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| Space yacht rides to stars on rays of sunlight |
| 2005-02-27 |
| A spacecraft that flies on sunbeams is about to begin its travels across the solar system. A group of American and Russian scientists are preparing to launch a probe with giant, wafer-thin plastic sails that can catch sunlight just as a yacht's sails fill with wind. Cosmos-1 has been designed to tack across space without using rockets and could form the forerunner of a network of solar observatories that would hover over the sun to provide early warnings of disruptive magnetic storms, or deliver instruments to remote space stations and planetary exploration teams. The probe, to be launched from a Russian nuclear missile submarine, is made up of a fan of eight 15-metre sails, each thinner than a dustbin bag but stiffened and coated with mirror material. The technology is the product of years of collaboration by the US Planetary Society, a group of private space enthusiasts; the Russian Academy of Sciences; and Moscow space industry designers Lavochkin. 'Cosmos-1 will be blasted into space by conventional rocket technology but once in orbit above earth, solar sail technology will take over,' said Susan Lendroth of the Planetary Society. 'We will be able to move each one of Cosmos-1's sails individually and so direct the craft in whatever direction we wish. The aim will be to get it to higher and higher orbits.' Solar sail technology exploits the fact that photons have momentum and apply pressure to surfaces. A comet's tail is the result of solar photons battering its surface, for example. But this pressure is still relatively meagre and only recently - with the development of micro-electronic circuits that allow tiny spacecraft to be constructed - has it become possible to consider powering craft with solar sails. The mission has cost a mere $4 million, raised by the Planetary Society. Cosmos-1 weighs only 50kg and contains only sails and electronic systems for guiding its panels. 'It is a technology test, no more than that,' said Lendroth. 'Once we have shown what can be done with solar sails, we hope all sorts of other agencies will follow.' Both Nasa and the European Space Agency say they are interested. One mission they are eyeing is for a full solar sail mission to place a probe in Mercury's orbit. Mercury whirls round the sun every 88 days, and a traditionally powered spacecraft would need to gain enormous energy to manoeuvre above the planet. A solar sail ship could spiral in towards Mercury and slip into orbit without any fuel. |
| Posted by:Steve White |
| #7 Dr simple fix: No deductions. 10% sales tax. 10% income tax. Anyone under poverty line gets back a fixed amount for the sales tax paid as a tax credit (or refund), and 100% of the income tax. No deductions. No mortage deduction, no charity deduction, none of that. Just take more of your paycheck home. (Social Security gets rolled into this, to treat it like what it truly is: a wealth transfer program). Capital gains are taxed at the 10% income rate. Tax return is a postcard: What did you make? Take 10% of that and send it in if you diudnt get it withheld. Corporations charged the same taxes - and are required to pass through all profit to shareholders, with strict expense accounting to prevent jobbing the system. Stock options, etc, are *income* and taxed accordingly. This plugs up the biggest leak in the economy (the underground and off books economy) by way of the sales tax. And promotes a very fair tax structure - everyone pays the same percentage. Why it will not happen: It puts the IRS, laywers and accountants out of business, and it stops congress from being able to give pet projects and donators tax breaks. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-02-27 7:37:26 PM |
| #6 Dr simple fix: No deductions. 10% sales tax. 10% income tax. Anyone under poverty line gets back a fixed amount for the sales tax paid as a tax credit (or refund), and 100% of the income tax. No deductions. No mortage deduction, no charity deduction, none of that. Just take more of your paycheck home. (Social Security gets rolled into this, to treat it like what it truly is: a wealth transfer program). Capital gains are taxed at the 10% income rate. Tax return is a postcard: What did you make? Take 10% of that and send it in if you diudnt get it withheld. Corporations charged the same taxes - and are required to pass through all profit to shareholders, with strict expense accounting to prevent jobbing the system. Stock options, etc, are *income* and taxed accordingly. This plugs up the biggest leak in the economy (the underground and off books economy) by way of the sales tax. And promotes a very fair tax structure - everyone pays the same percentage. Why it will not happen: It puts the IRS, laywers and accountants out of business, and it stops congress from being able to give pet projects and donators tax breaks. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-02-27 7:37:26 PM |
| #5 Dr simple fix: No deductions. 10% sales tax. 10% income tax. Anyone under poverty line gets back a fixed amount for the sales tax paid as a tax credit (or refund), and 100% of the income tax. No deductions. No mortage deduction, no charity deduction, none of that. Just take more of your paycheck home. (Social Security gets rolled into this, to treat it like what it truly is: a wealth transfer program). Capital gains are taxed at the 10% income rate. Tax return is a postcard: What did you make? Take 10% of that and send it in if you diudnt get it withheld. Corporations charged the same taxes - and are required to pass through all profit to shareholders, with strict expense accounting to prevent jobbing the system. Stock options, etc, are *income* and taxed accordingly. This plugs up the biggest leak in the economy (the underground and off books economy) by way of the sales tax. And promotes a very fair tax structure - everyone pays the same percentage. Why it will not happen: It puts the IRS, laywers and accountants out of business, and it stops congress from being able to give pet projects and donators tax breaks. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2005-02-27 7:37:26 PM |
| #4 Don't let the Aussies know about this sails-in-space thing we got. They'll cheat. |
| Posted by: Dennis Connor 2005-02-27 8:38:17 AM |
| #3 purging isn't always good... similar problems plague the IRS, after the 'Be nice damnit!' legislature, the IRS was forced to restructure, the point of the shuffle was to get the bad out and the good in, problem is the bad had the upper hand and all they did was give their cronies promotions and get rid of the good ones because the guys that knew what they were doing always made them uncomfortable. Nothing can make a useless guy unhappy like being forced to recognize his own incompetence; anyway, end result is that most, if not all, of the high management of the IRS is a painful joke. ---- Ex: For extra feel goodness, one of the above jokes decided to limit the length of audits, to ensure speedy results. problem is there is no equal speedy compulsion for the companies to demonstrate their compliance with tax law and plenty of financial incentive to make sure it’s impossible to complete the audit in the allotted time. ( not that there aren’t enough ways for big businesses to avoid paying taxes as it is ex: there is a law, passed by our beloved congress, which states that a company that was started between the time of Date x and the same Date x, in the state of y, does not have to pay taxes. Entertainingly enough, only one company was started during that time frame (I would fill in the variables, but my memory fails me right now) (as a side note, if you want to be happy. Don’t follow where the money goes in the history this country, it will only depress you) ) The wide variation in accounting systems and database structures makes it VERY easy for the companies to confuse the data to the point where it would take months to break down and analyze (the computers the IRS uses are old machines, but even with new machines, the work can be time intensive) ---- an old guy I know who used to love his job at the IRS. 'public enemy' or not he was still doing valuable work for the country he had served all his life (military etc).. An x-IRS accountant can make a hell of a lot of money working in the private sector, much more than he/she ever made working for the government. Many of the folks stuck around because the atmosphere was good and many of their peers were high caliber folks. It was just a nice place to work and that’s something you can’t buy with any amount of money... most of those high caliber types have since jumped ship, but my friend stuck around out of nostalgia and the vain hope that things would improve (things always got worse) hell.. he used to talk about never retiring, or maybe retiring in 2035 (I don't know why he picked that year ) A week ago I was talking to him, he told me with disgust that he no longer felt proud to be working for the Internal Revenue Service and planned to retire before this year ends. He never said it, but when I looked in his eyes, I could see he felt embarrassed to be associated with them any longer. There was a sadness in his eyes, the kind you only see when someone watches something good and personal go bad and turn into the unrecognizable. damn. I’m being talkative today. Ok Back into the lurker-mobile for me |
| Posted by: Dcreeper 2005-02-27 7:37:16 AM |
| #2 Amen, Barbara. Private enterprise, again, leads the way - reawakening the imaginations of those who look beyond their navels. NASA, like State, the CIA, etc, needs a long hot bath to clean out the visionless self-serving 'tards installed during and since the rainbow purge of the Clinton years. During that time, Dan Golden's tenure, real and highly experienced engineers were forced into retirement - the engineers that made NASA - in favor of MBA-types. They turned a hardcore think-tank and competency atmosphere into a MacNamara-ish Edsel nightmare of chart shows and career climbers. I knew some of these guys because they migrated to the oil business. I was amazed that I was more bitter about their treatment than they were. |
| Posted by: .com 2005-02-27 2:44:17 AM |
| #1 Cool. |
| Posted by: Barbara Skolaut 2005-02-27 1:17:10 AM |