There is more to it than that, and to be frank the 'alternative' theories are not good. To call the accepted theories 'populist' is, by the way, a red flag that you can kind of a crank.
This is a "hmm" results at best. What you have to understand is that this measurement is pretty local. They are very far from getting the big picture on this one despite being oversold in a press release.
Sounds like Chinese whispers to me (pardon the pun.)
In any case, which Long March rockets is this (supposedly authoritative) guy allegedly talking about? The current ones, or the ones that are in development?
China's rocket fleet currently uses hypergolic propellants, which are expensive to buy, use, and clean up. Their next generation use LOx/RP-1 like sensible people, and will utilize the industrial base of modern China rather than legacy ICBM manufacturing from the 1970s.
The middle does spin, just not with such a great tangential velocity. Unless you have some kind of joint, at which point we are into the realm of some extremely tricky engineering (you want people on this station right? So how are you going to stop air getting out? Can you make this triply, quadruply redundant, like a good space system should be?)
And for what? Making something sci-fi like in LEO gets us not one iota closer to colonising Mars or any other world.
My point is, it isn't likely. More likely is a successful but unremarkable existence as a LEO launch service provider.
Launching satellites, and even manned spacecraft, IS just engineering. That is not meant in a dismissive way, by the way. I just object to the ideological spin (only a fraction of which emanates from Musk himself.
We are talking about manned spaceflight. I am well aware that SpaceX has attracted commercial clients for satellite launches; that you can make money putting communication satellites up is not news.
But their flagship program, the one that is being discussed here and touted as evidence that the glorious Invisible Hand will take us all to the stars, is what I am saying is completely dependent on NASA, and I'm, right.
Furthermore, the development of SpaceX launch technology, whilst commercial in its operation, would have been far more difficult or impossible without technological inheritance from NASA (e.g. pintle injector) and their support and facilities (remember where the first Falcon 9 was launched from...)
SpaceX is just an engineering company. They are a pretty decent one, so far. The fanboys (with a little subtle encouragement from Musk himself, unfortunately) are blowing them up to be a lot more than they are, and claiming that their Final Ideological Victory is at hand. It simply is not.
I really don't see how spinning round an enormous space station (radius has to be on order 100s of metres for the occupants not to get sick from the rotation) where much of the mass is given over to providing one of the very conditions you go to space to escape will facilitate interplanetary space travel. It certainly won't facilitate easy fuel transfers. If you think it will, ask someone to do donuts in your car whilst you try to fill it up with petrol.
SpaceX is doing something that the US managed during the Gemini program, the USSR perfected in the 1970's with the Salyut stations, and the Chinese have just done. The first two of those national programs did so without any help or prior knowledge to draw on, and the Chinese had less help from the Russians than is commonly acknowledged.
SpaceX has had their hand held every step of the way by NASA, and have benefitted greatly from NASAs expertise, experience and technology - as have all commercial space launch companies in the US. The people running these companies freely admit this, but the libertarian fanboys simply refuse to, and demand NASA "get out of the way". This is like a teenage, entirely dependent on his parents income to live, demanding they "get out of the way" of his life.
Secondly, the "commercial" label is quite a stretch. These companies are offering a service that is almost exclusively used by a government agency (the very one that fanboys want to die right now quickly please) - they are not catering to a market. The artificial generation of demand that they are exploiting is pure Keynesian. No wonder the space libertarian crowd don't want to talk about this aspect of it.
It is nice that the US is working towards a Shuttle replacement, regardless of how it achieves this - but it is wrong to take this as a sign of the Ultimate Capitalist Triumph In Space, or as a cue to tear apart NASA in the name of ideology.
The reality at present is this; you can support the Libertarian Party, Ron Paul, and any other markets-above-all nuts - OR you can support the continued presence of the US in space. You cannot do both, at least not honestly.
This is very good advice, and best for all concerned.
It also avoids the worst case scenario; that if you use your social network accounts to shill for the company long enough, they might try to claim ownership of them.
Keep your work and your life separate. They don't own you.
I'm not certain that occupying roughly the same part of phase space as the Sun, and having similar chemistry, is enough to qualify these targets stars as being definitively born in the same place as our Sun.
Don't get me wrong, this kind of targeting search isn't necessarily a bad idea - I'm just skeptical that anyone is so sure of the dynamic origin of our Sun.
Would this work on the Raspberry Pi? Or some other cheap computer that an amateur could use as the starting point for his or her home robotics project?
Fluid ounces? British fail. About as many people in the UK use fluid ounces as use hogsheads and firkins. Older people sometimes use ounces for weights in cooking, but all fluids are measured in milliliters now (with the exception of blood, beer, and milk which for the time being still come in pints - although the latter is in the processes of transition)
Its a question of degree. Certainly ARM is a good company that can easily been seen to produce valuable IP.
However, if they somehow went bankrupt, a patent troll could buy up their IP and set up a very profitable and entirely non-productive NPE who would only subtract from human technological capability.
My point was not that ARM is bad for producing IP, merely that it is a symptom of how the UK economy works that they shy away from manufacture.
In the world economy, the UK is like the guy in a team who says he is the 'ideas guy' they lounges around the office doing very little but taking credit for everything. We have to remember what it is like to get our hands dirty.
This disconnect from the physical economy makes us unresponsive to changes in it (when oil prices rocketed last time, in 2008, it wasn't British people who went hungry...) - and that is dangerous.
My personal political beliefs, as far as economics go, is that we need an economic system that is rooted in physical processes - but still allows room for innovation. Both Green and Pirate political economy figure influence me in this. I see them as inherently compatible.
They draw up a definition of property that is enitirely contrary to common sense, and use it as a pretext to brutalise people in the name of sticking up for their 'rights'
Green and Pirate issues do have some overlap. Currently pure rent-seeking counts as economic activity, and so long as someone in your country is getting revenue from somewhere else, can perversely appear as growth. This is not a trivial problem; the UK has been a heavily IP-based economy for a long time (look at ARM: a UK company making one of the most ubiquitous architectures in the world that doesn't itself ever make a single chip. Pharmaceuticals are another good example.)
This can mask underlying problems in the physical economy - which should be of concern to Greens. Anything that allows you to maintain business-as-usual whilst oil prices rocket and we head towards a permanent energy crisis is obviously dangerous.
...and all those orders were scuppered by various countries who basically didn't like the fact we had something they didn't. Grumbling from a few members of the public was just a pretext. The corralling of Concorde into transatlantic trips was a purely political decision from all parties, to stick it to France and the UK.
It wasn't that it only "made sense" to to flights to JFK - it is that the US attempt at a supersonic passenger jet was an utter failure, and when UK/France got theirs built first you guys basically through a hissy fit, banned some of the most profitable routes (across the US and back in 1 working day) on the shallow pretext of sonic booms
(hint: The US isn't exactly densely populated. The problem was manageable even over land)
I am not a teacher. However, I trained as one for a short while (I wasn't cut out for it, as it happens.) - and both my mother and wife are teachers.
I have direct experience of UK classroom teaching, as the vocational part of the teacher training I did. I have gone into my wife's school to run a special lesson on stars when the class started asking questions about astrophysics she couldn't answer (we had lots of fun explaining hydrodynamic equilibrium with groups of kids pushing against each other!)
Despite having more direct contact with education that most of the posters here, I feel far less inclined to offer up a solution. Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect, people.
And this is the problem with this X-prize nonsense. The notion is that teachers are somehow morons, and if only some flashy entrepreneur could jump in with a magic idea, everything would be golden. The contempt for the teaching profession is inherent in the concept (and in the comments here, judging by the number of people who think that teaching unions are the source of all education problems.)
My personal suggest is to first of all, stop using teachers as punchbags and listen to them. Unless, of course, you would improve healthcare by demonizing doctors? In fact, that is the analogy - people who think they can improve education by second guessing teachers are equivalent to those who think they can improve healthcare by second guessing doctors i.e. homeopaths.
Anyone offering a magic bullet here is an educational homeopath.
Its almost pitiful watching the west (both US and EU) cheerfully gallop towards oblivion as political, economic, and technological powers.
The private sector will colonise Mars? With what money, I ask. Who is going to pay the hundreds of billions needed for this complex operation?
Our leaders have just given up. They haven't a clue what is wrong (or are in complete denial about it, e.g. peak oil) and think that if they just pray to the invisible hand everything will magically turn out OK. They are like Mayan priests desperately ramping up the human sacrifices as the crops fail around them. Clinging to their faith even tighter the more it conspicuously fails to deliver tangible results.
Let me offer a simple prediction. SpaceX will end up being slip into a profitable, but unremarkable, satellite launch business, and a separate manned spaceflight business. Having a monopoly on US human spaceflight, the latter will cheerfully gouge NASA for every penny they can, as part of their fiduciary duty.
US human spaceflight will stagnate even further. ESA will remain a non-presence in human spaceflight. The last of Russia's Soviet-era technology will be retired and they won't be able to replace it with anything decent. China and India will take the solar system. The End.
Not that unreasonable a prediction. Iran has really stepped on the gas with regards to science+technology (their current president - yes the 'crazy' one - is himself an engineer I believe.) They have done a couple of orbital launches - confirmed by other nations, not lied about them like DPRK did - and have stated they wish to put men into orbit.
One sunny prospect worth considering though; the Islamic world has an unfortunate habit of producing, in a very small minority of its population, suicide bombers. Imagine what damage could be done by such a person in control of a spacecraft moving at ~10km/s...
One day we will truly master the art of connecting human nervous systems to computers. And on the following day, some asshole will create the first neurological malware.
The future is a tech-illiterate grandma driven insane by trojans, trying to claws her own eyes out just to try and make the continuous loop penis enlargement ads stop.
The buzz is because of the very low price, and its educational design objective. This is aimed, in part, at children who want to learn computers (properly I mean, not the crap they teach you about spreadsheets in school.)
As you point out, this is mobile-phone-like hardware; but that potentially means that an inventive teenager could use it as the basis of a homemade mobile-phone-like device.
Slashdot Mirror
There is more to it than that, and to be frank the 'alternative' theories are not good. To call the accepted theories 'populist' is, by the way, a red flag that you can kind of a crank.
This is a "hmm" results at best. What you have to understand is that this measurement is pretty local. They are very far from getting the big picture on this one despite being oversold in a press release.
Also, why rushing to break the consensus on dark matter might not be the best idea: http://edgepenguin.com/content/darkmatter.html
Sounds like Chinese whispers to me (pardon the pun.)
In any case, which Long March rockets is this (supposedly authoritative) guy allegedly talking about? The current ones, or the ones that are in development?
China's rocket fleet currently uses hypergolic propellants, which are expensive to buy, use, and clean up. Their next generation use LOx/RP-1 like sensible people, and will utilize the industrial base of modern China rather than legacy ICBM manufacturing from the 1970s.
I'm fairly skeptical of this claim.
I'm a physicist too.
The middle does spin, just not with such a great tangential velocity. Unless you have some kind of joint, at which point we are into the realm of some extremely tricky engineering (you want people on this station right? So how are you going to stop air getting out? Can you make this triply, quadruply redundant, like a good space system should be?)
And for what? Making something sci-fi like in LEO gets us not one iota closer to colonising Mars or any other world.
My point is, it isn't likely. More likely is a successful but unremarkable existence as a LEO launch service provider.
Launching satellites, and even manned spacecraft, IS just engineering. That is not meant in a dismissive way, by the way. I just object to the ideological spin (only a fraction of which emanates from Musk himself.
We are talking about manned spaceflight. I am well aware that SpaceX has attracted commercial clients for satellite launches; that you can make money putting communication satellites up is not news.
But their flagship program, the one that is being discussed here and touted as evidence that the glorious Invisible Hand will take us all to the stars, is what I am saying is completely dependent on NASA, and I'm, right.
Furthermore, the development of SpaceX launch technology, whilst commercial in its operation, would have been far more difficult or impossible without technological inheritance from NASA (e.g. pintle injector) and their support and facilities (remember where the first Falcon 9 was launched from...)
SpaceX is just an engineering company. They are a pretty decent one, so far. The fanboys (with a little subtle encouragement from Musk himself, unfortunately) are blowing them up to be a lot more than they are, and claiming that their Final Ideological Victory is at hand. It simply is not.
Citation please. Bear in mind, I want a credible source. Lots of people in China talk shit and don't have any real authority.
I really don't see how spinning round an enormous space station (radius has to be on order 100s of metres for the occupants not to get sick from the rotation) where much of the mass is given over to providing one of the very conditions you go to space to escape will facilitate interplanetary space travel. It certainly won't facilitate easy fuel transfers. If you think it will, ask someone to do donuts in your car whilst you try to fill it up with petrol.
A little perspective is needed here.
SpaceX is doing something that the US managed during the Gemini program, the USSR perfected in the 1970's with the Salyut stations, and the Chinese have just done. The first two of those national programs did so without any help or prior knowledge to draw on, and the Chinese had less help from the Russians than is commonly acknowledged.
SpaceX has had their hand held every step of the way by NASA, and have benefitted greatly from NASAs expertise, experience and technology - as have all commercial space launch companies in the US. The people running these companies freely admit this, but the libertarian fanboys simply refuse to, and demand NASA "get out of the way". This is like a teenage, entirely dependent on his parents income to live, demanding they "get out of the way" of his life.
Secondly, the "commercial" label is quite a stretch. These companies are offering a service that is almost exclusively used by a government agency (the very one that fanboys want to die right now quickly please) - they are not catering to a market. The artificial generation of demand that they are exploiting is pure Keynesian. No wonder the space libertarian crowd don't want to talk about this aspect of it.
It is nice that the US is working towards a Shuttle replacement, regardless of how it achieves this - but it is wrong to take this as a sign of the Ultimate Capitalist Triumph In Space, or as a cue to tear apart NASA in the name of ideology.
The reality at present is this; you can support the Libertarian Party, Ron Paul, and any other markets-above-all nuts - OR you can support the continued presence of the US in space. You cannot do both, at least not honestly.
This is very good advice, and best for all concerned.
It also avoids the worst case scenario; that if you use your social network accounts to shill for the company long enough, they might try to claim ownership of them.
Keep your work and your life separate. They don't own you.
I'm not certain that occupying roughly the same part of phase space as the Sun, and having similar chemistry, is enough to qualify these targets stars as being definitively born in the same place as our Sun.
Don't get me wrong, this kind of targeting search isn't necessarily a bad idea - I'm just skeptical that anyone is so sure of the dynamic origin of our Sun.
Would this work on the Raspberry Pi? Or some other cheap computer that an amateur could use as the starting point for his or her home robotics project?
Fluid ounces? British fail. About as many people in the UK use fluid ounces as use hogsheads and firkins. Older people sometimes use ounces for weights in cooking, but all fluids are measured in milliliters now (with the exception of blood, beer, and milk which for the time being still come in pints - although the latter is in the processes of transition)
Its a question of degree. Certainly ARM is a good company that can easily been seen to produce valuable IP.
However, if they somehow went bankrupt, a patent troll could buy up their IP and set up a very profitable and entirely non-productive NPE who would only subtract from human technological capability.
Unlikely he would be able to enter the country, based on what happened to the other guy: http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2009/may/06/michael-savage-sue-jacqui-smith
By the way, this is an extreme decision. Don't take it as a normal occurrence. I've said some pretty off-colour things on twitter and I'm fine.
Fucking hell that is a massive strawman.
My point was not that ARM is bad for producing IP, merely that it is a symptom of how the UK economy works that they shy away from manufacture.
In the world economy, the UK is like the guy in a team who says he is the 'ideas guy' they lounges around the office doing very little but taking credit for everything. We have to remember what it is like to get our hands dirty.
This disconnect from the physical economy makes us unresponsive to changes in it (when oil prices rocketed last time, in 2008, it wasn't British people who went hungry...) - and that is dangerous.
My personal political beliefs, as far as economics go, is that we need an economic system that is rooted in physical processes - but still allows room for innovation. Both Green and Pirate political economy figure influence me in this. I see them as inherently compatible.
Yep
They draw up a definition of property that is enitirely contrary to common sense, and use it as a pretext to brutalise people in the name of sticking up for their 'rights'
Green and Pirate issues do have some overlap. Currently pure rent-seeking counts as economic activity, and so long as someone in your country is getting revenue from somewhere else, can perversely appear as growth. This is not a trivial problem; the UK has been a heavily IP-based economy for a long time (look at ARM: a UK company making one of the most ubiquitous architectures in the world that doesn't itself ever make a single chip. Pharmaceuticals are another good example.)
This can mask underlying problems in the physical economy - which should be of concern to Greens. Anything that allows you to maintain business-as-usual whilst oil prices rocket and we head towards a permanent energy crisis is obviously dangerous.
...and all those orders were scuppered by various countries who basically didn't like the fact we had something they didn't. Grumbling from a few members of the public was just a pretext. The corralling of Concorde into transatlantic trips was a purely political decision from all parties, to stick it to France and the UK.
It wasn't that it only "made sense" to to flights to JFK - it is that the US attempt at a supersonic passenger jet was an utter failure, and when UK/France got theirs built first you guys basically through a hissy fit, banned some of the most profitable routes (across the US and back in 1 working day) on the shallow pretext of sonic booms
(hint: The US isn't exactly densely populated. The problem was manageable even over land)
Well, that is all well and good - but what happens at super-subsupersonic speeds?
I am not a teacher. However, I trained as one for a short while (I wasn't cut out for it, as it happens.) - and both my mother and wife are teachers.
I have direct experience of UK classroom teaching, as the vocational part of the teacher training I did. I have gone into my wife's school to run a special lesson on stars when the class started asking questions about astrophysics she couldn't answer (we had lots of fun explaining hydrodynamic equilibrium with groups of kids pushing against each other!)
Despite having more direct contact with education that most of the posters here, I feel far less inclined to offer up a solution. Its called the Dunning-Kruger effect, people.
And this is the problem with this X-prize nonsense. The notion is that teachers are somehow morons, and if only some flashy entrepreneur could jump in with a magic idea, everything would be golden. The contempt for the teaching profession is inherent in the concept (and in the comments here, judging by the number of people who think that teaching unions are the source of all education problems.)
My personal suggest is to first of all, stop using teachers as punchbags and listen to them. Unless, of course, you would improve healthcare by demonizing doctors? In fact, that is the analogy - people who think they can improve education by second guessing teachers are equivalent to those who think they can improve healthcare by second guessing doctors i.e. homeopaths.
Anyone offering a magic bullet here is an educational homeopath.
Its almost pitiful watching the west (both US and EU) cheerfully gallop towards oblivion as political, economic, and technological powers.
The private sector will colonise Mars? With what money, I ask. Who is going to pay the hundreds of billions needed for this complex operation?
Our leaders have just given up. They haven't a clue what is wrong (or are in complete denial about it, e.g. peak oil) and think that if they just pray to the invisible hand everything will magically turn out OK. They are like Mayan priests desperately ramping up the human sacrifices as the crops fail around them. Clinging to their faith even tighter the more it conspicuously fails to deliver tangible results.
Let me offer a simple prediction. SpaceX will end up being slip into a profitable, but unremarkable, satellite launch business, and a separate manned spaceflight business. Having a monopoly on US human spaceflight, the latter will cheerfully gouge NASA for every penny they can, as part of their fiduciary duty.
US human spaceflight will stagnate even further. ESA will remain a non-presence in human spaceflight. The last of Russia's Soviet-era technology will be retired and they won't be able to replace it with anything decent. China and India will take the solar system. The End.
Not that unreasonable a prediction. Iran has really stepped on the gas with regards to science+technology (their current president - yes the 'crazy' one - is himself an engineer I believe.) They have done a couple of orbital launches - confirmed by other nations, not lied about them like DPRK did - and have stated they wish to put men into orbit.
One sunny prospect worth considering though; the Islamic world has an unfortunate habit of producing, in a very small minority of its population, suicide bombers. Imagine what damage could be done by such a person in control of a spacecraft moving at ~10km/s...
One day we will truly master the art of connecting human nervous systems to computers. And on the following day, some asshole will create the first neurological malware.
The future is a tech-illiterate grandma driven insane by trojans, trying to claws her own eyes out just to try and make the continuous loop penis enlargement ads stop.
The buzz is because of the very low price, and its educational design objective. This is aimed, in part, at children who want to learn computers (properly I mean, not the crap they teach you about spreadsheets in school.)
As you point out, this is mobile-phone-like hardware; but that potentially means that an inventive teenager could use it as the basis of a homemade mobile-phone-like device.