Indeed - far more valuable than the money from the reservations is the amount of investment money they'll be able to attract given such a demonstrated customer interest level.
Indeed. I'm a fan of COTS-style programs as well. NASA can ensure a market for something in the beginning while giving the actual market time to develop.
What I wrote isn't to mean that NASA should "get out of rocketry" entirely. The key issue is, if they're doing rocketry, it should be to innovate - as mentioned, advanced concepts. To develop fully functional technology demonstrators rather than workhorse deliverables. To build on as small of a scale as possible for a given new technology, with full acceptance that project failure might occur. Airbreathers, metastable fuels, ballistic launch, active suspended launch structures, composite cryogenic tanks, inflatable reentry, you name it... any untested technology that claims significant benefits but is too risky/expensive for private enterprise to develop from scratch, that should be NASA's domain. But it shouldn't be approached with the intent to make a workhorse. We wouldn't accept the NHTSA making and selling cars and trucks, the FAA making and selling passenger jets, or the DOE making commercial power plants - and nor should we accept NASA doing the same with rockets.
Yes, I'm sure you're going hungry because an average of $0.20 per year over ten years was sent on learning about a whole new class of planet that may represent the dominant form of equilibrium celestial body in the universe.
Things like NH are exactly what NASA should be doing.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly oppose SLS. But you know, it's perfectly understandable that they keep ending up going down these roads. They have too much infrastructure and too much personnel focused on building large rockets. The infrastructure especially, as you can't just "lay off" (or phase out) it like you do with people, and it costs you money to maintain. And the people making the decisions - congressional representatives - aren't experts, they're just ordinary people, and thus easily swayed by arguments made by advocates of these jobs (direct and indirect) in their districts.
It's understandable. But it needs to be fixed.
There's long been resistance to the privatization of rocketry. We remember the first privatization battles back in the Shuttle era, and how much resistance there was to letting Atlas and Delta go private rather than just disappear altogether. Indeed, the new battle in much of the launch market isn't so much over privatization as it is over "old school" vs. "new school" private companies, with the former offering evolved expendable launch vehicles with generally good track records but high price tags, and the latter offering ground-up vehicles with short launch histories but very low price tags.
Regardless of how this battle goes, there really isn't a place for NASA in it, any more than there would be a place for a government car maker to compete with giants like GM, Ford, etc and upstarts like Tesla in terms of making passenger cars. There certainly could be grounds for a government agency to conduct basic research that can advance automotive technology, things that private companies wouldn't pay for because it doesn't provide a short-term fiscal payoff or would help their competitors as much as it would help them - public health and safety, advanced concepts for the future, etc. But they shouldn't be making cars.
The same applies to NASA, only moreso. There's a *lot* of basic research in the aerospace industry that's either too expensive for its risk level or only associated with long-term payoff for them to conduct. And this is where NASA should be: planetary science and advanced concepts. But getting there is difficult, as it means having both an administration and congress who recognize the need to reorient NASA and are willing to accept the economic pain involved in doing so. It doesn't necessarily mean budget cuts - but it means closing facilities, selling off hardware for well less than you paid for it, and jobs leaving certain areas, even while new facilities open, new people are hired elsewhere, etc.
SpaceX wants to take over the private launch industry and use the money to go to Mars? The reaction shouldn't be "Oh noes! That's our goal, back off!", it should be "Awesome, that will save us a ton of money! How can we help?" And then let them spend their money on the glamorous stuff while NASA works on the less glamorous stuff behind the scenes. "That's a nice looking gigantic methane-fueled engine you've got there - we could hear it for miles when it fired up! So anyway, what do you think of this long-lifespan dirt scoop we made to dig up mucky ice for the habitat? And this water nanofiltration system to maintain electrolyte concentrations in the necessary levels in the electrolysis unit - want to see it? Oh, you're too busy playing with engines? Oh okay..."
I see this trope often, but whenever I look into specific plants that are behind schedule and over budget, NIMBY lawsuits are almost never part of the reason.
For example, one of the most (almost comically) behind schedule / overbudget reactors being is Olkiluoto Unit 3, which is a decade behind schedule and still not expected to be finished for years. The reasons for the delays are numerous - and not one of them is due to NIMBY lawsuits. The concrete for the foundation was bad. The forgings were wrong and had to be recast. The welders for the containment structure were given incorrect instructions. There were compensation disputes. Automation planning was behind schedule.
The head of their nuclear planning division's main excuse was that it's hard to deliver nuclear power plants on schedule because workers aren't used to the exacting standards required for them. But regardless of the reason, NIMBY lawsuits were not the reason. In fact, the only lawsuits involved were between the two construciton contractors, suing each other. By the time it's all said and done, the unit will likely be more expensive than the LHC and be one of the most expensive structures on Earth.
Nuclear reactors end up this way all too often. Reactor operators managed to convince enough investors that there would be a new "nuclear renaissance" because their new plants will produce plants cheaper that are more reliable. Their construction track records thusfar are scaring away most investors from followup.
Meh, except in extreme cases, it's not public opinion that kills nuclear power in the general case (developers generally can find at least *some* site that will let them build). It's finances. Nuclear power has always had a lot more support on K-Street than Wall Street. If nuclear power is to have a future, they need to stop having new construction projects run behind schedule and over budget.
And the thing is, Ike could have been so much worse for Galveston. If landfall had been ~10 kilometers to the southwest (which in hurricane terms is just a wobble), he would have done to Galveston what he did to the Bolivar Peninsula.
I was so mad with the mayor of Galveston, constantly playing down the building storm until the last minute out of fear of driving away tourist money. The NHC was taking the storm very seriously and giving warnings about its size, its growth potential and the potential range of its impact location, and then the mayor would come on and say, no, no, it's going to hit way south of us, and even if it did hit it'll only be a little category 1 or 2...
As bad as the damage was, they could have lost half the bloody island (along with all of the people who waited too long to leave due to listening to idiots like their mayor) had it made landfall just a bit further to the southwest. The northeast quadrant is the dangerous part of an Atlantic-basin hurricane. A more southwesterly track would have added nearly a meter to the storm surge and significantly increased winds and wave heights. And it would have also attacked the island on less well defended areas.
I really don't see why it isn't illegal. Get both the US and EU to pass laws banning the paying of ransomware and you've destroyed the lion's share of their income. You can't totally prevent people from paying, but you'll stop most of it.
Being infected by ransomware should basically become "bad news - your data was destroyed in a file".
I'm not too bothered about the display on my phone, but I'm desperate to see LCD replaced in the desktop monitor market. I'm still hanging on to a Sony FW900 CRT monitor, and it is astounding how good it looks next to a supposedly professional grade LCD... hopefully we might finally get a display technology that's can deliver a decent image.
It's not an issue about the presence or lack of blue light, it's about the quality of the blue. Colour LEDs emit in very narrow bands. And many people (myself included) find narrow-band blue to be really piercing.
Indeed. When I got my last phone, which has an IPS display, I compared with two coworkers who had recently gotten phones (similar price range) with AMOLED displays. The color quality was far better on my phone, something they both agreed on. Colour on AMOLED in all cases felt "oversaturated" in some colours while others looked lacking or "off". For anyone who's ever worked with LED grow lights, where your colors are broken down into distinct bands and it messes with your vision, it was that sort of effect on the small scale. In particular, it left the whites not really feeling completely white. The images on theirs also looked blurrier even though we had comparable resolutions.
I'm not sure why the AMOLED woulds seem blurrier, but the colour issue makes good sense; IPS uses a white LED backlight while AMOLED uses tiny RGB LEDs. White LEDs don't directly emit light; the light hits a phosphor and that emits broader spectrum light. The IPS polarization filters are paired up with colour filters which cut off out-of-band light but do not narrow (to any relevant degree) the spectrum of light passing through them. Color LEDs, however, emit light on a single frequency. It's actually one of their strengths in many contexts. But it's very poor for reproducing accurate colour.
At least given the state of the technology the last time I compared, I would definitely not switch to AMOLED. If that means my phone is a tad larger and heavier due to the display size and increased battery draw, so be it. I want image quality.
Right now wind and solar are basically proxies for natural gas, since with every watt of capacity from wind or sun there must be a watt of reserve in natural gas.
This is outright lie
It would be true if you had only one type of generation in precisely one geographic location, and nowhere else.
Otherwise... no.;) Just as with the demand side, which has always fluctuated greatly, the generation side relies on statistics to ensure a given level of grid reliability.
Not really. The desert southwest is good, but there are places that are better. You can see why for example Europe really wants to use the Sahara as a power plant. Which would be win-win for everyone (well, except Russia)
Indeed. China's current situation isn't just a large environmental cost... it's also a large financial cost. Medical care, sick days and disability cost an economy serious money.
I'm sure China would love to be able to shut off a large chunk of their current hardware today. But they need more, not less. It's amazing the lengths they've gone to try to stretch what they have... for example, pumped hydro to let them shift daytime loads into the night. China has nearly half of the world's large pumped hydro stations, including two of the three largest. They really need daytime capacity.
There's not much that could stop China's massive rate of solar installs. This isn't like a dam, where you can save pretty much all of a project cost by not building it. Solar these days is a very capital cost-dominated industry, if you count all manufacturing stages together. The factories are already built. They're not going to just idle them. If their rate of power demand growth drops as a result of their economic situation, it's going to be power projects involving resources that could be directed elsewhere that will be cut.
Even in this economic situation, though, China still is going to have serious demand for capacity growth.
It's interesting to see how much solar now looks like wind a decade ago. But that's a good thing. Up to a certain level of penetration (which we're nowhere close to), solar usually makes it easier on the grid, not harder, by reducing midday peaking requirements, particularly on the hottest days (if it's spread out enough, that is)
It's peak power rating, as most plants are rated for. To get the average power generation rate you have to multiply by the capacity factor. For fixed tilt, industrial solar in a good location you may get upwards of 25% capacity, but don't expect better than that. Heliostats improve that figure. Random rooftop installations or solar in less than optimal regions yield significantly reduced capacity factors.
I assume this is mostly industrial scale fixed-tilt in as good of locations as China has (China is pretty bright, but not as bright as the US desert southwest). I'd wager they get about 20% capacity factor.
Okay... now I can't get the image out of my head of a helper robot that looks like the one in the video, being all nice and helpful and smiling, but the only word she knows is "exterminate".
YOU said one of its problems was TWR. Now you're changing the claim by tacking on the "too long to be useful" qualifier. I
What the bloody hell is your malfunction? I pointed out that it has an abyssmal TWR. It does have an abyssmal TWR. For some reason you're pretending that I instead wrote "too low of a TWR to function as a rocket stage in all contexts". I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit. I never wrote anything of the sort. The fact that you Can't Read Very Simple English and want to instead credit to me things that I never wrote is nonsense.
I'll repeat, in all caps and bold, in case it makes it easier for you to read: I NEVER WROTE THAT IT IS NOT A FUNCTIONAL DESIGN IN ALL CONTEXTS. In fact, I WROTE PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE. To repeat, again in all caps and bold to help you with your reading deficiency:
THAT REALLY PUTS IT AS SOMEWHERE IN-BETWEEN CHEMICAL ROCKETS AND VASIMR, WHICH HAS AN EVEN LOWER THRUST TO WEIGHT RATIO BUT AN EVEN HIGHER ISP
Did the boldfacing and caps make it easier for you to read? How the bloody hell are you reading what I wrote as "NERVA is not useless in any context", when I'm sitting here advocating for VASIMR instead which I wrote in my very first post has an even worse thrust to weight ratio?
What the bloody hell is wrong with you?
Are you seriously going to quote a news article interviewing the rocket engine's creator
Well who the bloody hell do you want to hear from? I already did the calculations in the comments section elsewhere for today's working version of VASIMR, but apparently that's not good enough for you.
I know TOPAZ were flown, but those were few-kW units.
TOPAZ was 5-10kWe. Romaskha was 40kWe. BES-5 was 3kWe. Snap-10A was 45kWt. And these are just systems that were launched. I have no clue what the Soviets developed on land but didn't launch, but the US developed reactors over 100kWe on the ground.
This is something people have done again and again and again. The only reason the power levels weren't higher was because that was way more power than was needed for LEO applications. And they're cheap. The Soviet Union sold the US two units, without fuel, for $13M. Got that? $13M for two of them.
And to reiterate, nuclear isn't even needed.
It did and was pretty straightforward to complete
Yes, if you have, in modern dollars, a couple dozen billion USD lying around, then certainly. There's little question that the technology looked like it was going to be viable. The question is whether you have someone showering you with vast sums of money to make something that's only useful as a third stage on very heavy lift missions.
Source to flight-ready hardware please. I don't buy that the ISS has a very inefficient array.
Really? You don't "buy" that a system designed twenty years ago is obsolete? Do you also not "buy" that their computers are obsolete? Seriously, can you not google? ISS's panels are rigid. Today's state of the art are flexible. MegaFlex supercedes ATK's previous product, UltraFlex, which was 150W/kg. If you want more details on MegaFlex which they just validated, look up the Phase 1 proposal documents (or do I need to do that for you as well?) By now they're probably up to about 300W/kg in the lab.
That's not true either. You can't use it as a LIFT stage (i.e. low-atmosphere). But you can certainly use it for ascent (upper atmosphere, circularization) and escape (the aforementioned 3.6km/s).
Escape is not "ascent". Circularization is not "ascent". No, it does not beat chemical rockets for "upper atmosphere", unless you def
Flight component designs were used selectively, i.e., only when component characteristics had an important influence on overall system performance... In so far as possible, facility type components were used to save cost and time. Examples were many valves and the pneumatic system... in addition, a radiation shield was added to the configuration to protect engine components. This eliminated the need to radiation harden many components used in system testing... the paramount objective of this test was to demonstrate that engine system operational feasibility was successfully demonstrated and that no enabling technology issue remained as a barrier to flight engine development... confirmed that a nuclear rocket engine was suitable for space flight,... and the development of a flight nuclear rocket system could proceed with confidence... Its goals and objectives were to demonstrate the feasibility of a nuclear rocket engine... A major key to the success of Rover/NERVA was the development of test facilities... (ED: These no longer exist)... Perhaps the most significant facility.. was the nuclear furnace test facility... the scrubber had a much smaller capacity than would be required for testing reactors planned in the future... the feasibility of scrubbers has been tested in the small scale... The real future development challenge will be associated with engine and reactor ground testing in an environmentally acceptable fashion... (ED: If you think it would be hard to pass an environmental review back then, try today!)... it remains to be seen whether a Space Exploration Initiative management structure evolves which maximizes the probably of addressing the significant technical challenges associated with nuclear rocket development...
Got that? That's from an overall rather fawning report from proponents of resurrecting NERVA at NASA; even they aren't pretending that these were flight engines. It was simply an engine feasibility demonstration program. It wasn't flight hardware. And all of that is just concerning the engine. An engine is not a stage in and of itself. And even when you have a stage, it's not proven until running flight success (as the soviets saw with the N1). And even if it had been a full, tested flight stage, it'd be no more resurrectable than Apollo. Like with Apollo, most of the individual hardware components components and systems used in the manufacture no longer exist.
(In case you're curious why there's that talk of small-scale scrubbers as if their development was an afterthought... it was! Partway through development they were hit with a new enviro
Two spacecraft may be cheaper in the long run, and it can certainly be made to seem like a good idea with a great many assumptions. So far no one is putting their money down for it.
Look, when you're in a hole, stop digging. You made fun of the concept of tugs in general as if the concept made no sense and as if the OP made up the concept. Don't be surprised that people are criticizing you for that.
As it happens, it's difficult to obtain numbers for whatever lift/propulsion system you're thinking about if you don't actually mention what it is
The person that you were whining to said "nuclear tugs"
. Were you expecting worse than VASIMR?
The weight figures for VASIMR include the whole powertrain system (including your incredulous remark about "supercooled superconductors"). It does not of course include the power supply, which can be solar or nuclear. But since most Mars plans call for a nuclear power station anyway, you have to develop it either way. And it would hardly be the first space-based nuclear reactor. The Soviets launched dozens. A space-based nuclear reactor is much easier of a development item than a space-based nuclear rocket, and is a "been there, done that" thing. RAPID-L, a new one under development, is estimated at 670kg for 200kW.
, let alone getting it up there
So you think it's totally implausible to launch even once (hardly), yet you have no problem with launching it every single time? Because when you criticize the concept of a space tug, that's what you're criticizing.
Don't want that high power of VASIMR? No problem, there are plenty of ion engines with lower power outputs / consumption, that are just as efficient, they just take longer to get to their destination. Again, where's the logic for launching them every time rather than using them as a tug?
Are you actually complaining about the concept of a space tug, or are you complaining about VASIMR? A space tug is not tied into a specific technology; it just means "a piece of propulsion hardware that we don't have to launch every time". The heavier that propulsion system is, the more the benefit for using it as a tug rather than launching it each time, but it's always advantageous no matter what the weight. Mass savings are mass savings. It costs serious money to launch propulsion systems into space.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed - far more valuable than the money from the reservations is the amount of investment money they'll be able to attract given such a demonstrated customer interest level.
Right, because the whole point is showy things for the camera, rather than silly distractions like advancing the human species.
Indeed. I'm a fan of COTS-style programs as well. NASA can ensure a market for something in the beginning while giving the actual market time to develop.
What I wrote isn't to mean that NASA should "get out of rocketry" entirely. The key issue is, if they're doing rocketry, it should be to innovate - as mentioned, advanced concepts. To develop fully functional technology demonstrators rather than workhorse deliverables. To build on as small of a scale as possible for a given new technology, with full acceptance that project failure might occur. Airbreathers, metastable fuels, ballistic launch, active suspended launch structures, composite cryogenic tanks, inflatable reentry, you name it... any untested technology that claims significant benefits but is too risky/expensive for private enterprise to develop from scratch, that should be NASA's domain. But it shouldn't be approached with the intent to make a workhorse. We wouldn't accept the NHTSA making and selling cars and trucks, the FAA making and selling passenger jets, or the DOE making commercial power plants - and nor should we accept NASA doing the same with rockets.
Yes, I'm sure you're going hungry because an average of $0.20 per year over ten years was sent on learning about a whole new class of planet that may represent the dominant form of equilibrium celestial body in the universe.
Things like NH are exactly what NASA should be doing.
Don't get me wrong, I strongly oppose SLS. But you know, it's perfectly understandable that they keep ending up going down these roads. They have too much infrastructure and too much personnel focused on building large rockets. The infrastructure especially, as you can't just "lay off" (or phase out) it like you do with people, and it costs you money to maintain. And the people making the decisions - congressional representatives - aren't experts, they're just ordinary people, and thus easily swayed by arguments made by advocates of these jobs (direct and indirect) in their districts.
It's understandable. But it needs to be fixed.
There's long been resistance to the privatization of rocketry. We remember the first privatization battles back in the Shuttle era, and how much resistance there was to letting Atlas and Delta go private rather than just disappear altogether. Indeed, the new battle in much of the launch market isn't so much over privatization as it is over "old school" vs. "new school" private companies, with the former offering evolved expendable launch vehicles with generally good track records but high price tags, and the latter offering ground-up vehicles with short launch histories but very low price tags.
Regardless of how this battle goes, there really isn't a place for NASA in it, any more than there would be a place for a government car maker to compete with giants like GM, Ford, etc and upstarts like Tesla in terms of making passenger cars. There certainly could be grounds for a government agency to conduct basic research that can advance automotive technology, things that private companies wouldn't pay for because it doesn't provide a short-term fiscal payoff or would help their competitors as much as it would help them - public health and safety, advanced concepts for the future, etc. But they shouldn't be making cars.
The same applies to NASA, only moreso. There's a *lot* of basic research in the aerospace industry that's either too expensive for its risk level or only associated with long-term payoff for them to conduct. And this is where NASA should be: planetary science and advanced concepts. But getting there is difficult, as it means having both an administration and congress who recognize the need to reorient NASA and are willing to accept the economic pain involved in doing so. It doesn't necessarily mean budget cuts - but it means closing facilities, selling off hardware for well less than you paid for it, and jobs leaving certain areas, even while new facilities open, new people are hired elsewhere, etc.
SpaceX wants to take over the private launch industry and use the money to go to Mars? The reaction shouldn't be "Oh noes! That's our goal, back off!", it should be "Awesome, that will save us a ton of money! How can we help?" And then let them spend their money on the glamorous stuff while NASA works on the less glamorous stuff behind the scenes. "That's a nice looking gigantic methane-fueled engine you've got there - we could hear it for miles when it fired up! So anyway, what do you think of this long-lifespan dirt scoop we made to dig up mucky ice for the habitat? And this water nanofiltration system to maintain electrolyte concentrations in the necessary levels in the electrolysis unit - want to see it? Oh, you're too busy playing with engines? Oh okay..."
[Citation needed]
I see this trope often, but whenever I look into specific plants that are behind schedule and over budget, NIMBY lawsuits are almost never part of the reason.
For example, one of the most (almost comically) behind schedule / overbudget reactors being is Olkiluoto Unit 3, which is a decade behind schedule and still not expected to be finished for years. The reasons for the delays are numerous - and not one of them is due to NIMBY lawsuits. The concrete for the foundation was bad. The forgings were wrong and had to be recast. The welders for the containment structure were given incorrect instructions. There were compensation disputes. Automation planning was behind schedule.
The head of their nuclear planning division's main excuse was that it's hard to deliver nuclear power plants on schedule because workers aren't used to the exacting standards required for them. But regardless of the reason, NIMBY lawsuits were not the reason. In fact, the only lawsuits involved were between the two construciton contractors, suing each other. By the time it's all said and done, the unit will likely be more expensive than the LHC and be one of the most expensive structures on Earth.
Nuclear reactors end up this way all too often. Reactor operators managed to convince enough investors that there would be a new "nuclear renaissance" because their new plants will produce plants cheaper that are more reliable. Their construction track records thusfar are scaring away most investors from followup.
Meh, except in extreme cases, it's not public opinion that kills nuclear power in the general case (developers generally can find at least *some* site that will let them build). It's finances. Nuclear power has always had a lot more support on K-Street than Wall Street. If nuclear power is to have a future, they need to stop having new construction projects run behind schedule and over budget.
And the thing is, Ike could have been so much worse for Galveston. If landfall had been ~10 kilometers to the southwest (which in hurricane terms is just a wobble), he would have done to Galveston what he did to the Bolivar Peninsula.
I was so mad with the mayor of Galveston, constantly playing down the building storm until the last minute out of fear of driving away tourist money. The NHC was taking the storm very seriously and giving warnings about its size, its growth potential and the potential range of its impact location, and then the mayor would come on and say, no, no, it's going to hit way south of us, and even if it did hit it'll only be a little category 1 or 2...
As bad as the damage was, they could have lost half the bloody island (along with all of the people who waited too long to leave due to listening to idiots like their mayor) had it made landfall just a bit further to the southwest. The northeast quadrant is the dangerous part of an Atlantic-basin hurricane. A more southwesterly track would have added nearly a meter to the storm surge and significantly increased winds and wave heights. And it would have also attacked the island on less well defended areas.
I really don't see why it isn't illegal. Get both the US and EU to pass laws banning the paying of ransomware and you've destroyed the lion's share of their income. You can't totally prevent people from paying, but you'll stop most of it.
Being infected by ransomware should basically become "bad news - your data was destroyed in a file".
That's an excuse for one computer getting infected. That's not an excuse for the whole hospital getting infested.
Hmm...
It's not an issue about the presence or lack of blue light, it's about the quality of the blue. Colour LEDs emit in very narrow bands. And many people (myself included) find narrow-band blue to be really piercing.
Indeed. When I got my last phone, which has an IPS display, I compared with two coworkers who had recently gotten phones (similar price range) with AMOLED displays. The color quality was far better on my phone, something they both agreed on. Colour on AMOLED in all cases felt "oversaturated" in some colours while others looked lacking or "off". For anyone who's ever worked with LED grow lights, where your colors are broken down into distinct bands and it messes with your vision, it was that sort of effect on the small scale. In particular, it left the whites not really feeling completely white. The images on theirs also looked blurrier even though we had comparable resolutions.
I'm not sure why the AMOLED woulds seem blurrier, but the colour issue makes good sense; IPS uses a white LED backlight while AMOLED uses tiny RGB LEDs. White LEDs don't directly emit light; the light hits a phosphor and that emits broader spectrum light. The IPS polarization filters are paired up with colour filters which cut off out-of-band light but do not narrow (to any relevant degree) the spectrum of light passing through them. Color LEDs, however, emit light on a single frequency. It's actually one of their strengths in many contexts. But it's very poor for reproducing accurate colour.
At least given the state of the technology the last time I compared, I would definitely not switch to AMOLED. If that means my phone is a tad larger and heavier due to the display size and increased battery draw, so be it. I want image quality.
It would be true if you had only one type of generation in precisely one geographic location, and nowhere else.
Otherwise... no. ;) Just as with the demand side, which has always fluctuated greatly, the generation side relies on statistics to ensure a given level of grid reliability.
China doesn't need more 24/7 power. They need peak daytime power, that's what they're running out of.
Not really. The desert southwest is good, but there are places that are better. You can see why for example Europe really wants to use the Sahara as a power plant. Which would be win-win for everyone (well, except Russia)
24% is typical for fixed-tilt commercial plants in the the US desert southwest.
Indeed. China's current situation isn't just a large environmental cost... it's also a large financial cost. Medical care, sick days and disability cost an economy serious money.
I'm sure China would love to be able to shut off a large chunk of their current hardware today. But they need more, not less. It's amazing the lengths they've gone to try to stretch what they have... for example, pumped hydro to let them shift daytime loads into the night. China has nearly half of the world's large pumped hydro stations, including two of the three largest. They really need daytime capacity.
There's not much that could stop China's massive rate of solar installs. This isn't like a dam, where you can save pretty much all of a project cost by not building it. Solar these days is a very capital cost-dominated industry, if you count all manufacturing stages together. The factories are already built. They're not going to just idle them. If their rate of power demand growth drops as a result of their economic situation, it's going to be power projects involving resources that could be directed elsewhere that will be cut.
Even in this economic situation, though, China still is going to have serious demand for capacity growth.
It's interesting to see how much solar now looks like wind a decade ago. But that's a good thing. Up to a certain level of penetration (which we're nowhere close to), solar usually makes it easier on the grid, not harder, by reducing midday peaking requirements, particularly on the hottest days (if it's spread out enough, that is)
It's peak power rating, as most plants are rated for. To get the average power generation rate you have to multiply by the capacity factor. For fixed tilt, industrial solar in a good location you may get upwards of 25% capacity, but don't expect better than that. Heliostats improve that figure. Random rooftop installations or solar in less than optimal regions yield significantly reduced capacity factors.
I assume this is mostly industrial scale fixed-tilt in as good of locations as China has (China is pretty bright, but not as bright as the US desert southwest). I'd wager they get about 20% capacity factor.
Okay... now I can't get the image out of my head of a helper robot that looks like the one in the video, being all nice and helpful and smiling, but the only word she knows is "exterminate".
What the bloody hell is your malfunction? I pointed out that it has an abyssmal TWR. It does have an abyssmal TWR. For some reason you're pretending that I instead wrote "too low of a TWR to function as a rocket stage in all contexts". I'm sorry, but that's just bullshit. I never wrote anything of the sort. The fact that you Can't Read Very Simple English and want to instead credit to me things that I never wrote is nonsense.
I'll repeat, in all caps and bold, in case it makes it easier for you to read: I NEVER WROTE THAT IT IS NOT A FUNCTIONAL DESIGN IN ALL CONTEXTS. In fact, I WROTE PRECISELY THE OPPOSITE. To repeat, again in all caps and bold to help you with your reading deficiency:
Did the boldfacing and caps make it easier for you to read? How the bloody hell are you reading what I wrote as "NERVA is not useless in any context", when I'm sitting here advocating for VASIMR instead which I wrote in my very first post has an even worse thrust to weight ratio?
What the bloody hell is wrong with you?
Well who the bloody hell do you want to hear from? I already did the calculations in the comments section elsewhere for today's working version of VASIMR, but apparently that's not good enough for you.
TOPAZ was 5-10kWe. Romaskha was 40kWe. BES-5 was 3kWe. Snap-10A was 45kWt. And these are just systems that were launched. I have no clue what the Soviets developed on land but didn't launch, but the US developed reactors over 100kWe on the ground.
This is something people have done again and again and again. The only reason the power levels weren't higher was because that was way more power than was needed for LEO applications. And they're cheap. The Soviet Union sold the US two units, without fuel, for $13M. Got that? $13M for two of them.
And to reiterate, nuclear isn't even needed.
Yes, if you have, in modern dollars, a couple dozen billion USD lying around, then certainly. There's little question that the technology looked like it was going to be viable. The question is whether you have someone showering you with vast sums of money to make something that's only useful as a third stage on very heavy lift missions.
Really? You don't "buy" that a system designed twenty years ago is obsolete? Do you also not "buy" that their computers are obsolete? Seriously, can you not google? ISS's panels are rigid. Today's state of the art are flexible. MegaFlex supercedes ATK's previous product, UltraFlex, which was 150W/kg. If you want more details on MegaFlex which they just validated, look up the Phase 1 proposal documents (or do I need to do that for you as well?) By now they're probably up to about 300W/kg in the lab.
Escape is not "ascent". Circularization is not "ascent". No, it does not beat chemical rockets for "upper atmosphere", unless you def
Which of the following words:
"Abysmal"?
"An"?
"As"?
"Ascent"?
"Burn"?
"Can't"?
"It"?
"Long"?
"Means"?
"Not"?
"Ratio"?
"Stage"?
"Takes"?
"Time"?
"That"?
"Thrust"?
"To"?
"Unreasonably"?
"Use"?
"Weight"?
"You"?
Please help me out here because I'm not sure what part of that has been flying over your head.
Nope.
Dozens of them have been launched over the years.
Nope.
Got that? That's from an overall rather fawning report from proponents of resurrecting NERVA at NASA; even they aren't pretending that these were flight engines. It was simply an engine feasibility demonstration program. It wasn't flight hardware. And all of that is just concerning the engine. An engine is not a stage in and of itself. And even when you have a stage, it's not proven until running flight success (as the soviets saw with the N1). And even if it had been a full, tested flight stage, it'd be no more resurrectable than Apollo. Like with Apollo, most of the individual hardware components components and systems used in the manufacture no longer exist.
(In case you're curious why there's that talk of small-scale scrubbers as if their development was an afterthought... it was! Partway through development they were hit with a new enviro
So apparently I'm to blame for your lack of ability to read English? Wow.
Yes, they do.
You mean like the non-nuclear tug that Lockheed Martin just proposed as their CRS-2 project?
Look, when you're in a hole, stop digging. You made fun of the concept of tugs in general as if the concept made no sense and as if the OP made up the concept. Don't be surprised that people are criticizing you for that.
The person that you were whining to said "nuclear tugs"
. Were you expecting worse than VASIMR?
The weight figures for VASIMR include the whole powertrain system (including your incredulous remark about "supercooled superconductors"). It does not of course include the power supply, which can be solar or nuclear. But since most Mars plans call for a nuclear power station anyway, you have to develop it either way. And it would hardly be the first space-based nuclear reactor. The Soviets launched dozens. A space-based nuclear reactor is much easier of a development item than a space-based nuclear rocket, and is a "been there, done that" thing. RAPID-L, a new one under development, is estimated at 670kg for 200kW.
So you think it's totally implausible to launch even once (hardly), yet you have no problem with launching it every single time? Because when you criticize the concept of a space tug, that's what you're criticizing.
Don't want that high power of VASIMR? No problem, there are plenty of ion engines with lower power outputs / consumption, that are just as efficient, they just take longer to get to their destination. Again, where's the logic for launching them every time rather than using them as a tug?
Are you actually complaining about the concept of a space tug, or are you complaining about VASIMR? A space tug is not tied into a specific technology; it just means "a piece of propulsion hardware that we don't have to launch every time". The heavier that propulsion system is, the more the benefit for using it as a tug rather than launching it each time, but it's always advantageous no matter what the weight. Mass savings are mass savings. It costs serious money to launch propulsion systems into space.