There are far worse things on mars than Polar Bears, and unlike polar bears they're always there, waiting to kill you if you make the slightest mistake.
Even in the arctic you get a shedload of second chances.
What counts is how far downrange that separation takes place. All you need to do is cancel the horizontal component of the trajectory and have enough fuel to be able to carry it back (to some extent it should be glideable - even a skydiver can easily make 100mph as a horizontal component of his/her trajectory.).
The vertical component will be taken care of by gravity. As others have said it's mainly a matter of making sure it's slowed down "enough" by the time it reaches thicker atmosphere that it doesn't tear apart and it'll slow down even more as it passes through that.
The more I look at this the more I'm convinced that SpaceX are on the right track with a RTB profile.
Falcon stage1 separation is about 35 miles up and 40 miles downrange, at a total velocity of 3800-4000mph. That's going to give plenty of time to rotate and push back to base, even before apogee (are the landing legs also intended as drogues/airbrakes? It seems so to my untrained eyes.)
By way of comparison the SRBs detached after 2 minutes at 24miles altitude with a total velocity about 2800mph, reached apogee of 35 miles, did no retrofiring and only landed about 125 miles downrange. Profile drawings show separation happening at about 30-40 miles downrange.
NASA was already investigating flyback liquid boosters based on Deltas at the time of the Challenger disaster, after which the plans were shelved, so they clearly thought it was doable, but other events got in the way (NASA has always been shortfunded, even during the moonshots. The US public spent more on pizza deliveries or outboard motors in 1969 than NASA's entire annual budget (ie: either category is larger than the NASA budget) and it's been strangled ever since.)
Given the amount of handshaking which goes on, you can put the IMEI in those too.
Most modern cars have something like this in all their management systems. if breaking one up for parts, the components have to be electronically divorced from each other (while still connected to each other) or they'll refuse to work in another system (there's a marriage procedure too)
That setup was deliberately introduced to combat stolen parts rings and chop shops, but has only been partially effective (savvy operators steal entire cars and do the necessary procedures before commencing the chop, but many small legit breaking/recycling firms don't have the kit to do it, so are effectively selling electronic junk)
"Phones with blocked IMEI's still have value as parts"
In some cases they're worth more as parts than as phones.
It's a pity the Beeb didn't think to followthrough on the stories to find out what the fences were doing next. It'd a be a good "Kenyon" style undercover story.
> At least with this setup, the thieves would have to crack the phone open,....
fusble link proms are both tiny and extremely cheap. They can also be embedded _in_ the circuit board.
One of the original design criteria for mobile phones was that the electronic serial number should both be electronically immutable and impossible to physically without destroying the handset. At some point that went out the window.
The main (formerly govt monopoly) telco in New Zealand shut down virtually all media reporting of major fines it'd been hit with for illegal anticompetitive activities by threatening to pull all ad space in the time between the story was reported as "late breaking, more at 10" on the 6pm TV news and the 10pm news (both channels which ran news programs at the time ran them at 6 and 10pm)
Only IDG computerworld ran the story - and it's no coincidence that the telco didn't advertise in that.
It wasn't the first time a large company had shut down unfavourable press by thrreatening to withhold adverts, but it was the first time it had been done so effectively and across all mass media.
There's no reason most vaccines can't be combined in the same syringe.
Even if not: I can clearly remember getting shots at 4 years old. It hurt less than being pinched.
I had to do a bunch of vaccinations last year for travel. They hurt less than that.
OTOH Flu shots *throb* for days.
As far as autism goes, the withdrawing always seems to happen between 2 and 3, regardless of any given country's vaccine schedules. Correlation doesn't imply causality.
You might think that the worst effect of chicken pox is "a few scars, like acne", however:
Complications of chicken pox run at 1 in 100 and include:
1: Death (yes really!) 2: pneumonia, meningitis, encephalitis ( inflammation of the brain), inflammation of the heart and toxic shock 3: Cateracts (the virus can scar there too) 4: Limb growth problems. 5: permanent brain damage
Lest you think these are theoretical: A childhood friend of mine is legally blind thanks to chickenpox when she was 7 years old and the problems are more complex than cataracts.
So yes, it IS worth vaccinating against.
FWIW when I got chicken pox as a kid, there were 6 spots. 25 years later when shingles erupted across the left side of my face, medics were quite worried I'd lose an eye (I was lucky, but vision is slightly impaired).
Any disease which can badly affect 5% of th epopulation and cripple 1% of those is worth vaccinating against.
The death rate from Measles is 1 in 9000 and serious complication rate (which range from blindness to brain damage to "confined to an iron lung for the rest of your life") about 1 in 5000.
I'll take the frigging vcaccine and the 1 in 3millon chance of a reaction, TYVM (Actually, though no choice of my own, I didn't get vaccinated - and have had measles (both types) [local outbreaks whilst I was too young to be vaccinated], mumps, varicella+shingles [no vaccine available at the time for both] and a couple of other nasties. Trust me, you DO NOT WANT 'EM)
It's no great surprise that the vast majority of antivaxxers havn't suffered the diseases in question, because _their_ parents were sensible enough to vaccinate them.
Sensible schools _require_ vaccination certificates for children and exclude those who don't have 'em.
Most journals wouldn't allow the kind of claptrap Wakefield foisted on the world without preliminary reviews.
The Lancet failed miserably at the first hurdle.
I am still surprised that Wakefield hasn't faced criminal charges (or been sued into oblivion) for the damage he's caused and with any luck someone will take on Jenny McCarthy (endangering public health?)
When you're stationary, _nothing_ beats large lead-acid traction batteries for longevity and low maintenance requirements. That's why Telcos still use them.
Mass and volume efficiency are irrelevant if you're siting 'em next to a wind turbine.
It's a different matter in your home and the economics are just in favour of not doing it, vs buying offpeak power and staying disconnected in peak hours.
"It is possible that simply to be connected to a power grid there might be a monthly fee dedicated to paying for the distribution infrastructure"
This has already happened in the UK (and a number of USA jurisdictions. Supply and usage charges are separated. (The net effect is a substantial increase in pwer charges over the last few years, but if you generate, you don't get credits on the supply charge)
"You can always pull over in a car when the weather gets rough."
And you can always _land_ and wait it out if you see you're coming up to shitty weather, or turn back. I've done both.
VFR flying means staying away from such stuff if possible and staying the hell out of clouds. If you're caught in weather bad enough to cause problems then you're most likely outside your license conditions anyway (IFR pilots are a different ballgame but in GA you _must_ take account of the weather no matter which conditions you're observing)
I've known 3 pilots who got themselves killed in bad weather. All three exemplified the saying about there being "no old, bold pilots"
It might be something as simple as an oxygen fed fire in the forward cargo hold. The cargo manifest hasn't been published and liekly wouldn't include "internal" items being shuttled around for maintenance. (It was oxy generators and a tyre which downed Valuejet)
Even if the full service was enabled it's entirely possible that popping the breakers would have interrupted the data stream. The pings were coming from the tranceiver unit on the aircraft (similar to ethernet keepalives), not from the actual data senders.
The only diifference in that scenario is that more data would be available and hopefully someone would have jumped to attention when the data stream cut off.
All of this is just armchair quarterbacking until the data recorders are found. Even then they may not tell us much (It's entirely possible that the CVR was shut off early in the process. The Valuejet and Swissair ones both cut out before crashes, when the power was interrupted.)
1: The pingers don't just suddenly shut down, they fade out
2: 30 days is the _minimum_ guaranteed operational time at full output, at the end of the battery service life (Lithiums have a 10 year shelf life)
Under most circumstances there's likely to be 5-10 days further output at lower levels before the batteries give up the ghost. Apparently the batteries in these particular pingers may have been at or slightly past their use-by date. There's inconsistent documentation (The original pinger makers say the pingers hadn't been refurbished and should have been replaced a couple of years back, however they also pointed out that another outfit may have refurbed them, or the pingers may have been replaced with a 3rd party unit.)
If the aircraft ran out of fuel and went into the water in cruise trim, it's likely to have been nose down and travelling at at least 400 knots. The chances of any large pieces of debris remaining on the surface are small (similar to what happened with Swissair 111, or Valuejet 592)
By contrast Air France 447 stalled into the water and would have had a forward velocity of substantially less than 200knots and substantial vertical velocity - more like an uncontrolled bellyflop. This allowed the fin/rudder to snap off in one piece.
"If the pilot decided to be real crazy and was conscious he could have landed it like the hudson river landing all intact."
Unlikely. The Hudson is millpond flat compared to even the smallest open ocean swell. The best scenario for an open ocean ditching in the south shina sea would be pretty nasty, especially given it'd be 12-16 HOURS from rescue (planes might find it, but ships still have to get there)
"The VERY FIRST thing you would do is alert the ground you had a problem. Not turn off all hope of getting help. There is no fire that is STOPPED by turning off a radio!"
Only if you're an idiot. I've had friends killed because pilots got so busy trying to sort out mechanical problems that they forgot to fly the aircraft and ended up smearing it across a hillside (The pilot in one incident and a passenger in another)
Emergency handling is drilled into every pilot even at PPL level - Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. The only time I've ever needed to use that drill (blown exhaust valve) I was already looking at a suitable field before making the Pan call.
The British Airways 777 pilot was so busy flying the plane that he almost didn't make a pan call at all. If he'd done so earlier, there's a fair chance that instead of bellyflopping just short of the theshold, the 777 would have wiped out several hundred people on the ground (The approach path for Heathrow passes over a suburban town centre and hundreds of houses in the last couple of miles) and taken out a major arterial road..
The flight pattern mght possibly a preprogrammed triangle (which is the standard distress/attention pattern if radio is out) and "divert to where noone else will get killed" by the captain, on the basis that they might not make it back to land alive.
He was known to be fairly fastidious and the FBI investigation showed he'd run a number of emergency scenarios on his personal simulator.
As for the climb/descent, it could just as easily be a trimmed aircraft flying a route without altitude control engaged. The automatics would have taken it out of a stall if noone intervened.
The real quetions revolve around why the MAF didn't react when they saw a bogey. Petronas Towers is a fairly large target and radar operators are supposed to be watching for that kind of thing these days.
There was a report from an oil rig in the south china sea at the same time as the disappearanmce of an observed fire on an aircraft which then went out.
Slashdot Mirror
There are far worse things on mars than Polar Bears, and unlike polar bears they're always there, waiting to kill you if you make the slightest mistake.
Even in the arctic you get a shedload of second chances.
What counts is how far downrange that separation takes place. All you need to do is cancel the horizontal component of the trajectory and have enough fuel to be able to carry it back (to some extent it should be glideable - even a skydiver can easily make 100mph as a horizontal component of his/her trajectory.).
The vertical component will be taken care of by gravity. As others have said it's mainly a matter of making sure it's slowed down "enough" by the time it reaches thicker atmosphere that it doesn't tear apart and it'll slow down even more as it passes through that.
The more I look at this the more I'm convinced that SpaceX are on the right track with a RTB profile.
Falcon stage1 separation is about 35 miles up and 40 miles downrange, at a total velocity of 3800-4000mph. That's going to give plenty of time to rotate and push back to base, even before apogee (are the landing legs also intended as drogues/airbrakes? It seems so to my untrained eyes.)
By way of comparison the SRBs detached after 2 minutes at 24miles altitude with a total velocity about 2800mph, reached apogee of 35 miles, did no retrofiring and only landed about 125 miles downrange. Profile drawings show separation happening at about 30-40 miles downrange.
NASA was already investigating flyback liquid boosters based on Deltas at the time of the Challenger disaster, after which the plans were shelved, so they clearly thought it was doable, but other events got in the way (NASA has always been shortfunded, even during the moonshots. The US public spent more on pizza deliveries or outboard motors in 1969 than NASA's entire annual budget (ie: either category is larger than the NASA budget) and it's been strangled ever since.)
Appearing at fan conventions isn't that lucrative. Most do it because they feel a responsibility to the fans, not for the money.
Given the amount of handshaking which goes on, you can put the IMEI in those too.
Most modern cars have something like this in all their management systems. if breaking one up for parts, the components have to be electronically divorced from each other (while still connected to each other) or they'll refuse to work in another system (there's a marriage procedure too)
That setup was deliberately introduced to combat stolen parts rings and chop shops, but has only been partially effective (savvy operators steal entire cars and do the necessary procedures before commencing the chop, but many small legit breaking/recycling firms don't have the kit to do it, so are effectively selling electronic junk)
"Phones with blocked IMEI's still have value as parts"
In some cases they're worth more as parts than as phones.
It's a pity the Beeb didn't think to followthrough on the stories to find out what the fences were doing next. It'd a be a good "Kenyon" style undercover story.
> At least with this setup, the thieves would have to crack the phone open,....
fusble link proms are both tiny and extremely cheap. They can also be embedded _in_ the circuit board.
One of the original design criteria for mobile phones was that the electronic serial number should both be electronically immutable and impossible to physically without destroying the handset. At some point that went out the window.
Indeed.
The main (formerly govt monopoly) telco in New Zealand shut down virtually all media reporting of major fines it'd been hit with for illegal anticompetitive activities by threatening to pull all ad space in the time between the story was reported as "late breaking, more at 10" on the 6pm TV news and the 10pm news (both channels which ran news programs at the time ran them at 6 and 10pm)
Only IDG computerworld ran the story - and it's no coincidence that the telco didn't advertise in that.
It wasn't the first time a large company had shut down unfavourable press by thrreatening to withhold adverts, but it was the first time it had been done so effectively and across all mass media.
There's no reason most vaccines can't be combined in the same syringe.
Even if not: I can clearly remember getting shots at 4 years old. It hurt less than being pinched.
I had to do a bunch of vaccinations last year for travel. They hurt less than that.
OTOH Flu shots *throb* for days.
As far as autism goes, the withdrawing always seems to happen between 2 and 3, regardless of any given country's vaccine schedules. Correlation doesn't imply causality.
He was saying it in the 19th century.
"Survival of the fittest" was misused back in the day to justify mistreatment of workers, etc.
You might think that the worst effect of chicken pox is "a few scars, like acne", however:
Complications of chicken pox run at 1 in 100 and include:
1: Death (yes really!)
2: pneumonia, meningitis, encephalitis ( inflammation of the brain), inflammation of the heart and toxic shock
3: Cateracts (the virus can scar there too)
4: Limb growth problems.
5: permanent brain damage
Lest you think these are theoretical: A childhood friend of mine is legally blind thanks to chickenpox when she was 7 years old and the problems are more complex than cataracts.
So yes, it IS worth vaccinating against.
FWIW when I got chicken pox as a kid, there were 6 spots. 25 years later when shingles erupted across the left side of my face, medics were quite worried I'd lose an eye (I was lucky, but vision is slightly impaired).
Why would the homecooked meal be more likely to kill the OP than it is for unvaccinated people?
Any disease which can badly affect 5% of th epopulation and cripple 1% of those is worth vaccinating against.
The death rate from Measles is 1 in 9000 and serious complication rate (which range from blindness to brain damage to "confined to an iron lung for the rest of your life") about 1 in 5000.
I'll take the frigging vcaccine and the 1 in 3millon chance of a reaction, TYVM (Actually, though no choice of my own, I didn't get vaccinated - and have had measles (both types) [local outbreaks whilst I was too young to be vaccinated], mumps, varicella+shingles [no vaccine available at the time for both] and a couple of other nasties. Trust me, you DO NOT WANT 'EM)
It's no great surprise that the vast majority of antivaxxers havn't suffered the diseases in question, because _their_ parents were sensible enough to vaccinate them.
Sensible schools _require_ vaccination certificates for children and exclude those who don't have 'em.
Most journals wouldn't allow the kind of claptrap Wakefield foisted on the world without preliminary reviews.
The Lancet failed miserably at the first hurdle.
I am still surprised that Wakefield hasn't faced criminal charges (or been sued into oblivion) for the damage he's caused and with any luck someone will take on Jenny McCarthy (endangering public health?)
For slightly less purile fun, look at https://www.youtube.com/watch?... (The large haddock collider)
When you're stationary, _nothing_ beats large lead-acid traction batteries for longevity and low maintenance requirements. That's why Telcos still use them.
Mass and volume efficiency are irrelevant if you're siting 'em next to a wind turbine.
It's a different matter in your home and the economics are just in favour of not doing it, vs buying offpeak power and staying disconnected in peak hours.
"It is possible that simply to be connected to a power grid there might be a monthly fee dedicated to paying for the distribution infrastructure"
This has already happened in the UK (and a number of USA jurisdictions. Supply and usage charges are separated. (The net effect is a substantial increase in pwer charges over the last few years, but if you generate, you don't get credits on the supply charge)
"You can always pull over in a car when the weather gets rough."
And you can always _land_ and wait it out if you see you're coming up to shitty weather, or turn back. I've done both.
VFR flying means staying away from such stuff if possible and staying the hell out of clouds. If you're caught in weather bad enough to cause problems then you're most likely outside your license conditions anyway (IFR pilots are a different ballgame but in GA you _must_ take account of the weather no matter which conditions you're observing)
I've known 3 pilots who got themselves killed in bad weather. All three exemplified the saying about there being "no old, bold pilots"
It might be something as simple as an oxygen fed fire in the forward cargo hold. The cargo manifest hasn't been published and liekly wouldn't include "internal" items being shuttled around for maintenance. (It was oxy generators and a tyre which downed Valuejet)
Even if the full service was enabled it's entirely possible that popping the breakers would have interrupted the data stream. The pings were coming from the tranceiver unit on the aircraft (similar to ethernet keepalives), not from the actual data senders.
The only diifference in that scenario is that more data would be available and hopefully someone would have jumped to attention when the data stream cut off.
All of this is just armchair quarterbacking until the data recorders are found. Even then they may not tell us much (It's entirely possible that the CVR was shut off early in the process. The Valuejet and Swissair ones both cut out before crashes, when the power was interrupted.)
Bear in mind that
1: The pingers don't just suddenly shut down, they fade out
2: 30 days is the _minimum_ guaranteed operational time at full output, at the end of the battery service life (Lithiums have a 10 year shelf life)
Under most circumstances there's likely to be 5-10 days further output at lower levels before the batteries give up the ghost. Apparently the batteries in these particular pingers may have been at or slightly past their use-by date. There's inconsistent documentation (The original pinger makers say the pingers hadn't been refurbished and should have been replaced a couple of years back, however they also pointed out that another outfit may have refurbed them, or the pingers may have been replaced with a 3rd party unit.)
If the aircraft ran out of fuel and went into the water in cruise trim, it's likely to have been nose down and travelling at at least 400 knots. The chances of any large pieces of debris remaining on the surface are small (similar to what happened with Swissair 111, or Valuejet 592)
By contrast Air France 447 stalled into the water and would have had a forward velocity of substantially less than 200knots and substantial vertical velocity - more like an uncontrolled bellyflop. This allowed the fin/rudder to snap off in one piece.
"If the pilot decided to be real crazy and was conscious he could have landed it like the hudson river landing all intact."
Unlikely. The Hudson is millpond flat compared to even the smallest open ocean swell. The best scenario for an open ocean ditching in the south shina sea would be pretty nasty, especially given it'd be 12-16 HOURS from rescue (planes might find it, but ships still have to get there)
"The VERY FIRST thing you would do is alert the ground you had a problem. Not turn off all hope of getting help. There is no fire that is STOPPED by turning off a radio!"
Only if you're an idiot. I've had friends killed because pilots got so busy trying to sort out mechanical problems that they forgot to fly the aircraft and ended up smearing it across a hillside (The pilot in one incident and a passenger in another)
Emergency handling is drilled into every pilot even at PPL level - Aviate, Navigate, Communicate. The only time I've ever needed to use that drill (blown exhaust valve) I was already looking at a suitable field before making the Pan call.
The British Airways 777 pilot was so busy flying the plane that he almost didn't make a pan call at all. If he'd done so earlier, there's a fair chance that instead of bellyflopping just short of the theshold, the 777 would have wiped out several hundred people on the ground (The approach path for Heathrow passes over a suburban town centre and hundreds of houses in the last couple of miles) and taken out a major arterial road..
The flight pattern mght possibly a preprogrammed triangle (which is the standard distress/attention pattern if radio is out) and "divert to where noone else will get killed" by the captain, on the basis that they might not make it back to land alive.
He was known to be fairly fastidious and the FBI investigation showed he'd run a number of emergency scenarios on his personal simulator.
As for the climb/descent, it could just as easily be a trimmed aircraft flying a route without altitude control engaged. The automatics would have taken it out of a stall if noone intervened.
The real quetions revolve around why the MAF didn't react when they saw a bogey. Petronas Towers is a fairly large target and radar operators are supposed to be watching for that kind of thing these days.
There was a report from an oil rig in the south china sea at the same time as the disappearanmce of an observed fire on an aircraft which then went out.
He had a beard. All the other philospohers kept nicking his razor.