New Mars Forums

What if an astronaut on a Mars mission developed cancer during the mission? 

Many types of cancer have a prognosis of six months to live if untreated.  (That compares unfavorably to a two and a half year mission schedule.)  Since the cumulative odds of a crewman developing cancer on missions with a crew of four is about one in twenty missions, this is an eventuality that might arise.

Should supplies and instruments for cancer treatment be included in mission mass budgets?  Arguably not for every individual mission.  But would it be logical to include these supplies at a central base?

Back when I was a student, one of my physics professors would let me look at incoming letters from all of the nutcases wanting him to help them get published or endorse their crackpot ideas. 

AND I DISCOVERED SOMETHING ALL OF THEM HAD IN COMMON:

********INDISCRIMINATE USE OF FONTS and PUNCTUATION!!!!********

That right.  Invariably, font and punctuation rather than narrative were used to indicate important points within each article/letter. 

I couldn't believe it when I saw it laid out in front of me, but there it was.

"Great Scott!" I thought at the time:

(damn! where's the FLASHING TEXT font when I need it!)

!!!!!!!!

However, I was wrong.  It turns out that there is an entire school of "business-oriented" technical writing that teaches that getting attention is more important that what the writer has to say.  Unfortunately, it's advertised very heavily outside of academic circles, and a good many of the so-called instructional books available to the lay public today are selling this philosophy to make money.  The people sending those goofy letters learned to write them from books like these, and were not displaying some sort of delusional hypergraphia. 

This particular writing style is, however, a sign of lack of formal training.  (Or should be.  IMHO, no self respecting teacher of composition, MBA or otherwise, should pass a student out of his classroom being as unable to convey information as this particularly limited writing style will leave them.)  It's not a red flag, but it's definitely a call for time out.

Twietmeyer uses this writing style, making me immediately suspicious of everything he has to say. 

Some of it, like charging of the tether by the ionosphere, sounds like legitimate concerns.  Having studied the problems inherent in high altitude tethered ballooning, I can say that problems from charging of the tether have to be considered even if it does not conduct electricity at all.  However, since attention is more important than information to Twietmeyer, no detailed discussion -- or even rational perspective -- is forthcoming from this source. 

I still think space tethers are a possibility.  I think Edwards, et al. are doing an adequate job planning for any expected current in the tether.  This poorly written article has not persuaded me otherwise, I certainly have no fear for the ionosphere, and I wish the HighLift team godspeed.

P.S.  Yes, you can collect micrometeoritic material from the roof of your house.  However, the rate of collection is so low that if you live somewhere dry where there's any amount of local dust on a regular basis, or even have iron roofing nails that could rust, the influx of particles is completely swamped by terestrial sources.  That's a great attention grabber, if you don't give out the rest of the information.

Greason had a point.  For $1 million US, the cost of a single suit, you could buy an entire space suit factory.  Something seems wrong with that economic model...

(Yeah, I know I'm too lazy to start a new thread...  :bars3:   )

Does anyone know anything about current popular explanations for the precipitous drop in Carbon-14 concentrations over the past fifty years?

Carbon-14 spiked at levels double the previously measured concentrations during the peak of nuclear weapons testing in the early 1960's.  However, its present day levels are nearly back to  pre-1950's concentrations - reduced by half.  Atmospheric concentrations of Carbon Dioxide (the main reservior for non-A-Bomb C14 in the atmosphere) increased by a third over the past fifty years.

Fossil fuel and geologic emissions have very little C14 because they come from sources that sit around much longer than the halflife of C14, so all the C14 in them decays away over time.  Dillution with CO2 from these sources no doubt played a role in the decrease in concentration.  However, one and one third (the current-to-1960 ratio of CO2) times one half (the current-to-1960 ratio of C14) is not equal to one.  Something else has to be at work.

The C14 concentration did not decrease because of radioactive decay. (The halflife of C14 is 5000 years, not 50.)

So, where did the C14 go?

IMHO, the answer to that question is more critical to understanding the real effect of fossil fuel emissions than any political considerations.

I do hope that Martian Churches have that "small church" atmosphere.  Jesus may be my shepherd, but that doesn't mean I want to feel like I'm being herded in and out of a stockyard.  I'd wish the same for the marsians, too.

If Mike Melvill, why not Abdul Kalam?

A Centaur stage could reach orbit without a lower stage, but couldn't carry much except itself - not enough payload to make the launch worthwhile.  Some other workhorse rocket stages are like that, just not the old shuttle SRB's.

Come on now, everybody knows we really did it for the oil.

Weapons of mass destruction, sure.  Terrorism, maybe.  Even so, if Saddam Hussein had been dictator of a few thousand square miles of sparse, basaltic mountain scrub instead of one of the highest yield oilfields on the planet, he'd still be sitting pretty in his palace.

The threshold of "evidence" was low because the United States needed it to be.

No, not necessarily irrelevant if Kerry wins.  Although you do make a good case for it being irrelevant if Bush wins! 

Umm... I'll assume you're talking generally about evangelical christian denominations, which make up 33% of the population of the United States. 

While the snake-handling variety tend not to vote much, they're not representative, and Bush -- being an evangelical christian himself -- enjoys a wildly disproportionate share of  support among evangelical congregations.  At this point, Bush could walk away with 20% of the vote just by virtue of being a Southern Baptist (or whatever).  He'd barely even need to campaign for that much.

If you can come up with a way to get those people off the Bush ticket and on onboard with a man whose bishop wants him excommunicated, I'd be curious to hear it.

My favorites are the elaborately designed starships with the big empty boxes labelled: "Insert Stardrive Here."   

Indeed, there are all sorts of approaches to the problem of organizing research into space travel.  However, one entity would do best to focus on just a few approaches at a time.  This would make evaluating proposals easier still.

For example, do you want NASA to be a foundation, research laboratory, public works, for-profit company, regulatory agency, manufacturer, publishing house, advertising agency, university, military base, retailer, amusement park, launch provider, environmental consultant, and anything else that it will ever take to please the constituents of every single member of Congress?  Or, would you prefer that NASA just pick a job and go with it?

The individuals building the first privately financed orbital vehicles won't be if they go the route that NASA has chosen. 
NASA won't continue to be if it has to keep chasing money and approval the way it does. 

Unfortunately, the people meddling the most with NASA and introducing the most ungainly projects are often the very people controlling the purse strings.  Tightening up the requirements for each proposal would mean choking off money for a lot of them.  NASA is highly unlikely to do that.

Every time a rocket zings, an astronaut gets his wings... 

Hurray! May there be many more!

NASA today acts more like a foundation than a laboratory, manufacturer, public works, etc.  And, like many foundations (private, corporate and otherwise), it has suffered from substantial mission drift.  It has diversified so greatly and altered its purposes so often in the pursuit of revenue that there is no longer a consensus about what that purpose is.  The problem which started out as a lack of money has become a lack of vision.  At several points during the past decades, NASA repeatedly faced the same choice: follow its mission, or follow the money.

NASA has chosen to follow the money.

Privatization alone will not cure this.  Private foundations are just as prone to this problem, if not more so.  A restructuring of NASA is required.  Programs and whole departments need to be given over to other agencies, phased out, or simply cut loose.  The kind of restructuring required may call for a new National Space Act or equivalent.