Probably not, though in Tesla's case if they keep having their cars burst into flames when they get into an accident, they may not be around in 10 years (that's not a slap, just a comment).
It hasn't hurt that in each case that those cars burst into flame that the customers involved in those crashes have ordered a new Tesla automobile to replace the one that was destroyed..... well that and the customers also walked away from a potentially fatal accident in spite of the fire.
Besides, all this really means is that Tesla automobiles are starting to be common on the highways. And you consider that to be a bad thing? Thousands of these vehicles are being driven every day now, and sometimes crap happens.
It also doesn't hurt that Tesla has put together a fairly sizable software development staff simply for its own products, products where the software development costs are trivial compared to the hardware that accompanies that software.
I would agree that it is likely the salesman from SAP was likely overcharging Tesla, but then again there isn't really much experience with American start-up automobile manufacturing companies to compare against either. You either need to compare against a company like Fisker or General Motors... and there isn't much in between.
It shows a significant symptom of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about and how the citizens of America are being transformed into subjects and serfs. The NSA may not be directly responsible for losing all of the wars in recent memory (that 0-5 figure can be argued), but it is showing how the U.S. government doesn't really seem to concern itself with protecting ordinary citizens and is more interested in protecting the politically well connected.
America can survive just fine without either agency. The services which the TSA is currently providing can be amply performed by state and local police agencies, where they would be much more accountable to ordinary citizens and quite possibly be performing actual security of airports rather than treating every citizen as a criminal. Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the TSA is doing which wasn't better done by other agencies before it was created.
As for the NSA, if most citizens realized the sheer waste of resources being spent by that organization, much less the intrusive nature and sheer violations of civil rights that happen, they would immediately support its elimination as an agency. It has nothing to do about a world full of love and peace, as I'm not asking for an elimination of legitimate military intelligence or even foreign espionage. But the NSA as it is currently constituted and especially its domestic surveillance efforts need to end completely along with any tools that could even remotely be used for such things. The NSA has simply failed as an agency and needs to be eliminated.
Neither agency does much if anything to protect me as an ordinary citizen, but they do help protect the "rich and powerful" who really don't need those agencies in the first place and are both used as tools to intimidate ordinary citizens in the most cruel and irresponsible ways. Furthermore, neither agency has any sort of constitutional authority for their existence.
If they don't spy then you might as well close the doors and send them all home.
For myself, I think that sounds like an excellent thing to have happen to the NSA. They might have served a purpose in the American Republic once upon a time, but at this point they are doing far more harm than good.
The NSA, together with the TSA, are both agencies that should simply be disbanded completely with nothing to replace them. Neither agency really protects ordinary citizens.
No, there is no legal mechanism for a national referendum in America. Then again, there was supposedly never a need to have such a thing as the NSA prying into your private lives.
How is it a lie? The number of people who actually have read the full legislation is astonishingly few, and it doesn't include a single member of Congress. Yes, some staffers have read it, but that is immaterial. The point is that nobody read it completely before it became legislation (not even Barack Obama) except for the staff members that he trusted would have the stuff in it that he wanted, and relatively few have read it since. It also included explicit provisions for other "rule making bodies" that opened up those mere few pages as it were into a nightmare that nobody has ever read.
No, this isn't moving the goal posts. It is pointing out that it is deliberately obfuscated to be incomprehensible.
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
At least we can be comforted by the fact that the NSA data center is likely operated at the same levels of efficiency and competency.
Basing a computer program upon a deliberately obfuscated law that is also so huge that no single person has ever read the whole thing, much less that it can be converted into something that can be comprehended in mathematical terms is at least where to start with the whole mess. Forget about if the ideas that got the law started are valid or not, the law itself doesn't really accomplish any of the stated goals of what the legislation was supposed to do in the first place, other than to become a fiscal black hole for everything that touches it.... including any software development related to the law.
The star is apparently in the middle of its main sequence stage of life. Nice try on the suggestion though. The physics of what happens at that point of stellar development is pretty well understood, as is the size of a star with that spectral classification (aka its "color").
The problem is that the orbit is roughly circular in nature, thus why it is presumed there is some other mechanism at work. If the planet was orbiting in a highly elliptical orbit (such as is the case with many comets as seen in our solar system), it would make sense. That would have been detected from the combination of methods which were used to identify this planet.
Possibly there might be some other planets in this planetary system which could have helped to "circularize" the orbit. That is the big question at the moment though.
Doppler shifting of a star though light frequency shifts is something that is extremely accurate and the science involved is understood very well, hence why it is possible to detect planetary shifts in this manner. Keep in mind this technique mostly works because the planetary system (and the orbit of this planet) has its plane edge-on to us here on the Earth. This is the reason why Kepler was able to detect this planet, and why the spectrum of this star is able to give so much additional information.
If instead we were looking at the stellar pole and a sort of "top view" or "bottom view" of the planetary system as viewed from a telescope of a particular star, none of this is even remotely possible at the moment. I don't even know in terms of percentages how many planetary systems can even be detected in this manner, but it is a very small minority of the total number presumed to be in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. An important assumption (and it is admitted at the moment to be just an assumption) is that stellar planetary systems are randomly oriented relative to either us or the galactic disc.
I presume that some stellar planetary systems will likely need a physical probe to go visit them in order to conclusively identify if a particular star has planets or not, assuming planets haven't been detected near that star earlier. That of course is going to take centuries or even millennia to occur. In the meantime, it is sweet that pure luck has allowed us to at least spot some new planets.
Part of the problem is that many of the planetary system models have been developed with a sample size of one. That unfortunately skews the results of any such models. Now that there are literally hundreds of planetary systems to examine where the astrophysicists who make up these models can look at actual stellar systems to see how those models compare to reality, I'm sure there are going to be some changes to those models and some new theories put forward.
As usual, the science press is making up stuff to sensationalize a situation that is admittedly still unknown simply because it takes time to digest all of this new information. I don't think this is a reporter trying to attribute this to the supernatural, but they are trying to make what is otherwise dull news sound interesting.
I'd pay to see the Emperor force lightning JarJar. In my mind I am picturing something like don't taze me bro but it keeps going until JarJar is a smoldering cinder.
If that happened, I would make sure that the Rebellion would grant a medal for heroism in the midst of life threatening danger to the Emperor. Seriously, you would need to have some serious balls in order to take on Jar Jar like that. I mean, he (meaning Jar jar) is only the most feared sentient being in the entire galaxy.
Then again, I suppose the Emperor owes Jar Jar a favor for establishing the empire in the first place. That is most definitely a Sith Master.
Everything you say is going to happen with an engineering review of the accident. Even though this was a civilian flight test (or rather even more so because it was civilian and not military), the FAA is going to be all over this and treat it just like an accident investigation like any other flying mishap. It certainly is going to be a major point of review on granting any flight worthiness certificate on this vehicle and any attempt to whitewash this incident during that review process is going to have the engineers involved treated like a bunch of idiots who need to go back to college if they don't have answers to every one of your questions.
What happened with NASA in regards to the Space Shuttle is that the inspectors who should have had the authority to prevent those launches had elected and appointed politicians over them who overrode their decision making authority and demanded that the vehicles were launched in spite of very legitimate engineering concerns. The causes of both "loss of vehicle" events of the shuttle were well known before either of those launches took place, and there were formal engineering reports demanding a grounding of the shuttle fleet until those problems were fixed. Hell, the fiasco which destroyed the Columbia was known about even with STS-1 (aka the very first flight of the Shuttle).
In this case, Sierra Nevada is not even remotely powerful enough in term of lobbying power nor has the Dream Chaser the huge political necessity to fly like the Shuttle to get such kind of games to be played. This is also one of the reasons why programs like this need to be done, as there are at least four manned spaceflight vehicles under development (five if you include Orion) which each have their own flight histories, engineering teams, and certification reviews. If one of those vehicles is grounded due to some significant engineering problem that could endanger the crew, passengers, or the uninvolved public (aka having the vehicle or a part of it land on somebody's house and kill somebody on the ground), it won't stop crewed spaceflight from happening. That unfortunately did happen with the Shuttle, but even more unfortunately seven people needed to die each time those engineering reviews finally happened. The Space Shuttle would never have been given an air/space worthiness certificate if it had to go through current FAA-AST regulations.
you'd have thought they'd have done engineering tests on the thing before giving it the certification first time around.....:-)
What makes you think they didn't do engineering tests on the part prior to the flight? As I pointed out, it was a part used on other aircraft, which is where the certification came from in the first place. That means engineering data is available from not just engineering tests but also repair logs of numerous aircraft that have this part installed and thousands of hours of flight history to back it up. No doubt that engineering data is going to be used in the accident review.
I think a more pertinent question is - why did it fail this time, not whether the part is just generally deficient mas is the implication if they'll ground all aircraft that use it (do they ground military aircraft like they do commercial ones?).
TFA says that it failed to deploy, which suggests there is nothing wrong with it as landing gear anyway, so it had nothing to do with weight and speed of the aircraft.
Yes, military aircraft are grounded if there is a significant part failure like this. That implies that an engineering review of what caused the part failure will happen by the manufacturer and/or the military command which uses those aircraft. It may simply be having an engineer look at the data and say that the circumstances of this failure don't apply in the other aircraft and the engineer signs off for continued operations or that a more comprehensive fix needs to be applied. This is something that routinely happens in aviation all of the time, so it isn't exactly something new.
BTW, I wouldn't really infer anything from the scanty information presented in this article as it certainly isn't an engineering report but instead a mass consumer news publication. I'm somewhat familiar with FAA engineering protocols which is why I suggest that an engineering review of what caused the part failure (and a failure to deploy is a part failure) will most certainly happen.
Have passengers survived crashes when landing systems didn't work properly with commercial aviation vehicles? In this regard, it is absolutely no different. Furthermore, the part that failed was something that was a standard part for military jet aircraft and would have failed with a similar landing situation (in terms of landing speed and weight of the aircraft) and would have similarly put the pilot and passengers in danger. Besides, if you RTFA you would have seen that Sierra Nevada is planning on replacing that landing sub-assembly with another landing system anyway. All this mishap has done is speed up that replacement.
What failed is already FAA certified and in fact this accident is likely going to force a grounding of other aircraft which use this same landing system. If anything, this engineering test might even save a few lives, which is sort of the point of doing engineering tests like this. Usually you learn far more with failures than you do if it is a flawless success. Because it was an engineering test, it would never have had passengers in the first place so your question is also moot. That is like asking if the engineering tests of the Boeing 777 were ever intended to have passengers?
With a crappy economy, record debts to China, and collapsing income, why is the US wasting its time with these boondoggles?
Because there is going to be a future to America, and at some time if you want to have a stronger economy you need to invest into technology development.
BTW, the Dream Chaser vehicle is a private venture. That some NASA funds (hence U.S. taxpayers footing the bill) may be used for its development, that isn't the only source of investment capital or even the largest source for that matter. The idea is that the Sierra Nevada Corporation is going to be using this spacecraft for both government contracts as well as private commercial spaceflight... presumably space tourism as well as launching "microsatellites" and other commercial enterprises in space. If the NASA funds were cut entirely, this vehicle development would continue.
There certainly is no reason to complain about private individuals wanting to dump money on spacecraft when many times this amount is being spent on lipstick and reality television programs. Seriously, this kind of complaining is sort of pointless and demonstrates incredible ignorance of what is even happening here.
Of course water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, not that anybody involved really cares about such details. Incomplete combustion of Hydrogen also produces Hydrogen Peroxide... and that does have some other environmental consequences of its own. Not horribly nasty compared to other kinds of combustion products from burning hydrocarbon fuels, but it isn't completely without dangers either.
Simply put, you can't have everything to be perfect. There may be "lesser evils" and things that do less damage thus are more responsible things to do, but in the end this is all about how you collect, store, and release large quantities of energy in a fashion that is useful for an individual upon demand.
Both Tesla and SpaceX (I don't know if they share an office) have permanent staff in Washington DC. I suppose it is just a matter of time that your wish will be granted.
It isn't transferring energy that is the question here, it is transferring the "fuel", which doesn't need to be heated during that transfer (at least not to high temperatures). Unfortunately, when you transfer electricity it must either be used immediately or put into some storage mechanism... and that usually produces a whole lot of heat in the process.
Pouring gasoline into a gas tank most definitely doesn't produce a whole lot of heat.
In many regards, but especially to Mr. Musk's business model.
I would say that Elon Musk likely forgets more about hydrogen and fuel cells than you or most people on slashdot will ever learn. SpaceX clearly uses hydrogen as a fuel source, and the use of hydrogen fuel cells dates back to the Gemini program and was used in every single manned NASA mission except for the Mercury flights (which used sealed batteries for power). SpaceX engineers have most certainly looked into its use.
I'll also note that Tesla doesn't really care if fuel cells work or not in terms of them being a potential power source for the motors. That is the cool thing about using electric motors is that the fuel source can be uncoupled from the drive line. It simply doesn't matter how that electricity is generated, just that it is generated in the first place. The trick is to figure out how to store that electricity temporarily until it is needed on a vehicle. Besides, I don't see Elon Musk advocating that a bunch of solar panels cover the top of every Tesla vehicle (and sadly Tesla has been forced into making a formal statement about that idea too).
Heck, there are enough people who think perpetual motion machines actually work that it isn't surprising more critics show up to hammer on Musk with this.
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. They have a flat out formal policy which states there is no original research. Now the justification for that policy is really in place to drive out nut jobs and conspiracy theorists (which at one time was openly proclaimed by Jimmy Wales but now it isn't so much) because there were a whole bunch of idiots who saw Wikipedia as the golden opportunity to spout off all of their crazy ideas that no peer reviewed journal would ever consider. If Wikipedia permitted original research you would have it so quickly overrun with UFO theories and how the Illuminati/Nazis/Greys/Jews/Atlantians/G'ould are controlling every aspect of society that literally every article on Wikipedia would be instantly Godwinized and be a complete and utter joke. It would make Uncyclopedia the true source of accurate information (where I'll admit I've edited too... and sometimes does get a few things right even if you need to read between the lines of the humor).
Again I state that if anybody is a real expert, they should damn well not be publishing their original stuff on Wikipedia.
Now having those experts help out in terms of preparing those articles, you might have a point. The problem is that those "experts" (however you define that term) really need to be able to write in a collaborative manner and be humble enough to be willing to work with a junior high/middle school student that is also editing that same article not to mention college students (in reality much more common even if you may think otherwise), housewives, and other people who may only have a passing interest in the topic at hand or be very talented amateurs. That is a unique skill no matter how you cut it as collaborative writing like happens on Wikipedia really is never taught in schools, even if it is among a small group of peers.
Many of these experts feel that simply because they are experts they don't need to justify their edits. Their experience in publishing with other venues is that their opinion is instantly respected usually due to legitimate years of acquired respect usually due to their name. This kind of respect begins usually when they are that junior high/middle school student and continues to when they get that PhD/professorship/invent that damn cool thing or however they are considered an expert. They find themselves showing up on Wikipedia and unfortunately there is a sort of "rest" among Wikipedia editors for brand new accounts where that respect is simply missing as among Wikipedia users it means squat until they've proven themselves as people who can actually write coherent sentences and understand Wikipedia policies.... including stuff like no original research and writing with a neutral point of view (harder to do than you would think). Most of these genuine experts simply don't want to go through what can be a very humiliating experience as being the new kid on the block all over again when they thought they were done with that kind of game.
You also get people like Essjay that claimed all sorts of credentials that really didn't exist. Why he did that is something I will never understand as he was a very good editor and earned that community respect in spite of his credentials and not because of them. That is also why he was originally hired by Wikia and the offer was extended to put him on the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation.... until it showed that the credentials were bogus. Because of this reputation reset that I described above, any claimed credentials simply don't get examined or reviewed and are simply taken at face value. If you want to claim that you are the Emperor of the United States, nobody is going to dispute that claim as there is no real need.
There have been some discussions on Wikipedia as to if some of these people who have real credentials should get some respect, but the problem is that some people who have these "real life credentials" are also asshats and have gamed the system to earn their precious PhDs or other kinds of recognition that are claimed and perhaps can show. While certainly not true of everybody, some of them can't write a coherent sentence even if their life depended on it. How do you filter out some of those kind of people?
Slashdot Mirror
Probably not, though in Tesla's case if they keep having their cars burst into flames when they get into an accident, they may not be around in 10 years (that's not a slap, just a comment).
It hasn't hurt that in each case that those cars burst into flame that the customers involved in those crashes have ordered a new Tesla automobile to replace the one that was destroyed..... well that and the customers also walked away from a potentially fatal accident in spite of the fire.
Besides, all this really means is that Tesla automobiles are starting to be common on the highways. And you consider that to be a bad thing? Thousands of these vehicles are being driven every day now, and sometimes crap happens.
It also doesn't hurt that Tesla has put together a fairly sizable software development staff simply for its own products, products where the software development costs are trivial compared to the hardware that accompanies that software.
I would agree that it is likely the salesman from SAP was likely overcharging Tesla, but then again there isn't really much experience with American start-up automobile manufacturing companies to compare against either. You either need to compare against a company like Fisker or General Motors... and there isn't much in between.
It shows a significant symptom of the military-industrial complex that Dwight Eisenhower warned about and how the citizens of America are being transformed into subjects and serfs. The NSA may not be directly responsible for losing all of the wars in recent memory (that 0-5 figure can be argued), but it is showing how the U.S. government doesn't really seem to concern itself with protecting ordinary citizens and is more interested in protecting the politically well connected.
America can survive just fine without either agency. The services which the TSA is currently providing can be amply performed by state and local police agencies, where they would be much more accountable to ordinary citizens and quite possibly be performing actual security of airports rather than treating every citizen as a criminal. Seriously, there is absolutely nothing the TSA is doing which wasn't better done by other agencies before it was created.
As for the NSA, if most citizens realized the sheer waste of resources being spent by that organization, much less the intrusive nature and sheer violations of civil rights that happen, they would immediately support its elimination as an agency. It has nothing to do about a world full of love and peace, as I'm not asking for an elimination of legitimate military intelligence or even foreign espionage. But the NSA as it is currently constituted and especially its domestic surveillance efforts need to end completely along with any tools that could even remotely be used for such things. The NSA has simply failed as an agency and needs to be eliminated.
Neither agency does much if anything to protect me as an ordinary citizen, but they do help protect the "rich and powerful" who really don't need those agencies in the first place and are both used as tools to intimidate ordinary citizens in the most cruel and irresponsible ways. Furthermore, neither agency has any sort of constitutional authority for their existence.
If they don't spy then you might as well close the doors and send them all home.
For myself, I think that sounds like an excellent thing to have happen to the NSA. They might have served a purpose in the American Republic once upon a time, but at this point they are doing far more harm than good.
The NSA, together with the TSA, are both agencies that should simply be disbanded completely with nothing to replace them. Neither agency really protects ordinary citizens.
No, there is no legal mechanism for a national referendum in America. Then again, there was supposedly never a need to have such a thing as the NSA prying into your private lives.
How is it a lie? The number of people who actually have read the full legislation is astonishingly few, and it doesn't include a single member of Congress. Yes, some staffers have read it, but that is immaterial. The point is that nobody read it completely before it became legislation (not even Barack Obama) except for the staff members that he trusted would have the stuff in it that he wanted, and relatively few have read it since. It also included explicit provisions for other "rule making bodies" that opened up those mere few pages as it were into a nightmare that nobody has ever read.
No, this isn't moving the goal posts. It is pointing out that it is deliberately obfuscated to be incomprehensible.
Doesn't it strike anyone as odd that the Govt can design and implement a billion+ dollar data storage center for the NSA but can't deploy a website to allow people to sign up for insurance?
At least we can be comforted by the fact that the NSA data center is likely operated at the same levels of efficiency and competency.
Basing a computer program upon a deliberately obfuscated law that is also so huge that no single person has ever read the whole thing, much less that it can be converted into something that can be comprehended in mathematical terms is at least where to start with the whole mess. Forget about if the ideas that got the law started are valid or not, the law itself doesn't really accomplish any of the stated goals of what the legislation was supposed to do in the first place, other than to become a fiscal black hole for everything that touches it.... including any software development related to the law.
The star is apparently in the middle of its main sequence stage of life. Nice try on the suggestion though. The physics of what happens at that point of stellar development is pretty well understood, as is the size of a star with that spectral classification (aka its "color").
The problem is that the orbit is roughly circular in nature, thus why it is presumed there is some other mechanism at work. If the planet was orbiting in a highly elliptical orbit (such as is the case with many comets as seen in our solar system), it would make sense. That would have been detected from the combination of methods which were used to identify this planet.
Possibly there might be some other planets in this planetary system which could have helped to "circularize" the orbit. That is the big question at the moment though.
Doppler shifting of a star though light frequency shifts is something that is extremely accurate and the science involved is understood very well, hence why it is possible to detect planetary shifts in this manner. Keep in mind this technique mostly works because the planetary system (and the orbit of this planet) has its plane edge-on to us here on the Earth. This is the reason why Kepler was able to detect this planet, and why the spectrum of this star is able to give so much additional information.
If instead we were looking at the stellar pole and a sort of "top view" or "bottom view" of the planetary system as viewed from a telescope of a particular star, none of this is even remotely possible at the moment. I don't even know in terms of percentages how many planetary systems can even be detected in this manner, but it is a very small minority of the total number presumed to be in the Milky Way Galaxy alone. An important assumption (and it is admitted at the moment to be just an assumption) is that stellar planetary systems are randomly oriented relative to either us or the galactic disc.
I presume that some stellar planetary systems will likely need a physical probe to go visit them in order to conclusively identify if a particular star has planets or not, assuming planets haven't been detected near that star earlier. That of course is going to take centuries or even millennia to occur. In the meantime, it is sweet that pure luck has allowed us to at least spot some new planets.
Part of the problem is that many of the planetary system models have been developed with a sample size of one. That unfortunately skews the results of any such models. Now that there are literally hundreds of planetary systems to examine where the astrophysicists who make up these models can look at actual stellar systems to see how those models compare to reality, I'm sure there are going to be some changes to those models and some new theories put forward.
As usual, the science press is making up stuff to sensationalize a situation that is admittedly still unknown simply because it takes time to digest all of this new information. I don't think this is a reporter trying to attribute this to the supernatural, but they are trying to make what is otherwise dull news sound interesting.
I'd pay to see the Emperor force lightning JarJar. In my mind I am picturing something like don't taze me bro but it keeps going until JarJar is a smoldering cinder.
If that happened, I would make sure that the Rebellion would grant a medal for heroism in the midst of life threatening danger to the Emperor. Seriously, you would need to have some serious balls in order to take on Jar Jar like that. I mean, he (meaning Jar jar) is only the most feared sentient being in the entire galaxy.
Then again, I suppose the Emperor owes Jar Jar a favor for establishing the empire in the first place. That is most definitely a Sith Master.
Everything you say is going to happen with an engineering review of the accident. Even though this was a civilian flight test (or rather even more so because it was civilian and not military), the FAA is going to be all over this and treat it just like an accident investigation like any other flying mishap. It certainly is going to be a major point of review on granting any flight worthiness certificate on this vehicle and any attempt to whitewash this incident during that review process is going to have the engineers involved treated like a bunch of idiots who need to go back to college if they don't have answers to every one of your questions.
What happened with NASA in regards to the Space Shuttle is that the inspectors who should have had the authority to prevent those launches had elected and appointed politicians over them who overrode their decision making authority and demanded that the vehicles were launched in spite of very legitimate engineering concerns. The causes of both "loss of vehicle" events of the shuttle were well known before either of those launches took place, and there were formal engineering reports demanding a grounding of the shuttle fleet until those problems were fixed. Hell, the fiasco which destroyed the Columbia was known about even with STS-1 (aka the very first flight of the Shuttle).
In this case, Sierra Nevada is not even remotely powerful enough in term of lobbying power nor has the Dream Chaser the huge political necessity to fly like the Shuttle to get such kind of games to be played. This is also one of the reasons why programs like this need to be done, as there are at least four manned spaceflight vehicles under development (five if you include Orion) which each have their own flight histories, engineering teams, and certification reviews. If one of those vehicles is grounded due to some significant engineering problem that could endanger the crew, passengers, or the uninvolved public (aka having the vehicle or a part of it land on somebody's house and kill somebody on the ground), it won't stop crewed spaceflight from happening. That unfortunately did happen with the Shuttle, but even more unfortunately seven people needed to die each time those engineering reviews finally happened. The Space Shuttle would never have been given an air/space worthiness certificate if it had to go through current FAA-AST regulations.
you'd have thought they'd have done engineering tests on the thing before giving it the certification first time around..... :-)
What makes you think they didn't do engineering tests on the part prior to the flight? As I pointed out, it was a part used on other aircraft, which is where the certification came from in the first place. That means engineering data is available from not just engineering tests but also repair logs of numerous aircraft that have this part installed and thousands of hours of flight history to back it up. No doubt that engineering data is going to be used in the accident review.
I think a more pertinent question is - why did it fail this time, not whether the part is just generally deficient mas is the implication if they'll ground all aircraft that use it (do they ground military aircraft like they do commercial ones?).
TFA says that it failed to deploy, which suggests there is nothing wrong with it as landing gear anyway, so it had nothing to do with weight and speed of the aircraft.
Yes, military aircraft are grounded if there is a significant part failure like this. That implies that an engineering review of what caused the part failure will happen by the manufacturer and/or the military command which uses those aircraft. It may simply be having an engineer look at the data and say that the circumstances of this failure don't apply in the other aircraft and the engineer signs off for continued operations or that a more comprehensive fix needs to be applied. This is something that routinely happens in aviation all of the time, so it isn't exactly something new.
BTW, I wouldn't really infer anything from the scanty information presented in this article as it certainly isn't an engineering report but instead a mass consumer news publication. I'm somewhat familiar with FAA engineering protocols which is why I suggest that an engineering review of what caused the part failure (and a failure to deploy is a part failure) will most certainly happen.
Would the passengers also survived? Key question.
Have passengers survived crashes when landing systems didn't work properly with commercial aviation vehicles? In this regard, it is absolutely no different. Furthermore, the part that failed was something that was a standard part for military jet aircraft and would have failed with a similar landing situation (in terms of landing speed and weight of the aircraft) and would have similarly put the pilot and passengers in danger. Besides, if you RTFA you would have seen that Sierra Nevada is planning on replacing that landing sub-assembly with another landing system anyway. All this mishap has done is speed up that replacement.
What failed is already FAA certified and in fact this accident is likely going to force a grounding of other aircraft which use this same landing system. If anything, this engineering test might even save a few lives, which is sort of the point of doing engineering tests like this. Usually you learn far more with failures than you do if it is a flawless success. Because it was an engineering test, it would never have had passengers in the first place so your question is also moot. That is like asking if the engineering tests of the Boeing 777 were ever intended to have passengers?
With a crappy economy, record debts to China, and collapsing income, why is the US wasting its time with these boondoggles?
Because there is going to be a future to America, and at some time if you want to have a stronger economy you need to invest into technology development.
BTW, the Dream Chaser vehicle is a private venture. That some NASA funds (hence U.S. taxpayers footing the bill) may be used for its development, that isn't the only source of investment capital or even the largest source for that matter. The idea is that the Sierra Nevada Corporation is going to be using this spacecraft for both government contracts as well as private commercial spaceflight... presumably space tourism as well as launching "microsatellites" and other commercial enterprises in space. If the NASA funds were cut entirely, this vehicle development would continue.
There certainly is no reason to complain about private individuals wanting to dump money on spacecraft when many times this amount is being spent on lipstick and reality television programs. Seriously, this kind of complaining is sort of pointless and demonstrates incredible ignorance of what is even happening here.
And your point is exactly what? That the entire notion of a freely editable website that "anybody can edit" is utterly stupid?
Of course water vapor is also a greenhouse gas, not that anybody involved really cares about such details. Incomplete combustion of Hydrogen also produces Hydrogen Peroxide... and that does have some other environmental consequences of its own. Not horribly nasty compared to other kinds of combustion products from burning hydrocarbon fuels, but it isn't completely without dangers either.
Simply put, you can't have everything to be perfect. There may be "lesser evils" and things that do less damage thus are more responsible things to do, but in the end this is all about how you collect, store, and release large quantities of energy in a fashion that is useful for an individual upon demand.
Both Tesla and SpaceX (I don't know if they share an office) have permanent staff in Washington DC. I suppose it is just a matter of time that your wish will be granted.
It isn't transferring energy that is the question here, it is transferring the "fuel", which doesn't need to be heated during that transfer (at least not to high temperatures). Unfortunately, when you transfer electricity it must either be used immediately or put into some storage mechanism... and that usually produces a whole lot of heat in the process.
Pouring gasoline into a gas tank most definitely doesn't produce a whole lot of heat.
In many regards, but especially to Mr. Musk's business model.
I would say that Elon Musk likely forgets more about hydrogen and fuel cells than you or most people on slashdot will ever learn. SpaceX clearly uses hydrogen as a fuel source, and the use of hydrogen fuel cells dates back to the Gemini program and was used in every single manned NASA mission except for the Mercury flights (which used sealed batteries for power). SpaceX engineers have most certainly looked into its use.
I'll also note that Tesla doesn't really care if fuel cells work or not in terms of them being a potential power source for the motors. That is the cool thing about using electric motors is that the fuel source can be uncoupled from the drive line. It simply doesn't matter how that electricity is generated, just that it is generated in the first place. The trick is to figure out how to store that electricity temporarily until it is needed on a vehicle. Besides, I don't see Elon Musk advocating that a bunch of solar panels cover the top of every Tesla vehicle (and sadly Tesla has been forced into making a formal statement about that idea too).
Heck, there are enough people who think perpetual motion machines actually work that it isn't surprising more critics show up to hammer on Musk with this.
Oh, come on. There's got to be something in Animal House that can provide an adequate analogy.
It just doesn't matter.
Why shouldn't they?
Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. They have a flat out formal policy which states there is no original research. Now the justification for that policy is really in place to drive out nut jobs and conspiracy theorists (which at one time was openly proclaimed by Jimmy Wales but now it isn't so much) because there were a whole bunch of idiots who saw Wikipedia as the golden opportunity to spout off all of their crazy ideas that no peer reviewed journal would ever consider. If Wikipedia permitted original research you would have it so quickly overrun with UFO theories and how the Illuminati/Nazis/Greys/Jews/Atlantians/G'ould are controlling every aspect of society that literally every article on Wikipedia would be instantly Godwinized and be a complete and utter joke. It would make Uncyclopedia the true source of accurate information (where I'll admit I've edited too... and sometimes does get a few things right even if you need to read between the lines of the humor).
Again I state that if anybody is a real expert, they should damn well not be publishing their original stuff on Wikipedia.
Now having those experts help out in terms of preparing those articles, you might have a point. The problem is that those "experts" (however you define that term) really need to be able to write in a collaborative manner and be humble enough to be willing to work with a junior high/middle school student that is also editing that same article not to mention college students (in reality much more common even if you may think otherwise), housewives, and other people who may only have a passing interest in the topic at hand or be very talented amateurs. That is a unique skill no matter how you cut it as collaborative writing like happens on Wikipedia really is never taught in schools, even if it is among a small group of peers.
Many of these experts feel that simply because they are experts they don't need to justify their edits. Their experience in publishing with other venues is that their opinion is instantly respected usually due to legitimate years of acquired respect usually due to their name. This kind of respect begins usually when they are that junior high/middle school student and continues to when they get that PhD/professorship/invent that damn cool thing or however they are considered an expert. They find themselves showing up on Wikipedia and unfortunately there is a sort of "rest" among Wikipedia editors for brand new accounts where that respect is simply missing as among Wikipedia users it means squat until they've proven themselves as people who can actually write coherent sentences and understand Wikipedia policies.... including stuff like no original research and writing with a neutral point of view (harder to do than you would think). Most of these genuine experts simply don't want to go through what can be a very humiliating experience as being the new kid on the block all over again when they thought they were done with that kind of game.
You also get people like Essjay that claimed all sorts of credentials that really didn't exist. Why he did that is something I will never understand as he was a very good editor and earned that community respect in spite of his credentials and not because of them. That is also why he was originally hired by Wikia and the offer was extended to put him on the paid staff of the Wikimedia Foundation.... until it showed that the credentials were bogus. Because of this reputation reset that I described above, any claimed credentials simply don't get examined or reviewed and are simply taken at face value. If you want to claim that you are the Emperor of the United States, nobody is going to dispute that claim as there is no real need.
There have been some discussions on Wikipedia as to if some of these people who have real credentials should get some respect, but the problem is that some people who have these "real life credentials" are also asshats and have gamed the system to earn their precious PhDs or other kinds of recognition that are claimed and perhaps can show. While certainly not true of everybody, some of them can't write a coherent sentence even if their life depended on it. How do you filter out some of those kind of people?