Hubble Marching orders

Rand Simberg wrote:
On 23 Jan 2005 21:22:52 -0000, in a place far, far away, Thialfi
made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:

It's ultimately a matter of political will. If enough folks
really wanted a
manned mission to Mars, the money would have been found.


It's a matter of leadership.

Kennedy had it, Bush doesn't.

Then how is that he got the budget for his new exploration program
through Congress?

Precicely how does that reflect on leadership? Anyways, what he got
through congress was the budget for one year, not a sustained change.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

Rand Simberg ) wrote:
: On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 16:09:11 +0000 (UTC), in a place far, far away,
: (Eric Chomko) made the phosphor on my
: monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:


: : You will have to get your orbital mechanics education (and you need it -
: : badly) elsewhere.
:
: I have written a planetary program that rivals the accuracy of the ones at
: JPL and various astronomy magazines.

: Whether that's true or not (who knows what it means, or what a
: "planetary program" is?) you have repeatedly demonstrated a profound
: ignorance of orbital mechanics, and your attitude is such that few are
: going to be willing to attempt to repair it, particularly since you
: also exhibit an extreme inability to retain such knowledge.

I originally wrote in in BASIC and translated it into C with update
orbital elements from the JPL website.

Here today:
Enter date for planetary posistions calculation: (mm,dd,yyyy)
1,26,2005
Julian Day Number is: 2453396.5

Planet Longitude Latitude Distance (AU)
-----------------------------------------------------
Mercury 265.7277 -4.2996 0.4654
Venus 268.2482 -0.7016 0.7269
Earth 126.3685 0.0000 0.9846
Mars 235.2783 -0.1943 1.5372
Jupiter 188.0855 1.3046 5.4533
Saturn 112.9269 -0.0165 9.0501
Uranus 337.9836 -0.7691 20.0711
Neptune 324.5342 -0.4049 30.0239
Pluto 261.2090 8.2393 30.9076

I still have to add in the geocentric coordinates of right ascension and
declination. Geeze, I mispelled "positions" as well. The BASIC to C
conversion is incomplete.

I don't need your knowledge like it were some handout as your ability
regarding accuracy is in question.

Eric

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005 20:07:25 +0000 (UTC), in a place far, far away,
Sander Vesik made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:

It's a matter of leadership.

Kennedy had it, Bush doesn't.

Then how is that he got the budget for his new exploration program
through Congress?

Precicely how does that reflect on leadership?

Apparently you're unfamiliar with the US system of government.

Anyways, what he got
through congress was the budget for one year, not a sustained change.

How in the world would one demonstrate sustained change a priori?
That's an unrealistically high bar to set.

wrote in
oups.com:

Why not insist on 1 gee at 1 RPM? Not many (if any) tests of
spin-generated 'gravity' have been done but the consensus seems to be
that 1 RPM won't induce nausea in most people while 3RPM might.

The astronauts who will fly the early Mars missions will be a tightly
selected lot. I figure that adding RPM tolerance to the list of selection
criteria will not narrow the field down too far.

Also,
if we give the crew 1gee for the transit to/from Mars, they'll only be
exposed to 0.38gee for the time they're on the surface (a few months?).
We know people can take zero-gee for a year. Why waste a year or two
testing people in LEO at Mars-gee?

I see the early Mars missions as precursors to a permanent presence, so we
might as well find out now whether people can handle 0.38 g for extended
periods. All the other long-term obstacles to Mars settlement - atmosphere,
water, radiation - can be solved, but we can't do anything about the
surface gravity. If 0.38 g turns out not to be tolerable for long periods,
manned Mars missions will never be more than "flags and footprints", and
therefore probably aren't worth doing at all.

The cost to design, build, and test a 1 mile tether system won't be
significantly greater than the costs for a 76m system.

I agree, but a shorter tether gives you more mission flexibility. For
example, midcourse correction burns after TMI will almost certainly be
necessary. The dynamics of performing the burn with the tether extended
will be worse with a longer tether, requiring more sophistication in the
control system. Also, retracting/re-deploying the tether becomes much less
of an ordeal.

Anyway, we're both arguing nits here, relatively speaking - regardless of
the details of tether length, this is going to require far fewer
breakthroughs than relying on nanotech.

For that matter, using faster propulsion to shorten the trip time would
also probably be easier than nanotech.

--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Sander Vesik wrote in
:

Precicely how does that reflect on leadership? Anyways, what he got
through congress was the budget for one year, not a sustained change.

If that's your standard for "leadership", *no* US president could legally
meet it.

--
JRF

Reply-to address spam-proofed - to reply by E-mail,
check "Organization" (I am not assimilated) and
think one step ahead of IBM.

Eric Chomko wrote:
George William Herbert ) wrote:
: : Eric Chomko wrote:
: : Ever since the Republican takeover in Congress NASA HQ seems to have less
: : clout and JSC more. Just an observation.
[bunch of 90s stuff deleted]

If Bush is serious about his new space initiative, then some of the
traditional work that centers do should change and allow the centers other
than manned missions, planning (MSFC), launch (KSC) and operations (JSC)
in, and now.

If you had made your post two years ago, I'd be agreeing
with you, but times they are a changin'.

At the risk of repeating myself:

: Office of Exploration Systems is not at JSC. It's at HQ.

: No JSC managed manned space project has future growth planned.
: Shuttle is being retired, and ISS is going to be built out
: and operated, period.

: OExS could get moved to a center... there's always a risk of
: that happening. But it hasn't and shows no sign of happening.


O'Keefe stuck OExS at HQ. Steidle hasn't done any different.

And there it remains.

Unless something catastrophic happens, in the NASA world,
OExS is the future. The direction has changed.

What centers OExS draws upon, and allows to be part
of the new activities, is still up in the air as far
as I know. There is no sign that they're slotting into
the old mold, and lots of indication that OExS is staying
independent to NOT fall into the old center-based organizational
and structural traps.

The particular claim you started with... JSC having gained
clout relative to HQ, etc... was true in the90s. But then
it stopped being true about when OExS was set up, which
has been almost a year now. Regardless of who was responsible
for the JSC focus in the 90s (and 80s, and...), it's not
true anymore. O'Keefe seems to have understood what was
wrong, set up a structure for Steidle to run the
Exploration branch completely outside the old broken
structure, and let Steidle run with the ball.

And they're running.

I expect that, 20 year from now, we'll look back on O'Keefe's
tenure and remember three things:
- He was the poor SOB at the helm when Columbia was lost
- He helped lead NASA into the Exploration Initiative and chart that
- He set up Exploration Systems separate from the Centers and let it go

My hope is that the latter two will be very positive memories.
Despite his short tenure, I think that time and the tide of history
will show that the changes he was able to make have probably been
what allowed NASA a fighting chance at reform to stay relevant
in the 21st century, and that he will be remembered as one of
NASA's premiere administrators of all time.


-george william herbert

Christopher M. Jones wrote:

Fafnir wrote:

No, I blame the cancellation of Hubble on Bush.

He is, after all, president.

Fair enough. Though, strictly speaking, he's not entirely
responsible for Hubble being 15 years old.

Please note that 15 years was always the nominal mission lifetime of the
Hubble Space Telescope. That HST is now expected to be de-orbited after
17 or 18 years respresents a mission extension, not a contraction.

(Don't take that to mean I approve of the recent Hubble nonsense, because
I don't.)

Mike

-----
Michael Kent Apple II Forever!!
St. Peters, MO

Thialfi wrote:

In article
"Greg D. Moore \(Strider\)"
wrote:

It's ultimately a matter of political will. If enough folks
really wanted a
manned mission to Mars, the money would have been found.

It's a matter of leadership.

Kennedy had it, Bush doesn't.

One of these presidents set the exploration of outer space as the official
mission of NASA and proposed a far-reaching program accordingly. The
other saw outer space only as a political battlefield in a global war.
Can you guess which one is which?

Mike

-----
Michael Kent Apple II Forever!!
St. Peters, MO

On 27 Jan 2005 02:06:20 GMT, in a place far, far away, "Jorge R.
Frank" made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Sander Vesik wrote in
:

Precicely how does that reflect on leadership? Anyways, what he got
through congress was the budget for one year, not a sustained change.

If that's your standard for "leadership", *no* US president could legally
meet it.

At least not in real time, so as I said, it sets an impossible hurdle
for a current president (which of course, from these leftist loons,
given the current current president, is the intent).

"LewBob" wrote:

:"Fred J. McCall" wrote in message
.. .
: wrote:
:
: :So how many Hubbles, how many missions (perhaps even manned) to Mars
: :could be paid for with the billions we've spent on our "mission" in the
: :Middle East?
:
: Zero.
:
: How many political loons like you could be educated for the money
: we're going to spend on going to Mars?
:
:Hell, we don't need to be educated. Just send us on a one-way trip to Mars
:and you'll be rid of us. So long, and thanks for all the "fish."

Hell, you don't need to go to Mars. You folks are ALREADY living on
some other planet....

--
"Some people get lost in thought because it's such unfamiliar
territory."
--G. Behn