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Tech Scholarships for College/University?
Mirkon asks: "I'm a potential high school graduate, and have been accepted to a four-year school for furthering my rather biased educational interests. The problem is that while I'm cheap, the school (predictably) isn't. It's still getting itself off the ground, and thus only offers the legal minimum of scholarships - for racial minorities and those with intense financial need, neither of which I qualify for. Tedious searching for third-party scholarships has revealed that there are very, very few that cater to the interests of a technologically-inclined student, and even fewer that don't give a paltry one-time prize of $500 or less. While there's certainly no shortage of 'write an essay about us/you and we might give you a scholarship' offerings, I find it hard to swallow that there aren't more and more valuable scholarships to encourage growth in the tech sector. Are there?"
Scholarship. What is it all about... is it good, or is it whack?
muahahaha
Frist Pr0st, d00dz...
Reasonably close to furst post. Doink!
From: dietz@cs.rochester.edu (Paul Dietz)
Subject: Sea Dragon (was Re: reviving saturn v)
In article random@cscns.com (Doug Jones) writes:
> Hey, people, if we're going to resurrect a heavy lifter from the sixties, do
> it right-- build Sea Dragon.
Time to repost the passage from Ed Regis's "Great Mambo Chicken"...
The Sea Dragon was a launch vehicle of stupendous proportions that Truax had designed back when he was director of advanced development at Aerojet General. The best perk of that high office was the $1 million budget that he could spend any way he wanted to. Truax used it to test his pet theory that the *cost* of a rocket had nothing to do with how *big* the rocket was. You could make a given rocket just as big as you pleased and it would cost about the same as one that was about half the size, or smaller.
This went against conventional wisdom and common sense, but at Aerojet Truax collected enough facts and figures to prove its truth beyond a doubt. Indeed, he'd been assembling the necessary data from the time he'd been in the navy, where he'd had access to all sorts of cost information.
Take Agena versus Thor, for example. These two rockets were identical in every way: each had one engine, one set of propellant tanks, and so forth; the only significant difference between them was size. The Thor was far bigger than the Agena, but the surprise was that the *bigger* rocket had cost *less* to develop.
"I was shocked to discover the Agena cost more than the Thor," Truax said later. "The Thor was between five and ten times as big! I said to myself, We've been tilting at windmills all this time! If all rockets cost the same to make, why try to improve the payload-to-weight ratio? If you want more payload, make the rocket bigger."
The same anomaly cropped up again in the case of the two-stage Titan I launch vehicle: the upper stage was *smaller*, a miniature version of the lower stage, yet the smaller stage cost *more* to make.
It seemed irrational, but all of it made sense once you went through the costs item by item. Engineering costs, for example, were the same no matter what the size of the rocket. "You do the same engineering for the two vehicles, only for the bigger rocket you put ten to the sixth after a given quantity rather than ten to the third or whatever," Truax said.
The same was true for lab tests. "The cost of lab tests is a function of the size of your testing machine and the size of the sample you run tests on, not the size of the product."
Ditto for documentation, spec sheets, manuals, and so forth. The cost here was a function of the *number* of parts and not the *size* of the parts. "There are absolutely no more documents associated with a big thing than a small thing, as long as you're talking about the same article."
By this time Truax had accounted for a healthy chunk of the total cost of a given launch vehicle. About the only thing that *did* vary directly with a rocket's size was the cost of the raw materials that went into making it, but raw materials constituted only *2 percent* of the total cost of a rocket. "Two percent is almost insignificant!" he said. "And even with raw materials, if you buy a ton of it you get it at a lower unit price than if you buy a pound. And this is especially true of rocket propellants."
So if all this was true, if engineering, lab tests, documentation and so forth didn't determine a launch vehicle's price tag, *what did*? Essentially, three things: parts count, design margins, and innovation. Other things being equal, the more parts a machine had, the more it was going to cost. The more you wanted it to approach perfection, the more expensive it would end up being. And finally, the newer and more pioneering the design, the more you'd end up paying for it.
"We came up with a set of ground rules for designing a launch vehicle," Truax said. "Make it big, make it simpl
King: Piss boy! Piss boy!
Advisor: Your highness, you look just like the pissboy!
Mel Brooks (as the King): And you look like a bucket of shit!
It's Good to be The King!
I'm good with numbers -
What this in reply to my post, or to the runner's post?