New Mars Forums

are you being sarcastic, or not?

Well, this discovery, coupled with the fact that radar equipment has detected Hydrogen at many locations below the Martian surface tells me that we might have more water on Mars than even the most optimistic of us thought.

t/Space has stretched its initial NASA funding -- which the agency expected could only support paper studies -- to include flight tests of several key aspects of the proposed system. One such test series began in May 2005 to validate the simulations developed for the release method to be used by the VLA. Marti Sarigul-Klijn leads this project, described in a paper in the t/Space documents library. A 23% size test article of the CXV and its booster was carried aloft by Scaled Composites' Proteus aircraft from the Mojave Spaceport. It demonstrated that the Trapeze-Lanyard Air Drop (TLAD) method primarily invented by Dr. Sarigul-Klijn performs as predicted. TLAD enables a belly-mounted booster to begin a slow rotation as it drops away from the carrier aircraft. This turns the booster toward the vertical before its first stage begins thrusting. Other systems, such as the Orbital Sciences' Pegasus or the earlier X-15 aircraft, require wings to make this "gamma turn." The TLAD method thus reduces system weight by avoiding the need for wings.

The t/Space release method also enables the capsule and booster to cross the aircraft altitude behind the VLA, rather than in front as is the case with most aircraft-launched boosters and missiles. In the event of an anomaly, rear-crossing trajectories are safer for the carrier aircraft.

The major benefits of air launch come in safety, simplicity and flexibility. Crew safety is enhanced because abort-at-ignition is easier when the capsule already is high enough for parachute deployment, vs. the on-the-pad challenge of releasing sufficient energy in the correct direction to send the capsule high enough for the parachutes to deploy. Public safety is enhanced because the launch takes place over open ocean, well away from any populated areas.

Air launch also allows simpler engines, which don't need to be designed to operate at both sea-level air pressure and at altitude. The "all-airborne" operation also reduces the performance penalty of using inexpensive low-pressure tanks and engines.

Flexibility and responsiveness is greatly enhanced by air launch. Most winds and precipitation at the airport runway -- launch site -- don't delay a launch; the carrier aircraft simply flies to clear weather. In addition, responsive launch often requires matching a particular inclination and orbit phasing. The carrier aircraft over open ocean can launch the CXV to any azimuth, and by flying across longitudes, can quickly match a desired orbit phasing.

The t/Space version of air launch provides only modest performance gains, in the 10-25% range, compared to a ground launch. It does not attempt technically difficult challenges such as accelerating the launch aircraft to supersonic speeds, or reaching very high altitudes.

BWhite,

then you explain to me, why the US Government has placed the Space Operations and Launch Operations into Private Contractors under license of NASA and not government employees anymore and they will do the same in space and also tender the orbiting platform operations the same way .

Today, White House Press Secretary Scott McClellan lectured the media about a “journalistic standard that should be met” before running with a story. Fine, but isn't there also a political standard of accountability that should be met as well? McClellan's issue with the Newsweek story was that it was “based on a single anonymous source who cannot personally substantiate the report.”

Remember when we learned that the evidence for
Iraq's supposed mobile biological weapons labs came
from an unreliable source? What was McClellan's response then?

    QUESTION: Does it concern the President that the primary source for the intelligence on the mobile biological weapons labs was a guy that U.S. intelligence never every interviewed?

    MCCLELLAN: Well, again, all these issues will be looked
    at as part of a broad review by the independent commission
    that the President appointed… But it's important
    that we look at what we learn on the ground and compare that
    with what we believed prior to going into Iraq.

    [White House Press Gaggle, 4/5/04]

There you have it. When confronted with an anonymous source who provided faulty intelligence that the President relied upon to go to war, McClellan chose not to talk about standards of accountability that should be met. Instead, the White House passed the buck to an independent commission and suggested that it didn't matter what subsequent information they learned about Iraq's intelligence because they didn't know it when they went to war. Newsweek has taken responsibility by retracting its story. Will President Bush take responsibility for his own errors?

    QUESTION: He's the president of the United States. This thing he told the country on the verge of taking the nation to war has turned out to be, by your own account, not reliable. That's his fault, isn't it?

    MCCLELLAN: No.

Standing next to Aldrin was movie director James Cameron. Cameron wants to go to outer space. He's ridden the "vomit comet," the jet that uses parabolic arcs to simulate weightlessness among passengers. He would be thrilled to visit Mars. He said we have to become multi-planetary, just to survive. "If we discovered a comet nucleus or an asteroid on an impact course with Earth, we could do exactly what the dinosaurs did, and we could stare upward with a dumb look on our faces. We need to evolve beyond the dinosaurs," he had told the conference audience minutes earlier. NASA should enlist the media and Hollywood to make the space program more visually dramatic, Cameron told me in the hall. The Mars rovers ought to be on TV. We've seen what the rovers see, but not the rovers themselves. Imagine "Titanic" through Leonardo DiCaprio's eyes without seeing DiCaprio.

The Vision [VSE] has no official price tag, because it claims that NASA won't need any extra money to go to the moon and Mars. We'll go slowly, on the cheap. A skeptical observer might wonder how the government could inexpensively send people to another planet when it can barely afford to run trains from Washington to New York.

The Vision emits a whiff of conflict avoidance. It's almost a stealth program, an attempt to tippy-toe to the moon and beyond by noncontroversial increments. In the near term, there's no singular moment when we decide, as a country, that we're definitely doing this. John Logsdon, the sage academic who runs a think tank called the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, said: "If you're really cynical, you could say that this plan makes that decision without a decision . . . If it works, one day we're there."

A coerced retraction has the same value as a coerced confession - - zero!

The bigger question is why have our policies in Afghanistan have left the place such a powderkeg that a tiny Newsweek entry can cause such an explosion?

*Your proof the retraction was coerced?