New Mars Forums

I'm in a.... pretty typical mood today. Don't really fell like ranting right now. Pretty weird, huh?

This is from my younger brother:
"Blaahhhhhhhhhh!!!!! To all trolls: Get of teh computer and go get some exercise! I know the light and girls are scary but in time you will learn to enjoy it."

Hey, they're not my lines. Maybe I'll let him post more if I decide he's worthy of such privilages. :;):

The cool thing about SDV is that by eliminating the orbiter it should be possible to significantly reduce operating costs and develop a heavy-lift launch vehicle relatively quickly and affordibly. The potentially deadly thing about SDV is that NASA has every incentive in the world in the short-term to keep around as many of the technicians that make shuttle so mind-blowingly expensive as possible. Thousands of employees will petition the politicians who make NASA's long-term decisions to keep their jobs. There will be legions of grumpy engineers if they are laid of en masse, but it simply has to be done if NASA is going to be able to afford the VSE.

In short, SDV is a nice concept that stands a good chance of being accomplished effectively. However, in order for this to be done NASA must resist the temptation to maintain the shuttle army for the heavy-lift version of the shuttle stack. That's the risk involved with a shuttl-derived heavy lift system. To use GCN's phrase, NASA will need to learn to "kick the habbit" before they can return to the Moon and venture beyond.

99.99% of all religion is just fine. It's perfectly harmless stuff as long as people keep their beliefs to themselves and we can all universally agree on where exactly we need to draw the line on moral issues such as protecting life. Mars will almost certainly have a very frontier environment as it is first settled, and for the most part people have been able to settle frontiers throughout human history without stepping on each others toes too much. People get into trouble when you start cramming a bunch of them together for decades on end and let the shadier parts of the human psyche ferment more than civilization should responsibly allow.

Doubtless the first Martian colonists will be hard working. They'll have to be. This is not something we have to worry about because only the most driven, inspired, workaholic type people will even consider going live out the rest of their lives on a foreboding alien planet. They will work ridiculously hard patching holes in greenhouses, filling out quotas in agricultural production, and finding new resources to harvest. People who tend to work hard also play hard. Religion is one way that some people do this. As long as it's religion on the level of neighbors getting together to find deeper meaning in their lives on Sundays, then sitting around for afternoons relaxing together maybe playing a bit of football, then going in and and working like crazy on Monday, where's the problem. As long as you can keep the lynch mobs and suicide bombers out, I don't see what the problem is. Fortunately, the KKK and Al-Qeda types only form the tiniest fraction of all religious people.

As for the question of how many people go to Mars, I can't imagine it being more than maybe 2,000-5,000 people per colony, with maybe 10 to 20 colonies on the planet. Colonists are going to have a very tough time adjusting to the planet, and there will undoubtedly be many factors and difficulties that pop up that we can't even imagine today. It's asking a lot from people to ask them to live their entire lives inside a few big soda cans and plastic greenhouses, and I have serious questions as to whether or not we're psychologically up to the task. These issues are not as inconsequential as many space advocacy groups like the Mars Society make them out to be. I have no doubt that there will be some people living on Mars perminately, even with little more than today's technology, by the end of the century, but I can't imagine that millions and millions would jump at the chance to live on the red planet. We'll get there, but not in droves. At least not at first.

I am a deeply methodical and spiritual person. I do all my homework on time and study vigorously for tests to point where I get barely two thirds of the sleep I ought to get each night. My class rank is #2 of 526, I am in the running for Vice President of my school's NHS, and am taking pre-calculus, advanced physics, and AP European History as a sophmore. I'm the knid of guy who spends hours staring at pictures from Hubble and the MERs and voraciously reads books ranging from victorian novels to AIAA papers and thinks for the pure fun of it.

I only say this because I do these things yet cannot possibly fathom why anyone would start smoking. String theory is a piece of cake compared to trying to figure out what goes on these peoples' heads.

Spacex says that they're working on an F-1 class "super Merlin" engine that will power their heavy-lift launch vehicle. By heavy-lift I'm guessing they mean Ariane 5/EELV class, the kind of rocket that can loft two commercial sattelites to GEO at once. That could be in the range for the CLV, and be an attractive alternative to Boeing and LockMart. They've also alluded to a "super heavy lift" (SDV-class?) booster that they'll consider developing "if conditions warrant." The interesting thing is that if Spacex is as serious about this as it says it is it could put an clean-sheet launch vehicle in the running for heavy-lift, without requiring SDV or advanced EELV concepts. It's something to keep an eye out for if nothing else.

Things will probably change between now and when the CEV is brought to the pad, so we could see heavy-lift come back into vogue. EELVs will probably be just fine as far as safety goes as long as a highly effective abort capability is included. However, heavy lift does make things a whole lot cleaner, simpler, and perhaps cheaper once you can get past developing the launcher. The next year or two should be pretty exciting as NASA starts to make these critical choices.

Well, I don't know about do, but unfortunately if I brough a knife to work I'd get suspended, which would not be very fun. I'd personally love to let a knife live in my pocket, it's a lovely multi-purpose tool and helps you keep in touch with your inner social preditor, but there are so many places today where you could end up in a whole boatload of trouble if you're cought with one. My father keeps one with him at all times, and almost had it confiscated at the airport once.

I'm very happy with my immune system as it keeps me from going to the doctor's very often. When I was little I'd go to the doctor fairly regularly, for checkups, but eventually I guess they stopped seeing the use in sending a habitually perfectly healthy kid down to the office every year or so. Except for vaccinations. And my parents could never tell me when I was getting one. It was always "Let's go for a checkup, then we'll get ice cream!" Invariably I wouldn't have the slightest inkling of their ulterior motives until I smelled the rubbing alcohol being taken out. And we never even went to Baskin Robbins after all those years...

Digression within a digression. My point is, I'm quite happy that I don't have to spend much time around doctors. They're a brilliant group of people, no doubt about it, and I admire them for their work, but they never seem to get it whenever I'm around them. It's always a bunch of "Why don't you wear glasses all the time?" (after I fail the eye exam), "Okay, you shouldn't stay out in the Sun for more than ten minutes" (after they catch a look at my mole-covered neck), "Why don't you come in here more often?   I haven't seen a new mole pop up in three years and that's all they can ever talk about. It's as though their primary goal in their work is to fabricate the story that will best convince you that you're absolutely screwed. Bunch of lousy good-for-nothing...

But hey, I'm CPR/First Aid certified on the professional level, so I guess that makes me one of them. I've heard that many doctors get so used to other work and having nurses around that they completely forget how to perform CPR. The most basic, easy, life-saving maneuver when a patient is in cardiac distress, and they don't know how to do it. Cindy, have you ever noticed this problem among your colleagues?

My father and I got into an interesting discussion a while ago about piloting. It would help my cause if I could get out to the field more than once every two or three months, but whatev. It's funny, flying, like carrying a knife, is not inherantly dangerous but can get you into a tanker-sized boatload of trouble in a New York second if aren't careful. On the infinately linkable Wikipedia I found a site that has pretty nice descriptions of many of the major air accidents that have occured over the past half-century or so, with CVR transcripts, audio files, movie clips, and all that other good stuff. Back in 1985, apparently (I say that because I was -4 years old at the time) an L-1011 crashed on landing in Dallas. The pilot wasn't careful and got cought in a microburst and saw his speed shooting up. So, hey, it makes sense to throttle back, nose up, and slow down, right? Well, that worked until he got to the other side of the microburst and his speed shot down to many knots below the plane's stall speed and, you guessed it, the plane fell out of the sky. This is the kind of thing that makes me want to bang my head against the keyboard and scream YOU IDIOT, YOU NEVER SLOW DOWN ON APPROACH UNTIL YOU FLARE!!!!! It's a nice rule to follow in gliders, one I always adhere to. As long as you keep your speed up and are ready to shove the stick to the forward stop if you run into trouble, you'll generally be fine. A 2-32 has a stall speed of about 32 knots, and I try to stay above 60 all the way to that final flare before landing. Those are my thoughts on the matter anyways.

Has anyone here had a peanut butter-pickle sandwich before by any chance? If so, what kind of PB do you reccomend?

Heh heh, that's certainly true. Perhaps a bigger problem is when people call legitimate scientific principles "just" theories, as the ID/creationism crowd is so fond of doing. It's as though because an idea is a theory it's merely zero-evidence speculation to these guys. If you look at it from that perspective, hey, gravity is "just" a theory. Why some people can't simply face facts and try to integrate evolution via natural selection into their personal beliefs is beyond me. But I digress.

"End" as in fin. The end. That's it, show's over. You don't have to go home but you can't stay here. Granted, I suppose the universe could be cyclical, but the fact of the matter is that at some point, whether it's in 20 minutes or waaaaaay out there, every shred of progress and mark that humanity has made on this resplendant universe willl be erased. We just all have to face up to our mortality eventually. For people like us in the year 2005 the only finility we have to deal with is our own lives, but eventually the species to will be gone. Or maybe not, but it probably will happen. It's a thought some people might consider depressing, but as far as I'm concerned it's a completely moot point an I'd still live my life just the same even if I knew that the universe would draw to a close one second after my death. Sure, the universe will probably one day end, but who cares about the universe, we live on Earth! :laugh:

NOTE: Of course, you should care about just about everything. Just don't let it get you down. Realistic optimisim r0x0rz. :;):

Wait a minute, I thought the structures already were qualified. Wasn't the Falcon I already sitting on its pad? Good greif, Spacex really ought to fly that thing as soon as they can, they're starting to embarass themselves. If the engines still need to be qualified, for all we know the launch could slip into 2006, two full years after the originally published launch date.

I have no problem with every engineer at Spacex making absolutely positively without-a-doubt certain that the Falcon I won't blow itself up or crunch on its first flight, but they should not announce a launch date until they can be reasonably sure they can make it. Hopefully when they finally get around to flying they'll be able to show their much-touted ability to fly anytime.

Robotic exploration alone is pathetically limited in capability when compared to manned exploration. Pause for a second and think about the performance specs of the MERs. The two rovers are the most advanced hardware ever sent to the surface of another planet successfully and have almost single-handedly nailed shut the coffin of all doubts about a watery past for Mars, which would make you think at first that they are quite capable machines. However, they run on less power than a hairdryer, move at a maximum rate of 100 meters per day (!), and require complex sets of directions to carry out the most simple tasks.

For all the wonder that Opportunity has brought to the scientific community and the world in general, it has done nothing that a single human couldn't do in a few hours of hiking. The rover has been there for over a year, a person could do everything it's done and more in less than a day. Moreover, robots are inherantly limited to do only tasks that were specifically designed into their repitoire of abilities. For all we know one of the rovers may have driven repeatedly over a rock that was once a mat of algae, but if either of them ever do this we will never know because they don't have the right tools to find such rocks.

The future of robotic exploration does not look particularly bright for eliminating people from the picture either. No matter how andvanced robots become they will always be limited by their design specifications and the large communications lag time between planets. Because people design robots, logic dictates that they can only explore as well or not as well as us. Robots are great at tasks that people are bad at, such as inspecting nuclear reactor cores and disarming bombs. They are very bad at tasks that we are good at, such as exploration, by comparison.

I don't think there's any way that robotic exploration alone can ever satisfy our natural hunger for new horizons. People are smarter, better, and a better value than robots, and as soon as society develops the will to do so they will form the backbone of space exploration. There's really no other way you can do it.

http://epage.pvusd.k12.az.us/nchsweb/Fi … ml]Science Bowl 2005

My physics teacher is a funny guy. Well, the pics from Science Bowl are finally up, but the individual photos don't seem to have URLs (don't ask me how. I am completely lost on nearly all matters electronic). So, instead the link above is to the page with all the Science Bowl pics, click them of course to see the full size (just like always).

Let's see, there are probably a couple of things I should mention. In IMG 0091 I am second from the right. The other three nerds you see there are seniors, so they won't be around next year. In IMG 0105 you can see another shot of the A Team in action, this time yours truly is second from the left lovingly holding a Diet Dr. Pepper. That stuff's good! IMG 0115 is a pretty nice group shot of all three teams.

Most of the other teams just wore their regulation nerdy street clothes. Slackers. We were quite intimidating, even more so while wiping the floor with all who dared to oppose us in the hallowed arena of arcane science trivia. Go men (and women) in black!

I think the reason why there's a seperate cloud around the cockpit is due to the fact that the plane really isn't making one sonic boom as it passes mach 1. Different parts of the plane all have subtle aerodynamic nuance to them, and generally the different parts of an aircraft will all pass the sound barrier at slightly different times in different ways. There's a great picutre in my physics textbook that shows an F-111 breaking the sound barrier that was taken with a special camera that allows you to see the pressure waves on the airplane. Rather than one clean v-shaped wave steming from the nose to the tail there are about 20 or 30 teeny waves that all build on each other to create the sonic boom. The reason the cockpit in particular has its own condensation zone is likely because it sticks out farther than any other part of the plane near the nose. If the camera had taken the picture at a slightly different angle, you'd probably be able to see other clouds coming from the fuel tanks and hardpoints, but at the angle the pic was taken you can't really see them.

This reminds me of a story I remember my dad telling me a while ago. When he was in elementry school, growing up in southern Illinois, no regulations had been made yet on sonic booms over land. According to him, every week or so they'd be sitting there minding their own business (often in school) and suddenly hear an unbearibly noisy, window-rattling BOOM! Apparently he and his friends had good fun watching the teachers jump in utter fright with every sonic boom, and every once in a while they'd get one loud enough to crack a window. For course, for better or worse (almost definately better) those days are over now.

And that wisdom is wasted on the elders. I liked your deft use of "tha," though, makes you sound like a true gansta.

Just kidding, of course. Happy 33rd, CM Edwards!   Cindy, I think we all saw your profile before you removed your birthdate from it, so you don't have to hide from being ** years old. At my age, I'm certainly much more facile with the idea of getting older, but it's not something with which I'm exactly enamored. For now, age brings experience, wisdom, maturity, new horizons with each passing day; in twenty years? Bah, I guess I'll just have to cross that bridge when I come to it. In the end, no one gets out of life alive.

But on the plus side, being alive's pretty neat. I certainly enjoy it.