k.ovaska - Slashdot User

The Prospects For Lunar Mining 348

Posted by Soulskill on Monday January 17, 2011 @08:10PM from the peak-green-cheese dept.

MarkWhittington writes "With the discovery of vast amounts of water on the Moon, some frozen in the shadows of craters at the Lunar poles and some chemically bonded with the regolith, interest in lunar mining has arisen among commercial space entrepreneurs. Paul Spudis, a lunar geologist, has suggested a plan to return to the Moon, which features, among other things, robotic resource extraction and the deployment of space-based fuel depots using lunar water even before the first human explorers return to the lunar surface. But Mike Wall, writing in Space.com, suggests that there are a number of legal as well as technical issues involved in setting up lunar mining operations."

NASA Tests Flying Airbag 118

Posted by samzenpus on Wednesday December 09, 2009 @03:10PM from the drop-the-cloud-anchor dept.

coondoggie writes "NASA is looking to reduce the deadly impact of helicopter crashes on their pilots and passengers with what the agency calls a high-tech honeycomb airbag known as a deployable energy absorber. So in order to test out its technology NASA dropped a small helicopter from a height of 35 feet to see whether its deployable energy absorber, made up of an expandable honeycomb cushion, could handle the stress. The test crash hit the ground at about 54MPH at a 33 degree angle, what NASA called a relatively severe helicopter crash."

Comment Re:If you play enough, you will ALWAYS lose. (Score 1) 597

by k.ovaska on Friday October 16, 2009 @11:44AM (#29769319) Attached to: Computer-Based System To Crack Down On Casino Card Counters

I always like to think of gambling in terms of a very high risk investment.

This analogy is not really valid, because gambling generally has a negative expected value (you lose in the long term) while investment has a positive expected value, whether it's bank account or stocks. In fact, investors demand a higher expected profit when the risk is high. If high-risk stocks had identical expected profits to bank accounts, no one would invest in stocks but rather in the lower risk bank accounts.

Comment Re:Bullshit (Score 1) 349

by k.ovaska on Tuesday July 28, 2009 @12:47PM (#28854573) Attached to: Should Copyright of Academic Works Be Abolished?

Are there journals that do pay authors? All the journals I have encountered in the biomedical field require the authors to pay a fee, which ranges from $0 to $2500.

Comment Re:We used to be so good at this (Score 1) 414

by k.ovaska on Sunday July 19, 2009 @03:12AM (#28746159) Attached to: Early Abort of Ares I Rocket Would Kill Crew

Only 15 Saturn V's were built and only 13 of those were actually launched. They could have had an actual catastrophic failure rate of 10% and we would have never known it given the small number of launches that we did.

True. For rockets having 10% failure rate, there is a 25% chance of having 13 successful launches (0.9^13 = 0.254). We can say with some confidence that Saturn V had a failure rate below 20% (5% chance) and good confidence that the rate was below 30% (1% chance).

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