You have misunderstood the separation process they used. It turns out that electrolysis shows a very strong isotope effect: H comes off up to seven times faster than D at the negative electrode. They exploited this fact in a cascade of electrolytic cells.
Nowadays a different process is used, based on the shift with temperature of the equilibrium of the reaction H2O + HDS transforming to/from HDO + H2S. But this wasn't invented until after the war.
If the 'hydrogen economy' based on electrolytic production of hydrogen ever takes off, then anyone will be able to make heavy water at low marginal cost, which means nuclear proliferation will become much easier -- anyone will be able to build compact reactors using natural (unenriched) uranium as fuel.
Many of the passengers got to lifeboats and survived.
Re:The cost of Solaris
on
The Faded Sun
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Sun Execs. live in this [delusion] because their customers allow them to.
This is just the kind of thing Christensen talks about in 'The Innovator's Dilemma' -- following what makes money from current customers often leads companies into a dead end when a disruptive technology comes along.
Eventually the coyote looks down, realizes he's walked off a cliff, and falls, making a little Sun-logo-shaped hole in the ground at the bottom of the canyon.
If it does turn out that cost cutting played a role, would the loss of seven people and many billions of dollars of equipment be a reasonable thing, from a human or even accounting stand point?
Continuing to fly the shuttle at all was not a reasonable thing to do, from a human or economic point of view.
Even after an asteroid impact, Earth would be more habitable than anyplace else in the solar system.
The idea that we're going to set up colonies elsewhere in the solar system that are capable of completely independent existence and growth is not feasible now and probably not anytime soon. It's not a lack of will, it's that the problem is orders of magnitude beyond what we can do with existing technology.
No, the leading edges and the nose are covered with carbon-carbon composite, not titanium. The leading edges become far too hot for titanium to survive.
And debris could hit the surfaces other than the leading edges. The orbiter's curved flight path is irrelevant; what's relevant is the angle of the vehicle relative to the airflow at that time.
Boats, airplanes, and cars serve purposes that are actually useful, and that people are willing to pay for.
In contrast, manned spaceflight is an expensive activity in search of a real justification. That 'lack of will' the space faithful deride in the public is actually the failure of space to offer much that the public wants.
The whole mental model behind NASA is flawed, so it's no surprise that NASA itself is dysfunctional. And when people wake up to the fact that the space program is less visionary than it is delusional, then the space program will die.
No, it's a big disaster because it punctures the illusion on which the dream is based. The space program has not been 'travelling to the stars', it's been sucking down tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and providing very little in return.
Dreams that are based on delusions are not good things. People need to take an honest, skeptical look at NASA, not just resort to the same lame justifications.
A very long time, since Congress will not believe the lies that NASA used to justify the first one. The economic case for a new RLV is just not there.
If the shuttle stops flying then manned spaceflight, if it continues at all, will be on vehicles launched on top of expendable rockets (capsules or winged reentry vehicles).
No, they no longer lose radio contact during reentry due to the plasma. They can maintain contact through the TDRS satellites, since the plasma above the vehicle is not dense enough to prevent the propagation of microwaves.
I don't have room or time here to explain, or persuade, anyone why going into space is worthwhile.
No, what you don't have is a persuasive argument to back up your article of faith.
It's painful to question deeply held subconscious beliefs, but it would do you good to question yours. I used to be a big supporter of space exploration myself, until I realized how fraudlent and manipulative the whole enterprise has been. You just haven't yet figured out how you've been suckered.
Integrated circuits were invented in 1957, long before the Apollo program existed. The first big user of ICs was the Minuteman II guidance computer, not Apollo.
Apollo may have contributed to the early market for ICs, but it neither invented them nor was necessary for them to have been adopted.
NASA had nothing to do with the microwave. Microwave ovens owe their existence to the invention of the cavity magnetron, which dates back to WW2. And who do you think bought more magnetrons after the war: NASA or the Defense Department?
And you have failed to explain why 'going to other places in space' is worthwhile. NASA's problem is that it hasn't been seen as worthwhile. Now, you can just blithely dismiss this as 'lack of vision', but all that's going to do is make spacefans seem like cult members. The public and the powerful largely don't give a damn about space advocates' ideas of what's worthwhile to do in space.
None of those is really worth doing, unfortunately. The 1-G acceleration system, btw, is not possible with any technology we'll have soon -- the power density is simply far too high at the Isp that would be required.
Um, wasn't one of the reasons for Buran development stopping that the entire superstate funding the project (USSR) collapsed at that point, so the contributing nations had more on their minds than space research?
That certainly was a part of it, but notice they kept flying the expendables even through the collapse. They could sell launches on the expendables, since they had the most economical launchers in the world. Buran wasn't competitive, and retaining it would have meant preserving the entire Energya production line, which had no other customers.
The X-33 was a mismanaged mess. The economic justification for VentureStar was nonexistent (notice that LockMart did not decide to spend its own money on it.)
The shuttle will die, yes, and be replaced by expendable launchers.
Projects that don't fly, literally, should be no surprise when the U.S. can't give NASA a target.
NASA hasn't been doing much worthwhile because noone has been able to find much that is worthwhile for it to do. So it gets given poorly justified makework projects to keep money flowing to congressional districts. Since the projects aren't worth doing, there's no real cost to anyone (except the taxpayers) if they're starved of funds or poorly managed.
Ever read any of the studies that show massive economic return from industrial activities (and I don't mean something as big as asteroid mining, I mean much smaller activities) in space?
Yes. They're garbage, mostly. Even NASA's last administrator came out and said the spinoff argument is insupportable.
There's an economic return from some unmanned uses of space, certainly. But that's no justification for most of what NASA does.
So far, even with it's problems, NASA is the only agency that can do what it does: put people into space on a regular basis and bring them home.
This, of course, begs the question of whether sending people into space on a regular basis is something that anyone should be doing. After all, governments can do all sorts of economically senseless things that companies cannot do. That's no justification for having the government do them.
The shuttle was only ever a prototype, yes a couple more should have been built but that is all. The redesign process should have been started immediately for version 2. As flight experience was built up, then this could be incorporated into version 2 which would be truely reusable.
The problem with that argument is that if the shuttle was only going to be a prototype, then it would not have been possible to justify its construction, since the development costs of it and its successor could not possibly have been earned back in savings on launch costs.
The real answer is that reusable launchers cannot be justified until either the launch market is much larger or the development cost is much lower. The natural and economically rational path would have been to continue developing expendable launchers, gradually reducing launch costs and increasing the size of the market. NASA shouldn't have been involved except as a customer and perhaps as a developer of pieces of the technology, in a mode similar to the old NACA. However, that approach would not have suited NASA's institutional agenda, which was to preserve their budget.
Slashdot Mirror
You have misunderstood the separation process they used. It turns out that electrolysis shows a very strong isotope effect: H comes off up to seven times faster than D at the negative electrode. They exploited this fact in a cascade of electrolytic cells.
Nowadays a different process is used, based on the shift with temperature of the equilibrium of the reaction H2O + HDS transforming to/from HDO + H2S. But this wasn't invented until after the war.
If the 'hydrogen economy' based on electrolytic production of hydrogen ever takes off, then anyone will be able to make heavy water at low marginal cost, which means nuclear proliferation will become much easier -- anyone will be able to build compact reactors using natural (unenriched) uranium as fuel.
Many of the passengers got to lifeboats and survived.
Eventually the coyote looks down, realizes he's walked off a cliff, and falls, making a little Sun-logo-shaped hole in the ground at the bottom of the canyon.
The conquistadores made a profit very quickly after Columbus made his discovery, in a time less than the 'Space Age' has already existed.
So anything that costs less than the Pentagon budget cannot be a waste? Marvelously ridiculous reasoning.
Even after an asteroid impact, Earth would be more habitable than anyplace else in the solar system.
The idea that we're going to set up colonies elsewhere in the solar system that are capable of completely independent existence and growth is not feasible now and probably not anytime soon. It's not a lack of will, it's that the problem is orders of magnitude beyond what we can do with existing technology.
No, the leading edges and the nose are covered with carbon-carbon composite, not titanium. The leading edges become far too hot for titanium to survive.
And debris could hit the surfaces other than the leading edges. The orbiter's curved flight path is irrelevant; what's relevant is the angle of the vehicle relative to the airflow at that time.
Boats, airplanes, and cars serve purposes that are actually useful, and that people are willing to pay for.
In contrast, manned spaceflight is an expensive activity in search of a real justification. That 'lack of will' the space faithful deride in the public is actually the failure of space to offer much that the public wants.
The whole mental model behind NASA is flawed, so it's no surprise that NASA itself is dysfunctional. And when people wake up to the fact that the space program is less visionary than it is delusional, then the space program will die.
Considering the total f*ckup his predecessor made of NASA's accounting, it was a completely reasonable thing to do.
No, it's a big disaster because it punctures the illusion on which the dream is based. The space program has not been 'travelling to the stars', it's been sucking down tens of billions of dollars of taxpayer money and providing very little in return.
Dreams that are based on delusions are not good things. People need to take an honest, skeptical look at NASA, not just resort to the same lame justifications.
A very long time, since Congress will not believe the lies that NASA used to justify the first one. The economic case for a new RLV is just not there.
If the shuttle stops flying then manned spaceflight, if it continues at all, will be on vehicles launched on top of expendable rockets (capsules or winged reentry vehicles).
No, they no longer lose radio contact during reentry due to the plasma. They can maintain contact through the TDRS satellites, since the plasma above the vehicle is not dense enough to prevent the propagation of microwaves.
The wing does not have 'titanium shielding'. Moreover, the tiles along the bottom of the wing are exposed to any falling debris.
If the debris gouged a track down the wing then, yes, that could very well have caused the loss.
It's painful to question deeply held subconscious beliefs, but it would do you good to question yours. I used to be a big supporter of space exploration myself, until I realized how fraudlent and manipulative the whole enterprise has been. You just haven't yet figured out how you've been suckered.
Integrated circuits were invented in 1957, long before the Apollo program existed. The first big user of ICs was the Minuteman II guidance computer, not Apollo.
Apollo may have contributed to the early market for ICs, but it neither invented them nor was necessary for them to have been adopted.
NASA had nothing to do with the microwave. Microwave ovens owe their existence to the invention of the cavity magnetron, which dates back to WW2. And who do you think bought more magnetrons after the war: NASA or the Defense Department?
And you have failed to explain why 'going to other places in space' is worthwhile. NASA's problem is that it hasn't been seen as worthwhile. Now, you can just blithely dismiss this as 'lack of vision', but all that's going to do is make spacefans seem like cult members. The public and the powerful largely don't give a damn about space advocates' ideas of what's worthwhile to do in space.
None of those is really worth doing, unfortunately. The 1-G acceleration system, btw, is not possible with any technology we'll have soon -- the power density is simply far too high at the Isp that would be required.
The X-33 was a mismanaged mess. The economic justification for VentureStar was nonexistent (notice that LockMart did not decide to spend its own money on it.)
The shuttle will die, yes, and be replaced by expendable launchers.
There's an economic return from some unmanned uses of space, certainly. But that's no justification for most of what NASA does.
The real answer is that reusable launchers cannot be justified until either the launch market is much larger or the development cost is much lower. The natural and economically rational path would have been to continue developing expendable launchers, gradually reducing launch costs and increasing the size of the market. NASA shouldn't have been involved except as a customer and perhaps as a developer of pieces of the technology, in a mode similar to the old NACA. However, that approach would not have suited NASA's institutional agenda, which was to preserve their budget.