NASA and the Vision thing

Rand Simberg ) wrote:
: On Wed, 7 Dec 2005 16:28:40 -0500, in a place far, far away, "Ami
: Silberman" made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
: such a way as to indicate that:

:
: wrote in message
: oups.com...
:
: Henry Spencer wrote:
:
: If you are willing to settle for rather limited capabilities and a
: limited
: and somewhat uncertain working life, it's true that robots don't need as
: much support as astronauts. You get what you pay for.
:
: Plus, astonaut trainees can be mass produced by a large
: and enthusiastic, unskilled labor force, that enjoys their work.
:
: No, infants can be mass produced. Astronaut trainees require, at the very
: minimum, twelve years of high school, four years of college, and several
: years of post-college education.

: That doesn't have to be the case. NASA just has historically chosen
: to establish those as the criteria. On-orbit satellite repair could
: actually be a blue-collar job. It doesn't require a PhD.

Yep, fat guys with overalls named Bubba can do space repair. You don't
have to look like John Glenn to go into space, you can look like Larry the
Cable Guy.

Eric

Ami Silberman wrote:
wrote in message
ups.com...

Henry Spencer wrote:

If you are willing to settle for rather limited capabilities and a
limited
and somewhat uncertain working life, it's true that robots don't need as
much support as astronauts. You get what you pay for.

Plus, astonaut trainees can be mass produced by a large
and enthusiastic, unskilled labor force, that enjoys their work.

No, infants can be mass produced. Astronaut trainees require, at the very
minimum, twelve years of high school, four years of college, and several
years of post-college education. Once they are astronauts, they've also cost
somewhere on the order of a million dollars of training (and training
support etc.)

Oh great, another ****ing credentialist. Yes, we need to spend another
100 billion so that four more steroid befuddled guys can satisfy their
personal wet dream of walking on the moon. To hell with the self
educated masses.

More Americana from mediocre american idiots.

http://cosmic.lifeform.org
http://cosmic.lifeform.net

wrote:
Yes, we need to spend another
100 billion so that four more steroid befuddled guys can satisfy their
personal wet dream of walking on the moon.

Who said I wanted to send NFL players or members of the AL/NL to the
moon?

Besides, their wet dreams seem to run more to driving away from the
courthouse in their Ferrari with a "not guilty verdict".

/dps

snidely wrote:

wrote:

Yes, we need to spend another
100 billion so that four more steroid befuddled guys can satisfy their
personal wet dream of walking on the moon.

Who said I wanted to send NFL players or members of the AL/NL to the
moon?

Not me, I was responding to a completely idiotic remark by Ami S.

Besides, their wet dreams seem to run more to driving away from the
courthouse in their Ferrari with a "not guilty verdict".

But their behavior doesn't cost the taxpayers billions, just
hundreds of millions for tax leveraged stadiums, nor does
it denigrate the freedom of thought and knowledge with
useless and unnecessary honors and degrees, i.e. - NASA.

All you have to do to see that is read the crap on spacetoday.net.

NASA does not own space or science, it belongs to everybody.

http://cosmic.lifeform.org
http://cosmic.lifeform.net

Probably, but haven't several proposals been forwarded to seed the
atmosphere of Venus with zillions of zillions of bacteria that will
change the co2 content to oxygen, and a stage 2 proposal is to bombard
Venus with lots of water ice composed comets to saturate the
atmosphere, and provide decades of rain when the temperature falls low
enough for h20 clouds to form.

Yes indeed there have. The stumbling block though with every proposal
is the scale of the project and the quantities involved.

My "prime mission" is in asking the question "What should we be doing
NOW?". We have to think though where does this lead? The Shuttle, ISS
and manned space flight depending on chemical propulsion and carrying
everything from Earth is a DEAD END TECHNOLOGY.

More like a good laugh. Nothing we haven't seen before. Now try answering
the question I asked:

Please provide verifiable evidence that Cassini was *designed for* and *is
performing* work requiring anthropomorphic manipulators.

Of course Cassini was not designed as a manipulator. That is NOT the
point. The point is that NASA is infatuated with manned space flight
using dead end technologies. It is draining the budget of everything
else to pay for these things.

Because all it's doing is snapping pictures from afar. *That* is one
thing that remote-controlled equipment does do pretty well.

That is only because that is what it is designed to do. No the Mars
Rovers traveled a considerable distance and considerably exceeded
expectations. We have no manipulator simply because NASA lacks vision
and has a dead end mentality.

The point is too that Cassini does have moving parts and that given a
fraction of the sums spent on the Shuttle a manipulator could esily
have been built.Also Cassini has sophisticated electronics which
survived Jupiter. I am just commenting on the "nice environment"
argument. Astronauts would not have survived the trip to Saturn even if
they could have been kept supplied.

On 9 Dec 2005 00:46:48 -0800, wrote:

Probably, but haven't several proposals been forwarded to seed the
atmosphere of Venus with zillions of zillions of bacteria that will
change the co2 content to oxygen, and a stage 2 proposal is to bombard
Venus with lots of water ice composed comets to saturate the
atmosphere, and provide decades of rain when the temperature falls low
enough for h20 clouds to form.

Yes indeed there have. The stumbling block though with every proposal
is the scale of the project and the quantities involved.

My "prime mission" is in asking the question "What should we be doing
NOW?". We have to think though where does this lead? The Shuttle, ISS
and manned space flight depending on chemical propulsion and carrying
everything from Earth is a DEAD END TECHNOLOGY.

Manned space flight will switch to nuclear powered rockets within a
generation.

More like a good laugh. Nothing we haven't seen before. Now try answering
the question I asked:

Please provide verifiable evidence that Cassini was *designed for* and *is
performing* work requiring anthropomorphic manipulators.

Of course Cassini was not designed as a manipulator. That is NOT the
point. The point is that NASA is infatuated with manned space flight
using dead end technologies. It is draining the budget of everything
else to pay for these things.

Because all it's doing is snapping pictures from afar. *That* is one
thing that remote-controlled equipment does do pretty well.

That is only because that is what it is designed to do. No the Mars
Rovers traveled a considerable distance and considerably exceeded
expectations. We have no manipulator simply because NASA lacks vision
and has a dead end mentality.

Cameras can have filters that take a picture in another wavelength to
identify chemical elements in rocks.

The point is too that Cassini does have moving parts and that given a
fraction of the sums spent on the Shuttle a manipulator could esily
have been built.Also Cassini has sophisticated electronics which
survived Jupiter. I am just commenting on the "nice environment"
argument. Astronauts would not have survived the trip to Saturn even if
they could have been kept supplied.
--

Christopher

In article ,
Eric Chomko wrote:
Wasn't there talk about using telerobotics on HST? Practice first on ISS
to verify, and then actually do it? Whatever became of this? It was a
topic after O'Keefe stated no more HST shuttle missions...

I don't remember ISS being included in the plan, but that aside, yes,
MDA (makers of the shuttle and station arms) got some serious funding to
investigate the idea, and came up with a proposal to do it. However, it
was looking very expensive (up in the billion-dollar range), the schedule
was distinctly tight, and an outside assessment said that the probability
of success on the first try seemed poor.

If memory serves, it was Griffin who killed it, deciding essentially that
a shuttle repair visit remained a reasonable idea but a robot repair was
too expensive and too iffy.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In article ,
Eric Chomko wrote:
: The "fairly anthropomorphic" manipulators that you seem to think are ready
: for "immediate deployment" are in fact an advanced research problem which
: is not particularly close to being solved.

But is the research even ongoing?

A little bit, yes. Not in the space-robotics community, but in the
robotics world in general, there is some work on such things.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |

In sci.space.policy wrote:
My postings seem to have raised a stir. There have been a number of
points made and it is difficult to decide who to tag onto!

1) Robotic capabilities are limited.

At 15,000km and below you don't have robotics, you have VR.
Communication is instantaneous in the human sense. If you were driving
a F1 car 15,000km away a skilled racing driver would notice the delay
(Assuming you could simulate accelerations), but for masintainance of
Hubble etc. this will not matter. =15,000km capabilities will be NO
different. In fact a robot will have greater capability as there is no
danger of running out of air. Controllers could work in shifts.


This is unfortunately essentially untrue as far as modern technology goes.
Its not that it is entirely impossible it just that claiming what you did
is more or less the same as saying manned Mars misisons are off-the shelf.

--
Sander

+++ Out of cheese error +++

In article .com,
wrote:
1) Robotic capabilities are limited.
At 15,000km and below you don't have robotics, you have VR.

You're nitpicking an issue of terminology -- "robotics" is also used to
describe the whole range of possibilities, including teleoperation.

Communication is instantaneous in the human sense. If you were driving
a F1 car 15,000km away a skilled racing driver would notice the delay
(Assuming you could simulate accelerations), but for masintainance of
Hubble etc. this will not matter. =15,000km capabilities will be NO
different.

I think you'd be surprised at what even small delays can do to precision
tasks. For today's very slow space robotics it truly doesn't matter much
(when a talk I attended included a video clip of MDA's Hubble-repair
testing, the speaker noted that it had been sped up to make it less
boring!), but *you're* talking about a huge leap forward in capabilities,
with human-like dexterity operating at human-like speeds.

Bear in mind, also, that the actual distance covered by the signals can be
quite a bit longer because of line-of-sight constraints and the need for
relays. Also, as I've noted before, there are delays other than those
imposed by speed of light.

3) Cassini. Dis Cassini have a manipulator. No, but the telescope is a
moving part...

No it's not. Cassini's instruments are fixed to its frame; it has no scan
platform to point them independently. Cassini doesn't quite have no
moving parts, but it comes close.

In any case, the complexity of operating things like manipulators comes
not so much from the fact that they move, but from their interactions with
a complex outside environment. That just doesn't happen on an orbiter
mission like Cassini.

and the electronics package had to survive the Jovian radiation belts.

Less than you might think -- Cassini deliberately made a fairly distant
Jupiter encounter (closest approach about 10 million kilometers), to
minimize radiation dose. In any case, this is a completely separate
issue.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |