We, first loosers for 100 years.

On Sat, 27 May 2006 19:31:18 -0400, in a place far, far away, Pat
Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
such a way as to indicate that:

Rand Simberg wrote:


But we didn't sign on to the Moon Treaty, nor did any other
spacefaring nation.



So sure about that? Guess who one of the signatories that ratified it
is? Kazakhstan- as in Baikonur.

Well, if Kazahkstan wants to enforce it, more power to them. I'll
watch.



Orbital space itself has laws largely based on those of the oceans, with
free transit for all.



The oceans aren't Antarctica.



No, but we're back to the L point colony/artifical island nation
analogy. What makes you think someone isn't going to object to a group
of individuals building a country right over their heads?

I didn't say they wouldn't. But the colony can be moved, if
necessary.

h (Rand Simberg) wrote:

:On Sat, 27 May 2006 15:44:36 -0400, in a place far, far away,
:LooseChanj made the phosphor on my monitor glow
:in such a way as to indicate that:
:
:On or about Sat, 27 May 2006 14:42:22 -0400, Rand Simberg made the sensational claim that:
: On Sat, 27 May 2006 14:05:25 -0400, in a place far, far away, Pat
: Flannery made the phosphor on my monitor glow in
:One: Antarctica. Nations can't claim parts of it, but does that mean
:that a group of individuals couldn't go there and set up a small
:society of their own?
:
: Yes. They will be subject to *someone's* laws, of an existing state.
:
:I don't see how that *wouldn't* apply to space as well.
:
:Why would it? The two legal regimes aren't at all the same.

Nations are responsible for what things launched from their territory
do. I believe that the United States also maintains that the US
government is responsible for things launched by their nationals.

All this means that you're subject to SOME Earthside nation unless
you're born in space and all your stuff was built with space
resources. Then you have a different problem.

If you want to come to Earth, how do you go about it? No nationality
and no way to have a valid passport from anywhere.

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

Rand Simberg wrote:

No, but we're back to the L point colony/artifical island nation
analogy. What makes you think someone isn't going to object to a group
of individuals building a country right over their heads?



I didn't say they wouldn't. But the colony can be moved, if
necessary.



Actually the Earth will be rotating under it all the time; it's at L5,
not in GEO.
Anyway, the amount of money required to do something like that on the
Moon or up at L5 would be so staggering that only a major government
could afford it anyway, so you can kiss it being a independent country
good-bye from the get-go.
I doubt that even Bill Gates could afford something of that scale.

Pat

Fred J. McCall wrote:

All this means that you're subject to SOME Earthside nation unless
you're born in space and all your stuff was built with space
resources. Then you have a different problem.

If you want to come to Earth, how do you go about it? No nationality
and no way to have a valid passport from anywhere.



Good point; I hadn't even thought of that aspect of the concept. You'd
have to be recognized by the governments of Earth, like Israel or
Bangladesh were after their founding.

Pat

"James Nicoll" wrote in message
...
If the US lasts as long as the Western Empire did, it should
see the year 3000. If it lasts as long as the Eastern Empire, it should
see AD 3,900.

Gee, I never though of that...What's Latin for "who cares?"

Try applying your astounding capacity for numbers to this: take that figure
and divide it by the difference between how long it took the barbarian
hoards to WALK from northern Germany to the gates of Rome versus how long it
takes an ICBM to make the same trip.

Then you can take that result and store it in a cool, dark place, because
It. Doesn't. Matter. You're arguing that we're presiding over the start of
a long, slow decline rather than a short, fast one, and I'm saying I don't
want the decline to begin in the first place. The bottom line is that when
a culture reaches the point where it gives up its big dreams so that it can
honor glamor over intellect, the twilight has come.

"Jim Kingdon" wrote in message
news
Of course, one big difference between us and the Romans is that the
Romans never had to import engineers from third-world countries
because not enough of thier own kids were interested in math and
science. They never reached a point at which 80% of thier grad
students in science and engineering were foreign nationals.

I don't know if the historical (or archaeological) record breaks down
engineers versus other job classifications in the Roman Empire, but
they certainly did import lots of labor from the third-world countries
of their day.

All roman legions were also engineering corps. They spent thier time
building when they weren't fighting and training. It helped maintain
discipline, and the public works they produced tended to win "hearts and
minds".

I hate to do something crass, like bring the discussion back to the topic of
the newsgroup, but the point I was trying to make was that they did't need
to turn to Pakistan, India, and China to find people to advance thier
technology.

Of course, as usual with history one could draw multiple conclusions:
that immigration keeps the US vital, or that this is another factor
which will hasten the fall of the US Empire.


I'm the son of an imigrant. I know better than most how important the
immigrant spirit is to the American character. It's not the fact that we
have immigrants in science and math that worries me, in fact if it wasn't
for them the American preeminence in technology would have dissapeared at
least a generation ago. I've spent enough time in Silicon Valley to know
who built the Internet economy (and by the way, namaste and thanks). What
bothers me is the fact that we now HAVE TO import our engineers and grad
students because American kids think math and science are boring, and would
rather become lawyers, pimps, or drug dealers.

A real space program over the last 30 years would have been a fairly cheap
investment compared to the value of a generation of native-born engineering
and science students to the economy and security of the country.

Rand Simberg wrote:

Orbital space itself has laws largely based on those of the oceans, with
free transit for all.

The oceans aren't Antarctica.

No, but individuals are still subject to laws of their countries
on the seas.

http://www.straightdope.com/mailbag/mlawofsea.html

Paul

On Sun, 28 May 2006 10:10:20 -0400, in a place far, far away, "Lou
Adornato" not@home made the phosphor on my monitor glow in such a
way as to indicate that:


A real space program over the last 30 years would have been a fairly cheap
investment compared to the value of a generation of native-born engineering
and science students to the economy and security of the country.

It's not at all clear that a "real space program" (what does that
mean, anyway?) would have done anything about this problem.

"Derek Lyons" wrote in message
...

*yawn* Poor spoiled child - reality could not match your dreams, so
you shifted the blame somewhere else.


Not to get personal (well, not to get any MORE personal), but what exactly
have YOU done to further the cause, aside from posting snotty messages on
obscure bulletin boards?

I spent a year and a day in that center looking for some evidence that we
were doing something, ANYTHING other than protecting the NASA budget. It
simply wasn't there. Here it was 1990 and we, the icon of American
technology, were flying the best technology that 1972 had to offer, using
documentation control practices that my father would have laughed at (I
checked with him, and he actually DID laugh at those same processes). We
had to pass every single software decision through a three-man management
trioka that, not once in the 52 meetings I attended, actually made a
decision. The only program around that came close to "modern" technology
wouldn't be qualified for flight for another seven years (it actually went
online in '98; it's dependent on Silicon Graphics workstations - SGI filed
for bankruptcy two weeks ago). The actual, documented process for changing
a line of flight code took a minimum of TWO YEARS from proposal to first
flight. The "research" organizations in the MSFC org chart were basically a
thinly disguised form of the corporate gulag known in the private sector
calls "Special Projects".

If a terrorist held a gun to my head and demanded I tell him what business
or technical value my department added to the process, I'd probably reach up
and pull the trigger myself. The only two possible futures for me at JSC
would have been to become the "young turk" railing against the system (and
gradually becoming the "cranky old hand"), or become a part of the
management structure, swearing allegience to the STS program office and
turning my back on what I came there to do.

Here's the heart of the matter: there are a lot of ways to give up your life
for a cause you beleive in, and only a few are glamorous to end up on the
evening news; I lost count of the people I met down there who'd given up
thier lives, one day at a time, for a cause that's so obviously lost. I
didn't have the courage to do that, and to this day, there's not a mission
that goes by that I don't find myself feeling like I've abandoned my post,
even though I had to commit the financial equivalent of chewing off my own
leg to get out of that particular trap.

So don't think you have the right to tell me about reality, I've been there
and I paid the price. I certainly don't need YOU to rub salt in the wound.

"Pat Flannery" wrote in message
...

Voyagers 1 and 2 returned far more interesting scientific data than Apollo
ever did.
Same goes for Hubble.


Interesting to who? The Apollo program brought about entire new fields of
technology. Compared to the scale of engineering represented by manned
missions, the robot missions are toys.

Of course, one of the big differences between today and back then was that
people dreamed really BIG dreams back then.


The really big dream being to put people on the Moon before the Soviets
did.
After that was accomplished, we realized that when you get right down to
it the Moon is a pretty boring, expensive, and largely useless place to
go.

Same can be said for Vegas, but lots of people still want to go there. Of
course, there's no gambling, booze, or prostitution on the moon (at least,
not yet).


Of course, one big difference between us and the Romans is that the Romans
never had to import engineers from third-world countries because not
enough of thier own kids were interested in math and science.


Actual mathematicians in ancient Rome were probably few and far between.
The ones the did have were largely Greek, as the Greeks were admired
(somewhat- they were also looked on a bit as having their heads in the
clouds) for intellectual, artistic, and scientific endeavors.
Were Rome really shown was in the caliber of its practical engineers; the
didn't spend their time working out obscure mathematical formula, the
figured out how exactly to build things that were very strong and durable.

Wow, enlightening, off-topic, and completely useless all at the same time.

My reference to Rome came from the previous poster, but the point is that
without SOMETHING to get the attention of the next generation of engineers
and scientists, we're going to end up dependent on foreign talent for the
most important skills of our day. I'm pretty sure the Romans never issued
huge numbers of H1B visas to ensure they had enough civil engineers to
maintain thier roads.

As expensive as the manned program was, it generated a lot of today's
scientists and engineers. You can send robots into the heart of hell itself
and it's not going to stir the imagination of the young like the old films
of Ed White's spacewalk and Armstrong's small step.


You can't go to the moon by staying home. NASA has had 35 years to
answer those questions. We have years of data from Skylab, from Mir,
from Shuttle, from LDEF, and we do NOTHING with it. It's not a lack of
data. It's a lack of leadership, it's a lack of nerve, it's a lack of
vision, but it's NOT a lack of data.

It's the lack of any particularly good or pressing reason to go there.


This is EXACTLY why we need to get NASA out of the Shuttle Operations
business and into a role in which it's facilitating private investment and
development of space. It's not fair that people like you have thier tax
money diverted to programs you're not emotionally equipped to understand,
and it's not fair to people like me to have to keep explaining it. We need
to stop treating space like we're socialists and start looking at it like
capitalists - I for one want the opportunity to invest in the next wave of
space exploration.

Note the Chinese- are they sending people to the Moon ASAP?
No, the are building the world's largest hydroelectric dam.
Why? because it will serve many useful purposes, including controlling
flooding, producing hydroelectric power, and allowing cargo ships to
journey hundreds of miles inland.
Want to do something big and worthwhile?
That's the sort of project to think about, not going back to the Moon.

Question 1: Since when are the Chinese the guage for ANYTHING? They've
managed to combine the worst excesses of capitalism from the age of Dickens
and the worst of Communism from the age of Stalin, and we're going to follow
THEIR lead? I'd rather take cooking lessons from Jeffrey Dahlmer,
thankyouverymuch.

Question 2: When was the last hydroelectric dam built in North America? Try
building one today and you'll be nibbled to death by ducks faster than you
can say "Mount Grahm Red Squirrels eat Snail Darter sandwiches". When I say
we don't dare to dream big dreams anymore, I'm not just talking about space.
I just happen to like the idea of space travel because it will get me far,
far away from the Siera Club and all the other neo-Luddites.

We wouldn't have had anything in particular to launch with them; as the
only two things they were really good for was manned flights to the Moon,
and building a giant space station... and we've all now seen just how
pointless a giant space station is as far as generating anything really
worthwhile to people on Earth.


Well, I don't see the ISS as being "worthwhile to people on Earth" like
curbside recycling and Shakira videos, and it won't pick up trash on the
highways or make our armpits smell like petunias. But there does happen to
be an element of humanity that dreams of living on the frontier.

Any kind of realistic program is going to need large throw-weight vehicles.


Remember the glory days of "100 to 200 Shuttle flights per year"?
Ever notice that no one ever stated what exactly the 100 to 200 payloads
were to be? :-D


Get the cost of payloads down to the $10/lb, or even $100/lb range, and
people will come up with payloads. Problem is that the shuttle has never
managed to go below $10,000/lb.

Pat