Quote: "Much like a commercial airliner, our multi-engine design has the potential to provide significantly higher reliability than single engine competitors."
WHAT "single engine competitors"?? No U.S. to-orbit vehicle of which I am aware has EVER been "single-engine"!
How about space ship two, if you only count the first 50km of the launch?
Oh, and the test site is located at an old weapons test site. There are all these weird looking bunkers peppering the surrounding countryside. It felt like a scene from a Marvel comic or something. Unfortunately nothing went wrong and I failed to develop super powers due to radiation exposure.
Brings to mind the novel Rocketship Galileo by Robert Heinlein. Maybe Elon is actually going to the moon to battle Nazis.
Look at the Apollo lunar lander. That thing had panels you could *punch* through. The astronauts during testing were told that the flimsiness of the lander wouldn't be a problem in space when they were weightless....
Yeah but NASA are fantastic engineers. Their interface design and validation are orders of magnitude ahead of anybody else.
Consider the first shuttle flight. The most complex and unlikely machine (pretty much) ever built. And it worked first time. They were hot at the time, coming off the experience of Apollo.
I just don't think NASA is a good example of what can be done by anybody other than NASA.
The Falcon 9 will launch SpaceX's spaceship Dragon with up to 7 humans from 2009 on.
I bet it won't.
Launching human beings into orbit is hard to do. For a start you need to demonstrate that your launch vehicle is reliable enough to be considered man rated. Then you need to develop your lander and validate that.
They may get there eventually but I doubt they can do it in one year.
It doesn't matter what the "underlying social mechanism"
If IQ turns out to be an indicator of melanin concentration when it is meant to be an indicator of cognitive ability then we should go back and find out what went wrong with the way we determine intelligence.
We already have perfectly good optical instruments for measuring the colors of things. We don't need stupid indirect ways of doing it.
If IQ really is different for people of African descent then it is IQ which is broken.
Not all oxidation requires Oxygen. Reference the Na Cl reaction as just one trivial example. However the production of flames rather than kabooms requires something to moderate the reaction. It would be interesting to find what reactions could take place at Titan's STP.
It would be rather good if fossil oxidiser could be found on Titan. Perhaps there are deep beds of frozen Nitrous Oxide under the surface just waiting to be dug up and put to use in a new fossil fuel industry.
The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal contains many references to the affect of gas pressure inside the descent engine bell. Below two metres altitude the engine was supposed to be shut down because the excess pressure close to the ground might cause the bell to deform.
We had this discussion a little while back. The mythical AI where machines "learn" how to "think" is a long way away or possibly impossible with current technology.
Interesting that in Friday the shipstones were absolutely closed source proprietary hardware. They were similar in some ways to the General Products hull in Larry Niven's Ringworld.
The effect was to create a hugely profitable monopoly which utterly controlled commerce. The analogy with the software industry is obvious.
The existing device includes a ballistic recovery system, basically an explosive-launched parachute that you deploy when something goes wrong. The main trick with that is to be flying high enough for the parachute to deploy and float you down. It's a common thing in ultralight aircraft and probably accounts for a lot of the cost. Most ultralight fatalities occur because the failure occurred too low for the BRD to deply, or it fouled in a propeller or something.
Thats why I think he should give up on the jetpack idea. He should attach the fans to a little cabin like on a sailplane, then outfit it with airbags inside and outside. That will help, but not totally fix the low altitude failure problem.
Ground effect applies to airplanes, helicopters and of course hovercraft.
Ands rockets. Lunar module pilots had to either cut their power or throttle right down to land on the moon. Ground effect was significant over the last couple of metres.
Sky biking on the moon was mentioned in Rendezvous with Rama. I always wondered if Jimmy Pak, the sky bike rider in that book was intended to be from Sri Lanka.
But this system's definition of "unusual activity" intrigues me. If one of these toys is set up for example in a bank to monitor a vault door and a bank guard passes by the door every hour on his rounds, the software would presumably record that as "normal" activity. What is the "unusual" element that would prod the AI into sending an alert if a thief did exactly the same thing? What dynamic does the system employ to determine if a bank guard is a legitimate bank guard or Willie Sutton? The time it happened? Facial recognition? The fact that the "bank guard" pulled a cutting torch or dynamite out of his backpack and started going to town on the vault door?
Maybe it flags people who hide their face from the camera.
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Quote: "Much like a commercial airliner, our multi-engine design has the potential to provide significantly higher reliability than single engine competitors."
WHAT "single engine competitors"?? No U.S. to-orbit vehicle of which I am aware has EVER been "single-engine"!
How about space ship two, if you only count the first 50km of the launch?
This is awesome news. But why did I sign up for the newletter if they always release their stuff to spaceref or spacedaily first? Just saying...
They have a mailing list? Haven't they heard of RSS?
Now that was a great spacecraft. Keep it nice and simple. Probably less complicated than a modern day light aircraft.
Oh, and the test site is located at an old weapons test site. There are all these weird looking bunkers peppering the surrounding countryside. It felt like a scene from a Marvel comic or something. Unfortunately nothing went wrong and I failed to develop super powers due to radiation exposure.
Brings to mind the novel Rocketship Galileo by Robert Heinlein. Maybe Elon is actually going to the moon to battle Nazis.
Look at the Apollo lunar lander. That thing had panels you could *punch* through. The astronauts during testing were told that the flimsiness of the lander wouldn't be a problem in space when they were weightless....
Yeah but NASA are fantastic engineers. Their interface design and validation are orders of magnitude ahead of anybody else.
Consider the first shuttle flight. The most complex and unlikely machine (pretty much) ever built. And it worked first time. They were hot at the time, coming off the experience of Apollo.
I just don't think NASA is a good example of what can be done by anybody other than NASA.
Note that they said "up to" seven humans. An unmanned launch of Dragon in 2009 would qualify.
They should have said "up to 7000 humans". Sounds better that way.
Oh, and you can develop/qualify your lander at the same time you qualify your launcher; they don't have to be done serially.
True, but they do need a reliable launcher to test the lander and they don't have one of those yet.
The Falcon 9 will launch SpaceX's spaceship Dragon with up to 7 humans from 2009 on.
I bet it won't.
Launching human beings into orbit is hard to do. For a start you need to demonstrate that your launch vehicle is reliable enough to be considered man rated. Then you need to develop your lander and validate that.
They may get there eventually but I doubt they can do it in one year.
It doesn't matter what the "underlying social mechanism"
If IQ turns out to be an indicator of melanin concentration when it is meant to be an indicator of cognitive ability then we should go back and find out what went wrong with the way we determine intelligence.
We already have perfectly good optical instruments for measuring the colors of things. We don't need stupid indirect ways of doing it.
If IQ really is different for people of African descent then it is IQ which is broken.
Not all oxidation requires Oxygen. Reference the Na Cl reaction as just one trivial example. However the production of flames rather than kabooms requires something to moderate the reaction. It would be interesting to find what reactions could take place at Titan's STP.
It would be rather good if fossil oxidiser could be found on Titan. Perhaps there are deep beds of frozen Nitrous Oxide under the surface just waiting to be dug up and put to use in a new fossil fuel industry.
So does this mean we finally will have the ability to 'nuke it from orbit'? 'It' being the terrorist-sheltering target of the week.
Not if the target has a substantial monetary value.
The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal contains many references to the affect of gas pressure inside the descent engine bell. Below two metres altitude the engine was supposed to be shut down because the excess pressure close to the ground might cause the bell to deform.
We had this discussion a little while back. The mythical AI where machines "learn" how to "think" is a long way away or possibly impossible with current technology.
How do you know they are not thinking now?
The effect was to create a hugely profitable monopoly which utterly controlled commerce. The analogy with the software industry is obvious.
The existing device includes a ballistic recovery system, basically an explosive-launched parachute that you deploy when something goes wrong. The main trick with that is to be flying high enough for the parachute to deploy and float you down. It's a common thing in ultralight aircraft and probably accounts for a lot of the cost. Most ultralight fatalities occur because the failure occurred too low for the BRD to deply, or it fouled in a propeller or something.
Thats why I think he should give up on the jetpack idea. He should attach the fans to a little cabin like on a sailplane, then outfit it with airbags inside and outside. That will help, but not totally fix the low altitude failure problem.
Jtpck actually
To get a (hot) chick?
But how to you take her home?
Ground effect applies to airplanes, helicopters and of course hovercraft.
Ands rockets. Lunar module pilots had to either cut their power or throttle right down to land on the moon. Ground effect was significant over the last couple of metres.
less dangerous than any incarnation if this thing, which would fall like a rock on engine failure.
I assume you would give it a ballisic parachute, possiby automatic but it won't help you below 100 feet or so.
Methane would do it fine.
Never know, she could have joined the 3-feet high club with Mr. Martin ....
What you mean one jetpack each? I am not sure they are designed for...in flight refueling.
If this guy forgot about the jetpack requirement and built a little ducted fan powered aircraft he could actually be on to something.
I hope it has a ballistic parachute though.
I hope he's done having children at that point. I can't imagine how ruined your genitalia would be after a 8000 mile or so ride.
I have cycled 9182 km in the last three years and I am yet to see any degredation in my genitalia.
Sky biking on the moon was mentioned in Rendezvous with Rama. I always wondered if Jimmy Pak, the sky bike rider in that book was intended to be from Sri Lanka.
But this system's definition of "unusual activity" intrigues me. If one of these toys is set up for example in a bank to monitor a vault door and a bank guard passes by the door every hour on his rounds, the software would presumably record that as "normal" activity. What is the "unusual" element that would prod the AI into sending an alert if a thief did exactly the same thing? What dynamic does the system employ to determine if a bank guard is a legitimate bank guard or Willie Sutton? The time it happened? Facial recognition? The fact that the "bank guard" pulled a cutting torch or dynamite out of his backpack and started going to town on the vault door?
Maybe it flags people who hide their face from the camera.
What we *NEED* is ultra efficient storage of energy.
You need shipstones!