Not really. One shuttle launch I attended was cancelled due to bad weather in Africa, because it would have gone splat if it had to abort and tried to land there. Many landed in California because the weather was too bad to land at KSC, and you only got one chance to land or go splat.
I don't remember how Skylon is supposed to work, but every pound of excess fuel carried to allow it to abort a landing and try again is a pound less it can carry to orbit. And its payload capacity is already small.
Reuse of the shuttle took several months of costly refurbishing for each launch, though.
If I remember correctly, wasn't the fastest turnaround about six weeks between flights? I think that was two flights of the same payload, though, so they didn't have to change out much in the payload bay.
The SRBs were re-used as well as the engines connected to the Shuttle itself.
The tin cans around the SRMs were reused. There's still debate as to whether it saved NASA any money, since most of the cost of the SRB was the SRM inside it, which had to be replaced every time.
Tougher means heavier. Every additional pound used for toughness is one less usable pound for payload.
That's Shuttle-think: 'to minimize cost, everything must be as efficient as possible to get the maximum payload on each flight'.
In reality, if making the engine 10% heavier would allow you reuse a stage twice as often before you had to throw it away, you'd probably find you saved money. In particular, the mass of the first stage engines has little impact on the payload, as they don't go anywhere near orbit.
And the Skylon is looking to build a genuine spaceplane, single stage to orbit, with its funky jet/rocket combined engines,
Trouble is, from the numbers I've seen it won't cost much less per pound to orbit than a reusable Falcon, but will cost many times more to develop than a resuable Falcon. The high development cost of SSTOs is why Musk is far more likely to be the one who slashes the cost of getting things into orbit. Obviously, at some point, the cost of recovering and reassembling the stages becomes such a high proportion of the cost of a launch that SSTO will start to make sense.
These are not cost reduction measures but rather anti-tamper protections.
Yes and no. In some cases you may be correct, but when I worked in consumer electronics, the devices were glued because it was cheaper and screws would have required us to use a thicker care just so there was space for the screws.
And 99.9% of people would just throw it away if it failed, so why worry about it?
Hey, it's the anti-Space Nutter Nutter. How's it going?
And yes, I would totally have bought a $1000 printer to print one $80 part and then throw it away. That's why I didn't.
For another example, one of the common causes for scrapping one of the cars I used to own was the coolant tank failing, because it was two pieces of plastic glued or melted together and the joint would eventually fail (after about fifteen years, in mine). Then you had to find a replacement coolant tank from a scrapyard which hadn't failed, or bodge in one from another model. I'm not sure whether a current 3D printer can produce something that would survive temperatures from -10 to 110C and pressures of a couple of atmospheres on a routine basis, but it's another area where it could save someone having to scrap a device worth more than $1000.
A 3D printer could certainly have saved me $80 buying a new soap dispenser for our dishwasher when the plastic latch broke so it would no longer stay closed. There are a number of things I've thrown away because some small part like that broke and it wasn't cost-effective to fix.
I've been wondering for some time now why TLS (SSH) is not integrated into the OS, to extend the TCP/IP stack on a low level.
Hint: you don't need it when all mass-market modern operating systems I've used have IPSEC built in.
Of course IPSEC is an abomination that's a billion times easier to misconfigure than to configure correctly, and still suffers from the same authentication issues as HTTPS. If they hadn't thrown the kitchen sink in the spec, we'd probably all be using encrypted communications by now. Hey, did anyone see the NSA skulking around the IPSEC committee?
1. Until recently, most PCs had only a dual core CPU. 2. You're assuming those tasks can trivially be done in parallel. In reality, most can't. You can't render the graphics until the physics are calculated, for example. Yes, you can be calculating physics for the next frame while you're rendering the current one, but then you have to maintain two copies of all the relevant data (current and new), or use a more complex data format which can support multiple threads updating it at the same time. That's a lot more work than just wrapping a thread around the physics calculations.
You are talking about a very short period of prosperity that was artificially created by having the government dump a whole pile of money largely created by debt extending barely over a twenty year period of time.
You forgot the part about bombing the crap out of the rest of the world, and handing half of it over to Commies who kept their workers out of the global economic system.
Well, the US (unlike the Reich) pretty much has to go high-tech with its army, simply because high losses would quickly mean that support for any kind of war would decline sharply.
Only for wars that never had any popular support in the first place.
And America can't afford to lose its high-tech aircraft, because they're so expensive.
Incidentally, that's the same warload as a F-117, and no one ever complained that it didn't carry enough bombs.
That's because they had real bombers to do the grunt work. They'd sure have been complaining if the F-117 was the only bomber they had.
The F-35's stealth is only useful in a ground-attack role in a few tiny corner cases--which country, exactly, do you think it's going to be bombing which has good enough air defence for the stealth to make a difference, but not good enough that it makes no difference?--and, for that, you pay several times the cost of an aircraft that's just as capable the rest of the time. And, given the cost of losing one, odds are they'll just stay back out of range and launch missiles, the same way a cheaper aircraft would.
Isn't the F-35 heavily reliant on networked sensors to detect targets, since using radar immediately tells the other guys where it is? Doesn't that have precisely the same jamming problem as drone links?
Sure, it can keep flying without those links, but that doesn't help if it can't shoot anything.
Duh. You don't have to worry about 'air supremacy' when fighting third-world peasants, because they don't have any planes. What you do have to worry about are anti-aircraft guns and missiles, which are vastly cheaper than F-35s.
Sending a $337,000,000 (according to the 'War Nerd' post linked above) fighter to blow up Toyotas full of peasants is like using a 30mm gatling gun to hunt ducks. It's all very exciting, and fun if you can afford it, but not very sensible.
Those "sensor pods" are shaped like external fuel tanks. They've got that rounded and curved shape, to make them aerodynamic. Which is horrible for stealth. The F35 has to pack all its baggage inside the fuselage, with minimal openings.
You do realize the F-35 has to carry most if its weapons on highly non-stealthy wing pylons for air-to-ground attacks, right? If I remember correctly, it can only carry two bombs or four air-to-air missiles internally, everything else has to go under the wings... including the external fuel tanks required for a long bombing mission.
Actually, if that were the case, the predecessors wouldn't be as capable.
The predecessors actually have to do something in the real world, like bombing third-world peasants, while the F-35 sits in a hangar. Besides, who's really going to risk a $200,000,000 jet to blow up a $10,000 pickup with a couple of guys with RPGs in the back?
Because everyone in Europe has a high-speed rail station outside their house from where they can take a train all the way to their destination by the direct route without stopping anywhere in between.
You're right that flying makes little sense on short routes, due to the time taken to get on and off the plane. But high-speed rail makes little sense on those routes, either. When I lived in the UK, even the relatively slow 220-ish km/h inter-city trains used to spend about the first half hour crawling out of London before they could get up to speed, then, after a few minutes at that speed, they'd be crawling in and out of the stations where they stopped along the way.
If NASA had used a 3D scanner to scan in an existing wrench, instead of designing a new one, then they could claim, in some rudimentary way, to have deployed the first instance of a star-trek style transporter.
Only if they destroyed the original wrench after they 'transported' it.
That seems more likely, but, when I was writing DMA code years ago, we put the buffers in non-cached RAM (and there were only written to from a driver in the kernel). Maybe explicit cache flushes are faster these days.
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Not really. One shuttle launch I attended was cancelled due to bad weather in Africa, because it would have gone splat if it had to abort and tried to land there. Many landed in California because the weather was too bad to land at KSC, and you only got one chance to land or go splat.
I don't remember how Skylon is supposed to work, but every pound of excess fuel carried to allow it to abort a landing and try again is a pound less it can carry to orbit. And its payload capacity is already small.
Reuse of the shuttle took several months of costly refurbishing for each launch, though.
If I remember correctly, wasn't the fastest turnaround about six weeks between flights? I think that was two flights of the same payload, though, so they didn't have to change out much in the payload bay.
The SRBs were re-used as well as the engines connected to the Shuttle itself.
The tin cans around the SRMs were reused. There's still debate as to whether it saved NASA any money, since most of the cost of the SRB was the SRM inside it, which had to be replaced every time.
Tougher means heavier. Every additional pound used for toughness is one less usable pound for payload.
That's Shuttle-think: 'to minimize cost, everything must be as efficient as possible to get the maximum payload on each flight'.
In reality, if making the engine 10% heavier would allow you reuse a stage twice as often before you had to throw it away, you'd probably find you saved money. In particular, the mass of the first stage engines has little impact on the payload, as they don't go anywhere near orbit.
And the Skylon is looking to build a genuine spaceplane, single stage to orbit, with its funky jet/rocket combined engines,
Trouble is, from the numbers I've seen it won't cost much less per pound to orbit than a reusable Falcon, but will cost many times more to develop than a resuable Falcon. The high development cost of SSTOs is why Musk is far more likely to be the one who slashes the cost of getting things into orbit. Obviously, at some point, the cost of recovering and reassembling the stages becomes such a high proportion of the cost of a launch that SSTO will start to make sense.
These are not cost reduction measures but rather anti-tamper protections.
Yes and no. In some cases you may be correct, but when I worked in consumer electronics, the devices were glued because it was cheaper and screws would have required us to use a thicker care just so there was space for the screws.
And 99.9% of people would just throw it away if it failed, so why worry about it?
Hey, it's the anti-Space Nutter Nutter. How's it going?
And yes, I would totally have bought a $1000 printer to print one $80 part and then throw it away. That's why I didn't.
For another example, one of the common causes for scrapping one of the cars I used to own was the coolant tank failing, because it was two pieces of plastic glued or melted together and the joint would eventually fail (after about fifteen years, in mine). Then you had to find a replacement coolant tank from a scrapyard which hadn't failed, or bodge in one from another model. I'm not sure whether a current 3D printer can produce something that would survive temperatures from -10 to 110C and pressures of a couple of atmospheres on a routine basis, but it's another area where it could save someone having to scrap a device worth more than $1000.
A 3D printer could certainly have saved me $80 buying a new soap dispenser for our dishwasher when the plastic latch broke so it would no longer stay closed. There are a number of things I've thrown away because some small part like that broke and it wasn't cost-effective to fix.
I've been wondering for some time now why TLS (SSH) is not integrated into the OS, to extend the TCP/IP stack on a low level.
Hint: you don't need it when all mass-market modern operating systems I've used have IPSEC built in.
Of course IPSEC is an abomination that's a billion times easier to misconfigure than to configure correctly, and still suffers from the same authentication issues as HTTPS. If they hadn't thrown the kitchen sink in the spec, we'd probably all be using encrypted communications by now. Hey, did anyone see the NSA skulking around the IPSEC committee?
Hopefully this might convince them to make more movies that are actually worth watching, rather than 'CGI! Then EXPLOSION! LENS FLARE!'
1. Until recently, most PCs had only a dual core CPU.
2. You're assuming those tasks can trivially be done in parallel. In reality, most can't. You can't render the graphics until the physics are calculated, for example. Yes, you can be calculating physics for the next frame while you're rendering the current one, but then you have to maintain two copies of all the relevant data (current and new), or use a more complex data format which can support multiple threads updating it at the same time. That's a lot more work than just wrapping a thread around the physics calculations.
Yes, but... Global Warming! Oil is EVIL! Cheap Oil Will Kill Us All!
You are talking about a very short period of prosperity that was artificially created by having the government dump a whole pile of money largely created by debt extending barely over a twenty year period of time.
You forgot the part about bombing the crap out of the rest of the world, and handing half of it over to Commies who kept their workers out of the global economic system.
Well, the US (unlike the Reich) pretty much has to go high-tech with its army, simply because high losses would quickly mean that support for any kind of war would decline sharply.
Only for wars that never had any popular support in the first place.
And America can't afford to lose its high-tech aircraft, because they're so expensive.
Incidentally, that's the same warload as a F-117, and no one ever complained that it didn't carry enough bombs.
That's because they had real bombers to do the grunt work. They'd sure have been complaining if the F-117 was the only bomber they had.
The F-35's stealth is only useful in a ground-attack role in a few tiny corner cases--which country, exactly, do you think it's going to be bombing which has good enough air defence for the stealth to make a difference, but not good enough that it makes no difference?--and, for that, you pay several times the cost of an aircraft that's just as capable the rest of the time. And, given the cost of losing one, odds are they'll just stay back out of range and launch missiles, the same way a cheaper aircraft would.
Isn't the F-35 heavily reliant on networked sensors to detect targets, since using radar immediately tells the other guys where it is? Doesn't that have precisely the same jamming problem as drone links?
Sure, it can keep flying without those links, but that doesn't help if it can't shoot anything.
Duh. You don't have to worry about 'air supremacy' when fighting third-world peasants, because they don't have any planes. What you do have to worry about are anti-aircraft guns and missiles, which are vastly cheaper than F-35s.
Sending a $337,000,000 (according to the 'War Nerd' post linked above) fighter to blow up Toyotas full of peasants is like using a 30mm gatling gun to hunt ducks. It's all very exciting, and fun if you can afford it, but not very sensible.
Those "sensor pods" are shaped like external fuel tanks. They've got that rounded and curved shape, to make them aerodynamic. Which is horrible for stealth. The F35 has to pack all its baggage inside the fuselage, with minimal openings.
You do realize the F-35 has to carry most if its weapons on highly non-stealthy wing pylons for air-to-ground attacks, right? If I remember correctly, it can only carry two bombs or four air-to-air missiles internally, everything else has to go under the wings... including the external fuel tanks required for a long bombing mission.
Actually, if that were the case, the predecessors wouldn't be as capable.
The predecessors actually have to do something in the real world, like bombing third-world peasants, while the F-35 sits in a hangar. Besides, who's really going to risk a $200,000,000 jet to blow up a $10,000 pickup with a couple of guys with RPGs in the back?
Because everyone in Europe has a high-speed rail station outside their house from where they can take a train all the way to their destination by the direct route without stopping anywhere in between.
You're right that flying makes little sense on short routes, due to the time taken to get on and off the plane. But high-speed rail makes little sense on those routes, either. When I lived in the UK, even the relatively slow 220-ish km/h inter-city trains used to spend about the first half hour crawling out of London before they could get up to speed, then, after a few minutes at that speed, they'd be crawling in and out of the stations where they stopped along the way.
The same could be said for flying car science.
I'm 3D printing my flying car right now. It's just the printer is going to take thirty years to finish printing.
The artificial scarcity of money is the chief factor holding us back from a post-scarcity society. We don't have a production capacity problem.
Cool. Since we have unlimited production capacity, I want my own Death Star in five minutes. Thanks.
If NASA had used a 3D scanner to scan in an existing wrench, instead of designing a new one, then they could claim, in some rudimentary way, to have deployed the first instance of a star-trek style transporter.
Only if they destroyed the original wrench after they 'transported' it.
The base iPad Mini 2 lists at $299 and was as low as $229 during recent sales; the N1 is launching at $249.
And there are Commodore 64s on ebay for $50. This thing is clearly crazy overpriced.
That seems more likely, but, when I was writing DMA code years ago, we put the buffers in non-cached RAM (and there were only written to from a driver in the kernel). Maybe explicit cache flushes are faster these days.