For the curious, the "throw" of a rocket is determined by the following equation:
delta-V = 9.8 * Isp * ln (Mass1 / Mass2)
Where delta-v is the change in velocity required (8-10 km/s for orbit), mass1 is the lift off mass, mass2 is the on orbit mass, and Isp is the specific impulse which is a parameter of engine design primarily effected by propellant choice. Isp varies between 100 and 450 seconds - the SSME is 450 seconds, an estes model rocket gets 100 or so seconds.
So the above example is a back of the envelope calculation for a conceptual rocket - mass1 is 10 kg, mass2 is 0.5 kg, Isp is 280 s. This gives you a delta v of 8.2 km/s, which is enough to reasonably be expected make orbit (assuming that orbit is possible at all, of course - I mean the basic engineering premise is a bit of a stretch, but the physics works).
OK, I can see that dramatically reducing the costs of intercontinental package delivery would make it easier to send anthrax, but would it not also make it easier to send flowers? Why is everything only seen as a weapon? Fed Ex would pay a mountain of cash for this capability - which means that someone out there values the capability.
As an aside, rocks do not survive reentry very well. Only a very small portion of a meteorite makes it to the ground - and none at all of small meteorites. There are some very simple ways to do what you suggest using very low technology right now, if you are simply looking for cheap indiscriminate death. (I won't go into those for obvious reasons, but if you are curious look into what gave Norad nightmares during the cold war.)
I think you misunderstand about the balloon - it is above most of the atmosphere, so it does not experience buoyancy. The point is merely that a very small, very lightweight launch payload can turn into a somewhat large, easily seen (in visible and to radar) satellite.
Really, for this class of vehicle (the whole thing would most likely weigh almost nothing), the risks are quite minimal. Just launch it from the middle of nowhere - people are greatly overestimating the probability of 1) hitting something valuable that is not aimed at when your possible impact points are the entire globe, and 2) probability of anything surviving reentry - reentry is hard to survive, and you have to design for it on purpose. Small and mid sized rocks do not survive reentry. A balloon might survive in some form, but is unlikely to cause damage.
Um, I am a rocket engineer. 10 kg is sufficient to send 500 grams to orbit using standard propellants. I am assuming that a 10 gram payload launcher can be built at 500 grams dry mass, but without some kind of assumption like that none of this works anyway.
The concept you are looking for is "mass fraction". A particular mass is not needed. A particular mass fraction is needed.
OK, but you are now changing the bar. Previously you said "rockets are dangerous". Now you are saying "dangerous rockets are dangerous". I'm not going to disagree with that second statement, but it doesn't bring a lot to the discussion.
Yes, like aircraft and other heavy equipment like cars, rockets need some regulation in order to keep the public safe. However, XCOR (as an example) has had thousands of engine firings and probably hundreds of manned flights without any explosions. Zero explosions. Zero deaths.
Rockets, like any other engine, can be made safe. What is your argument:
Fuel is dangerous? No, normal rocket engines run on jet fuel or alcohol, only NASA monstrosities run on hydrogen. (Normal being determined by number of engine firings in modern times)
The engines are dangerous? No, the engines are simpler and can therefor have larger margins and be safer than a jet turbine, for example. Newer companies are using those margins - NASA doesn't, and so yes, their engines are a bit dicey, but it is a design decision, not a "rocket problem". As an example, a formula one race car has a much higher probability of catostrophic failure than a Yugo, even though they use the same engine cycle. Safety is an engineering problem.
And more to the point, if you drop a $2K rocket capable of putting only 10 grams into orbit on a school, chances are you would have:
rocket 0, school 1
I mean really, what do you think this is going to be? It will probably have maybe 10 kg of gasoline in it... at liftoff, which will be far from any school...
Why do so many people say this? It is ludicrous - planes are just as deadly... and a lot easier to get / use / make. Think about what is involved in making a model jet powered cruise missile!
Besides, it you wanted to deliver a rocket - based kinetic payload, it would have to survive reentry. Essentially, you are saying that this mystical bad guy is going to get some unobtainium, give it enough energy to make orbit, then remove most of that energy so that it comes back down, burn off most of the mass in the atmosphere, so it can whack you on the head. A little far-fetched, isn't it?
No, it could be done with your math (two words - reusable rocket). What makes it impossible is that you are required to have insurance for any launches. No matter how small, the insurance rate does not go below $2K.
(Pretend that you had a magic SSTO gas and go rocket - all the $2K has to cover is the fuel, and $2K is almost a ton of fuel. The issue is the other costs - insurance and range rental.)
Why is a rocket so much more dangerous than a 747? You can currently build a cruise missile that will reach anywhere on the planet for a few $10K... why is a rocket so much more dangerous?
We need to get over this "rockets are scary" mentality - rockets are another way of moving from A to B, nothing more. Any method of moving can be abused, but the benefits outweigh the liabilities.
Um... as a rocket engineer, I'm afraid what you are arguing makes no sense...
1. Space is an altitude. Orbit is a velocity. You can orbit 1 inch off the ground if you could some how sustain 8 km/s - for example, if you put a pipe filled with vacuum surrounding the Earth. So to get to orbit, you need a lot of speed, not a particular position.
2. GEO orbit (35786 km) is really hard to get to - and pretty pointless, really. Go above 400 km and you will hang around quite a while.
3. If you are in an orbit, you cannot possibly be a risk to airplanes. (Except on the way down, and even then the risk is way smaller than the risk caused by ducks, etc. - assuming you can even survive reentry)
Probably the easiest way to win this is with a mylar balloon as the "satellite". You could make a very large, highly reflective surface that would last a few orbits.
That said, this is unlikely to be won - $2K is just too low, it will cost more than that to get flight insurance / government permission.
Second, the cap and trade system, while not perfect , does not redistribute wealth
Very true - that is why the older, embedded politicians and companies like it so much. Who is hurt under cap and trade? STARTUPS!
As a startup, (building rockets, for example), I am not allowed to pollute, or at least have to pay some arbitrary amount for it. And who do I pay? My competition, who were established before the caps and now can just sit back and accept the checks.
Why are you against progress? You want anyone trying to create something new to be beholden to the status quo? Really, how does your system help anyone that is not a large corporation?
If you are really curious, the Wikipedia article describes it in some detail. They even have pictures so you can see what type of colorblindness you have - its kind of fun.
(My type is admittedly rather rare - I have trouble seeing green. Most traffic lights I can tell, some I can't. The worst is that you cannot see traffic lights mixed in with city lights - I live in downtown Chicago!)
And as for 1.3%... 8-10% of males in the US are colorblind. I have no idea where you get your numbers from... and even if it was, we have braille on elevators and ramps on buildings - why can't we have vertical stoplights so it is obvious to colorblind people?
(There is no point in telling me that I should know left from right, as there is no way to know until you have seen such a light and I can't see it! I'm also dyslexic, so I have a pretty good chance of guessing wrong anyway.)
Heh, my family keeps making fun of me because when I was teaching my daughter to safely cross the street at intersections, I told her to look at the "green guy". Apparently although the traffic light is green, the little guy is white - who knew?
Also, I can never move to Texas. The rest of the country has vertical traffic lights, but not Texas. It is bad enough to choose red and green as the stop and go colors, with the full knowledge that a large percentage of the population can't see them - it is a travesty to take that and put it on its side so that up vs down cannot be used.
And before you get to the left vs right, some of us are dyslexic...
(I was trying to start the "Meet the Robinsons" Blue Ray disk the other day, and couldn't find the "Play" option. It seems some genius over there made the text green on white, and therefor invisible to me...)
As a startup guy, one thing you hear over and over from the money guys is that they'd rather fund a good team with a lousy product than a great product with a mediocre team.
OK, so which "you" is you, the "you" you are now or the "you" you were this morning? Why should time be different than space? You are constantly changing, yet you consider the entire continuum from cradle to grave to be "you". Why not consider a copy "you"? Especially if you can merge back at some point?
What's the advantage to copying yourself?
That isn't the point, the point is that only people that see an advantage in copying themselves will copy themselves - leading to more people that see the advantage, and copy themselves. What is the point in a virus?
You're avoiding my question.
I'm not, you are just having trouble seeing my perspective (not being me!) - my answer is that they are both "you", just like your mother's baby was you even though you don't share any memories with it...
From my perspective, that would be perfectly fine to do - you would indeed have two different "you"s. It could be something akin to reproduction, but most likely that would be outlawed (because it would cause a cascade failure - the only people that would copy themselves obviously like to copy themselves, and so would do so until all resources are taken). My preferred implementation would be that you branch - in that your two running programs are generating experiences/memories, but that you could later rejoin and merge the two datasets (the programs probably don't change much, so you would just have both memories).
Perhaps legally, but in other real senses no. If you believe in an afterlife (and happen to be correct, of course) there is obviously a you. An afterlife can take many forms:
If someone millennia from now figures out a way to read brainwaves and decode the original program, and someone finds a way to imprint that onto different hardware (like another body), and someone builds a REALLY big radio telescope, they could point the telescope at a black hole that has reflected your brainwaves from your last moments alive back to Earth, read in your brainwave, and put your program/soul/whatever into a new body.
Anyway, being dead is not the disability that it once was...
Not really true - I would much rather have a stranger go through my stuff than a family member. The stranger is unlikely to pass on inappropriate data he may find...
Just because you are dead, that doesn't mean your wishes and desires are dead. You may not be able to voice them, but they still exist. We are programs, not hardware - the program cannot die, it can only be erased/not executed.
Although I only have the 701 EEEPC model (I'm using it to respond to you now!), my battery life experience seems to match what they said in the article - namely, about 2 hours when I am watching a movie with the wireless on.
On the other hand, when I am on a plane with the wireless off and just typing or playing solitaire and listening to music, I get over 4 hours of life from it. So your usage pattern matters a lot.
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For the curious, the "throw" of a rocket is determined by the following equation:
delta-V = 9.8 * Isp * ln (Mass1 / Mass2)
Where delta-v is the change in velocity required (8-10 km/s for orbit), mass1 is the lift off mass, mass2 is the on orbit mass, and Isp is the specific impulse which is a parameter of engine design primarily effected by propellant choice. Isp varies between 100 and 450 seconds - the SSME is 450 seconds, an estes model rocket gets 100 or so seconds.
So the above example is a back of the envelope calculation for a conceptual rocket - mass1 is 10 kg, mass2 is 0.5 kg, Isp is 280 s. This gives you a delta v of 8.2 km/s, which is enough to reasonably be expected make orbit (assuming that orbit is possible at all, of course - I mean the basic engineering premise is a bit of a stretch, but the physics works).
OK, I can see that dramatically reducing the costs of intercontinental package delivery would make it easier to send anthrax, but would it not also make it easier to send flowers? Why is everything only seen as a weapon? Fed Ex would pay a mountain of cash for this capability - which means that someone out there values the capability.
As an aside, rocks do not survive reentry very well. Only a very small portion of a meteorite makes it to the ground - and none at all of small meteorites. There are some very simple ways to do what you suggest using very low technology right now, if you are simply looking for cheap indiscriminate death. (I won't go into those for obvious reasons, but if you are curious look into what gave Norad nightmares during the cold war.)
I think you misunderstand about the balloon - it is above most of the atmosphere, so it does not experience buoyancy. The point is merely that a very small, very lightweight launch payload can turn into a somewhat large, easily seen (in visible and to radar) satellite.
Really, for this class of vehicle (the whole thing would most likely weigh almost nothing), the risks are quite minimal. Just launch it from the middle of nowhere - people are greatly overestimating the probability of 1) hitting something valuable that is not aimed at when your possible impact points are the entire globe, and 2) probability of anything surviving reentry - reentry is hard to survive, and you have to design for it on purpose. Small and mid sized rocks do not survive reentry. A balloon might survive in some form, but is unlikely to cause damage.
Um, I am a rocket engineer. 10 kg is sufficient to send 500 grams to orbit using standard propellants. I am assuming that a 10 gram payload launcher can be built at 500 grams dry mass, but without some kind of assumption like that none of this works anyway.
The concept you are looking for is "mass fraction". A particular mass is not needed. A particular mass fraction is needed.
OK, but you are now changing the bar. Previously you said "rockets are dangerous". Now you are saying "dangerous rockets are dangerous". I'm not going to disagree with that second statement, but it doesn't bring a lot to the discussion.
Yes, like aircraft and other heavy equipment like cars, rockets need some regulation in order to keep the public safe. However, XCOR (as an example) has had thousands of engine firings and probably hundreds of manned flights without any explosions. Zero explosions. Zero deaths.
Rockets, like any other engine, can be made safe. What is your argument:
Fuel is dangerous? No, normal rocket engines run on jet fuel or alcohol, only NASA monstrosities run on hydrogen. (Normal being determined by number of engine firings in modern times)
The engines are dangerous? No, the engines are simpler and can therefor have larger margins and be safer than a jet turbine, for example. Newer companies are using those margins - NASA doesn't, and so yes, their engines are a bit dicey, but it is a design decision, not a "rocket problem". As an example, a formula one race car has a much higher probability of catostrophic failure than a Yugo, even though they use the same engine cycle. Safety is an engineering problem.
And more to the point, if you drop a $2K rocket capable of putting only 10 grams into orbit on a school, chances are you would have:
rocket 0, school 1
I mean really, what do you think this is going to be? It will probably have maybe 10 kg of gasoline in it... at liftoff, which will be far from any school...
Why do so many people say this? It is ludicrous - planes are just as deadly... and a lot easier to get / use / make. Think about what is involved in making a model jet powered cruise missile!
Besides, it you wanted to deliver a rocket - based kinetic payload, it would have to survive reentry. Essentially, you are saying that this mystical bad guy is going to get some unobtainium, give it enough energy to make orbit, then remove most of that energy so that it comes back down, burn off most of the mass in the atmosphere, so it can whack you on the head. A little far-fetched, isn't it?
The benefits outweigh the risks, people!
No, it could be done with your math (two words - reusable rocket). What makes it impossible is that you are required to have insurance for any launches. No matter how small, the insurance rate does not go below $2K.
(Pretend that you had a magic SSTO gas and go rocket - all the $2K has to cover is the fuel, and $2K is almost a ton of fuel. The issue is the other costs - insurance and range rental.)
Why is a rocket so much more dangerous than a 747? You can currently build a cruise missile that will reach anywhere on the planet for a few $10K... why is a rocket so much more dangerous?
We need to get over this "rockets are scary" mentality - rockets are another way of moving from A to B, nothing more. Any method of moving can be abused, but the benefits outweigh the liabilities.
Um... as a rocket engineer, I'm afraid what you are arguing makes no sense...
1. Space is an altitude. Orbit is a velocity. You can orbit 1 inch off the ground if you could some how sustain 8 km/s - for example, if you put a pipe filled with vacuum surrounding the Earth. So to get to orbit, you need a lot of speed, not a particular position.
2. GEO orbit (35786 km) is really hard to get to - and pretty pointless, really. Go above 400 km and you will hang around quite a while.
3. If you are in an orbit, you cannot possibly be a risk to airplanes. (Except on the way down, and even then the risk is way smaller than the risk caused by ducks, etc. - assuming you can even survive reentry)
Probably the easiest way to win this is with a mylar balloon as the "satellite". You could make a very large, highly reflective surface that would last a few orbits.
That said, this is unlikely to be won - $2K is just too low, it will cost more than that to get flight insurance / government permission.
Second, the cap and trade system, while not perfect , does not redistribute wealth
Very true - that is why the older, embedded politicians and companies like it so much. Who is hurt under cap and trade? STARTUPS!
As a startup, (building rockets, for example), I am not allowed to pollute, or at least have to pay some arbitrary amount for it. And who do I pay? My competition, who were established before the caps and now can just sit back and accept the checks.
Why are you against progress? You want anyone trying to create something new to be beholden to the status quo? Really, how does your system help anyone that is not a large corporation?
And yes, it works quite well.
Also, a major part of the cost of owning a plane is parking it.
Think about it - what would it cost you to park your car at the airport every day?
If you are really curious, the Wikipedia article describes it in some detail. They even have pictures so you can see what type of colorblindness you have - its kind of fun.
(My type is admittedly rather rare - I have trouble seeing green. Most traffic lights I can tell, some I can't. The worst is that you cannot see traffic lights mixed in with city lights - I live in downtown Chicago!)
And as for 1.3%... 8-10% of males in the US are colorblind. I have no idea where you get your numbers from... and even if it was, we have braille on elevators and ramps on buildings - why can't we have vertical stoplights so it is obvious to colorblind people?
(There is no point in telling me that I should know left from right, as there is no way to know until you have seen such a light and I can't see it! I'm also dyslexic, so I have a pretty good chance of guessing wrong anyway.)
Even if you can't distinguish the colours, the positions work just fine.
Unless you are dyslexic, as I pointed out.
Heh, my family keeps making fun of me because when I was teaching my daughter to safely cross the street at intersections, I told her to look at the "green guy". Apparently although the traffic light is green, the little guy is white - who knew?
Also, I can never move to Texas. The rest of the country has vertical traffic lights, but not Texas. It is bad enough to choose red and green as the stop and go colors, with the full knowledge that a large percentage of the population can't see them - it is a travesty to take that and put it on its side so that up vs down cannot be used.
And before you get to the left vs right, some of us are dyslexic...
Except...
Please remember that some of us are colorblind!
(I was trying to start the "Meet the Robinsons" Blue Ray disk the other day, and couldn't find the "Play" option. It seems some genius over there made the text green on white, and therefor invisible to me...)
As a startup guy, one thing you hear over and over from the money guys is that they'd rather fund a good team with a lousy product than a great product with a mediocre team.
People are everything in this business.
I'm talking about from a subjective perspective
OK, so which "you" is you, the "you" you are now or the "you" you were this morning? Why should time be different than space? You are constantly changing, yet you consider the entire continuum from cradle to grave to be "you". Why not consider a copy "you"? Especially if you can merge back at some point?
What's the advantage to copying yourself?
That isn't the point, the point is that only people that see an advantage in copying themselves will copy themselves - leading to more people that see the advantage, and copy themselves. What is the point in a virus?
You're avoiding my question.
I'm not, you are just having trouble seeing my perspective (not being me!) - my answer is that they are both "you", just like your mother's baby was you even though you don't share any memories with it...
From my perspective, that would be perfectly fine to do - you would indeed have two different "you"s. It could be something akin to reproduction, but most likely that would be outlawed (because it would cause a cascade failure - the only people that would copy themselves obviously like to copy themselves, and so would do so until all resources are taken). My preferred implementation would be that you branch - in that your two running programs are generating experiences/memories, but that you could later rejoin and merge the two datasets (the programs probably don't change much, so you would just have both memories).
Heaven will be an interesting place...
Perhaps legally, but in other real senses no. If you believe in an afterlife (and happen to be correct, of course) there is obviously a you. An afterlife can take many forms:
If someone millennia from now figures out a way to read brainwaves and decode the original program, and someone finds a way to imprint that onto different hardware (like another body), and someone builds a REALLY big radio telescope, they could point the telescope at a black hole that has reflected your brainwaves from your last moments alive back to Earth, read in your brainwave, and put your program/soul/whatever into a new body.
Anyway, being dead is not the disability that it once was...
Not really true - I would much rather have a stranger go through my stuff than a family member. The stranger is unlikely to pass on inappropriate data he may find...
Just because you are dead, that doesn't mean your wishes and desires are dead. You may not be able to voice them, but they still exist. We are programs, not hardware - the program cannot die, it can only be erased/not executed.
Although I only have the 701 EEEPC model (I'm using it to respond to you now!), my battery life experience seems to match what they said in the article - namely, about 2 hours when I am watching a movie with the wireless on.
On the other hand, when I am on a plane with the wireless off and just typing or playing solitaire and listening to music, I get over 4 hours of life from it. So your usage pattern matters a lot.
Well, the battery charger exists - it is called buying another EEEPC. They don't exactly cost a lot, ya know...