Space Shuttle To Be Replaced By SpaceX For ISS Resupply 297
destinyland writes "Next year SpaceX will perform resupply missions for the International Space Station after the Space Shuttle is grounded, as part of a $3.5 billion NASA resupply contract. 'The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set. We're likely to see a similar industry shakeout in the private space vehicle market segment in the coming decades.'"
Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:5, Insightful)
LMFAO!!!
Re:Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, I noticed that too. It was IBM's bios that was reversed engineered, not MS DOS.
Re:Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:5, Funny)
Two guys in a garage could start a small hardware or software company and have a shot of success.
Yeah, playing with LEO-capable rocket motors in your garage tends to piss of the neighbours, if not the feds. :/
Don't diss the 6502! (Score:3, Insightful)
The 8080 chip was what grown up hardware enthusiasts were using in their S-100 computers. The kiddies had the weaker, cheaper 6502 parts.
Don't diss the 6502. It was a wonderful chip for its time and although it ran at slower clock speeds than later 8080s and Z80s, it still ran code faster because very few clock cycles were wasted. The instruction set was remarkably well done.
If you've never read through Woz's Sweet 16 interpreter, which fit in just a bit over a page of memory (about 270 bytes) and emulated a 16 bit architecture CPU, you have not experienced True Programming.
The 6502 was a remarkable work of engineering. It's a great pity
Re:Don't diss the 6502! (Score:5, Informative)
Well, there was the 65816, a 16 bit version of the 6502, but it never really caught on.
Re:Don't diss the 6502! (Score:5, Informative)
The 6502 was succeeded by the 65816 (a commercial failure) as was pointed out by camperdave, and was made by MOS Technology. The 8 bit Motorola CPU was the 6800.
Motorola 68k boxes were the first viable commercial Unix machines, not that anyone marketed them particularly well.
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You mean they moved onto Z80s?
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You guys are ten years too late. Back in the 1970s, when computers ran on 8080 processors, the company Micro-Soft [wired.com] (which is what they were called when they were in Albuquerque before the name change to Microsoft and the move to Washington) had an operating system and a basic interpreter that were widely pirated, reverse engineered, and otherwise ripped-off. At the time, I was running an MITS Altair [ucdavis.edu]. This thing started with 256 bytes of RAM, but we eventually upgraded it to, I think, 8k bytes. After loading a few hundred bytes of boot code in using the panel switches, it would suck Micro-Soft's "Disk Basic" boot loader in off the first sector of the 8" floppy drive, then load the OS and BASIC interpreter. It was so nice when we finally burned that first boot loader into a ROM! By 1976, Bill was pissed about people ripping his wares, and he wrote a famous letter [digibarn.com] about it. This may have happened before you were wearing nappies, but you should still be embarrassed about laughing at the author. I now ROFL at your childish and uninformed antics!
Yes, but that wasn't MS-DOS. MS-DOS did not exist until Microsoft contracted with IBM to supply the OS for IBM's new PC (which Microsoft already had a contract to supply a Basic and a C compiler for). Microsoft bought the rights to what would become MS-DOS off of another company that had developed it as QDOS.
So, what you were using was something completely unrelated (except for the fact that it came from the same company) to what would later be MS-DOS. What Bill Gates was pissed about was people ripping o
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Speaking as someone who had one, yes, that's true. But the only clone makers that made it were the ones using Phoenix's BIOS, since Phoenix had reverse engineered it, and everyone else copied IBM's BIOS and got sued.
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Re:Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:4, Interesting)
And built computers using the 8080, no less. I actually used a computer with an 8080, but they were much less common than machines using the Z80, which was 8080 compatible and also included a number of other instructions. I suspect this 'technology reporter' wasn't around in the '80s and hasn't read any history of technology, which makes me wonder how he or she is considered qualified for the title.
If this is like the computer revolution of the '80s, I wonder who will be claiming that we need a rocket on every desk...
640 (Score:5, Funny)
640 tonnes of lift capacity ought to be enough for anyone. ;)
Re:Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:5, Funny)
If this is like the computer revolution of the '80s, I wonder who will be claiming that we need a rocket on every desk...
A stark contrast to when it was like the computer revolution of the '60s.
<glayven> I predict that in a hundred years, rockets will be twice as powerful, ten thousand times larger, and so expensive only the five riches CEOs in the West will be able to afford them! <glayven>
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I predict that by the year 1992 computers will have become so advanced that we'll only need a single blinking light for I/O
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I wouldn't say that I'm a fan persay, but I would definitely suck him off if he stuck his cock in my face.
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LMFAO!!!
Yes I agree it is laughable that our government is thinking it appropriate to move basic space endeavors to the private sector. I might have more faith in this move if we were pursuing greater feats while leaving the left overs to the private sector. Seams to me that since the abandoning the Apollo kit for the Space Shuttle we have been on a steady downward decline at NASA.
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The Space Shuttle was designed (badly) as a low cost re-launchable vehicle. However, when it was discovered that it would need to be stripped down to the bare airframe and totally rebuilt for each relaunch that idea sort of fizzled. Then it simply became a funding mechanism for the aerospace industry, which it remained for the remainder of it's use life. Thank goodness most of the airframes are ash now, so we don't have to continue that particular bit of 'earmark' funding any longer.
Re:Reverse Engineered Microsoft DOS??? (Score:5, Interesting)
Sorry for hijacking the first post. However, this story appears to be completely false. There is a report which recommends this as an alternative. However, I can find not reputable news source that is suggesting this will happen. So, either I cannot find the right sources, or we have another example of shoddy Slashdot journalism.
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A perfect example of a Pleonasm [wikipedia.org].
Alternate History Much? (Score:4, Insightful)
I love how journalists rewrite history. So now the personal computer industry was founded upon stealing DOS from Microsoft and building PCs from 8080 chips?
Wow. Just wow.
Re:Alternate History Much? (Score:5, Funny)
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The cool part about the story is that Steve Jobs wasn't flying kilos of coke around in the plane at the time.
He was such a nice boy.
oh no (Score:2, Insightful)
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Re:oh no (Score:5, Insightful)
Really? Those crappy PC clones were leaps and bounds ahead of the Macs, Amigas and Atari STs available at the time?
It was not about being better. It was about being affordable and compatible with the software you ran on computers at your work place.
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If the space industry is going to be successful in the private sector, it will have to grow out of its infancy first, and that means (unfortunately) making mistakes along the way.
The space industry is almost entirely in the private sector.
OTOH, it's also almost entirely gov't funded, which is why you get descriptions like "space-industrial complex".
You'd think one of the titans of aerospace would be designing the launch vehicle of the future,
but it looks like they're unwilling to do so unless it is on a federal cost plus contract.
Doesn't anybody remember how crappy the PC was? (Score:2)
Doesn't anybody remember how crappy the first PC clones were?
Doesn't anybody remember how crappy the PC was? Crippled CPU (in too many ways to list), edge-triggered interrupts, no software (one of the most popular upgrades was a chip that let you run CP/M-80 on it), bizarre wasteful memory map, premium price for an entry-level product? Of course the clones were going to suck. Sheesh.
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Oh, grow up.
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It is ironic that a post defending a grammar nazi contains several grammatical errors.
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Yes, let's not hurt the feelings of someone who doesn't know which word is the proper one. Hurting feelings is bad, especially when everyone knows just what they[sic] other person meant. /sarcasm
Don't mistake us wanting you to STFU with wanting to keep his feelings from being hurt. We're not concerned with your feelings being hurt either, hypocrite.
I love journalists. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes it was JUST like the early computer days.
SpaceX bought a shuttle, worked on it in their parents garage, brought it to Berkley and got friends to help out.
I suggest an equally stupid title:
The fledgling Independant Space Industry is just like the Alaska Gold Rush; Folks are excited about getting up their and getting rich!
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I know you're joking, but if someone in the US did that, they'd be facing criminal sanctions under ITAR.
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I was thinking that'd only apply for exporting the rockets, but when I looked up ITAR, it includes importing as well. Personally, though, I'd be more worried about zoning law violations & running afoul of the loca
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I suggest an equally stupid title:
The fledgling Independant Space Industry is just like the Alaska Gold Rush; Folks are excited about getting up their and getting rich!
Too wordy! Try "Space is like a box of chocolates..."
Slashdot is slowpoke again (Score:2)
Most of the article is about Tesla anyway. Interesting, but I'd prefer to read a
Yet another "technology" writer (Score:3, Interesting)
that doesn't understand computers, and why that revolution doesn't apply to every other technology.
A Better Article (Score:5, Informative)
For anyone who would like to read a good article about SpaceX [popularmechanics.com] check out that link. And it's not just SpaceX that will be delivering cargo to the station under COTS, there's also Orbital Sciences.
Wait a second? (Score:3, Insightful)
What, exactly, is it about the space industry today that is supposed to be reminiscent of those false memories of the early days of the personal computer? All the startups reverse engineering Space-Shuttle-compatible launch vehicles in their garages and undercutting the United Space Alliance on price?
Its hard to figure out which is worse, the analogy proposed or the recollection of history that it is in part based on.
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I think the dipshit author is trying to channel this article: A Netscape moment for the commercial space industry? [venturebeat.com] Which is actually quite a nice article, and if you were to remove Netscape from the title it might even be accurate.
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They aren't so much reverse engineering as following established standards [wikipedia.org], but yeah, basically that's exactly what's happening.
SpaceX is awesome (Score:5, Insightful)
Theres a can-do attitude that NASA lost long ago.
Elon Musk is an amazing dude. At a time where rich people are not popular, here is a reason that people
should become rich , he uses his paypal money to do the stuff he wants to do like electric cars and spaceships
and in doing the stuff that makes him happy benefits us all.
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How ironic (Score:2)
After years of people confusing relatively simple computer concepts with unnecessary and imprecise analogies to "real-world" things, people are now confusing relatively simple space transport concepts with unnecessary and imprecise analogies to computers.
ATV? Progress? (Score:2)
Re:ATV? Progress? (Score:5, Informative)
Disclaimer - I work for NASA.
I don't think the cost per kg of cargo is a driving factor on this decision. The US government has a vested interest in supporting both SpaceX and Orbital on the COTS contract. If successful the vehicle SpaceX is developing will provide a domestically produced launch vehicle that has shows some promise in having a lot of launch flexibility and much cheaper rides to orbit.
Additionally, if SpaceX is successful it will provide some negotiation power in getting upmass to ISS (the rides get more expensive when Progress is the only game in town) and will also provide some competition on government contracts to the United Launch Alliance consortium of Boeing and Lockheed Martin.
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The biggest concern isn't the cost so much as the existence of a domestic supplier, whether it be Orbital, SpaceX or the big old guys.
Of course the other important part of COTS is encouraging the development of a fixed-price contract system for orbital launches instead of the cost-plus system that dominates vehicle development right now, a change that does have the implication of leading to lower costs.
Go SpaceX go (Score:5, Informative)
I'm happy to read that SpaceX will be taking over resupply. We should encourage private launch companies.
Having NASA handle all launch needs was putting all our eggs in a single basket, and killed any chance for private launch. It's already expensive and hard to develop a new space launch system; to do it when NASA is offering launches at cut-rate prices was impossible. (NASA has always been embarrassed by how expensive the Shuttle actually was, and never charged anywhere near a profitable amount for flying things on the Shuttle.)
Once we have several private companies flying things to orbit, we can expect the cost to orbit to come down drastically. And once you are in orbit, you are halfway to anywhere in the Solar System [nss.org].
NASA is talking about a return to Mars 30 years from now. That's crazy; once we have cheap launch, we can assemble a Mars mission in pieces, rather than launching the whole mission on one giant rocket (as we did the Apollo missions). If you can cheaply and reliably launch dozens of launch vehicles, each ferrying up a tonne of fuel, you could make a Mars mission with lots of gear, lots of fuel, lots of safety margin.
steveha
Re:Go SpaceX go (Score:5, Informative)
Having NASA handle all launch needs was putting all our eggs in a single basket
NASA does not handle "all" US launch needs. In fact, NASA buys most of its launches from commercial providers. And the defense and commercial sectors-- both of which, I should remind you, has more funding than NASA-- buy all of their launches from commercial providers.
Re:Go SpaceX go (Score:4, Informative)
I apologize for unclear writing. I didn't mean to imply that NASA was still trying to handle all launch needs. I was referring to the dark days before the Commercial Space Launch Act:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_spaceflight#American_deregulation [wikipedia.org]
Clearly private launch is not killed now, given that SpaceX is taking over resupply of the ISS! But it would have been rather difficult to get SpaceX funded in 1983 or so, would it not?
My first-ever conversation with Geoffrey Landis [geoffreylandis.com] and it's about my vague, unclear writing? Pardon me, I need to go weep in a corner.
steveha
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Plus you'd have to have the cost of launches come down a LOT to make dozens of rockets cheaper than one or two expensive ones.
That's just it. I'm saying that the cost of launches is going to come down a LOT.
Besides, it would be really, really hard to do an Apollo-style Mars mission, where you just build one freaking huge rocket and it carries everything up. It would be much better to use a heavy-lift launcher to put some kind of Mars travel spacecraft into orbit, then lots of cheap small launchers to ferr
Incorrect computer history (Score:5, Informative)
It was the Intel 8088 chip not the 8080 chip used in the IBM PC and PC Clones.
MS-DOS was not reverse engineered, it was originally IBM PC-DOS and Microsoft released the MS-DOS to work with IBM PC clones that had reverse engineered the IBM PC BIOS. MS-DOS used GWBASIC.COM to replace the IBM BASICA.COM that used the IBM PC BIOS and wouldn't work on PC Clones.
Some say MS-DOS and IBM PC-DOS which was based on 86-DOS/Q-DOS was really a reverse engineered DRI CP/M-86 with some commands renamed to be more user friendly and moved into RAM instead of the floppy disk. DRI later on released DR-DOS to compete with MS-DOS. Anyway DRI lost the DOS wars and when they tried to make a competitor to Windows named GEM, they got sued by Apple and had to change the way it looked.
Start the pod race... (Score:2)
Are you sure about this? Trusting our fate to a rocket we hardly know? The Hill will not approve.
Recycling, With Gravy (Score:2)
As far as I can see the only thing in TFA that wasn't covered months ago in http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/12/24/0151211 [slashdot.org] is the entirely useless analogy to the computer industry. I wonder if that section is replaced with say, an equally bogus analogy to automobiles so it can be sent to Car And Driver.
Reaction mass bounty (Score:3, Insightful)
Here come the parasites.
Could turn into a buy-off of a threat to big aerospace.
If NASA were serious they'd cut out all their launch technology development and just put up a $2000/kg bounty for reaction mass delivered to orbit, by any domestic system, at the desired inclination and altitude, starting immediately. Grab it with a tug later.
You can always use reaction mass.
Let the industrial learning curve do the rest.
Of course, if they did that, launch services would become so affordable, there would be private space stations and they'd lose their mandate for big bucks operational budgets and have to go back to science.
Old news (Score:2)
This is news?
It was announced late last year, and has appeared on /. at least once already.
A lot of faith (Score:3, Interesting)
Great idea! They are putting a lot of faith in an organisation that has exactly one successful orbital launch of a dummy spacecraft to their credit. SpaceX is an admirable organisation, but it is a decade away from being able to launch large payloads. The Falcon 9 has never flown. Given the track record of the Falcon 1 we can expect failures. And when they lose a mission to ISS, what then? Will failure be tolerated?
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Will failure be tolerated?
I guess that since it is a private company, the government will have to call to the customer service 1-800 number in India to claim their warranty. lol
(ring ring, ring ring)
SpaceX recording: "Thank you for calling to SpaceX, Where the sky isn't the limit (tm). If you are calling for customer service press 1, if you are calling for a technical support press 2, if you are..."
US Government DTMF: "1336Hz+697Hz" (2)
SpaceX recording: "Thank you for calling to SpaceX, Where the sky isn't the limit (tm). If y
sendeths enlgish class (Score:2, Insightful)
omfg.
to = let's go to the movies.
too = there are too many of them.
two = there are only two of them, not three.
there = let's go there.
their = it is their house.
they're = they are going to the house.
seriously people. 3rd grade stuff here. learn these 6 simple things or be doomed to look like an idiot when you write.
Realizing the reality of our childhood reading (Score:2)
Private spaceflight is a long standing theme of MANY sci fi favorites.
Its the next great frontier, the next new world.
We have been reading about the "early days" of space exploration from the position of the future.
Stories about clipper ships taking off in the distance.
I think once things happen, they are going to start happening very quickly.
If not in our lifetimes in our childrens lifetime, comm
Not quite... (Score:3, Insightful)
Leaving aside the gross inaccuracies about the history of the personal computer in TFA, there's one giant shrieking difference between the "Fire in the Valley" days and the current commercial space rush: startup costs. Any number of early personal computer companies really were started by a couple of guys in a garage with a few thousand dollars. There may very well be some space industry parts vendors who still start this way. But no one starts a private launch company without a ton of money up front.
It's still exciting, but not in the way the early personal computer days were. Back then, you could look at, let's say, Wozniak and Jobs and think, "That could be me!" No one at my pay grade is having that thought about SpaceX.
A bit of creative history here (Score:3, Interesting)
The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set.
I had to double check that it wasn't kdawson that edited this article. Wow. You usually do a pretty good job, timothy. But this?
No one "reversed engineered Microsoft's DOS" and it did not come out until the industry was pretty well established. The original IBM PC's BIOS was reverse engineered. The only thing Microsoft ever did that ran on an 8080 was Microsoft BASIC (which was indeed a true standard of its time - even Apple adopted it as Applesoft BASIC).
In the earliest years, the world was 6502 dominated - Apple, Commodore, etc. There wasn't any need to reverse engineer Apple Software, because they published it all in the Apple ][ red manual.
Once the 8080 came out (and its competitor the Z80) there still wasn't any need to reverse engineer software as CP/M was effectively open source.
PC DOS was very much a late comer to the game and as the industry was moving from 8 to 16 bit. Just because a bunch of whacked out journalist bozos said that the IBM PC (on the traffic light controller 8088, or so sayeth the official Intel documentation on that chip) "legitimized" personal computers doesn't make it correct.
Sheesh.
Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:5, Insightful)
This is a great idea. Since NASA has lost the last 40 years on good scientific research but no exploration
Seriously, what it is with the insane, ingorant NASA hate around here these days. No exploration? What about spirit and opprtunity?
Don't they count?
And when it comes to rocketry, sure, the shuttle is getting a little long in the tooth, but is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:5, Funny)
Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:5, Funny)
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Can we debunk this one once and for all? Parisians as a whole don't seem to be any more or less hostile to foreigners than the inhabitants of any other large city.
Granted, I grew up just outside of New York City, and accordingly have absolutely no expectation for total strangers to give me much more than the time of the day (especially in another language), but such is city life -- Paris gets an unfair rap, and really is a wonderful city. Every locale has its little quirks...
Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:4, Insightful)
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
No, but it *is* about the same as looking at someone else's holiday photos.
Don't forget the #1 rule of manned space flight: *you* don't get to go. And if you're stuck on earth, does it really matter if the pictures you're looking at were taken by man or machine?
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What do you mean, an african or european man?
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Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:5, Interesting)
Wow. Yes, it matters. Because even if I don't get the excitement etc. of being on Mars, someone does, and I bet that person is just as excited as I would be. And I get a small piece of his excitement by listening to his radio transmissions, or watching himself walk around on the surface, or reading about it in the newspaper... whatever. Is it as good as the real thing? I doubt it's even in the same league. But it's also better than nothing, and nothing is what you seem to think we should have.
I'm really picking up a huge vibe of jealousy here. "If I don't get to go to Mars, nobody else should either." Or perhaps it's just that you think others should feel that way. I don't really get it. But perhaps you're also one of those people who don't think I should aspire to be wealthy because the so-called American dream is really a myth designed to keep me in de facto indentured servitude for my entire life, only my deluded hope of bettering my situation or my children's preventing me from overthrowing the bourgeoisie.
(Is there a law like Godwin's for calling someone a communist? I think there should be. By the way, I'm not trolling or... flamebaiting... a lot of people actually believe what I wrote above. I don't get that either, but it does explain the parent's sentiment, if I'm reading him correctly, and also why he's +4 insightful when he should be, at most, +4 buzzkill masquerading as "realism.")
Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:5, Funny)
I explored Paris via Google Maps, but it's just not the same as being there.
Actually you were checking out Paris on a completely different site, but the same principle applies.
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I meant no NASA hate--I have followed everything they have done. My hate is for our leaders since JFK who did not have the foresight to move maintenance off to dedicated resources. The rocket scientists at NASA should be spending their time dreaming up cooler stuff. Think of the innovations that came out of the Mercury-Gemini-Apollo missions. And in the intervening 40 years we have had no more of that innovation. The shuttle was designed in the 1970s. I think if our rocket scientists were put up to the chal
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Actually, the shuttles have taught us a lot (Score:5, Insightful)
The shuttles have taught us a great deal about what you need to be designing into a SHUTTLE rather than a single use rocket. The costs, maintenance, and safety issues that crop up over the 20-30 year life span of a launch platform designed to be re-used. There are things you learn over the long term. Who would have thought that foam insulation around the liquid fuel tanks would be more dangerous because it is light weight than it would be if it were heavier? It took many many launches before we learned it (in a worst case scenario, sadly). Point is, that's just the one big glaring example. There are countless other reliability and availability lessons learned.
We already knew we could make a rocket get into space. We needed to make it almost commercially reliable and cheap. We're not there yet, but a long way closer, yes?
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Re:Actually, the shuttles have taught us a lot (Score:4, Interesting)
My intention was not to slam the current folks at NASA. I too am proud of their achievements.
But you know that they were twiddling their thumbs. They had nothing to do. The shuttle was a craft looking for a mission. It was a mistake from the start. It never possessed the ability to go anywhere and so it merely soaked up all the dollars that should have been sent to the private sector so that NASA could do something interesting.
The shuttle satisfied our need for blast offs without actually attempting to do anything. Surely it did a great thing in putting up Hubble. No one wants to disparage what the shuttle did--it just was unambitious from the start. It never was a travel-to-mars platform. We should have started a space launch business and then NASA would have done something new.
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But you know that they were twiddling their thumbs. They had nothing to do. The shuttle was a craft looking for a mission. It was a mistake from the start. It never possessed the ability to go anywhere and so it merely soaked up all the dollars that should have been sent to the private sector so that NASA could do something interesting.
Why is the private sector some sort of magic bullet for NASA's problems? If you'll recall, the shuttle was built by a consortium of private contractors. If SpaceX is successful, they become the next Lockheed (or more likely, as with Scaled Composites, they'll be flat-out purchased by Lockheed or Boeing). Big whoop there.
I'm also more than a little bit troubled by the existence of enormous companies that exist solely to provide goods and services directly to the government. Seems to blur the line between
Re:Actually, the shuttles have taught us a lot (Score:5, Informative)
The Shuttle was designed to do a couple of things, build and service a space station, launch a space telescope, launch/retrieve orbital experiments, and carry large military payloads and do all of this affordably through a high launch frequency. It has largely accomplished all of its missions except the affordability part. Yes it is bigger and more expensive than the Dyna Soar++ it was originally conceived to be and accomplished several of its goals a decade late but did largely live up to them. The major issue with the Shuttle which nearly (some might suggest did) ruined the whole program was the Challenger disaster.
In 1985 there were a record nine Shuttle missions. At that rate the Shuttle is fairly economical to fly as a lot of fixed costs get amortized over a larger number of launches. The economic efficiency of a launch vehicle is directly related to launch frequency. A big portion of launch cost is personnel costs, they're getting paid whether you do one or ten flights in a year. The key to the Shuttle being successful as a platform was/is a high launch frequency. Both NASA and the DoD had a number of satellite and space probe launches scheduled on the Shuttle which helped pad out NASA's manned space science missions (Spacelab, etc). These were all in addition to the long term plans like the space telescope and a space station. The Shuttle isn't cheap but is very capable, a single mission can replace several smaller scale missions that taken together would cost more than a Shuttle launch. The Challenger disaster ruined the Shuttle's scheduling and set NASA back by at least a decade.
The DoD was set to launch a number of spy satellites (including an early missile warning system) as well as the GPS Block II satellites on the Shuttle in 1986. With the Shuttle fleet grounded after Challenger the DoD had to kick their Complementary Expendable Launch Vehicle program into high gear. Originally meant to be a compliment to the Shuttle to cover tight last minute scheduling conflicts the program was repurposed to be a Shuttle replacement for a lot of DoD missions and became the Titan IV. The Delta II was developed to launch the GPS satellites and went on to be a fairly successful family of ELVs. The NASA missions intended to be launched on the Shuttle were all pushed back or canceled outright and the number of flights were cut back. In the late 80s and 90s a lot of would-be Shuttle business was instead taken up by the likes of the Delta II and Titan III. The as-designed space station was canceled its components later rolled into the ISS which became an international effort.
The Shuttle is not a perfect design but it is not the abject failure its detractors cast it as being. The Saturn was designed to be and was built as a racehorse, it was meant to get the Apollo stack to the Moon and that was about it. The Saturn was not very economical to build or launch and would have made a terrible workhorse. The Shuttle was a realization that cost to orbit was a bigger issues than getting more mass into orbit. If a smaller launcher can get half the mass into orbit at a third of the cost then more science can get done per dollar. The Shuttle was approaching the sweet spot of capability and affordability when the Challenger disaster happened. The program never really recovered economically from Challenger which meant one of the Shuttle's two main features was non-existant.
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What we really need, and will soon get, is a space race with the Chinese.
They'll of course, use the interest payments from the Obamabonanza Loans to pay for their program. The US will be funding both sides of the 'race.'
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is there any other vehicle capable of either servising Hubble, or bringing anything down?
There are plenty of vehicles that can bring themselves down; most of them do, somewhere around South Pacific. If you mean "safely" then the list narrows, but a used satellite, well past its "use by" date, is just not worth of bringing down in one piece. The value is in data bits, not in bits of metal and silicon - and data can be easily sent over the radio.
Hubble is yet another issue. The original cost of Hubble wa
Re:If You Can't Lead--Get Out Of the Way (Score:5, Insightful)
Not really. The really important thing about the Hubble servicing mission - and the various service and resupply missions to the ISS - is learning how to WORK in space. If we're planning on anything long term, we must have the capability to routinely get up out of bed, out the door and fix whatever broke (remember Murphy?).
Obviously, we aren't there yet. It took years of training and planning to fix the Hubble. It took years of training and planning to fix the solar cells on the ISS. We've got to get to the point where we can go 'oops, the widget broke, need to go out and replace it' without spending months choreographing every move. It's routine and boring but it's exactly what we need to do to STAY in space. That's why ISS is important and that's why the Hubble resupply missions were critically important.
Even if you're correct and it's cheaper to just chuck the old one and launch Hubble II.
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Just because there's nothing like it doesn't mean it's a good idea [idlewords.com].
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Seriously, what it is with the insane, ingorant NASA hate around here these days. No exploration? What about spirit and opprtunity?
Children ...
NASA should never have been a government agency. That was President Eisenhower's doing and aren't all Republicans evil?
The moon missions were done as stupidly as they possibly could be. The mathematics of space, delta-V is everything and once you're in Earth orbit you're half way to anywhere, dictated the establishment of a space station that could be used to launch further flights outward. This was debated before they chose the throw-everything-away-along-the-way design they ended up using.
S
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There is no money to be made directly from space exploration.
If mars had large wooded forests and a magic crystal that was trivial to turn into some paradigm shift technology, then yeah.
NASA's exploration allows us to better understand the universe, and gives focus to companies to develop RnD to accomplish goals. That RnD and it's results is the market payoff, and why the space program actually more then pays for itself.
Satellite launches? sure, that can go private.
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The best thing NASA has done in the past 40 years is Hubble. That is a real treat for anybody with a pair of eyes and an imagination.
Did you really write that there was no money to be made in space exploration? There are an infinite number of ways to make money there. Sure, it takes huge investments but even as tourism and mining there's a lot out there. Wasn't Lebensraum ("living space") [wikipedia.org] one of the main justifications for World War II? People just want to explore.
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Wasn't Lebensraum ("living space") [wikipedia.org] one of the main justifications for World War II? People just want to explore.
And is a bizarre sort of way, Großdeutschland actually happened, only we now call it the European Union and it's (arguably) a good thing.
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Yet.
Bound to be plenty of stuff we can make that are just better when made in microgravity, like ultrapure crystals & medications, foamed metals, stuff like that...
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Yup. There are places on the earth that aren't worth developing. And they have an atmosphere. And they are close to resupply points. And definitely much less expensive than even getting to orbit, much less getting to another planet.
Why would I want to develop Mars? Venus? It would be far more expensive to get there and maintain than you wold ever get out of it.
Sure I am for exploration. But this fantasy that somehow we can make a self-supporting base on Mars or another planet is ridiculous. Fantasy. If we t
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Yup. That is the perfect, superficial logic analogy.
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IBM wasn't sure that such a wide bus as the 8086 had would catch on.
No, IBM decided that they wanted to cut costs by using cheap 8-bit components on the motherboard rather than the much more expensive 16-bit ones, and cut costs on the board itself by reducing the number of traces required.