Skydiving from Space

[Lone Wolf]

In case anyone missed Felix Baumgartner's incredible skydive from 127,000 feet, here's the deal: our man Felix flies up into space in a balloon.  From space, he skydives, experiencing nearly 4 and a half minutes of free fall and breaking the sound barrier, reaching a speed of 729 miles per hour.  (And yes, he survives, so it's okay to watch.)  :)

I'm not too funny about heights, but I'm pretty sure that when the Earth looks like this, you're up too damn high:



Gizmodo has the video: http://gizmodo.com/5951621/watch-the-vi ... -jump-here

Also, a helmet-cam video of the early parts, including a dangerous-looking uncontrolled spin: http://gizmodo.com/5951725/first-head-c ... space-jump

I guess he couldn't let the wing-suit guys have all the fun.  :)

[MediumTex]

I love that Red Bull is his sponsor.

I love Red Bull.

I'm surprised fewer people have tried this sort of thing.  I'm sure some of you have seen the footage from people sending digital cameras up with helium balloons and getting pictures of the earth basically from space.

It's remarkable how our two main approaches to getting that high are to burn a TON of rocket fuel or just let a helium balloon carry you up there.  It seems to me that a really elegant spacecraft would be taken to suborbital heights under a helium balloon and then fire the rockets from there.

[Lone Wolf]

It's remarkable how our two main approaches to getting that high are to burn a TON of rocket fuel or just let a helium balloon carry you up there.  It seems to me that a really elegant spacecraft would be taken to suborbital heights under a helium balloon and then fire the rockets from there.

I think that this is a very clever idea!  My 3-year-old has taken an interest in the moon recently, so he and I had a great time watching and rewatching the original countdown and launch of Apollo 11 this weekend.  There's nothing quite as macho as the way that the Saturn V bulls through the pull of gravity with brute force.

I looked it up over the weekend.  A Saturn V uses 5.5 million pounds of fuel.  That's just an astonishing amount of energy.

Compared to that, I love the elegance of your balloon idea.  After all, our hero Felix got 24 miles up with nothing but a balloon!

[MachineGhost]

Compared to that, I love the elegance of your balloon idea.  After all, our hero Felix got 24 miles up with nothing but a balloon!

If that was the balloon, it looks more like space capsule.

Only the government could come up with the kooky idea of wasting 5.5 million pounds of fuel to get to orbit rather than using a baloon. 

[Gumby]

You wouldn't be able to easily lift a man, a capsule and fuel, and a rocket with a balloon — let alone a payload. Think about how large the balloon was just to lift Felix and his capsule.

Balloons can raise the initial altitude of rockets.

However, balloons have relatively low payload (although see the Sky Cat project for an example of a heavy-lift balloon intended for use in the lower atmosphere), and this decreases even more with increasing altitude.

The lifting gas is usually helium, which is expensive in large quantities. This makes balloons an expensive launch assist technique. Hydrogen could be used as it has the advantage of being cheaper and lighter than helium, but the disadvantage of also being highly flammable.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

But, here's a link of other cool non-rocket spacelaunch ideas...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

[Gumby]

Btw, MT's idea is called a "Rockoon"

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon

A serious disadvantage is that balloons cannot be steered and consequently neither the direction the launched rocket moves in nor the region where it will fall is easily adjustable. Therefore, a large area for the fall of the rocket is required for safety reasons.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rockoon

[MachineGhost]

But, here's a link of other cool non-rocket spacelaunch ideas...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-rocket_spacelaunch

Wow, pretty cool!  Maybe now that NASA has relinquished its death-grip monopoly on space travel, we'll start to see a lot more innovation and lower costs from startup kids in garages plus also save the economy to boot!  Who said hope was a four-lettered word?

[moda0306]

Jeezus MG... Death Grip monopoly?  Does it piss you off that bad that it was government that figured out how to put a man on the moon?  Has the private sector been so oppressed against getting to space?

[Gumby]

Jeezus MG... Death Grip monopoly?  Does it piss you off that bad that it was government that figured out how to put a man on the moon?  Has the private sector been so oppressed against getting to space?

Wait, didn't NASA fake the moon landing?

[MachineGhost]

Jeezus MG... Death Grip monopoly?  Does it piss you off that bad that it was government that figured out how to put a man on the moon?  Has the private sector been so oppressed against getting to space?

It doesn't piss me off.  I just perceive a tragic farce to society of continuing suboptimal outcomes.  If Congress had not allowed NASA to monopolize the space industry and outlawed private space travel until quite recently, we'd surely have colonized Mars and probably beyond by now!  What gave those Congressional MFers the right to do that other than they just could?  Did we hold a Citizen's Referendum to decide the issue?  The supression may not have been at the infamous heights of the FDA or IRS, but it still occurred.  Can you honestly say the pace of NASA's innovation since 1962 has been in any way comparable to the exponetial growth of the PC/tech industry?  NASA isn't bringing Star Trek-style technology into fruitition, the free market is.

Nothing in this world works better than war, greed, envy and competition for producing technological innovation and moving society into the future.  Central planning and government bureaucracies just do not operate on this "profit motive" dynanism.  Its a whole entirely different, alien ecosystem culture of statism where satisfying external output needs in a win-win situation for all parties is not even remotely the driving force.**  No amount of progressivism, liberalism, idealism or wishful thinking will change this real-world fact.  The sooner we recognize that voluntary solutions provide superior outcomes to society, the faster we'll stop clinging to the "government" delusion that might makes right.

** I am also sympathetic to the argument that corporations -- even private -- are the breeding grounds of socialism.  They are certainly not free market hierarchericies internally, but utilize the same top down, command and conquer perversion that government festers upon general society.

To paraphrase Mittens, "government doesn't create jobs".  People masquerading as "government" can only expropriate free minds and free labors by using the "printing press" and "taxes".  We all know this to be true, for MMR says so!

[Xan]

I am also sympathetic to the argument that corporations -- even private -- are the breeding grounds of socialism.  They are certainly not free market hierarchericies internally, but utilize the same top down, command and conquer perversion that government festers upon general society.

There's an interesting book on re-thinking organizations that I've been meaning to read for a long time but haven't:
http://www.amazon.com/Confederates-Boar ... 0971335168

"The nineteenth- and twentieth-century paradigm of centralised control continues to thwart social, educational, and political progress. The idea that nothing can be accomplished without top-down imposition continues to justify a bloated bureaucracy more interested in its own survival than the well-being of the people it (supposedly) serves.

But there is a new revolution challenging centralised control--and it is already changing the way we work. From self-managing teams to XP (Extreme Programming) to RAPP (Rapid Project Planning), a fresh approach bypasses hidebound standard operating procedures and top-down control in favour of spontaneous self-organisation and dispersed decision-making authority--the confederal approach. This new way, surprisingly, is based on traditional insights that are now being rediscovered by complexity science, a discipline that arose from groundbreaking research in biology and engineering.

Libertarians, conservatives, Southern traditionalists, communitarians, and community activists across the political spectrum, long frustrated by remote, unsympathetic bureaucracy, will recognise a much-needed new direction in this book."

[Pointedstick]

Very relevant: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economic ... ate-world/

[moda0306]

Any time two people, even voluntarily, team up for shared gain and shared sacrifice, they've given up some piece freedom for convenience (and companionship).

I think this can be healthy, but it can eat away at our souls if we're not careful.  Large corporations, as MG says, have a very Socialistic, if not Communistic internal operating structure.  It is voluntary in nature, yes, but even voluntary threats to our freedom are very real... in fact, sometimes a lot more real than the imagined or real ones we don't enter into by choice.  This was made remarkably clear by HB in "How I Found Freedom."

Gawd I love that book.

[MediumTex]

Large corporations, as MG says, have a very Socialistic, if not Communistic internal operating structure.

The definitive work on this topic is Earl Shorris's Scenes From Corporate Life.

It's out of print now, but well worth tracking down a copy.

Here is one review:

Though I never was close to any managers, it was obvious that most of them suffered the same intimidation and hassles that I faced as their peon. But if bosses were as oppressed as I was, I reasoned, why were they so willing, even eager, to carry out the ridiculous dictates of the company? How had they turned into complacent embodiments of corporate policies? Why were they so ready to enforce completely arbitrary policies which oppressed them as much as me? It couldn't just be the money, or could it?

Scenes From Corporate Life, a detailed exploration of the corporate manager's life, is an attempt to answer these questions. The book, which originally had the same title as this review, depicts the duplicity, shallowness, manipulations, and general stupidity that prevail among managers. The portrait will be familiar to anyone who has labored in the office world. Earl Shorris (who was a long-time middle manager himself) argues convincingly that common business practices produce corporations which are essentially totalitarian institutions.

For Shorris, totalitarianism is the process of destroying autonomy. Corporate totalitarianism idolizes efficiency in its bureaucracies and takes its ideology from industrial psychology, management textbooks and classes. The result is a microworld where the autonomy of human beings is systematically thwarted.

Among his vignettes he describes techniques effective in intimidating and controlling both managers and knowledge workers. For example, the annual bonus system is used almost as a piece-rate kind of motivation for the middle-level employees. And yet, because of the company's need to keep people off guard and unsure of themselves the awarding of bonuses is often arbitrary and out of line with actual events.

***

But "men do not merely acquiesce, they choose to live under totalitarian conditions. . . out of fear, mistaking its effect upon them because they do not think of the meaning of their actions.'' Managers have accepted an externally- imposed definition of happiness (i.e. material wealth, career advancement) provided by The Organization and its leaders. In so doing they have ceded their autonomy as free human beings to an abstract end and reduced themselves to mere means. In sacrifices "for the company'' Shorris identifies the essential ingredient of a totalitarian society: human beings actively, even willingly, participating in self-delusion and renunciation of their own freedom, in exchange for a false sense of security.

"In the modern world a delusion about work and happiness enables people not only to endure oppression but to seek it and to believe that they are happier because of the very work that oppresses them.''

[MediumTex]

Large corporations, as MG says, have a very Socialistic, if not Communistic internal operating structure.

The definitive work on this topic is Earl Shorris's Scenes From Corporate Life.

It's out of print now, but well worth tracking down a copy.

Here is one review:

Where did you find this review?

http://www.processedworld.com/Issues/is ... middle.htm

[Ad Orientem]

To each their own. I don't even like standing on a step ladder to change light bulbs.