Endi 2011 / Daniel/Jason/Kevin/Marc/MiHe/Parth/Simrun

Links – Space Shuttle

The space shuttle was sold to America as cheap, safe and reliable. It was none of those. It cost $196 billion over 40 years, ended the lives of 14 astronauts and managed to make less than half the flights promised. Yet despite all that, there were some big achievements that weren’t promised: major scientific advances, stunning photos of the cosmos, a high-flying vehicle of diplomacy that helped bring Cold War enemies closer, and something to brag about. Former President George H.W. Bush, who oversaw the early flights, said the shuttle program “authored a truly inspiring chapter in the history of human exploration.’’ NASA’s first space shuttle flight was in April 1981. The 135th and final launch is set for Friday, although storms could cause a delay. Once Atlantis lands at the end of a 12-day mission, it and the other two remaining shuttles are officially museum pieces — more expensive than any paintings. America has done far more for far less. The total price tag for the program was more than twice the $90 billion NASA originally calculated. The nation spent more on the space shuttle than the combined cost of soaring to the moon, creating the atom bomb, and digging the Panama Canal, according to an analysis by The Associated Press using figures from NASA and the Smithsonian Institution and adjusting for inflation. Even its most ardent supporters concede that the shuttle program never lived up to its initial promise. The selling point when it was conceived four decades ago was that with weekly launches, getting into space would be relatively inexpensive and safe. That wasn’t the case. “But there is no embarrassment in setting the bar impossibly high and then failing to clear it,’’ said former astronaut Duane Carey, who flew in 2002. “What matters is that we strived mightily to do so — and we did strive mightily. The main legacy left by the shuttle program is that of a magnificent failure.’’ Of the five shuttles built, two were lost in fiery tragedies. The most shuttle flights taken in one year was nine — far from the promised 50. The program also managed to make blasting into space seem everyday dull by going to the same place over and over again. Shuttles circled the planet 20,830 times, but went nowhere really new. The shuttle’s epitaph is “we tried,’’ said Hans Mark, a former deputy NASA administrator who oversaw most of the first dozen launches. Six years ago, then-NASA chief Michael Griffin even called the shuttle program a mistake. But as a mistake it is one that paid off in wildly unexpected ways that weren’t about money and reliability.

Links - Asteroid Mining

Any mining will cost billions

Chassell 08- Director and Treasurer of the Free Software Foundation, Inc. He is the author of Programming in Emacs Lisp: An Introduction, co-author of the Texinfo Manual, and an editor of more than a dozen other books. He graduated from Cambridge University, in England(April 2008, Robert J, “Mining in Space,” http://www.rattlesnake.com/notions/space-mining.html)

It is expensive to carry steel or any other weighty substance up from the earth's surface into space. But going the other way is different. It is not so expensive to bring steel down. Presuming you have recovered it from an asteroid, and you have moderate manufacturing capabilities (something all the space mining endeavors presume), you can form some of your steel into large re-entry vehicles (500 or 1000 ft across, say), load the rest of the steel inside, and de-orbit the aerobodies over a stretch of ocean. Design the aerobodies so they splash down slowly enough - subsonic will do - and at a low enough angle, that the splashes don't sink nearby ships. Design the RVs to float. Send tug boats out to pull in your steel laden barges. Assuming you have got your space operation going (a big assumption, admittedly), the transport costs will not be too different from those currently incurred transporting steel across the Pacific. Last I looked (which was some time ago), the price of one of the steels was $0.225 per pound. Suppose I brought back a gigaton, over twenty years (no faster, so as not to lower the price too much by saturating the market); and other competitors did not cut the price either -- so I cleared $400 per ton on 50 megatons per year. (Total US steel production is in the 70 megaton per year range.) At a 10% rate of discount, the present value of that gigaton is $170 billion. At a 30% rate of discount, the present value of that gigaton is $66 billion. Either rate of discount, that is real money. Note, however, that no investor will put up a $100 billion to acquire that gigaton if his or her hoped-for rate of return is 30% ... and a desire for 30% is not outrageous for this kind of investment. I don't know the elasticity of demand for steel, but suppose I brought back 100 megatons per year over 10 years, and sold it at $300 per ton. At a 30% rate of discount the prevent value of that gigaton is $93 billion. Still not attractive to investors, but getting there. The financial issue is in balancing how much to sell --- the more you sell the lower your price --- against how slowly you get your money back. Of course, a real calculation not only takes into account the other materials you could bring back (a kiloton of gold, perhaps?), but also postulates a probability distribution for different prices (a 10% chance during year 8 a price is $500/ton; a 15% chance it is $225/ton). Also, you postulate the probabilities of finding differing amounts of the various materials, and the probabilities for the costs for recovering them (0.1% chance the re-entry vehicles cost a half what you expected; 80% chance they cost more; 10% chance one of them goes off course and squashes the Bank of America headquarters building). But illustrative as my numbers are, I think they are within the ball park. I guess that my real point is that to consider space industry nowadays, you have to think very big -- a gigaton of steel is no small amount, nor is $100 billion. The threshhold costs are very high. By contrast, the Spanish paid much less, proportionally to their resources, in funding Columbus' expedition across the Atlantic in 1492: it was the cost of losing three ships. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it was less costly than losing three contemporary American aircraft carriers would be for the US. Funding an asteroid mining operation is more like risking the loss of all the US carriers, or more. Someone asked if I took into account the cost of mining and refining. My response: First, in vacuum and free-fall, you can build very large, light-weight mirrors -- much larger than in any environment with weight and storms. Second, the presumption is that as part of your $100 billion investment, you build semi-automated (or, ideally, fully automated) machinery to build and operate your plant. Because of the vacuum and microgravity, refining and gross manufacturing may be much simpler than on earth. Now, I agree, you might not be able to buy this capability for $100 billion. This is one of the reasons private investors are leary of this sort of thing. They fear the project will fail, like the French attempt to dig a Panama Canal in the 1890s. (Incidentally, in that set of projects, the experts you had to hire to make it possible were the research doctors and the railroad engineers. These were not the experts traditional canal builders thought were most important when planning. Doctors so your crew did not die; railroaders so you could move megatons of dirt.) As for the aerobodies, they would not be powered by other than gravity, and by a space tug that pushes them into an earth-intercept orbit, and by ocean tugs that later tow them to shore. A more difficult question concerns the effect air braking would have on the atmostphere. This may be a problem (I am assuming some ablation, which would put particles in the atmosphere; like the exhaust of jets, this might be dangerous. I doubt the heat output would be a problem, since a thunderstorm generates more heat). Another question is whether governments will "let anyone aim a giant steel bullet at their cities if they can help it." This depends on the military imbalance of power and on the judgements the potential victims make regarding the likelyhood that these potential weapons will be used against them. Suppose a US steel company undertook the project; many would figure that if the US wanted to destroy part of a city, it would bomb the city in the usual way. On the other hand, suppose the current Iraqi government understook this project.

NASA will fund Asteroid mining

Poeter, 11- writer and author of the PCMag.com (5/26/11, Damon, “NASA Preps Asteroid-Mining Spacecraft for 2014 Launch,” http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2385949,00.asp)

• 
  
  

NASA will bring a beloved arcade game to life in 2014 when it deploys an unmanned spacecraft capable of busting up asteroids. Actually, the OSIRIS-REx spacecraft won't exactly be capable of blowing up the small, rocky leftovers from the solar system's birth—let alone possess an energy shield or the ability to jump into hyperspace. But the vessel will be equipped with a robotic arm built to pluck samples from a near-Earth asteroid designated 1999 RQ36 when it reaches its destination in 2020. NASA announced its first-ever mission to retrieve asteroid samples and bring them back to Earth on Thursday. "This is a critical step in meeting the objectives outlined by President Obama to extend our reach beyond low-Earth orbit and explore into deep space," NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden said in a statement. "It's robotic missions like these that will pave the way for future human space missions to an asteroid and other deep space destinations." Asteroids contain material left over from the cloud of gas and dust that cohered some 4.5 billion years ago to form the solar system we enjoy today—original material from the solar nebula that scientists believe contains important clues about the solar system's birth. NASA picked RQ36 for its relative closeness to Earth and primitive makeup. "This asteroid is a time capsule from the birth of our solar system and ushers in a new era of planetary exploration," said Jim Green, director of NASA's Planetary Science Division. "The knowledge from the mission also will help us to develop methods to better track the orbits of asteroids." The Origins-Spectral Interpretation-Resource Identification-Security-Regolith Explorer mission, or OSIRIS-REx for short, involves a four-year trip to the designated asteroid. When the Lockheed Martin Space Systems-built spacecraft gets to within three miles of the asteroid, it will conduct comprehensive mapping of RQ36's surface, which is approximately 1,900 feet in diameter, for six months. Scientists will then move the spacecraft in closer to a selected site where the robotic arm will pluck about two ounces of material, turn around and head back to Earth. The mission, excluding the launch vehicle, will costabout $800 million—meaning an ounce of asteroid material is worth about 263,000 times the currentprice of gold. After collecting the sample, which NASA believes could contain organic molecules, the robot arm will place it in a capsule that will land at Utah's Test and Training Range in 2023 in much the same way that NASA collected and recovered particles from come Wild 2 in 2006 with its Stardust spacecraft. Once it's arrived, the sample will then go to a dedicated research facility where hopefully it will yield up its secrets. The OSIRIS-REx mission, the third in NASA's New Frontiers Program, will also measure the "Yarkovsky effect" for the first time, according to the space agency. The Yarkovsky effect is a "small push" to an asteroid's orbit that builds up over time as it absorbs sunlight and re-emits the energy as heat. It is important for scientists to understand because even such small changes to the orbits of asteroids must be measurable to calculate whether one may someday strike the Earth

Directory: file -> view
view -> Western Europe after wwii
view -> Author study: paul fleischman
view -> Qpa1 7ela study Guide
view -> Arctic Oil/Gas Neg
view -> November 1970 Approximately 150,000-500,000 deaths Bhola Cyclone Bangladesh
view -> Grade Level: 6 Unit of Study: Caribbean glce
view -> Citation: Duffield, Katy
view -> Table of Contents Lesson #
view -> Chinese Wind Energy Disad

Download 0.51 Mb.

Share with your friends: