Space & Astronomy/Space and Astronomy (October 1993).iso/mac/TEXT/SPACEDIG/V12_6/V12_717.TXT

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Subject: SPACE Digest V12 #717

SPACE Digest                                     Volume 12 : Issue 717

Today's Topics:
        Re: MAJOR SOLAR FLARE ALERT & UPDATED WARNINGS
            Re: Planetary Society
            Re: pressure-altitude relation
                Re: NASA BBS ?

Administrivia:

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Date: 19 Dec 90 23:54:12 GMT
From: sdd.hp.com!wuarchive!rex!rouge![e-mail]  (Fraering Philip)
Organization: Univ. of Southwestern LA, Lafayette
Subject: Re: MAJOR SOLAR FLARE ALERT & UPDATED WARNINGS
References: <[e-mail]>, <[e-mail]>
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Tom Neff) writes:

>It occurs to me that it must be awfully fun to watch the Sun's weather
>all day as one's job, and to issue NWS-style weather reports on it.
>After a while you must feel like you *live* on the Sun!  I think I
>picked the wrong career.  Wonder how it feels to grok M-class fares for
>hours on end, then go rolling your shopping cart down the aisles at the
>Pic 'N Pay while you pick up some calf's liver for dinner.

Well, Tom, guess what? Solar activity does affect the weather on Earth,
although through processes that are 'not well understood' :-)

There are supposed to be some sort of connections between droughts and
the sunspot cycle, and even the ozone layer. (I don't know if it gets
thicker or thinner at solar maximum).

Phil
[e-mail]

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Date: 20 Dec 90 03:03:41 GMT
From: zephyr.ens.tek.com!tektronix!sequent!crg5![e-mail]  (Nick Szabo)
Organization: Sequent Computer Systems, Inc
Subject: Re: Planetary Society
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In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John Roberts) writes:
[I write]
>>The *concept* of a space station needs redesign.  NASA has designed
>>and redesigned dozens of "space stations" since its inception and has only
>>a brief post-Apollo fling, ending in the sands of the Australian outback,
>>to show for it.  Maybe it's time we realized the whole approach is wrong.
>
>I hope you're not implying that Skylab was the best a space station can be.

Barring a rapid turnaround in the Soviet economy, Skylab is
one of the biggest space stations we will ever see.  Remember,
it crashed into Australia because the resources and times scales needed
of supporting people in space are monumental.  One bad business cycle
or change in the political winds, and the whole contraption bites the
dust.

By the time we get an economical "manned" presence in space, the term
and conception of "space station" will have been replaced by a
buzzword describing habitats nearly self-sufficient in all ways except
raw matter and energy.  This requires a large, complex industrial
infrastructure in space.  This will happen some time after we start mining
the asteroids, comets, etc. which happens after we have thoroughly explored
the solar system. The longer we devote our resources to building
grossly uneconomical tin cans, the longer it will be until we can have a
real manned space presence.


>It had several serious design problems, notably limited docking facilities
>and the lack of provision for resupply. It was not *intended* for long-term
>use, at least in its final implementation.

The biggest "design problem" is that it has no paying customers.
Nobody wants to use it (unless they are subsidized nearly 100%).
The micrograv scientists don't want it, the deep space mission planners
don't want it.  It is just a gigantic welfare project taking away money
from the real space program and creating another generation of
economically illiterate engineers (I'm an engineer, who has studied
econ and business on my own because it wasn't in the engineering curiculum.
I work at a company that has grown rapidly in a competitive market,
and exports half of its products overseas, because it teaches its
engineers about business.  No flames please.  :-)   It doesn't matter
how many docking facilities etc. it should have when folks don't want
to dock there in the first place.


>Plausible uses for space stations (not necessarily continuously manned)
>include assembly facilities,

There is little or no need for assembly that cannot be teleoperated.
Amortizing a multi-billion dollar project over a little bit of
assembly is wildly uneconomical.  BTW has anybody asked to be
able to assemble something, and stated a price they are willing
to pay?  I didn't think so.


>testbeds for human habitation in zero or
>low gravity (i.e. LLNL), and testbeds for 0g human-tended experiments that
>are not highly sensitive to occasional low-g thrust or vibration. Obviously,
>one design can not accommodate all of these applications, and obviously
>things such as highly sensitive 0g experiments should not be included
>on a manned station.

There is no need to test human reaction to prolonged space unless
there is a need to send humans into prolonged space into the near future.
As has been demonstrated there is no such need.  So all experiments
on humans in space, are, at best, basic science to be funded at NSF levels --
a tiny fraction of the cost of Fred.  Here, too, nobody has
volunteered to put up even a miniscule fraction of the cost of Fred to
conduct such experiments.  Ditto for LLNL.


>>>[PS supports "manned" Mission to Mars]
>>Good grief.  Everybody in the planetary science field knows this is
>>just a political ploy to get funding for the stuff that does the real
>>work, the probes.   There is no way anybody is going to afford to
>>send people to Mars or anywhere else beyond the Earth system until well
>>after it has been thoroughly explored and mapped.  But politics is
>>politics, and if NASA can conjure up space station "customers", the
>>planetary probe folks are entitled to conjure up a macho alternative
>>to war in the cosmos.
>
>A clever argument, worthy of Voltaire or Br'er Rabbit ("Oh please,
>Br'er Congress, don't throw me in that Unmanned Probe patch!"), but
>if this claim is valid, then it lowers my opinion of their advocacy
>techniques still farther. You claim to exonerate the Planetary Society of
>charges of a minor deception, then turn around and admiringly attribute
>to them a much more serious offense. Certainly it's in an organization's
>interest to use diplomacy and tact to present its views in a favorable
>light, but to hold one view while claiming to hold the opposite is
>downright fraud, and it is reprehensible.

Ah, put the PS *does* want to go to Mars!  To the PS "manned" is
not "the opposite", it is a minor, expendable detail.  There is no
deception, this is how they think and feel.  It is only "reprehensible"
if for some reason you feel astronauts are more important than
science, and you can't imagine that others might feel differently.
They don't share an empathy for this, since they consider Voyager
and Apollo to be equally well "manned" -- by themselves.  Astronauts
are an irrelevant detail.

This is far less reprehensible than the stuff posted every day by NASA
on this net about "wow, we got some *great science*" every time they
get one of their instruments to work, or the stuff about space station
"customers" when in fact no one has put up commercial money or orders
on Fred, and the originally stated "customers" (deep space mission
planners and micrograv scientists) now say they are better off without
a space station.  It's just human nature to make arguments favorable to
their own cause.  Why do you call this "reprehensible" and not the stuff
that NASA posts every day to this very newsgroup?


>If they're that tricky, how do you know they're not actually in favor of more
>manned exploration, but are stringing the unmanned probe enthusiasts along
>by means of a well-circulated rumor to the contrary?

Because they are scientists.  Because the are the people that have
explored most of our solar system.  They have succeeded where no
other people of any nation have, and I respect them for that.  And they
are still human, and (fortuneately) know something about politics, and I
respect them for that too.


>You've already said
>that everybody in the field has swallowed that rumor, and therefore won't
>cause any trouble, winking to each other and believing that *they're* the ones
>perpetrating the deception. Later on, if they complain, the Planetary Society
>can just say "Why didn't you read our official policy? We *said* that we
>were strongly in favor of manned exploration." - That would seem to be a more
>plausible explanation for their behavior than the one you gave.

All I can suggest, is get to know some planetary scientists and what
motivates them.  Learn the economics of deep space exploration -- why
did Apollo cost 50 times more than Voyager?  Which returned more
science (of value to a planetary scientist)?   Learn about how to get
funding for a "unmanned" mission inside the NASA bureaucracy.  Learn
from James Van Allen, without whose discoveries we would have
torched our first astronauts to go beyond LEO.  Hear what he and Bruce
Murray (head of JPL during Viking and Voyager) and others have
to say about the economics of space science.  It's not what you read from
NASA on the net, I guarantee you.


>>I, most explorers, and all successful space commerce companies don't
>>consider throwing around humans in tin cans a good utilization of
>>human resources on Earth.
>
>Earth has plenty of human resource to spare - most of it hangs around in malls
>or watches TV or squats in the dirt in third-world countries.

Ah, the old "look, all these people are wasting resources so we can waste
them too!" argument.  Which goes nowhere unless you are in a government
funded welfare program.  If we wish to join the ranks of those
squatting in the dirt, it is a good argument.  If we really want to
go into space, it is ridiculous.


>From a human
>resource perspective, it wouldn't hurt Earth a bit to have a few humans out in
>space.

More of the same argument.  It hurts quite a lot in fact.  If you want
to waste money yourself fine, but leave my tax money out of it please.


>Financial resources (in other words, harnessed or applied human
>resource) are another matter.

No they are not.  Financial resources correspond pretty closely to
human and natural resources.  The "manned program" is more environmentally
destructive, and consumes more educated labor, for the same reason
that it is more expensive -- it is a very suboptimal use of our resources.
We don't have environmental or human resources to squander, *especially*
in the difficult task of getting human civilization into space.


>Given the disproportionately high expense of
>manned vs unmanned exploration, a constant effort should be made to keep
>(or stop) the manned program from hurting the unmanned program. I don't see
>how that would imply that the manned program must be killed off, as you
>advocate. Shooting your neighbor's kids so they won't beat up your kids is
>often not considered socially acceptable.

We are shooting budgets here, not children, but thank you for some
excellent "reprehensible" rhetoric.  :-)  The "manned" program has
already hurt the "unmanned" badly.  We can safely assume the effort
to support both has been an utter failure, and it is now time to gut
the "manned" program (at least the most uneconomical parts of it,
like Fred).


>For the broader question of whether humans should be in space at all, I feel
>that human extraterrestrial presence has a value aside from direct
>contribution to space science and exploitation of resources.

In the long run, I agree with you.  But humans need technology -- very
advanced technology, not punch-card or 50's SF conceptions of
technology -- to survive in space.  We need the James Van Allens to go
before us, discovering the radiation belts and other hazards to be
avoided.  We need the Bruce Murrays leading the exploration of our
solar system.  We need probes to discover and machines to extract
resources.   We need industries, like Arthur C. Clarke's comsats, to
spring up to pay for the venture.

Humans in space, more than any other humans, must make optimal use of
resource and technology. This corresponds closely to optimal use of
*financial* resources.  Something so expensive as Fred --- 100,000 times
the price of a house ten times its size -- is an incredible step in
the wrong direction for moving humans into space.  Luddites who think in
terms of "manned vs. unmanned" (with the natural bias that "manned" is
better) will not survive in space.  From the political and technological
trends, it doesn't look like they will survive too long even under the
U.S. & U.S.S.R.'s socialist welfare umbrellas.  Which is really good news
for those of us who want to see sustained human presence in space in our
lifetimes -- as well as those who simply want to explore and make use of
the solar system.


>millions of people share this opinion.

Most people in the Middle Ages preferred spending money on the
Crusades instead of Columbus.  Most people in the 70's wanted to (and
did) spend money on the "manned" program, but we still got the discoveries
of Viking and Voyager.   If the minority knows what it's doing (and the
good news is that PS, JPL, OSC, Hercules, DARPA, Motorola et. al. know
what they are doing, politically, economically, and technologically) the
majority opinion, and megabytes of "great science" postings on the net.
don't really matter.


>I feel that human presence in space
>should be limited for the time being because of the current high cost, but
>that some level of ongoing activity is an important precursor to much more
>extensive human occupation of space and other celestial bodies in the future.

We are closer to agreement.  IMHO, zero "manned" activity right now
would be more beneficial, since later we will want to take advantage of
new technologies and economies, and obsolete structures and ideas
will hurt us.  I am willing to compromise by just freeing up some
of the money and engineering talent from cancelling Fred and transferring
these people (after a re-education effort on economics) to exploration
or private industry programs.  We need all the talent we can get, let's
not squander it please.




--
"Embrace Change. Keep the Values. Hold Dear the Laughter."
(Sequent ESO Division Motto)
The above opinions are my own and not related to those of any
organization I may be affiliated with.

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Date: 18 Dec 90 01:08:40 GMT
From: hpda!hpcuha![e-mail]  (Bob Campbell)
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Cupertino
Subject: Re: pressure-altitude relation
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> Thanks Matthew!  I haven't quite polished my climbing skills to the point
> where I'm venturing into the stratosphere but *now* I'm prepared :-)
>
> Plugging in numbers into the troposphere model I get a 0.48 bar pressure for
> Mt Everest (29000 feet) assuming 300K at sea level.  Is this right I thought
> it might be a bit less???
>
> dave kinkley
> [e-mail]

Well, my standard atmosphere table in Kuethe & Chow list the following
properties at an elevation of 10 km.

      o                      4    2
T= -50 C    P= 2.642 x 10   N/m     = .26 bar

ahhh, here is a table listing in REAL units (for 29,000 ft. :-)

        o                     2
T= -44.3 F    P= 6588 lbf/ft       = .32 bar

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bob Campbell                Some times I wish that I could stop you from
[e-mail]    talking, when I hear the silly things you say.
Hewlett Packard                                    - Elvis Costello

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Date: 20 Dec 90 00:50:32 GMT
From: sdd.hp.com!hp-pcd!hp-vcd![e-mail]  (Mike Dobbs)
Organization: Hewlett Packard, Vancouver, WA
Subject: Re: NASA BBS ?
References: <[e-mail]>
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>>NASA BBS - how do I connect to that?
----------
NASA computer access number [phone]

Mike Dobbs

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End of SPACE Digest V12 #717
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