Yeah, because if you carry hydrocarbons and liquid oxygen on board, the most efficient thing you can possible do with them is burn them in a generator and use the electricity to power a plasma propulsion system.
Having a fission reactor on board (the only thing that can possible deliver on the promises of VASIMR, even if its completed) is no small deal. Aside from having a risk assessment that involves 'burning nuclear reactor falling out of the sky in pieces' you also have the fact that they really, really fucking heavy.
True, but this means that the idea of allocating resources based on money and an (artificially) stoked sense of greed is incapable of providing what any objective observe can clearly see we need - an interplanetary civilisation.
He is, in this article, a cheerleader for the private sector whilst his only commercial product is derived from work done at NASA funded by the US government. I've found that a great deal of private sector 'acheivement' is actually co-opted from public works, or has its losses buried in the public purse.
I was under the impression that, because of this test, they must've had a working magnetic nozzle? Certainly that has been implied in many things I have read about the project. Could it be that private spaceflight has been overhyped AGAIN?
It's not that private companies are inherently incapable of doing space travel. The fact is that space travel simply isn't profitable, and therefore, there's no reason for private companies to do it.
That is pretty damn funny.
Basically, its "I COULD climb that tree any time I want to, I just don't want to!". Nothing other than blind faith in the 'invisible hand' or some such nonsense could convince you that private enterprise is capable of space flight.
Ironically, you've already indicated the reason why; corporations can only respond to simply profit margins. If something is a) worthwhile and b) has a worth that can't be represented monetarily then private enterprise is lost.
I find it intensely amusing that the only commercial space flight companies that can actually put people into space for money, are the ones who outsource the actual business of launching rockets to a foreign government, using equipment designed by communists.
To me it has exposed serious weaknesses in the corporate model of organization. Space travel just doesn't seem like something they can do, at all, whilst larger governments have been doing it competently for years. Sure, there are corporate contractors for government funded space missions, but they are kept on a very tight leash. It could be that higher-level organization is not something you can get from institutions built around artificially inflated self interest.
No, BT are clinging to the outdated business model of 'not paying a subsidy to another industry with better political connections than you have'. They need to get with the times, or the FAC are going to come around and smash all their windows.
What is it with people massively overhyping fairly routine balloon flights? 32km is not the 'edge of space' anymore than London is on the 'edge of France'
What makes you think that the current fragmented conflicts are less deadly than a world war? Let me tell you; its because neither you nor anybody you care about are affected. Let me give you an example; between 1998 and 2004 about 4 million were killed in the second congo war; and that was a fairly localised conflict. Add that to the casualties form the other wars in that period and you like get a figure not far off a world war.
Exactly. The first (and for a while, second) world outsourced its violence, suffering and oppression to the third world. We let Baghdad be carpet bombed instead of Coventry. Union leaders get murdered in Bogota instead of Detroit. We haven't reduced the shittiness humans do to each other, we have simply shifted the majority of it only people that the general population, at a subconcious level at least, do not consider fully human.
Not true. Plenty of people in the print media use macs and are also averse to upgrading because their tight print deadlines leave no margin for error. If something works, they don't fiddle with it. Ever.
Hear hear. I don't know why desktops became so unfashionable either, because from what I saw most people didn't have a big enough monitor to cause problems before they switched over to flat panel.
They could easily add a thin layer of foil to the cardboard for RF shielding, without it being a metal case (where the metal is also structural and thus much thicker than you need for shielding). However, I imagine this would scupper the ability to recycle the thing
Anecdotally, I have run many computers without a case (normally when I have been modifying something, or for brief periods when my existing case has insufficient ventilation for new components but I haven't been able to change it. I've not noticed any problems that I did not notice with the case on. Many of the components (the drives for instance) have their own shielding anyway.
I seem to have got some notion somewhere that paper products such as cardboard burns at around 451 Fahrenheit (thats about 232 centigrade in proper units). If any part of your computer in contact with the case is anywhere close to that temperature, there is plenty of stuff that has already failed.
In any case, your current computer likely has a thin, metal case, which will conduct heat very nicely. If it is heated to 232 centigrade, then it will likely heat the floor/desk beneath it to almost the same temperatureï. What do you think happens to wood/carpet? There would be thousands of cases of red hot computers setting peoples homes on fire.
1) IANAD but couldn't the purpose of this to be try and catch those nasty, difficult to detect heart conditions that cause otherwise healthy young people to spontaneously drop dead?
2) Continuous monitoring of your body is a good thing, for a number of reasons - just so long as you take care that the information is well handled
3) Join the rest of the civilized world and get fucking universal healthcare already.
Soyuz can be used to ferry people and return cargo. ATV has been designed from the outset to be adapted for both those functions, and being large would be more capable at both of them.
How much of a pathetic 'libertarian' do you have to be to think that NASA has 'failed' and that Interorbital are going to 'move forward'? Please put your money where you mouth is, and book a ride on the rocket that private enterprise built. Your eulogy will be a fucking hoot.
NASA will be asking the Church of Scientology for a lift before these jokers.
The fact is, the private sector does not have a real role in the ISS; Russia can handle the people and Europe the cargo for less money, and can do it right now, than US private enterprise. The only reason SpaceX got a sniff of a contract (when their unproven Dragon capsule being less capable and less value for money than ATV) is because the US government is pushing NASA to go for US private companies even when they aren't the best at their job; thus negating the supposed advantage of private enterprise.
Trust me on this, NASA is dying laughing on the inside. 'Interorbital Systems' are a joke amongst serious minds in the space industry; they are constantly making grandiose claims yet have never fielded any hardware that couldn't simply be bought off the shelf. They are always a short amount of time from some 'amazing' breakthrough - but to put this in perspective, their nominated 'first teenager in space' is now in his twenties.
The idea that private enteprise is simply 'better' - an idea rubbished by experiences with healthcare, banking, transport, energy supply, and many other things - is blinding you to how clearly absurd these people are.
25,000 die a day from lack of food; Borlaug reduced the problem but he was not able to eliminate it in his lifetime unfortunately. Problem is, yield increases (whilst absolutely essential of course) are only part of the problem. There is enough food produced in the world now to feed everybody, but most of it is wasted or deliberately destroyed.
Borlaug's work, whilst incredibly impressive, is unfinished.
This is a fairly standard high-altitude photography method, that is just being hyped up. You attached a camera to a helium balloon. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. Doesn't have anything to do with space.
Indeed, they have a potent weapon called 'postmodernism'. They say a bunch of words and sentences to you, and even though these sentences parse correctly and sound like they are dripping with meaning, they are actually void of any meaning whatever. They are the memetic equivalent of mangled packets, which needlessly tie up your mental facilities, and any brain that hasn't received the postmodernism-is-bullshit patch is susceptible to attack.
Social networking is getting creepier by the day. Maybe it was never innocent, it was just that I was. If you want to place the way Facebook and Twitter in a proper context, obtain and watch The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. Essentially, that film finished at the point that politicians fell in love with the focus group; its thesis can easily be extended by the view to cover the new obsession with online social networks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, because if you carry hydrocarbons and liquid oxygen on board, the most efficient thing you can possible do with them is burn them in a generator and use the electricity to power a plasma propulsion system.
Having a fission reactor on board (the only thing that can possible deliver on the promises of VASIMR, even if its completed) is no small deal. Aside from having a risk assessment that involves 'burning nuclear reactor falling out of the sky in pieces' you also have the fact that they really, really fucking heavy.
True, but this means that the idea of allocating resources based on money and an (artificially) stoked sense of greed is incapable of providing what any objective observe can clearly see we need - an interplanetary civilisation.
He is, in this article, a cheerleader for the private sector whilst his only commercial product is derived from work done at NASA funded by the US government. I've found that a great deal of private sector 'acheivement' is actually co-opted from public works, or has its losses buried in the public purse.
I was under the impression that, because of this test, they must've had a working magnetic nozzle? Certainly that has been implied in many things I have read about the project. Could it be that private spaceflight has been overhyped AGAIN?
That is pretty damn funny.
Basically, its "I COULD climb that tree any time I want to, I just don't want to!". Nothing other than blind faith in the 'invisible hand' or some such nonsense could convince you that private enterprise is capable of space flight.
Ironically, you've already indicated the reason why; corporations can only respond to simply profit margins. If something is a) worthwhile and b) has a worth that can't be represented monetarily then private enterprise is lost.
I find it intensely amusing that the only commercial space flight companies that can actually put people into space for money, are the ones who outsource the actual business of launching rockets to a foreign government, using equipment designed by communists.
To me it has exposed serious weaknesses in the corporate model of organization. Space travel just doesn't seem like something they can do, at all, whilst larger governments have been doing it competently for years. Sure, there are corporate contractors for government funded space missions, but they are kept on a very tight leash. It could be that higher-level organization is not something you can get from institutions built around artificially inflated self interest.
No, BT are clinging to the outdated business model of 'not paying a subsidy to another industry with better political connections than you have'. They need to get with the times, or the FAC are going to come around and smash all their windows.
What is it with people massively overhyping fairly routine balloon flights? 32km is not the 'edge of space' anymore than London is on the 'edge of France'
What makes you think that the current fragmented conflicts are less deadly than a world war? Let me tell you; its because neither you nor anybody you care about are affected. Let me give you an example; between 1998 and 2004 about 4 million were killed in the second congo war; and that was a fairly localised conflict. Add that to the casualties form the other wars in that period and you like get a figure not far off a world war.
Exactly. The first (and for a while, second) world outsourced its violence, suffering and oppression to the third world. We let Baghdad be carpet bombed instead of Coventry. Union leaders get murdered in Bogota instead of Detroit. We haven't reduced the shittiness humans do to each other, we have simply shifted the majority of it only people that the general population, at a subconcious level at least, do not consider fully human.
Not true. Plenty of people in the print media use macs and are also averse to upgrading because their tight print deadlines leave no margin for error. If something works, they don't fiddle with it. Ever.
Hear hear. I don't know why desktops became so unfashionable either, because from what I saw most people didn't have a big enough monitor to cause problems before they switched over to flat panel.
They could easily add a thin layer of foil to the cardboard for RF shielding, without it being a metal case (where the metal is also structural and thus much thicker than you need for shielding). However, I imagine this would scupper the ability to recycle the thing
Anecdotally, I have run many computers without a case (normally when I have been modifying something, or for brief periods when my existing case has insufficient ventilation for new components but I haven't been able to change it. I've not noticed any problems that I did not notice with the case on. Many of the components (the drives for instance) have their own shielding anyway.
I seem to have got some notion somewhere that paper products such as cardboard burns at around 451 Fahrenheit (thats about 232 centigrade in proper units). If any part of your computer in contact with the case is anywhere close to that temperature, there is plenty of stuff that has already failed.
In any case, your current computer likely has a thin, metal case, which will conduct heat very nicely. If it is heated to 232 centigrade, then it will likely heat the floor/desk beneath it to almost the same temperatureï. What do you think happens to wood/carpet? There would be thousands of cases of red hot computers setting peoples homes on fire.
1) IANAD but couldn't the purpose of this to be try and catch those nasty, difficult to detect heart conditions that cause otherwise healthy young people to spontaneously drop dead?
2) Continuous monitoring of your body is a good thing, for a number of reasons - just so long as you take care that the information is well handled
3) Join the rest of the civilized world and get fucking universal healthcare already.
Soyuz can be used to ferry people and return cargo. ATV has been designed from the outset to be adapted for both those functions, and being large would be more capable at both of them.
How much of a pathetic 'libertarian' do you have to be to think that NASA has 'failed' and that Interorbital are going to 'move forward'? Please put your money where you mouth is, and book a ride on the rocket that private enterprise built. Your eulogy will be a fucking hoot.
Also malaria, after they got DDT banned to save all the wittle birdies.
NASA will be asking the Church of Scientology for a lift before these jokers.
The fact is, the private sector does not have a real role in the ISS; Russia can handle the people and Europe the cargo for less money, and can do it right now, than US private enterprise. The only reason SpaceX got a sniff of a contract (when their unproven Dragon capsule being less capable and less value for money than ATV) is because the US government is pushing NASA to go for US private companies even when they aren't the best at their job; thus negating the supposed advantage of private enterprise.
Trust me on this, NASA is dying laughing on the inside. 'Interorbital Systems' are a joke amongst serious minds in the space industry; they are constantly making grandiose claims yet have never fielded any hardware that couldn't simply be bought off the shelf. They are always a short amount of time from some 'amazing' breakthrough - but to put this in perspective, their nominated 'first teenager in space' is now in his twenties.
The idea that private enteprise is simply 'better' - an idea rubbished by experiences with healthcare, banking, transport, energy supply, and many other things - is blinding you to how clearly absurd these people are.
25,000 die a day from lack of food; Borlaug reduced the problem but he was not able to eliminate it in his lifetime unfortunately. Problem is, yield increases (whilst absolutely essential of course) are only part of the problem. There is enough food produced in the world now to feed everybody, but most of it is wasted or deliberately destroyed.
Borlaug's work, whilst incredibly impressive, is unfinished.
OK. I'm working on a satellite. One that will a) really go into space and b) costs a shitload more than a weather balloon.
This is a fairly standard high-altitude photography method, that is just being hyped up. You attached a camera to a helium balloon. Whoop-de-fucking-doo. Doesn't have anything to do with space.
Indeed, they have a potent weapon called 'postmodernism'. They say a bunch of words and sentences to you, and even though these sentences parse correctly and sound like they are dripping with meaning, they are actually void of any meaning whatever. They are the memetic equivalent of mangled packets, which needlessly tie up your mental facilities, and any brain that hasn't received the postmodernism-is-bullshit patch is susceptible to attack.
Social networking is getting creepier by the day. Maybe it was never innocent, it was just that I was. If you want to place the way Facebook and Twitter in a proper context, obtain and watch The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis. Essentially, that film finished at the point that politicians fell in love with the focus group; its thesis can easily be extended by the view to cover the new obsession with online social networks.