The problem with the smoke/drink solution is that there are air purifiers and stuff on the station which will suck in the smoke much more strongly than this tiny leak.
The way they are currently going about locating the leak is by using stethoscopes (or a similar instrument) to listen at various places on the hull for the hissing of air. Unfortunatly, they haven't found anything yet, which is why they are so confused.
By what mechanism exactly does an RTG convert heat to electricity? The first method that came to my mind was a thermocouple, yet AFAIK those are fairly ineffecient. Does anyone know?
Well, the Brahmos is a different kind of missile, designed for a different mission profile. First of all your point about no air/submarine launch capabilities is downright wrong, as the article specifically mentions the flexibility in launching platforms as a reason for choosing to focus development on cruise missiles (as opposed to airplanes, etc.). The second point is that obviously the Indian's aren't going to be launching Brahmos' at targets that are out of range, that would just be retarded. Brahmos' mission profile is probably more like this scenario - many cheap, mobile, almost expendable launchers who move into close proximity to the target and then launch a debilitating first strike. It's also well suited to submarine operations (the Indian navy is currently in negotiations to purchase several new Kilo class subs) or basically any platform that is stealthy enough to get within range. Finally, if they do have air launch capabilities, this whole discussion on range being a limiting factor is moot, as you could just put the missile on a plane and have it carry it in...
Actually, the summary is wrong - 2007 is the date for a flight test of a scramjet engine, they are by no means presuming to be able to construct a full space plane by then. As you mentioned, after the scramjet engine is developed, there are HUGE challenges in shielding and hypersonic aeronautics to overcome before a spaceplane is feasable. If the Indians can succesfully do it however, props to them.
In one sense they are in that hydrogen is usually seen as an energy storage mechanism rather than a source (i.e. there aren't many natural sources of pure hydrogen). However, the relevance to this article is that the hydrogen fuel cells on helios were filled with hydrogen on the ground before takeoff, not filled with hydrogen during flight (presumably from electrolyzed water vapour, the electricity being provided by the solar cells). These batteries will be charged by the solar cells during flight.
Please mod this troll down (see his user page for numerous first posts and other trolls). This plane doesn't use ion engines, doesn't have anything to do with the ESA, and doesn't go into outer space and therefore can't be using gravity assist maneuvers.
Um, I don't know which article you were reading, but this plane does not use any kind of ion engine, nor are ion engines even mentioned in the article! While your post was factually correct, it has nothing to do with the article in question and is in fact completely offtopic. Hrm, maybe you've stumbled on a new formula for cheap karma: 1) Claim that something you know is relevant to the story (even if it's not) 2) Talk about what you know 3) Karma!!!
I actually would be disappointed to see virtual conferencing take over face-to-face meetings. I actually enjoy traveling, regardless of the standard airport snafus, and would be sad to see travel opportunities in buisiness disappear. I do however realize the economic and environmental gain to be had by videoconferencing, and I can sadly see buisiness travel slowly shrinking into oblivion...
Actually, at the North and South poles of the moon there are craters that don't recieve any sunlight at the bottom, ever. Some people have advocated putting optical telescopes there. Others have discussed the proposition of building a circumlunar railway with the telescope mounted on it so that the telescope could always be on the dark side of the moon (the moon's rotation is a lot slower and it's a lot smaller, making the distance and speeds actually feasible.)
Despite those, the benefits of a radio telescope that you pointed out are still probably the most promising benefits of a lunar presence.
So what? SpaceShipOne is only designed to meet the requirements of the X-prize competition goal of 100km altitude - which is barely even halfway to low earth orbit (LEO). The Space Shittle* can make WAY higher, and soyuz even higher. LEO isn't even leaving the atmosphere completely, just skimming it's highest layer. The only reasonably useful commercial application i've heard of for x-prize vehicles is extremely high altitude skydiving. This is what the Canadian Arrow (http://www.canadianarrow.com/) X-prize team plans for their vehicle after the prize has been won.
I forget exactly where I got this from, but I seem to recall from recent space elevator stories that a cable (of carbon nanotubes) would have to have a tensile strength of 23 GPa just to be able to hold itself together. Of course if you are splicing nanotubes with even more dense materials this value will go up and also it doesn't even take into account whatever loads you would like to carry into orbit.
The figures you quote say that strengths of 150 GPa are ultimately possible, with 12 GPa materials in the near future. Given that, investing in CN research would clearly be at minimum a 5+ year project before we would see returns that might enable even the prototyping of an elevator. Even assuming 100% successes and that all goals are met, this means multiple years of doing NOTHING else in space. That's not something that I find acceptable. If you think we should increase CN research funding, I'd totally agree with you. However, I am not prepared to pull all our eggs in a basket that may or may not work.
People are concentrating on many of the wrong departments. From the Forbes Article:
Fourteen agencies improved their grades, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Science Foundation each received an "A." The Social Security Administration received a "B+" and the Department of Labor received a "B,"
The Nuclear regulatory commission, which is the department in charge of making sure nothing happens to or with nuclear shit got an A, and the Social Security administration (you can guess why you wouldn't want them to get hacked) did fairly well too. As for the NSF, well we already knew that they were fairly smart guys:-).
Specifically in response to your comment, the NRC actually plays a much bigger role in maintaining nuclear security around the country than the DOE does, so I wouldn't be too worried about that aspect of the DOE's grade. Still, the situation does need to be fixed for all the departments that got below a C.
If you want to get technical, quark strangelets also pass through the earth (and actually at faster velocities than sound). Basically, they are extremely small, dense bundles of quarks travelling at a nearly 0.2% of the speed of light that can pass clear through the planet. Actually, they also cause seismic events when they enter and leave the planet.
I have no idea how you'd use these to map the earths core (asides from their seismic signatures), and they happen pretty infrequently. If you're interested though, you can read about them here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml? xml=%2F news%2F2002%2F05%2F12%2Fwnugg12.xml
Actually, there is significant evidence that points to the American deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey as the cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kruschev never publicly admitted it, and frequently gave multiple different vague reasons for the USSR's nuclear involvement in Cuba. Years after the crisis, it was revealed that in order to get the Russians to back down, Kennedy agreed to remove the missiles from turkey within a year or two. This was one of the Russian's chief demands, but Kennedy insisted that it not be publicly revealed so that he could be seen as a public hero who was tough on the Russians for the upcoming election.
The other leading cause for the Cuban Missile Crisis was the missile gap. A number of other factors definitely contributed, so much so that there isn't really historical agreement on the subject at all.
Wow, the historical ignorance displayed in this post is astounding:
The ONLY reason nuclear war didn't break out during those years was because a. we'd have volatilized them and b. the Russians were never quite sure their equipment would actually work. Furthermore, they knew that we were highly unlikely to ever fire the first shot.
Please post some sources for this opinion - it's highly unconventional and conflicts with the generally accepted historical view. The Russians were actually fairly confident in their missile capability, and as much as the states yould have "volatized" them, they would have volatized us. The reason nuclear war didn't break out was because of the principal of MAD, which you cite in your introduction but clearly don't seem to understand.
Pakistan has atom bombs (only fission weapons at this point, I understand), India either does or isn't far behind and China most likely does but probably wouldn't admit it yet.
For your information, China has had nukes and openly admitted it since 1964, and has had intercontinental capability since not-long-after. India tested a civilian nuclear device in 1974, and then detonated both fission AND fusion bombs in 1998. Pakistan detonated their fission bomb in response.
Given the political and economic instability of the Middle East and the Orient, I have no doubt that any of the major "peace loving" players would be perfectly capable of firing that first shot.
None of the nations you have cited are the most likely perpetrator of the first shot in that scenario - Isreal is (They have nukes, but won't admit it). In fact the closest this world has ever come to nuclear war was not the Cuban missile crisis (as most Americans would like to believe), but the Yom Kippur War. Had Isreal not been able to reverse their apalling rout with an emergency infusion of US arms, this world would have seen nukes flying in the middle east.
Please, go take a 20th century history course or do some reading before you start spouting off unfounded opinions on slashdot. Most slashdot posts have at least some (tenuous) grounding in reality.
I see a lot of people reccomending the standard alternatives (overnet, bittorrent, etc.), but no-one has mentioned sharescan. While it's not really useful on a home connection, on residence dorms (where I live), sharescan is a gold mine. It's super-fast (all traffic is within your network) and in large universities the selection is almost as good as the largest P2P networks (as long as you don't like stuff that's too esoteric). Try it, you'll be amazed at the amount of content on there.
IMO, the proposal to build a station at L2 isn't that bad, but I question whether we should be building another ISS-like system. One of the major features of futurists' vision of space is a gravity system. So far the only realistic way we have of implementing this is a centripetal force method of simulating a "gravity". We haven't done it though? Why not?
Such a station would solve the problems with bone density + muscle mass loss in space, but could still provide a zero-g environment for whatever you heart desires. I have no problem expanding our space infrastructure, as long as we learn from the process and achieve meaningful goals in the process.
Bah, don't be silly - everyone knows that the best password is ******** !
DONT USE "I for one"!
on
Eating in Space
·
· Score: 0, Offtopic
Man, I realize that this is very grammar nazi-ish of me, but there is a phenomenon on/. that is really starting to piss me off: the use of the phrase "I, for one, blah blah blah". It clearly derives from the now old "I, for one, welcome our new so-and-so overlords", but taken out of context it is terrible. It serves no grammatical or informational purpose, and it reads like crap. In the above example the parent could have merely said "I was amazed...". I would think that most people here would have some respect for stating ideas clearly and succinctly without clouding them with useless language.
Bah, sorry for the rant but please stop using this phrase.
Wrongo. Germany was a democracy. War was favored by a majority of the population.
WRONG. The Nazi party was elected by the popular majority, sure. However, they passed an act called the enabling act which effectively disbanded the Reichstag (german parliament), gaving them absolute control of the government. They passed this act only by having a lot of armed "brown shirts" (SA) standing around and coercing the public representatives to vote in favour of it.
Wrongo again. The majority of the nation wanted war. They weren't killed; they came to an understand while glancing upwards for more atom bombs.
WRONG. The japanese people had pretty much no say in the matter, and even if they did, they would have made very uneducated choices as they had been inundated with government propaganda.
I don't know why I waste my time answering these stupid trolls. Perhaps it is because I find your outrightly incorrect interpretation of history so offensive.
Hrm, on the first page you linked is states that the NERVA engines acheived thrust-to-weight (TTW) ratios of "three to four". Does this mean it had a TTW ratio of 3:4, or TTW ratios ranging from 3:1 to 4:1?
If the best TTW ratio they could get was 3:4, that's not very impressive as they would then need an airframe and an atmosphere to provide effective lift, and this is just the engine we're talking about here...
They don't "pump" air per se, nor are they actually used for much of anything other than sport and recreation, but there are sail-cars. You sometimes see them having races on beaches or salt flats. They're basically only practical in flat, wide open spaces with lots of wind.
Its actually not just techno-blither. Mechatronics actually refers to a specific engineering disipline which walks the the fine (or not so fine sometimes) line between mechanical and electrical engineering. We have had this option at my university (UBC) for several years now (it used to go by a different name though). I must say though, as an engineering student myself I have a lot of respect for the guys who take this program, as it is five years of an absolutely gruelling courseload.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the smoke/drink solution is that there are air purifiers and stuff on the station which will suck in the smoke much more strongly than this tiny leak.
The way they are currently going about locating the leak is by using stethoscopes (or a similar instrument) to listen at various places on the hull for the hissing of air. Unfortunatly, they haven't found anything yet, which is why they are so confused.
By what mechanism exactly does an RTG convert heat to electricity? The first method that came to my mind was a thermocouple, yet AFAIK those are fairly ineffecient. Does anyone know?
Well, the Brahmos is a different kind of missile, designed for a different mission profile. First of all your point about no air/submarine launch capabilities is downright wrong, as the article specifically mentions the flexibility in launching platforms as a reason for choosing to focus development on cruise missiles (as opposed to airplanes, etc.). The second point is that obviously the Indian's aren't going to be launching Brahmos' at targets that are out of range, that would just be retarded. Brahmos' mission profile is probably more like this scenario - many cheap, mobile, almost expendable launchers who move into close proximity to the target and then launch a debilitating first strike. It's also well suited to submarine operations (the Indian navy is currently in negotiations to purchase several new Kilo class subs) or basically any platform that is stealthy enough to get within range. Finally, if they do have air launch capabilities, this whole discussion on range being a limiting factor is moot, as you could just put the missile on a plane and have it carry it in...
Actually, the summary is wrong - 2007 is the date for a flight test of a scramjet engine, they are by no means presuming to be able to construct a full space plane by then. As you mentioned, after the scramjet engine is developed, there are HUGE challenges in shielding and hypersonic aeronautics to overcome before a spaceplane is feasable. If the Indians can succesfully do it however, props to them.
60 million birds killed per year in car collisions is a pretty amazing statistic. What I want to know is HOW THE FUCK DO THEY KNOW THAT?!
In one sense they are in that hydrogen is usually seen as an energy storage mechanism rather than a source (i.e. there aren't many natural sources of pure hydrogen). However, the relevance to this article is that the hydrogen fuel cells on helios were filled with hydrogen on the ground before takeoff, not filled with hydrogen during flight (presumably from electrolyzed water vapour, the electricity being provided by the solar cells). These batteries will be charged by the solar cells during flight.
Please mod this troll down (see his user page for numerous first posts and other trolls). This plane doesn't use ion engines, doesn't have anything to do with the ESA, and doesn't go into outer space and therefore can't be using gravity assist maneuvers.
That's it?! It's a pretty pathetic little scream to be in all those movies...
Um, I don't know which article you were reading, but this plane does not use any kind of ion engine, nor are ion engines even mentioned in the article! While your post was factually correct, it has nothing to do with the article in question and is in fact completely offtopic. Hrm, maybe you've stumbled on a new formula for cheap karma:
1) Claim that something you know is relevant to the story (even if it's not)
2) Talk about what you know
3) Karma!!!
I actually would be disappointed to see virtual conferencing take over face-to-face meetings. I actually enjoy traveling, regardless of the standard airport snafus, and would be sad to see travel opportunities in buisiness disappear. I do however realize the economic and environmental gain to be had by videoconferencing, and I can sadly see buisiness travel slowly shrinking into oblivion...
Actually, at the North and South poles of the moon there are craters that don't recieve any sunlight at the bottom, ever. Some people have advocated putting optical telescopes there. Others have discussed the proposition of building a circumlunar railway with the telescope mounted on it so that the telescope could always be on the dark side of the moon (the moon's rotation is a lot slower and it's a lot smaller, making the distance and speeds actually feasible.)
Despite those, the benefits of a radio telescope that you pointed out are still probably the most promising benefits of a lunar presence.
So what? SpaceShipOne is only designed to meet the requirements of the X-prize competition goal of 100km altitude - which is barely even halfway to low earth orbit (LEO). The Space Shittle* can make WAY higher, and soyuz even higher. LEO isn't even leaving the atmosphere completely, just skimming it's highest layer. The only reasonably useful commercial application i've heard of for x-prize vehicles is extremely high altitude skydiving. This is what the Canadian Arrow (http://www.canadianarrow.com/) X-prize team plans for their vehicle after the prize has been won.
:-)
*I noticed this typo, but I decided I liked it
I forget exactly where I got this from, but I seem to recall from recent space elevator stories that a cable (of carbon nanotubes) would have to have a tensile strength of 23 GPa just to be able to hold itself together. Of course if you are splicing nanotubes with even more dense materials this value will go up and also it doesn't even take into account whatever loads you would like to carry into orbit.
The figures you quote say that strengths of 150 GPa are ultimately possible, with 12 GPa materials in the near future. Given that, investing in CN research would clearly be at minimum a 5+ year project before we would see returns that might enable even the prototyping of an elevator. Even assuming 100% successes and that all goals are met, this means multiple years of doing NOTHING else in space. That's not something that I find acceptable. If you think we should increase CN research funding, I'd totally agree with you. However, I am not prepared to pull all our eggs in a basket that may or may not work.
People are concentrating on many of the wrong departments. From the Forbes Article:
:-).
Fourteen agencies improved their grades, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the National Science Foundation each received an "A." The Social Security Administration received a "B+" and the Department of Labor received a "B,"
The Nuclear regulatory commission, which is the department in charge of making sure nothing happens to or with nuclear shit got an A, and the Social Security administration (you can guess why you wouldn't want them to get hacked) did fairly well too. As for the NSF, well we already knew that they were fairly smart guys
Specifically in response to your comment, the NRC actually plays a much bigger role in maintaining nuclear security around the country than the DOE does, so I wouldn't be too worried about that aspect of the DOE's grade. Still, the situation does need to be fixed for all the departments that got below a C.
If you want to get technical, quark strangelets also pass through the earth (and actually at faster velocities than sound). Basically, they are extremely small, dense bundles of quarks travelling at a nearly 0.2% of the speed of light that can pass clear through the planet. Actually, they also cause seismic events when they enter and leave the planet.
? xml=%2F news%2F2002%2F05%2F12%2Fwnugg12.xml
I have no idea how you'd use these to map the earths core (asides from their seismic signatures), and they happen pretty infrequently. If you're interested though, you can read about them here:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml
Actually, there is significant evidence that points to the American deployment of Jupiter missiles in Turkey as the cause of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Kruschev never publicly admitted it, and frequently gave multiple different vague reasons for the USSR's nuclear involvement in Cuba. Years after the crisis, it was revealed that in order to get the Russians to back down, Kennedy agreed to remove the missiles from turkey within a year or two. This was one of the Russian's chief demands, but Kennedy insisted that it not be publicly revealed so that he could be seen as a public hero who was tough on the Russians for the upcoming election.
The other leading cause for the Cuban Missile Crisis was the missile gap. A number of other factors definitely contributed, so much so that there isn't really historical agreement on the subject at all.
Wow, the historical ignorance displayed in this post is astounding:
The ONLY reason nuclear war didn't break out during those years was because a. we'd have volatilized them and b. the Russians were never quite sure their equipment would actually work. Furthermore, they knew that we were highly unlikely to ever fire the first shot.
Please post some sources for this opinion - it's highly unconventional and conflicts with the generally accepted historical view. The Russians were actually fairly confident in their missile capability, and as much as the states yould have "volatized" them, they would have volatized us. The reason nuclear war didn't break out was because of the principal of MAD, which you cite in your introduction but clearly don't seem to understand.
Pakistan has atom bombs (only fission weapons at this point, I understand), India either does or isn't far behind and China most likely does but probably wouldn't admit it yet.
For your information, China has had nukes and openly admitted it since 1964, and has had intercontinental capability since not-long-after. India tested a civilian nuclear device in 1974, and then detonated both fission AND fusion bombs in 1998. Pakistan detonated their fission bomb in response.
Given the political and economic instability of the Middle East and the Orient, I have no doubt that any of the major "peace loving" players would be perfectly capable of firing that first shot.
None of the nations you have cited are the most likely perpetrator of the first shot in that scenario - Isreal is (They have nukes, but won't admit it). In fact the closest this world has ever come to nuclear war was not the Cuban missile crisis (as most Americans would like to believe), but the Yom Kippur War. Had Isreal not been able to reverse their apalling rout with an emergency infusion of US arms, this world would have seen nukes flying in the middle east.
Please, go take a 20th century history course or do some reading before you start spouting off unfounded opinions on slashdot. Most slashdot posts have at least some (tenuous) grounding in reality.
I see a lot of people reccomending the standard alternatives (overnet, bittorrent, etc.), but no-one has mentioned sharescan. While it's not really useful on a home connection, on residence dorms (where I live), sharescan is a gold mine. It's super-fast (all traffic is within your network) and in large universities the selection is almost as good as the largest P2P networks (as long as you don't like stuff that's too esoteric). Try it, you'll be amazed at the amount of content on there.
IMO, the proposal to build a station at L2 isn't that bad, but I question whether we should be building another ISS-like system. One of the major features of futurists' vision of space is a gravity system. So far the only realistic way we have of implementing this is a centripetal force method of simulating a "gravity". We haven't done it though? Why not?
Such a station would solve the problems with bone density + muscle mass loss in space, but could still provide a zero-g environment for whatever you heart desires. I have no problem expanding our space infrastructure, as long as we learn from the process and achieve meaningful goals in the process.
Bah, don't be silly - everyone knows that the best password is ******** !
Man, I realize that this is very grammar nazi-ish of me, but there is a phenomenon on /. that is really starting to piss me off: the use of the phrase "I, for one, blah blah blah". It clearly derives from the now old "I, for one, welcome our new so-and-so overlords", but taken out of context it is terrible. It serves no grammatical or informational purpose, and it reads like crap. In the above example the parent could have merely said "I was amazed...". I would think that most people here would have some respect for stating ideas clearly and succinctly without clouding them with useless language.
Bah, sorry for the rant but please stop using this phrase.
Wrongo. Germany was a democracy. War was favored by a majority of the population.
WRONG. The Nazi party was elected by the popular majority, sure. However, they passed an act called the enabling act which effectively disbanded the Reichstag (german parliament), gaving them absolute control of the government. They passed this act only by having a lot of armed "brown shirts" (SA) standing around and coercing the public representatives to vote in favour of it.
Wrongo again. The majority of the nation wanted war. They weren't killed; they came to an understand while glancing upwards for more atom bombs.
WRONG. The japanese people had pretty much no say in the matter, and even if they did, they would have made very uneducated choices as they had been inundated with government propaganda.
I don't know why I waste my time answering these stupid trolls. Perhaps it is because I find your outrightly incorrect interpretation of history so offensive.
Hrm, on the first page you linked is states that the NERVA engines acheived thrust-to-weight (TTW) ratios of "three to four". Does this mean it had a TTW ratio of 3:4, or TTW ratios ranging from 3:1 to 4:1?
If the best TTW ratio they could get was 3:4, that's not very impressive as they would then need an airframe and an atmosphere to provide effective lift, and this is just the engine we're talking about here...
They don't "pump" air per se, nor are they actually used for much of anything other than sport and recreation, but there are sail-cars. You sometimes see them having races on beaches or salt flats. They're basically only practical in flat, wide open spaces with lots of wind.
Its actually not just techno-blither. Mechatronics actually refers to a specific engineering disipline which walks the the fine (or not so fine sometimes) line between mechanical and electrical engineering. We have had this option at my university (UBC) for several years now (it used to go by a different name though). I must say though, as an engineering student myself I have a lot of respect for the guys who take this program, as it is five years of an absolutely gruelling courseload.