"The most damning evidence of that is that the only major sponsor/user besides NASA, the US Air Force, abandoned it as soon as its actual operational limitations became clear."
Which took a shitload of chuntzpah, given that it was USAF demands for crossrange abilities which put the huge wings on the thing and made it so big it had to be bolted to the side of a tank instead of sitting safely at the top of the stack.
Shuttle was a camel (in the sense of "a horse designed by committee") and ended up spending most of its life in search of a reason for existence - other than the obvious "national prestige" flagwaving one.
As a "space truck" it didn't need those enormous wings and as a USAF single orbit spysat launcher it lost a _lot_ of payload capacity for space truck operations.
Their alliances are to themselves. They buy from whoever gives the best deals and long-term support (or at times, from whoever's actually willing to sell to them)
Buying russian hardware has been a necessity since they had sanctions dropped on them by the west after demonstrating they could build nukes - using material misappropriated from the supposedly proliferation-resistant CANDU reactors Canada sold them cheap as part of an aid package.
"Right after the US withdrew from Vietnam, they fought (and won) a border war with China."
Viet/Chinese emnity goes back a lot further than you might think: The Vietnamese reputedly still haven't gotten around to forgiving China for stripping their forests in order to build Admiral Zheng He's fleet.
The Vietnamese would happily welcome american money as much as russian money, as long as it doesn't come with governance strings attached - the Vietnam war was fundamentally a war of independence from French Colonial rule after all.
As for "liking" or "not liking" communism - the average vietnamese citizen has no choice in the matter and in another 40-50 years there won't be enough of the old guard left to keep the pretence up.
"China is in this for themslves. They're making good use of the western sanctions on Russia to enrich themselves, negotiating all of the detals with Russia that they've been wanting to negotiate for a long time at bargain-basement prices that previously Russia had been unwilling to do."
Spot on. There's little love lost between the two neighbours - they're on "cordial" terms, not "friendly" ones.
"It's about proportionality... if Russia can spend a couple tens of millions of dollars to make the US spend a billion, Russia wins"
If the US spends that in VIetnam then Vietnam wins - and quite frankly the USA is better off spending money on this kind of thing than wasting money dropping bombs on people (if you factor in all the costs and knock-on effects, it'd be cheaper and probably more effective in most cases to drop cash on places where the war on terrorism is happening than to blow people up. The collateral damage is steadily turning more and more people into venom-spitting enemies of the whole western world.). In the overall scheme of military things 1 billion is pocket change down the back of the sofa.
It's worth noting that russian economy is extremely weak, so forcing them to spend a few tens of millions more in a bunch of areas may be all that's needed to dissuade them from the dickwaving competition.
War innovates, peace expands markets. If all the russians have to offer is clapped out cold-war bombers then the best retort is to outbid 'em for the bases they use.
Swiss watches are fancy jewellery, marketed by a national body building an image in the same way that de Beers crafted the diamond market.
Apple watches are a different kind of jewellery.
For most people the USP of anything they put on their wrist is the jewellery factor. People who can afford a $24,000 apple watch don't have just one watch and those who buy the base model would probably never even think of paying $350 for a Tissot 1853 PR100 Titanium.
IMHO the market for both barely overlaps. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that Apple selling 30 million watches a year will impact on swiss sales by even 1-2%.
The real danger to watch sales in all areas has been mobile phone sales.Even the dumbest phone has an accurate clock onboard. In the 1980s, just about every adult in western countries wore a watch. Take a look around today and see how many you see. The market to sell a new piece of wrist adornment is huge, if people can be persuaded to wear them.
" I think it will be a long time before a 3D printer can make something with the properly annealled or tempered structure."
You might be pleasantly surprised. For starters you can always anneal/heat treat the output after it leaves the printer.
I think reverse engineering a commodity vehicle gearbox and making a working replica out of plastic is a fairly impressive achievement.
FWIW one of my high school maths teachers was a gearbox designer for a UK road machinery manufacturer. He quit not long after he was told that his designs for grader (aka road graders or motor graders) gearboxes were too reliable and they would be degrading the specification markedly in order to be able to sell more parts. Unsurprisingly the company no longer exists.
Look under the hood and you'll find a lot of those old cars are merely a shell for an entirely new vehicle (it's a way of avoiding punitive taxes)
Vietnam had the same problem for a long time and entire drivetrains were replaced to keep old french cars running. It wasn't uncommon to find a single cylinder lister diesel under the hood and the cabin converted to 3-4 rows of bench seating.
"then one of the brave pilots managed to dial in a rough turn to home into the autopilot before either fleeing the cockpit or dying"
The plane turned and tracked perfectly to the longest runway in the area - Pulau Langkawi
Pulau Langkawi is on the east side of Malaysia, a LOT longer than KL and has an easy ocean approach. KL is on the opposite side of Malaysia to the flight and there are 8000 foot mountain ranges in the way.
After passing Pulau Langkawi it seems to have been blown around by high altitude winds and got itself into (and stalled out of) coffin corner.(*)
Much of the "skirted around islands" shit was down to various countries refusing to admit that it went straight overhead without setting off their alert systems and the remaining tracks fit the known wind directions that day.
This insistence comes down to "Loss of Face" - Indonesia eventually admitted they had no records for the aircraft - not that they'd tracked it flying around their territory - and that admission involved greater loss of face than their initial denials.
All in all the most likely explanation is some sort of catastrophic failure which overwhelmed the crew between the time they turned around and the time the plane reached the field (easily explained by a fire fed by the cockpit oxygen system(**)). The pilot was known to be fastidious about planning and to have kept alternates programmed into the autopilot for each leg of his flights.
"What this all screams to me is that planes should be sending a regular report up to the satellites."
Many do. It's an added cost option on 777s and Malaysia airlines declined to spend the money for it. Such squawks are how the Air France debris was initially located.
MIA was facing major cutbacks after massive losses. Airline staff in all areas were reported to be lacking morale and there had been a large number of safety incidents both in the air and in maintenance shops (including a major cigarette-started fire which destroyed a lot of stuff in a heavy maintenance hanger, in an area which is non-smoking). The odds are high that this was another such event.
The only conspiracies which need to be considered are those of coverups - both within MIA and within various neighbouring countries military as they don't want to admit how badly they dropped the ball.
Having seen airlines go out of their way to deny culpability (Air New Zealand TE901), I'm quite prepared to believe that manglement would throw the pilots under a bus to save their own wretched skin.
(*) The electrical fire theory (possibly oxygen fed(**)) could have dumped all sorts of random garbage into the autopilot, but the general feeling is that after Pulau Langkawi the plane was simply flying "straight and level" (which will inevitably result in altitude changes unless manually corrected) and no bearings set, so crosswinds would cause directional changes - and all the known changes match prevailing winds at altitude.
Actually no. The chinese leadership care far more about the people than "companies" and "money".
Even though their version of "following the will of the people and the good of the country" isn't close to what anyone would term "democracy", it's clear that many US politicians don't care about what's good for either as long as they line their own pockets along with those of their cronies.
"Are you saying that space somehow becomes less nutty if we envision a Chinese future in it? "
Yup
Take a good hard look at Heinlein's science fiction since the 1960s. The USA is a minor entity in most of the books because he could see the way the country was heading. He's not the only author who noticed that western powers were generally more interested in their own navels than what was going on elsewhere.
The next human voice on the moon is highly likely to be chinese.
The ones after that may well be indian, although the latter's current focus for their space program is firmly looking "down", diversions to luna and mars notwithstanding.
I totally agree, but given a bunch of stuff I'd attributed to incompetence has been proven otherwise via Snowden revelations, the other explanation can't be discounted out of hand.:-(
The problem with more atmospheric co2 equals more warming is twofold.
1: higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, through ice melt and/or thermal expansion - both are problematic for coastal populations.
2: If the temperature climb is high enough then stored methane (methane hydrates or permafrost swamps) can start bubbling out, leading to runaway warming.
The second is more worrying as it appears to be starting in siberia and in shallow arctic seas. Methane is quoted as 20 times more warming than co2 over 100 years but in the first decade of release it's more like 100-250 times as warming.
We're facing an uncertain future. Whilst the extreme doomsayers are unlikely to be right, the deniers are equally unlikely to be correct.
The real question is how much things will change and how quickly, with secondary questions about how political systems adapt to cope.
The problem with more co2 equals more warming is twofold.
1: higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, through ice melt and/or thermal expansion - both are problematic for coastal populations.
2: If the temperature climb is high enough then stored methane (methane hydrates or permafrost swamps) can start bubbling out, leading to runaway warming.
The second is more worrying as it appears to be starting in siberia and in shallow arctic seas. Methane is quoted as 20 times more warming than co2 over 100 years but in the first decade of release it's more like 100-250 times as warming.
We're facing an uncertain future. Whilst the extreme doomsayers are unlikely to be right, the deniers are equally unlikely to be correct. The real question is how much things will change and how quickly.
"We still have major cred overseas as that tiny country with the balls to tell the yanks to fuck off with their nukes. They still haven't forgiven us for that"
NZ has been bending over backwards to please the USA for the last 15-20 years. Whatever credibility it might have as a result of "Truck off Fuckston" should have evaporated a long time ago.
Spacecrcaft components are NEVER EVER bleeding edge on a production bird (microsats and testrigs are a different matter, but the last thing you want on a long-duration bird is 'bleeding edge')
They're generally locked in place from what's reliable when the designs are laid out (so the tech is 10 years old about then), then on average launched 10 years after that point (making them 10 years behind spacecraft state of the art and 15-20 years behind general purpose state of the art)
Until very recently the CPUs of choice were 1990s era P5 or Power devices because they were proven to work.
"There are screwdrivers in orbit being tracked by NORAD."
And there are a lot more items in orbit smaller than that which aren't.
A 10mm nut is more than sufficient to do serious damage, let alone a bolt and nothing smaller than about 5cm is able to be tracked.
The LEO traffic jam has been likened to a room full of armed moustraps, with more being placed there all the time. Eventually one will set off the others in a chain reaction. Space scientists have been seriously worrying about tipping point for the last 5-6 years.
"a conspiracy theory I heard summer of 2013 that Samsung was sitting on a stockpile or memory chips"
If this was the case they'd be pushing their microsd ranges harder than they are. The Pro and Evo ranges are still low volume items and still limited to 64/128Gb.
Slashdot Mirror
Or it could be Russia, the EU and China, with India and Brazil joining later.
The only country dead-set against working with China in space is the USA.
> Here's your first lot of hot air :-) [nasa.gov], already having been packaged for delivery to the ISS, probably in September.
That's the third one. The first 2 were free-flying testbeds which are still in orbit.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
"The most damning evidence of that is that the only major sponsor/user besides NASA, the US Air Force, abandoned it as soon as its actual operational limitations became clear."
Which took a shitload of chuntzpah, given that it was USAF demands for crossrange abilities which put the huge wings on the thing and made it so big it had to be bolted to the side of a tank instead of sitting safely at the top of the stack.
Shuttle was a camel (in the sense of "a horse designed by committee") and ended up spending most of its life in search of a reason for existence - other than the obvious "national prestige" flagwaving one.
As a "space truck" it didn't need those enormous wings and as a USAF single orbit spysat launcher it lost a _lot_ of payload capacity for space truck operations.
"as long as the latency in both directions is equal."
It almost never is.
The "bus" test is simple - if XYZ developer fell under a bus, could the project continue operating without disruption?
The fact that Stenn feels he can't take vacations is a good sign that NTP would fail this test.
WRT the Indians: they're non-aligned.
Their alliances are to themselves. They buy from whoever gives the best deals and long-term support (or at times, from whoever's actually willing to sell to them)
Buying russian hardware has been a necessity since they had sanctions dropped on them by the west after demonstrating they could build nukes - using material misappropriated from the supposedly proliferation-resistant CANDU reactors Canada sold them cheap as part of an aid package.
"Right after the US withdrew from Vietnam, they fought (and won) a border war with China."
Viet/Chinese emnity goes back a lot further than you might think: The Vietnamese reputedly still haven't gotten around to forgiving China for stripping their forests in order to build Admiral Zheng He's fleet.
The Vietnamese would happily welcome american money as much as russian money, as long as it doesn't come with governance strings attached - the Vietnam war was fundamentally a war of independence from French Colonial rule after all.
As for "liking" or "not liking" communism - the average vietnamese citizen has no choice in the matter and in another 40-50 years there won't be enough of the old guard left to keep the pretence up.
"China is in this for themslves. They're making good use of the western sanctions on Russia to enrich themselves, negotiating all of the detals with Russia that they've been wanting to negotiate for a long time at bargain-basement prices that previously Russia had been unwilling to do."
Spot on. There's little love lost between the two neighbours - they're on "cordial" terms, not "friendly" ones.
"It's about proportionality... if Russia can spend a couple tens of millions of dollars to make the US spend a billion, Russia wins"
If the US spends that in VIetnam then Vietnam wins - and quite frankly the USA is better off spending money on this kind of thing than wasting money dropping bombs on people (if you factor in all the costs and knock-on effects, it'd be cheaper and probably more effective in most cases to drop cash on places where the war on terrorism is happening than to blow people up. The collateral damage is steadily turning more and more people into venom-spitting enemies of the whole western world.). In the overall scheme of military things 1 billion is pocket change down the back of the sofa.
It's worth noting that russian economy is extremely weak, so forcing them to spend a few tens of millions more in a bunch of areas may be all that's needed to dissuade them from the dickwaving competition.
War innovates, peace expands markets. If all the russians have to offer is clapped out cold-war bombers then the best retort is to outbid 'em for the bases they use.
The swiss watch industry sold ~30 million watches - to people who want to buy swiss watches.
People who just want accurate timepieces buy casio or timex or whatever (See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...)
Swiss watches are fancy jewellery, marketed by a national body building an image in the same way that de Beers crafted the diamond market.
Apple watches are a different kind of jewellery.
For most people the USP of anything they put on their wrist is the jewellery factor. People who can afford a $24,000 apple watch don't have just one watch and those who buy the base model would probably never even think of paying $350 for a Tissot 1853 PR100 Titanium.
IMHO the market for both barely overlaps. I could be wrong, but I don't believe that Apple selling 30 million watches a year will impact on swiss sales by even 1-2%.
The real danger to watch sales in all areas has been mobile phone sales.Even the dumbest phone has an accurate clock onboard. In the 1980s, just about every adult in western countries wore a watch. Take a look around today and see how many you see. The market to sell a new piece of wrist adornment is huge, if people can be persuaded to wear them.
Lawyers do what their clients tell them to.
Clever lawyers tell their clients how to achieve whatever the clients want (whether it's ethical or not is immaterial).
" I think it will be a long time before a 3D printer can make something with the properly annealled or tempered structure."
You might be pleasantly surprised. For starters you can always anneal/heat treat the output after it leaves the printer.
I think reverse engineering a commodity vehicle gearbox and making a working replica out of plastic is a fairly impressive achievement.
FWIW one of my high school maths teachers was a gearbox designer for a UK road machinery manufacturer. He quit not long after he was told that his designs for grader (aka road graders or motor graders) gearboxes were too reliable and they would be degrading the specification markedly in order to be able to sell more parts. Unsurprisingly the company no longer exists.
Look under the hood and you'll find a lot of those old cars are merely a shell for an entirely new vehicle (it's a way of avoiding punitive taxes)
Vietnam had the same problem for a long time and entire drivetrains were replaced to keep old french cars running. It wasn't uncommon to find a single cylinder lister diesel under the hood and the cabin converted to 3-4 rows of bench seating.
"then one of the brave pilots managed to dial in a rough turn to home into the autopilot before either fleeing the cockpit or dying"
The plane turned and tracked perfectly to the longest runway in the area - Pulau Langkawi
Pulau Langkawi is on the east side of Malaysia, a LOT longer than KL and has an easy ocean approach. KL is on the opposite side of Malaysia to the flight and there are 8000 foot mountain ranges in the way.
After passing Pulau Langkawi it seems to have been blown around by high altitude winds and got itself into (and stalled out of) coffin corner.(*)
Much of the "skirted around islands" shit was down to various countries refusing to admit that it went straight overhead without setting off their alert systems and the remaining tracks fit the known wind directions that day.
This insistence comes down to "Loss of Face" - Indonesia eventually admitted they had no records for the aircraft - not that they'd tracked it flying around their territory - and that admission involved greater loss of face than their initial denials.
All in all the most likely explanation is some sort of catastrophic failure which overwhelmed the crew between the time they turned around and the time the plane reached the field (easily explained by a fire fed by the cockpit oxygen system(**)). The pilot was known to be fastidious about planning and to have kept alternates programmed into the autopilot for each leg of his flights.
"What this all screams to me is that planes should be sending a regular report up to the satellites."
Many do. It's an added cost option on 777s and Malaysia airlines declined to spend the money for it. Such squawks are how the Air France debris was initially located.
MIA was facing major cutbacks after massive losses. Airline staff in all areas were reported to be lacking morale and there had been a large number of safety incidents both in the air and in maintenance shops (including a major cigarette-started fire which destroyed a lot of stuff in a heavy maintenance hanger, in an area which is non-smoking). The odds are high that this was another such event.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/m... - remains the most compelling theory.
The only conspiracies which need to be considered are those of coverups - both within MIA and within various neighbouring countries military as they don't want to admit how badly they dropped the ball.
Having seen airlines go out of their way to deny culpability (Air New Zealand TE901), I'm quite prepared to believe that manglement would throw the pilots under a bus to save their own wretched skin.
(*) The electrical fire theory (possibly oxygen fed(**)) could have dumped all sorts of random garbage into the autopilot, but the general feeling is that after Pulau Langkawi the plane was simply flying "straight and level" (which will inevitably result in altitude changes unless manually corrected) and no bearings set, so crosswinds would cause directional changes - and all the known changes match prevailing winds at altitude.
(**) http://www.iasa-intl.com/folde... http://www.skybrary.aero/index...
Actually no. The chinese leadership care far more about the people than "companies" and "money".
Even though their version of "following the will of the people and the good of the country" isn't close to what anyone would term "democracy", it's clear that many US politicians don't care about what's good for either as long as they line their own pockets along with those of their cronies.
"Are you saying that space somehow becomes less nutty if we envision a Chinese future in it? "
Yup
Take a good hard look at Heinlein's science fiction since the 1960s. The USA is a minor entity in most of the books because he could see the way the country was heading. He's not the only author who noticed that western powers were generally more interested in their own navels than what was going on elsewhere.
The next human voice on the moon is highly likely to be chinese.
The ones after that may well be indian, although the latter's current focus for their space program is firmly looking "down", diversions to luna and mars notwithstanding.
I totally agree, but given a bunch of stuff I'd attributed to incompetence has been proven otherwise via Snowden revelations, the other explanation can't be discounted out of hand. :-(
The problem with more atmospheric co2 equals more warming is twofold.
1: higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, through ice melt and/or thermal expansion - both are problematic for coastal populations.
2: If the temperature climb is high enough then stored methane (methane hydrates or permafrost swamps) can start bubbling out, leading to runaway warming.
The second is more worrying as it appears to be starting in siberia and in shallow arctic seas. Methane is quoted as 20 times more warming than co2 over 100 years but in the first decade of release it's more like 100-250 times as warming.
We're facing an uncertain future. Whilst the extreme doomsayers are unlikely to be right, the deniers are equally unlikely to be correct.
The real question is how much things will change and how quickly, with secondary questions about how political systems adapt to cope.
The problem with more co2 equals more warming is twofold.
1: higher temperatures mean higher sea levels, through ice melt and/or thermal expansion - both are problematic for coastal populations.
2: If the temperature climb is high enough then stored methane (methane hydrates or permafrost swamps) can start bubbling out, leading to runaway warming.
The second is more worrying as it appears to be starting in siberia and in shallow arctic seas. Methane is quoted as 20 times more warming than co2 over 100 years but in the first decade of release it's more like 100-250 times as warming.
We're facing an uncertain future. Whilst the extreme doomsayers are unlikely to be right, the deniers are equally unlikely to be correct. The real question is how much things will change and how quickly.
"We still have major cred overseas as that tiny country with the balls to tell the yanks to fuck off with their nukes. They still haven't forgiven us for that"
NZ has been bending over backwards to please the USA for the last 15-20 years. Whatever credibility it might have as a result of "Truck off Fuckston" should have evaporated a long time ago.
"Yet the underwear bomber was allowed to board a plane despite being dobbed in to the powers that be by his own family"
The alternative theory is that "they" let him board and get caught in order to have an excuse to grab more power.
The only danger any of the military coups in Fiji have posed to anyone is the fijian people (whatever their ethnicity).
The days of jumping in a war canoe and going off to war with neighbouring island groups (or Tonga ruling Samoa) are long-gone.
Spacecrcaft components are NEVER EVER bleeding edge on a production bird (microsats and testrigs are a different matter, but the last thing you want on a long-duration bird is 'bleeding edge')
They're generally locked in place from what's reliable when the designs are laid out (so the tech is 10 years old about then), then on average launched 10 years after that point (making them 10 years behind spacecraft state of the art and 15-20 years behind general purpose state of the art)
Until very recently the CPUs of choice were 1990s era P5 or Power devices because they were proven to work.
"There are screwdrivers in orbit being tracked by NORAD."
And there are a lot more items in orbit smaller than that which aren't.
A 10mm nut is more than sufficient to do serious damage, let alone a bolt and nothing smaller than about 5cm is able to be tracked.
The LEO traffic jam has been likened to a room full of armed moustraps, with more being placed there all the time. Eventually one will set off the others in a chain reaction. Space scientists have been seriously worrying about tipping point for the last 5-6 years.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... - and with enough moustraps in close proximity you don't even need the pingpong balls.
microdebris piercing the hydrazine tank would explain both the temperature spike and the explosion.
"a conspiracy theory I heard summer of 2013 that Samsung was sitting on a stockpile or memory chips"
If this was the case they'd be pushing their microsd ranges harder than they are. The Pro and Evo ranges are still low volume items and still limited to 64/128Gb.