If you just go straight up, you're just going to fall back to earth and never achieve orbit.
If you have an efficient enough rocket (not chemically powered) you can achieve escape velocity by going straight up, then you will never fall down (to the earth) again.
While true, you'll also never achieve orbit going straight up.
You may escape Earth's gravity that way, but you'll still be in a solar orbit... one that will likely intersect with a certain insignificant little blue green planet sooner or later.
Insignificant. The Dragon is volume constrained anyway, so there is spare lift capacity. You could pack it to the gills and still have unused capacity to lift extra fuel.
And then you have to add buffer fuel for the flight back...
Not if what is left over after the boost phase is finished is beyond ample for the task. In other words, Y>R+M, where R is what you need to return, and M is a safety margin.
I disagree with never planning to use your buffers. You have a flight plan for nominal flight. You have a flight plan for engine out. You have a flight plan for two engines out, etc. You plan for every foreseeable contingency, and some of those flight plans will specify using the buffers. Now, for a nominal flight plan, yes, you do not use the buffers.
Once the boost phase is over, any buffer propellant is no longer part of the main mission profile. In other words, once the boost phase is over, the buffer propellant is no longer buffer propellant. It can thus be used as fly-back and landing propellant.
"I look back at my decisions and wonder, 'How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?'"
That struck me as an apology for the action itself.
That struck me as a "they broke me", rather than an "I'm sorry".
The fuel isn't extra fuel. The fuel is buffer fuel, as in "We need x tons of fuel to boost the upper stage, so put x+y on board so we don't run out too soon". They're flying back on the y.
I would think that most of the volatile molecules like water would have been baked away over the millennia. If so, that would leave primarily rock and metal type asteroids. Further out, like the belts of the gas giants, the story would be different.
Fuel's the only problem for unmanned space. Mass of the rest of the crap is trivial. Mining asteroids doesn't solve, or really address at all, the fuel problem.
Fuel is trivial too. The main problem is that all of it is sitting at the bottom of the planet's gravity well. Climbing out of that well requires big rockets, and big rockets are expensive to design and build. As far as fueling them, that is "in the noise" as they say: costing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a project that costs billions of dollars.
Imagine if a quarter horse was cloned and became a hot breeding item. By restricting the registry to the master copy only, there would be only one source of "official" sperm, thus a monopoly.
For years was taking notes with paper and pen. I used the four color BIC pen; black is for titles, section headings, etc. Blue is for main body notes. Red is for references and underlining, and green is for activities, suggested reading, etc. I would also recommend the Cornell notetaking system. Also get some good notebooks so that you're not going to lose pages.
The problem with paper is searching for information. Using a system like Cornell will help for searching, but nothing beats an electronic search. For that, I'd recommend Microsoft OneNote. OneNote lets you have audio, video, text, clipart, and screen captures on the page. You can even insert documents from Word and Excel. You can arrange notes hierarchically, and cross link notes from other sections. OneNote allows collaberation. Although, I have not tried it (due to not having a tablet PC), you can even hand-write notes a-la pen and paper. OneNote can OCR this for you so that you don't have to try to read your own handwriting - a bonus in my case.
[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The
robot steps out of the spaceship...]
"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further
grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with
Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none
of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done
this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of
pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it
again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there,
swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent
than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing
so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the
people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards
and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why
don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the
vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in
more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard
might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his
voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to
them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and
utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
You can't exert energy like that and then eat and drink garbage, your body knows what it needs and tells you by rather convincing means. Headaches, cramps, lethargy and such...
I'd rather it tell me what it needs by inducing a halo effect around the required food along with an auditory hallucination of a choir singing "Ah".
It's doubly insane because plants need nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and petroleum is made of carbon and hydrogen. There are no plant nutrients in petroleum, so trying to convert oil to fertilizer is pointless.
Slashdot Mirror
kelly johnson ... didn't run the projects to just pump money out of government.
And that is supposed to make us trust him?
The point is, it's a modern science class, it should be C, not F.
If you just go straight up, you're just going to fall back to earth and never achieve orbit.
If you have an efficient enough rocket (not chemically powered) you can achieve escape velocity by going straight up, then you will never fall down (to the earth) again.
While true, you'll also never achieve orbit going straight up.
You may escape Earth's gravity that way, but you'll still be in a solar orbit... one that will likely intersect with a certain insignificant little blue green planet sooner or later.
High school chemistry classes should be teaching that paper burns at 451 C not 451 F. Units people!
Insignificant. The Dragon is volume constrained anyway, so there is spare lift capacity. You could pack it to the gills and still have unused capacity to lift extra fuel.
And then you have to add buffer fuel for the flight back...
Not if what is left over after the boost phase is finished is beyond ample for the task. In other words, Y>R+M, where R is what you need to return, and M is a safety margin.
I disagree with never planning to use your buffers. You have a flight plan for nominal flight. You have a flight plan for engine out. You have a flight plan for two engines out, etc. You plan for every foreseeable contingency, and some of those flight plans will specify using the buffers. Now, for a nominal flight plan, yes, you do not use the buffers.
Once the boost phase is over, any buffer propellant is no longer part of the main mission profile. In other words, once the boost phase is over, the buffer propellant is no longer buffer propellant. It can thus be used as fly-back and landing propellant.
"I look back at my decisions and wonder, 'How on earth could I, a junior analyst, possibly believe I could change the world for the better over the decisions of those with the proper authority?'"
That struck me as an apology for the action itself.
That struck me as a "they broke me", rather than an "I'm sorry".
Ten thousand dollars of extra fuel saves you 30 million dollars of rocket parts. Seems dead simple to me.
The fuel isn't extra fuel. The fuel is buffer fuel, as in "We need x tons of fuel to boost the upper stage, so put x+y on board so we don't run out too soon". They're flying back on the y.
Um... Zeno died of an arrow wound trying to prove that.
I would think that most of the volatile molecules like water would have been baked away over the millennia. If so, that would leave primarily rock and metal type asteroids. Further out, like the belts of the gas giants, the story would be different.
Fuel's the only problem for unmanned space. Mass of the rest of the crap is trivial. Mining asteroids doesn't solve, or really address at all, the fuel problem.
Fuel is trivial too. The main problem is that all of it is sitting at the bottom of the planet's gravity well. Climbing out of that well requires big rockets, and big rockets are expensive to design and build. As far as fueling them, that is "in the noise" as they say: costing hundreds of thousands of dollars on a project that costs billions of dollars.
Imagine if a quarter horse was cloned and became a hot breeding item. By restricting the registry to the master copy only, there would be only one source of "official" sperm, thus a monopoly.
Wake me when they reach my country. Until then I'll stick with TekSavvy.
I think the parent is referring to veridical experiences.
But what about the horizondical experiences?
Whatever you do, GET A SYSTEM.
For years was taking notes with paper and pen. I used the four color BIC pen; black is for titles, section headings, etc. Blue is for main body notes. Red is for references and underlining, and green is for activities, suggested reading, etc. I would also recommend the Cornell notetaking system. Also get some good notebooks so that you're not going to lose pages.
The problem with paper is searching for information. Using a system like Cornell will help for searching, but nothing beats an electronic search. For that, I'd recommend Microsoft OneNote. OneNote lets you have audio, video, text, clipart, and screen captures on the page. You can even insert documents from Word and Excel. You can arrange notes hierarchically, and cross link notes from other sections. OneNote allows collaberation. Although, I have not tried it (due to not having a tablet PC), you can even hand-write notes a-la pen and paper. OneNote can OCR this for you so that you don't have to try to read your own handwriting - a bonus in my case.
Content blocked by your organization
Reason: This Websense category is filtered: Personal Network Storage and Backup.
^THIS^ is the problem with any cloud based solution. Your data is only available at the whim of the sysadmins.
Gee! Without internet connected light bulbs, we'd have no need for the abundance of addresses that IPv6 gives us.
Tip your servers.
I tried that, and it pulled the power cord out. Curse you for ruining my uptime!
I....... Fail to see a problem.
That's because you've got third party cookie blocking turned on.
[An extraterrestrial robot and spaceship has just landed on earth. The robot steps out of the spaceship...]
"I come in peace," it said, adding after a long moment of further grinding, "take me to your Lizard."
Ford Prefect, of course, had an explanation for this, as he sat with Arthur and watched the nonstop frenetic news reports on television, none of which had anything to say other than to record that the thing had done this amount of damage which was valued at that amount of billions of pounds and had killed this totally other number of people, and then say it again, because the robot was doing nothing more than standing there, swaying very slightly, and emitting short incomprehensible error messages.
"It comes from a very ancient democracy, you see..."
"You mean, it comes from a world of lizards?"
"No," said Ford, who by this time was a little more rational and coherent than he had been, having finally had the coffee forced down him, "nothing so simple. Nothing anything like to straightforward. On its world, the people are people. The leaders are lizards. The people hate the lizards and the lizards rule the people."
"Odd," said Arthur, "I thought you said it was a democracy."
"I did," said ford. "It is."
"So," said Arthur, hoping he wasn't sounding ridiculously obtuse, "why don't the people get rid of the lizards?"
"It honestly doesn't occur to them," said Ford. "They've all got the vote, so they all pretty much assume that the government they've voted in more or less approximates to the government they want."
"You mean they actually vote for the lizards?"
"Oh yes," said Ford with a shrug, "of course."
"But," said Arthur, going for the big one again, "why?"
"Because if they didn't vote for a lizard," said Ford, "the wrong lizard might get in. Got any gin?"
"What?"
"I said," said Ford, with an increasing air of urgency creeping into his voice, "have you got any gin?"
"I'll look. Tell me about the lizards."
Ford shrugged again.
"Some people say that the lizards are the best thing that ever happened to them," he said. "They're completely wrong of course, completely and utterly wrong, but someone's got to say it."
Natural gas != petroleum. Petroleum == crude oil.
There's more to safe weight loss than calorie balance.
You can't exert energy like that and then eat and drink garbage, your body knows what it needs and tells you by rather convincing means. Headaches, cramps, lethargy and such...
I'd rather it tell me what it needs by inducing a halo effect around the required food along with an auditory hallucination of a choir singing "Ah".
It's doubly insane because plants need nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and petroleum is made of carbon and hydrogen. There are no plant nutrients in petroleum, so trying to convert oil to fertilizer is pointless.