The timing matters sure. I'll just note that the alleged cause precedes the alleged effect. That plus the correlation implies causation.
If one manned mission was so fruitful, there should be more incentive to do more manned missions and more people would want to jump in.
Why? Last I checked space science wasn't actually a high priority. This is a nuance that people routinely miss in my postings about manned space exploration. Keep in mind Keenmustard emphasized the value of science. In that light, then it matters what you use to get that science and on site humans have considerable advantage over current remote controlled robots in terms of scientific output for the dollars spent.
But if your goal is merely the appearance of doing scientific research, then robotics is the better deal since the ante is much smaller. You can throw something on the surface of Mars for a few hundred million dollars right now.
And that's fundamentally why surface-based lunar research stopped for forty years. There was nothing cheap you could do on the surface of the Moon that could look impressive after the Apollo missions.
We could have a star trek utopia right here... Free education, opportunity through small businesses, cheap housing, plentiful energy.
I read through your essay. You spend way too much time talking about changing peoples' attitudes rather than concrete structural changes that would matter more.
For example, we already have part of the above. It turns out people are willing to borrow lots of money for an expensive education rather than get the cheap or free education. There's little difference in outcome between societies with free education and those with expensive educations.
And energy has been plentiful in the developed world for half a century or more. Same goes for opportunity through small businesses.
And housing isn't cheap because it isn't cheap to make or situate. The technology has to come about first in order for that to happen.
I'll just note that a lot of the obstacles to progress here come from your fellow utopianists who think that interfering with the above leads to their desired utopias. Perhaps you could all agree on the ideal approach (it'll only take forever, of course) while the rest of us build a nice society, which probably will include a substantial space-side presence?
Alternately, perhaps you could find a few perfect people who believe what you think needs to be believed, and implement a prototype of your desired society. If that turns out well, and it probably won't - be warned, then there will be a strong example for getting the rest of us to adopt the necessarily beliefs in order to implement your utopia.
That's a terrible risk diversity argument. There might be thousands or even millions of human generations before the next asteroid big enough to destroy human civilization on Earth. Taking fifty years to say, first develop the alleged "Star Trek" utopia wouldn't significantly change the risk for us.
Instead, I think far more mundane risks are better to consider. For example, there are routinely large economic downturns every ten to twenty years. A larger economy due to a space-side presence would help to smooth out the effects of such recessions.Or if there's a large war or disaster, there would be more resources available to help mitigate the harm.
Obviously, they don't provide a "killer ap" for space development, but there really isn't one over the span of a few human lifetimes except the opportunity to be at places that are completely alien to us on Earth and do things that haven't ever been done before.
Again, you claimed Apollo as an example of the superiority of flesh based exploration. When you find it it wasn't, you claim the example is irrelevant. I find your constant refuting of your own arguments a bit bizarre.
I didn't "find it wasn't". The bottom line on Apollo is that it was a national prestige projection which had scientific research as a lower priority. Despite that and various other constraints, such as the short time actually spent on the Moon, they did enough research to shut down all unmanned surface exploration by the entire world for forty years.
Yes. Which is to say, the arguments for electric light won us over when we saw it in action, and electric lighting inevitably replaced the technology that preceded it. Just as robotic exploration has now replaced the technology that preceded it (human based exploration).
You are conflating vastly different meanings of "as a species". The species didn't invent the lightbulb, and the species didn't adopt the light bulb. Most of humanity didn't even have a thing to do with the creation of the societies that made invention of the light bulb possible.
And your "inevitable" replacement of previous technologies by the light bulb took generations. It was in high volume use long before the majority of humanity ever used one.
Finally, we go to the painfully obvious point that only a few people had anything at all to do with the invention of the light bulb. It didn't take humanity to make a light bulb, it took a few people working in labs over the course of 50 or so years to do so.
Currently, even putting things into Earth orbit take considerable economic effort. That will change just as it has for the past few centuries. Eventually, it'll drop to the point where a group with sufficient economic resources to make it happen will do so.
The discoveries (as far as it goes) weren't enough to justify the cost. The purpose of Apollo was to beat the Ruskies to the moon. Rumour has it that Kennedy was presented with a proposal to send a probe to Mars, he rejected it in favour of a manned mission to the moon. Thought it was more showy. Upshot is, any science that happened was merely incidental, and none of it in this century requires or recommends itself to having a human physically present on the moon. Want to place a mirror on the moon? Send a probe. Need a moon rock sample? Land a probe, get a sample, blast off back to earth.
All of which is completely irrelevant to both the capabilities of manned space flight and the capabilities of future groups of people to engage in manned space flight. The "incidental science", for example, happened and we can use that as an example of human endeavors in that sort of environment no matter the motives of the time.
As the questions at the end of your post, they are remarkable only for their lack of ambition. For example, you could have asked instead "Want to establish a colony on the Moon?" which is a bit more involved than just picking up a few more rocks from the Moon. Well, you'll need people for that.
Going from 3,000 K to 3K is also cooling. This is what I'm speaking of. Do you have a point to your argument? Perhaps you ought to look at actual video of rocket plumes in space. They really do cool very rapidly to below ionization temperatures.
PHYSICS says that the exhaust will expand. Eventually the exhaust cloud will be larger than the area covered by the "shield". At which time the exhaust will be visible.
How visible? You're chasing a straw man here. I'm not interested in perfect invisibility, I'm interested in "stealth", making a vehicle hard enough to detect that it can sneak up on a target and get within range of making a useful attack.
It is instead a free expansion of gas and that leads to NO cooling.
That is incorrect. What happens is that as the exhaust plume expands, the motion becomes correlated. Everything has random motion, but only particles moving in the same direction will stay near one another. Thus, the random motion of heat translates naturally into translation motion. That's how the temperature will drop from expansion.
Doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how expensive the infrastructure is, it's no more valuable to me than what I'm willing to pay for it. If the power company makes it too expensive to tie to the grid, then they aren't going to have anyone tied to the grid.
but it seems to me that a state trying to block a transaction between a resident of that state and a resident of another state is on shaky legal ground.
Only if the transaction is interstate/out of state.
Ironically we could do the insurance thing totally cashless fairly easily
I doubt there's 1 in 1,000 people in the US who pay for their insurance with cash. It's close enough to cashless. Maybe we ought to look at problems instead.
Explain how the exhaust will cool to background radiation levels.
The assumption here is that the exhaust is in the form of a gas. Once it passes through the constriction of the rocket nozzle, it expands (the effect is to turn thermal random motion of the particles of the exhaust into directed velocity). Expansion of a gas causes cooling. After leaving the bell, there are no more restrictions to expansion of the gas aside from the small amount of matter in space.
In addition, the much increased surface area of the exhaust plume allows for greater radiation of heat to space.
That is what you posted. And they will take 300 years to reach the Oort cloud.
And again, so what? I already explained why I posted that. No one is going to use the behavior of Voyager spacecraft, particularly beaming a highly directed signal at the target you're trying to sneak up on, as a strategy for stealth. It was an inappropriate example for the article to use. That's the only reason I mentioned it.
You claim that a cloak of invisibility is possible.
I say that physics says it is not.
Then use physics to make that argument not assertions that I brought up Voyager. And please characterize my arguments correctly. I'm not saying that invisibility is possible, but rather that stealth is.
I say that if it was an invisibility cloak you wouldn't need tactics to take out anyone who isn't blind. The cloak would make you invisible. They would not see you. Tactics do not beat physics.
I think you're starting to see my point. Stealth isn't perfect. It would be relatively hard against large, sensitive detectors. But you can't haul those on a high acceleration warship (unless you're doing some sort of swarm-based sensing). Disable the detectors and you're left with far weaker systems. The methods we've been discussing would be much more effective in that case.
It's also worth noting that even rudimentary stealth efforts might be effective against self-guiding weapons or enemies who don't happen to have access to good sensory equipment. It can provide an edge or improve survivability.
Day traders profit off of the day to day fluctuations of the market, and government policies can and does have both immediate and systematic effects on those fluctuations.
Lots of things can cause fluctuations even the entry of new players or someone deciding to change the size of their investment in a corporation. Government interference is far from unique in this regard.
While it is true what day traders do isn't rape and pillage, the analogy I would equate to is accepting stolen or counterfeit goods.
This analogy doesn't make sense at all to me. I don't see that it is any better to pretend a government policy or regulation change didn't happen.
What I was saying is those things are not signs of not being an idiot, but signs of not having much empathy.
Which is part of the lesson IMHO. Training like this can help you turn off empathy when it is inappropriate and/or unhealthy for you.
The previous AC was speaking of stock markets. Those are relatively free.
In the absence of a free market, government sets the precedent that it's ok to violate the rights of others to further one's own interests. Being successful under such conditions is not a good indicator that one is intelligent or competent (i.e not an idiot), but whether one possesses the same traits as a psychopath - willing to exploit whatever loophole that exists, violating any rights that gets in the way, ignore the loss of liberty for all. "I got mine, screw yours"
While I agree, I don't see the connection to the discussion of day trading. It's obviously not particularly moral, but it's not taking candy from babies either. And if this guy is as good at it as he claims, then that's a better thing to be doing from his bedroom than a lot of stuff I can think of. As to his mental outlook, I think that's actually two useful lessons for us all.
First, knowledge learned in one area can be applied elsewhere sometimes in surprising places or ways. Who knew that playing a game could help you become a vigorous trader on a stock market? Well, now we know.
Then there's the mental attitude he speaks of. It takes a considerable mental adjustment to be able to accept such a high rate of failure as routine and develop a feeling for when something has failed or succeeded to the point of abandonment. Sure, it's not so great an outlook for child-rearing, but there's plenty such as trade or commerce of just about anything, where this is a useful approach.
"to how taxes were done" by whom? When I see stuff like this, it's usually from a US citizen who doesn't have a clue what sort of loopholes were around 50 years ago.
We could have socialized medicine in the US if we could get this money.
Or we could have something useful. Or just not collect the taxes in the first place, if that's the best you can do with it.
Let's also kill right now, the notion that corporations are persons.
Definitely from the US. Well, I guess you'll be pleased to find out that everyone including the US Supreme Court already agrees with you. Corporations aren't people and there just isn't any disagreement on that. OTOH, corporate personhood is a legal fiction used to insure that the people involved with a corporation receive proper protection under a variety of developed world legal systems, including the US.
It's a fallacy designed to be pro-business.
Let me note that pro-business is far less harmful and crazy to human society than anti-business.
You are claiming that. But you have not explained how it would happen.
You just quoted my explanation "rapid expansion of the propellant in a vacuum in addition to the above mentioned thermal radiation". My point was not that rocket exhaust is instantly invisible, but rather it cools off very quickly and is not as visible as claimed by you or the link that's been passed around. "Glow" in particular implies ionization. That goes away particularly fast in space.
Like your previous example of Voyager. Which you did not like once I pointed out that it would take 300 years just to reach the Oort cloud.
I didn't bring up Voyager, that was brought up by the article on the impossibility of stealth in space. Here's what that article stated:
As of 2013, the Voyager 1 space probe is about 18 billion kilometers away from Terra and its radio signal is a pathetic 20 watts (or about as dim as the light bulb in your refrigerator). But as faint as it is, the Green Bank telescope can pick it out from the background noise in one second flat.
Note that there's no mention of the facts that the signal in question is highly directional and narrow bandwidth, while the Green Bank antenna is massive. The observation is irrelevant to any attempt at stealth.
If 10000 daytraders start out with 10000 dollars each and assuming zero sum game one of them is going to end up with a hundred million.
Doesn't work that way unless everyone does all or nothing bets. My view is that it's more likely to stabilize with each one tending to hold a portion with the more competent tending to be the wealthier and portions stabilizing where investment opportunities tend to taper off.
The reason, when it comes down to it, is that as a species, we are not convinced by the case put forward that we ought to do it.
Were we convinced as a species to develop the light bulb? The cost of space travel is declining while manufacture continues to improve. Eventually, it'll get to the point where a "species" doesn't need to make the decision in order for manned space travel to Mars to happen.
I find it disingenuous to equate human-level exploration with no exploration at all.
But that is a strawman. You disappoint me.
It's your straw man. Be "disappointed" at someone else. When we actually look at a real life manned exploration of another body, we see far more exploration of the Moon over a three year period (with only about 2 man-weeks total of ground time between the dozen astronauts who landed on the Moon) than the world has managed with space probes on Mars over the past 40 years.
My view is that after a Robert Zubrin style mission (four people to Mars for two years and return), we'll get so much scientific data and hard samples, that it'll obsolete most unmanned surface exploration of Mars for decades, like it did for the US and lunar surface exploration following Apollo.
So far I haven't seen anyone posting what that "shielding" is made of.
Aluminum foil, shiny side in. A few kilograms at most.
The reason it does not matter is that the exhaust will, eventually, travel further to the side than the shielding can shield. Then it will be seen as a glowing cloud behind the shielded ship.
Except it won't be glowing. Unlike the spacecraft itself, rocket exhaust (chemical or otherwise) will cool rapidly to the microwave background temperature (rapid expansion of the propellant in a vacuum in addition to the above mentioned thermal radiation).
Sure, all of this can be detected by a large enough and sophisticated enough detector. That's why that large, vulnerable target gets blown up first.
To claim that physics prevents stealth is to ignore the actual physics as well as tactical considerations like the size and mass of a viable detector.
there's that old joke about applying to work for N banks and making a different prediction about a fixed set, S, of stocks to each one; if N=2^|S|, you'll sweep one of them, guaranteed.
Except that the cost of making each bet is just the effort to fill out the application. Here, the guy had to put in their own money in on each bet they made. And as a result, they ended up $54 million ahead just last year and they've apparently have been doing well for a ten year period.
This is a rather consistent result over probably tens of thousands of trades. What burns people like this is not that they were somehow one of the few lucky people out of far more people than exist in the world today, but rather that they tend to underestimate the low frequency risks to such trading.
If you are betting using a huge amount of borrowed money (this guy probably is operating on a fair amount of margin given how much wealth growth he claims to have created), then it doesn't take much bad luck or fail to erase your entire holdings.
So, no studying PtoE, company fundamentals, etc. etc. Further proving that the Stock Market is almost entirely disconnected from the underlying companies. Basically, it's a Ponzi scheme.
Time scale matters. Long term considerations are completely irrelevant when you won't hold a stock long enough for them to matter. Meanwhile if you're planning to buy and hold for a long time, you shouldn't be trying to time the market or making a lot of trades.
Rather than the silly argument that something is a Ponzi scheme just because one guy profits from a completely different approach to investing than you would take, recognize that it takes a peculiar skill set and effort/focus to be good at any sort of market making or other short term trading. This guy happens to have those skills and to take the effort.
The US government would have invested Social Security in the Stock Market, but they can't find a spokesperson from the financial industry you can advocate the scheme without drooling at the prospect.
Instead, we have what would, if it were an attempt at investment, be a guaranteed money loser for anyone putting in now, with a built in huge incentive for the federal government to cut back on future benefits in order to pay current benefits. That's the real Ponzi scheme.
And in the process, Social Security as it currently stands lessens ownership of capital (none of that money enables the Social Security pensioner to own even a little bit of a company or other capital), which unlike labor is not declining in value, while dumping that money in the hands of special interests who pick up public funding. Plenty to like about that scheme.
Also, you ignored the assertion I made that Apollo would have also killed the crew if its launch vehicle had exploded and ripped it apart in the process (as happened to Challenger). We all ASSUME the Apollo LAS would have worked, but this was never proven (tested on Little Joe II, but NEVER on Saturn).
Sounds like you should have ignored what you were thinking too.
DreamChaser has an integral launch abort system, so this shortcoming of the shuttle is not a generic "spaceplane" shortcoming
Indeed. Notice I never said anything to disagree. I didn't speak at all of DreamChaser's features which would mitigate or evade the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
Except of course that Apollo 13 very nearly put the nail in that coffin. Had the Apollo 13 explosion been a tad more energetic, it could well have cracked or holed the heat shield (and indeed nobody knew it had not at the time) whereas a shuttle-type arangement would have been safer in THAT incident (its TPS in a less-vulnerable position and the by-that-point-in-the-mission inert main engines being in the position to be hurt).
Not at all. Keep in mind that Apollo 13 accident happened just prior to a propellant burn to insert the capsule in lunar orbit. The Shuttle under the same situation would have propellant on board and some sort of active rocket engine for conducting the burn (though not necessarily the Main Engines). In that situation, damage to the heat shield is still possible depending on where everything happens to be. For example, if the Shuttle is still piggy backing on the side, then the heat shield is still exposed to potential damage.
In the case of the capsule scheme, there's generally another severe and dangerous limitation: separation from the service module must happen so close to reentry that there is no time to do ANYTHING between when the shield is exposed and inspectable and the time when plasma begins to surround the vehicle...
And not much of a reason to care either since the heat shield has been inspected on the ground. But I suppose we could stick a couple of cameras on the service module to image the heat shield, should this ever become a problem.
Your final note about size is exactly why DreamChaser (the POINT of this discussion) is so much smaller than shuttle (NOT the subject of the discussion). DreamChaser is sized for the same number of crew as CST-100 and Dragon, and has three more seats than the (now crippled) version of Orion LockMart is spending BILLIONS and more than a decade building for NASA...
So what? Lockheed Martin would spend more than that, if we let them. The cost of their projects tend to be sized to the available funding. None of the other capsule builders have this sort of problem.
That would be the part where they discussed whether shielding your engines would be possible. So, yeah, they do.
You can "shield" your engines just by not pointing the exhaust directly at the target you're trying to sneak up on.
The engines give off reaction mass to move the ship forward. That reaction mass is probably very hot. Which means that it will radiate heat which will be seen.
"Probably very hot" is considerable fail right there. For example, the exhaust temperature of chemical rockets drops considerably as it passes through the "throttle", a constriction and subsequent expansion which converts most of the thermal energy of the exhaust into kinetic motion. So the exhaust as viewed from the side is vastly cooler than if you're looking directly down the throttle to the burn chamber.
Further, the "shielding" that everyone talks about just isn't that heavy. The bell of a chemical rocket already acts as a simple shield and one can put a lightweight (as in lighter than the bell's mass which is already pretty negligible) shroud outside that to mask the heat radiated from the bell.
And of course, there's the mass driver approach which allows one to decelerate in line with a target and produce no notable heat signature while spewing projectiles in a militarily useful direction.
And if you are going to use the Voyager craft as examples, please remember that it took 12 years to reach Neptune and will take THREE HUNDRED YEARS to reach the Oort cloud.
If you're going to bring that up, please remember that the above observation is completely irrelevant since spacecraft can move a lot faster than the Voyager spacecraft, are trying to hide, and aren't deliberately broadcasting signals at the enemy to pick up.
so no I will not back down from my statement that he is an idiot with ADD.
A wealthy idiot who probably made more in ten years trading stocks than you'll make in several lifetimes. If the "idiot" achieves by their actions a considerable gain (be it money or not), then maybe you should reconsider whether the term is appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
Correlation does not imply causation.
The timing matters sure. I'll just note that the alleged cause precedes the alleged effect. That plus the correlation implies causation.
If one manned mission was so fruitful, there should be more incentive to do more manned missions and more people would want to jump in.
Why? Last I checked space science wasn't actually a high priority. This is a nuance that people routinely miss in my postings about manned space exploration. Keep in mind Keenmustard emphasized the value of science. In that light, then it matters what you use to get that science and on site humans have considerable advantage over current remote controlled robots in terms of scientific output for the dollars spent.
But if your goal is merely the appearance of doing scientific research, then robotics is the better deal since the ante is much smaller. You can throw something on the surface of Mars for a few hundred million dollars right now.
And that's fundamentally why surface-based lunar research stopped for forty years. There was nothing cheap you could do on the surface of the Moon that could look impressive after the Apollo missions.
We could have a star trek utopia right here... Free education, opportunity through small businesses, cheap housing, plentiful energy.
I read through your essay. You spend way too much time talking about changing peoples' attitudes rather than concrete structural changes that would matter more.
For example, we already have part of the above. It turns out people are willing to borrow lots of money for an expensive education rather than get the cheap or free education. There's little difference in outcome between societies with free education and those with expensive educations.
And energy has been plentiful in the developed world for half a century or more. Same goes for opportunity through small businesses.
And housing isn't cheap because it isn't cheap to make or situate. The technology has to come about first in order for that to happen.
I'll just note that a lot of the obstacles to progress here come from your fellow utopianists who think that interfering with the above leads to their desired utopias. Perhaps you could all agree on the ideal approach (it'll only take forever, of course) while the rest of us build a nice society, which probably will include a substantial space-side presence?
Alternately, perhaps you could find a few perfect people who believe what you think needs to be believed, and implement a prototype of your desired society. If that turns out well, and it probably won't - be warned, then there will be a strong example for getting the rest of us to adopt the necessarily beliefs in order to implement your utopia.
That's a terrible risk diversity argument. There might be thousands or even millions of human generations before the next asteroid big enough to destroy human civilization on Earth. Taking fifty years to say, first develop the alleged "Star Trek" utopia wouldn't significantly change the risk for us.
Instead, I think far more mundane risks are better to consider. For example, there are routinely large economic downturns every ten to twenty years. A larger economy due to a space-side presence would help to smooth out the effects of such recessions.Or if there's a large war or disaster, there would be more resources available to help mitigate the harm.
Obviously, they don't provide a "killer ap" for space development, but there really isn't one over the span of a few human lifetimes except the opportunity to be at places that are completely alien to us on Earth and do things that haven't ever been done before.
Again, you claimed Apollo as an example of the superiority of flesh based exploration. When you find it it wasn't, you claim the example is irrelevant. I find your constant refuting of your own arguments a bit bizarre.
I didn't "find it wasn't". The bottom line on Apollo is that it was a national prestige projection which had scientific research as a lower priority. Despite that and various other constraints, such as the short time actually spent on the Moon, they did enough research to shut down all unmanned surface exploration by the entire world for forty years.
Yes. Which is to say, the arguments for electric light won us over when we saw it in action, and electric lighting inevitably replaced the technology that preceded it. Just as robotic exploration has now replaced the technology that preceded it (human based exploration).
You are conflating vastly different meanings of "as a species". The species didn't invent the lightbulb, and the species didn't adopt the light bulb. Most of humanity didn't even have a thing to do with the creation of the societies that made invention of the light bulb possible.
And your "inevitable" replacement of previous technologies by the light bulb took generations. It was in high volume use long before the majority of humanity ever used one.
Finally, we go to the painfully obvious point that only a few people had anything at all to do with the invention of the light bulb. It didn't take humanity to make a light bulb, it took a few people working in labs over the course of 50 or so years to do so.
Currently, even putting things into Earth orbit take considerable economic effort. That will change just as it has for the past few centuries. Eventually, it'll drop to the point where a group with sufficient economic resources to make it happen will do so.
The discoveries (as far as it goes) weren't enough to justify the cost. The purpose of Apollo was to beat the Ruskies to the moon. Rumour has it that Kennedy was presented with a proposal to send a probe to Mars, he rejected it in favour of a manned mission to the moon. Thought it was more showy. Upshot is, any science that happened was merely incidental, and none of it in this century requires or recommends itself to having a human physically present on the moon. Want to place a mirror on the moon? Send a probe. Need a moon rock sample? Land a probe, get a sample, blast off back to earth.
All of which is completely irrelevant to both the capabilities of manned space flight and the capabilities of future groups of people to engage in manned space flight. The "incidental science", for example, happened and we can use that as an example of human endeavors in that sort of environment no matter the motives of the time.
As the questions at the end of your post, they are remarkable only for their lack of ambition. For example, you could have asked instead "Want to establish a colony on the Moon?" which is a bit more involved than just picking up a few more rocks from the Moon. Well, you'll need people for that.
Going from 3,000 K to 2,000 K is "cooling".
Going from 3,000 K to 3K is also cooling. This is what I'm speaking of. Do you have a point to your argument? Perhaps you ought to look at actual video of rocket plumes in space. They really do cool very rapidly to below ionization temperatures.
PHYSICS says that the exhaust will expand. Eventually the exhaust cloud will be larger than the area covered by the "shield". At which time the exhaust will be visible.
How visible? You're chasing a straw man here. I'm not interested in perfect invisibility, I'm interested in "stealth", making a vehicle hard enough to detect that it can sneak up on a target and get within range of making a useful attack.
It is instead a free expansion of gas and that leads to NO cooling.
That is incorrect. What happens is that as the exhaust plume expands, the motion becomes correlated. Everything has random motion, but only particles moving in the same direction will stay near one another. Thus, the random motion of heat translates naturally into translation motion. That's how the temperature will drop from expansion.
Doesn't work that way. It doesn't matter how expensive the infrastructure is, it's no more valuable to me than what I'm willing to pay for it. If the power company makes it too expensive to tie to the grid, then they aren't going to have anyone tied to the grid.
Yeah, but if you give away more free stuff than you ever get back in revenue you will be losing money.
Depends what the free stuff costs and what you're getting back in revenue. I don't see that Ireland came out poorly on the deal.
but it seems to me that a state trying to block a transaction between a resident of that state and a resident of another state is on shaky legal ground.
Only if the transaction is interstate/out of state.
Ironically we could do the insurance thing totally cashless fairly easily
I doubt there's 1 in 1,000 people in the US who pay for their insurance with cash. It's close enough to cashless. Maybe we ought to look at problems instead.
Explain how the exhaust will cool to background radiation levels.
The assumption here is that the exhaust is in the form of a gas. Once it passes through the constriction of the rocket nozzle, it expands (the effect is to turn thermal random motion of the particles of the exhaust into directed velocity). Expansion of a gas causes cooling. After leaving the bell, there are no more restrictions to expansion of the gas aside from the small amount of matter in space.
In addition, the much increased surface area of the exhaust plume allows for greater radiation of heat to space.
That is what you posted. And they will take 300 years to reach the Oort cloud.
And again, so what? I already explained why I posted that. No one is going to use the behavior of Voyager spacecraft, particularly beaming a highly directed signal at the target you're trying to sneak up on, as a strategy for stealth. It was an inappropriate example for the article to use. That's the only reason I mentioned it.
You claim that a cloak of invisibility is possible.
I say that physics says it is not.
Then use physics to make that argument not assertions that I brought up Voyager. And please characterize my arguments correctly. I'm not saying that invisibility is possible, but rather that stealth is.
I say that if it was an invisibility cloak you wouldn't need tactics to take out anyone who isn't blind. The cloak would make you invisible. They would not see you. Tactics do not beat physics.
I think you're starting to see my point. Stealth isn't perfect. It would be relatively hard against large, sensitive detectors. But you can't haul those on a high acceleration warship (unless you're doing some sort of swarm-based sensing). Disable the detectors and you're left with far weaker systems. The methods we've been discussing would be much more effective in that case.
It's also worth noting that even rudimentary stealth efforts might be effective against self-guiding weapons or enemies who don't happen to have access to good sensory equipment. It can provide an edge or improve survivability.
Day traders profit off of the day to day fluctuations of the market, and government policies can and does have both immediate and systematic effects on those fluctuations.
Lots of things can cause fluctuations even the entry of new players or someone deciding to change the size of their investment in a corporation. Government interference is far from unique in this regard.
While it is true what day traders do isn't rape and pillage, the analogy I would equate to is accepting stolen or counterfeit goods.
This analogy doesn't make sense at all to me. I don't see that it is any better to pretend a government policy or regulation change didn't happen.
What I was saying is those things are not signs of not being an idiot, but signs of not having much empathy.
Which is part of the lesson IMHO. Training like this can help you turn off empathy when it is inappropriate and/or unhealthy for you.
In the absence of a free market, government sets the precedent that it's ok to violate the rights of others to further one's own interests. Being successful under such conditions is not a good indicator that one is intelligent or competent (i.e not an idiot), but whether one possesses the same traits as a psychopath - willing to exploit whatever loophole that exists, violating any rights that gets in the way, ignore the loss of liberty for all. "I got mine, screw yours"
While I agree, I don't see the connection to the discussion of day trading. It's obviously not particularly moral, but it's not taking candy from babies either. And if this guy is as good at it as he claims, then that's a better thing to be doing from his bedroom than a lot of stuff I can think of. As to his mental outlook, I think that's actually two useful lessons for us all.
First, knowledge learned in one area can be applied elsewhere sometimes in surprising places or ways. Who knew that playing a game could help you become a vigorous trader on a stock market? Well, now we know.
Then there's the mental attitude he speaks of. It takes a considerable mental adjustment to be able to accept such a high rate of failure as routine and develop a feeling for when something has failed or succeeded to the point of abandonment. Sure, it's not so great an outlook for child-rearing, but there's plenty such as trade or commerce of just about anything, where this is a useful approach.
We could have socialized medicine in the US if we could get this money.
Or we could have something useful. Or just not collect the taxes in the first place, if that's the best you can do with it.
Let's also kill right now, the notion that corporations are persons.
Definitely from the US. Well, I guess you'll be pleased to find out that everyone including the US Supreme Court already agrees with you. Corporations aren't people and there just isn't any disagreement on that. OTOH, corporate personhood is a legal fiction used to insure that the people involved with a corporation receive proper protection under a variety of developed world legal systems, including the US.
It's a fallacy designed to be pro-business.
Let me note that pro-business is far less harmful and crazy to human society than anti-business.
And what about mass drivers?
You are claiming that. But you have not explained how it would happen.
You just quoted my explanation "rapid expansion of the propellant in a vacuum in addition to the above mentioned thermal radiation". My point was not that rocket exhaust is instantly invisible, but rather it cools off very quickly and is not as visible as claimed by you or the link that's been passed around. "Glow" in particular implies ionization. That goes away particularly fast in space.
Like your previous example of Voyager. Which you did not like once I pointed out that it would take 300 years just to reach the Oort cloud.
I didn't bring up Voyager, that was brought up by the article on the impossibility of stealth in space. Here's what that article stated:
As of 2013, the Voyager 1 space probe is about 18 billion kilometers away from Terra and its radio signal is a pathetic 20 watts (or about as dim as the light bulb in your refrigerator). But as faint as it is, the Green Bank telescope can pick it out from the background noise in one second flat.
Note that there's no mention of the facts that the signal in question is highly directional and narrow bandwidth, while the Green Bank antenna is massive. The observation is irrelevant to any attempt at stealth.
Tactics do not beat physics.
You first have to show that.
If 10000 daytraders start out with 10000 dollars each and assuming zero sum game one of them is going to end up with a hundred million.
Doesn't work that way unless everyone does all or nothing bets. My view is that it's more likely to stabilize with each one tending to hold a portion with the more competent tending to be the wealthier and portions stabilizing where investment opportunities tend to taper off.
The reason, when it comes down to it, is that as a species, we are not convinced by the case put forward that we ought to do it.
Were we convinced as a species to develop the light bulb? The cost of space travel is declining while manufacture continues to improve. Eventually, it'll get to the point where a "species" doesn't need to make the decision in order for manned space travel to Mars to happen.
I find it disingenuous to equate human-level exploration with no exploration at all.
But that is a strawman. You disappoint me.
It's your straw man. Be "disappointed" at someone else. When we actually look at a real life manned exploration of another body, we see far more exploration of the Moon over a three year period (with only about 2 man-weeks total of ground time between the dozen astronauts who landed on the Moon) than the world has managed with space probes on Mars over the past 40 years.
My view is that after a Robert Zubrin style mission (four people to Mars for two years and return), we'll get so much scientific data and hard samples, that it'll obsolete most unmanned surface exploration of Mars for decades, like it did for the US and lunar surface exploration following Apollo.
So far I haven't seen anyone posting what that "shielding" is made of.
Aluminum foil, shiny side in. A few kilograms at most.
The reason it does not matter is that the exhaust will, eventually, travel further to the side than the shielding can shield. Then it will be seen as a glowing cloud behind the shielded ship.
Except it won't be glowing. Unlike the spacecraft itself, rocket exhaust (chemical or otherwise) will cool rapidly to the microwave background temperature (rapid expansion of the propellant in a vacuum in addition to the above mentioned thermal radiation).
Sure, all of this can be detected by a large enough and sophisticated enough detector. That's why that large, vulnerable target gets blown up first.
To claim that physics prevents stealth is to ignore the actual physics as well as tactical considerations like the size and mass of a viable detector.
Finally, I see no mention of mass drivers.
there's that old joke about applying to work for N banks and making a different prediction about a fixed set, S, of stocks to each one; if N=2^|S|, you'll sweep one of them, guaranteed.
Except that the cost of making each bet is just the effort to fill out the application. Here, the guy had to put in their own money in on each bet they made. And as a result, they ended up $54 million ahead just last year and they've apparently have been doing well for a ten year period.
This is a rather consistent result over probably tens of thousands of trades. What burns people like this is not that they were somehow one of the few lucky people out of far more people than exist in the world today, but rather that they tend to underestimate the low frequency risks to such trading.
If you are betting using a huge amount of borrowed money (this guy probably is operating on a fair amount of margin given how much wealth growth he claims to have created), then it doesn't take much bad luck or fail to erase your entire holdings.
So, no studying PtoE, company fundamentals, etc. etc. Further proving that the Stock Market is almost entirely disconnected from the underlying companies. Basically, it's a Ponzi scheme.
Time scale matters. Long term considerations are completely irrelevant when you won't hold a stock long enough for them to matter. Meanwhile if you're planning to buy and hold for a long time, you shouldn't be trying to time the market or making a lot of trades.
Rather than the silly argument that something is a Ponzi scheme just because one guy profits from a completely different approach to investing than you would take, recognize that it takes a peculiar skill set and effort/focus to be good at any sort of market making or other short term trading. This guy happens to have those skills and to take the effort.
The US government would have invested Social Security in the Stock Market, but they can't find a spokesperson from the financial industry you can advocate the scheme without drooling at the prospect.
Instead, we have what would, if it were an attempt at investment, be a guaranteed money loser for anyone putting in now, with a built in huge incentive for the federal government to cut back on future benefits in order to pay current benefits. That's the real Ponzi scheme.
And in the process, Social Security as it currently stands lessens ownership of capital (none of that money enables the Social Security pensioner to own even a little bit of a company or other capital), which unlike labor is not declining in value, while dumping that money in the hands of special interests who pick up public funding. Plenty to like about that scheme.
Also, you ignored the assertion I made that Apollo would have also killed the crew if its launch vehicle had exploded and ripped it apart in the process (as happened to Challenger). We all ASSUME the Apollo LAS would have worked, but this was never proven (tested on Little Joe II, but NEVER on Saturn).
Sounds like you should have ignored what you were thinking too.
DreamChaser has an integral launch abort system, so this shortcoming of the shuttle is not a generic "spaceplane" shortcoming
Indeed. Notice I never said anything to disagree. I didn't speak at all of DreamChaser's features which would mitigate or evade the Challenger and Columbia disasters.
Except of course that Apollo 13 very nearly put the nail in that coffin. Had the Apollo 13 explosion been a tad more energetic, it could well have cracked or holed the heat shield (and indeed nobody knew it had not at the time) whereas a shuttle-type arangement would have been safer in THAT incident (its TPS in a less-vulnerable position and the by-that-point-in-the-mission inert main engines being in the position to be hurt).
Not at all. Keep in mind that Apollo 13 accident happened just prior to a propellant burn to insert the capsule in lunar orbit. The Shuttle under the same situation would have propellant on board and some sort of active rocket engine for conducting the burn (though not necessarily the Main Engines). In that situation, damage to the heat shield is still possible depending on where everything happens to be. For example, if the Shuttle is still piggy backing on the side, then the heat shield is still exposed to potential damage.
In the case of the capsule scheme, there's generally another severe and dangerous limitation: separation from the service module must happen so close to reentry that there is no time to do ANYTHING between when the shield is exposed and inspectable and the time when plasma begins to surround the vehicle...
And not much of a reason to care either since the heat shield has been inspected on the ground. But I suppose we could stick a couple of cameras on the service module to image the heat shield, should this ever become a problem.
Your final note about size is exactly why DreamChaser (the POINT of this discussion) is so much smaller than shuttle (NOT the subject of the discussion). DreamChaser is sized for the same number of crew as CST-100 and Dragon, and has three more seats than the (now crippled) version of Orion LockMart is spending BILLIONS and more than a decade building for NASA...
So what? Lockheed Martin would spend more than that, if we let them. The cost of their projects tend to be sized to the available funding. None of the other capsule builders have this sort of problem.
That would be the part where they discussed whether shielding your engines would be possible. So, yeah, they do.
You can "shield" your engines just by not pointing the exhaust directly at the target you're trying to sneak up on.
The engines give off reaction mass to move the ship forward. That reaction mass is probably very hot. Which means that it will radiate heat which will be seen.
"Probably very hot" is considerable fail right there. For example, the exhaust temperature of chemical rockets drops considerably as it passes through the "throttle", a constriction and subsequent expansion which converts most of the thermal energy of the exhaust into kinetic motion. So the exhaust as viewed from the side is vastly cooler than if you're looking directly down the throttle to the burn chamber.
Further, the "shielding" that everyone talks about just isn't that heavy. The bell of a chemical rocket already acts as a simple shield and one can put a lightweight (as in lighter than the bell's mass which is already pretty negligible) shroud outside that to mask the heat radiated from the bell.
And of course, there's the mass driver approach which allows one to decelerate in line with a target and produce no notable heat signature while spewing projectiles in a militarily useful direction.
And if you are going to use the Voyager craft as examples, please remember that it took 12 years to reach Neptune and will take THREE HUNDRED YEARS to reach the Oort cloud.
If you're going to bring that up, please remember that the above observation is completely irrelevant since spacecraft can move a lot faster than the Voyager spacecraft, are trying to hide, and aren't deliberately broadcasting signals at the enemy to pick up.
so no I will not back down from my statement that he is an idiot with ADD.
A wealthy idiot who probably made more in ten years trading stocks than you'll make in several lifetimes. If the "idiot" achieves by their actions a considerable gain (be it money or not), then maybe you should reconsider whether the term is appropriate.