Statistically, the people that are most likely to win the lottery are the ones that play the most. Which would have a high correlation with people with gambling addictions. Winning a lot of money for a gambling addict means they can gamble more at a higher level.
If you only followed people who won the lottery who previously only bought 1 ticket a week, they would be closer to the average person.
This could actually work, at least for a smaller player to drive growth in market. A smaller player can't maintain the dealer network to pull this off, because it depends on sufficient dealers and service centers to credibly supply the necessary "support" required. And support is required.
But a smaller player simply can't do that. Instead you provide easily accessible diagnostic information, and 1-2 service warehouses able to ship parts overnight with sufficient information for the farmer themselves, independent mechanism with a number of highly mobile factory mechanics (for a fee) when necessary. This open approach would traditionally been seen as an issue by farmers in terms of support. Farmers were used to the local tractor dealer providing the wrap around support required. But in the modern connected era this is making less sense, and a much more open and flexible while still fast form of support is becoming more acceptable, as the big brands try and maintain the dealer network service profitability.
Cost is irrelevant, it is the compromise in the design. If they did have a super long life tire they would be awful tires.
There is a trade off between grip and wear. You need grip to turn and stop effectively, very important for safety. That means a stickier tire compound and more wear. Grip is friction after all. Interestingly there is also a tradeoff between grip and roll resistance, so less grip results in more fuel efficiency.
You could make an effectively wearless high fuel efficiency tire with a really hard low grip compound. It would also be a very poor handling and dangerous car.
But the insurance industry does improve safety and prevent harm. It encourages programs, standards and good practice in those it insures in exchange for lower insurance rates. So hurricane resistant building designs will get lower premiums in hurricane prone areas. And they do this by accessing risk based on statistical evidence. It pushes best practice before bad things happen.
I think much of the issues with say flood insurance propping up otherwise too risky flood prone communities, is that the insurance is government subsidised in flood prone areas. Which distorts the market pressure from increased insurance costs on flood prone areas, and instead encourage further building.
Probably the clearest example I can think of is the setting up of the "underwriters laboratory" for what was originally fire safety standards and approval for fire safety in buildings and electrical safety, setup by the National Board of Fire Underwriters, now the American Insurance Association trade association. UL standards are everywhere, and ensure product safety over a wide range of products.
OK, it's more sigmoidal and not exponential. This is actually true of all exponential growth in real life, they eventually hit another limit that stops the growth. Google bacterial growth curve for an example.
Obviously the growth in clock speed has been exponential (moores law) and goes in major steps process and design changes, but for fun, the linear average increase in clock speed since the launch of the intel 4004 in 1971 (740khz) to the present top line chips (~4.3 Ghz) is 3 Hz per second. Or 3 more cycles per second per second.
To be strategic is to do something in the wider world like countering competitors in an established market, or invading a new market. It intimately involves responses of players you have 0 control over in reality, customers, competitors responses, and investor expectations.
Control freaks, do not apply here. You will fail. Yes you can be a destructive middle manager with some stats you can manipulate to show apparentsuccess, but as soon as you come up against what you have 0 control over you will not know how to respond
To be strategic is to actually be able to balance tactical vs the ultimate aim in a highly skilled way. It is also the skill of looking into what may happen in the future and design counter measures. You will be wrong, but if you are mostly right then that will be good enough you change your view based on those facts.
Everyone says that you can't site wikipedia because it can be defaced or randomly changed. But every change is documented with time and date of the last update with a unique link. There maybe cases where offensive material maybe permanently removed, but otherwise a snapshot of a citable page should always be available at wikipedia to view.
It is the same as citing a book, you include the edition etc as later editions can be significantly different.
Having said that, anything that is on wikipedia should be cited and verified anyway. In which case it's better to cite that source.
The dealer network takes on some of the risk of launching and selling new models. Basically they purchase stock.of cars for their lots, and can take a haircut if they don't shift. A direct delivery model works, but expect very long lead times for orders (eg tesla), as production is essentially throttled to demand.
It is actually one of the great myths about lean manufacturing coming out of the auto industry. Lean manufacturing holding almost no stock only really works if you can shift significant amounts of the risk and stock to suppliers and your dealer network.
Be honest and say you want to retire. And give a time frame. What a sensible employer will do is negotiate a change over period where a new person to the role is trained and information passed on.
Had a similar situation where an engineer was retiring, who had basically designed all the electronics in all our products. Did the above, hired a good engineer and planned a 6 months cross training period. We in the end only got 3 months as the guy decided to retire even earlier, but those 3 months were invaluable.
Night time irrigation reduces water loss from evaporation. Irrigate at night and there is 12 hours or more to soak into the ground and be absorbed by the crops before it gets to the hottest part of the day.
Demonstrate the value of good practice. The difference between inexperience and experience is the experienced have made the mistakes and seen the consequences of other mistakes. The point of all those software approaches is that they improve end software quality,and medium to longer term improve maintainability and extensiblility of the code. (If they don't achieve any of those, you probably should get rid of the process).
The real problem with inexperienced programmers is they haven't seen the result on a large code base and project of not following good practice. So they can't see the value yet.
Very simply, try and demonstrate the value. Eg two pieces of code, one with poor structure and commenting and one written to a good standard. Have them change some functionality in each and validate the change. The poorly written bit of code will be a pig, the code that is to standard easy and the automated testing will give them a nice little validation of the result. Drive home why the better written code was easier to work with.
It will also let you weed out the really destructive programmers early, the ones that never learn the value of good coding practice.
You remember dieselgate right, where VW cars were cheating the lab based regulatory tests, by going into a state where the NOx emission are within standards, but when driven on real roads the cars exceeded the standards by 20 fold and higher. The point of the article is because the car standards are lab based, they bear a very poor relationship to the actual NOx emissions in real world conditions. The real world testing of heavy vehicles has ensured that they are actually lower in output than many dieshttps://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/01/06/142229/diesel-cars-produce-more-toxic-emissions-than-trucks-and-buses-eu-study-says#el cars under similar conditions.
The science was always going to be the first one to be hit from brexit. Basically the system is based on funding collaborations across the EU, and rightly or wrongly, collaboration groups are dropping UK based research institutes as a high risk to the projects funding prospects. There has been no real impact yet as very few grants have been awarded since the vote, but as we see the next few rounds of various Horizon 2020 EU grant scheme go through we will see a drop in funding going to the UK.
Next that will be obvious is the decrease in funding for regional development, and that will be when it starts to impact the people that actually voted to leave. That is going to take a year or so to become obvious.
My frustration with the referendum is that the leave side of the vote wasn't actually had no specific actions assigned to it in the law that set it up, in the end it was a very expensive nation wide opinion poll on EU membership. In a way, people who voted leave didn't actually vote for anything concrete.
The vote should have had article 50 legislatively tied to the vote when the referendum was first setup, with an automatic and immediate invocation of it outside the control of the UK parliament and prime minister. It would have dramatically curtailed the leave campaigns ability to basically come up with contradictory and fanciful scenarios of what voting leave would mean, it would have been a much starker and obvious choice.
Yep, broad acre farming is capital intensive. There is the land for a start. Then the required structures to run the farm. Housing for management and workers, grain storage silos, workshop, machinery sheds, fertilizer storage sheds etc. And then lots of capital equipment: Main tractor, seeder and tillage equipment. Sprayer and fertilizer spreader. Then harvester, and chaser bins etc. Then the ancillary equipment, pickups trucks, full sized trucks, workshop equipment, etc etc. Then at that point you get the opportunity to invest in the seed grain, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and man power required to put in and grow a potentially good crop (no guarantees). Then wait a growing season to see if you made enough money to put in next seasons crops, cover interest and pay off a small sliver of the debt mountain you have. Rinse and repeat. Why anyone would want to be a farmer.
Or the result of photochemistry done with circularly polarized light... something stars emit a fair amount of. So no, not an exclusive signature of life.
That would be a cosmic process for enriching enantiomers. Which would have implications for the origin of life, as life has chosen specific enantiomers. Read my last sentence:)
In truth the CPL light theory for enantiomeric enrichment is far fetched. It is the effect of the opposite signed circular dichroism (differential absorbance of circular polarised light) of the 2 enantiomeric forms, and that is ~1x10^-5 for the vast majority of chiral molecules compared to the overall absorbance. All the material would be destroyed before any meaningful enrichment occurred.
I think the real answer is that life just started, and a choice had to be made. All biochemistry would work perfectly in the complete mirror image if the universe had chosen that way round, but to replicate and reach enough complexity one enantiomeric form for all the complex carbon molecules had to be chosen.
They've found that one of the simplest pair of chiral molecules can be created in space. Not surprising, and both the left and right enantiomers (the left and right handed molecules) are almost certainly present in a 50/50 ratio, so not enantiomerically pure. They have not shown anything at all interesting here.
One of the defining things about chiral chemistry is that to have a pure enantiomeric compound you either have to start with an enantiomerically pure compound as a starting materials (biologically derived materials are the only known natural source) or have it interact with another enantiomericially pure catalyst (biological enzymes being the only known natural source of these) or purification medium. It is pretty much a signature of biology.
What would be interesting is if there was found a chiral molecule in space that was significantly biased to one enantiomer. Depending on the context of what was found this would be proof of either extraterrestrial life, or a cosmic enantiomeric enrichment process that would have huge implications for understanding the origin of life.
Synergy used to have a specific meaning in business; it pertained to mergers and acquisitions. The point of a merger was to achieve 'synergy' because the two companies owned or produced something that would improve the overall product in some way.
Now, of course, it means fuck all.
In mergers and acquisitions synergy actually means "the 2 companies have replicated staff roles that become redundant when we merge and we can fire half of them but maintain the combined marketshare.". To be fair, it's often actually true.
Because they don't have coordinated tax systems, and doing that is a huge political issue, otherwise yes that is how you do it. This is the reasonably low bureaucratic route where the company reports all income and taxes, and spot checks can be used to make sure companies are telling the truth.
"Then why don't the people living in these neighborhoods open competing shops, and drive the bad retailers out of business while making a nice profit?"
That is the point of cooperatives, though for some reasons they are not popular in the US for setting up retail and grocery stores as elsewhere in the world. I grew up in a small remote town with one town cooperative grocery store. This was to ensure there was an accessible grocery store that did not price gouge.
One of the dynamics that allow price gouging in poor neighbourhoods is lack of transport options. If you don't have a car or can't afford to run it and have to take public transport then your options are limited. It's what you can walk to, what you can easily get to on the bus, or what gets delivered to your door. It's not like the middle-class suburban lifestyle of being able to easily drive to a number of difference retail and grocery options without thinking about it.
There are a number of reasons why ford would be very interested in the model X.
The model X is Tesla's 3rd time around in developing a pure EV car platform. There will be a lot of lessons learnt the hard way embedded in the design of the model X.
The model X is a SUV, playing right in Fords bread and butter market. The previous models where in the small sports car and then the luxury saloon car market. First one is almost absent from the ford lineup, and the second a fairly small part of what they do. The model X is a benchmark for any EV SUV's fords have in development. Ride quality, handling, real range, real performance etc. are all important things to compare against and difficult to get purely from specs. Also simply understanding how it compares to fords conventional and hybrid offerings is important to drive marketing and sales information in the short term.
So they buy 1 or 2 of these. Look at all aspects of it, and use this to drive marketing in the short term and product development long term.
"ESRO enjoyed its first big success in 1968 with the launch of ESRO 2B, an astronomy survey orbiter that was delivered to orbit utilizing a Scout rocket from the Western Test Range in California. But the establishment of a European launch vehicle, which was eventually named Europa, didn't progress as hoped. Several nations collaborated on the vehicle, with the United Kingdom developing the first stage (based on the “Blue Streak” ballistic missile), France the second stage, and Germany the third. Europa experienced many growing pains, cost overruns, and a lack of focus. Successive rocket stage failures eventually doomed the program."
What isn't mentioned is that there were 2 countries that had developed space programs with a launch capability by 1971 in the same time period as they were trying to develop Europa. The French had the Diamant launch system, and in the same period the UK developed the same Blue Streak missile technology, used on the Europa first stage, into the Black Arrow rocket. Both countries had successfully launched satellites by 1971. The Europa launch system was your obvious european politically driven mixture of technology from UK, France and West Germany with the divisions causing confusion and poor communication between the engineering teams. Result was it failed, got scrapped and the Ariane launch system was developed and put together by the French, which makes sense as they had the most experience and success with their own launch vehicle. The UK dropped their space launch capability and decided to focus on what would become ESA, making them the only country to have developed a national satellite launch capability and then to have dropped it.
Slashdot Mirror
There is one modifier to that I'd add.
Statistically, the people that are most likely to win the lottery are the ones that play the most. Which would have a high correlation with people with gambling addictions. Winning a lot of money for a gambling addict means they can gamble more at a higher level.
If you only followed people who won the lottery who previously only bought 1 ticket a week, they would be closer to the average person.
This could actually work, at least for a smaller player to drive growth in market. A smaller player can't maintain the dealer network to pull this off, because it depends on sufficient dealers and service centers to credibly supply the necessary "support" required. And support is required.
But a smaller player simply can't do that. Instead you provide easily accessible diagnostic information, and 1-2 service warehouses able to ship parts overnight with sufficient information for the farmer themselves, independent mechanism with a number of highly mobile factory mechanics (for a fee) when necessary. This open approach would traditionally been seen as an issue by farmers in terms of support. Farmers were used to the local tractor dealer providing the wrap around support required. But in the modern connected era this is making less sense, and a much more open and flexible while still fast form of support is becoming more acceptable, as the big brands try and maintain the dealer network service profitability.
Cost is irrelevant, it is the compromise in the design. If they did have a super long life tire they would be awful tires.
There is a trade off between grip and wear. You need grip to turn and stop effectively, very important for safety. That means a stickier tire compound and more wear. Grip is friction after all. Interestingly there is also a tradeoff between grip and roll resistance, so less grip results in more fuel efficiency.
You could make an effectively wearless high fuel efficiency tire with a really hard low grip compound. It would also be a very poor handling and dangerous car.
But the insurance industry does improve safety and prevent harm. It encourages programs, standards and good practice in those it insures in exchange for lower insurance rates. So hurricane resistant building designs will get lower premiums in hurricane prone areas. And they do this by accessing risk based on statistical evidence. It pushes best practice before bad things happen.
I think much of the issues with say flood insurance propping up otherwise too risky flood prone communities, is that the insurance is government subsidised in flood prone areas. Which distorts the market pressure from increased insurance costs on flood prone areas, and instead encourage further building.
Probably the clearest example I can think of is the setting up of the "underwriters laboratory" for what was originally fire safety standards and approval for fire safety in buildings and electrical safety, setup by the National Board of Fire Underwriters, now the American Insurance Association trade association. UL standards are everywhere, and ensure product safety over a wide range of products.
OK, it's more sigmoidal and not exponential. This is actually true of all exponential growth in real life, they eventually hit another limit that stops the growth. Google bacterial growth curve for an example.
Intel top line CPU speeds have gone from 3.8 to 4.3 ghz in the last 10 years. That is still 2 hz per second increase over the last 2 years.
Obviously the growth in clock speed has been exponential (moores law) and goes in major steps process and design changes, but for fun, the linear average increase in clock speed since the launch of the intel 4004 in 1971 (740khz) to the present top line chips (~4.3 Ghz) is 3 Hz per second. Or 3 more cycles per second per second.
To be strategic is to do something in the wider world like countering competitors in an established market, or invading a new market. It intimately involves responses of players you have 0 control over in reality, customers, competitors responses, and investor expectations.
Control freaks, do not apply here. You will fail. Yes you can be a destructive middle manager with some stats you can manipulate to show apparentsuccess, but as soon as you come up against what you have 0 control over you will not know how to respond
To be strategic is to actually be able to balance tactical vs the ultimate aim in a highly skilled way. It is also the skill of looking into what may happen in the future and design counter measures. You will be wrong, but if you are mostly right then that will be good enough you change your view based on those facts.
Everyone says that you can't site wikipedia because it can be defaced or randomly changed. But every change is documented with time and date of the last update with a unique link. There maybe cases where offensive material maybe permanently removed, but otherwise a snapshot of a citable page should always be available at wikipedia to view.
It is the same as citing a book, you include the edition etc as later editions can be significantly different.
Having said that, anything that is on wikipedia should be cited and verified anyway. In which case it's better to cite that source.
The dealer network takes on some of the risk of launching and selling new models. Basically they purchase stock .of cars for their lots, and can take a haircut if they don't shift. A direct delivery model works, but expect very long lead times for orders (eg tesla), as production is essentially throttled to demand.
It is actually one of the great myths about lean manufacturing coming out of the auto industry. Lean manufacturing holding almost no stock only really works if you can shift significant amounts of the risk and stock to suppliers and your dealer network.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lSwUEVx5G3U
If there is sufficient market, there will be a secondary market solution. Simple really.
Be honest and say you want to retire. And give a time frame. What a sensible employer will do is negotiate a change over period where a new person to the role is trained and information passed on.
Had a similar situation where an engineer was retiring, who had basically designed all the electronics in all our products. Did the above, hired a good engineer and planned a 6 months cross training period. We in the end only got 3 months as the guy decided to retire even earlier, but those 3 months were invaluable.
Night time irrigation reduces water loss from evaporation. Irrigate at night and there is 12 hours or more to soak into the ground and be absorbed by the crops before it gets to the hottest part of the day.
Demonstrate the value of good practice. The difference between inexperience and experience is the experienced have made the mistakes and seen the consequences of other mistakes. The point of all those software approaches is that they improve end software quality,and medium to longer term improve maintainability and extensiblility of the code. (If they don't achieve any of those, you probably should get rid of the process).
The real problem with inexperienced programmers is they haven't seen the result on a large code base and project of not following good practice. So they can't see the value yet.
Very simply, try and demonstrate the value. Eg two pieces of code, one with poor structure and commenting and one written to a good standard. Have them change some functionality in each and validate the change. The poorly written bit of code will be a pig, the code that is to standard easy and the automated testing will give them a nice little validation of the result. Drive home why the better written code was easier to work with.
It will also let you weed out the really destructive programmers early, the ones that never learn the value of good coding practice.
Their is a specific exemption Spacecraft in the RoHS directive.
You remember dieselgate right, where VW cars were cheating the lab based regulatory tests, by going into a state where the NOx emission are within standards, but when driven on real roads the cars exceeded the standards by 20 fold and higher. The point of the article is because the car standards are lab based, they bear a very poor relationship to the actual NOx emissions in real world conditions. The real world testing of heavy vehicles has ensured that they are actually lower in output than many dieshttps://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/01/06/142229/diesel-cars-produce-more-toxic-emissions-than-trucks-and-buses-eu-study-says#el cars under similar conditions.
The science was always going to be the first one to be hit from brexit. Basically the system is based on funding collaborations across the EU, and rightly or wrongly, collaboration groups are dropping UK based research institutes as a high risk to the projects funding prospects. There has been no real impact yet as very few grants have been awarded since the vote, but as we see the next few rounds of various Horizon 2020 EU grant scheme go through we will see a drop in funding going to the UK.
Next that will be obvious is the decrease in funding for regional development, and that will be when it starts to impact the people that actually voted to leave. That is going to take a year or so to become obvious.
My frustration with the referendum is that the leave side of the vote wasn't actually had no specific actions assigned to it in the law that set it up, in the end it was a very expensive nation wide opinion poll on EU membership. In a way, people who voted leave didn't actually vote for anything concrete.
The vote should have had article 50 legislatively tied to the vote when the referendum was first setup, with an automatic and immediate invocation of it outside the control of the UK parliament and prime minister. It would have dramatically curtailed the leave campaigns ability to basically come up with contradictory and fanciful scenarios of what voting leave would mean, it would have been a much starker and obvious choice.
Yep, broad acre farming is capital intensive.
There is the land for a start. Then the required structures to run the farm.
Housing for management and workers, grain storage silos, workshop, machinery sheds, fertilizer storage sheds etc.
And then lots of capital equipment:
Main tractor, seeder and tillage equipment.
Sprayer and fertilizer spreader.
Then harvester, and chaser bins etc.
Then the ancillary equipment, pickups trucks, full sized trucks, workshop equipment, etc etc.
Then at that point you get the opportunity to invest in the seed grain, fertilizer, pesticides, herbicides, and man power required to put in and grow a potentially good crop (no guarantees). Then wait a growing season to see if you made enough money to put in next seasons crops, cover interest and pay off a small sliver of the debt mountain you have. Rinse and repeat. Why anyone would want to be a farmer.
Or the result of photochemistry done with circularly polarized light... something stars emit a fair amount of. So no, not an exclusive signature of life.
That would be a cosmic process for enriching enantiomers. Which would have implications for the origin of life, as life has chosen specific enantiomers. Read my last sentence:)
In truth the CPL light theory for enantiomeric enrichment is far fetched. It is the effect of the opposite signed circular dichroism (differential absorbance of circular polarised light) of the 2 enantiomeric forms, and that is ~1x10^-5 for the vast majority of chiral molecules compared to the overall absorbance. All the material would be destroyed before any meaningful enrichment occurred.
I think the real answer is that life just started, and a choice had to be made. All biochemistry would work perfectly in the complete mirror image if the universe had chosen that way round, but to replicate and reach enough complexity one enantiomeric form for all the complex carbon molecules had to be chosen.
They've found that one of the simplest pair of chiral molecules can be created in space. Not surprising, and both the left and right enantiomers (the left and right handed molecules) are almost certainly present in a 50/50 ratio, so not enantiomerically pure. They have not shown anything at all interesting here.
One of the defining things about chiral chemistry is that to have a pure enantiomeric compound you either have to start with an enantiomerically pure compound as a starting materials (biologically derived materials are the only known natural source) or have it interact with another enantiomericially pure catalyst (biological enzymes being the only known natural source of these) or purification medium. It is pretty much a signature of biology.
What would be interesting is if there was found a chiral molecule in space that was significantly biased to one enantiomer. Depending on the context of what was found this would be proof of either extraterrestrial life, or a cosmic enantiomeric enrichment process that would have huge implications for understanding the origin of life.
Synergy used to have a specific meaning in business; it pertained to mergers and acquisitions. The point of a merger was to achieve 'synergy' because the two companies owned or produced something that would improve the overall product in some way.
Now, of course, it means fuck all.
In mergers and acquisitions synergy actually means "the 2 companies have replicated staff roles that become redundant when we merge and we can fire half of them but maintain the combined marketshare.". To be fair, it's often actually true.
Because they don't have coordinated tax systems, and doing that is a huge political issue, otherwise yes that is how you do it. This is the reasonably low bureaucratic route where the company reports all income and taxes, and spot checks can be used to make sure companies are telling the truth.
"Then why don't the people living in these neighborhoods open competing shops, and drive the bad retailers out of business while making a nice profit?"
That is the point of cooperatives, though for some reasons they are not popular in the US for setting up retail and grocery stores as elsewhere in the world. I grew up in a small remote town with one town cooperative grocery store. This was to ensure there was an accessible grocery store that did not price gouge.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_cooperative_movement
One of the dynamics that allow price gouging in poor neighbourhoods is lack of transport options. If you don't have a car or can't afford to run it and have to take public transport then your options are limited. It's what you can walk to, what you can easily get to on the bus, or what gets delivered to your door. It's not like the middle-class suburban lifestyle of being able to easily drive to a number of difference retail and grocery options without thinking about it.
There are a number of reasons why ford would be very interested in the model X.
The model X is Tesla's 3rd time around in developing a pure EV car platform. There will be a lot of lessons learnt the hard way embedded in the design of the model X.
The model X is a SUV, playing right in Fords bread and butter market. The previous models where in the small sports car and then the luxury saloon car market. First one is almost absent from the ford lineup, and the second a fairly small part of what they do. The model X is a benchmark for any EV SUV's fords have in development. Ride quality, handling, real range, real performance etc. are all important things to compare against and difficult to get purely from specs. Also simply understanding how it compares to fords conventional and hybrid offerings is important to drive marketing and sales information in the short term.
So they buy 1 or 2 of these. Look at all aspects of it, and use this to drive marketing in the short term and product development long term.
"ESRO enjoyed its first big success in 1968 with the launch of ESRO 2B, an astronomy survey orbiter that was delivered to orbit utilizing a Scout rocket from the Western Test Range in California. But the establishment of a European launch vehicle, which was eventually named Europa, didn't progress as hoped. Several nations collaborated on the vehicle, with the United Kingdom developing the first stage (based on the “Blue Streak” ballistic missile), France the second stage, and Germany the third. Europa experienced many growing pains, cost overruns, and a lack of focus. Successive rocket stage failures eventually doomed the program."
What isn't mentioned is that there were 2 countries that had developed space programs with a launch capability by 1971 in the same time period as they were trying to develop Europa. The French had the Diamant launch system, and in the same period the UK developed the same Blue Streak missile technology, used on the Europa first stage, into the Black Arrow rocket. Both countries had successfully launched satellites by 1971. The Europa launch system was your obvious european politically driven mixture of technology from UK, France and West Germany with the divisions causing confusion and poor communication between the engineering teams. Result was it failed, got scrapped and the Ariane launch system was developed and put together by the French, which makes sense as they had the most experience and success with their own launch vehicle. The UK dropped their space launch capability and decided to focus on what would become ESA, making them the only country to have developed a national satellite launch capability and then to have dropped it.