Antikythera Mechanism

[frank81]

And because you don't care.....???

That money wasn't spent just to find out if the moon was made out of cheese. NASA and other offshoots of military research are responsible for a lot of the things we enjoy today. Satellite communications, GPS, even the internet. All three of which have transitioned to the private sector, or at least private/public partnerships. Why is space flight such a sacred cow? The past ten years have proven that the technology and costs are at a point the government doesn't need to support and control it.

That last point I will make is I'm part of the crowd that believes we spend too much, but money spent on R&D is not wasted and far better than some of the stuff that we aren't cutting.

[dusty]

That money wasn't spent just to find out if the moon was made out of cheese. NASA and other offshoots of military research are responsible for a lot of the things we enjoy today. Satellite communications, GPS, even the internet. All three of which have transitioned to the private sector, or at least private/public partnerships. Why is space flight such a sacred cow? The past ten years have proven that the technology and costs are at a point the government doesn't need to support and control it.

That last point I will make is I'm part of the crowd that believes we spend too much, but money spent on R&D is not wasted and far better than some of the stuff that we aren't cutting.

Satellite communications and GPS

Those were developed so that I would have a job during the last eight years of my career. This resulted in some of the most interesting test work that I have been involved with.

Internet? - I thought Gore did that when he wasn't messing with green energy.

[Ed in Tampa]

That money wasn't spent just to find out if the moon was made out of cheese. NASA and other offshoots of military research are responsible for a lot of the things we enjoy today. Satellite communications, GPS, even the internet. All three of which have transitioned to the private sector, or at least private/public partnerships. Why is space flight such a sacred cow? The past ten years have proven that the technology and costs are at a point the government doesn't need to support and control it.

That last point I will make is I'm part of the crowd that believes we spend too much, but money spent on R&D is not wasted and far better than some of the stuff that we aren't cutting.

Actually Gps was millitary that got converted. Most Satellite used for communications and such were company founded.
What got wasted was money sending man to the moon and rovers to distant planets.

If you want to spend money why not on R&D of propulsions systems. Until a propulsion system is invented that can take man past the speed of light the rest is just like draining the ocean with a teaspoon. And don't tell me you have to shoot a guy into space to invent such a system. The guy going into space was just that a guy going into space.

If we have the money shot into space over the last 50 years we would have the money for deficit. Sure we won't have an lunar rocks and maybe teflon, WD40 and few others but I think I could have lived with them. Example the space station what a waste of money to have people up there fixing the station so they can stay up there.

[JPG]

Actually Gps was millitary that got converted. Most Satellite used for communications and such were company founded.
What got wasted was money sending man to the moon and rovers to distant planets.

If you want to spend money why not on R&D of propulsions systems. Until a propulsion system is invented that can take man past the speed of light the rest is just like draining the ocean with a teaspoon. And don't tell me you have to shoot a guy into space to invent such a system. The guy going into space was just that a guy going into space.

If we have the money shot into space over the last 50 years we would have the money for deficit. Sure we won't have an lunar rocks and maybe teflon, WD40 and few others but I think I could have lived with them. Example the space station what a waste of money to have people up there fixing the station so they can stay up there.

Yep!

No sense in drilling holes in the ground.

There are plenty of whales around.


:D:D:D

[dusty]

Actually Gps was millitary that got converted. Most Satellite used for communications and such were company founded.
What got wasted was money sending man to the moon and rovers to distant planets.

If you want to spend money why not on R&D of propulsions systems. Until a propulsion system is invented that can take man past the speed of light the rest is just like draining the ocean with a teaspoon. And don't tell me you have to shoot a guy into space to invent such a system. The guy going into space was just that a guy going into space.

If we have the money shot into space over the last 50 years we would have the money for deficit. Sure we won't have an lunar rocks and maybe teflon, WD40 and few others but I think I could have lived with them. Example the space station what a waste of money to have people up there fixing the station so they can stay up there.

Actually, GPS was a Rockwell (and later Rockwell/Siemens) product developed under contract for the Government. In the very beginning, the satellite was the only part of the project that belonged solely to the Government and even it and the payload were developed by civilian contractors.

[donalexander]

for the Thread Drift of the year award.

Now I have built a clock with my Shopsmith and I have contemplated building a device for tracking and predicting planetary motion, which was what the Greeks were observed to have done in the first post.

Has anyone here built a rocket ship with their Shopsmith?

I didn't think so....(but I'll be I've come closer than most by building some parts for a 200+ mph airplane on my Shopsmith - but you don't see me whining about the cost of the F22 Raptor!). So, do ya think we could quit belly aching about perceived government waste and talk about what we're building with our Shopsmith's?

<g>

I may have to change my nickname to "Grumpy" unless one of you has already taken the name, in which case I'll use "Curmudgeon".

[Ed in Tampa]

Sorry Don!:o Didn't mean to contribute to the hijacking of your thread.
I'm so ashamed!:o

[BuckeyeDennis]

Has anyone here built a rocket ship with their Shopsmith?

Nope, but I once designed a couple of early GPS mapping vans, way back when the military still had "selective availability" turned on. This was so that the Russkies could not use our own GPS system to drop a nuke directly on the lids of our missle silos.

By using differential GPS, you could still get absolute accuracy to about a meter. Signal loss, from skyscrapers and trees and such, was a big problem back then. So we added old-fashioned gymbaled gyros and wheel sensors and such to the vans for dead reckoning. To even our own amazement, the dead-reckoning stuff was accurate to better than a meter per mile traveled. (Dang it, I just hate mixed unit systems! )

Same general objectives as the Greeks, but with a couple millenia of technological advances in our favor.

I did recently use my SS to help prototype a miniature power supply for an intelligent brushless servomotor. The first application for the motor is in a new military vehicle that can adequately protect our troops from roadside bombs. Seriously.

The second application will be a lightning-fast GPS-enabled .22 rifle-aiming gun platform purpose-designed for harvesting hickory-fed Ohio squirrels. Ed in Tampa is sponsoring that project.

[frank81]

for the Thread Drift of the year award

For the week maybe. The year may only be a quarter of the way over but that's still a pretty high bar.

[camerio]

There is a show about it called "Ancient Computer". If you haven't heard of this, it's really neat and worth a look.

It was built by the greeks over 2000 years ago and is a complex series of gears used for astronomy. I learned about it in a link from an imaging publication because they used a CT scanner to fully assess it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/29/scien ... epage&_r=0



Remember this was made over 2000 years ago

To come back to this thread, NOVA made a very interesting program about this and the creation of a replica. It involved research done by US, Canadian and Greek scientists and it is a very nice story to watch. It was on last wednesday April 03 on PBS Burlington.
You American can watch it on internet at this
http://video.pbs.org/video/2364988981
Well worth it like many if not all Nova program.