"Why send people?" is modded "Troll"? A bit offtopic maybe, but not "Troll". This is the question we must be able to answer if we are to have a successful manned space program, Constellation, DIRECT, COTS, or otherwise.
In the Apollo era, manned space flight provided another means to fund weapons development. The launch vehicles of the early space program, including the Saturn family, are variations of ballistic missiles or started development as heavy launch vehicles for DoD payloads. We are no longer in the same kind of arms race, and finding money to fund civil aerospace ventures is not as easy as military ones.
Many have tried to explain "why" manned space flight in general, let alone the moon and Mars (recently here and here). It is not an easy question to answer. Arguments to the contrary range from "robots are cheaper" to "we should stop spending money on space altogether and address the large number of problems we have here on Earth".
There are those that will say we should do it simply because it is there to explore. That it is human nature. Because it is the unknown, the "final frontier", if you will. A romantic notion (and one that is more than enough to convince some of us), but in the end, this is a political question. We must justify spending tax dollars on manned space flight. What's in it for the taxpayers? While some like to point to technologies that have been spun off of NASA's work over the years, it's not easy to say that the tax-paying public will get X, Y, and Z from future investments.
The true answer here is one that few, if any, politician would ever use even if they knew it was the answer. Why send people? So that we can to guarantee our survival as a species. Humanity has spread beyond the cradle of its birth for many reasons. Initially the exodus was to find more room and resources to support our growing species. Later it was from reasons ranging from natural disasters to religious disputes to dreams of fortune in other lands. If our entire species lived at the foot of a volcano, the volcano could wipe us all out. Our species has spread such that it cannot be wiped out by most natural (or even man-made) disasters. It is only recently that we have started thinking at a scale larger than our local area on this planet. There is plenty of evidence of mass extinctions throughout the Earth's history. Whether by internal (global climate change) or external (comet/asteroid) forces, we are essentially planted at the base of a cosmic volcano. It is time to move beyond the fertile cradle of humanity's birth to ensure its long-term survival. In the past it took picking up and moving to a new field or forest or across a desert or an ocean. These took a variety of effort and planning, but none compare to the journey ahead of us. Our vision as a species, recognizing our strengths and weaknesses and the environment that surrounds us, must guide these decisions for the future. We have taken the first steps to develop habitats for humans to live and work and experiment and learn outside of Earth's atmosphere. We now must take the next steps to develop habitats and technologies that allow us to survive in even harsher environments...those on other planetary bodies. The moon is the closest, and perhaps one of the harshest, places for us to start to take these steps. Without this step, we cannot make the more important steps of leaving our orbit for others around the sun, and someday to other solar systems. We will most definitely not see the results in our lifetimes, but we need to be at a place where our short individual lives don't dictate every decision we make as a species.
Most people alive today can name Armstrong and Aldrin (and some even Collins...though sadly not enough). How many know the names of Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt? Or can name the most recent shuttle o
"Having a say, and "dictating" are two different things. Only a small fraction of shuttle missions have been military-related. Having a few percent dictate the entire design would not be very rational."
Military mission needs contributed a great deal to the design of our current vehicle, and the Air Force was heavily involved in the process. In fact, the shuttle was about to start launching military missions from CA's Vandenberg Air Force Base when Challenger happened. Most people don't realize the amount of spending associated with the shuttle program that came from the military side: http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/winter2 003/05.html
This is true for the full spectrum of people, not just a specific political group. Everyone likes to think that their own way is the best, and in a lot of cases this means that they convince themselves that any other way for any other person is wrong, even if the situation is in no way similar to their own.
Whenever you have an issue that people differ on, you'll have others blindly ridiculing your choices. Whether it's your hair cut or the types of clothes you wear as a kid, the car you drive or your operating system/software, your political/philosophical ideas, opinion on pro-life/choice in the US, or religion X/Y/Z/none-of-the-above, you can't escape it.
The beauty of a civilized, democratic, market-based society is that you should be able to discuss your opinions and disagree without resorting to ridiculing one another, name-calling, or blind labeling. We have a large variety of options presented to us in most areas of our lives, and we don't all have to choose the same things.
I've been one of two people in an office who didn't have computers down due to a virus simply because we were using Mozilla's Messenger and Thunderbird. When asked how we weren't stricken, we praised the email clients. Watching everyone else standing around waiting for someone to come out and fix the problem made me appreciate the productivity side.
I've recently helped a few people obtain new computers. MS Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) adds $279 to a computer that costs less than $400 without it. I've been able to introduce OpenOffice.org to these people because it makes financial sense, and because it is interoperable with documents created on or transferred to their MS Office systems on the job.
I currently work for a US government agency that is dealing with layoffs and cutting of entire areas of research due to funding. Idealistically, I like to think that a shift to more free/open source solutions would allow us to shift the money that goes to new software and maintenance licenses would free up funds to keep the intellectual resources we have, or at the very least allow those of us left to have more funds available to attempt to carry out out research. I try not to be a zealot, but whenever I hear complaints about proprietary software or formats or when it comes time that we are looking to renew maintenance licenses or get new software, I make sure to point out that there are other solutions available, and that I have been using them since I started.
One shouldn't be obnoxious about these things. As these products improve over time, and as we are able to point out sensible adoption strategies for them at the right time, I think the shift will occur naturally. I've noticed more and more coworkers using the software or coming to ask me questions about it over the last 6 months or so, and those I've gotten to use OpenOffice.org on their new computers have been ecstatic. Switching to new software without a directly observable financial or productivity gain can be hard to sell. Deciding to spend the time to learn a few small changes in office software instead of doubling the price of a new computer is easy.
"they're not supposed to be schedule-driven anymore"
False.
In fact, R6.2-1 says that "schedule deadlines are an important management tool." It simply says that meeting a schedule is not more important than recognizing and understanding risks that come during the schedule, and adjusting the schedule accordingly. This is true, whether you're scheduled to pick your child up at school (don't drive at extremely reckless speeds in a residential area just because you're running late), or if you're planning a mission with NASA (don't launch a shuttle to stay on schedule if the temperature is below the tolerance level of your SRB O-ring system). In either case, the goal of keeping a schedule is not worth the lives, equipment, and money involved.
This is all we ask. Do a risk analysis for the Hubble mission. Identify and assess the risks and benefits of carrying out the mission. If the goal of continuing Hubble's mission (which is a very complex and dynamic issue to define in the first place) does not outweight the risks, then that's fine. But have the data to back it up. We are (supposed to be) scientists at NASA. We make up our minds based on analyzing as many of the associated facts as possible.
Sure, decisions need to be made. We cannot go to the Moon and Mars, build a space station, launch new Hubble-sized satellites, design the next generation of the shuttle, explore hypersonic flight, determine how to lower the effects of a sonic boom, and design new, safe, and more efficient ways to utilize our airspace (don't forget the first 'A'). Not all in the same year. Or decade, for that matter. These are only a portion of the things that NASA is currently involved in, with a much smaller fraction of the federal budget than when NASA was focused on getting a man to the moon.
We need to pick our battles and to prioritize our missions based on our available resources, financial and otherwise. The only good way to do that is through an analysis of the options and the associated risks.
Both Scaled Composites and XCOR Aerospace (the two leading competitors in the X-Prize competition) currently fly out of Mojave Airport.
Scaled Composites is taking part in the X-Prize competition, but XCOR is not. They are developing their products to break into a market of suborbital payloads and microsatellites, as well as the passenger market (they are currently under contract with Space Adventures to provide the space travel experience to "adventure travelers" for $98,000 when the technology is ready). You can read more about their goals on their website.
The X-Prize website hosts a list of the teams competing for the X-Prize.
I just realized while browsing more of the pages...in this example, each page of the book contains either the title of the book or the author's name at the top, so two searches will give you links to every page. (Sorry about the "Browsing through pages." fragment in prev post. I even previewed twice...must be time for bed.)
I did a quick search using their demo for "Curse of the Bambino" in the 'Try Searches' area of the page linked to in the main/. story. After choosing the first book (Curse of the Bambino) I did another search just within that book (from the link on their page) for "Bambino." This turned up 129 of the 240 pages. Browsing through pages. Since you can display a couple of pages before and after the chosen page, it's easy to get to the rest of the pages in the book by just choosing a word on the page preceding/following the one displayed and doing another search for that word. I can't imagine this won't be abused...wonder how Amazon will deal with this. Perhaps a limit on each account for pages viewed per book/time period?
"Whether or not they collect specific "Personal" information, e.g., name, rank, serial number, etc., if they are using my web activity for their benefit without my knowledge or consent, that's bad and anyone associated with these activities should be considered unfit for the position in question."
The idea that collecting anonymous information is "bad" is absurd. When you walk into a store, there are often devices that register you passing through their entranceway. This helps them gather statistics - evaluating everything from advertising campaigns to employee effectiveness - in order to help them improve their business, i.e. for their benefit. Visiting a website can be viewed the same as entering a store. You are accessing something that someone else created and made available to you, and they are able to anonymously collect information in order to help them make their site more effective.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why send people?" is modded "Troll"? A bit offtopic maybe, but not "Troll". This is the question we must be able to answer if we are to have a successful manned space program, Constellation, DIRECT, COTS, or otherwise.
In the Apollo era, manned space flight provided another means to fund weapons development. The launch vehicles of the early space program, including the Saturn family, are variations of ballistic missiles or started development as heavy launch vehicles for DoD payloads. We are no longer in the same kind of arms race, and finding money to fund civil aerospace ventures is not as easy as military ones.
Many have tried to explain "why" manned space flight in general, let alone the moon and Mars (recently here and here). It is not an easy question to answer. Arguments to the contrary range from "robots are cheaper" to "we should stop spending money on space altogether and address the large number of problems we have here on Earth".
There are those that will say we should do it simply because it is there to explore. That it is human nature. Because it is the unknown, the "final frontier", if you will. A romantic notion (and one that is more than enough to convince some of us), but in the end, this is a political question. We must justify spending tax dollars on manned space flight. What's in it for the taxpayers? While some like to point to technologies that have been spun off of NASA's work over the years, it's not easy to say that the tax-paying public will get X, Y, and Z from future investments.
The true answer here is one that few, if any, politician would ever use even if they knew it was the answer. Why send people? So that we can to guarantee our survival as a species. Humanity has spread beyond the cradle of its birth for many reasons. Initially the exodus was to find more room and resources to support our growing species. Later it was from reasons ranging from natural disasters to religious disputes to dreams of fortune in other lands. If our entire species lived at the foot of a volcano, the volcano could wipe us all out. Our species has spread such that it cannot be wiped out by most natural (or even man-made) disasters. It is only recently that we have started thinking at a scale larger than our local area on this planet. There is plenty of evidence of mass extinctions throughout the Earth's history. Whether by internal (global climate change) or external (comet/asteroid) forces, we are essentially planted at the base of a cosmic volcano. It is time to move beyond the fertile cradle of humanity's birth to ensure its long-term survival. In the past it took picking up and moving to a new field or forest or across a desert or an ocean. These took a variety of effort and planning, but none compare to the journey ahead of us. Our vision as a species, recognizing our strengths and weaknesses and the environment that surrounds us, must guide these decisions for the future. We have taken the first steps to develop habitats for humans to live and work and experiment and learn outside of Earth's atmosphere. We now must take the next steps to develop habitats and technologies that allow us to survive in even harsher environments...those on other planetary bodies. The moon is the closest, and perhaps one of the harshest, places for us to start to take these steps. Without this step, we cannot make the more important steps of leaving our orbit for others around the sun, and someday to other solar systems. We will most definitely not see the results in our lifetimes, but we need to be at a place where our short individual lives don't dictate every decision we make as a species.
Most people alive today can name Armstrong and Aldrin (and some even Collins...though sadly not enough). How many know the names of Cernan, Evans, and Schmitt? Or can name the most recent shuttle o
"Having a say, and "dictating" are two different things. Only a small fraction of shuttle missions have been military-related. Having a few percent dictate the entire design would not be very rational."
2 003/05.html
Military mission needs contributed a great deal to the design of our current vehicle, and the Air Force was heavily involved in the process. In fact, the shuttle was about to start launching military missions from CA's Vandenberg Air Force Base when Challenger happened. Most people don't realize the amount of spending associated with the shuttle program that came from the military side:
http://www.aero.org/publications/crosslink/winter
This is true for the full spectrum of people, not just a specific political group. Everyone likes to think that their own way is the best, and in a lot of cases this means that they convince themselves that any other way for any other person is wrong, even if the situation is in no way similar to their own.
Whenever you have an issue that people differ on, you'll have others blindly ridiculing your choices. Whether it's your hair cut or the types of clothes you wear as a kid, the car you drive or your operating system/software, your political/philosophical ideas, opinion on pro-life/choice in the US, or religion X/Y/Z/none-of-the-above, you can't escape it.
The beauty of a civilized, democratic, market-based society is that you should be able to discuss your opinions and disagree without resorting to ridiculing one another, name-calling, or blind labeling. We have a large variety of options presented to us in most areas of our lives, and we don't all have to choose the same things.
I've been one of two people in an office who didn't have computers down due to a virus simply because we were using Mozilla's Messenger and Thunderbird. When asked how we weren't stricken, we praised the email clients. Watching everyone else standing around waiting for someone to come out and fix the problem made me appreciate the productivity side.
I've recently helped a few people obtain new computers. MS Office Small Business (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook) adds $279 to a computer that costs less than $400 without it. I've been able to introduce OpenOffice.org to these people because it makes financial sense, and because it is interoperable with documents created on or transferred to their MS Office systems on the job.
I currently work for a US government agency that is dealing with layoffs and cutting of entire areas of research due to funding. Idealistically, I like to think that a shift to more free/open source solutions would allow us to shift the money that goes to new software and maintenance licenses would free up funds to keep the intellectual resources we have, or at the very least allow those of us left to have more funds available to attempt to carry out out research. I try not to be a zealot, but whenever I hear complaints about proprietary software or formats or when it comes time that we are looking to renew maintenance licenses or get new software, I make sure to point out that there are other solutions available, and that I have been using them since I started.
One shouldn't be obnoxious about these things. As these products improve over time, and as we are able to point out sensible adoption strategies for them at the right time, I think the shift will occur naturally. I've noticed more and more coworkers using the software or coming to ask me questions about it over the last 6 months or so, and those I've gotten to use OpenOffice.org on their new computers have been ecstatic. Switching to new software without a directly observable financial or productivity gain can be hard to sell. Deciding to spend the time to learn a few small changes in office software instead of doubling the price of a new computer is easy.
"they're not supposed to be schedule-driven anymore"
t m#sectR)
False.
In fact, R6.2-1 says that "schedule deadlines are an important management tool." It simply says that meeting a schedule is not more important than recognizing and understanding risks that come during the schedule, and adjusting the schedule accordingly. This is true, whether you're scheduled to pick your child up at school (don't drive at extremely reckless speeds in a residential area just because you're running late), or if you're planning a mission with NASA (don't launch a shuttle to stay on schedule if the temperature is below the tolerance level of your SRB O-ring system). In either case, the goal of keeping a schedule is not worth the lives, equipment, and money involved.
Risk Analysis: a technique to identify and assess factors that may jeopardize the success of a project or achievement of a goal. (http://www.gao.gov/special.pubs/bprag/bprgloss.h
This is all we ask. Do a risk analysis for the Hubble mission. Identify and assess the risks and benefits of carrying out the mission. If the goal of continuing Hubble's mission (which is a very complex and dynamic issue to define in the first place) does not outweight the risks, then that's fine. But have the data to back it up. We are (supposed to be) scientists at NASA. We make up our minds based on analyzing as many of the associated facts as possible.
Sure, decisions need to be made. We cannot go to the Moon and Mars, build a space station, launch new Hubble-sized satellites, design the next generation of the shuttle, explore hypersonic flight, determine how to lower the effects of a sonic boom, and design new, safe, and more efficient ways to utilize our airspace (don't forget the first 'A'). Not all in the same year. Or decade, for that matter. These are only a portion of the things that NASA is currently involved in, with a much smaller fraction of the federal budget than when NASA was focused on getting a man to the moon.
We need to pick our battles and to prioritize our missions based on our available resources, financial and otherwise. The only good way to do that is through an analysis of the options and the associated risks.
Both Scaled Composites and XCOR Aerospace (the two leading competitors in the X-Prize competition) currently fly out of Mojave Airport.
Scaled Composites is taking part in the X-Prize competition, but XCOR is not. They are developing their products to break into a market of suborbital payloads and microsatellites, as well as the passenger market (they are currently under contract with Space Adventures to provide the space travel experience to "adventure travelers" for $98,000 when the technology is ready). You can read more about their goals on their website.
The X-Prize website hosts a list of the teams competing for the X-Prize.
I just realized while browsing more of the pages...in this example, each page of the book contains either the title of the book or the author's name at the top, so two searches will give you links to every page. (Sorry about the "Browsing through pages." fragment in prev post. I even previewed twice...must be time for bed.)
I did a quick search using their demo for "Curse of the Bambino" in the 'Try Searches' area of the page linked to in the main /. story. After choosing the first book (Curse of the Bambino) I did another search just within that book (from the link on their page) for "Bambino." This turned up 129 of the 240 pages. Browsing through pages. Since you can display a couple of pages before and after the chosen page, it's easy to get to the rest of the pages in the book by just choosing a word on the page preceding/following the one displayed and doing another search for that word. I can't imagine this won't be abused...wonder how Amazon will deal with this. Perhaps a limit on each account for pages viewed per book/time period?
"Whether or not they collect specific "Personal" information, e.g., name, rank, serial number, etc., if they are using my web activity for their benefit without my knowledge or consent, that's bad and anyone associated with these activities should be considered unfit for the position in question."
The idea that collecting anonymous information is "bad" is absurd. When you walk into a store, there are often devices that register you passing through their entranceway. This helps them gather statistics - evaluating everything from advertising campaigns to employee effectiveness - in order to help them improve their business, i.e. for their benefit. Visiting a website can be viewed the same as entering a store. You are accessing something that someone else created and made available to you, and they are able to anonymously collect information in order to help them make their site more effective.