We started Baby Sign with my daughter at about 6 months. My mother was offended, convinced that we were going to retard the child's lingual development. At about 10-months, we started to get coherent responses to queries. It started out with simple concepts like "eat" and "done." Once she realized that she could communicate with sign, the learning and communication grew exponentially. Her lingual skills were delayed slightly, but she went from no verbal communication to full-polysyllabic-sentences almost overnight. The transition was astounding, and her sign vocabulary was well over 150 signs (we couldn't keep up...)
Don't listen to the buttheads who claim children can't communicate before 12-16 months. Oh yes they can. Many tantrums are a result of frustration because the kid can't verbalize what he wants to communicate. Signing is a whole lot more practical than speaking for someone with limited motor skills.
We've still maintaiined some signs, but not nearly to the level we used to have. It's a wonderful skill for communicating across distances - you don't need to shout across a large room to confirm that your kid is okay after tripping and falling. Also, I credit the early sign exposure for jump-starting my daughter's reading and writing abilities. She's five now, and can read books, can write her own stories (which look like something from Infocom,) and has an amazing vocabulary.
I can envision the doctor saying "you may feel a slight pinch..." Between the scooping and the biopsy, I wish I could give you "+1 Disturbing" mod points, but "Informative" will have to do.
Here's another way to view the math - if you start at standstill (i.e. v(0)=0) and expect to be moving at 11km/s at the exit of the tube, your average velocity is Vaverage = (v(exit) - v(0))/2 = 5.5km/s. Using this number you can calculate the time to traverse the launch tube: t = distance/Vaverage = 11km / 5.5 km/s = 2 seconds. You can also calculate the acceleration: a = v(exit)/t = 11km/s / 2 = 5.5km/s^2. So relative to 1 g = 9.8m/s^2, your launch system will require occupants and payload to sustain about 561 g's for the 2 second launch.
It's more than just bucks. Your entire equipment design needs to meet specifications - so it's time, materials, techniques... which all reduce back to additional expense.
I've been through the NEBS gauntlet a number of times. They take your equipment, put a gas burner under it and ignite it intentionally. When the flame is removed, the equipment must self-extinguish in accordance with the NEBS rules. Here's a snippet from a Verizon testing document -
After the conclusion of the methane ignition line burn, the components in the equipment assembly
should show evidence of beginning to self-extinguish.
At 10 minutes into the test, there should be a significant flame reduction (or extinguished) and a
visible reduction in the smoke from the equipment assembly.
At 15 minutes into the test, flames shall be extinguished, and there shall be only minimal wisps of
smoke from the equipment assembly as determined from Verizon review.
If the smoke density measurements show any increase after the ignition burner is turned off, the
length of time shall be measured until the smoke is completely eliminated.
If the heat release measurements show any increase after the ignition burner is turned off, the
length of time shall be measured until the equipment reaches ambient temperature.
If during the initial ignition period of the Fire Spread Test, it is not possible to sustain a flame in
the ignition line burner due to airflow from the fans extinguishing the flame, the fans shall be
turned off.
Then they take another piece of your equipment (from your manufacturing line, no less) and hit it with overvoltage conditions simulating lightning and power-line contacts. Only devices that are specifically designated as fuses may open-circuit. If a PCB trace peels up, you fail. If an IC opens up, you fail.
NEBS certification requires flogging several pieces of produciton gear to death in horrible conditions. Going through the process is tough, and it teaches you just how much you don't know about real world failure scenarios.
Theory #1: StarROMS business model was flawed. They don't create any content, so they're stuck distributing a product that someone else manufacturers, licenses, and ultimately controls. Since StarROMS doesn't bring much to the table (other than an online sales website,) they're stuck with whatever deal the license holders see fit to dictate. StarROMS has a fundamentally weak position from which to negotiate. Infotari (or whoever) can dictate street price, fees, and sales quotas. That's a bad situation for StarROMS to be in.
Theory #2: Infotari (and others) are interested in this potential market called "emulation." However, many companies are loathe to adopt risk. Along comes StarROMS... the perfect whipping boy. Infotari licenses a handful of titles to StarROMS to see what happens. There's no motivation for other companies to participate yet, so they sit back and observe. Infotari can test the waters of this particular market without the possibility of tarnishing the corporate image. If things are successful, [*doink*] Infotari pulls it's licenses and sells directly. If it's not successful, [*doink*] Infortari takes its ball and goes home. Either way it's lose-lose for StarROMS.
Theory #3: Infotari signed up to a trial period licensing arrangement. That period has expired, and StarROMS has failed to meet quotas that would extend the contract period. (Note: Infotari would be in a position to force unsustainable pricing structures on StarROMS [see 1, above] and force them to fail. Why? It'd give them some perceived credibility when they say "We tried the legal download method, and people continued to pirate. We need some new legislation...")
You didn't think Infotari (or anyone else) would sign up to a perpetual irrevocable license arrangement with StarROMS, did you?
They're charging $20 (advance purchase) or $25 (at the door) to participate in the meatspace-portion of this event. Soooo.... they're expecting to get about $80 of revenue for this thing? The main incentive for participating is vacuous at best. I can watch someone fumble about with a VR helmet on? I might get to see this Make Magazine guy's wifi laptop with some uncomfortable-looking VR gadgets dangling off it?
The venue isn't large, so chewing up half the available space for the projector will cramp things further. I can't see a NE coffee shop shooing away regular paying customers, so I'd expect a fair number of non-participants to be crammed into the mix as well.
This thing is a train wreck that hasn't left the station yet.
(ps: I should probably have a second cup of coffee before posting to/.)
I cut my teeth on a Terak 8510/a operating under the UCSD p-System. I had the monochrome graphics display and the dual 8" floppies. The thing was a beast, but was amazingly reliable. Sometimes, if it's really quiet, I can still hear the floppy drive going *ca-thunk* *ca-thunk*.
Now get the hell off my lawn before I spray you with the hose.
Perhaps they were measuring POUSes - Protons Of Unusual Smallness. Maybe?
Or a better explanation probably comes from the article editor - "The average Joe can't comprehend something smaller than a mosquito, or a number larger than a million, so substitute those..."
This isn't news, nor is it some grand conspiracy. It's perfectly normal business practice. If you price a product (or worse, make it available for free,) you'll have huge demand. This demand carries with it a customer support expense, which can be quite large. You can break a company with excessive expenses, of which customer support is one.
When pricing a product, you typically want to set a minimum price specifically for the purpose of eliminating the deadbeat/hobbyist factor. Yes, you'll lose a couple of potential sales because the price presents a barrier to entry, but if you did the math properly, that minor loss is substantially easier to swallow than the loss from a huge non-revenue-generating support obligation. If the majority of your customers are businesses, they won't blink at a couple-hundred bucks for a product.
The expendable portion of a lunar mission isn't necessarily waste. You took a bunch of survey equipment (including a golf cart) to the moon. Why would you expend structure and fuel to bring it back? Similarly, you need structure and tanks to contain the fuel you're using to get to the moon. When the tanks are empty, why would you haul that empty (and now useless) mass around? Nope, the most efficient method requires you to be an interstellar litterbug. As soon as a resource is depleted, you jettison as much as you can.
In space, mass is the one variable you can control. Escape velocity, orbital velocity, and a host of other parameters are dictated by the math - your orbital altitude is a function of your velocity, not your mass. So to obtain a particular orbit, you need to achieve velocity V. The energy required to do so is dictated by E = 1/2mv^2. There's a direct relationship between the mass of the vehicle and the energy required to achieve a particular delta-V.
If you look at the Rocket Equation, you'll see that the overall relationship between wet mass (fuel) and dry mass (structure + payload) is exponential in nature. At the bottom of the Wiki page (link above) there's an example comparing single- and two-stage-to-orbit vehicles. All things being equal, the two-stage vehicle can put more mass into LEO by shedding the first stage.
Besides, bringing back used equipment is usually pointless. All of the Apollo-era vehicles used ablative shielding techniques, and couldn't be re-used (by design.) The Shuttle is technically re-usable, but it's largely rebuilt in-between flights. It pays a huge penalty in payload mass in exchange for bringing the brick-lined wings on a round-trip journey.
Hell, if I was inclined to perform questionable behavior on the web, I'd certainly be making a Pringles-can antenna for my WiFi card, and I'd hunt down some poor rube's AP several km away. I absolutely wouldn't be abusing my neighbor's AP... too close to home. The police will come knocking within 300 feet of the offending AP because they *know* WiFi doesn't have more range than that.
Sitting in front of a house leeching WiFi access will probably get you noticed, expecially if you're there for hours. The busybodies in my neighborhood will call the parking enforcement asshats if you park your car on the street for more than one day. (Yeah, I gotta move.)
A friend of mine had a wonderful comment about patents - "There's no such thing as a defensive patent. A patent is a sword. You use it to attack other people. Having a patent doesn't prevent someone from sueing you, so it never functions as a defensive element."
The so-called "defensive patents" are just used to deter attacks through the threat of countersuit. Mutually Assured Litigation?
Looks like Indonesia and Nigeria are good places to avoid too. I didn't realize Nigeria was a hotbed of maritime Pirate activity. Maybe all the 419-scammers are looking to branch out.
Redefining "science" to be "any grammatically-correct explanation of phenomena, regardless of plausibility or logic, will be acceptable as long as you feel good about the answer."
I hereby coin the phrase New Science, Kansas-Style. See New Math for background if you weren't in elementary school in the US in the early 1970's.
I further declare the so-called Kansas Board of Education to be a bunch of emotional, dung-flinging chimps. I haven't seen much more retarded behavior than this (and I do mean "retarded" from a damaging-to-society perspective.)
Apply for a title? From whom? You're making the assumption that there's an existing government in place on the moon from which you apply for title to land.
That's crap. If you have the resources to get your butt onto the moon and establish a permanent presence, you should just declare yourself to be a sovereign state and tell the rest of the world to "f*ck off."
Be prepared to defend your new turf, however. Nothing gets a country's attention as much as someone attempting to declare sovereignty in a very visible place. You'll probably be getting a visit from the Space Marines, the Ukrainian Space Police, and the Chinese Taikonaut Re-Education Squad.
But there's a fundamental difference between the Apollo-era technology developments and the modern ISS efforts. For Apollo, nothing existed. The problems were largely unknown. Folks tooks lots of risk, and they were very creative with their solutions.
The ISS is all about risk avoidance, and all the technology developed for the ISS is being created within well-known bounds and limits. Want to fly an experiment on the ISS? It needs to be made from space-rated materials (i.e. stuff we already have and know about.) NASA has a list. If you use materials that aren't on the list, you have two options: a) change to approved materials; or b) go through the space qualification process. Most folks opt for (a) because it's less expensive in both time and bucks. The rules, regulations, and processes tend to funnel everyone back toward known materials and processes. It's like setting out on an expedition to explore your bathtub.
I'm not a fan of the ISS simply because it became more of a political platform than a scientific one. There *could* be amazing stuff done there. Instead, we use it as a corporate welfare program for the aerospace industry.
If that last statement bothers you, ask why the ISS can't have more than two crew aboard if the Shuttle doesn't fly. The answer is "water." There isn't enough water capacity in the ISS to support a third person, and they don't have the water reclamation facility installed yet. You'd think that basic self-sustenance equipment like the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) would have been one of the *first* modules launched, not the last. Nope. Here's where I put on my tinfoil hat - If the ISS could sustain itself, cutting back Shuttle launches (i.e. budget cuts) would be acceptable. However, if the ISS inhabitants die without regular Shuttle missions, the Shuttle *must* fly! This all comes back to the situation where the ISS is the place for the Shuttle to go, and the Shuttle is what keeps the ISS going. It's a parasitic symbiosis that just drains the global economy.
I belive I'll see new technology derivatives from the rovers on Mars. I don't expect squat from the ISS.
But when the airplane was new, it was within the realm of reality to go build one yourself. "Pilot's license"... A what? If you look at the history of aviation, it's full of half-crazed poineers who built their own craft, sometimes dying in the process. But the DIY opportunity existed. It still does, though highly regulated by the gub'ment.
Fast forward a half a century, and you'll see a bunch of folks doing experimental rocket launches. Many are privately funded. Lots of folks did dangerous things. Some were successful.
Nowadays, we're completely risk-averse. Launches are prohibitively expensive... a major cost being the insurance that's required. "Small" spacecraft are typically 500-1000 kg, and cost millions to get into orbit. The test and acceptance procedures are draconian. They're also in place to reduce the risk that your mission will hose the launch vehicle and impact all the other paying customers.
I'm depressed at the amateur and university efforts. Everyone seems to launch a Mode-J repeater or a camera or the same old and tired missions that have been accomplished in LEO for the last 20 years. Yeah, it's more affordable to launch a Cubesat payload, but most of those fly hacked digital cameras or hacked hand-held radios. Let's face it - LEO is boring.
Dammit. Now I just rambling. Getting back on-topic, it's virtually impossible for average folks to participate in space exploration with the same opportunities presented by aircraft. Space travel is difficult, but we've put up legal and cost barriers to prevent widespread participation. Yes, crashing a rocket into your neighbor's house is a bad thing, but so is flying your homebuilt aircraft into your neighbor's house. I strongly suspect that NASA needs to control space flight opportunities, or it will cease to exist (or worse, become the red-headed stepchild of the FAA.) The politics have gotten in the way of progress. Beyond that, we're going to need to invent new propulsion technologies to make spaceflight more common. You can't negotiate with the physics - there's an energy cost associated with getting to LEO. It doesn't matter what fuel you use, you need to have a delta-V of about 7km/s to maintain orbit. How you do that is up to you, but right now it's really expensive.
Sterling engines are "heat differential" engines. They require a hot-side, and a cold-side. It doesn't matter where the "hot" and "cold" come from. A cup of coffee or your hand (relative to ambient air temperature) works great for small Sterling engines. The solar focusing technique is just one implementation.
Unless this is a nuclear reaction, the Mg doesn't go away. It'll still be around, probably in the "spent reactants" tank (i.e. the non-gaseous "waste" tank.) The fuel infrastructure will certainly want to collect and recycle that material (assuming that it's a more economical source of Mg than strip-mining some remote town.) The "no emissions" part of this article's claim just makes this stink like a scam.
Slashdot Mirror
We started Baby Sign with my daughter at about 6 months. My mother was offended, convinced that we were going to retard the child's lingual development. At about 10-months, we started to get coherent responses to queries. It started out with simple concepts like "eat" and "done." Once she realized that she could communicate with sign, the learning and communication grew exponentially. Her lingual skills were delayed slightly, but she went from no verbal communication to full-polysyllabic-sentences almost overnight. The transition was astounding, and her sign vocabulary was well over 150 signs (we couldn't keep up ...)
Don't listen to the buttheads who claim children can't communicate before 12-16 months. Oh yes they can. Many tantrums are a result of frustration because the kid can't verbalize what he wants to communicate. Signing is a whole lot more practical than speaking for someone with limited motor skills.
We've still maintaiined some signs, but not nearly to the level we used to have. It's a wonderful skill for communicating across distances - you don't need to shout across a large room to confirm that your kid is okay after tripping and falling. Also, I credit the early sign exposure for jump-starting my daughter's reading and writing abilities. She's five now, and can read books, can write her own stories (which look like something from Infocom,) and has an amazing vocabulary.
I can envision the doctor saying "you may feel a slight pinch ..." Between the scooping and the biopsy, I wish I could give you "+1 Disturbing" mod points, but "Informative" will have to do.
Here's another way to view the math - if you start at standstill (i.e. v(0)=0) and expect to be moving at 11km/s at the exit of the tube, your average velocity is Vaverage = (v(exit) - v(0))/2 = 5.5km/s. Using this number you can calculate the time to traverse the launch tube: t = distance/Vaverage = 11km / 5.5 km/s = 2 seconds. You can also calculate the acceleration: a = v(exit)/t = 11km/s / 2 = 5.5km/s^2. So relative to 1 g = 9.8m/s^2, your launch system will require occupants and payload to sustain about 561 g's for the 2 second launch.
For electrical and mechanical payloads, that's achievable. Many small atmospheric-study payloads have been gun-launched to orbital altitudes, but on ballistic trajectories. Cited accelerations are on the order of 12000-14000 g's for very short durations.
For people and critters: pink goo.
I've been through the NEBS gauntlet a number of times. They take your equipment, put a gas burner under it and ignite it intentionally. When the flame is removed, the equipment must self-extinguish in accordance with the NEBS rules. Here's a snippet from a Verizon testing document -
Then they take another piece of your equipment (from your manufacturing line, no less) and hit it with overvoltage conditions simulating lightning and power-line contacts. Only devices that are specifically designated as fuses may open-circuit. If a PCB trace peels up, you fail. If an IC opens up, you fail.
NEBS certification requires flogging several pieces of produciton gear to death in horrible conditions. Going through the process is tough, and it teaches you just how much you don't know about real world failure scenarios.
Theory #1: StarROMS business model was flawed. They don't create any content, so they're stuck distributing a product that someone else manufacturers, licenses, and ultimately controls. Since StarROMS doesn't bring much to the table (other than an online sales website,) they're stuck with whatever deal the license holders see fit to dictate. StarROMS has a fundamentally weak position from which to negotiate. Infotari (or whoever) can dictate street price, fees, and sales quotas. That's a bad situation for StarROMS to be in.
... the perfect whipping boy. Infotari licenses a handful of titles to StarROMS to see what happens. There's no motivation for other companies to participate yet, so they sit back and observe. Infotari can test the waters of this particular market without the possibility of tarnishing the corporate image. If things are successful, [*doink*] Infotari pulls it's licenses and sells directly. If it's not successful, [*doink*] Infortari takes its ball and goes home. Either way it's lose-lose for StarROMS.
...")
Theory #2: Infotari (and others) are interested in this potential market called "emulation." However, many companies are loathe to adopt risk. Along comes StarROMS
Theory #3: Infotari signed up to a trial period licensing arrangement. That period has expired, and StarROMS has failed to meet quotas that would extend the contract period. (Note: Infotari would be in a position to force unsustainable pricing structures on StarROMS [see 1, above] and force them to fail. Why? It'd give them some perceived credibility when they say "We tried the legal download method, and people continued to pirate. We need some new legislation
You didn't think Infotari (or anyone else) would sign up to a perpetual irrevocable license arrangement with StarROMS, did you?
After the Red Team exercises that demonstrated how flimsy the system security was, he really should want the system upgraded and re-scrutinized.
USA Today Article
RABA Technologies PDF Report on Security Assessment
They're charging $20 (advance purchase) or $25 (at the door) to participate in the meatspace-portion of this event. Soooo .... they're expecting to get about $80 of revenue for this thing? The main incentive for participating is vacuous at best. I can watch someone fumble about with a VR helmet on? I might get to see this Make Magazine guy's wifi laptop with some uncomfortable-looking VR gadgets dangling off it?
/.)
The venue isn't large, so chewing up half the available space for the projector will cramp things further. I can't see a NE coffee shop shooing away regular paying customers, so I'd expect a fair number of non-participants to be crammed into the mix as well.
This thing is a train wreck that hasn't left the station yet.
(ps: I should probably have a second cup of coffee before posting to
Sounds more like Mrs. Broflovski, Kyle's mom.
Cartman's mom would be all sing-songy with something like "Okay, poopie-kins, time to take nap-naps with Clyde frog."
Y'all young-uns are making me feel old again.
I cut my teeth on a Terak 8510/a operating under the UCSD p-System. I had the monochrome graphics display and the dual 8" floppies. The thing was a beast, but was amazingly reliable. Sometimes, if it's really quiet, I can still hear the floppy drive going *ca-thunk* *ca-thunk*.
Now get the hell off my lawn before I spray you with the hose.
Perhaps they were measuring POUSes - Protons Of Unusual Smallness. Maybe?
..."
Or a better explanation probably comes from the article editor - "The average Joe can't comprehend something smaller than a mosquito, or a number larger than a million, so substitute those
This isn't news, nor is it some grand conspiracy. It's perfectly normal business practice. If you price a product (or worse, make it available for free,) you'll have huge demand. This demand carries with it a customer support expense, which can be quite large. You can break a company with excessive expenses, of which customer support is one.
When pricing a product, you typically want to set a minimum price specifically for the purpose of eliminating the deadbeat/hobbyist factor. Yes, you'll lose a couple of potential sales because the price presents a barrier to entry, but if you did the math properly, that minor loss is substantially easier to swallow than the loss from a huge non-revenue-generating support obligation. If the majority of your customers are businesses, they won't blink at a couple-hundred bucks for a product.
The expendable portion of a lunar mission isn't necessarily waste. You took a bunch of survey equipment (including a golf cart) to the moon. Why would you expend structure and fuel to bring it back? Similarly, you need structure and tanks to contain the fuel you're using to get to the moon. When the tanks are empty, why would you haul that empty (and now useless) mass around? Nope, the most efficient method requires you to be an interstellar litterbug. As soon as a resource is depleted, you jettison as much as you can.
In space, mass is the one variable you can control. Escape velocity, orbital velocity, and a host of other parameters are dictated by the math - your orbital altitude is a function of your velocity, not your mass. So to obtain a particular orbit, you need to achieve velocity V. The energy required to do so is dictated by E = 1/2mv^2. There's a direct relationship between the mass of the vehicle and the energy required to achieve a particular delta-V.
If you look at the Rocket Equation, you'll see that the overall relationship between wet mass (fuel) and dry mass (structure + payload) is exponential in nature. At the bottom of the Wiki page (link above) there's an example comparing single- and two-stage-to-orbit vehicles. All things being equal, the two-stage vehicle can put more mass into LEO by shedding the first stage.
Besides, bringing back used equipment is usually pointless. All of the Apollo-era vehicles used ablative shielding techniques, and couldn't be re-used (by design.) The Shuttle is technically re-usable, but it's largely rebuilt in-between flights. It pays a huge penalty in payload mass in exchange for bringing the brick-lined wings on a round-trip journey.
Hell, if I was inclined to perform questionable behavior on the web, I'd certainly be making a Pringles-can antenna for my WiFi card, and I'd hunt down some poor rube's AP several km away. I absolutely wouldn't be abusing my neighbor's AP ... too close to home. The police will come knocking within 300 feet of the offending AP because they *know* WiFi doesn't have more range than that.
Sitting in front of a house leeching WiFi access will probably get you noticed, expecially if you're there for hours. The busybodies in my neighborhood will call the parking enforcement asshats if you park your car on the street for more than one day. (Yeah, I gotta move.)
A friend of mine had a wonderful comment about patents - "There's no such thing as a defensive patent. A patent is a sword. You use it to attack other people. Having a patent doesn't prevent someone from sueing you, so it never functions as a defensive element."
The so-called "defensive patents" are just used to deter attacks through the threat of countersuit. Mutually Assured Litigation?
Probably because we realize that *expecting* tentacle-rape would be unrealistic.
Dammit, shoulda included the link to the 2004 Maritime Piracy Maps.
Looks like Indonesia and Nigeria are good places to avoid too. I didn't realize Nigeria was a hotbed of maritime Pirate activity. Maybe all the 419-scammers are looking to branch out.
Redefining "science" to be "any grammatically-correct explanation of phenomena, regardless of plausibility or logic, will be acceptable as long as you feel good about the answer."
I hereby coin the phrase New Science, Kansas-Style. See New Math for background if you weren't in elementary school in the US in the early 1970's.
I further declare the so-called Kansas Board of Education to be a bunch of emotional, dung-flinging chimps. I haven't seen much more retarded behavior than this (and I do mean "retarded" from a damaging-to-society perspective.)
Apply for a title? From whom? You're making the assumption that there's an existing government in place on the moon from which you apply for title to land.
That's crap. If you have the resources to get your butt onto the moon and establish a permanent presence, you should just declare yourself to be a sovereign state and tell the rest of the world to "f*ck off."
Be prepared to defend your new turf, however. Nothing gets a country's attention as much as someone attempting to declare sovereignty in a very visible place. You'll probably be getting a visit from the Space Marines, the Ukrainian Space Police, and the Chinese Taikonaut Re-Education Squad.
But there's a fundamental difference between the Apollo-era technology developments and the modern ISS efforts. For Apollo, nothing existed. The problems were largely unknown. Folks tooks lots of risk, and they were very creative with their solutions.
The ISS is all about risk avoidance, and all the technology developed for the ISS is being created within well-known bounds and limits. Want to fly an experiment on the ISS? It needs to be made from space-rated materials (i.e. stuff we already have and know about.) NASA has a list. If you use materials that aren't on the list, you have two options: a) change to approved materials; or b) go through the space qualification process. Most folks opt for (a) because it's less expensive in both time and bucks. The rules, regulations, and processes tend to funnel everyone back toward known materials and processes. It's like setting out on an expedition to explore your bathtub.
I'm not a fan of the ISS simply because it became more of a political platform than a scientific one. There *could* be amazing stuff done there. Instead, we use it as a corporate welfare program for the aerospace industry.
If that last statement bothers you, ask why the ISS can't have more than two crew aboard if the Shuttle doesn't fly. The answer is "water." There isn't enough water capacity in the ISS to support a third person, and they don't have the water reclamation facility installed yet. You'd think that basic self-sustenance equipment like the Environmental Control and Life Support System (ECLSS) would have been one of the *first* modules launched, not the last. Nope. Here's where I put on my tinfoil hat - If the ISS could sustain itself, cutting back Shuttle launches (i.e. budget cuts) would be acceptable. However, if the ISS inhabitants die without regular Shuttle missions, the Shuttle *must* fly! This all comes back to the situation where the ISS is the place for the Shuttle to go, and the Shuttle is what keeps the ISS going. It's a parasitic symbiosis that just drains the global economy.
I belive I'll see new technology derivatives from the rovers on Mars. I don't expect squat from the ISS.
Damn, I didn't even realize I'd typed it wrong. And I *know* it's "Stirling." I've built several Stirling engines, and they're cool little devices.
Mea cupla.
But when the airplane was new, it was within the realm of reality to go build one yourself. "Pilot's license" ... A what? If you look at the history of aviation, it's full of half-crazed poineers who built their own craft, sometimes dying in the process. But the DIY opportunity existed. It still does, though highly regulated by the gub'ment.
... a major cost being the insurance that's required. "Small" spacecraft are typically 500-1000 kg, and cost millions to get into orbit. The test and acceptance procedures are draconian. They're also in place to reduce the risk that your mission will hose the launch vehicle and impact all the other paying customers.
Fast forward a half a century, and you'll see a bunch of folks doing experimental rocket launches. Many are privately funded. Lots of folks did dangerous things. Some were successful.
Nowadays, we're completely risk-averse. Launches are prohibitively expensive
I'm depressed at the amateur and university efforts. Everyone seems to launch a Mode-J repeater or a camera or the same old and tired missions that have been accomplished in LEO for the last 20 years. Yeah, it's more affordable to launch a Cubesat payload, but most of those fly hacked digital cameras or hacked hand-held radios. Let's face it - LEO is boring.
Dammit. Now I just rambling. Getting back on-topic, it's virtually impossible for average folks to participate in space exploration with the same opportunities presented by aircraft. Space travel is difficult, but we've put up legal and cost barriers to prevent widespread participation. Yes, crashing a rocket into your neighbor's house is a bad thing, but so is flying your homebuilt aircraft into your neighbor's house. I strongly suspect that NASA needs to control space flight opportunities, or it will cease to exist (or worse, become the red-headed stepchild of the FAA.) The politics have gotten in the way of progress. Beyond that, we're going to need to invent new propulsion technologies to make spaceflight more common. You can't negotiate with the physics - there's an energy cost associated with getting to LEO. It doesn't matter what fuel you use, you need to have a delta-V of about 7km/s to maintain orbit. How you do that is up to you, but right now it's really expensive.
Sterling engines are "heat differential" engines. They require a hot-side, and a cold-side. It doesn't matter where the "hot" and "cold" come from. A cup of coffee or your hand (relative to ambient air temperature) works great for small Sterling engines. The solar focusing technique is just one implementation.
Unless this is a nuclear reaction, the Mg doesn't go away. It'll still be around, probably in the "spent reactants" tank (i.e. the non-gaseous "waste" tank.) The fuel infrastructure will certainly want to collect and recycle that material (assuming that it's a more economical source of Mg than strip-mining some remote town.) The "no emissions" part of this article's claim just makes this stink like a scam.