Bigelow Aerospace, A new Genesis in space |
Bigelow Aerospace, A new Genesis in space |
Jun 1 2006, 07:18 PM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 2454 Joined: 8-July 05 From: NGC 5907 Member No.: 430 |
To quote:
On June 16, he'll use a Russian Dnepr rocket to launch a 1/3-scale Genesis model of his planned commercial orbital space station. That much has been public for a while. What I didn't learn until just now is what will be on that module. Freefloating inside will be 1,000 photocards and small personal objects contributed by Bigelow employees. If all goes well, those items will be continuously blown throughout the pressurized module in a kind of space collage. Six onboard cameras will stream video to Bigelow's new website, which will launch tomorrow or Friday. Seven external cameras will provide views of the Earth from space and the outside of the module. If that doesn't get even the most disinterested member of the public at least intrigued about the possibilities of space travel, I don't know what will. But it gets better. Subject to a successful launch of the first module, Bigelow will launch a second Genesis module in September, and that one will contain photos and other small items contributed by anyone who cares to pony up $295. Full article here: http://michaelbelfiore.com/blog/2006/05/bi...s-to-orbit.html -------------------- "After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance. I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard, and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft." - Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853 |
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Guest_DonPMitchell_* |
Jul 15 2006, 09:03 PM
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Guests |
I think for plant irrigation and dairy farming, I would have to give credit to the ancient Sumerians. And let us not forget that thanks to NASA, my CorningWare casserole could probably survive atmospheric reentry. You can argue about the causal relationships here, but I would argue that consumer electronics drove technology far more than NASA contracts.
Certainly the military drives the market, but the R&D gets done by corporations like Electric Boat Company or Boeing or Hugues or Lockheed. Very little gets done in the style of the Manhatten Project, with direct government control. France invented the modern airplane? When? I grew up in the rural midwest, and the electrification was a co-op enterprise owned by the farmers. The technololgy of power distribution was largely made by Westinghouse and General Electric. The original internet was developed under a DARPA grant, but at that time, there were extensive private computer networks owned and built by IBM and Control Data. I used the CDC PLATO system during the late 1970s, and it was damn impressive technology. The internet as it exsists today, with 100,000,000 sites is made possible by drastic redesign of routing and link-level protocols by Cisco and many others. And it has always run on top of privately built lines like AT&T's photonic trunk lines. Government plays a role, but without professional commerical engineering and market incentive, these big projects would not exist. So getting back to space exploration, I still believe that the current programs by NASA and ESA are short sighted and in a steady state. Commercial and military satellites create the market and technology now. |
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