A bomb is not a surface to air missile. A modern SAM ~would~ annihilate a 767 or airbus. All that would hit the ground is millions of flaming plastic chunks.
The SAM missiles that the US has actually don't have very large warheads. The most common deployed missile is the stinger man portable missile, deployed in the US on the Avenger air defense vehicle.
Here are the US SAM missiles with their warhead size:
Stinger unknown, but the whole missile only weight 12 lbs.
Engines failing is one thing, and sure this turbine can help with that.. But what if the hydralic lines themselves fail? or the control cylinders for the rudder or ailerons.
That said, I cant imagine anyway around this. The forces involved would be far too much to try anything mechanical, assuming they could even come up with some sort of wire rope and pulley system..
Well if the hydraulic lines and the engines fail you are pretty much out of luck. However if the engines are working by you lose hydraulic pressure; i.e. something breaks all the hydraulic lines, it is possible to control the aircraft using engine thrust alone.
The DHL cargo plane that was hit with a missile on takeoff at Baghdad airport a few weeks ago managed to land without any hydraulics using this method. And NASA did some experimentsto build this emergency ability directly into flight control computers.
How does the RAT deploy w/o hydraulic pressure? Unlike a gas, a liquid isn't compressible, so it just isn't possible to leave a spare tank of fluid under pressure for such things.
It deploys using gravity. When the hydraulic pressure is lost the locking mechanism of the RAT releases and it drops out of the bottom of the aircraft into the airstream.
How do you figure that spindle speed is the major component in shock damage?
Well you get damage when the platters and the read head intersect. This could be because either the head or the platters moved with respect to the disk casing. All else being equal a faster spinning platter will resist being rotated out of its spinning plane (gyroscopic effect) more than a slower platter. So if the iPod were to rotate and the head/arm assembly was stiff enough so as to retain its alignment with the case then the extra deflection of the faster platters might cause a head crash.
That being said, the main protection the iPod harddrive has is that smaller form factor disks can be much more rigid because of the smaller platters and shorter arms.
Also it spins down the disk as much as possible, which it can get away with doing because of the very fast spin-up spin-down times of the smaller platters. (Less rotational inertia to overcome)
2. All of outer space looks and feels like midwest America circa 1850.
Except the inner planets of the Alliance, one of which was shown in 'Ariel'. That was a very high tech planet. Now Serenity doesn't go there often due to the abundance of law enforcement:)
Or the resort planet for the very rich shown in 'Trash'. Airborn floating islands with mansions on them is hardly midwest America circa 1850.
3. They've got space ships and inhabit many many worlds, and yet everyone still speaks with a midwestern American accent and carry around colt 45's to shoot each other with.
And semiautomatic rifles with scopes, and assault rifles, and the odd semi-auto pistol, not to mention the rare laser weapon or non-lethal electroshock rifle.
>Although I could drone on and on for much time about the show having no laser blasters
There were at least two laser blasters. The one carried by the villain in 'Heart of Gold' and a second one in 'Trash' that was mentioned again in 'The Message'. To be fair these were the unaired episodes...
It is indeed true that shipping into and out of Antarctica is a risky business. But you tell me - which is more risky? Shipping in an extra 400 litres of fuel, or shipping out an airplane?
The 400 liters would need to be replaced quickly, so that it was on hand if the base had a life threatening emergency that required the fuel. This would require the replacement fuel to be flown in and 100 gallons of fuel weighs about 650 lbs, so it would either displace 650 lbs of previously planned equipment or supplies or come out of the safety margin for the inbound flight. These flights are heavily packed to try to minimize the number because of the danger of flying into Antarctica. On the other hand, you have more margin (or rather a better knowledge of the margin) on a outbound flight and a ~200 lbs person is easier to slot in.
Shipping the plane out can wait until the yearly resupply by boat. The weight of the plane is irrelevant to the ship, and a ship can carry plenty of fuel to get in and back out. So 400 lbs of fuel in vs. shipping the plane out is a false dilemma.
Also while they could safely ship in the fuel for the plane on the ship, they would have to feed the pilot until the ship arrives which would stretch their resources.
I still don't understand why the base commanders are giving him shelter - if they didn't give him shelter then I would be more supportive of them, as I would at least see consistency in their action
I can see three reasons. One, if the plane doesn't have enough fuel to fly on to Argentina (call it 6 hours) then it doesn't have enough fuel to run the engine for heat more that say two or three times that long, so this would only postpone the requirement to shelter him for at most a day.
Second, like a car, an airplane sitting in the cold is going to loose heat very quickly, so it would provide very poor shelter, quickly becoming dangerously cold even if the pilot was turning off the engine as much as possible to prolong his fuel.
And finally, in an insulated building adding a person decreases the amount on energy you need to use to keep the area heated, so having provided the pilot food it is an energy win to keep him in your shelter. The decrease is partly due to the lowered volume of air to keep heated and mostly because humans are warmer than room temperature and put off heat helping (marginally) to keep the building warm. So it would be unsafe to leave him in his plane and it isn't an additional resource drain to provide him shelter. Seems like good reasons to shelter him to me.
So, how does the broadcast flag, which devices must then not allow you to make unlimited copies of, cause you to be unable to make unlimited copies of non-flagged materials (your home videos)?
I think what people are concerned about is that future input devices (VCRs, DVD recorders, Camcorder) will be built with the assumption on the part of the manufacturer that any analog input (including that of the camcorder) will be considered an attempt to "pirate" their IP. So these input devices will just flag anything they record from analog as 'never copy'
After all you could have pointed your digital video camera at your HDTV plasma screen, so anything it records must be non-copyable.
The worry is that when you transition your home movie to digital the device that does so won't leave it "non-flagged" but will flag it for your convenience:)
Later on after broadcast flag removers become available manufacturers might modify their units to either reflag any unflagged data, on the theory it is pirated, or just treat unflagged data as an error and refuse to display or handle it.
I remember seeing something like this before also. (Probably 8 or 9 years ago) One of the things they did with it that I remember; they lathered the white paste on one side of a paper towel, then held that side up to a blowtorch with the paper towel held so you could see the back side of it.
IIRC on that show the inventor was also making claims about using it for re-entry material.
Even if you can't fly a Sea King off a ship smaller than a carrier (see post downthread for counter-argument) you don't need to use a helicopter to lift the capsule.
There wasn't any technical reason that a decent sized ship with a crane on it (similar to the ships used for deploying tethered deep sea submersibles) couldn't just use its crane to pick up a capsule and place it on deck.
Of course from a PR standpoint it would be horrible to have your brave astronauts hauled out of the water by a fishing boat.
Re:Scudder/ The Past Through Tomorrow
on
New Heinlein Novel
·
· Score: 1
"Let There be Light" is published in "The Man Who Sold the Moon"
In reality, people and organizations of the caliber required for something so large in magnitude are far more careful about their investments. This kind of horse&wagon colonization is possible only in the mind of a writer that does not understand logistics
Or a large government moving its undesirables away from the industrialized planets.... hmm, like the one described in the show.
Heck if it got the people off of some form of welfare it might be a net profit for the government. In any case governments can and do act for reasons other that the bottom line, and will do expensive things with no possibility of return on investment if they feel it is in their interests
The new primitive colonies aren't an investment by the government, although I'm sure they would be happy to get taxes from them, but a way to eliminate large groups of undesirables without the backlash of simply killing them all. Think of it like a cheap prison, dump the people with some supplies and leave them alone. And if they all die, well that's just too bad.
Prostitutes will never be the top females in the social hierarchy of any civilization.
If you fly a spaceship to colonize a new planet, you will never have to drive a chuckwagon pulled by a team of horses to get across a babbling brook on that planet.
First of all she wasn't exactly a prostitute, but more importantly a companion is not the "top female in the social hierarchy", yes she ranks better than the semi-criminal/black-market/smuggler crew running around in their obsolete junker of a spacecraft, but that isn't exactly way up the social chain.
And second, depending on how you got to the planet you might well drive a chuckwagon pulled by a team of horses. Just because you got dropped off in a spaceship doesn't imply that you are rich, or that the spaceship deposited a set of modern machine tools with the colony.
A planet could be colonized much like Australia, a place to dump people that aren't wanted in the parent society. With a low level of trading between the parent planet and the colony, there wouldn't be much ability to import needed items, and maintaining or building up a technological society from near scratch isn't easy. You need a lot of energy, which you don't necessarily have, a lot of raw materials, and some expensive machining tools to even get as far as the 19th century tech.
The nice thing about horses and wagons is that horses are self reproducing, you don't need a tech base to fix them when they break or build new ones. And grass or hay is easier to get than petroleum, or electric generation, or fission/fusion. And wagons can be build and maintained with little more that basic hand word working tools.
as I could barely sit through one episode without cringing.
You only watched the first episode "Train Job" didn't you?
Leave it to fox to run the worst episode first and the pilot episode that introduces you to everyone last
The rest of the series was much better than train job, and if fox had promoted it, led off with the pilot, and aired it in order it likely could have made at least till the end of the season.
Actually the DC-X flew a number of times under the original McDonnell-Douglas / Airforce program. It was a subscale demonstrator designed to show that a rockets could be controlled safely during takeoff and landing using only it rocket's thrust (no parachute, no wings, etc).
It also demonstrated that it could perform the "swoop of death" turn over that the full sized vehicle would perform on re-entry. The vehicle would reenter the atmosphere nose first, then after slowing down flip over and land tail first.
Once the airforce program finished playing with it they turned it over to NASA who promptly crashed it, as mentioned in the parent post.
Of course when NASA had to decide on a SSTO vehicle to fund the chose the X-33 Venture Star because it contained more untried and experimental technology. In other words NASA wanted to run a research program instead of building a SSTO vehicle. The X-33 required developing a new type of engine, new fuel tanks, a new thermal system, and a relativly untested body design. While it is interesting to work on developing these technologies, the place to do it is not in a program whose stated purpose is to build a working vehicle.
Um, the bird isn't ready to fly operationally, that is why you do flight testing and approval. You can't test the plane and get the bugs out without, well testing the plane.
And you can't tell whether the number of failures sited is excessive without the ability to compare then to previous similar aircraft / helicopters during the same stage of their development.
Some of the examples mentioned in the article are fuel, oil, hydraulic leaks and a door that sometimes could be opened. While these can cause a problem, they can also be dealt with, it doesn't sound like a "flight critical" safety failure equals the vehicle exploding in midair, more like something which if a number of things went wrong could cause the aircraft possibly crash, or at least perform an emergency landing.
And yes I know that several V-22s crashed during testing, and that is unfortunate, but a not unexpected part of flight testing a new military vehicle.
Also, you can be sure people are going to die because of this. People died trying to get to Asia, cross the Atlantic, get to the north pole, discover redioactivity, (nearly died) to discover electricity, and create trains, automobiles and airplanes.
And people still die climbing Everest, or sailing single handedly across oceans, or journeying to the north/south pole.
I don't see where you can logically oppose the possible loss of life from individuals attempting to fly spaceships and not oppose people doing all sort of other dangerous (probably more dangerous) activities for entertainment.
For the record, as long as they are doing so in a way that minimizes probable danger to others I feel they should be free to try, be it climbing Everest or flying clear of the atmosphere. Its their money and their lives, Good luck to them.
Back when my dad was learning to fly, before the cost of litigation and insurance had bankrupted most of the light aviation industry, a small plane wasn't much more expensive than a car.
In fact when he bought a GTO, which is a nice but not especially expensive car, he considered buying a small plane instead as it only cost about 30% more.
A small plane in this case would be something about the size of a four seat, fixed wheels, single engine Cessna. When you think about it there isn't that much difference in work and materials needed between a family car and a light plane. The key is to make a lot of them so they are affordable and the insurance can be spread wider lowering rates. [And prevent people from suing the builders for every accident]
from the article:You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.
Bullshit it can't....
I grant you that it has sufficient return cargo capacity to return a satellite to earth. And with the canada arm it can capture a satellite, as demonstrated by the Hubble repair.
However, while technically the shuttle could return a satellite for repair, there are a couple of problems to overcome. First almost all satellites orbit higher than the shuttle can fly, so it can't get high enough to capture them. The original idea was that there was going to be an on orbit tug to ferry satellite to and from the shuttle. Never got built.
Second the canada arm's capture device only works on satellites that have a special attachment point on them like the Hubble. As far as I know no other satellite has one, so a satellite couldn't be easily capture even if it was close to the shuttle.
Third, NASA is very worried about possible damage to their shuttles, and don't like flying it near anything they don't have too; much less a damaged satellite which could do something unexpected or have debris floating around it
And Fourth, while this isn't a technical point it isn't economical to return a satellite for repair and reorbit. Its cheaper to build a new one and scrap the old one except in maybe in special cases like the one of a kind Hubble.
So in summary, the shuttle could retrieve a damaged satellite and return it, if it could reach it (which it can't), and capture it (which it can't), and NASA would authorize it (they wouldn't) and someone would pay for it (which they won't). The original statement that the shuttle can't retrieve a damaged satellite might be overstating the case, but stating that they won't would be about right.
Obviously this doesn't count thing like spacehab which stays docked in the shuttle's cargo bay, or a science experiment released and recovered during a flight.
And what got us from an exhibition of air travel in the Lindberg flight to the actuality of cross-country and worldwide scheduled airline service wasn't government research grants, it was little fledgling companies like Trans-World Airlines, American Airlines and Pan-American Airlines.
And the reason that we got little fledgling flying companies like TWA, American, and PanAm, is that they, more or less, grew out of the early airmail companies.
The airmail companies started buying bigger planes and flying passengers to increase profits on their airmail routes.
And the reason that they had airmail routes is because the US government guaranteed a minimum level of business. If you formed an airmail company capable of meeting payload, range, and time requirements set by the government they were required to give your company a certain amount of airmail business.
So the government provided a business case for these startup companies. They could go to their potential investors and say, if you provide X money then we can acquire enough planes to qualify for a government airmail contract and start earning a profit for you.
So far the government hasn't stepped forward and offered a similar incentive for space launches. If they offered to buy a minimum number of pounds per year to orbit for a fixed price per pound (which would be set significantly lower than currently offered by the existing commercial launchers) then smaller private companies would be able to attract investors to build rockets. As it is, it is almost impossible for anyone smaller than an established aerospace company to attract investors because you can't show a reasonable chance that a completed rocket would be able to sell launches.
And what got us from an exhibition of air travel in the Lindberg flight to the actuality of cross-country and worldwide scheduled airline service wasn't government research grants, it was little fledgling companies like Trans-World Airlines, American Airlines and Pan-American Airlines.
And the reason that we got little fledgling flying companies like TWA, American, and PanAm, is that they, more or less, grew out of the early airmail companies.
The airmail companies started buying bigger planes and flying passengers to increase profits on their airmail routes.
And the reason that they had airmail routes is because the US government guaranteed a minimum level of business. If you formed an airmail company capable of meeting payload, range, and time requirements set by the government they were required to give your company a certain amount of airmail business.
So the government provided a business case for these startup companies. They could go to their potential investors and say, if you provide X money then we can acquire enough planes to qualify for a government airmail contract and start earning a profit for you.
So far the government hasn't stepped forward and offered a similar incentive for space launches. If they offered to buy a minimum number of pounds per year to orbit for a fixed price per pound (which would be set significantly lower than currently offered by the existing commercial launchers) then smaller private companies would be able to attract investors to build rockets. As it is, it is almost impossible for anyone smaller than an established aerospace company to attract investors because you can't show a reasonable chance that a completed rocket would be able to sell launches.
A lot of that injuries were probably inflicted because the US ejection seats weren't designed for supersonic ejection.
The Russians have a seat capable of ejecting a person at over mach 2. Basically it straps their arms and legs tight to the seat, then it deploys and small air break in front of them to break up the supersonic airflow and pops a couple of very small stabilizing parachutes out the back to minimize the tendency to tumble.
Each vote is confirmed twice, onscreen and by voice -again using the sample of the candidate- to ensure that the voter is absolutely certain that this is the proper choice.
And everyone in the voting station will know who that person voted for becuase the machine just read the names of the selected candates out loud.
Votes are suppost to be private. There should be no way that even someone standing outside the voting booth can tell who you just voted for.
Slashdot Mirror
The SAM missiles that the US has actually don't have very large warheads. The most common deployed missile is the stinger man portable missile, deployed in the US on the Avenger air defense vehicle.
Here are the US SAM missiles with their warhead size:
Stinger unknown, but the whole missile only weight 12 lbs.
Patriot 90 lbs (PAC1), 91 lbs (PAC2), 73 lbs (PAC3)
HAWK 300 lbs
Now a HAWK might be able to "annihilate" a 767 but a stinger wouldn't even come close, and a Patriot would leave big pieces.
Well if the hydraulic lines and the engines fail you are pretty much out of luck. However if the engines are working by you lose hydraulic pressure; i.e. something breaks all the hydraulic lines, it is possible to control the aircraft using engine thrust alone.
The DHL cargo plane that was hit with a missile on takeoff at Baghdad airport a few weeks ago managed to land without any hydraulics using this method. And NASA did some experimentsto build this emergency ability directly into flight control computers.
damn, I wish I had mod points right now.
That being said, the main protection the iPod harddrive has is that smaller form factor disks can be much more rigid because of the smaller platters and shorter arms.
Also it spins down the disk as much as possible, which it can get away with doing because of the very fast spin-up spin-down times of the smaller platters. (Less rotational inertia to overcome)
Or the resort planet for the very rich shown in 'Trash'. Airborn floating islands with mansions on them is hardly midwest America circa 1850.
And semiautomatic rifles with scopes, and assault rifles, and the odd semi-auto pistol, not to mention the rare laser weapon or non-lethal electroshock rifle.
>Although I could drone on and on for much time about the show having no laser blasters
There were at least two laser blasters. The one carried by the villain in 'Heart of Gold' and a second one in 'Trash' that was mentioned again in 'The Message'. To be fair these were the unaired episodes...
On the other hand, you have more margin (or rather a better knowledge of the margin) on a outbound flight and a ~200 lbs person is easier to slot in.
Shipping the plane out can wait until the yearly resupply by boat. The weight of the plane is irrelevant to the ship, and a ship can carry plenty of fuel to get in and back out.
So 400 lbs of fuel in vs. shipping the plane out is a false dilemma.
Also while they could safely ship in the fuel for the plane on the ship, they would have to feed the pilot until the ship arrives which would stretch their resources.
I can see three reasons. One, if the plane doesn't have enough fuel to fly on to Argentina (call it 6 hours) then it doesn't have enough fuel to run the engine for heat more that say two or three times that long, so this would only postpone the requirement to shelter him for at most a day.
Second, like a car, an airplane sitting in the cold is going to loose heat very quickly, so it would provide very poor shelter, quickly becoming dangerously cold even if the pilot was turning off the engine as much as possible to prolong his fuel.
And finally, in an insulated building adding a person decreases the amount on energy you need to use to keep the area heated, so having provided the pilot food it is an energy win to keep him in your shelter. The decrease is partly due to the lowered volume of air to keep heated and mostly because humans are warmer than room temperature and put off heat helping (marginally) to keep the building warm.
So it would be unsafe to leave him in his plane and it isn't an additional resource drain to provide him shelter. Seems like good reasons to shelter him to me.
After all you could have pointed your digital video camera at your HDTV plasma screen, so anything it records must be non-copyable.
The worry is that when you transition your home movie to digital the device that does so won't leave it "non-flagged" but will flag it for your convenience
Later on after broadcast flag removers become available manufacturers might modify their units to either reflag any unflagged data, on the theory it is pirated, or just treat unflagged data as an error and refuse to display or handle it.
Probably not a problem, but worrying to many
I remember seeing something like this before also. (Probably 8 or 9 years ago) One of the things they did with it that I remember; they lathered the white paste on one side of a paper towel, then held that side up to a blowtorch with the paper towel held so you could see the back side of it.
IIRC on that show the inventor was also making claims about using it for re-entry material.
Even if you can't fly a Sea King off a ship smaller than a carrier (see post downthread for counter-argument) you don't need to use a helicopter to lift the capsule.
There wasn't any technical reason that a decent sized ship with a crane on it (similar to the ships used for deploying tethered deep sea submersibles) couldn't just use its crane to pick up a capsule and place it on deck.
Of course from a PR standpoint it would be horrible to have your brave astronauts hauled out of the water by a fishing boat.
"Let There be Light" is published in "The Man Who Sold the Moon"
Amazon link
Or a large government moving its undesirables away from the industrialized planets.... hmm, like the one described in the show.
Heck if it got the people off of some form of welfare it might be a net profit for the government. In any case governments can and do act for reasons other that the bottom line, and will do expensive things with no possibility of return on investment if they feel it is in their interests
The new primitive colonies aren't an investment by the government, although I'm sure they would be happy to get taxes from them, but a way to eliminate large groups of undesirables without the backlash of simply killing them all. Think of it like a cheap prison, dump the people with some supplies and leave them alone. And if they all die, well that's just too bad.
First of all she wasn't exactly a prostitute, but more importantly a companion is not the "top female in the social hierarchy", yes she ranks better than the semi-criminal/black-market/smuggler crew running around in their obsolete junker of a spacecraft, but that isn't exactly way up the social chain.
And second, depending on how you got to the planet you might well drive a chuckwagon pulled by a team of horses. Just because you got dropped off in a spaceship doesn't imply that you are rich, or that the spaceship deposited a set of modern machine tools with the colony.
A planet could be colonized much like Australia, a place to dump people that aren't wanted in the parent society. With a low level of trading between the parent planet and the colony, there wouldn't be much ability to import needed items, and maintaining or building up a technological society from near scratch isn't easy. You need a lot of energy, which you don't necessarily have, a lot of raw materials, and some expensive machining tools to even get as far as the 19th century tech.
The nice thing about horses and wagons is that horses are self reproducing, you don't need a tech base to fix them when they break or build new ones. And grass or hay is easier to get than petroleum, or electric generation, or fission/fusion. And wagons can be build and maintained with little more that basic hand word working tools.
You only watched the first episode "Train Job" didn't you?
Leave it to fox to run the worst episode first and the pilot episode that introduces you to everyone last
The rest of the series was much better than train job, and if fox had promoted it, led off with the pilot, and aired it in order it likely could have made at least till the end of the season.
Actually the DC-X flew a number of times under the original McDonnell-Douglas / Airforce program. It was a subscale demonstrator designed to show that a rockets could be controlled safely during takeoff and landing using only it rocket's thrust (no parachute, no wings, etc).
It also demonstrated that it could perform the "swoop of death" turn over that the full sized vehicle would perform on re-entry.
The vehicle would reenter the atmosphere nose first, then after slowing down flip over and land tail first.
Once the airforce program finished playing with it they turned it over to NASA who promptly crashed it, as mentioned in the parent post.
Of course when NASA had to decide on a SSTO vehicle to fund the chose the X-33 Venture Star because it contained more untried and experimental technology. In other words NASA wanted to run a research program instead of building a SSTO vehicle. The X-33 required developing a new type of engine, new fuel tanks, a new thermal system, and a relativly untested body design. While it is interesting to work on developing these technologies, the place to do it is not in a program whose stated purpose is to build a working vehicle.
Um, the bird isn't ready to fly operationally, that is why you do flight testing and approval. You can't test the plane and get the bugs out without, well testing the plane.
And you can't tell whether the number of failures sited is excessive without the ability to compare then to previous similar aircraft / helicopters during the same stage of their development.
Some of the examples mentioned in the article are fuel, oil, hydraulic leaks and a door that sometimes could be opened. While these can cause a problem, they can also be dealt with, it doesn't sound like a "flight critical" safety failure equals the vehicle exploding in midair, more like something which if a number of things went wrong could cause the aircraft possibly crash, or at least perform an emergency landing.
And yes I know that several V-22s crashed during testing, and that is unfortunate, but a not unexpected part of flight testing a new military vehicle.
And people still die climbing Everest, or sailing single handedly across oceans, or journeying to the north/south pole.
I don't see where you can logically oppose the possible loss of life from individuals attempting to fly spaceships and not oppose people doing all sort of other dangerous (probably more dangerous) activities for entertainment.
For the record, as long as they are doing so in a way that minimizes probable danger to others I feel they should be free to try, be it climbing Everest or flying clear of the atmosphere. Its their money and their lives, Good luck to them.
Back when my dad was learning to fly, before the cost of litigation and insurance had bankrupted most of the light aviation industry, a small plane wasn't much more expensive than a car.
In fact when he bought a GTO, which is a nice but not especially expensive car, he considered buying a small plane instead as it only cost about 30% more.
A small plane in this case would be something about the size of a four seat, fixed wheels, single engine Cessna. When you think about it there isn't that much difference in work and materials needed between a family car and a light plane. The key is to make a lot of them so they are affordable and the insurance can be spread wider lowering rates. [And prevent people from suing the builders for every accident]
I grant you that it has sufficient return cargo capacity to return a satellite to earth. And with the canada arm it can capture a satellite, as demonstrated by the Hubble repair.
However, while technically the shuttle could return a satellite for repair, there are a couple of problems to overcome.
First almost all satellites orbit higher than the shuttle can fly, so it can't get high enough to capture them.
The original idea was that there was going to be an on orbit tug to ferry satellite to and from the shuttle. Never got built.
Second the canada arm's capture device only works on satellites that have a special attachment point on them like the Hubble. As far as I know no other satellite has one, so a satellite couldn't be easily capture even if it was close to the shuttle.
Third, NASA is very worried about possible damage to their shuttles, and don't like flying it near anything they don't have too; much less a damaged satellite which could do something unexpected or have debris floating around it
And Fourth, while this isn't a technical point it isn't economical to return a satellite for repair and reorbit. Its cheaper to build a new one and scrap the old one except in maybe in special cases like the one of a kind Hubble.
So in summary, the shuttle could retrieve a damaged satellite and return it, if it could reach it (which it can't), and capture it (which it can't), and NASA would authorize it (they wouldn't) and someone would pay for it (which they won't). The original statement that the shuttle can't retrieve a damaged satellite might be overstating the case, but stating that they won't would be about right.
Obviously this doesn't count thing like spacehab which stays docked in the shuttle's cargo bay, or a science experiment released and recovered during a flight.
And the reason that we got little fledgling flying companies like TWA, American, and PanAm, is that they, more or less, grew out of the early airmail companies.
The airmail companies started buying bigger planes and flying passengers to increase profits on their airmail routes.
And the reason that they had airmail routes is because the US government guaranteed a minimum level of business. If you formed an airmail company capable of meeting payload, range, and time requirements set by the government they were required to give your company a certain amount of airmail business.
So the government provided a business case for these startup companies. They could go to their potential investors and say, if you provide X money then we can acquire enough planes to qualify for a government airmail contract and start earning a profit for you.
So far the government hasn't stepped forward and offered a similar incentive for space launches. If they offered to buy a minimum number of pounds per year to orbit for a fixed price per pound (which would be set significantly lower than currently offered by the existing commercial launchers) then smaller private companies would be able to attract investors to build rockets. As it is, it is almost impossible for anyone smaller than an established aerospace company to attract investors because you can't show a reasonable chance that a completed rocket would be able to sell launches.
I'm almost positive that Xanth is, one 9 book trilogy, followed by a second 16 book trilogy.
:)
Not a 30 book trilogy.
A lot of that injuries were probably inflicted because the US ejection seats weren't designed for supersonic ejection.
The Russians have a seat capable of ejecting a person at over mach 2. Basically it straps their arms and legs tight to the seat, then it deploys and small air break in front of them to break up the supersonic airflow and pops a couple of very small stabilizing parachutes out the back to minimize the tendency to tumble.
And everyone in the voting station will know who that person voted for becuase the machine just read the names of the selected candates out loud.
Votes are suppost to be private. There should be no way that even someone standing outside the voting booth can tell who you just voted for.