It's kind of silly to take your earth-reentry equipment and fuel all of the way to Mars and back.
The alternative is to carry enough fuel to brake into LEO before rendezvous with the reentry capsule.
Oddly enough, the fuel required to go from Mars-Earth transition orbit to LEO is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH heavier than the capsule capable of reentry directly from that same mars-earth transition orbit.
Is there any way to get editors who know enough English to at least filter out sentences like:
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published a whitepaper recommending free operating systems how to deal with UEFI secure boot.
It's not like it would have been hard to change it to:
BLOCKQUOTE>The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published a whitepaper recommending ways for free operating systems to deal with UEFI secure boot.
And yes, I know that being a grammar nazi is unfashionable. But illiteracy really does work to convince people you have nothing to say worth reading...
Can you show your work on that? I did some questionable math and came up with ~5000N.
Hmm, 16000 m/s exhaust speed assumed. Which is typical for Hall-effect thrusters.
So, m*v^2/2 = energy required.
m = 200,000 W/v^2 = 200,000W/256,000,000 m^2/s^2.
m = 0.0008 kg/s
thrust = exhaust speed * mass flow rate. 16000 * 1/1280 = 12.5 N. Hmm, left the decimal off the 2.5 pounds thrust, I see.
Pick a lower exhaust speed, get more mass flow rate for a given power input, of course. But to get 5000 N, you're talking 40 m/s exhaust speed.
Which is an Isp of about 4. Which would require about 5 x 10^347 kg of reaction mass to do a lunar flyby....
Face it, high thrust rockets of any kind use a LOT of power (in chemical rockets, the power is generated by burning the chemicals, every other kind you have to input the power yourself) - the SSME is in the range of 4.5 - 5 GW, for example - and masses only 3500 kg or so.
Compare that to your friendly neighborhood 1GW nuclear power plant sometime, which masses in the thousands of tons.
They're talking about 100KW thrusters. Those would be able to get you there in days to weeks, not months.
100 KW thruster, assuming pretty near 100% efficiency - about 25 pounds thrust.
Salyut-3 (chosen arbitrarily) - ~19000kg. Plus reaction mass, of course.
Acceleration, not counting reaction mass - ~0.00001g.
Time to escape speed (assuming escape speed actually works the same for low acceleration as it does for high acceleration - it doesn't) - ~55 days.
Note that the deltaV required for escape speed is ~1.4142 x orbital speed with a high thrust system, but ~2x orbital speed for an extremely low thrust system.
Which last suggests more than doubling the transit time.
Note that deceleration to lunar orbit was ignored. That will also add time.
And that was one-way. Double it for the round trip.
Note that reaction mass was ignored. Nominal reaction mass to reach escape speed three times (about what should be required for a round trip, including braking back into LEO with your Salyut) is about 80% of the dry mass of the Salyut. Which reduces acceleration to ~55% os assumed value, and increases travel time by ~1/3.
In other words, it will only take "days or weeks" if you count 150 as a reasonable number of days, or 20 as a reasonable number of weeks.
Note, by the way, that you could reduce your trip to a reasonable number of days with a 100 MW power plant, rather than a 100 KW power plant.
You can't opt out of ever getting sick or injured or otherwise needing medical attention for your entire lifetime.
Compelling reason for requiring health insurance, if you ask me.
I take it you are unaware that in a group where ALL members will have similar medical costs over a lifetime, cost of "health insurance" for each member must be approximately the cost of all the health care required by each member?
In other words, you're not actually saving ANYONE any money by doing health insurance - there's no spreading of risk when we all get old....
Note, by the by, that when the discussion turns to healthcare costs, one thing that is frequently not mentioned is that about 2/3 of the nation's healthcare costs are already covered by Medicare. This law only has a small impact on healthcare costs for the 1/3 of the costs that are still borne by private individuals....
Genesis 38:9 But Onan knew that the offspring would not be his; so whenever he lay with his brother's wife, he spilled his semen on the ground to keep from producing offspring for his brother.
Which has less to do with sex and more to do with inheritance laws of the time.
The brother had died sans children, so the law required Onan to impregnate his sister-in-law so as to produce an heir for the brother.
On the other hand, if the brother never comes up with an heir, then Onan gets the brother's stuff....
That's a viable strategy as long as you're lucky enough not to have a catastrophic accident. Because, if you did have one, you would probably end up bankrupted by the experience, once the hospital and their collection agencies got through with you.
Pre-existing conditions, remember? You have a catastrophic accident, you call the insurance company and get health coverage, and the insurance company pays the bills.
You just have to pay for the ambulance and the ER visit, plus insurance premiums till you're out of the hospital.
*** in addition to the small business exclusion, because of the new definition of minimally qualifying insurance, it is estimated that some employers will find it cheaper to join the current crop of non-insurers and pay the fine rather than to increase their coverage to the minimial qualifying amount. This increase in coverage cost is primarly due to several provisions of the act such as the removal of the annual and lifetime limits...
What I'm interested in seeing is how many businesses with just OVER 50 employees decide to lay off enough people to stay just UNDER 50. Because if you have 50+, you'll have to provide health insurance, and if you have 49-, you won't.
Trust me, this WILL happen. Health insurance is expensive (check out the cost of COBRA next time you're unemployed - the difference between that and your share of the premiums is what your employer is paying), and having everyone work an hour or two overtime every week is MUCH cheaper.
Well, maybe with more people in the insurance pool, she will be able to afford it. And if she's younger than 26, she can be on her parents' policy now.
Not sure if she is younger than 26 now, pretty sure she won't be by 2014. And her parents are dead, so that's not an option.
Have you bothered to look at the CBO estimates of health insurance prices in the future? HINT: they're not going down, they're not increasing slower than inflation, they're not even increasing slower than they were BEFORE Obamacare.
So, no, she won't be able to afford it even with more people in the pool.
I expect that my daughter, who recently became unemployed (and also isn't under 26), will try to help her out financially, if she can convince her friend to take the money.
By the by, were you aware that anyone who is unemployed for more than three months in a year will be liable for the penalty? Assuming, of course, that they can't afford health insurance with no income.
The news articles I've seen here (outside the US) state that the penalty only applies if you could afford health care.
For (hopefully) the last time - "health care" is NOT "health insurance".
That said, the devil is in the details. The "tax" is actually cheaper than the insurance, even with the subsidies provided. So there will still be people in the gap of "I can afford the 'tax', but not the health insurance."
One thing the mandate does do (indirectly) is set an upper limit on insurance prices, i.e. insurance must be cheaper than the penalty, otherwise people will just pay the penalty (if they're healthy and don't anticipate needing insurance).
Hate to say this, but the "tax" is MUCH lower than the cost of insurance.
"I can make bundles of money by leveraging a stable society, an excellent highway system to move goods, and low corruption so I can not worry so much about paying bribes or getting robbed" support.
"I can make bundles of money by paying bribes to Congressmen rather than free-lance crooks"
1. A lot of them pay small amount of tax, so the carrot would be small. For the Rich, it is a sizable increase, perhaps worth a changing a behavior.
You've not read the fine print, I see.
The "tax" in question has a lot of clauses setting the exact amount you pay.
All the clauses include the phrase "the lesser of".
"The lesser of" was put in there so as not to unduly burden the very poor. Alas, it also has the effect of reducing the "tax" to TRIVIAL for the well-off the depreciation on their yacht in any one year will pay the "tax" for the rest of their life.
No, you can't. That's the entire point. That's why all the teabaggers were so upset. You can't, any more, blow off getting insurance without penalty. If you don't get insurance, you'll pay a tax used to cover the costs of your "freeloading" (to use the term used earlier in the thread.)
I take it you've never had health insurance before?
If you had, you'd know that the "tax" is FAR CHEAPER than even your share of an employer provided plan (qualifier - that's based on my own experience - neither I nor my wife nor my daughter has ever had to pay so little for health insurance).
Which means the tax won't pay for your "freeloading", even if you "freeload".
Frankly, I won't be terribly surprised if MOST of the people with no insurance end up paying the penalty. Right now, you don't pay for health insurance mostly because it's too expensive. The "tax" is a small price to pay for insurance when you can get diagnosed with an expensive problem and THEN buy insurance...
Okay, so maybe some jerkwads will game the system. At least the tax income will come in handy to pay for the freeloaders at the ER. Also, the tax could be increased.
My daughter has a friend who can't afford health insurance, and isn't poor enough for Medicaid. She pretty much has no choice but to game the system, and may have a tough time paying the penalty even if she games the system.
In other words, paying the penalty isn't necessarily the act of a "jerkwad".
Note also that every time YOU take a legal deduction, you are "gaming the system" in the same way - you're doing something that is perfectly legal in order to save yourself some money....
Further, it should be noted that the tax income isn't actually dedicated to "paying for the freeloaders at the ER". There's absolutely NOTHING in the law providing for payments to hospitals/doctors to pay for such things.
And finally, it WILL be increased. The law as written provides for its increase every year. Which won't mean much, since health insurance costs are rising even faster.
When people were polled about specific parts OF the bill, with the exception of the mandate, everything had a solid majority of support.
Well, of course!
After all, the ACA amounted to a whole bunch of "FREE STUFF PAID FOR BY OTHER PEOPLE!!!", plus a requirement that people buy health insurance (which, as I understand it, was NOT approved by the Supremes) PLUS a "tax" (actually, in the text of the law, it is NEVER descrbied as a tax, but rather as a "fine") if you don't (which WAS approved by the Supremes).
Yes, especially when the government (AKA "we the people") wants you to stop freeloading on the health insurance system we're paying for.
*sighs*...you're conflating "healthCARE" and "health INSURANCE". They're not the same thing, no matter what Obama says.
Note that "freeloading on the health insurance system" wasn't possible BEFORE Obamacare, but it is now.
Because now, anyone can blow off getting health insurance till they have some expensive medical bills, get health insurance and have it pay the medical bills, then cancel insurance. Used to be that was impossible....
That will be an infinitisimally small number of Americans.
Not necessarily. The "tax" is MUCH smaller than health insurance premiums, and it's not like you can't wait on getting health insurance until you really need it (that preexisting condition mandate comes in handy).
Note, by the by, that I've been opposed to Obamacare since Day One (I believed that the correct way to do it was to gradually extend Medicare eligibility age down to birth). But I'm also someone who's going to benefit from it ([1] qualifier - if a bone marrow match[2] can be found, I'll be getting a bone marrow transplant. If that happens, I'll either (a) die within the year due to complications of the transplant, or (b) not have cancer anymore. Either way, y'all won't have to help on my medical bills.
[2] plug for bone marrow donor organization: BeTheMatch exists to get people onto the registry, as well as to provide financial assistance to both recipients of bone marrow transplants and donors (the latter mostly in the form of providing free airline tickets to and from wherever you need to go to provide the marrow - they, alas, can't provide for your hotel stay for the couple-three days you need to be there).
Do it for your siblings, if noone else - you're more likely to be a good match for (or find a good match among) your siblings than anyone else. Alas, none of mine are a match, so the Doc is still looking.
Oh, and a quick survey of Obamacare shows that you can keep your insurance costs under control by only maintaining insurance for ten months of the year - a two month period with no insurance doesn't cause a "tax" to be levied against you. And if something bad happens in those two months, well, preexisting condition, eh?
It is very, very, very rare to see a police officer ticketing people speeding or passing in a playground zone.
In most places, the size of a speeding ticket is a function of excess speed. People tend to drive faster on highways than in neighborhoods, so there's more money to be made getting tickets on highways.
I guess the guy who made the bench in the park should get to choose who sits on it, and should get certain amount every time someone sits on the bench.
You laugh, but if he had a PATENT on the bench, this would pretty much be true....
Slashdot Mirror
The alternative is to carry enough fuel to brake into LEO before rendezvous with the reentry capsule.
Oddly enough, the fuel required to go from Mars-Earth transition orbit to LEO is MUCH, MUCH, MUCH heavier than the capsule capable of reentry directly from that same mars-earth transition orbit.
Is there any way to get editors who know enough English to at least filter out sentences like:
It's not like it would have been hard to change it to:
BLOCKQUOTE>The Free Software Foundation (FSF) has published a whitepaper recommending ways for free operating systems to deal with UEFI secure boot.
And yes, I know that being a grammar nazi is unfashionable. But illiteracy really does work to convince people you have nothing to say worth reading...
Hmm, 16000 m/s exhaust speed assumed. Which is typical for Hall-effect thrusters.
So, m*v^2/2 = energy required.
m = 200,000 W/v^2 = 200,000W/256,000,000 m^2/s^2.
m = 0.0008 kg/s
thrust = exhaust speed * mass flow rate. 16000 * 1/1280 = 12.5 N. Hmm, left the decimal off the 2.5 pounds thrust, I see.
Pick a lower exhaust speed, get more mass flow rate for a given power input, of course. But to get 5000 N, you're talking 40 m/s exhaust speed.
Which is an Isp of about 4. Which would require about 5 x 10^347 kg of reaction mass to do a lunar flyby....
Face it, high thrust rockets of any kind use a LOT of power (in chemical rockets, the power is generated by burning the chemicals, every other kind you have to input the power yourself) - the SSME is in the range of 4.5 - 5 GW, for example - and masses only 3500 kg or so.
Compare that to your friendly neighborhood 1GW nuclear power plant sometime, which masses in the thousands of tons.
Note that the UNCRC doesn't actually forbid corporeal punishment of children....
100 KW thruster, assuming pretty near 100% efficiency - about 25 pounds thrust.
Salyut-3 (chosen arbitrarily) - ~19000kg. Plus reaction mass, of course.
Acceleration, not counting reaction mass - ~0.00001g.
Time to escape speed (assuming escape speed actually works the same for low acceleration as it does for high acceleration - it doesn't) - ~55 days.
Note that the deltaV required for escape speed is ~1.4142 x orbital speed with a high thrust system, but ~2x orbital speed for an extremely low thrust system.
Which last suggests more than doubling the transit time.
Note that deceleration to lunar orbit was ignored. That will also add time.
And that was one-way. Double it for the round trip.
Note that reaction mass was ignored. Nominal reaction mass to reach escape speed three times (about what should be required for a round trip, including braking back into LEO with your Salyut) is about 80% of the dry mass of the Salyut. Which reduces acceleration to ~55% os assumed value, and increases travel time by ~1/3.
In other words, it will only take "days or weeks" if you count 150 as a reasonable number of days, or 20 as a reasonable number of weeks.
Note, by the way, that you could reduce your trip to a reasonable number of days with a 100 MW power plant, rather than a 100 KW power plant.
Hall effect thrusters are NOT high thrust devices. He's not talking three days to Luna, more like three MONTHS.
Each way.
Somehow, I'm not seeing this as terribly practical.
I take it you are unaware that in a group where ALL members will have similar medical costs over a lifetime, cost of "health insurance" for each member must be approximately the cost of all the health care required by each member?
In other words, you're not actually saving ANYONE any money by doing health insurance - there's no spreading of risk when we all get old....
Note, by the by, that when the discussion turns to healthcare costs, one thing that is frequently not mentioned is that about 2/3 of the nation's healthcare costs are already covered by Medicare. This law only has a small impact on healthcare costs for the 1/3 of the costs that are still borne by private individuals....
Which has less to do with sex and more to do with inheritance laws of the time.
The brother had died sans children, so the law required Onan to impregnate his sister-in-law so as to produce an heir for the brother.
On the other hand, if the brother never comes up with an heir, then Onan gets the brother's stuff....
Pre-existing conditions, remember? You have a catastrophic accident, you call the insurance company and get health coverage, and the insurance company pays the bills.
You just have to pay for the ambulance and the ER visit, plus insurance premiums till you're out of the hospital.
What I'm interested in seeing is how many businesses with just OVER 50 employees decide to lay off enough people to stay just UNDER 50. Because if you have 50+, you'll have to provide health insurance, and if you have 49-, you won't.
Trust me, this WILL happen. Health insurance is expensive (check out the cost of COBRA next time you're unemployed - the difference between that and your share of the premiums is what your employer is paying), and having everyone work an hour or two overtime every week is MUCH cheaper.
Not sure if she is younger than 26 now, pretty sure she won't be by 2014. And her parents are dead, so that's not an option.
Have you bothered to look at the CBO estimates of health insurance prices in the future? HINT: they're not going down, they're not increasing slower than inflation, they're not even increasing slower than they were BEFORE Obamacare.
So, no, she won't be able to afford it even with more people in the pool.
I expect that my daughter, who recently became unemployed (and also isn't under 26), will try to help her out financially, if she can convince her friend to take the money.
By the by, were you aware that anyone who is unemployed for more than three months in a year will be liable for the penalty? Assuming, of course, that they can't afford health insurance with no income.
For (hopefully) the last time - "health care" is NOT "health insurance".
That said, the devil is in the details. The "tax" is actually cheaper than the insurance, even with the subsidies provided. So there will still be people in the gap of "I can afford the 'tax', but not the health insurance."
Hate to say this, but the "tax" is MUCH lower than the cost of insurance.
Hmm, Obama promises not to raise taxes on the middle class...
The Democratic Party (Obama's Party) writes a law that NEVER uses the word "tax" to describe this - they use the word "fine" pretty regularly.
So, you're saying the Democrats would fight to the death to avoid labelling anything honestly?
"I can make bundles of money by paying bribes to Congressmen rather than free-lance crooks"
You've not read the fine print, I see.
The "tax" in question has a lot of clauses setting the exact amount you pay.
All the clauses include the phrase "the lesser of".
"The lesser of" was put in there so as not to unduly burden the very poor. Alas, it also has the effect of reducing the "tax" to TRIVIAL for the well-off the depreciation on their yacht in any one year will pay the "tax" for the rest of their life.
I take it you've never had health insurance before?
If you had, you'd know that the "tax" is FAR CHEAPER than even your share of an employer provided plan (qualifier - that's based on my own experience - neither I nor my wife nor my daughter has ever had to pay so little for health insurance).
Which means the tax won't pay for your "freeloading", even if you "freeload".
Frankly, I won't be terribly surprised if MOST of the people with no insurance end up paying the penalty. Right now, you don't pay for health insurance mostly because it's too expensive. The "tax" is a small price to pay for insurance when you can get diagnosed with an expensive problem and THEN buy insurance...
My daughter has a friend who can't afford health insurance, and isn't poor enough for Medicaid. She pretty much has no choice but to game the system, and may have a tough time paying the penalty even if she games the system.
In other words, paying the penalty isn't necessarily the act of a "jerkwad".
Note also that every time YOU take a legal deduction, you are "gaming the system" in the same way - you're doing something that is perfectly legal in order to save yourself some money....
Further, it should be noted that the tax income isn't actually dedicated to "paying for the freeloaders at the ER". There's absolutely NOTHING in the law providing for payments to hospitals/doctors to pay for such things.
And finally, it WILL be increased. The law as written provides for its increase every year. Which won't mean much, since health insurance costs are rising even faster.
Well, of course!
After all, the ACA amounted to a whole bunch of "FREE STUFF PAID FOR BY OTHER PEOPLE!!!", plus a requirement that people buy health insurance (which, as I understand it, was NOT approved by the Supremes) PLUS a "tax" (actually, in the text of the law, it is NEVER descrbied as a tax, but rather as a "fine") if you don't (which WAS approved by the Supremes).
*sighs*...you're conflating "healthCARE" and "health INSURANCE". They're not the same thing, no matter what Obama says.
Note that "freeloading on the health insurance system" wasn't possible BEFORE Obamacare, but it is now.
Because now, anyone can blow off getting health insurance till they have some expensive medical bills, get health insurance and have it pay the medical bills, then cancel insurance. Used to be that was impossible....
Not necessarily. The "tax" is MUCH smaller than health insurance premiums, and it's not like you can't wait on getting health insurance until you really need it (that preexisting condition mandate comes in handy).
Note, by the by, that I've been opposed to Obamacare since Day One (I believed that the correct way to do it was to gradually extend Medicare eligibility age down to birth). But I'm also someone who's going to benefit from it ([1] qualifier - if a bone marrow match[2] can be found, I'll be getting a bone marrow transplant. If that happens, I'll either (a) die within the year due to complications of the transplant, or (b) not have cancer anymore. Either way, y'all won't have to help on my medical bills.
[2] plug for bone marrow donor organization: BeTheMatch exists to get people onto the registry, as well as to provide financial assistance to both recipients of bone marrow transplants and donors (the latter mostly in the form of providing free airline tickets to and from wherever you need to go to provide the marrow - they, alas, can't provide for your hotel stay for the couple-three days you need to be there).
Do it for your siblings, if noone else - you're more likely to be a good match for (or find a good match among) your siblings than anyone else. Alas, none of mine are a match, so the Doc is still looking.
Oh, and a quick survey of Obamacare shows that you can keep your insurance costs under control by only maintaining insurance for ten months of the year - a two month period with no insurance doesn't cause a "tax" to be levied against you. And if something bad happens in those two months, well, preexisting condition, eh?
Unless you are part of the "media", of course. They can print whatever they want.
In most places, the size of a speeding ticket is a function of excess speed. People tend to drive faster on highways than in neighborhoods, so there's more money to be made getting tickets on highways.
130W solar cells to drive it, with no masts or sails.
Which means, under ideal conditions, a trolling motor pushing you across the Atlantic.
Good luck with that.
You laugh, but if he had a PATENT on the bench, this would pretty much be true....