4 launches still sounds amazingly inefficient to drop some people off - Apollo did it in one launch, for good reason. Anything more than two launches seems risky and poorly optimized. And no, landing on the moon isn't that challenging, but I'd be surprised if Bigelow has a base there by 2025. That sounds overly optimistic to me.
I guess I'm confused about your motivation in replying to my original post then... my whole contention is that 4 launches (much less 6) isn't remotely optimal for a boots-on-the-moon mission. Bigelow's plans for lots of launches for a moon base don't seem to be relevant because the trades, risks, and goals are totally different. Or, is Bigelow suggesting 4 launches for each group sent to the moon for a stay? That strikes me as a poorly thought out mission profile if so.
First the BA330 holds 6 ppl fine. With a tug, it can take them to the lunar orbit in just 3-4 days.
You are amazingly optimistic. First of all, water is indeed good shielding, but to survive something like a solar flare (the risk of which is quite large in a months-long mission) you would want to have something on the order of a meter or more thickness. That's not something the BA330 can support.
You're also talking about something fundamentally different from what the article is suggesting. Could four FH launches get people to a moon landing? Yes. Could four launches be sufficient for a 6-12 month stay on the moon? Not likely. And in either case, multi-launch mission profiles have lots of drawbacks, which was my original contention. If you're doing such a thing, at a minimum you need to have redundant launches prepped in case of a failure, otherwise your mission success probability takes a big hit.
Money and power are always and everywhere part of female attraction -- be it long term, or a quick hook-up.
How in the world is this modded insightful? "Always and everywhere?" Ever heard of the loser boyfriend who won't pay rent? There are so many counterexamples to your claim that it's just absurd.
Some women look for power or money in a mate. Some look for physical attractiveness, or creative ability - artists, musicians, writers all have a mystique for the opposite sex that's totally separate from power or money. Some look for kindness or the attributes that would make someone a good partner for raising kids.
The point is, the worldview touted above sounds like the skewed opinion of a recent and bitter divorcee. It's a shame because otherwise the post makes some good points.
First, lets say that you use a bigelow 330 unit to travel to the moon. It could be launched on an FH for 150 M. Then you have supplies for 6 ppl to last say 6-12 months. That would fit in a unit that could be attached to the ba's front. That is 1 FH launch. Now, add a tug with fuel which 1 FH can do. Finally, you send up a crew of 6 in an f9 and dragon.
Wait, what? Why would you send 6 people, and why would you send them for months? The Bigelow modules don't have nearly the radiation protection you would need... and are people going to be living in that on the moon's surface? That will require a substantial lander.
There's more to architecting a mission profile than just snapping together random components that fit within a mass budget.
For a single mission it certainly is. We did ONE big-ass launch for each Apollo mission. The problem with multiple launches is that your risk increases - each one carries with it some chance of failure, and if even one fails, the whole thing is scrapped. You've also got a ton of risky and complicated orbital rendezvous to pull off... Apollo only had to do it once for each mission.
Overall, this reeks of impracticality. This is something that COULD work, but I bet nobody's seriously planning on using this architecture.
Which you were choosing to exclude in your analysis - I just don't see the value in saying "the costs approach zero if you neglect the most expensive part of the equation." What does that add to the discussion?
Actually, you really just can. Even random rocks from space - not shaped for optimal entry shape, not cemented together by anything yet what nature chose to gie them - do this all the time.
Let's suppose some sort of railgun or other 'material return apparatus' that's worked into some sort of asteroid mining operation. Assume the payload is a solid slug of platinum, or otherwise highly refined and resilient metal. If you fire that straight at the Earth on a re-entry trajectory, sure, you could have it target some benign place in an ocean, or a desert. Regardless, though, this thing will end up having an enormous amount of kinetic energy... just something in LEO will be running greater than 17,000 MPH - these rocks aren't just going to be plopping into the ocean, you're talking about releasing the equivalent energy of a decent sized bomb with each one. There's plenty of space in the Pacific to do such a thing, but then you've got a massive metal slug on the bottom of the ocean floor - a difficult engineering problem itself. A land target seems even more problematic - it doesn't seem likely that something coming in with that sort of speed would hold together well, and even if it did, it would penetrate into the earth a fair way - so you would need a secondary mining operation if that was the case. So sure, you CAN return rocks straight to the Earth's surface, and have them survive (for varying values of 'survive') but the engineering challenges are still of the same order of complexity as on-orbit resource use or a controlled re-entry. I don't think that changes the calculus much.
Launch costs really are key to the rate of development at the very least, in that they limit the rate in which funding can be raised for the necessary exploratory and test craft to be launched. Even if the economics for operating a mine on a NEO works out really well at present launch costs, you have to prove that you can do it before you can raise the billions to build it. And to prove that you can do it you have to launch a number of missions while you're still relatively poorly funded. They face the same problem that Bigelow has faced - a probably reasonable business plan but the early phases hinging around factors that they don't control.
I agree with you there. Besides the direct impact on profitability of an established space business, there's a huge barrier to entry... it makes it hard for any new business model to get even the opportunity to prove itself.
I'm saying that there very well could be a compelling case for asteroid mining even without any radical changes in space technologies.
There certainly could be. Planetary Resources thinks so, and they have some serious expertise on their roster. I don't think we'll see a real "Space Age", though, until launch costs are addressed. I'm hopeful that reuse will be a substantial step in that direction, but honestly even then the complexity, inefficiency, and inherent danger of chemical rockets might never do the job. I for one would love to see a lot more research into alternatives (the Launch Loop is a personal favorite) but the investment problems there are magnified even compared to standard space access.
But the mining of NEOs could be as little as *zero* dollars per gram (excluding capital costs and maintenance), insomuch as it would be possible to fire sintered minerals (using solar power) via a coilgun onto an aerocapture trajectory.
You forgot to exclude operational expenses. And also didn't mention that you can't just lob chunks of metal straight to Earth's surface, and refined minerals in LEO aren't useful to anybody right now or for the foreseeable future. If they are going to re-enter you need at least some sort of return vehicle to control reentry, if they aren't then you need on-orbit factories for those to do any good. By your same logic, the mining of minerals on Earth would be zero dollars per gram if the equipment was solar powered and automated - that isn't the case, because fuel and drivers are a tiny fraction of the total cost of a mine.
There's no question that it will be economical to mine asteroids at some point, but the primary driver of this is launch costs. Planetary Resources exists because they believe the business case will close, and they are giving it a good shot, but given that we have only one small startup pursuing things right now, I suspect that it's still not obvious that the numbers will work out. Part of that is because there is so much uncertainty about the makeup of asteroids, how challenging the material will be to retrieve and what the real mineral densities are. But I guarantee you, if the cost of space access came down by an order of magnitude, as SpaceX is targeting, a lot of marginal business prospects become viable. That said, Planetary Resources might already be banking on that cost reduction, it's hard to say.
It does nobody any good to pretend that the lack of a space economy is because investors are cowards and morons that are just too narrow-minded to see the possibilities of space resources. The real problem is that boondoggles like SLS and the Shuttle before it cost the better part of a billion dollars for each and every launch, and that's been the primary model for space access historically. If people appreciate just how expensive this is, they'll stop advocating what amounts to a private jet to retrieve a $15 sweater, and instead start focusing on finding better transport. Things won't change until access gets cheap.
The point of the example wasn't to say that Apollo was focused on profit, or that the Moon is a good business proposition - it's to point out the fact that there are very few substances that are valuable enough, per gram, to make retrieval from space financially viable. It's not that a business case has been there all this time and everybody is too dumb to see it - it's that the business case hasn't been there because launch costs are too damn high.
I guess you fail to understand that the conservatives don't view those events as bad. To you, they were lessons in what not to do, but conservatives have learned other lessons.
Good point. First among them: war and xenophobia can always be exploited for profit and power.
I don't disagree with you. My point wasn't that conflict wouldn't exist without American intervention - it's that American intervention has been ineffective at best, and more often has made existing problems far worse.
You didn't respond directly to any of my points, although you used an ad-hominem and threw out a lot of tangentially related information. So, I'll just repeat what I said earlier.
How many people has Greenpeace killed? Non-violently interfering with business operations is something more socially disruptive than activism, but still a far cry from murdering people en masse. Lumping them into the same category as ISIS, et al isn't sensible.
You didn't explain how many people had been killed by Greenpeace. Nor did you rebut my point that the actions by these left-leaning groups are a fundamentally different kind of activity than what we see from ISIS and Al Qaeda. One is destroying property for a political cause, the other is crucifying, beheading, and burning people alive for the sake of spectacle.
You don't understand just how overwhelmingly expensive it is to get to space. Suppose the Moon was made of diamonds. Just big piles of diamonds, easy to pick up and bring back home.
Large, pure, high quality diamonds are worth about $65,000/gram. Someone did the math on the total cost to get us all the moon rocks we have... the cost in today's dollars to return those rocks works out to $281,000/gram.
Your business case doesn't even come close to breaking even. You lose over $200k for every gram fictional lunar diamond you bring home. That isn't to say that there will never be a business case to be made, but if things were as easy as you claim them to be, people would have been doing this long ago.
So, if people want to ever make money in space, it needs to become cheap. The right combo to get us there might be SpaceX working to make it inexpensive, combined with NASA providing the megabucks. Governments on their own haven't made any real progress on lowering the expense of access despite multiple serious attempts.
A conservative, by definition, values the lessons of history
You wouldn't know it by today's conservatives. They are calling for Muslim registration (sounds eerily of WWII concentration camps for Japanese-Americans), abandoning war refugees (the populace didn't want to accept Jewish refugees from Germany), continued American presence in the Middle East (which has arguably created much of this situation). What lessons are they heeding, exactly?
The conservative engineer determines that singing a song has been ineffective, while blowing the bastards up more reliably stops their influence.
Really? Terrorism has been effective in what ways, exactly? It produces tangible results in terms of dead people and international headlines, but what is really accomplished?
If Greenpeace extremists was your sample of terrorists, you'd find they tend to be liberal and have degrees in social sciences , environmental science, etc.
How many people has Greenpeace killed? Non-violently interfering with business operations is something more socially disruptive than activism, but still a far cry from murdering people en masse. Lumping them into the same category as ISIS, et al isn't sensible.
Not sure if this is sarcasm and I just missed it. They do say that parody of conservatism is often indistinguishable from the real thing.
I don't understand what you mean. The Falcon 1 did have a useful first stage.
There's no inherent size limit to what can be orbital and what can't. The Falcon 9 can put up a pretty hefty payload to orbit. The New Shepherd isn't nearly as powerful, but if the capsule was replaced with a small second stage and a smaller payload, there's likely a configuration available that could get something orbital.
Consider the cubesat launch platform that's basically just a big-ass missile hanging off a fighter jet. The New Shepherd could certainly lift that missile as an orbital second stage, if it replaced the passenger capsule. Possibly even something much bigger.
So, from that standpoint, the difference between New Shepherd and Falcon 9 is one of scale (which still make things very, very different) but it isn't pure orbital vs. suborbital. It's big suborbital booster versus small suborbital booster.
Good to know - that's the kind of thing that content providers could support very easily, but they've made the business decision to save bandwidth instead of making the viewing experience more flexible and user-friendly.
Flights that just pop up to the Karman line and back down are virtually nothing like flights that actually go to orbit.
To be fair, the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 doesn't go to orbit either. It does have a very substantial horizontal velocity component, it has to boost back to the launch site, and it does go about twice as fast as the New Shepherd did in this flight, so the SpaceX problem is more challenging, but there's more to the comparison than you might suspect initially. Consider: the New Shepherd could absolutely serve as a reusable first stage of an orbital vehicle, albeit with a much smaller payload than the Falcon 9.
I assume that the author means the only single-stage vehicle? Although that is probably giving him too much credit, since he conflated sub-orbital and orbital flight.
The backlash here is because the article's author claims "Jeff Bezos finally one-upped Elon Musk in space."
That's completely inaccurate. Jeff Bezos' sub-orbital landing is the commercial jingle to Elon Musk's five-movement symphony of orbital re-entry and landing. Anybody who is saying this feat is more impressive is just ignorant.
To be more technically correct, the author could have claimed that Bezos one-upped Scaled Composites and Spaceship One, which made sub-orbital spaceflights several years ago to claim the Ansari X-Prize, but even then he has only really replicated their accomplishment. So the point isn't that the New Shepherd isn't technically impressive (it is) or that sub-orbital spaceflight is easy (it isn't), but that the article is totally wrong in its comparison to SpaceX.
Did you ever think that it's not "stupid" but more related to customer preference?
What customer would EVER prefer that a paused video would not continue loading? Netflix, Youtube, Google Play, Vimeo - all of them stop downloading when you pause, which makes them unusable if your connection is slow for whatever reason - network congestion, bad wireless signal, etc.
I recently rented an online video from Google Play and demanded a refund, which I wouldn't have done if this feature existed... the video kept stopping to buffer every 30 seconds or so. That ruins a movie. If I could have left it alone for 20 minutes to load, and then watched the whole thing, it would have been fine. Google's choice to save bandwidth (or whatever their motivation is) cost them that sale.
So, there's no real "preference" at play here, unless your preference is for limited options. You can still stream it real time, the OP is asking that you also be allowed to download in one chunk when bandwidth is limited so you get a seamless viewing experience without frequent pauses to buffer.
I guess the question is what was meant to be implied by "Analog" in the context of the movie (and the real answer is they just needed some technobabble to explain why one robot was EMP immune and another one wasn't).
The thyratons are interesting - how would they be used for analog control? It looks like enough current can be sourced, but they can't be operated in a linear region so you're talking about switching still, which smells digital to me.
And, I don't doubt that analog components could be up to certain aspects of the job... a lot of controls problems can be solved quite elegantly with analog circuits, and what is a giant robot if not an incredibly complex series of controls problems?
The thing that really caught me as absurd was that this robot, built some time in our near future, would have been built *exclusively* with analog components, and that all the other existing mechs, built years or decades later, wouldn't have been. It's just preposterous. Not to mention, aside from all of the robotics hardware, you've got a fancy neural interface and a whole lot of display hardware - basically a whole lot of stuff where you would have to spend many orders of magnitude more to implement via analog design assuming it were even possible.
- EMP-type event not affecting one robot because it's nuclear powered.
Actually, this wasn't the reason given in the film. It was even better. Gypsy Danger was ANALOG, not digital, so that's why it survived the blast.
I would love to see the schematics for that thing's control boards, since they apparently don't have a single microcontroller in there, no memory, nothing. For some reason they decided to build the entire robot with 1930's technology. Not to mention, how are they modulating the power to all the insane motors they must have all over the place? The world's largest potentiometers?
Myself and a few other robotics/physics nerds watched this one in the theater and the hilarity of that scene alone was well worth the ticket price.
Exactly right. It only takes a few statements to this effect to totally undermine all the positive PR work Nye has done for science. The fastest way to produce anti-intellectualism is for intellectuals to go around insulting people for being ignorant and denigrating their harmless pastimes.
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4 launches still sounds amazingly inefficient to drop some people off - Apollo did it in one launch, for good reason. Anything more than two launches seems risky and poorly optimized. And no, landing on the moon isn't that challenging, but I'd be surprised if Bigelow has a base there by 2025. That sounds overly optimistic to me.
I guess I'm confused about your motivation in replying to my original post then... my whole contention is that 4 launches (much less 6) isn't remotely optimal for a boots-on-the-moon mission. Bigelow's plans for lots of launches for a moon base don't seem to be relevant because the trades, risks, and goals are totally different. Or, is Bigelow suggesting 4 launches for each group sent to the moon for a stay? That strikes me as a poorly thought out mission profile if so.
First the BA330 holds 6 ppl fine. With a tug, it can take them to the lunar orbit in just 3-4 days.
You are amazingly optimistic. First of all, water is indeed good shielding, but to survive something like a solar flare (the risk of which is quite large in a months-long mission) you would want to have something on the order of a meter or more thickness. That's not something the BA330 can support.
You're also talking about something fundamentally different from what the article is suggesting. Could four FH launches get people to a moon landing? Yes. Could four launches be sufficient for a 6-12 month stay on the moon? Not likely. And in either case, multi-launch mission profiles have lots of drawbacks, which was my original contention. If you're doing such a thing, at a minimum you need to have redundant launches prepped in case of a failure, otherwise your mission success probability takes a big hit.
Commenting to undue mod. Should have been insightful instead of redundant. Good point!
Money and power are always and everywhere part of female attraction -- be it long term, or a quick hook-up.
How in the world is this modded insightful? "Always and everywhere?" Ever heard of the loser boyfriend who won't pay rent? There are so many counterexamples to your claim that it's just absurd.
Some women look for power or money in a mate. Some look for physical attractiveness, or creative ability - artists, musicians, writers all have a mystique for the opposite sex that's totally separate from power or money. Some look for kindness or the attributes that would make someone a good partner for raising kids.
The point is, the worldview touted above sounds like the skewed opinion of a recent and bitter divorcee. It's a shame because otherwise the post makes some good points.
First, lets say that you use a bigelow 330 unit to travel to the moon. It could be launched on an FH for 150 M. Then you have supplies for 6 ppl to last say 6-12 months. That would fit in a unit that could be attached to the ba's front. That is 1 FH launch. Now, add a tug with fuel which 1 FH can do. Finally, you send up a crew of 6 in an f9 and dragon.
Wait, what? Why would you send 6 people, and why would you send them for months? The Bigelow modules don't have nearly the radiation protection you would need... and are people going to be living in that on the moon's surface? That will require a substantial lander.
There's more to architecting a mission profile than just snapping together random components that fit within a mass budget.
6 launches isn't complex.
For a single mission it certainly is. We did ONE big-ass launch for each Apollo mission. The problem with multiple launches is that your risk increases - each one carries with it some chance of failure, and if even one fails, the whole thing is scrapped. You've also got a ton of risky and complicated orbital rendezvous to pull off... Apollo only had to do it once for each mission.
Overall, this reeks of impracticality. This is something that COULD work, but I bet nobody's seriously planning on using this architecture.
Which you were choosing to exclude in your analysis - I just don't see the value in saying "the costs approach zero if you neglect the most expensive part of the equation." What does that add to the discussion?
Let's suppose some sort of railgun or other 'material return apparatus' that's worked into some sort of asteroid mining operation. Assume the payload is a solid slug of platinum, or otherwise highly refined and resilient metal. If you fire that straight at the Earth on a re-entry trajectory, sure, you could have it target some benign place in an ocean, or a desert. Regardless, though, this thing will end up having an enormous amount of kinetic energy... just something in LEO will be running greater than 17,000 MPH - these rocks aren't just going to be plopping into the ocean, you're talking about releasing the equivalent energy of a decent sized bomb with each one. There's plenty of space in the Pacific to do such a thing, but then you've got a massive metal slug on the bottom of the ocean floor - a difficult engineering problem itself. A land target seems even more problematic - it doesn't seem likely that something coming in with that sort of speed would hold together well, and even if it did, it would penetrate into the earth a fair way - so you would need a secondary mining operation if that was the case. So sure, you CAN return rocks straight to the Earth's surface, and have them survive (for varying values of 'survive') but the engineering challenges are still of the same order of complexity as on-orbit resource use or a controlled re-entry. I don't think that changes the calculus much.
I agree with you there. Besides the direct impact on profitability of an established space business, there's a huge barrier to entry... it makes it hard for any new business model to get even the opportunity to prove itself.
There certainly could be. Planetary Resources thinks so, and they have some serious expertise on their roster. I don't think we'll see a real "Space Age", though, until launch costs are addressed. I'm hopeful that reuse will be a substantial step in that direction, but honestly even then the complexity, inefficiency, and inherent danger of chemical rockets might never do the job. I for one would love to see a lot more research into alternatives (the Launch Loop is a personal favorite) but the investment problems there are magnified even compared to standard space access.
But the mining of NEOs could be as little as *zero* dollars per gram (excluding capital costs and maintenance), insomuch as it would be possible to fire sintered minerals (using solar power) via a coilgun onto an aerocapture trajectory.
You forgot to exclude operational expenses. And also didn't mention that you can't just lob chunks of metal straight to Earth's surface, and refined minerals in LEO aren't useful to anybody right now or for the foreseeable future. If they are going to re-enter you need at least some sort of return vehicle to control reentry, if they aren't then you need on-orbit factories for those to do any good. By your same logic, the mining of minerals on Earth would be zero dollars per gram if the equipment was solar powered and automated - that isn't the case, because fuel and drivers are a tiny fraction of the total cost of a mine.
There's no question that it will be economical to mine asteroids at some point, but the primary driver of this is launch costs. Planetary Resources exists because they believe the business case will close, and they are giving it a good shot, but given that we have only one small startup pursuing things right now, I suspect that it's still not obvious that the numbers will work out. Part of that is because there is so much uncertainty about the makeup of asteroids, how challenging the material will be to retrieve and what the real mineral densities are. But I guarantee you, if the cost of space access came down by an order of magnitude, as SpaceX is targeting, a lot of marginal business prospects become viable. That said, Planetary Resources might already be banking on that cost reduction, it's hard to say.
It does nobody any good to pretend that the lack of a space economy is because investors are cowards and morons that are just too narrow-minded to see the possibilities of space resources. The real problem is that boondoggles like SLS and the Shuttle before it cost the better part of a billion dollars for each and every launch, and that's been the primary model for space access historically. If people appreciate just how expensive this is, they'll stop advocating what amounts to a private jet to retrieve a $15 sweater, and instead start focusing on finding better transport. Things won't change until access gets cheap.
Furthermore, who's focused on mining the moon?
The point of the example wasn't to say that Apollo was focused on profit, or that the Moon is a good business proposition - it's to point out the fact that there are very few substances that are valuable enough, per gram, to make retrieval from space financially viable. It's not that a business case has been there all this time and everybody is too dumb to see it - it's that the business case hasn't been there because launch costs are too damn high.
I guess you fail to understand that the conservatives don't view those events as bad. To you, they were lessons in what not to do, but conservatives have learned other lessons.
Good point. First among them: war and xenophobia can always be exploited for profit and power.
I don't disagree with you. My point wasn't that conflict wouldn't exist without American intervention - it's that American intervention has been ineffective at best, and more often has made existing problems far worse.
You didn't respond directly to any of my points, although you used an ad-hominem and threw out a lot of tangentially related information. So, I'll just repeat what I said earlier.
How many people has Greenpeace killed? Non-violently interfering with business operations is something more socially disruptive than activism, but still a far cry from murdering people en masse. Lumping them into the same category as ISIS, et al isn't sensible.
You didn't explain how many people had been killed by Greenpeace. Nor did you rebut my point that the actions by these left-leaning groups are a fundamentally different kind of activity than what we see from ISIS and Al Qaeda. One is destroying property for a political cause, the other is crucifying, beheading, and burning people alive for the sake of spectacle.
You don't understand just how overwhelmingly expensive it is to get to space. Suppose the Moon was made of diamonds. Just big piles of diamonds, easy to pick up and bring back home.
Large, pure, high quality diamonds are worth about $65,000/gram. Someone did the math on the total cost to get us all the moon rocks we have... the cost in today's dollars to return those rocks works out to $281,000/gram.
Your business case doesn't even come close to breaking even. You lose over $200k for every gram fictional lunar diamond you bring home. That isn't to say that there will never be a business case to be made, but if things were as easy as you claim them to be, people would have been doing this long ago.
So, if people want to ever make money in space, it needs to become cheap. The right combo to get us there might be SpaceX working to make it inexpensive, combined with NASA providing the megabucks. Governments on their own haven't made any real progress on lowering the expense of access despite multiple serious attempts.
How the hell is this modded insightful?
A conservative, by definition, values the lessons of history
You wouldn't know it by today's conservatives. They are calling for Muslim registration (sounds eerily of WWII concentration camps for Japanese-Americans), abandoning war refugees (the populace didn't want to accept Jewish refugees from Germany), continued American presence in the Middle East (which has arguably created much of this situation). What lessons are they heeding, exactly?
The conservative engineer determines that singing a song has been ineffective, while blowing the bastards up more reliably stops their influence.
Really? Terrorism has been effective in what ways, exactly? It produces tangible results in terms of dead people and international headlines, but what is really accomplished?
If Greenpeace extremists was your sample of terrorists, you'd find they tend to be liberal and have degrees in social sciences , environmental science, etc.
How many people has Greenpeace killed? Non-violently interfering with business operations is something more socially disruptive than activism, but still a far cry from murdering people en masse. Lumping them into the same category as ISIS, et al isn't sensible.
Not sure if this is sarcasm and I just missed it. They do say that parody of conservatism is often indistinguishable from the real thing.
I don't understand what you mean. The Falcon 1 did have a useful first stage.
There's no inherent size limit to what can be orbital and what can't. The Falcon 9 can put up a pretty hefty payload to orbit. The New Shepherd isn't nearly as powerful, but if the capsule was replaced with a small second stage and a smaller payload, there's likely a configuration available that could get something orbital.
Consider the cubesat launch platform that's basically just a big-ass missile hanging off a fighter jet. The New Shepherd could certainly lift that missile as an orbital second stage, if it replaced the passenger capsule. Possibly even something much bigger.
So, from that standpoint, the difference between New Shepherd and Falcon 9 is one of scale (which still make things very, very different) but it isn't pure orbital vs. suborbital. It's big suborbital booster versus small suborbital booster.
Good to know - that's the kind of thing that content providers could support very easily, but they've made the business decision to save bandwidth instead of making the viewing experience more flexible and user-friendly.
Flights that just pop up to the Karman line and back down are virtually nothing like flights that actually go to orbit.
To be fair, the first stage of the SpaceX Falcon 9 doesn't go to orbit either. It does have a very substantial horizontal velocity component, it has to boost back to the launch site, and it does go about twice as fast as the New Shepherd did in this flight, so the SpaceX problem is more challenging, but there's more to the comparison than you might suspect initially. Consider: the New Shepherd could absolutely serve as a reusable first stage of an orbital vehicle, albeit with a much smaller payload than the Falcon 9.
I assume that the author means the only single-stage vehicle? Although that is probably giving him too much credit, since he conflated sub-orbital and orbital flight.
The backlash here is because the article's author claims "Jeff Bezos finally one-upped Elon Musk in space."
That's completely inaccurate. Jeff Bezos' sub-orbital landing is the commercial jingle to Elon Musk's five-movement symphony of orbital re-entry and landing. Anybody who is saying this feat is more impressive is just ignorant.
To be more technically correct, the author could have claimed that Bezos one-upped Scaled Composites and Spaceship One, which made sub-orbital spaceflights several years ago to claim the Ansari X-Prize, but even then he has only really replicated their accomplishment. So the point isn't that the New Shepherd isn't technically impressive (it is) or that sub-orbital spaceflight is easy (it isn't), but that the article is totally wrong in its comparison to SpaceX.
Did you ever think that it's not "stupid" but more related to customer preference?
What customer would EVER prefer that a paused video would not continue loading? Netflix, Youtube, Google Play, Vimeo - all of them stop downloading when you pause, which makes them unusable if your connection is slow for whatever reason - network congestion, bad wireless signal, etc.
I recently rented an online video from Google Play and demanded a refund, which I wouldn't have done if this feature existed... the video kept stopping to buffer every 30 seconds or so. That ruins a movie. If I could have left it alone for 20 minutes to load, and then watched the whole thing, it would have been fine. Google's choice to save bandwidth (or whatever their motivation is) cost them that sale.
So, there's no real "preference" at play here, unless your preference is for limited options. You can still stream it real time, the OP is asking that you also be allowed to download in one chunk when bandwidth is limited so you get a seamless viewing experience without frequent pauses to buffer.
I guess the question is what was meant to be implied by "Analog" in the context of the movie (and the real answer is they just needed some technobabble to explain why one robot was EMP immune and another one wasn't).
The thyratons are interesting - how would they be used for analog control? It looks like enough current can be sourced, but they can't be operated in a linear region so you're talking about switching still, which smells digital to me.
And, I don't doubt that analog components could be up to certain aspects of the job... a lot of controls problems can be solved quite elegantly with analog circuits, and what is a giant robot if not an incredibly complex series of controls problems?
The thing that really caught me as absurd was that this robot, built some time in our near future, would have been built *exclusively* with analog components, and that all the other existing mechs, built years or decades later, wouldn't have been. It's just preposterous. Not to mention, aside from all of the robotics hardware, you've got a fancy neural interface and a whole lot of display hardware - basically a whole lot of stuff where you would have to spend many orders of magnitude more to implement via analog design assuming it were even possible.
- EMP-type event not affecting one robot because it's nuclear powered.
Actually, this wasn't the reason given in the film. It was even better. Gypsy Danger was ANALOG, not digital, so that's why it survived the blast.
I would love to see the schematics for that thing's control boards, since they apparently don't have a single microcontroller in there, no memory, nothing. For some reason they decided to build the entire robot with 1930's technology. Not to mention, how are they modulating the power to all the insane motors they must have all over the place? The world's largest potentiometers?
Myself and a few other robotics/physics nerds watched this one in the theater and the hilarity of that scene alone was well worth the ticket price.
Exactly right. It only takes a few statements to this effect to totally undermine all the positive PR work Nye has done for science. The fastest way to produce anti-intellectualism is for intellectuals to go around insulting people for being ignorant and denigrating their harmless pastimes.
Science needs better representatives.
"NASA has suggested that the exploration of space is like NASCAR only with rocket ships ..." ... which always turn left.
Sounds a lot like an orbit.