You might double the payload fraction of the rocket part of the system, but that is not the only part of the flight vehicle. The ride up to 40 000 ft isn't free. So you haven't halved the launch costs per lb of payload as your simple analysis might imply. The costs of designing, building, maintaining, and operating the winged component aren't known but are unlikely to be negligible.
Your point about the g-losses is strange. Rockets follow a ballistic trajectory which goes straight-ish up at the beginning at enough of an angle so that the path will "tip over" to level at exactly the right altitude.
True about drag, as far as it goes. Cylinders are particularly strong and aerodynamic in the axial direction, and the velocity is relatively slow where the atmosphere is dense so you don't get much. Any gain is probably more than cancelled out because you have to design the rocket heavier to do a pitch-up maneuver which is why the thing has a wing like Pegasus. By the way, the wing in the picture is oddly located. In the real thing if it's ever built the wing should be farther forward.
The nozzle part is right on.
The way I look at it is this: winged flyback stages will be really worth it if they allow you to eliminate a whole stage from the ballistic part. Just making the ballistic part a bit smaller doesn't help because you still need to buy all the same parts, maybe just small ones. The savings can be incremental but not revolutionary.
Mach 6 at 60,000 feet gives you 6% of the energy you need to to orbit. A carrier airplane isn't worth the effort.
Nobody wants to tell him that because...why turn off the money? Another thing poor old Paul isn`t being told:
Q: How do you make a small fortune in aerospace?
A: Start with a large fortune.
These guys are all playing...like the hot-air balloonists who were playing around while Orville and Wilbur were doing the real deal. What the brothers did was hard. Think of it in modern terms: what if there were two guys, one who could cobble together the hardware software and physics to simulate hypersonic flow, and the other guy who could beg borrow steal or pyrolize enough carbon/carbon and titanium to make a scram SSTO. It's almost unimaginable, just like what Orville and Wilbur did. We don't yet know if those two guys will ever exist.
Yeah, when I was a kid my dad was a VP at GE. That is until another VP sabotaged my dad's career and got him busted to cleaning bathrooms as it were. GE encourages that kind of "competitive energy". So we paid for GE on the way up because dad was never around then on the way down because we were broke. I won't get in to what it did to the family.
Those people would make half their employees eat the other half's babies if there was money in it. Health care? The only thing GE knows about medicine is the most efficient way to suck peoples' blood out of their veins.
One time I went on an out-of-town training class for a particular FEM pre/post processing program that's popular in our industry. Funny story actually, I show up at their regional office and a couple of the sales reps who I knew looked at me blankly and said "Oh. That session was cancelled. Nobody signed up." That was pretty funny. So anyway, seeing as how I was working for a big customer of theirs at the time they decided to let me self-learn with their class materials and a machine. So I did that and after 1 day I find out about their macro programming tool and after 3 days I've written some pcl modules hooked in to GUI thingies. I know, not heroic but remember I'm not a software guy I'm a gearhead.
So the one fellow in charge of the office invited me along to dinner on the last night of my self-course and at the beginning of the meal suggested that I should apply for a job opening they have coming up for some kind of application engineer. Great I thought, flattering. I might have to take them up on that. Then I proceeded to tear into the lobster we were having with bare-handed gusto. I mean, fragments of lobster were flying all over. I may have had bits of it in my hair.
Still waiting to hear back on that job thing...it's only been 18 years...and they got bought...ahhh what the heck, between you and me it's a crappy program anyway.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. I always thought it was funny in a depressing sort of a way that he chose to portray himself as a peanut farmer instead.
Of course Boeing also designed the most hideous fighter of modern times. The revolting nature of this flying wart left the US military with no alternative to LockMart's idea of blasting through the air on a plume of evaporating thousand-dollar bills.
I don't know if a pilot could land a 20 Mach+ airplane, but the two Falcon crashes prove one thing: nobody would ever go up in a hypersonic glider unless it had an extensive flight-test program first.
What doesn't worry me is that Americans won't be able to afford food or will die of ordinary diseases. What worries me is that America's economy has grown by 2/3 over the past 30 years and all of that has gone to the top 10% of the earners.
The "bottom" 90% has seen negligible earnings growth over the past 30 years even though it was their productivity growth (aka "working harder") that grew the economy. This won't go on forever but what scares me is the process by which the trend reverses itself. It may not be pretty.
Current carbon fiber gets its strength from carbon "lamellae" which are a micostructural feature of the fiber itself. That is, inside the fiber are regions that are amorphous carbon and regions that are organized into sheets. If you wanted to make a structural material using graphene sheets this might be what you would do. But we already have it. So why isn't it taking over the world?
Beware of grandiose claims about strength. You could accurately say current carbon fiber is 10 times stronger than steel, but you don't see any real-world things made out of cfrp that are 10 times stronger than an equivalent steel part even on a weight basis. That's because going from microstructure to macro-structure is a long and winding road and includes also the weakest parts, not just the strongest parts that everyone likes to talk about.
If CS is anything like engineering, the administration doesn't want everyone to swim. They count on 1/2 of each undergrad year to drop out so the tuition of the unsuccessful can be used to subsidize the university's other programs.
God-forsaken wasteland if they start taking away the few perks that come with growing up as a human icicle? Do this and California will fall to the sound of a 999,999 rubber boots (one got stuck in the mud on the trek through Oregon) marching down from Canada, packing heat. (no I mean literally: electric socks (why do you think Canadians make such good major league pitchers? Carrying those lead-acid car batteries around the playground under your left arm while your throw iceballs with your right makes you strong that's why)). After that we'll open illegal back-alley Timmies and say goodbye to your peace-love-eternal-groovieness California. Think this is a joke? Check the obscure fine print in your immigration laws there's a hoser clause put in there by our secret operative Lorne Greene decades ago. They don't call it a Greene Card for nothing, huh? It's easier when you realize the truth: there is no lumber cartel. So stop it. Thank you. The nurse is here!
Being able to manually delete LSO's is ok but too labour-intensive. The addon above lets you delete-on-close like regular cookies you flag as "allow for session" in FF.
The world isn't lacking good ideas, it's lacking people who make them real.
We can barely find people who know the difference between crippling buckling. The not-horrible ones we can find have been working on the F35 for so long they think 2 years to finish one rib is about right.
If anyone wants to make an ambitiously weird new plane, they are going to have to invest billions just to get bright people back into this business. I wouldn't be surprised if it would cost hundreds of billions to get get a commercial carbon-fiber spanlifter into service because this industry is just so moribund. The organizations that are around right now couldn't make a go of it on any finite budget.
Maybe, and I don't know for sure, Google is a well-run company. My experience is that most large entities are not, and the manager's job is not primarily to manage people, but to figure out what the hell the group should be doing so that he/she won't get in trouble for going against the poobahs while still producing the vaguely-defined deliverables (those being defined as "that which the director determines you should have done in hindsight" or "that which they needed, not what they asked for"). If Google's managers actually know the requirements and have great people working for them, then they can concentrate of clearing roadblocks, a life most technology managers can only dream of.
That said, another legitimate job for a manager is to represent the capabilities of the group. Realistically. This is hard in engineering, because communicating many technical challenges is hard when the audience has never done that kind of work. It's pretty fun to stand up in front of a group of heavy-hitters and say "I know it seems like it should only take 3 months, but something always goes wrong so we need nine." They scowl and suck air through their teeth and maybe you don't work there any more pretty soon after that.
That's why technology companies need people who came up through the ranks because things that people have never done always seem easy. In 10 years, what will Google's non-tech managers be saying when they all have new hats? They will need people who can sit in a conference room with the owners and say "Larry, that idea you just had? That's just stupid." and not get laser-beamed.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Those who chose a medieval future chose it for themselves, not for everyone. What's more, they are volunteering their many future helpless spawn to be economic prisoners of the minority who chose a reality-based reality.
So ladies and gentlemen, stop trying to create useful technology. Write home-astrology software. Start an Ayn Rand website. Hell, start a religion.
The ignoramuses are going to pay for being willfully stupid, right? Why shouldn't they pay you? Have you ever stopped to consider that L. Ron might be a role model and not the enemy? The guy got people to pay to worship atomic bombs and something called Xenu. Not bad if you ask me.
The system is pay-as-you go, which as far as I can tell the boomer generation never agitated to change. It means that the boomer bulge will have to be paid for by the current working generation. The boomers never had to fund a bulge which is why pay-as-you go was their selfish preference as was a low birth rate which compounds the problem.
The problem can be with the T. The hot compressed gas cools to ambient over time, dissipating energy (seen as a loss of pressure). I suppose, though, the energy is used before much heat has a chance to leak away. Barring that the limit on efficiency is the mechanical losses in the motor you drive with the gas.
You don't need particularly high pressures to make it theoretically efficient. You may be thinking of heat engines based on Otto (piston) or Brayton (turbine) cycles where efficiency is related to the pressure and temperatures at combustion, the higher the better.
Slashdot Mirror
The real reason NASA is investigating is to determine what manner of space-time warpage the device uses to change the local value of pi.
You might double the payload fraction of the rocket part of the system, but that is not the only part of the flight vehicle. The ride up to 40 000 ft isn't free. So you haven't halved the launch costs per lb of payload as your simple analysis might imply. The costs of designing, building, maintaining, and operating the winged component aren't known but are unlikely to be negligible.
Your point about the g-losses is strange. Rockets follow a ballistic trajectory which goes straight-ish up at the beginning at enough of an angle so that the path will "tip over" to level at exactly the right altitude.
True about drag, as far as it goes. Cylinders are particularly strong and aerodynamic in the axial direction, and the velocity is relatively slow where the atmosphere is dense so you don't get much. Any gain is probably more than cancelled out because you have to design the rocket heavier to do a pitch-up maneuver which is why the thing has a wing like Pegasus. By the way, the wing in the picture is oddly located. In the real thing if it's ever built the wing should be farther forward.
The nozzle part is right on.
The way I look at it is this: winged flyback stages will be really worth it if they allow you to eliminate a whole stage from the ballistic part. Just making the ballistic part a bit smaller doesn't help because you still need to buy all the same parts, maybe just small ones. The savings can be incremental but not revolutionary.
Mach 6 at 60,000 feet gives you 6% of the energy you need to to orbit. A carrier airplane isn't worth the effort.
Nobody wants to tell him that because...why turn off the money? Another thing poor old Paul isn`t being told:
Q: How do you make a small fortune in aerospace?
A: Start with a large fortune.
These guys are all playing...like the hot-air balloonists who were playing around while Orville and Wilbur were doing the real deal. What the brothers did was hard. Think of it in modern terms: what if there were two guys, one who could cobble together the hardware software and physics to simulate hypersonic flow, and the other guy who could beg borrow steal or pyrolize enough carbon/carbon and titanium to make a scram SSTO. It's almost unimaginable, just like what Orville and Wilbur did. We don't yet know if those two guys will ever exist.
Yeah, when I was a kid my dad was a VP at GE. That is until another VP sabotaged my dad's career and got him busted to cleaning bathrooms as it were. GE encourages that kind of "competitive energy". So we paid for GE on the way up because dad was never around then on the way down because we were broke. I won't get in to what it did to the family.
Those people would make half their employees eat the other half's babies if there was money in it. Health care? The only thing GE knows about medicine is the most efficient way to suck peoples' blood out of their veins.
One time I went on an out-of-town training class for a particular FEM pre/post processing program that's popular in our industry. Funny story actually, I show up at their regional office and a couple of the sales reps who I knew looked at me blankly and said "Oh. That session was cancelled. Nobody signed up." That was pretty funny. So anyway, seeing as how I was working for a big customer of theirs at the time they decided to let me self-learn with their class materials and a machine. So I did that and after 1 day I find out about their macro programming tool and after 3 days I've written some pcl modules hooked in to GUI thingies. I know, not heroic but remember I'm not a software guy I'm a gearhead.
So the one fellow in charge of the office invited me along to dinner on the last night of my self-course and at the beginning of the meal suggested that I should apply for a job opening they have coming up for some kind of application engineer. Great I thought, flattering. I might have to take them up on that. Then I proceeded to tear into the lobster we were having with bare-handed gusto. I mean, fragments of lobster were flying all over. I may have had bits of it in my hair.
Still waiting to hear back on that job thing...it's only been 18 years...and they got bought...ahhh what the heck, between you and me it's a crappy program anyway.
Jimmy Carter was a nuclear engineer. I always thought it was funny in a depressing sort of a way that he chose to portray himself as a peanut farmer instead.
Of course Boeing also designed the most hideous fighter of modern times. The revolting nature of this flying wart left the US military with no alternative to LockMart's idea of blasting through the air on a plume of evaporating thousand-dollar bills.
I don't know. Why ask me? What on Earth makes you think I would know? Go ask an expert. Geesh.
Any relatively literate reactionaries want to do their own research?
I don't know if a pilot could land a 20 Mach+ airplane, but the two Falcon crashes prove one thing: nobody would ever go up in a hypersonic glider unless it had an extensive flight-test program first.
Are their any write-ups on the propulsion and heat resistant materials?
It's a glider.
Materials.
"...trapped in the muck like footprints, of where our universe banged into others."
This may be true, depending on the definitions of the (perhaps metaphorically used) words "trapped", "muck", "where", "universe", and "banged".
Also, wasn't the same phenomenon cited as evidence of structure that existed "before" the big bang by someone else recently? Roger Penrose?
Thanks God!!! From now on (and because of that), those moons do have some chances to develop life...
Only if the scientist who wrote that entered the sphere.
Now we know the probability of life developing on a distant moon has gone up from .2a to .25a where a is an unknown value between 0 and 4
That's an exobiology arithmetic joke you cretins.
What doesn't worry me is that Americans won't be able to afford food or will die of ordinary diseases. What worries me is that America's economy has grown by 2/3 over the past 30 years and all of that has gone to the top 10% of the earners.
The "bottom" 90% has seen negligible earnings growth over the past 30 years even though it was their productivity growth (aka "working harder") that grew the economy. This won't go on forever but what scares me is the process by which the trend reverses itself. It may not be pretty.
Current carbon fiber gets its strength from carbon "lamellae" which are a micostructural feature of the fiber itself. That is, inside the fiber are regions that are amorphous carbon and regions that are organized into sheets. If you wanted to make a structural material using graphene sheets this might be what you would do. But we already have it. So why isn't it taking over the world?
Beware of grandiose claims about strength. You could accurately say current carbon fiber is 10 times stronger than steel, but you don't see any real-world things made out of cfrp that are 10 times stronger than an equivalent steel part even on a weight basis. That's because going from microstructure to macro-structure is a long and winding road and includes also the weakest parts, not just the strongest parts that everyone likes to talk about.
If CS is anything like engineering, the administration doesn't want everyone to swim. They count on 1/2 of each undergrad year to drop out so the tuition of the unsuccessful can be used to subsidize the university's other programs.
God-forsaken wasteland if they start taking away the few perks that come with growing up as a human icicle? Do this and California will fall to the sound of a 999,999 rubber boots (one got stuck in the mud on the trek through Oregon) marching down from Canada, packing heat. (no I mean literally: electric socks (why do you think Canadians make such good major league pitchers? Carrying those lead-acid car batteries around the playground under your left arm while your throw iceballs with your right makes you strong that's why)). After that we'll open illegal back-alley Timmies and say goodbye to your peace-love-eternal-groovieness California. Think this is a joke? Check the obscure fine print in your immigration laws there's a hoser clause put in there by our secret operative Lorne Greene decades ago. They don't call it a Greene Card for nothing, huh? It's easier when you realize the truth: there is no lumber cartel. So stop it. Thank you. The nurse is here!
Firefox: BetterPrivacy
Being able to manually delete LSO's is ok but too labour-intensive. The addon above lets you delete-on-close like regular cookies you flag as "allow for session" in FF.
The world isn't lacking good ideas, it's lacking people who make them real.
We can barely find people who know the difference between crippling buckling. The not-horrible ones we can find have been working on the F35 for so long they think 2 years to finish one rib is about right.
If anyone wants to make an ambitiously weird new plane, they are going to have to invest billions just to get bright people back into this business. I wouldn't be surprised if it would cost hundreds of billions to get get a commercial carbon-fiber spanlifter into service because this industry is just so moribund. The organizations that are around right now couldn't make a go of it on any finite budget.
Maybe, and I don't know for sure, Google is a well-run company. My experience is that most large entities are not, and the manager's job is not primarily to manage people, but to figure out what the hell the group should be doing so that he/she won't get in trouble for going against the poobahs while still producing the vaguely-defined deliverables (those being defined as "that which the director determines you should have done in hindsight" or "that which they needed, not what they asked for"). If Google's managers actually know the requirements and have great people working for them, then they can concentrate of clearing roadblocks, a life most technology managers can only dream of.
That said, another legitimate job for a manager is to represent the capabilities of the group. Realistically. This is hard in engineering, because communicating many technical challenges is hard when the audience has never done that kind of work. It's pretty fun to stand up in front of a group of heavy-hitters and say "I know it seems like it should only take 3 months, but something always goes wrong so we need nine." They scowl and suck air through their teeth and maybe you don't work there any more pretty soon after that.
That's why technology companies need people who came up through the ranks because things that people have never done always seem easy. In 10 years, what will Google's non-tech managers be saying when they all have new hats? They will need people who can sit in a conference room with the owners and say "Larry, that idea you just had? That's just stupid." and not get laser-beamed.
You're looking at it the wrong way. Those who chose a medieval future chose it for themselves, not for everyone. What's more, they are volunteering their many future helpless spawn to be economic prisoners of the minority who chose a reality-based reality.
So ladies and gentlemen, stop trying to create useful technology. Write home-astrology software. Start an Ayn Rand website. Hell, start a religion.
The ignoramuses are going to pay for being willfully stupid, right? Why shouldn't they pay you? Have you ever stopped to consider that L. Ron might be a role model and not the enemy? The guy got people to pay to worship atomic bombs and something called Xenu. Not bad if you ask me.
Hi I'm Bill Gates and I never want to get elected to public office in the United States.
The system is pay-as-you go, which as far as I can tell the boomer generation never agitated to change. It means that the boomer bulge will have to be paid for by the current working generation. The boomers never had to fund a bulge which is why pay-as-you go was their selfish preference as was a low birth rate which compounds the problem.
The problem can be with the T. The hot compressed gas cools to ambient over time, dissipating energy (seen as a loss of pressure). I suppose, though, the energy is used before much heat has a chance to leak away. Barring that the limit on efficiency is the mechanical losses in the motor you drive with the gas.
You don't need particularly high pressures to make it theoretically efficient. You may be thinking of heat engines based on Otto (piston) or Brayton (turbine) cycles where efficiency is related to the pressure and temperatures at combustion, the higher the better.