Even the cleanest fuels like hydrogen + oxygen liquid engine generate a shedload of nitric oxides
In a word, bullshit.
There's certainly no nitrogen in the propellants. And the engines run too hydrogen-rich for any O2-N2 reactions in the surrounding air to happen. Even if not, a single lightning strike would generate more nitric oxides than a launch.
If you're making up your data on that point, what else are you making up your data on?
As for manned space flight, Scaled Composites flight was nowhere close to real space flight. They flew into space, they didn't really fly in space. Orbital, manned flight is a far more complicated affair
Right, that's why NASA spent all those years on development between the Shepard and Grissom suborbital Mercury flights and Glenn's (and subsequen) orbital flights. Oh wait, that was only seven months.
I know, that was why the Soviets spent years of development improving their sub-orbital Vostok... oh wait, that didn't happen either.
The only difference between suborbital and orbital flight is that you have to go up a little faster, and you come down faster. The really complicated issues involving zero-G, vacuum and radiation environments are the same. Beef up the heat shielding and strap on a bigger booster. Forty-five year old technology.
When a private company can put something into orbit like nasa does, call me
What, you mean like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and Orbital Services? Hello? Who do you think routinely puts things in orbit for the likes of your friendly neighborhood satellite TV, communications, or global imaging company?
They're not manned because they don't need to be. Although in Lockheed's case, the LV's are derived from vehicle designs (Atlas, Titan) that were used for manned launches 45 years ago.
NASA doesn't - except for a few experimental vehicles - build its own custom cars or airplanes. It's employees get around using standard automobiles and flying commercial airlines. Why should trips to space - Earth orbit, at least - be any different?
Sure, missions designated for vehicle R & D or back to the Moon may be different, but we've been putting people in LEO for nearly 50 years now. The Shuttle is 30 years old, for crying out loud. Pay Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin or Rocketplane or even the Russians for tickets for routine trips. (And yes, I know the former aren't yet offering orbital trips. How fast do you think that could change if Shuttle is no more and NASA's offering a few $million a seat for rides? Where would we be now if they'd started doing that fifteen years ago?)
(Hey, MGM could re-release "2001: A Space Odyssey" as "2041" with the Pan-Am logo digitally swapped for Virgin Galactic's. That's about the only change needed. Sigh.)
That's 11% of theatrical releases! Could you imagine if a retail store had an 11% shrink rate?
Faulty comparison. For that to be valid, then after somebody camcords a movie, nobody pays ticket price any more. Taking something off a retail store shelf makes that particular item unavailable for anyone else to buy, so it is a real loss. A cam copy may cut in to movie ticket sales slightly, but it doesn't make the movie no longer available in the theatre.
You'd have a somewhat better comparison (although still flawed) if pirates were holding up the theatres and stealing the reels of film.
If books were still popular, I might have mistakenly typed the BPAA (imaginary Book Publishers Association of America).
That would probably be the ABA, the American Booksellers Association. They intimidate even the publishers. (In how many other industries can the retailer get a refund on units ordered just by ripping off the cover (boxtop, whatever) and sending that back?) Not that all publishers are saints (some are, but the bigger houses tend to be like corporations everywhere).
And books are still popular. Readership statistics really haven't changed much in the last hundred or so years. Distribution models -- as with other industries -- are a mess, though.
Considering the number of religions that have critical holy days dependant upon phases of the Moon, it might certainly be a challenge to sustain those on the Moon. You'd have to keep calling Earth ("can you see me now?") to check. It gets worse as you get further out, of course.
(If you're on the Lunar equator in the middle of the side facing Earth, then Earth is directly overhead. How do pray towards Mecca? Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Spring Equinox -- although that can be calculated in advance. And so on...)
Live on the moon in 1/6th gravity. Never come to Earth again. Ridiculously expensive to have family and friends visit. Possible long term health consequences, possible heath effect for children, if children are even a possiblity.
I know many people who would take up that offer. Not everyone is a wimp.
There's a plaque honoring pioneers. It says "The cowards never even started. The weak died along the way. Only the strong survived. These were the pioneers."
Of course there's another alternative. Heinlein wrote about it in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and he got the idea from Australia's Botany Bay: penal colony.
There's nothing magic about moon dust and seals. Moon dust is highly abrasive because it has a lot of sharp edges -- it doesn't get abraded much by wind and water action, after all. There are lots of techniques for dealing with it now that we know the problem exists. (Blowing it off, electrostatics, harder or self-healing seals, etc.)
I've even seen a design for a doorless airlock, although that one requires a lot of vacuum oil. (Think "p-trap".)
I know you were just making a joke... but objects of any size can become black holes, including individual protons.
No, he's referring to the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit - a neutron star above 3 solar masses will collapse to a black hole (or possibly a quark star), similar to Chandrasekhar's limit (about 1.44 solar masses) for forming a white dwarf. (Although because large stars blow off matter as they go through the changes, the starting mass for the star has to be better than about 8 solar masses.)
A proton couldn't become a black hole, its Schwarzschild radius is far less than a Planck length. It's generally considered that the smallest mass that can become a black hole (radius equal to the Planck length) is about 21.77 micrograms, called the Planck mass.
Okay, there's two things that could consume power in an ethernet connection: maintaining the circuit at a given voltage level (ie steady state), and switching the signal (ie, sending a bit, modulo whatever encoding scheme is used).
For a given chunk of data -- email, text message, video clip, whatever -- you have a certain number of bits which is going to require a certain number of signal switches, whether you do those at 10M/sec or 1000M/sec. So, no energy savings there.
You also need to keep the circuit open, regardless of whether or not you're sending a signal over it. (Unless you want to try syncronizing the connection times: "call me every 7 minutes past the hour" or something. Not very practical). No energy savings there either.
So how, exactly, do they figure this is energy saving? (If anything, the extra bits sent for negotiation make it worse, no?)
I would have thought a phased conformal antenna array, "steered" electronically. Less drag, and the technology has been around for years. No mechanical parts to mess up, either.
IIRC WLAN client cards modulate their output power based on incoming signal strength, so the clients would have lowered their transmit power to match.
I'm not saying you're wrong -- I've seen crazier things -- but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If an incoming signal is weak because of distance, say, wouldn't it make more sense for the client to increase transmit power to be sure of reaching the AP?
Is there some sort of "let's lower our power until we can't hear each other and then raise it a notch" negotiation going on? (Which would make sense in a "minimum power for the job" sense, but sounds way too cooperative.)
1. All amendments are voted on. It's impossible for any one person to amend a bill.
That's the theory, anyway. In fact whatever clerk typing up the revised bill can change a few words here and there. It's been known to happen, and it's not like the congresscritters actually read the bills they're voting on.
(Of course major changes aren't going to happen this way.)
The states really need to figure out how to STOP giving the Feds. monies that the Feds turn back around and blackmail the states with like this ID and other laws.
If the Feds keep piling on the unfunded mandates (at e.g. the threat of withholding highway funds), sooner or later states are going to figure that it's cheaper for them to ignore the mandates and tell the Feds where to stick their highway dollars.
two similar things ("opposition to government funding of science" and "opposition to science") are compared.
You seem confused. How are they similar?
Many people are opposed to government spending any money, since they take that money (by threat of force -- consider what happens if you don't pay taxes) from the citizenry. Most of those people have no problem with science per se, especially if private individuals (or corporations) are spending their own money (or money freely given to them) to do it. Science has been around a lot longer than government funding of it, and historically has often done better without government strings attached (although this may be more in the technology development arena).
but Titanium supplies are pretty tight, and mostly eaten up by aerospace.
That's changing. The new FFC process for electrochemically refining titanium will likely replace the cumbersome Kroll batch process, and do for titanium what the Hall process did for aluminum. (Before the Hall process, refining of aluminum was done chemically and was so difficult that aluminum was considered a precious metal.)
Man has walked on the moon, so there is proof in that concept. How come it isn't cheaper now?
I have no doubt it would be, if the assembly lines for Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft were still open. Some of the technologies have vastly improved in the last forty years.
One can do almost anything with a virtually unlimited budget.
How about a proof-of-concept antigravity or faster-than-light drive, then? Or even -- within theoretical bounds now -- a Mr. Fusion type power source? I can think of plenty of demands for the latter even at several million dollars each.
Sure it's not cost effective. Prototypes and one-offs rarely are.
As a proof-of-concept, though, it's highly successful. This guy is demonstrating, not just hand-waving, that one can be entirely energy self-sufficient through solar power, even with the crappy efficiency of current mass produced photovoltaic panels.
Find a way to increase the efficiency and/or drop the price of the panels (and H2 storage system, fuel cells, etc) and it starts to look really attractive. More so if you want to build somewhere way off-grid. And without some of the attendant problems of a windmill.
The next time somebody argues that you can't live off-grid just on solar power, you can point to this guy. Then the argument comes down to cost-effectiveness, which depends on a lot of other factors.
PS. Of course technically, even a Bussard ramjet (aka ramscoop) is "rocket" technology in that it gets its thrust by pushing matter out the back at high speed, so I'll give you that.
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Even the cleanest fuels like hydrogen + oxygen liquid engine generate a shedload of nitric oxides
In a word, bullshit.
There's certainly no nitrogen in the propellants. And the engines run too hydrogen-rich for any O2-N2 reactions in the surrounding air to happen. Even if not, a single lightning strike would generate more nitric oxides than a launch.
If you're making up your data on that point, what else are you making up your data on?
As for manned space flight, Scaled Composites flight was nowhere close to real space flight. They flew into space, they didn't really fly in space. Orbital, manned flight is a far more complicated affair
... oh wait, that didn't happen either.
Right, that's why NASA spent all those years on development between the Shepard and Grissom suborbital Mercury flights and Glenn's (and subsequen) orbital flights. Oh wait, that was only seven months.
I know, that was why the Soviets spent years of development improving their sub-orbital Vostok
The only difference between suborbital and orbital flight is that you have to go up a little faster, and you come down faster. The really complicated issues involving zero-G, vacuum and radiation environments are the same. Beef up the heat shielding and strap on a bigger booster. Forty-five year old technology.
When a private company can put something into orbit like nasa does, call me
What, you mean like Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, and Orbital Services? Hello? Who do you think routinely puts things in orbit for the likes of your friendly neighborhood satellite TV, communications, or global imaging company?
They're not manned because they don't need to be. Although in Lockheed's case, the LV's are derived from vehicle designs (Atlas, Titan) that were used for manned launches 45 years ago.
NASA doesn't - except for a few experimental vehicles - build its own custom cars or airplanes. It's employees get around using standard automobiles and flying commercial airlines. Why should trips to space - Earth orbit, at least - be any different?
Sure, missions designated for vehicle R & D or back to the Moon may be different, but we've been putting people in LEO for nearly 50 years now. The Shuttle is 30 years old, for crying out loud. Pay Virgin Galactic or Blue Origin or Rocketplane or even the Russians for tickets for routine trips. (And yes, I know the former aren't yet offering orbital trips. How fast do you think that could change if Shuttle is no more and NASA's offering a few $million a seat for rides? Where would we be now if they'd started doing that fifteen years ago?)
(Hey, MGM could re-release "2001: A Space Odyssey" as "2041" with the Pan-Am logo digitally swapped for Virgin Galactic's. That's about the only change needed. Sigh.)
By percentage. And it might not cheer them up, the fact is that - in the US anyway - readers have never made up a huge percentage of the population.
The stats were mentioned recently in a post on the Baen Books web forum, sorry I don't recall the exact location.
That's 11% of theatrical releases! Could you imagine if a retail store had an 11% shrink rate?
Faulty comparison. For that to be valid, then after somebody camcords a movie, nobody pays ticket price any more. Taking something off a retail store shelf makes that particular item unavailable for anyone else to buy, so it is a real loss. A cam copy may cut in to movie ticket sales slightly, but it doesn't make the movie no longer available in the theatre.
You'd have a somewhat better comparison (although still flawed) if pirates were holding up the theatres and stealing the reels of film.
If books were still popular, I might have mistakenly typed the BPAA (imaginary Book Publishers Association of America).
That would probably be the ABA, the American Booksellers Association. They intimidate even the publishers. (In how many other industries can the retailer get a refund on units ordered just by ripping off the cover (boxtop, whatever) and sending that back?) Not that all publishers are saints (some are, but the bigger houses tend to be like corporations everywhere).
And books are still popular. Readership statistics really haven't changed much in the last hundred or so years. Distribution models -- as with other industries -- are a mess, though.
There isn't any magic spell that has been cast to make programmers more stupid or make compilers worse over the last twenty years.
Really? Then how do you explain Windows?
Considering the number of religions that have critical holy days dependant upon phases of the Moon, it might certainly be a challenge to sustain those on the Moon. You'd have to keep calling Earth ("can you see me now?") to check. It gets worse as you get further out, of course.
(If you're on the Lunar equator in the middle of the side facing Earth, then Earth is directly overhead. How do pray towards Mecca? Easter falls on the first Sunday after the first full Moon after the Spring Equinox -- although that can be calculated in advance. And so on...)
Live on the moon in 1/6th gravity. Never come to Earth again. Ridiculously expensive to have family and friends visit. Possible long term health consequences, possible heath effect for children, if children are even a possiblity.
I know many people who would take up that offer. Not everyone is a wimp.
There's a plaque honoring pioneers. It says "The cowards never even started. The weak died along the way. Only the strong survived. These were the pioneers."
Of course there's another alternative. Heinlein wrote about it in "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress", and he got the idea from Australia's Botany Bay: penal colony.
There's nothing magic about moon dust and seals. Moon dust is highly abrasive because it has a lot of sharp edges -- it doesn't get abraded much by wind and water action, after all. There are lots of techniques for dealing with it now that we know the problem exists. (Blowing it off, electrostatics, harder or self-healing seals, etc.)
I've even seen a design for a doorless airlock, although that one requires a lot of vacuum oil. (Think "p-trap".)
I know you were just making a joke ... but objects of any size can become black holes, including individual protons.
No, he's referring to the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit - a neutron star above 3 solar masses will collapse to a black hole (or possibly a quark star), similar to Chandrasekhar's limit (about 1.44 solar masses) for forming a white dwarf. (Although because large stars blow off matter as they go through the changes, the starting mass for the star has to be better than about 8 solar masses.)
A proton couldn't become a black hole, its Schwarzschild radius is far less than a Planck length. It's generally considered that the smallest mass that can become a black hole (radius equal to the Planck length) is about 21.77 micrograms, called the Planck mass.
Okay, there's two things that could consume power in an ethernet connection: maintaining the circuit at a given voltage level (ie steady state), and switching the signal (ie, sending a bit, modulo whatever encoding scheme is used).
For a given chunk of data -- email, text message, video clip, whatever -- you have a certain number of bits which is going to require a certain number of signal switches, whether you do those at 10M/sec or 1000M/sec. So, no energy savings there.
You also need to keep the circuit open, regardless of whether or not you're sending a signal over it. (Unless you want to try syncronizing the connection times: "call me every 7 minutes past the hour" or something. Not very practical). No energy savings there either.
So how, exactly, do they figure this is energy saving? (If anything, the extra bits sent for negotiation make it worse, no?)
(pronounced 'G-Z-One')
That's "gee-zed-one", right?
Usually a rotating antenna
I would have thought a phased conformal antenna array, "steered" electronically. Less drag, and the technology has been around for years. No mechanical parts to mess up, either.
IIRC WLAN client cards modulate their output power based on incoming signal strength, so the clients would have lowered their transmit power to match.
I'm not saying you're wrong -- I've seen crazier things -- but that doesn't make a lot of sense to me. If an incoming signal is weak because of distance, say, wouldn't it make more sense for the client to increase transmit power to be sure of reaching the AP?
Is there some sort of "let's lower our power until we can't hear each other and then raise it a notch" negotiation going on? (Which would make sense in a "minimum power for the job" sense, but sounds way too cooperative.)
1. All amendments are voted on. It's impossible for any one person to amend a bill.
That's the theory, anyway. In fact whatever clerk typing up the revised bill can change a few words here and there. It's been known to happen, and it's not like the congresscritters actually read the bills they're voting on.
(Of course major changes aren't going to happen this way.)
The states really need to figure out how to STOP giving the Feds. monies that the Feds turn back around and blackmail the states with like this ID and other laws.
If the Feds keep piling on the unfunded mandates (at e.g. the threat of withholding highway funds), sooner or later states are going to figure that it's cheaper for them to ignore the mandates and tell the Feds where to stick their highway dollars.
Or so we can hope, anyway.
But what I and thousands of other space enthusiasts want to know is; "Is there water on Mars?"
And the answer is the same as it has been for decades: YES. You can see it from Earth, if you have a good telescope.
The permanent Martian polar caps are water ice. In the winter hemisphere they get bigger because of the CO2 ("dry") ice on top of the water ice
Sheesh. The only thing exciting about water elsewhere on Mars (geological history implications aside) is that you won't have to haul it as far.
what is wrong with a national ID standard
Please point out the section of the Constitution that authorizes the Federal government to require this.
And don't say "Commerce clause".
two similar things ("opposition to government funding of science" and "opposition to science") are compared.
You seem confused. How are they similar?
Many people are opposed to government spending any money, since they take that money (by threat of force -- consider what happens if you don't pay taxes) from the citizenry. Most of those people have no problem with science per se, especially if private individuals (or corporations) are spending their own money (or money freely given to them) to do it. Science has been around a lot longer than government funding of it, and historically has often done better without government strings attached (although this may be more in the technology development arena).
but Titanium supplies are pretty tight, and mostly eaten up by aerospace.
That's changing. The new FFC process for electrochemically refining titanium will likely replace the cumbersome Kroll batch process, and do for titanium what the Hall process did for aluminum. (Before the Hall process, refining of aluminum was done chemically and was so difficult that aluminum was considered a precious metal.)
Man has walked on the moon, so there is proof in that concept. How come it isn't cheaper now?
I have no doubt it would be, if the assembly lines for Saturn V and the Apollo spacecraft were still open. Some of the technologies have vastly improved in the last forty years.
One can do almost anything with a virtually unlimited budget.
How about a proof-of-concept antigravity or faster-than-light drive, then? Or even -- within theoretical bounds now -- a Mr. Fusion type power source? I can think of plenty of demands for the latter even at several million dollars each.
Sure it's not cost effective. Prototypes and one-offs rarely are.
As a proof-of-concept, though, it's highly successful. This guy is demonstrating, not just hand-waving, that one can be entirely energy self-sufficient through solar power, even with the crappy efficiency of current mass produced photovoltaic panels.
Find a way to increase the efficiency and/or drop the price of the panels (and H2 storage system, fuel cells, etc) and it starts to look really attractive. More so if you want to build somewhere way off-grid. And without some of the attendant problems of a windmill.
The next time somebody argues that you can't live off-grid just on solar power, you can point to this guy. Then the argument comes down to cost-effectiveness, which depends on a lot of other factors.
PS. Of course technically, even a Bussard ramjet (aka ramscoop) is "rocket" technology in that it gets its thrust by pushing matter out the back at high speed, so I'll give you that.