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But that is where some of the fantasy begins.
In the 80's I worked for a large computer manufacturer and trained just those type of people to trouble shoot and test high voltage switching power supplies, to read schematics, using ohm meters, Digital voltage meters, Oscilloscopes and soldering removal tools.
It comes back to who should bear the cost of training personel for a given job being the employer or the employee, whether this is on the job training, college , university or a technical school given education. Oh and lets not forget coop students who work to gain knowlegde of a job.
I guess That I was miss understood in that having a job of any kind is the right thing to do and Not to be welching on socialistic welfare programs. I would not want to pay people to do nothing.
My other though was of providing better paying jobs rather than the jobs being of the stlye that keeps us as working poor just barely surviving.
PoliSci: Fight begins for science dollars
With all that has happened not only to Nasa in 2004 but with the recent tsunami it will press the budgets to the limits and may force delays or cancellations to on going projects as a new pecking order of priorities are adjusted.
The question that just will not go away. Can and should we service the Hubble or for that fact any space orbiting device or even the ISS if unmanned.
IEEE-USA Urges 'Safe Servicing' of Hubble Space Telescope for Humankind
NASA should "strive to develop procedures, technology and equipment that would allow the safe servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope, including the possible use of tele-operated robots,
A chunk that could possibly come out of such a collision would most likely expand in the absence of the much larger gravity that it would no longer be under. Even if some were to get here after burning its way though the atmosphere it still would be the same composition as when it left the neutron star. Carbon compressed is still a diamond even from a neutron star. Can any one say dilithium crystal.. comes to mind when thinking of such things.
(Mad Grad Student @ Posted on Dec. 31 2004, 17:41
)]I'd bet that the EU would much rather be spending these 40 million euros on feeding the homeless or creating new jobs.
I think that making jobs that pay well such as in the space industry would be the number one thing to do. Making service style, temporary employment hiring and minimum wage jobs do nothing to help the situation that can and are probably the reason for the homeless an unemployed quite possibly. I know from my own experience that if I can not save money for a rainy day then I am not earning enough for the job that I have after normal living expenses.
Why would we want a new ship with more wing surface? Since it is so easy to bring this style ship to a horrible ending on re-entry. If anything you would only want the re-entry portion of the craft to have small wings and nor would we need a large cargo bay for that could be expendable before re-entry. I would go with a lot more heat shield that is replaceable whether it be the TPS system or the boiler plate as well as radiational shielding on just that section.
Right now all the biosphere strategies employ the crew contained within one to put in large amounts of time keeping it going. The larger the population contained within one the more work that must be done to keep it safe to stay within.
Things must operate with no human intervention, energy source must be freely abundent or we will be in the same boat as we are with the ISS but only on the moon.
The trouble is no work will be done on completing a new rocket design during the shuttles continued use and will need a 4 to 5 years to even if all money is promised for the working design. Raising the grand total to replacement of close to 10 years before first launch of a non man rated vehicle. That sounds just like the rest of the time line that was given in the presidential plan.
So in multiple threads we think the required number of rockets are in the order of 2 or 3 but a max of 6 depending on the crew count and length of stay, whether fuel to come home is insitu or sent, whether the ITV is cyclical or reusuable and for the MAV, hab.
So lets look at the time required to build a rocket, if the rocket construction was simular to a soyuz or progress then 18 months would be typical. I have no knowledge of how long for atlas or delta for I have not seen this any where.
Launching in a month wide window would be difficult from a single pad and launching from other nations would make rendiverse in orbit a more costly event for some nations.
Cancelling the shuttle out right is not a possibility though it would be for the best. So what can be done to make the best of the situation?
Trying to off load launches that are borderline as to the need of a shuttle and making sure that we launch each shuttle 3 times each year. Other than that what else can be done to retire the shuttle early?
Yes Dayton3: there is a need to do a dry run using the moon as if it were Mars. Designing the hardware as if it were going to mars, staying the long duration in flight in 0g, getting the radiation exposure issue resolved, designing long duration power sources, and so much more. That is just why I started The need for a Moon direct, and sustainability program so many months ago. For IMO felt that any Mars program would get little or no support in congress due to the large long term cost and the minimal returns. Besides a few rocks, flags and foot prints which would not be what any of us here on new mars would want.
Plus if all goes well with all the dry run hardware and stuff on the moon we could be rather than saying we can go to mars for flag and foot prints we could instead be say we are going to stay. The moon missions could be a very good momentum builder for mars in the long run. But all space hardware and intent must be geared not at just the moon capabilities but rather for Mars use from the start.
So in the ex nasa man speaks it is the contention that without an escape tower that all would be better.
But that is only good on the way up there is no tower on the way down. So the problem therefore is only half solved...
Every vessel ever designed has its what if this happens ... that you would loss the crew. We can not fear the unknown we must instead make changes to not allow the what if to happen.
I see this as a chance to maybe stop some of the fighting in Iraq if the Budhist, Musilums and christians especially those in Iraq unite to care for those that have been devistated by the tsunami.
There is no need for a continued war against insurgents by the US. Can not the insurgence see that mother nature is angry... The insurgence must have some nation at one time that they called home and if it were one of these hard hit countries why not stop and go help in being a solution, rather than a hinderance in the Iraq affair.
All have sort of danced around the financial issue. People want what ever is usually cheapest of any commodity and the roll of supply versus demand changes that field of play. When companies control product flow and pricing it takes away the middle man thus putting them in control. By limiting the flow of diamonds they control the pricing of the available product.
So if no competition for market share then no fluctuation of product pricing and or demand.
As for the lunar or asteroid property claims if no one is there at the site to also mine the resource then there is no competition for deliverable of that commodity for space.
The only challenge to this is if Earth mining produces extra product to be delivered to space. Then the price can be less than the resource of space mining for space use. It would be very hard to make space products to cost less than those that are already available here on earth. Other than the example of He3 space can only supplement the amount of total resources that earth already has. But space can supplement other space locations where there are shortages of key items such as the low carbon content of the moon or the lower oxygen content of mars. But in either case they both have low water H2O availability which make shipping short term to space from earth a market for colonization's support. That list of support is more than just water thou and would increase as need increases if self sufficiency is not started early on.
I agree GCNRevenger; lots of grains of salt.
But when and if they were to get the funding level of Nasa just look out. For we already know that there equipment cost less as compared to comparable US stuff which costs on the order of at least 3 to 5 times what there's does.
With a very open mind this could happen under an international team effort. But do we really want to be dependent on Russia for space travel...
NASA's Wildest Dreams well not really but could be used by the agency or anyone that has the cash.
The US space agency has plenty of big thinkers, but budget-challenging times like these tend to rein in their creativity. That's where the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts comes in. This six-person center - operated by the independent Universities Space Research Association, not the government - hands out some $3 million a year.
Other technology think tank items other than a space elevator are:
LASER LIFTOFF laser powered rocket launch system
SPACE COWBOYS tethered orbital craft to moon launch and capture system
SELF-MADE MACHINES reconfigurable bots that can form complex machines
TRACTOR BEAMS from the futuristic but a main stay from the star trek series of shows
Well I do not know about who or what is clean those solar panels but the heat shield photos are slowly rolling in.
Mars rover Opportunity visits heat shield impact site
The image was taken during the rover's 325th martian day (December 22) and released by NASA on Tuesday.
This orbital view shows the course the rover drove from its landing to its 324th martian day, or sol (Dec. 21, 2004), including the historic path of Opportunity's six months of exploration inside Endurance Crater.
Then you get the not so nice way of saying we are exploring the heat shield. Mars rover seeks treasure in trash Engineers scavenge for ideas in charred debris of heat shield
This research thou is very valuable for if we can make the shield out of lighter wieght materials that would mean we would be able to deliver a much larger payload to the surface someday.
The heat shield was built at Jeffco's Lockheed Martin Space Systems and consists of:
• A surface coated with a protective layer, six-tenths of an inch thick.
• The protective coating is made from the outer bark of cork oaks, ground to a powder and mixed in a vat with tiny glass spheres.
Taiwan's space programme offers tsunami satellite images to aid relief and I hope others will follow suit it such relief efforts.
I think this next item should probably also go under the Russians play hardball with regards to the ISS as well as here...
Russians ready pay-as-you-go space plan Agency says NASA will write off space station ‘debt’
Russia’s cash-strapped space agency said on Tuesday it would stop giving U.S. astronauts free rides into orbit in the future.
Under the new proposal, the United States would write off debts of man-hours that Russia owes for work carried out on the station in exchange for Russia launching its astronauts.
When the station was built, participants from 16 nations agreed money and expertise they would put into the project. Russia still owes some of its agreed input, some of which would be written off if the United States agrees to the plan.
Starting in 2006
Thou there has been slow but steady progress towards returning the shuttle to flight. The main reason for its grounding was foam debri falling from the external tank.
The external tank has been altered but how was it tested for the stress that it will see under a maybe not so typical launch.
NASA improves rocket fuel tank in big step toward return to space
Media Invited To See Shuttle External Fuel Tank Ship From Michoud
NASA Unveils Changes to Prevent Another Shuttle Disaster
"This is the safest, most reliable tank NASA has ever produced," said Ms. Coleman.
Still, Ms. Coleman acknowledged that the tank's foam insulation will still produce debris. "We can never completely eliminate foam coming off the tank," she said.
redesign included these steps:
Lockheed Martin Space Systems, the maker of the external tank, will now assign two workers to apply the foam - one to apply it and one to look for flaws that could leave an air pocket that might fill up and freeze.
Lockheed has tightened its certification standards for foam workers, requiring them to demonstrate expertise in applying foam in specific areas of the tank, instead of being certified for applying the foam anywhere.
Heaters have been added to replace the insulation at points where the foam was considered particularly vulnerable, including the connection between the tank and the orbiter - the spot that produced the frozen foam that damaged the Columbia.
Some components of the tank have been redesigned to limit the size of the pieces of foam needed to cover them, or to reduce the chance of freezing. For instance, Ms. Malone said, a spot on the tank where a feeder line comes in was reshaped so that any water that accumulates will drip off to the side rather than onto the foam.
Cameras will be mounted on the tank and a booster rocket to allow flight engineers to monitor the foam's condition. While some members of the Columbia's flight team suspected that the foam might have damaged the craft, they were unable to ascertain its condition.
Edit:
New year, new hope for shuttle missions NASA plans to unveil a better rocket fuel tank
Safety revisions to the fuel tank represent a major component of NASA's return-to-flight strategy. Since the Columbia shuttle disaster on Feb. 1, 2003, NASA has spent nearly $200 million to reduce the kind of tank insulation foam losses that caused the fatal wing damage.
Though that is not that much of a complete launch cost it is however quite a bit more than a single tank is worth. I hope they have got it right this time.
I think you have described the space time dimensions. For the fabric of what can be seen to agree with what would be the estimates of all energy at a big bang moment would mean that it was contained sort of like in a bubble with each bounce off the sides rebounding and returning in the opposite direction until it has slowed to light speed. Hopefully that would explain the young galaxies within what is visible now.
You have been watching to many superman movies with Lex Lugger and cronies that try to make shore front property out of the California's San adreas fault erupting to make the coast slide out to sea and a new shore line to come about in death valley.
But this is not really the place for this.... enough said.
A number of similar news stories coming from other places of the miracle of survival or at least of the near miss to those telling of the event.
Financing:
If income stream could be generated then the group doing so could purchase the same rockets that Nasa would use to do the same exploration and or settlement.
MoonTreaty:
Much like the ISS in that one nation can charge for services but can not exclude nations that want to put forth the funds to have a presence there.
More news stories still coming in on the death toll.
At Least 3,000 Dead, 30,000 Missing On Two Indian Islands: Officials
Many of the islands in the area are still inhabited by indigenous tribes people with several Sentinelese aborigines and Shompen aborigines tribes that may have there populations wiped up by the tsunami. The last untouched area from mans early cradle to which civilization sprang from.
