The reason I argue for the energy/person (or perhaps energy/kg would be better to handle the unmanned case) is that I would assume a vehicle that holds more people is going to cost more, and thus more can be spent on safety. I certainly wouldn't claim it as a foolproof or absolute measure, but it seems a reasonable way to go. As a rather ridiculous example: trampoline shoes are going to be much safer than a personal jet-pack: while it would be possible to kill yourself with either, and accidents may be as likely with both, a jet-pack accident is much more likely to be deadly.
As you point out there's a lot more that goes into it, the frequency of travel and the professionalism of the operators have a major effect as well. I was simply trying to point out that all other things being equal, a suborbital flight is going to be far safer than an orbital flight, but less safe than an airline flight.
But what indication is there that it will have a safety rate like that? If you consider safety as rough function of amount of energy/person required (a reasonable assumption) it falls pretty squarely between orbital vehicles and commercial craft. Add in that the participants are spending far more per person, the failure rate can probably be brought down to where commercial airliners are.
More specifically, consider the two failure modes of the shuttle: an SRB that bursts at the joint due to schedule rush and unsafe conditions, and a falling piece of foam that damages the heating tiles. 1. SS2 has a much smaller motor, making it easy to safeguard. Also, the passengers aren't going to push to launch when the engineers are telling them the engine might explode if they go now. 2. There are no re-entry tiles, because the entry speed is so much lower. Re-entry and landing is better approximated by an small plane than by a spacecraft. Most of the danger in orbital re-entry comes from dissipating the orbital speed as heat. Also, there arent the same aerodynamic pressures on SS2 as it takes off, making it less likely for that kind of impact to happen in the first place.
While it is true that it is the unexpected failure modes you have to worry about, the order of magnitude reduction in launch energy suggests that you'd have to have a really big problem to kill the passengers -- as opposed to an orbital vehicle where small problems can be catastrophic if unnoticed.
As a grad student in aerospace engineering (dynamics and controls), I actually have a number of textbooks that I use regularly after the class is done. Particularly my orbital mechanics, optimal control theory, estimation, and dynamics books have proven to be extremely useful outside of the classes they were originally purchased for, in later classes, research and "real-world" work.
I suppose grad school is different -- its more focused and you know enough from undergrad to start learning more directly applicable theory. I also suppose mechanically-oriented engineering isn't obsoleted so quickly -- the fundamentals stay the same over time, while the methods of application change drastically.
Nonetheless, while anecdotes make poor evidence, I'd say that the applicability of textbooks is highly dependent on the field and program.
I'm sorry. Going without a cell phone is not a good option for a lot of people. Its an expected part of life for most people, and quite frankly it makes life a lot easier. I'm rather young (24), so trying to get a group of people together and meeting somewhere has always been made a lot easier by use of cell phones -- this improves quality of life. I don't worry about getting stranded somewhere with car troubles, which eases peace of mind considerably. While they can be abused annoyingly, like when some sorority girl spends an hour talking loudly at a coffee shop, that doesn't mean that they're not extremely useful. Thats why they've grown to become ubiquitous over the past decade.
If there were better cell phone companies, moving to them would help too, but the big guys have created a lovely oligarchy, and the high cost of entry to build a nationwide network means its impossible for startups to fix it with competitive pressure. You're not going to get a large portion of the country to stop using cell phones. This means that in this case a reasonable amount of government regulation to stop the most abusive practices and maybe work to break up the pseudo-trust (a harder task that I couldn't say how to do) is perfectly reasonable.
Small-government conservatism isn't about saying government involvement and regulation should be avoided at all costs, I'd hope this got discredited last year with the banking crisis, its about asking if its really necessary before doing it, and having a good debate. In this case, without real competitive pressure happening, I think the answer is a resounding yes.
Looking at the B&N ebook store, it looks like everything thats not public domain is still DRM'd. To me this isn't any better than the amazon store, since while both are built on a decently open format (ePub and Mobi), you still can't read them without authenticating them. DRM is going to make incompatibilities, there is no way around it. While there are no sources of DRM free movies, there are plenty of sources of DRM free music. This was done because the music labels were scared to death of being bullied around by Apple. Movies are different for now because its still a physical medium controlled by the publishers, and they're not scared of themeselves -- if and when digital/non-streaming distribution becomes more dominant in movies we're bound to see something similar happen.
And this isn't to say I'm a Kindle partisan. If I were in the market now I'd be looking at the other options too. I'm just saying that its disingenuous to say you HAVE to use DRM-locked files on the Kindle -- this misinformation has been spread endlessly around the internet. I just looked and its quite easy to get MOBI files on Gutenberg, and I've read quite a few books from Baen on mine. As soon as I see a general audience DRM-free eBook store with good selection I'll jump ship, until then its just picking what vendor you want to be locked into. I apologize if you thought I was being rude, I was simply trying to correct a misconception I see a lot.
To be clear, and this FUD has been going around since the thing came out, you can use non-DRM formats on the Kindle. TXT and MOBI/PRC files can be read no problem -- the device mounts as a flash drive, you copy them over and they appear readable on the home screen. You can also get DOC and HTML files converted for free. The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears, but given that the spec leaves room for any DRM scheme to I expect that it will be just as fractured as anything else.
The real problem isn't the devices, its the stores. There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM. I don't think we'll see this until publishers get scared of Amazon or someone else dominating the market and pulls an Amazon Music Store -- offering DRM free MOBI or ePub in order to get into the market with the largest installed base.
While I disagree with the parent post (my response is below), I think you oversimplify it too far in the other direction. Private enterprise isn't automatically better, but for well-known tasks, fixed-price contracts and market forces that aren't as subject to the whims of senators trying to keep jobs in their states are likely to be more efficient.
While it may be correct that LockMart was the prime contractor for the Mars missions, this is not what people are referring to when they talk about 'private space.' How most missions are run, including the ones your friend works on, are through "Cost-plus contracts." That is, NASA says "here's the probe we want built, how cheaply do you think you can do it?" Then Lockheed, Boeing, etc. all make up numbers to show they can do it cheapest -- of course, they're never held to that budget and when they run over (since they were trying to win the bid) they get it and are assured of making a tidy profit no matter how inefficient they are, or even if they fail, since there's no real competition. Lockheed was essentially working as a subcontractor to NASA, and its hard to separate blame for failures.
What programs like COTS and CCDev advocate are "fixed-price contracts," where the government agrees to pay a private company, whether it be Lockheed or Boeing or a newcomer like SpaceX, a fixed amount for a given service. If the company is incapable of doing so at the cost they claim, they have to eat the difference, and if they can't complete the task they wouldn't get any money at all. Throw in some competition and this has the potential to actually make things more efficient. Of course, this kind of contracting only really makes sense for things like trucking cargo to orbit, not exploring Mars, since those are much higher risk and unpredictable.
And a private company is going to respect human life as well, and not out of any particular goodness, but because if a vehicle is killing astronauts, it is likely to kill the company. Skimping on safety for the sake of saving money or pushing schedules is as likely to happen in a government program as they are with private development. There is always going to be a trade between money and human life, and all industries must do it. If you give a human life infinite value, you cannot do anything -- cars would cost more than houses and get 2 mpg if they didn't think this way. Whether you are NASA or SpaceX you always end up having to place a dollar value on human life, as crass as that is, so that you can perform a proper trade study, comparing the cost of safety features to their effectiveness, and the available budget.
While I am a proponent of privatization, its disingenuous to say that NASA has no place. SpaceX has a lot of potential, and I have a lot of faith that they and companies like them will be able to handle the task of getting cargo and astronauts back and forth from orbit. Further, I fully agree that NASA needs to make motions towards getting out of the business of trucking stuff to orbit at all, leaving it fully to fixed-price contracts. I am a "true believer" in NewSpace.
Given that, NASA still has a critical role to play: the initial exploration role, doing the things that have never been done before. For-profit fixed-price contracts make sense when looking to make things that have been done before more efficient -- Getting people to orbit has known, manageable risks and quantifiable profit potential. When learning how to do things for the first time, what you might call a high-risk, low-reward task, the cost-plus government directed methods actually work -- doing it for the first time is never going to be perfectly efficient.
Put simply, SpaceX wouldn't be where they were if NASA hadn't done its work during the Apollo Era. What needs to be done now is for NASA to learn to pass on the well-understood tasks to industry and focus on what it does best, high-risk exploration.
After hearing astronaut Mark Kelly speak at a conference a couple of weeks ago, this was my first thought as well. When asked what his opinion was on the possibility of riding something like Dragon to orbit, he hesitated and said a lot about safety. There is the impression that somehow civil servants somehow are able to make things safer than the employees of a private company. I imagine a lot of it has to do with protecting the magic of being an astronaut, as the corps is also concerned that vehicles like Dragon treat them more like cargo than pilots (there was an Orlando Sentinel Op-Ed to that effect about a month ago).
Protecting jobs at the manned spaceflight centers, particularly Marshall, where they develop the rockets most at risk of being killed by private development, is another obvious goal. Senators from Alabama fought tooth and nail to keep kill funding for CCDev, since it could eliminate the necessity for MSFC to be crucial for each and every portion of manned space flight.
Theres a difference between managing and mitigating risk, and avoiding anything that might be risky, and all of your examples are, to me, examples of good risk management. Risk is a necessary part of life, but its still reasonable and responsible to avoid things that are likely to cause failure, and take the precautions necessary to reduce risk. Its a matter of weighing the likelihood and costs of failure with the costs of avoiding that risk -- in all of these cases the danger is far more 'expensive' than what is/was necessary to reduce that risk.
For bicycle helmets, they reduce risk of injury significantly with very few problems -- you look a little dorky, but so many people use them nowadays its less of an issue.
For retirement of the shuttle, NASA knows that continuing flights without a huge investment in revamping the orbiters does not merely risk disaster, it almost assures it. The failure at NASA isn't one of fearing failure in this case, its one of failing to follow through in developing new vehicles (for any number of reasons that is a wholly separate debate). The cost of revamping the orbiters would be better spent developing a new vehicle, and operating in such a way that you can be sure you ARE going to kill some astronauts is completely irresponsible.
In this case, running power plants past their design lifetime and well over their rated capacity is also dangerous and irresponsible. Its not that doing so might lead to a failure, but rather that it is almost certain to. All of the plants in this country are aging and overworked, and while the safety margins are enough to keep risks low at a single plant, you're playing with statistics and the more you abuse the plants the more likely it is that some kind of disaster will occur. The correct solution, again, was to continue licensing and building new plants -- while this is turning around now, we'd be in much better shape if it had happened 10 years ago.
Actually, the first new nuclear plants in 30 years have been licensed in the past year or two. The NIMBY problem is turning around. The problem is that that turnaround will take a decade to make a difference, and keeping old plants running may bring it back.
This isn't FUD. Relicensing old 'zombie' plants is a truly terrible idea, its also just better than all the others. When you have a plant designed to last 30 years, running it to 40 or 50 years and at 120% of its designed power capacity, it IS going to cause safety problems. If the engineers designed the systems that over-spec they were being irresponsible and running the costs up unnecessarily. As in all engineering problems, you put some safety factor in the design, and that safety factor will keep most of these plants in decent shape. However, you're playing games with statistics and with 100 nuclear plants in the country, all running towards the end of their life and over-capacity, you vastly increase the chances of disaster.
I think a big part is that its been working and practical for 30 years while no new plants have been built, and that many feel its been held back from development by the NIMBY masses. If more intelligent and less fearful handling of nuclear power had existed in the past we might be in better shape than we are now. While I don't agree with the grandparent that pursuing other alternatives isn't worthwhile, I do feel that nuclear power is a strong component of a sustainable future energy strategy.
I imagine this particular technology will be economical, useful, but limited in its implementation, just as hydroelectric power is. Just as with hydro power, the ultimate power source is the evaporation, vapor movement and rain caused by the sun -- though I can't claim to be certain, I'd imagine you could predict now the total amount of power available from this, and I'd imagine it is significant but no panacea. This is the general problem I and other nuclear proponents see: not that "clean" power technology is bad or boring, but that current concepts of wind, solar and tidal seem incapable of meeting current demand -- anything that doesn't meet current demand is unlikely to be solely used if alternatives (such as nuclear) exist, since the public would rather not be inconvenienced.
To counter your objections: 1. The toxic material can be reduced significantly by reprocessing the fuels. This poses a proliferation risk, but France and other countries have managed to do so for years without losing any material. It was banned by executive order by Carter, an order that should be rescinded. Also, interestingly and amusingly, Yucca Mountain is only 10 or 20 miles from an old nuclear test site, making the objections to the storage site seem less based on reality.
2. As we continue to operate older and older plants this is bound to be a problem. Extending the operating life past what they were designed for is bound to create safety trouble, but new ones have been impossible to build for decades, and replacing them with coal plants is not better in my mind. New construction and a renaissance in safer plant design (pebble beds are particularly impressive) can mitigate a lot of risk. Also, while the safety concerns are real and significant, and shouldn't be downplayed, I think the general public overestimates the danger -- Three Mile Island released no radiation and showed the validity of safety precautions.
Actually, the exact statement is: * Meaningful human exploration is possible under a less-constrained budget, increasing annual expenditures by approximately $3 billion in real purchasing power above the FY 2010 guidance. * Funding at the increased level would allow either an exploration program to explore the Moon First or one that follows the Flexible Path. Either could produce significant results in a reasonable timeframe.
And yes, while the Chinese budget isn't enough on its own to achieve the magic $3B Norm and crew recommend, its a lot. By cooperating, they would be able to spend less focusing on basics, and be able to learn from us and gain experience. Throw in some real cooperation with other countries, and its possible to reach that goal. Now, how that cooperation is done is another question -- the best example of international cooperation is the ISS, not exactly a beacon of exploration and efficiency. A true international effort probably depends on a true international agency. All I'm arguing here is that in an era of limited budgets, cooperation can be a big advantage -- the devil, as always, is in the details.
Actually, most of our budget is devoted to the basic stuff, so each dollar added at this point is much more impressive than the money we already spend. The Augustine commission stated that adding $3B/year allows us to do a lot more than we do right now.
Its hard to know exactly how much the Chinese are spending, but its estimated at around $1.5B -- not too bad. NASA accounts for approximately half of world-wide civilian space spending, so real international cooperation (not degrading and subordinating other countries programs) has the potential for a lot of development.
A political race is unsustainable. If we were to enter another 60s style space race, we would spend incredible amounts of money to do more flags and footprints and then sputter around for 40 or 50 years afterwards, again.
While Apollo was an impressive feat, I can't help but wonder where we would be now if we had stuck to an Eisenhower-esque slow and steady approach, and not gotten drawn into the space race. It certainly would have taken longer to get to the moon -- we might just be getting there now. However, we would be doing so in an affordable way, with an eye towards long-term missions, science and development. I think slow and consistent is better than massive rushes followed by 40 years of sputtering about.
The problem with Apollo is that it was run at a rate that history has shown is about 4 times higher than is politically sustainable without an external threat. Since this was the beginning of the Space Age, NASA assumed that the gravy train would go on forever, since there was no evidence otherwise. They never learned how to do things right within a small budget. This is why we're currently where we are. Vehicle design is always seeking an absolute perfection rather than a balance between cost and capability. The constant rallying cry is 'if only we had Apollo-level money again.' Perhaps most importantly, efforts to privatize the low-risk parts such as LEO transport is like pulling teeth, since the huge federal cost-plus contracts from the Apollo era are still massive employers.
Personally, I welcome the idea of cooperation. Sharing money, technology and development is the best way to make use of limited budgets and speed up frontier development. Competition is a great short-term motivator for politics, and can encourage efficiency in the long term. However, cooperative ventures are much more sustainable in the long-term, and competition in the free market sense only makes sense for developed technologies such as LEO transport, not the "Lewis and Clark" role that the government should excel at.
Not really. The DMZ (as far as I know) is the only place where a minefield still actually serves a military purpose. Furthermore, without an ability to disarm the mines remotely, it wouldn't be that advantageous to know where they are, since the North Korean forces would be maneuvering to avoid the mines and would be much more vulnerable to counterattack. The US and the South would know they were coming from troop buildups and the spraying of the field with bacteria (it takes a few hours to activate). And even if they were nullified, we still possess massive advantages in both conventional and nuclear forces -- Kim Jong Il may act crazy, but his behavior is actually quite rational. Of course, I'm in no way a military strategist so I could be wrong.
And the advantage of being able to spot mines at low cost is far greater than the potential disadvantages in Korea. WWII era mines are a scourge on third world countries, where adults and children are regularly mutilated and killed by weapons from 60 year old conflicts. Modern warfare has already evolved past the use of fields of landmines -- large forces use targeted strikes, guided weapons, automated observations, and lately tend to fight small guerrilla forces against which a minefield is useless. Small guerrilla forces, meanwhile, cannot afford minefields, and tend to take advantage of the visibility of conventional forces to manually target them.
Don't forget one of the most interesting things about Type 1a's: they're always the same size. Because it happens from gradual accumuluation, the star is always at the same mass when it goes off, and is thus always the same brightness.
This, along with a few other standard candles (such as Cepheid Variables) allow us to know how far away things are -- brightness we see is related to both absolute brightness and distance, so when you know the absolute and relative brightness you can calculate the distance. Combine this with measuring the speed of the objects, measured from a redshift, and these kind of stars are critical for understanding how the universe is expanding.
You're right. I accidentally typed in (300*300/7*7) instead of (.../(7*7)). Mea culpa.
At any rate, its around 10 stellar magnitude off, which means it would be around magnitude 14 on a very near approach. This is just barely visibile in a 16" telescope, so its still very hard to see.
This does not indicate a question of looking in the right direction. Seeing something that small is basically impossible until its right on top of us even if you're looking straight at it, which is fortunate since its not a big concern. Compare a 7 meter asteroid with a 300 meter asteroid such as 99942 Apophis:
Since surface projection is proportional to the radius squared, Apophis is likely to be 100,000 times brighter, or around 12.5 stellar magnitudes. During the 2029 close approach, when Apophis will be within the geostationary belt, it will be magnitude 3.3, meaning that a 7-meter asteroid would be around magnitude 16. This is below the limiting magnitude of most telescopes being used in these searches, so only the very large (1+ meter) would be able to find it even when that close.
Also, there are a number of individuals doing this in addition to the official NASA work. This was processed through the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, to which it is quite easy to submit information on new asteroids. With automated amateur equipment (the well-funded 60 year old amateur, not the $200 14 year old amateur) its quite easy to set up a system to automatically observe a region of sky and detect asteroids. If you have a series of plates indicating an asteroid, they can be submitted to the MPC through automated software and its all logged. You may not be satisfied, but its certainly not nothing, even if the NASA effort itself is underfunded.
I think it depends on how easy it is to ship diesel fuel to the disaster zone. If moving things in and out is a nightmare, then a collector truck of similar size to a large truck with a generator may be a better solution, simply because you only have to get it in there once.
The main advantage for a military base is that you severely reduce the logistical needs (and potentially cost, but thats secondary). Hauling in truck after truck of diesel fuel through either a war zone or a disaster zone has a lot of potential for trouble. If you can eliminate that need, while remaining competitive on costs (much easier than being competitive with commercial power stations), then this seems like a viable solution to both situations.
I'm usually not a defender of SBSP (except potentially for forward military bases), for various feasibility and economic viability reasons, but I'm curious where you get your 99% power loss figure.
Power is intended to be returned to earth as either lasers or narrowly focused microwave beams. Obviously if you're just taking a basic r^2 power loss equation you'd lose an absurd amount, but no one is going to do that -- throw in the gain from a large microwave antenna and it gets much saner. Lasers are going to be of a narrow enough beam you should have no losses within the freespace transmission.
Using it to create hydrogen is pretty senseless. Presumably you're referring to hydrolyzing water to get O2 and H. Standard chemical rocket fuels provide two things in one package: energy to propel the propellant, and propellant mass to push the spacecraft. Only the mass is a major concern as far as getting it to orbit -- the costs of having distinct hydrogen and oxygen being lifted to orbit over water is minimal compared to the cost of building a station like this. Now, put it on the surface of a planet with usable resources and you have something. Of course, there's already a lot of work on that (look up ISRU).
And why would there be an energy drought? We have solutions, and people are going to be less upset about scary nuclear plants, ugly wind plants, and expensive solar plants than they are going to be about giving up modern niceties. The issue right now is the question of when to switch -- when the government says to do so, or when the invisible hand of the market forces the issue.
Sunk costs don't matter for deciding future policy, only costs to complete it matter. When analyzing whether or not something should be done, you have to consider whether or not the remaining cost is worthwhile.
The Augustine Report, on which any policy decision is likely to be based lays out the options and considers the completion costs on a 'stay the course' direction. And the only place where significant sunk costs may be wasted is on Ares 1. Ares V hasn't been significantly developed, and all options presented by the committee keep Orion on the table, since CCDEV options are only good for LEO missions. And considering that Ares 1-X, a shuttle SRB with some simulators stacked on top cost $450M (more than all of SpaceX, designing LVs from scratch), I don't have trouble believing that going back to the drawing board with a shuttle-derived system or an EELV may be cheaper.
Discontinuing a flawed plan despite sunk costs is very responsible, as long as a well-thought-out plan that learns the lessons of previous failures replaces it. Let's hope that better decisions are made this time.
The difference is in cost. The hope is that for mere eraser shavings we can have small private companies develop the modern guidance and control software for a lander that would take traditional contractors with NASA direction much more to develop.
When someone says "we did it 50 years ago" remind them that we did it then with 3-4 times the budget, and improved computer technology only lends incremental advantages -- plus that there was some loss of institutional knowledge of vehicle development since we haven't developed anything successfully since the shuttle.
Of course not, thats why some are hobbies and some are professions. I'm arguing that being a well rounded person, and being able to make time to have an outside life even in a demanding profession* is not only possible but probably beneficial.
* I'd also say an MD, many military jobs, and other things I can't think of are probably more demanding
Slashdot Mirror
As long as we're correcting minor mistakes, ion thrusters use an electric grid to accelerate ions, not magnetic one... not to be pedantic or anything.
The reason I argue for the energy/person (or perhaps energy/kg would be better to handle the unmanned case) is that I would assume a vehicle that holds more people is going to cost more, and thus more can be spent on safety. I certainly wouldn't claim it as a foolproof or absolute measure, but it seems a reasonable way to go. As a rather ridiculous example: trampoline shoes are going to be much safer than a personal jet-pack: while it would be possible to kill yourself with either, and accidents may be as likely with both, a jet-pack accident is much more likely to be deadly.
As you point out there's a lot more that goes into it, the frequency of travel and the professionalism of the operators have a major effect as well. I was simply trying to point out that all other things being equal, a suborbital flight is going to be far safer than an orbital flight, but less safe than an airline flight.
But what indication is there that it will have a safety rate like that? If you consider safety as rough function of amount of energy/person required (a reasonable assumption) it falls pretty squarely between orbital vehicles and commercial craft. Add in that the participants are spending far more per person, the failure rate can probably be brought down to where commercial airliners are.
More specifically, consider the two failure modes of the shuttle: an SRB that bursts at the joint due to schedule rush and unsafe conditions, and a falling piece of foam that damages the heating tiles.
1. SS2 has a much smaller motor, making it easy to safeguard. Also, the passengers aren't going to push to launch when the engineers are telling them the engine might explode if they go now.
2. There are no re-entry tiles, because the entry speed is so much lower. Re-entry and landing is better approximated by an small plane than by a spacecraft. Most of the danger in orbital re-entry comes from dissipating the orbital speed as heat. Also, there arent the same aerodynamic pressures on SS2 as it takes off, making it less likely for that kind of impact to happen in the first place.
While it is true that it is the unexpected failure modes you have to worry about, the order of magnitude reduction in launch energy suggests that you'd have to have a really big problem to kill the passengers -- as opposed to an orbital vehicle where small problems can be catastrophic if unnoticed.
As a grad student in aerospace engineering (dynamics and controls), I actually have a number of textbooks that I use regularly after the class is done. Particularly my orbital mechanics, optimal control theory, estimation, and dynamics books have proven to be extremely useful outside of the classes they were originally purchased for, in later classes, research and "real-world" work.
I suppose grad school is different -- its more focused and you know enough from undergrad to start learning more directly applicable theory. I also suppose mechanically-oriented engineering isn't obsoleted so quickly -- the fundamentals stay the same over time, while the methods of application change drastically.
Nonetheless, while anecdotes make poor evidence, I'd say that the applicability of textbooks is highly dependent on the field and program.
I'm sorry. Going without a cell phone is not a good option for a lot of people. Its an expected part of life for most people, and quite frankly it makes life a lot easier. I'm rather young (24), so trying to get a group of people together and meeting somewhere has always been made a lot easier by use of cell phones -- this improves quality of life. I don't worry about getting stranded somewhere with car troubles, which eases peace of mind considerably. While they can be abused annoyingly, like when some sorority girl spends an hour talking loudly at a coffee shop, that doesn't mean that they're not extremely useful. Thats why they've grown to become ubiquitous over the past decade.
If there were better cell phone companies, moving to them would help too, but the big guys have created a lovely oligarchy, and the high cost of entry to build a nationwide network means its impossible for startups to fix it with competitive pressure. You're not going to get a large portion of the country to stop using cell phones. This means that in this case a reasonable amount of government regulation to stop the most abusive practices and maybe work to break up the pseudo-trust (a harder task that I couldn't say how to do) is perfectly reasonable.
Small-government conservatism isn't about saying government involvement and regulation should be avoided at all costs, I'd hope this got discredited last year with the banking crisis, its about asking if its really necessary before doing it, and having a good debate. In this case, without real competitive pressure happening, I think the answer is a resounding yes.
Looking at the B&N ebook store, it looks like everything thats not public domain is still DRM'd. To me this isn't any better than the amazon store, since while both are built on a decently open format (ePub and Mobi), you still can't read them without authenticating them. DRM is going to make incompatibilities, there is no way around it. While there are no sources of DRM free movies, there are plenty of sources of DRM free music. This was done because the music labels were scared to death of being bullied around by Apple. Movies are different for now because its still a physical medium controlled by the publishers, and they're not scared of themeselves -- if and when digital/non-streaming distribution becomes more dominant in movies we're bound to see something similar happen.
And this isn't to say I'm a Kindle partisan. If I were in the market now I'd be looking at the other options too. I'm just saying that its disingenuous to say you HAVE to use DRM-locked files on the Kindle -- this misinformation has been spread endlessly around the internet. I just looked and its quite easy to get MOBI files on Gutenberg, and I've read quite a few books from Baen on mine. As soon as I see a general audience DRM-free eBook store with good selection I'll jump ship, until then its just picking what vendor you want to be locked into. I apologize if you thought I was being rude, I was simply trying to correct a misconception I see a lot.
To be clear, and this FUD has been going around since the thing came out, you can use non-DRM formats on the Kindle. TXT and MOBI/PRC files can be read no problem -- the device mounts as a flash drive, you copy them over and they appear readable on the home screen. You can also get DOC and HTML files converted for free. The lack of ePub could be a frustration if a good DRM-free ePub store appears, but given that the spec leaves room for any DRM scheme to I expect that it will be just as fractured as anything else.
The real problem isn't the devices, its the stores. There is no source that I know of for new, legal novels without DRM. I don't think we'll see this until publishers get scared of Amazon or someone else dominating the market and pulls an Amazon Music Store -- offering DRM free MOBI or ePub in order to get into the market with the largest installed base.
While I disagree with the parent post (my response is below), I think you oversimplify it too far in the other direction. Private enterprise isn't automatically better, but for well-known tasks, fixed-price contracts and market forces that aren't as subject to the whims of senators trying to keep jobs in their states are likely to be more efficient.
While it may be correct that LockMart was the prime contractor for the Mars missions, this is not what people are referring to when they talk about 'private space.' How most missions are run, including the ones your friend works on, are through "Cost-plus contracts." That is, NASA says "here's the probe we want built, how cheaply do you think you can do it?" Then Lockheed, Boeing, etc. all make up numbers to show they can do it cheapest -- of course, they're never held to that budget and when they run over (since they were trying to win the bid) they get it and are assured of making a tidy profit no matter how inefficient they are, or even if they fail, since there's no real competition. Lockheed was essentially working as a subcontractor to NASA, and its hard to separate blame for failures.
What programs like COTS and CCDev advocate are "fixed-price contracts," where the government agrees to pay a private company, whether it be Lockheed or Boeing or a newcomer like SpaceX, a fixed amount for a given service. If the company is incapable of doing so at the cost they claim, they have to eat the difference, and if they can't complete the task they wouldn't get any money at all. Throw in some competition and this has the potential to actually make things more efficient. Of course, this kind of contracting only really makes sense for things like trucking cargo to orbit, not exploring Mars, since those are much higher risk and unpredictable.
And a private company is going to respect human life as well, and not out of any particular goodness, but because if a vehicle is killing astronauts, it is likely to kill the company. Skimping on safety for the sake of saving money or pushing schedules is as likely to happen in a government program as they are with private development. There is always going to be a trade between money and human life, and all industries must do it. If you give a human life infinite value, you cannot do anything -- cars would cost more than houses and get 2 mpg if they didn't think this way. Whether you are NASA or SpaceX you always end up having to place a dollar value on human life, as crass as that is, so that you can perform a proper trade study, comparing the cost of safety features to their effectiveness, and the available budget.
While I am a proponent of privatization, its disingenuous to say that NASA has no place. SpaceX has a lot of potential, and I have a lot of faith that they and companies like them will be able to handle the task of getting cargo and astronauts back and forth from orbit. Further, I fully agree that NASA needs to make motions towards getting out of the business of trucking stuff to orbit at all, leaving it fully to fixed-price contracts. I am a "true believer" in NewSpace.
Given that, NASA still has a critical role to play: the initial exploration role, doing the things that have never been done before. For-profit fixed-price contracts make sense when looking to make things that have been done before more efficient -- Getting people to orbit has known, manageable risks and quantifiable profit potential. When learning how to do things for the first time, what you might call a high-risk, low-reward task, the cost-plus government directed methods actually work -- doing it for the first time is never going to be perfectly efficient.
Put simply, SpaceX wouldn't be where they were if NASA hadn't done its work during the Apollo Era. What needs to be done now is for NASA to learn to pass on the well-understood tasks to industry and focus on what it does best, high-risk exploration.
After hearing astronaut Mark Kelly speak at a conference a couple of weeks ago, this was my first thought as well. When asked what his opinion was on the possibility of riding something like Dragon to orbit, he hesitated and said a lot about safety. There is the impression that somehow civil servants somehow are able to make things safer than the employees of a private company. I imagine a lot of it has to do with protecting the magic of being an astronaut, as the corps is also concerned that vehicles like Dragon treat them more like cargo than pilots (there was an Orlando Sentinel Op-Ed to that effect about a month ago).
Protecting jobs at the manned spaceflight centers, particularly Marshall, where they develop the rockets most at risk of being killed by private development, is another obvious goal. Senators from Alabama fought tooth and nail to keep kill funding for CCDev, since it could eliminate the necessity for MSFC to be crucial for each and every portion of manned space flight.
Theres a difference between managing and mitigating risk, and avoiding anything that might be risky, and all of your examples are, to me, examples of good risk management. Risk is a necessary part of life, but its still reasonable and responsible to avoid things that are likely to cause failure, and take the precautions necessary to reduce risk. Its a matter of weighing the likelihood and costs of failure with the costs of avoiding that risk -- in all of these cases the danger is far more 'expensive' than what is/was necessary to reduce that risk.
For bicycle helmets, they reduce risk of injury significantly with very few problems -- you look a little dorky, but so many people use them nowadays its less of an issue.
For retirement of the shuttle, NASA knows that continuing flights without a huge investment in revamping the orbiters does not merely risk disaster, it almost assures it. The failure at NASA isn't one of fearing failure in this case, its one of failing to follow through in developing new vehicles (for any number of reasons that is a wholly separate debate). The cost of revamping the orbiters would be better spent developing a new vehicle, and operating in such a way that you can be sure you ARE going to kill some astronauts is completely irresponsible.
In this case, running power plants past their design lifetime and well over their rated capacity is also dangerous and irresponsible. Its not that doing so might lead to a failure, but rather that it is almost certain to. All of the plants in this country are aging and overworked, and while the safety margins are enough to keep risks low at a single plant, you're playing with statistics and the more you abuse the plants the more likely it is that some kind of disaster will occur. The correct solution, again, was to continue licensing and building new plants -- while this is turning around now, we'd be in much better shape if it had happened 10 years ago.
Actually, the first new nuclear plants in 30 years have been licensed in the past year or two. The NIMBY problem is turning around. The problem is that that turnaround will take a decade to make a difference, and keeping old plants running may bring it back.
This isn't FUD. Relicensing old 'zombie' plants is a truly terrible idea, its also just better than all the others. When you have a plant designed to last 30 years, running it to 40 or 50 years and at 120% of its designed power capacity, it IS going to cause safety problems. If the engineers designed the systems that over-spec they were being irresponsible and running the costs up unnecessarily. As in all engineering problems, you put some safety factor in the design, and that safety factor will keep most of these plants in decent shape. However, you're playing games with statistics and with 100 nuclear plants in the country, all running towards the end of their life and over-capacity, you vastly increase the chances of disaster.
I think a big part is that its been working and practical for 30 years while no new plants have been built, and that many feel its been held back from development by the NIMBY masses. If more intelligent and less fearful handling of nuclear power had existed in the past we might be in better shape than we are now. While I don't agree with the grandparent that pursuing other alternatives isn't worthwhile, I do feel that nuclear power is a strong component of a sustainable future energy strategy.
I imagine this particular technology will be economical, useful, but limited in its implementation, just as hydroelectric power is. Just as with hydro power, the ultimate power source is the evaporation, vapor movement and rain caused by the sun -- though I can't claim to be certain, I'd imagine you could predict now the total amount of power available from this, and I'd imagine it is significant but no panacea. This is the general problem I and other nuclear proponents see: not that "clean" power technology is bad or boring, but that current concepts of wind, solar and tidal seem incapable of meeting current demand -- anything that doesn't meet current demand is unlikely to be solely used if alternatives (such as nuclear) exist, since the public would rather not be inconvenienced.
To counter your objections:
1. The toxic material can be reduced significantly by reprocessing the fuels. This poses a proliferation risk, but France and other countries have managed to do so for years without losing any material. It was banned by executive order by Carter, an order that should be rescinded. Also, interestingly and amusingly, Yucca Mountain is only 10 or 20 miles from an old nuclear test site, making the objections to the storage site seem less based on reality.
2. As we continue to operate older and older plants this is bound to be a problem. Extending the operating life past what they were designed for is bound to create safety trouble, but new ones have been impossible to build for decades, and replacing them with coal plants is not better in my mind. New construction and a renaissance in safer plant design (pebble beds are particularly impressive) can mitigate a lot of risk. Also, while the safety concerns are real and significant, and shouldn't be downplayed, I think the general public overestimates the danger -- Three Mile Island released no radiation and showed the validity of safety precautions.
Actually, the exact statement is:
* Meaningful human exploration is possible under a less-constrained budget, increasing annual expenditures by approximately $3 billion in real purchasing power above the FY 2010 guidance.
* Funding at the increased level would allow either an exploration program to explore the Moon First or one that follows the Flexible Path. Either could produce significant results in a reasonable timeframe.
And yes, while the Chinese budget isn't enough on its own to achieve the magic $3B Norm and crew recommend, its a lot. By cooperating, they would be able to spend less focusing on basics, and be able to learn from us and gain experience. Throw in some real cooperation with other countries, and its possible to reach that goal. Now, how that cooperation is done is another question -- the best example of international cooperation is the ISS, not exactly a beacon of exploration and efficiency. A true international effort probably depends on a true international agency. All I'm arguing here is that in an era of limited budgets, cooperation can be a big advantage -- the devil, as always, is in the details.
Actually, most of our budget is devoted to the basic stuff, so each dollar added at this point is much more impressive than the money we already spend. The Augustine commission stated that adding $3B/year allows us to do a lot more than we do right now.
Its hard to know exactly how much the Chinese are spending, but its estimated at around $1.5B -- not too bad. NASA accounts for approximately half of world-wide civilian space spending, so real international cooperation (not degrading and subordinating other countries programs) has the potential for a lot of development.
A political race is unsustainable. If we were to enter another 60s style space race, we would spend incredible amounts of money to do more flags and footprints and then sputter around for 40 or 50 years afterwards, again.
While Apollo was an impressive feat, I can't help but wonder where we would be now if we had stuck to an Eisenhower-esque slow and steady approach, and not gotten drawn into the space race. It certainly would have taken longer to get to the moon -- we might just be getting there now. However, we would be doing so in an affordable way, with an eye towards long-term missions, science and development. I think slow and consistent is better than massive rushes followed by 40 years of sputtering about.
The problem with Apollo is that it was run at a rate that history has shown is about 4 times higher than is politically sustainable without an external threat. Since this was the beginning of the Space Age, NASA assumed that the gravy train would go on forever, since there was no evidence otherwise. They never learned how to do things right within a small budget. This is why we're currently where we are. Vehicle design is always seeking an absolute perfection rather than a balance between cost and capability. The constant rallying cry is 'if only we had Apollo-level money again.' Perhaps most importantly, efforts to privatize the low-risk parts such as LEO transport is like pulling teeth, since the huge federal cost-plus contracts from the Apollo era are still massive employers.
Personally, I welcome the idea of cooperation. Sharing money, technology and development is the best way to make use of limited budgets and speed up frontier development. Competition is a great short-term motivator for politics, and can encourage efficiency in the long term. However, cooperative ventures are much more sustainable in the long-term, and competition in the free market sense only makes sense for developed technologies such as LEO transport, not the "Lewis and Clark" role that the government should excel at.
Not really. The DMZ (as far as I know) is the only place where a minefield still actually serves a military purpose. Furthermore, without an ability to disarm the mines remotely, it wouldn't be that advantageous to know where they are, since the North Korean forces would be maneuvering to avoid the mines and would be much more vulnerable to counterattack. The US and the South would know they were coming from troop buildups and the spraying of the field with bacteria (it takes a few hours to activate). And even if they were nullified, we still possess massive advantages in both conventional and nuclear forces -- Kim Jong Il may act crazy, but his behavior is actually quite rational. Of course, I'm in no way a military strategist so I could be wrong.
And the advantage of being able to spot mines at low cost is far greater than the potential disadvantages in Korea. WWII era mines are a scourge on third world countries, where adults and children are regularly mutilated and killed by weapons from 60 year old conflicts. Modern warfare has already evolved past the use of fields of landmines -- large forces use targeted strikes, guided weapons, automated observations, and lately tend to fight small guerrilla forces against which a minefield is useless. Small guerrilla forces, meanwhile, cannot afford minefields, and tend to take advantage of the visibility of conventional forces to manually target them.
Don't forget one of the most interesting things about Type 1a's: they're always the same size. Because it happens from gradual accumuluation, the star is always at the same mass when it goes off, and is thus always the same brightness.
This, along with a few other standard candles (such as Cepheid Variables) allow us to know how far away things are -- brightness we see is related to both absolute brightness and distance, so when you know the absolute and relative brightness you can calculate the distance. Combine this with measuring the speed of the objects, measured from a redshift, and these kind of stars are critical for understanding how the universe is expanding.
You're right. I accidentally typed in (300*300/7*7) instead of (.../(7*7)). Mea culpa.
At any rate, its around 10 stellar magnitude off, which means it would be around magnitude 14 on a very near approach. This is just barely visibile in a 16" telescope, so its still very hard to see.
This does not indicate a question of looking in the right direction. Seeing something that small is basically impossible until its right on top of us even if you're looking straight at it, which is fortunate since its not a big concern. Compare a 7 meter asteroid with a 300 meter asteroid such as 99942 Apophis:
Since surface projection is proportional to the radius squared, Apophis is likely to be 100,000 times brighter, or around 12.5 stellar magnitudes. During the 2029 close approach, when Apophis will be within the geostationary belt, it will be magnitude 3.3, meaning that a 7-meter asteroid would be around magnitude 16. This is below the limiting magnitude of most telescopes being used in these searches, so only the very large (1+ meter) would be able to find it even when that close.
Also, there are a number of individuals doing this in addition to the official NASA work. This was processed through the Minor Planet Center in Cambridge, to which it is quite easy to submit information on new asteroids. With automated amateur equipment (the well-funded 60 year old amateur, not the $200 14 year old amateur) its quite easy to set up a system to automatically observe a region of sky and detect asteroids. If you have a series of plates indicating an asteroid, they can be submitted to the MPC through automated software and its all logged. You may not be satisfied, but its certainly not nothing, even if the NASA effort itself is underfunded.
I think it depends on how easy it is to ship diesel fuel to the disaster zone. If moving things in and out is a nightmare, then a collector truck of similar size to a large truck with a generator may be a better solution, simply because you only have to get it in there once.
The main advantage for a military base is that you severely reduce the logistical needs (and potentially cost, but thats secondary). Hauling in truck after truck of diesel fuel through either a war zone or a disaster zone has a lot of potential for trouble. If you can eliminate that need, while remaining competitive on costs (much easier than being competitive with commercial power stations), then this seems like a viable solution to both situations.
I'm usually not a defender of SBSP (except potentially for forward military bases), for various feasibility and economic viability reasons, but I'm curious where you get your 99% power loss figure.
Power is intended to be returned to earth as either lasers or narrowly focused microwave beams. Obviously if you're just taking a basic r^2 power loss equation you'd lose an absurd amount, but no one is going to do that -- throw in the gain from a large microwave antenna and it gets much saner. Lasers are going to be of a narrow enough beam you should have no losses within the freespace transmission.
Using it to create hydrogen is pretty senseless. Presumably you're referring to hydrolyzing water to get O2 and H. Standard chemical rocket fuels provide two things in one package: energy to propel the propellant, and propellant mass to push the spacecraft. Only the mass is a major concern as far as getting it to orbit -- the costs of having distinct hydrogen and oxygen being lifted to orbit over water is minimal compared to the cost of building a station like this. Now, put it on the surface of a planet with usable resources and you have something. Of course, there's already a lot of work on that (look up ISRU).
And why would there be an energy drought? We have solutions, and people are going to be less upset about scary nuclear plants, ugly wind plants, and expensive solar plants than they are going to be about giving up modern niceties. The issue right now is the question of when to switch -- when the government says to do so, or when the invisible hand of the market forces the issue.
Sunk costs don't matter for deciding future policy, only costs to complete it matter. When analyzing whether or not something should be done, you have to consider whether or not the remaining cost is worthwhile.
The Augustine Report, on which any policy decision is likely to be based lays out the options and considers the completion costs on a 'stay the course' direction. And the only place where significant sunk costs may be wasted is on Ares 1. Ares V hasn't been significantly developed, and all options presented by the committee keep Orion on the table, since CCDEV options are only good for LEO missions. And considering that Ares 1-X, a shuttle SRB with some simulators stacked on top cost $450M (more than all of SpaceX, designing LVs from scratch), I don't have trouble believing that going back to the drawing board with a shuttle-derived system or an EELV may be cheaper.
Discontinuing a flawed plan despite sunk costs is very responsible, as long as a well-thought-out plan that learns the lessons of previous failures replaces it. Let's hope that better decisions are made this time.
The difference is in cost. The hope is that for mere eraser shavings we can have small private companies develop the modern guidance and control software for a lander that would take traditional contractors with NASA direction much more to develop.
When someone says "we did it 50 years ago" remind them that we did it then with 3-4 times the budget, and improved computer technology only lends incremental advantages -- plus that there was some loss of institutional knowledge of vehicle development since we haven't developed anything successfully since the shuttle.
Of course not, thats why some are hobbies and some are professions. I'm arguing that being a well rounded person, and being able to make time to have an outside life even in a demanding profession* is not only possible but probably beneficial.
* I'd also say an MD, many military jobs, and other things I can't think of are probably more demanding