And small mass benefits on one stage means very large benefits for your payload capacity delivered to space.
You are getting your rocket equation backwards. While small changes to payload result in exponentially increasing changes through the stages, reciprocally it takes a large change to the first stage to have a small effect on payload.
It's worth noting that unlike Hulu/Netflix/iTunes, Auntie doesn't go out of her way to block people who take even basic measures to bypass geo-blocking.
For example, on Firefox I use the Modify Headers addon and an "X-Forwarded-For" entry with the Beeb's own IP address. (212.58.246.94) There are other addons that make it as simple as clicking on a flag. Bit easier than screwing around with VPNs or DNS spoofing.
What's especially weird about this article is that neither Branson nor Musk have ever said that their space ventures are anything other than a method of making them a bunch of profit...
Nor have they "egotistically proclaim[ed] that they alone can solve mankind's problems, from aging to space travel." Nor "all the talk of exploration." Nor "shoot endangered animals on safari".
Seriously, the guy is nothing but a walking strawman.
There's plenty of things you can criticise the "PayPal mafia" and NewSpace over, especially Thiel and Branson respectively, but nothing that the Professor is going on about even comes close to a valid criticism. (Or even something that has anything to do with reality.) It's bizarre that someone would say it, but crazy that a major newspaper would actually publish it.
"The more recent trend is billionaires making fleets of rocket ships"
A) "recently", for something that's over a decade old, suggests that he's only just heard about it and because he only just heard about it, thinks it's new.
B) "fleets of rocket ships" is how a child would see it. Suggesting the guy is not only ignorant, but is surrounded by ignorant people.
"neither [Elon] Musk's nor [Richard] Branson's goals really seem to break new ground"
VG won't be doing anything special, (although even a private sub-orbital system is new; nothing like SS2 exists. X-15 with passengers and open space.)
But Musk already has the cheapest launcher on the market (perhaps ignoring a few micro-launchers), is about to develop fly-back first stage (something the industry has been wishing for since the early sixties), and is developing a private manned capsule, and is developing a heavy lift launcher that costs less than any other medium-lift launcher on the market even if they doesn't achieve reusability, and he's working with NASA to develop a Saturn V F1-class engine for a Saturn V class launcher, and he wants to go to Mars.
Not breaking new ground? What the fuck does this idiot want from them, a warp drive?
it's really doubtful that there's any show stoppers here.
God I hate that phrase. So many failed NASA programs started because someone said "There's no show stoppers". I needs to be purged from NASA's vocabulary.
I think you could decelerate to subsonic velocities at the proper moment
The "proper moment" is before you enter the atmosphere. So no. As soon as you enter the atmosphere, you can't do a retro-burn until you are subsonic, and you can't slow to subsonic without multiple hypersonic and supersonic parachutes. (Terminal velocity for a capsule on Mars is supersonic. You would hit the ground before you slowed enough to be able to fire retro-rockets.)
The only alternative is to have enough fuel in Mars orbit to do a retro-burn that virtually zeros the orbital velocity before you enter the atmosphere. And, by definition, that takes as much fuel as it does to launch from the surface into orbit.
Have a look at the entry sequence for MSL-Curiosity, hypersonic heat shield, supersonic drag-chutes, huge subsonic parachutes, and retrorockets, because the parachutes aren't enough to let you land on the surface. And every stage pushed the state of the art to the limits of current technology. All that just to land 900kg.
Now imagine what you'd have to add to land a multi-ton human-scale capsule...
Oh, did I say capsule? No. You have to get back home, so you need to land an entire launch vehicle on the surface of Mars. Plus all the infrastructure necessary to refuel and launch that vehicle.
under much worse conditions then in the Martian landing scenario
Earth reentry is much easier than Mars. A nice fat atmosphere to bleed off all your velocity, down to subsonic, before you even worry about parachutes or retro-rockets. Mars' atmosphere is just awful. Too thick to be ignored, too thin to be useful. Exactly, precisely wrong.
The impact force of a large asteroid would be much larger, but no worse than a near miss with an ICBM warhead would be
Que? The impact force from a small asteroid impact is equivalent to a large nuke. The 20m Russian Chelyabinsk impact was about half a megaton equivalent.
A large asteroid would outstrip the effects of the entire global nuclear arsenal all detonated at the same time on a single site. Asteroids can punch through the ocean crust.
For Android devices there's nearly identical products like Twilight. Plus a thousand apps that dim or invert the display without affecting the colour temp.
It looks weird if you go between day/night settings abruptly. During the normal cycle, your eyes adjust as it fades/brightens, so you barely notice it. Try it for a few days. Since using it, I've reduced the night colour-temperature quite a bit (below 4000K) from where I originally set it (about 4800k), you underestimate just how much your eyes can adjust. (Use the slow-transition, the fast-transition is buggy anyway.)
Also, manually adjust the lat/long to suit your sleep pattern, rather than your actual location.
Why do you think it's okay to confiscate people's property?
Even if a particular item isn't allowed on carry-on, why is it just assumed to be acceptable to permanently steal it from the passengers unless their was a suspicious of malice and it was evidence in the criminal case against them?
This is particularly true of the cannon and chainsaw. Unless the cannon had gunpowder and the chainsaw fuel, both are useless as weapons. (At best really clumsy bludgeons.) Even if you decide to not allow them in carry-on, because... {handwave} reasons... why is it necessary to permanently steal it from the passenger to use as a trophy, rather than put it in the baggage hold or allow the owners to make arrangements to reclaim their property later? (Hell, it's an airport, there's going to be a freight company like FedEx nearby. Given the number of items being taken from passengers, returning them seems a pretty simple thing to standardise.)
But look it another way, this is the cream of the crop, gathered from nationwide, the trophies the TSA puts on show to justify their existence and try to deflect criticism. And yet most of the items seem to many of us to be hysterical overreactions, that few of the items should have actually been confiscated from the passengers, and even fewer permanently.
So if that's the best of the best, how bad is the rest of the haul?
let's also consider that there have been no successful terrorist activity on US airlines since all these measures were put in place.
However, all non-successful attempts were stopped by passengers on the aircraft, not TSA.
TSA cannot point to a single example of a terrorist being stopped by them. Not one.
(And you know they would be shouting it from the rooftops, given that they brag about stealing items from non-terrorists as if their agents had done something good.)
Every window on a large passenger aircraft are multi-layered laminated glass and plastic, not just the cockpit windows. They don't explode out when punctured.
As I said, people have shot up planes before. This is not a new thing.
I get what you mean, but an airflow of 10-12psi through metal holes generally doesn't "erode" like that. The metal would have to be extremely weak and brittle already, say pre-fatigued to the verge of failure, in which case the aircraft was already a death-trap.
Click the link, it isn't a "paper" it's a newspaper, and the Tribune article isn't paywalled. (Or at least isn't immediately.)
The article is written as if the yellow-timing issue was something the newspaper had previously caught the city on, while the study is a new thing they've done. Ie, the city reverted the timing to normal before the Tribune commissioned the study. But I'm reading between the lines, it isn't clear, and the "study" isn't published (in the normal sense), so there's no way to know for sure.
Slashdot Mirror
And small mass benefits on one stage means very large benefits for your payload capacity delivered to space.
You are getting your rocket equation backwards. While small changes to payload result in exponentially increasing changes through the stages, reciprocally it takes a large change to the first stage to have a small effect on payload.
What exactly has never been done before?
Landing a six story building on a barge in the ocean after launching a commercial capsule to the International Space Station.
300 x 170 is a real bad ratio, it's going to be a sloppy ride.
The barge itself is 300 x 100ft. The extra width is on the deck only.
Why? Not a clue.
Hydraulics ran out just before landing. So it lost control at the last moment.
I can just imagine what a rocket looks like on IR.
Or you could just google it.
I haven't tried it, but PLA apparently works well as the "wax" in lost-wax casting.
It's worth noting that unlike Hulu/Netflix/iTunes, Auntie doesn't go out of her way to block people who take even basic measures to bypass geo-blocking.
For example, on Firefox I use the Modify Headers addon and an "X-Forwarded-For" entry with the Beeb's own IP address. (212.58.246.94) There are other addons that make it as simple as clicking on a flag. Bit easier than screwing around with VPNs or DNS spoofing.
What's especially weird about this article is that neither Branson nor Musk have ever said that their space ventures are anything other than a method of making them a bunch of profit...
Nor have they "egotistically proclaim[ed] that they alone can solve mankind's problems, from aging to space travel." Nor "all the talk of exploration." Nor "shoot endangered animals on safari".
Seriously, the guy is nothing but a walking strawman.
There's plenty of things you can criticise the "PayPal mafia" and NewSpace over, especially Thiel and Branson respectively, but nothing that the Professor is going on about even comes close to a valid criticism. (Or even something that has anything to do with reality.) It's bizarre that someone would say it, but crazy that a major newspaper would actually publish it.
"The more recent trend is billionaires making fleets of rocket ships"
A) "recently", for something that's over a decade old, suggests that he's only just heard about it and because he only just heard about it, thinks it's new.
B) "fleets of rocket ships" is how a child would see it. Suggesting the guy is not only ignorant, but is surrounded by ignorant people.
"neither [Elon] Musk's nor [Richard] Branson's goals really seem to break new ground"
VG won't be doing anything special, (although even a private sub-orbital system is new; nothing like SS2 exists. X-15 with passengers and open space.)
But Musk already has the cheapest launcher on the market (perhaps ignoring a few micro-launchers), is about to develop fly-back first stage (something the industry has been wishing for since the early sixties), and is developing a private manned capsule, and is developing a heavy lift launcher that costs less than any other medium-lift launcher on the market even if they doesn't achieve reusability, and he's working with NASA to develop a Saturn V F1-class engine for a Saturn V class launcher, and he wants to go to Mars.
Not breaking new ground? What the fuck does this idiot want from them, a warp drive?
Space is very unforgiving. It's why a ~$350 million test stand was built in Mississippi
No, it's really not.
it's really doubtful that there's any show stoppers here.
God I hate that phrase. So many failed NASA programs started because someone said "There's no show stoppers". I needs to be purged from NASA's vocabulary.
I think you could decelerate to subsonic velocities at the proper moment
The "proper moment" is before you enter the atmosphere. So no. As soon as you enter the atmosphere, you can't do a retro-burn until you are subsonic, and you can't slow to subsonic without multiple hypersonic and supersonic parachutes. (Terminal velocity for a capsule on Mars is supersonic. You would hit the ground before you slowed enough to be able to fire retro-rockets.)
The only alternative is to have enough fuel in Mars orbit to do a retro-burn that virtually zeros the orbital velocity before you enter the atmosphere. And, by definition, that takes as much fuel as it does to launch from the surface into orbit.
Have a look at the entry sequence for MSL-Curiosity, hypersonic heat shield, supersonic drag-chutes, huge subsonic parachutes, and retrorockets, because the parachutes aren't enough to let you land on the surface. And every stage pushed the state of the art to the limits of current technology. All that just to land 900kg.
Now imagine what you'd have to add to land a multi-ton human-scale capsule...
Oh, did I say capsule? No. You have to get back home, so you need to land an entire launch vehicle on the surface of Mars. Plus all the infrastructure necessary to refuel and launch that vehicle.
under much worse conditions then in the Martian landing scenario
Earth reentry is much easier than Mars. A nice fat atmosphere to bleed off all your velocity, down to subsonic, before you even worry about parachutes or retro-rockets. Mars' atmosphere is just awful. Too thick to be ignored, too thin to be useful. Exactly, precisely wrong.
The impact force of a large asteroid would be much larger, but no worse than a near miss with an ICBM warhead would be
Que? The impact force from a small asteroid impact is equivalent to a large nuke. The 20m Russian Chelyabinsk impact was about half a megaton equivalent.
A large asteroid would outstrip the effects of the entire global nuclear arsenal all detonated at the same time on a single site. Asteroids can punch through the ocean crust.
http://impact.ese.ic.ac.uk/ImpactEffects/
f.lux is available for iDevices, but not Android.
For Android devices there's nearly identical products like Twilight. Plus a thousand apps that dim or invert the display without affecting the colour temp.
It looks weird if you go between day/night settings abruptly. During the normal cycle, your eyes adjust as it fades/brightens, so you barely notice it. Try it for a few days. Since using it, I've reduced the night colour-temperature quite a bit (below 4000K) from where I originally set it (about 4800k), you underestimate just how much your eyes can adjust. (Use the slow-transition, the fast-transition is buggy anyway.)
Also, manually adjust the lat/long to suit your sleep pattern, rather than your actual location.
Terrorists have smuggled (small) bombs onto post-9/11 aircraft. The TSA hasn't caught a single would-be bomber.
So, schnitzel then?
Would they try to stop him?
In Soviet Russia all pilots were armed, and rightly so.
So are about 12,000 US commercial airline pilots.
Federal Flight Deck Officer program.
Why do you think it's okay to confiscate people's property?
Even if a particular item isn't allowed on carry-on, why is it just assumed to be acceptable to permanently steal it from the passengers unless their was a suspicious of malice and it was evidence in the criminal case against them?
This is particularly true of the cannon and chainsaw. Unless the cannon had gunpowder and the chainsaw fuel, both are useless as weapons. (At best really clumsy bludgeons.) Even if you decide to not allow them in carry-on, because... {handwave} reasons... why is it necessary to permanently steal it from the passenger to use as a trophy, rather than put it in the baggage hold or allow the owners to make arrangements to reclaim their property later? (Hell, it's an airport, there's going to be a freight company like FedEx nearby. Given the number of items being taken from passengers, returning them seems a pretty simple thing to standardise.)
But look it another way, this is the cream of the crop, gathered from nationwide, the trophies the TSA puts on show to justify their existence and try to deflect criticism. And yet most of the items seem to many of us to be hysterical overreactions, that few of the items should have actually been confiscated from the passengers, and even fewer permanently.
So if that's the best of the best, how bad is the rest of the haul?
let's also consider that there have been no successful terrorist activity on US airlines since all these measures were put in place.
However, all non-successful attempts were stopped by passengers on the aircraft, not TSA.
TSA cannot point to a single example of a terrorist being stopped by them. Not one.
(And you know they would be shouting it from the rooftops, given that they brag about stealing items from non-terrorists as if their agents had done something good.)
Every window on a large passenger aircraft are multi-layered laminated glass and plastic, not just the cockpit windows. They don't explode out when punctured.
As I said, people have shot up planes before. This is not a new thing.
I get what you mean, but an airflow of 10-12psi through metal holes generally doesn't "erode" like that. The metal would have to be extremely weak and brittle already, say pre-fatigued to the verge of failure, in which case the aircraft was already a death-trap.
with some being shot out windows?
The multi-layered laminated windows on aircraft don't "shoot out".
[People have shot up planes before, you know. Both in actual acts of terrorism and in testing.]
Shopping malls don't tend to depressurize when punctured.
Neither do aircraft.
The pressurisation pumps are more than capable of keeping up with the amount of air leaking through a thumb-sized hole.
Click the link, it isn't a "paper" it's a newspaper, and the Tribune article isn't paywalled. (Or at least isn't immediately.)
The article is written as if the yellow-timing issue was something the newspaper had previously caught the city on, while the study is a new thing they've done. Ie, the city reverted the timing to normal before the Tribune commissioned the study. But I'm reading between the lines, it isn't clear, and the "study" isn't published (in the normal sense), so there's no way to know for sure.