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2005-08-23 Home Front: Tech

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Posted by Ulavinter Whons8844 2005-08-23 00:00|| || Front Page|| [4 views since 2007-05-07] Top

#1 C'mon guys... can we beat the Chinese in setting up a moonbase alpha. Please?

Posted by Mac Suirtain 2005-08-23 00:56|| 2005-08-23 00:56|| Front Page Top

#2 Or the Iranians for that matter.

Posted by Mac Suirtain 2005-08-23 00:56|| 2005-08-23 00:56|| Front Page Top

#3 Overlooking the golf course would be nice.

Posted by Captain America 2005-08-23 01:14|| 2005-08-23 01:14|| Front Page Top

#4 Who are we to dream, our country is stuck on a dumb archaic shuttle. The Hubble will probably be closest we gringos get an eye on the moon in the next few decades.

And since the Hubble depends on shuttle maintenance runs, mama mia. We screwed.

Posted by Mac Suirtain 2005-08-23 01:18|| 2005-08-23 01:18|| Front Page Top

#5 Dismantle NASA, go private

Posted by Captain America 2005-08-23 01:20|| 2005-08-23 01:20|| Front Page Top

#6 The Chinese would buy out any privatized based stuff we got going.

Posted by Mac Suirtain 2005-08-23 01:24|| 2005-08-23 01:24|| Front Page Top

#7 ...our country is stuck on a dumb archaic shuttle... the Hubble depends on shuttle maintenance runs...
Interesting observations, Mac. Point the Hubble at the Earth instead of celestial bodies, and what do you call it? KH-11. And why was the shuttle built at all?

A brief history of the National Reconaissance Office (NRO) will reveal a series of bureaucratic fights between the USAF and the CIA. The CIA had the upper hand from NRO's birth through the '80s, but the proportion of blue suiters has increased steadily in the past 15 years, indicating that the CIA has lost interest.

Image processing is all fine and dandy, but perhaps the Directorate of Technology had a deeper motive than eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one explaining what each one was. Perhaps the CIA was actually after the delivery vehicle.

Taken in isolation, such a theory might qualify me for the schizoid/paranoiac olympics, but there is another data point. This one in "inner space." After the hub-ub created by the book Blind Man's Bluff, John P. Craven felt compelled to tell some of his sea stories, and in so doing correcting a few errors in Bluff.

Craven's volume was not a best-seller. It should have been. I will not repeat Craven's deeply disturbing account of the K-129 fiasco. After Craven retired from US gov't service, he found that the Glomar Explorer represented a significant obstacle to his dreams of commercial exploration, exploitation, and perhaps even human settlement of Neptune's domain.

The Explorer's official cover story of Manganese-nodule mining excited big corporations and prompted them to spend lots of money in R&D. These companies discovered that such mining was not commercially feasable, but not before vast amounts of time and capital vanished forever. The overtly covert nature of the Explorer did not matter -- perceptions were engraved. A good portion of the UN's Law of the Sea Treaty is devoted to a mindless code for manganese nodule mining. Craven could not speak his mind at the time due to security restrictions.

Re-reading Blind Man's Bluff, I came a cross one sentence that struck me. In the '60s, the CIA attempted to set up something called the NURO - National Underwater Reconaissance Office. The Navy fought it, after seeing what happened with the NRO. Sontag and Drew don't give any indications of the NURO's fate.

All inference, I know. But there was a remarkable article posted on Rantburg a few weeks ago.Link. It has stuck in my mind since I saw it.

Posted by Rory B. Bellows 2005-08-23 02:58|| 2005-08-23 02:58|| Front Page Top

#8 Rory, What? The CIA was after the delivery vehicle? Meaning the shuttle? Why the hell would they want that when they can and have put up satellites of their own? Why put up a seperate survelliance sat when all communications goes through current sats that they could bug prior to launch if they really wanted to (since the US did the bulk of launching for some time).

I repeat, wtf?

Posted by rjschwarz 2005-08-23 10:14|| 2005-08-23 10:14|| Front Page Top

#9 Why the hell would they want that when they can and have put up satellites of their own?

They didn't want the shuttle so they could launch satellites, exactly. I contend that the CIA wanted to influnce the shuttle design to ensure that it never became an efficient launch system. NASA couldn't get funding for the shuttle, until they agreed to make it large enough to carry a KH-11, which is basically a Hubble pointed at the Earth.

Like the Glomar Explorer, the Shuttle was designed to soak up huge amounts of development capital, planting the notion that space travel is ruinously expensive.

In the article that I linked to, Jonathan Huebner contends that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down dramatically. The advances we have nowadays are mostly refinements instead of break-throughs. I think he is broadly correct, and the main reason is that several governments, and especially the US gov't, is sitting on large amounts of technology. Mind you, I'm not saying I disagree with the policy.

Posted by Rory B. Bellows 2005-08-23 14:59|| 2005-08-23 14:59|| Front Page Top

#10 In the article that I linked to, Jonathan Huebner contends that the rate of technological innovation is slowing down dramatically. The advances we have nowadays are mostly refinements instead of break-throughs. I think he is broadly correct, and the main reason is that several governments, and especially the US gov't, is sitting on large amounts of technology. Mind you, I'm not saying I disagree with the policy.

My God. It looks like the Co-Dominium is actually going to take place

Seriously if the PRC does sucees in placing men on the lunar surface watch for them to claim the whole Moon for themselves. Not that many people would care, at least until the Rods From God started hitting.

Posted by Cheaderhead 2005-08-23 16:16|| 2005-08-23 16:16|| Front Page Top

#11 CIA had nothing to do with the shuttle, it was the United States Air Force that wanted to be able to put military satellites up and insisted on the massive payload. Besides that the Hubble is not some extra large special satelite, what makes it special is that it is put into a higher orbit than most satelites which makes it difficult/expensive to fix.

A spy satelite wouldn't need to be in that higher orbit and putting something up there doesn't require a shuttle, just a a large rocket (which the Air Force shifted to after the Challenger disaster).

The connections are not there, the logic is not there, I think you have been misinformed.

Posted by rjschwarz 2005-08-23 17:45|| 2005-08-23 17:45|| Front Page Top

#12 I think he is broadly correct, and the main reason is that several governments, and especially the US gov't, is sitting on large amounts of technology. Mind you, I'm not saying I disagree with the policy.

Like what? And why?

Posted by Laurence of the Rats">Laurence of the Rats 2005-08-23 17:51|| http://www.punictreachery.com/]">[http://www.punictreachery.com/] 2005-08-23 17:51|| Front Page Top

#13 Don't forget about the willful turning away from electro-gravitation-love beams back in 1964. Someday it will become clear that we became a nation of liquid propelled rocket nutz right when Venus was rising. It's a shame. Someone needs to pay. This is why we lost the Battle of the Harvest Moon and the Betty Crockercrats have the upper hand.

/damn is everybody a moron or what?

Posted by Shipman 2005-08-23 18:27|| 2005-08-23 18:27|| Front Page Top

#14 What was that TV show back in the '70's where a junk yard owner launched shots into orbit to 'salvage' space junk? I think Andy Griffith played the owner.

Ah... IMDB is your friend. The name of the show was Salvage....
from 1979...

Posted by CrazyFool 2005-08-23 19:20|| 2005-08-23 19:20|| Front Page Top

#15 Back to the Moonbase... I see it as functionally different from a Mars base. Moon operations will need to be mostly underground, because of the severe abrasiveness of Lunar dust and the need for large amounts of living and working area. Ironically, the above ground activities will center on scooping up large quantities of the dust and taking it below ground--for processing--concentrating the H3 for shipment back to Earth. This means that the some of the first equipment that goes to the Moon will have to be mining equipment. Digging shafts and tunnels to accommodate the processing equipment. Physical constraints would probably mean that this tunneling would have to be done slowly--too slowly for human supervision--so would have to be done by mining robots. The new US, 100-ton heavy lift rocket will be of great help in getting these heavy systems to the Moon.

Posted by Anonymoose 2005-08-23 20:08|| 2005-08-23 20:08|| Front Page Top

#16 rjschwarz:CIA had nothing to do with the shuttle, it was the United States Air Force that wanted to be able to put military satellites up and insisted on the massive payload. If first glance, yes, the CIA had nothing to do with the shuttle. But the satellites the shuttle was required to lift were CIA-designed. As per the NRO history link: "By informal agreement, the Air Force provided launchers, bases, and recovery capability for reconnaissance systems, while the Agency was responsible for research, development, contracting, and security. Essentially, the agreement allowed the Agency to decide which systems would be deployed, and the Air Force challenged the CIA's jurisdiction." The informal arraingments were formalized in 1965. A three-man executive comittee was established, made up of the DCI, an ass't sec. of Defense, and the President's scientific advisor. This panel reported to the Secretary of Defense. The arrangement put the DCI in charge of establishing "collection requirements in consultation with USIB." If he disagreed with the SecDef, the DCI could appeal directly to the President. Estabilishing collection requirements would in effect put the CIA in charge of designing the satellites.

Furthermore, this document link suggests that the KH-11 represented a leap in technology the prior satellite programs. Page 15 (as marked in pen in the bottom right) specifically mentions that the leap approach was favored by the CIA, and the Land Panel, which advised the President's Scientific Advisor. This organizational history (link) states: "...although CIA usually handled IMINT and Air Force had primary responsibility for SIGINT." The KH-11 is (was?) most decidedly imint.

I believe the spy satellite requirement was intended to hobble the shuttle, which brings us to LotR: Like what? And why?

I could not say with any degree of confidnece what they have and don't have. What I see are programs designed to stifle development, commercial and otherwise, in certain spheres.

Huebner cites two examples of "trunk" technology (as opposed to the small branches we're filling out now.): "major fields like transportation or the generation of energy." Shuttle and the Glomar Explorer would qualify as transportation. Last time man had a major breakthrough in energy production, man learned to split the atom (and we learned fusion, but we can't control that, yet). This was of course, preceeded by advances in our knowledge of the physical world. There is certainly room for improvement in physics today in unifying different theories.

And that leads us to "why" The last time there was a breakthrough, the nuclear bomb, pound for pound, humbled the chemical explosives that had preceded it. We may have found something more powerful than the atom bomb. I don't know.

Our main opponents for the past 60 years, Russia and China, display remarkably little technical innovation. This is due to their economies. What breakthroughs they get, they steal through espionage, either traditional or industrial. Limiting our own development, commercial and military, also slows our opponents.

Posted by Rory B. Bellows 2005-08-23 21:12|| 2005-08-23 21:12|| Front Page Top

#17 A lunar base would likely be built on or around a lava tube. This is what the Artemis folks have suggested at least. Natural hollow that you could take over, expand out and only worry about sealing the top.

Rory B. Bellows, Nasa could easily have designed a dual system, a smaller shuttle and large lift vehicle. They made a bad call try for the simplicity of all in one design. There was no conspiracy involved, just a number of engineering trade-offs over time and some bullshit guesses on how much per pound the shuttle could deliver product to orbit.

Look at the history of space station freedom, begun under Reagan and totally unrecognizable from the ISS of today. Design tradeoffs combined with politics.

Posted by rjschwarz 2005-08-23 23:33|| 2005-08-23 23:33|| Front Page Top

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