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Subject: SPACE Digest V9 #330

SPACE Digest                                      Volume 9 : Issue 330

Today's Topics:
        Re: Success with cold fusion reported
        Bad news about Hubble Space Telescope
     Re: Room Temperature fusion - possible indications?
        Re: Success with cold fusion reported
        Re: Success with cold fusion reported
              Re: Two questions.
             "This space for rent" on Mir
              Solar Eclipse in July 1991
----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 89 19:51:34 GMT
From: pasteur!washoe.Berkeley.EDU![e-mail]  (Chuck Kring)
Subject: Re: Success with cold fusion reported

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Chris Phoenix) writes:
> Path: pasteur!ames!mailrus!purdue!decwrl!shelby!csli!cphoenix
> From: [e-mail] (Chris Phoenix)
> Newsgroups: sci.research,sci.space,sci.environment,misc.headlines,sci.misc
> Subject: Re: Success with cold fusion reported
> Message-ID: <[e-mail]>
> Date: 30 Mar 89 09:30:26 GMT
> References: <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]> <77762DBH106@PSUVM> <[e-mail]> <[e-mail]>
> Sender: [e-mail] (Chris Phoenix)
> Reply-To: [e-mail] (Chris Phoenix)
> Organization: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford U.
> Lines: 22
> Xref: pasteur sci.research:876 sci.space:10590 sci.environment:731 misc.headlines:12080 sci.misc:3720
>
> In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (John Abt) writes:
>
> Imagine how cheap it would be, with unlimited power, to turn large areas of
> land into mirrors.  Just find any sandy area such as a desert, then melt it
> smooth, then sputter on some shiny metal.

Not to flame, but this is one of the stupidest ideas that I've read in this
group.  In addition to totally destroying part of the environment, it simply
will not work for two reasons:

    1> Deserts get cold at night because there is little vegetation or
       water in the atmosphere to hold the heat.  Reflecting it during the
       day would not significantly increase amount of heat which is radiated
       over time.

    2> If the greenhouse effect were a problem, then much of the reflected
       sunlight would get trapped on the way back up and end up warming the
       atmosphere anyway.

Finally, unlimited power does not imply cheap power.  Cold fusion aside,
everything that I've heard about fusion implies that it will be very
expensive.  I haven't heard anyone who would really know claim that cold
fusion will be cheap.  How much does palladium cost?  How long will it
last in in a fusion environment?

I hope that if you are ever in a position to make decisions which will affect
the envorinment, you will give more thought about the ramifications of your
position.

Chuck Kring
UC Berkeley CAD Group
[e-mail]

------------------------------

Date:     Thu, 30 Mar 89 8:10:48 CST
From: Will Martin -- AMXAL-RI <[e-mail]>
Subject:  Bad news about Hubble Space Telescope

The following posting just showed up on the latest RISKS Digest; I checked
the past SPACE Digests and didn't find it there, so I'm sending in a copy
to get the information over here. If it turns out to be a duplicate, my
apologies. The info in here is alarming. Considering the enormous slippage
in the HST launch date, it is rather incredible. It appears that if the
HST had been launched on time according to the original schedule, it
could not have been used due to this software problem! So all that delay
was not necessarily a bad thing. Yet the entire system may STILL not be
ready, even after having given the software side vast amounts of extra
development time during all these years of delayed launch.

This is very depressing...

Will Martin

[This info also provided by: Peter Scott <[e-mail]> -Ed]

Item from RISKS:
Date: Tue, 28 Mar 89 14:57:02 PST
From: [e-mail] (Paul Eggert)
Subject: Will the Hubble Space Telescope Compute?

M. Mitchell Waldrop's article (_Science_, 17 March 1989, pp 1437-1439) on
SOGS is notable for its coverage accessible to the general scientific public,
and for its claim that the software engineering community has switched to
rapid prototyping.  Selected quotes follow.
  -- Paul Eggert, Twin Sun Inc. <aerospace.aero.com!twinsun!eggert>

        Will the Hubble Space Telescope Compute?

    Critical operations software is still a mess--the victim of
    primitive programming methods and chaotic project management

First the good news: two decades after it first went into development, the
$1.4-billion Hubble Space Telescope is almost ready to fly....

But now the bad news: the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore still
has dozens of programmers struggling to fix one of the most basic pieces of
telescope software, the $70-million Science Operations Ground System (SOGS)....
It was supposedly completed 3 years ago.  Yet bugs are still turning up ... and
the system currently runs at only one-third optimum speed....  If Space
Telescope had been launched in October 1986, as planned at the time of the
Challenger accident, it would have been a major embarrassment: a superb
scientific instrument crippled by nearly unworkable software....

[chronology:
    1980-1    2"-thick requirements doc. written by NASA-appointed committee
    1981    contract awarded to TRW; peak team included 150 people
    1983    first software components delivered
    later    SOGS declared utterly unsuitable.]

The problem was basically a conceptual one.  NASA's specifications for SOGS had
called for a scheduling algorithm that would handle telescope operations on a
minute-by-minute basis....  The tacit assumption was that the system would
schedule astronomers on a monthly and yearly basis by simply adding up
thousands upon thousands of these minute-by-minute schedules.

In fact, that tacit assumption was a recipe for disaster....  The number of
possible combinations to consider rises much faster than exponentially....
In the computer science community, where this phenomenon has been well known
for about 40 years, it is called ``the combinatoric explosion.''  Accepted
techniques for defusing such explosions call for scheduling algorithms that
plan their trips with a road map, so to speak. And SOGS simply did not have it.

In addition to performance issues, however, SOGS was also deficient in basic
design terms.  ``SOGS used last-generation programming technology,'' says one
senior programmer....  ``SOGS was designed in such a way that you couldn't
insert new releases without bringing down the entire system!  For days!'' says
the science institute's associate director for operations, Ethan Schreier....
Indeed, the fundamental structure of SOGS is so nonmodular that fixing a bug in
one part of the program almost invariably generates new bugs somewhere else....

So, where did SOGS go wrong?...

One of the main villains seems to have been the old-line aerospace industry
approach to software development....  In the wider computer science community
this Give-Me-The-Requirements approach is considered a dismal methodology at
best...  Modern programming practice calls for ... a style known as ``rapid
prototyping''...

Even more fundamental ... few people at NASA were even thinking about
telescope operations in the early years....  the Space Telescope project as a
whole was saddled with a management structure that can only be described as
Byzantine....  At the hardware level the chaos at the top was reflected in a
raft of independently developed scientific instruments and onboard computers,
none of which were well coordinated with the others.  Indeed, the presumption
was that any such problems would be taken care of later in the software....

So, is SOGS fixed now?

Maybe.  With TRW's help, the institute has spent the past several years beating
the system into shape....  On the other hand, such progress has come at a
price.  SOGS now consists of about 1 million lines of programming code, roughly
ten times larger than originally estimated.  Its overall cost has more than
doubled, from $30 million in the original contract to roughly $70 million....

In both NASA and Pentagon contracting, the cost of the old-line approach is
becoming all too apparent.  Indeed, it has become a real sore point in the
computer community.

``It's the methodology that got us to Apollo and Skylab,'' says [James] Weiss
[data systems manager for Space Telescope at NASA headquarters].  ``But it's
not getting us to the 1990s.  The needs are more complex and the problems are
more complex.''

``SOGS,'' he says, ``is probably the last example of the old system.''
***End of Posting***

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 89 05:48:33 GMT
From: vsi1!v7fs1![e-mail]  (Mike Van Pelt)
Subject: Re: Room Temperature fusion - possible indications?

In article <[e-mail]> [e-mail] (Henry Spencer) writes:
<Last I heard, the geologists were still split on whether the Sudbury ore
<body is the asteroid itself or magma brought up from deep deposits by
<the heat of the strike.  One should be cautious about using this as
<evidence.

Now that's fascinating.  Perhaps if you dig deep enough anywhere,
you'll hit platinum-rich material.  (Hopefully the mantle would be
deep enough!)  Maybe we should have continued the Mohole project.
--
Mike Van Pelt                          Here lies a Technophobe,
Video 7                                   No whimper, no blast.
...ames!vsi1!v7fs1!mvp                 His life's goal accomplished,
                                          Zero risk at last.

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 89 18:42:17 GMT
From: rochester!kodak!elmgate![e-mail]  (Mark Armstrong SOFT)
Subject: Re: Success with cold fusion reported

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Alien Wells) writes:
>
> In addition, I expect the government to try to limit the use (if it works)
> to utility use only for two reasons.  First, there will be political pressure
> to protect the structure of utilities, despite the reality that we would
> be better off putting one of these in everyone's home and eliminiating the
> power grid.

Be the first on your block with your own fusion reactor!!! What a great idea,
we can all have our table top fusion reactor which will create some steam
which will drive the turbines which are connected to a generator -)-). Yep, this
has to be much cheaper than buying electric from those mean old utility
companies. Just buy the wife a lead jacket when she does the laundry in the
basement in case those nasty radioactive stuff happens to leak.

Why do you think it would be more efficient to produce your own electricity
instead of buying it from utilities?? What would be the cost of such system,
$5,000 sounds realistic. How about maintanence cost, $500 per year. What about
the radioactive waste, I guess we could water the lawn with it. This is reality.


Mark Armstrong

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 89 18:40:34 GMT
From: voder!blia!blic![e-mail]  (Mike Tossy)
Subject: Re: Success with cold fusion reported

>>
>>I'm not sure that distributed energy production has anything intrinsically
>>going for it that centralized doesn't - basically the centralization is
>>a response to economics just like centralized food production (they call
>>them farms, meat packers, grain co-ops, etc.), centralized news media (I
>>suppose we COULD all do our own investigative reporting), centralized
>>traffic control (again - we could all get 4X4's and take off cross-country),

>Ok Bob, think for a second.  Energy production is not analogous to
>telecommunications OR food production.  The most important factor is
>the distribution loss (either I2 x R or thermal) that result from
>trying to produce energy in one location and move it to another.
>Producing energy locally would make us a much less energy intensive
>nation.  The only disadvantage to local energy production is that
>utilities don't make as much money. :-)

Seems to me that the distribution loss is not "the most important factor".
There are others.  As with today's fossil fuel plants, the cold fusion plants
may turn out to be more efficent at larger sizes.  The cost of the operations
staff  (unless you believe these cells can operated without staffing)
could make some centralization cost effective. Even if they can operate
unmanned then perhaps maintainance might still make for less expensive
centralized operation (it maybe cheaper to ship "cheap fusion power"
over an existing power grid than to move maintainance personnel from house to
house).  Again depending upon the technology, it maybe cheaper to build
less capacity and use the existing powergrid to load balance than it would
be to build enough capacity for each site to meet its peak demand.  (My
house uses little energy during the day and my office uses little power
at night.  Today with centralized power production we can share the installed
power plant capacity - not so without a power grid.)

Other arguments are possible of course. An assembly line might produce
standard units at a low enough cost as to make decentralization possible.
Or perhaps something in between, perhaps neighborhood power stations?

You can even envision that "advanced countries" like the U.S. would
adopt a centralized approach because of our existing power grid, while
"developing countries" might go for a distributed approach and avoid the
capital investment of building a power grid. (Look at railways, very few
developing countries find them cost effective to build, but most countries
that developed during the rail age find them cost effective to maintain.)

As always it is going to get down to economics (plus other social
considerations).  Unfortunately for those environmentalists who like to
snipe at utilities the truth is that utilities do perform a socally useful
function and that usefulness may very well continue even if cold fusion
works.

Final point: being "much less energy intensive nation" is not a "goodness"
in isolation.  There is nothing morally superior about using less energy, per
say.  The problem of energy use comes from the side effects that our
current energy production techniques.  Would you believe that using less
energy was good if all our energy was produced with alternative methods like
solar?  Reducing the cost of energy has been traditionally how societies
have increased the value of human labor, and I think that is a moral goodness.
I'm glad I live in a society of "mechanical slaves" instead of human ones.

--Mike Tossy

(No I don't work for a Utility.)

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 89 18:54:27 GMT
From: att!cbnewsl![e-mail]  (Stuart Warmink)
Subject: Re: Two questions.

In article <[e-mail]>, [e-mail] (Abhay Sawant) writes:
>
> 1.  I thought the idea of having spacecraft merely 'nudge' asteroids
> towards earth was really neat.  [...]

Nudging them towards the Earth is one thing, getting them to match the
Earth's velocity is quite another! The alternative is to send them in a
Hohman (sp?) transfer orbit to the Earth, this requires the minimum ammount of
energy up front and at arrival. Still, we are talking about (for current
technology) staggering ammounts of energy (for an asteroid worth mining).

Stabilisation should not be a problem; it is made easier by good choice of
propulsive site and automatic attitude control.

> 2.  If it's not very hard getting some kind of hot fusion going, isn't
> it a easy solution to the radioactive waste problem to chuck it into a
> merrily burning fusion reaction?  Alternatively, shoot it into the
> center of the sun.  Alternatively, shoot it at the stars.  Why have we
> only thought of earth-based solutions to radioactive wastes so far?

The Sun wouldn't notice, sending it into "empty" space is perhaps
short-sighted. Anyway, no-one will get away with actually launching the
stuff in the first place, for fear of an accident...
--
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
"PENTAGON OFFICIALS ARE CONCERNED ABOUT  |  Stuart Warmink, Whippany, NJ, USA
AN ANTIMATTER SHORTAGE"  ("WHAT'S NEW")  | [e-mail] (att!cbnewsl!sw)
-----------> My opinions are not necessarily those of my employer <-----------

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 30 Mar 89 09:40:03 PST
From: Peter Scott <[e-mail]>
Subject: "This space for rent" on Mir

I just heard on the radio that you can now buy advertising space on Mir
(a couple of years ago I would have assumed it was an April Fool's joke).
You can buy a patch on a cosmonaut's spacesuit, or a 2-lb cargo that you can
proclaim "has flown in space", or an ad on the Mir hull, or a billboard at
the Baikonur launch pad.  It boggles the mind.  I wonder if they'll consider
inserting promos for sponsors in the voice links?  "Comrade, the Bulova
time is 00:30 Zulu..."

Peter Scott ([e-mail])

------------------------------

Date: 30 Mar 89 18:21:39 GMT
From: ncrlnk!ncrcce![e-mail]  (Michael A. Pasek)
Subject: Solar Eclipse in July 1991

Excuse me if this is not the proper forum, but....
I heard that there will be a total solar eclipse in July 1991, that will be
visible (full) in Hawaii and (partial) in the Western U.S.  Can anybody out
there tell me EXACTLY when this will occur ?  I would like to make plans
now to be in Hawaii when it does happen, and to be on the right side of
the islands for viewing, etc.  Please e-mail responses.  Thanks.

M. A. Pasek          Switching Software Development         NCR Comten, Inc.
[phone]              CNG Development               2700 N. Snelling Ave.
[e-mail]                               Roseville, MN  55113

------------------------------

End of SPACE Digest V9 #330
*******************