It's irrelevant whether the farmer contaminated his crops accidentally or deliberately, the problem is Monsanto having the patent in the first place.
So if I'm understanding you right, you want GMO technology to not be patentable subject matter. Do you think that advancement in this avenue of technology is not an overall benefit? Or do you believe there's a better approach to achieving it, for example through publicly (i.e. governmentally) funded R&D projects. In my experience, the anti-genetic-patent camp significantly overlaps with the general anti-GMO camp, simply because they believe GMO not to have significant-enough benefit to society and the anti-genetic-patent stance is merely a vehicle to be used to achieve the goal of ending GMO development. Which is it? Do you support GMO technology and simply want to terminate its patentability (in which case I ask how for alternative means to encourage its R&D), or do you object to GMO as a technology in general and are merely using the patentability argument as a tool to achieve another goal?
If they have the ability to sue anyone who infringes their patent
Yes, that's how patents work.
then depending on their goodwill to only go after people who tell them they've done it deliberately is incredibly naive, regardless of any other evidence of what they've actually done
Wait, so are you saying that nobody should be able to sue for patent infringement, even if the plaintiff believes that willful infringement can be demonstrated in court? I'm probably misunderstanding you here. Can you please rephrase that last sentence?
Why otherwise would Monsanto need to patent the seeds?
Because otherwise anybody could take their seeds and by virtue of all life being essentially a super-efficient self-replicator, coat-tail several billion dollars's worth of research for pure personal enrichment. If somebody spends countless resources to invent something really novel, I have no problem recognizing their right to benefit from said invention by guaranteeing to them, for a reasonable period of time, exclusivity to that idea. At the same time, nobody in the public should be forced to use said invention and therefore pay royalties. As far as I'm aware 1) farmers don't have to use Monsanto's GM seeds 2) Monsanto has publicly vowed (and AFAICT has not yet reneged on this promise) to compensate farmers for accidental contamination and even to remove it and 3) there hasn't yet been a case where a farmer really apparently has had accidental cross-contamination and Monsanto sued anyway. I've heard of plenty of cases where Monsanto sued farmers, but those have almost always been for illegal large-scale use of their GM seeds, or for violation of contract. Is Monsanto litigious? It appears so. But I've yet to discover a case where they've sued in bad faith.
Schmeiser never stated that the 1998 crop was compromised, but that the seeds he planted were from 1997.
He could feign ignorance if he didn't intentionally concentrate the gene expression by spraying with roundup. He knew what he was doing. He deliberately tried to surreptitiously obtain the GM trait by exploiting what he perceived to be a legal loophole. If he had not sprayed with Roundup to intentionally concentrate the gene expression, I'd be fully on your side. He'd have been an innocent victim of the "Big Bad Corporation" trying to pressure little people. But he knew damn well that what he was doing was in effect copying GM technology without a license. Or if you think he was in his right to copy and commercially exploit the patented GM trait that had accidentally gotten expressed on his field, let me ask you this: is it okay to copy and sell copyrighted works, provided the first copy got into your possession by accident (e.g. you one day found it lying on your lawn)?
Do yourself a favor and read the whole page, or else you will simply embarrass yourself.
Ouch, somebody's got a sensitive spot for this. I don't give a fuck either way. I'm not in the farming business, not even by remote proxy. But I don't agree with the complete abolition of intellectual property rights, which is what you apparently seem to have a problem with.
The Schmeiser case was exactly the fraudulent one I was talking about should not be brought up. He intentionally planted GM canola that he fully knew contained Monsanto's GM technology. He sprayed his own field with Roundup, which he knew would kill anything non-resistant. The only thing that survived was cross-polinated seed. He then took that seed and replanted it. That's why he had 95-98% concentration of the GM crop. This wasn't an accident. He knew what he was doing when he sprayed Roundup on it to select only for the GM variety.
I googled the thing you suggested exactly and the top hits are all either about the Schmeiser case, or are rebuttals of GM myths, one prominent one of which is exactly this one: that Monsanto sues farmers for accidental contamination. So I'm still curious. Do Monsanto really do this? I don't know, but so far, the evidence seems pretty thin on the ground.
Once you plant GM crops and their genes spill over to non-GM crops, Monsanto will lay claim to the non-GM seeds and sue the farmer to death.
Can you cite an example of this happening? I'm genuinely curious. I know of only one case where Monsanto has sued a farmer for cross-polination. It was shown in court that the farmer actually was trying to deliberately and surreptitiously acquire GM seeds through a roundabout way.
We wouldn't need overburdening regulation if these dumbasses would act like adults with more than two brain cells to rub together. This is why we can't have nice things.
Alas, it's the 1% of dumbasses that might eventually make regulation a necessity. If there's one constant in the world, it's that there will always be some idiots.
100x this. As a pilot myself, we're acutely aware of things like temporary flight restrictions over crowded spaces (especially games) and restricted areas over places with special security requirements. Now I'm not a fan of overburdening regulation, but I fully support public education of all potential drone pilots that as soon as they put their craft over anybody's head, it's no longer just a toy. Maybe even require a license to fly a drone over/near populated areas.
So there's two aspects to this: the controlling aspect and the surveillance aspect. Airports with low traffic volume are fine with procedural controlling (no need for high traffic density) and airports with high traffic volume can afford ground radar. The surveillance aspect is almost pointless. In good visibility, it's very low priority (aircraft can see each other anyway) and in poor visibility, which is when it's most needed, it doesn't work anyway. Mind you, I'm talking about some sort of automated optical surveillance system. Not just a bunch of cameras relaying a video feed to a remote human controller - that actually isn't a bad idea in itself. Also, an even cheaper and more reliable method is already being deployed, isn't weather-dependent either and doesn't require a multi-megabit fat internet pipe between airport and controlling station. Quite frankly, an automated optical system is pointless.
The difference is the type of airport. You reference a general aviation example, while the article is talking about a commercial airport.
No, there are tons of commercial airports without radar coverage and with only procedural control and they manage perfectly fine. Imagine this, they're able to operate even in bad weather when controller can't see the planes! What unholy sorcery!
Sundsvall airport handles over a quarter million passengers per year.
Holy tits, when you write it like "quarter million" it sounds so bombastic! But in reality it averages out to one aircraft movement about every 1-2 hours (and that's being generous with daytime-only operations). Yawn...
100% agree. The A-10 isn't broken, she's a solid platform that we can build on.
Maybe increase the engine power a few percent.
This is actually quite a trivial thing. The TF34 is quite dated by modern standards and the civilian variant, the CF34, has been continuously updated since the 70s. By my rough estimate, 3-7% higher thrust with 5-10% lower specific fuel consumption should be easily there. Higher gains would probably require significant airframe modifications to switch to a completely new engine type.
Actually significant weight reductions can be easily achieved in the avionics. This, combined with improved airframe internals (such as your mentioned inclusion of carbon fiber parts in stress members) could probably increase performance even further.
You're mistaking deuterium (H^2) for tritium (H^3), which is still the wrong thing to be looking for. Lunar regolith is frequently cited as a source of He^3 (Helium-3), which in some schemes would be a suitable fusion fuel, but Helium-3 fusion is so difficult to initiate and keep stable that it's just stuff of pure science fiction (I mean the fusion bit is science fiction, the Helium-3 part is real enough).
The most commonly assumed because it's of the easiest to initiate fusion reactions is D-T fusion. The "T" stands for radioactive tritium, i.e. the H^3 isotope.
Looking at the route, it flew on average about 30kts over the ground. That's basically ocean liner speed. A high-altitude balloon would probably be faster.
Nuclear powered craft are ONLY used for spacecraft which will be leaving earth orbit and not returning.
Those nuclear reactor powered probes I mentioned (SNAP-10A and TOPAZ reactor series) are in orbit. But I see what you mean and in Earth orbit, solar power seems to be good enough for most use cases.
First, you can physically render a nuclear device inert by removing parts of it.
Of course you can. All you need to do is distort any part of its ignition mechanism. You could do that on orbit even.
I believe they call it a "pill"
Precisely. It's usually a central part of the first stage. Without it in, upon ignitor detonation, the nuclear material won't compress correctly and will instead tend to be flung out of the pit, rather than achieve criticality.
So keep your nuclear devices UNDER ground, keep them disabled by storing that last bit of fissionable material in a totally different area.
And this is precisely what we already do and what even this asteroid defense plan would do.
Setting a device off in LEO is going to be a mess and it's going to affect a huge area.
The points on EMP blasts and radiation damage on detonation in LEO is quite correct. In no case would asteroid defense, however, entail doing that. By the time the object got close enough for LEO detonation to be a factor, we're toast anyway. A few seconds to minutes to impact - no amount of nuking is going to turn an asteroid around or stop it dead in its tracks. Asteroid defense always talks about deflection when the object is very far away, way past the orbit of Mars even. I think you got the wrong impression from some shitty Bruce Willis movie:)
will have to use them early to nudge the object onto a different path
This would be the case for any asteroid defense and we're already capable of detecting and track most objects large enough to cause serious concern. With more investment, we'll only be getting better and be able to detect smaller and smaller objects.
banned by multiple international agreements
Banned due to potential for a space arms race over a potential war. Doesn't apply in case of joint global asteroid defense.
We don't put nuclear power generators in space for a reason
We can and regularly do send nuclearpowergenerators into space, including fully-featured nuclearreactors. In related the news, we haven't all died yet.
Just send many smaller ones. Even if some don't work, all you want to achieve is deflection. Pro tip: when not required, don't park the things in space. Keep them on the ground and launch them should the need arise. Any asteroid early-detection program gives notice years in advance (e.g. we learned about the close pass of 99942 Apophis a good 2 decades in advance).
6. An accidental malfunction would be a SERIOUS problem for the near by earth
Same problem applies for weapons stored on Earth. Fix is simple: keep the device disarmed and design in fail-safes. This has already been done. I 7 decades of nuclear weaponry, number of inadvertent nuclear detonations, even in case of accidental weapons drops: zero.
an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay
I mean in the civilian sector. You can't log simulator hours (except maybe the absolute top-tier type 7 ones) into your logbook as full value flight hours, so how would this crap count?
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation.
Which is in no way different to your standard IR, which all airline pilots are required to have anyway. Moreover, first thing they teach you in IR training is "don't trust your sense of motion". If anything, these static control stations are even worse, because they don't teach you to ignore conflicting motion sensations.
I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig
That is quite true. Pilots are paid atrociously, yet the training demands and responsibilities are as high as they've ever been.
My guess is, many of these aviators don't like the look of this shit on their logbooks (if it even gets logged at all). "Oh yeah, I totally played a video game for 1500 hours". I somehow have a hard time imagining this will land you an airline job after you're out of the airforce.
That's hardly enough for a few missions. Reported, Curiosity has almost 5kg on board, while Cassini has 32kg. However, it seems the US has restarted production in 2013, so yay for at least some sense.
What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?
Pu238 is produced in reactors here on Earth. Due to all the restrictions and red-tape put up by (supposedly) anti-nuclear activists, it's difficult and very costly to keep producing it, so everybody who had been producing it, simply shut down.
Now to be honest though, this is a poorly constructed argument. Strict regulation of nuclear materials isn't in itself a bad thing and besides, the lack of Pu238 is mainly due to the shutdown of the nuclear weapons industry, not the power industry (which never produced it anyway). Moreover, Philae was a low-value part of the mission to begin with and an RTG wasn't really necessary (needless to say that it can weigh quite a bit, potentially sacrificing other experiments that could be carried in its stead). Regardless, the comet was scheduled to make a close pass by the Sun regardless, so there was always the possibility of getting more power later on in the mission. Where the RTG argument *can* make sense is in missions like Juno. Juno had to go to some pretty serious compromises to be able to explore Jupiter without an RTG, such as having oversized solar panels for its relatively meager scientific payload. Had Juno had an RTG, it would likely have been able to pack a lot more equipment that is also more power-hungry, allowing us to get more out of the mission. Anything beyond the orbit of Jupiter without an RTG is an outright non-starter using solar power, as the scientific return quickly diminishes to zero simply due to the lack of power. Even Mars missions without RTGs were compromised (one of the principal reasons Curiosity got an RTG was so that we could get more power-hungry experiments on it, cause being able to snap pretty pictures only gets you so far).
Overall, it's a soapbox article and sadly, it starts out with the wrong premise.
A few of reasons this is not political:
1) Pu238 is *extremely* hard to come by. Pretty much all we had has already been used up.
2) Even if there was some available, getting through all the red tape to handle anything labeled "nuclear material" is a massive PITA.
3) RTGs are not very light-weight. This mission was enormously weight-conscious and philae was only an add-on. If it were RTG powered, it would likely have meant that some other experiments couldn't go on the main probe (which was the higher scientific value to begin with).
Philae was only a small extra and weighing all pros and cons, my guess is the scientists on the mission simply said "ah, screw it, it ain't worth all the trouble".
I know both about the short ton and the "metric ton" and that it is not a standard unit, however, it's in common usage and a perfectly acceptable shorthand, kinda like how you can say "I weigh 80 kilos" and everybody knows you're talking about kilograms, or how in Japanese centimeters are commonly referred to as "centi" - it's just a common shorthand.
They came at us with a shit ton of rockets and mortars!
Tons are used in metric too and its definition even makes more sense. 1 ton = 1000 kg, whereas in US 1 ton = 2000 lbs (admittedly easier to remember than the number of yards in a mile).
Lack of modern istrumentation, radar transponders, and other equipment which is normally used by modern air traffic control systems.
That's just BS. First of all, the instrumentation to fly an assigned heading and altitude must already be there, otherwise they just wouldn't be certified to fly. Secondly, there's no problem installing a modern radio stack in an old airplane - you can even have it tucked away in the cockpit so it doesn't interfere with the "old style" cockpit look too much. Tons of old airplanes are retrofitted with new avionics all the time. All you really need is the two boxes near the bottom of this instrument panel (retrofitted to a 1940s era Piper Cub with an admittedly quite pimped out instrument retrofit, the original had far fewer instruments, but still at least a compass and an airspeed and altitude indicator).
The primary issue won't be in the corridor itself, it'll be getting into and out of it from shared public airspace
You do know that ATC doesn't control all aircraft, right? Do you know what VFR means? How about class G airspace? Instruments aren't needed for all navigation and many pilots aren't even certified for instrument-only flight (look up "Instrument Rating") - in fact, these pilots are 100% self-reliant. ATC can provide traffic advisories and suggested headings if you ask them, but they don't have to and aren't even obligated to (if ATC is overloaded, VFR traffic gets dropped first).
and avoiding collisions between the aircraft themselves, many of which do not have anti-collision systems or even radars.
Tons of privately owned aircraft do not have TCAS and civilian aircraft radar isn't even intended to and cannot show other aircraft. Still, people manage to survive fly-ins and other large-scale GA gathering events even at uncontrolled airports. The key, that every pilot knows, is: look before you turn, say intentions before you act.
Their design trades chamber pressure and engine Isp for lower pumping power requirements. They have 9 engines with pumps in the 50HP range, so around 350kW of pumping power. That really isn't able to give much more than 3-4MPa, which also roughly meshes with their claimed Isp figures (~270s at SL). The required power for self-feeding of fuel to the turbine engine is comparatively tiny, perhaps less than 1% of the overall output power requirement. As for cooling, they said they're using regenerative.
Slashdot Mirror
It's irrelevant whether the farmer contaminated his crops accidentally or deliberately, the problem is Monsanto having the patent in the first place.
So if I'm understanding you right, you want GMO technology to not be patentable subject matter. Do you think that advancement in this avenue of technology is not an overall benefit? Or do you believe there's a better approach to achieving it, for example through publicly (i.e. governmentally) funded R&D projects. In my experience, the anti-genetic-patent camp significantly overlaps with the general anti-GMO camp, simply because they believe GMO not to have significant-enough benefit to society and the anti-genetic-patent stance is merely a vehicle to be used to achieve the goal of ending GMO development. Which is it? Do you support GMO technology and simply want to terminate its patentability (in which case I ask how for alternative means to encourage its R&D), or do you object to GMO as a technology in general and are merely using the patentability argument as a tool to achieve another goal?
If they have the ability to sue anyone who infringes their patent
Yes, that's how patents work.
then depending on their goodwill to only go after people who tell them they've done it deliberately is incredibly naive, regardless of any other evidence of what they've actually done
Wait, so are you saying that nobody should be able to sue for patent infringement, even if the plaintiff believes that willful infringement can be demonstrated in court? I'm probably misunderstanding you here. Can you please rephrase that last sentence?
Why otherwise would Monsanto need to patent the seeds?
Because otherwise anybody could take their seeds and by virtue of all life being essentially a super-efficient self-replicator, coat-tail several billion dollars's worth of research for pure personal enrichment. If somebody spends countless resources to invent something really novel, I have no problem recognizing their right to benefit from said invention by guaranteeing to them, for a reasonable period of time, exclusivity to that idea. At the same time, nobody in the public should be forced to use said invention and therefore pay royalties. As far as I'm aware 1) farmers don't have to use Monsanto's GM seeds 2) Monsanto has publicly vowed (and AFAICT has not yet reneged on this promise) to compensate farmers for accidental contamination and even to remove it and 3) there hasn't yet been a case where a farmer really apparently has had accidental cross-contamination and Monsanto sued anyway. I've heard of plenty of cases where Monsanto sued farmers, but those have almost always been for illegal large-scale use of their GM seeds, or for violation of contract. Is Monsanto litigious? It appears so. But I've yet to discover a case where they've sued in bad faith.
Schmeiser never stated that the 1998 crop was compromised, but that the seeds he planted were from 1997.
He could feign ignorance if he didn't intentionally concentrate the gene expression by spraying with roundup. He knew what he was doing. He deliberately tried to surreptitiously obtain the GM trait by exploiting what he perceived to be a legal loophole. If he had not sprayed with Roundup to intentionally concentrate the gene expression, I'd be fully on your side. He'd have been an innocent victim of the "Big Bad Corporation" trying to pressure little people. But he knew damn well that what he was doing was in effect copying GM technology without a license. Or if you think he was in his right to copy and commercially exploit the patented GM trait that had accidentally gotten expressed on his field, let me ask you this: is it okay to copy and sell copyrighted works, provided the first copy got into your possession by accident (e.g. you one day found it lying on your lawn)?
Do yourself a favor and read the whole page, or else you will simply embarrass yourself.
Ouch, somebody's got a sensitive spot for this. I don't give a fuck either way. I'm not in the farming business, not even by remote proxy. But I don't agree with the complete abolition of intellectual property rights, which is what you apparently seem to have a problem with.
The Schmeiser case was exactly the fraudulent one I was talking about should not be brought up. He intentionally planted GM canola that he fully knew contained Monsanto's GM technology. He sprayed his own field with Roundup, which he knew would kill anything non-resistant. The only thing that survived was cross-polinated seed. He then took that seed and replanted it. That's why he had 95-98% concentration of the GM crop. This wasn't an accident. He knew what he was doing when he sprayed Roundup on it to select only for the GM variety.
I googled the thing you suggested exactly and the top hits are all either about the Schmeiser case, or are rebuttals of GM myths, one prominent one of which is exactly this one: that Monsanto sues farmers for accidental contamination. So I'm still curious. Do Monsanto really do this? I don't know, but so far, the evidence seems pretty thin on the ground.
Once you plant GM crops and their genes spill over to non-GM crops, Monsanto will lay claim to the non-GM seeds and sue the farmer to death.
Can you cite an example of this happening? I'm genuinely curious. I know of only one case where Monsanto has sued a farmer for cross-polination. It was shown in court that the farmer actually was trying to deliberately and surreptitiously acquire GM seeds through a roundabout way.
We wouldn't need overburdening regulation if these dumbasses would act like adults with more than two brain cells to rub together. This is why we can't have nice things.
Alas, it's the 1% of dumbasses that might eventually make regulation a necessity. If there's one constant in the world, it's that there will always be some idiots.
100x this. As a pilot myself, we're acutely aware of things like temporary flight restrictions over crowded spaces (especially games) and restricted areas over places with special security requirements. Now I'm not a fan of overburdening regulation, but I fully support public education of all potential drone pilots that as soon as they put their craft over anybody's head, it's no longer just a toy. Maybe even require a license to fly a drone over/near populated areas.
So there's two aspects to this: the controlling aspect and the surveillance aspect. Airports with low traffic volume are fine with procedural controlling (no need for high traffic density) and airports with high traffic volume can afford ground radar. The surveillance aspect is almost pointless. In good visibility, it's very low priority (aircraft can see each other anyway) and in poor visibility, which is when it's most needed, it doesn't work anyway. Mind you, I'm talking about some sort of automated optical surveillance system. Not just a bunch of cameras relaying a video feed to a remote human controller - that actually isn't a bad idea in itself. Also, an even cheaper and more reliable method is already being deployed, isn't weather-dependent either and doesn't require a multi-megabit fat internet pipe between airport and controlling station. Quite frankly, an automated optical system is pointless.
Video would be most useful for directing taxiing.
This is a solved problem.
The difference is the type of airport. You reference a general aviation example, while the article is talking about a commercial airport.
No, there are tons of commercial airports without radar coverage and with only procedural control and they manage perfectly fine. Imagine this, they're able to operate even in bad weather when controller can't see the planes! What unholy sorcery!
Sundsvall airport handles over a quarter million passengers per year.
Holy tits, when you write it like "quarter million" it sounds so bombastic! But in reality it averages out to one aircraft movement about every 1-2 hours (and that's being generous with daytime-only operations). Yawn...
Maybe increase the engine power a few percent.
This is actually quite a trivial thing. The TF34 is quite dated by modern standards and the civilian variant, the CF34, has been continuously updated since the 70s. By my rough estimate, 3-7% higher thrust with 5-10% lower specific fuel consumption should be easily there. Higher gains would probably require significant airframe modifications to switch to a completely new engine type.
Actually significant weight reductions can be easily achieved in the avionics. This, combined with improved airframe internals (such as your mentioned inclusion of carbon fiber parts in stress members) could probably increase performance even further.
You're mistaking deuterium (H^2) for tritium (H^3), which is still the wrong thing to be looking for. Lunar regolith is frequently cited as a source of He^3 (Helium-3), which in some schemes would be a suitable fusion fuel, but Helium-3 fusion is so difficult to initiate and keep stable that it's just stuff of pure science fiction (I mean the fusion bit is science fiction, the Helium-3 part is real enough).
The most commonly assumed because it's of the easiest to initiate fusion reactions is D-T fusion. The "T" stands for radioactive tritium, i.e. the H^3 isotope.
Looking at the route, it flew on average about 30kts over the ground. That's basically ocean liner speed. A high-altitude balloon would probably be faster.
Nuclear powered craft are ONLY used for spacecraft which will be leaving earth orbit and not returning.
Those nuclear reactor powered probes I mentioned (SNAP-10A and TOPAZ reactor series) are in orbit. But I see what you mean and in Earth orbit, solar power seems to be good enough for most use cases.
First, you can physically render a nuclear device inert by removing parts of it.
Of course you can. All you need to do is distort any part of its ignition mechanism. You could do that on orbit even.
I believe they call it a "pill"
Precisely. It's usually a central part of the first stage. Without it in, upon ignitor detonation, the nuclear material won't compress correctly and will instead tend to be flung out of the pit, rather than achieve criticality.
So keep your nuclear devices UNDER ground, keep them disabled by storing that last bit of fissionable material in a totally different area.
And this is precisely what we already do and what even this asteroid defense plan would do.
Setting a device off in LEO is going to be a mess and it's going to affect a huge area.
The points on EMP blasts and radiation damage on detonation in LEO is quite correct. In no case would asteroid defense, however, entail doing that. By the time the object got close enough for LEO detonation to be a factor, we're toast anyway. A few seconds to minutes to impact - no amount of nuking is going to turn an asteroid around or stop it dead in its tracks. Asteroid defense always talks about deflection when the object is very far away, way past the orbit of Mars even. I think you got the wrong impression from some shitty Bruce Willis movie :)
1. Nuclear devices are ineffective in space.
Not the case. See Project Orion.
will have to use them early to nudge the object onto a different path
This would be the case for any asteroid defense and we're already capable of detecting and track most objects large enough to cause serious concern. With more investment, we'll only be getting better and be able to detect smaller and smaller objects.
banned by multiple international agreements
Banned due to potential for a space arms race over a potential war. Doesn't apply in case of joint global asteroid defense.
We don't put nuclear power generators in space for a reason
We can and regularly do send nuclear power generators into space, including fully-featured nuclear reactors. In related the news, we haven't all died yet.
4. Nuclear devices are pretty fragile devices & 5. Nuclear fission devices require regular maintenance
Just send many smaller ones. Even if some don't work, all you want to achieve is deflection. Pro tip: when not required, don't park the things in space. Keep them on the ground and launch them should the need arise. Any asteroid early-detection program gives notice years in advance (e.g. we learned about the close pass of 99942 Apophis a good 2 decades in advance).
6. An accidental malfunction would be a SERIOUS problem for the near by earth
Same problem applies for weapons stored on Earth. Fix is simple: keep the device disarmed and design in fail-safes. This has already been done. I 7 decades of nuclear weaponry, number of inadvertent nuclear detonations, even in case of accidental weapons drops: zero.
an officer pilot would never let a flight hour go uncounted because it directly affects their pay
I mean in the civilian sector. You can't log simulator hours (except maybe the absolute top-tier type 7 ones) into your logbook as full value flight hours, so how would this crap count?
Flying drones actually does teach a pretty valuable skill in that it requires being able to fly purely via instrumentation.
Which is in no way different to your standard IR, which all airline pilots are required to have anyway. Moreover, first thing they teach you in IR training is "don't trust your sense of motion". If anything, these static control stations are even worse, because they don't teach you to ignore conflicting motion sensations.
I knew a man who was a commercial airline pilot and it didn't really seem like that great of a gig
That is quite true. Pilots are paid atrociously, yet the training demands and responsibilities are as high as they've ever been.
My guess is, many of these aviators don't like the look of this shit on their logbooks (if it even gets logged at all). "Oh yeah, I totally played a video game for 1500 hours". I somehow have a hard time imagining this will land you an airline job after you're out of the airforce.
That's hardly enough for a few missions. Reported, Curiosity has almost 5kg on board, while Cassini has 32kg. However, it seems the US has restarted production in 2013, so yay for at least some sense.
What bollocks is that? What has an RTG in space to do with a nuclear (fission) reactor on earth?
Pu238 is produced in reactors here on Earth. Due to all the restrictions and red-tape put up by (supposedly) anti-nuclear activists, it's difficult and very costly to keep producing it, so everybody who had been producing it, simply shut down.
Now to be honest though, this is a poorly constructed argument. Strict regulation of nuclear materials isn't in itself a bad thing and besides, the lack of Pu238 is mainly due to the shutdown of the nuclear weapons industry, not the power industry (which never produced it anyway). Moreover, Philae was a low-value part of the mission to begin with and an RTG wasn't really necessary (needless to say that it can weigh quite a bit, potentially sacrificing other experiments that could be carried in its stead). Regardless, the comet was scheduled to make a close pass by the Sun regardless, so there was always the possibility of getting more power later on in the mission. Where the RTG argument *can* make sense is in missions like Juno. Juno had to go to some pretty serious compromises to be able to explore Jupiter without an RTG, such as having oversized solar panels for its relatively meager scientific payload. Had Juno had an RTG, it would likely have been able to pack a lot more equipment that is also more power-hungry, allowing us to get more out of the mission. Anything beyond the orbit of Jupiter without an RTG is an outright non-starter using solar power, as the scientific return quickly diminishes to zero simply due to the lack of power. Even Mars missions without RTGs were compromised (one of the principal reasons Curiosity got an RTG was so that we could get more power-hungry experiments on it, cause being able to snap pretty pictures only gets you so far).
Overall, it's a soapbox article and sadly, it starts out with the wrong premise.
A few of reasons this is not political:
1) Pu238 is *extremely* hard to come by. Pretty much all we had has already been used up.
2) Even if there was some available, getting through all the red tape to handle anything labeled "nuclear material" is a massive PITA.
3) RTGs are not very light-weight. This mission was enormously weight-conscious and philae was only an add-on. If it were RTG powered, it would likely have meant that some other experiments couldn't go on the main probe (which was the higher scientific value to begin with).
Philae was only a small extra and weighing all pros and cons, my guess is the scientists on the mission simply said "ah, screw it, it ain't worth all the trouble".
I know both about the short ton and the "metric ton" and that it is not a standard unit, however, it's in common usage and a perfectly acceptable shorthand, kinda like how you can say "I weigh 80 kilos" and everybody knows you're talking about kilograms, or how in Japanese centimeters are commonly referred to as "centi" - it's just a common shorthand.
They came at us with a shit ton of rockets and mortars!
Tons are used in metric too and its definition even makes more sense. 1 ton = 1000 kg, whereas in US 1 ton = 2000 lbs (admittedly easier to remember than the number of yards in a mile).
Lack of modern istrumentation, radar transponders, and other equipment which is normally used by modern air traffic control systems.
That's just BS. First of all, the instrumentation to fly an assigned heading and altitude must already be there, otherwise they just wouldn't be certified to fly. Secondly, there's no problem installing a modern radio stack in an old airplane - you can even have it tucked away in the cockpit so it doesn't interfere with the "old style" cockpit look too much. Tons of old airplanes are retrofitted with new avionics all the time. All you really need is the two boxes near the bottom of this instrument panel (retrofitted to a 1940s era Piper Cub with an admittedly quite pimped out instrument retrofit, the original had far fewer instruments, but still at least a compass and an airspeed and altitude indicator).
The primary issue won't be in the corridor itself, it'll be getting into and out of it from shared public airspace
You do know that ATC doesn't control all aircraft, right? Do you know what VFR means? How about class G airspace? Instruments aren't needed for all navigation and many pilots aren't even certified for instrument-only flight (look up "Instrument Rating") - in fact, these pilots are 100% self-reliant. ATC can provide traffic advisories and suggested headings if you ask them, but they don't have to and aren't even obligated to (if ATC is overloaded, VFR traffic gets dropped first).
and avoiding collisions between the aircraft themselves, many of which do not have anti-collision systems or even radars.
Tons of privately owned aircraft do not have TCAS and civilian aircraft radar isn't even intended to and cannot show other aircraft. Still, people manage to survive fly-ins and other large-scale GA gathering events even at uncontrolled airports. The key, that every pilot knows, is: look before you turn, say intentions before you act.
Their design trades chamber pressure and engine Isp for lower pumping power requirements. They have 9 engines with pumps in the 50HP range, so around 350kW of pumping power. That really isn't able to give much more than 3-4MPa, which also roughly meshes with their claimed Isp figures (~270s at SL). The required power for self-feeding of fuel to the turbine engine is comparatively tiny, perhaps less than 1% of the overall output power requirement. As for cooling, they said they're using regenerative.