Eh if you want an idea about the safety go sit somewhere you can see a full traffic pattern for a major airport and then realize that even at a place like Hartsfield at the peak of operations it just dosn't compare to something like a major higway traffic Jam. Think of it this way... how many planes can you see at any one time, then driving on the higway how many cars can you see. how may withen less than 5 seconds of travel apart ? With conventional takeoff there will always be a landing a take off issue as that means shared runway space, but with a viable VTOL technology for the masses I wouldn't be to concerned.
Danger from mass flying will more likely come in the form of popular destinations with large numbers of simultaneous arrivals and departures... imagine everyone taking off/landing before and after a big game or concert... as these will be one of the few situations where alot of people are trying to share space with a lot of intersecting traffic. However, typical commuting would be far safer in terms of collisions.. your typical safety margian distance would be far greater both in distance and time... to reach car traffic density levels you would be flying in Blue Angle type precision formations with complete strangers... something that is not going to happen... but with the sky open you don't have the bottlenecks of roads and the problems inherrent with differnt directions and cross traffic generally forced to share the same plane.... also instituting a major traffic maanagement system (like a complext set of overpasses at a multi road interchange) would simply be a matter of some more eletronics and or a couple of operators instead of a massive time consuming and expesive construction process that would dirupt traffic flow while being implemented. In otherwords scalability of airspace management is far far far more flexible than that for roads.
Thats the guy with the scooter, not the sky car. Though the sky car is still pretty suspect... takes a LOT of power to lift 4 people and go 300mph... at altitude and over distance its possible to get car level mpg, but certainly not over the short haul.
Well I think when I wrote that I had DC-X and the 33 mixed a bit. But they may well have hit the same problem reagarding tanks with a full scale up. Margians get real slim when your limited to 500isp. Though I agree... far more down the road to working that the 33 ever got.
I just don't see the reservicing mission. Not like it is gone, it will continue for a while yet and may still provide some surprises. and the longer it lasts the more chance of it lasting till a replacement is up. Right now I think the only hard limit on its life span is the decay of its orbit... but I think that margian is enough that the real concern is how long the gyros last and the bats can be conserved. Now if they start talking about de-orbiting it before it croaks I will be screaming bloody murder. Not fixing it is one thing, not utilizing it as along as it keeps working something entirely different.
Can't agree more that NASA has gotten so risk averse as to be non-functional. However, it isn't just NASA that has gone panzy... their decisions are just symptomatic of a much larger shift in mindset of the american public in general.
Hmmmmm... come to think of it what would I like to see done with that money that is most likely going right down the toilet (well not all... some of it is paying my bills:-)). How about pushing through with the ARES heavy lift concept championed by Zubrin and a couple Mars Direct missions ? I'll take that over a gutted station and an overstretched shuttle system working just to fullfill a contractual obligation.
Unless something changed I am kind of surprised you point to DC-X as a prooven... though considering what your comparing to.... eh never mind.
yeah getting the weight out there would be a problem.... would be nice if we had just mothballed the sat V production capacity rather than dismantled it. Technically Energia could still be produced and it would be more than capable, also could do the shuttle C or Z concepts. Considering it looks like we are serious about the CEV then I imagine we would have the ability to get out to geosync to service by the time it was needed. Roll of the dice certainly but in return you dust off a heavy lift design, and gain a more capable telescope that makes one revolution around its orbit a day instead of one every 90 minutes or so. Eh largely just academic anyway. My guess is hubble wasn't designed to take the thermal load of long periods without being shaded in earths shadow.
I really was under the impression that the components all existed to build a second telescope but regardless lets take that 4bn number. You are really suggesting you would rather spend 2bn to marginally extend the life of Hubble rather then 4bn to place a new system of the same design with a flawless mirror in orbit? IMHO that 4bn would be spent a hell of alot better than the 2 for a reservicing mission.
As for ISS and Shuttle? Shuttle is now far more gainfully employed supporting/constructing ISS than it has been in its entire existence to date. As for the value of the ISS design and current utilization.... I mostly agree it was compromised out of just about any usefull feature. This does not mean we cannot find a use for it. Its most glaring lack right now is man power. We could put one of Bigelows inflatable habs where the crew hab was planned to be (buy em if we have to, make more if not). We could add extra docking nodes for the ability to dock multiple soyuz for escape vehicles while we dick around with a CRV capable of returning a full complement. And if nothing else actually send scientists up there instead of flyboys/girls ( with every appology to the astronaught corps ) to hopefully run more meaningfull experiments than (insert experiment that has been done millions of times) IN SPAAACE and incredibly experiments that have already been done many times IN SPAAAAACE. I swear its like hollywood sequals gone horribly wrong.... If science is not viable then turn it into an astronaught training facility and screw floating around in the NBT. Orient them in the tank then send them to learn in the real environment. Set goals for running station without utilizing supplies from earth in order to design better long term life support systems. Need I continue?
I am sure with some thought we could find something worthwhile to do with several tonnes of orbiting material with propulsion, life support and power systems. Its too fucking expensive to get mass up there to just wirte it off and say there is nothing to be done with it. We need some more "Failure is not an option" mentality and we have got to get out of this scrap it all and do something totaly different every time something looks hard crap. In the mean time our only viable option for altering the design or finishing the construction is Shuttle.
Why is having shuttle go to station such a horrible horrible thing? I can't say I disagree to much with your thinking that both programs are not what they should or could be and wanting more. But shit in one hand and want in the other and see which one fills up first.
What he have are two lobotomized programs but they are better than none. And for the first time in its life Shuttle is actually be used as a.... SHUTTLE. Continually amazes me that now shuttle is being used in one of its primary designed missions people think it is an utter waste of time.
I do agree with your sentiments about the now abandoned Hubble mission. But at the same time it has done far more than it was thought it could to begin with. Also its failure is not a given. It is only projected, so it may well continue to operate well past its current expected demise... or it might croak tommorrow. I think a better option than repair would be putting together the spares on the ground, including a PERFECT mirror as opposed to the flawed one that got launched, and launch Hubble II. The components exist. so lets put them to use. What would be really nice would be if we could get it out to Geosync to give it a chance for longer more stable exposuers.
buy the cheapest ticket you can... hide equipment in a backpack with a blue tooth set to a scanner that looks like a cell phone/pda/psp...or hell a scanner that is built into one of those devices.
you know people traveling somewhere often have alot of bulk with them and it isn't suspicious at all.
Da I know about what ION can do. Will have to look up Holl effect or is it a specific kind of ION system ? While the end result of an Ion system represents much higher Delta V from a given fuel source it takes a LOOONG time to build that speed up. What can be done in seconds with a chemical system can take months with an ion system.
For those that don't know the LOX and LH reaction utilized by the shuttle is just about the most energetic chemical reaction and maxes somewhere in the high 400's for isp, SSME's extract around 452 in vacumm if memory serves. NTR's utilizing superheated hydrogen can achieve somewhere around 900 (achieved by nerva program). However ion systems achieve isps well into the thousands. The problem is how fast your can extract that energy.
isp, or specific impulse, refferes to how long a pound of fuel can produce one pound of thrust... or conversely how many pounds of thrust one pound of fuel can deliver in one second. Example. a 400isp means one pound of fuel can produce one pound of thrust for 400 seconds, or it can produce a maximum of 400 pounds of thrust for one second. Chemical systems work at either extreme. IE you can slowly extract the energy over time... or combine it faster and get the higher max amount. ion drives, on the otherhand, currently don't work that way. While they have fabulously high isp's you can't extract more than a small fraction of that at a time. If they solve that problem then alot of our space propulsion problems will be solved. In fact ion already represents the best option for outer solar system exploration.
Hence Why I said with Chemical Power. Atomic is a whole other ball of wax. But even with atomic that will not change the delta V requirements. In fact to make use of the faster transit capabilities a longer sustainable, or just higher power, propulsion system would entail it would require more delta V... and it STILL wouldn't cahnage the fact that you could have gone to Mars with the same delta V expenditure you went to the moon with.
If we were using moon rock as reation mass then I am willing to bet we would be better off getting it to earth orbit from the moon than going to the moon to get it. The exception would be if we had a technology that pretty much didn't care about delta V expenditures on those levels. IE not squirt and coast propulsion. An atomic rocket would still be a squirt and coast system unless it were used to power an Ion drive. But to date they really can't extract much propulsion from Ion. You have to be going a Loooooooooong way before Ion pays off and the Moon, and even mars are to close to give it an advantage over chemical much less an NERVA style atomic rocket.
If this dosn't make sese go pick up Zubrin's "Case for Mars". He has a chapter or two in there about what it takes to get stuff to mars vrs going to the moon then mars.
If the loss rate is 1% every 1000 charge cycles that is 20,000 charge cycles to get to 80%. If it works like that then these would have replacement timelines on the order of engine rebuilds/replacement.
Ok now I want my T-zero with these batteries in it.
Yeah the reclimation in City Driving would actually be more helpfull than in highway cruising and would help narrow the gap that would still exist due to energy density. Would be like getting gas back in the tank when breaking. Nothing agianst Regen braking. But that guy seemed to want to use it as a perpetual motion machine.
Eh I can't say I think they shouldn't have been used for science missions at the time. Just pointing out that using them as such was far from what they were designed for... and most of their limitations as a science platform were founded in the fact the thing just wasn't designed to be used that way. That it was used that way for so long does not mean it is now a good science platform or that it was a good use of shuttle. It just means it was a shelter in a storm. It is what was available at the time. All things considered they got alot out of them, but it was a jury rig system none the less.
I just think that once we got back to the idea of building a permanent platform for science that we should have dedicated the fleet to do that and trimmed any excess. That didn't happen for largely political reasons and the nail in the coffin of the idea was that columbia couldn't get to ISS orbit with much of a payload (it did dock at station one time and was scheduled to do so again after a diet program refit). So at that point the question was whether to mothball, strip it of excess weight, or continue to fly what we had planned YEARS before even though it made little sense with a partially online ISS facility that was STARVED for science work. In the end it was supposed to fly that last fatefull science lab mission, then be stripped of any excess weight that could be stripped then used for a couple of oddball missions to speed up core complete and finally, mothballed.
Of course hindsight is 20/20 and it seemed harmless enough to just let the inertia of the planned missions peter out. Only reason I say anything about it at all is I said many times before STS-107 that the science missions that were still happening after the activation of ISS in 2001 were a waste and a distraction to what NASA said was its primary goal for manned missions. The one exception in my book was Columbia's earlier mission to service Hubble. That was a real mission and real reason not to use shuttle in support of furthering ISS at the time.
But I am not saying that would have prevented columbia or anything... well other than mothballing it (but that would mean that ET would have been used on another orbiter and we might be three orbiters down now). It probably just would have fireballed on an ISS mission, or perhaps the now defunct hubble mission. Either of which would have had more meaning in my eyes than running one last make work shuttle science mission.
True enough but what I mentioned is the reason why regen isn't a net source of energy. Regen can capture lots of energy but the energy has to come from somewhere... IE acceleration which creates momentum which is captured by a regen system. Thus the only way to get more energry out of a regen cycle than you put into it is a special case where you start at the top of the hill and only recapture the potential energy that presents. But then, unless you built the car there energy had to be expended to get the car there in the first place (like driving it there). Thus in the end less energy will be regained than was put into it.
So Regen is not a refuling option which is the context the parent to my comments was impplying it could be used for.
ummmm dude thats what I said. The New Covenant established a new pact for salvation. And that was one of the few NEW things it did and regards one of the few OLD things it superceded.
Most of the OT is still relavent to Christianity else it would have been dropped as a holy text as being irrelevant. At its formal creation some 200 years AFTER Christ. As is the contradicting passages are there for historical learning. IE expaples of mistakes made. And they are cast as such in the tragic stories of the fall of the Chosen people as they departed from the words of god.
Eh using this I would say they would have a chance at making such a tractor. At a rough guess I would think they are still short just due to the density issue.. but not nearly as much as cars. This is because the scale of farm vehicles is so different from those of road vehicles. Besides a refuling station could be as close as the nearest power line rather than back at the base of operations.
Nope... check into the energy density of gas sometimes then consider it in terms of what you pump in two minutes without even really thinking about it. Seems crazy for an electrical system since we don't use anything that powerfull in electric form. But so to was this once the case for the car. But remember if you shifting the fuel supply from gass delivered to stations you would have to move that power onto the utility grid... which means the grid has to be capable of handling it.
And interim system would be an on site battery bank of these trickly charging in slow times to fuel cars as needed with the heavy duty system local at the station and a more constant draw from the grid by the station. Bye bye tanker trucks hello higher power bills.
Less you are going down a hill you can't reap more energy from regen braking than you put into it... and wind resistence means constant input to the system you will never see back from regen. However this will make regen systems more effective since you would not need to further complicated the system with large banks of capacitors to absorb the high energy output of hard braking.
Makes times in between refuling farther apart as well.
Probably a battery farm of these at the gas station similar to the ones in the cars. Since they can charge at this rate they should also be able to discharge at this rate. So you build a bank of batteries that are constantly trickle charging to full off the grid and doing massive discharges as needed to refule cars. You would probably design your sustaining capacity somewhere around your average and be able to maintain peak outputs for rush periods.
Could also have an onsight Generator capable of zapping a couple of cars at a time running from the gas tanks with a smaller assitent battery bank absorbing idle time from the generators and distributing more power when more cars are being refuled simultaneously. Also big incentive to add solar cells to the gas stations once they get cheap enough.
Either should avoide needed new super duty power lines to carry massive. In either case utilities have to then start producing that power we used to get by harnessing gas in an ICE.
If this is for real it is a world changer. And electric car could be a serious alternative to an ICE and the infrastructure is much easier to implement than hydrogen. Then if we make the leap to fusion we can use that to power the utilities and eliminate fossil fule burning altogether. Would still be utilizing them for plastics though.
Very very good points. Almost wish I hadn't been posting so I could mod you up.
Also can't say I disagree with the mothballing. Without the already scrapped Crew Hab, if we launch COF and JEM we will have one lab per Crew. And if the Russians actually built their facility we would have more labs than crew. Considering that as is it takes about 2.5 crew to run maintenence we might have more maintence hours than crew time available unless they don't sleep.
If they want to do this I think NASA should be all over those inflatable habs. Hell it is their idea to begin with and this guy has gone and built them. Try one out. If it works BAM, crew hab or if nothing else it might provide a space for tourists and solve the probelm of NASA getting its panties in a wad whenever the Russians sell a seat on a Soyuz flight.
Also the reason those 'pure science' missions remained for columbia were two fold. ONE, as mentioned it couldn't take much payload to ISS orbit due to its heavier design weight as the first orbiter. TWO, it provided a science environment we were in charge of... unlike station which is an international effort.
Those science only missions for Shuttle should have been rolled into the ISS program and the shuttle fleet dedicated to its design specific task of supporting a space station. For those with short memories, Shuttle was in fact largely designed to support skylab and other as yet unconstructed space stations. Not to run as a science platform itself. The orbital payload delivery/recovery abilities are that of a support vehicle that was expected to spend minimal time in orbit and have a quick turn around. This was opposed to say the long mission durations desireable by a science facility. The payload bay science lab was a direct result of the shuttle program failing to get off the ground in time to save skylab from burning up in re-entry. When that happend they developed the science lab 'payload' and turned shuttle into an ad hoc orbital science facility that could only operate for a couple weeks at a time.
As things worked out a new station design didn't get off the drawing boards till the late 90's with the start of building the ISS. This means shuttles interim adhoc science ability has been utilized for far longer than it was even thought a shuttle would last. At least in terms of years. None of the shuttles have even come close to the end of the designed life cycle of 100 or so missions. Hell the whole program itself didn't pass 100 missions till 2001. So now almost everyone thinks it is a bad thing that shuttle only exists to go to station when in fact that was the whole idea to begin with.
Moon dosn't make much sense as a refuling station... at least not in terms of chemical systems. Takes almost the same Delta V to go to the moon as to mars. So to go to the moon and to mars takes almost double the Delta V. In other words why drive somewhere to fill up a tank of gass to go somwhere else if you could have just driven straight there with the first tank of gas? Remember, distances vrs fuel requirements don't work the same in squirt and coast interplanetary travel as they do driving down the highway.
However, if you established a more or less self sufficient base on the moon that dropped supplies into earth orbit that were available that would make sense. Inherrently cheaper (in terms of delta V) to get things from the moon to earth orbit than from earths surface to earth orbit. But that is only if you are using lunar resources to accomplish that. IE an engine that uses Lunar Derived fuel and nothing from earth. Cause anything from earth already incured the delta V penalty and has to show and enourmous return in order to offset that. The engine for example would likely need to be good for several trips.... unless we could built it there.
You sure they could actually do a Ti hot frame? As I recall this is sort of what they did for the SR-71, hell the frame on that was annealed every time it flew which actually strengthend the thing over time. But it also caused some major problems with expansion... they never could fully seal the gas tank through all ranges of the flight envelope.. damn thing leaked fuel till it heated up enough to tighten the seals. Sealing the crew compartment through the full range might be a bitch if you are going to incure that much heating of the frame and the inherrent expansion. Granted that was the late 50's and early 60's. Might could do better now.
Be nice if you could cut the weight of the TPS like that. Would remove most of the weight penalty incurred by the wings in the first place... not to mention if the orbiter were that much lighter it would deffinatly glide better , probably be able to lower its stall speed and angle of attack for landing which might lead to some landing gear weight reductions as well. 40% increase in payload would kill most of my problems with the current shuttle stack. I think tossing 120k into orbit of which the large majority (~100k, orbiter 75k + 21k for 3 SSME's ) consists of the TPS and engines is pretty damn silly. But then again it was a first effort the we should have moved beyond long ago.
Not very far behind ? Not quite sure how you arrive at that notion. We were supposed to be about 20-24 some odd launches along by now and I think either just have or just about to deliver the last bit of core complete construction payloads. At a launch rate of 10 a year that is almost 2 and half years behind if we start launching at the same rate we were before columbia which was the heavist launch schedule in the entire history of the Shuttle program.
Soyuz kept Station manned.... barely. We had to cut to two crew because they could not have supplied 3. Science upmass is all but nothing. 50kg or some such silly pathetic amount. Not knocking it but the program has not advanced in the interim. It has survived on a minimal existence.
Station is VERY behind. To the point where it is a very real possibility that its usefull completed life will be less than half of its planned life. It quite possibly will never house its inteded full crew complement of 7 for any longer than shuttle docking events. You want to know something crazy about that? If the Russians build and deliver their lab (doubtful at this point) and the COF and JEM get delivered, we will have more Labs (4) on Station than Crew (3).
Heh nice idea but not really the way it works. One obvious example is that of the 10 commandments. Those hold from the Old Testament. There is very little about the new covanent that directly conflicts with the teachings of the OT and most of that regards salvation.
Hmmmm.... you know preventing a child from becoming obese isn't keeping them from eating. Its keeping them from over eating and yes I for one would suggest that.
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Eh if you want an idea about the safety go sit somewhere you can see a full traffic pattern for a major airport and then realize that even at a place like Hartsfield at the peak of operations it just dosn't compare to something like a major higway traffic Jam. Think of it this way... how many planes can you see at any one time, then driving on the higway how many cars can you see. how may withen less than 5 seconds of travel apart ? With conventional takeoff there will always be a landing a take off issue as that means shared runway space, but with a viable VTOL technology for the masses I wouldn't be to concerned.
Danger from mass flying will more likely come in the form of popular destinations with large numbers of simultaneous arrivals and departures... imagine everyone taking off/landing before and after a big game or concert... as these will be one of the few situations where alot of people are trying to share space with a lot of intersecting traffic. However, typical commuting would be far safer in terms of collisions.. your typical safety margian distance would be far greater both in distance and time... to reach car traffic density levels you would be flying in Blue Angle type precision formations with complete strangers... something that is not going to happen... but with the sky open you don't have the bottlenecks of roads and the problems inherrent with differnt directions and cross traffic generally forced to share the same plane.... also instituting a major traffic maanagement system (like a complext set of overpasses at a multi road interchange) would simply be a matter of some more eletronics and or a couple of operators instead of a massive time consuming and expesive construction process that would dirupt traffic flow while being implemented. In otherwords scalability of airspace management is far far far more flexible than that for roads.
Thats the guy with the scooter, not the sky car. Though the sky car is still pretty suspect... takes a LOT of power to lift 4 people and go 300mph... at altitude and over distance its possible to get car level mpg, but certainly not over the short haul.
Well I think when I wrote that I had DC-X and the 33 mixed a bit. But they may well have hit the same problem reagarding tanks with a full scale up. Margians get real slim when your limited to 500isp. Though I agree... far more down the road to working that the 33 ever got.
I just don't see the reservicing mission. Not like it is gone, it will continue for a while yet and may still provide some surprises. and the longer it lasts the more chance of it lasting till a replacement is up. Right now I think the only hard limit on its life span is the decay of its orbit... but I think that margian is enough that the real concern is how long the gyros last and the bats can be conserved. Now if they start talking about de-orbiting it before it croaks I will be screaming bloody murder. Not fixing it is one thing, not utilizing it as along as it keeps working something entirely different.
:-)). How about pushing through with the ARES heavy lift concept championed by Zubrin and a couple Mars Direct missions ? I'll take that over a gutted station and an overstretched shuttle system working just to fullfill a contractual obligation.
Can't agree more that NASA has gotten so risk averse as to be non-functional. However, it isn't just NASA that has gone panzy... their decisions are just symptomatic of a much larger shift in mindset of the american public in general.
Hmmmmm... come to think of it what would I like to see done with that money that is most likely going right down the toilet (well not all... some of it is paying my bills
Unless something changed I am kind of surprised you point to DC-X as a prooven... though considering what your comparing to.... eh never mind.
yeah getting the weight out there would be a problem.... would be nice if we had just mothballed the sat V production capacity rather than dismantled it. Technically Energia could still be produced and it would be more than capable, also could do the shuttle C or Z concepts. Considering it looks like we are serious about the CEV then I imagine we would have the ability to get out to geosync to service by the time it was needed. Roll of the dice certainly but in return you dust off a heavy lift design, and gain a more capable telescope that makes one revolution around its orbit a day instead of one every 90 minutes or so. Eh largely just academic anyway. My guess is hubble wasn't designed to take the thermal load of long periods without being shaded in earths shadow.
I really was under the impression that the components all existed to build a second telescope but regardless lets take that 4bn number. You are really suggesting you would rather spend 2bn to marginally extend the life of Hubble rather then 4bn to place a new system of the same design with a flawless mirror in orbit? IMHO that 4bn would be spent a hell of alot better than the 2 for a reservicing mission.
As for ISS and Shuttle? Shuttle is now far more gainfully employed supporting/constructing ISS than it has been in its entire existence to date. As for the value of the ISS design and current utilization.... I mostly agree it was compromised out of just about any usefull feature. This does not mean we cannot find a use for it. Its most glaring lack right now is man power. We could put one of Bigelows inflatable habs where the crew hab was planned to be (buy em if we have to, make more if not). We could add extra docking nodes for the ability to dock multiple soyuz for escape vehicles while we dick around with a CRV capable of returning a full complement. And if nothing else actually send scientists up there instead of flyboys/girls ( with every appology to the astronaught corps ) to hopefully run more meaningfull experiments than (insert experiment that has been done millions of times) IN SPAAACE and incredibly experiments that have already been done many times IN SPAAAAACE. I swear its like hollywood sequals gone horribly wrong.... If science is not viable then turn it into an astronaught training facility and screw floating around in the NBT. Orient them in the tank then send them to learn in the real environment. Set goals for running station without utilizing supplies from earth in order to design better long term life support systems. Need I continue?
I am sure with some thought we could find something worthwhile to do with several tonnes of orbiting material with propulsion, life support and power systems. Its too fucking expensive to get mass up there to just wirte it off and say there is nothing to be done with it. We need some more "Failure is not an option" mentality and we have got to get out of this scrap it all and do something totaly different every time something looks hard crap. In the mean time our only viable option for altering the design or finishing the construction is Shuttle.
What do you suggest we do?
Why is having shuttle go to station such a horrible horrible thing? I can't say I disagree to much with your thinking that both programs are not what they should or could be and wanting more. But shit in one hand and want in the other and see which one fills up first.
What he have are two lobotomized programs but they are better than none. And for the first time in its life Shuttle is actually be used as a.... SHUTTLE. Continually amazes me that now shuttle is being used in one of its primary designed missions people think it is an utter waste of time.
I do agree with your sentiments about the now abandoned Hubble mission. But at the same time it has done far more than it was thought it could to begin with. Also its failure is not a given. It is only projected, so it may well continue to operate well past its current expected demise... or it might croak tommorrow. I think a better option than repair would be putting together the spares on the ground, including a PERFECT mirror as opposed to the flawed one that got launched, and launch Hubble II. The components exist. so lets put them to use. What would be really nice would be if we could get it out to Geosync to give it a chance for longer more stable exposuers.
buy the cheapest ticket you can... hide equipment in a backpack with a blue tooth set to a scanner that looks like a cell phone/pda/psp.. .or hell a scanner that is built into one of those devices.
you know people traveling somewhere often have alot of bulk with them and it isn't suspicious at all.
Da I know about what ION can do. Will have to look up Holl effect or is it a specific kind of ION system ? While the end result of an Ion system represents much higher Delta V from a given fuel source it takes a LOOONG time to build that speed up. What can be done in seconds with a chemical system can take months with an ion system.
For those that don't know the LOX and LH reaction utilized by the shuttle is just about the most energetic chemical reaction and maxes somewhere in the high 400's for isp, SSME's extract around 452 in vacumm if memory serves. NTR's utilizing superheated hydrogen can achieve somewhere around 900 (achieved by nerva program). However ion systems achieve isps well into the thousands. The problem is how fast your can extract that energy.
isp, or specific impulse, refferes to how long a pound of fuel can produce one pound of thrust... or conversely how many pounds of thrust one pound of fuel can deliver in one second. Example. a 400isp means one pound of fuel can produce one pound of thrust for 400 seconds, or it can produce a maximum of 400 pounds of thrust for one second. Chemical systems work at either extreme. IE you can slowly extract the energy over time... or combine it faster and get the higher max amount. ion drives, on the otherhand, currently don't work that way. While they have fabulously high isp's you can't extract more than a small fraction of that at a time. If they solve that problem then alot of our space propulsion problems will be solved. In fact ion already represents the best option for outer solar system exploration.
Hence Why I said with Chemical Power. Atomic is a whole other ball of wax. But even with atomic that will not change the delta V requirements. In fact to make use of the faster transit capabilities a longer sustainable, or just higher power, propulsion system would entail it would require more delta V... and it STILL wouldn't cahnage the fact that you could have gone to Mars with the same delta V expenditure you went to the moon with.
If we were using moon rock as reation mass then I am willing to bet we would be better off getting it to earth orbit from the moon than going to the moon to get it. The exception would be if we had a technology that pretty much didn't care about delta V expenditures on those levels. IE not squirt and coast propulsion. An atomic rocket would still be a squirt and coast system unless it were used to power an Ion drive. But to date they really can't extract much propulsion from Ion. You have to be going a Loooooooooong way before Ion pays off and the Moon, and even mars are to close to give it an advantage over chemical much less an NERVA style atomic rocket.
If this dosn't make sese go pick up Zubrin's "Case for Mars". He has a chapter or two in there about what it takes to get stuff to mars vrs going to the moon then mars.
If the loss rate is 1% every 1000 charge cycles that is 20,000 charge cycles to get to 80%. If it works like that then these would have replacement timelines on the order of engine rebuilds/replacement.
Ok now I want my T-zero with these batteries in it.
Yeah the reclimation in City Driving would actually be more helpfull than in highway cruising and would help narrow the gap that would still exist due to energy density. Would be like getting gas back in the tank when breaking. Nothing agianst Regen braking. But that guy seemed to want to use it as a perpetual motion machine.
Eh I can't say I think they shouldn't have been used for science missions at the time. Just pointing out that using them as such was far from what they were designed for... and most of their limitations as a science platform were founded in the fact the thing just wasn't designed to be used that way. That it was used that way for so long does not mean it is now a good science platform or that it was a good use of shuttle. It just means it was a shelter in a storm. It is what was available at the time. All things considered they got alot out of them, but it was a jury rig system none the less.
I just think that once we got back to the idea of building a permanent platform for science that we should have dedicated the fleet to do that and trimmed any excess. That didn't happen for largely political reasons and the nail in the coffin of the idea was that columbia couldn't get to ISS orbit with much of a payload (it did dock at station one time and was scheduled to do so again after a diet program refit). So at that point the question was whether to mothball, strip it of excess weight, or continue to fly what we had planned YEARS before even though it made little sense with a partially online ISS facility that was STARVED for science work. In the end it was supposed to fly that last fatefull science lab mission, then be stripped of any excess weight that could be stripped then used for a couple of oddball missions to speed up core complete and finally, mothballed.
Of course hindsight is 20/20 and it seemed harmless enough to just let the inertia of the planned missions peter out. Only reason I say anything about it at all is I said many times before STS-107 that the science missions that were still happening after the activation of ISS in 2001 were a waste and a distraction to what NASA said was its primary goal for manned missions. The one exception in my book was Columbia's earlier mission to service Hubble. That was a real mission and real reason not to use shuttle in support of furthering ISS at the time.
But I am not saying that would have prevented columbia or anything... well other than mothballing it (but that would mean that ET would have been used on another orbiter and we might be three orbiters down now). It probably just would have fireballed on an ISS mission, or perhaps the now defunct hubble mission. Either of which would have had more meaning in my eyes than running one last make work shuttle science mission.
True enough but what I mentioned is the reason why regen isn't a net source of energy. Regen can capture lots of energy but the energy has to come from somewhere... IE acceleration which creates momentum which is captured by a regen system. Thus the only way to get more energry out of a regen cycle than you put into it is a special case where you start at the top of the hill and only recapture the potential energy that presents. But then, unless you built the car there energy had to be expended to get the car there in the first place (like driving it there). Thus in the end less energy will be regained than was put into it.
So Regen is not a refuling option which is the context the parent to my comments was impplying it could be used for.
ummmm dude thats what I said. The New Covenant established a new pact for salvation. And that was one of the few NEW things it did and regards one of the few OLD things it superceded.
Most of the OT is still relavent to Christianity else it would have been dropped as a holy text as being irrelevant. At its formal creation some 200 years AFTER Christ. As is the contradicting passages are there for historical learning. IE expaples of mistakes made. And they are cast as such in the tragic stories of the fall of the Chosen people as they departed from the words of god.
Eh using this I would say they would have a chance at making such a tractor. At a rough guess I would think they are still short just due to the density issue.. but not nearly as much as cars. This is because the scale of farm vehicles is so different from those of road vehicles. Besides a refuling station could be as close as the nearest power line rather than back at the base of operations.
Nope... check into the energy density of gas sometimes then consider it in terms of what you pump in two minutes without even really thinking about it. Seems crazy for an electrical system since we don't use anything that powerfull in electric form. But so to was this once the case for the car. But remember if you shifting the fuel supply from gass delivered to stations you would have to move that power onto the utility grid... which means the grid has to be capable of handling it.
And interim system would be an on site battery bank of these trickly charging in slow times to fuel cars as needed with the heavy duty system local at the station and a more constant draw from the grid by the station. Bye bye tanker trucks hello higher power bills.
Thee words, conservation of energy.
Less you are going down a hill you can't reap more energy from regen braking than you put into it... and wind resistence means constant input to the system you will never see back from regen. However this will make regen systems more effective since you would not need to further complicated the system with large banks of capacitors to absorb the high energy output of hard braking.
Makes times in between refuling farther apart as well.
Probably a battery farm of these at the gas station similar to the ones in the cars. Since they can charge at this rate they should also be able to discharge at this rate. So you build a bank of batteries that are constantly trickle charging to full off the grid and doing massive discharges as needed to refule cars. You would probably design your sustaining capacity somewhere around your average and be able to maintain peak outputs for rush periods.
Could also have an onsight Generator capable of zapping a couple of cars at a time running from the gas tanks with a smaller assitent battery bank absorbing idle time from the generators and distributing more power when more cars are being refuled simultaneously. Also big incentive to add solar cells to the gas stations once they get cheap enough.
Either should avoide needed new super duty power lines to carry massive. In either case utilities have to then start producing that power we used to get by harnessing gas in an ICE.
If this is for real it is a world changer. And electric car could be a serious alternative to an ICE and the infrastructure is much easier to implement than hydrogen. Then if we make the leap to fusion we can use that to power the utilities and eliminate fossil fule burning altogether. Would still be utilizing them for plastics though.
Very very good points. Almost wish I hadn't been posting so I could mod you up.
Also can't say I disagree with the mothballing. Without the already scrapped Crew Hab, if we launch COF and JEM we will have one lab per Crew. And if the Russians actually built their facility we would have more labs than crew. Considering that as is it takes about 2.5 crew to run maintenence we might have more maintence hours than crew time available unless they don't sleep.
If they want to do this I think NASA should be all over those inflatable habs. Hell it is their idea to begin with and this guy has gone and built them. Try one out. If it works BAM, crew hab or if nothing else it might provide a space for tourists and solve the probelm of NASA getting its panties in a wad whenever the Russians sell a seat on a Soyuz flight.
Also the reason those 'pure science' missions remained for columbia were two fold. ONE, as mentioned it couldn't take much payload to ISS orbit due to its heavier design weight as the first orbiter. TWO, it provided a science environment we were in charge of... unlike station which is an international effort.
Those science only missions for Shuttle should have been rolled into the ISS program and the shuttle fleet dedicated to its design specific task of supporting a space station. For those with short memories, Shuttle was in fact largely designed to support skylab and other as yet unconstructed space stations. Not to run as a science platform itself. The orbital payload delivery/recovery abilities are that of a support vehicle that was expected to spend minimal time in orbit and have a quick turn around. This was opposed to say the long mission durations desireable by a science facility. The payload bay science lab was a direct result of the shuttle program failing to get off the ground in time to save skylab from burning up in re-entry. When that happend they developed the science lab 'payload' and turned shuttle into an ad hoc orbital science facility that could only operate for a couple weeks at a time.
As things worked out a new station design didn't get off the drawing boards till the late 90's with the start of building the ISS. This means shuttles interim adhoc science ability has been utilized for far longer than it was even thought a shuttle would last. At least in terms of years. None of the shuttles have even come close to the end of the designed life cycle of 100 or so missions. Hell the whole program itself didn't pass 100 missions till 2001. So now almost everyone thinks it is a bad thing that shuttle only exists to go to station when in fact that was the whole idea to begin with.
Moon dosn't make much sense as a refuling station... at least not in terms of chemical systems. Takes almost the same Delta V to go to the moon as to mars. So to go to the moon and to mars takes almost double the Delta V. In other words why drive somewhere to fill up a tank of gass to go somwhere else if you could have just driven straight there with the first tank of gas? Remember, distances vrs fuel requirements don't work the same in squirt and coast interplanetary travel as they do driving down the highway.
However, if you established a more or less self sufficient base on the moon that dropped supplies into earth orbit that were available that would make sense. Inherrently cheaper (in terms of delta V) to get things from the moon to earth orbit than from earths surface to earth orbit. But that is only if you are using lunar resources to accomplish that. IE an engine that uses Lunar Derived fuel and nothing from earth. Cause anything from earth already incured the delta V penalty and has to show and enourmous return in order to offset that. The engine for example would likely need to be good for several trips.... unless we could built it there.
You sure they could actually do a Ti hot frame? As I recall this is sort of what they did for the SR-71, hell the frame on that was annealed every time it flew which actually strengthend the thing over time. But it also caused some major problems with expansion... they never could fully seal the gas tank through all ranges of the flight envelope.. damn thing leaked fuel till it heated up enough to tighten the seals. Sealing the crew compartment through the full range might be a bitch if you are going to incure that much heating of the frame and the inherrent expansion. Granted that was the late 50's and early 60's. Might could do better now.
Be nice if you could cut the weight of the TPS like that. Would remove most of the weight penalty incurred by the wings in the first place... not to mention if the orbiter were that much lighter it would deffinatly glide better , probably be able to lower its stall speed and angle of attack for landing which might lead to some landing gear weight reductions as well. 40% increase in payload would kill most of my problems with the current shuttle stack. I think tossing 120k into orbit of which the large majority (~100k, orbiter 75k + 21k for 3 SSME's ) consists of the TPS and engines is pretty damn silly. But then again it was a first effort the we should have moved beyond long ago.
Not very far behind ? Not quite sure how you arrive at that notion. We were supposed to be about 20-24 some odd launches along by now and I think either just have or just about to deliver the last bit of core complete construction payloads. At a launch rate of 10 a year that is almost 2 and half years behind if we start launching at the same rate we were before columbia which was the heavist launch schedule in the entire history of the Shuttle program.
Soyuz kept Station manned.... barely. We had to cut to two crew because they could not have supplied 3. Science upmass is all but nothing. 50kg or some such silly pathetic amount. Not knocking it but the program has not advanced in the interim. It has survived on a minimal existence.
Station is VERY behind. To the point where it is a very real possibility that its usefull completed life will be less than half of its planned life. It quite possibly will never house its inteded full crew complement of 7 for any longer than shuttle docking events. You want to know something crazy about that? If the Russians build and deliver their lab (doubtful at this point) and the COF and JEM get delivered, we will have more Labs (4) on Station than Crew (3).
Heh nice idea but not really the way it works. One obvious example is that of the 10 commandments. Those hold from the Old Testament. There is very little about the new covanent that directly conflicts with the teachings of the OT and most of that regards salvation.
Hmmmm.... you know preventing a child from becoming obese isn't keeping them from eating. Its keeping them from over eating and yes I for one would suggest that.