Actually, no. Most are solar fusion power derived (including wind, biogenic coal, biogenic hydrocarbons). But tidal waves are caused by gravity, and nuclear power (be it fission, fusion or radioactive decay) are not solar fusion power derived.
When people talk about fertilizer being made with oil, they are actually talking about ammonia (NH3) production under the Haber-Bosch process, which requires Hydrogen. The Hydrogen usually comes from natural gas, not oil. Oil is too expensive to be worthwhile for that.
The more layers between the people working at the bottom who deal with the clients and the people making the decisions on the top, the larger the room for lazyness, incompetence and waste. Government is worse than the corporations because government is bigger and more layered than the corporations. Simple as that.
Actually both the Soviets of old and the Chinese now were concerned with using toxic propellants in their space launch vehicles. China is designing a new generation of rockets using LOX/Kerosene and LOX/LH2 right now. The Soviet Union designed Buran and Zenith. They did not before because of a simple thing any capitalist should understand: lack of resources in a country with a feeble industrial base. The non-toxic rockets are nearly unusable as a weapons launch vehicle, and the Chinese rocket designers, like the Soviets before, had to sell their rockets to the military for national defense purposes.
If the OSS Windows app is in C++ and uses the Win32 API, or worse, MFC... Uses Microsoft Visual Studio project files and so on, it will be pretty friggin hard to port to anything other than winelib...
Actually, one group of people pushing the most for widespread semi-autonomous power generation is... guess who... the military. That is because they have a real need for heavy duty mobile power generation to carry out their tasks. The military has invested in portable nuclear reactors (US Navy: pushed for LWR reactors and uses them in submarines and carriers), fuel cells for the US Army and Navy, solar cells for military satellites, etc. The military is also a technological leader in energy and food conservation, or recycling for much the same reasons. The US Army is converting their vehicle fleet to diesel vehicles which can run on biodiesel and is investing in recycling cooking oil for use in vehicles. Napoleon gave a prize to the person which invented canned food for the army.
As for fusion, we do not have cheap fusion because fusion is bloody hard, and billions of dollars and decades of work have not managed to crack it yet.
You can put enough windmills to generate 100% of power requirements. The issue is: that energy will not be cost effective versus nuclear or coal. More expensive energy means people will be poorer in general, since so much in our society depends on it. Some places have more wind than others, while other places have lots of wind, but are too far away from the places which require the energy.
Even Denmark only generates 20% of its power from windmills for economical reasons, and you can hardly find a country with more favourable conditions for windpower than that.
Storage advances would be nice, but I wouldn't be holding my breath on it. H2 storage is uneconomical versus older technology like pumped storage. We need solutions we can use today, not vapour.
MOA: Magnetic Field Oscillating Amplified Thruster
Mr. Norbert Frischauf, Booz Allen Hamilton, Austria
Mr. Tobias Bartusch, University of Augsburg, Germany
Dr. Andreas Grassauer, Green Hills Biotechnology, Austria
Mr. Manfred Hettmer, Manfred Hettmer Datenverarbeitung, Austria
Abstract - It was in 1942, when the later Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén published a letter, stating, that oscillating magnetic fields can accelerate ionised matter via magneto hydrodynamic interactions in a wave like fashion. These waves were later called "Alfvén waves", in honour of their discoverer. Although the evidence for Alfvén's hypothesis came already rather early with the observation of certain plasma phenomena, such as being connected with high solar wind Wolf-Rayet stars, more than 60 years had to pass by before a technical implementation of Alfvén waves for propulsive purposes was proposed for the first time.
The name of the concept, utilising Alfvén waves to accelerate ionised matter for propulsive purposes, is MOA - Magnetic field Oscillating Amplified thruster. Alfvén waves are generated by making use of two coils, one being permanently powered and serving also as magnetic nozzle, the other one being switched on and off in a cyclic way, deforming the field lines of the overall system.
It is this deformation that generates Alfvén waves, which are in the next step used to transport and compress the propulsive medium, in theory leading to a propulsion system with a much higher performance than any other electric propulsion system.
Based on computer simulations, which we conducted to get a first estimate on the performance of the system, MOA is a highly flexible propulsion system, whose performance parameters might easily be adapted, by changing the mass flow and/or the power level. As such the system is capable to deliver a maximum specific impulse of 13116 s (12.87 mN) at a power level of 11.16 kW, using Xe as propellant, but can also be attuned to provide a thrust of 236.5 mN (2411 s) at 6.15 kW of power.
Although a dual-use system, space propulsion is expected to be the prime application for MOA. As MOA works best in high-power mode and with ionised matter, utilisation concepts range from a high-efficient Nuclear Electric Propulsion System, to an 'afterburner' for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Systems. This wide range of applications makes MOA a unique accessory for any nuclear propulsion system to overcome specific concept drawbacks, allowing a full-fledged hybrid nuclear propulsion system, with attune able thrust / specific impulse parameters, perfectly suited for nearly all types of space missions.
The article seems to be pretty thin in technical detail. But it appears they are talking about an MPD thruster.
They usually have problems with erosion, not to mention the low thrust-to-weight ratio (which means you cannot get off the Earth's surface with one). Also, they take a lot of juice, so you likely need something like a nuclear reactor or friggin huge solar array (we are talking MW here) to generate enough electricity to power one of these babies.
Soyuz was designed by Sergei Korolev's design team as the R-7 ICBM. UR-100N (NATO designation SS-19) was from Vladimir Chelomei's design team (see Rokot). They also designed Proton, and that is a fairly reliable launcher. Proton is marketed by ILS.
You mean I can download the source to Yahoo and Google?!
Non-sequitur. You can base your business on open source without necessarily making everything you produce, using those open source tools, available under an open source license. Same way the letters you write in Microsoft Word belong to you, rather than Microsoft.
PDF is an open document format. Adobe has patents and copyrights on PDF, but they provide everyone using those patents and copyrights a royalty free license. The specification is also open and available free of charge. Several 3rd party pieces of software read and write PDF, including OpenOffice and Ghostscript.
Monsense. The Dynasoar program continued right up until Shuttle development when the president forced the Airforce to accept the Shuttle program as an alternative. The Titan IIIc with its revolutionary SRBs (later to be used by the Shuttle) was the rocket intended for the Dynasoar. (Yes, they were that close to completion.)
Uhm, no. Dynasoar was to be replaced with MOL by order from McNamara. MOL was to be an orbiting military space station, for observation purposes, serviced with enhanced Gemini capsules. Then MOL was itself canceled in favour of robotic Key Hole series spy satellites. MOL USAF astronauts were actually trained, and when the thing was cancelled some were asked to switch to NASA, including NASA Administrator to be Richard Truly.
As for the Russians, Kliper still seems to be in a state of flux. The design is still changing and they obviously have not settled on the rocket they want yet. Your link even states as much. But I suspect political pressure from above (read Putin in his drive to reestablish Russia as a major independent power) will ensure Zenit will not be used, as in the past.
Zenit is manufactured at Ukraine. RSC Energia, the Kliper designers, are from Russia. There is a Russian government policy not to rely on foreign suppliers of potentially hostile countries for parts with possible military uses, and this includes launch vehicles.
Is there something wrong with the Russian Cosmodrome?
The problem is not getting a piece of land to launch from. Russia has plenty of vacant spots. The problem is, since the rocket is much larger and new, you need new launch infrastructure. You know, a pad, cranes, possibly an assembly building, figure out a way to transport the parts to the launch site, get new tooling for manufacturing the rocket, etc.
As for Dynasoar, it was shelved. The other attempt to put a winged vehicle on top of a launch stack was the ESA Hermes. Which was in turn also shelved. One of the reasons both these vehicles were shelved, and indeed why the Shuttle configuration was picked decades after the Dynasoar debacle was precisely because of aerodynamic instability caused by the wings during launch. They might have figured out a way to solve this by now, but I haven't heard anything about it.
The Delta IV Heavy failed to put the inaugural payload in the right orbit and is being debugged. The Atlas V Heavy has never even flown yet.
If Boeing and Lockheed Martin do merge like they want, one of these rockets is most likely going to bite the dust without even getting to prove itself.
The first successful Ariane 5 ECA launch was in February 12.
Saturn V and Energia would have more payload, but neither are in production right now. So sorry to burst your bubble, but what I said was the truth. Ariane 5 ECA is heaviest lift vehicle you can buy on the market right now if you actually wanted your payload to be delivered ASAP. If we are going to count paper rockets, might as well add Falcon 9 to the list.
Only one nitpick: the Kliper design also uses heat tiles. Carbon-carbon shielding is not used more on Shuttle AFAIK because it is both extremely expensive and fragile.
Regarding the rest I agree. Also, Kliper has an expendable service module.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, no. Most are solar fusion power derived (including wind, biogenic coal, biogenic hydrocarbons). But tidal waves are caused by gravity, and nuclear power (be it fission, fusion or radioactive decay) are not solar fusion power derived.
When people talk about fertilizer being made with oil, they are actually talking about ammonia (NH3) production under the Haber-Bosch process, which requires Hydrogen. The Hydrogen usually comes from natural gas, not oil. Oil is too expensive to be worthwhile for that.
Socialism has grown a bit larger than the Marxist definition... I think the other person was thinking more along the lines of Libertarian Socialism.
The more layers between the people working at the bottom who deal with the clients and the people making the decisions on the top, the larger the room for lazyness, incompetence and waste. Government is worse than the corporations because government is bigger and more layered than the corporations. Simple as that.
Actually both the Soviets of old and the Chinese now were concerned with using toxic propellants in their space launch vehicles. China is designing a new generation of rockets using LOX/Kerosene and LOX/LH2 right now. The Soviet Union designed Buran and Zenith. They did not before because of a simple thing any capitalist should understand: lack of resources in a country with a feeble industrial base. The non-toxic rockets are nearly unusable as a weapons launch vehicle, and the Chinese rocket designers, like the Soviets before, had to sell their rockets to the military for national defense purposes.
If the OSS Windows app is in C++ and uses the Win32 API, or worse, MFC... Uses Microsoft Visual Studio project files and so on, it will be pretty friggin hard to port to anything other than winelib...
With the preloader in OOo 2.0 the startup time has gone down. Way down. I was pretty amazed when I saw it.
I agree. Putty and WinSCP are excellent tools which I use quite often in Microsoft Windows.
But when someone makes an OSS app which only works on Windows (Miranda), I consider it somewhat of a waste.
As for fusion, we do not have cheap fusion because fusion is bloody hard, and billions of dollars and decades of work have not managed to crack it yet.
Even Denmark only generates 20% of its power from windmills for economical reasons, and you can hardly find a country with more favourable conditions for windpower than that.
Storage advances would be nice, but I wouldn't be holding my breath on it. H2 storage is uneconomical versus older technology like pumped storage. We need solutions we can use today, not vapour.
There are many original Open Source games. Including Nethack.
You can however patent one.
You probably have better odds of picking a pretty girl by knowing German.
MOA: Magnetic Field Oscillating Amplified Thruster
Mr. Norbert Frischauf, Booz Allen Hamilton, Austria
Mr. Tobias Bartusch, University of Augsburg, Germany
Dr. Andreas Grassauer, Green Hills Biotechnology, Austria
Mr. Manfred Hettmer, Manfred Hettmer Datenverarbeitung, Austria
Abstract - It was in 1942, when the later Nobel laureate Hannes Alfvén published a letter, stating, that oscillating magnetic fields can accelerate ionised matter via magneto hydrodynamic interactions in a wave like fashion. These waves were later called "Alfvén waves", in honour of their discoverer. Although the evidence for Alfvén's hypothesis came already rather early with the observation of certain plasma phenomena, such as being connected with high solar wind Wolf-Rayet stars, more than 60 years had to pass by before a technical implementation of Alfvén waves for propulsive purposes was proposed for the first time.
The name of the concept, utilising Alfvén waves to accelerate ionised matter for propulsive purposes, is MOA - Magnetic field Oscillating Amplified thruster. Alfvén waves are generated by making use of two coils, one being permanently powered and serving also as magnetic nozzle, the other one being switched on and off in a cyclic way, deforming the field lines of the overall system.
It is this deformation that generates Alfvén waves, which are in the next step used to transport and compress the propulsive medium, in theory leading to a propulsion system with a much higher performance than any other electric propulsion system.
Based on computer simulations, which we conducted to get a first estimate on the performance of the system, MOA is a highly flexible propulsion system, whose performance parameters might easily be adapted, by changing the mass flow and/or the power level. As such the system is capable to deliver a maximum specific impulse of 13116 s (12.87 mN) at a power level of 11.16 kW, using Xe as propellant, but can also be attuned to provide a thrust of 236.5 mN (2411 s) at 6.15 kW of power.
Although a dual-use system, space propulsion is expected to be the prime application for MOA. As MOA works best in high-power mode and with ionised matter, utilisation concepts range from a high-efficient Nuclear Electric Propulsion System, to an 'afterburner' for Nuclear Thermal Propulsion Systems. This wide range of applications makes MOA a unique accessory for any nuclear propulsion system to overcome specific concept drawbacks, allowing a full-fledged hybrid nuclear propulsion system, with attune able thrust / specific impulse parameters, perfectly suited for nearly all types of space missions.
This article will be presented on Friday, October 21 2005, 08h30m at the 56th International Astronautical Congress in Fukuoka, Japan.
They usually have problems with erosion, not to mention the low thrust-to-weight ratio (which means you cannot get off the Earth's surface with one). Also, they take a lot of juice, so you likely need something like a nuclear reactor or friggin huge solar array (we are talking MW here) to generate enough electricity to power one of these babies.
Soyuz was designed by Sergei Korolev's design team as the R-7 ICBM. UR-100N (NATO designation SS-19) was from Vladimir Chelomei's design team (see Rokot). They also designed Proton, and that is a fairly reliable launcher. Proton is marketed by ILS.
Non-sequitur. You can base your business on open source without necessarily making everything you produce, using those open source tools, available under an open source license. Same way the letters you write in Microsoft Word belong to you, rather than Microsoft.
Mozilla Thunderbird keeps improving in leaps and bounds, it should eventually surpass Outlook in all aspects, just like Firefox surpassed IE.
Like those great failures, Yahoo and Google?
PDF is an open document format. Adobe has patents and copyrights on PDF, but they provide everyone using those patents and copyrights a royalty free license. The specification is also open and available free of charge. Several 3rd party pieces of software read and write PDF, including OpenOffice and Ghostscript.
Uhm, no. Dynasoar was to be replaced with MOL by order from McNamara. MOL was to be an orbiting military space station, for observation purposes, serviced with enhanced Gemini capsules. Then MOL was itself canceled in favour of robotic Key Hole series spy satellites. MOL USAF astronauts were actually trained, and when the thing was cancelled some were asked to switch to NASA, including NASA Administrator to be Richard Truly.
As for the Russians, Kliper still seems to be in a state of flux. The design is still changing and they obviously have not settled on the rocket they want yet. Your link even states as much. But I suspect political pressure from above (read Putin in his drive to reestablish Russia as a major independent power) will ensure Zenit will not be used, as in the past.
Zenit is manufactured at Ukraine. RSC Energia, the Kliper designers, are from Russia. There is a Russian government policy not to rely on foreign suppliers of potentially hostile countries for parts with possible military uses, and this includes launch vehicles.
Is there something wrong with the Russian Cosmodrome?
The problem is not getting a piece of land to launch from. Russia has plenty of vacant spots. The problem is, since the rocket is much larger and new, you need new launch infrastructure. You know, a pad, cranes, possibly an assembly building, figure out a way to transport the parts to the launch site, get new tooling for manufacturing the rocket, etc.
As for Dynasoar, it was shelved. The other attempt to put a winged vehicle on top of a launch stack was the ESA Hermes. Which was in turn also shelved. One of the reasons both these vehicles were shelved, and indeed why the Shuttle configuration was picked decades after the Dynasoar debacle was precisely because of aerodynamic instability caused by the wings during launch. They might have figured out a way to solve this by now, but I haven't heard anything about it.
If Boeing and Lockheed Martin do merge like they want, one of these rockets is most likely going to bite the dust without even getting to prove itself.
The first successful Ariane 5 ECA launch was in February 12.
Saturn V and Energia would have more payload, but neither are in production right now. So sorry to burst your bubble, but what I said was the truth. Ariane 5 ECA is heaviest lift vehicle you can buy on the market right now if you actually wanted your payload to be delivered ASAP. If we are going to count paper rockets, might as well add Falcon 9 to the list.
Regarding the rest I agree. Also, Kliper has an expendable service module.