Well, gee, perhaps I should just mouseover to see what each button does? Oh yeah that's right, there's not even a bloody mouseover for half of the buttons. Gotta just try clicking them and seeing what happens.
Lets look at your list. 5 bloody buttons for Google Integration. Which again, the vast majority of people using Google Maps want nothing to do with. "Gee, I need directions to my friend's house. I could really use a button to open up Google Drive right now!" And hey, let's put them in top of the screen where most people expect to find their most important controls!
Hey, that view type? The one in the lower left, which is probably the least likely place a person would look for it? Let's make that only represent half of the possibilities for the view type! Let's put the other half in the upper left right near the directions button!
Hey, pictures? Let's make them suddenly appear when you turn on satellite. But not on the map - my god no, why would you want to know where on the map the pictures are? Let's make them take up a massive thumbbar at the bottom of your screen, clearly people will want that! What, people are complaining? Okay, let's put a tiny line when you mouseover the image that only emphasizes how the ordering of the images has no correlation to where they are on the map.
There's three buttons on the bottom right, to the right of the streetview person. Let's see what each of them do. PSYCH! Haha, gotcha, they're all just one button, and it's not even a button, just a toggle to the annoying "photo bar". The seemingly disconnected arrow icon is the same thing.
Clearly we've now got too much stuff on the screen, so let's take away people's ability to choose their zoom level, because nobody gives a rat's arse about that, what they really want is a quick link to Google Drive!
Language input is in the upper left. Language choice is in the setting bar on the lower right. Making a route is in the lower left. Sharing a link to the route is in the setting bar on the lower right. And of course, all of the stuff on the lower right is below a bloody link to what you've been searching for on Google, as if that has any bloody purpose in being there whatsoever. But a link to My Maps? No no, not there! It's in the bloody suggested searches entry on the upper left.
Whatever flock of drunken geese designed the interface should never be allowed to touch design again.
Interesting - just saw the most recent video and you can indeed see the RCS trying (and failing) to keep it upright. Maybe a RCS thrust upgrade is in order...
SW doesn't even have a twitter account. You're confusing AA and SW. And AA mentioned in a forum conversation just last year that she was the victim of an assault and the perpetrator was never brought to justice, and that his followers still continue to smear her for daring to report it.
1.Proof by ghost reference:
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.
2. Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
I didn't even know that the old one was still available, so I've been forced to use the new one. And despite all of the usage, I still hate it. Do they not focus test these sort of things?
The "clearer to use" thing is absolutely true, there's all of these buttons that do things that the vast majority of users are never going to want to do, and the functionality that people do all the time is buried. I've had to search online for how to do simple tasks way more often than I should have.
At least it's not the worst revamp I've had to deal with - the worst has to be GIMP, no contest.
Asserting something does not make it true. She absolutely has NOT. There is literally zero evidence to back up your claim, and a wealth of evidence that states clearly otherwise.
There is an EAW which lists four charges. This is what the UK courts work with. They have ruled it valid, properly issued, and in force, at every level of the courts system.
In Sweden, Assange is not "charged" for the simple matter that the Swedish court system use British/American laws and English language; nobody in Sweden will ever be "charged" because that is not a Swedish word. This may sound like nitpicking but it's actually a key point. The english concept of "charging" is under Swedish law split into two different concepts described by two different words: "anklaga" and "åtala".
Take the time to look them up in many different Swedish dictionaries (not just one). You'll find that there are variations on how they're translated, but each can in lay speech mean variously accused, charged, indicted, and other such words. Legally, however, they're quite distinct. A suspect is anklagad when there is belief that they committed a crime and feels that the person needs to be brought into custody. The suspect is åtalad when the case is ready to go to court. In fact, once they're åtalad, the case must go to court, within a short period of time. åtala-ing a person causes the commencement of court proceedings. There's a number of legal requirements before the case can reach this stage, including what usually amounts to additional rounds of questioning.
Assange is anklagad but not åtalad. And under the Swedish legal system this is precisely the stage he should be in. They can't bring him to trial because he refuses to hand himself over. The stage for bringing a suspect into custody is the stage that Assange is in: anklagad.
If you're looking for English words to clarify the difference, probably your best choice would be "charge" for anklaga and "indict" for åtala; in English "indict" sounds more formal and invokes more images of court proceedings than the word "charge". But the simple fact is, Sweden is not the UK and nor is it the US. Their legal system has its own laws and rules.
Sorry, but the EAW lists them as charges. They're listed as charge #1, charge #2, charge #3, and charge #4. Asserting otherwise doesn't make it the truth.
Every level of the UK court system ruled the EAW warrant validly issued. Your parroting of Assange's lawyer's arguments that got torn up in court doesn't make them fact.
I could pick any of the UK rulings on this matter, but just at random I'll take the lower court's:
The main points made about Ms Ny’s lack of authority to issue the EAW are: 1) Ms Ny is not “the Director of Public Prosecutions” as referred to by the prosecution. 2) Whether she has authority to issue the warrant is a fundamental question going to the heart of the court’s jurisdiction in this case. 3) There is lack of clarity as to who is the judicial authority in this case.
The authority to issue an EAW is indeed a fundamental question. That question has already been determined by the Serious Organised Crime Agency. The certificate issued by SOCA on 6th December 2010 says “On behalf of the Serious Organised Crime Agency I hereby certify that the part 1 warrant issued by Director of Public Prosecution Marianne Ny, Swedish Prosecution Authority, Sweden, on 2nd December 2010 was issued by a judicial authority of a category one territory which has the function of issuing warrants”.
There is an important reason why the EAW must be certified in this way in each case. It is an important protection for the citizen. Unless the authority is checked by SOCA a person is at risk of being arrested and detained improperly. Further, SOCA is better placed than the court to consider who is the appropriate judicial authority for any particular country. If this task were not undertaken by SOCA then the court would be required to undertake a technical enquiry in each case. Many defendants are unrepresented and unlikely to be able to take the point. The court has a special responsibility to unrepresented defendants. In such cases the court checks the key elements of the warrant to satisfy itself that it is valid on the face of it. Neither the court nor the individual has the capacity easily to verify the authenticity of the person or organisation who issued the warrant. SOCA does.
Having said that, the court cannot and should not close its eyes to the possibility of a mistake. If there is clear reason to doubt the authority to issue the EAW then the court is on enquiry and should check that there has not been a mistake. Here there is simply no reason to believe there has been a mistake. I heard live evidence from a recently retired Swedish prosecutor. Mr Alhem told me in there is nothing wrong with the EAW in this case. Similarly Brita Sundberg-Weitman said that Ms Ny is entitled to issue an EAW, although not on the facts as she understood them to be. Mr Hurtig is a Swedish lawyer. He may not be an expert on extradition but nevertheless he must have been well placed to discover whether Ms Ny had the appropriate authority, and he has not suggested otherwise. Ms Ny herself has made a statement saying she has the appropriate authority. Counsel for the defence took me to various documents to suggest that there is no such office as Director of Public Prosecutions in Sweden.
I was also taken to original documents, including the Swedish Code of Statutes. Section 3 says, with reference to the EAW: “A Swedish arrest warrant for the purpose of criminal prosecution is issued by a prosecutor. The Prosecutor-General decides which prosecutors are competent to issue a Swedish arrest warrant”. Whether or not Ms Ny can properly be described as the Director of Public Prosecutions is surely a matter for Swedish law and custom. There can be no sensible suggestion she is not a prosecutor. Here, as throughout the preparation of this case the defence has been meticulous and has left no stone unturned. Nevertheless I am unpersuaded that any of those documents raise a doubt about Ms Ny
No, she did not. This is, again, the problem with the Assange echo chamber.
The leaked police report states that the interviewer saw that she (SW) looked distracted and decided to terminate the interview, that she then consented to a rape kit, and requested a legal respresentative. Her legal representative, Claes Borgström, then pushed the case on for her, including filing the appeal that got her portion of the case reopened when it was were briefly closed (AA's portion was never closed)
Are we supposed to believe that the poor damsel didn't know what her own legal representative was doing on her behalf?
It is a complete myth that she said she "wanted nothing to do with the prosecution" and "they are continuing on without her".
Anyone who's played Kerbal has experienced that one aplenty;)
Not sure what the best solution is. For example, maybe they can just improve the control and stabilization software for the system as it is. I'm sure they're really hoping that's possible! It's probably the most likely and cheapest approach.
I'd be really "easy" to land if they had an RCS, just a couple seconds worth to cancel out any lateral movements and rotations - but that'd still be a lot of mass. Maybe if they had an RCS they could narrow / weaken / lighten the landing gear to pay for the added mass?
Or maybe the solution has nothing to do with the rocket. Maybe they need something to grab it on the way down? I mean, planes landing on carriers grab a hook, maybe there's a rocket equivalent for this? One envisions comic-book-ish solutions like landing in a giant net, but there may be practical answers.
Or maybe combine the two. Maybe there's no RCS on the rocket, and no grabbing system on the barge, but rather a supersized reverse RCS system on the barge, big jets that can be fired up and shut off in an instant, aimed at blowing the rocket to induce a leveling force on it.
Or maybe you don't need to apply a leveling force further up on the rocket - maybe you just need to provide some torque where it's touching the pad. Maybe the pad could be mounted on powerful hydraulic pistons to jerk to keep the rocket stable even if it's got some lateral or rotational inertia when it touches down.
I really don't know. But I really hope they get it. And I really hope it's the first option, because things start getting technologically uglier if you have to complicate the landing.
1. On 13th – 14th August 2010, in the home of the injured party [name given] in Stockholm, Assange, by using violence, forced the injured party to endure his restricting her freedom of movement. The violence consisted in a firm hold of the injured party’s arms and a forceful spreading of her legs whilst lying on top of her and with his body weight preventing her from moving or shifting.
2. On 13th – 14th August 2010, in the home of the injured party [name given] in Stockholm, Assange deliberately molested the injured party by acting in a manner designed to violate her sexual integrity. Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her without her knowledge.
3. On 18th August 2010 or on any of the days before or after that date, in the home of the injured party [name given] in Stockholm, Assange deliberately molested the injured party by acting in a manner designed to violate her sexual integrity i.e. lying next to her and pressing his naked, erect penis to her body.
4. On 17th August 2010, in the home of the injured party [name given] in Enkoping, Assange deliberately consummated sexual intercourse with her by improperly exploiting that she, due to sleep, was in a helpless state. It is an aggravating circumstance that Assange, who was aware that it was the expressed wish of the injured party and a prerequisite of sexual intercourse that a condom be used, still consummated unprotected sexual intercourse with her. The sexual act was designed to violate the injured party’s sexual integrity.
This is what has been repeatedly upheld in court, with findings of probable cause. Now, you may think the courts are wrong and want to be judge and jury based on whatever tripe you heard through the grapevine about the case. Fine, I get that. But the fact of the matter is, you are not a court of law, and that is where criminal matters belong. Not public lynch squads (note: this applies the same in the opposite direction, such as the people calling for assassinations of those they consider traitors).
False. He's wanted on four charges (which there have been now two court findings of probable cause on review of the evidence). The condom one is only molestation, one of the most minor charges he stands accused of. The most major of the four is rape, for F*ing a sleeping girl to work around her refusal to consent to unprotected sex with her (the second most serious charge is unlawful sexual coersion, for pinning down a girl and trying to pry her legs open against her resistance until she agreed to sleep with him).
And he is not merely "wanted for questioning". As per the statement from the prosecutor's office to the UK courts: " Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."
Indeed, I prefer a relay too; I was just pointing out that it's not a fundamental requirement and there are mission proposals that don't use one.
Actually my "ideal" mission (a Titan sample return mission) has the relay probe be the propulsion stage (ion powered), and operating in a low orbit. While a tilt-rotor explorer would be exploring, the orbiter would be pumping its propellant tanks full of Titan's outer atmosphere (most ion engines are very propellant flexible, and the 1500m/s Titan atmosphere drag velocity is way less than the ion output velocity) and thus refilling its tanks for a return mission. So once the explorer returns on its ascent stage and re-docks, the propulsion stage now has full power and has full tanks for the return mission with the surface samples. Then back at Earth, not only are the surface samples returned, but also the residual Titan atmosphere in the propellant tanks. And both the propellant stage and explorer's (expensive) RTGs are recovered at the same time .
My ideal explorer is not a lander, but a tilt-rotor pontoon aircraft (I really don't see the point of fixed wing... tilt rotor adds in another driven component and joint, but it removes a corresponding required control surface, so it's a wash in terms of complexity, and it lets you land VTOL, then rest on the surface and recharge your flight batteries while doing surface science - aka, you can use a much smaller, cheaper RTG. Win-win-win. And while most propelled designs I've seen use ridiculously tiny quadcopter-ish motors to barely hold a heavy probe aloft (say a 0,5kg motor for a 120kg probe), my mission would have a several kilogram motor so that it'd have enough power to haul its ascent stage up to max flight altitude and velocity and reduce its delta-V reqs down to about 2k m/s. If the ascent stage has the same payload fraction as a Pegasus solid stage then that means that it'd only need to be about 150% the weight of whatever portion of the explorer you wish to return to orbit - totally doable. And the explorer doesn't need orbital maneuvering capability because you've got an ion-propelled propulsion stage out there that can come to you.
As an added bonus? You can do a stardust-style flyby of Enceladus for the added weight of a little aerogel, same with various rings, and a dip through the most extreme outer layers of Saturn with the scoop / pump feeding into a small sampling tank. Then it's not just a Titan sample return, but a Titan / Enceladus / Saturn sample return. And you save weight and cost on science experiments. You don't need to bring the science experiments to the Saturnian system, you just bring the Saturnian system back to Earth;) No high power orbital radars or massive telescopic imagers like Cassini had, no surface chemistry experiments, no X-ray fluorescence setups... just a navcam on your propulsion stage, a multispectral pancam on your explorer so you can pick what to sample, and a good sampling arm with an abrasion tool (plus any flight hardware you can repurpose, such as the low power radar altimeter one would need).
Yeah, that'd probably be a Flagship mission. But my god, can you imagine how much data we'd get out of that?
(Concerning robotic arms... I was surprised how light they are when researching. MERs's very capable arms were barely over 4kg. Totally doable for even a mission where weight constraints are significant)
Wind speeds are irrelevant. Turbulence is relevant. Venus's cloudtops are not believed to be significantly turbulent in that layer. Who cares how fast you're moving over the surface?
It's known that there are electrical storms on Venus but not whether they ever exist at the altitudes in question.
Venus is actually the easiest place outside Earth and the Moon to have astronauts land... for broad definitions of "land";) See this comment.
Of course, anywhere you send humans you have to have an excuse of "them doing science", even though we all know that robots do it far cheaper. On Venus, you would have a floating lab analyzing the results of balloon probes repeatedly descending to the surface, collecting samples, and bringing them back up to the "livable" heights for analysis. For obvious reasons, humans would not be going down there.
Who knows - maybe they'd find something interesting there? Maybe Venus's hellish surface concentrates some sort of rare minerals that might justify large scale balloon collection and return. Some day.;)
It's not necessary to have a relay, though it helps. The AVIATR concept, for example, involved no relay. The atmosphere is dense but it's not as much of a radio absorber as Earth's.
So many big questions. Are those suspected cryovolcanoes what we think they are, and if so, what's in that subsurface water ocean that they've been spewing out to the surface? What's eating up the acetylene and hydrogen? Where is the unexplained methane coming from? If something is breaking down the acetylene with hydrogen and it's not "living", what sort of natural catalyst could do that at such low temperatures? What on earth are those organic tholins that are everywhere? What are these long-chain organic compounds that are forming in the atmosphere? Could Titan have sitting on it the recipe for how the earliest life on Earth formed? What's in these seas - which are, it should be added, chemically different from each other? And on and on and on. Plus, there's so many incredible exploration concepts to try to answer the questions: orbiters, landers, boats, submarines, hot air baloons, blimps, fixed wing aircraft, tilt rotor aircraft, you name it. No funding for any of them. Even the cheap ones. It all gets dumped on Mars.
If your goal is living offworld, the most earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth is the cloudtops of venus. A person could walk outside in shirtsleeves with just an oxygen-providing and eye-shielding face mask. Ordinary earth air is a lifting gas. Gravity is 0,9g. Aerocapture is simple. Water can be condensed straight from the cloudtops and oxygen hydrolized with the abundant solar power. There is zero dust to gum up the works (and the SO2 aspect is overplayed, even in the clouds it's not that concentrated).
If your goal is science, Mars isn't the place either, it's been way more studied than everywhere else but Earth and possibly the moon. People differ about what's the most scientifically interesting place but I'd argue that Titan has the most interesting unanswered questions.
If your goal is a colony that stands a chance of paying for itself (good luck with that), your best bet is an asteroid or cometary body (potentially with ice / CHONP, otherwise they can be shipped in with little delta-V from other asteroids / comets) that has abundant valuable metals in concentrated, non-oxidized forms for mining with little delta-V reqs for earth return or space use.
If your goal is a self-sustaining colony (a "backup earth" or whatnot), step out of the sci-fi novels. We're centuries away from that at best.
What great news for the prospect of life on Mars! Quantities of a chemical that destroys organics on contact are so great that they suck water out of the soil and air!
Nasa's massive obsession with this self-sterilizing rock come at the cost of investigating much more interesting targets elsewhere in the solar system. The money going to Mars 2020 in particular could do so much elsewhere (we really could use a followup to Titan, there's so many mysteries there we're not even close to solving, while new missions to Mars are more trying to find new mysteries to solve and answering the same vague "questions" over and over again) At least Europe is going to get something now - not my personal favorite (if there is anything interesting there, which we don't actually know, it's buried way too deep for us to get at it for a long, long time). But at least it's not NASA's "All Mars Channel".
Solar thermal doesn't count? Biomass doesn't count? Geothermal doesn't count?
Also, on the other side of the spectrum, captured industrial heat doesn't count?
I agree that the world needs to do more with waste heat. But it's not much of an argument for nuclear because heat in general is widely available but thrown away across the board as it stands. Tons and tons of heat, very little usage. And it is possible to economically use, mind you. Here in Iceland for example we use the waste heat from our geothermal plants for all sorts of things - and that's not even as high temperature as most thermal plants' waste heat. We have a whole municipal hot water distribution system running to the lion's share of homes and businesses in the country.
Slashdot Mirror
Damn kids. And turn down that that racket, we're trying to sleep over here!
Well, gee, perhaps I should just mouseover to see what each button does? Oh yeah that's right, there's not even a bloody mouseover for half of the buttons. Gotta just try clicking them and seeing what happens.
Lets look at your list. 5 bloody buttons for Google Integration. Which again, the vast majority of people using Google Maps want nothing to do with. "Gee, I need directions to my friend's house. I could really use a button to open up Google Drive right now!" And hey, let's put them in top of the screen where most people expect to find their most important controls!
Hey, that view type? The one in the lower left, which is probably the least likely place a person would look for it? Let's make that only represent half of the possibilities for the view type! Let's put the other half in the upper left right near the directions button!
Hey, pictures? Let's make them suddenly appear when you turn on satellite. But not on the map - my god no, why would you want to know where on the map the pictures are? Let's make them take up a massive thumbbar at the bottom of your screen, clearly people will want that! What, people are complaining? Okay, let's put a tiny line when you mouseover the image that only emphasizes how the ordering of the images has no correlation to where they are on the map.
There's three buttons on the bottom right, to the right of the streetview person. Let's see what each of them do. PSYCH! Haha, gotcha, they're all just one button, and it's not even a button, just a toggle to the annoying "photo bar". The seemingly disconnected arrow icon is the same thing.
Clearly we've now got too much stuff on the screen, so let's take away people's ability to choose their zoom level, because nobody gives a rat's arse about that, what they really want is a quick link to Google Drive!
Language input is in the upper left. Language choice is in the setting bar on the lower right. Making a route is in the lower left. Sharing a link to the route is in the setting bar on the lower right. And of course, all of the stuff on the lower right is below a bloody link to what you've been searching for on Google, as if that has any bloody purpose in being there whatsoever. But a link to My Maps? No no, not there! It's in the bloody suggested searches entry on the upper left.
Whatever flock of drunken geese designed the interface should never be allowed to touch design again.
Interesting - just saw the most recent video and you can indeed see the RCS trying (and failing) to keep it upright. Maybe a RCS thrust upgrade is in order...
SW doesn't even have a twitter account. You're confusing AA and SW. And AA mentioned in a forum conversation just last year that she was the victim of an assault and the perpetrator was never brought to justice, and that his followers still continue to smear her for daring to report it.
Two classics. :)
1.Proof by ghost reference:
Nothing even remotely resembling the cited theorem appears in the reference given.
2. Proof by reference to inaccessible literature:
The author cites a simple corollary of a theorem to be found in a privately circulated memoir of the Slovenian Philological Society, 1883.
I didn't even know that the old one was still available, so I've been forced to use the new one. And despite all of the usage, I still hate it. Do they not focus test these sort of things?
The "clearer to use" thing is absolutely true, there's all of these buttons that do things that the vast majority of users are never going to want to do, and the functionality that people do all the time is buried. I've had to search online for how to do simple tasks way more often than I should have.
At least it's not the worst revamp I've had to deal with - the worst has to be GIMP, no contest.
First stage has an RCS at the top? I've never heard about this. Where can I find more details about it?
Asserting something does not make it true. She absolutely has NOT. There is literally zero evidence to back up your claim, and a wealth of evidence that states clearly otherwise.
Don't move the whole boat. Move a steel plate on the deck with hydraulic rams.
Again, not the best solution. But at least better than moving the whole boat.
There is an EAW which lists four charges. This is what the UK courts work with. They have ruled it valid, properly issued, and in force, at every level of the courts system.
In Sweden, Assange is not "charged" for the simple matter that the Swedish court system use British/American laws and English language; nobody in Sweden will ever be "charged" because that is not a Swedish word. This may sound like nitpicking but it's actually a key point. The english concept of "charging" is under Swedish law split into two different concepts described by two different words: "anklaga" and "åtala".
Take the time to look them up in many different Swedish dictionaries (not just one). You'll find that there are variations on how they're translated, but each can in lay speech mean variously accused, charged, indicted, and other such words. Legally, however, they're quite distinct. A suspect is anklagad when there is belief that they committed a crime and feels that the person needs to be brought into custody. The suspect is åtalad when the case is ready to go to court. In fact, once they're åtalad, the case must go to court, within a short period of time. åtala-ing a person causes the commencement of court proceedings. There's a number of legal requirements before the case can reach this stage, including what usually amounts to additional rounds of questioning.
Assange is anklagad but not åtalad. And under the Swedish legal system this is precisely the stage he should be in. They can't bring him to trial because he refuses to hand himself over. The stage for bringing a suspect into custody is the stage that Assange is in: anklagad.
If you're looking for English words to clarify the difference, probably your best choice would be "charge" for anklaga and "indict" for åtala; in English "indict" sounds more formal and invokes more images of court proceedings than the word "charge". But the simple fact is, Sweden is not the UK and nor is it the US. Their legal system has its own laws and rules.
And terms.
Sorry, but the EAW lists them as charges. They're listed as charge #1, charge #2, charge #3, and charge #4. Asserting otherwise doesn't make it the truth.
Every level of the UK court system ruled the EAW warrant validly issued. Your parroting of Assange's lawyer's arguments that got torn up in court doesn't make them fact.
I could pick any of the UK rulings on this matter, but just at random I'll take the lower court's:
No, she did not. This is, again, the problem with the Assange echo chamber.
The leaked police report states that the interviewer saw that she (SW) looked distracted and decided to terminate the interview, that she then consented to a rape kit, and requested a legal respresentative. Her legal representative, Claes Borgström, then pushed the case on for her, including filing the appeal that got her portion of the case reopened when it was were briefly closed (AA's portion was never closed)
Are we supposed to believe that the poor damsel didn't know what her own legal representative was doing on her behalf?
It is a complete myth that she said she "wanted nothing to do with the prosecution" and "they are continuing on without her".
Anyone who's played Kerbal has experienced that one aplenty ;)
Not sure what the best solution is. For example, maybe they can just improve the control and stabilization software for the system as it is. I'm sure they're really hoping that's possible! It's probably the most likely and cheapest approach.
I'd be really "easy" to land if they had an RCS, just a couple seconds worth to cancel out any lateral movements and rotations - but that'd still be a lot of mass. Maybe if they had an RCS they could narrow / weaken / lighten the landing gear to pay for the added mass?
Or maybe the solution has nothing to do with the rocket. Maybe they need something to grab it on the way down? I mean, planes landing on carriers grab a hook, maybe there's a rocket equivalent for this? One envisions comic-book-ish solutions like landing in a giant net, but there may be practical answers.
Or maybe combine the two. Maybe there's no RCS on the rocket, and no grabbing system on the barge, but rather a supersized reverse RCS system on the barge, big jets that can be fired up and shut off in an instant, aimed at blowing the rocket to induce a leveling force on it.
Or maybe you don't need to apply a leveling force further up on the rocket - maybe you just need to provide some torque where it's touching the pad. Maybe the pad could be mounted on powerful hydraulic pistons to jerk to keep the rocket stable even if it's got some lateral or rotational inertia when it touches down.
I really don't know. But I really hope they get it. And I really hope it's the first option, because things start getting technologically uglier if you have to complicate the landing.
To be more specific, from the EAW:
This is what has been repeatedly upheld in court, with findings of probable cause. Now, you may think the courts are wrong and want to be judge and jury based on whatever tripe you heard through the grapevine about the case. Fine, I get that. But the fact of the matter is, you are not a court of law, and that is where criminal matters belong. Not public lynch squads (note: this applies the same in the opposite direction, such as the people calling for assassinations of those they consider traitors).
False. He's wanted on four charges (which there have been now two court findings of probable cause on review of the evidence). The condom one is only molestation, one of the most minor charges he stands accused of. The most major of the four is rape, for F*ing a sleeping girl to work around her refusal to consent to unprotected sex with her (the second most serious charge is unlawful sexual coersion, for pinning down a girl and trying to pry her legs open against her resistance until she agreed to sleep with him).
And he is not merely "wanted for questioning". As per the statement from the prosecutor's office to the UK courts: " Subject to any matters said by him, which undermine my present view that he should be indicted, an indictment will be launched with the court thereafter. It can therefore be seen that Assange is sought for the purpose of conducting criminal proceedings and that he is not sought merely to assist with our enquiries."
Ah, my personal stalker returns. How's life in the bushes over there?
Indeed, I prefer a relay too; I was just pointing out that it's not a fundamental requirement and there are mission proposals that don't use one.
Actually my "ideal" mission (a Titan sample return mission) has the relay probe be the propulsion stage (ion powered), and operating in a low orbit. While a tilt-rotor explorer would be exploring, the orbiter would be pumping its propellant tanks full of Titan's outer atmosphere (most ion engines are very propellant flexible, and the 1500m/s Titan atmosphere drag velocity is way less than the ion output velocity) and thus refilling its tanks for a return mission. So once the explorer returns on its ascent stage and re-docks, the propulsion stage now has full power and has full tanks for the return mission with the surface samples. Then back at Earth, not only are the surface samples returned, but also the residual Titan atmosphere in the propellant tanks. And both the propellant stage and explorer's (expensive) RTGs are recovered at the same time .
My ideal explorer is not a lander, but a tilt-rotor pontoon aircraft (I really don't see the point of fixed wing... tilt rotor adds in another driven component and joint, but it removes a corresponding required control surface, so it's a wash in terms of complexity, and it lets you land VTOL, then rest on the surface and recharge your flight batteries while doing surface science - aka, you can use a much smaller, cheaper RTG. Win-win-win. And while most propelled designs I've seen use ridiculously tiny quadcopter-ish motors to barely hold a heavy probe aloft (say a 0,5kg motor for a 120kg probe), my mission would have a several kilogram motor so that it'd have enough power to haul its ascent stage up to max flight altitude and velocity and reduce its delta-V reqs down to about 2k m/s. If the ascent stage has the same payload fraction as a Pegasus solid stage then that means that it'd only need to be about 150% the weight of whatever portion of the explorer you wish to return to orbit - totally doable. And the explorer doesn't need orbital maneuvering capability because you've got an ion-propelled propulsion stage out there that can come to you.
As an added bonus? You can do a stardust-style flyby of Enceladus for the added weight of a little aerogel, same with various rings, and a dip through the most extreme outer layers of Saturn with the scoop / pump feeding into a small sampling tank. Then it's not just a Titan sample return, but a Titan / Enceladus / Saturn sample return. And you save weight and cost on science experiments. You don't need to bring the science experiments to the Saturnian system, you just bring the Saturnian system back to Earth ;) No high power orbital radars or massive telescopic imagers like Cassini had, no surface chemistry experiments, no X-ray fluorescence setups... just a navcam on your propulsion stage, a multispectral pancam on your explorer so you can pick what to sample, and a good sampling arm with an abrasion tool (plus any flight hardware you can repurpose, such as the low power radar altimeter one would need).
Yeah, that'd probably be a Flagship mission. But my god, can you imagine how much data we'd get out of that?
(Concerning robotic arms... I was surprised how light they are when researching. MERs's very capable arms were barely over 4kg. Totally doable for even a mission where weight constraints are significant)
Wind speeds are irrelevant. Turbulence is relevant. Venus's cloudtops are not believed to be significantly turbulent in that layer. Who cares how fast you're moving over the surface?
It's known that there are electrical storms on Venus but not whether they ever exist at the altitudes in question.
Venus is actually the easiest place outside Earth and the Moon to have astronauts land... for broad definitions of "land" ;) See this comment.
Of course, anywhere you send humans you have to have an excuse of "them doing science", even though we all know that robots do it far cheaper. On Venus, you would have a floating lab analyzing the results of balloon probes repeatedly descending to the surface, collecting samples, and bringing them back up to the "livable" heights for analysis. For obvious reasons, humans would not be going down there.
Who knows - maybe they'd find something interesting there? Maybe Venus's hellish surface concentrates some sort of rare minerals that might justify large scale balloon collection and return. Some day. ;)
It's not necessary to have a relay, though it helps. The AVIATR concept, for example, involved no relay. The atmosphere is dense but it's not as much of a radio absorber as Earth's.
So many big questions. Are those suspected cryovolcanoes what we think they are, and if so, what's in that subsurface water ocean that they've been spewing out to the surface? What's eating up the acetylene and hydrogen? Where is the unexplained methane coming from? If something is breaking down the acetylene with hydrogen and it's not "living", what sort of natural catalyst could do that at such low temperatures? What on earth are those organic tholins that are everywhere? What are these long-chain organic compounds that are forming in the atmosphere? Could Titan have sitting on it the recipe for how the earliest life on Earth formed? What's in these seas - which are, it should be added, chemically different from each other? And on and on and on. Plus, there's so many incredible exploration concepts to try to answer the questions: orbiters, landers, boats, submarines, hot air baloons, blimps, fixed wing aircraft, tilt rotor aircraft, you name it. No funding for any of them. Even the cheap ones. It all gets dumped on Mars.
If your goal is living offworld, the most earthlike place in the solar system outside of Earth is the cloudtops of venus. A person could walk outside in shirtsleeves with just an oxygen-providing and eye-shielding face mask. Ordinary earth air is a lifting gas. Gravity is 0,9g. Aerocapture is simple. Water can be condensed straight from the cloudtops and oxygen hydrolized with the abundant solar power. There is zero dust to gum up the works (and the SO2 aspect is overplayed, even in the clouds it's not that concentrated).
If your goal is science, Mars isn't the place either, it's been way more studied than everywhere else but Earth and possibly the moon. People differ about what's the most scientifically interesting place but I'd argue that Titan has the most interesting unanswered questions.
If your goal is a colony that stands a chance of paying for itself (good luck with that), your best bet is an asteroid or cometary body (potentially with ice / CHONP, otherwise they can be shipped in with little delta-V from other asteroids / comets) that has abundant valuable metals in concentrated, non-oxidized forms for mining with little delta-V reqs for earth return or space use.
If your goal is a self-sustaining colony (a "backup earth" or whatnot), step out of the sci-fi novels. We're centuries away from that at best.
We'll just 3d-print out a new civilization on Mars.
Oh, and that infographic forgot Phoenix - so add yet another Mars lander to that list.
What great news for the prospect of life on Mars! Quantities of a chemical that destroys organics on contact are so great that they suck water out of the soil and air!
Nasa's massive obsession with this self-sterilizing rock come at the cost of investigating much more interesting targets elsewhere in the solar system. The money going to Mars 2020 in particular could do so much elsewhere (we really could use a followup to Titan, there's so many mysteries there we're not even close to solving, while new missions to Mars are more trying to find new mysteries to solve and answering the same vague "questions" over and over again) At least Europe is going to get something now - not my personal favorite (if there is anything interesting there, which we don't actually know, it's buried way too deep for us to get at it for a long, long time). But at least it's not NASA's "All Mars Channel".
Solar thermal doesn't count? Biomass doesn't count? Geothermal doesn't count?
Also, on the other side of the spectrum, captured industrial heat doesn't count?
I agree that the world needs to do more with waste heat. But it's not much of an argument for nuclear because heat in general is widely available but thrown away across the board as it stands. Tons and tons of heat, very little usage. And it is possible to economically use, mind you. Here in Iceland for example we use the waste heat from our geothermal plants for all sorts of things - and that's not even as high temperature as most thermal plants' waste heat. We have a whole municipal hot water distribution system running to the lion's share of homes and businesses in the country.