The minimum amount of energy required to pump a given quantity of propellant against a given chamber pressure is fixed, and not low. Doing it in a shorter period of time only makes the *power* requirements *higher*. You also need enough batteries to supply your power demands with the batteries partially discharged, so the effective energy density is reduced.
For a rough, BOTE calculation: they claim a thrust of 4600 lbf and specific impulse (vacuum, presumably) of 327 s. Mass flow rate is something like 6 kg/s. Very roughly approximating the combined LOX and RP-1 density as 1 g/cm^3, assuming a Merlin 1D-like chamber pressure of 9.7 MPa, pumping with 100% efficiency takes 62 kW per engine. Realistically, more like 100-200 kW, or 1-2 MW total.
Also, the rocket's not going at anything close to 30 gravities. All 9 first stage engines at peak thrust could only push about 600 kg at that acceleration.
Fuel cells can achieve high energy density due to using tanks of fuel, but their power density may not be up to driving a fuel pump for a launch vehicle. They are also limited in fuels. This rocket appears to use some form of semi-liquid monopropellant.
They state they use lithium polymer batteries on this page: http://www.rocketlabusa.com/ab... This is a rather odd choice. The main advantages of LiPo are rechargability and ability to be formed into thin cell-phone-friendly shapes, and they make tradeoffs to achieve these advantages compared to other lithium-ion and non-rechargable lithium batteries. LiPo batteries aren't a huge improvement over alkaline batteries in energy density, and are a few times worse than lithium metal batteries. An oxygen tank and lithium-air "battery" (actually a type of metallic fuel cell) might be a relatively good choice.
Yet, you managed quite foolishly ignore risk, right in the face of the self evident consequence of it. It goes wrong, it goes boom and you have nothing.
If you throw it away, you are guaranteed to have nothing. If you bring it back for reuse, you have a great deal of very expensive hardware that you no longer need to build for the next launch. Just reusing it once allows that hardware to launch 50% more mass over its lifetime than it would have if operated as an expendable vehicle. They anticipate much longer lifetimes.
Besides staged rockets logically become a thing of the past, when you want to establish a permanent moon base (they become parts for the base and for vehicles that will go further out into space).
First...that doesn't in any way make staged rockets "a thing of the past". Second, the first stage doesn't go anywhere near low orbit, let alone the moon.
I'm pretty sure the large object that went overboard was the first stage's engine/octaweb section.
The range safety charges should be almost impossible to detonate by fire or impact, and there was an announcement that they were "safed" during descent, but I wonder if there might be a contingency for setting them off in situations like this...not to destroy the vehicle, but to make sure there aren't any surviving bits of high explosive strewn around.
More than that: since the minimum thrust is greater than the vehicle weight, slowing it down would actually mean a shorter landing burn. The faster the stage is falling, the higher it starts the landing burn and the more time it has to correct its descent.
Note that they don't fully extend the legs until just before landing...this might be to reduce drag and ensure it has enough descent speed to make the landing.
But maximizing payload mass is very important, since it's already a small fraction of total rocket mass, and it's paying for everything. Every pound of extra fuel you want to keep for landing is coming directly out of your payload budget.
No, it comes out of the entire second stage mass, only about 20% of which is payload/structure. With that mass fraction, each kilogram of payload you sacrifice means there's 4 kg of second stage propellant you no longer need, so you can load an extra 5 kilograms of propellant onto the first stage. They anticipate around a 30% payload reduction due to reuse, eliminating most of the cost of a new launch vehicle in return.
Those test vehicles weren't coming back after launching a second stage on its way to orbit, and could carry a bunch of extra ballast. For the later hoverslam tests, they still lifted off with a T/W ratio of 1, hovered for a bit to burn off fuel, then started their descent under power before their T/W went above 1. The returning first stage starts its landing burn with a T/W ratio of more like 2-2.5.
The center core would never get far from Florida, even in completely expendable operation. However, getting cold would not be a problem if it could make orbit: RP-1 will stay liquid in LEO, and LOX will boil off over time if not insulated and shielded from the sun and Earth or actively cooled. However, they'd last long enough: the upper stage uses the same propellants and has the capability to restart after periods of coasting to do place multiple payloads in different orbits, perform additional high orbit maneuvers, etc.
With a light enough payload/low energy trajectory, and especially with crossfeeding, you can leave the center core with more propellant at separation than the side cores had. So there is a range of launches where they can bring all three cores back. It's not yet clear how useful that range is, and it's not doable for missions to geostationary orbit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
It may be that they just didn't want to model the ASDS.
They use a pneumatic separation system. No consumables, fewer munitions for people to have to work around, greatly reduced mechanical shock during separation, etc.
The engines can start and restart multiple times, as demonstrated by the hot fire tests and multiple burns during flight. I don't think they use pyro valves or anything of the sort anywhere. There's been talk of refueling on the ASDS and having the stage fly itself back to land, so they're hoping for something very close to gas and go.
That was about aerodynamic control surfaces doing funny things at supersonic speeds. The rocket was moving slowly enough to very nearly make a good landing, it just didn't quite null out enough of its horizontal motion to stay upright.
Jokes aside, it was probably good that they got a crash landing on the barge that early, because it illustrated how badly some people were exaggerating the dangers involved. The rocket was almost completely empty of fuel, and while it made a big fireball and smeared the rocket itself across the deck of the barge, it caused very little damage. The detractors of bringing the first stage back to land would have you think it'd be more like the last Antares launch: https://lh6.googleusercontent....
The point isn't that it would be safe, it's that there's a wide range of hazardous concentrations that wouldn't affect a canary. Canaries were only useful for detecting presence of poisonous gases or a dangerous lack of oxygen. Presence of flammable gases was detected by instruments such as Davy lamps, not canaries.
And a lot more than 3.4 times as difficult to reach. There's no shortage of deuterium on Earth, and no reason to go out there to get it.
Of course, this is good news should we ever need to put a fusion power plant on Mars, but there's many other much more immediate uses for the water, like virtually any sort of industrial activity.
The primary advantages of this thing seem to be a somewhat more compact and breadboard-friendly form factor and less work to set up a development environment and get started with the board (the STM32F4 Discovery Board sample code is neither comprehensive nor particularly suited to being incorporated in other code).
Chemicals aren't going away. They have too many advantages in thrust to weight, cost, controllability, etc.
SpaceX is in the business of launching stuff to orbit, and bringing boosters and spacecraft back down to planetary surfaces. Ion engines aren't going to do that...exactly how would you suggest they deliver those reactors and ion propulsion systems into orbit? Their focus is right where it needs to be.
The gravitational acceleration of an object isn't a constant at all, it is a function of distance. The relevant "constant" is the "standard gravitational parameter" (should be Greek mu, broken in the preview) = GM, the product of the gravitational constant and the mass of the body. This can be directly measured more precisely than G or M (G being very difficult to measure precisely, and measurements of M generally being derived from measurements of ) and is far more commonly needed in calculations than G or M alone.
More specific quantities are "surface gravity" and "surface escape velocity". These are relatively constant, given a reasonably spherical body, but also only meaningful on the surface. Surface gravity is the specific thing you were looking for, telling you how fast things fall and how much things weigh on the surface, setting the minimum acceleration needed to leave. Escape velocity tells you how deep in the gravity well the surface is, and how much of an overall velocity change is needed to leave.
The gravitational constant is G, and is the same everywhere...it's a physical constant. The surface gravitational acceleration of Mars is different because of its lesser mass. And apart from the problem of the atmosphere, having surface gravity of about 1/3 of Earth's is nowhere near enough to make ion propulsion useful for launch, an ion propulsion system with a nuclear reactor and propellant would easily weigh around ten thousand times what it could actually lift on Mars. The only bodies where launch could be usefully performed or assisted by ion thrust are asteroids and comets.
Ion engines use very high amounts of power and very low flow rates of propellant. They provide a benefit when you need low amounts of thrust for a long period, and have either plentiful solar power or a nuclear power source. They could be used for shipping bulk supplies ahead of a manned expedition, but a manned expedition itself or any other mission with tighter than usual time constraints will use chemical propulsion, or at most nuclear thermal propulsion. These relatively low-Isp systems require more propellant for a given delta-v, but can achieve accelerations millions of times higher than ion engines, and do so without heavy power systems and gigantic radiators.
The "established" guys were compensated for having to follow those rules by being given cost-plus contracts that guaranteed profits and provided incentive to inflate costs whenever it could be justified, and actively punished reductions in costs.
So: they were applying the same restrictions to SpaceX, without giving them the same benefits, since SpaceX operates under fixed-price contracts: they sell a product, get paid, and their ability to make a profit and continue existing is dependent on keeping expenses low. What was that about fairness?
More than that...in the frame of the emitter at its higher location in the gravity well, the light actually appears to slow as it passes through the well (Shapiro delay). Measured locally, the light is traveling at the same speed no matter where you look, but it's taking a longer path through curved space-time and its speed in a distant reference frame can be something different.
Stated another way, as your travel speed approaches the speed of light, your experienced travel time approaches zero. Note that time dilation actually happens both ways...the ship sees the surroundings as being time dilated just as much as they see it as being time dilated, and any physical measurements taken on the ship while it is coasting will be indistinguishable from those taken "at rest". It's only the fact that it's the ship that accelerates at the start and end of the trip that breaks the symmetry.
However, you reach a point where you have to convert most of the mass of your ship into energy well before you reach really high levels of time dilation. If the EmDrive worked as described, it would break a number of conservation laws and allow production of energy and momentum from nothing, which would be a way around this, but more realistically is an indication that the EmDrive doesn't work.
You'd only need a centrifuge, and only one providing enough "gravity" to confine a shallow puddle of liquid, which doesn't take much. The powder fusion approaches are better suited for the stuff you'd need to print in space, though...just keep that powder out of your life support filters. (not to mention your lungs)
Paint is almost never the solution. Paint involves additional equipment and manufacturing steps, dealing with adhesion and coverage issues, loss of fine details, sensitivity to wear and scratching, and so on. Plastic parts are almost always unpainted, instead incorporating pigments or other stabilizing additives within the plastic itself. These can't be incorporated into 3D printer resin for obvious reasons.
"This ignores that other space craft on reentry... using your aerobraking method have to take similar stresses."
No, they do not. The heating occurs due to compression in a detached shock in front of the vehicle. Much of it is radiated away immediately, the vast bulk of the remainder is left far behind the craft, and the craft itself only needs to handle a tiny fraction of it.
"You say it will meet with the impact of a tank shell. But we're talking about brushing the surface not impacting it at a 90 degree angle. The translated energy will be vastly lower."
No. The energy is a function of the relative velocity. The angle is completely irrelevant. You are converting the kinetic energy of the cable and spacecraft into heating of the cable and ground via friction, and the cable alone has enough kinetic energy to completely destroy it.
"The issue will be can the surface withstand the friction and heat. A surface similar to diamond should withstand the friction."
Apart from the fact that a hypothetical diamond super-cable isn't a substitute for the present reality of aerobraking...it would not, and the surface of the moon isn't perfectly smooth diamond. Your cable will make first contact with projections such as mountains, hills, boulders, crater edges, etc. It will separate explosively at the point of contact and the portion below will slam into the side of whatever the obstruction was. It may remove the obstruction in the process, but that's of no help in braking your spacecraft. This might be a useful method of landing on very low gravity objects...providing both a deceleration method and a way of securing the payload to the surface...but the idea is completely unworkable at the speeds involved in landing on the moon.
You might be able to engineer a hypervelocity runway landing, a very smooth aluminum surface with a cushion of injected gas to support the craft and electromagnetic braking to reduce velocity until you can make physical contact and stop, or you might be able to put up a lunar space elevator or surround it with momentum exchange tethers, but this gets back to the infrastructure problem, and it might well be cheaper to just land on rockets.
The impact velocity will be nearly double the muzzle velocity of Abrams M829 armor piercing shells. The lunar surface consists of mountains, boulders, craters, and so on. There is no "just brushing the surface", the portions of the cable that actually make contact would be vaporized.
Even if the moon were polished smooth and you were able to lightly drag the cable across the surface, the kinetic energy of the cable itself is 2.88 MJ/kg at minimum just to brake the portions in contact. Friction will convert that to heat. The areas in contact additionally have to brake the portion of the cable that is above the ground, and of course the payload itself. With aerobraking, the excess energy is shed extremely effectively by compressing the atmosphere in the path of the vehicle and leaving it behind as a streak of incandescent gas. With your suggestion, it is your cable that becomes a streak of incandescent gas.
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The minimum amount of energy required to pump a given quantity of propellant against a given chamber pressure is fixed, and not low. Doing it in a shorter period of time only makes the *power* requirements *higher*. You also need enough batteries to supply your power demands with the batteries partially discharged, so the effective energy density is reduced.
For a rough, BOTE calculation: they claim a thrust of 4600 lbf and specific impulse (vacuum, presumably) of 327 s. Mass flow rate is something like 6 kg/s. Very roughly approximating the combined LOX and RP-1 density as 1 g/cm^3, assuming a Merlin 1D-like chamber pressure of 9.7 MPa, pumping with 100% efficiency takes 62 kW per engine. Realistically, more like 100-200 kW, or 1-2 MW total.
Also, the rocket's not going at anything close to 30 gravities. All 9 first stage engines at peak thrust could only push about 600 kg at that acceleration.
Fuel cells can achieve high energy density due to using tanks of fuel, but their power density may not be up to driving a fuel pump for a launch vehicle. They are also limited in fuels. This rocket appears to use some form of semi-liquid monopropellant.
They state they use lithium polymer batteries on this page: http://www.rocketlabusa.com/ab...
This is a rather odd choice. The main advantages of LiPo are rechargability and ability to be formed into thin cell-phone-friendly shapes, and they make tradeoffs to achieve these advantages compared to other lithium-ion and non-rechargable lithium batteries. LiPo batteries aren't a huge improvement over alkaline batteries in energy density, and are a few times worse than lithium metal batteries. An oxygen tank and lithium-air "battery" (actually a type of metallic fuel cell) might be a relatively good choice.
Yet, you managed quite foolishly ignore risk, right in the face of the self evident consequence of it. It goes wrong, it goes boom and you have nothing.
If you throw it away, you are guaranteed to have nothing. If you bring it back for reuse, you have a great deal of very expensive hardware that you no longer need to build for the next launch. Just reusing it once allows that hardware to launch 50% more mass over its lifetime than it would have if operated as an expendable vehicle. They anticipate much longer lifetimes.
Besides staged rockets logically become a thing of the past, when you want to establish a permanent moon base (they become parts for the base and for vehicles that will go further out into space).
First...that doesn't in any way make staged rockets "a thing of the past". Second, the first stage doesn't go anywhere near low orbit, let alone the moon.
I'm pretty sure the large object that went overboard was the first stage's engine/octaweb section.
The range safety charges should be almost impossible to detonate by fire or impact, and there was an announcement that they were "safed" during descent, but I wonder if there might be a contingency for setting them off in situations like this...not to destroy the vehicle, but to make sure there aren't any surviving bits of high explosive strewn around.
More than that: since the minimum thrust is greater than the vehicle weight, slowing it down would actually mean a shorter landing burn. The faster the stage is falling, the higher it starts the landing burn and the more time it has to correct its descent.
Note that they don't fully extend the legs until just before landing...this might be to reduce drag and ensure it has enough descent speed to make the landing.
But maximizing payload mass is very important, since it's already a small fraction of total rocket mass, and it's paying for everything. Every pound of extra fuel you want to keep for landing is coming directly out of your payload budget.
No, it comes out of the entire second stage mass, only about 20% of which is payload/structure. With that mass fraction, each kilogram of payload you sacrifice means there's 4 kg of second stage propellant you no longer need, so you can load an extra 5 kilograms of propellant onto the first stage. They anticipate around a 30% payload reduction due to reuse, eliminating most of the cost of a new launch vehicle in return.
Those test vehicles weren't coming back after launching a second stage on its way to orbit, and could carry a bunch of extra ballast. For the later hoverslam tests, they still lifted off with a T/W ratio of 1, hovered for a bit to burn off fuel, then started their descent under power before their T/W went above 1. The returning first stage starts its landing burn with a T/W ratio of more like 2-2.5.
The center core would never get far from Florida, even in completely expendable operation. However, getting cold would not be a problem if it could make orbit: RP-1 will stay liquid in LEO, and LOX will boil off over time if not insulated and shielded from the sun and Earth or actively cooled. However, they'd last long enough: the upper stage uses the same propellants and has the capability to restart after periods of coasting to do place multiple payloads in different orbits, perform additional high orbit maneuvers, etc.
With a light enough payload/low energy trajectory, and especially with crossfeeding, you can leave the center core with more propellant at separation than the side cores had. So there is a range of launches where they can bring all three cores back. It's not yet clear how useful that range is, and it's not doable for missions to geostationary orbit: http://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/c...
It may be that they just didn't want to model the ASDS.
They use a pneumatic separation system. No consumables, fewer munitions for people to have to work around, greatly reduced mechanical shock during separation, etc.
The engines can start and restart multiple times, as demonstrated by the hot fire tests and multiple burns during flight. I don't think they use pyro valves or anything of the sort anywhere. There's been talk of refueling on the ASDS and having the stage fly itself back to land, so they're hoping for something very close to gas and go.
That was about aerodynamic control surfaces doing funny things at supersonic speeds. The rocket was moving slowly enough to very nearly make a good landing, it just didn't quite null out enough of its horizontal motion to stay upright.
Jokes aside, it was probably good that they got a crash landing on the barge that early, because it illustrated how badly some people were exaggerating the dangers involved. The rocket was almost completely empty of fuel, and while it made a big fireball and smeared the rocket itself across the deck of the barge, it caused very little damage. The detractors of bringing the first stage back to land would have you think it'd be more like the last Antares launch: https://lh6.googleusercontent....
The point isn't that it would be safe, it's that there's a wide range of hazardous concentrations that wouldn't affect a canary. Canaries were only useful for detecting presence of poisonous gases or a dangerous lack of oxygen. Presence of flammable gases was detected by instruments such as Davy lamps, not canaries.
And a lot more than 3.4 times as difficult to reach. There's no shortage of deuterium on Earth, and no reason to go out there to get it.
Of course, this is good news should we ever need to put a fusion power plant on Mars, but there's many other much more immediate uses for the water, like virtually any sort of industrial activity.
And TI's LaunchPad boards: http://www.ti.com/ww/en/launch...
The primary advantages of this thing seem to be a somewhat more compact and breadboard-friendly form factor and less work to set up a development environment and get started with the board (the STM32F4 Discovery Board sample code is neither comprehensive nor particularly suited to being incorporated in other code).
Chemicals aren't going away. They have too many advantages in thrust to weight, cost, controllability, etc.
SpaceX is in the business of launching stuff to orbit, and bringing boosters and spacecraft back down to planetary surfaces. Ion engines aren't going to do that...exactly how would you suggest they deliver those reactors and ion propulsion systems into orbit? Their focus is right where it needs to be.
The gravitational acceleration of an object isn't a constant at all, it is a function of distance. The relevant "constant" is the "standard gravitational parameter" (should be Greek mu, broken in the preview) = GM, the product of the gravitational constant and the mass of the body. This can be directly measured more precisely than G or M (G being very difficult to measure precisely, and measurements of M generally being derived from measurements of ) and is far more commonly needed in calculations than G or M alone.
More specific quantities are "surface gravity" and "surface escape velocity". These are relatively constant, given a reasonably spherical body, but also only meaningful on the surface. Surface gravity is the specific thing you were looking for, telling you how fast things fall and how much things weigh on the surface, setting the minimum acceleration needed to leave. Escape velocity tells you how deep in the gravity well the surface is, and how much of an overall velocity change is needed to leave.
The gravitational constant is G, and is the same everywhere...it's a physical constant. The surface gravitational acceleration of Mars is different because of its lesser mass. And apart from the problem of the atmosphere, having surface gravity of about 1/3 of Earth's is nowhere near enough to make ion propulsion useful for launch, an ion propulsion system with a nuclear reactor and propellant would easily weigh around ten thousand times what it could actually lift on Mars. The only bodies where launch could be usefully performed or assisted by ion thrust are asteroids and comets.
Ion engines use very high amounts of power and very low flow rates of propellant. They provide a benefit when you need low amounts of thrust for a long period, and have either plentiful solar power or a nuclear power source. They could be used for shipping bulk supplies ahead of a manned expedition, but a manned expedition itself or any other mission with tighter than usual time constraints will use chemical propulsion, or at most nuclear thermal propulsion. These relatively low-Isp systems require more propellant for a given delta-v, but can achieve accelerations millions of times higher than ion engines, and do so without heavy power systems and gigantic radiators.
The "established" guys were compensated for having to follow those rules by being given cost-plus contracts that guaranteed profits and provided incentive to inflate costs whenever it could be justified, and actively punished reductions in costs.
So: they were applying the same restrictions to SpaceX, without giving them the same benefits, since SpaceX operates under fixed-price contracts: they sell a product, get paid, and their ability to make a profit and continue existing is dependent on keeping expenses low. What was that about fairness?
More than that...in the frame of the emitter at its higher location in the gravity well, the light actually appears to slow as it passes through the well (Shapiro delay). Measured locally, the light is traveling at the same speed no matter where you look, but it's taking a longer path through curved space-time and its speed in a distant reference frame can be something different.
Stated another way, as your travel speed approaches the speed of light, your experienced travel time approaches zero. Note that time dilation actually happens both ways...the ship sees the surroundings as being time dilated just as much as they see it as being time dilated, and any physical measurements taken on the ship while it is coasting will be indistinguishable from those taken "at rest". It's only the fact that it's the ship that accelerates at the start and end of the trip that breaks the symmetry.
However, you reach a point where you have to convert most of the mass of your ship into energy well before you reach really high levels of time dilation. If the EmDrive worked as described, it would break a number of conservation laws and allow production of energy and momentum from nothing, which would be a way around this, but more realistically is an indication that the EmDrive doesn't work.
You'd only need a centrifuge, and only one providing enough "gravity" to confine a shallow puddle of liquid, which doesn't take much. The powder fusion approaches are better suited for the stuff you'd need to print in space, though...just keep that powder out of your life support filters. (not to mention your lungs)
Paint is almost never the solution. Paint involves additional equipment and manufacturing steps, dealing with adhesion and coverage issues, loss of fine details, sensitivity to wear and scratching, and so on. Plastic parts are almost always unpainted, instead incorporating pigments or other stabilizing additives within the plastic itself. These can't be incorporated into 3D printer resin for obvious reasons.
"This ignores that other space craft on reentry... using your aerobraking method have to take similar stresses."
No, they do not. The heating occurs due to compression in a detached shock in front of the vehicle. Much of it is radiated away immediately, the vast bulk of the remainder is left far behind the craft, and the craft itself only needs to handle a tiny fraction of it.
"You say it will meet with the impact of a tank shell. But we're talking about brushing the surface not impacting it at a 90 degree angle. The translated energy will be vastly lower."
No. The energy is a function of the relative velocity. The angle is completely irrelevant. You are converting the kinetic energy of the cable and spacecraft into heating of the cable and ground via friction, and the cable alone has enough kinetic energy to completely destroy it.
"The issue will be can the surface withstand the friction and heat. A surface similar to diamond should withstand the friction."
Apart from the fact that a hypothetical diamond super-cable isn't a substitute for the present reality of aerobraking...it would not, and the surface of the moon isn't perfectly smooth diamond. Your cable will make first contact with projections such as mountains, hills, boulders, crater edges, etc. It will separate explosively at the point of contact and the portion below will slam into the side of whatever the obstruction was. It may remove the obstruction in the process, but that's of no help in braking your spacecraft. This might be a useful method of landing on very low gravity objects...providing both a deceleration method and a way of securing the payload to the surface...but the idea is completely unworkable at the speeds involved in landing on the moon.
You might be able to engineer a hypervelocity runway landing, a very smooth aluminum surface with a cushion of injected gas to support the craft and electromagnetic braking to reduce velocity until you can make physical contact and stop, or you might be able to put up a lunar space elevator or surround it with momentum exchange tethers, but this gets back to the infrastructure problem, and it might well be cheaper to just land on rockets.
The impact velocity will be nearly double the muzzle velocity of Abrams M829 armor piercing shells. The lunar surface consists of mountains, boulders, craters, and so on. There is no "just brushing the surface", the portions of the cable that actually make contact would be vaporized.
Even if the moon were polished smooth and you were able to lightly drag the cable across the surface, the kinetic energy of the cable itself is 2.88 MJ/kg at minimum just to brake the portions in contact. Friction will convert that to heat. The areas in contact additionally have to brake the portion of the cable that is above the ground, and of course the payload itself. With aerobraking, the excess energy is shed extremely effectively by compressing the atmosphere in the path of the vehicle and leaving it behind as a streak of incandescent gas. With your suggestion, it is your cable that becomes a streak of incandescent gas.