New Mars Forums

Make no doubt about it that Russia has a realitic plan to go to the moon.  However, the ship of choice will be the venerable Soyuz (docked to a new rocket stage,) and it will transport American "capitalist pigs."

Soyuz was Korolev's moon ship; the Zond variant would have flown around the moon (it succeeded in this feat in unmanned flights,) and the LOK version would have docked with the LK lander on the admittedly-dangerous Soviet moon mission.

With Space Adventures offering Russia cold, hard cash, the Soyuz translunar mission is back on the table, as long as Americans are willing to fork over some serious money.  If the initial flights should succeed, perhaps the Russians would try to resurrect the LK.  A different launcher will be needed, though--N1 was hopelessly complex.  Perhaps an earth-orbit rendezvous mission using multiple Soyuz or Onega rockets would do the job.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/9189916/

Does this mean that it is the responsibility of New Orleans to ask for assistance from foreign states? If Federal Government is divesting itself of the Authority and responsibility of emergency services, then New Orleans must have the authority to go it alone...

I wonder if anyone had ever considered this solution:

The killer for Louisiana is a Category Three storm at 72 hours before landfall that becomes a Category Four at 48 hours and a Category Five at 24 hours—coming from the worst direction," says Joe Suhayda, a retired coastal engineer at Louisiana State University who has spent 30 years studying the coast. Suhayda is sitting in a lakefront restaurant on an actual August afternoon sipping lemonade and talking about the chinks in the city's hurricane armor. "I don't think people realize how precarious we are.

A cocktail of natural and human factors is putting the coast under. Delta soils naturally compact and sink over time, eventually giving way to open water unless fresh layers of sediment offset the subsidence. The Mississippi's spring floods once maintained that balance, but the annual deluges were often disastrous. After a devastating flood in 1927, levees were raised along the river and lined with concrete, effectively funneling the marsh-building sediments to the deep waters of the Gulf. Since the 1950s engineers have also cut more than 8,000 miles (13,000 kilometers) of canals through the marsh for petroleum exploration and ship traffic. These new ditches sliced the wetlands into a giant jigsaw puzzle, increasing erosion and allowing lethal doses of salt water to infiltrate brackish and freshwater marshes.

While such loss hits every bayou-loving Louisianan right in the heart, it also hits nearly every U.S. citizen right in the wallet. Louisiana has the hardest working wetlands in America, a watery world of bayous, marshes, and barrier islands that either produces or transports more than a third of the nation's oil and a quarter of its natural gas, and ranks second only to Alaska in commercial fish landings. As wildlife habitat, it makes Florida's Everglades look like a petting zoo by comparison.

Such high stakes compelled a host of unlikely bedfellows—scientists, environmental groups, business leaders, and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers—to forge a radical plan to protect what's left. Drafted by the Corps a year ago, the Louisiana Coastal Area (LCA) project was initially estimated to cost up to 14 billion dollars over 30 years, almost twice as much as current efforts to save the Everglades. But the Bush Administration balked at the price tag, supporting instead a plan to spend up to two billion dollars over the next ten years to fund the most promising projects. Either way, Congress must authorize the money before work can begin.

Neither lunar nor Martian dust should respond to magnetism; they are mostly silicates.
          -- RobS

I wonder about this whole levy thing. Is it a good idea? It can increase the areas we can live in but what are there probabilities of failure. How robust can they be made and what measures are in place for if they fail. I really can't gauge the whole cost benefit of them.

To understand the ultimate benefits of levees, you should look at what would happen without them.  New Orleans would go away immediately, of course, but wait long enough and so will Baton Rouge, Vicksburg, St. Louis, half of Chicago, most ports along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers, a quarter of Kentucky's farmland, several small gulf coast and atlantic ports, etc.  Flooding would see to what land subsidence did not.  The US levee system is vast - much bigger than most people realize.  Its construction was the rural electrification of its day, and it has become one of the unseen backbones of our economy.

Another interesting idea would be to somehow get Visa or Mastercard on board and come up with special 'emergency credit cards' which could only purchase certain goods and services up to a certain limit per card when the government declared an emergency in an area. This would limit the number of people who elect to stay behind for money reasons, although fraud would probably be a show-stopper, which is bad, because that would greatly simplify the accounting for disaster relief - aid could be directly distributed to victims without much in the way of middlemen.

For the first time in 37 years, federal budget cuts have all but stopped major work on the New Orleans area's east bank hurricane levees, a complex network of concrete walls, metal gates and giant earthen berms that won't be finished for at least another decade.

"I guess people look around and think there's a complete system in place, that we're just out here trying to put icing on the cake," said Mervin Morehiser, who manages the "Lake Pontchartrain and vicinity" levee project for the Army Corps of Engineers. "And we aren't saying that the sky is falling, but people should know that this is a work in progress, and there's more important work yet to do before there is a complete system in place."

...

"I can't tell you exactly what that could mean this hurricane season if we get a major storm," Naomi said. "It would depend on the path and speed of the storm, the angle that it hits us.

"But I can tell you that we would be better off if the levees were raised, . . . and I think it's important and only fair that those people who live behind the levee know the status of these projects."

Paving and draining have removed the safety valve that prevented devastating flooding along rivers and in low-lying cities like New Orleans. Thousands of acres of swamp used to surround New Orleans, and it sponged up excess water and reduced the pressure on the levees.  Same deal  along the Miss.

When  the hell will people ever learn to work with the land and water, and not against it?  Water always wins.