Starship Asterisk*

spaceflight has taken a significant step away from being an endeavor that only big governments can do with public money

kjardine wrote:I'm a bit puzzled here. Surely this is all paid for with public money? It seems to me highly unlikely that a private company would ever pay for something like the ISS.

Has it not always been the case that private companies have designed and built the spacecraft and rockets? And the launch was at Cape Canaveral as usual. So this seems to be more a rebranding exercise. Instead of NASA's Space Shuttle built by Boeing, this is SpaceX's Dragon built by SpaceX. But the money comes from taxes as always.

kjardine wrote:

spaceflight has taken a significant step away from being an endeavor that only big governments can do with public money

I'm a bit puzzled here. Surely this is all paid for with public money? It seems to me highly unlikely that a private company would ever pay for something like the ISS. Has it not always been the case that private companies have designed and built the spacecraft and rockets? And the launch was at Cape Canaveral as usual. So this seems to be more a rebranding exercise. Instead of NASA's Space Shuttle built by Boeing, this is SpaceX's Dragon built by SpaceX. But the money comes from taxes as always.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25 wrote:

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<<The Boeing VC-25 is the designation of a United States Air Force passenger transportation aircraft, a military version of the Boeing 747 airliner. The A-model (VC-25A) is the only variant of the VC-25. The VC-25 is most famous for its role as Air Force One, the call sign of any U.S. Air Force aircraft carrying the President of the United States. The two aircraft currently in U.S. service are highly modified versions of Boeing's 747-200B, with tail numbers 28000 and 29000. Although the Air Force One designation technically applies to the aircraft only while the President is aboard, the term is commonly applied to the VC-25s more generally. They often operate in conjunction with Marine One helicopters that ferry the President to airports in circumstances where a vehicle motorcade would be inappropriate.

Air Force One usually does not have fighter aircraft to escort the presidential aircraft over the United States, but this has occurred. In June 1974, while President Nixon was on his way to a scheduled stop in Syria, Syrian fighter jets intercepted Air Force One to act as escorts. However, the Air Force One crew was not informed in advance and, as a result, took evasive action including a dive.

The VC-25As are expected to be replaced, as they have become less cost-effective to operate. The USAF Air Mobility Command has been charged with looking into possible replacements, including the new Boeing 747-8 and the Airbus A380. On 7 January 2009, the Air Force Materiel Command issued a new requirement for a replacement aircraft to enter service beginning in 2017. On 28 January 2009, EADS announced they would not bid on the program, leaving Boeing the sole bidder, with either their Boeing 747–8 or Boeing 787 Dreamliner being proposed.>>

Irishman wrote:Oddly, I am not getting the actual picture (or video) today on the APOD page. I get the APOD page and all text, but no image.

I followed the first link and saw the video launch, but the main page is missing something. Is this on your end or mine?

tmo wrote:

Irishman wrote:Oddly, I am not getting the actual picture (or video) today on the APOD page. I get the APOD page and all text, but no image.

I followed the first link and saw the video launch, but the main page is missing something. Is this on your end or mine?

Same here...

owlice wrote:NomadWanderer, it sounds like you are using the automatic background software to have the APOD image downloaded to your desktop every day. If the image is a video, the software grabs the first still image it comes across from the APOD text.

If there's another app out there that serves the same purpose but doesn't give you the occasional train wreck or cat on video days, I am unaware of it.

BMAONE23 wrote:

owlice wrote:NomadWanderer, it sounds like you are using the automatic background software to have the APOD image downloaded to your desktop every day. If the image is a video, the software grabs the first still image it comes across from the APOD text.

If there's another app out there that serves the same purpose but doesn't give you the occasional train wreck or cat on video days, I am unaware of it.

Perhaps this could be avoided if the First Image linked in the APOD text was that of a screen capture of the movie that is the APOD

Like This dramatic image

neufer wrote:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_VC-25 wrote:
Air Force One usually does not have fighter aircraft to escort the presidential aircraft over the United States, but this has occurred. In June 1974, while President Nixon was on his way to a scheduled stop in Syria, Syrian fighter jets intercepted Air Force One to act as escorts. However, the Air Force One crew was not informed in advance and, as a result, took evasive action including a dive.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-hiltzik-20130818,0,2474072.column wrote:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

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Elon Musk's Hyperloop: A pipe dream?
By Michael Hiltzik, L.A. Times, August 16, 2013

<<If you've been a sentient creature during the last week, you've heard something about the Hyperloop. The proposed transit system would carry 6 million passengers per year between Los Angeles and San Francisco at astonishingly minimal cost and speeds high enough to reduce the trip to 35 minutes. It's the brainchild of electric-car and spaceflight entrepreneur Elon Musk, who is irked that nothing better exists to meet his commuting needs between those two metropolises. But as often happens when talented hard-chargers pursue their personal dreams, he may be answering the wrong question.

The Hyperloop has garnered scads of fawning publicity since Musk unveiled a 57-page outline last week. So has Musk, which may be the point. He's being praised for Big-Idea thinking, for discarding those 19th and 20th century transport technologies (cars, trains) to come up with something worthy of the 21st. He's lauded especially for proposing a way to circumvent the grubby regional politics that have ballooned the cost of the current answer to the L.A.-S.F. transport riddle, California's high-speed rail project, to $68 billion.

To hear Musk tell it, a suitable mass transit system would have to be safer, faster, cheaper, more convenient and more earthquake resistant than the alternatives of planes, cars and trains. The Hyperloop, he says, is "the right solution." It's curious that he comes to that conclusion, because judging from his own proposal, the Hyperloop would be none of those things. There's no evidence that it would be cheaper than the high-speed rail project, and reason to believe it would cost more; it certainly couldn't be built for the $6-billion price tag Musk claims. As for the real issues of politics and technology that Musk waves away, in the real world they don't go away quietly.

The Hyperloop has two things going for it: the notion of going between Los Angeles and San Francisco in a half-hour in capsules propelled on cushions of air, which sounds awfully snazzy; and the fact that Elon Musk proposed it. But it's not clear that the first is an especially pressing need, except for people like Elon Musk. As for Musk himself, he's a serial entrepreneur with an impressive record that includes PayPal, the electric-car company Tesla Motors, and SpaceX, a space launch company. But whether his skill at synthesizing existing technologies into new businesses in those fields translates into solving a problem of public infrastructure on this scale is unproven. One hint that he may be playing outside his comfort zone comes from his description of the Hyperloop as a "cross between Concorde, a rail gun and an air hockey table." Concorde? The Anglo-French supersonic jet took some 20 years to get off the drawing boards. It came in at 15 times its original cost estimates, couldn't carry enough passengers to operate profitably and was mothballed after a catastrophic crash in 2000 underscored its myriad technological flaws. If that's the model for the Hyperloop, I'll stay home, thanks.

There's something mischievous about Musk's Hyperloop. He says it's not something he'd be willing to build himself, which raises the question of who he thinks should build it, and how the economics would change if it were a public project rather than the blue-sky musing of a Silicon Valley billionaire. There's no discussion in Musk's paper of the operation and maintenance cost of a system that will have to maintain low pressure in a 700-mile pneumatic tube at all times, or of the cost of security to keep ill-doers or vandals from damaging the tube, which would be suspended on overhead pylons for most of the route. That's a more important issue than it is for an open rail line; the physical tolerances for a closed-loop system carrying hundreds or thousands of passengers at a time in capsules at 700 mph are so tight that any breach, or even a dent, could spell disaster. Musk's paper is festooned with magic asterisks to cover many existing engineering questions. "This is where things get tricky," he writes at one point. The result is a plan with a veneer of just enough detail — graphs, maps, mathematical equations and all that jazz — to impress news pundits, so they don't notice the murkiness under the surface.

There's no question that seemingly insurmountable technical challenges often can be solved, given time and money. But the time can be a century and the money trillions. So the question becomes: should they be solved, or should other alternatives be examined? That's the truly important question the Hyperloop doesn't address. Indeed, one of the flaws in the high-speed rail project that the Hyperloop replicates is that no one has a very good idea of the real demand for service on that corridor. "We know very little about transit patterns within the state," says David Brownstone, an expert on transportation economics at UC Irvine. "It would be nice if we slowed down and tried to figure out how many people are traveling from point A to point B." Then there's the question of how to get passengers to their destinations once they reach the terminus. That's less of a problem in the Bay Area than the Southland, but there is as yet no solution to moving people en masse from downtown L.A. to Santa Monica, Irvine, or LAX.

Musk's paper treats the need for some rapid transit service between L.A. and San Francisco as a given, but that question has never received the debate it deserves. "Give me $68 billion and I can solve a lot of problems in California that are more pressing — secondary and primary education, prison overcrowding, pollution," says C. William Ibbs, a professor of civil and environmental engineering at Berkeley. "I'm not sure that giving highly paid professionals a transportation subsidy is the best use."

None of this is to say that Musk did wrong in putting a futuristic mass transit plan on the table. Only that this particular plan is so narrow and self-interested that one wonders why he took the time. If he's got that much energy and creativity to spare, it would be great to see him try to solve a public crisis that's really important.>>