Joined: Aug 17, 2006 Age: 40 Posts: 2426 Location: Ontario
Posted: Thu May 24, 2012 3:40 pm Post subject:
ruveyn wrote:
edgewaters wrote:
[
All done by people, who are the physically existing causes for things like road construction, incarcerating dangerous criminals, and war.
just people who take orders from other people as prescribed by Law. Just people who do things out of the blue? Not likely.
ruveyn
They do it because of ideas they have (such as government, or law). But these ideas don't exist outside of people's heads, and certainly aren't capable of acting on their own. This is a fallacy of reification.
For those who are interested, tommorrow morning at 8-9am EST the commercial Dragon capsule will attempt to berth with the ISS. Carrying about 1mt of supplies for this test run. There will be live video somewhere on the second link. If that's successful the hatch will open 24 hours later.
Joined: Sep 22, 2008 Age: 76 Posts: 29314 Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 6:10 am Post subject:
edgewaters wrote:
They do it because of ideas they have (such as government, or law). But these ideas don't exist outside of people's heads, and certainly aren't capable of acting on their own. This is a fallacy of reification.
If the actions people take are real than the causes of those actions are real. No real thing can come to be without real causes. Ideas are honest to goodness patterns of electrochemical processes which just happen to take place in our heads. Everything has to happen somewhere, right? Being internal to our bodies does not make something unreal. Our heartbeat is real and it takes place in our chest. Thoughts are real and they happen in our heads.
I'd imagine that the overhead for R&D into gascore nuclear plasma thrusters would be very high. And I honestly can't say whether or not there is any private company in the US that has the kind of money to do it.
Now (even)if I'm wrong, and there are companies that could do it, or perhaps create a consortium to do it, the US government wouldn't allow it because nuclear energy is heavily controlled.
Fact 1 - Kodak recently decommissioned a nuclear reactor they had been using for the research purposes for the last thirty years. US gov does give out licences for that sort of stuff al the time. The local city/state authorities had no idea Kodak was running a reactor...
Fact 2 - Nobody is going anywhere on the back of a nuclear rocket for the foreseeable future. The technology was developed and refined in the 60s & 70s but most countries agreed to an above ground test ban and that is widely interpreted as also banning nuclear rockets. Without a ratification, no dice.
Fact 3 - SpaceX has had heaps of money, tech transfer and staff from NASA, the idea that the Elon Musk started from scratch in his garage designing rockets is ridiculous, he had free tech & expertise from NASA that would have taken him a decade and tens of billions dollars if he really had to do it alone.
Joined: Sep 22, 2008 Age: 76 Posts: 29314 Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 2:47 pm Post subject:
DC wrote:
Fact 3 - SpaceX has had heaps of money, tech transfer and staff from NASA, the idea that the Elon Musk started from scratch in his garage designing rockets is ridiculous, he had free tech & expertise from NASA that would have taken him a decade and tens of billions dollars if he really had to do it alone.
The folks at SpaceX had access to the publications of NASA most of which or open and in the public domain. All citizens have a right to access this material since our taxes in the aggregate paid for NASA in the first place. Are you saying the Elon Musk got special, particular and exclusive help from NASA which other people could not have gotten? If so, document that claim.
The U.S. government publishes billions of dollars worth of scientific and mathematical material which are available free to any member of the public. You make it sound that Musk did something underhanded. Did he? If so document the claim.
Joined: Sep 22, 2008 Age: 76 Posts: 29314 Location: New Jersey
Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 2:47 pm Post subject:
DC wrote:
Fact 3 - SpaceX has had heaps of money, tech transfer and staff from NASA, the idea that the Elon Musk started from scratch in his garage designing rockets is ridiculous, he had free tech & expertise from NASA that would have taken him a decade and tens of billions dollars if he really had to do it alone.
The folks at SpaceX had access to the publications of NASA most of which or open and in the public domain. All citizens have a right to access this material since our taxes in the aggregate paid for NASA in the first place. Are you saying the Elon Musk got special, particular and exclusive help from NASA which other people could not have gotten? If so, document that claim.
The U.S. government publishes billions of dollars worth of scientific and mathematical material which are available free to any member of the public. You make it sound that Musk did something underhanded. Did he? If so document the claim.
Whether it's NERVA or a VASIMR powered by a hypothetical nuclear reactor, they wouldnt be powered up until at least in orbit and maybe further. Chemical rockets would lift them into space. Under current plans that kind of heavy lift capability wouldnt exist until ~2030 when the 2cd stage for the SLS *might* be completed. Maybe they could design these things for smaller rockets. I don't know.
The question of money is the next problem.
For those who care, the first commercial capsule berthed with the ISS this morning. They'll open the hatch tommorrow morning. In three years it might be carrying people.
Are you saying the Elon Musk got special, particular and exclusive help from NASA which other people could not have gotten? If so, document that claim.
Here ya go.
The heat shield (rather an important bit of kit) is NASA's newest shiniest tech. You can't download it from the internet, you can't ask them nicely for instructions.
I didn't mean to suggest that something dodgy was going on, Elon Musk makes a point of thanking NASA for extraordinary amount of help and support they have given him. The point is if you are drawing conclusions about private vs public space exploration you need to add 54 years worth of NASA funding and experience to the Space X costings.
NASA has also given billions of dollars to Space X by offering contracts for space flights to a company which in 2008 didn't even have a prototype rocket let alone any successful launches.
Do you think that if Mr Any American rolls up to NASA's front door and ask for a billion or three in contracts they will hand the cash over or have security escort you off the premises?
Don't get me wrong, what Elon Musk has done is awesome but you can't call it 'private sector' in the way that Paypal or Tesla Motors was private sector, Nasa coughed up billions to match Elon's 100 million stake...
The core problem with government is that rather than being the force that push humanity forward it has become that which holds it back. In the US I suspect this is related to the number of lawyers in political positions, since lawyers are great at arguing things, but not doing things.
If people would put equal money and effort into science as they do religion, we'd be living in a world where humanity would rocket forward in development. There is also the aspect of the only way to learn more about space is to explore it, the more we learn for space, the better our lives on the ground become.
NASA has also given billions of dollars to Space X by offering contracts for space flights to a company which in 2008 didn't even have a prototype rocket let alone any successful launches.
They didnt get billions. The contracts will be paid when each mission is completed and they havent yet started the deliveries. What theyve been given to date is for completion of milestones, per the COTS or CCDEV programs because NASA awarded them contracts to develop a service that NASA needs in a timely manner. Theyve been awarded a few hundred million by now. Most of the development cost has been SpaceX money (investors plus Musk), which is a big savings for taxpayers. But the company existed and was going forward before those programs. Later there was a selection process and both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences survived it. Another early winner was dropped when they couldnt meet requirements.
Another difference is that they offer a full service, fixed price business. So NASA doesnt have to pay the fixed costs of running their own cargo/crew service. The same rockets will launch private satellites, which was the original business model.
NASA has also given billions of dollars to Space X by offering contracts for space flights to a company which in 2008 didn't even have a prototype rocket let alone any successful launches.
They didnt get billions. The contracts will be paid when each mission is completed and they havent yet started the deliveries. What theyve been given to date is for completion of milestones, per the COTS or CCDEV programs because NASA awarded them contracts to develop a service that NASA needs in a timely manner. Theyve been awarded a few hundred million by now. Most of the development cost has been SpaceX money (investors plus Musk), which is a big savings for taxpayers. But the company existed and was going forward before those programs. Later there was a selection process and both SpaceX and Orbital Sciences survived it. Another early winner was dropped when they couldnt meet requirements.
Another difference is that they offer a full service, fixed price business. So NASA doesnt have to pay the fixed costs of running their own cargo/crew service. The same rockets will launch private satellites, which was the original business model.
They have outstanding contract with nasa for about $3.1 billion, this is almost as good as money as you can borrow against it, most expanding businesses get the contract and then go to the bank with it to borrow against.
Musk put up $100 million, other private investors put up a total of $100 million and NASA gave them $500 million cash before they had made a single delivery to space...
Whichever way you slice it, NASA is still the majority funder, I don't mean to diminish Musk's extraordinary achievement, but it would not have happened without public money and political orders to channel funds to the 'private sector' and if NASA hadn't been generous with it's tech and time to help out it wouldn't have happened without many, many more billions being poured into it.
Space X is a really bad example of 'markets being more efficient' and the private sector always being able to out perform the public sector, that was my point.
SpaceX has contracts with many private companies to launch satellites. They were founded in 2002, four years before NASA entered the picture with their specific needs.
Launching satellites didnt require a pressurized capsule, heatshield, recovery system, or the supporting ops that much of NASA's milestone payments have gone to fund. To support a program that NASA *needs* to maintain the ISS. If the government needs a service and awards a contract to develop and get those needs met from an extant company, I don't see how it's suddenly not private enterprise. If they'd gone to Boeing, ULA, Lockheed Martin or another major contracter the only difference would be that it would cost a lot more due to the nature of cost-plus contracting. That wouldnt challenge Boeing's status as a private company.
SpaceX is a labor of love for a multi-billionaire with a history of self-funding his companies. I think you sell them short by suggesting that without NASA they could not succeed as a launch company. Every private space company has leveraged NASA's experience in one way or another. Many of them helped create that experience through awarded contracts over the past 50 years.
Joined: Aug 17, 2006 Age: 40 Posts: 2426 Location: Ontario
Posted: Fri May 25, 2012 10:29 pm Post subject:
ruveyn wrote:
If the actions people take are real than the causes of those actions are real. No real thing can come to be without real causes. Ideas are honest to goodness patterns of electrochemical processes which just happen to take place in our heads. Everything has to happen somewhere, right?
Right, ideas are real ... they do have a physical manifestation (between the synapses, for instance). But there's no direct connection between the ideas in my head and yours, except this act of communication. That is to say an idea like "government" exists discretely in every mind, there is no telepathy at work. Thus any idea is a separate instance in each individual who holds it - it has no existance outside of the mind, and no physical connection to similar ideas in other minds. Almost all actions we take are, of course, caused by our minds but this applies to anything that we do.
In other words, government is not an entity in its own right, and it doesn't have any sort of intellect of its own. All it really is, is a set of protocols between people, a convention for a set of behaviours. All of "its" actions manifest as individuals taking actions of some sort, in accordance with these protocols (which is what allows them to act in unison, which gives the illusion of a singular entity)
