You sign a contract with your employer which says you must do only x,y and z but you go off and do a b and c. (this can even include future employment)
Said employer can now sue you for breach of contract.
Moral: Always read the smallprint.
Submoral: Probably don't work for giant multinationals (like MS) if you're going to break any contracts.
The rocket motors on the Long March derived rockets use Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and Nitrogen Tetroxide as the oxidiser source. (probably due to it being related to the Dongfeng ICBM)
The smaller upper stages do use LOX/LH2 like the Shuttle system.
I am told the main reason for the ECO system on the Shuttle is that if the fuel runs out, the roket's turbopumps are liable to over-rev and disintegrate (bye-bye engine).
Assuming the long March motors use turbopumps to inject the oxidant, then they'd suffer the same problem. However, this problem need not be seen as 'critical' in a vehicle which is largely expended in launch and also includes a method for extracting the crew at any stage of launch, a launch-escape tower (actually a Solid rocket on the capsule).
Judging by the array of little props on the leading edge of the wing, this UAV is probably Hydrogen Fuel-Cell powered.
However, if I recall, Hydrogen Fuel Cells, which produce water as a by-product would actually contribute to ozone depletion because water acts like a greenhouse-gas at altitudes over ~27,000ft.
Luckily, these little things probably don't produce all that much water. - Unless they build one each to spy on everyone in the world!;-)
I really rather hope this project is okay and only suffering from a 'glitch'. (ie: unexpected orbit)
The trouble is, every time you take what is essentially a robotically controlled device and send it into space giving it a good *shake* in the process (rockets really do vibrate a lot), you run the risk of breaking something.
Of course, you combat this by duplicating as much of the systems as you can but when your experiment requires a very low mass (ala solar sail controller) I wonder how much redundancy is possible?
Still. I hope Cosmos sparks back to life/is found and they get a sucessful experiment. I would be good to prove that solar-sailing is a viable solar-locomotion concept rather than just proving that electronics packages are fragile things.
TBH, I'd steer away from the 'Claymation' moniker because I'm absolutely convinced it was a trademark of a CGI company operating roughly ten years ago.
I seem to remember that this company produced some impressive stuff (for the time) - if anyone has info about them now, I'd be much obliged....
That would seem to indicate that if the ISS didnt make any prograde burns, it too would be entering the atmosphere in several weeks.
I say wierd because I had presumed that ISS, like Mir would take a few months to reach an unrecoverable orbit which would lead to a re-entry.
SO, they throw it downwards when they launch the suit? Well, Im no physicist - and this is only what I remember from my school days; if you were to throw something downwards with the maximum force available to a human from the ISS, then the object would return to you hours or days later because its angular velocity in relation to the orbit wouldnt have changed.
In order to actually alter the continous orbit of the suit as you launch it, you would have to either throw the suit out ahead of the ISS (To make it go higher) or throw it backwards along the ISS orbit to make it go lower.
However, I would rather suspect that an overhand throw of a spacesuit wouldnt make any siginificant difference in the time taken for re-entry to occur.
Come to think of it. - Every force has an equal and opposite. which indicates that the ISS crew are going to have to fashion some sort of rocket to get the suit going. - A small compresses air cylinder would come to mind but would be hard to aim. You could of course blow it from the airlock but youd have to correct the ISS orbit using Progress afterwards.
While the article does tell of 'all weather' capabilities, the cruel sea is often outside the bounds of normally accepted 'weather'.
Its worth remembering that the decks of RN carriers are extremely confined spaces, I would hope that if the system can't cater itself for the 1 in a Million chance wave that pitches the carriers superstructure towards the landing aircraft (causing damage to both) that it will still allow the pilot to assume control and direct his broken aircraft to the best of his ability over the side before pulling the handle and praying to Martin Baker for safe delivery.
A burning aircraft on the deck / superstructure is generally thought to be a Bad Thing(tm).
Indeed, in 1982 during the Falklands campaign when the Harrier had just entered service, it was operated in some very nasty weather conditions from the RN Thru Deck Cruisers (Carriers) by nothing more than human RN Pilots and the seat of their pants.
Well, if you have the 'keys' to it (or just a user account), its incredibly simple to discover (google or otherwise) that typing 'uptime' into the console will probably yeild the results you want.
Or maybe it is stuck in fine, granular and very dry sand which would perhaps be even worse than wet sand.
Every time you try to move, the sand is quickly displaced so the vehicle stays put.
Its a shame they can't use the trick from Ice cold in Alex where they put it in reverse (lowest gear) and move it using the starting handle as not to displace the sand too quickly.
Of course, this would rely on:
A) Opportunity having a starting handle. B) A friendly passing Martian offering to wind it.
One glaring safety issue that I can see is that the Shuttle lacks the crew-saving 'abort modes' that Saturn V and even Gemini / Mecury had ie: The Launch Escape Tower.
If anything had gone wrong ie: vehicle exploded on pad / during initial climb, the Launch Escape System would drag the capsule clear of the rocket and then land using the normal parachute system.
The Shuttle has very limited launch abort modes and very optimistic ideas about how the crew could leave the vehicle. Ultimately, if the Shuttle's main tank burnt fast / exploded on the pad, that would be curtains for the crew. As Challenger demonstrated, the Shuttle is vulnerable during ascent too where a catastrophic failure of the SRBs would destroy the entire vehicle and crew.
If you search around, you can find the NASA descriptions of both Shuttle and Saturn V abort modes and just in the way they read, you can see that the Saturn V escape system was a *serious* concept whereas the Shuttle abort modes are no more than lip-service to any significant malfunction.
Although the NASA launch escape systems were never tested on an exploding rocket, the Russian space program did demonstrate on a couple of occasions that the escape towers (I think on N1 boosters) worked. This is the same launch escape system used on manned Soyuz flights to this day.
If someone told me I had to ride in a rocket to LEO tommorow, I would choose a Soyuz flight over a Shuttle flight purely for the ammount of 'options' provided throughout the flight.
QRIO is apparently just a little shorter than 2 feet tall and weighs only 6.5kg (about 14lbs) with its power pack installed.
So, even if the robot went 'dead' and fell rigidly from its full height, it would probably, at worst cause a small bruise to a kids knee.
However, having read a bit on QRIO, the robot knows when it is going to, or is being forcibly overbalanced and takes apropriate action to soften its fall (hands out) and even contort to avoid objects it is falling toward.
The Anotonov AN-225 Mriya is the largest commercial aircraft in the world.
In fact, save for the 'Spruce Goose' it is the largest aircraft ever flown full-stop. (bearing in mind the Spruce Goose never left ground-effect).
Originally designed to carry the Buran shuttle and its captive-carry mounting crane, the AN-225 is now in commercial operation with a uk company called Heavy-Lift.
Rumour has it, the 2nd AN-225 in now being completed.
Some of the legistlation relating to this is less than ten years old and it is *all* geared towards providing the European 'Free Market' economy. ie: It deals exclusively with the shipping of items between EU countries.
Being Dutch, you should also be aware that *most* legal fights over matters of the free market are over fairly quickly (in comparision to the duration of equivalent cases in the USA).
I don't know the ins and outs but I'd imagine that if you have a nice chirpy nuclear-reactor to generate power, taking photovoltaics (solar panels) with you too would be rather pointless. - PVs would cost extra to put into space to start with and would also need trickery to align them with the sun.
Having glanced at the picture, I'd suggest it is more likely that the big flat panels are heat dissipators (heat-sinks) to get rid of the excess heat from the nuclear reactor. I presume that in space there is no conduction of heat away from the vehicle, only radiation. And that you improve the radiation of heat by increasing the surface area.
Slashdot Mirror
You sign a contract with your employer which says you must do only x,y and z but you go off and do a b and c. (this can even include future employment)
Said employer can now sue you for breach of contract.
Moral: Always read the smallprint.
Submoral: Probably don't work for giant multinationals (like MS) if you're going to break any contracts.
AFAIK, at least in the UK, putting in the *original* copyright notice is 'proof' that the published work's copyright is expired.
How this relates to the literary work (longer copyright duration) is anyone's guess but you'll notice these are scans of the 'typsetting'.
So apparently, this work by virtue of being copyright 1971 and 1979 is actually copyright expired.
Here is the page I refer to: LINK
It does seem to be as the parent post suggests.
Just making a search using the term 'Service' at HP India produces 192 new positions.
Job Search HP India
(Scroll down if you don't have a vertical monitor / insane resolution)
The rocket motors on the Long March derived rockets use Unsymmetrical Dimethylhydrazine (UDMH) and Nitrogen Tetroxide as the oxidiser source. (probably due to it being related to the Dongfeng ICBM)
The smaller upper stages do use LOX/LH2 like the Shuttle system.
I am told the main reason for the ECO system on the Shuttle is that if the fuel runs out, the roket's turbopumps are liable to over-rev and disintegrate (bye-bye engine).
Assuming the long March motors use turbopumps to inject the oxidant, then they'd suffer the same problem. However, this problem need not be seen as 'critical' in a vehicle which is largely expended in launch and also includes a method for extracting the crew at any stage of launch, a launch-escape tower (actually a Solid rocket on the capsule).
Its interesting to see that Microsoft and DRM technology providers are now taking a leaf out of Slashdot's book.
Abindgdon is to the West of London and a good way away - being in a different county (Oxfordshire unsuprisingly).
Judging by the array of little props on the leading edge of the wing, this UAV is probably Hydrogen Fuel-Cell powered.
However, if I recall, Hydrogen Fuel Cells, which produce water as a by-product would actually contribute to ozone depletion because water acts like a greenhouse-gas at altitudes over ~27,000ft.
Luckily, these little things probably don't produce all that much water. - Unless they build one each to spy on everyone in the world!
To be honest, this might have been worth something if the drive was anything other than a Maxtor.
I really rather hope this project is okay and only suffering from a 'glitch'. (ie: unexpected orbit)
/is found and they get a sucessful experiment. I would be good to prove that solar-sailing is a viable solar-locomotion concept rather than just proving that electronics packages are fragile things.
The trouble is, every time you take what is essentially a robotically controlled device and send it into space giving it a good *shake* in the process (rockets really do vibrate a lot), you run the risk of breaking something.
Of course, you combat this by duplicating as much of the systems as you can but when your experiment requires a very low mass (ala solar sail controller) I wonder how much redundancy is possible?
Still. I hope Cosmos sparks back to life
TBH, I'd steer away from the 'Claymation' moniker because I'm absolutely convinced it was a trademark of a CGI company operating roughly ten years ago.
I seem to remember that this company produced some impressive stuff (for the time) - if anyone has info about them now, I'd be much obliged....
That would seem to indicate that if the ISS didnt make any prograde burns, it too would be entering the atmosphere in several weeks.
I say wierd because I had presumed that ISS, like Mir would take a few months to reach an unrecoverable orbit which would lead to a re-entry.
SO, they throw it downwards when they launch the suit? Well, Im no physicist - and this is only what I remember from my school days; if you were to throw something downwards with the maximum force available to a human from the ISS, then the object would return to you hours or days later because its angular velocity in relation to the orbit wouldnt have changed.
In order to actually alter the continous orbit of the suit as you launch it, you would have to either throw the suit out ahead of the ISS (To make it go higher) or throw it backwards along the ISS orbit to make it go lower.
However, I would rather suspect that an overhand throw of a spacesuit wouldnt make any siginificant difference in the time taken for re-entry to occur.
Come to think of it. - Every force has an equal and opposite. which indicates that the ISS crew are going to have to fashion some sort of rocket to get the suit going. - A small compresses air cylinder would come to mind but would be hard to aim. You could of course blow it from the airlock but youd have to correct the ISS orbit using Progress afterwards.
I should imagine the cost of the bulbs for the whiteboard projectors will run in to the hundreds of dollars too.
With bulb lives as low as 1400hrs, thats possibly not the greatest of economies.
While the article does tell of 'all weather' capabilities, the cruel sea is often outside the bounds of normally accepted 'weather'.
Its worth remembering that the decks of RN carriers are extremely confined spaces, I would hope that if the system can't cater itself for the 1 in a Million chance wave that pitches the carriers superstructure towards the landing aircraft (causing damage to both) that it will still allow the pilot to assume control and direct his broken aircraft to the best of his ability over the side before pulling the handle and praying to Martin Baker for safe delivery.
A burning aircraft on the deck / superstructure is generally thought to be a Bad Thing(tm).
Indeed, in 1982 during the Falklands campaign when the Harrier had just entered service, it was operated in some very nasty weather conditions from the RN Thru Deck Cruisers (Carriers) by nothing more than human RN Pilots and the seat of their pants.
Well, if you have the 'keys' to it (or just a user account), its incredibly simple to discover (google or otherwise) that typing 'uptime' into the console will probably yeild the results you want.
Or maybe it is stuck in fine, granular and very dry sand which would perhaps be even worse than wet sand.
Every time you try to move, the sand is quickly displaced so the vehicle stays put.
Its a shame they can't use the trick from Ice cold in Alex where they put it in reverse (lowest gear) and move it using the starting handle as not to displace the sand too quickly.
Of course, this would rely on:
A) Opportunity having a starting handle.
B) A friendly passing Martian offering to wind it.
I know its nit-picking but most air-liners don't launch vertically or re-enter the atmosphere at 15-17,000mph ;-)
Do modern safety requirements = Shuttle?
One glaring safety issue that I can see is that the Shuttle lacks the crew-saving 'abort modes' that Saturn V and even Gemini / Mecury had ie: The Launch Escape Tower.
If anything had gone wrong ie: vehicle exploded on pad / during initial climb, the Launch Escape System would drag the capsule clear of the rocket and then land using the normal parachute system.
The Shuttle has very limited launch abort modes and very optimistic ideas about how the crew could leave the vehicle. Ultimately, if the Shuttle's main tank burnt fast / exploded on the pad, that would be curtains for the crew. As Challenger demonstrated, the Shuttle is vulnerable during ascent too where a catastrophic failure of the SRBs would destroy the entire vehicle and crew.
If you search around, you can find the NASA descriptions of both Shuttle and Saturn V abort modes and just in the way they read, you can see that the Saturn V escape system was a *serious* concept whereas the Shuttle abort modes are no more than lip-service to any significant malfunction.
Although the NASA launch escape systems were never tested on an exploding rocket, the Russian space program did demonstrate on a couple of occasions that the escape towers (I think on N1 boosters) worked. This is the same launch escape system used on manned Soyuz flights to this day.
If someone told me I had to ride in a rocket to LEO tommorow, I would choose a Soyuz flight over a Shuttle flight purely for the ammount of 'options' provided throughout the flight.
QRIO is apparently just a little shorter than 2 feet tall and weighs only 6.5kg (about 14lbs) with its power pack installed.
So, even if the robot went 'dead' and fell rigidly from its full height, it would probably, at worst cause a small bruise to a kids knee.
However, having read a bit on QRIO, the robot knows when it is going to, or is being forcibly overbalanced and takes apropriate action to soften its fall (hands out) and even contort to avoid objects it is falling toward.
A very big difference
Despite what the MPAA has fed you about copyright infringement being theft. It is not.
If you steal a physical DVD from someone, you now posess the DVD and the rightful owner does not. Hence theft
If you copy a DVD, you now posess a copy of the DVD which the rightful owner still posesses. Hence copyright infringement
The MPAA / RIAA / MPIA etc etc should not be allowed to play with the word of law to fit their own needs.
Go and have a look what Heavy-Lift uses it for.
The Anotonov AN-225 Mriya is the largest commercial aircraft in the world.
In fact, save for the 'Spruce Goose' it is the largest aircraft ever flown full-stop. (bearing in mind the Spruce Goose never left ground-effect).
Originally designed to carry the Buran shuttle and its captive-carry mounting crane, the AN-225 is now in commercial operation with a uk company called Heavy-Lift.
Rumour has it, the 2nd AN-225 in now being completed.
Detail on the AN-225: here
Who told you they were old laws?
Some of the legistlation relating to this is less than ten years old and it is *all* geared towards providing the European 'Free Market' economy. ie: It deals exclusively with the shipping of items between EU countries.
Being Dutch, you should also be aware that *most* legal fights over matters of the free market are over fairly quickly (in comparision to the duration of equivalent cases in the USA).
I don't know the ins and outs but I'd imagine that if you have a nice chirpy nuclear-reactor to generate power, taking photovoltaics (solar panels) with you too would be rather pointless. - PVs would cost extra to put into space to start with and would also need trickery to align them with the sun.
Having glanced at the picture, I'd suggest it is more likely that the big flat panels are heat dissipators (heat-sinks) to get rid of the excess heat from the nuclear reactor. I presume that in space there is no conduction of heat away from the vehicle, only radiation. And that you improve the radiation of heat by increasing the surface area.
Only another 5 hours to go before it becomes April 2nd by Slashdot time (unless they decide to change timezones as the ultimate April-fool)