A whole deck full of them. Browse through here to get an idea. Uses from nuclear physics, CFD, military applications, applications that will set off the tinfoil beanie crowd...yeah, the.gov still has supercomputers. Heck, how do you think NOAA makes the weather forecasts that AccuWeather wants to (re)sell you?
The developers of OO have basically been trying to reverse engineer the.doc encoding that Microsoft uses in order to get it to work. They're doing this blind, so they're bound to miss some random "feature" that somebody needs. It also doesn't help that for years Microsoft has changed the.doc format to make versions it has EOL'ed incompatible in order to force people to plunk down the money to upgrade.
That said, I regret to say that I still have to use MS Office almost daily. I have to use it at work because that's what's supported by IT. (I will give them this much, when they forced the update to Office 2003 they also loaded Firefox and encouraged people to start using it. I may have to give a demo in the next staff meeting...). At home I have to use it too because I wind up having to write technical papers for my grad school classes and I need the Equation Editor. OO, in my experience, has severely limited support for writing equations. (If anyone knows of any improvements they've made or a good third party plugin, please let me know. I'd love to try them out.) I also wind up having to use macros in Excel to work through calculations. OO doesn't support this well either. Those are the only things holding me back from a full conversion to open source...a tenuous but frustratingly strong chain.
There is a public safety element at work here. In the last 6 months in the New Orleans area, a stretch of interstate and a heavily-used bridge over Lake Ponchartrain have both seen speed limit increases. The rationale was essentially to decrease the delta between the people who actually obey the limit and those who think they know what the "accepted" speed is and thus decrease accidents. They coupled this with stepped up enforcement on the idiots who still insist on going over the new limit.
IF you think you own the road and can go whatever speed you want, you WILL cause an accident. It's just a matter of time. I've seen drivers so intent on maintaining their idiotically high speed and NEVER EVER hitting the brake that they will swerve in and out of lanes and onto the shoulder. Barring that, they will tailgate within an inch of your bumper and at the first opening swerve around you and come within an inch of clipping you. Law of averages says your luck will run out. Then you slow down traffic for the rest of us as the police scrape your bloody remains and that of the innocent family you just took out off of the pavement.
You've never been through (insert ubiquitous small town here), have you? There are towns out there that exist solely as speed traps. They usually appear on a major state or US highway (not interstates) between larger population centers. Since local authorities set the speed through their towns, they will ramp down the speed limit 20-30 mph in less than half a mile. At the end of that is the town's lone cop with a radar gun and your ticket already half filled out. If you haven't already vaporized your brakes trying to kill your speed in time, you're toast.
Some states have tried to pass laws making it harder to do this, but they have always been met with cries of "But we have no other revenue source for our town!!!" Yes, it's that blatant. I've heard that Florida's famous for this and I've had near misses in Colorado and Missouri.
The Progress ships are automated, but are very closely monitored on final station approach. An astronaut or ground control can take over the operation at the first sign of trouble. Linky. The station is also a very big target. The point of DART was to demonstrate automated rendezvous capability with a much smaller target. That it got within 300 feet is pretty darn good, IMHO.
I know very little about the mission, but I'll take a wild guess here, the navigational systems probably need refining. It sounds to me like it ran itself out of fuel getting itself oriented properly with the target satellite. You can only take so much with you.
"The crack is about the size as a hair on the lens of a camera," NASA spokeswoman Eileen Hawley told reporters at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The crack was located just above the intertank door on the rear of the tank, opposite the orbiter, Hawley said.
It sounds like a small surface defect in the spray on insulation, not in the aluminum tank. Similar defects have probably happened before, but never made the headlines. Most likely the maximum hazard is that they will see a very small amount of ice growth at that site when propellant is loaded. This isn't even a significant threat because the crack is on the opposite side of the tank from the orbiter, so unless you've got some ice that can do fancier flying than Oswald's magic bullet there is no threat to launch.
What brought down Columbia was a large chunk of foam that was hand-applied when the tank was closed out. The hand-application process of the bipod ramp foam tends to leave large voids. That's what popped off and hit the wing. The ramps have been replaced with heaters to avoid ice formation at that location. (Ironically, the foam was put there in the first place to prevent ice from forming on that joint and hitting the orbiter.)
Disclaimer: I work for NASA, but any opinions are my own and haven't been approved by anybody. I'm just trying to inject a little sanity into this discussion...
Beyond that, I'm sad, but I can't get too broken up about Hubble. Speaking for myself, it's a cost-benefit equation. You can spend whatever a shuttle mission costs to keep Hubble flying for a couple of years. It snaps a few more photos and then dies anyway. It's near it's planned lifespan. It had a good run, but bottom line, the capability is out there to ensure there are pretty pictures of the cosmos for years to come.
What I'm more disturbed by are the good missions being killed before they're born (JIMO) and the one of a kind opportunities being casually tossed aside (Voyager).
Luck has little to do with it. Unmanned satellites have the advantage that they can be placed in orbits that are relatively clear of debris. Depending on the mission, I think (and my memory's pretty fuzzy right now) that some satellites have been rad hardened enough to survive in/near the Van Allen belts, an area that is naturally swept of debris.
Unfortunately, electronics are easier to rad harden than people, so the shuttle must fly in "riskier" orbits from a debris impact point of view. The shuttle is protected in two major ways that I know of: first, a box of space around the orbiter is constantly monitored by NORAD radar. If something enters that box, they assess it's threat to the orbiter and can order course corrections if necessary. This helps dodge a lot of bullets. Second, after the infamous paint fleck that took a chunk out of Challenger's window, flight rules were changed so that the orbiter is oriented with the main engines facing toward the direction of flight at all times. So much better to have a paint fleck put a hole in an ablative nozzle that isn't being used and that will get refitted anyway than have that same fleck cause an explosive decompression.
You remind me of my fiancee. She put up with the crap served up in her high school for 3 years before she dropped out. *GASP* What makes her case different is she was able to find a college that would admit her without a high school diploma (they DO exist). After a couple of years at the place that took her, she was able to transfer anywhere in the country. I'm not saying this is a solution for everyone, but it can be an option depending on your situation.
Something else I'd suggest is to find a program similar to NASA's SHARP program. It's a summer internship program for high school students to work at NASA centers. I'm sure other agencies and private sector companies have similar programs.
Not to defend Berman or anything (he is a fuckwit), but I don't think the entire blame can be laid on him. I think the faceless (and brainless) network suits are at least partially to blame.
Think about it, the three incarnations that have aired as part of a network lineup have either sucked, been cancelled early, or both. The ultimate reason is ratings. Network suits care only about ratings, because they are in a brutal competition to be the first to the bottom of the barrel. The two incarnations that aired in syndication, though, were actually quite good (or at least respectable). Because it's airing as filler for a station (yes it sounds bad, but bear with me) they aren't as worried about ratings, so there's less meddling by suits in order to get a short-term ratings boost.
To illustrate, TOS was simply killed because it wasn't getting enough ratings. NBC had other stuff to work with, so no stupid stunts (and it was the '60s, we were much closer to the top of the barrel). Voyager wasn't too bad, but it was UPN's only show that was worth anything at the time, so they wanted to boost it's ratings (and cross-promote its other shows) any way they could to make the network look good. Unfortunately that led to the travesty of an episode guest starring the Rock and the "hey, CBS is doing a miniseries about an asteroid hitting earth this week, how quickly can we air an asteroid episode too?" insult that was the episode "Rise". Then, with Enterprise, they continued the ratings boost shenanigans from the beginning, alienating fans and leading to a horrible show. This time, because of the WWE deal, UPN can afford to abandon the ST franchise. Anyone else notice that when they put it in the Friday night deathwatch slot, the show got a far sight better?
I suspect one reason a lot of 8 character passwords are "fat fingered" is because anymore we're being forced to create supposedly strong passwords out of more or less random characters. Thus they are forced to type something that would not naturally be typed, so people fumble it. I know I do it at work.
This same jumble of characters I would think would do more to kill typing speed. Again, they're "fat fingering" it because they're not typing in natural letter combinations, so when the authenticator barfs, they slow down the next time and mash each letter slowly and methodically. I think it would be faster for most people that know how to touch type (hunt and peck management types are more or less boned) to type an 8 word phrase than an 8 character random mess.
You do have a point here, but "standard" grammar (not to mention spelling;)) has a bad habit of widely varying over relatively narrow regions, particularly among languages like English that have very poorly defined grammatical rules. A locally-originating attack might have a chance of succeeding, but some hacker in Asia might have a harder time parsing a passphrase written by someone in the US Deep South.
Damn. I just read through that link to the Feynman excerpt and flashed back to the MMATs back in grade school in Missouri. The tests were every spring. For three weeks beforehand, the teachers would drop everything and make us memorize stuff that would be on the tests. Worst month of the year, as far as I was concerned, because we weren't learning anything. By all accounts it's even worse now thanks to NCLB.
Anyway, in hopes to bring this remotely back ontopic, hopefully this program works and they can apply it to other sciences and mathematics. But...I'm R'ing TFA. It's in London. Probably wouldn't happen here in the States. The schools won't accept the liability. And so the race to the bottom continues.
Also wanted to mention that when the tanks are released, they technically aren't empty either. There's still a little bit of propellant that is not dense enough to be used (too hot or not enough pressure to maintain engine pump functionality) or has been so thoroughly entrained with pressurant that it would start causing problems. Kinda like the gas tank on your car. There's still fuel left when it's "empty". What's liquid but not enough to feed the pumps and more has been kicked up to make fumes...not usable either. Difference is, you don't care about that extra little bit in your gas tank; you just go get gas. But for flight, you have to accurately estimate this amount left over because the rest of the fuel still has to lift it. More fuel in the tank = more of this overage. And there ain't a damn thing that can be done about it because it's physics, not government waste. (Unless you want to sic the OMB against $Creator, which might prove interesting...)
Not dumb...actually pretty interesting. I'll take a stab...
Theoretically, yes. Depending on the mission profile, the tank isn't necessarily completely full, so there may be extra volume available. Whether or not it's actually enough to allow the shuttle to orbit the extra mass, I don't know. Assuming Mir's orbital inclination is anything like ISS (remember it's at a high inclination so the Russians can reach it from Baiknour) though, that margin is eaten into more since it takes extra fuel to launch to higher orbital inclinations. Plus you have to get the whole ball of wax to the right altitude. Higher altitude=more fuel=less margin. There could be ways around that...strapping on extra boosters like what's done with the Delta 4 and Atlas 5 heavy configurations, for example, although flight certifying such things takes time and money, unfortunately.
NASA would also need a reason to go to MIR. I doubt they would designate a special shuttle mission or four just to ferry an ET to orbit. Of course, the company could pay NASA a whole fuckload of money...
On a side note, I just finished reading Earth by David Brin. In it he describes some interesting ways of building infrastructure in orbit, notably building orbital stations using previously expendable launch vehicle components rather than by launching specifically designed Lego pieces. Rather interesting approach to things.
By the way, I'm not involved in the shuttle program, though I do do propulsion testing work. This is my own best guess. If anyone closer to the program would care to clarify, please do.
My boss used to work at Michoud. I want to say he told me it was about 1000 pounds of weight savings (my memory's fuzzy but it was a rather large number for this business). Interestingly, they got the idea from the assembly line worker suggestion box, so that thing's not always the black hole its stereotyped as being.
That's exactly what they did. Ice formation on the tanks is a huge problem. When you're dealing with cryogenic fuels (up to several hundred degrees below zero...you can look it up), humidity in the air immediately condenses and freezes to the tank. The point of the insulation is to prevent this, because a large chunk of ice (very fucking heavy compared to the foam) falling onto a key portion of your spacecraft is extremely undesirable. We've seen that the foam on the bipod ramp is just as dangerous, but just leaving that spot on the tank uninsulated is suicidal. Hence the heaters, the best thing that can be done with a bad situation.
I think after they got to the moon they didn't really know what to do next[...]
Thing is, NASA absolutely knew what to do next. There was a huge vision of permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations and manned trips to Mars as a follow on to the Apollo program. All of this would be built with a reusable "space truck." Thing is, Nixon and Congress refused to fund everything but the space truck (which now had little to do), which became the highly politicized design of the space shuttle and things started going downhill from there.
I suggest reading the first couple chapters of the CAIB report. (It's available online.) They basically went back to the very beginning of the Shuttle program in order to trace everything that went wrong. It's very enlightening.
About the, erm, shocking railroad experience, I saw the first one where they had the dummy basically holding the energized rail before he got fried. Based on shall we say...personal...observations, I'm not so sure that they were correctly modeling the biology/physics involved. IIRC, they basically uncorked a reservoir in their dummy and let it flow based on the pressure head. The bladder is actually pressurized through muscle contraction, imparting a greater exit velocity. This appears to result in the continuous stream they had such a hard time reproducing, thus resulting in an extra tasty crispy wang.
That said, it's hilarious to watch these guys try to kill themselves (after all, they're what we call "professionals") just to prove how stupid people can be, but I wouldn't necessarily go to them for a rigorous course in the scientific method.
Hard to believe...he was at Stennis Space Center just a few weeks ago with fellow astronauts Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra promoting a scholarship program they had founded, so I got a chance to see him speak. Obviously they had all aged, but it looked like he had more than the others, unfortunately. But his confidence was still there; you could feel it in the room. Truly an extraordinary person. Thank you for leading the way, Mr. Cooper. We'll try to make you proud.
Just bought a civic hybrid CVT... EPA sticker says it's 47 highway/48 city. In the albeit short time I've had it, It's been getting consistently around 40...That's highway commuting to work plus playing dodge-moron on New Orleans city streets. Overall, not too bad. I'm sure if I babyed it I could squeeze out a few more mpg's, but then the jackasses in the F150s wouldn't even bother tailgating; I'd just be a speedbump to them. (People wonder why LA insurance rates are so high.) So, yeah, the EPA's numbers are a little dodgy, but it's still better than a lot of stuff on the road. And the way I figure it, the less I'm sucking from the oil company tit, the better.
P.S. If y'all want to get specific: here's the disclaimer from the sticker: Actual mileage will vary with options, driving conditions, driving habits, and vehicle's condition. Results reported to EPA indicated that the majority of vehicles with these estimates will achieve between 40 and 56 mpg (city), and 39 and 55 mpg (highway).
It goes on to say that the mileages of all other compact cars run from 13 to 48 city and 19 to 51 highway. EPA gives themselves quite a bit of wiggle room.
Why can't they just work on a 100% completely reusable Single Stage to Orbit (SSTO) Verticle Takeoff and Landing (VTOL)?
My boss used to work on Lockheed's end of the X-33 development process. He told me that SSTO is pretty much a pipe dream at this point because of difficulties in maintaining such large fuel tanks for launch and reentry. Any fuel tank will have several hundred pounds of residual propellant that have to be dealt with. The propellant will cyclically boil and condense inside the tank during orbits, inducing thermal stresses on the tank as well as constantly varying its pressure; same with any residual heat from reentry. Maintaining control over such issues is difficult. Extra insulation, for example, creates a weight penalty that could be more usefully put toward payload.
I see a lot of people on here complaining that the shuttle is inefficient because it takes up extra equipment (in the form of flight control surfaces) that it doesn't need for the majority of the flight. The same logic follows with fuel tanks for a SSTO scheme. This is why anymore, most follow-on vehicle schemes require at least two stages to reach orbit.
Real is currently working on dying a painful death. Apple is under no obligation to throw them a lifeline. The only conceivable business interest anyone would have in Real would be buying them out, and they really don't have any technology of value that a gazillion of others don't already have.
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Thanks! I'll give it a try.
A whole deck full of them. Browse through here to get an idea. Uses from nuclear physics, CFD, military applications, applications that will set off the tinfoil beanie crowd...yeah, the .gov still has supercomputers. Heck, how do you think NOAA makes the weather forecasts that AccuWeather wants to (re)sell you?
Naah, it was their first time. They were under a lot of pressure to perform. So in the heat of the moment the kernels panicked.
That said, I regret to say that I still have to use MS Office almost daily. I have to use it at work because that's what's supported by IT. (I will give them this much, when they forced the update to Office 2003 they also loaded Firefox and encouraged people to start using it. I may have to give a demo in the next staff meeting...). At home I have to use it too because I wind up having to write technical papers for my grad school classes and I need the Equation Editor. OO, in my experience, has severely limited support for writing equations. (If anyone knows of any improvements they've made or a good third party plugin, please let me know. I'd love to try them out.) I also wind up having to use macros in Excel to work through calculations. OO doesn't support this well either. Those are the only things holding me back from a full conversion to open source...a tenuous but frustratingly strong chain.
IF you think you own the road and can go whatever speed you want, you WILL cause an accident. It's just a matter of time. I've seen drivers so intent on maintaining their idiotically high speed and NEVER EVER hitting the brake that they will swerve in and out of lanes and onto the shoulder. Barring that, they will tailgate within an inch of your bumper and at the first opening swerve around you and come within an inch of clipping you. Law of averages says your luck will run out. Then you slow down traffic for the rest of us as the police scrape your bloody remains and that of the innocent family you just took out off of the pavement.
Some states have tried to pass laws making it harder to do this, but they have always been met with cries of "But we have no other revenue source for our town!!!" Yes, it's that blatant. I've heard that Florida's famous for this and I've had near misses in Colorado and Missouri.
I know very little about the mission, but I'll take a wild guess here, the navigational systems probably need refining. It sounds to me like it ran itself out of fuel getting itself oriented properly with the target satellite. You can only take so much with you.
"The crack is about the size as a hair on the lens of a camera," NASA spokeswoman Eileen Hawley told reporters at NASA's Johnson Space Center. The crack was located just above the intertank door on the rear of the tank, opposite the orbiter, Hawley said.
It sounds like a small surface defect in the spray on insulation, not in the aluminum tank. Similar defects have probably happened before, but never made the headlines. Most likely the maximum hazard is that they will see a very small amount of ice growth at that site when propellant is loaded. This isn't even a significant threat because the crack is on the opposite side of the tank from the orbiter, so unless you've got some ice that can do fancier flying than Oswald's magic bullet there is no threat to launch.
What brought down Columbia was a large chunk of foam that was hand-applied when the tank was closed out. The hand-application process of the bipod ramp foam tends to leave large voids. That's what popped off and hit the wing. The ramps have been replaced with heaters to avoid ice formation at that location. (Ironically, the foam was put there in the first place to prevent ice from forming on that joint and hitting the orbiter.)
Disclaimer: I work for NASA, but any opinions are my own and haven't been approved by anybody. I'm just trying to inject a little sanity into this discussion...
Beyond that, I'm sad, but I can't get too broken up about Hubble. Speaking for myself, it's a cost-benefit equation. You can spend whatever a shuttle mission costs to keep Hubble flying for a couple of years. It snaps a few more photos and then dies anyway. It's near it's planned lifespan. It had a good run, but bottom line, the capability is out there to ensure there are pretty pictures of the cosmos for years to come.
What I'm more disturbed by are the good missions being killed before they're born (JIMO) and the one of a kind opportunities being casually tossed aside (Voyager).
Unfortunately, electronics are easier to rad harden than people, so the shuttle must fly in "riskier" orbits from a debris impact point of view. The shuttle is protected in two major ways that I know of: first, a box of space around the orbiter is constantly monitored by NORAD radar. If something enters that box, they assess it's threat to the orbiter and can order course corrections if necessary. This helps dodge a lot of bullets. Second, after the infamous paint fleck that took a chunk out of Challenger's window, flight rules were changed so that the orbiter is oriented with the main engines facing toward the direction of flight at all times. So much better to have a paint fleck put a hole in an ablative nozzle that isn't being used and that will get refitted anyway than have that same fleck cause an explosive decompression.
Something else I'd suggest is to find a program similar to NASA's SHARP program. It's a summer internship program for high school students to work at NASA centers. I'm sure other agencies and private sector companies have similar programs.
Think about it, the three incarnations that have aired as part of a network lineup have either sucked, been cancelled early, or both. The ultimate reason is ratings. Network suits care only about ratings, because they are in a brutal competition to be the first to the bottom of the barrel. The two incarnations that aired in syndication, though, were actually quite good (or at least respectable). Because it's airing as filler for a station (yes it sounds bad, but bear with me) they aren't as worried about ratings, so there's less meddling by suits in order to get a short-term ratings boost.
To illustrate, TOS was simply killed because it wasn't getting enough ratings. NBC had other stuff to work with, so no stupid stunts (and it was the '60s, we were much closer to the top of the barrel). Voyager wasn't too bad, but it was UPN's only show that was worth anything at the time, so they wanted to boost it's ratings (and cross-promote its other shows) any way they could to make the network look good. Unfortunately that led to the travesty of an episode guest starring the Rock and the "hey, CBS is doing a miniseries about an asteroid hitting earth this week, how quickly can we air an asteroid episode too?" insult that was the episode "Rise". Then, with Enterprise, they continued the ratings boost shenanigans from the beginning, alienating fans and leading to a horrible show. This time, because of the WWE deal, UPN can afford to abandon the ST franchise. Anyone else notice that when they put it in the Friday night deathwatch slot, the show got a far sight better?
This same jumble of characters I would think would do more to kill typing speed. Again, they're "fat fingering" it because they're not typing in natural letter combinations, so when the authenticator barfs, they slow down the next time and mash each letter slowly and methodically. I think it would be faster for most people that know how to touch type (hunt and peck management types are more or less boned) to type an 8 word phrase than an 8 character random mess.
You do have a point here, but "standard" grammar (not to mention spelling ;)) has a bad habit of widely varying over relatively narrow regions, particularly among languages like English that have very poorly defined grammatical rules. A locally-originating attack might have a chance of succeeding, but some hacker in Asia might have a harder time parsing a passphrase written by someone in the US Deep South.
Anyway, in hopes to bring this remotely back ontopic, hopefully this program works and they can apply it to other sciences and mathematics. But...I'm R'ing TFA. It's in London. Probably wouldn't happen here in the States. The schools won't accept the liability. And so the race to the bottom continues.
Also wanted to mention that when the tanks are released, they technically aren't empty either. There's still a little bit of propellant that is not dense enough to be used (too hot or not enough pressure to maintain engine pump functionality) or has been so thoroughly entrained with pressurant that it would start causing problems. Kinda like the gas tank on your car. There's still fuel left when it's "empty". What's liquid but not enough to feed the pumps and more has been kicked up to make fumes...not usable either. Difference is, you don't care about that extra little bit in your gas tank; you just go get gas. But for flight, you have to accurately estimate this amount left over because the rest of the fuel still has to lift it. More fuel in the tank = more of this overage. And there ain't a damn thing that can be done about it because it's physics, not government waste. (Unless you want to sic the OMB against $Creator, which might prove interesting...)
Theoretically, yes. Depending on the mission profile, the tank isn't necessarily completely full, so there may be extra volume available. Whether or not it's actually enough to allow the shuttle to orbit the extra mass, I don't know. Assuming Mir's orbital inclination is anything like ISS (remember it's at a high inclination so the Russians can reach it from Baiknour) though, that margin is eaten into more since it takes extra fuel to launch to higher orbital inclinations. Plus you have to get the whole ball of wax to the right altitude. Higher altitude=more fuel=less margin. There could be ways around that...strapping on extra boosters like what's done with the Delta 4 and Atlas 5 heavy configurations, for example, although flight certifying such things takes time and money, unfortunately.
NASA would also need a reason to go to MIR. I doubt they would designate a special shuttle mission or four just to ferry an ET to orbit. Of course, the company could pay NASA a whole fuckload of money...
On a side note, I just finished reading Earth by David Brin. In it he describes some interesting ways of building infrastructure in orbit, notably building orbital stations using previously expendable launch vehicle components rather than by launching specifically designed Lego pieces. Rather interesting approach to things.
By the way, I'm not involved in the shuttle program, though I do do propulsion testing work. This is my own best guess. If anyone closer to the program would care to clarify, please do.
My boss used to work at Michoud. I want to say he told me it was about 1000 pounds of weight savings (my memory's fuzzy but it was a rather large number for this business). Interestingly, they got the idea from the assembly line worker suggestion box, so that thing's not always the black hole its stereotyped as being.
That's exactly what they did. Ice formation on the tanks is a huge problem. When you're dealing with cryogenic fuels (up to several hundred degrees below zero...you can look it up), humidity in the air immediately condenses and freezes to the tank. The point of the insulation is to prevent this, because a large chunk of ice (very fucking heavy compared to the foam) falling onto a key portion of your spacecraft is extremely undesirable. We've seen that the foam on the bipod ramp is just as dangerous, but just leaving that spot on the tank uninsulated is suicidal. Hence the heaters, the best thing that can be done with a bad situation.
Thing is, NASA absolutely knew what to do next. There was a huge vision of permanent moon bases, orbiting space stations and manned trips to Mars as a follow on to the Apollo program. All of this would be built with a reusable "space truck." Thing is, Nixon and Congress refused to fund everything but the space truck (which now had little to do), which became the highly politicized design of the space shuttle and things started going downhill from there.
I suggest reading the first couple chapters of the CAIB report. (It's available online.) They basically went back to the very beginning of the Shuttle program in order to trace everything that went wrong. It's very enlightening.
That said, it's hilarious to watch these guys try to kill themselves (after all, they're what we call "professionals") just to prove how stupid people can be, but I wouldn't necessarily go to them for a rigorous course in the scientific method.
Hard to believe...he was at Stennis Space Center just a few weeks ago with fellow astronauts Scott Carpenter and Wally Schirra promoting a scholarship program they had founded, so I got a chance to see him speak. Obviously they had all aged, but it looked like he had more than the others, unfortunately. But his confidence was still there; you could feel it in the room. Truly an extraordinary person. Thank you for leading the way, Mr. Cooper. We'll try to make you proud.
10 hours a day eh? I think my fiancee's hedgehog can handle that. It runs. All. Night. Long. Off to work so I can get some sleep....:)
P.S. If y'all want to get specific: here's the disclaimer from the sticker: Actual mileage will vary with options, driving conditions, driving habits, and vehicle's condition. Results reported to EPA indicated that the majority of vehicles with these estimates will achieve between 40 and 56 mpg (city), and 39 and 55 mpg (highway).
It goes on to say that the mileages of all other compact cars run from 13 to 48 city and 19 to 51 highway. EPA gives themselves quite a bit of wiggle room.
My boss used to work on Lockheed's end of the X-33 development process. He told me that SSTO is pretty much a pipe dream at this point because of difficulties in maintaining such large fuel tanks for launch and reentry. Any fuel tank will have several hundred pounds of residual propellant that have to be dealt with. The propellant will cyclically boil and condense inside the tank during orbits, inducing thermal stresses on the tank as well as constantly varying its pressure; same with any residual heat from reentry. Maintaining control over such issues is difficult. Extra insulation, for example, creates a weight penalty that could be more usefully put toward payload.
I see a lot of people on here complaining that the shuttle is inefficient because it takes up extra equipment (in the form of flight control surfaces) that it doesn't need for the majority of the flight. The same logic follows with fuel tanks for a SSTO scheme. This is why anymore, most follow-on vehicle schemes require at least two stages to reach orbit.
Real is currently working on dying a painful death. Apple is under no obligation to throw them a lifeline. The only conceivable business interest anyone would have in Real would be buying them out, and they really don't have any technology of value that a gazillion of others don't already have.