"Michael M. Butler" wrote:
> Adrian Tymes wrote:
> > Devil's advocate: so, how do you keep your legos from exploding and
> > showering junk all over mine? Also, how do you get your system up and
> > running before you have the transmitter/receiver pointed the right way
> > and powered up? (Aside from being there, but it'll probably be less
> > than 10% of humanity, even industrialized humanity, that gets a chance
> > to be up there in the next few decades even if space colonization is
> > wildly successful.)
>
> I don't understand these objections.
>
> Perhaps I lack sufficient context. Devil away, but tell me what you are
> envisioning?
> I keep my LEGOs from exploding by not building them in such a way that
> they tend to explode. How many AMSATs have exploded? Initially, at
> least, I am not talking about shipping a bunch of units up to
> self-assemble. I am talking about being able to put a single spacefaring
> device together that is small and made of LEGO-like standard parts.
Ah, ok. That answers the concern I stated...though it does raise
another one. If they can't self-assemble, then you lose a lot of the
advantage of LEGO et al: once something is assembled, you can't easily
alter it (including repairs) on site. There is also the concern of
getting a finished assembly into orbit, with - at the very least -
delay during launch, which substantially quenches the instant
gratification of seeing a LEGO machine work, or put another way,
significantly slows the built-test-debug cycle down. (If this last
sentence is unclear, think of it this way: when writing a computer
program, you can compile and test it immediately, and thus go through a
whole lot of testing for relatively little time and even less money;
when building a machine that can only be tested after a lengthy
shipment to where it will be used, the time and money cost per test
cycle mean you can't do as much testing - for serious projects - or
playing - for non-serious.)
> Tangentially: Have you heard about the Delta upper stage embarrassments
> of a few years ago? They used to leave them parked with propellant dregs
> still in the tanks. After x thousand hot/cold soak cycles, boom. _Not_
> neighborly.
Aye. One might not be able to solve the problem on one's own, but one
can lead the way in not making the problem worse.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b30 : Mon May 28 2001 - 09:59:39 MDT