My last speaking customer blew $4000 for me to fly to South Korea and back first-class. It was interesting that besides the expected AC outlets there were USB outlets. But only rarely do I avoid flying coach.
Of course I have a pair of Quiet Comfort 25's for travel. Over-ear (works better IMO) and they run for several flights on one AAA battery and don't involve my phone. Carrying a spare AAA is really easy. I'd much rather use an external pack than to have my earphones depend on lightning.
I'm at all not clear why you expect better of me. Do you think that future, denser battery tech is going to be less troublesome? Lithium-air can potentially store as much energy as gasoline.
I'm not saying we should stop it. We need to figure out how to live with it. Tesla did a lot of work to encapsulate their batteries, for example.
Are you sure about solid-state batteries? My impression was that the kind of resistance they have limits self-discharge, not normal charging and discharge.
Well, you're assuming that I don't already know about batteries. Which is wrong. And hey, a bit arrogant.
I am not talking about today's cells, which is why this is the tip of the iceberg. The market is pushing for new chemistry like lithium-air, and improvements in current chemistry like increasing the surface area of the electrodes without increasing their size, using nano texturing such as nanowires. All of these technologies are speculative and might not be productized, but we're going to end up with more powerful batteries eventually. The market demands it and these new batteries will not be less trouble.
One in 42,000 phones is estimated to have the problem by Samsung. Now, this is the problem with high energy density. If there's a problem, you get a release of high energy all at once.
Now, the whole world is moving toward better batteries. Meaning denser, and even more likely to fail catastrophically unless the makers can somehow contrive a chemistry with higher internal resistance (and thus harder to charge and less efficient). Otherwise, more efficient batteries are all going to make pretty good bombs.
Headphones, and your ears, are analog. The signal gets converted from digital to analog before you can hear it, and is amplified. So, do you want to use the amplifier in the phone, which has a nice big battery and a powerful amplifier that can also drive the speaker, and that can easily dissipate any heat from the amplifier, or the amplifier in your headphone, which if it's an in-ear one is going to have limitations regarding the battery and the amplifier.
It is not even theoretically possible for a Bluetooth headphone to make better sound. At best, it's the same. The only benefit is that you lose the cord.
This was an astonishingly cynical move and I hope that Apple loses customers over it.
We had a Soyuz capsule on the old Hornet in Alameda for a while, the Soyuz really looks like a diving bell. Love those small museums that let you get close to things and touch them. The Apollo 15 quarantine trailer is there too, another great piece of streamlined metal retro tech.
Not holding out much hope for the Russians when they vacate the space station.
Yes. It wasn't clear earlier in the day. But the rocket was at T minus 3 minutes with the strongback still up even though it should have been retracted by that time. So nowhere near firing and in a physical configuration that would have prevented firing.
Yes, I watched the pad abort test. I think they undershot a bit, they came down really close to shore. But they would have gotten away in time. One mechanism of the abort system is a wire that runs the length of the stage, and loss of continuity in that wire causes an abort. It would have triggered instantly.
If you are so ready to monkey wrench, nuclear war is still the #1 risk of wiping out the ecology completely. Get at it. Second to that, you should work on the lazziez-faire economics variety of capitalism and the me-first variety of libertarianism, because they are the major political movements campaigns for those who ignore externalities of their activities. Neo-liberal economics of the Alan Greenspan variety should be a target too. And then all of the folks who feel that they should have as many babies as possible, because overpopulation is the root of ecological destruction. They have churches telling them to make an unlimited number of babies.
I am not at all clear what your gripe would be with space colonies, though. Because whatever we do, planets are not forever. If nothing else they die of natural causes. We offer the only chance of any part of the life of Earth surviving once the planet's gone.
Yes, that really is the biggest problem. So, suppose we build a vehicle to take people to Mars. It needs to have enough space for them, and all of the supplies they'd need, and a rocket to get into Mars transfer orbit, stop when there, and get back to Earth transfer orbit, and stop when there too.
Such a thing might be as large as ISS. After all, it does a similar job of being a habitat for people. Now, ISS was assembled incrementally, but we learned that it would have been better to build a big rocket and lift the whole thing at once, the way we did with Skylab on a Saturn V. Once it was there, it only took a much smaller Saturn 1B to get to it.
So, yes, the biggest deal about a manned mission to Mars is building a rocket that can lift as much as or more than the Saturn V to take the vehicle to space in one shot. More economically than the Saturn V, with booster recovery and maybe second-stage recovery. And this is actually referred to as "BFR", for "big rocket".
And we'd probably need two or three launches of this thing, because we would also be sending a ground habitat to Mars, a fuel factory, and an orbit-to-ground transfer vehicle.
I'd be really happy for the SABRE engine to work, but it's not clear that it simplifies the problem. If wings were necessary we'd not have all of those recovered boosters. Spaceplanes thus seem to be a dead end. And we have yet to see that the SABRE engine ends up being lighter, for a given payload to space and booster return, than a plain rocket.
Apollo CSM engine SPS was throttleable and restartable.
Yes, of course. But this was not the case for booster rockets. They were mostly one-use, and they did not have a throttle capability. If you were not launching the design weight, you added ballast. Or sometimes a secondary payload.
He also didn't consider who he was talking with. There might be a better than 50% chance that I'll be dead in 20 years. Young folks think they will live forever.
SpaceX doesn't use the escape tower in Dragon 2. They use rockets on the side of the vehicle that are also intended for propulsive landing. But yes, the system would probably have been able to get the astronauts out of there.
The explosion is not the only kick in the pants they'd get. Escape approaches 10 Gs. As for the force of the initial explosion, the carbon fiber fairing seemed to survive intact until it was dropped.
Actually, I am not a big fan of the Mars mission for similar reasons. I think SpaceX needs to work on cadence first, and of course we're going to face mission failures on the way.
And I hate hyperloop. It's B.S., meant cynically to divert attention from real trains, kill it.
And the compusolipsism was just silly.
But everybody knew there would be mission failures, this is unfortunate but not sure it changes much. Especially after watching the video and seeing where the problem started. And the Mars thing will probably happen, because NASA wants to go. Maybe not during the 2018 conjunction, though.
I would just love to have another way to do it than with rockets, but that's what we have right now. As for Apollo, no we are not leaving the entire thing to governments again.
You would have to be betting on the death of the species or the collapse of society to believe that one. As for me, I was born before the US put anything in space, and I have had my own work go into orbit and will have another project in orbit soon. So, this is all a lot more real to me than people who are at a greater distance from space research.
Slashdot Mirror
My last speaking customer blew $4000 for me to fly to South Korea and back first-class. It was interesting that besides the expected AC outlets there were USB outlets. But only rarely do I avoid flying coach.
Of course I have a pair of Quiet Comfort 25's for travel. Over-ear (works better IMO) and they run for several flights on one AAA battery and don't involve my phone. Carrying a spare AAA is really easy. I'd much rather use an external pack than to have my earphones depend on lightning.
Companies will go to great lengths to avoid being forced by government regulation. Voluntary recalls are a common means to do this.
Not only do the plates release O2, the electrolyte is an organic solvent. One choice is dimethyl carbonate.
I'm at all not clear why you expect better of me. Do you think that future, denser battery tech is going to be less troublesome? Lithium-air can potentially store as much energy as gasoline.
I'm not saying we should stop it. We need to figure out how to live with it. Tesla did a lot of work to encapsulate their batteries, for example.
Are you sure about solid-state batteries? My impression was that the kind of resistance they have limits self-discharge, not normal charging and discharge.
Well, you're assuming that I don't already know about batteries. Which is wrong. And hey, a bit arrogant.
I am not talking about today's cells, which is why this is the tip of the iceberg. The market is pushing for new chemistry like lithium-air, and improvements in current chemistry like increasing the surface area of the electrodes without increasing their size, using nano texturing such as nanowires. All of these technologies are speculative and might not be productized, but we're going to end up with more powerful batteries eventually. The market demands it and these new batteries will not be less trouble.
One in 42,000 phones is estimated to have the problem by Samsung. Now, this is the problem with high energy density. If there's a problem, you get a release of high energy all at once.
Now, the whole world is moving toward better batteries. Meaning denser, and even more likely to fail catastrophically unless the makers can somehow contrive a chemistry with higher internal resistance (and thus harder to charge and less efficient). Otherwise, more efficient batteries are all going to make pretty good bombs.
The iPhone 8 will require special glasses to see the screen. Apple will congratulate itself for its bravery in leading the industry in such a move.
Headphones, and your ears, are analog. The signal gets converted from digital to analog before you can hear it, and is amplified. So, do you want to use the amplifier in the phone, which has a nice big battery and a powerful amplifier that can also drive the speaker, and that can easily dissipate any heat from the amplifier, or the amplifier in your headphone, which if it's an in-ear one is going to have limitations regarding the battery and the amplifier.
It is not even theoretically possible for a Bluetooth headphone to make better sound. At best, it's the same. The only benefit is that you lose the cord.
This was an astonishingly cynical move and I hope that Apple loses customers over it.
We had a Soyuz capsule on the old Hornet in Alameda for a while, the Soyuz really looks like a diving bell. Love those small museums that let you get close to things and touch them. The Apollo 15 quarantine trailer is there too, another great piece of streamlined metal retro tech. Not holding out much hope for the Russians when they vacate the space station.
It's also something that the customer's insurer had to sign off upon if they had launch insurance. And they didn't have much trouble doing so.
Yes. It wasn't clear earlier in the day. But the rocket was at T minus 3 minutes with the strongback still up even though it should have been retracted by that time. So nowhere near firing and in a physical configuration that would have prevented firing.
Yes, I watched the pad abort test. I think they undershot a bit, they came down really close to shore. But they would have gotten away in time. One mechanism of the abort system is a wire that runs the length of the stage, and loss of continuity in that wire causes an abort. It would have triggered instantly.
If you are so ready to monkey wrench, nuclear war is still the #1 risk of wiping out the ecology completely. Get at it. Second to that, you should work on the lazziez-faire economics variety of capitalism and the me-first variety of libertarianism, because they are the major political movements campaigns for those who ignore externalities of their activities. Neo-liberal economics of the Alan Greenspan variety should be a target too. And then all of the folks who feel that they should have as many babies as possible, because overpopulation is the root of ecological destruction. They have churches telling them to make an unlimited number of babies.
I am not at all clear what your gripe would be with space colonies, though. Because whatever we do, planets are not forever. If nothing else they die of natural causes. We offer the only chance of any part of the life of Earth surviving once the planet's gone.
I simply meant that SpaceX will soon enough be in the crew business despite today's setback, and Russia will be the one catching up with reuse.
Well, as it's clear to Mr. Rogozin now, you can razz us for a little while but it doesn't last forever. He got the trampoline he asked for.
Yes, that really is the biggest problem. So, suppose we build a vehicle to take people to Mars. It needs to have enough space for them, and all of the supplies they'd need, and a rocket to get into Mars transfer orbit, stop when there, and get back to Earth transfer orbit, and stop when there too.
Such a thing might be as large as ISS. After all, it does a similar job of being a habitat for people. Now, ISS was assembled incrementally, but we learned that it would have been better to build a big rocket and lift the whole thing at once, the way we did with Skylab on a Saturn V. Once it was there, it only took a much smaller Saturn 1B to get to it.
So, yes, the biggest deal about a manned mission to Mars is building a rocket that can lift as much as or more than the Saturn V to take the vehicle to space in one shot. More economically than the Saturn V, with booster recovery and maybe second-stage recovery. And this is actually referred to as "BFR", for "big rocket".
And we'd probably need two or three launches of this thing, because we would also be sending a ground habitat to Mars, a fuel factory, and an orbit-to-ground transfer vehicle.
But the problem is still lifting.
Having the payload aboard took a day off the launch cycle. It was, however, a relatively new thing for SpaceX and maybe they won't do it again soon.
I bet John Glenn would have been more confident riding a rocket on which all engines had been thoroughly tested. Just not with him in it.
I'd be really happy for the SABRE engine to work, but it's not clear that it simplifies the problem. If wings were necessary we'd not have all of those recovered boosters. Spaceplanes thus seem to be a dead end. And we have yet to see that the SABRE engine ends up being lighter, for a given payload to space and booster return, than a plain rocket.
Yes, of course. But this was not the case for booster rockets. They were mostly one-use, and they did not have a throttle capability. If you were not launching the design weight, you added ballast. Or sometimes a secondary payload.
They are too busy spouting groundnut nonsense today.
He also didn't consider who he was talking with. There might be a better than 50% chance that I'll be dead in 20 years. Young folks think they will live forever.
SpaceX doesn't use the escape tower in Dragon 2. They use rockets on the side of the vehicle that are also intended for propulsive landing. But yes, the system would probably have been able to get the astronauts out of there.
The explosion is not the only kick in the pants they'd get. Escape approaches 10 Gs. As for the force of the initial explosion, the carbon fiber fairing seemed to survive intact until it was dropped.
Look at this GIF. The explosion appears to originate at the upper stage filling interface.
This is SpaceX responsibility too. But maybe not as bad long term as another type of failure.
Actually, I am not a big fan of the Mars mission for similar reasons. I think SpaceX needs to work on cadence first, and of course we're going to face mission failures on the way.
And I hate hyperloop. It's B.S., meant cynically to divert attention from real trains, kill it.
And the compusolipsism was just silly.
But everybody knew there would be mission failures, this is unfortunate but not sure it changes much. Especially after watching the video and seeing where the problem started. And the Mars thing will probably happen, because NASA wants to go. Maybe not during the 2018 conjunction, though.
I would just love to have another way to do it than with rockets, but that's what we have right now. As for Apollo, no we are not leaving the entire thing to governments again.
You would have to be betting on the death of the species or the collapse of society to believe that one. As for me, I was born before the US put anything in space, and I have had my own work go into orbit and will have another project in orbit soon. So, this is all a lot more real to me than people who are at a greater distance from space research.