Missing Mary Road

26 of NASA’s legends, including Cernan, Armstrong, and Lovell have blasted Obama’s new space plan.

The United States entered into the challenge of space exploration under President Eisenhower’s first term, however, it was the Soviet Union who excelled in those early years.

Under the bold vision of Presidents Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, and with the overwhelming approval of the American people, we rapidly closed the gap in the final third; of the 20th century, and became the world leader in space exploration.
America’s space accomplishments earned the respect and admiration of the world. Science probes were unlocking the secrets of the cosmos; space technology was providing instantaneous worldwide communication; orbital sentinels were helping man understand the vagaries of nature.

Above all else, the people around the world were inspired by the human exploration of space and the expanding of man’s frontier. It suggested that what had been thought to be impossible was now within reach. Students were inspired to prepare themselves to be a part of this new age.

World leadership in space was not achieved easily. In the first half-century of the space age, our country made a significant financial investment, thousands of Americans dedicated themselves to the effort, and some gave their lives to achieve the dream of a nation.

In the latter part of the first half century of the space age, Americans and their international partners focused primarily on exploiting the near frontiers of space with the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station.

As a result of the tragic loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia in 2003, it was concluded that our space policy required a new strategic vision. Extensive studies and analysis led to this new mandate: meet our existing commitments, return to our exploration roots, return to the moon, and prepare to venture further outward to the asteroids and to Mars.
The program was named Constellation In the ensuing years, this plan was endorsed by two Presidents of different parties and approved by both Democratic and Republican congresses.

The Columbia Accident Board had given Nasa a number of recommendations fundamental to the Constellation architecture which were duly incorporated. The Ares rocket family was patterned after the Von Braun Modular concept so essential to the success of the Saturn 1B and the Saturn 5.

A number of components in the Ares 1 rocket would become the foundation of the very large heavy lift Ares V, thus reducing the total development costs substantially. After the Ares 1 becomes operational, the only major new components necessary for the Ares V would be the larger propellant tanks to support the heavy lift requirements.

The design and the production of the flight components and infrastructure to implement this vision was well underway. Detailed planning of all the major sectors of the program had begun. Enthusiasm within Nasa and throughout the country was very high.

When President Obama recently released his budget for Nasa, he proposed a slight increase in total funding, substantial research and technology development, an extension of the International Space Station operation until 2020, long range planning for a new but undefined heavy lift rocket and significant funding for the development of commercial access to low earth orbit

Although some of these proposals have merit, the accompanying decision to cancel the Constellation program, its Ares 1 and Ares V rockets, and the Orion spacecraft, is devastating.

America’s only path to low Earth orbit and the International Space Station will now be subject to an agreement with Russia to purchase space on their Soyuz – at a price of over 50 million dollars per seat with significant increases expected in the near future – until we have the capacity to provide transportation for ourselves.

The availability of a commercial transport to orbit as envisioned in the President’s proposal cannot be predicted with any certainty, but is likely to take substantially longer and be more expensive than we would hope.

It appears that we will have wasted our current $10-plus billion investment in Constellation and, equally importantly, we will have lost the many years required to recreate the equivalent of what we will have discarded.

For The United States, the leading space faring nation for nearly half a century, to be without carriage to low Earth orbit and with no human exploration capability to go beyond Earth orbit for an indeterminate time into the future, destines our nation to become one of second or even third rate stature.

While the President’s plan envisages humans traveling away from Earth and perhaps toward Mars at some time in the future, the lack of developed rockets and spacecraft will assure that ability will not be available for many years.

Without the skill and experience that actual spacecraft operation provides, the USA is far too likely to be on a long downhill slide to mediocrity. America must decide if it wishes to remain a leader in space. If it does, we should institute a program which will give us the very best chance of achieving that goal.

Neil Armstrong
Commander, Apollo 11

James Lovell
Commander, Apollo 13

Eugene Cernan
Commander, Apollo 17

Chris Kraft
Johnson Space Center Past Director

Jack Lousma
Skylab 3, STS 3

Vance Brand
Apollo-Soyuz, STS-5, STS-41B, STS-35

Bob Crippen
STS-1, STS-7, STS-41C, STS-41G, Kennedy Space Center Past Director

Michael D. Griffin
Past NASA Administrator

Ed Gibson
Skylab 4

Jim Kennedy
Kennedy Space Center Past Director

Alan Bean
Apollo 12, Skylab 3

Alfred M. Worden
Apollo 15

Scott Carpenter
Mercury Astronaut

Glynn Lunney
Gemini-Apollo Flight Director

Jim McDivitt Gemini 4
Apollo 9 Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager

Gene Kranz
Gemini-Apollo Flight Director, NASA Mission Ops. Past Director

Joe Kerwin
Skylab 2

Fred Haise
Apollo 13, Shuttle Landing Tests

Gerald Carr
Skylab 4

Jake Garn
STS-51D, U.S. Senator

Charlie Duke
Apollo 16

Bruce McCandless
STS-41B, STS-31

Frank Borman
Gemini 7, Apollo 8

Paul Weitz
Skylab 2, STS-6

George Mueller
Past Associate Administrator For Manned Space Flight

Harrison Schmitt
Apollo 17, U.S. Senator

Dick Gordon
Gemini 11, Apollo 12

During the climactic men’s hockey game at the end of this winter’s Olympics, Toronto was united by a lot more than enthusiasm for sports. As this graph of the city’s water usage during the game clearly shows, Torontonians were also remarkably synchronized that night in the timing of their trips to the washroom, with massive spikes in water consumption to coincide with each intermission in play and a huge dip in usage following Sidney Crosby’s winning goal. This was almost certainly due to toilets, citywide, flushing, and not flushing, in unison. Bladders were straining together all over Toronto.

Similar graphs showing water usage in Edmonton and Winnipeg have already made the news?but this graph, from Toronto Water, our city’s water-supply agency, is the first evidence specifically in Toronto.

Almost thirty years ago, stuntman Dar Robinson leapt from the crown of the CN Tower with no parachute, no airbag, and only a thin wire looped around his torso to keep him from splattering on the sidewalk below. Today, we can relive that jump thanks to this excellent documentary video?uploaded by YouTube user Retrontario and posted at 1?T.O.?which, for no apparent reason, is narrated by Chuck Norris.

Robinson jumped from the CN Tower on two separate occasions. The first, in 1979, was for an action movie called Highpoint, in which Robinson was doubling for Christopher Plummer. Robinson wore a parachute for the original jump. It was, at the time, the highest such leap by any stuntman.

The second jump, in 1980, is the one shown in the video above. It was staged not for a movie, but for a documentary on Robinson, that eventually aired on ABC. According to Toronto Star articles from the time, Robinson received $250,000 to do it.

The video above is not from the 1980 documentary itself. It’s a segment on the MAKING OF the original documentary, from a second, completely separate documentary on Robinson, filmed in 1987. The occasion for the second documentary was Dar Robinson’s death, in 1986, after he (unintentionally) rode a motorcycle off a cliff during a routine stunt for another now-obscure eighties action movie.

Here, with more information on Dar Robinson’s untimely demise, is another YouTube clip?which, for no apparent reason, is hosted by Bill O’Reilly:

The revision thing: A history of the Iraq war, told entirely in lies

All text is verbatim from senior Bush Administration officials and advisers. In places, tenses have been changed for clarity.

Once again, we were defending both ourselves and the safety and survival of civilization itself. September 11 signaled the arrival of an entirely different era. We faced perils we had never thought about, perils we had never seen before. For decades, terrorists had waged war against this country. Now, under the leadership of President Bush, America would wage war against them. It was a struggle between good and it was a struggle between evil.

It was absolutely clear that the number-one threat facing America was from Saddam Hussein. We know that Iraq and Al Qaeda had high-level contacts that went back a decade. We learned that Iraq had trained Al Qaeda members in bomb making and deadly gases. The regime had long-standing and continuing ties to terrorist organizations. Iraq and Al Qaeda had discussed safe-haven opportunities in Iraq. Iraqi officials denied accusations of ties with Al Qaeda. These denials simply were not credible. You couldn’t distinguish between Al Qaeda and Saddam when you talked about the war on terror.

The fundamental question was, did Saddam Hussein have a weapons program? And the answer was, absolutely.

Keep reading, it’s pretty awesome.

are you as cool as this guy?

when the internet was coming of age in the mid to late 90′s, the browser wars were kicking in.

technology has changed a whole lot since and so have the browsers, you can do more with the browser alone today than you were able to do with a fully loaded computer with all the shareware you could find hacked up from astalavista.

tom’s hardware has an awesome write up and comparison of the most popular browsers in the market available today.  aptly titled, the web browser grand prix, they set about an awesome methodology in comparing the big five, namely, IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

my favourite being Opera did rather well which I was expecting completely. what it doesn’t measure is the usability and feature set of the browser, which in my opinion is far superior for Opera than any other browser.  the amount of customization one can do in Opera, along with mail and feeds integration, tab management, opera unite and link along with widgets makes it the most usable piece of software i have on my computer.

anyway, go and figure it out here, but do go through it carefully, it rocks.

the mariana’s trench all scaled up in a nice infopic.

Symbian OS developed by Nokia continues to rule the mobile smartphone world. The latest Gartner data for the 4th quarter of 2009 shows that Symbian leads with 46.9% market share with RIM in second at 19.9%. Unfortunately, Symbian saw a drop of 5.5% from the same quarter a year ago. RIM, iPhone, and Android platforms all saw large increases in market share and are definitely the ones to keep an eye on moving forward.

Looking at the manufacturer numbers we see that Nokia dominates the world with 36.4% (down from 38.6%) with Samsung in second at 19.5%. Nokia did outperform expecations in a down economy though and is still in a very strong leadership position.

Instead of sending people to the Moon, the US space program is sending robots to the Asteroid Belt. When these robots discover metals in the Belt, how will it affect the economy of Earth?

Discovery’s Robert Lamb reports on a lecture given by Vatican astronomer Guy J. Consolmagno, which was in part about the ethics of asteroid mining. Lamb writes:

Can you put a price tag on an asteroid? Sure you can. We know of roughly 750 S-class asteroids with a diameter of at least 1 kilometer. Many of these pass as near to the Earth as our own moon ? close enough to reach via spacecraft. As a typical asteroid is 10 percent metal, Brother Consolmango estimates that such an asteroid would contain 1 billion metric tons of iron. That’s as much as we mine out of the globe every year, a supply worth trillions and trillions of dollars. Subtract the tens of billions it would cost to exploit such a rock, and you still have a serious profit on your hands.

But is this ethical? Brother Consolmango asked us to ponder whether such an asteroid harvest would drastically disrupt the economies of resource-exporting nations. What would happen to most of Africa? What would it do to the cost of iron ore? And what about refining and manufacturing? If we spend the money to harvest iron in space, why not outsource the other related processes as well? Imagine a future in which solar-powered robots toil in lunar or orbital factories.

“On the one hand, it’s great,” Brother Consolmango said. “You’ve now taken all of this dirty industry off the surface of the Earth. On the other hand, you’ve put a whole lot of people out of work. If you’ve got a robot doing the mining, why not another robot doing the manufacturing? And now you’ve just put all of China out of work. What are the ethical implications of this kind of major shift?”

The question is interesting. A number of authors, including Ken MacLeod and Paul McAuley, have suggested that Earth’s future economy may become rigidly environmentalist to preserve the planet’s habitability. Development planetside will grind to a halt, but old-fashioned dirty industry will thrive in space. So you could wind up with two human economies: A controlled, stable-state one on Earth, and a crazily free market one offworld.

A Swiss freediver held his breath underwater for 19 minutes and 21 seconds, according to news reports this week. The gasp-inducing feat beat the previous world record by 19 seconds, and blew away the record of 17 minutes and four seconds that magician David Blaine set on Oprah Winfrey’s talk show in 2008.

For most ordinary humans, all that breath-holding can be hard to fathom. The feat might also bring up some basic questions about biology. For example: Is it really possible to survive without inhaling for that long? And is it healthy?

“It is, as a matter of fact, possible — with certain tricks,” explained Claes Lundgren, a physiologist at the University of Buffalo School of Medicine in New York.

It is probably not, however, good for you, and consequences can be deadly.

The first announcement by Nokia at Mobile World Congress 2010 in Barcelona is the introduction of MeeGo. In a significant development in the convergence of communications and computing, Intel Corporation and Nokia are merging their popular Moblin and Maemo software platforms. This will create a unified Linux-based platform that will run on multiple hardware platforms across a wide range of computing devices, including pocketable mobile computers, netbooks, tablets, media phones, connected TVs and in-vehicle infotainment systems. Called MeeGo, the open software platform will accelerate industry innovation and time-to-market for a wealth of new Internet-based applications and services and exciting user experiences. MeeGo-based devices from Nokia and other manufacturers are expected to be launched later this year. This announcement strengthens the Nokia and Intel relationship, and builds on the companies’ broad strategic collaboration announced in June 2009. Intel and Nokia now invite participation in MeeGo from existing Maemo and Moblin global communities and across the communications and computing industries. “Our vision for seamlessly communicating between computing devices from the home, auto, office or your pocket is taking a big step forward today with the introduction of MeeGo,” said Intel President and CEO Paul Otellini. “This is a foundational step in our evolving relationship with Nokia. The merging of these two important assets into an open source platform is critical toward providing a terrific experience across a variety of devices and gaining cross industry support.”

apple (computers? devices?) these days reminds me more and more of fairy tales and other stories or rather the morals learnt (or lack thereof) from them. it’s funny how the company makes an announcement and the world of media just explodes all over the interwebs. anyway…so i suppose from my previous post you know what my stance on the new device is.

apple is a smart company. their UI’s are usually beautiful and they make sleek and elegant devices. usually in my experience, that’s all they are though, sleek and elegant, and not much else. also they’re flimsy, very, very flimsy. (if you’ve ever bought a first gen apple product, you know what i’m talking about). take the new tablet for example.

they’re aiming for a netbook alternative, but they’re not gonna be  getting much out of it to because to keep their price point low, they’ve had to skimp out on hardware. pretty much no usb ports or SD support. super cool idea for a device that’s being advertised as a media box, don’t you think? and in true apple fashion, they’ll just charge you an arm and two legs for getting those plastic pieces of apple USB and SD adapters. same thing with 3G support. you want 3g on that thing, you may hand over 60% more money for the same thing without, thank you very much. good stuff. oh another thing seriously lacking, a camera. my n900 has two! one for making video calls forward facing, and another for shooting video and taking photos.

now let’s see…what else, oh yeah, wanna see what the web looks like using the ipad. click here and find out. err…get used to the blue logos. you’ll be seeing it a lot if you’re on the ipad. and if you’re interested in reading why Mac OS doesn’t support flash altogether…not well anway…well you can read here more about it and why they won’t be supporting it anytime soon either.

the other reason apple can afford to keep down their hardware costs is by making up most of the money in software, especially since they make huge cuts in the app store, itunes and  ibook sales. so what it boils down to, with apple, no such thing as a free lunch. it will be interesting to see how apple reacts to it’s software content distribution systems and the percentage it takes off it, as it sees the apps move from the stores to the web itself (case in point, google voice).

now giving credit where it’s due. both the ipod and iphone reinvented the future and brought it to us and handed it to us on a silver platter. it changed the way we consumed the technology and  we loved every minute of it. the ipad just took a step back unfortunately. it was designed to consume media. a sort of re-invented television, yet it’s being marketed as a computer which it hardly isn’t. a computer is something that is customizable both in terms of hardware and software, the ipad is neither. a user of a computer has a very intimate relationship with the computer itself. the very design of apple devices these days deny you that privilege. the whole reason why computers are in the shape and form that they are in today is because thirty years ago there were hackers and geeks tinkering away and messing with parts to improve upon and adding on devices and other electronics and fun toys to make their computers better, faster and using them in ways that the original manufacturing neither intended nor imagined. with the whole lock down of software (and now hardware, especially with proprietary hardware), the future is fast looking like a bleak place where there can be no innovation as far as the end users are concerned.

unfortunately without the lack of multiple apps running simultaneously, all the ipad is is something similar to changing channels on tv, good luck trying to watch two things at the same time, or for that matter, even choosing what playing, because the app store really doesn’t give you that choice, Apple does, and they control what gets to play. so you’ve got hundreds of channels, and nothings on. they got away with this business on a phone, i’m not sure how successful it would be on something thats meant to overlap with a computer. yes you can writeup quick emails and browse the app store and text in real fancy manners to other ipad users, but thats not the same thing as reconfiguring an entire computer to do something entirely different.

have a good day ladies and gents.

A physicist carefully examined the way R2D2 flies in Attack of the Clones, and has come to a startling discovery. Examining the thrust of R2′s flight, then adding in gravity and resistance, he discerned that R2 is lighter than styrofoam.

Rhett Alain, a physicist at Southeastern Louisiana University, first turns R2′s flight into a free body diagram, pictured here. Then he solves for F-thrust, assuming Earth gravity and some atmospheric resistance (you can see all his equations here). Then he reaches the fun part, which is figuring out R2′s mass.

Writes Allain, as he solves his equation for mass:
* rho = 1.2 kg/m3
* Area: Wookieepedia says that R2 is 0.96 meters tall. Using tracker video on an image of R2, I am going to approximate it as a rectangle that is 0.42 meters by 0.62 meters for an area of 0.26 m2
* Wikipedia lists the drag coefficient for a smooth sphere as 0.1. It has a smooth brick with a coefficient of 2.1. A skier has a coefficient of 1.0. Wikipedia does not list the drag coefficient for R2, but a value of around 1.0 seems reasonable.
* For the velocity, I took it a little far. I was just going to ballpark guess at his speed, but I didn’t. I used Tracker to look at R2′s motion in Clone Wars where he flies to rescue Padme. From this, I get a speed of 2.3 m/s.
* I already said I would assume Earth-like gravity. So, g will be 9.8 N/kg
* Theta is about 35 degrees (although it could be as high as 45 degrees).
Using these values, the mass of R2 is 0.1 kg. Yes, 100 grams. How do I know I am correct? I know because Wookieepedia doesn’t list R2′s mass or weight. They know it is silly, so they left it off.
If this mass is so low, I think R2 doesn’t even need thrusters. He would just float (which would actually change my calculations above – I left off the buoyancy force). By my estimations, R2 is about .42 meters in diameter. This would put its volume at about 0.1 m3 and R2′s density would be this:

I was originally thinking that maybe R2 was made of styrofoam – but that has a density of about 40 kg/m3. So there.

So basically R2 doesn’t need thrusters, and is made of spiderwebs. Makes perfect sense!