I'm a really big fan of SpaceX and a lot of the other things that Musk is doing. He's helping solve global warming with Tesla and SolarCity not just with his own companies but by pushing other companies to follow. The Falcon 9 is as of right now the cheapest rocket for medium sized payloads even without reuse (they aren't launching by themselves the very small payloads, and until the Falcon Heavy is setup they won't have the ability to launch the largest satellites). That number will go down even further if/when reuse is successful (and honestly I was very skeptical initially about reuse when they were just starting with the Falcon 1). However, this sort of statement worries me a lot, especially in the context of the recent AMOS-6 disaster where they lost a rocket on the ground and destroyed the satellite in the process http://spacenews.com/analysis-disaster-on-the-launchpad-implications-for-spacex-and-the-industry/. We need to colonize other worlds, simply as a backup plan for serious disasters on Earth, but it would seem a lot better if they focused on systems just for Mars and didn't jump out so far ahead as to aim at other bodies (as cool as that is). I worry that they are proceeding too fast, and that if they fail, it may not be for a very long time until anyone else tries anything similar.
Regular taxis do this also but just lie about it and claim that they don't. I was stuck right after the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the taxis were charging $100 to $200 for what was normally a $15-$20 ride. The only major difference is that Uber is open that they do this, and the direct impact is clear: more drivers get on the roads as the prices will bear it. Pretending that regular cabs don't do this in emergencies is just silly.
Things like Transcension are comforting but there's no good reason to expect them to be true. Unfortunately, the possibility of a Great Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter is far more likely. This could be some sort of early events (maybe the origin of life or the jump to eukaryotic life was very unlikely for example) but the really disturbing possibility is that there's some sort of late filtration. Maybe all societies wipe themselves out, such as by nuclear war, bad nanotech, engineered diseases, extreme pollution, or something even more exotic that we don't see coming yet. And no amount of comforting hypothesis generation will stop it if that's what is going on.
At this point, it seems that what is happening is a combination of two factors: 1) Experimental error. 2) Small amounts of material are being heated up and outgassed. This is consistent with an open cavity and is consistent with some of the reports having the drive's thrust take a small amount of time to start off, which looks a lot like it is taking time for the cavity to heat up.
And it's morons like YOU that keep the elite entitled-from-birth 1% like Crooked Hillary! in power.
Hillary Clinton's father ran a small business in a small town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#Early_life_and_education. She and Bill Clinton clawed their way up to where they are today. There are problems with Hillary by being "entitled-from-birth 1%" is definitely not one of them.
Because it is cheap, and a single reformat will deal with the vast majority of issues. A few bad sectors aren't in general going to make the drive unusable.
Unfortunately, this isn't fast enough. First, although the amount of renewables will overtake fossil fuels, the amount of fossil fuel use is not expected to decline worldwide unless we go a lot faster http://www.vox.com/2016/6/14/11919610/india-decarbonization-8-graphs. So what can we do as individuals to speed things up?
First, you can get solar panels on your home. This often pays back in 5-10 years.
You can donate to groups which work with alternative energies. For example, Everybody Solar helps non-profits such as schools, homeless shelters and science museums get solar panels. So you can help the environment while helping other people. Any eventual long-term solution is going to involve at least some nuclear and CASEnergy is a group pushing for more more nuclear plants that you can donate to http://casenergy.org/.
You can also donate to candidates who will help. Local candidates may matter the most, but in the US there are a handful of obvious elections to point out. One of them is Emily Cain http://emilycain.com/ who is running for the House in a very competitive district in Maine against an opponent who is very not good on environmental issues. Every dollar helps.
That's a really good point. Especially because the time and resources taken up by deposition and discovery are pretty heavy. Essentially this could resemble a financial DDOS.
It goes to his sincerity that this is something he thought damaged him. Frankly, if I were on a jury it likely wouldn't likely alter my response at all, but it is well within plausibly relevant information.
It goes to Hogan's credibility as a witness, which was a major part of the case. At minimum, it should have been disclosed early in the case to the judge so he could have decided if it was relevant enough for the jury to hear it.
If you think that's what happened then that's also not a good sign. If one uses your versions of things, then a legitimate victim can't get restitution unless they have a billionaire backing them?
A large part of the case concerns Hogan's claims. As a witness in the case, it is relevant to his credibility as a witness when he claims to have been damaged. That's some thing a jury should have known about or at minimum should have been made clear to the judge who could have decided if it were relevant enough for the jury to know about. It doesn't look like either of those things happened. Insults don't changethe situation.
On the one hand I have no sympathy for Gawker and really don't mind seeing them go. On the other hand, it is deeply concerning that we may be in a situation where a billionaire can essentially destroy a company by funding lawsuits from other people. In the Hogan case it isn't clear to me if the jury knew that the lawsuit was being funded by Thiel at all, and this would be something that they should know. As a general rule, it seems like this sort of thing is a victory for the very powerful. After this, all media are going to think very carefully before doing any reporting on the very wealthy and be especially wary of reporting on anything Peter Thiel is doing. There's a clear chilling effect here.
The idea is interesting but it doesn't really work. I know you are probably joking, but just to be clear the missile blew up very shortly after launch. . In atmosphere the effective range of laser weapons is short. 20 km is a generally safe upper estimate on range. See the Boeing YAL-1 for more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1. And a failure due to a laser would be highly noticeable in the debris and nature of the explosion and even if the laser wasn't visible in the regular spectrum, it would very likely show up on infrared. North Korea is definitely paying very close attention to their borders, and especially near where the rockets are being launched. It isn't clear to me where this launch occurred from. They have two main launch areas. Mof their launches are either from Tonghae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonghae_Satellite_Launching_Ground or Sohae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sohae_Satellite_Launching_Station and neither one is that far from China. Sohae is in fact very close. If the US had developed anti-missile lasers, it seems unlikely they would want to use them this way on China's backdoor at this time.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me incredibly if some sort of ongoing sabotage has been at work. But for it to be a laser that would mean that many fundamental aspects of the technology would need to have been drastically improved in a very short time, and that they would then think this was a good enough use to to risk it
Your comment has zero evidence or claims to back it up simply a statement of what you believed and a claim that you'd be downvoted which you equated to censorship. In fact, the only moderation to your comment so far has been +3 interesting. It sounds like you have a bit of a persecution complex.
Thanks for dropping your personal politics into this in completely unrelated way. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ is a bit relvant. Note that if you think that "Social Justice Warriors" are a political group that objects to rocket launches, then this says more about you than any actual political group. Most people who care about social justice don't even have this on their radar screen at all. You appear to be taking every political position you don't like an labeling them all as "Social Justice." Maybe this means you should try harder to actually understand the political groups you don't agree with?
If I understand correctly the rockets that they are recovering are for evaluating purposes only. That is, they are trying to figure out the type of stress and damage a rocket undergoes so they can design a rocket that is durable enough to be launched. The last one suffered so much damage that it could never fly again.
Not quite. The first landed rocket was kept for evaluation purposes. The one that suffered damage seemed to be possibly reflyable but given the damage they decided that it was better to subject to it to very extensive testing. They are intending to relaunch (very likely it will be the second landed one which landed on the drone ship).
Elon's tweeted that the landing came down a bit hard but it shouldn't have done anything but impacted the crumple zones on the landing legs. Since the legs are replaced anyways, this shouldn't impact reusability. Right now, this is the fourth successful landing, and it looks like the basics of landing have been really worked out. Whether they can then actually reuse them is still in the air.
Also, there's been prior speculation that SpaceX was going to try to reuse the fairing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fairing- which is the nose cone around the payload which helps protect the payload and keep it aerodynamic during the first part of the launch. If they can do fairing recover and reuse that would be another avenue for serious cost reduction. They mentioned fairing reuse as something they were working towards on the broadcast which is as far as I know the most prominent time they've mentioned it. So it looks like they are going to be trying to seriously do that. How much this all actually reduces cost remains to be seen.
Right now, even without reuse, SpaceX is substantially cheaper than every other company for the medium size payloads. (They aren't launching the really small ones and until the Falcon Heavy is set up they won't be able to launch the really big ones). So even without reuse they are having a substantial impact on the market. The other major players, ULA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance (which is a joint Boeing and Lockheed company) and Ariane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance (the big French rocket launcher who is currently the biggest rocket launch company) are both planning on reuse programs, but they are essentially playing catchup. ULA has a plan for just reusing the engines which may be interesting. Ariane has a similarly interesting idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_(rocket) but neither imagines reuse any earlier than 2020, by which point, SpaceX will have been doing full first stage reuse and probably even doing reuse for the Falcon Heavy and will be working on their next generation Raptor rockets. That's not to say that ULA and the others aren't doing interesting things - their ACES proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage is really neat, but in terms of reducing cost through reuse, SpaceX is way ahead of everyone else.
Global warming and world hunger are both problems with direct benefits from cheap space access. Cheaper space access means better environmental modeling since we can have more weather and climate satellites. That also means that farmers and the like get better data which helps plan crops. Also, better weather reports along with GPS help reduce the cost of ocean and air travel making moving food and other goods easier, faster, and use less fossil fuels.
Moreover, in the long-run, not having all humans on one very tiny rock is a definite practical benefit.
The use of walking pattern as an identity feature has been tried by a few people. Some of the first research on this was done by Ari Trachtenberg and his students at Boston University. I remember being very impressed when they presented the basics and found the idea of using the accelerometer to measure how one was walking to be pretty neat. They were careful to emphasize that it wasn't by itself ideal or unique identitifier. So in this context, combining it with other signals makes a lot of sense.
That's a good point, where in contrast SpaceX's Falcon 9 really is American made with the Merlin engines being made in the US. Every other year or so they announce a plan to build the RD-180 in the US - ULA announced it again late last year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#US_production_of_the_RD-180 but there are a lot of technical difficulties with making a version of it in our factories. The Russians have done some very subtle and very careful engineering with it (which gives the engine its very good power to weight ratio and high ISP) and them duplicating would be tough. At the same time, there have been some issues with RD-180 quality control so it might be better just for that reason to produce it in the US, aside from all the national security concerns about relying on a Russian rocket engine for national security launches.
SpaceX has repeatedly had delays also and pretty much nothing they do is on time to the point where people jokingly refer to "ElonTime." The Falcon Heavy for example was supposed to originally fly in 2012 and it still hasn't flown yet. So it isn't clear that Dragon will be ready when they say it is either. There was a flag left at the ISS to be taken back by the next American manned spacecraft to go to the station. http://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-space-station-tribute.html The race in the 1960s was to plant a flag and that race was between two countries. Now the race is to retrieve a flag and it is between two corporations.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a really big fan of SpaceX and a lot of the other things that Musk is doing. He's helping solve global warming with Tesla and SolarCity not just with his own companies but by pushing other companies to follow. The Falcon 9 is as of right now the cheapest rocket for medium sized payloads even without reuse (they aren't launching by themselves the very small payloads, and until the Falcon Heavy is setup they won't have the ability to launch the largest satellites). That number will go down even further if/when reuse is successful (and honestly I was very skeptical initially about reuse when they were just starting with the Falcon 1). However, this sort of statement worries me a lot, especially in the context of the recent AMOS-6 disaster where they lost a rocket on the ground and destroyed the satellite in the process http://spacenews.com/analysis-disaster-on-the-launchpad-implications-for-spacex-and-the-industry/. We need to colonize other worlds, simply as a backup plan for serious disasters on Earth, but it would seem a lot better if they focused on systems just for Mars and didn't jump out so far ahead as to aim at other bodies (as cool as that is). I worry that they are proceeding too fast, and that if they fail, it may not be for a very long time until anyone else tries anything similar.
Regular taxis do this also but just lie about it and claim that they don't. I was stuck right after the aftermath of the Boston Marathon Bombing and the taxis were charging $100 to $200 for what was normally a $15-$20 ride. The only major difference is that Uber is open that they do this, and the direct impact is clear: more drivers get on the roads as the prices will bear it. Pretending that regular cabs don't do this in emergencies is just silly.
Things like Transcension are comforting but there's no good reason to expect them to be true. Unfortunately, the possibility of a Great Filter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Filter is far more likely. This could be some sort of early events (maybe the origin of life or the jump to eukaryotic life was very unlikely for example) but the really disturbing possibility is that there's some sort of late filtration. Maybe all societies wipe themselves out, such as by nuclear war, bad nanotech, engineered diseases, extreme pollution, or something even more exotic that we don't see coming yet. And no amount of comforting hypothesis generation will stop it if that's what is going on.
At this point, it seems that what is happening is a combination of two factors: 1) Experimental error. 2) Small amounts of material are being heated up and outgassed. This is consistent with an open cavity and is consistent with some of the reports having the drive's thrust take a small amount of time to start off, which looks a lot like it is taking time for the cavity to heat up.
And it's morons like YOU that keep the elite entitled-from-birth 1% like Crooked Hillary! in power.
Hillary Clinton's father ran a small business in a small town https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Clinton#Early_life_and_education. She and Bill Clinton clawed their way up to where they are today. There are problems with Hillary by being "entitled-from-birth 1%" is definitely not one of them.
We're not going to buy your overpriced tulips.
Tulips at least look pretty. And gold is shiny. Bitcoin has all the same problems and doesn't even have anything nice to look at.
Because it is cheap, and a single reformat will deal with the vast majority of issues. A few bad sectors aren't in general going to make the drive unusable.
First, you can get solar panels on your home. This often pays back in 5-10 years.
You can donate to groups which work with alternative energies. For example, Everybody Solar helps non-profits such as schools, homeless shelters and science museums get solar panels. So you can help the environment while helping other people. Any eventual long-term solution is going to involve at least some nuclear and CASEnergy is a group pushing for more more nuclear plants that you can donate to http://casenergy.org/.
You can also donate to candidates who will help. Local candidates may matter the most, but in the US there are a handful of obvious elections to point out. One of them is Emily Cain http://emilycain.com/ who is running for the House in a very competitive district in Maine against an opponent who is very not good on environmental issues. Every dollar helps.
That's a really good point. Especially because the time and resources taken up by deposition and discovery are pretty heavy. Essentially this could resemble a financial DDOS.
It goes to his sincerity that this is something he thought damaged him. Frankly, if I were on a jury it likely wouldn't likely alter my response at all, but it is well within plausibly relevant information.
It goes to Hogan's credibility as a witness, which was a major part of the case. At minimum, it should have been disclosed early in the case to the judge so he could have decided if it was relevant enough for the jury to hear it.
If you think that's what happened then that's also not a good sign. If one uses your versions of things, then a legitimate victim can't get restitution unless they have a billionaire backing them?
A large part of the case concerns Hogan's claims. As a witness in the case, it is relevant to his credibility as a witness when he claims to have been damaged. That's some thing a jury should have known about or at minimum should have been made clear to the judge who could have decided if it were relevant enough for the jury to know about. It doesn't look like either of those things happened. Insults don't changethe situation.
On the one hand I have no sympathy for Gawker and really don't mind seeing them go. On the other hand, it is deeply concerning that we may be in a situation where a billionaire can essentially destroy a company by funding lawsuits from other people. In the Hogan case it isn't clear to me if the jury knew that the lawsuit was being funded by Thiel at all, and this would be something that they should know. As a general rule, it seems like this sort of thing is a victory for the very powerful. After this, all media are going to think very carefully before doing any reporting on the very wealthy and be especially wary of reporting on anything Peter Thiel is doing. There's a clear chilling effect here.
The idea is interesting but it doesn't really work. I know you are probably joking, but just to be clear the missile blew up very shortly after launch. . In atmosphere the effective range of laser weapons is short. 20 km is a generally safe upper estimate on range. See the Boeing YAL-1 for more detail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_YAL-1. And a failure due to a laser would be highly noticeable in the debris and nature of the explosion and even if the laser wasn't visible in the regular spectrum, it would very likely show up on infrared. North Korea is definitely paying very close attention to their borders, and especially near where the rockets are being launched. It isn't clear to me where this launch occurred from. They have two main launch areas. Mof their launches are either from Tonghae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonghae_Satellite_Launching_Ground or Sohae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sohae_Satellite_Launching_Station and neither one is that far from China. Sohae is in fact very close. If the US had developed anti-missile lasers, it seems unlikely they would want to use them this way on China's backdoor at this time.
That said, it wouldn't surprise me incredibly if some sort of ongoing sabotage has been at work. But for it to be a laser that would mean that many fundamental aspects of the technology would need to have been drastically improved in a very short time, and that they would then think this was a good enough use to to risk it
Your comment has zero evidence or claims to back it up simply a statement of what you believed and a claim that you'd be downvoted which you equated to censorship. In fact, the only moderation to your comment so far has been +3 interesting. It sounds like you have a bit of a persecution complex.
Thanks for dropping your personal politics into this in completely unrelated way. http://lesswrong.com/lw/gw/politics_is_the_mindkiller/ is a bit relvant. Note that if you think that "Social Justice Warriors" are a political group that objects to rocket launches, then this says more about you than any actual political group. Most people who care about social justice don't even have this on their radar screen at all. You appear to be taking every political position you don't like an labeling them all as "Social Justice." Maybe this means you should try harder to actually understand the political groups you don't agree with?
They only get a chase plane when it is a NASA launch since NASA supplies that. So there won't be any chase plane footage in this case.
Did you read where I noted that even without reuse they are cheaper than the competitors?
Is there a time line out there when the will actually reuse a Falcon 9 rocket? What type of milestones are they looking for?
The plan currently is for the first reuse to occur by the end of summer http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/04/09/falcon_9_rocket_reused_in_two_months/ but given SpaceX's general tendency to not do things on time, by November seems like a safer bet.
If I understand correctly the rockets that they are recovering are for evaluating purposes only. That is, they are trying to figure out the type of stress and damage a rocket undergoes so they can design a rocket that is durable enough to be launched. The last one suffered so much damage that it could never fly again.
Not quite. The first landed rocket was kept for evaluation purposes. The one that suffered damage seemed to be possibly reflyable but given the damage they decided that it was better to subject to it to very extensive testing. They are intending to relaunch (very likely it will be the second landed one which landed on the drone ship).
Elon's tweeted that the landing came down a bit hard but it shouldn't have done anything but impacted the crumple zones on the landing legs. Since the legs are replaced anyways, this shouldn't impact reusability. Right now, this is the fourth successful landing, and it looks like the basics of landing have been really worked out. Whether they can then actually reuse them is still in the air.
Also, there's been prior speculation that SpaceX was going to try to reuse the fairing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Payload_fairing- which is the nose cone around the payload which helps protect the payload and keep it aerodynamic during the first part of the launch. If they can do fairing recover and reuse that would be another avenue for serious cost reduction. They mentioned fairing reuse as something they were working towards on the broadcast which is as far as I know the most prominent time they've mentioned it. So it looks like they are going to be trying to seriously do that. How much this all actually reduces cost remains to be seen.
Right now, even without reuse, SpaceX is substantially cheaper than every other company for the medium size payloads. (They aren't launching the really small ones and until the Falcon Heavy is set up they won't be able to launch the really big ones). So even without reuse they are having a substantial impact on the market. The other major players, ULA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance (which is a joint Boeing and Lockheed company) and Ariane https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Launch_Alliance (the big French rocket launcher who is currently the biggest rocket launch company) are both planning on reuse programs, but they are essentially playing catchup. ULA has a plan for just reusing the engines which may be interesting. Ariane has a similarly interesting idea https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adeline_(rocket) but neither imagines reuse any earlier than 2020, by which point, SpaceX will have been doing full first stage reuse and probably even doing reuse for the Falcon Heavy and will be working on their next generation Raptor rockets. That's not to say that ULA and the others aren't doing interesting things - their ACES proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_Cryogenic_Evolved_Stage is really neat, but in terms of reducing cost through reuse, SpaceX is way ahead of everyone else.
Global warming and world hunger are both problems with direct benefits from cheap space access. Cheaper space access means better environmental modeling since we can have more weather and climate satellites. That also means that farmers and the like get better data which helps plan crops. Also, better weather reports along with GPS help reduce the cost of ocean and air travel making moving food and other goods easier, faster, and use less fossil fuels.
Moreover, in the long-run, not having all humans on one very tiny rock is a definite practical benefit.
The use of walking pattern as an identity feature has been tried by a few people. Some of the first research on this was done by Ari Trachtenberg and his students at Boston University. I remember being very impressed when they presented the basics and found the idea of using the accelerometer to measure how one was walking to be pretty neat. They were careful to emphasize that it wasn't by itself ideal or unique identitifier. So in this context, combining it with other signals makes a lot of sense.
That's a good point, where in contrast SpaceX's Falcon 9 really is American made with the Merlin engines being made in the US. Every other year or so they announce a plan to build the RD-180 in the US - ULA announced it again late last year https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-180#US_production_of_the_RD-180 but there are a lot of technical difficulties with making a version of it in our factories. The Russians have done some very subtle and very careful engineering with it (which gives the engine its very good power to weight ratio and high ISP) and them duplicating would be tough. At the same time, there have been some issues with RD-180 quality control so it might be better just for that reason to produce it in the US, aside from all the national security concerns about relying on a Russian rocket engine for national security launches.
SpaceX has repeatedly had delays also and pretty much nothing they do is on time to the point where people jokingly refer to "ElonTime." The Falcon Heavy for example was supposed to originally fly in 2012 and it still hasn't flown yet. So it isn't clear that Dragon will be ready when they say it is either. There was a flag left at the ISS to be taken back by the next American manned spacecraft to go to the station. http://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-space-station-tribute.html The race in the 1960s was to plant a flag and that race was between two countries. Now the race is to retrieve a flag and it is between two corporations.