However, the cost of not having to rebuild the rocket every time is much more significant. Even if they can only reuse it a few times, that's a lot of production cost being saved.
The money saved by not having to produce a new vehicle is offset by the money spent on fixed infrastructure and on recovering and refurbishing the vehicle for the next flight. Airline travel is as a cheap as it is because they've gotten between-flights maintenance down to essentially zero (basically only emergent work) - the expensive refurbishment and refitting occurs at intervals of months to years. (And the amortized costs of the facilities for doing so are spread over a large number of aircraft and a very large number of flights.) The Shuttle was expensive as it was because between-flights maintenance costs were very high. (And the amortized costs of the infrastructure were spread over a very small number of vehicles and small number of flights.)
So, if a first stage (new-in-box) costs $x million and refurbishment costs $.9x million (including the amortized portion of the fixed costs), then it'll have to fly ten times just to break even. The break even point calculation is very sensitive to flight rate, flight interval, and the number of vehicles in the fleet. The hope is, over a long time frame, to reach civil aviation levels... but there's a long way to go between here and there. (Particularly in light of the low flight rate of F9 launches that have sufficient spare payload capacity to allow them to be recovered.)
If they can show over a couple attempts that they get close to the target then they can move to doing this over land. They have already proven they can do this in Texas many times.
There's a reason why they're flying all these attempts over water - they haven't done it in Texas even so much as once. The flights in Texas have been "take off, go a short distance up, then land more-or-less right back where you started" - which isn't the difficult part (so far as flight control is concerned, it's more of an engine control problem) as small errors have no time to propagate. The difficult part (from the flight control POV and the reason they are testing on a barge) is the boostback and retro burns, where even small errors in attitude and delta V propagate into significant errors by the time you hit your hovering gates (and is thus an engine control *and* a flight control problem). Another issue, also not tested in Texas, is the aerodynamics and flight dynamics of the returning stage (especially in the high speed regime), and indeed these issues caused a problem on the first attempt.
So no, coming close isn't a win. They're going to have to demonstrate pinpoint recovery a number of times before anyone is going to let them even consider attempting it over land.
So while a shortcut down a sleepy street might not be a problem in a place like Des Moines or even Detroit, it's a different story in a city that last year was again ranked No. 1 for the nation's most time-consuming traffic jams.
Why wouldn't it be a problem for those of use not living in Trendville? It was a hell of a problem here in a town much smaller (37k) than either Detroit (681k) or Des Moines (203k) where cars would speed (during non rush hour) down a neighborhood street or pack it bumper to bumper (during rush hour) to cut around a stop light - especially when the elementary school one more street over was letting out and the area was filled with kids walking home. It finally took a kid getting hit (though thankfully not seriously injured) before the city stopped "studying the problem" and got around to blocking one end of the street.
Books are portrait, I'll give you that. But you unfold them into a landscape A5-ish or large book with multiple columns (because of the difficulty of printing very near the gutter in the middle).
The sheets of paper are flat when they're printed - it's no more difficult to print near where the gutter will be when the pages are folded and cut than for any other part of the sheet. But that nitpick aside, though they open to landscape, with few exceptions (full page spreads) we deal with them as two side-by-side portrait format chunks.
Photographs? Mostly landscape and certainly specified in landscape size and cameras are mostly designed for landscape operation (except when making portraits - for which we shockingly use them portrait!)
Anyone from the serious hobbyist up uses landscape or portrait interchangeably as the composition demands. (The composition, not the subject.)
This will cost us billions of dollars in the private and public sector
who is this "us" he is talking about? because with just a little thought, you quickly realized these "billions of dollars" are just transfers from the (assumed) wealthy building owners to the less wealthy contractors and workers.
Who is this us? The not-wealthy lady running a photography studio whose rent just went up to pay for the refits. (And her customers.) And the not-wealthy guy renting an apartment. And the not wealthy family running a little convenience store. And that's just the not-wealthy renters. The not-wealthy owners of the buildings their businesses are in or they reside in aren't in any better situation. (This may come as a surprise to you, but people outside the 1% can and do own buildings.)
I was thinking he sounds more like the kind of parent who forces his kid to do _________, so the parent can relive their glory years and bask in the reflected glory. Baseball, beauty pageants, dance, piano, football, video games... it the act that matters, not the activity.
You just set up a industrial park next to your data center, build in some heat transfer systems and offer the waste heat as value add for a bit of $ into whatever medium the customer wants (air, water, etc). In no time at all you will have all sorts of setups that require heat for their industrial use
Very unlikely. What comes out of a data center is diffuse, low grade heat. Maybe useful for running a dehydrator or drying system, maybe replacing building heating systems... but not much more as the temperature is too low.
This is one thing the Scandinavians and Germans have always understood, once you make the heat you might as well use it because it's damned foolish just to waste it. They use waste heat all the time for community driven heating and for all sorts of things and it probably ends up saving all kinds of money.
It's common in Scandinavia because of the climate - but not many people live in that cold of a climate. (The equivalent latitudes in the America's are way the hell up in Canada.) Geography matters.
No it doesn't, it depends on the power usage of the house - unless you expect the residents to go into power saving mode every night and every time there's cloudy weather.
My household uses a bit less than 10kWh per day
Googling about, that shows you well below the American average (roughly 30KWh/day). And even with a full 30KWh battery... I haven't seen the sun in six days. (Not at all unusual for this time of year.)
Those utilities are not envisioning the fact that all that power savings that is "eating into their profits" today is energy they can sell to tomorrow's customers. Why? Because populations grow over time, and they grow quite quickly. Instead of bitching about the paper loss they think they are seeing, they should be celebrating the fact that they don't have to build more power-plants and infrastructure for 10-20 years and will be able to serve a much larger base with the same infrastructure.
The problem here isn't short term thinking - it's that you're utterly clueless. If the population goes up, capacity still has to go up - because the utility has to have the capacity to supply the grid when renewable sources aren't available. If you have twice the population, you have twice the night time load - and you need twice the daytime capacity available for cloudy days, for deeply cold days, etc... etc...
Not to mention that in many urban areas, a good chunk of that growth will go into apartments - which don't have sufficient roof space for solar to offset a significant part of consumption.
Renewable power sources are not magic, and they are a supplement, not a replacement, for baseload capacity.
If a car can have a 85KWh battery then why can't a house have a 10KWh battery?
I never said they couldn't - I said they'd be expensive. (And 10KWh isn't very much.)
The price of batteries is set to plummet due to mass scale production of electric cars which need the batteries
Which means that if you add additional demand for batteries for houses... the prices are going to go right back up. (Supply and demand, simple economics.) And even "plummeted" prices are still very expensive - into five figures.
What planet are you from? No utility I'm aware of gives away power for free. Not to mention you completely ignored the required to cover periods when solar is providing sufficient power during the day. (Etc... etc...) You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
They have good reason to be nervous... They'll still be on the hook to provide full power when solar is producing less than peak capability or isn't producing at all, but there's little chance they'll be allowed to significantly raise their rates. This works out to being required to maintain full generating and transmission capacity with sharply reduced revenue.
Not to mention that very few people installing subsidized and/or cheap solar panels will spend the money to install unsubsidized and expensive battery capacity. That's long been a deep flaw in the thinking of solar power supporters - that they can have their cake and eat it too, the unspoken assumption that the utilities will always be there and will always have the capacity to make up any lack. You get what you pay for folks, TANSTAAFL.
Four CAD drawings are not worth getting excited about. When the number gets above 4 million, we're probably talking some serious information about the carrier.
Depends on *which* four drawings they are and the purpose you intend to put them to. Four drawing doesn't sound like much to uninitiated, but the right four drawings can be very valuable to the professional and/or the knowledgeable. For example, a drawing showing the locations of ammunition magazines, [aviation] fuel bunkers, the reactor spaces, and the engines rooms shows you location of the most important spaces. Add a drawing of the armor arrangement on top of that, and now you can analyze where you might want to put a limpet mine or pull a boat loaded with explosives alongside for maximum possible effect. (Etc... etc...)
Four million drawings *sounds* impressive, but in reality 3,999,900 of those drawings will be completely boring stuff of not much use or interest to anyone except the shipyard building the carrier and any future shipyard overhauling the carrier. The remaining hundred? They're the ones that guys with bad intentions want because analyzing them shows potential vulnerable spots. Even if someone wants the plans to analyze to build their own carrier...., they only want/need a fraction of the total number of drawings. (The detailed arrangement of the berthing spaces, or the layout of the kitchen, or the as-installed electrical diagram for the lighting system really aren't much use.)
Disclaimer: Former USN Submarine Service - I spent a *lot* of time looking at ship's drawings....
Which is a fascinating thought, because let's face it: Controlling people's sexuality, has a lot more to do with cultural and especially religiously ingrained norms, than it has to do with any kind of harm.
And her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?
Well, those contacts do wear down and require require regular maintenance as do the rails themselves. That such maintenance was done is the reason you were able to get to work.
But it should also be said that just because it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source doesn't logically mean it's wrong, either.
That's my point - he didn't give us anything on which to judge whether his claims were right or wrong. He made no effort to support or defend his implicit claims. The article was essentially empty of anything beyond snide remarks, allusions, spin, and misdirection.
From TFS: "There has been quite a bit of discussion about the misinformation propagated by this particular 60 Minutes segment."
But somehow... he never actually gets around to telling us what any of those things are. Instead, the bulk of the article is dedicated to snide ad hominem attacks on the reporter. The article headline asks "Is Chernobyl still dangerous or was 60 Minutes pushing propaganda?", but places essentially all of it's effort on the latter portion of the question.
In short, it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source.
I believe that if we wait to start colonizing space something, space rock, super volcano, radical islamists, pick your poison, will destroy the possibility of survival.
The problem is, even if we started colonizing space tomorrow, it'll almost certainly be a century or more before we can build a colony that can survive unaided. And if it can survive unaided, all it accomplishes is being a pit down which we collectively shovel endless bundles of cash to no good end. (Well, unless you're foolish enough to think that providing a pacifier for idiots is a good end.)
It may have been sterilized but a seagull can just fly over and poop on it. As the rocket speeds out the atmosphere, it must initially flatten lots of bugs against itself.
If you actually read the links, you'll find they applied DNA samples with specific and known markers to the exterior of the vehicle and then tested for DNA with those specific and known markers after it was recovered. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, once again actual scientists actually do know what they're doing, unlike random Slashdot commenters and mods.
Whereas wind and ice will cause more widespread outages that will strain response time, and that represents the vast majority of total downtime anywhere in the NW.
I never claimed otherwise.
Your claim that trees do not represent a problem is bullshit.
And given your constantly shifting story and constantly pulling irrelevant assumptions out of your ass - I'm done here.
You're the exception that proves it. Most of the region has great uptime, and also lots of trees, urban and rural both.
You're assuming something I didn't say - because I said nothing about uptime at all. (And for good reason, it's irrelevant to the your nonsensical claim that there is no impact from trees, and because it's not an issue... I've only lost power in the heaviest of storms.) The rest of the message is just more of the same - claiming I'm being "pillaged" not based on facts but on assumptions you've pulled out of thin air
Heavy rain doesn't impact the lines at all.
Except for when it does of course. If you lived in this area, you'd know it's very hilly and pieces of it do slide and trees do fall over when the ground gets saturated (in many places the topsoil is fairly thin with hardpan relatively close to the surface). Wherever you are isn't the whole of the Northwest, stop assuming that what hold true there holds true here.
All things, right here in the Pacific Northwest, that have caused power outages at my house. And my utility is a public traded company
Really? Which company would that be? The only "investor-owned" electric utility in this region that I'm familiar with failed miserably in the stock market and was taken private years ago to keep them limping along.
My mistake, but that's irrelevant - because they still aren't the public utility you cited.
My advice to communities... have a public utility that isn't controlled by the city or other general-purpose politicians, and elect engineers to the board. It works really well.
That is why in the Pacific Northwest where trees grow faster than any other part of the US, and cities are full of trees, there is reliable power almost everywhere.
Except for when snow causes a tree to sag on the lines. Or a windstorm causes a tree to fall on the lines. Or very heavy rain causes a tree to sag onto the lines.
All things, right here in the Pacific Northwest, that have caused power outages at my house. And my utility is a public traded company, which covers the entire Puget Sound Basin. You may have a perfect idyllic power utility and reliable power that never has problems with trees - but you aren't the whole of the Pacific Northwest.
Slashdot Mirror
The money saved by not having to produce a new vehicle is offset by the money spent on fixed infrastructure and on recovering and refurbishing the vehicle for the next flight. Airline travel is as a cheap as it is because they've gotten between-flights maintenance down to essentially zero (basically only emergent work) - the expensive refurbishment and refitting occurs at intervals of months to years. (And the amortized costs of the facilities for doing so are spread over a large number of aircraft and a very large number of flights.) The Shuttle was expensive as it was because between-flights maintenance costs were very high. (And the amortized costs of the infrastructure were spread over a very small number of vehicles and small number of flights.)
So, if a first stage (new-in-box) costs $x million and refurbishment costs $.9x million (including the amortized portion of the fixed costs), then it'll have to fly ten times just to break even. The break even point calculation is very sensitive to flight rate, flight interval, and the number of vehicles in the fleet. The hope is, over a long time frame, to reach civil aviation levels... but there's a long way to go between here and there. (Particularly in light of the low flight rate of F9 launches that have sufficient spare payload capacity to allow them to be recovered.)
There's a reason why they're flying all these attempts over water - they haven't done it in Texas even so much as once. The flights in Texas have been "take off, go a short distance up, then land more-or-less right back where you started" - which isn't the difficult part (so far as flight control is concerned, it's more of an engine control problem) as small errors have no time to propagate. The difficult part (from the flight control POV and the reason they are testing on a barge) is the boostback and retro burns, where even small errors in attitude and delta V propagate into significant errors by the time you hit your hovering gates (and is thus an engine control *and* a flight control problem). Another issue, also not tested in Texas, is the aerodynamics and flight dynamics of the returning stage (especially in the high speed regime), and indeed these issues caused a problem on the first attempt.
So no, coming close isn't a win. They're going to have to demonstrate pinpoint recovery a number of times before anyone is going to let them even consider attempting it over land.
From TFA:
Why wouldn't it be a problem for those of use not living in Trendville? It was a hell of a problem here in a town much smaller (37k) than either Detroit (681k) or Des Moines (203k) where cars would speed (during non rush hour) down a neighborhood street or pack it bumper to bumper (during rush hour) to cut around a stop light - especially when the elementary school one more street over was letting out and the area was filled with kids walking home. It finally took a kid getting hit (though thankfully not seriously injured) before the city stopped "studying the problem" and got around to blocking one end of the street.
4% of the Federal budget, not GDP - and even then, it only touched that value for two years.
The sheets of paper are flat when they're printed - it's no more difficult to print near where the gutter will be when the pages are folded and cut than for any other part of the sheet. But that nitpick aside, though they open to landscape, with few exceptions (full page spreads) we deal with them as two side-by-side portrait format chunks.
Anyone from the serious hobbyist up uses landscape or portrait interchangeably as the composition demands. (The composition, not the subject.)
Who is this us? The not-wealthy lady running a photography studio whose rent just went up to pay for the refits. (And her customers.) And the not-wealthy guy renting an apartment. And the not wealthy family running a little convenience store. And that's just the not-wealthy renters. The not-wealthy owners of the buildings their businesses are in or they reside in aren't in any better situation. (This may come as a surprise to you, but people outside the 1% can and do own buildings.)
I was thinking he sounds more like the kind of parent who forces his kid to do _________, so the parent can relive their glory years and bask in the reflected glory. Baseball, beauty pageants, dance, piano, football, video games... it the act that matters, not the activity.
Very unlikely. What comes out of a data center is diffuse, low grade heat. Maybe useful for running a dehydrator or drying system, maybe replacing building heating systems... but not much more as the temperature is too low.
It's common in Scandinavia because of the climate - but not many people live in that cold of a climate. (The equivalent latitudes in the America's are way the hell up in Canada.) Geography matters.
[[Citation needed]] - from an independent source, not just one that repeats NASA's propaganda spin.
No it doesn't, it depends on the power usage of the house - unless you expect the residents to go into power saving mode every night and every time there's cloudy weather.
Googling about, that shows you well below the American average (roughly 30KWh/day). And even with a full 30KWh battery... I haven't seen the sun in six days. (Not at all unusual for this time of year.)
Hence the ongoing need for baseload.
The problem here isn't short term thinking - it's that you're utterly clueless. If the population goes up, capacity still has to go up - because the utility has to have the capacity to supply the grid when renewable sources aren't available. If you have twice the population, you have twice the night time load - and you need twice the daytime capacity available for cloudy days, for deeply cold days, etc... etc...
Not to mention that in many urban areas, a good chunk of that growth will go into apartments - which don't have sufficient roof space for solar to offset a significant part of consumption.
Renewable power sources are not magic, and they are a supplement, not a replacement, for baseload capacity.
I never said they couldn't - I said they'd be expensive. (And 10KWh isn't very much.)
Which means that if you add additional demand for batteries for houses... the prices are going to go right back up. (Supply and demand, simple economics.) And even "plummeted" prices are still very expensive - into five figures.
What planet are you from? No utility I'm aware of gives away power for free. Not to mention you completely ignored the required to cover periods when solar is providing sufficient power during the day. (Etc... etc...) You have no fucking clue what you're talking about.
They have good reason to be nervous... They'll still be on the hook to provide full power when solar is producing less than peak capability or isn't producing at all, but there's little chance they'll be allowed to significantly raise their rates. This works out to being required to maintain full generating and transmission capacity with sharply reduced revenue.
Not to mention that very few people installing subsidized and/or cheap solar panels will spend the money to install unsubsidized and expensive battery capacity. That's long been a deep flaw in the thinking of solar power supporters - that they can have their cake and eat it too, the unspoken assumption that the utilities will always be there and will always have the capacity to make up any lack. You get what you pay for folks, TANSTAAFL.
Depends on *which* four drawings they are and the purpose you intend to put them to. Four drawing doesn't sound like much to uninitiated, but the right four drawings can be very valuable to the professional and/or the knowledgeable. For example, a drawing showing the locations of ammunition magazines, [aviation] fuel bunkers, the reactor spaces, and the engines rooms shows you location of the most important spaces. Add a drawing of the armor arrangement on top of that, and now you can analyze where you might want to put a limpet mine or pull a boat loaded with explosives alongside for maximum possible effect. (Etc... etc...)
Four million drawings *sounds* impressive, but in reality 3,999,900 of those drawings will be completely boring stuff of not much use or interest to anyone except the shipyard building the carrier and any future shipyard overhauling the carrier. The remaining hundred? They're the ones that guys with bad intentions want because analyzing them shows potential vulnerable spots. Even if someone wants the plans to analyze to build their own carrier...., they only want/need a fraction of the total number of drawings. (The detailed arrangement of the berthing spaces, or the layout of the kitchen, or the as-installed electrical diagram for the lighting system really aren't much use.)
Disclaimer: Former USN Submarine Service - I spent a *lot* of time looking at ship's drawings....
And her culture (which seems to require that young girls be forced to wear a sign showing her sexuality and availability) is less controlling and better than ours... how exactly?
Well, those contacts do wear down and require require regular maintenance as do the rails themselves. That such maintenance was done is the reason you were able to get to work.
That's my point - he didn't give us anything on which to judge whether his claims were right or wrong. He made no effort to support or defend his implicit claims. The article was essentially empty of anything beyond snide remarks, allusions, spin, and misdirection.
From TFS: "There has been quite a bit of discussion about the misinformation propagated by this particular 60 Minutes segment."
But somehow... he never actually gets around to telling us what any of those things are. Instead, the bulk of the article is dedicated to snide ad hominem attacks on the reporter. The article headline asks "Is Chernobyl still dangerous or was 60 Minutes pushing propaganda?", but places essentially all of it's effort on the latter portion of the question.
In short, it's a deeply biased article from a deeply biased source.
The problem is, even if we started colonizing space tomorrow, it'll almost certainly be a century or more before we can build a colony that can survive unaided. And if it can survive unaided, all it accomplishes is being a pit down which we collectively shovel endless bundles of cash to no good end. (Well, unless you're foolish enough to think that providing a pacifier for idiots is a good end.)
If you actually read the links, you'll find they applied DNA samples with specific and known markers to the exterior of the vehicle and then tested for DNA with those specific and known markers after it was recovered. Or, not to put too fine a point on it, once again actual scientists actually do know what they're doing, unlike random Slashdot commenters and mods.
But it _does_ happen.
No shit Sherlock. And nobody claimed it was.
I never claimed otherwise.
Your claim that trees do not represent a problem is bullshit.
And given your constantly shifting story and constantly pulling irrelevant assumptions out of your ass - I'm done here.
You're assuming something I didn't say - because I said nothing about uptime at all. (And for good reason, it's irrelevant to the your nonsensical claim that there is no impact from trees, and because it's not an issue... I've only lost power in the heaviest of storms.) The rest of the message is just more of the same - claiming I'm being "pillaged" not based on facts but on assumptions you've pulled out of thin air
Except for when it does of course. If you lived in this area, you'd know it's very hilly and pieces of it do slide and trees do fall over when the ground gets saturated (in many places the topsoil is fairly thin with hardpan relatively close to the surface). Wherever you are isn't the whole of the Northwest, stop assuming that what hold true there holds true here.
My mistake, but that's irrelevant - because they still aren't the public utility you cited.
Except for when snow causes a tree to sag on the lines. Or a windstorm causes a tree to fall on the lines. Or very heavy rain causes a tree to sag onto the lines.
All things, right here in the Pacific Northwest, that have caused power outages at my house. And my utility is a public traded company, which covers the entire Puget Sound Basin. You may have a perfect idyllic power utility and reliable power that never has problems with trees - but you aren't the whole of the Pacific Northwest.