And if NASA buys launches from private firms, then NASA can help kick-start an efficient private launch industry.
NASA has been buying launchers and launches from private firms since roughly.002 seconds after NASA was founded, and if you'll look around you'll notice a distinct lack of an 'efficient' private launch industry. (Assuming that by 'efficient' you actually mean to say 'cheap'.) Adding a handful of flights per year to that total won't chnage much.
And really, when it comes to government contracting on this level - there's a huge lock in effect. Whoever wins the COTS contract in the end is going to be the next Boeing - heavily dependent on government handouts and almost impossible to dislodge.
When I was hired out of college my first boss pulled me to the side and said "your *REAL* study begins now, you have the theory but none of the knowhow". He was right
When I reported to my first submarine, my chief and division officer told me that and were right too...
But the thing is, the college you attended and the Navy schools I attended, taught both the theory *and* how to learn the know how. That's something somebody fresh out of high school and only used to rote memorization doesn't have.
Maybe you should actually read TFA - you'll find Kos fired R2K *after* they were deemed unreliable by a third party, and *then* a study by a fourth party confirmed what the second party had already noted.
There's a difference between being sold defective product and knowingly selling said defective product.
They knowingly put their name on the product - and thus implied the product was not defective. Thus it doesn't matter what they knew or when they knew it, because they failed to verify it wasn't defective.
That's pretty much not what happened. The Daily Kos published the poll results without review or oversight - until a third party found the pollster to be unreliable and a fourth party found the particular polls published by the Daily Kos to be flawed.
So yeah, I'd lump the Daily Kos in among the culprits for failing to properly review the material they were publishing.
Kos immediately dumped the pollster, did an investigation, owned up to the errors publicly, and is now pursuing legal recourse.
In other words, they're sorry because they got caught - and they only got caught because of an independent review by an unaffiliated third party.
This is exactly how you would expect an honest media organization (if one with a considerable political agenda) to behave.
No, I'd expect an honest media organization to do their own routine reviews of second party material they publish and promote and place the weight of their own reputation behind. But dishonest corporations (of any stripe) can get away with just about anything short of murder because they can bet on two things; First, that people have short memories. Second, that the fanboys will be out in force explaining how it can't possible be the corporations fault. The corporation has always been at war with Eastasia.
By itself, no the paint won't accomplish much. It needs to be grounded, and your doors and windows also need to be retrofitted to shield against RF. You also need to do something about any penetrations through the walls (wiring outlets and plumbing), not to mention that your cabling and plumbing systems (if the latter is metal) themselves have to be modified to prevent them from acting as antennas and piping the RF you're trying to block right into the shielded volume.
As for the age of the manuscripts--the whole point of the exercise is to work on larger chunks of ideas, not on individual characters like in those BS "Bible Code" shenanigans.
Whether you're working on individual words or larger chunks - it's the same shenanigans.
While the exact character for character accuracy of ancient texts is a problem at times and for some texts (we call that textual criticism), it's not such a big deal for Plato
No, we don't call that textual criticism. Textual criticism is the process of comparing the contents of multiple copies of a manuscript in order to attempt to eliminate the errors that arise in copying and recover the original contents. Character for character accuracy need not apply.
it's definitely trivial when working at the scale of ideas and moods rather than individual characters.
Except 'ideas and moods' are markings overlaid by later scholars based on assumptions, biases, and beliefs - they aren't something unequivocally part of the original text and they sure as hell aren't something mathematical that you can subsequently treat mathematically.
If you assume you can re-provision at the ISS, then you could cut the supplies in half.
That would take storage space on ISS (which is limited) and cargo delivery upmass (which is very limited). You also have the problem of transferring water from the ISS to the capsule and topping off the oxygen tanks. It also makes the logistics pipeline more complicated.
So I don't think designers of the capsule would assume that. (And I expect the specifications would ground rule it out anyhow.)
Apollo was barely big enough for 3. Something only a "little" bigger is supposed to hold 7?
Do they sit on each other's laps?
Actually, they do practically sit in each others laps. Most people don't realize that beneath the couches of the Apollo command module was more-or-less open space - the crew slept down there during flight. Using this space to carry people was first planned back in the 1970's when they modified one command module into the Skylab rescue configuration.
So yes, making the capsule just a little taller and a little wider enlarges the crew compartment enough to pack in seven seats.
The previous posters are partly wrong on supply weight and volume though though: First, the majority of the supplies in the capsule were carried at the astronauts feet in the Lower Equipment Bay (the astronauts actually sat off center in the spacecraft), and you'll need almost the same amount for a station taxi. (The Apollo's configuration was to control the center of gravity, offsetting it controlled re-entry attitude and allowed the spacecraft the limited ability to 'fly' a non ballistic trajectory during re-entry. Almost certainly the station taxi will do the same.) There were also considerable supplies carried in the service module.
Supplies save less than you might think because of the increase in crew size. Both will require roughly 42 person days of supplies - 3 crew times 14 days for Apollo, 7 crew times 6 days for the new module. Yes, six days. Two days to fly to the station, two days to fly from the station to re-entry, and two days for contingencies. (No, you can't shorten the fly to or fly home portions, those are dictated by orbital mechanics.)
Considerable weight savings will also come from the the weight reduction in the electrical and electronic systems in the past forty or fifty odd years. (The Apollo guidance system, which weighed a couple of hundred pounds, would weigh less than ten today.)
But real biggie in terms of weight savings will be in the thinner heat shield (Apollo's needed to be able to stand a high velocity return from the moon, which a station taxi will not). Additional weight can be saved by using modern materials (composites, AL/Li alloys, etc.) for structural components. More weight can also be saved by shrinking the propulsion system - a station taxi has no need to brake itself into lunar orbit or blast itself free from the same.
Moreover, manufacturing hydrocarbons will mitigate the advantage that China has accrued in cornering the rare earth market.
Given the usefulness of rare earths as catalysts... I wouldn't bet on the process that you link to uses none. (Not to mention the myriad of non auto related uses for the rare earths.)
A computer with an offsite backup still preserves data when the building is bombed, burned down, flooded, or otherwise destroyed. A map in such a building will be gone forever.
In my world, it's trivially easy to make backup copies of paper data - photocopying, microfilming, xeroxing, or scanning and storing digital copies. (Or hell, even carbon copies.) In fact, people have been using various such methods of backing up important data (and storing it offsite) for centuries.
In your world people seem to forgotten how to do this. I'm glad I don't live in your world.
Your Vet teacher and apparently the entire Marine Corps have it wrong.
You need to familiarize yourself with the technology in question before calling people wrong. Just because it isn't digital doesn't mean it doesn't work.
My choice - the one with the track record. The one with just one sucessful launch may have been very lucky on the first launch. The one with the track record, I know what I'm getting into.
The one with the 'track record' you think you know what you're getting into - but they may have just been lucky too. Consider the O-rings on the Shuttle, which could have failed on any flight and nearly did on several flights prior to Challenger's loss. But by your logic you'd have happily climbed on board. The same goes for the foam - over a hundred flights, on any one of which it could have caused a disaster, yet you'd happily have climbed aboard Columbia too... because she had a 'track record'.
The above amounts to good advice, but I have one thing to add. If you're still interested in publishing in an academic journal, use something like Google Scholar to find recent articles about algorithms like yours. That will give you (a) an idea of what journals publish on that subject and hence what researchers in that area read, (b) examples of published articles in that field to use as a stylistic template and (c) some idea of which academics are active in the area, which could be useful if you'd like to either recommend reviewers (as many journals ask you to when submitting) and possibly contact one of them for advise.
Not to mention; d) getting up to date on current research will help you design your test protocols (it's much more than mere 'benchmarking' as malpracticed in the computer world) and e) help ensure you aren't duplicating work already done.
Um, no, my question was whether it was practical. Not as a theoretical possibility, but, would this be useful in the real world?
Certainly.
In the case of an abort near the pad, thrust termination ensures the discarded booster doesn't punch a hole in VAB or a hotel full of tourists. In any abort scenario it ensures the discarded booster stays within the bounds of the range (I.E. the area kept clear for the launch). It prevents recontact between the discarded booster or it's plume with the departing module. It ensures the discarded booster lands well clear of the descending module. (And it means your escape boost system can be smaller and lighter.)
I.E. pretty much the same reasons that liquid fueled boosters have the capability to be shut down and destroyed.
As it's been explained to me, thrust venting works by opening both ends of the rocket. Since the thrust is now exiting equally from top and bottom, they cancel each other out. Given that, I would think that if you instead tried to direct the vented thrust to the side, that would not cancel out the "normal" exhaust. The rocket would instead veer sharply to one side. In the case of an outrigger (like STS), that would be directly into the main vehicle. In the case of a single rocket stack, it would still leave the normal exhaust pushing the solid rocket into the next stage. Am I missing something here?
You're missing several things... Yes, venting to side does contribute to canceling out the 'normal' thrust, both by directing the vented thrust in a useful direction (usually about 45 degrees from the vehicle's axis) and by controlling the relative vent areas between the forward and aft ends of the vehicle.
Keep in mind that you don't simply blow the end(s) off the vehicle. The usual method of venting the forward end is to provide a stack (a pipe) between the motor dome and the skin of the vehicle. When the time comes to vent, you blow a hole in the motor dome and in the skin and the stacks direct the vented gas in the chosen direction. If you look at this picture of a Poseidon missile, you'll see a series of ovals at the forward end of the missile - those are the skin panels over the end of the trust termination stacks. (Poseidon narrows at that point for other reasons, it's not strictly needed for thrust termination.) This picture shows the Orion escape rocket being tested (so it's pointed at the ground so as not to take flight), but it shows roughly what the front end of the Poseidon shown above would have looked like during thrust termination.
The nozzle may or may not be blown off depending on the desired thrust termination profile. Equal (and large) areas provide maximum thrust decay, proving larger vents forward (or not blowing off the nozzle) provides maximum deceleration and separation between the discarded booster and the departing module. The designer chooses the relative areas and timing of blowing the vents at each end to provide the desired profile.
The vehicle doesn't veer because you design the vents so that they vent symmetrically about the vehicles axis. In the case of the design originally proposed for the shuttle, if you look at the shuttle from the nose and imagine the orbiter is on North side of the vehicle, then (relative to the ET center line) the 'East' SRB vented to the NE, E, and SE, while the 'West' SRB vented to the NW, W, and SW. No veering and no vent plume directly impinging on vehicle structure. You can see the same symmetrical effects in the picture of the Orion escape system above.
And once the vehicle is in flight, if you can afford to jettison the solid rocket, I don't see the point in bothering with thrust venting. You don'
So being biased, sexist, and only interested in supporting a special interest is OK - because they "haven't gotten fair treatment"? That makes it OK that males don't get fair treatment and get ignored by the politicians they elect?
You don't seem to actually understand how democracy works.
I participate in Zogby surveys, and I haven't even watched traditional news media in years. I trust Google News more
You seem to be unaware that Google News is nothing but a search engine (of sorts) for traditional news media.
it doesn't present a single point of information on a subject. I get a representative article, and then a link that gives me the details - "all 11,002 articles" on the subject. I can drill down as far as I want.
Which I suspect you probably don't do all that often, as if you do you'd realize that it's all traditional media with (as you say below) "once agenda and one viewpoint", almost always repeating the same material from the same sources.
As a women, I have yet to notice any women president or prime-minister leading a western country that has put any additional emphasis over their male counterparts in the same political party on women's only issues: gender discrimination, reproductive rights, healthcare inequalities, etc.
So, you only want to see women elected to high office who are heavily biased and predisposed towards a single special interest? I find that pretty sad actually.
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned the biggest reason that there aren't more people over 40 working in IT and software development.
Nah, it has nothing to do with the hand waving fogginess you and others keep proposing.
It's all about the math people - the IT industry as we recognize it today is barely 25 years old.
Seriously, anyone who is in their 40's today started programming with the first wave of PC's, and the industry has grown by exponential leaps and bounds since then. With that growth, and with the massive numbers of twentysomethings entering the field each year, the proportion of older programmers has shrunk naturally and will continue to do so regardless of any change in their absolute numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
You're not alone. I was 19 when it came out and I practically fell asleep while watching it.
NASA has been buying launchers and launches from private firms since roughly .002 seconds after NASA was founded, and if you'll look around you'll notice a distinct lack of an 'efficient' private launch industry. (Assuming that by 'efficient' you actually mean to say 'cheap'.) Adding a handful of flights per year to that total won't chnage much.
And really, when it comes to government contracting on this level - there's a huge lock in effect. Whoever wins the COTS contract in the end is going to be the next Boeing - heavily dependent on government handouts and almost impossible to dislodge.
When I reported to my first submarine, my chief and division officer told me that and were right too...
But the thing is, the college you attended and the Navy schools I attended, taught both the theory *and* how to learn the know how. That's something somebody fresh out of high school and only used to rote memorization doesn't have.
Ok, so it doesn't compete with food supplies - but what uses does it compete with?
Except - they neither caught R2K nor exposed them, FiveThirtyEight.com did. Going public was an act of damage control, not and act of contrition.
Maybe you should actually read TFA - you'll find Kos fired R2K *after* they were deemed unreliable by a third party, and *then* a study by a fourth party confirmed what the second party had already noted.
If this were remotely a valid comparison, that would be a valid question.
They knowingly put their name on the product - and thus implied the product was not defective. Thus it doesn't matter what they knew or when they knew it, because they failed to verify it wasn't defective.
That's pretty much not what happened. The Daily Kos published the poll results without review or oversight - until a third party found the pollster to be unreliable and a fourth party found the particular polls published by the Daily Kos to be flawed.
So yeah, I'd lump the Daily Kos in among the culprits for failing to properly review the material they were publishing.
In other words, they're sorry because they got caught - and they only got caught because of an independent review by an unaffiliated third party.
No, I'd expect an honest media organization to do their own routine reviews of second party material they publish and promote and place the weight of their own reputation behind. But dishonest corporations (of any stripe) can get away with just about anything short of murder because they can bet on two things; First, that people have short memories. Second, that the fanboys will be out in force explaining how it can't possible be the corporations fault. The corporation has always been at war with Eastasia.
They hired the pollsters,put their imprimatur on the results, and published them, so yes they are at least partially at fault.
By itself, no the paint won't accomplish much. It needs to be grounded, and your doors and windows also need to be retrofitted to shield against RF. You also need to do something about any penetrations through the walls (wiring outlets and plumbing), not to mention that your cabling and plumbing systems (if the latter is metal) themselves have to be modified to prevent them from acting as antennas and piping the RF you're trying to block right into the shielded volume.
It's not easy to block RF.
Whether you're working on individual words or larger chunks - it's the same shenanigans.
No, we don't call that textual criticism. Textual criticism is the process of comparing the contents of multiple copies of a manuscript in order to attempt to eliminate the errors that arise in copying and recover the original contents. Character for character accuracy need not apply.
Except 'ideas and moods' are markings overlaid by later scholars based on assumptions, biases, and beliefs - they aren't something unequivocally part of the original text and they sure as hell aren't something mathematical that you can subsequently treat mathematically.
That would take storage space on ISS (which is limited) and cargo delivery upmass (which is very limited). You also have the problem of transferring water from the ISS to the capsule and topping off the oxygen tanks. It also makes the logistics pipeline more complicated.
So I don't think designers of the capsule would assume that. (And I expect the specifications would ground rule it out anyhow.)
Actually, they do practically sit in each others laps. Most people don't realize that beneath the couches of the Apollo command module was more-or-less open space - the crew slept down there during flight. Using this space to carry people was first planned back in the 1970's when they modified one command module into the Skylab rescue configuration.
So yes, making the capsule just a little taller and a little wider enlarges the crew compartment enough to pack in seven seats.
The previous posters are partly wrong on supply weight and volume though though: First, the majority of the supplies in the capsule were carried at the astronauts feet in the Lower Equipment Bay (the astronauts actually sat off center in the spacecraft), and you'll need almost the same amount for a station taxi. (The Apollo's configuration was to control the center of gravity, offsetting it controlled re-entry attitude and allowed the spacecraft the limited ability to 'fly' a non ballistic trajectory during re-entry. Almost certainly the station taxi will do the same.) There were also considerable supplies carried in the service module.
Supplies save less than you might think because of the increase in crew size. Both will require roughly 42 person days of supplies - 3 crew times 14 days for Apollo, 7 crew times 6 days for the new module. Yes, six days. Two days to fly to the station, two days to fly from the station to re-entry, and two days for contingencies. (No, you can't shorten the fly to or fly home portions, those are dictated by orbital mechanics.)
Considerable weight savings will also come from the the weight reduction in the electrical and electronic systems in the past forty or fifty odd years. (The Apollo guidance system, which weighed a couple of hundred pounds, would weigh less than ten today.)
But real biggie in terms of weight savings will be in the thinner heat shield (Apollo's needed to be able to stand a high velocity return from the moon, which a station taxi will not). Additional weight can be saved by using modern materials (composites, AL/Li alloys, etc.) for structural components. More weight can also be saved by shrinking the propulsion system - a station taxi has no need to brake itself into lunar orbit or blast itself free from the same.
Given the usefulness of rare earths as catalysts... I wouldn't bet on the process that you link to uses none. (Not to mention the myriad of non auto related uses for the rare earths.)
Your conclusion doesn't follow from your premise - because that's exactly what Arlington is, a bare list of names and dates.
In my world, it's trivially easy to make backup copies of paper data - photocopying, microfilming, xeroxing, or scanning and storing digital copies. (Or hell, even carbon copies.) In fact, people have been using various such methods of backing up important data (and storing it offsite) for centuries.
In your world people seem to forgotten how to do this. I'm glad I don't live in your world.
You need to familiarize yourself with the technology in question before calling people wrong. Just because it isn't digital doesn't mean it doesn't work.
The one with the 'track record' you think you know what you're getting into - but they may have just been lucky too. Consider the O-rings on the Shuttle, which could have failed on any flight and nearly did on several flights prior to Challenger's loss. But by your logic you'd have happily climbed on board. The same goes for the foam - over a hundred flights, on any one of which it could have caused a disaster, yet you'd happily have climbed aboard Columbia too... because she had a 'track record'.
Not to mention; d) getting up to date on current research will help you design your test protocols (it's much more than mere 'benchmarking' as malpracticed in the computer world) and e) help ensure you aren't duplicating work already done.
Certainly.
In the case of an abort near the pad, thrust termination ensures the discarded booster doesn't punch a hole in VAB or a hotel full of tourists. In any abort scenario it ensures the discarded booster stays within the bounds of the range (I.E. the area kept clear for the launch). It prevents recontact between the discarded booster or it's plume with the departing module. It ensures the discarded booster lands well clear of the descending module. (And it means your escape boost system can be smaller and lighter.)
I.E. pretty much the same reasons that liquid fueled boosters have the capability to be shut down and destroyed.
You're missing several things... Yes, venting to side does contribute to canceling out the 'normal' thrust, both by directing the vented thrust in a useful direction (usually about 45 degrees from the vehicle's axis) and by controlling the relative vent areas between the forward and aft ends of the vehicle.
Keep in mind that you don't simply blow the end(s) off the vehicle. The usual method of venting the forward end is to provide a stack (a pipe) between the motor dome and the skin of the vehicle. When the time comes to vent, you blow a hole in the motor dome and in the skin and the stacks direct the vented gas in the chosen direction. If you look at this picture of a Poseidon missile, you'll see a series of ovals at the forward end of the missile - those are the skin panels over the end of the trust termination stacks. (Poseidon narrows at that point for other reasons, it's not strictly needed for thrust termination.) This picture shows the Orion escape rocket being tested (so it's pointed at the ground so as not to take flight), but it shows roughly what the front end of the Poseidon shown above would have looked like during thrust termination.
The nozzle may or may not be blown off depending on the desired thrust termination profile. Equal (and large) areas provide maximum thrust decay, proving larger vents forward (or not blowing off the nozzle) provides maximum deceleration and separation between the discarded booster and the departing module. The designer chooses the relative areas and timing of blowing the vents at each end to provide the desired profile.
The vehicle doesn't veer because you design the vents so that they vent symmetrically about the vehicles axis. In the case of the design originally proposed for the shuttle, if you look at the shuttle from the nose and imagine the orbiter is on North side of the vehicle, then (relative to the ET center line) the 'East' SRB vented to the NE, E, and SE, while the 'West' SRB vented to the NW, W, and SW. No veering and no vent plume directly impinging on vehicle structure. You can see the same symmetrical effects in the picture of the Orion escape system above.
So being biased, sexist, and only interested in supporting a special interest is OK - because they "haven't gotten fair treatment"? That makes it OK that males don't get fair treatment and get ignored by the politicians they elect?
You don't seem to actually understand how democracy works.
You seem to be unaware that Google News is nothing but a search engine (of sorts) for traditional news media.
Which I suspect you probably don't do all that often, as if you do you'd realize that it's all traditional media with (as you say below) "once agenda and one viewpoint", almost always repeating the same material from the same sources.
So, you only want to see women elected to high office who are heavily biased and predisposed towards a single special interest? I find that pretty sad actually.
Nah, it has nothing to do with the hand waving fogginess you and others keep proposing.
.
It's all about the math people - the IT industry as we recognize it today is barely 25 years old
Seriously, anyone who is in their 40's today started programming with the first wave of PC's, and the industry has grown by exponential leaps and bounds since then. With that growth, and with the massive numbers of twentysomethings entering the field each year, the proportion of older programmers has shrunk naturally and will continue to do so regardless of any change in their absolute numbers.