[quote=the_intrepid] Quote:
Originally Posted by "bad manners":ubd8k9jv
And where are these 'garage hobbyist' teams? Right, nowhere. No money, no expertise, no nothing.
Some of those teams have several millions of dollars, and are comprised of engineers and physicists of various capacities. They know plenty.[/quote:ubd8k9jv]
Yeah, plenty from their previous involvement in US govt sponsored business. Just what I am talking about.
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Scaled Compoisites, a completely private company (which never accepted government subsidy) made it to space with only a fraction of the cost of what it cost NASA.
X-47A? Would you enlighten me how Scaled never received anything from the USD 35 million spent on the vehicle they designed and built?
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The companies who built the landing craft that landed on the moon were, indeed, contracted by the government. That's not the same thing as being subsidized, but I'll ignore the issue for now.
Oh really? They were receiving money from the US govt for research, design and fabrication of the stuff. Many many many years.
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The important thing here is that you understand Scaled Composites (being only 22 years old) was formed much later than that, and never accepted any government money. You continue to not be able to grasp this.
See above. It was just one example of the "private" business of Scaled. There are many more.
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No, again I say that Scaled Composites (first private company to put a man in space aboard the "SpaceShipOne". The US governmentn ever gave them any money, as you can tell not only by the rules of the X-Prize Foundation, but also by reading the company's history on their website and elsewhere. You continue to make claims without actually reading any of it.
Never gave them any money for that idiotic project. It did for many others.
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Private space flight into space is idiocy? When it's doing so more efficiently, and for a whole lot less money than when government organizations (NASA) did it? I think you're confused or disillusioned.
I am not confused. You are. The money that NASA have spent enable these "private" companies to repeat what NASA did 40 (forty) years ago for "less" money. Simply because they can borrow the technology. But even that is done in a half-assed way.
A few minutes of flight with a payload of less than a ton. A real breakthrough, that.
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I don't believe I ever mentioned military satellites, and if I had, I would have gladly pointed out that the United States, once it caught up to the Soviet Union during the 'Space Race', surpassed it in terms of many things -- including military satellite technology. I'm talking about commercial satellites.
The discussion is about "private" versus "state-sponsored" space technology. As you can see, the state-sponored technology is light years ahead of this "private" stuff (which is still state-sponsored in the end.)
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But since we're on military technology, the U.S. military has over 200 high resolution military satellites in orbit. Until the early 1990s, the Soviet Union had about 100 or so. That number has since dropped to less than a DOZEN in the late 1990s.
What does that have to do with technology? Do you think that making 100 replicas of one satellite is a technological wonder?
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We'll continue to talk military satellites, since you seem so inclined to do so.
Sure.
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The first American military satellites (KeyHole: KH series) began with a resolution of about 2m (KH-1, launched in 1960). Type KH-11 and KH-12 Spy Satellites 4 inch resolutions. The Air Force and CIA Discoverer 13 series has a 12 inch resolution. KH-11 and KH-12 images are not available to the public, but I believe you can order Air Force/CIA Discoverer 13 images for a few thousand dollars.
The information on the actual resolution of KH-11 and KH-12 is classified. The 4 inch resolution is derived from "back of envelope" calculations. But even if it is true, it is hardly a tribute to engineering. These sats are huge, the size of a four-storey building orbiting the Earth. You can put your Hubble telescope into that kind of sat, big deal. The usefulness of that kind of resolution is close to zero. It is only useful for the types in CIA and their subcontractors, who were given a nice stack of money to spend.
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Modern Russian military satellites have something like 1/3 or 1/4 of a meter resolution. This means they have a resolution of something like 10-12 inches.
Classified just the same. I do not know, you do not know (or if you did, you would not say it here). That is comparable to the mainstream US sats anyway.
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In Russia, modern non-military satellites have resolutions no better than 1m.
Simply because they would all be sent to Siberia for doing any better.
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Modern American military and intelligence imaging satellites have a 4inch resolution. In Russia, the best they have to offer is 10 inches.
This statement is not based on anything but rumours.
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More information you might not like to hear is that modern Russian commercial satellites are actually used for military purposes, because the military cannot afford to have many full time imagine satellites in space at once -- so they do contract work with private Russian companies (not that the companies have much of a choice).
I do not care. So far you have failed to mention anything that would be a lot "more advanced than anything you'll see in Russia".