Comment Re:Science creates understanding of a real world. (Score 1) 770
Thanks for that. One-stop shopping, rather than having to send people hither and yon.
Thanks for that. One-stop shopping, rather than having to send people hither and yon.
Well then, give a link to some actual research that they (the deniers) have done. All that I've seen so far has been crap. The only ones that I heard doing actual research ended up changing sides in the debate.
And get rid of Daylight Savings Time.
If it happened in the US there would be an immediate assumption that it was a terrorist attack, even if it just plopped down in a cornfield, and the Pentagon would be invading someone before the first investigators arrived on the site.
Back in the '80s the Norwegians launched a sounding rocket. All the forms had been filled out, but apparently got lost on some bureaucrat's desk in the Kremlin. The launch path looked like a SLBM coming from the North Sea with a trajectory in the general direction of Moscow. The Kremlin wanted to retaliate for the assumed attack immediately of course, but Yeltsin made them wait until the full trajectory had been confirmed. The world had a close call that day. If it had been Washington down-range Reagan would have launched immediately.
In the case of the previous two, since they were traveling at right angles to each other they were pretty certainly not related. I haven't seen any examination of the path of this new meteor yet.
I remember proposals for robotic servicing of satellites in GEO when I was in high school, so that would have been the late-'70s, because it was not thought to be worthwhile to send humans to that distance. All of the satellite servicing missions NASA was able to carry out were done in LEO, IIRC the Hubble servicing missions were at the maximum altitude the Shuttle could reach. There has been some movement in the last few years to standardize on fuel inlets for GEO comm satellites in the hope that future refueling operations can extend their functional lifespan, but I'm not sure how far that has gotten.
NASA has wanted to do this for, literally, decades. I believe they first proposed this in the 1970s, and every few years since, but Congress will never appropriate the money. DARPA will have this money tomorrow, if they really want it. Makes me sick.
When I pretty much start the call by telling them that I have 18 years of desktop, server and network administration you would think that should scare them off, but no. They have a script to follow, and they'll follow it to the end of the Earth and over the edge. Most of the guys that I get tell me they work for Microsoft, and having worked on campus (and in fact having done security for a lot of those buildings) I find it amusing to take them on a mental tour of the Redmond campus. Eventually they drag me back onto the script. They're quite dogged, impressive in their own way.
About 30 seconds into one call I told the guy that I knew he was a scammer, and that he didn't work for MS. He still stayed on the line, doing his worst to try to get me to comply with his script, for another 23 minutes. The only reason that the call ended then was because it was time to toss stuff in the wok and I needed two hands.
Having ingested fumarole Archea (and survived the truly amazing case of the 24-hour runs resulting from that stupidity) I would guess really, really nasty.
The average surface temperature on Titan is about -180 C. On Titan water is a rock, and since these (and all other Terran) organisms are mostly water I think it unlikely. Any critter that lives on Titan will not be at all similar to anything on Earth, no matter how extreme its environment.
It's a common mistake, made more common by the fact that at one time it was more-or-less true. Many municipalities did grant exclusive franchises (generally for 20 years) during the initial cable build-out in the 1950s and '60s, but those agreements have long ago expired. The nominal justification was that it would take companies that long to recoup their investment (the actual time to break-even was closer to 10 years, but cable companies were already earning their well-deserved reputation as liars.) It's become a major plank of the Libertaridan platform now so it gets repeated a lot, never mind that it's every bit as inaccurate as most of the rest of their talking points.
Some Asteroids are believed to be aggregations of relatively loosely bound matter.
FTFY. Some asteroids are differentiated masses that were clearly molten at some point in their history. Some are fragments of larger bodies that were broken up.
for the enormous cost of servicing the Hubble it could have simply been replaced,
No, there's not enough pork in a new telescope for Congress to pass funding, which is why Webb took so long to get funded. To dig a tunnel out of prison you might want a boring machine, but if all you have is a shovel you'll use that. NASA was stuck using a spoon because that was all that Congress would allow. The most disappointing thing that we learned from the entire Hubble mission is that while they wouldn't even pay for basic maintenance on Hubble until NASA had grovelled sufficiently and promised even more giveaways to the Pentagon, they gleefully purchased so many Hubble-class telescopes for the National Recon Office that the NRO couldn't even use two of them.
If Webb ever needs servicing it will be abandoned, since Congress will never budget the funding for the R&D in time to prevent minor malfunctions from cascading into complete failure. There just isn't enough pork in it.
Non-obligatory XKCD. 'Number of living humans who have walked on another world.'
The overtext says, "The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there's no good reason to go into space--each discovered, studied and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision."
Early on VonBraun planned on using multiple launches and assemble the spacecraft in orbit. Kennedy's 'end of the decade' deadline made that proposal a non-starter, since we didn't have the time necessary to learn the proper construction techniques, so we ended up with the enormous beast of the Saturn V as our booster. It's too bad, VonBraun's design would have had people working on the surface for as much as a month at a time before returning, and the program would have grown at a sustainable rate that could have been integrated into the economy and government.
Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. -- Steinbach