The cost of fuel, plus the cost of the rocket hardware, including its design and quality control. The difference between manufacturing of a car and of a rocket is that a simple bolt in the car is maybe 10 times stronger than required. A similar bolt in a rocket may only be 25% stronger than required. This means that you need very good engineering, tight manufacturing requirements, and good quality control, which are all costly. The design cost can be spread out over multiple launches, of course, but this requires you achieve many launches in the first place.
Propellant cost isn't the only thing. The fuel mass/payload mass ratio is much more reasonable for a sub-orbital craft, which means you don't have to cut so much mass, making the engineering a lot more relaxed. And it's not only accelerating, reentry from orbit is a lot more challenging than landing from sub-orbital.
It depends. There's not much potential in sub-orbital itself, except as a glorified roller coaster ride. If that's all you want, great. If you want to grow into orbital flights, it remains to be seen how much of the SpaceshipTwo design can be reused. And even if it can be adapted, that still leaves over 90% of the required orbital speeds that needs to be provided by roman candles.
No, energy is not the only thing, but a factor of 100-150 in difficulty between sub-orbital and orbital seems very reasonable, if you also take into account the other difficulties. Energy requirement may be a reasonable proxy.
There is no doubt that space research has advanced technology. But the question is whether putting money in (manned) space research has better return on investment than other kind of research here on earth. In case of projects like the ISS, I doubt it. Most of the money involved in the ISS involves low-tech housekeeping, and most of the original research is about how to survive in zero gravity, which isn't particularly relevant to anybody who isn't an astronaut. There are a few overlaps, such as osteoporosis, but if we really cared about that, we can put some more funds in research here on earth.
Exactly. If they'd never built the ISS, the dozens of billions of dollars could have gone into directed medical research and found the same thing here on earth.
Those places would actually be fucked with 0m sea level rise if it weren't for the levee system. The map isn't really accurate for those places, as it assumes that all levees and dikes will be breached with a +1 meter sea level rise, which may not be necessarily true.
Of course, your average gasoline powered ICE only extracts about 25% of that energy. An electric motor can reach over 90%, so you wouldn't need as much energy to recharge.
Something like 200 A @ 10kV should be possible to engineer. Combined with regenerative braking and nightly home charging, this should provide enough juice for fairly decent consumer experience.
Nothing wrong with using extensions if you're only going to use GCC anyway. Some of the stuff you can do with extensions are very hard to do without them.
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Average and standard deviation are fixed by definition, so the IQ distribution will stay the same. In theory, you can already go below 0.
The cost of fuel, plus the cost of the rocket hardware, including its design and quality control. The difference between manufacturing of a car and of a rocket is that a simple bolt in the car is maybe 10 times stronger than required. A similar bolt in a rocket may only be 25% stronger than required. This means that you need very good engineering, tight manufacturing requirements, and good quality control, which are all costly. The design cost can be spread out over multiple launches, of course, but this requires you achieve many launches in the first place.
Propellant cost isn't the only thing. The fuel mass/payload mass ratio is much more reasonable for a sub-orbital craft, which means you don't have to cut so much mass, making the engineering a lot more relaxed. And it's not only accelerating, reentry from orbit is a lot more challenging than landing from sub-orbital.
It depends. There's not much potential in sub-orbital itself, except as a glorified roller coaster ride. If that's all you want, great. If you want to grow into orbital flights, it remains to be seen how much of the SpaceshipTwo design can be reused. And even if it can be adapted, that still leaves over 90% of the required orbital speeds that needs to be provided by roman candles.
No, energy is not the only thing, but a factor of 100-150 in difficulty between sub-orbital and orbital seems very reasonable, if you also take into account the other difficulties. Energy requirement may be a reasonable proxy.
There is no doubt that space research has advanced technology. But the question is whether putting money in (manned) space research has better return on investment than other kind of research here on earth. In case of projects like the ISS, I doubt it. Most of the money involved in the ISS involves low-tech housekeeping, and most of the original research is about how to survive in zero gravity, which isn't particularly relevant to anybody who isn't an astronaut. There are a few overlaps, such as osteoporosis, but if we really cared about that, we can put some more funds in research here on earth.
Exactly. If they'd never built the ISS, the dozens of billions of dollars could have gone into directed medical research and found the same thing here on earth.
There's no future in manned space flight. It's a completely pointless exercise to send our fragile bodies up into space.
If rain were the answer, why do you think people are pumping up ground water in the first place ?
"No one died" times 7.5 is still not much.
Those places would actually be fucked with 0m sea level rise if it weren't for the levee system. The map isn't really accurate for those places, as it assumes that all levees and dikes will be breached with a +1 meter sea level rise, which may not be necessarily true.
Unfortunately, space stations and moon bases are pretty useless, as well as manned interplanetary travel.
Of course, your average gasoline powered ICE only extracts about 25% of that energy. An electric motor can reach over 90%, so you wouldn't need as much energy to recharge. Something like 200 A @ 10kV should be possible to engineer. Combined with regenerative braking and nightly home charging, this should provide enough juice for fairly decent consumer experience.
Nothing wrong with using extensions if you're only going to use GCC anyway. Some of the stuff you can do with extensions are very hard to do without them.
Or, you can use the computer you already have for $0.