What I find impressive is SpaceX's turnaround time on scrubbed launches. I mean, sometimes they've fixed problems and relaunched within hours - 3 days is rather long by their standards
Huh? Why would you be impressed by that? Fast turnarounds, where possible, are pretty much the gold standard in the launch industry. You just don't hear about them as much because other launch companies aren't surrounded by the Musk's hype-and-media Reality Distortion Field.
And he's right that governments will get really nervous about hypersonic craft. As he says in TFA, the hypersonic flight could stick to its planned flight path and then deviate only for the last 20 minutes, and still be able to hit an arbitrary target.
So can subsonic aircraft. And that's setting aside his confusion (easily missed by uneducated readers) over the difference between a ballistic suborbital craft and a hypersonic aircraft. And overlooking his error in thinking a hypersonic vehicle can be diverted vast distances at the last moment - it can't, by about fifteen or twenty minutes before landing it's slowing and descending (if it hasn't already). Or, if it's ballistic, by the last minute it will take considerable amounts of energy to divert it any significant distance. Or his failure to grasp that no modern air traffic control radar depends on skin paint - it's all transponders (and thus you don't need the massive ABM radars he seems to think you do). Etc.. etc..
With two U.S. rockets soon capable of delivering astronauts to LEO, there must be some way to perform some type of minimal maintenance mission to the Hubble so it can continue its mission beyond the current EOL deadline.
There isn't. The manned vehicles on the horizon are simply are not capable of doing so. Everyone wanted "cheap and safe" capsules, and losing practically all but the most basic manned capability in space is the price of that.
as a normal U.S. citizen, and *especially* after 9/11/2001, I have felt like certain topics must be tread upon very carefully when conversing with others online. My own Facebook posts, comments and even "liking" something that might be considered contreversial seemingly spawns a new process in my brain that wants to ask the question, "Should I really?"
Have you seen a mental health professional for the evaluation of these symptoms - or are you just a garden variety tinfoil nutter? (That is technically sane, though demonstrably not quite living in reality.)
If you want to control minds and mouths, you make them hesitant to speak or even think thoughts that might be viewed by others as risky.
Seriously, grow the fuck up and get over yourself. Despite the rampant paranoia in your post, and in many like it, and many articles like this one posted on Slashdot... there's precisely zero evidence that the government is hunting down any US citizens for their posts, comments, or "likes". Zip. Nada. Zilch. There's no camps, no disappeared ones, nothing. Nothing to show that anything might be viewed as "risky".
What's next Slashdot? Chemtrails? The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion?
Because that turns the from a lightweight simple torus into a heavy and complicated mechanism - and introduces the problem of ensuring that nobody gets tangled in or injured by the rotor system. Not to mention that with the added weight, the torus now needs to be larger in order to support the weight of the equipment as well as the weight of the swimmer.
Just dropping a bog standard torus makes everything simpler.
There was an amusing scene in Mythbusters about this, where Jamie goes to replace the battery in a Dodge Stratus they purchased and has to take one of the wheels off in order to access it. Needless to say he was unimpressed; I think his quote was "You see, what happened here is some idiot designed this in a computer and didn't think."
No, what happened is Jamie is an idiot - applying the standards of batteries decades ago and his personal bias as tinkerer to a place where they are inappropriate. We don't replace batteries practically annually (as was the habit up until not too long ago) and we no longer need to routinely check the water levels and clean and tighten the terminals. With batteries that routinely last several years and which require zero maintenance - there's no need for them to be routinely accessible.
Remeber, this was the mainstream distribution media for software for ~30 years (how often did you have to return original SW due to a bad floppy?).
Never - but that's completely irrelevant to the actual question at hand: how often did disks in use (either read only for software or read/write for data) fail? Plenty. By about 1985 or so I was already in the habit of working from copies of my 'install' disks and routinely backing up my working (data) disks because of these failures.
I have to use these things everyday in computer-controlled machine tools, and media/drive quality matter 100%.
IME, 20 year-old 3M-branded floppies from Ebay paired with drives made from cast aluminum frames are reliable (old school Teac/Sony/Panasonic drives).
Curiously (or perhaps not) you insist that quality matters 100% - but you don't tell us anything beyond them being "reliable", which can mean almost anything.
She complains of having to use a laptop from 2013? WTF? The same goes for the Blackberry, if it's doing it's job - what's the problem that it's not "cutting edge"?
The problem here isn't the technology the White House is using, the problem is a manager without a clue. (Which shouldn't come as a real surprise, as she doesn't appear to have any actual qualifications for the job other than having worked at Google.)
I can't be the only one who thinks that is a terribly bad idea... It would rip the guts right out of repeatability, and confidence that "this" is what $RESEARCHER found.
Um, have you never heard of versioning? It would be pretty trivial to add the statement "Used the XXX v3.5.1 dataset to perform these calculations" to your research paper.
Versioning only ensures that anyone who subsequently performs the calculations will reach the same result - it does not verify the data is complete or correct. That's the basic flaw in Wikipedia, and one that must be fixed in order to use a system like it as a depository for scientific information rather than a hazy collection of stuff that one guy maintains is accurate in his opinion or that nobody can be bothered to maintain correct and up-to-date.
I see plenty of English speakers learning Chinese. A lot of them never learn "proper" English. But I work in San Francisco with the children of Chinese immigrants.
No offense, but that seems to have given you the viewpoint of an ant in a field... seeing only the grass, and not the mountains, forests, and seas.
Going back to the OP, the current entrenchment is no guarantee. 100 years ago, everybody who wanted to do science learned German. 300 years ago, everybody learned French. 600 years ago, everybody in the West learned Latin. 2000 years ago, everybody in the Mediterranean learned Greek.
Um... no. 100 years ago everyone who wanted to do physics, mathematics, and chemistry learned German. 300 years ago, the elite learned French. 600 years ago, the elite learned Latin. 2000 years ago, traders and some of the elite learned Greek.
Notice a pattern? And how it's different from today's widespread teaching and usage of English?
1. Most of those rules and pitfalls are put there by bureaucrats who want to bilk you out of money for certifications and licenses the laws they passed require. If are you are well versed in the knowledge needed, yet don't know these extra rules, then the rules themselves are bullshit traps to force people into buying these licenses for legal protection.
No, those rules and 'pitfalls' exist to protect the people around you from idiots like you - because unlike the grandparent you fail to grasp the difference between having the knowledge and having the ability. The two are not the same thing.
2. Precedent is a broken concept that should be abolished. Cases should be weighed on their own circumstances. Considering the outrageous fees lawyers get for 'interpreting' the law other lawyers have written, it's the least they could do.
Here in the real world, cases are weighed on their own merits. Once again, the problem here isn't the system, it's your complete ignorance.
don't use Biosphere II as an example. It never was a serious scientific experiment
That has always made me wonder why nobody followed up on these projects with a rigorous scientific version.
There's been a variety of related and rigorous work - but unlike Biosphere II, they haven't been large and gaudy and thus haven't captured the media and the public's attention. That the more rigorous research has only lead to the conclusion that we don't currently actually know all that much rather than making sexy headlines hasn't helped much.
There are two kinds of people who announce they can do something like that - the ones who don't have a clue how hard it is, and the ones who don't care because their objective is to scam investors.
So which one is Elon Musk? (I'm voting for Type I myself.)
But building an ecosystem that can sustain your moon colony is really hard; we don't know how to keep small pilot projects like Biosphere II running for very long without cheating and restocking the atmosphere, or how to build dirt without a ready supply of nitrogen and phosphate to grow plants with.
You're correct in that we don't know how to do those things... but please don't use Biosphere II as an example. It never was a serious scientific experiment, even though the ecological mystics in charge of the project managed to sell it as such.
Cheaper way would be a large high altitude jet to carry the rocket to the edge of space.
The problem is - it's not really cheaper. Fuel is cheap, large high altitude jets aren't - and it takes a very, very, large number of flights to amortize the cost of the latter below the cost of the former. Further, the size of the jet places significant size constraints on the booster. On top of that, your booster is now heavier because the structure must now be strengthened to take the loads of being carried horizontally and dropped as well as the usual longitudinal loads.
Air launch is one of those ideas that seems to make sense (in the same way that many perpetual motion machines do) on the BOTE and among those who haven't bothered to do the research... but when you move on to rigorous analysis, the whole scheme rapidly falls apart. There's a reason why Pegasus is one of the most expensive launchers around per/kg and why, despite being so "obvious", air launchers are largely noticeable by their near complete absence.
The article you link to is dated 2012 - the MER rovers launched in 2003. You do the math.
No, the article says that you either need low-intensity, long duration heat (which has apparently long been known), or high-intensity, short-duration:
Hello, McFly... did you even bother to read why you're replying to?
And either way, dissipating the heat is going to be a serious problem - 250C is still high enough to potentially cause considerable damage to the surrounding components.
We are still buying flash that we can't fix because of the packaging. We're still shipping this unfixable flash in mission-critical applications. When does it get fixed?
Never, because the cure is far more problematical than the disease.
Facebook & Twitter, etc - Highly dependent on the outcome of the pending global collapse of the advertising bubble (both online and offline). Advertising is at least 2 orders of magnitude over priced. If they survive on reduced revenue, they may still be around, but at MySpace levels.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. MySpace never had the deep and extensive penetration that Facebook does. Even if Facebook's revenue collapses, there's nothing on the horizon to indicate that their userbase will do so.
If it was long-known that long-duration, low-intensity heat would revive failed flash, why did these rovers leave without the ability to do so?
The article you link to is dated 2012 - the MER rovers launched in 2003. You do the math.
And why am I not able now to buy flash memory that will heat itself to 800 degrees and heal itself?
Put an 800 degree flame inside the electronic equipment you use the flash memory in - stand back, way back, and borrow a friend's phone, tablet, or PC to report the results back to us. (If they'll let you.)
Seriously, 800 degrees, even in a small space, is still a lot of heat to dissipate. It's more than enough to damage the solder connections of the flash chip, and probably enough to damage the socket it's plugged into.
In other words, a unit that's completely unlike the one that will be required on Mars... It doesn't have to deal with abrasive dust... it doesn't have to compress and liquify the output gasses...
There's perhaps an even more compelling argument why the atmosphere is good for us if we intend to land on Mars AND launch again: ISRU and the Sabatier reaction could be a huge win. If you plan to spend a few months on the surface, you can generate a ton of methalox fuel using the local atmosphere and only half a ton of water.
If the process works that is... that is, the machinery to manufacture the fuel has never been tested beyond the crudest laboratory bench level. There's a whole host of known unknowns between the laboratory bench and a working prototype on Mars. Let alone a fully operational unit that can be trusted with human lives.
That article is from 2007. Since then a Sky Crane was used to land the 1 ton Curiosity rover on Mars.
Which means we've upped the current limit to around 6% of the fifteen ton weight of the Apollo LM. Which in turn means we're still far, far short of the weight of any plausible manned Mars landing vehicle.
Worst case would be the humans don't land close enough to the supplies to be able to survive long-term, in which case Plan B is to explore similar to how the Apollo Lunar program did, and head back after several days.
Even a short stay lander is going to way around 45 tons - three times the weight of the Apollo LM weight we don't know don't how to land now.
Slashdot Mirror
Huh? Why would you be impressed by that? Fast turnarounds, where possible, are pretty much the gold standard in the launch industry. You just don't hear about them as much because other launch companies aren't surrounded by the Musk's hype-and-media Reality Distortion Field.
So can subsonic aircraft. And that's setting aside his confusion (easily missed by uneducated readers) over the difference between a ballistic suborbital craft and a hypersonic aircraft. And overlooking his error in thinking a hypersonic vehicle can be diverted vast distances at the last moment - it can't, by about fifteen or twenty minutes before landing it's slowing and descending (if it hasn't already). Or, if it's ballistic, by the last minute it will take considerable amounts of energy to divert it any significant distance. Or his failure to grasp that no modern air traffic control radar depends on skin paint - it's all transponders (and thus you don't need the massive ABM radars he seems to think you do). Etc.. etc..
Or, in short, he's full of crap.
There isn't. The manned vehicles on the horizon are simply are not capable of doing so. Everyone wanted "cheap and safe" capsules, and losing practically all but the most basic manned capability in space is the price of that.
Have you seen a mental health professional for the evaluation of these symptoms - or are you just a garden variety tinfoil nutter? (That is technically sane, though demonstrably not quite living in reality.)
Seriously, grow the fuck up and get over yourself. Despite the rampant paranoia in your post, and in many like it, and many articles like this one posted on Slashdot... there's precisely zero evidence that the government is hunting down any US citizens for their posts, comments, or "likes". Zip. Nada. Zilch. There's no camps, no disappeared ones, nothing. Nothing to show that anything might be viewed as "risky".
What's next Slashdot? Chemtrails? The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion?
Because that turns the from a lightweight simple torus into a heavy and complicated mechanism - and introduces the problem of ensuring that nobody gets tangled in or injured by the rotor system. Not to mention that with the added weight, the torus now needs to be larger in order to support the weight of the equipment as well as the weight of the swimmer.
Just dropping a bog standard torus makes everything simpler.
No, what happened is Jamie is an idiot - applying the standards of batteries decades ago and his personal bias as tinkerer to a place where they are inappropriate. We don't replace batteries practically annually (as was the habit up until not too long ago) and we no longer need to routinely check the water levels and clean and tighten the terminals. With batteries that routinely last several years and which require zero maintenance - there's no need for them to be routinely accessible.
Never - but that's completely irrelevant to the actual question at hand: how often did disks in use (either read only for software or read/write for data) fail? Plenty. By about 1985 or so I was already in the habit of working from copies of my 'install' disks and routinely backing up my working (data) disks because of these failures.
Curiously (or perhaps not) you insist that quality matters 100% - but you don't tell us anything beyond them being "reliable", which can mean almost anything.
She complains of having to use a laptop from 2013? WTF? The same goes for the Blackberry, if it's doing it's job - what's the problem that it's not "cutting edge"?
The problem here isn't the technology the White House is using, the problem is a manager without a clue. (Which shouldn't come as a real surprise, as she doesn't appear to have any actual qualifications for the job other than having worked at Google.)
The number of humans editing Wikipedia is small - they've driven everyone else off.
Versioning only ensures that anyone who subsequently performs the calculations will reach the same result - it does not verify the data is complete or correct. That's the basic flaw in Wikipedia, and one that must be fixed in order to use a system like it as a depository for scientific information rather than a hazy collection of stuff that one guy maintains is accurate in his opinion or that nobody can be bothered to maintain correct and up-to-date.
No offense, but that seems to have given you the viewpoint of an ant in a field... seeing only the grass, and not the mountains, forests, and seas.
Um... no. 100 years ago everyone who wanted to do physics, mathematics, and chemistry learned German. 300 years ago, the elite learned French. 600 years ago, the elite learned Latin. 2000 years ago, traders and some of the elite learned Greek.
Notice a pattern? And how it's different from today's widespread teaching and usage of English?
No, those rules and 'pitfalls' exist to protect the people around you from idiots like you - because unlike the grandparent you fail to grasp the difference between having the knowledge and having the ability. The two are not the same thing.
Here in the real world, cases are weighed on their own merits. Once again, the problem here isn't the system, it's your complete ignorance.
There's been a variety of related and rigorous work - but unlike Biosphere II, they haven't been large and gaudy and thus haven't captured the media and the public's attention. That the more rigorous research has only lead to the conclusion that we don't currently actually know all that much rather than making sexy headlines hasn't helped much.
So which one is Elon Musk? (I'm voting for Type I myself.)
You're correct in that we don't know how to do those things... but please don't use Biosphere II as an example. It never was a serious scientific experiment, even though the ecological mystics in charge of the project managed to sell it as such.
Wait, what? You basically repeat back what he wrote, add a few snarky comments, and he's the one with an uninformed opinion?
VERY obviously biased.
The problem is - it's not really cheaper. Fuel is cheap, large high altitude jets aren't - and it takes a very, very, large number of flights to amortize the cost of the latter below the cost of the former. Further, the size of the jet places significant size constraints on the booster. On top of that, your booster is now heavier because the structure must now be strengthened to take the loads of being carried horizontally and dropped as well as the usual longitudinal loads.
Air launch is one of those ideas that seems to make sense (in the same way that many perpetual motion machines do) on the BOTE and among those who haven't bothered to do the research... but when you move on to rigorous analysis, the whole scheme rapidly falls apart. There's a reason why Pegasus is one of the most expensive launchers around per/kg and why, despite being so "obvious", air launchers are largely noticeable by their near complete absence.
Until a gear strips. Or a bearing freezes up. Or... there's lots of things to go wrong with a mechanical window that will render it non functional.
Hello, McFly... did you even bother to read why you're replying to?
And either way, dissipating the heat is going to be a serious problem - 250C is still high enough to potentially cause considerable damage to the surrounding components.
Never, because the cure is far more problematical than the disease.
The conclusion doesn't follow from the premise. MySpace never had the deep and extensive penetration that Facebook does. Even if Facebook's revenue collapses, there's nothing on the horizon to indicate that their userbase will do so.
The article you link to is dated 2012 - the MER rovers launched in 2003. You do the math.
Put an 800 degree flame inside the electronic equipment you use the flash memory in - stand back, way back, and borrow a friend's phone, tablet, or PC to report the results back to us. (If they'll let you.)
Seriously, 800 degrees, even in a small space, is still a lot of heat to dissipate. It's more than enough to damage the solder connections of the flash chip, and probably enough to damage the socket it's plugged into.
Not flying the astronauts again (as happened to the Apollo 7 and SL-4 crews) has proved pretty effective at getting Houston's point across.
In other words, a unit that's completely unlike the one that will be required on Mars... It doesn't have to deal with abrasive dust... it doesn't have to compress and liquify the output gasses...
etc... etc...
Which is completely fucking irrelevant to the question of soft landing a heavy object on Mars.
If the process works that is... that is, the machinery to manufacture the fuel has never been tested beyond the crudest laboratory bench level. There's a whole host of known unknowns between the laboratory bench and a working prototype on Mars. Let alone a fully operational unit that can be trusted with human lives.
Which means we've upped the current limit to around 6% of the fifteen ton weight of the Apollo LM. Which in turn means we're still far, far short of the weight of any plausible manned Mars landing vehicle.
Even a short stay lander is going to way around 45 tons - three times the weight of the Apollo LM weight we don't know don't how to land now.