Space Launch System's design called for the integration of existing hardware
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design.
The reason for incremental development is that your engineers and technicians learn their "craft", gradually learn where they can shave off millimetres and where they have to add more. Work out what works better than expected and what is clumsy and stupid and needs to be redesigned. A kind of guided evolution of technology.
However, the first couple of flights of SLS will be using actual Shuttle orbiter engines (SSMEs) salvaged from the three retired orbiters. Experimental, first generation, beyond-the-state-of-the-art-at-the-time, hideously complex and overengineered engines which haven't been in production since the late 1980s and whose designers are all in nursing homes.
Most decidedly not using "proven technology, incrementally advanced."
but if we can tweak existing tech, and make it useful for deep space why not??
SLS and the Orion capsule are costing around $3 billion per year during development. The first manned launch will be no earlier than 2021, and insiders suggest that deadline will slip several years. But from now until 2021, ignoring the tens of billions spent so far, SLS/Orion will cost $21 billion in development before the first crew is launched. However, that configuration is only capable of reaching the moon and back, carrying no cargo besides the Orion capsule, and the capsule will only have 14 days life support. By the time the SLS Block II and Orion's long-duration service module are developed for deep space missions, around 2032 (plus delays), the cost will be over $50 billion (plus overruns). That, of course, doesn't include actual launch costs; nor does it allow for developing any mission hardware, such as landers/rovers/surface-habs/etc.
That $21 billion would buy 140 Falcon Heavy launches, or about 7000 tons of payload. The $50 billion could buy over 300 FH launches, or over 16000 tons of payload. The equivalent of more than two full International Space Stations every year.
Or more realistically, four FH and one F9/Dragon, 200 tonnes and 7 crew, for just $750 million per mission, up to four missions per year for the same budget. Or, starting in, say, 2019 to mark the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11, you'd have $15 billion free to develop additional boosters/landers/rovers/habitats/etc, then two missions per year, leaving $1.5 billion every year for other projects, hardware, and operations.
In other words, the opportunity cost of SLS/Orion, ie, what they prevent, is enormous.
From the picture it looks like it takes just as much space as a regular parking garage, but I think the real potential in a system like this is in maximizing the density of parked cars.
If you skip the retarded sites like "Mashable" in TFS, you'll find that it actually does increase the density of parking.
I'm picturing something like an Amazon warehouse, but with cars on each shelf.
Those kinds of shelf parking systems already exist, however, they require building an entirely new parking structure. The robot "valets" work with existing structures, which means a parking operator can upgrade just for the price of a few robots plus the check-in station, rather than having to tear down and rebuild from scratch. The operator can also introduce the robots gradually, say dedicating one floor to robot parking and charging a premium for "valet" service, increasing the number of robots as revenue allows.
How long have the sherpas been up there carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers?
Atmospheric pressure, and hence oxygen content, at the height Tibetans have lived naturally for thousands of years is a bit over half that of sea-level. This story has nothing to do with climbing Everest.
I was replying to a comment that strongly implied that the four editors were violating Wikipedia's own policies, and "it took a lawsuit" to expose them. On the contrary, everything the tried to put in the article seems to meet Wiki guidelines. And rather than malicious intent, they seem to have been "fighting the good fight" against attempts by sockpuppets to whitewash the article on behalf of Yank Barry.
As for the libel case itself, can you point to anything that suggests the editors "insisted on RE-publishing the false information", "took information out of context", and/or deleted or blocked attempts to correct it? It seems to be Yank Barry who is trying to create a "false light" about himself, and to slander the editors.
There's nothing in the Wikipedia article that hasn't been printed in the press about Barry. And the page is actually pretty tame compared to what they could add. (Putting fake clients on the website for his fake-meat company, for example. His phony "nominations" for a Nobel Peace Prize. Etc. None of those things are mentioned in the article, yet they meet Wikipedia citation standards.)
Yank Barry? He's a convicted extortionist who worked for the Mafia in Montreal in the '80s. After being released from prison, he founded a company that sells fake food to (sometimes fake) clients, through which he conned celebrity endorsements by promising to donate food via his fake charities.
Sigh. It's not NASA vs SpaceX. It's NASA and SpaceX/Bigelow/etc, versus NASA and LM/ATK/etc.
It's a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars total, versus a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars per year.
It's a launcher that will cost NASA less than $100m per launch for 50 tonnes to LEO, versus a launcher that costs NASA $2 billion per year every year for one launch of 70 tonnes to LEO once every year or two.
It's commercial space stations that cost $100-150m/yr each for NASA to lease, versus a space station that costs NASA $3 billion/yr to operate and is dependent on Russian modules and Russian crew capsules (costing an extra $75m per seat.)
It's about the most cost effective way for US taxpayers to achieve the things they apparently want to do, versus repeating the same costly mistakes over and over.
You don't have to go to that extreme with any BBC property. Just use a header-spoofer addon with your browser. The BBC doesn't go out of its way to detect such methods. I use Modify Header for Firefox, but there's a bunch of others (some of which are stupidly easy to use.) I'm in Australia and this allows me to read/watch BBC's UK-only content. (And a fair bit of blocked US-only content.)
[That said, it's weird that the BBC would block news articles for UK readers.]
Battery power density has increased much faster than hydrogen storage density. (Energy density for batteries has doubled every decade. Hydrogen... not so much.) Battery costs/Wh have decreased much faster than hydrogen-fuel-cell costs. ($/Wh for batteries halves every 4 years.) Mains-to-battery-to-motor efficiency (over 80%) is higher than hydrogen-to-fuel-cell-to-motor efficiency (50%), without even touching on how inefficient hydrogen production and distribution is.
Hydrogen requires the whole infrastructure from gas-cracking to transport to on-site storage to the completely novel pumping infrastructure itself, and there's no short-cuts. Hydrogen stations are required to allow people to own a HFCV, whereas electric charging stations merely make owning a BEV more convenient since electricity is already available in nearly every garage of nearly every customer. Similarly the infrastructure required to build charging stations is 90% complete, needing only the "last mile". And the technology is... well, electricity. The original plug'n'play. Hence commercial charging stations are vastly cheaper to build than hydrogen stations, and can be built almost anywhere, without the special safety or zoning rules attached to hydrogen storage. Currently there are 1500 charging stations in California, compared to 9 hydrogen stations (plus two for buses). Given the cost of building a hydrogen station vs even a fast-charger, hydrogen will never catch up. Hell, Kansas already has 100 charging stations.
With modern welding techniques, closed-cycle high pressure steam turbines, high efficiency gas-fired boiler, you should be able to produce quite a clean and efficient modern steam car.
Actually, 1968.50694 ± 393.700787 inches. The 50m is to one significant figure, so "50 or so" would be 50 ± 10m. (Normally I'd say ± 5, but since 50 is a midpoint in base ten, there may be greater rounding than is strictly standard.)
However that is not the case when we blindly throw genes from one species into another. Just because we have the ability to do something doesn't mean that we have the knowledge to use it appropriately.
Except the technology being used here is the same as is routinely used to genetically engineer lab animals with genes from other species, even (and especially) human genes, in order to explore gene functionality.
The only difference is that it's using elephants with mammoth genes, instead of rats, mice, pigs, dogs, monkeys, etc, with human or jellyfish genes. It even sounds like they've mapped the function of the first three genes they've chosen, and they've started in a cell culture to test their technique. Wow, it's almost like they're being scientific about it.
This is why you start with Mammoth. It's not like you are going to misplace them, or walk out our BSL2 with one stuck to our shirt. And we know they are habitat limited and that we can hunt them to extinction.
But seriously, we genetically engineer lab mice and rats all the time, even hybridising them with human genes, and no-one bats an eyelash. This is the same process, just using elephants with specific mammoth genes.
Batteries have gone through multiple generations of technology in the last two decades. Solar panels are now so cheap that the physical installation costs are the biggest part of installed costs. Solid-state storage is increasingly the norm. OLEDs are now in TVs, 77" diag. 4k-ish, WRGB. e-Paper readers cost tens of dollars and are seen as outdated tech. Smartphones cost tens of dollars. 4G phones. Gb/s Wi-Fi. Etc etc.
How much fucking progress do you need?
(When Li-Ion was introduced in '91, it stored less than 90 Wh/kg, now it's over 200 Wh/kg. The price was over $3/Wh, and is now less than 30c/Wh. http://www.batteryuniversity.com/images/parttwo-55h.gif. And there's no reason to suspect it will stop, we're still pushing Li-polymer capacity. With LiS, LiMetal, and ZnAir all in the early commercialisation stage, and graphite-everything in the lab stage.)
((Solar panels have doubled in capacity/m^2 every ten years, and halved in price/m^2. Every doubling of global production cuts the price by 1/5th. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-19. And there's no reason to suggest the trend will stop.))
In the near future will SpaceX reuse their launchers? Not likely,
Their current plan is apparently to recover (on land) a first stage before the end of the year, and attempt to re-fly some time next year. There's been speculation that they might initially mix recovered engines with new engines to reduce risk. But who knows.
(All ISS missions are contractually required to use new stages and new capsules. That will leave SpaceX with a bunch of left over used stages and capsules... and eventually someone will agree to pay, say, $10m in order to launch their experiment, or themselves.)
Slashdot Mirror
Space Launch System's design called for the integration of existing hardware
I would much rather them use existing tried tech and incrementally advance them rather than try a radical new design.
The reason for incremental development is that your engineers and technicians learn their "craft", gradually learn where they can shave off millimetres and where they have to add more. Work out what works better than expected and what is clumsy and stupid and needs to be redesigned. A kind of guided evolution of technology.
However, the first couple of flights of SLS will be using actual Shuttle orbiter engines (SSMEs) salvaged from the three retired orbiters. Experimental, first generation, beyond-the-state-of-the-art-at-the-time, hideously complex and overengineered engines which haven't been in production since the late 1980s and whose designers are all in nursing homes.
Most decidedly not using "proven technology, incrementally advanced."
but if we can tweak existing tech, and make it useful for deep space why not??
SLS and the Orion capsule are costing around $3 billion per year during development. The first manned launch will be no earlier than 2021, and insiders suggest that deadline will slip several years. But from now until 2021, ignoring the tens of billions spent so far, SLS/Orion will cost $21 billion in development before the first crew is launched. However, that configuration is only capable of reaching the moon and back, carrying no cargo besides the Orion capsule, and the capsule will only have 14 days life support. By the time the SLS Block II and Orion's long-duration service module are developed for deep space missions, around 2032 (plus delays), the cost will be over $50 billion (plus overruns). That, of course, doesn't include actual launch costs; nor does it allow for developing any mission hardware, such as landers/rovers/surface-habs/etc.
That $21 billion would buy 140 Falcon Heavy launches, or about 7000 tons of payload. The $50 billion could buy over 300 FH launches, or over 16000 tons of payload. The equivalent of more than two full International Space Stations every year.
Or more realistically, four FH and one F9/Dragon, 200 tonnes and 7 crew, for just $750 million per mission, up to four missions per year for the same budget. Or, starting in, say, 2019 to mark the 50th Anniversary of Apollo 11, you'd have $15 billion free to develop additional boosters/landers/rovers/habitats/etc, then two missions per year, leaving $1.5 billion every year for other projects, hardware, and operations.
In other words, the opportunity cost of SLS/Orion, ie, what they prevent, is enormous.
From the picture it looks like it takes just as much space as a regular parking garage, but I think the real potential in a system like this is in maximizing the density of parked cars.
If you skip the retarded sites like "Mashable" in TFS, you'll find that it actually does increase the density of parking.
(Even Jalopnik has better information.)
I'm picturing something like an Amazon warehouse, but with cars on each shelf.
Those kinds of shelf parking systems already exist, however, they require building an entirely new parking structure. The robot "valets" work with existing structures, which means a parking operator can upgrade just for the price of a few robots plus the check-in station, rather than having to tear down and rebuild from scratch. The operator can also introduce the robots gradually, say dedicating one floor to robot parking and charging a premium for "valet" service, increasing the number of robots as revenue allows.
How long have the sherpas been up there carrying shit for rich European thrill seekers?
Atmospheric pressure, and hence oxygen content, at the height Tibetans have lived naturally for thousands of years is a bit over half that of sea-level. This story has nothing to do with climbing Everest.
But reality is far less interesting than we want it to be ...
I dunno, polar bear hybrids in the Himalayas. That's pretty interesting.
I was replying to a comment that strongly implied that the four editors were violating Wikipedia's own policies, and "it took a lawsuit" to expose them. On the contrary, everything the tried to put in the article seems to meet Wiki guidelines. And rather than malicious intent, they seem to have been "fighting the good fight" against attempts by sockpuppets to whitewash the article on behalf of Yank Barry.
As for the libel case itself, can you point to anything that suggests the editors "insisted on RE-publishing the false information", "took information out of context", and/or deleted or blocked attempts to correct it? It seems to be Yank Barry who is trying to create a "false light" about himself, and to slander the editors.
There's nothing in the Wikipedia article that hasn't been printed in the press about Barry. And the page is actually pretty tame compared to what they could add. (Putting fake clients on the website for his fake-meat company, for example. His phony "nominations" for a Nobel Peace Prize. Etc. None of those things are mentioned in the article, yet they meet Wikipedia citation standards.)
Who is that?
Yank Barry? He's a convicted extortionist who worked for the Mafia in Montreal in the '80s. After being released from prison, he founded a company that sells fake food to (sometimes fake) clients, through which he conned celebrity endorsements by promising to donate food via his fake charities.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2012/04/15/yank-barry/
It's like the old WWII joke: "Vun German panzer can beat 5 American panzers." "Ja wohl... but ze Americans sent 6!"
The same mass as a WWII aircraft carrier.
That's wasteful. All we need to launch is a WWII Japanese battleship.
Sigh. It's not NASA vs SpaceX. It's NASA and SpaceX/Bigelow/etc, versus NASA and LM/ATK/etc.
It's a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars total, versus a crew capsule built for NASA for around a billion dollars per year.
It's a launcher that will cost NASA less than $100m per launch for 50 tonnes to LEO, versus a launcher that costs NASA $2 billion per year every year for one launch of 70 tonnes to LEO once every year or two.
It's commercial space stations that cost $100-150m/yr each for NASA to lease, versus a space station that costs NASA $3 billion/yr to operate and is dependent on Russian modules and Russian crew capsules (costing an extra $75m per seat.)
It's about the most cost effective way for US taxpayers to achieve the things they apparently want to do, versus repeating the same costly mistakes over and over.
without a proxy/VPN.
You don't have to go to that extreme with any BBC property. Just use a header-spoofer addon with your browser. The BBC doesn't go out of its way to detect such methods. I use Modify Header for Firefox, but there's a bunch of others (some of which are stupidly easy to use.) I'm in Australia and this allows me to read/watch BBC's UK-only content. (And a fair bit of blocked US-only content.)
[That said, it's weird that the BBC would block news articles for UK readers.]
Posting to undo stupid.
high efficiency gas-fired boiler
Battery power density has increased much faster than hydrogen storage density. (Energy density for batteries has doubled every decade. Hydrogen... not so much.) Battery costs/Wh have decreased much faster than hydrogen-fuel-cell costs. ($/Wh for batteries halves every 4 years.) Mains-to-battery-to-motor efficiency (over 80%) is higher than hydrogen-to-fuel-cell-to-motor efficiency (50%), without even touching on how inefficient hydrogen production and distribution is.
Hydrogen requires the whole infrastructure from gas-cracking to transport to on-site storage to the completely novel pumping infrastructure itself, and there's no short-cuts. Hydrogen stations are required to allow people to own a HFCV, whereas electric charging stations merely make owning a BEV more convenient since electricity is already available in nearly every garage of nearly every customer. Similarly the infrastructure required to build charging stations is 90% complete, needing only the "last mile". And the technology is... well, electricity. The original plug'n'play. Hence commercial charging stations are vastly cheaper to build than hydrogen stations, and can be built almost anywhere, without the special safety or zoning rules attached to hydrogen storage. Currently there are 1500 charging stations in California, compared to 9 hydrogen stations (plus two for buses). Given the cost of building a hydrogen station vs even a fast-charger, hydrogen will never catch up. Hell, Kansas already has 100 charging stations.
Hydrogen is stupid.
With modern welding techniques, closed-cycle high pressure steam turbines, high efficiency gas-fired boiler, you should be able to produce quite a clean and efficient modern steam car.
Obama the Republican. Who knew.
It took a lot of us by surprise.
Nice calculation. Thanks.
Actually, 1968.50694 ± 393.700787 inches. The 50m is to one significant figure, so "50 or so" would be 50 ± 10m. (Normally I'd say ± 5, but since 50 is a midpoint in base ten, there may be greater rounding than is strictly standard.)
Ads spread disease, ruin shit
In a manner of speaking.
However that is not the case when we blindly throw genes from one species into another. Just because we have the ability to do something doesn't mean that we have the knowledge to use it appropriately.
Except the technology being used here is the same as is routinely used to genetically engineer lab animals with genes from other species, even (and especially) human genes, in order to explore gene functionality.
The only difference is that it's using elephants with mammoth genes, instead of rats, mice, pigs, dogs, monkeys, etc, with human or jellyfish genes. It even sounds like they've mapped the function of the first three genes they've chosen, and they've started in a cell culture to test their technique. Wow, it's almost like they're being scientific about it.
This is why you start with Mammoth. It's not like you are going to misplace them, or walk out our BSL2 with one stuck to our shirt. And we know they are habitat limited and that we can hunt them to extinction.
But seriously, we genetically engineer lab mice and rats all the time, even hybridising them with human genes, and no-one bats an eyelash. This is the same process, just using elephants with specific mammoth genes.
They had nine launches in 4 years. Of those the first 5 took 39 months. The next 4 took 8 months.
At that rate of acceleration, they should easily be down to 1 per month by the end of the year.
Batteries have gone through multiple generations of technology in the last two decades. Solar panels are now so cheap that the physical installation costs are the biggest part of installed costs. Solid-state storage is increasingly the norm. OLEDs are now in TVs, 77" diag. 4k-ish, WRGB. e-Paper readers cost tens of dollars and are seen as outdated tech. Smartphones cost tens of dollars. 4G phones. Gb/s Wi-Fi. Etc etc.
How much fucking progress do you need?
(When Li-Ion was introduced in '91, it stored less than 90 Wh/kg, now it's over 200 Wh/kg. The price was over $3/Wh, and is now less than 30c/Wh. http://www.batteryuniversity.com/images/parttwo-55h.gif. And there's no reason to suspect it will stop, we're still pushing Li-polymer capacity. With LiS, LiMetal, and ZnAir all in the early commercialisation stage, and graphite-everything in the lab stage.)
((Solar panels have doubled in capacity/m^2 every ten years, and halved in price/m^2. Every doubling of global production cuts the price by 1/5th. http://www.economist.com/blogs/graphicdetail/2012/12/daily-chart-19. And there's no reason to suggest the trend will stop.))
Long legs like a camel, spots like a leopard. Not that hazy really. Actually more descriptive than Giraffe itself ("zarafa"), "fast walker".
In the near future will SpaceX reuse their launchers? Not likely,
Their current plan is apparently to recover (on land) a first stage before the end of the year, and attempt to re-fly some time next year. There's been speculation that they might initially mix recovered engines with new engines to reduce risk. But who knows.
(All ISS missions are contractually required to use new stages and new capsules. That will leave SpaceX with a bunch of left over used stages and capsules... and eventually someone will agree to pay, say, $10m in order to launch their experiment, or themselves.)