There was hoax TV series called "Space Cadets" done in Britain a few years ago where some people were fooled into thinking that they were on a Russian Space Shuttle flight. Even the actors who were in on the hoax found it hard to believe that they weren't in space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_(television_hoax)
I have some cousins who married pretty women and ended up regretting it. Having said that though, you might be right about ugly people too: Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone - W.C. Fields
The Soyuz accidents were many years ago, while the last shuttle loss was only a few years ago. In fact, the Soyuz could have had a worse record; a Soyuz crew survived a launch fire over 20 years ago and were saved by the Lauch Abort System (LAS) rockets pulling them out of harm's way, something not available for the shuttle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_T-10-1. In addition the shuttles are very expensive and complicated to keep going. Having said that, the extra costs of a few more extra shuttle flights would be very small in contrast to the huge expense of developing and building the shuttles.
Some years ago the New Zealand Green Party got tricked into supporting a ban on dihydrogen monoxide, much to the glee of the conservative National Party. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0110/S00440.htm
The Delta IV rocket uses a lot of helium to start its liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket engines; it gets pumped through its turbopumps to to spin them up for pumping its fuel. If its main competitor the Atlas V did not use a Russian kerosene/oxygen engine (the RD-180), then this plus the inefficiency of hydrogen for a first stage engine would have precluded the Delta IV from consideration for being man-rated, I also remember when I was at school that my physics teacher had to send an electron-beam gun to be refilled with helium since it would leak out from the tiniest of gaps around where the glass seal was melted shut.
While it would be great to get fibre to our home, if it is too expensive then we won't use it to full capacity and the benefit is lost. We are thinking about upgrading to slow broadband over Telecom NZ''s copper wire while most of our area has gone to coaxial cable with Telstra Saturn. The city council has just rebuilt our roads and pavements after they were ripped up to lay the Telstra Saturn cables underground. We are not looking forward to having our roads and pavements ripped up yet again so soon.
The Shuttles are nearly always operated by computer control, only the final few minutes are flown manually. I read recently that one re-entry and landing was done totally manually by a specially-trained shuttle pilot, but even he required guidance from the flight computers to tell him what to do. The astronauts were worried that a rogue computer command would lower the landing gear during re-entry so this requires an astronaut to manually flip a switch in the cockpit. After the destruction of Columbia it was decided to enable a damaged shuttle to attempt a fully automatic landing without a crew. The shuttles and/or the International Space Station now carry a special cable that can be connected to bypass the switch and to allow the landing gear to be lowered under remote control. The Columbia could easily have been destroyed by excessive acoustic energy at its first launch and its elevon flaps were forced back, potentially crippling the shuttle's hydraulic system. One of the astronauts commented that had they known this, they would have ejected as soon as it was safe to do so. Columbia's first launch was very close to being its last!
Sir Clive Sinclair and his Anamartic company were involved in something like this with "Wafer-Scale Integration" many years ago which used the "Catt Spiral" developed by Ivor Catt to make solid-state memory disks. Mr Catt is proposing something very similar to the "Lottery Core" cpus with his plans for the "Kernel Machine" http://www.ivorcatt.com/3ew.htm
Actually, it is an air data boom used in atmospheric testing. I have been following the X-37B too and I do not recall ever seeing mention about a re-entry ablative spike a.k.a an aerospike. The following is from http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=5364.msg560226;topicseen#new discussing your post:
Re: X-37 to fly on a Atlas V in 2010
Reply #472 on: 03/14/2010 08:30 PM
I came across the following slashdot comment about the X-37 having an "ablative spike" (which seems to be in the WK2 photos). Anybody know anything more about this, if the comment below is nonsense, or if ablative reentry spikes have been tested in the past?
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1582228&cid=31473292
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Jim
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Re: X-37 to fly on a Atlas V in 2010
Reply #473 on: 03/14/2010 09:03 PM
Quote from: neilh on 03/14/2010 08:30 PM
I came across the following slashdot comment about the X-37 having an "ablative spike" (which seems to be in the WK2 photos). Anybody know anything more about this, if the comment below is nonsense, or if ablative reentry spikes have been tested in the past?
There is no such thing on X-37. It is just some B S by someone incorrect
Does the shuttle have one?
Yes it did, it is a air data boom. Very common on new aircraft configs undergoing flight test.
http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/fullimage.jsp?searchpage=true&keywords=enterprise&textsearch=Go&hitsperpage=30&pageno=2&photoId=S77-28140
Reminds me of the invention of Turbo Codes in the early Nineties for forward error correction for communication networks. It was later discovered that in the early Sixties, low density parity check (LDPC) coding was developed that performed a similar function but was not used because of the lack of computer power and memory back then. The LDCP patents had expired by then, so now there are two technologies doing the same thing in a different way but one is patent-free. In a similar vein, I read some years ago of a company in the UK who search through expired and current patents looking for inventions that meet their customers' needs. They would often find solutions in a totally different field to the area being researched and a lot of it was stuff that was ahead of its time and its technology had been abandoned.
Another space plane in the works is the X-37B which should be launched from an Atlas V rocket in April of this year. It is unmanned and looks very much like a miniature space shuttle with a V-tail. The USAF is being very secretive, but it will be solar-powered in orbit and be designed for long-duration flight, with a tiny cargo bay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
Ha, maybe it will be a chance for a Slashdotter to get a girlfriend and to get lucky!!. Doing a Google search on Antarctica and "ice wives" brings up this site as well as a few others;-). bigdeadplace.com/frontierwatch/?p=123
How the hell can we expect to send people on a multi-year round trip to Mars if we struggle to keep people alive and equipment functioning on a space station that's only about 200 miles away? If the ISS is disposed off prematurely we will lose a great opportunity to prepare for very-long duration space voyages.
Don't laugh, but there are rumours that the Russians are planning to disconnect their section from the rest of the ISS if it is abandoned, leaving them with their own mini space-station. They have the control rocket jets on their portion and some small folded-up solar panels; the Americans have the big solar panels on theirs. Even if the massive American solar panels are not free to rotate to follow the sun and the gyroscopes are not turning to keep the ISS oriented in the same position, I think that it would still be habitable at a much-reduced functionality.
New Zealand also has a major satellite communications spy base Waihopai, said to be part of ECHELON, a worldwide network of spy stations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSB_Waihopai
Slashdot Mirror
There was hoax TV series called "Space Cadets" done in Britain a few years ago where some people were fooled into thinking that they were on a Russian Space Shuttle flight. Even the actors who were in on the hoax found it hard to believe that they weren't in space. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Cadets_(television_hoax)
I have some cousins who married pretty women and ended up regretting it. Having said that though, you might be right about ugly people too: Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes to the bone - W.C. Fields
I stumbled onto a story of a PDP-10 with a mysterious "magic switch" some time ago; did it really happen or is it just a story? http://catb.org/jargon/html/magic-story.html
The Soyuz accidents were many years ago, while the last shuttle loss was only a few years ago. In fact, the Soyuz could have had a worse record; a Soyuz crew survived a launch fire over 20 years ago and were saved by the Lauch Abort System (LAS) rockets pulling them out of harm's way, something not available for the shuttle http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_T-10-1. In addition the shuttles are very expensive and complicated to keep going. Having said that, the extra costs of a few more extra shuttle flights would be very small in contrast to the huge expense of developing and building the shuttles.
Some years ago the New Zealand Green Party got tricked into supporting a ban on dihydrogen monoxide, much to the glee of the conservative National Party. http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0110/S00440.htm
The Delta IV rocket uses a lot of helium to start its liquid hydrogen and oxygen rocket engines; it gets pumped through its turbopumps to to spin them up for pumping its fuel. If its main competitor the Atlas V did not use a Russian kerosene/oxygen engine (the RD-180), then this plus the inefficiency of hydrogen for a first stage engine would have precluded the Delta IV from consideration for being man-rated, I also remember when I was at school that my physics teacher had to send an electron-beam gun to be refilled with helium since it would leak out from the tiniest of gaps around where the glass seal was melted shut.
While it would be great to get fibre to our home, if it is too expensive then we won't use it to full capacity and the benefit is lost. We are thinking about upgrading to slow broadband over Telecom NZ''s copper wire while most of our area has gone to coaxial cable with Telstra Saturn. The city council has just rebuilt our roads and pavements after they were ripped up to lay the Telstra Saturn cables underground. We are not looking forward to having our roads and pavements ripped up yet again so soon.
The Shuttles are nearly always operated by computer control, only the final few minutes are flown manually. I read recently that one re-entry and landing was done totally manually by a specially-trained shuttle pilot, but even he required guidance from the flight computers to tell him what to do. The astronauts were worried that a rogue computer command would lower the landing gear during re-entry so this requires an astronaut to manually flip a switch in the cockpit. After the destruction of Columbia it was decided to enable a damaged shuttle to attempt a fully automatic landing without a crew. The shuttles and/or the International Space Station now carry a special cable that can be connected to bypass the switch and to allow the landing gear to be lowered under remote control. The Columbia could easily have been destroyed by excessive acoustic energy at its first launch and its elevon flaps were forced back, potentially crippling the shuttle's hydraulic system. One of the astronauts commented that had they known this, they would have ejected as soon as it was safe to do so. Columbia's first launch was very close to being its last!
Ha, I still have a working HP41C from 1982 in my desk drawer. I hardly ever use it now, which might explain why its batteries date back to 2004!
Sir Clive Sinclair and his Anamartic company were involved in something like this with "Wafer-Scale Integration" many years ago which used the "Catt Spiral" developed by Ivor Catt to make solid-state memory disks. Mr Catt is proposing something very similar to the "Lottery Core" cpus with his plans for the "Kernel Machine" http://www.ivorcatt.com/3ew.htm
Actually, it is an air data boom used in atmospheric testing. I have been following the X-37B too and I do not recall ever seeing mention about a re-entry ablative spike a.k.a an aerospike. The following is from http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=5364.msg560226;topicseen#new discussing your post: Re: X-37 to fly on a Atlas V in 2010 Reply #472 on: 03/14/2010 08:30 PM I came across the following slashdot comment about the X-37 having an "ablative spike" (which seems to be in the WK2 photos). Anybody know anything more about this, if the comment below is nonsense, or if ablative reentry spikes have been tested in the past? http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1582228&cid=31473292 Logged Jim Night Gator Full Member ***** Offline Posts: 3869 Location: Cape Canaveral Spaceport Re: X-37 to fly on a Atlas V in 2010 Reply #473 on: 03/14/2010 09:03 PM Quote from: neilh on 03/14/2010 08:30 PM I came across the following slashdot comment about the X-37 having an "ablative spike" (which seems to be in the WK2 photos). Anybody know anything more about this, if the comment below is nonsense, or if ablative reentry spikes have been tested in the past? There is no such thing on X-37. It is just some B S by someone incorrect Does the shuttle have one? Yes it did, it is a air data boom. Very common on new aircraft configs undergoing flight test. http://images.jsc.nasa.gov/luceneweb/fullimage.jsp?searchpage=true&keywords=enterprise&textsearch=Go&hitsperpage=30&pageno=2&photoId=S77-28140
I'm surprised that no-one has yet mentioned Kees Moeliker's paper "The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos" http://www.theregister.co.uk/2005/03/09/gay_duck_honour/
Years after I got rid of my Amstrad CPC I heard that it was actually a cut-down version of BBC Basic
Don't you know that the problem with GOTO was solved years ago with COMEFROM http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COMEFROM ;-)
Reminds me of the invention of Turbo Codes in the early Nineties for forward error correction for communication networks. It was later discovered that in the early Sixties, low density parity check (LDPC) coding was developed that performed a similar function but was not used because of the lack of computer power and memory back then. The LDCP patents had expired by then, so now there are two technologies doing the same thing in a different way but one is patent-free. In a similar vein, I read some years ago of a company in the UK who search through expired and current patents looking for inventions that meet their customers' needs. They would often find solutions in a totally different field to the area being researched and a lot of it was stuff that was ahead of its time and its technology had been abandoned.
Another space plane in the works is the X-37B which should be launched from an Atlas V rocket in April of this year. It is unmanned and looks very much like a miniature space shuttle with a V-tail. The USAF is being very secretive, but it will be solar-powered in orbit and be designed for long-duration flight, with a tiny cargo bay. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37
So, you are the captain of a traditional Native American object http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreamcatcher
Ha, maybe it will be a chance for a Slashdotter to get a girlfriend and to get lucky!!. Doing a Google search on Antarctica and "ice wives" brings up this site as well as a few others ;-). bigdeadplace.com/frontierwatch/?p=123
How the hell can we expect to send people on a multi-year round trip to Mars if we struggle to keep people alive and equipment functioning on a space station that's only about 200 miles away? If the ISS is disposed off prematurely we will lose a great opportunity to prepare for very-long duration space voyages.
Don't laugh, but there are rumours that the Russians are planning to disconnect their section from the rest of the ISS if it is abandoned, leaving them with their own mini space-station. They have the control rocket jets on their portion and some small folded-up solar panels; the Americans have the big solar panels on theirs. Even if the massive American solar panels are not free to rotate to follow the sun and the gyroscopes are not turning to keep the ISS oriented in the same position, I think that it would still be habitable at a much-reduced functionality.
Is that you Mike Jittlov? www.youtube.com/watch?v=GoLhLn9hVkE
Back in the 80's they had already predicted a much-more realistic robot in the movie Cherry 2000. www.youtube.com/watch?v=kckEEQKXaCU
Surely it's "nybble" not "nibble", next thing we will be talking about "bites" instead of "bytes"!!
New Zealand also has a major satellite communications spy base Waihopai, said to be part of ECHELON, a worldwide network of spy stations. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GCSB_Waihopai
You read my mind. I just posted a reply further back along the same lines.