Do the math. To loft a 10-Kg solar panel into orbit takes about 100 Kg of fuel, or 4.2 x 10^9 Joules.
If it's 10 meters squared in area, it's going to generate about 10KW. Assume a conversion efficiency of 60%, it's 6KW, or 6K joules/second. Assume a wildly optimistic 30% collection rate, and we have 1800 watts delivered to the ground.
It would have to run for about two years just to collect as much energy as it took to loft it.
Not to mention the cost and weight of the downlink equipment.
Then to recover the launch costs, that's never going to happen.
The specs are not impressive. He's talking about 0.040 Watts. To even begin to light a house you'd want at least 10 watts, that would take 250 of these devices. At $4 each, that's a cost of $100 per watt. Spendy.
Or take one salvaged windshield-wiper motor with a three blades. Maybe $15 for 10 watts, or $1.50 per watt. Which is cheaper and easier to install and maintain?
>Whew... I guess it's a good thing my Beechcraft Skipper doesn't have lights, brakes, wheels, pneumatic tires and... oh, wait a minute... it has all of those features!
Yes it does. Now take a stopwatch and your Skipper out on a real road and time how long it takes for something to break.
Airplane wheels, tires, and brakes are designed for short and infrequent rolls down a nice flat runway or grass field. Not subject to typical road bumps, potholes and sudden stops. Not to mention steering and cornering forces.
To be a capable and licenseable road vehicle, it needs to have things like Lights, Bumpers, Side-Impact protection. Not to mention meet pollution regulations. And um, pneumatic tires, wheels, a transmission, and capable brakes. Those all add a heck of a lot of weight. At least 500 pounds that an airplane does not need. So it's going to be a mighty lousy airplane. Carrying a useless 500 pounds at air-freight costs is not an economical way to fly.
Then there are the FAA regulations, which are very strict, and hardly in conformance with the road regulations. Many very basic regulations about configuration are very hard to reconcile with the needs of an auto. The alternative is to license it as an experimental aircraft, which gives you some freedoms, but closes a lot of windows too-- making the plane difficult to insure, finance, and restricts its uses.
Blood transfusions have been going on for something like a century. A lot more successful once they figured out the compatible blood types.
Now this "news report" would have us believe that there's been a problem all this time, and either nobody did any research on it, or if they did they were total numbskulls to not see the connection between lowered oxygen efficacy and the lowering of chemical X.
Ultrasonic leak detectors have been around since at least as far back as 1955.
The telephone company (way back when there was just ONE big one, ATT), used to have like lots of copper wires running from pole to pole (way back when there were wires, and poles, and above-ground stringing).
In the wetter climates the wires were covered in a lead casing (back when lead wasn't so despised). The lead "tubes" were pressurized to keep the moisture out. If the lead sheathing got a leak, a guy (back when telephone company people in the field were guys) would walk down the street holding up an ultrasonic microphone.
A little box on his belt would map the ultrasonic frequencies down to the audible range and feed it to his headphones (back when headphones were big clunky black bakelite things).
>wouldn't it be able to dislodge more than one electron in whatever medium captured it?
Wow! Somebody that knows about secondary emission!
That would be a great idea, trade off energy (voltage) for more electrons (current).
Sorry to say though, IIRC the betas come off at about 300eV, so even if you put them through a 64x electron cascade, down to 5 volts, you'd still need 1/30th of Hanford to get an Amp.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if Skype is making $90 million a quarter and rising, that's $360 million a year, or almost 14% ROI. Most companies would kill to make that much.
Beta emitter.... Hmmm, that's superbly amenable to mathematical analysis. You see each beta particle is an electron, and there's 6.2.. x 10^18 of them per second in an Ampere.
So if you want a radioactive source that's putting out that many electrons per second, and one Curie, one gram of Radium, is 3.7 x 10^10 disintegrations per second. My advanced math, i.e. division, we need about 1.67 x 10^8 Curies of radioactivity. That's kinda a lot.
There's only about HALF of that amount of radioactivity in all the nuclear waste tanks at Hanford.
Kinda impractical to stuff your laptop with several million gallons of radioactive waste.
A little more background info-- our German guys at Huntsville arsenal could have launched a satellite before the Russians. But our govt decided it would not be cool for the first thing in orbit to be pushed there by a rocket designed to launch a nuclear warhead. So our satellite program was required to start from scratch, with a completely peaceful launch vehicle.
Okay, OCR a page of text. You'll probably end up with 5% typos.
Now pass that through a machine translator. Laugh at the results.
From a Russian cruise ship notice:
Behold many whistles! Pursue life savering equipments and bang convolve across the bosoms.
Flee then to the indifferent career ships whereast obediencing the orders of the vessel chef.... and so on from 3454 web sites that collect broken English.
The supposed cost of production has little to do with the eventual selling price. More likely the price will be like 15% below the competition. Don't be looking for $1/watt, more likely $6-7/watt.
Also $1/watt is just the cost of the cells. By the time they're mounted in a panel, panel installed, and all the rest, the cost will be many times higher.
Well, what IBM called "proportional typing" was not what most people would call "proportional spacing". It could, if you held down a tab, do a half-space. Big Whoop.
And the Executive can't change fonts, as it has the old-style typebars, not a golf-ball.
Not that it matters, we're getting a bit off-topic.
>the IBM Selectric,....
Well, not really.
First of all I did not say anything about the document having multiple fonts in it. But if you assume the "th" had to be done in a smaller font size, then:
The IBM Selectric offers "fonts" in the sense that Windows offers "security".
You can, at considerable expense, ($40 in 1960 dollars!, almost $180 today!) purchase alternate type balls. These were NON-PROPORTIONAL, i.e. fixed space fonts. You could select 9 or 10 or 12-point spacing, but only by moving a little gear-shift lever. No other font spacings. Only two font sizes in common use. There is no way anyone in their senses would switch type balls to type a superscripted "th".
And the basic Selectric did NOT have proportionally spaced characters.
You may be conflating it with the "Mag-Card Selectric", a very different $28,000 beast, much despised, which did have proportional spacing, of a sort.
In any case a 1970's military memo looks nothing like what was presented as such. Anybody's who has seen a fewe of ther real thing would never confuse the two.
I suspect the only thing the Australians did was notice "Hey, there's a F-15 going by our window with USAF on it, the radar IFF says that plane is squaquing "4773". That other USAF is squawking "4771". Let's surmise US fighters all squawk 4773 today and heavies squawk "4771".
That's the most likely meaning of the "codes". Not encryption methods at all.
Seriously folks, Dan Rather has about as much common sense as a Bugby.
This is the guy that went on the airwaves with a "memo" supposedly typed in the 1970's, with proportional fonts and different-font sized superscripts! I would not trust someone like that to tell me it's raining.
Carbon-fiber composite construction has been around for going on forty years now. It's been accellerator tested in hot humid ovens and passed with darn good results. Boeing doesn't make junk. And airframes are warranted for tens of thousands of Hobbs clock hours, so the airlines are not at risk, they're voting with their checkbooks.
Some of you may recall a little bit of crazyness a few years back, where almost a MILLION times as much money as was handed to the 12 year old went down the drain. IIRC the final tab for that orgy was about nine *trillion* dollars.
We humans seem to very quickly forget the not too distant past.
Secondly it's not so much a "law", as a consequence of how long it takes to amortize the cost of a fab plant.
Thirdly, it's tied to 2-D circuit layouts. If and when 3-D IC technology becomes practical, then all we need is 2^1/3 percent or about 22% linear shrink every year, which is somewhat more maintainable for a few more generations.
Totally ridiculous idea.
You have an engine that can push with thirty-five micro-newtons.
Now IF we assume this thing draws just TEN watts, what is the weight of the propulsor plus the ten-watt power source?
Probably no less than ten pounds.
How quickly will 35 micro Newtons accelerate a ten-pound weight?
Very, very very slowly. About 0.00003 of a G, I estimate.
And that doesnt allow any weight for the spacecraft, instruments, etc....
You're not going to get to Mars or much of anywhere, not at any reasonable speed with that little acceleration.
And no, ganging up more of these doesn't help. Weight, you know.
Think, folks, think. How often do you need electronics IN a hot zone?
What's worked just fine for many decades is to have sensors in the hot zone, ceramic or Teflon-coated wires to a cooler place where you have the electronics.
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It would have to run for about two years just to collect as much energy as it took to loft it. Not to mention the cost and weight of the downlink equipment.
Then to recover the launch costs, that's never going to happen.
Or take one salvaged windshield-wiper motor with a three blades. Maybe $15 for 10 watts, or $1.50 per watt. Which is cheaper and easier to install and maintain?
Yes it does. Now take a stopwatch and your Skipper out on a real road and time how long it takes for something to break.
Airplane wheels, tires, and brakes are designed for short and infrequent rolls down a nice flat runway or grass field. Not subject to typical road bumps, potholes and sudden stops. Not to mention steering and cornering forces.
To be a capable and licenseable road vehicle, it needs to have things like Lights, Bumpers, Side-Impact protection. Not to mention meet pollution regulations. And um, pneumatic tires, wheels, a transmission, and capable brakes. Those all add a heck of a lot of weight. At least 500 pounds that an airplane does not need. So it's going to be a mighty lousy airplane. Carrying a useless 500 pounds at air-freight costs is not an economical way to fly.
Then there are the FAA regulations, which are very strict, and hardly in conformance with the road regulations. Many very basic regulations about configuration are very hard to reconcile with the needs of an auto. The alternative is to license it as an experimental aircraft, which gives you some freedoms, but closes a lot of windows too-- making the plane difficult to insure, finance, and restricts its uses.
Now this "news report" would have us believe that there's been a problem all this time, and either nobody did any research on it, or if they did they were total numbskulls to not see the connection between lowered oxygen efficacy and the lowering of chemical X.
Smells a teeensy bit fishy.
The telephone company (way back when there was just ONE big one, ATT), used to have like lots of copper wires running from pole to pole (way back when there were wires, and poles, and above-ground stringing).
In the wetter climates the wires were covered in a lead casing (back when lead wasn't so despised). The lead "tubes" were pressurized to keep the moisture out. If the lead sheathing got a leak, a guy (back when telephone company people in the field were guys) would walk down the street holding up an ultrasonic microphone.
A little box on his belt would map the ultrasonic frequencies down to the audible range and feed it to his headphones (back when headphones were big clunky black bakelite things).
>wouldn't it be able to dislodge more than one electron in whatever medium captured it? Wow! Somebody that knows about secondary emission! That would be a great idea, trade off energy (voltage) for more electrons (current). Sorry to say though, IIRC the betas come off at about 300eV, so even if you put them through a 64x electron cascade, down to 5 volts, you'd still need 1/30th of Hanford to get an Amp.
Maybe I'm missing something, but if Skype is making $90 million a quarter and rising, that's $360 million a year, or almost 14% ROI. Most companies would kill to make that much.
Kinda impractical to stuff your laptop with several million gallons of radioactive waste.
There's no "Somewhat unique", or "very unique".
A little more background info-- our German guys at Huntsville arsenal could have launched a satellite before the Russians. But our govt decided it would not be cool for the first thing in orbit to be pushed there by a rocket designed to launch a nuclear warhead. So our satellite program was required to start from scratch, with a completely peaceful launch vehicle.
Okay, OCR a page of text. You'll probably end up with 5% typos. Now pass that through a machine translator. Laugh at the results. From a Russian cruise ship notice: Behold many whistles! Pursue life savering equipments and bang convolve across the bosoms. Flee then to the indifferent career ships whereast obediencing the orders of the vessel chef. ... and so on from 3454 web sites that collect broken English.
Also $1/watt is just the cost of the cells. By the time they're mounted in a panel, panel installed, and all the rest, the cost will be many times higher.
Well, what IBM called "proportional typing" was not what most people would call "proportional spacing". It could, if you held down a tab, do a half-space. Big Whoop. And the Executive can't change fonts, as it has the old-style typebars, not a golf-ball. Not that it matters, we're getting a bit off-topic.
Details? Were you in diapers then and you can't Google for "Internet bubble"?
>the IBM Selectric, ....
Well, not really.
First of all I did not say anything about the document having multiple fonts in it. But if you assume the "th" had to be done in a smaller font size, then:
The IBM Selectric offers "fonts" in the sense that Windows offers "security".
You can, at considerable expense, ($40 in 1960 dollars!, almost $180 today!) purchase alternate type balls. These were NON-PROPORTIONAL, i.e. fixed space fonts. You could select 9 or 10 or 12-point spacing, but only by moving a little gear-shift lever. No other font spacings. Only two font sizes in common use. There is no way anyone in their senses would switch type balls to type a superscripted "th".
And the basic Selectric did NOT have proportionally spaced characters.
You may be conflating it with the "Mag-Card Selectric", a very different $28,000 beast, much despised, which did have proportional spacing, of a sort.
In any case a 1970's military memo looks nothing like what was presented as such. Anybody's who has seen a fewe of ther real thing would never confuse the two.
That's the most likely meaning of the "codes". Not encryption methods at all.
- Buying Madonna's book: Screwing for Virginity.
- Buying MS Vista for it's speed and congeniality.
Seriously folks, Dan Rather has about as much common sense as a Bugby.This is the guy that went on the airwaves with a "memo" supposedly typed in the 1970's, with proportional fonts and different-font sized superscripts! I would not trust someone like that to tell me it's raining.
Carbon-fiber composite construction has been around for going on forty years now. It's been accellerator tested in hot humid ovens and passed with darn good results. Boeing doesn't make junk. And airframes are warranted for tens of thousands of Hobbs clock hours, so the airlines are not at risk, they're voting with their checkbooks.
We humans seem to very quickly forget the not too distant past.
One might suspect that might apply to these shorter microwaves too.
What's the Geneva Convention rules say about weapons that blind you , even if not immediately?
Secondly it's not so much a "law", as a consequence of how long it takes to amortize the cost of a fab plant.
Thirdly, it's tied to 2-D circuit layouts. If and when 3-D IC technology becomes practical, then all we need is 2^1/3 percent or about 22% linear shrink every year, which is somewhat more maintainable for a few more generations.
Totally ridiculous idea. You have an engine that can push with thirty-five micro-newtons. Now IF we assume this thing draws just TEN watts, what is the weight of the propulsor plus the ten-watt power source? Probably no less than ten pounds. How quickly will 35 micro Newtons accelerate a ten-pound weight? Very, very very slowly. About 0.00003 of a G, I estimate. And that doesnt allow any weight for the spacecraft, instruments, etc.... You're not going to get to Mars or much of anywhere, not at any reasonable speed with that little acceleration. And no, ganging up more of these doesn't help. Weight, you know.
What's worked just fine for many decades is to have sensors in the hot zone, ceramic or Teflon-coated wires to a cooler place where you have the electronics.
Columbus got over 2,000 miles per galleon.....