"Whereas Congress has determined that a US owned manned space station is in the national interest, be it resolved that the Treasurer of the United States is directed to pay, and payment is hereby authorized, to the first American owned firm to place 14 Americans in orbit about the Earth and maintain them there continuously for a period of not less than 18 months, the sum of Seven Billion dollars, this payment to be free of taxes."
This will work only after they repeal the law of gravity.
Posted by: wndrwrthg on September 25, 2005 at 05:34am
Nano-ware strikes again! Nano tubes are as plausible as the flea circus hoax used to bilk thousands in Jurrasic Park. Nano-ware is no more than pathetic wishful thinking and fantasy. It is hilarioius to think that people buy this unfounded hokum.
Posted by: Jeff Wierbloom on September 25, 2005 at 09:18am
So, are they all on shrooms or acid? I say acid.
Posted by: BB on September 25, 2005 at 12:42pm
You mother fucking lowlife libs need to give it a rest. W won and he has 3 more years to consolidate the Bush revolution. We'll get these 2 and maybe 1 or 2 more supremes and they'll all be conservative. No more Souters, we're talking CONSERVATIVE!
It's like the weather---if it's going to rain anyway, you might as well sit back and enjoy it.
Posted by: BJ Clinton on September 25, 2005 at 06:08pm
I confess I thought I'd never see the Huffington Post link to an article on space elevators. Glad to see I was wrong.
We have a copy of Dr. Edward's NIAC study on our website at http://www.liftport.com/files/521Edwards.pdf (PDF format). It's a good summary of how, what, when and where. The lay public can easily understand the concept.
We also have a Forum where you can discuss the concept at http://www.liftport.com/forums/ and a FAQ at http://www.liftport.com/faq.php
Read the material, think and decide for yourselves. Knee jerk reactions (science fiction! can't happen! nano-ware, pah) are all very well but a careful reader will be surprised.
Submitted by bdunbar @ mm:dd:yyyy
I’ve been editing the video from the 1,000-foot robot test. Since I’ve been busy lately with grant writing etc., I wasn’t involved in activities like making the ribbon. So it wasn’t until I was watching the video that I noticed the sentence written in block letters on the 2-inch wide ribbon (which alternates color in 50-foot strips of bright yellow and fluorescent orange) near the top:ATTENTION PILOT: IF YOU CAN READ THIS, YOU’RE TOTALLY SCREWED.Our sense of humor (or at least Nyein’s) may not (or it may) be visible from far away, but it’s there.
Always with free time on my hands — freelancing is a harsh mistress, yo — I decided to help NASA out. I took the movie they released, mixed a soundtrack for it, and edited it into something just slightly more snappy, just slightly more fun to watch. I hope.I think it's good - go watch.
Either that, or it sucks. Damned if I know which it is.
Anyway, here you go.
Maybe i am a bit out of touch (although i doubt it, being physicist and seeing people who actively work in the nanoparticle research and astrophysics department everyday), but i think this is all such a bullshit.You can generally bet the rest of what he will say is wrong, foolish, incorrect or just plain dumb.
To be blunt, we have big problems with this plan. It's the same basicThere is more. It's all fair criticism. I'm for the idea in principle. We can afford it, and there is no reason not to spend 1% of the national budget on exploration and the far frontier - that is what the State is for.
approach as Apollo, disposable (mostly) spacecraft, on big NASA-proprietary boosters, flown a few times a year, by a standing army of NASA and contractor employees. This is Apollo 2.0, with somewhat more delivered exploration, at moderately higher cost, on a significantly slower schedule.
And yeah, frankly I think humanity needs to colonize the solar system. We need to have not just an outpost on the moon, but full-fledged cities. Why? Because we can! Because as unlikely as it may be, one good asteroid could wipe out life on this planet, and the human race is too precious to entrust to just one world.Phi knows how to make it happen.
If we competed against China by announcing (hefty) prizes for private orbiters and moon shots and so on, I think that'd give us an added PR victory as a defeat of centrally planned economic activity, as well. And it seems to me both cheaper and more likely to succeed.Glenn Reynolds questions the current NASA Plan
I'm all for Moon colonies, and I realize that the better can be the enemy of the good. But I'm not at all sure that this plan puts the money in the right place.
I admit I have a soft spot for America, Russia and Brazil. Tormented histories spattered with heroics are the best. Something about Ireland calls to me in my bones. Otherwise
Fuck Nationalism.
I’m an American. We’re better than that.
We've had our photo op; now comes the infrastructure. Now comes the backbreaking work that won't finish until space elevators stretch from Malaysia to Guyana. Till we lift the construction material to build wetdocks at L5. Till the gleaming bulkheads of lighthuggers are sealed far above this jewel of a planet.
Testing proto space elevator tech won't get anyone's flag-waving picture on the cover of Time.
But it'll get humanity that much closer to the stars and the untapped liberty and self-sufficiency they represent. That, my friends, is a path of which the merest step down may outweigh all the pretty pictures in the world.
What we have here is a guy who took all the good will and familiarity he’d built up thus far and dynamites it for the sake of making a damn good movie, and that’s rather brave: picture Bob Newhart playing a psycho sex killer in a ’66 crime drama – then picture Bob Newhart returning to his previous button-down persona without missing a beat, and going on to decades of success. That’s what Griffith did.
I discovered today that George W. Bush is a better leader or a better Christian than I knew.
Here he is facing a barrage of Katrina criticism, some of it almost surely coming from the people who helped create the Katrina crisis, and what does he do?
He reaches out and thanks these people for their criticism. After his meeting with Bush, the mayor of New Orleans, Mr. C. Ray Nagin, said, "If anything, he told me he kind of appreciated my frankness and my bluntness."
This might be the triumph of a Christian generosity, a turning of the cheek. It's hard not to notice that no one takes Bush's Christianity seriously, unless, in my opinion, they take it too seriously. No one seems ever to read Bush's behavior as if he were being animated by Christian beliefs or practices. Instead, people treat his Christianity as if it were somehow "part of the act," an opportunistic play for sun belt, heart land, anti-coastal voters. No one seems to believe that George W. Bush is ever actually listening when in church. He's there as part of the theatre of his presidency, to show that he stands with certain conservative verities and against the godless Dems.
I know it's not fashionable to talk this way about George W. Bush, but that should give us pause. Actually, the problem goes deeper than that. It is indeed barely intelligible to talk about George Bush this way. To refer to the kind or effect of his religious feeling, do we ever do this? To refer to the selflessness of his presidency, this too trembles on the verge of incoherence. In sum, we have read certain interpretive possibilities out of analysis before analysis has begun. And we all did it. Intellectuals all did it. Intellectuals all did it. (It always astonishes me to see that the intellectual is first and foremost a pack animal.)
George W. Bush, maybe for all of his take-charge, Texan, just-folk transparency, there are complexities we have not discovered. Discovering complexities, I thought this was what the chattering classes were for.
An Earth-to-orbit elevator (sometimes called a "Beanstalk," a "space bridge," or an "orbital tether") is one of those ideas that, at first blush, sounds almost too ludicrous to be real. After all, we're accustomed to thinking of rockets as our only way into space, mixing danger and adventure; taking an elevator into space sounds almost boring. It turns out, however, that a space elevator is not only plausible, it's potentially revolutionary. Perhaps more importantly, given all that has happened in recent days and weeks, the notion of a space elevator can provide a bit of almost giggly optimism about the future.Very good images are linked in that WorldChanging article.
The present might look grim, but within 20-30 years, we'll be taking an elevator to orbit!
It was clear to everyone who looked at the situation that if no provision were made, the poor of New Orleans would suffer grievously in a major hurricane. This was said repeatedly, for years. Nothing was done. I think this inaction is symptomatic of a larger pattern.
America is a nation that has largely stopped really believing its myths. The "Great Society" to be created by winning a "War on Poverty," the vision of another generation of leaders, now seems an incomprehensible failure. One can argue methods, by my point is that now we can hardly imagine anyone even thinking they could actually realize such a ‘big idea.’ The now-pervasive cynicism and complacency mean that problems that could and should be solved are ignored. The result is obvious with Katrina, but there are thousands of individual-scale disasters in the U.S. every day, disasters of crime, poverty, domestic violence, economic decline, dysfunctional schools, and breakdowns of medical and other systems. These disasters are hidden and ignored, the same way the vulnerability of New Orleans' poor to flooding was ignored.
America cannot be sustained, as America, by the achievements of a relatively small stratum of technical/managerial elites, while ever-larger swaths of the population become ever-more marginalized and underserved. We need a vision of rebuilding the nation for all our citizens. Perhaps we can find it in the way we rebuild the region destroyed by a hurricane.
Doonesbury rewritten the to show Trudeau’s inner monologue, with out the obfuscation he applies for a wider market:To which I can only add a .. heh.http://davemunger.blogspot.com/2005/07/blog-post.html“There is no purer emotion than the anger of a Boomer who doesn’t know what he’s talking about!!!!”.
Ha!
Finally, one new thing we are starting with this issue is to ask for your help.
This is a large project and we think we've made a lot of progress over the past three years. To continue moving forward, each week we are going to ask one "Little Thing" from our newsletter subscribers. This "Little Thing" will not involve money. This newsletter is not, and never will be, a "marketing and sales" tool for the company.
The first reason we send these letters out is to inform and educate the growing community interested in our project. The second reason is to expand our global network. Our thinking on this is simple - the more people involved with the Space Elevator, the easier and more likely it is to succeed
We'd like you to get actively involved.
Each "Little Thing" that we ask will have a cumulative effect. The end result will be an elevator into the sky.
The first thing we are asking you to do is tell two people about what we are doing, and ask them to sign up for our newsletter (www.liftport.com/lists.php), or to send an email to info@liftport.com.
Today, we have 1,183 people on our list. Our goal is to have 10,000 by the end of the year. With your help, we can build that list. With that list, we can build the Space Elevator.
