Not only have they been using them in Mexico (Mexico City is the most polluted city on the planet) but they've been using them for some years in Spain.
Do you have a link that supports this claim? Not the seven year old one showing them thinking about using them in Mexico City - but a link that shows them actually doing so. Ditto for Spain. (Since the companies website is noticeably silent on both issues.)
Shame on you torok, and shame on you ScuttleMonkey. The former for falsely attributing the vehicle and technology to the undeserving; the latter for not doing his job and checking the story for validity.
scuba tanks are not just compressed air, they are a speacial mixture of gasses and as such cost way more then simply compressing everyday air into little cannisters, if one were to compress regular air into a scuba tank it would likely cost around a couple cents worth of electricity to fill, though it would then be useless for scuba diving.
This is incorrect. SCUBA tanks are generally filled with plain old air, compressed to between 2500 and 3500 psi. The only thing special about the air is that it is dried and filtered -- dried so that the tanks don't rust and filtered because you don't want to breathe compressed crap that has settled out in the bottom over multiple fills.
The air for these cars will have to be dried and filtered too... Dried to prevent water from accumulating in the filling station and automobile tanks, and to prevent ice from forming when the air is expanded through the engine. Filtered to prevent damage to the compressor and/or engine over time.
My guess is that they don't have or can't raise the capital to take on the large manufacturers toe-to-toe, and are hoping their technology can get a toe-hold on places where local regulations for things like crash-safety won't kill a lightweight chassis and a fibreglass body... which sounds exactly like what they've done with the proof-of-concept fleet in Mexico
What proof of concept fleet in Mexico? A press release from seven years ago with an announcement of plans to negotiate a contract doesn't constitute a fleet in being. In fact, I can find no evidence that the fleet ever existed a more than a press release. No fleet in being, no proof of concept.
Ironically, the fact that I am really into race sims (not GTA, but Gran Turismo et al) probably is what saved me in my first accident. I was rear-ended in the right rear at freeway speeds and sent into a spin. If I hadn't already had the muscle memory to recover from spins, I would have probably caused other collisions as opposed to being able to recover. I only ended up doing roughly a 720.
Where did you practice doing the spins in order to build that muscle memory? Oh, wait. You didn't practice. You played a video game with a completely different interface from your car.
You didn't have muscle memory - you got lucky. Doing a 720 isn't "recovering from a spin" it's the "expected result from such an accident".
So just blindly voting on a bill you haven't read is somehow better?
It's a whole lot better than a sham that gives people warm fuzzy feelings but doesn't actually accomplish it's stated purpose. (See: Security Theatre.)
A group called DownSizeDC.org is promoting a bill that would force every legislator who votes for a bill to sign a declaration that have either read the entire text of the bill, or had it read to them. The "Read the Bills Act" would also require that every piece of legislation be posted on the Net in its final form for a full 7 days before any vote could occur, giving the rest of us time to read and react...
There used to be requirements in US House and Senate for reading of the bills, but they both routinely waive that requirement. If it were required, the number and complexitiy of bills actually presented would go down dramatically.
That's a wonderful theory - right alongside "we'll all hold hands and sing kum-by-ya" in practicality. The folks at DownSizeDC.org seem to have failed to notice that it's 2007, not 1807. You can't run a country in the 21st century the same way you could a much smaller and less complex country 200 years ago today.
Absolutely. I was just discussing this with someone today - if the "readings" in Congress were mandatory and could not be bypassed by consent, we'd have a much better legal system for a variety of reasons - Congressional representatives couldn't claim ignorance, there would be an incentive to keep bills shorter, and an unexpected change would be noticed more readily.
ROTFLMAO. As if someone would actually sit through the hours it would take to read (aloud) many of these bills - and even if they would, I doubt they'd notice a change of a few dozen words out of thousands.
Because the Linux community has this fixed (and unsupported) idea that Joe Sixpack is pounding on the door of Best Buy and Circuit City begging, begging, to buy a Linux PC.
I can watch a movie on a big screen or my 24" monitor at home or a friends house
3. People who want to get together and watch a movie with a bunch of friends, and don't have a $3000+ entertainment system and a living room that seats 20+ people comfortably.
Yep. And no matter how much you handwave - no (ordinary) home big screen even remotely approaches the quality of experience that comes with a movie theatre screen. 24" monitors? Don't make laugh - the difference is beyond apples and oranges.
It depends on how cheap they can get the price, I suppose.
That's the point I'm trying to get across - air launch never becomes cheap when compared with a conventional first stage. The fixed costs of the carrier aircraft are simply too high - and they aren't going to come down.
And given the markets for space tourism and suborbital transportation, there's plenty of potential demand.
I've seen numbers from reliable sources that for airlaunch to be economical (I.E. competitive) - you need a launch demand on the order of several hundred launches per year. (I.E. far more than any single provider is likely to capture even under the most wildly optimistic estimates of the market, squared.) But there is a kicker in the deck- airlaunch never becomes significantly cheaper, regardless of flight rate[1], and always has a significant peformance hit compared to conventional first stages. No matter what you do - if you apply the same conditions to both launch methods, airlaunch never becomes significantly cheaper than conventional first stages and always exacts penalties for modest performance gains.
[1] When you start talking demand on that level, conventional stages start getting some significant economies of scale as well.
Theres a reason why real rocket scientists keep looking at air launch for orbital operations - and then abandon it when they run the actual numbers. It simply isn't as cheap and simple as it appears at first glance.
I assume you know of Pegasus which was launched from a 747 at 40,000 feet.
I am aware of Pegasus - I am also aware that it turned out to be far more expensive than first thought. While somewhat cheaper than more conventional methods - it's not cheaper enough to attract a great deal of interest.
Anyway, there are solid economic reasons to airlaunch. You get an initial boost to the vehicle from a reusable and reliable component (that can be test flown a lot beforehand).
In reality - there are solid economic reasons not to airlaunch. Extremely large (I.E. large enough for a useful payload, which the Mercury sized one of Pegasus is not) custom built aircraft are extremely expensive to build. They are extremely^2 expensive to certify for commercial use. They require ludicrously expensive infrastructure, (runways, hangars). A stock 747 will run you around $200 million - then heap on more millions for the modifications and more tens of millions for certification... An equivalent rocket stage will run you less than $5 million dollars.
'Reusability' and 'testability' are not magic wands that will yield cheap flights - amortized cost per flight is what counts. The massive upfront cost of an air launcher, combined with a very modest improvement in performance, combined with a low launch rate... means you actually spend more money than you 'save'.
And the lower atmospheric pressure at high altitude means that the rocket engine design is simplified.
Not significantly - you change the shape of exhaust nozzle, every other part is precisely the same.
The purpose of virtually every first stage is merely to get the rocket of the atmosphere and provide some forward velocity. A plane carrier can do this.
Nobody is arguing that a plane carrier can do it. The question is whether a plane carrier can do it cheaper than a first stage - and the answer seems to be a resounding no once you use actual numbers rather than assumptions. For example - compare Pegasus to Taurus. Taurus has three times the payload but only costs 50% more.
Taurus is a Pegasus with the wings removed and a simple first stage motor added.
The real problem with air launch isn't whether you can fit it on a standard commercial airfield. It isn't the (very real and not even remotely solved) issues with aerodynamics and structures at release time. The problem is that it simply does not work. A lot of people keep coming back to airlaunch because it seems 'obvious' that it has to be cheaper - but that impression doesn't survive the first honest comparision with actual numbers.
NASA is going to try to make going to the moon as risk free as possible. This habitat is an example of risk aversion. Caves, though riskier, offer several advantages. They're bigger, they offer better solar storm protection. The downside is finding them and then sealing them.
Actually - the downside is that we don't know where any caves on the moon are, or even if they exist in the first place. NASA would be extremely foolish to base any planning on using places not known to exist, and if they do exist - whose characteristics are unknown.
Instead, the billions of dollars NASA will waste would be better spent setting up prizes to get people to risk their necks to get to the moon. The X-Prize showed that you get more people spending more money than the prize value to win the prize.
Historically - such technology and achievement prizes have failed to produce the technology the sought, or (on the achievement side) much beyond stunts. The X-Prize is in fact a prime example of just that effect - SpaceShipOne is a point solution and pretty much at the dead end of its evolutionary path. It can't be scaled up to a size useful for space travel without being hideously expensive. (By hideously expensive I mean - on the same order as the Space Shuttle.)
Theres a reason why real rocket scientists keep looking at air launch for orbital operations - and then abandon it when they run the actual numbers. It simply isn't as cheap and simple as it appears at first glance.
You don't even have to make it all money. Give people who can settle and produce something on the moon property rights to the land and whatever they produce and we'll see a resurgence of pioneers willing to try it.
Niether NASA nor the US goverment can give anyone land on the Moon - as the Moon, like Antartica, is protected by international treaty.
Because there is a substantial portion of the Slashdot community who feels that it is their 'right' to break the law - and they fear anything that could infringe that 'right'.
I'll admit that I'm exaggerating "two weeks" and the simplicity of the support script, but I don't see where my general statement is wrong.
It's not the the general statement is wrong per se - but that the (vast) exaggeration and stereotyping render the form you wrote it in incorrect.
Providing a pre-installed GNU/Linux should largely be the same as providing Windows, except that bundling things becomes slightly easier due to the more advantageous license terms.
Certainly it is largely the same. But even so - all the support and backend up stuff has to set up from scratch, and that takes time. I'd guess between two and six months.
Yea, in the dreamworld of someone utterly clueless as to how business works and the realities of consumer demand.
None of this is hard. Even the support issue is overrated - the support people follow the same sort of script, that ends in the same two places ("We don't support 3rd party software" OR "Looks like it's hosed, use the restore CD").
Proof positive of the abovementioned lack of a clue and disconnect from reality.
Considering the amount of, and importance of, data that flows through that system... I am surprised that it's not routinely well ahead of the needs at peak capacity.
Generally it *is* ahead of things at peak capacity - but there was a massive spike yesterday that briefly exceeded peak capacity.
One of the problems Wall Street has been dealing with for decades is a tail chase with itself - every time they up their computer capacity, trading volume expands to consume the capacity. What was shortly before a comfortable capacity margin is now consumed in the regular course of business - which means the ability to deal with peaks over average goes down. They upgrade their computer sysems and.... lather, rinse, repeat.
Change in Chineese trading market regulations were the cause of this drop. A massive sell off occurred with the beginning of a crackdown on questionable and illegal trading on China's stock market. This rippled to every other market in the world. Asian, North America, South American and European markets were all affected. Blaming the computer systems is damage control.
if you actually bother to read TFA - you'll find they don't blame the computers for the drop. They blame the computers for creating the perception of a cliff rather than a steep slope.
This is actually something fairly important to consider as more and more of our life interfaces with displays mediated by computer. (Even down to the mundane. I've discovered the digital controls in my oven seem to use a time weighted average - which works fine in convection mode, but it enlarges the deadband in normal mode.)
Maybe there really is something to all of those science fiction movies that show space ports opening like a clamshell a few minutes before the spacecraft lifts off, especially if the air inside was temperature and humidity controlled. That kind of thing might have prevented Challenger's destruction and would keep any craft free from weather-related damage before takeoff...
Those clamshells are nice - but for any useful size of rocket they are pretty much impossibly beyond our current engineering abilities.
While such a clamshell might have prevented Challenger's loss - it's pretty much even odds that sooner or later we would have lost a Shuttle to O-ring blowby. The rings were failing at much higher temperatures because the real cause of the blowby (joint rotation) is temperature independent.
Also, it's not just the Shuttle that can be grounded by insulation damage - every cryogenic fueld rocket has insulation.
Dell needs to continue listening to its customers, and give me Linux on my Dell (dude).
There is no evidence that they've stopped listening to their customers - but a major vendor like Dell cannot simply start shipping machines with Linux on them. There's a lot to be done beforehand.
Easy - they applied to the DEA for a research permit and were certified to buy small amounts from qualified vendors.
Yes, I'm serious. If you are a properly certified research/development facility, and you get an approved permit, you can buy or be loaned all manner of things not available on the 'open' market. This includes cocaine, meth, plutonium - and moon rocks. (And yes, part of being certified is having a tracking and accounting system in place for the material, and there limits as to how much you can obtain.)
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Do you have a link that supports this claim? Not the seven year old one showing them thinking about using them in Mexico City - but a link that shows them actually doing so. Ditto for Spain. (Since the companies website is noticeably silent on both issues.)
Glass houses, stones, etc... etc...
The air for these cars will have to be dried and filtered too... Dried to prevent water from accumulating in the filling station and automobile tanks, and to prevent ice from forming when the air is expanded through the engine. Filtered to prevent damage to the compressor and/or engine over time.
What proof of concept fleet in Mexico? A press release from seven years ago with an announcement of plans to negotiate a contract doesn't constitute a fleet in being. In fact, I can find no evidence that the fleet ever existed a more than a press release. No fleet in being, no proof of concept.
Yeah, some people confuse 'seek to to accurately reproduce' with 'accurately reproduces'. Seeking is not accomplishing.
Right - and your support for this assertion is what?
Yet another assertion sans support.
Impressive. Not.
Where did you practice doing the spins in order to build that muscle memory? Oh, wait. You didn't practice. You played a video game with a completely different interface from your car.
You didn't have muscle memory - you got lucky. Doing a 720 isn't "recovering from a spin" it's the "expected result from such an accident".
It's a whole lot better than a sham that gives people warm fuzzy feelings but doesn't actually accomplish it's stated purpose. (See: Security Theatre.)
That's a wonderful theory - right alongside "we'll all hold hands and sing kum-by-ya" in practicality. The folks at DownSizeDC.org seem to have failed to notice that it's 2007, not 1807. You can't run a country in the 21st century the same way you could a much smaller and less complex country 200 years ago today.
ROTFLMAO. As if someone would actually sit through the hours it would take to read (aloud) many of these bills - and even if they would, I doubt they'd notice a change of a few dozen words out of thousands.
Because the Linux community has this fixed (and unsupported) idea that Joe Sixpack is pounding on the door of Best Buy and Circuit City begging, begging, to buy a Linux PC.
The ignorance in this exchange is in the assumption that resolution has anything to do with what I was talking about.
Yep. And no matter how much you handwave - no (ordinary) home big screen even remotely approaches the quality of experience that comes with a movie theatre screen. 24" monitors? Don't make laugh - the difference is beyond apples and oranges.
That's the point I'm trying to get across - air launch never becomes cheap when compared with a conventional first stage. The fixed costs of the carrier aircraft are simply too high - and they aren't going to come down.
I've seen numbers from reliable sources that for airlaunch to be economical (I.E. competitive) - you need a launch demand on the order of several hundred launches per year. (I.E. far more than any single provider is likely to capture even under the most wildly optimistic estimates of the market, squared.) But there is a kicker in the deck- airlaunch never becomes significantly cheaper, regardless of flight rate[1], and always has a significant peformance hit compared to conventional first stages. No matter what you do - if you apply the same conditions to both launch methods, airlaunch never becomes significantly cheaper than conventional first stages and always exacts penalties for modest performance gains.
[1] When you start talking demand on that level, conventional stages start getting some significant economies of scale as well.
I am aware of Pegasus - I am also aware that it turned out to be far more expensive than first thought. While somewhat cheaper than more conventional methods - it's not cheaper enough to attract a great deal of interest.
In reality - there are solid economic reasons not to airlaunch. Extremely large (I.E. large enough for a useful payload, which the Mercury sized one of Pegasus is not) custom built aircraft are extremely expensive to build. They are extremely^2 expensive to certify for commercial use. They require ludicrously expensive infrastructure, (runways, hangars). A stock 747 will run you around $200 million - then heap on more millions for the modifications and more tens of millions for certification... An equivalent rocket stage will run you less than $5 million dollars.
'Reusability' and 'testability' are not magic wands that will yield cheap flights - amortized cost per flight is what counts. The massive upfront cost of an air launcher, combined with a very modest improvement in performance, combined with a low launch rate... means you actually spend more money than you 'save'.
Not significantly - you change the shape of exhaust nozzle, every other part is precisely the same.
Nobody is arguing that a plane carrier can do it. The question is whether a plane carrier can do it cheaper than a first stage - and the answer seems to be a resounding no once you use actual numbers rather than assumptions. For example - compare Pegasus to Taurus. Taurus has three times the payload but only costs 50% more.
Taurus is a Pegasus with the wings removed and a simple first stage motor added.
The real problem with air launch isn't whether you can fit it on a standard commercial airfield. It isn't the (very real and not even remotely solved) issues with aerodynamics and structures at release time. The problem is that it simply does not work. A lot of people keep coming back to airlaunch because it seems 'obvious' that it has to be cheaper - but that impression doesn't survive the first honest comparision with actual numbers.
Easily - it doesn't. On the near side the (fairly) bright planet shines through the (nearly) transparent rings.
Why is Jimbo making decisions on what happens on Wikipedia anyhow? Hasn't he stepped down both from Wikipedia and Wikimedia foundation?
Actually - the downside is that we don't know where any caves on the moon are, or even if they exist in the first place. NASA would be extremely foolish to base any planning on using places not known to exist, and if they do exist - whose characteristics are unknown.
Historically - such technology and achievement prizes have failed to produce the technology the sought, or (on the achievement side) much beyond stunts. The X-Prize is in fact a prime example of just that effect - SpaceShipOne is a point solution and pretty much at the dead end of its evolutionary path. It can't be scaled up to a size useful for space travel without being hideously expensive. (By hideously expensive I mean - on the same order as the Space Shuttle.)
Theres a reason why real rocket scientists keep looking at air launch for orbital operations - and then abandon it when they run the actual numbers. It simply isn't as cheap and simple as it appears at first glance.
Niether NASA nor the US goverment can give anyone land on the Moon - as the Moon, like Antartica, is protected by international treaty.
Because there is a substantial portion of the Slashdot community who feels that it is their 'right' to break the law - and they fear anything that could infringe that 'right'.
It's not the the general statement is wrong per se - but that the (vast) exaggeration and stereotyping render the form you wrote it in incorrect.
Certainly it is largely the same. But even so - all the support and backend up stuff has to set up from scratch, and that takes time. I'd guess between two and six months.
Yea, in the dreamworld of someone utterly clueless as to how business works and the realities of consumer demand.
Proof positive of the abovementioned lack of a clue and disconnect from reality.
Generally it *is* ahead of things at peak capacity - but there was a massive spike yesterday that briefly exceeded peak capacity.
One of the problems Wall Street has been dealing with for decades is a tail chase with itself - every time they up their computer capacity, trading volume expands to consume the capacity. What was shortly before a comfortable capacity margin is now consumed in the regular course of business - which means the ability to deal with peaks over average goes down. They upgrade their computer sysems and.... lather, rinse, repeat.
if you actually bother to read TFA - you'll find they don't blame the computers for the drop. They blame the computers for creating the perception of a cliff rather than a steep slope.
This is actually something fairly important to consider as more and more of our life interfaces with displays mediated by computer. (Even down to the mundane. I've discovered the digital controls in my oven seem to use a time weighted average - which works fine in convection mode, but it enlarges the deadband in normal mode.)
Those clamshells are nice - but for any useful size of rocket they are pretty much impossibly beyond our current engineering abilities.
While such a clamshell might have prevented Challenger's loss - it's pretty much even odds that sooner or later we would have lost a Shuttle to O-ring blowby. The rings were failing at much higher temperatures because the real cause of the blowby (joint rotation) is temperature independent.
Also, it's not just the Shuttle that can be grounded by insulation damage - every cryogenic fueld rocket has insulation.
There is no evidence that they've stopped listening to their customers - but a major vendor like Dell cannot simply start shipping machines with Linux on them. There's a lot to be done beforehand.
Easy - they applied to the DEA for a research permit and were certified to buy small amounts from qualified vendors.
Yes, I'm serious. If you are a properly certified research/development facility, and you get an approved permit, you can buy or be loaned all manner of things not available on the 'open' market. This includes cocaine, meth, plutonium - and moon rocks. (And yes, part of being certified is having a tracking and accounting system in place for the material, and there limits as to how much you can obtain.)