PB666

From what I have read appears the scientist was hunting for funding.

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-37200489 For posterities sake a million years from now?

It D-news, not too definitive.

But the government expenditure, think 2 trillion one for a war totally not needed, alot of hideous waste. Money spent on science and tech has been a ggod return on the investment. At the height of the apollo era, when NASA spending was 10x per GDP relative to today, deficits were less than 5o billion per year, we cancelled apollo and cut nih spending, about the same time deficit speding went to 250 billion. Proof of the pudding is in the eating. If you invest in the growth sectors of the economy and encourage research and developement, walla, what a surprise the fastest growing part of the economy will grow faster still, jobs will get higher pay, people pay more taxes and the economy will grow. The technology industry has been pulling the economy along, including paying that expensive debt for about 20 years now. Go down to clear lake, it was a swamp, NASA/ texas medical center makes houston the consistently fastest growing econmy, most diverse population, fort bend county is one of the richest counties in the US, and we are in the midst of an oil bust, how is that possible? Our primary mistake in this country is that at the grass roots level we undermine science, we put a burden on science and technology, space base public projects drawn trainees into a very hungry system where good paying jobs around and otherwise flow overseas. If you do anything to cut sci tech investment, i can almost assure you, the deficit spending will get worse, not better. I see a crier in our society, its a finger that points blame on those that got ahead, because the crier lags, they blame the government for their problems, they blame foreigners. But i was raised amoungst those that now cry i was in the FFA, i placed in show, shoveled excrement, sheered sheep, all that muck. I see where i went up and i watched as they fell. Its not like im an outsider commenting from the bubble, I went to the same schools, played in the same feilds, etc. Sorry to say many are gone. Wheras they listen to the social forces that be; it was the 70s. i pushed for something 'up' that was not just about a fast buck and do booze, girls and drugs. Next thing they are off to church for their redemption. Now i hear this 'why have the jobs gone overseas or why to this group, or aliens'. Its the biggest BS argument i have heard. In my place of work, they are almost all resident aliens, the last job interview we went through 40 interviews, not a single qualified candidate, position closed and a position opened to 'resident aliens' was opened. Thats the reality, the meat of the decline is motivating the growth engine of the economy, people, there is 1% added growth buried in underemployment in science tech, thats where those deficits lie. How many kids know how to use an iphone, how many american born college grads know how to program apps for an iphone? We 'white' males built the economy, who were the rocketeers and the test pilots. We built the econmy that requires task evolution to survive, but now 'we' are blaming others because we are too conservative to keep evolving and they aren't? I don't buy these arguments, there is enough money for the shuttle program and ten shuttle programs. It was a loss of function plain and simple, a back peddling, a retraction of american standing, a sign of fatness, personal greed, a lack of self criticism, a feckless behavior. If i send 10000 troops onto the battle field in Iraq, i have added more to the debt, killed 100 more Americans, destroyed more lives, undermined the capacity of the VA, and thank you very much ended up with nearly every bayou bridge in our fair city being occupied by a disenfranchised homeless war veteran who lost his mind in a war the creators thereof don't want to pay for. But the shuttle program is somehow singled out here many times as a disaster. black is white and white is black

I mean we could argue the same thing about building the Hoover dam, or building an aircraft carrier. Neither were/are really cost effective unless you need water in LA or to ward off some foe. How many weapons systems has the pentagon built that came under cost or saved money. The joint-strike fighter was supposed to save more money than the F22, the F22 is greatly more capable. The problem is quite clear when we lost the shuttle we lost functionality. The shuttle was the only movable manned space activity platform. Check your boxes. ISS, has a telescoping arm, but is in a fixed orbit that cannot be substantially changed, and very expensive. Has the capability of self repair, but cannot repair things in space Orion, Apollo. Sure its manned and can transport, yes can access movable orbits, but were a decade at least away on anything Orion-like from a repair capability. We could collaborate with the neo-soyuz program, but like thats going to work given the delays ESA is facing in collaborating with RSA. Can launch satellites that need some post launch manipulation. ISS can, but only from its orbital inclination. Upgrades, Think about K2 and Hubble. Hubble was launched in the late 80s, and its still kicking cheeks. This is surprising because as launched the hubble was a fail, but human spaceflight rescued it, and upgraded it several times. K2 is what we call crippled kepler, most of keplars mission is now K2, sure its still going until one more gyro fails, which can be tommorow. Compare the two, unmanned, basically dead in the water, mission will be over soon. Manned, started crippled, (through no fault of the shuttle), shuttle crew repaired and upgraded the cripple turning it into the single most successful science mission ever launched by humans. IF JWST has any major problem, no matter how much we invested in it, its dead, nothing can be done, ever, its over, kaputs. This is what I call obsolescent functionality by design. Hubble could have been that, should have been that, but for the shuttle was not that. Short term science missions that require human assistance. We (our group) were the beneficiary of one of the animal studies. If you send animals to the ISS, that's good for a few months, but you may not get a ride back when you planned. The short term missions helped to define in animal models some of the medical problems of space flight. It is true that all these functionalities could be replaced by other spacecraft, but . . . . if wishes were horses beggars would ride. Those capabilities have not appeared, not only that they are not in planning. It is basically true that we ended the shuttle program with an eye on the bottom line, but we closed our eyes to what was lost hoping those problems will just be forgotten over time. The shuttle program was bogged down in standards that were not neccesary, by contractor overcharging, and when push came to shove important safety issues were overlooked. Much more of the work could have been done in a SpaceX manner. But the shuttle was a feeding trough for political favors. How much should solid fuel rockets really cost, if 95% of the cost is in the casing, well then who was wasting the money. On board computer systems could have been lightened. The weight of air recycling could be reduced, the amount of metal required for structured could have been reduced with new age composites. Particularly on the non-heated side. Reduce wing loading means total wing mass could have been reduced. Satellites have gotten smaller, the payload bay could be reduced. Flight crews could be reduced to 4 even for ISS missions only one pilot is needed. The payload bay could second as an added crew compartment when added for complex repairs or high crew missions. There are a grand many things that could have been done, upgrades starting in the mid 90s. Let me just put it like this Dehavilland Comet- first commercial jet. Production did not even last two decades with british miliary support. Boeing 707 - 4 engine direct thrust jet. As quickly went out of production - replaced by 737. Unless you count KC-135 none are still flying. DC8- same thing. The DC7 was a great aircraft and some are still flying, along with DC3, 4 and 6s but you would be hard pressed to find a 707 or DC8 in service anywhere. Concorde, first of its class. not flying, and for good reason. This is not to say Concorde is a bad aircraft, it was a great aircraft, but it was not really designed for modern runways or modern fuel costs. Had someone invested in its marked renovation it might be still flying. Why is this, the first production model of any serious craft is generally not optimized for its task DC6B and DC7 were the heavily refined versions of the DC3/DC4 class of aircraft. But we see elements of the 707 in both the 737 and 747. In addition there are less demands on a DC3 than a jet aircraft. They can run on low melting point gasoline, don't need a formal runway, getting particulate in the propeller intake is not a serious problem. Every new class of aircraft places increased demands on the physics, kinks that need to be worked out in the next generation. Even the 727 are basically fading away. It was one of the fastest non-heavy commercial passenger jets around and yet its basically been delegated for hauling boxes. Why, because under the demands of the current US aviation industry these old first off the line models were not efficient, there had to be relatively fast design overhauls. The result 737 still in production, 747 still in production. All of the faults attributed to the shuttle can be attributed to basically any first model of production. We can look at the SpaceX early rockets and merlin engines. All of these technologies are GREAT in that that put the platform out to be tested, but eventually the platform needs to undergo intense refinement process that works out the kinks and inefficiencies. The shuttle did this, it got better more powerful and efficient engines, what you did not see is a 30 to 50 percent reduction in the airframe, complete replacement of the 5 on board computers with more efficient computers, a gross reduction in the weight of onboard electronics, reduction of air management weight, etc. THat is what one might have expected if there was a commitment that one might have expected with a viable aircraft corporation. If the 707 is such a great improvement why is it not flying, the answer is the DC9, L-1011. Same is true for the DC-8. Did the goverment ask for competitive major variants of the space shuttle, say in 1990. Did they take bids from competitors for replacement, and how exactly did the RSA end up carrying passengers, was that competitive? See its not particularly a matter of what is competitive, I have no problem with RSA carrying some manned ISS resupplies, my problem is that they are carrying all manned resupply, and basically NASA is out of the game. If you get 5 flights out of one shuttle, its worthy of retirement, so 30 missions for 3 shuttles the fixed cost becomes trivial savings for addtional missions, its better to replace and upgrade.

Disliking it per say is not the problem, claiming a lack of success and then pointing to something more successful is the problem. You can dislike something that is successful, There was a greatly popular president from the 80's I disliked, but I cannot deny his success as a president and there were things that he did that I liked. The shuttle largely built the livable parts of the ISS, it placed hubble in space as well as a number of secret military satellites. It was expensive and some of those missions should have gone up on regular rockets. The problem comparing shuttle and anything since with Apollo is this -Apollo was extremely expensive. Money was being thrown hand over fist into the space program. -We were too stupid to know about the risks and in a post WWII - cold war mindset the needs of the country outweighed the needs of the astronaut. We lost more crew/crew seat missions in Apollo than the shuttle, but no-one ever reports on the Apollo launchpad loses. -There was a whole lot of luck involved in 7 landing missions, you are not going to get that luck if you fly 100+ missions, any weakness in the program and lady luck eventually takes its toll. -I personally would not have paused the program for vehicle loses, In the case of challenger, they knew it was cold weather launches, so don't launch on cold weather and fix on the fly. From my perspective we could not do today with Apollo what we did in the 60's and 70's because America just does not have the stomach for the risks or the costs. If the US populous had backbone and stomach, we would have a working shuttle program and at least attempted a manned mission to mars if we were in a 60s to 70s mindset. But we are not. It does not ultimately take that much to get the mars, but you have to build a facility in space that can stock supplies and neccesary craft, and we are piddling around trying to re-invent a larger scale version of a lunar module which ultimately, by itself without some large ship, cannot get humans to mars alive. Part of that modern mindset is shuttle bashing self-defeatism. Yes, to be certain, after every 30 missions or so there should have been a preprogrammed efficiency oriented (big) redesigned. They might have even had two versions of the shuttle, one for big launches and projects and a smaller shuttle. There could have also been contractor buy-ins and commercial repurposing. I worked in a lab, actively producing science for 30 years now, I can tell you that any revolutionary system, platforms for conducting science need to undergo frequent and periodic renovation, old things thrown out. I can give an instance were we started with a 500 lb piped in steam autoclave that required about a 3 square meter footprint for operation replaced by an electric autoclave that takes less than a half a meter with a 5% relative operating cost (running steam, reparing steamline breaks, routing maintenance, etc). Just about every system from spectrophotometers to centrifuges have undergone technological revolutions that reduced weight, space and operating costs. The first spectrophotometer was 6 feet long and weight over 150 lbs, the one we use now is about 10 lbs and takes up a 10th of the space. We now produce the same amount of science as 30 years ago, but in 2/5 ths of the lab space. So if you argue at the end of the shuttles life that it was obsolete, thats not a fair argument if the upgrades were largely trivial. Look at the 757 ->787, this is just commercial, not cutting edge science, cutting edge science platforms, to stay alive, have to evolve faster. At the same time the shuttle program was aging, the investment in space per GDP was declining basically by 10 fold from the end of the Apollo to the end of the shuttle, so the shuttle program cannot be blamed from the fact it did not evolve into something more efficient or useful over a broader variety of application. If you want to make a fair comparison compare soviet/russian commercial jet aircraft with US commericial jet aircraft. You don't blame the Shuttle for being relatively obsolete compared to other evolving spacecraft if we have putinesque committment to technological renovation of that program. We lost functionality when we lost the shuttle, while other craft may be more efficient and we may be saving money, neither of these will restore the lost functionality, and there is neither a monetary commitment or drive on the part of the US gov or NASA to restore the lost functionality. Was it worth paying a bit more for, I think so, it increased the diversity of US based space operations.

Harlock. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Pirate_Captain_Harlock_(film)

60 bucks is way too expensive for 20 - 40 hours of play. BUt the question is why is it expensive, there are no repetitive planets, but the creatures are repetitive and so are the alien races. In addition the claims that people could meet and engage each other in the game (rare but they should be able to interact) apparently not rare and they were not able to interact. By and large its spore in which the game provider makes all the content, and the user is stuck with whatever monotony they produce. Lets see . . . .Habitable planets are very few and far between in our universe, those that actually have complex life are rare, i don't mean like 1 in 100, more like 1 in a million or billion. Travel distances even at 0.99c are great, few of them would be suitable for human occupation without some modification. So essentially at 0.99c you are talking about 4 years (or whatever the transform is) for 400 light years to the first planet with complex life, probably not sentient, and immediately hostile and unfacilitative to humans. As I heard from one gamer, its not worth a half-cheeks hack effort. At least with spore you have users creating content (although must say spaceships shaped like baloon kitty cats and teacups really brought the game down) there was tons of variable content (eye-candy) the variation on NPC behaviors was limited, but there was unlimited strategies for dealing with aliens from appeasement to obliteration. There should be a game were you can freeze in the depth of space due to random component failures, run short of targets, have to build stand alone space-colonies to make long distance traverse between stars with unhabitable planets. Also should have terraformable planets and science, cause run-away greenhouse effects, run-away snowball effects, unsuspected bacterial or viral infections. Aliens that encounter that are either xenophobic or have poor communication skills that take decades to overcome . . . . . . . you catch my drift, something not so-fake.

Not to mention nuclear for the same reason, they are a threat. The biggest post weapon cleanup was in Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

Whats critically wrong with your arguement is we haven't had the expenditure in 6 years and what have we done without it, nothing. No hubble replacement, we are limping around on K2, the mars rovers are old hat, objectives all complete. In that 6 year period in the sixties we were 80% of the way to the moon, we are not even 80% of the way to to a working Orion capsule right now. Shuttle was expensive but its utility was a committment, not much of a committment in the space program right other than sitting around and seeing what ELon musk can do with NASA head-nods abd third party contracts. Suffice it to say we coukd not put a man on the moon right now in eight years if we wanted to, the problem is not in clear lake, its in DC. Either you want a committment to space or you dont, if you dont want a committment then you dont get a technology driven feedback effect. Its not about losing dollars it a bout losing stimulus to the growth- engine sector of the economy. The really big question here is why is there this repeatedly overt and now cryptic attempts to insert this shuttle hate politics into the space-science sub forum.

Not going to warch the nother shuttle hater video.

If you use the suicide countdown feature and handicap 1 second per km of starting altitude for moderate angle approaches and 2 seconds/km for low angle approaches you should have enough dV/sec in most cases to cover then change in distance as horizontal speed decreases. Of course, high starting angle approaches are silly and wasteful.

What is withbthe sudden mass appearance of all these necrotic threads. Did someone lift a rug and start violently shaking the archives

Ultimately the kcal/mol of bond breaking and reformation creates a saturation ISP, beyond which any given fuel can supercede withou the outside input of energy,msuchbas rf of laser.mThe problem is that all sources of energy have lower energy density than chemical fuels. Solar is highly weoght effocient but can on produce about 1.3 kw per kg, and agian there is the problem that efficiency of solar electric power required per N of thrust gies up linearly with ISP to 300 MW/N for a photon drive. nuclear electric power theorectically can generate huge amounts of power, but fission reactors in space are ineffeicient and require more weight in heat exchanges than solar requires panels. SEP has the following limitation, as mass increase the two dimension profile of a three dimensional object increases as a function of f^2/3. AS a consequence as a space ship gets bigger the structure required to create a two dimension plane that can give the same amount of accelation as a smaller ship decreases. Invariably then for SEP, biggers ships will accekerate more slowly or be more inefficient. The same can be said about fission electric, it would need nore structure for heat exchangers. So this leaves direct nuclear propulsion as the only option more capable than chemical in terms of performance but not efficiency. And performance is an efficiency, becasue a spiralling transfer eventually cost more dV than a hohmann transfer, but the types of energy available with nuclear either fall into low performing nerva type Nuclear thermal rockets, secondary heat transfer rockets or pulse fusion rockets. Both of these have engine masses that are quite high and both need storage needy hydrogen. Theoretically what is needed is a rocket that converts all hydrogen and deuterium into either energy or a fusion product that is accelerated. If about 3% of the mass coverted then a stop start trip of 0.1c is plausible, though not realistic.

- oh i just let someone else do it

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Slower is better, fewer errors

-88 (-) Myfault valid is -93 (-) -94 (-) Just gotta love the creativity of the forum server

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Should be name Vapouri-2 as in a few months it will evaporate in the retraction literature.

Also, I don't use the autoland feature, it has a problem when close to hilly terrain of either trying to land above or in the terrain.

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