Posted on 10/04/2002 6:26:50 AM PDT by meowmeow
The help wanted pages are chock full of opportunities for those in sales and healthcare. And the economic and regulatory policies of the luddist Bush administration are killing the tech sector. Why would any intelligent person, who wants to maximize their economic opportunities, bust their ass learning something hard like math and science?
Rockets by their nature have the possibility of catastrophic failure. It will always be so and it is factored into the cost.
It would be great to have an order of magnitude increase in performance that drives the cost down by an order of magnitude. Do this twice and everybody will have a space winnebago in the driveway for weekends on the moon. Until then it's incremental improvements such as businesses are familiar with -- gradual improvement.
We'd better find a way to do it; it's as important as ever.
For some satellite fun, click here. Two windows will open. One of them will show you almost every satellite in orbit, real time. Watch the specks for a few seconds: They're moving.
It's fun to play around with the options. You can drag the frame around, zoom in, speed up the action, click on individual satellites to see what they are, whether they are in geo-stationary orbit, polar orbit, etc., etc.
Not as much as you would think. I worked in the space business for years. What you get in any business is just what you ask for. Pre-clintoon, space workers were asked to get successful missions, and they mostly did. In the clintoon era, they were asked to have a diversified work force, and they mostly did.
Leadership is about setting priorities. Those of us who vote for leaders must make sure that we agree with the priorities of the ones we elect. What they ask for is what all of us will get.
That is sooo cool. Like watching electrons orbit a really big atom. 45 years ago there was just one artificial satellite. Well, two, the payload and the booster. Most of us saw the booster rather than the Sputnik, but that was really something!
Try this . . . drag the frame around and around in a circle until you can see the Continental US. Notice the fat cluster of satellites parked over the US in the outer ring? Click on one of them. Select the option 'Center on satellite,' and then speed the simulation up to the maximum possible speed and refresh rate.
You can see most of the satellites in this cluster hover right over the US while all the others are zipping all around. I think you can also get that orbit info from the drop-down menu, but it's cool (I think) to see it in action.
I haven't checked 'em all out yet. I wish they'd give us a little more information, such as whose satellite it is and what it's doing. I'd like to know how many of them are Russian.
BTW, I found that site through this under-appreciated post. I still haven't been able to explore all of it.
I definitely get the feeling that someday we're going to be able to click on a satellite on some webpage like this one in the future, and check out all the images and all the data it's collecting on the Earth (that is, as long as the satellite isn't a military one). I sure hope it's reasonably priced. Right now, I think their prices are a bit steep for the little guy.
Stupid me . . . I told you I hadn't fully explored the site!
Try this: click on a satellite in the sim, then click on the 'Satellite' drop down menu. Click on 'select.' Find your satellite in the list and double click it. Then click on "Sat. Info." All the info about that satellite will now be displayed in the second window that opened up when you first got to the simulation.
Much of the infrastructure to do this is already in place; it needs to be implemented in a test case. The amount of data that would go over the Internet servers in the world would probably increase a few percent as a result, but raw satellite data needs processing to be used by the general audience. It's a question of how much preprocessing would be done and how much would be left to the browser.
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