Why go to Mars like this? As soon as the first man is on their way to the surface, we'll be done, budgets will get slashed, and we'll hang out in LEO for another 50 years glorying in the old days when we went to Mars. This is the Apollo mindset -- it worked well as a tech kickstart, but we never really recovered because we never got beyond the way we built things then. And it wouldn't even happen, Apollo was a policy of diplomacy as much as anything else, projecting soft and hard power and demonstrating the superiority of capitalism and a free society -- we have no good political reason to fund NASA to that level.
Instead we're finally getting around to building a truly robust LEO infrastructure that means our failure to develop a new vehicle will risk killing our HSF program (like now), and that a disaster such as Challenger or Columbia doesn't make us dependent on Russia for 3 years. With cheaper LEO access a 'true spaceship' as discussed recently by Buzz Aldrin could be built more quickly and make missions to places like the Moon, Mars or asteroids cheaper, safer, and more comfortable.
At any rate, Bolden said yesterday that even with unlimited budget, they couldn't get people to Mars in 10 years -- anything longer than 10 years is probably a political loser. We don't understand the effects of long journeys like that, and protection against radiation is still an underdeveloped field. Fortunately there's a lot of R&D money here to really get a grasp on these problems so that we can find answers and be capable of doing it in the future.
Technology is only part of the question -- politics is just as important and something space advocates often fail to account for.
Yes, Constellation is a technically feasible program. However, it is not politically feasible. It requires $3-$4B more per year for 10 years at least, and however much those of who think space exploration is important complain, NASA's not getting that. Any feasible NASA plan has to fit within the current budget for the forseeable future, and simply be prepared to accelerate things if more money becomes available.
According to the Augustine report, the American HSF program, as dominated by Constellation was "on an unsustainable trajectory." Technological feasibility is only part of the equation.
It's still sensationalist even for SpaceX alone. Musk is still funding SpaceX largely from himself and private investors; the COTS money was supposedly helpful but not absolutely necessary. He has said that they can afford four F9 failures before a successful flight, and since its still largely privately funded development, the political risks are minimized -- congress can only cancel COTS, not Falcon 9 development.
Musk understands that at a certain point its cheaper to risk blowing up a rocket with a dummy payload than it is to spin your engineer's wheels trying to find more flaws. The biggest risk in a failed first launch, by far, is a (misplaced) swing in public opinion away from the FY2011 NASA budget proposal -- one that would largely be based on FUD.
This can't be said enough. Falcon 9 Flight 1 is in no way a single point failure for the administration's budget proposal. Whether its a success or failure it demonstrates why the new plan is in fact the right way to go.
First, SpaceX has judged that at this point its cheaper to fly the rocket than to suffer from the 'failure is not an option' mentality. Yes, an explosion looks bad, but quite frankly, after a certain point its cheaper to just launch the thing than to waste engineer hours trying to find more failure modes. Thats why you try them out first without people or expensive payloads on board -- the fact that the first shuttle launched was manned showed an incredible amount of hubris as far as I'm concerned. This method of testing makes things cheaper and better in the long run.
Second, even if SpaceX were to completely fall apart (not that they will,) they are not the only hope for US spaceflight, despite what some opponents of the new plan claim. Under the COTS program, Orbital Sciences is also preparing vehicles for ISS resupply. With CCDev, which will be followed with far more money under the new budget, old and new companies, from Boeing and the LM/Boeing hybrid ULA, to Blue Origin and Bigelow will be developing vehicles for manned flight. Falcon 9, Atlas V and Delta IV are all being prepped for use as manned launchers, and Dragon, Dream Chaser, and a cut-down version of Orion are being prepped as manned orbital vehicles. If one doesn't work, it just means more business for the other two.
The whole point of the new proposed way of doing human spaceflight is to create redundancy and encourage efficiency. Don't let those who are afraid of change spread the FUD that is sure to arise from this flight, no matter what happens.
I'm pretty sure most of the e-readers do allow you use arbitrary quantities of DRM-free material, and conversion from one format to another isn't a problem since they're all open standards when you strip off the DRM.
I have a Kindle, so its what I'll refer to -- I'm sure other readers have similar capabilities. I can take any file of format txt, mobi, rtf, and copy it to the kindle (it mounts as a flash drive) and they are immediately readable. Conversion of things like.doc are obviously more complex, but Amazon even offers to do this for you, for free if you're willing to load it on the device yourself. The only limit on quantity is memory availability. The main format lacking is ePub, which has emerged as an industry standard after the release of the first Kindle -- however, even then, it should be pretty easy to translate between ePub and Mobi, assuming no DRM.
That DRM is the crux of the issue, but this is not a question of devices but of stores. There are no good *general-purpose* ebook stores. However, if you get books from Project Gutenburg, or from Baen's free releases, or any other source of DRM-free books, the new readers have exactly what you're looking for. Don't believe the FUD thats been spread since the Kindle and other e-ink readers started to come out.
Yeah, this sounds much more like an issue of not thinking through interferences and tolerances well enough. Those problems tend to be hard to find in a computer model, since its all perfectly precise in those cases.
Of course it could also just be that something else was attached improperly and causes everything else to be messed up. There are a huge number of issues that this could be, and I think maybe the poster just has an axe to grind with Imperial units.
You realize Boeing and ULA (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed) are two of the primary contractors under CCDev, the precursor to a larger 'commercial' manned operation. Furthermore, SpaceX, Blue Origin, et. al. employ a large number of people who used to work at more traditional companies -- Boeing and Lockheed do not have experience, the people working for them do.
The difference in the game isn't that the money is going to different people, its how its being managed. Before, we were operating in the same way we did in Apollo, by telling companies what we wanted built, and paying significantly more when things didn't work out as cheaply as we hoped. This made sense in the 60s, since we didn't really know what it took to complete the task. However, after we have been launching people into orbit for 50 years, we should no longer be able to claim to not be able to predict the costs. So the difference here is that instead of funding development of vehicles, NASA is instead saying they'll be a guaranteed customer, and purchase rides at a fixed price from these companies. While this may seem like a fine distinction, it changes the incentive structure significantly so that programs are more likely to stay on time and on budget, proposals are more likely to be accurate, and congress is less able to meddle.
Costs for missions beyond LEO are harder to predict, so government directed cost-plus contracts may make sense in this regime -- however, they will be far more successful if there is a robust, reliable, multi-vendor infrastructure for getting people to and from LEO.
What about neophyte startups like ULA, a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed, and of course Boeing proper. Much of the new 'commercial' sector is going to be the same people as before, just acting through fixed-price rather than cost-plus contracts.
Comparing Ares 1X to Falcon 9 is foolish. Falcon 9 is the potentially final vehicle, with a first and second stage. Ares 1X was a 4-segment SRB (as opposed to the required 5-segment), a second stage mass simulator, and a Titan control system. It was intended only as an aerodynamic test, and yet managed to cost as much as all of Space X's development combined. A better analogy would be Ares 1X:Ares 1 as Falcon 1:Falcon 9, in terms of progression of technology. And to answer your question, F9 is coming along quite well. Should see the first test flight in the next few months -- if it doesn't go off, we're fortunate because F9 isn't a single point of failure in this new plan, unlike Ares 1, and there are still other, completely separate vehicles in development that will be able to take up the slack.
Finally, Bolsheviks in the Augustine Commission??? Its socialist to want to privatize something??? Clearly I'm confused in my understanding of these words.
This plan is no less vacuous than the program of record, and has the advantage of having results that can be built off of within an administration -- if CxP were continued, it would just be at risk of being cancelled by the next administration change, and the one after that, and the one after that (no landing till the 2030s). A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. NASA hasn't managed to build a new vehicle using traditional contracting methods since the 1970s, it would be insanity to keep doing it this way.
Oh I see. Just because Obama does it its wrong. Now I get it!
This is similar to a stiquito in only the most superficial way -- its a movable machine with 6 legs. In every other way its different.
Controls: The stiquito has a single (or sometimes two) actuators, that are placed to mechanically, repeatedly cause the same walking motion. This student's robot has 12 actuators, 2 joints on each leg. This makes the robot much more versatile, but also makes the control problem much harder to solve.
Learning: A stiquito is dumb -- you attach the SMA to the legs, and put a current through to tighten them. It works exactly the same every time, and you have to put it together in just the right way to make it work. This robot is self-learning (or more exactly, learns through reinforcement). The designer simply creates a fairly simple algorithm that has it try motions and see if it gets it to move in the desired direction, and then learns how to do it over time.
While I think its fair to say anyone with some mechanical aptitude and knowledge of machine learning could put something like this together, its not exactly a simple feat and is certainly impressive for an undergrad. I don't know of any other self-learning six-legged robots (reflecting my ignorance only), but given the capabilities plus the (likely?) low cost its nothing to sneeze at and could have uses in things like disaster operations.
We need a heavy-lift vehicle (HLV,) not Ares V. Ares V at this point is a paper rocket, not much more than a concept study, and one that made more sense when it could leverage technology from Ares I. What this budget includes is $3B over 5 years to support technology development related to heavy lift, something thats been neglected for decades. In 5 years, if the commercial infrastructure is in place and if this research leads to significant improvements, the design space will be considerably different -- a clean break would be preferable anyway.
As far as what we'll do for manned flight -- what we were going to do anyway, pay Russia $50M per astronaut. Ares 1+Orion were at about the same point in design as Falcon 9+Dragon, and the SpaceX offering is much simpler, meaning it's likely to be completed sooner than the program of record anyway. The flight gap was always going to be a problem. By creating a competitive, robust market for LEO transport we can hopefully avoid this in the future.
Looking at the author's site, the research group has 3 peer reviewed journal articles, 6 conference papers, some ground tests and experimentation, and flight experiments by the summer -- and quite frankly as someone with a bit of experience in electric propulsion and satellite design (grad student in AERO, did some undergrad EP work), it sounds reasonable.
This doesn't sound like vaporware or pseudo-science -- I'd imagine the article is pretty accurate.
That was my first thought too. However, after talking to people there and looking at the numbers, I don't think SpaceX was especially interested in CCDev.
There wasn't a whole lot of money being thrown around relative to COTS ($500M split two ways instead of $100M split five ways) -- the biggest thing CCDev provides at this point is publicity and mindshare as being part of the new path forward, but since they already have it from COTS they don't need to worry about the extra requirements CCDev would bring right now.
Except the budgets going up and there seems to be work targeted at keeping jobs.
KSC is now being tasked with a $2B upgrade of its facilities, and since commercial vehicles are going to get running faster than Ares 1 (late 2020s), or at the very least around the same time, and will probably launch from the cape as well, I don't see how there's much of a job loss there, beyond what was already happening with shuttle retirement.
JSC will continue to run the ISS, which is going to be getting more work, and will continue to train ISS astronauts. Research to enable longer duration human spaceflight, particularly close looped systems will be huge tasks for the center.
MSFC, who I had predicted would really hurt from all this, look like they'll be fine as well. There is $3B for heavy-lift enabling research, which is exactly what MSFC is good at.
While there will be some pain and uncertainty, most of the job losses will likely be soaked up by increased employment at COTS and CCDev contractors -- furthermore, by focusing on research and developing the un-sexy LEO infrastructure in such a way that it isn't as fragile, the legacy of this administration will be to leave NASA in a state where it is better able to complete big projects in 4-8 years, since this is commonly a limiting time period for any large program. .
I wouldn't even really call it a delay. Ares 1+Orion was no further along in development than Falcon 9+Dragon. Since Dragon is trying to do less, its simpler and theres a good chance that it would be ready sooner.
I'm looking forward to see what happens in this budget fight.
Have you read the budget documents? They don't say that at all. Privatization only applies to LEO transport -- a well-known, well-defined task with clear profit potential and well-understood risks.
The budget specifically states that its renewing a focus on developing fundamental technologies, something that was lacking in the past decades and the main reason Constellation was a dinosaur. The budget specifically lists some things like enabling technologies for heavy lift vehicles, improving RTGs for planetary exploration (we're about to run out of P238), in-situ resource utilization, lunar regolith factories, and in-space propulsion. There are increased budgets for planetary and earth science.
This is NASA concentrating on its roots. NASA was in charge of getting people to LEO when that was new and challenging and unknown. NASA roots are doing the new hard things, with a focus on exploration.
Of course, if we were going to redesign Ares over again it wouldn't make sense to cancel it. The Augustine commission is intended to consider only costs to proceed. This gave the program of record an advantage in the comparisons, yet still came out behind.
Comparing cost to completion is how you avoid the sunk cost fallacy.
First, Ares 1 is actually designed only to get astronauts on board an Orion capsule to LEO. (However Orion is a much more capable capsule than Dragon.) Ares V, which is even further from reality is what's needed to leave LEO. And no, NASA can't get to LEO on its current rockets, since once the shuttle retires it has none of its own launch vehicles. And for the record, keeping the shuttle out of retirement is not trivial, if thats what you're going for.
And you seem to imply that experience is attached to the institution and not to the people and the records of development. Private industry built all that we have now, and will continue to in the future. All thats happening here is a variation in contracting methods -- fixed-price instead of cost-plus. The knowledge that NASA has accumulated over the years is public domain. As development methods shift, so will jobs -- there may be some pain of layoffs and relocation for new jobs, but we'll end up having most of the same people doing most of the same jobs, conserving experience, but with a more efficient, less paralyzing management structure.
Finally, of course government funding is critical to exploration, no one is arguing otherwise. Exploration is high-risk with a reward that is largely non-monetary. Commercialization schemes don't say that private firms should be defining the vision, only that the well-defined tasks of basic launch infrastructure are handled by fixed-price contracts. A robust, multi-vendor competitive launch market will simply make exploration easier in the long term, as it will be less dependent on political wrangling and single points of failure for launch vehicles.
You're under the impression that NASA is currently capable of creating an HLV using its old contracting methods. NASA has been incapable of creating a new launch vehicle since the shuttle, not at the fault of the dedicated civil servants, but by a paralyzing management and political structure.
People and talent are mobile, and most of vehicle design in the past was done by private contractors anyway. Having NASA write you a paycheck doesn't make you more (or less) capable. What's going on here is simply a shift from cost-plus to fixed-price contracts. These are less subject to political manipulation, and push more management to distinct companies with their own structures -- if one company becomes paralyzed, it isn't a single point of failure for US human spaceflight.
And yes, currently 'commercial space' vehicles concentrate on simple LEO transport, because this is the largest, most guaranteed market. However, if NASA needs to buy an HLV, there's no reason that one can't be provided by similar methods. A less risky (and less efficient) cost-plus development contract may be necessary occasionally, but if everyone is used to fixed-price approaches, and there's an understanding that eventual acquisition of more vehicles will be at a fixed-price then the same improved efficiencies will hopefully dominate.
NASA doesn't need to design its own launch vehicles -- it needs to define requirements. If it needs something it buys it, and if it can't it can fund development, same as it always has, with modified expectations.
I think that this wouldn't be possible if you were using a capacitive stylus with a narrow tip. The reason is that the screen is not actually measuring pressure, but relies on the fact that fingers are 'squishy' and when you press harder more contact is being made and therefore either the output value or the number of pixels goes up.
There's a stylus that Ars reviewed a week or two that claimed to make the touchpad on a laptop work like a pressure-sensitive wacom, and it relied on having a large tip that was similarly 'squishy'. However, this also meant it had a big, imprecise tip that could never be as good as a true pressure sensitive system -- useful but no substitute.
Absolutely about the USPS providing a guaranteed market.
However, the exploration portions of NASA aren't going to be contracted out, only the ferrying people to LEO. NASA or something like it will always have to play the Lewis and Clark role. When you take the onus of maintaining US manned access to space off of NASA's shoulders, it should be be better able to explore, and hopefully be able to do more with less.
We're not throwing anything away, just shifting the way we fund it to make it cheaper and more reliable.
As a counter-argument, all of SpaceX's development has been done at about the same cost as the Ares 1-X model rocket, which was cobbled together from already existing parts.
NASA already operates by making cost-plus contracts with private companies. Saturn V wasn't built by NASA, it was operated by NASA and built by every aerospace contractor in the country. All this is doing is changing the way we contract it out -- fixed-price contracts where you pay a certain amount for a service rather than to the lowest bidder who will always go over-budget since they're trying to be the lowest bidder.
The efficiencies come from the fact that the current NASA+Contractor structure is horribly inefficient. For example, applying foam to the external tank on the shuttle is done at a shop in Alabama, while the tank is manufactured in New Orleans. Now, the foam application happens multiple times in the middle of the manufacturing process so rather than design it to all be built in one place, parts are shipped back and forth on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. When you move to a fixed price contract (say buying a car instead of building a house), theres more of an expectation that you pick from your options and its built how the company builds it -- this reduces the political influences on manufacturing sites and processes. As far as safety -- a company won't make money if they negligently kill astronauts. It doesn't make sense for the bottom line to be unsafe with something this high-profile.
Here's why -- markets, privitization, and competition lead to efficiency. If you want efficiency then you move in that direction
The reason that warfighting is a government task is that warfighting is not efficient, and shouldn't be. Since you're not trying to make it more efficient, privatization makes no sense. Social security is also not supposed to be efficient -- the most efficient way to deal with retirees is to kill them off. Obviously there is societal benefit to keeping them alive that isn't easily monetized, so privatization doesn't make sense there either.
However, getting people and objects to LEO is a well-defined task with a well-developed technology where efficiency is a good thing. This is more like breaking up the Bell monopoly than it is like privatization of social security.
While SpaceX is certain to profit from this, so is the rest of the industry. Big companies like LockMart and Boeing are going to have to do a little rethinking, but they've got the people and the expertise and they're going to be some seriously heavy hitters here as well, especially now that its not just COTS as a little side project, but as the main event. They just need to learn to work within a budget.
#1: Obama had bad things to say about the *manned* space program -- he always liked the robotic parts.
#2: Presidents have cut manned programs before. We've been trying to build a replacement for the shuttle since it was built, but they keep being overdesigned, underfunded boondoggles that have to be cut. Its only making a bigger splash now because we can't keep using the shuttle.
#3: The politicization of NASA, a necessary evil for any government program, is a good argument FOR putting basic LEO launch infrastructure in the hands of a more robust commercial ecosystem. If bad leadership ruins one of multiple companies that are contracted to for launch, then the results are much less drastic.
#4: A space program that exists to employ people is great example of the broken window fallacy. We do it because its important, and if we can do more with less, as this plan hopes, that seems like a good thing. It may cause temporary pain as business model changes, but its good for the industry and the country in the long term.
#5: Regarding contributions to society, how is this going to change. NASA is great at doing *NEW* things -- getting people to LEO isn't new. If the basic foundation of LEO-access is made more sustainable and reliable by fixed-price competitive contracts, then they'll be able to do those truly new and valuable things -- exploration of NEOs, solar-power, self-sustaining systems -- better since thats all they have to worry about.
#6: We're not not going into space, we're just changing how we pay for it - cutting the corporate welfare of cost-plus contracts and proceeding to the more efficient fixed-price contracts of a mature market.
#7: Keeping going on a flawed design is another economic fallacy. If its cheaper to start over than it is to keep going, or if there are fundamentally better ways to go about things, you don't consider sunk costs, you only consider costs to proceed. Ares wasn't just flawed because of technical challenges, it was flawed because in many ways it was designed by congress, keeping the various contractors happy.
#8: Ares is not the space program! I've yet to see anything about Orion being cut (Augustine talked about putting it on top of an EELV), and I've yet to see anything that says that the amount we're spending will go down. NASA will continue to explore, this will just make it easier for them to do that instead of fretting about the space-taxi part. This is *good* for our space industry and could put us leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, as multiple contractors going in multiple directions refine and improve our capabilities far better than a monolithic program could.
The sky is not falling, we're not giving up our leadership. It could be painful for some workers at NASA centers (and I sincerely apologize and thank you for your work if you're one of them), but this is probably the best, most sustainable path forward for manned spaceflight.
I'm not sure, in the space community you'll find those who love this and those who hate it. Those whose jobs depend on the big centers in Houston and Florida hate it -- although I'm pretty sure only MSFC in Alabama is really going to hurt in the long term -- Houston is all about astronaut training and operations, and Florida is all about launching, and these things will continue to be done.
And you've hit the nail on the head. WHen you have multiple vehicles running simultaneously at fixed-price contracts, you're going to get more variety and more reliability -- not in the sense of each vehicle being more reliable, I imagine that will stay relatively the same, but in the sense that an accident doesn't lead to a two-year halt as our one vehicle is redesigned. NASA does great at exploration and science, the high-risk, low-profit things its hard to make a business case for. The technology to launch to LEO is well developed, and theres a clear profit in it, so why not let it go to a (well-regulated) market that will eventually give us more for left.
As far as the money thing goes, there are some conflicting reports, but everything makes it seem that the budget is either staying the same or going up. Granted some is being transferred to Earth Science, which was neglected under Bush, but nonetheless, theres a good chance the NASA budget will go up, despite the doomsdayers.
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Why go to Mars like this? As soon as the first man is on their way to the surface, we'll be done, budgets will get slashed, and we'll hang out in LEO for another 50 years glorying in the old days when we went to Mars. This is the Apollo mindset -- it worked well as a tech kickstart, but we never really recovered because we never got beyond the way we built things then. And it wouldn't even happen, Apollo was a policy of diplomacy as much as anything else, projecting soft and hard power and demonstrating the superiority of capitalism and a free society -- we have no good political reason to fund NASA to that level.
Instead we're finally getting around to building a truly robust LEO infrastructure that means our failure to develop a new vehicle will risk killing our HSF program (like now), and that a disaster such as Challenger or Columbia doesn't make us dependent on Russia for 3 years. With cheaper LEO access a 'true spaceship' as discussed recently by Buzz Aldrin could be built more quickly and make missions to places like the Moon, Mars or asteroids cheaper, safer, and more comfortable.
At any rate, Bolden said yesterday that even with unlimited budget, they couldn't get people to Mars in 10 years -- anything longer than 10 years is probably a political loser. We don't understand the effects of long journeys like that, and protection against radiation is still an underdeveloped field. Fortunately there's a lot of R&D money here to really get a grasp on these problems so that we can find answers and be capable of doing it in the future.
Technology is only part of the question -- politics is just as important and something space advocates often fail to account for.
Yes, Constellation is a technically feasible program. However, it is not politically feasible. It requires $3-$4B more per year for 10 years at least, and however much those of who think space exploration is important complain, NASA's not getting that. Any feasible NASA plan has to fit within the current budget for the forseeable future, and simply be prepared to accelerate things if more money becomes available.
According to the Augustine report, the American HSF program, as dominated by Constellation was "on an unsustainable trajectory." Technological feasibility is only part of the equation.
It's still sensationalist even for SpaceX alone. Musk is still funding SpaceX largely from himself and private investors; the COTS money was supposedly helpful but not absolutely necessary. He has said that they can afford four F9 failures before a successful flight, and since its still largely privately funded development, the political risks are minimized -- congress can only cancel COTS, not Falcon 9 development.
Musk understands that at a certain point its cheaper to risk blowing up a rocket with a dummy payload than it is to spin your engineer's wheels trying to find more flaws. The biggest risk in a failed first launch, by far, is a (misplaced) swing in public opinion away from the FY2011 NASA budget proposal -- one that would largely be based on FUD.
This can't be said enough. Falcon 9 Flight 1 is in no way a single point failure for the administration's budget proposal. Whether its a success or failure it demonstrates why the new plan is in fact the right way to go.
First, SpaceX has judged that at this point its cheaper to fly the rocket than to suffer from the 'failure is not an option' mentality. Yes, an explosion looks bad, but quite frankly, after a certain point its cheaper to just launch the thing than to waste engineer hours trying to find more failure modes. Thats why you try them out first without people or expensive payloads on board -- the fact that the first shuttle launched was manned showed an incredible amount of hubris as far as I'm concerned. This method of testing makes things cheaper and better in the long run.
Second, even if SpaceX were to completely fall apart (not that they will,) they are not the only hope for US spaceflight, despite what some opponents of the new plan claim. Under the COTS program, Orbital Sciences is also preparing vehicles for ISS resupply. With CCDev, which will be followed with far more money under the new budget, old and new companies, from Boeing and the LM/Boeing hybrid ULA, to Blue Origin and Bigelow will be developing vehicles for manned flight. Falcon 9, Atlas V and Delta IV are all being prepped for use as manned launchers, and Dragon, Dream Chaser, and a cut-down version of Orion are being prepped as manned orbital vehicles. If one doesn't work, it just means more business for the other two.
The whole point of the new proposed way of doing human spaceflight is to create redundancy and encourage efficiency. Don't let those who are afraid of change spread the FUD that is sure to arise from this flight, no matter what happens.
I'm pretty sure most of the e-readers do allow you use arbitrary quantities of DRM-free material, and conversion from one format to another isn't a problem since they're all open standards when you strip off the DRM.
I have a Kindle, so its what I'll refer to -- I'm sure other readers have similar capabilities. I can take any file of format txt, mobi, rtf, and copy it to the kindle (it mounts as a flash drive) and they are immediately readable. Conversion of things like .doc are obviously more complex, but Amazon even offers to do this for you, for free if you're willing to load it on the device yourself. The only limit on quantity is memory availability. The main format lacking is ePub, which has emerged as an industry standard after the release of the first Kindle -- however, even then, it should be pretty easy to translate between ePub and Mobi, assuming no DRM.
That DRM is the crux of the issue, but this is not a question of devices but of stores. There are no good *general-purpose* ebook stores. However, if you get books from Project Gutenburg, or from Baen's free releases, or any other source of DRM-free books, the new readers have exactly what you're looking for. Don't believe the FUD thats been spread since the Kindle and other e-ink readers started to come out.
Yeah, this sounds much more like an issue of not thinking through interferences and tolerances well enough. Those problems tend to be hard to find in a computer model, since its all perfectly precise in those cases.
Of course it could also just be that something else was attached improperly and causes everything else to be messed up. There are a huge number of issues that this could be, and I think maybe the poster just has an axe to grind with Imperial units.
You realize Boeing and ULA (a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed) are two of the primary contractors under CCDev, the precursor to a larger 'commercial' manned operation. Furthermore, SpaceX, Blue Origin, et. al. employ a large number of people who used to work at more traditional companies -- Boeing and Lockheed do not have experience, the people working for them do.
The difference in the game isn't that the money is going to different people, its how its being managed. Before, we were operating in the same way we did in Apollo, by telling companies what we wanted built, and paying significantly more when things didn't work out as cheaply as we hoped. This made sense in the 60s, since we didn't really know what it took to complete the task. However, after we have been launching people into orbit for 50 years, we should no longer be able to claim to not be able to predict the costs. So the difference here is that instead of funding development of vehicles, NASA is instead saying they'll be a guaranteed customer, and purchase rides at a fixed price from these companies. While this may seem like a fine distinction, it changes the incentive structure significantly so that programs are more likely to stay on time and on budget, proposals are more likely to be accurate, and congress is less able to meddle.
Costs for missions beyond LEO are harder to predict, so government directed cost-plus contracts may make sense in this regime -- however, they will be far more successful if there is a robust, reliable, multi-vendor infrastructure for getting people to and from LEO.
What about neophyte startups like ULA, a joint venture by Boeing and Lockheed, and of course Boeing proper. Much of the new 'commercial' sector is going to be the same people as before, just acting through fixed-price rather than cost-plus contracts.
Comparing Ares 1X to Falcon 9 is foolish. Falcon 9 is the potentially final vehicle, with a first and second stage. Ares 1X was a 4-segment SRB (as opposed to the required 5-segment), a second stage mass simulator, and a Titan control system. It was intended only as an aerodynamic test, and yet managed to cost as much as all of Space X's development combined. A better analogy would be Ares 1X:Ares 1 as Falcon 1:Falcon 9, in terms of progression of technology. And to answer your question, F9 is coming along quite well. Should see the first test flight in the next few months -- if it doesn't go off, we're fortunate because F9 isn't a single point of failure in this new plan, unlike Ares 1, and there are still other, completely separate vehicles in development that will be able to take up the slack.
Finally, Bolsheviks in the Augustine Commission??? Its socialist to want to privatize something??? Clearly I'm confused in my understanding of these words.
This plan is no less vacuous than the program of record, and has the advantage of having results that can be built off of within an administration -- if CxP were continued, it would just be at risk of being cancelled by the next administration change, and the one after that, and the one after that (no landing till the 2030s). A definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again, expecting different results. NASA hasn't managed to build a new vehicle using traditional contracting methods since the 1970s, it would be insanity to keep doing it this way.
Oh I see. Just because Obama does it its wrong. Now I get it!
This is similar to a stiquito in only the most superficial way -- its a movable machine with 6 legs. In every other way its different.
Controls: The stiquito has a single (or sometimes two) actuators, that are placed to mechanically, repeatedly cause the same walking motion. This student's robot has 12 actuators, 2 joints on each leg. This makes the robot much more versatile, but also makes the control problem much harder to solve.
Learning: A stiquito is dumb -- you attach the SMA to the legs, and put a current through to tighten them. It works exactly the same every time, and you have to put it together in just the right way to make it work. This robot is self-learning (or more exactly, learns through reinforcement). The designer simply creates a fairly simple algorithm that has it try motions and see if it gets it to move in the desired direction, and then learns how to do it over time.
While I think its fair to say anyone with some mechanical aptitude and knowledge of machine learning could put something like this together, its not exactly a simple feat and is certainly impressive for an undergrad. I don't know of any other self-learning six-legged robots (reflecting my ignorance only), but given the capabilities plus the (likely?) low cost its nothing to sneeze at and could have uses in things like disaster operations.
We need a heavy-lift vehicle (HLV,) not Ares V. Ares V at this point is a paper rocket, not much more than a concept study, and one that made more sense when it could leverage technology from Ares I. What this budget includes is $3B over 5 years to support technology development related to heavy lift, something thats been neglected for decades. In 5 years, if the commercial infrastructure is in place and if this research leads to significant improvements, the design space will be considerably different -- a clean break would be preferable anyway.
As far as what we'll do for manned flight -- what we were going to do anyway, pay Russia $50M per astronaut. Ares 1+Orion were at about the same point in design as Falcon 9+Dragon, and the SpaceX offering is much simpler, meaning it's likely to be completed sooner than the program of record anyway. The flight gap was always going to be a problem. By creating a competitive, robust market for LEO transport we can hopefully avoid this in the future.
Looking at the author's site, the research group has 3 peer reviewed journal articles, 6 conference papers, some ground tests and experimentation, and flight experiments by the summer -- and quite frankly as someone with a bit of experience in electric propulsion and satellite design (grad student in AERO, did some undergrad EP work), it sounds reasonable.
This doesn't sound like vaporware or pseudo-science -- I'd imagine the article is pretty accurate.
That was my first thought too. However, after talking to people there and looking at the numbers, I don't think SpaceX was especially interested in CCDev.
There wasn't a whole lot of money being thrown around relative to COTS ($500M split two ways instead of $100M split five ways) -- the biggest thing CCDev provides at this point is publicity and mindshare as being part of the new path forward, but since they already have it from COTS they don't need to worry about the extra requirements CCDev would bring right now.
Except the budgets going up and there seems to be work targeted at keeping jobs.
KSC is now being tasked with a $2B upgrade of its facilities, and since commercial vehicles are going to get running faster than Ares 1 (late 2020s), or at the very least around the same time, and will probably launch from the cape as well, I don't see how there's much of a job loss there, beyond what was already happening with shuttle retirement.
JSC will continue to run the ISS, which is going to be getting more work, and will continue to train ISS astronauts. Research to enable longer duration human spaceflight, particularly close looped systems will be huge tasks for the center.
MSFC, who I had predicted would really hurt from all this, look like they'll be fine as well. There is $3B for heavy-lift enabling research, which is exactly what MSFC is good at.
While there will be some pain and uncertainty, most of the job losses will likely be soaked up by increased employment at COTS and CCDev contractors -- furthermore, by focusing on research and developing the un-sexy LEO infrastructure in such a way that it isn't as fragile, the legacy of this administration will be to leave NASA in a state where it is better able to complete big projects in 4-8 years, since this is commonly a limiting time period for any large program. .
I wouldn't even really call it a delay. Ares 1+Orion was no further along in development than Falcon 9+Dragon. Since Dragon is trying to do less, its simpler and theres a good chance that it would be ready sooner.
I'm looking forward to see what happens in this budget fight.
Have you read the budget documents? They don't say that at all. Privatization only applies to LEO transport -- a well-known, well-defined task with clear profit potential and well-understood risks.
The budget specifically states that its renewing a focus on developing fundamental technologies, something that was lacking in the past decades and the main reason Constellation was a dinosaur. The budget specifically lists some things like enabling technologies for heavy lift vehicles, improving RTGs for planetary exploration (we're about to run out of P238), in-situ resource utilization, lunar regolith factories, and in-space propulsion. There are increased budgets for planetary and earth science.
This is NASA concentrating on its roots. NASA was in charge of getting people to LEO when that was new and challenging and unknown. NASA roots are doing the new hard things, with a focus on exploration.
Of course, if we were going to redesign Ares over again it wouldn't make sense to cancel it. The Augustine commission is intended to consider only costs to proceed. This gave the program of record an advantage in the comparisons, yet still came out behind.
Comparing cost to completion is how you avoid the sunk cost fallacy.
First, Ares 1 is actually designed only to get astronauts on board an Orion capsule to LEO. (However Orion is a much more capable capsule than Dragon.) Ares V, which is even further from reality is what's needed to leave LEO. And no, NASA can't get to LEO on its current rockets, since once the shuttle retires it has none of its own launch vehicles. And for the record, keeping the shuttle out of retirement is not trivial, if thats what you're going for.
And you seem to imply that experience is attached to the institution and not to the people and the records of development. Private industry built all that we have now, and will continue to in the future. All thats happening here is a variation in contracting methods -- fixed-price instead of cost-plus. The knowledge that NASA has accumulated over the years is public domain. As development methods shift, so will jobs -- there may be some pain of layoffs and relocation for new jobs, but we'll end up having most of the same people doing most of the same jobs, conserving experience, but with a more efficient, less paralyzing management structure.
Finally, of course government funding is critical to exploration, no one is arguing otherwise. Exploration is high-risk with a reward that is largely non-monetary. Commercialization schemes don't say that private firms should be defining the vision, only that the well-defined tasks of basic launch infrastructure are handled by fixed-price contracts. A robust, multi-vendor competitive launch market will simply make exploration easier in the long term, as it will be less dependent on political wrangling and single points of failure for launch vehicles.
You're under the impression that NASA is currently capable of creating an HLV using its old contracting methods. NASA has been incapable of creating a new launch vehicle since the shuttle, not at the fault of the dedicated civil servants, but by a paralyzing management and political structure.
People and talent are mobile, and most of vehicle design in the past was done by private contractors anyway. Having NASA write you a paycheck doesn't make you more (or less) capable. What's going on here is simply a shift from cost-plus to fixed-price contracts. These are less subject to political manipulation, and push more management to distinct companies with their own structures -- if one company becomes paralyzed, it isn't a single point of failure for US human spaceflight.
And yes, currently 'commercial space' vehicles concentrate on simple LEO transport, because this is the largest, most guaranteed market. However, if NASA needs to buy an HLV, there's no reason that one can't be provided by similar methods. A less risky (and less efficient) cost-plus development contract may be necessary occasionally, but if everyone is used to fixed-price approaches, and there's an understanding that eventual acquisition of more vehicles will be at a fixed-price then the same improved efficiencies will hopefully dominate.
NASA doesn't need to design its own launch vehicles -- it needs to define requirements. If it needs something it buys it, and if it can't it can fund development, same as it always has, with modified expectations.
I think that this wouldn't be possible if you were using a capacitive stylus with a narrow tip. The reason is that the screen is not actually measuring pressure, but relies on the fact that fingers are 'squishy' and when you press harder more contact is being made and therefore either the output value or the number of pixels goes up.
There's a stylus that Ars reviewed a week or two that claimed to make the touchpad on a laptop work like a pressure-sensitive wacom, and it relied on having a large tip that was similarly 'squishy'. However, this also meant it had a big, imprecise tip that could never be as good as a true pressure sensitive system -- useful but no substitute.
Absolutely about the USPS providing a guaranteed market.
However, the exploration portions of NASA aren't going to be contracted out, only the ferrying people to LEO. NASA or something like it will always have to play the Lewis and Clark role. When you take the onus of maintaining US manned access to space off of NASA's shoulders, it should be be better able to explore, and hopefully be able to do more with less.
We're not throwing anything away, just shifting the way we fund it to make it cheaper and more reliable.
As a counter-argument, all of SpaceX's development has been done at about the same cost as the Ares 1-X model rocket, which was cobbled together from already existing parts.
NASA already operates by making cost-plus contracts with private companies. Saturn V wasn't built by NASA, it was operated by NASA and built by every aerospace contractor in the country. All this is doing is changing the way we contract it out -- fixed-price contracts where you pay a certain amount for a service rather than to the lowest bidder who will always go over-budget since they're trying to be the lowest bidder.
The efficiencies come from the fact that the current NASA+Contractor structure is horribly inefficient. For example, applying foam to the external tank on the shuttle is done at a shop in Alabama, while the tank is manufactured in New Orleans. Now, the foam application happens multiple times in the middle of the manufacturing process so rather than design it to all be built in one place, parts are shipped back and forth on a weekly, sometimes daily basis. When you move to a fixed price contract (say buying a car instead of building a house), theres more of an expectation that you pick from your options and its built how the company builds it -- this reduces the political influences on manufacturing sites and processes. As far as safety -- a company won't make money if they negligently kill astronauts. It doesn't make sense for the bottom line to be unsafe with something this high-profile.
If you kill astronauts through negligence you probably won't be making any more money. Risks won't be significantly increased.
Here's why -- markets, privitization, and competition lead to efficiency. If you want efficiency then you move in that direction
The reason that warfighting is a government task is that warfighting is not efficient, and shouldn't be. Since you're not trying to make it more efficient, privatization makes no sense. Social security is also not supposed to be efficient -- the most efficient way to deal with retirees is to kill them off. Obviously there is societal benefit to keeping them alive that isn't easily monetized, so privatization doesn't make sense there either.
However, getting people and objects to LEO is a well-defined task with a well-developed technology where efficiency is a good thing. This is more like breaking up the Bell monopoly than it is like privatization of social security.
While SpaceX is certain to profit from this, so is the rest of the industry. Big companies like LockMart and Boeing are going to have to do a little rethinking, but they've got the people and the expertise and they're going to be some seriously heavy hitters here as well, especially now that its not just COTS as a little side project, but as the main event. They just need to learn to work within a budget.
No.
#1: Obama had bad things to say about the *manned* space program -- he always liked the robotic parts.
#2: Presidents have cut manned programs before. We've been trying to build a replacement for the shuttle since it was built, but they keep being overdesigned, underfunded boondoggles that have to be cut. Its only making a bigger splash now because we can't keep using the shuttle.
#3: The politicization of NASA, a necessary evil for any government program, is a good argument FOR putting basic LEO launch infrastructure in the hands of a more robust commercial ecosystem. If bad leadership ruins one of multiple companies that are contracted to for launch, then the results are much less drastic.
#4: A space program that exists to employ people is great example of the broken window fallacy. We do it because its important, and if we can do more with less, as this plan hopes, that seems like a good thing. It may cause temporary pain as business model changes, but its good for the industry and the country in the long term.
#5: Regarding contributions to society, how is this going to change. NASA is great at doing *NEW* things -- getting people to LEO isn't new. If the basic foundation of LEO-access is made more sustainable and reliable by fixed-price competitive contracts, then they'll be able to do those truly new and valuable things -- exploration of NEOs, solar-power, self-sustaining systems -- better since thats all they have to worry about.
#6: We're not not going into space, we're just changing how we pay for it - cutting the corporate welfare of cost-plus contracts and proceeding to the more efficient fixed-price contracts of a mature market.
#7: Keeping going on a flawed design is another economic fallacy. If its cheaper to start over than it is to keep going, or if there are fundamentally better ways to go about things, you don't consider sunk costs, you only consider costs to proceed. Ares wasn't just flawed because of technical challenges, it was flawed because in many ways it was designed by congress, keeping the various contractors happy.
#8: Ares is not the space program! I've yet to see anything about Orion being cut (Augustine talked about putting it on top of an EELV), and I've yet to see anything that says that the amount we're spending will go down. NASA will continue to explore, this will just make it easier for them to do that instead of fretting about the space-taxi part. This is *good* for our space industry and could put us leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else, as multiple contractors going in multiple directions refine and improve our capabilities far better than a monolithic program could.
The sky is not falling, we're not giving up our leadership. It could be painful for some workers at NASA centers (and I sincerely apologize and thank you for your work if you're one of them), but this is probably the best, most sustainable path forward for manned spaceflight.
I'm not sure, in the space community you'll find those who love this and those who hate it. Those whose jobs depend on the big centers in Houston and Florida hate it -- although I'm pretty sure only MSFC in Alabama is really going to hurt in the long term -- Houston is all about astronaut training and operations, and Florida is all about launching, and these things will continue to be done.
And you've hit the nail on the head. WHen you have multiple vehicles running simultaneously at fixed-price contracts, you're going to get more variety and more reliability -- not in the sense of each vehicle being more reliable, I imagine that will stay relatively the same, but in the sense that an accident doesn't lead to a two-year halt as our one vehicle is redesigned. NASA does great at exploration and science, the high-risk, low-profit things its hard to make a business case for. The technology to launch to LEO is well developed, and theres a clear profit in it, so why not let it go to a (well-regulated) market that will eventually give us more for left.
As far as the money thing goes, there are some conflicting reports, but everything makes it seem that the budget is either staying the same or going up. Granted some is being transferred to Earth Science, which was neglected under Bush, but nonetheless, theres a good chance the NASA budget will go up, despite the doomsdayers.