RadioBanter - View Single Post - BPL - UPLC ->Repeat the lie three times and claim it for truth

July 2nd 04, 11:40 AM

In article , (Steve
Robeson K4CAP) writes:

Subject: BPL - UPLC -Repeat the lie three times and claim it for truth
From: PAMNO (N2EY)
Date: 7/1/2004 6:32 PM Central Standard Time
Message-id:

In article , Mike Coslo writes:

N2EY wrote:

I couldn't blame him...I thought (think) the stuff sucks.

It has one use, in my book: If a dishwasher gets stains from hard water, just
fill the soap dispenser with Tang and run it with no dishes inside.

Couldn't build more Saturns, as the tooling is gone, as well as the
supply path.

So we'd have to rebuild the tooling and supply systems in order to build the
rockets. Which could take longer than it did the first time.

I'd certainly hope that engineering skills and contruction methodology
hadn't REGRESSED in the last four decades! =) Who's running this thing,
anyway? Ex-Army radio clerks ?

It's not about regression; it's about not keeping facilities that aren't being
used.

As enormous as Saturn Vs were, they were just adequate for the job. That's a
good thing.

If you get even one pound more of thrust MORE than what you "need", then
that's ALL you

all you what?

Well, that leaves the field wide open. Some would have us believe that
we would be better to spend the money feeding the world's poor. Of
course, then you end up with a lot of fat poor people that will continue
eating your food until you run out, then you can starve along with 'em! 8^)

Or the money could be spent teaching the world's poor how not to be poor.
The old "give a man a fish" thing.

That ain't a happening thng.

You know what I was so "impressed" with while overseas doing the things
Lennie says I didn't do...?!?!

There were American "missionaries" trying to impose thier religion and
moral values on people supposedly too poor to eat or even buy a Bible...(you
see thier kids on "Feed The Children" commercials...

BUT...They always seemed to have money to buy AK47's and ammunition.

Go figure...

Those people don't want help. There are plenty of other people who do.

Today there is no such need or competition.

Just wait 5 years.

More like 20

The last years of the Soviet system were examples of what happens to a
society wherein competion and individual initiative are stripped from people.

Nope. It's about rewards.

The basic flaw in any collectivist system is that people are expected to work
hard and take risks but are not rewarded for successfully doing so. The old
saying

"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"

is true but incomplete.

Here's the complete version:

"In a society where rewards are distributed by the rule 'From each according to
his ability, to each according to his need', the end result will be very little
ability and an enormous amount of need."

The Russians found out the hard way. The Chinese learned, but they also
learned how to keep people repressed and doing what they want them to do.

It is interesting to note that when many Chinese speak of "freedom" and
"democracy", what those words mean to them are economic freedom and a free
market system.

That is
the take away I get from the SpaceShipOne effort. By comparison, the
Rutan effort is almost easy.

I would not say "easy". And the SS1 effort has decades of experience and
data behind it. X-15 did not.

Exactly. And "composites"...And computing power 1000 fold greater than
what Apollo had...

More like a million fold...

So if they can do it for less money, and private money at that, why should
we spend billions of tax dollars on it?

"SpaceShip" 1 barely went suborbital.

That's as high as X-15 ever went.

It will take a LOT more investment
capital before we see any of Burt's stuff on orbit!

How much more?

Ahh, now we are getting close to what I think you are trying to say. As
much as I enjoy the martian rovers, and as excited as I get about their
discoveries, and in general, all the wonderful things that we get from
the unmanned side of space exploration, if the basic purpose isn't to
put people somewhere - I don't support it.

Why not? The machines can do things humans cannot. The cost is less. The
machines can stay for a long time and don;t have to come back.

The machines can't fix them selves enroute or on-site.

So you build more reliable machines. Learning how to do that is an earthbound
benefit of a space program!

Many human ills cannot be self-repaired, either.

Look at Cassini-Huygens - more than 7 years in space and performing perfectly.

One key to reliability is simplicity. A manned probe needs additional layers of
complexity because it has to include life support and systems to return home.

I am willing to bet that the Brit's "Beagle 2" mission burnt up on
entering the Martian atmosphere.

Why? What data supports that?

Maybe had it been a manned mission, the
1/10th of a degree attitude adjustment necessary to PREVENT it could have
been made.

Doubtful. The machines are faster and more accurate at such tasks than humans.

AND, as we see from Hubble, they aren't taking care of the toys we are
giving them now.

Because the money isn't there.

The Hubble deserves to live out it's full lifetime.

At the end of it's useful life, it should be visited by a shuttle,
packed up, and returned to earth to take an honored place in the
Smithsonian Air and Space museum. Getting to see THAT would give me
goosebumps and get me all excited. And what's more, it helps cement my
support for all of this. The people at NASA should be concerned that
ubergeeks like me don't support them at this time.

It could also serve as a testbed for the effects of space on the hardware -
all
of it. How many meteorite holes, how much radiation damage, etc? Simulation
is
fine but imagine being able to study, in detail, something that spent years
in space.

How many other massive spaceborne telescopes have we had on orbit?

There are some smaller ones but none like Hubble.

These things also serve as testbeds. We tend to think of the space
program as being "old" since were in our 3rd generation with it. It's not.
It's still well within "infancy"

That's why I say that if it's useful life is over, go get it, bring it back to
earth and study it. See what failed and figure out why.

I think we are so confused between our fantasy perception of space
travel
(ie: Star Trek et al, Babylon 5, etc) and the reality (barely crawling at
this
point) that we have these grossly overinflated ideas of how these systems
OUGHT to "last" or "work".

I'm not confused at all. Some folks, however, think that because humans went
from Kitty Hawk to supersonic flight in less than half a century, and from
there to the Sea of Tranquility in another quarter century, that such progres
would continue on a linear path. It doesn't.

Once upon a time, we built the thing. It was important enough to take
the risks and send it into space.

Even though it was known that the optics were defective.

But they were able to compensate for that.

Why not do it right the first time?

It got there - it had problems. We considered it important enough to go
back into space and repair it. That was a technological triumph by the
way. It turned that ugly duckling into a a beautiful swan of optical
imaging.

They *knew* the lense wasn't right. Why it was launched is a classic case of
"not my job". That lesson is a valuable one.

We felt it was important enough to send servicing missions to.
Now "we" don't any more. At one time, we were going to retrieve it, but
now it is too "dangerous" to even do a maintenance run on it.

Answer: Robots.

How does man learn to do these things in space if we send machines to
try and do it?

Why should humans take unreasonable risks to do what can be done by machines?

And how do we "teach" a machine to do something if we ourselves don't
already know how it should be done?

It's done all the time. Look at the newest fly-by-wire military aircraft like
the joint services fighter. Its aerodynamically characteristics are such that a
human pilot cannot fly it directly - takes too many corrections in too little
time. But a computer can fly it directly.

The human pilot tells the computer what he/she wants the plane to do and the
computer figures out how to move the control surfaces to make that happen.

More important, most car accidents are caused or exacerbated by human error.
People not wearing seat belts, driving too fast, driving while impaired,
etc.
By comparison, the shuttle failures were caused by equipment troubles that
the crew could do nothing about.

Oh?

Yep.

Could the Columbia crew have gone EVA and fixed the busted shuttle tiles with
what was onboard that last mission?

They were engineering errors if we patently accept the investigation's
reports. The errors were due to a failure of the people making the decisons.

In the case of Challenger, yes.

Thiokol said "go" after being coerced by NASA people to let Challenger
fly. Coerced by men...not robots.

Yep. Men from Reagan;s White House....

Boom.

There had been issues raised over the foam on the external tank being
able
to come loose, but again cooler heads didn't get a chance to prevail.

One "suggestion" that had been laid out years ago was that a "once-over"
EVA be done to the Shuttle prior to re-entry in order to make sure no
external
damage was done.

It was suggested that thios would place the crew at too much risk.

There's also the fact that a lot of flaws could not be fixed. If the Columbia
crew had lnown there was a problem with foam damage, could they have fixed it?

The idea of a small "ROV" be built for the same purpose was made..

"Too much time and money".

I'll bet a bunch of MIT kids could have designed the thing as a class
project for less than a mil...

Designed, maybe. Built, tested and certified for manned space flight? No.

Compare that against the loss we suffered.

Exactly. The humans made a wrong decision. Even though they were professionals,
they messed up.

But part of the problem is the basic design of the STS itself. The
people-carrying orbiter sits alongside the fuel tank and SRBs, not atop the
rocket as was done in Apollo and its predecessors. There's no "escape tower",
as was done in those earlier systems. And the reentry heat shield is exposed to
the elements from long before the flight to the very end, where in previous
systems (particularly Apollo) it was protected by other modules until reentry.
(Of course there's a downside - once assembled to the SM, the Apollo CM
heatshield could not be inspected.)

Actually, I don't think there is a way to solve those problems.

The ones on earth? I disagree!

Me too.

I was once told that there are not really any "problems"...Just
solutions awaiting implementation!

Standard HR BS.

The facts a

Some problems have no solution. ("What is the exact value of pi expressed as
the ratio of two integers?).
Some problems have a theoretical solution but it cannot be found in practice
(Traveling salesman problem)
Some problems have realizable solutions.

I'm old enough to remember when the phrase "reaching for the moon" meant
someone was trying to do that which could not be done. Yet it was done.

Yep. I believe we will one day find outr how to go light speed or
better.
It's just a matter of time, money and effort.

No, it isn't.

At this point we do not know if such travel is possible.

It may be that there are as-yet-undiscovered principles of physics that would
make such travel possible.

It also may be that the very nature of the universe makes such travel by humans
completely impossible.

As it stands right now, our knowledge of physics says it cannot be done. Not a
matter of better rockets or materials - it's the very nature of the universe
that is the limit. Of course that knowledge could change! But at the present
time, human travel at or beyond the speed of light is *not* a matter of money
or effort; it's a matter of physical reality. Basic relativity physics, IOW.

And as Hans says so well:

"Reality does not care what you believe"

There was a time when it was seriously argued that some men had to be
enslaved,
either literally or economically, because nobody would voluntarily do those
jobs. That problem was solved.

Yep..We just look the other way at the border once in a while! =)

By saying that, even humorosly, you're saying you believe some people have to
be enslaved economically.

There was a time when it was seriously argued that women could not be
allowed
to vote because it would cause all kinds of problems. Turned out not to be a
problem.

That's a matter of opinion.

Several political pundits have said that a lot of the "vote" that went
to Bill Clinton did so because some segment of women voters thought
he was more
handsome than President Bush, and thought that his rhetoric on women's
"issues" was "sweet".

And who are these "pundits"?

What is their data?

Most of all, even if their claim is true, how is it any different from:

Men who won't vote for a black person?
Men who won't vote for a Roman Catholic? Or a Jew?
Men who won't vote for a person from a certain place or region?
Men who won't vote for someone because they "feel" he "cannot be trusted"?

There was a time when it was considered impossible to teach most children to
read and write because their work was 'needed' in the farms, mills and
factories.

Obviously it's still true.

No, it isn't.

A very large part of our imports from India and Pakistan are made by
kids.

That may be - but we don't have to import those things. There was a time when
the USA was, for all intents and purposes, self-sufficient in all or at least
most necessary industries. That could be true again if we wanted it to be.

If we're not their, and it isn't humans there, maybe it's just time to
sit down and watch the history channel. We might see a story about us
there some day.

What's all the rush? Space has been there for a lot longer than we have, and
will be there long after we are gone. We can take our time and do it in a
planned way, or rush headlong and wastefully, and accomplish little.

Yes...it will still be there...but I for one am very disappointed that
after four decades of manned space travel, we still haven't done a darned
thing
to REALLY start exploring "space"...!

We haven't? I say we have!

It seems some people are confused between their fantasy perception of space
travel (ie: Star Trek et al, Babylon 5, etc) and the reality to the point that
they have grossly overinflated ideas of how these systems ought work.

73 de Jim, N2EY