Just as an FYI followup to this, Harmy has been working on the despecialized editions for years, so there are a few different versions hanging around. The latest version is v2.5. The improvements in quality from his first release to his most recent release are huge.
He also did preliminary attempts at Empire and Jedi, but he only did a rough first pass on those, so the work on them is nowhere near the quality of his work on Star Wars. He plans to revisit Empire and Jedi once he's satisfied with the original.
From reading the article on the Lac-Megantic derailment, it looks like the operator was poorly trained and proper safety protocol as well as common sense was outright ignored. The operator did not apply any hand brakes and knowingly left a malfunctioning locomotive unattended for a long period of time. Talk about a glaring mistake. I can see this as a problem stemming from the reduction of train crews to one guy who has to manually locks dozens of cars taking 2-3 minutes each car.
This is false. The operator activated the hand brakes on all 5 locomotives and 10 out of 72 train cars. It was not sufficient to stop the train from moving. The railway's requirement was 5 locomotives and 11 handbrakes. So while the engineer didn't comply with the railway's own policy, it probably wouldn't have mattered if he had, as the railways own policy was insufficient.
The railway is undoubtedly at fault for the derailment. However, the massive extent of the damage caused after the derailment (the resulting fire, and explosions intense enough that several people were completely vaporized) is largely the fault of the DOT-111 tanker cars, which have been known to be dangerously defective for decades. Reports going back as far (at least) as the early 90s remark that these cars have a far higher integrity failure rate during derailments than other cars.
As has been pointed out, desalination plants don't typically use distillation, they use reverse osmosis. That is to say that they use very high-pressure pumps to force the water through a membrane which rejects salt. Energy consumption is currently at about 3 kWh per cubic metre, although that's falling over time was membrane technology improves (the less pressure required, the lower the cost).
That works out to about 3 watt-hours per litre. Where I live, industrial power rates put that at $0.0001056 CAD per litre. Or $0.1056 CAD per cubic metre of water (thousand litres) if you prefer.
Obviously, if you live in a place that charges more for power (industrial power is $0.0352 per kWh here), that cost goes up.
Desalination plants don't boil water to filter the salt out. They use reverse osmosis, which typically requires about 3 kWh of electricity per cubic metre of water processed due to the very high pressure pumps required to force the water through the filters.
Other than the fact that the ruling is specifically and exclusively about the ongoing sanctions against Russia, it has nothing to do with the ongoing sanctions against Russia. Right. That makes sense.
And the judge apparently thinks that idea has enough merit to block the no-compete sale while it's thoroughly investigated.
That's not at all what happened. The judge did not consider or rule on the merits of the contract at all, nor did the judge block or directly interfere with that contract. The judge considered that ULA intends to buy Russian engines from an individual on the sanctions list, which could be illegal. As such, the injunction is limited to forbidding the purchase of the engines until the proper authorities can decide if the purchases would be sanction violations.
The rest of the contract is (so far) free to move forward, using existing Russian engines already in ULA's possession (they claim to have a two-year supply).
I think where your explanation and analogies fall apart is that no bids were ever done. The problem isn't with a sole-source contract (every individual launch is a sole-source contract) but with an uncompeted sole-source contract. Nobody else was even given an opportunity to try to meet the requirements, over-specified or otherwise.
I haven't seen that, so I can't comment on that, but SpaceX would presumably have the raw feed from every camera during launch. If they don't, then their video director would have to be switching blindly between cameras during launch.
See also: getting rid of pennies, or replacing the $1 bill with a coin. Both are amazingly easy things to do (you simply stop making pennies and/or $1 bills and eventually everybody has migrated), but they still can't get either done.
Admittedly, it took Canada until last year to ditch the penny, but when they did it, it was a complete non-event.
Vending machines here in Montreal never take any sort of cards, but when I was recently visiting Boston, many of the machines had contactless readers, so the PayPass/PayWave on our Canadian credit cards worked fine.
What wasn't so nice is when you come across a machine in the US that doesn't take credit cards... Because the Americans don't have any useful denominations of coins, you basically can't use vending machines if you don't have any $1 bills. Even putting a $10 bill into the machine to buy a $2 drink would spit out 32 coins, which is insane.
Except Target Canada's card readers are giant antiquated-looking things that are awkward to use, have a completely useless touchscreen/stylus for some reason (to do what with, exactly?), and don't support contactless payments (which all cards support at this point).
It's not just the card readers that work poorly. Their self-checkout terminals also have issues. They're unilingual French (in Montreal), even in English neighbourhoods, which doesn't really matter because the volume level is below a whisper and is inaudible (although the screen is also in French). They're more complex to use than comparable machines at other stores, and instead of just showing you a list of what you've scanned, they show a strange "stacked deck of cards" that makes it tough to see anything other than the most recent thing you scanned.
More than that, you've got good quality imagery from that same camera from the launch, and a significant portion of the frame there is going to be the same. Notably, of the two iframes that SpaceX was able to partiall recover, the big chunk missing from one of them is of the fuselage (which would be the very similar on launch).
There's a lot of information missing to be sure, but it's still worth pointing out that SpaceX posted the raw transport stream data that they got from the rocket, so reconstruction can be done on the raw data rather than YouTube.
I grew up with the expanded universe, and it was good back then, but at this point it's super depressing. They've killed off a bunch of main characters (both from the films and the EU), and they've sketched out a future that makes it clear that there is no hopeful future in the EU, just an endless cycle of collapse and ruin.
Eventually, sure. But the first space elevator is unlikely to get 2 orders of magnitude cost reductions; estimates I've seen put it at something like $100 per pound, which is about 1/30th the cost of what a non-reusable rocket can do. Notably, that could change dramatically with reusable rockets, which is starting to look like a near-term possibility.
People forget that space elevators will be hideously expensive, and once you've spent all that money building the thing, you are both going to want to recoup your investment, substantially improve on it, and then make an ongoing profit. It can potentially reduce the cost of access to space, but only with incredible up-front costs, and there's no guarantee the long-term costs would beat out improvements in rockets.
Also, space elevators are currently impossible with modern material science, so there's that. And then there's the fact that space elevators can't get to low-earth orbit, that's kind of a limitation.
I will jokingly point out that the main political source of strife that basically starts a world war in the Japanese animated series "Gundam 00" was the existence of orbital solar power plants, and how they concentrated wealth in the hands of a few rich countries after oil became scarce:P
Space colonies would certainly do well to rely on solar power, but it's not clear why a solar power plant would be required for them when they're already in space and could use their own solar power. I'm not saying that solar in space serves no purpose, far from it. I'm saying that the net benefits of orbital solar power with the goal of delivery to earth will never pay off for mass power distribution. There may be some isolated use cases where the benefits might outweigh the costs (perhaps military use), but it'll never be more affordable than ground-based solar.
Space elevators might give us an order of magnitude reduction in launch costs (which fully reusable rockets also ought to). Practical orbital energy probably needs two or three orders of magnitude.
What, me? I don't get why people think space elevators will be practically free to use. If you spend tens of billions of dollars building something, you can't then claim that it has a zero dollar per kilogram cost for lifting payload.
Some estimates seem to put them at a hundred bucks a kilo. That's quite good, but it's also in the range of where reusable rockets might get, so it's not magical.
The question is, how much mass would you need to lift to the moon to make mining raw materials and converting it into gigawatts worth of PV panels worth it? Consider also that it's much more expensive to land materials on the moon than it is to get it into geostationary orbit.
If you extrapolate the population of Japan out to 2030, you get... about 3.2% less people than today. They have a negative population growth rate.
On top of that, they have tons of usable space for solar: if nothing else, they have a huge amount of rail rights of way that they can put panels over, which gives them several hundred square kilometres of area usable for solar. I did the math in another post, and that alone could supply roughly ten times more power (in watt hours) as their one gigawatt orbital installation. It wouldn't be nearly enough to supply the whole country (maybe a tenth), but it's still far more practical.
Japan has tons of free space that they could use for solar. If nothing else, they've got 27,268 kilometers of rail. With an assumption of a 40 foot wide right of way (a very conservative number), that's about 332 square kilometres that they can build solar panels over, giving them (at 5 full-sun-equivalent-hours per day) a theoretical power generation capacity of ~250 gigawatt hours per day. That would be a system capable of delivering an average of a bit more than ten gigawatts of power, a good deal more than their proposed one gigawatt orbital facility, and that's just from building solar panels over rail right-of-ways!
Space elevators are cheap, but they're not free. They'll be very expensive to build, and will only be able to move so much mass at a time, which will result in them having a not insignificant cost to get stuff to GEO. By the time they're practical, the cost of PV panels will have dropped so much that it still will be cheaper to just build more PV panels on earth rather than loft them into orbit on a space elevator.
PV prices are dropping faster than launch prices. You'd need launch prices that are something like $10 per pound (two orders of magnitude cheaper than today) to make orbital power feasible with today's panels, but by the time launch prices dropped that low (if they ever do), PV panels would be that much more efficient, and you'd need launch prices much cheaper than $10 per pound.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as an FYI followup to this, Harmy has been working on the despecialized editions for years, so there are a few different versions hanging around. The latest version is v2.5. The improvements in quality from his first release to his most recent release are huge.
He also did preliminary attempts at Empire and Jedi, but he only did a rough first pass on those, so the work on them is nowhere near the quality of his work on Star Wars. He plans to revisit Empire and Jedi once he's satisfied with the original.
LaRonde (SixFlags) in Montreal did experiments with this nearly a year ago:
https://developer.oculusvr.com...
From reading the article on the Lac-Megantic derailment, it looks like the operator was poorly trained and proper safety protocol as well as common sense was outright ignored. The operator did not apply any hand brakes and knowingly left a malfunctioning locomotive unattended for a long period of time. Talk about a glaring mistake. I can see this as a problem stemming from the reduction of train crews to one guy who has to manually locks dozens of cars taking 2-3 minutes each car.
This is false. The operator activated the hand brakes on all 5 locomotives and 10 out of 72 train cars. It was not sufficient to stop the train from moving. The railway's requirement was 5 locomotives and 11 handbrakes. So while the engineer didn't comply with the railway's own policy, it probably wouldn't have mattered if he had, as the railways own policy was insufficient.
The railway is undoubtedly at fault for the derailment. However, the massive extent of the damage caused after the derailment (the resulting fire, and explosions intense enough that several people were completely vaporized) is largely the fault of the DOT-111 tanker cars, which have been known to be dangerously defective for decades. Reports going back as far (at least) as the early 90s remark that these cars have a far higher integrity failure rate during derailments than other cars.
As has been pointed out, desalination plants don't typically use distillation, they use reverse osmosis. That is to say that they use very high-pressure pumps to force the water through a membrane which rejects salt. Energy consumption is currently at about 3 kWh per cubic metre, although that's falling over time was membrane technology improves (the less pressure required, the lower the cost).
That works out to about 3 watt-hours per litre. Where I live, industrial power rates put that at $0.0001056 CAD per litre. Or $0.1056 CAD per cubic metre of water (thousand litres) if you prefer.
Obviously, if you live in a place that charges more for power (industrial power is $0.0352 per kWh here), that cost goes up.
Desalination plants don't boil water to filter the salt out. They use reverse osmosis, which typically requires about 3 kWh of electricity per cubic metre of water processed due to the very high pressure pumps required to force the water through the filters.
Other than the fact that the ruling is specifically and exclusively about the ongoing sanctions against Russia, it has nothing to do with the ongoing sanctions against Russia. Right. That makes sense.
And the judge apparently thinks that idea has enough merit to block the no-compete sale while it's thoroughly investigated.
That's not at all what happened. The judge did not consider or rule on the merits of the contract at all, nor did the judge block or directly interfere with that contract. The judge considered that ULA intends to buy Russian engines from an individual on the sanctions list, which could be illegal. As such, the injunction is limited to forbidding the purchase of the engines until the proper authorities can decide if the purchases would be sanction violations.
The rest of the contract is (so far) free to move forward, using existing Russian engines already in ULA's possession (they claim to have a two-year supply).
I think where your explanation and analogies fall apart is that no bids were ever done. The problem isn't with a sole-source contract (every individual launch is a sole-source contract) but with an uncompeted sole-source contract. Nobody else was even given an opportunity to try to meet the requirements, over-specified or otherwise.
Well, yeah, the video is primarily of PR and posterity value... But is there a problem with that?
I haven't seen that, so I can't comment on that, but SpaceX would presumably have the raw feed from every camera during launch. If they don't, then their video director would have to be switching blindly between cameras during launch.
See also: getting rid of pennies, or replacing the $1 bill with a coin. Both are amazingly easy things to do (you simply stop making pennies and/or $1 bills and eventually everybody has migrated), but they still can't get either done.
Admittedly, it took Canada until last year to ditch the penny, but when they did it, it was a complete non-event.
Vending machines here in Montreal never take any sort of cards, but when I was recently visiting Boston, many of the machines had contactless readers, so the PayPass/PayWave on our Canadian credit cards worked fine.
What wasn't so nice is when you come across a machine in the US that doesn't take credit cards... Because the Americans don't have any useful denominations of coins, you basically can't use vending machines if you don't have any $1 bills. Even putting a $10 bill into the machine to buy a $2 drink would spit out 32 coins, which is insane.
Except Target Canada's card readers are giant antiquated-looking things that are awkward to use, have a completely useless touchscreen/stylus for some reason (to do what with, exactly?), and don't support contactless payments (which all cards support at this point).
It's not just the card readers that work poorly. Their self-checkout terminals also have issues. They're unilingual French (in Montreal), even in English neighbourhoods, which doesn't really matter because the volume level is below a whisper and is inaudible (although the screen is also in French). They're more complex to use than comparable machines at other stores, and instead of just showing you a list of what you've scanned, they show a strange "stacked deck of cards" that makes it tough to see anything other than the most recent thing you scanned.
Errm, they did have a well planned means to evaluate success: telemetry data. Which they have good copies of. The video is just candy.
More than that, you've got good quality imagery from that same camera from the launch, and a significant portion of the frame there is going to be the same. Notably, of the two iframes that SpaceX was able to partiall recover, the big chunk missing from one of them is of the fuselage (which would be the very similar on launch).
There's a lot of information missing to be sure, but it's still worth pointing out that SpaceX posted the raw transport stream data that they got from the rocket, so reconstruction can be done on the raw data rather than YouTube.
I grew up with the expanded universe, and it was good back then, but at this point it's super depressing. They've killed off a bunch of main characters (both from the films and the EU), and they've sketched out a future that makes it clear that there is no hopeful future in the EU, just an endless cycle of collapse and ruin.
Eventually, sure. But the first space elevator is unlikely to get 2 orders of magnitude cost reductions; estimates I've seen put it at something like $100 per pound, which is about 1/30th the cost of what a non-reusable rocket can do. Notably, that could change dramatically with reusable rockets, which is starting to look like a near-term possibility.
People forget that space elevators will be hideously expensive, and once you've spent all that money building the thing, you are both going to want to recoup your investment, substantially improve on it, and then make an ongoing profit. It can potentially reduce the cost of access to space, but only with incredible up-front costs, and there's no guarantee the long-term costs would beat out improvements in rockets.
Also, space elevators are currently impossible with modern material science, so there's that. And then there's the fact that space elevators can't get to low-earth orbit, that's kind of a limitation.
I will jokingly point out that the main political source of strife that basically starts a world war in the Japanese animated series "Gundam 00" was the existence of orbital solar power plants, and how they concentrated wealth in the hands of a few rich countries after oil became scarce :P
Space colonies would certainly do well to rely on solar power, but it's not clear why a solar power plant would be required for them when they're already in space and could use their own solar power. I'm not saying that solar in space serves no purpose, far from it. I'm saying that the net benefits of orbital solar power with the goal of delivery to earth will never pay off for mass power distribution. There may be some isolated use cases where the benefits might outweigh the costs (perhaps military use), but it'll never be more affordable than ground-based solar.
Space elevators might give us an order of magnitude reduction in launch costs (which fully reusable rockets also ought to). Practical orbital energy probably needs two or three orders of magnitude.
What, me? I don't get why people think space elevators will be practically free to use. If you spend tens of billions of dollars building something, you can't then claim that it has a zero dollar per kilogram cost for lifting payload.
Some estimates seem to put them at a hundred bucks a kilo. That's quite good, but it's also in the range of where reusable rockets might get, so it's not magical.
The question is, how much mass would you need to lift to the moon to make mining raw materials and converting it into gigawatts worth of PV panels worth it? Consider also that it's much more expensive to land materials on the moon than it is to get it into geostationary orbit.
If you extrapolate the population of Japan out to 2030, you get... about 3.2% less people than today. They have a negative population growth rate.
On top of that, they have tons of usable space for solar: if nothing else, they have a huge amount of rail rights of way that they can put panels over, which gives them several hundred square kilometres of area usable for solar. I did the math in another post, and that alone could supply roughly ten times more power (in watt hours) as their one gigawatt orbital installation. It wouldn't be nearly enough to supply the whole country (maybe a tenth), but it's still far more practical.
Japan has tons of free space that they could use for solar. If nothing else, they've got 27,268 kilometers of rail. With an assumption of a 40 foot wide right of way (a very conservative number), that's about 332 square kilometres that they can build solar panels over, giving them (at 5 full-sun-equivalent-hours per day) a theoretical power generation capacity of ~250 gigawatt hours per day. That would be a system capable of delivering an average of a bit more than ten gigawatts of power, a good deal more than their proposed one gigawatt orbital facility, and that's just from building solar panels over rail right-of-ways!
Space elevators are cheap, but they're not free. They'll be very expensive to build, and will only be able to move so much mass at a time, which will result in them having a not insignificant cost to get stuff to GEO. By the time they're practical, the cost of PV panels will have dropped so much that it still will be cheaper to just build more PV panels on earth rather than loft them into orbit on a space elevator.
PV prices are dropping faster than launch prices. You'd need launch prices that are something like $10 per pound (two orders of magnitude cheaper than today) to make orbital power feasible with today's panels, but by the time launch prices dropped that low (if they ever do), PV panels would be that much more efficient, and you'd need launch prices much cheaper than $10 per pound.