Actually, that not-burning thing is pretty important. There isn't anything you can make the envelop out of that will actually keep hydrogen from permeating through the walls. That means your hydrogen-filled blimp is always a spark away from disaster. Not a big deal at 20,000 ft, but who would want to service the thing while it's on the ground? I wouldn't go anywhere near it. Also, storing and handling hydrogen is dangerous and adds quite a bit to the cost of the ground operations - it's one of the things that makes the shuttle so expensive to operate.
Everybody in that business considers using hydrogen at one point or another, and they always reject it.
Complicated meaning number of moving parts and materials requirements. I don't think the g-forces are all that meaningful from an operations standpoint. An orbital ship has to deal with a bigger heat load than a passenger jet, but rocket engines are (or at least can be) simpler than jet engines. If we'd only ever built four passenger jets they would be every bit as dangerous and as expensive as the shuttle.
Not right now. SSTO with chemical rockets is just plain impossible. Weight-to-payload ratio is murderous.
I don't think that's been established at all. It's definitely doable if you build a really large rocket. It's not doable for a really small rocket. I think you could probably make it work for a medium-sized vehicle if you didn't have high expectations on payload side. But that's okay, since the point of a rocket like that is to fly often.
2STO should be possible, but how would it be different from Shuttle?
It would only be beneficial if you got rid of the wings on the upper stage. IMO powered landing is crucial to reducing operational costs because you don't have the enormous heat stress on reentry. If they build a 2STO and use a shuttle-style vehicle for the second stage... well, it's a waste of money.
Were I king I'd restart DC-X and build DC-Y. I'd find out, through experimentation, exactly how much payload we can get to LEO using a VTVL SSTO, realizing the answer might be a negative number.
If that didn't work out I'd pursue a 2STO solution with the upper stage being a VTVL craft lifted from my SSTO program and the lower stage being some kind of flyback (either VTVL or VTHL).
It wouldn't surprise me either, because Congress is far more focused on how many jobs are maintained by the program than they are on efficiency. Creating a vehicle that can be maintained by 20 people instead of 20,000 is really at odds with Congress's interest in the endeavor.
I think it would be a mistake to assume that. An orbital ship isn't fundamentally any more complicated than a passenger jetliner. I expect something like SSTO or 2STO is probably doable with low operational overhead, and a working flyback booster gets us half way to 2STO. I'm a big proponent of SSTO myself, and would like to see DC-X (or something like it) restarted.
I hope they can come up with something that works out. This should have been done decades ago when it became clear the shuttle would always be an albatross.
I wondered about that in relation to all the fiber that got laid down during the dotcom bubble. As demand for bandwidth increases the fibers are already in place, whereas without the dotcom bubble there would have been a lag.
Lets end the myth that the stock market is a rational market and that it has rational actors. If it did, prices would only change surrounding major events- earnings announcements, dividends, and big deals.
I believe the market is a lot more rational than you imagine. Stock prices are based in large part on what investor expectation is regarding profits. It's quite rational to have large swings in price as a result of changing expectations regarding growth, currency fluctuations, or government action. If you're projecting earnings far out into the future, a little change in the shape of your curve has a big impact on the underlying value of the stock. Of course people make mistakes (in the sense that they make money-losing decisions), but from what I can see most of the mistakes are a result of changing conditions or a lack of information.
Exactly what harm are they trying to mitigate here? Volatility isn't a bad thing in and of itself. If the underlying value of the stock is there, the price will recover. If not, well, it needs to go down.
That's a nice plan, but you can't just swap warheads like that. If we have the capability to launch nuclear interceptors, they're already deployed. I doubt that's actually the case, since we don't have that many deployed interceptors and the nuclear-tipped missiles could only be used as a last resort.
On a related note, why exactly does BP have a say in who gets to do what at the spill site? Why do we let them control this?
Legally, BP is on the hook for the entire cost. They have to pay to fix the leak, they have to compensate fishermen and beach communities for lost revenue, and they have to reimburse the government for whatever it is the government is doing. So they certainly have the motivation to contain this. They also have the expertise.
I assume when you say "we" you mean the US government. If "we" take over the operation, with our relative lack of expertise and propensity for making big problems bigger, then BP could quite reasonably sue in federal court to have its liability reduced.
I don't think it's so much they're representing companies as they want to be able to tell constituents they saved x number of jobs in the district. Unfortunately that's the sort of thing people base their vote on.
You have a lot of stones calling other people ignorant and then blaming the wars for our fiscal situation. We spend about 4% of our GDP on the military, which is less than 20% of total federal government outlays.
The only way you can pretend entitlements aren't what's sinking the boat is to pretend social security and medicare are off in their own dimension somewhere. Well, they're not. What we've spent on Iraq and Afghanistan is quite literally lost in the noise of the coming tidal wave of entitlement obligations.
The U.S. can't just cede human space flight to other countries who are eager to take our place up there.
Why not? What vital national interest are we serving by putting people into LEO? There simply isn't anything you can do in space with people that couldn't be done more cheaply with machines. By an order of magnitude. We shouldn't have a manned space program at all until we can figure out how to dramatically reduce costs to orbit. There are a couple avenues to explore - SSTO, tethers, cannons for cargo. Some other, more exotic stuff. But for the time being manned space is a vanity project - the shuttle program should have been canceled in the early '80s when it was clear it would consume the budget for space activities without getting us beyond LEO.
They say it's selling well, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it's for. Anything with a backlit display won't be as good an ereader as a Kindle. Too big to fit in your pocket, and no keyboard for serious business use. What are people doing with it?
I will say this in Java's favor, however: It's a language where the smartest can't write code that confuses the dumbest, and where the dumbest can't write code that does too much damage.
That alone makes it the best language for large business projects. Your coworkers will be a mix of good and bad, and pretending the bad programmers is a more damaging mistake than anything you can do to the code.
Playing video games sounds a hell of a lot more fun than making those little plastic key chain rope things we made when I was a kid. And three hours a day isn't much at all if they're spending the rest of the day, you know, hiking and sailing and such.
I have this suspicion these "kid health experts" don't actually know that much about children.
As usual people on the left who don't know anything about the Constitution assume it says things it doesn't say. The law is constitutional - it doesn't give Arizona authorities any powers federal police don't already have.
Lemme join the crowd in agreeing Bing is better than Google. But beyond that remember people used to say the same thing about Sony when Microsoft entered the console market. If they keep at it long enough Microsoft will eventually find a winning formula for the search engine market.
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Didn't the Times Square bomber use a prepaid phone? And didn't they catch him in a day or so?
We already have blimps doing advertising at sporting events, beaches, and county fairs. How would this be different?
Actually, that not-burning thing is pretty important. There isn't anything you can make the envelop out of that will actually keep hydrogen from permeating through the walls. That means your hydrogen-filled blimp is always a spark away from disaster. Not a big deal at 20,000 ft, but who would want to service the thing while it's on the ground? I wouldn't go anywhere near it. Also, storing and handling hydrogen is dangerous and adds quite a bit to the cost of the ground operations - it's one of the things that makes the shuttle so expensive to operate.
Everybody in that business considers using hydrogen at one point or another, and they always reject it.
Complicated meaning number of moving parts and materials requirements. I don't think the g-forces are all that meaningful from an operations standpoint. An orbital ship has to deal with a bigger heat load than a passenger jet, but rocket engines are (or at least can be) simpler than jet engines. If we'd only ever built four passenger jets they would be every bit as dangerous and as expensive as the shuttle.
My brother had an old Ford Galaxy like that.
I don't think that's been established at all. It's definitely doable if you build a really large rocket. It's not doable for a really small rocket. I think you could probably make it work for a medium-sized vehicle if you didn't have high expectations on payload side. But that's okay, since the point of a rocket like that is to fly often.
Let me echo the AC that replied mentioning Pournelle. I can't recommend How To Get To Space and also The SSX Concept highly enough.
It would only be beneficial if you got rid of the wings on the upper stage. IMO powered landing is crucial to reducing operational costs because you don't have the enormous heat stress on reentry. If they build a 2STO and use a shuttle-style vehicle for the second stage... well, it's a waste of money.
Were I king I'd restart DC-X and build DC-Y. I'd find out, through experimentation, exactly how much payload we can get to LEO using a VTVL SSTO, realizing the answer might be a negative number.
If that didn't work out I'd pursue a 2STO solution with the upper stage being a VTVL craft lifted from my SSTO program and the lower stage being some kind of flyback (either VTVL or VTHL).
It wouldn't surprise me either, because Congress is far more focused on how many jobs are maintained by the program than they are on efficiency. Creating a vehicle that can be maintained by 20 people instead of 20,000 is really at odds with Congress's interest in the endeavor.
I think it would be a mistake to assume that. An orbital ship isn't fundamentally any more complicated than a passenger jetliner. I expect something like SSTO or 2STO is probably doable with low operational overhead, and a working flyback booster gets us half way to 2STO. I'm a big proponent of SSTO myself, and would like to see DC-X (or something like it) restarted.
I hope they can come up with something that works out. This should have been done decades ago when it became clear the shuttle would always be an albatross.
I wondered about that in relation to all the fiber that got laid down during the dotcom bubble. As demand for bandwidth increases the fibers are already in place, whereas without the dotcom bubble there would have been a lag.
I believe the market is a lot more rational than you imagine. Stock prices are based in large part on what investor expectation is regarding profits. It's quite rational to have large swings in price as a result of changing expectations regarding growth, currency fluctuations, or government action. If you're projecting earnings far out into the future, a little change in the shape of your curve has a big impact on the underlying value of the stock. Of course people make mistakes (in the sense that they make money-losing decisions), but from what I can see most of the mistakes are a result of changing conditions or a lack of information.
Exactly what harm are they trying to mitigate here? Volatility isn't a bad thing in and of itself. If the underlying value of the stock is there, the price will recover. If not, well, it needs to go down.
That's a nice plan, but you can't just swap warheads like that. If we have the capability to launch nuclear interceptors, they're already deployed. I doubt that's actually the case, since we don't have that many deployed interceptors and the nuclear-tipped missiles could only be used as a last resort.
This would explain Courtney Love's problems.
It's not clear to me a treatment for normal cognitive decline would necessarily be effective for Alzheimer's.
Legally, BP is on the hook for the entire cost. They have to pay to fix the leak, they have to compensate fishermen and beach communities for lost revenue, and they have to reimburse the government for whatever it is the government is doing. So they certainly have the motivation to contain this. They also have the expertise.
I assume when you say "we" you mean the US government. If "we" take over the operation, with our relative lack of expertise and propensity for making big problems bigger, then BP could quite reasonably sue in federal court to have its liability reduced.
I don't think it's so much they're representing companies as they want to be able to tell constituents they saved x number of jobs in the district. Unfortunately that's the sort of thing people base their vote on.
You have a lot of stones calling other people ignorant and then blaming the wars for our fiscal situation. We spend about 4% of our GDP on the military, which is less than 20% of total federal government outlays.
The only way you can pretend entitlements aren't what's sinking the boat is to pretend social security and medicare are off in their own dimension somewhere. Well, they're not. What we've spent on Iraq and Afghanistan is quite literally lost in the noise of the coming tidal wave of entitlement obligations.
Why not? What vital national interest are we serving by putting people into LEO? There simply isn't anything you can do in space with people that couldn't be done more cheaply with machines. By an order of magnitude. We shouldn't have a manned space program at all until we can figure out how to dramatically reduce costs to orbit. There are a couple avenues to explore - SSTO, tethers, cannons for cargo. Some other, more exotic stuff. But for the time being manned space is a vanity project - the shuttle program should have been canceled in the early '80s when it was clear it would consume the budget for space activities without getting us beyond LEO.
Spaceshipone was very nearly a catastrophic failure. I'd rather go with Armadillo, which has a much more elegant design.
They say it's selling well, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what it's for. Anything with a backlit display won't be as good an ereader as a Kindle. Too big to fit in your pocket, and no keyboard for serious business use. What are people doing with it?
That alone makes it the best language for large business projects. Your coworkers will be a mix of good and bad, and pretending the bad programmers is a more damaging mistake than anything you can do to the code.
Playing video games sounds a hell of a lot more fun than making those little plastic key chain rope things we made when I was a kid. And three hours a day isn't much at all if they're spending the rest of the day, you know, hiking and sailing and such.
I have this suspicion these "kid health experts" don't actually know that much about children.
As usual people on the left who don't know anything about the Constitution assume it says things it doesn't say. The law is constitutional - it doesn't give Arizona authorities any powers federal police don't already have.
Lemme join the crowd in agreeing Bing is better than Google. But beyond that remember people used to say the same thing about Sony when Microsoft entered the console market. If they keep at it long enough Microsoft will eventually find a winning formula for the search engine market.