretty well, and would be good for a planetary probe because its completely sealed, so if you have a way to clean the surface you wouldn't have to worry about internal wear.
This "tumbleweed" concept is cheap and affordable, may be a little unpredictable in the direction it will go, but will ultimately allow many more vehicles doing a lot more exploration in aggregate.
So yes, this is exactly what will be left of the space program after the administration is done. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Constellation as an architecture was fatally flawed. This is not a question of privatization, of the viability of human settlement or anything like that -- the program of record was an unsustainable throwback to the Apollo era that was simply unviable in the current environment and didn't complete the goals laid out in the Vision for Space Exploration. The fact that it was based on shuttle technologies is besides the point -- they screwed this up anyway by using 5-meter tankage and 5-segment SRBs that eliminated much of the advantage of being 'shuttle-derived'.
The statement by the Augustine commission that "if Constellation were completed now, it would still have to be cancelled because we couldn't afford to operate it" is the most succinct way of stating the flaw. Even after all of the development costs, the amount to fly each flight is so high that NASA would have to continue operating at the politically untenable +$3B budget . This is exactly what happened with Apollo: it was built, we went to the moon, but each flight was so expensive that it couldn't be sustained after the impetus to beat the Soviets was removed. This isn't to negate the accomplishment of Apollo -- the Saturn V stack, sending it all up at once, was the best way to do it as quickly as possible, but definitely not the cheapest.
Now instead consider the current situation. NASA's budget is limited to approximately 0.5% of the federal budget, we have nothing to prove, we understand the basics of space flight, have much better computer and control technology, and we are interested in doing real exploration. The only things that actually need to get from the Earth's surface to the Moon's surface and back, each time, are humans and their research equipment. All the landers, Earth-departure stages, communications equipment and long-term life-support can be pretty easily re-used. They will be more expensive than their equivalent disposable counterparts (say by a factor of 4), but if you run 10 missions you've saved money. So what we do is we have a lunar transport vehicle (LTV) that sits in Earth orbit, refuels from orbiting fuel depots, and simply goes back and forth to the moon. Fuel depots could be brought to orbit more cheaply, even by more ridiculous methods like space-guns, because they can handle extremely high G-loads. Astronauts get to orbit and rendezvous with the LTV using simple low-cost vehicles that resemble Dragon. Note that I don't discuss how they're developed -- cost-plus or fixed-price rides.
It may take 30 years to get to the moon this way, but it makes a lot more sense. The simple capsule could be completed in 5 years easily, and fuel depots are another independent project. The LTV and other components again could be broken up into manageable pieces that could be completed within a single administration. Budget cuts wouldn't eliminate previously developed capabilities, since they're already deployed, and once you have the entire thing completed you can get astronauts to the moon for a cost equivalent to a couple of STS flights.
Of course this is all just musing on my part, I'd have to run a lot of numbers to see estimate sizing, and cost savings. All I hope to demonstrate is what a better approach is than Constellation could look like. Constellation was pie-in-the-sky because it depended on the nature of our politics changing, which is far more difficult than solving mere engineering problems.
While I'm a big proponent of privatizing LEO launch and things like that, NASA (or an entity like it) will be the critical partner in exploration for a long-time to come.
Exploration is very high-risk, and theres not a whole lot of guaranteed reward in term of monetary profit. Pushing the sphere of humanity is something that (at least I feel) has great value for society, but its not good business. Like the national defense and laying out infrastructure, the 'Lewis and Clark' role will always be best handled by a government entity.
However, after the initial exploration, its then time to consider privatization. Boeing, Bigelow and SpaceX aren't going to take us to NEOS, the Moon or Mars, but they're damn sure going to be able to get us to the near frontier, 500-miles up. From there they can get on a NASA vehicle and push on to the far frontier. As NASA keeps going, more of what was once the far frontier becomes the near frontier, responsibilities shift, and progress is made. What we're seeing now is the growing pains of learning how to hand off the torch.
In case you didn't notice, Constellation in many ways was a much bigger sellout to private companies -- these undefinitized contracts seem to be a handy way to funnel money to the big contractors with little oversight.
Space exploration is not about adventure for its own sake -- for that we can send all our astronauts to climb Mt. Everest instead. Its about advancing the frontier, and learning to live and work sustainably in space, and Constellation wasn't doing that. Even at the time of Apollo, Von Braun et.al. knew that that architecture was not the way forward, because each mission was individually incredibly expensive. Rebuilding Apollo in the form of Constellation was always doomed to repeat flags and footprints with little else, and without the political impetus of cold war and a mission from a martyred president, it was quite frankly stillborn. A cheap LEO launch vehicle with true spaceships that never re-entered the Earth's atmosphere was always a better long-term plan, it just couldn't get built as quickly, so didn't fit the goals of the time.
This was what the original Bush VSE said, until CxP hijacked it, and its what the Augustine commission said. Sustainability is key, and the FY2011 budget, despite the piss-poor PR to go along with it, lays out a path for sustainable, flexible exploration.
Politicians nowadays aren't particularly better or worse than they were in the past. They're never going to get better. Depending on that as your plan for anything is akin to asking that the world get better by people becoming less greedy -- it would be nice, but its not going to happen. The leadership (as in NASA leadership, not congressional leadership) needs to take the frivolities of our political system into account when planning.
Short term projects are the only way you get anything done. You have an over-arching goal, but you break it up into small manageable tasks. If Bush's VSE had developed a LEO vehicle and an Earth-Moon shuttle that was built in orbit and remained there, never re-entering, the LEO craft would already be built, and there wouldn't be nearly as much trouble -- even if the moon were cancelled we'd still be in a position to get to LEO. Constellation was purely designed to go to the moon, while a system like that could much more easily be designed to go anywhere you wanted. Breaking it up into smaller tasks makes it faster, less politically risky, and more flexible. A monolithic system only made sense for a massively funded nationalistic race like Apollo. Perhaps I should have stated it as short-term standalone components of long-term projects.
And in case you weren't aware, for a long time, government was the only way to get anything to orbit, even for commercial systems. Orbital Sciences only moved into the market because Boeing and Lockheed had demonstrated that there was a commercial market -- and they only entered it because the Air Force helped fund their initial development. In the early days of aviation, the USPS encouraged investment in aviation firms by guaranteeing a market for air-mail. Guaranteeing a government market helps kick-start an industry -- and others getting involved bring down the costs. This market isn't necessarily space tourists or anything like that, its letting other governments purchase flights. At this point if there's even one extra flight from an external customer it will bring down costs. Exploration is a good government role -- trucking cargo, even human cargo, is well known task at this point and shouldn't be handled by government anymore.
Its filled with competent engineers. However, to a great extent the engineers in charge tend to lack judgement regarding the political process their work depends on. Politics isn't going to change (see Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government...",) so the biggest change that needs to happen within NASA is how it deals with politics, instead of just complaining about it. This means:
1. Short-term goals that accomplish something on their own even if the long-term project is cancelled. 2. Shorter term projects in general. 3. Explicit plans to keep projects moving with reduced budgets, as well as take advantage of increased budgets. 4. International cooperation: Partners are a big reason ISS is extended till 2020. 5. Privatize basic, lower-risk components, such as launch to LEO, so that they can't be cancelled or micro-managed.
Constellation was an engineers design, and was quite feasible within the laid out budget, but it failed to take into account that Bush might not actually push very hard to get the extra money, and didn't gracefully degrade with lower budgets. It also pursued a singular Apollo-like goal instead of pursuing a broader improvement in the nations capabilities that could be repurposed by future administrations. If the FY2011 budget passes as is, it may seem like a short term step back, but will ultimately leave us in a much better place.
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JPL is a NASA facility operated by CalTech. While it originated before NASA (1949 I believe), it is currently a central fixture of NASA's unmanned exploration efforts, and isn't somehow distinct from it.
I think the difference you're looking for is the manned program vs. the unmanned program. The unmanned program has diversified a lot lately - while JPL is still the leader in the field (I may be biased, I'm starting there next month), Ames and Goddard have both been doing a lot of impressive work lately as well. Only the human spaceflight program, which uses many robots and teleoperation devices as well, is the bureaucratic nightmare you envision, and even then, the robotic portions seem to be the most impressive things coming out of HSF right now.
While those quotes are correct, and I agree with them, they don't disagree with what I'm saying.
There was a mismatch between goals and funds. You can interpret this to mean that they need more money, but hoping that Congress opens the purse-strings for something that doesn't get many votes isn't a proper plan for exploration. NASA has funding, they just need to use it more wisely. Something like Constellation is only going to happen with Apollo-level funding, which while as you and I know would be very good and not too draining, this is not politically viable.
And the comment about a lack of mismanagement is referring to the program managers at NASA. They were given a task, and they performed admirably to do the best they could do at what was an impossible task. The mismanagement I refer to is from the political leadership going back 30 years. Post-shuttle NASA history is littered with cancelled programs that attempted to do ridiculously hard things without getting the basics right. The Constellation program (which never really sought to fulfill the goals set out by Bush, who never called Griffin on his shenanigans) was only feasible under Bush's promise to get more money out of Congress -- a promise he never came through on and didn't try very hard for. Griffin took him at his word and never had a descope option to handle the inevitable problems when that didn't go smoothly. All of this leaves us trying to build something to go to the moon on a shoestring budget when NASA seems to have forgotten how to build a manned spacecraft at all.
We need to step out of the shadow of Apollo and figure out what actually works under modern budgets with modern political pressures.
The space program is funded. The reason for the gap isn't a lack of funding, its a matter of extremely poor management. The new direction for the budget is probably going to get our manned program back off the ground, if it ever passes.
Additionally, we have plenty of ways to get unmanned stuff off the ground, only manned vehicles are an issue. The unmanned space program should be (and is) a source of pride for the country, and is doing quite well.
Yes, when doing a budget for a large project you always use cost units such as FY2010 dollars.
Of course it can happen here. Unfortunately hiding your contacts isn't a good way to avoid it. Because, if someones really interested there are many other avenues to find that information.
The way to stop McCarthyism in the future is political. If you're hiding so much you can't actually live your life then what is the point? Of course its risky, but then again life is a giant risk.
From what I've seen (we had a seminar at my university about it recently) the JPL system for trajectory planning and spacecraft simulation all looks like Python.
They have a backend framework of compiled C/C++ code with general components for building spacecraft, including different physics components (everything from standard gravity models to solar influences to atmospheric drag), and applying controls. Then they use Python to combine these into practical models for testing.
Its probably not as impressive looking as in the movies, but they're able to pull out 'porkchop' plots (contour plots that indicate the minimum launch energy vs. launch time) and design complex trajectories in less than an hour.
The beauty of the proposed FY2011 budget is that it moves NASA in a direction to avoid this in the future. A few years of startup funding for designing multiple vehicles that are ultimately 'owned' by private groups will make the basic infrastructure more robust against the political vagaries inherent to a large government program. HLV may be in trouble if Obama isn't reelected, but as long as a more sustainable LEO infrastructure is in place (or has enough momentum to get there), we'll be in a much better place to do this all over again.
We're never going to solve all the issues we face. The relatively small amount of money and effort used by the space program is not enough to make a dent in the serious issues we face. We can't wait for the world to be perfect before we try to advance ourselves because we won't get anywhere. Rather, we should advance ourselves in as many ways as possible and hope that the synergies between different fields raise everyone up and help us make the world a better place.
The lack of a 'plan' seems to be taking a lot of flak, but I think sometimes a bit of lightly moderated chaos can be far more productive than a rigid plan. To paraphrase a comment from the "The West Wing," a government directed program on polio will give you the best iron lung ever designed, but some grad students messing around in their lab will give you a polio vaccine.
Since you acknowledge the failures of NASA HSF over the past 30 years, particularly the fact that the procurement methods from Apollo and the Shuttle have been completely incapable of producing a successor vehicle, doesn't it make sense to try something new? If the NASA designed cost-plus contracts move slowly, tend to be cancelled, don't move technology forward, and represent a single-point of failure in our HSF capabilities, then the only sane thing to do is try something new. The fact that the proposed fixed-price 'commercial' procurement system will hopefully be cheaper is just gravy.
Without the ability to get to LEO, and without an external political threat to motivate huge amounts of spending, the idea of planning to go to the Moon or Mars is fairly ridiculous. Under the current environment, you could only conceivably expect to be able to do that after 30 years of work. With an average presidential term of 6 years, there are five chances for it to be cancelled before then. The only alternative is to hope that congress becomes more cooperative, and that doesn't sound like a good bet to make to me. However, if the new proposal does manage to create a robust, multi-vendor LEO infrastructure, then future 'grand plans' can be carried out on shorter time scales and within the expected budget. Short term goals that can be built upon are much more sustainable -- right now our short term goals need to be getting our LEO capability back, and in a stronger way.
In other words, our human space program is in rehab now after the past 30 years of mismanagement. We need to get back on our feet before we can talk about truly advancing the frontier.
They do have a monopoly on MP3 players, but you'll notice that there aren't many abuses of that platform. In fact, the biggest changes in the non-touch ipod/itunes ecosystem in the past few years has been the removal of DRM. In smartphones, Apple may dominate in mindshare, but RIM and Symbian still rack up more sales, and MS and Android aren't terribly far behind -- no one has a monopoly in the smart phone market at this point.
The real danger of a monopoly is that you're locked in by external factors, and that in order to to interact with the rest of the world you're subjected to the whims of a CEO somewhere. Most Mac and Linux users I know keep a spare copy of Windows around on a partition or a virtual machine because there are times you just can't go without it. I would happily never use MS Office ever again, except that makes it extremely difficult to interoperate with people I work with. I can't escape from Microsoft. However, I can perfectly well avoid using an Apple product if I wanted to. While the iPod dominates the market, there is very little keeping me from using another MP3 player -- the file format is even more dominant, and I could buy myself a Creative player tomorrow, sync it up with my MP3s, and be good to go. I can just as easily do without an iPhone. While Apple does apply a lot more lock-in mechanisms with iPhone OS (this latest stuff is getting more and more inexcusable), there are no external factors, just simply the fact that I currently have it, have invested in some Apps, and like the platform. If this stuff keeps going and I get myself a Nexus One at the end of the year, I'll continue to be able to interact with people and work and the web exactly as I was before. Anyone not buying into the platform is in no way disadvantaged as far as I know.
Since the proposed FY2011 NASA budget has about $6B allocated for helping fund the development of these new vehicles.... it sounds like they're going to get exactly what they're asking for. I'm not sure I see what the problem is.
They just have to compete for the money like everyone else (their experience should help there,) and they'll need to be more careful with their budget, since the whole idea is to eliminate the cost-plus contracts that allows them to lowball their estimate and ask for more money later.
I think the question is one of precision more than accuracy. You're correct, the standard is infinitely accurate by definition (well, more precisely the expectation or mean of your standard is infinitely accurate).
What this is saying, though, is that the variance of the standard from its own mean is smaller for man-made atomic clocks than it is for celestial clocks such as pulsars.
That requires more thought to understand. If you say "the size of a mini cooper" you get it in less than a second, with dimensions it takes me 5 or 10 seconds to process it all and get an understanding. As much as football fields, mini coopers and libraries of congress are ridiculous and imprecise, they are pretty decent references for public, non-technical descriptions.
While 5 or 10 seconds may not be much in the grand scheme of things, if you're reading a news article, you're likely to ignore measurements but a reference to an everyday object will get the point across very easily. And having seen both Mini Coopers and MSL, its a pretty apt comparison.
The thing that gets me the most (I'm severely red-green colorblind) is the inability to determine when meat is done cooking. If I'm cooking for others, I often ask "Am I going to poison us?" and if I'm cooking for myself I usually overcook it.
A few other items that are amusing in hindsight:
- I bought a pink flashlight camping on spring break a few years ago
- According to my girlfriend, I have quite a few pieces of clothing with light red stains on them
- Settlers of Catan is a difficult game to play - sheep and grain have to be distinguished based on texture not color
- Older board games with poor color choices (my copy of Diplomacy stands out) leads to confusion.
These are of course in addition to the more serious (potentially professionally and personally hazardous) concerns of reading maps and charts, setting color schemes for websites, being able to pick clothes that actually match, and distinguishing dim green lights on horizontal stoplights.
Not to say that any of these things seriously hinder quality of life, and can be corrected with a little bit of thinking ahead -- still very inconvenient. Of course, one nice thing is the ability to purchase monitors that don't show red. I've picked up quite a few for less than $10 and I can't tell the difference.
They can do both, and the two goals reinforce each other -- the skills to do both are pretty non-overlapping anyway. For me, the streaming has been a non-starter so far because I run a MythTV media center and own a Wii -- the only place I can use the streaming right now is on my laptop (a Mac), which is not the best movie viewing machine.
This brings me into the market now, and makes me think that when I move out of my current place (the account is in my roommates name) I'll get my own subscription as well. Assuming I'm not a total outlier (not many people will have MythTV, but there are many people with only a Wii, DVD player, and crappy cable box attached to their TV,) this greatly expands the number of people using streaming, and will thus encourage content producers to see that they need to find a good way to monetize streaming video.
Just because this doesn't benefit you directly and in particular, that doesn't mean its not worthwhile, and in this case a rising tide raises all boats.
As an engineer who does astronomical optics rather than a photographer, I can say with certainty with absolute certainty that all else being equal (i.e. diffraction limited case) a larger aperture is sharper. This is simply a matter of physics. The resolution is inversely proportional to diameter of the aperture due to the wave-like nature of light.
Now, if by 'crisper' you don't mean sharper, but rather a fuzzy measure of how you think it looks, its not surprising because smaller lenses of good quality are easier to make, and will thus approach the ideal diffraction limit. But this isn't a case of all other things being equal, and won't be as capable.
Actually, its currently a terrible time to be an entry-level engineer trying to find an Aerospace job. The fact that the current Obama plan (which I fully support) is still only proposed, no one knows whats going to happen, and none of the established companies are hiring -- most of the job postings are not being actively pursued by Boeing, LockMart, etc. SpaceX has job postings up, and I think they mean to fill them, but they're a small company and they're busy right now so most of those are standing still too.
Combine this with the generally lackluster economy, which has led most companies to go on a hiring freeze anyway, and you get a situation where I know of only one person from my department who's gotten a job offer this year, and the pay was so poor for it that the person was better off staying in school with a stipend and a low cost of living than moving to LA where the job was.
Of course, once the budget passes I expect it will be a much better time, I hope. I was unwilling to work in the pork-filled behemoth that was CxP, but if the new plan survives unscathed there are a lot of interesting and rewarding opportunities.
This would be a terrible way to do a single vehicle. However, they want to 'swarm' these instead. While each individual vehicle may be limited, if you have hundreds canvasing a region, correlating the data between each 'tumbleweed' would make the information more valuable than the mere sum of its parts.
I don't think this replaces something like the MERs, but rather complements them.
We actually had this idea (I'm a grad student in aerospace engineering) a few years ago, and one guy managed to throw together a small 'roll-bot' that bhas a motor attached to the axis of a spherical shell, and a weight on a servo that hanges below that axis. The motor controls the speed, and you can turn it by moving the weight so it causes the wheel to tilt. Works pretty well, and would be good for a planetary probe because its completely sealed, so if you have a way to clean the surface you wouldn't have to worry about internal wear.
This "tumbleweed" concept is cheap and affordable, may be a little unpredictable in the direction it will go, but will ultimately allow many more vehicles doing a lot more exploration in aggregate.
So yes, this is exactly what will be left of the space program after the administration is done. Sounds like a good thing to me.
Constellation as an architecture was fatally flawed. This is not a question of privatization, of the viability of human settlement or anything like that -- the program of record was an unsustainable throwback to the Apollo era that was simply unviable in the current environment and didn't complete the goals laid out in the Vision for Space Exploration. The fact that it was based on shuttle technologies is besides the point -- they screwed this up anyway by using 5-meter tankage and 5-segment SRBs that eliminated much of the advantage of being 'shuttle-derived'.
The statement by the Augustine commission that "if Constellation were completed now, it would still have to be cancelled because we couldn't afford to operate it" is the most succinct way of stating the flaw. Even after all of the development costs, the amount to fly each flight is so high that NASA would have to continue operating at the politically untenable +$3B budget . This is exactly what happened with Apollo: it was built, we went to the moon, but each flight was so expensive that it couldn't be sustained after the impetus to beat the Soviets was removed. This isn't to negate the accomplishment of Apollo -- the Saturn V stack, sending it all up at once, was the best way to do it as quickly as possible, but definitely not the cheapest.
Now instead consider the current situation. NASA's budget is limited to approximately 0.5% of the federal budget, we have nothing to prove, we understand the basics of space flight, have much better computer and control technology, and we are interested in doing real exploration. The only things that actually need to get from the Earth's surface to the Moon's surface and back, each time, are humans and their research equipment. All the landers, Earth-departure stages, communications equipment and long-term life-support can be pretty easily re-used. They will be more expensive than their equivalent disposable counterparts (say by a factor of 4), but if you run 10 missions you've saved money. So what we do is we have a lunar transport vehicle (LTV) that sits in Earth orbit, refuels from orbiting fuel depots, and simply goes back and forth to the moon. Fuel depots could be brought to orbit more cheaply, even by more ridiculous methods like space-guns, because they can handle extremely high G-loads. Astronauts get to orbit and rendezvous with the LTV using simple low-cost vehicles that resemble Dragon. Note that I don't discuss how they're developed -- cost-plus or fixed-price rides.
It may take 30 years to get to the moon this way, but it makes a lot more sense. The simple capsule could be completed in 5 years easily, and fuel depots are another independent project. The LTV and other components again could be broken up into manageable pieces that could be completed within a single administration. Budget cuts wouldn't eliminate previously developed capabilities, since they're already deployed, and once you have the entire thing completed you can get astronauts to the moon for a cost equivalent to a couple of STS flights.
Of course this is all just musing on my part, I'd have to run a lot of numbers to see estimate sizing, and cost savings. All I hope to demonstrate is what a better approach is than Constellation could look like. Constellation was pie-in-the-sky because it depended on the nature of our politics changing, which is far more difficult than solving mere engineering problems.
While I'm a big proponent of privatizing LEO launch and things like that, NASA (or an entity like it) will be the critical partner in exploration for a long-time to come.
Exploration is very high-risk, and theres not a whole lot of guaranteed reward in term of monetary profit. Pushing the sphere of humanity is something that (at least I feel) has great value for society, but its not good business. Like the national defense and laying out infrastructure, the 'Lewis and Clark' role will always be best handled by a government entity.
However, after the initial exploration, its then time to consider privatization. Boeing, Bigelow and SpaceX aren't going to take us to NEOS, the Moon or Mars, but they're damn sure going to be able to get us to the near frontier, 500-miles up. From there they can get on a NASA vehicle and push on to the far frontier. As NASA keeps going, more of what was once the far frontier becomes the near frontier, responsibilities shift, and progress is made. What we're seeing now is the growing pains of learning how to hand off the torch.
In case you didn't notice, Constellation in many ways was a much bigger sellout to private companies -- these undefinitized contracts seem to be a handy way to funnel money to the big contractors with little oversight.
Space exploration is not about adventure for its own sake -- for that we can send all our astronauts to climb Mt. Everest instead. Its about advancing the frontier, and learning to live and work sustainably in space, and Constellation wasn't doing that. Even at the time of Apollo, Von Braun et.al. knew that that architecture was not the way forward, because each mission was individually incredibly expensive. Rebuilding Apollo in the form of Constellation was always doomed to repeat flags and footprints with little else, and without the political impetus of cold war and a mission from a martyred president, it was quite frankly stillborn. A cheap LEO launch vehicle with true spaceships that never re-entered the Earth's atmosphere was always a better long-term plan, it just couldn't get built as quickly, so didn't fit the goals of the time.
This was what the original Bush VSE said, until CxP hijacked it, and its what the Augustine commission said. Sustainability is key, and the FY2011 budget, despite the piss-poor PR to go along with it, lays out a path for sustainable, flexible exploration.
Politicians nowadays aren't particularly better or worse than they were in the past. They're never going to get better. Depending on that as your plan for anything is akin to asking that the world get better by people becoming less greedy -- it would be nice, but its not going to happen. The leadership (as in NASA leadership, not congressional leadership) needs to take the frivolities of our political system into account when planning.
Short term projects are the only way you get anything done. You have an over-arching goal, but you break it up into small manageable tasks. If Bush's VSE had developed a LEO vehicle and an Earth-Moon shuttle that was built in orbit and remained there, never re-entering, the LEO craft would already be built, and there wouldn't be nearly as much trouble -- even if the moon were cancelled we'd still be in a position to get to LEO. Constellation was purely designed to go to the moon, while a system like that could much more easily be designed to go anywhere you wanted. Breaking it up into smaller tasks makes it faster, less politically risky, and more flexible. A monolithic system only made sense for a massively funded nationalistic race like Apollo. Perhaps I should have stated it as short-term standalone components of long-term projects.
And in case you weren't aware, for a long time, government was the only way to get anything to orbit, even for commercial systems. Orbital Sciences only moved into the market because Boeing and Lockheed had demonstrated that there was a commercial market -- and they only entered it because the Air Force helped fund their initial development. In the early days of aviation, the USPS encouraged investment in aviation firms by guaranteeing a market for air-mail. Guaranteeing a government market helps kick-start an industry -- and others getting involved bring down the costs. This market isn't necessarily space tourists or anything like that, its letting other governments purchase flights. At this point if there's even one extra flight from an external customer it will bring down costs. Exploration is a good government role -- trucking cargo, even human cargo, is well known task at this point and shouldn't be handled by government anymore.
Its filled with competent engineers. However, to a great extent the engineers in charge tend to lack judgement regarding the political process their work depends on. Politics isn't going to change (see Churchill: "Democracy is the worst form of government...",) so the biggest change that needs to happen within NASA is how it deals with politics, instead of just complaining about it. This means:
1. Short-term goals that accomplish something on their own even if the long-term project is cancelled.
2. Shorter term projects in general.
3. Explicit plans to keep projects moving with reduced budgets, as well as take advantage of increased budgets.
4. International cooperation: Partners are a big reason ISS is extended till 2020.
5. Privatize basic, lower-risk components, such as launch to LEO, so that they can't be cancelled or micro-managed.
Constellation was an engineers design, and was quite feasible within the laid out budget, but it failed to take into account that Bush might not actually push very hard to get the extra money, and didn't gracefully degrade with lower budgets. It also pursued a singular Apollo-like goal instead of pursuing a broader improvement in the nations capabilities that could be repurposed by future administrations. If the FY2011 budget passes as is, it may seem like a short term step back, but will ultimately leave us in a much better place.