It's cheaper to have smaller engines, when done right. First, they only need one type of engine. Most rockets use a different kind of engine for each stage. Those engines are build painstakingly by hand. ESA needs a Vulcain 2 engine every two months. Even steps that could be automated are simply not worth the investment at that rate.
If you build 10 or 28 engines per rocket, launching on the order of 10 rockets or more per year, you'll need another engine every day or every other day of the week. That's when investing in specialized equipment actually starts to make sense and will improve the quality, while reducing the overhead of quality assurance (once the production line has been properly set up, which will take a while to do).
Of course, at some point this will go the other way. Build your engines too small and they will be too heavy and reliability starts to become a major issue - as it was in the 1960/70ies. But given enough time (this is not a race to the moon!), reliabiliy should be no problem. Falcon 9 launched 3 times already without any engine troubles in-flight.
The list wasn't complete. And there really is no point even thinking about the Delta IV Heavy when it comes to commercial launches because of the cost. ($400mio or is it more already? It's at least twice as expensive as an Ariane 5. And that's not counting any of the money paid to the ULA just to keep the Delta IV available for military launches or its development cost.)
This might sound strange, but guys like Intelsat avoid building satellites that can only be launched by one kind of rocket if in any way possible. Most geostationary satellites today cluster around 6 tons. This is the limit for the Russian Proton rocket (launched from Baikonur), the Ukranian/Russian/American SeaLaunch (using a Zenit rocket) and was the limit of the Ariane5 GS (which has been upgraded to the Ariane 5 ECA with about 10t. But ESA has a hard time finding customers for passenger satellites in the 2-3t range to make launches worthwhile.)
What does that have to do with SpaceX and the Falcon Heavy? Well, ESA is about to decide whether to develop a new smaller rocket - the Ariane 6 ( capable of lifting 3-8t to GTO) - or improve the Ariane 5 to the point that it can deliver about 12t to GTO. (With the idea of launching two of the popular 6t satellites at a time, which would instandly make the rocket much more economical)
In the latter case, SpaceX will have a much easier time to find heavy satellites for its rocket. Having a competitor is actually important in this business. You don't commit on the order of a billion dollars in building a satellite, just to find out that your only way to launch it is no longer available or recently had an accident (e.g. SeaLaunch or failures of the maiden flights of Ariane 5 GS and Ariane 5 ECA that also failed) and you have to wait several years to get another launch opportunity.
If ESA goes for the Ariane 6, SpaceX will most likely have to resort to launching several satellites at a time and compete with all the other guys that are also capable of launching "smaller" satellites. Which is bad for SpaceX and the industry in general. At the same time, ESA will find out that the old Ariane 5 will suddenly be in much larger demand for 8-10t satellites (as will be Falcon Heavy).
Lets hope they are reasonable... or somebody comes up with something roughly similar to the Falcon Heavy.
New Yorkers don't pay in Euro last time I heard. New Yorks 19 cents are more like 0.13-0.15 Euro. (Florida? About 0.05 Euro/kWh.) Also, your figures are outdated.
Just as everywhere else in the developed world. (Although actual figures in US states vary between 35% and 53% of people getting cancer - no evacuations so far, despite hugely increased risk in some states.)
I haven't implied in any way whatsoever that either Hansen or other climatologists hadn't heard about this. I merely pointed out that Hansen neglected to say as much, even though it was absolutely relevant to his statement.
What Hansen doesn't say about the Pliocene is that back then, North America and South America were divided continents.
What we call the Gulf Stream today (and some people seem to be quite impressed by it) would have been the Pacific Stream back then. It transported a much larger amount of heat to Europe and beyond than it currently receives from that puny bathtub called the Gulf of Mexico. Of course that had a large influence on the amount of ice in and around the arctic sea and the global sea level.
There is no causative link from higher CO2 levels during that age to higher sea levels, it is merely a correlation.
Even if there were such lists, they are not what research funding is based on.
What funding is based on is which journal published your article and how many citations it received in other papers - whether the author citing your paper has actually so much as read (much less made use of) your paper or not. Just being popular with peers helps, because you can always find some excuse or other to cite a paper even if it is semi-relevant at best.
I'm one of those guys who is fed up with "studies" that "indicate" that X prevents Y just after another study showed that X causes Y. I'm one of those guys who read the news and knows that studies showing that some new pill is usually tested for effectiveness not against accepted treatments but merely against placebos.
Vaccination is well established and has a firm scientific grounding that can be replicated any number of ways, be it epidemiology, in-vivo or in-vitro experiments
Not being an American, I don't know what FOX is putting out. But if they are pointing out that any arbitrary number of "X causes cancer", "Y prevents cancer" and "Z causes heart disease" studies are bullshit, then it is not merely their perfect legal right to do so, but they are also delivering an accurate describtion of such "research".
Just because somebody is a murderer and thus a bad man, doesn't mean he also picked your pocket, ran a red light and parked his car in front of your garage.
The solution lies in a reformation of research finance that is not focussed on how many papers X published compared to Y, but also takes into account whether they are consequential or not and if they actually comply with at least basic scientific attributes such as repeatibility, verifiablity, falsifiability, accessibility of all data and all conducted research, as well as actually conducted verification of research by independent third parties.
There should also be an outright condemnation of data mining, where data bases are checked only for the existence of attributes and correlations that happen to affirm the researchers opinion and leave all others untouched.
Fields like economics, medicine and climate have long since deteriorated to mere cargo cults due to those failings.
Slashdot Mirror
It's cheaper to have smaller engines, when done right. First, they only need one type of engine. Most rockets use a different kind of engine for each stage. Those engines are build painstakingly by hand. ESA needs a Vulcain 2 engine every two months. Even steps that could be automated are simply not worth the investment at that rate.
If you build 10 or 28 engines per rocket, launching on the order of 10 rockets or more per year, you'll need another engine every day or every other day of the week. That's when investing in specialized equipment actually starts to make sense and will improve the quality, while reducing the overhead of quality assurance (once the production line has been properly set up, which will take a while to do).
Of course, at some point this will go the other way. Build your engines too small and they will be too heavy and reliability starts to become a major issue - as it was in the 1960/70ies. But given enough time (this is not a race to the moon!), reliabiliy should be no problem. Falcon 9 launched 3 times already without any engine troubles in-flight.
The list wasn't complete. And there really is no point even thinking about the Delta IV Heavy when it comes to commercial launches because of the cost. ($400mio or is it more already? It's at least twice as expensive as an Ariane 5. And that's not counting any of the money paid to the ULA just to keep the Delta IV available for military launches or its development cost.)
This might sound strange, but guys like Intelsat avoid building satellites that can only be launched by one kind of rocket if in any way possible. Most geostationary satellites today cluster around 6 tons. This is the limit for the Russian Proton rocket (launched from Baikonur), the Ukranian/Russian/American SeaLaunch (using a Zenit rocket) and was the limit of the Ariane5 GS (which has been upgraded to the Ariane 5 ECA with about 10t. But ESA has a hard time finding customers for passenger satellites in the 2-3t range to make launches worthwhile.)
What does that have to do with SpaceX and the Falcon Heavy? Well, ESA is about to decide whether to develop a new smaller rocket - the Ariane 6 ( capable of lifting 3-8t to GTO) - or improve the Ariane 5 to the point that it can deliver about 12t to GTO. (With the idea of launching two of the popular 6t satellites at a time, which would instandly make the rocket much more economical)
In the latter case, SpaceX will have a much easier time to find heavy satellites for its rocket. Having a competitor is actually important in this business. You don't commit on the order of a billion dollars in building a satellite, just to find out that your only way to launch it is no longer available or recently had an accident (e.g. SeaLaunch or failures of the maiden flights of Ariane 5 GS and Ariane 5 ECA that also failed) and you have to wait several years to get another launch opportunity.
If ESA goes for the Ariane 6, SpaceX will most likely have to resort to launching several satellites at a time and compete with all the other guys that are also capable of launching "smaller" satellites. Which is bad for SpaceX and the industry in general. At the same time, ESA will find out that the old Ariane 5 will suddenly be in much larger demand for 8-10t satellites (as will be Falcon Heavy).
Lets hope they are reasonable ... or somebody comes up with something roughly similar to the Falcon Heavy.
In this case, I'll comply with your anarchistic ideals, go all out Alpha-Male and tell you to shut up.
New Yorkers don't pay in Euro last time I heard. New Yorks 19 cents are more like 0.13-0.15 Euro. (Florida? About 0.05 Euro/kWh.) Also, your figures are outdated.
Germans now pay 0.25 Euro per kWh.
The average is on the order of 3.5% or 2.5 GW.
But didn't anybody tell you, that TEPCO is a bunch of lying bastards?
Is it really so hard to figure out that you could just search for "us states cancer data"?
Publicly available data.
Just as everywhere else in the developed world. (Although actual figures in US states vary between 35% and 53% of people getting cancer - no evacuations so far, despite hugely increased risk in some states.)
You're right. When it comes to current space travel, 40 years is of cours much too long.
Apollo, at its very peak (in terms of cost) in 1968, cost 4.8% of the US government budget. Which itself is only a fraction of the US GDP.
Quite unlike another manned spacecraft that was recently (and quite deservedly) retired.
Strange how they cite liner corrosion of the AP1000 as a problem before a single AP1000 has ever been build.
Critique where it is due, not where it is not. If inspections are a problem, this is a problem of inspections, not of the AP1000. Period.
Gravity works even after take-off. Thrust at lift-off is a bit less than 1.3 times the weight.
0.3g is left, so long as the rocket is flying vertically, which it does, at first.
With an average 7.6mSv per year Cornwall is well above 8 times average background radiation.
What exactly is unclear about the title?
"What Hansen doesn't say"
I haven't implied in any way whatsoever that either Hansen or other climatologists hadn't heard about this. I merely pointed out that Hansen neglected to say as much, even though it was absolutely relevant to his statement.
What Hansen doesn't say about the Pliocene is that back then, North America and South America were divided continents.
What we call the Gulf Stream today (and some people seem to be quite impressed by it) would have been the Pacific Stream back then. It transported a much larger amount of heat to Europe and beyond than it currently receives from that puny bathtub called the Gulf of Mexico. Of course that had a large influence on the amount of ice in and around the arctic sea and the global sea level.
There is no causative link from higher CO2 levels during that age to higher sea levels, it is merely a correlation.
It wasn't me who wrote this, it were my fingers ... touch typing does strange things to your spelling, you know?
I was referring to his post.
You are currently at step 2.
Even if there were such lists, they are not what research funding is based on.
What funding is based on is which journal published your article and how many citations it received in other papers - whether the author citing your paper has actually so much as read (much less made use of) your paper or not. Just being popular with peers helps, because you can always find some excuse or other to cite a paper even if it is semi-relevant at best.
I'm one of those guys who is fed up with "studies" that "indicate" that X prevents Y just after another study showed that X causes Y. I'm one of those guys who read the news and knows that studies showing that some new pill is usually tested for effectiveness not against accepted treatments but merely against placebos.
Vaccination is well established and has a firm scientific grounding that can be replicated any number of ways, be it epidemiology, in-vivo or in-vitro experiments
Not being an American, I don't know what FOX is putting out. But if they are pointing out that any arbitrary number of "X causes cancer", "Y prevents cancer" and "Z causes heart disease" studies are bullshit, then it is not merely their perfect legal right to do so, but they are also delivering an accurate describtion of such "research".
Just because somebody is a murderer and thus a bad man, doesn't mean he also picked your pocket, ran a red light and parked his car in front of your garage.
The solution lies in a reformation of research finance that is not focussed on how many papers X published compared to Y, but also takes into account whether they are consequential or not and if they actually comply with at least basic scientific attributes such as repeatibility, verifiablity, falsifiability, accessibility of all data and all conducted research, as well as actually conducted verification of research by independent third parties.
There should also be an outright condemnation of data mining, where data bases are checked only for the existence of attributes and correlations that happen to affirm the researchers opinion and leave all others untouched.
Fields like economics, medicine and climate have long since deteriorated to mere cargo cults due to those failings.