And, bizarrely, this mistake is repeated by modern libertarian/neoliberal space advocates, who are certain that SpaceX and Bigelow can beat the Chinese without any government help at all. This is nothing but fantasy.
As a % of nominal GDP, China spends about the same as most ESA member states (0.02% by my calculation) compared to the real big players USA (0.13%) and Russia (0.26%)
Don't ask me for a reference. I literally just worked this out myself from numbers off wikipedia (which are themselves well referenced enough). If you are skeptical, just repeat the calculation.
China isn't especially focused on space travel, or manned space travel - its just a big economy, and its found a way to do manned spaceflight cheap.
I think its safe to assume that, had it been developed as a mainstream OS in the intervening time, it would've gone to pre-emptive multitasking as soon as the hardware permitted it.
Most of my fond memories are of the interface; the consistent and effective use of three mouse buttons, the innovative save dialog and the way in which applications were packaged (which, honestly, I know people thought was invented with Mac OS X)
They had a surprisingly modern looking desktop, that booted in seconds. It would be interesting to see where the platform would be today had it taken off in a big way.
I wondered how long it would take for 'private space flight' to be mentioned.
Private spaceflight is, right now, pathetic. And an ideologically motivated insistence on it has crippled NASA. Congratulations on handing Mars over to the Russians and the Chinese.
Did you read that article? There may be de jure equality but the situation on the ground is very different.
Don't pretend that Israel is some poor, put upon liberal democracy. It isn't. That said, it seems churlish to refuse scientific cooperation with them. Isolation will only serve to make them more paranoid, more reactionary, and more likely to lash out in response to threats.
Even if this is a statistically significant cluster of reported failures (I am skeptical of that; random data does cluster you know...) then it could simply be that Soyuz failures are being reported more.
The words that explain this are 'mission critical'. If a computer that important still works, you need a damn good reason to unplug it and replace it with an untested system. Having something new and shiny is not a good enough reason.
Yeah, because exponential growth is ALWAYS a good sustainable strategy. Especially exponential growth in something like efficiency, which is capped by the very laws of physics.
1. They got telemetry transmitted to the ground that let them see the failure in real time. Rockets have a hell of a lot more sensors than an aircraft, and the Americans have pushed the Russians to include more in the Soyuz rocket, during the ASTP in the 70s and then again during the ISS project.
2. They found a bit of fuel pipe with a bit of turbine in it, and jumped to a conclusion.
3. They are guessing, under political pressure to provide a quick answer and get Russia's most prestigious technical achievement flying again.
I agree that a thorough investigation can't have been conducted yet.
It always amuses me how libertarians who wish to criticise socialism (which to them means any economic system other than the outright market-driven insanity they favour) invoke the 'socialist calculation problem' to insist no economic solution, besides the one they intuited when they were 15 years old and reading Ayn Rand, can ever work.
The idea is that there is something magical in markets, something in the interaction between rational maximisers, that can't be reproduced analytically. Except that is exactly how modern capitalism functions. The notion that prices are determined by canny entrepreneurs belongs in the 19th century not the 21st.
The gas generator is basically a turbine connected by a shaft to the fuel and oxidiser pumps. On most modern rockets, its turned by either fuel that has been heated by pumping it around the engine bell and combustion chamber (which has the added bonus of cooling it) or by pre-burning a small quantity of the propellants. Soyuz engines are unusual in that the turbine is powered by a supply of hydrogen peroxide separate from the fuel and oxidiser.
Saying that a gas generator failure and a fuel line blockage caused the accident suggests either a) when they said gas generator they meant turbupump, and a bit of the turbopump broke off and blocked the line or b) the failure of the gas generator triggered the failure of the fuel turbopump. On a shaft rotating at 50k RPM one end of the shaft turning to shrapnel is likely to cause problems at the other end.
The Soyuz rocket has redundancy upon redundancy, to accomodate for just this kind of manufacturing error, and normally it works as evidenced by the incredible reliability of the rocket. Consider the fact that, when first introduced, it had to deal with 1960s Soviet quality control on its parts. Sometimes, of course, even the best precaution fails. You can't draw conclusions about the entire state of Russian society based on a single wonky gas generator...
Nobody, not a single person, has lived in space for an amount of time equivalent to a Mars mission. The people who have lived in space have faced constant technical issues (and the occasional fire, decompression accident, and getting dinged by a cargo ship). They've done this with the benefit of regular cargo flights and real time communications with the ground. Living in space is something we as a species need a lot more practice at.
More like a Long March towards being man-rated. Each of the three flights of the LM-2F have suffered technical issues (vibration being the biggest one). Its a Mao-era ICBM with booster, flying a spacecraft from the age of the iPad. The Chinese are going to replace it as soon as possible, with a dedicated launch vehicle that doesn't use toxic hypergolic propellants - probably the LM-7
You don't know that the scanners are safe, because they have not been properly tested and monitored.
Radiation is not all equivalent anyhow. Cosmic radiation you experienced is composed of very high energy protons and heavier nuclei - most of the blast straight through you without depositing much energy.
Backscatter X-rays, however, are not very penetrating, and deposit all their energy in a few cm of tissue. Ironically, the lower energy radiation can be more dangerous than the higher due to it interacting more.
The (legitimate) concern is that lots of radiation energy is being deposited in soft tissues close to the surface of the body (include breasts and testicle, places where its always fun to get cancer...)
Sounds like Asperger's Syndrome gone bad. With AS a person can either recognize that their are massively unsuited to interacted with the human race, and seek to correct their own behaviour, or they can start seeing the human race as a threat and turn into a dangerous, paranoid loon.
Somehow, I think a camera designed to stare into the inky blackness of space is probably best not pointed at a fully illuminated part of the Moon's surface.
The likely final nail in the coffin of the Apollo hoaxes will be a photo of a bunch of Chinese astronauts standing around one of the descent modules.
This cancerous organisation has just made a deal with the government it is deep in the pockets of, to extend its media monopoly in the UK - this scandal is unlikely to reverse that decision, given how personally close News International is to the Conservative Party:
The summary says the investigator deleted the voicemail messages. In the news report I saw, the allegation is that the NotW journalists deleted the messages.
(alleged) chain of events is:
1. NotW hires investigator to gain access to voicemail
2. NotW listens to voicemail to get soundbites from loved ones for their shitty, amoral rag.
3. Once voicemail is full, they delete stored messages so they can get more juicy copy from distraught friends and relatives of a murdered 13-year old girl
4. They then interview parents of said girl, the mother speaking about the hope that her daughter is still alive based on the deleted voicemails.
Do not try to excuse this. The people doing this are pitiless psychopaths.
Slashdot Mirror
Italy is just maintaining its hard earned reputation as one of the worst place in the EU to be a journalist:
http://en.rsf.org/IMG/pdf/carte-2011.pdf
http://en.rsf.org/press-freedom-index-2010,1034.html
And, bizarrely, this mistake is repeated by modern libertarian/neoliberal space advocates, who are certain that SpaceX and Bigelow can beat the Chinese without any government help at all. This is nothing but fantasy.
Not Really
As a % of nominal GDP, China spends about the same as most ESA member states (0.02% by my calculation) compared to the real big players USA (0.13%) and Russia (0.26%)
Don't ask me for a reference. I literally just worked this out myself from numbers off wikipedia (which are themselves well referenced enough). If you are skeptical, just repeat the calculation.
China isn't especially focused on space travel, or manned space travel - its just a big economy, and its found a way to do manned spaceflight cheap.
There is doing it, and doing it well...
Bollocks. Best case, your 386 was running this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_2
I think its safe to assume that, had it been developed as a mainstream OS in the intervening time, it would've gone to pre-emptive multitasking as soon as the hardware permitted it.
Most of my fond memories are of the interface; the consistent and effective use of three mouse buttons, the innovative save dialog and the way in which applications were packaged (which, honestly, I know people thought was invented with Mac OS X)
They had a surprisingly modern looking desktop, that booted in seconds. It would be interesting to see where the platform would be today had it taken off in a big way.
I wondered how long it would take for 'private space flight' to be mentioned.
Private spaceflight is, right now, pathetic. And an ideologically motivated insistence on it has crippled NASA. Congratulations on handing Mars over to the Russians and the Chinese.
Did you read that article? There may be de jure equality but the situation on the ground is very different.
Don't pretend that Israel is some poor, put upon liberal democracy. It isn't. That said, it seems churlish to refuse scientific cooperation with them. Isolation will only serve to make them more paranoid, more reactionary, and more likely to lash out in response to threats.
You are a conspiracy theorist.
Even if this is a statistically significant cluster of reported failures (I am skeptical of that; random data does cluster you know...) then it could simply be that Soyuz failures are being reported more.
The words that explain this are 'mission critical'. If a computer that important still works, you need a damn good reason to unplug it and replace it with an untested system. Having something new and shiny is not a good enough reason.
Yeah, because exponential growth is ALWAYS a good sustainable strategy. Especially exponential growth in something like efficiency, which is capped by the very laws of physics.
I can think of 3 possibilities:
1. They got telemetry transmitted to the ground that let them see the failure in real time. Rockets have a hell of a lot more sensors than an aircraft, and the Americans have pushed the Russians to include more in the Soyuz rocket, during the ASTP in the 70s and then again during the ISS project.
2. They found a bit of fuel pipe with a bit of turbine in it, and jumped to a conclusion.
3. They are guessing, under political pressure to provide a quick answer and get Russia's most prestigious technical achievement flying again.
I agree that a thorough investigation can't have been conducted yet.
It always amuses me how libertarians who wish to criticise socialism (which to them means any economic system other than the outright market-driven insanity they favour) invoke the 'socialist calculation problem' to insist no economic solution, besides the one they intuited when they were 15 years old and reading Ayn Rand, can ever work.
The idea is that there is something magical in markets, something in the interaction between rational maximisers, that can't be reproduced analytically. Except that is exactly how modern capitalism functions. The notion that prices are determined by canny entrepreneurs belongs in the 19th century not the 21st.
They may be describing the same failure mode.
The gas generator is basically a turbine connected by a shaft to the fuel and oxidiser pumps. On most modern rockets, its turned by either fuel that has been heated by pumping it around the engine bell and combustion chamber (which has the added bonus of cooling it) or by pre-burning a small quantity of the propellants. Soyuz engines are unusual in that the turbine is powered by a supply of hydrogen peroxide separate from the fuel and oxidiser.
Saying that a gas generator failure and a fuel line blockage caused the accident suggests either a) when they said gas generator they meant turbupump, and a bit of the turbopump broke off and blocked the line or b) the failure of the gas generator triggered the failure of the fuel turbopump. On a shaft rotating at 50k RPM one end of the shaft turning to shrapnel is likely to cause problems at the other end.
The Soyuz rocket has redundancy upon redundancy, to accomodate for just this kind of manufacturing error, and normally it works as evidenced by the incredible reliability of the rocket. Consider the fact that, when first introduced, it had to deal with 1960s Soviet quality control on its parts. Sometimes, of course, even the best precaution fails. You can't draw conclusions about the entire state of Russian society based on a single wonky gas generator...
Nobody, not a single person, has lived in space for an amount of time equivalent to a Mars mission. The people who have lived in space have faced constant technical issues (and the occasional fire, decompression accident, and getting dinged by a cargo ship). They've done this with the benefit of regular cargo flights and real time communications with the ground. Living in space is something we as a species need a lot more practice at.
More like a Long March towards being man-rated. Each of the three flights of the LM-2F have suffered technical issues (vibration being the biggest one). Its a Mao-era ICBM with booster, flying a spacecraft from the age of the iPad. The Chinese are going to replace it as soon as possible, with a dedicated launch vehicle that doesn't use toxic hypergolic propellants - probably the LM-7
You don't know that the scanners are safe, because they have not been properly tested and monitored.
Radiation is not all equivalent anyhow. Cosmic radiation you experienced is composed of very high energy protons and heavier nuclei - most of the blast straight through you without depositing much energy.
Backscatter X-rays, however, are not very penetrating, and deposit all their energy in a few cm of tissue. Ironically, the lower energy radiation can be more dangerous than the higher due to it interacting more.
The (legitimate) concern is that lots of radiation energy is being deposited in soft tissues close to the surface of the body (include breasts and testicle, places where its always fun to get cancer...)
Sounds like Asperger's Syndrome gone bad. With AS a person can either recognize that their are massively unsuited to interacted with the human race, and seek to correct their own behaviour, or they can start seeing the human race as a threat and turn into a dangerous, paranoid loon.
Because apparently, you can build a world-beating high tech economy purely on patent trolling.
Somehow, I think a camera designed to stare into the inky blackness of space is probably best not pointed at a fully illuminated part of the Moon's surface.
The likely final nail in the coffin of the Apollo hoaxes will be a photo of a bunch of Chinese astronauts standing around one of the descent modules.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/04/david-cameron-dinner-rebekah-brooks-mystery
We are a perfectly corrupt society.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/jun/30/news-corporation-powerful-media
This cancerous organisation has just made a deal with the government it is deep in the pockets of, to extend its media monopoly in the UK - this scandal is unlikely to reverse that decision, given how personally close News International is to the Conservative Party:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uk_general_election_2010#Endorsements
The summary says the investigator deleted the voicemail messages. In the news report I saw, the allegation is that the NotW journalists deleted the messages.
(alleged) chain of events is:
1. NotW hires investigator to gain access to voicemail
2. NotW listens to voicemail to get soundbites from loved ones for their shitty, amoral rag.
3. Once voicemail is full, they delete stored messages so they can get more juicy copy from distraught friends and relatives of a murdered 13-year old girl
4. They then interview parents of said girl, the mother speaking about the hope that her daughter is still alive based on the deleted voicemails.
Do not try to excuse this. The people doing this are pitiless psychopaths.