That last comment is not unrelated. I would be interested in seeing the amount of advertising money made by right-wing hacks stirring up the birther movement etc. to the annual budget of NASA.
This is very true, but doesn't actually apply here. This space station is part of Project 921, which China has been working on since 1992.
The schedule has slipped by a year or two, but what they are doing now is pretty what they planned to be doing in the early 90s.
The US on the other hand has gotten into the habit of switching programs every 18 months or so. This is unlikely to change with a 'new space race' because the Chinese threat to US space dominance is boiling-frog slow, and the US public are decidedly lukewarm regarding such things these days - see the total non-response to Obama's "Sputnik Moment" comment.
So my money is on the Chinese, as they are showing an ability to commit to long term projects in space. Guess its easier to stay the course when your leadership is totally unaccountable to anybody.
Not sure why every news source is banging on about the station being low mass; once the principle of on-orbit assembly is mastered the only real limits to mass are how many modules you choose to launch, and how much fuel you need for a reboost. Getting from 60-tonne station to 400-tonne station is a far smaller step than getting from nothing to a multi-modular station.
The fact China isn't going to build a very large station may indicate firm intentions to go to the Moon. If they are just using this to practice techniques for longer range exploration, there isn't much point making it huge.
NASA has been told by the president to build heavy life (i.e. Ares V) rockets to facilitate a NEA/Mars mission.
Now someone at the agency has said "screw heavy lift, we are going to assemble our mission in space" directly contradicting the supposed path.
To get people on this Mars mission, the US government is paying for the development of more than one manned capsule, to be launched on more than one rocket.
Its just like the bickering design bureaus that kept the Soviets from mounting a serious challenge to the Apollo programme. The Chinese thank you for giving them a perfect opportunity to catch up and overtake.
Musk doesn't have the money to go to Mars. He doesn't have the technology yet. However, he can make SpaceX popular with credulous nerves by making a "10 or 20 years" claim.
Thats what I took from the article; the only thing Lustig is being accused of is excessive showmanship and overstating how firm certain conclusions are.
One thing I did notice was that the consensus about what causes heart disease and diabetes was different in the 1970s in Europe than in the US. Compare the obesity rates of these two areas; is this some kind of grim, accidental, controlled experiment?
The word 'debunked' is used by that. Don't say someones argument is wrong, because then someone will ask you why. Say its been debunked, and then you don't have to produce reasons for its being wrong. If people still want to know whats wrong with the argument, say its been *extensively* debunked...
Except that it had to make two burns after it had left Earth; one to circularise its orbit, and another to deorbit. Don't presume to lecture me on orbital dynamics.
Not quite. The R-7 had several upper stages added over 10 years to become the first Soyuz rocket, and that rocket was then modified to be safer during the Apollo-Soyuz test program. Further modifications were made after the cold war ended and the US bought Russia into the ISS.
The thing is; it works. It puts ~8t into orbit very reliably, very cheaply, and provides human occupants with what is generally a very smooth ride (based on the description of the launch given by an American).
Why change what works so well? The big irony of the moon race is that the Soviets effort produced a lot more hardware that continued to be used after the moon race was over (Soyuz capsule+rocket, Proton, Block-D upper stage, NK-33 engines)
ICBM tests were ballasted to give other groups in the US (not staffed by Nazis) a chance to launch the first US satellite.
Also, the US was fully committed to the space race by the time of Vostok 1, which is the actual event being discussed here.
The idea that early Soviet successes were part of some cunning ploy by Eisenhower is utterly retarded. The public perception of the Soviet threat helped carry Kennedy in the 1960 election, so you are supposing that Eisenhower would deliberately sabotage his own party and his own vice-president. I am calling bullshit on this one.
The hang-wringing in the western press about this seems to me to be largely due to an inability to fit the event into the triumphalist narrative that has endured in government and media since the end of the cold war. The idea that capitalism, specifically our version of capitalism is best always, everywhere and forever.
Its disquieting to such dogmatists to be reminded of even a single success from an alternative way of doing things. Even if that way of doing things ultimately imploded on itself decades later, it makes a rational person question the absolutism of the narrative, and thus the narrators must try and dissect and blunt the impact of the threatening event.
Its not faith to accept the scientific consensus; what you are believing in is the process, not the specific conclusions. The process of how scientific hypotheses are tested is easily understandable to the layman, and knowing that it is being applied can satisfy you that the conclusions drawn are the best ones available.
People comparing science and faith are retards attacking the source of all our current worthwhile knowledge, normally for a particular agenda.
...there will be a simple, over-the-counter cure for baldness.
And then, on the following day, a drunk college student will pass out and have the formula smeared all over his face by his almost equally drunk 'friends'
Firstly, that requires a radically different manufacturing technique. Secondly, it would suffer from serious heat issues. Running a cooling fluid through a 3D transistor block would be troublesome due to the way fluids behave at such small scales.
Don't think he is saying they can't do these things, I think he is saying we currently don't because we are addicted to exponential speed increases.
Programmers just assume Moore's Law will protect them from bloat. They are working from the assumption that they can program stupider and technology will save them.
Relying on parallel processing will flip this relationship upside down. The only thing chipmakers will be able to do is produce chips cheaper, thus having more of them in the same level of device. At this point, speed increases must come from the programmer as they have to correctly implement concurrency to have the extra hardware do anything better.
I just don't think the software industry is ready for this. Its just too full of lazy, incompetent programmers for them to be able to adjust to the new method of progress.
Also, STFU about quantum computing. You clearly don't know a damn thing. It isn't some kind of magic bullet that is going to save us from the end of Moore's law, and you are in no position to predict its arrival.
A fellow A3000 user! I too miss having an 8MHz computer with 2Mb of RAM that could boot into a pretty well implemented window environment in ~2 seconds.
Whatever happened to saving documents with drag and drop anyway? That was cool.
Transistors were invented before vacuum tubes were phased out, by several decades IIRC.
There is no technology, not even speculative, that can give the kind of increases in processing power we are used to seeing once you've hit the atomic level. The best research at the moment centres on getting to the atomic level (which might not ever be feasible as a mass produced technology).
So, if its all the same to you, I won't let your glib dismissal of Prof. Kaku's comments to influence my assessment of them.
Random, often small, bits of metal flying around LEO are a hazard, so you want to get rid of them. The military kindly offers to develop a way to track and bring them down, whilst conveniently developing the capability to do the same to enemy ICBMs, re-entry vehicles, satellites etc..
I think the US wants to control all human access to space, tbh. The Russians and the Chinese will have to ask for 'clearance' to launch anything and won't be allowed to do military stuff up there (whilst the US will be free to).
Of course, there is the possibility that China gets there first.
Please, don't indulge in conspiracy theories about the Chinese spacewalk. The same deal applies to this as to with the moon landings; if it were faked one of the countries competitors would've used that to score an immediate propaganda coup.
Unless you can account for the silence of the US, Japan and India on the matter, don't take this crap seriously. Shenzhou 7 happened, and there was a spacewalk.
You seem to not believe the evidence supplied for a Chinese spacewalk, accepted by nations with every reason to portray China as more backward than it is, yet you unquestioningly accept the vastly over-optimistic projections of private space companies that are yet to put a single human into orbit. Your skepticism is rather selective, betraying your bias.
If Shenzhou can be called 1960's technology because it looks like the Soyuz, then SpaceShipOne can be called 1950's technology because it's basically a nicely painted X-15.
Slashdot Mirror
Why not? In six months, you will have completely outsourced it to Russia...
That last comment is not unrelated. I would be interested in seeing the amount of advertising money made by right-wing hacks stirring up the birther movement etc. to the annual budget of NASA.
This is very true, but doesn't actually apply here. This space station is part of Project 921, which China has been working on since 1992.
The schedule has slipped by a year or two, but what they are doing now is pretty what they planned to be doing in the early 90s.
The US on the other hand has gotten into the habit of switching programs every 18 months or so. This is unlikely to change with a 'new space race' because the Chinese threat to US space dominance is boiling-frog slow, and the US public are decidedly lukewarm regarding such things these days - see the total non-response to Obama's "Sputnik Moment" comment.
So my money is on the Chinese, as they are showing an ability to commit to long term projects in space. Guess its easier to stay the course when your leadership is totally unaccountable to anybody.
Not sure why every news source is banging on about the station being low mass; once the principle of on-orbit assembly is mastered the only real limits to mass are how many modules you choose to launch, and how much fuel you need for a reboost. Getting from 60-tonne station to 400-tonne station is a far smaller step than getting from nothing to a multi-modular station.
The fact China isn't going to build a very large station may indicate firm intentions to go to the Moon. If they are just using this to practice techniques for longer range exploration, there isn't much point making it huge.
NASA has been told by the president to build heavy life (i.e. Ares V) rockets to facilitate a NEA/Mars mission.
Now someone at the agency has said "screw heavy lift, we are going to assemble our mission in space" directly contradicting the supposed path.
To get people on this Mars mission, the US government is paying for the development of more than one manned capsule, to be launched on more than one rocket.
Its just like the bickering design bureaus that kept the Soviets from mounting a serious challenge to the Apollo programme. The Chinese thank you for giving them a perfect opportunity to catch up and overtake.
Musk doesn't have the money to go to Mars. He doesn't have the technology yet. However, he can make SpaceX popular with credulous nerves by making a "10 or 20 years" claim.
Thats what I took from the article; the only thing Lustig is being accused of is excessive showmanship and overstating how firm certain conclusions are.
One thing I did notice was that the consensus about what causes heart disease and diabetes was different in the 1970s in Europe than in the US. Compare the obesity rates of these two areas; is this some kind of grim, accidental, controlled experiment?
The word 'debunked' is used by that. Don't say someones argument is wrong, because then someone will ask you why. Say its been debunked, and then you don't have to produce reasons for its being wrong. If people still want to know whats wrong with the argument, say its been *extensively* debunked...
Except that it had to make two burns after it had left Earth; one to circularise its orbit, and another to deorbit. Don't presume to lecture me on orbital dynamics.
Not quite. The R-7 had several upper stages added over 10 years to become the first Soyuz rocket, and that rocket was then modified to be safer during the Apollo-Soyuz test program. Further modifications were made after the cold war ended and the US bought Russia into the ISS.
The thing is; it works. It puts ~8t into orbit very reliably, very cheaply, and provides human occupants with what is generally a very smooth ride (based on the description of the launch given by an American).
Why change what works so well? The big irony of the moon race is that the Soviets effort produced a lot more hardware that continued to be used after the moon race was over (Soyuz capsule+rocket, Proton, Block-D upper stage, NK-33 engines)
This is revisionist crap.
ICBM tests were ballasted to give other groups in the US (not staffed by Nazis) a chance to launch the first US satellite.
Also, the US was fully committed to the space race by the time of Vostok 1, which is the actual event being discussed here.
The idea that early Soviet successes were part of some cunning ploy by Eisenhower is utterly retarded. The public perception of the Soviet threat helped carry Kennedy in the 1960 election, so you are supposing that Eisenhower would deliberately sabotage his own party and his own vice-president. I am calling bullshit on this one.
Vostok 1 wasn't a "ballistic shot" - it went into orbit. The first American in space, however, did not.
It was 50 years ago, get over it.
The hang-wringing in the western press about this seems to me to be largely due to an inability to fit the event into the triumphalist narrative that has endured in government and media since the end of the cold war. The idea that capitalism, specifically our version of capitalism is best always, everywhere and forever.
Its disquieting to such dogmatists to be reminded of even a single success from an alternative way of doing things. Even if that way of doing things ultimately imploded on itself decades later, it makes a rational person question the absolutism of the narrative, and thus the narrators must try and dissect and blunt the impact of the threatening event.
He survived, but only just. Until the paramedics got there the crew were convinced he was long dead.
Its not faith to accept the scientific consensus; what you are believing in is the process, not the specific conclusions. The process of how scientific hypotheses are tested is easily understandable to the layman, and knowing that it is being applied can satisfy you that the conclusions drawn are the best ones available.
People comparing science and faith are retards attacking the source of all our current worthwhile knowledge, normally for a particular agenda.
Apply Occam's Razor. The current stuff doesn't work...
Playing devils advocate, public funded research could be consider an integral part of a capitalist society, and something capitalists support?
...there will be a simple, over-the-counter cure for baldness.
And then, on the following day, a drunk college student will pass out and have the formula smeared all over his face by his almost equally drunk 'friends'
Firstly, that requires a radically different manufacturing technique. Secondly, it would suffer from serious heat issues. Running a cooling fluid through a 3D transistor block would be troublesome due to the way fluids behave at such small scales.
Don't think he is saying they can't do these things, I think he is saying we currently don't because we are addicted to exponential speed increases.
Programmers just assume Moore's Law will protect them from bloat. They are working from the assumption that they can program stupider and technology will save them.
Relying on parallel processing will flip this relationship upside down. The only thing chipmakers will be able to do is produce chips cheaper, thus having more of them in the same level of device. At this point, speed increases must come from the programmer as they have to correctly implement concurrency to have the extra hardware do anything better.
I just don't think the software industry is ready for this. Its just too full of lazy, incompetent programmers for them to be able to adjust to the new method of progress.
Also, STFU about quantum computing. You clearly don't know a damn thing. It isn't some kind of magic bullet that is going to save us from the end of Moore's law, and you are in no position to predict its arrival.
A fellow A3000 user! I too miss having an 8MHz computer with 2Mb of RAM that could boot into a pretty well implemented window environment in ~2 seconds.
Whatever happened to saving documents with drag and drop anyway? That was cool.
Transistors were invented before vacuum tubes were phased out, by several decades IIRC.
There is no technology, not even speculative, that can give the kind of increases in processing power we are used to seeing once you've hit the atomic level. The best research at the moment centres on getting to the atomic level (which might not ever be feasible as a mass produced technology).
So, if its all the same to you, I won't let your glib dismissal of Prof. Kaku's comments to influence my assessment of them.
Random, often small, bits of metal flying around LEO are a hazard, so you want to get rid of them. The military kindly offers to develop a way to track and bring them down, whilst conveniently developing the capability to do the same to enemy ICBMs, re-entry vehicles, satellites etc..
I think the US wants to control all human access to space, tbh. The Russians and the Chinese will have to ask for 'clearance' to launch anything and won't be allowed to do military stuff up there (whilst the US will be free to).
Of course, there is the possibility that China gets there first.
Please, don't indulge in conspiracy theories about the Chinese spacewalk. The same deal applies to this as to with the moon landings; if it were faked one of the countries competitors would've used that to score an immediate propaganda coup.
Unless you can account for the silence of the US, Japan and India on the matter, don't take this crap seriously. Shenzhou 7 happened, and there was a spacewalk.
You seem to not believe the evidence supplied for a Chinese spacewalk, accepted by nations with every reason to portray China as more backward than it is, yet you unquestioningly accept the vastly over-optimistic projections of private space companies that are yet to put a single human into orbit. Your skepticism is rather selective, betraying your bias.
If Shenzhou can be called 1960's technology because it looks like the Soyuz, then SpaceShipOne can be called 1950's technology because it's basically a nicely painted X-15.
To the best of my knowledge, all additive manufacture techniques that work in metal need a vacuum - so, if you pardon the pun, don't hold your breath.