As I remember, their catalog sales operation was a can't-lose lottery. You filled out an order, paid for it, then picked it up when it arrived. But what you PAID for was what you ORDERED, and their policy of hiring the cheapest possible people to pack boxes meant that was not necessarily what you GOT. You might order an ignition feeler gauge and get a drill press...and if the reverse happened, you could always return it.
Guard units have a nicely dovetailed dual role. Most of the time they act as reserve squadrons for the Air Force, and can be deployed overseas. The rest of the time, their ground organizational structure, which ordinarily keeps their aircraft and crews ready to go, can be mobilized on a moment's notice to deal with local disasters.
What Drethon said. The Doolittle raid was a major embarrassment to the Japanese military, and it became clear that any repetition would be followed by rolling heads. As a result, some major naval assets were pulled back into home-waters defense, and that contributed a lot to the outcome at Midway.
Unfortunately, our thanks hasn't much of a material side: If you're a librarian or a mail carrier or a DMV clerk you have today off, but if you're only a veteran you have to go to work.
There's enough to cause decay eventually, but it can be a long time...on the order of decades or more. Tidal forces could be a factor, but I'd expect them to be a decay factor -- as seen from the spacecraft, the tidal bulges would appear to be rotating retrograde.
No! When a high (like geosynchronous) orbiter decays, the speed goes up. When it gets down to the altitude of a low orbiter, it's going just as fast as that low orbiter. It will still burn in -- it just takes several times as long from launch to burn-in as a low orbiter does.
Yes, it's thermal radiation by high-temperature gases, usually ionized. But in zero-G, it will quickly envelop itself in a ball of inert, burned gas which blocks out the oxygen, and it will go out. You could keep it going with a small fan.
In theory, the flame's history is supposed to be unbroken back to its lighting with a magnifying glass on Mt. Olympus, though they can deploy extra flames from there to accomplish relights without traveling back to Greece. There have been some incidents where that rule was broken, especially where nobody was looking.
The relay by athletes, BTW, is a Nazi invention dating to 1936.
What Immerman said. A satellite deals with gravity just peachy, but air kills it.
No artificial satellite is completely outside the atmosphere. There are still traces of air even hundreds of miles out, and every time a satellite hits an air molecule it loses an eensy-teensy bit of energy. Each loss makes the orbit a little bit lower, and a little bit faster. (Yes, orbital mechanics is a curious realm where you can slow down by applying thrust and speed up by applying the brakes.) The lower it gets, the more often it hits a molecule, and the energy loss gradually begins to snowball.
You can't predict the precise impact point without precise knowledge of the air density the satellite is encountering, and we don't have that information because it varies with all manner of factors, like solar wind and terrestrial weather. The principal means of prediction is the change in the length of an orbit. When you start seeing a measurable time difference from one orbit to the next, things are starting to happen.At that point, you can predict the time of impact with a precision on the order of weeks, and as time goes on you can narrow it down further.
Right now, we know when GOCE will come in give or take a handful of hours -- and since it can circle the world a couple of times in that interval, we have very little idea of where it will hit. As time passes, the error factor shrinks...when Skylab came in, NASA knew it would hit "somewhere in Australia" three or four hours before it hit.
An intentional reentry is different, because you use a retro-rocket to dump a nice big packet of energy and skip right over the protracted decay time, and make it land where you want.
In the interest of perspective, keep in mind that Nature throws rocks at us from space all the time -- meteors big enough to survive the trip through the atmosphere hit the earth dozens of times per day. Yet there are only a handful of cases on record where a person was injured, or even saw one hit -- simply because you and I and all the other people cover a VERY tiny fraction of the earth's surface. We are little bitty spots on a great big dartboard.
Harlan Ellison wrote a terrific screenplay for I, Robot with Asimov's participation and approval, for Warner Brothers. Ellison refused to bastardize it the way Warner demanded, so the project died and Asimov ultimately licensed him to publish it in illustrated-screenplay form -- ISBN 1-4165-0600-4.
TFA offers a countermeasure to that: just make an offsetting contribution to the pro-GM charity of your choice. Same advice I used to give to people wanting to visit Knott's Berry Farm, back in the days when Walter Knott was paying the Santa Ana Register to feature his right-wing rants and hosannas to the John Birch Society.
Why? It's in microgravity and temperature controlled.
When you're in orbit, "temperature controlled" is a slippery concept. You've got direct sunlight on one side, dark space on the other side, temperatures to the fourth power fighting it out, and no air to redistribute heat -- and an hour later, the sides will have switched.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone warned him he was taking crazy risks and he'd die some time.
Wonder what percentage of them were smokers...
You can go west from every point in Antarctica but one.
It's the part where your longitude has a W in front of it.
As I remember, their catalog sales operation was a can't-lose lottery. You filled out an order, paid for it, then picked it up when it arrived. But what you PAID for was what you ORDERED, and their policy of hiring the cheapest possible people to pack boxes meant that was not necessarily what you GOT. You might order an ignition feeler gauge and get a drill press...and if the reverse happened, you could always return it.
Yes, it does. The 174th has been deployed in the Persian Gulf and Iraq, among other places.
Guard units have a nicely dovetailed dual role. Most of the time they act as reserve squadrons for the Air Force, and can be deployed overseas. The rest of the time, their ground organizational structure, which ordinarily keeps their aircraft and crews ready to go, can be mobilized on a moment's notice to deal with local disasters.
that any of the Axis powers in WW2 were richeous in any way.
Or even righteous.
What Drethon said. The Doolittle raid was a major embarrassment to the Japanese military, and it became clear that any repetition would be followed by rolling heads. As a result, some major naval assets were pulled back into home-waters defense, and that contributed a lot to the outcome at Midway.
Unfortunately, our thanks hasn't much of a material side: If you're a librarian or a mail carrier or a DMV clerk you have today off, but if you're only a veteran you have to go to work.
Indeed. Attila the Hun was called "The Scourge of God".
There's enough to cause decay eventually, but it can be a long time...on the order of decades or more. Tidal forces could be a factor, but I'd expect them to be a decay factor -- as seen from the spacecraft, the tidal bulges would appear to be rotating retrograde.
No! When a high (like geosynchronous) orbiter decays, the speed goes up. When it gets down to the altitude of a low orbiter, it's going just as fast as that low orbiter. It will still burn in -- it just takes several times as long from launch to burn-in as a low orbiter does.
Yes, it's thermal radiation by high-temperature gases, usually ionized. But in zero-G, it will quickly envelop itself in a ball of inert, burned gas which blocks out the oxygen, and it will go out. You could keep it going with a small fan.
In theory, the flame's history is supposed to be unbroken back to its lighting with a magnifying glass on Mt. Olympus, though they can deploy extra flames from there to accomplish relights without traveling back to Greece. There have been some incidents where that rule was broken, especially where nobody was looking.
The relay by athletes, BTW, is a Nazi invention dating to 1936.
Ummm, no. You don't get to select both the altitude and speed of a circular orbit: one determines the other. Kepler and all that.
Even those, though their lifetimes are much longer.
What if it hits an airline?
Same thing that happens if a meteor hits it...only meteors are more common.
What Immerman said. A satellite deals with gravity just peachy, but air kills it.
No artificial satellite is completely outside the atmosphere. There are still traces of air even hundreds of miles out, and every time a satellite hits an air molecule it loses an eensy-teensy bit of energy. Each loss makes the orbit a little bit lower, and a little bit faster. (Yes, orbital mechanics is a curious realm where you can slow down by applying thrust and speed up by applying the brakes.) The lower it gets, the more often it hits a molecule, and the energy loss gradually begins to snowball.
You can't predict the precise impact point without precise knowledge of the air density the satellite is encountering, and we don't have that information because it varies with all manner of factors, like solar wind and terrestrial weather. The principal means of prediction is the change in the length of an orbit. When you start seeing a measurable time difference from one orbit to the next, things are starting to happen.At that point, you can predict the time of impact with a precision on the order of weeks, and as time goes on you can narrow it down further.
Right now, we know when GOCE will come in give or take a handful of hours -- and since it can circle the world a couple of times in that interval, we have very little idea of where it will hit. As time passes, the error factor shrinks...when Skylab came in, NASA knew it would hit "somewhere in Australia" three or four hours before it hit.
An intentional reentry is different, because you use a retro-rocket to dump a nice big packet of energy and skip right over the protracted decay time, and make it land where you want.
In the interest of perspective, keep in mind that Nature throws rocks at us from space all the time -- meteors big enough to survive the trip through the atmosphere hit the earth dozens of times per day. Yet there are only a handful of cases on record where a person was injured, or even saw one hit -- simply because you and I and all the other people cover a VERY tiny fraction of the earth's surface. We are little bitty spots on a great big dartboard.
When someone begins a statement with "All I know is..." I consider it within my rights to interpret it literally.
At least somebody here RTFB...
You must not have read much of it. They got the vote after serving, when their dues were paid.
Harlan Ellison wrote a terrific screenplay for I, Robot with Asimov's participation and approval, for Warner Brothers. Ellison refused to bastardize it the way Warner demanded, so the project died and Asimov ultimately licensed him to publish it in illustrated-screenplay form -- ISBN 1-4165-0600-4.
At least somebody got it right...
TFA offers a countermeasure to that: just make an offsetting contribution to the pro-GM charity of your choice. Same advice I used to give to people wanting to visit Knott's Berry Farm, back in the days when Walter Knott was paying the Santa Ana Register to feature his right-wing rants and hosannas to the John Birch Society.
Why? It's in microgravity and temperature controlled.
When you're in orbit, "temperature controlled" is a slippery concept. You've got direct sunlight on one side, dark space on the other side, temperatures to the fourth power fighting it out, and no air to redistribute heat -- and an hour later, the sides will have switched.