Huh? I'm a grad student on a rather paltry salary, and I can afford to develop for the iPhone/iPad/Touch. The dev fee is only $100, and sounds a lot like the XBox system. You pay your fee, you give back some of the money (if you don't give it away free) and they have some controls on output (which I'm sure XBox does too -- they're not going to let a Nazi Jew-murdering game get published.)
As far as the API, it uses the same language and many of the same APIs as OS-X development, so if you've ever done Mac development before its quite easy to get started. I'm not sure I see how its different. In the end, there are a number of closed ecosystems, and a number of open ones, and both are thriving side-by-side -- which is the point the parent was trying to make.
Exactly. I have an air that I carry with me most everywhere -- I'm a student and like being able to work wherever I end up. (To defend myself from the detractors, yes its underpowered and expensive, but I was tired of dealing with Linux laptops, I had the money, its light and more pleasant to use than a small netbook, and I still like it).
Looking at this, if done right, it could eliminate many of my needs, making it easier to pair this with a cheaper, heavier, more capable notebook. You can get browsing/research, document reading, SSH stuff, etc. done on a smartphone, but its not especially pleasant.
Of course, if its done right and does prove useful and the UI is a better paradigm, I'm curious to see if we end up with a flood of android/other-based tablets, as opposed to current desktop-os based tablets. That could be very interesting.
Except that NASA's current modus operandi is already what DOD does. Apollo and STS were built by private contractors under cost-plus contracts, same as defense systems are.
When you hear 'commercial space' interpret it as 'fixed-price contracts.' Its not new in the fact that its giving money to private companies to do things the government wants, its new in saying "we'll pay you this much to do (blank)" instead of asking "how much can you do this for, and oh yeah, if you run over, we'll help cover that too."
Cost-plus has its place, in high-risk situations where final cost may be highly variable. However, getting to LEO has been done over and over again, so fixed-price makes much more sense, and will ultimately save money.
Actually it is encouraging. And actually, the panel was stacked with long-time NASA contractors who benefit from the current cost-plus contracting methods. And corporate interests and petty politics already dominate NASA -- Ares 1 isn't being kept alive for its technical merits, its because ATK and the senators from Alabama are fighting hard to keep it alive.
As far as vaporware, though I must admit I can be a little optimistic about companies like SpaceX, I'd point out that NASA has become a master of vaporware, and hasn't managed to develop a new launch vehicle since the space shuttle.
The idea is that using fixed-price contracts (what this is actually referring to, s/c have always been built by contractors) will replace the need to build expensive vehicles like Ares 1, and ultimately leave more money for exploration.
Whether it actually happens is up for debate -- however, the concept is one of saving money.
The FAA Office of Commercial Space (AST -- I don't understand their abbreviation scheme) is doing a good job of creating a regulatory environment that 'gets out of the way' as much as is responsible. The people working there are sharp minds and have their hearts in the right place, so I think this is a good sign.
However, I think there is a place for government involvement here as well. Don't forget that in the early days of aviation, startups got a big boost from the US Postal Service. The guaranteed market (not necessarily guaranteed contracts for a specific company) made it easier to justify a business case and get things off the ground. It was a chicken-and-egg problem, so guaranteed government contracts helped kick-start the process.
In this case, the government has a need for transportation to LEO (Ares 1 is in serious trouble), and ISS ferry service contracts are exactly the kind of thing these companies need to get off the ground. Despite right-wing rhetoric, the government is not always bad, and this is a case where they can help facilitate developing a market.
Oh, they're still exploring, just mostly with robots lately. I think once you have a consistent, reliable, cheaper transport to LEO it will be easier to translate that to manned missions as well. I hope anyway.
In this case, no. The Bush plan was underfunded and overplanned. Ares has proven to be a colossal money sink, using a contracting method that has been incapable of creating an actual working vehicle since the space shuttle, and kept alive by political considerations rather than practical reasons.
The flexible path provides new and early 'Firsts' that can be accomplished much more cheaply and fits better within expected budgets. It moves to take NASA out of the LEO ferry game, and keep it doing what it does best -- Exploration. The mission steps outlined by the Augustine commission were designed specifically to deal with the always changing political goalposts. The flexibility means that if funding changes our the target changes its not a cessation of an entire program, just some relatively minor revisions.
There's not nothing wrong with it, but if more people are saved by the technologies proper use than are injured by its improper use its probably worthwhile.
Accidents happen, this is no different. The engineers of the equipment have a duty to make it as easy to use as possible, and the operators have a duty to understand it as best as possible -- this doesn't mean that accidents won't happen every once in a while, since as you point out we aren't all mistake-free geniuses.
I see a few hundred mistakes out of probably tens of thousands of uses. This doesn't suggest to me that the tech is flawed, but rather that its new. It suggests improvements in the way its run -- checklists, multiple operators with redundant procedures, improved UIs, and avoiding using it except when absolutely necessary -- but it doesn't imply that the tech needs to be done away with.
I would assume thats referring to mosaicing (setting the images side by side) rather than with stacking (adding the images on top of each other).
If you're trying to image something like andromeda through an 8" scope, you're going to have to scan across it. Really, for something that big, your best bet is to stick a DSLR piggyback on the telescope tube.
Most amateur level astronomical CCDs (amateur is a relative term in this case) are pretty low resolution. The SBIG ST-7 I use for the observatory I run is only around 800x600. For this kind of equipment you're not looking for number of pixels nearly as much as low noise, good cooling, and pixels that are sized right for the optics you're running.
When the parent refers to resolution, he means the angular size of each pixel, not the sheer number of pixels. This is a function of aperture size and atmospheric clarity -- all the CCD can do is take maximum advantage of whats available by making each pixel about half of what can be resolved by the optics.
I'm not really trying to argue that COTS-like contracts would be safer. All I'm saying is that changing the contracting method from cost-plus to fixed-cost would have little direct impact on safety. In the long-term it could lead to improvements, but thats just because of potentially lower costs, which leaves more room in the budget for safety, and more frequent flights, which improves statistics and design procedures, no matter who is doing it.
But how is a government organization immune to this? I can see a company growing complacent and cutting corners -- it would happen after a number of successful flights, when they think its never been a problem before, so why keep protecting against it. This is exactly what killed 14 STS passengers, and it was the government there that was behaving irrationally, and in the case of Challenger, the corporate manufacturer was encouraging delaying the flight.
If SpaceX or Orbital Sciences kills an astronaut they're going out of business just as quickly as if they don't deliver a product at all. There will probably be less tolerance for failure from a private company than there is for NASA failures. On top of this, the people working at a private company aren't especially less or more moral than civil servants.
The wasted money isn't on redundancy and proper design, its on the inefficiencies inherent to government work. Ares 1 is being propped up not by its technical merits, but by the fact that if it is cancelled a lot of jobs will be lost in Alabama and the senators from that state are defending it with everything they have. There is nothing magical about civil servants that makes them more conscientious -- I've worked as both.
It's engineering, not science at this point. Its not a matter of learning how to do it, its a matter of learning how to streamline it and make it safer, cheaper and more reliable.
NASA has proven to be incapable of developing a viable launch vehicle -- this isn't to blame the people at NASA, I know and like many of them, but structurally, it just isn't happening. Look at Ares 1, overbudget, underperforming and subject more to the goals of keeping jobs in Alabama rather than getting astronauts to orbit. Ares 1-X, a cobbled together model that was passed off as a prototype, cost around $500M -- this is as much as all the work of SpaceX. While the argument that Falcon 9 has yet to fly, and there may be a lot of trouble along the way is valid, it applies just as much to Ares 1.
Private companies with private investment will be trying harder to be efficient and achieve competitive costs, but this won't be at the expense of safety. If SpaceX kills an astronaut its as bad for their bottom line as if they don't fly at all. Ferrying astronauts to space is no longer the frontier -- NASA showed us how to do it, now its time to let more efficient methods come to bear. Let NASA continue its role as the leading edge of exploration, the Lewis and Clark role. There is no profit and very high risks in sending rovers to Mars or learning how to send astronauts to asteroids, but there is great societal benefit -- this is a great job for the government. However, ferrying people and cargo to orbit has much lower risks and the ability to generate profit -- if market-oriented contracts can reduce costs we can do more to expand the frontier, which is ultimately the goal.
Most reputable materials folks I know still claim its a fundamental technology problem, not merely a funding one. While the expected stresses are nominally within what an ideal carbon nano-tube structure can handle, the purity required for that is well beyond what we can manufacture.
In order to feasibly build a space elevator, we would need much improved nano-technology. Not that I feel that its necessarily an idea-killer -- I'm not terribly knowledgeable on nanotech, but its one of those fields that always surprises me with how fast its going.
Wow. My sister once got her bag searched because of an amusingly unfortunate arrangement of a pack of summer sausages, a belt, and some electronics. Somehow they ended up looking like a bomb.
Of course your brother's is pre-9/11, probably explaining some of the laxness.
The CIA is always protective of their secrecy, and they're being cooperative, so will obviously degrade the image quality, since you don't even need commercially available quality (0.5 meter) to measure ice flows. Plus exporting anything higher resolution (finer resolution technically) than that out of the country is illegal anyway.
I would assume also that any images that show a feature that might indicate *when* the image was taken, such as an identifiable ship, would be held back as well. These guys don't tend to be too lax about these things -- I'm a little surprised they're going along with this at all, even though these precautions can eliminate the security threat.
However, I'd say that that principle is mooted as far as the existence of planets by the anthropic principle. Assuming life requires a planet to develop on (we have no counter-examples to state otherwise,) then of course we have planets here, but thats no guarantee that they are common. Even if there were only 1 star in the entire galaxy with planets, we'd still develop on that one and think of planets as 'normal'.
Given the sheer scale of the universe I'm sure no one seriously thought there were no other planets out there, but it was perfectly reasonable to guess that they were so rare we might never find one. Same as I can't comprehend that we're the only intelligent life out here, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we'll ever contact another species, because it may be so rare that the intersection of two civilizations is incredibly unlikely. Without any more information than our singular data point, its impossible to really know.
That refresh rate is why its really only used on ebook readers, where the primary action is turning a page, which takes a second or two on a paper book as well. As far as for the UI for selecting and downloading books, etc., I haven't used the Sony reader, but the Kindle 1 and the Nook both have a pretty decent workaround - using a smaller, faster display to do the active portions of the UI. On the nook, its that little LCD touchscreen on the bottom, while on the Kindle 1, there is a 2x40(ish) silver strip with large pixels that has a good response rate. While certainly not good for a general purpose tablet, I think these systems work extremely well for the e-book task, and the engineers have gone out of their way to mitigate the obvious limitations of the technology.
Actually, you could probably do it for closer to $300M. The rest of that website happens to contain a mission concept thats been pretty well vetted (working with NASA Ames and multiple iterations) that can go and study the asteroid, mitigate it if necessary, and practice mitigation if not. It focuses less on resources for exploitation and more on the basics of mitigation, tracking, surface studies and material properties. More focused but perfect for a mitigation focused mission. You could probably find better asteroids (lower delta-v to and from) for resource exploitation.
Full disclosure: thats a mission I'm working on and I threw together that website... odd to see it linked to.
I definitely agree, Apophis provides a great rehearsal run. But I would point out that any deflection strategy that makes sense with Apophis would necessarily require years of advance warning. I've never seen a feasible concept that could deflect a short-notice, 'Armageddon' type asteroid -- it really would rely on a Bruce Willis-led nuclear Hail Mary.
Well, I would hope... sincerely hope... that they plan to track the asteroid and confirm its course before trying to do anything. Fortunately its not very expensive to do it the right way, assuming they go with a gravity tractor and not something ridiculous like a kinetic impactor.
The equipment required to move it isn't very different from the equipment required to study it, so you can go out, track it (having a radio beacon can improve your estimates by 10-100x), and figure out where its going. If it is an impact risk, you move it out of the way. If its not you practice moving it further to make sure we know how if we need to in the future, making sure at all times to be sure to do no harm.
From what I've heard (friend of mine was at a conference with many of them), the NEO guys in Russia are a little behind us, but they're not stupid. I'd bet this statement is just the kind of thing to get their own people excited again, since Roscosmos hasn't been able to do much beyond keep the Proton/Soyuz and cargo transport businesses going, and to remind the world that they were once a space power as well.
Actually we are all of the Human species. Race is a subset of species, similar to breeds of dogs, and as such is used correctly here. The term is often misapplied in science fiction.
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Huh? I'm a grad student on a rather paltry salary, and I can afford to develop for the iPhone/iPad/Touch. The dev fee is only $100, and sounds a lot like the XBox system. You pay your fee, you give back some of the money (if you don't give it away free) and they have some controls on output (which I'm sure XBox does too -- they're not going to let a Nazi Jew-murdering game get published.)
As far as the API, it uses the same language and many of the same APIs as OS-X development, so if you've ever done Mac development before its quite easy to get started. I'm not sure I see how its different. In the end, there are a number of closed ecosystems, and a number of open ones, and both are thriving side-by-side -- which is the point the parent was trying to make.
Exactly. I have an air that I carry with me most everywhere -- I'm a student and like being able to work wherever I end up. (To defend myself from the detractors, yes its underpowered and expensive, but I was tired of dealing with Linux laptops, I had the money, its light and more pleasant to use than a small netbook, and I still like it).
Looking at this, if done right, it could eliminate many of my needs, making it easier to pair this with a cheaper, heavier, more capable notebook. You can get browsing/research, document reading, SSH stuff, etc. done on a smartphone, but its not especially pleasant.
Of course, if its done right and does prove useful and the UI is a better paradigm, I'm curious to see if we end up with a flood of android/other-based tablets, as opposed to current desktop-os based tablets. That could be very interesting.
Except that NASA's current modus operandi is already what DOD does. Apollo and STS were built by private contractors under cost-plus contracts, same as defense systems are.
When you hear 'commercial space' interpret it as 'fixed-price contracts.' Its not new in the fact that its giving money to private companies to do things the government wants, its new in saying "we'll pay you this much to do (blank)" instead of asking "how much can you do this for, and oh yeah, if you run over, we'll help cover that too."
Cost-plus has its place, in high-risk situations where final cost may be highly variable. However, getting to LEO has been done over and over again, so fixed-price makes much more sense, and will ultimately save money.
Actually it is encouraging. And actually, the panel was stacked with long-time NASA contractors who benefit from the current cost-plus contracting methods. And corporate interests and petty politics already dominate NASA -- Ares 1 isn't being kept alive for its technical merits, its because ATK and the senators from Alabama are fighting hard to keep it alive.
As far as vaporware, though I must admit I can be a little optimistic about companies like SpaceX, I'd point out that NASA has become a master of vaporware, and hasn't managed to develop a new launch vehicle since the space shuttle.
The idea is that using fixed-price contracts (what this is actually referring to, s/c have always been built by contractors) will replace the need to build expensive vehicles like Ares 1, and ultimately leave more money for exploration.
Whether it actually happens is up for debate -- however, the concept is one of saving money.
The FAA Office of Commercial Space (AST -- I don't understand their abbreviation scheme) is doing a good job of creating a regulatory environment that 'gets out of the way' as much as is responsible. The people working there are sharp minds and have their hearts in the right place, so I think this is a good sign.
However, I think there is a place for government involvement here as well. Don't forget that in the early days of aviation, startups got a big boost from the US Postal Service. The guaranteed market (not necessarily guaranteed contracts for a specific company) made it easier to justify a business case and get things off the ground. It was a chicken-and-egg problem, so guaranteed government contracts helped kick-start the process.
In this case, the government has a need for transportation to LEO (Ares 1 is in serious trouble), and ISS ferry service contracts are exactly the kind of thing these companies need to get off the ground. Despite right-wing rhetoric, the government is not always bad, and this is a case where they can help facilitate developing a market.
Oh, they're still exploring, just mostly with robots lately. I think once you have a consistent, reliable, cheaper transport to LEO it will be easier to translate that to manned missions as well. I hope anyway.
In this case, no. The Bush plan was underfunded and overplanned. Ares has proven to be a colossal money sink, using a contracting method that has been incapable of creating an actual working vehicle since the space shuttle, and kept alive by political considerations rather than practical reasons.
The flexible path provides new and early 'Firsts' that can be accomplished much more cheaply and fits better within expected budgets. It moves to take NASA out of the LEO ferry game, and keep it doing what it does best -- Exploration. The mission steps outlined by the Augustine commission were designed specifically to deal with the always changing political goalposts. The flexibility means that if funding changes our the target changes its not a cessation of an entire program, just some relatively minor revisions.
There's not nothing wrong with it, but if more people are saved by the technologies proper use than are injured by its improper use its probably worthwhile.
Accidents happen, this is no different. The engineers of the equipment have a duty to make it as easy to use as possible, and the operators have a duty to understand it as best as possible -- this doesn't mean that accidents won't happen every once in a while, since as you point out we aren't all mistake-free geniuses.
I see a few hundred mistakes out of probably tens of thousands of uses. This doesn't suggest to me that the tech is flawed, but rather that its new. It suggests improvements in the way its run -- checklists, multiple operators with redundant procedures, improved UIs, and avoiding using it except when absolutely necessary -- but it doesn't imply that the tech needs to be done away with.
I would assume thats referring to mosaicing (setting the images side by side) rather than with stacking (adding the images on top of each other).
If you're trying to image something like andromeda through an 8" scope, you're going to have to scan across it. Really, for something that big, your best bet is to stick a DSLR piggyback on the telescope tube.
Most amateur level astronomical CCDs (amateur is a relative term in this case) are pretty low resolution. The SBIG ST-7 I use for the observatory I run is only around 800x600. For this kind of equipment you're not looking for number of pixels nearly as much as low noise, good cooling, and pixels that are sized right for the optics you're running.
When the parent refers to resolution, he means the angular size of each pixel, not the sheer number of pixels. This is a function of aperture size and atmospheric clarity -- all the CCD can do is take maximum advantage of whats available by making each pixel about half of what can be resolved by the optics.
I'm not really trying to argue that COTS-like contracts would be safer. All I'm saying is that changing the contracting method from cost-plus to fixed-cost would have little direct impact on safety. In the long-term it could lead to improvements, but thats just because of potentially lower costs, which leaves more room in the budget for safety, and more frequent flights, which improves statistics and design procedures, no matter who is doing it.
But how is a government organization immune to this? I can see a company growing complacent and cutting corners -- it would happen after a number of successful flights, when they think its never been a problem before, so why keep protecting against it. This is exactly what killed 14 STS passengers, and it was the government there that was behaving irrationally, and in the case of Challenger, the corporate manufacturer was encouraging delaying the flight.
If SpaceX or Orbital Sciences kills an astronaut they're going out of business just as quickly as if they don't deliver a product at all. There will probably be less tolerance for failure from a private company than there is for NASA failures. On top of this, the people working at a private company aren't especially less or more moral than civil servants.
The wasted money isn't on redundancy and proper design, its on the inefficiencies inherent to government work. Ares 1 is being propped up not by its technical merits, but by the fact that if it is cancelled a lot of jobs will be lost in Alabama and the senators from that state are defending it with everything they have. There is nothing magical about civil servants that makes them more conscientious -- I've worked as both.
It's engineering, not science at this point. Its not a matter of learning how to do it, its a matter of learning how to streamline it and make it safer, cheaper and more reliable.
NASA has proven to be incapable of developing a viable launch vehicle -- this isn't to blame the people at NASA, I know and like many of them, but structurally, it just isn't happening. Look at Ares 1, overbudget, underperforming and subject more to the goals of keeping jobs in Alabama rather than getting astronauts to orbit. Ares 1-X, a cobbled together model that was passed off as a prototype, cost around $500M -- this is as much as all the work of SpaceX. While the argument that Falcon 9 has yet to fly, and there may be a lot of trouble along the way is valid, it applies just as much to Ares 1.
Private companies with private investment will be trying harder to be efficient and achieve competitive costs, but this won't be at the expense of safety. If SpaceX kills an astronaut its as bad for their bottom line as if they don't fly at all. Ferrying astronauts to space is no longer the frontier -- NASA showed us how to do it, now its time to let more efficient methods come to bear. Let NASA continue its role as the leading edge of exploration, the Lewis and Clark role. There is no profit and very high risks in sending rovers to Mars or learning how to send astronauts to asteroids, but there is great societal benefit -- this is a great job for the government. However, ferrying people and cargo to orbit has much lower risks and the ability to generate profit -- if market-oriented contracts can reduce costs we can do more to expand the frontier, which is ultimately the goal.
Most reputable materials folks I know still claim its a fundamental technology problem, not merely a funding one. While the expected stresses are nominally within what an ideal carbon nano-tube structure can handle, the purity required for that is well beyond what we can manufacture.
In order to feasibly build a space elevator, we would need much improved nano-technology. Not that I feel that its necessarily an idea-killer -- I'm not terribly knowledgeable on nanotech, but its one of those fields that always surprises me with how fast its going.
Wow. My sister once got her bag searched because of an amusingly unfortunate arrangement of a pack of summer sausages, a belt, and some electronics. Somehow they ended up looking like a bomb.
Of course your brother's is pre-9/11, probably explaining some of the laxness.
The CIA is always protective of their secrecy, and they're being cooperative, so will obviously degrade the image quality, since you don't even need commercially available quality (0.5 meter) to measure ice flows. Plus exporting anything higher resolution (finer resolution technically) than that out of the country is illegal anyway.
I would assume also that any images that show a feature that might indicate *when* the image was taken, such as an identifiable ship, would be held back as well. These guys don't tend to be too lax about these things -- I'm a little surprised they're going along with this at all, even though these precautions can eliminate the security threat.
However, I'd say that that principle is mooted as far as the existence of planets by the anthropic principle. Assuming life requires a planet to develop on (we have no counter-examples to state otherwise,) then of course we have planets here, but thats no guarantee that they are common. Even if there were only 1 star in the entire galaxy with planets, we'd still develop on that one and think of planets as 'normal'.
Given the sheer scale of the universe I'm sure no one seriously thought there were no other planets out there, but it was perfectly reasonable to guess that they were so rare we might never find one. Same as I can't comprehend that we're the only intelligent life out here, but that doesn't necessarily mean that we'll ever contact another species, because it may be so rare that the intersection of two civilizations is incredibly unlikely. Without any more information than our singular data point, its impossible to really know.
That refresh rate is why its really only used on ebook readers, where the primary action is turning a page, which takes a second or two on a paper book as well. As far as for the UI for selecting and downloading books, etc., I haven't used the Sony reader, but the Kindle 1 and the Nook both have a pretty decent workaround - using a smaller, faster display to do the active portions of the UI. On the nook, its that little LCD touchscreen on the bottom, while on the Kindle 1, there is a 2x40(ish) silver strip with large pixels that has a good response rate. While certainly not good for a general purpose tablet, I think these systems work extremely well for the e-book task, and the engineers have gone out of their way to mitigate the obvious limitations of the technology.
Actually, you could probably do it for closer to $300M. The rest of that website happens to contain a mission concept thats been pretty well vetted (working with NASA Ames and multiple iterations) that can go and study the asteroid, mitigate it if necessary, and practice mitigation if not. It focuses less on resources for exploitation and more on the basics of mitigation, tracking, surface studies and material properties. More focused but perfect for a mitigation focused mission. You could probably find better asteroids (lower delta-v to and from) for resource exploitation.
Full disclosure: thats a mission I'm working on and I threw together that website... odd to see it linked to.
I definitely agree, Apophis provides a great rehearsal run. But I would point out that any deflection strategy that makes sense with Apophis would necessarily require years of advance warning. I've never seen a feasible concept that could deflect a short-notice, 'Armageddon' type asteroid -- it really would rely on a Bruce Willis-led nuclear Hail Mary.
Well, I would hope... sincerely hope... that they plan to track the asteroid and confirm its course before trying to do anything. Fortunately its not very expensive to do it the right way, assuming they go with a gravity tractor and not something ridiculous like a kinetic impactor.
The equipment required to move it isn't very different from the equipment required to study it, so you can go out, track it (having a radio beacon can improve your estimates by 10-100x), and figure out where its going. If it is an impact risk, you move it out of the way. If its not you practice moving it further to make sure we know how if we need to in the future, making sure at all times to be sure to do no harm.
From what I've heard (friend of mine was at a conference with many of them), the NEO guys in Russia are a little behind us, but they're not stupid. I'd bet this statement is just the kind of thing to get their own people excited again, since Roscosmos hasn't been able to do much beyond keep the Proton/Soyuz and cargo transport businesses going, and to remind the world that they were once a space power as well.
Yes. Its an investing site called SmartMoney.com. Shouldn't that be what they focus on?
Actually we are all of the Human species. Race is a subset of species, similar to breeds of dogs, and as such is used correctly here. The term is often misapplied in science fiction.