I live in the murky Eastern United States and if I can see a half a dozen stars from my backyard it's a good night. A few years ago I spent six weeks at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and one night several members of my team drove out to a remote corner of the site to take a picture of one of those comets that was big news in 1996 - I forget it's name. I thought the comet would be the high point of the night. It wasn't. Folks, when you are laying on your back looking up at the whole Milky Way splayed out above you, and you can really SEE that thing streching across the sky, it is a truly life humbling experience you will always remember. You almost think you could fall off the planet into the void. There is one hell of a lot more to see out there than a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels will ever show and it is worth the effort to get to dark skies to see it.
Actually, I DON'T think the most clever people are Americans - we only have the advantage of having the most freedom and resources. Lots of studies show that American school kids lag behind those of other nations in a variety of subjects, particulary science and math. I DO think, however, that most Americans think (incorrectly) that we have some kind of monopoly on computer technology - we invented the PC, Bill Gates is American, we have more people on the internet than anybody else, etc. My comment was intended to "shake up" those who subconsciously believe that stuff means something. I personally believe that Russian hackers and Indian coders and all those other nationalities will start eating our lunch in the IT arena if we don't watch out. About the only non-Americans I'm willing to believe that are not as clever as Americans are those jokers in Afghanistan...
The most amazing 15 year old I've run across isn't even American. MacMillan India Ltd. is publishing a book he wrote as a 14 year old. From the jacket blurb: "...The author, Ankit Fadia, 16 years old is a tenth class student, studying in Delhi Public School R.K. Puram. Ankit Fadia, who at the tender age of 14 wrote this book, is the youngest author for Macmillan in their 110 years of history. He started his website, Hacking Truths for a small circle of friends to whom Ankit would send out periodic manuals, but very soon it evolved into a worldwide community of thousands of like mined people who subscribed to receive information that really mattered. The basic motive behind Hacking Truths is to spread the message of ethical hacking which would revolutionize the global security scene. He believes ethical hacking is like vaccination - you fight eveil for positive gains..." So go ahead, Slashdot Effect Ankit's website Hacking Truths...it's pretty cool.
...but then they killed Birkhoff, and the rest of Season Four sucked, bordering on insane, then the fans pitched a fit, "How could you DO that to the show we loved!" and got it back for a mini-Season Five, whereupon the producers of the show said "If you thought S4 was bad, wait til you see THIS...."
A real shame, because Nikita was a show with class when it was good.
Actually, this ad approach is aimed at young females, who are the ones that made Titanic a hit. Dark Angel is very much a chick flick kind of sci-fi, which isn't bad as we need to get more babes involved - both in sci-fi shows and in watching them. Hey, there's still time to catch up on Dark Angel reruns so never having seen an ep isn't an excuse - altho better hurry, the season finale is coming up and you don't want to see it without a little exposure to the DA universe. The last ninety seconds is pretty intense drama in anybody's book...
Actually, the original Alien was a Ridley Scott film and Cameron did only the sequel Aliens in the mid 80s between the two Terminator movies, for which he is much better known and is his true SF "franchise". I forget who did Alien 3 - Alan Smithee maybe?
I'm with you, pal. Dark Angel rocks, period. Every other science fiction show on TV has their little sets and representative characters to show off a species or group - Max gets on her cycle and just goes by pile after pile of garbage, fires in barrels, and little knots of people. The depiction of a true world where people live is almost overwhelming. Also, the characters change with time - true development, not stereotypes. Logan gets embarrassed and depressed over his handicap, comtemplating sucicide, then overcoming it, only to start losing his fortune - Lydecker's alcoholism and turncoat nature - Nana Visitor's new character - all superb. The continuing storyline also greatly contributes to the sense of development. The attitude towards guns is refreshing - Max won't touch them, Logan realizes the power of one bullet instead of clip after clip, and in the "out of town" episode a gun is potrayed as a hidden threat instead of just raw power that blasts away. The occasional focus on religion and "why am I here" is refreshing as well, particularly the Lady of the Heart episode. Most of all, Dark Angel can occasionally come up with a few moments that just plain stun the viewer and make you say - wow. "You just bought yourself a whole lot of birthdays" followed by "What was so hard about that, soldier?" and most of all Zack's final speech in the season finale. I can hardly wait to see what Max & Co. come up with next season. This has got to be the SF show that did the best job of staying on focus to a single unified vision its freshman year. I hope it only gets better. Viva Max!
I agree media coverage of the Sklyarov arrest has been a (non-existant) travesty. I have an idea, bear with me for a paragraph here. I noticed over the past few days that a USA Today reporter named Dennis Cauchon has written two stories on First Amendment arrests (although they were buried on the inside pages) here and here. To quote his story, "At the Justice Department's request, a federal judge jailed freelance writer Vanessa Leggett on July 20 on contempt of court charges after she refused to turn over notes, tape recordings and other material she collected while researching a book on the slaying of Doris Angleton in 1997. Angleton was the wife of Robert Angleton, a millionaire ex-bookie who was acquitted in 1998 of hiring his brother to commit the murder."
Seems to me 'ole Dennis might be interested in the current party going on in Dimitri's Las Vegas cell, if only he knew about it. And USA Today might print what 'ole Dennis dug up on the story. So I'm gonna email 'ole Dennis at dcauchon@usatoday.com and give him an earful of URLs. Why don't ya'll email 'ole Dennis, too, and show him what the Slashdot Effect is all about?
Since this is propane powered, he should mount a BBQ grill onboard and do "shrimp on the barbie" as he howls along.....At $3 per minute he needs a sponsor, maybe Food Network would sponsor him. He could start his own TV show, Jet Chef...
Dr. Levin, the guy behind the Viking Labeled Release Experiment, has been a lone voice in the wind the past few years about Viking discovering life, even before this latest interest. Check out his data here.
Let's see... he's 5300 years old, say a generation is 20 years, so 5 generations per hundred years, 5*53 = 265 generations of offspring lost by his death, say at 1.1 kids average per generation, his death prevented the birth of 1.1^265 = over 93 BILLION people!!! - enough to toally swamp the planet. So obviously he was killed by a terminator robot from the future to insure his offspring wouldn't lead to the destruction of the intelligent computers we will build in the next 50 years. This theory is further supported by the fact that he was found at/near/in Austria. Everybody knows those futuristic terminator robots speak with an Austrian accent. And another thing...a coverup is underway!!! The arrowhead was pure titanium!!! They're trying to cover that up by showing some flint fake on the news!!!!
"In 1997, Biospherics' President and CEO, Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, announced his new conclusion that his 1976 Viking Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment found living microorganisms in the soil of Mars. Objective application of the scientific process to 21 years of continued research and to new developments on Mars and Earth forced this conclusion. Of all the many hypotheses offered over the years to explain the LR Mars results, the only possibility fitting all the relevant data is that microbial life exists in the top layer of the Martian surface." Details here.
... and saw the blueprints back in the 80s. These things can be built small. I'd like to say I could tell you more but then I'd have to kill you, but the fact is, I'm gettin' old and I've just plain forgotten most of it...
For some intro level discussion and pretty pictures of wire bonding discussed in my other reply (and flipchip technology, which is an attempt to replace wirebonding that will in itself be skipped if the HP nanotech works out OK) see here. The important thing is that there has been a whole branch of supporting technology (how do you connect these newfangled chips to pins) going for 40 years and they still have room for major improvements. Now they're jumping to a whole new interconnect technology several orders of magnitude smaller and they're gonna have the kinks worked out by 2005? Such speedy development is a bigger story than the minaturization...
Actually, I DON'T really understand the HP technology, and that's why I'm asking these questions!!! Current technology involves the inclusion of nice, standard sized "pads" or "landing zones" on a silicon chip around its perimeter where nice, standard sized preinspected wires are put in place and attached by micromanipulators. That's how a current technology silicon chip is attached to pins leading (pun) to the outside world, and it is a very well understood, deterministic, inspectible process via a microscope that has all sorts of ISO9000 and MILSPEC standards applied to assure reproducibility and quality. On a wire only a couple of atoms thick made by chemical etching, how do you assure that it doesn't have a narrow, pinched off point somewhere along it that is subject to breakage or failure? The only way to inspect someting that small is by something like an electron microscope, and blasting an atoms-thick wire with a beam of high energy electrons just to image it doesn't sound like too good of an idea.
I hope the HP technology is robust enough to overcome these challenges, and if it's not, some other technology will. I'm not defending cavalry!!! I want isolinear chips and positronic brains and all of that sci-fi tech as much as the next guy. My main point is that here's a new technology, it's a lot smaller, hooray, but now we have to rethink all of the supporting technologies around it to make sure they will work, too. That's a logical and rational step that has to be taken...and I'm confident that somebody will figure it all out.
HP is taking the "kill em all and let God sort em out" approach here, by using some sort of chemical etching process that makes a rat's nest of random possible connections, then figuring out which connection goes where after it's over. A couple of questions arise...Isn't there a possibility that one or a few connections just don't get made and so the circuit just won't work, even tho it's 99%+ connected? How often will something like this happen, and will it make the wafer yield too low to be feasible? How will you certify something like this for NASA and the military - they already are a little leery of things like neural nets which aren't deterministic enough to fully trust in mission critical aps. And finally, after a while don;t you get so small that cosmic rays / radiation will zap the wires? Transient resets in CPUs from cosmic rays is already a measurable phenomenon, would'nt this be worse?
Actually, only the third time, and over something I feel very strongly about...I'm not trolling!!! But I'll be a good little boy and try to be original from now on....
Actually, I am very much in favor of using extraterrestrial resources to enable vastly cheaper spaceflight efforts. Again, the near-term concept farthest along in this vein is Mars Direct.
See also Gerrold K. O'Neill's work, The High Frontier...dated, but not refuted. America's and NASA's political interests have diverged from these paths, and I hope they or someone else will return to them.
If a shuttle could be left up there for a couple of months, it would have been done by now and we would never have built the station. The shuttle launches with a fixed amount of liquid oxygen and hydrogen in its tanks. This is combined in the fuel cells to make electricity and waste water (in what is effectively reverse electrolysis). The waste water is pumped thru the Orbiter to pick up waste heat and then vented overboard, carrying the waste heat with it, via the radiators on the inside of the payload bay doors. This process is why opening the payload doors is the first thing that's done upon reaching orbit. Failure to open the payload doors (which has never happened) would be an automatic abort situation because it would get real hot inside, real fast. Basically the orbiter carries enough liquid oxygen and hydrogen for three weeks or less. I think the longest mission so far was 16 days and they still had their emergency reserve of another day or two at that point. Next the obvious question is "Why not carry extra liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the payload bay?" Answer - the Station is in such a god-forsaken orbit to allow Russian participation that the Shuttle payload capability to this orbit is severely reduced. This is the main thing that has driven costs so high - a lot more Shuttle flights are required now than in the original plan just to get the same amount of stuff up there, but at least we got Rusian participation...
Re:Might As Well Go EVA, There Ain't No Test Tubes
on
ISS Airlock Installed
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· Score: 2
A moderator that hasn't seen the boilerplate before won't think it's redundant because to her it will be original. Ditto for a lot of viewers. If you've read this before, scroll onward. The real sin is not redundancy, it's off-topic. This isn't off topic.
Re:Might As Well Go EVA, There Ain't No Test Tubes
on
ISS Airlock Installed
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· Score: 2
This is the last time, I promise. The karma points dangling in front of me made me do it.
Might As Well Go EVA, There Ain't No Test Tubes ..
on
ISS Airlock Installed
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· Score: 5
The Space Station is SO big that the current crew of three is run ragged trying to keep the systems maintenance going - there is NO TIME for ANY science at present. That fact is putting NASA in danger of having to cancel the whole thing....
This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!
What about using two Soyuz capsules? That's the obvious solution but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
Dr. Alibek's Writings Available On The Web
on
Biohazard
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· Score: 5
This is one scary book that everybody should read. The Russian author, Ken Alibek, moved to Alabama (where I live) where he was a consultant after his defection to the US Army Chemical/Biological Warfare Group at Fort McClellan in Anniston, so I have actually followed this story fairly closely. Dr. Alibek is basically the guy behind the drive to vaccinate the US Army against anthrax, which has caused quite a furor over the past few years. A slide show he gave/gives fairly frequently is here and his Congressional testimony is here... it's VERY interesting reading. If Dr. Alibek's writings don't induce a rising sense of worry in the back of your mind, just keep reading here.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in the murky Eastern United States and if I can see a half a dozen stars from my backyard it's a good night. A few years ago I spent six weeks at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico and one night several members of my team drove out to a remote corner of the site to take a picture of one of those comets that was big news in 1996 - I forget it's name. I thought the comet would be the high point of the night. It wasn't. Folks, when you are laying on your back looking up at the whole Milky Way splayed out above you, and you can really SEE that thing streching across the sky, it is a truly life humbling experience you will always remember. You almost think you could fall off the planet into the void. There is one hell of a lot more to see out there than a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels will ever show and it is worth the effort to get to dark skies to see it.
Actually, I DON'T think the most clever people are Americans - we only have the advantage of having the most freedom and resources. Lots of studies show that American school kids lag behind those of other nations in a variety of subjects, particulary science and math. I DO think, however, that most Americans think (incorrectly) that we have some kind of monopoly on computer technology - we invented the PC, Bill Gates is American, we have more people on the internet than anybody else, etc. My comment was intended to "shake up" those who subconsciously believe that stuff means something. I personally believe that Russian hackers and Indian coders and all those other nationalities will start eating our lunch in the IT arena if we don't watch out. About the only non-Americans I'm willing to believe that are not as clever as Americans are those jokers in Afghanistan...
The most amazing 15 year old I've run across isn't even American. MacMillan India Ltd. is publishing a book he wrote as a 14 year old. From the jacket blurb: "...The author, Ankit Fadia, 16 years old is a tenth class student, studying in Delhi Public School R.K. Puram. Ankit Fadia, who at the tender age of 14 wrote this book, is the youngest author for Macmillan in their 110 years of history. He started his website, Hacking Truths for a small circle of friends to whom Ankit would send out periodic manuals, but very soon it evolved into a worldwide community of thousands of like mined people who subscribed to receive information that really mattered. The basic motive behind Hacking Truths is to spread the message of ethical hacking which would revolutionize the global security scene. He believes ethical hacking is like vaccination - you fight eveil for positive gains..." So go ahead, Slashdot Effect Ankit's website Hacking Truths...it's pretty cool.
...but then they killed Birkhoff, and the rest of Season Four sucked, bordering on insane, then the fans pitched a fit, "How could you DO that to the show we loved!" and got it back for a mini-Season Five, whereupon the producers of the show said "If you thought S4 was bad, wait til you see THIS...."
A real shame, because Nikita was a show with class when it was good.
Actually, this ad approach is aimed at young females, who are the ones that made Titanic a hit. Dark Angel is very much a chick flick kind of sci-fi, which isn't bad as we need to get more babes involved - both in sci-fi shows and in watching them. Hey, there's still time to catch up on Dark Angel reruns so never having seen an ep isn't an excuse - altho better hurry, the season finale is coming up and you don't want to see it without a little exposure to the DA universe. The last ninety seconds is pretty intense drama in anybody's book...
Actually, the original Alien was a Ridley Scott film and Cameron did only the sequel Aliens in the mid 80s between the two Terminator movies, for which he is much better known and is his true SF "franchise". I forget who did Alien 3 - Alan Smithee maybe?
I'm with you, pal. Dark Angel rocks, period. Every other science fiction show on TV has their little sets and representative characters to show off a species or group - Max gets on her cycle and just goes by pile after pile of garbage, fires in barrels, and little knots of people. The depiction of a true world where people live is almost overwhelming. Also, the characters change with time - true development, not stereotypes. Logan gets embarrassed and depressed over his handicap, comtemplating sucicide, then overcoming it, only to start losing his fortune - Lydecker's alcoholism and turncoat nature - Nana Visitor's new character - all superb. The continuing storyline also greatly contributes to the sense of development. The attitude towards guns is refreshing - Max won't touch them, Logan realizes the power of one bullet instead of clip after clip, and in the "out of town" episode a gun is potrayed as a hidden threat instead of just raw power that blasts away. The occasional focus on religion and "why am I here" is refreshing as well, particularly the Lady of the Heart episode. Most of all, Dark Angel can occasionally come up with a few moments that just plain stun the viewer and make you say - wow. "You just bought yourself a whole lot of birthdays" followed by "What was so hard about that, soldier?" and most of all Zack's final speech in the season finale. I can hardly wait to see what Max & Co. come up with next season. This has got to be the SF show that did the best job of staying on focus to a single unified vision its freshman year. I hope it only gets better. Viva Max!
OK, I wrote 'ole Dennis. If you did too, sound off below!!!
I agree media coverage of the Sklyarov arrest has been a (non-existant) travesty. I have an idea, bear with me for a paragraph here. I noticed over the past few days that a USA Today reporter named Dennis Cauchon has written two stories on First Amendment arrests (although they were buried on the inside pages) here and here. To quote his story, "At the Justice Department's request, a federal judge jailed freelance writer Vanessa Leggett on July 20 on contempt of court charges after she refused to turn over notes, tape recordings and other material she collected while researching a book on the slaying of Doris Angleton in 1997. Angleton was the wife of Robert Angleton, a millionaire ex-bookie who was acquitted in 1998 of hiring his brother to commit the murder."
Seems to me 'ole Dennis might be interested in the current party going on in Dimitri's Las Vegas cell, if only he knew about it. And USA Today might print what 'ole Dennis dug up on the story. So I'm gonna email 'ole Dennis at dcauchon@usatoday.com and give him an earful of URLs. Why don't ya'll email 'ole Dennis, too, and show him what the Slashdot Effect is all about?
Since this is propane powered, he should mount a BBQ grill onboard and do "shrimp on the barbie" as he howls along.....At $3 per minute he needs a sponsor, maybe Food Network would sponsor him. He could start his own TV show, Jet Chef...
Dr. Levin, the guy behind the Viking Labeled Release Experiment, has been a lone voice in the wind the past few years about Viking discovering life, even before this latest interest. Check out his data here.
Let's see... he's 5300 years old, say a generation is 20 years, so 5 generations per hundred years, 5*53 = 265 generations of offspring lost by his death, say at 1.1 kids average per generation, his death prevented the birth of 1.1^265 = over 93 BILLION people!!! - enough to toally swamp the planet. So obviously he was killed by a terminator robot from the future to insure his offspring wouldn't lead to the destruction of the intelligent computers we will build in the next 50 years. This theory is further supported by the fact that he was found at/near/in Austria. Everybody knows those futuristic terminator robots speak with an Austrian accent. And another thing...a coverup is underway!!! The arrowhead was pure titanium!!! They're trying to cover that up by showing some flint fake on the news!!!!
"In 1997, Biospherics' President and CEO, Dr. Gilbert V. Levin, announced his new conclusion that his 1976 Viking Labeled Release (LR) life detection experiment found living microorganisms in the soil of Mars. Objective application of the scientific process to 21 years of continued research and to new developments on Mars and Earth forced this conclusion. Of all the many hypotheses offered over the years to explain the LR Mars results, the only possibility fitting all the relevant data is that microbial life exists in the top layer of the Martian surface." Details here.
... and saw the blueprints back in the 80s. These things can be built small. I'd like to say I could tell you more but then I'd have to kill you, but the fact is, I'm gettin' old and I've just plain forgotten most of it...
For some intro level discussion and pretty pictures of wire bonding discussed in my other reply (and flipchip technology, which is an attempt to replace wirebonding that will in itself be skipped if the HP nanotech works out OK) see here. The important thing is that there has been a whole branch of supporting technology (how do you connect these newfangled chips to pins) going for 40 years and they still have room for major improvements. Now they're jumping to a whole new interconnect technology several orders of magnitude smaller and they're gonna have the kinks worked out by 2005? Such speedy development is a bigger story than the minaturization...
Actually, I DON'T really understand the HP technology, and that's why I'm asking these questions!!! Current technology involves the inclusion of nice, standard sized "pads" or "landing zones" on a silicon chip around its perimeter where nice, standard sized preinspected wires are put in place and attached by micromanipulators. That's how a current technology silicon chip is attached to pins leading (pun) to the outside world, and it is a very well understood, deterministic, inspectible process via a microscope that has all sorts of ISO9000 and MILSPEC standards applied to assure reproducibility and quality. On a wire only a couple of atoms thick made by chemical etching, how do you assure that it doesn't have a narrow, pinched off point somewhere along it that is subject to breakage or failure? The only way to inspect someting that small is by something like an electron microscope, and blasting an atoms-thick wire with a beam of high energy electrons just to image it doesn't sound like too good of an idea.
I hope the HP technology is robust enough to overcome these challenges, and if it's not, some other technology will. I'm not defending cavalry!!! I want isolinear chips and positronic brains and all of that sci-fi tech as much as the next guy. My main point is that here's a new technology, it's a lot smaller, hooray, but now we have to rethink all of the supporting technologies around it to make sure they will work, too. That's a logical and rational step that has to be taken...and I'm confident that somebody will figure it all out.
HP is taking the "kill em all and let God sort em out" approach here, by using some sort of chemical etching process that makes a rat's nest of random possible connections, then figuring out which connection goes where after it's over. A couple of questions arise...Isn't there a possibility that one or a few connections just don't get made and so the circuit just won't work, even tho it's 99%+ connected? How often will something like this happen, and will it make the wafer yield too low to be feasible? How will you certify something like this for NASA and the military - they already are a little leery of things like neural nets which aren't deterministic enough to fully trust in mission critical aps. And finally, after a while don;t you get so small that cosmic rays / radiation will zap the wires? Transient resets in CPUs from cosmic rays is already a measurable phenomenon, would'nt this be worse?
Amen.
Actually, only the third time, and over something I feel very strongly about...I'm not trolling!!! But I'll be a good little boy and try to be original from now on....
Actually, I am very much in favor of using extraterrestrial resources to enable vastly cheaper spaceflight efforts. Again, the near-term concept farthest along in this vein is Mars Direct. See also Gerrold K. O'Neill's work, The High Frontier...dated, but not refuted. America's and NASA's political interests have diverged from these paths, and I hope they or someone else will return to them.
If a shuttle could be left up there for a couple of months, it would have been done by now and we would never have built the station. The shuttle launches with a fixed amount of liquid oxygen and hydrogen in its tanks. This is combined in the fuel cells to make electricity and waste water (in what is effectively reverse electrolysis). The waste water is pumped thru the Orbiter to pick up waste heat and then vented overboard, carrying the waste heat with it, via the radiators on the inside of the payload bay doors. This process is why opening the payload doors is the first thing that's done upon reaching orbit. Failure to open the payload doors (which has never happened) would be an automatic abort situation because it would get real hot inside, real fast. Basically the orbiter carries enough liquid oxygen and hydrogen for three weeks or less. I think the longest mission so far was 16 days and they still had their emergency reserve of another day or two at that point. Next the obvious question is "Why not carry extra liquid oxygen and hydrogen in the payload bay?" Answer - the Station is in such a god-forsaken orbit to allow Russian participation that the Shuttle payload capability to this orbit is severely reduced. This is the main thing that has driven costs so high - a lot more Shuttle flights are required now than in the original plan just to get the same amount of stuff up there, but at least we got Rusian participation...
A moderator that hasn't seen the boilerplate before won't think it's redundant because to her it will be original. Ditto for a lot of viewers. If you've read this before, scroll onward. The real sin is not redundancy, it's off-topic. This isn't off topic.
This is the last time, I promise. The karma points dangling in front of me made me do it.
This won't change until we get a crew escape vehicle (currently the Russian Soyuz, a 30-year-old design) that can carry more than three people back. Guess what - there isn't even a funded plan to build such a vehicle!
What about using two Soyuz capsules? That's the obvious solution but the Soyuz has a limited lifetime on orbit and has to be exchanged fairly regularly. That's why Tito was able to get to space as a tourist recently...it was a Soyuz changeout mission and they really only need a crew of two to fly that. The problem is that to have crew escape for 6 (ie, two Soyuz) then you have to fly twice as many changeout missions and the Russians are stressed out trying to keep up with the changeout missions they are currently assigned. Plus in order to dock two Soyuz capsules at once would require another docking node, and nobody wants to pay for building that and taking it up - $1 billion at least, $500M to build it and $500M to launch it on a Shuttle mission that isn't available - they are all booked on previously scheduled construction flights. Plus if you had two Soyuz capsules docked it would tremendously complicate Shuttle ops around the station - mission rules call for keeping clear of the Soyuz capsules both spatially on orbit and schedulewise during their changeouts. It could be done, but the problems just snowball when you look at the two Soyuz option...
When I started working on Station in the mid-80s, the dreams were high. We were going to provide ultra-pure water, on-orbit X-ray machines to analyze fragile protein crystals grown in zero-G that would never survive reentry, animal cages and discection capabilities (imagine handling mouse litter and blood drops in orbit!), freezers and microscopes and video links, centrifuges to grow wheat in lunar gravity levels and corn in Martian gravity levels - plus all the solar cells and heat radiators to run all of this stuff - run by astronauts living off of a closed life support system that would be a dress rehersal for a Mars mission.
Well, the ugly reality of $10,000 per pound to orbit reared it's ugly head, the Cold War ended and the project had to include the Russians, the mission orbit was changed to let Russian rockets barely get there at the expense of halving what a US Shuttle could get there from a Florida launch, the life support system is basically scuba tanks of air and there's no lab equipment to speak of or crew time to run it if there was any. I guess the only thing left to do is turn a module into a film backdrop for recording fantasy dreams....
I hate to say it, but I can hardly wait for NASA to declare the Space Station a rousing sucess, bring the last crew home and deorbit the damn thing. Only then can we get on with establishing a lunar base or doing something like Zubrin's Mars Direct where we escape the tyranny of having to drag up every single pound of stuff we use at hideous cost and start using extraterrestrial resources instead.
This is one scary book that everybody should read. The Russian author, Ken Alibek, moved to Alabama (where I live) where he was a consultant after his defection to the US Army Chemical/Biological Warfare Group at Fort McClellan in Anniston, so I have actually followed this story fairly closely. Dr. Alibek is basically the guy behind the drive to vaccinate the US Army against anthrax, which has caused quite a furor over the past few years. A slide show he gave/gives fairly frequently is here and his Congressional testimony is here... it's VERY interesting reading. If Dr. Alibek's writings don't induce a rising sense of worry in the back of your mind, just keep reading here.