Henry Spencer
Henry Spencer
Henry Spenceris a Canadian computer programmer and space enthusiast. He wrote "regex", a widely used software library for regular expressions, and co-wrote C News, a Usenet server program. He also wrote The Ten Commandments for C Programmers. He is coauthor, with David Lawrence, of the book Managing Usenet. While working at the University of Toronto he ran the first active Usenet site outside the U.S., starting in 1981. His records from that period were eventually acquired by Google to provide...
NationalityCanadian
ProfessionScientist
CountryCanada
The Moon may not be quite as appealing as Mars, but it's still a complex and poorly understood world, with many questions still unanswered.
An experienced designer with more freedom to act might have realised that there was just too much optimism in the Ares I concept: that a shuttle SRB was simply too small as a first stage for a rocket carrying the relatively heavy Orion spacecraft.
Developing expendable rockets is always going to be painful and expensive. Throwing the whole rocket away on each attempt not only costs a lot, it also hampers figuring out just what went wrong because you don't get the rocket back for inspection.
In 1960-61, a small group of female pilots went through many of the same medical tests as the Mercury astronauts and scored very well on them - in fact, better than some of the astronauts did.
In the first few years, it was at least plausible to come in in the morning and read all the Usenet traffic that had come in, and 15 minutes later be off doing something useful.
In the long run, it's impossible to make progress without sometimes having setbacks, although people who get lucky on their first attempt sometimes forget this.
It's true that Apollo 10's lander was overweight. Late in the craft's development, it became clear that its ballooning weight was endangering the whole mission.
Large solid rockets have never been a very good way to build launchers that might have crews on top, especially because of the problems in getting the crew away from a failing launcher.
Whether solid rockets are more or less likely to fail than liquid-fuel rockets is debatable. More serious, though, is that when they do fail, it's usually violent and spectacular.
Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
If I must be ruled by larcenous bullies, I much prefer that they be located far away. Local bullies know far more about me and my doings than faraway bullies sitting in offices in Washington, and can oppress me far more effectively.
Altruism is a fine motive, but if you want results, greed works much better.
Programming graphics in X is like finding the square root of PI using Roman numerals.
Belief is no substitute for arithmetic.