Let's say I live 2 hours from the nearest civilization which is entirely possible in the US. Now say I want a pizza delivered. I would be told no way. What if I REALLY wanted a pizza? They would name a price that would make it worth their while to drive out there with a 2 hour old pizza I may not want that or I may decide to drive 2 hours into town to get the pizza myself. That is what should be allowed to happen with mail. If you live in the wilderness it shouldn't be the job of other taxpayers to make sure your mail lands on your doorstep. A PO box in the nearest post office is good enough even if it's 2 hours away.
I saw a great interview with Musk and he said the way he cuts costs is by building everything they can't buy off the shelf. This is directly opposite to what most major defense contractors do. The reason is simple. If it's off the shelf you can buy it because the development costs were already paid for and there is an existing market. If there isn't a off the shelf product available you may as well design and build it yourself to cut out the middleman. This isn't rocket science it's rocket engineering. Elon isn't breaking any scientific ground with the Falcon which is why it's so cheap. He learned the lessons of the past and spent his money trying to make it cheap.
You are missing a very important reason for recovering the stage. It is a great for engineering to see what the engines/ect look like after a flight. You can get a lot of data on a test stand but nothing beats flight testing.
Not that this isn't a great tech demonstrator but why build a capsule that has a reusable heat shield? So you go through all of this trouble to build a beautiful reusable heat shield than slam it into an ocean or desert? Seems like you will be picking salt and sand out of it for a long time.
I've seen many Space Shuttle Landing in person and we are going to miss the ability to land a couple of miles away from the hangar.
You are correct. If you had enough fuel you could brake the craft to a much lower speed.Think about all the fuel needed to tiny payload from the surface of the earth to orbit. You would need the same amount if you wanted to make a tail first landing back on the launch pad. Think of space ship one. It falls from space about 60 miles but with no tangential velocity. It makes it back with regular composites.
I was talking to one of the engineers that developed this system to replace the leading edges of the shuttle. It is similar to what the Germans are doing but it uses heat pipes to carry the heat from the most intense heating areas to relatively cooler ares. It worked like a champ but one of the problems with the Space Shuttle Program is that is was treated like it only had 5 years left for the last 20 years. If instead we kept upgrading them and fixing the high cost items we might have something that is a lot cheaper to operate.
This report is from 1998.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.30.3183&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I'm not sure you understand how many NASA employees there are. It's less than 20,000 about 1/5 of the IRS or USDA. The purpose of NASA is to be the National Aeronautic and Space ADMINISTRATION. That means NASA is supposed to take the tax dollars from Congress and figure out how to use that to further the goals stated in the NASA Act. NASA doesn't have enough employees to build anything. They are there to figure out the projects needed, how much to fund them, and make sure the contractors are doing what they are supposed to do. So you are right that Caltech does fine on their own. NASA is really just there to write the specs and the checks. They do keep some technical employees at NASA just because you don't MBA's writing the technical specs and determining if the contractor met them. They are also there to keep some institutional knowledge to help younger companies out.
Patents are a legal temporary monopoly that are to be used to help technical progress. Can you imagine how long in the 1800's it took to get the word out on a product? It almost made sense to have a 20 year patent. But these days I don't think it's needed anymore. It takes a second to roll out a product nationally. Plus the things that get patents are mostly marginal improvements that won't be useful for 20 years. How about this. The US patent system only gets to grant 100 patents a year for the really great inventions. You can make it a reality show.
You are correct. I noticed that in the transcript the word illegal was only used in front of immigrant 1 time out of 10 mentions. So even in this conversation they are lying about their opposition saying that people are against immigrants. Now there may be some people that want all immigration stopped but there are also some that just want people to follow the laws of which I can include myself. I personally feel we should increase the number of immigrants in this country but it has to be done according to the laws.
Here is my main problem with their argument and why you are right. They are confusing facts with arguments and evidence. Facts are indisputable. Take the birthers for instance. I don't agree with them but Obama's birth certificate isn't a fact it's evidence. There is a picture of one that was released. It is evidence and some people that are really out there will say it's a fake. They didn't reject a fact they rejected evidence. Saying that illegal immigrants don't kidnap that many people so you shouldn't be against illegal immigrants is an argument that someone can also reject. Trying to label these things as facts is just an attempt to score points against a political opponent.
A real fact is hard to come by. That is why in a court of law you don't submit facts you submit evidence and it is the juries job to try to figure out what the facts are based on the evidence.
Well the maximum setting for the Space Shuttle Main Engines is 109% (104% is the max on most launches). That is because they work better than designed and it was easier to set the "knob" to 109% than rewrite the software.
The problem is mixing science with politics. If the climate scientists were just trying to convince people to curb their own lifestyles voluntarily than you wouldn't see such a large outcry. Something along the lines of vaccines. But politicians that want to control everything you do have seized upon climate change just like they did with terrorism to take away freedom and put themselves in control. That is the main reason there is so much contention.
You mean the data from these? http://www.surfacestations.org/
My favorite part is where they changed the coating on the shelters from a lime white wash to a white latex paint. But the latex paint causes the temperatures to read higher than with a white wash.
I read a great book called "The Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane (Little House on the Prairie). It examines the attempts at freedom through history. The First was the Moses leading the Jews to Freedom and the founding of Israel. The second was Mohammed who again wrestled control away from the churches/government and taught people to be free which lead to a spectacular civilization that lasted though the European Dark Ages. Ever wonder why the Renaissance happened in Italy and not Britain? Because they were very close and interacted with the Muslim civilization. The third was the founding of the US. It looks like our attempt at freedom will not last as long as the Muslims. It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive. This book shows that freedom is not the norm. The norm is dictators, theocracy, and poverty. This looks like where we are headed. It seems people get comfortable with the luxuries freedom provides and they forget how fragile it is. People think there will always be computers and movies but history shows that once people abandon freedom and reason it is easy to slip back into the normal state of humanity which is abject poverty.
http://mises.org/books/discovery.pdf
People are forgetting that in the US we don't need no stinking rules. Think of this for a second. What will happen is some people will want to walk and others just stand there. So eventually you get to a place where the walkway is blocked and you have people lined up behind them. When you get to the deceleration stage in effect the walkway contracts so there is less room per person. If people are already standing very close than they will rear end each other.
Since I started this let me tell you what I mean. It is stupid to waste resources having TSA and Air Marshals. The airport security worked fine on 9/11. They had box cutters not AR-15's. But after 9/11 you can bet that anyone that looks similar to what the terrorists on 9/11 looked like will get attention from their fellow passengers. Now there may be 1 terrorist out of every billion passengers but when someone fitting that description starts to do something like bang on the cockpit door or try to light their shoe on fire history shows the passengers will stop it from now on.
The captain already has something to make it difficult for potential terrorists to take over. It's called the yoke. Can the pilot depressurize the cabin?
I think there are terrorists everywhere constantly planning attacks the same way there are people everyone planning on what they will do when they win the lotto. Luckily for us both groups are mostly idiots. Like that "bomb" in Times Square. That was the biggest joke. What did he have some propane tanks and gas cans? Was he trying to make bomb with what he found at Home Depot?
I've been arguing for years that we can do with less security. Go back to 9/11 and what was the real cause that they were able to pull off the attack? It was the FAA position that we should cooperate with hijackers. Once the people on the 4th plane learned what was going to happen they tried to take the plane back. I'm sure the whole time on those planes the fight attendants were telling everyone to stay seated and be calm and it would be over soon like they were trained to do. So to prevent this in the future you don't need the TSA and flight marshal's and no fly lists. All you needed was a change in attitude that passengers no longer will comply with hijackers. Done. Just let the regular airport security do their job of keeping guns off the plane.Reinforcing the cockpit door wasn't a bad move either. But besides that nothing more needed to be done. Notice all of the near misses prevented by passengers since then. What is great too is that passengers are allowed to profile. While the TSA is frisking Mexican Abuelas every passenger is keeping their eye on Ahkmed. Now Ahkmed may be a fine upstanding man but passengers will watch him the whole flight and if he does something out of the ordinary will do something about it for self preservation.
I know I'm dating myself here but I remember my first CD ROM drive. You had a little case that had a sliding door similar to what a 3-1/2 disk looked like. It was great because you didn't have access to the disc surface and you couldn't scratch them. I have kids and it's hard for them to properly hold a CD so they always get finger prints on them.
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Let's say I live 2 hours from the nearest civilization which is entirely possible in the US. Now say I want a pizza delivered. I would be told no way. What if I REALLY wanted a pizza? They would name a price that would make it worth their while to drive out there with a 2 hour old pizza I may not want that or I may decide to drive 2 hours into town to get the pizza myself. That is what should be allowed to happen with mail. If you live in the wilderness it shouldn't be the job of other taxpayers to make sure your mail lands on your doorstep. A PO box in the nearest post office is good enough even if it's 2 hours away.
I still have that loaded on my computer. I play melee about once a day. It's quick and fun.
A really neat feature of regolith is that you can melt it with microwaves to make structures. http://www.lunarpedia.org/index.php?title=Sintered_regolith
I saw a great interview with Musk and he said the way he cuts costs is by building everything they can't buy off the shelf. This is directly opposite to what most major defense contractors do. The reason is simple. If it's off the shelf you can buy it because the development costs were already paid for and there is an existing market. If there isn't a off the shelf product available you may as well design and build it yourself to cut out the middleman. This isn't rocket science it's rocket engineering. Elon isn't breaking any scientific ground with the Falcon which is why it's so cheap. He learned the lessons of the past and spent his money trying to make it cheap.
You are missing a very important reason for recovering the stage. It is a great for engineering to see what the engines/ect look like after a flight. You can get a lot of data on a test stand but nothing beats flight testing.
Not that this isn't a great tech demonstrator but why build a capsule that has a reusable heat shield? So you go through all of this trouble to build a beautiful reusable heat shield than slam it into an ocean or desert? Seems like you will be picking salt and sand out of it for a long time. I've seen many Space Shuttle Landing in person and we are going to miss the ability to land a couple of miles away from the hangar.
You are correct. If you had enough fuel you could brake the craft to a much lower speed.Think about all the fuel needed to tiny payload from the surface of the earth to orbit. You would need the same amount if you wanted to make a tail first landing back on the launch pad. Think of space ship one. It falls from space about 60 miles but with no tangential velocity. It makes it back with regular composites.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.30.3183&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I was talking to one of the engineers that developed this system to replace the leading edges of the shuttle. It is similar to what the Germans are doing but it uses heat pipes to carry the heat from the most intense heating areas to relatively cooler ares. It worked like a champ but one of the problems with the Space Shuttle Program is that is was treated like it only had 5 years left for the last 20 years. If instead we kept upgrading them and fixing the high cost items we might have something that is a lot cheaper to operate. This report is from 1998. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.30.3183&rep=rep1&type=pdf
I'm not sure you understand how many NASA employees there are. It's less than 20,000 about 1/5 of the IRS or USDA. The purpose of NASA is to be the National Aeronautic and Space ADMINISTRATION. That means NASA is supposed to take the tax dollars from Congress and figure out how to use that to further the goals stated in the NASA Act. NASA doesn't have enough employees to build anything. They are there to figure out the projects needed, how much to fund them, and make sure the contractors are doing what they are supposed to do. So you are right that Caltech does fine on their own. NASA is really just there to write the specs and the checks. They do keep some technical employees at NASA just because you don't MBA's writing the technical specs and determining if the contractor met them. They are also there to keep some institutional knowledge to help younger companies out.
Patents are a legal temporary monopoly that are to be used to help technical progress. Can you imagine how long in the 1800's it took to get the word out on a product? It almost made sense to have a 20 year patent. But these days I don't think it's needed anymore. It takes a second to roll out a product nationally. Plus the things that get patents are mostly marginal improvements that won't be useful for 20 years. How about this. The US patent system only gets to grant 100 patents a year for the really great inventions. You can make it a reality show.
You are correct. I noticed that in the transcript the word illegal was only used in front of immigrant 1 time out of 10 mentions. So even in this conversation they are lying about their opposition saying that people are against immigrants. Now there may be some people that want all immigration stopped but there are also some that just want people to follow the laws of which I can include myself. I personally feel we should increase the number of immigrants in this country but it has to be done according to the laws. Here is my main problem with their argument and why you are right. They are confusing facts with arguments and evidence. Facts are indisputable. Take the birthers for instance. I don't agree with them but Obama's birth certificate isn't a fact it's evidence. There is a picture of one that was released. It is evidence and some people that are really out there will say it's a fake. They didn't reject a fact they rejected evidence. Saying that illegal immigrants don't kidnap that many people so you shouldn't be against illegal immigrants is an argument that someone can also reject. Trying to label these things as facts is just an attempt to score points against a political opponent. A real fact is hard to come by. That is why in a court of law you don't submit facts you submit evidence and it is the juries job to try to figure out what the facts are based on the evidence.
Well the maximum setting for the Space Shuttle Main Engines is 109% (104% is the max on most launches). That is because they work better than designed and it was easier to set the "knob" to 109% than rewrite the software.
The problem is mixing science with politics. If the climate scientists were just trying to convince people to curb their own lifestyles voluntarily than you wouldn't see such a large outcry. Something along the lines of vaccines. But politicians that want to control everything you do have seized upon climate change just like they did with terrorism to take away freedom and put themselves in control. That is the main reason there is so much contention.
You mean the data from these? http://www.surfacestations.org/ My favorite part is where they changed the coating on the shelters from a lime white wash to a white latex paint. But the latex paint causes the temperatures to read higher than with a white wash.
I read a great book called "The Discovery of Freedom" by Rose Wilder Lane (Little House on the Prairie). It examines the attempts at freedom through history. The First was the Moses leading the Jews to Freedom and the founding of Israel. The second was Mohammed who again wrestled control away from the churches/government and taught people to be free which lead to a spectacular civilization that lasted though the European Dark Ages. Ever wonder why the Renaissance happened in Italy and not Britain? Because they were very close and interacted with the Muslim civilization. The third was the founding of the US. It looks like our attempt at freedom will not last as long as the Muslims. It is only with freedom and liberty does civilization thrive. This book shows that freedom is not the norm. The norm is dictators, theocracy, and poverty. This looks like where we are headed. It seems people get comfortable with the luxuries freedom provides and they forget how fragile it is. People think there will always be computers and movies but history shows that once people abandon freedom and reason it is easy to slip back into the normal state of humanity which is abject poverty. http://mises.org/books/discovery.pdf
People are forgetting that in the US we don't need no stinking rules. Think of this for a second. What will happen is some people will want to walk and others just stand there. So eventually you get to a place where the walkway is blocked and you have people lined up behind them. When you get to the deceleration stage in effect the walkway contracts so there is less room per person. If people are already standing very close than they will rear end each other.
I hoped that when NASA was going to look for groups to have an outreach with that lesbians would have been higher than muslims.
Since I started this let me tell you what I mean. It is stupid to waste resources having TSA and Air Marshals. The airport security worked fine on 9/11. They had box cutters not AR-15's. But after 9/11 you can bet that anyone that looks similar to what the terrorists on 9/11 looked like will get attention from their fellow passengers. Now there may be 1 terrorist out of every billion passengers but when someone fitting that description starts to do something like bang on the cockpit door or try to light their shoe on fire history shows the passengers will stop it from now on.
You can buy detonators at Home Depot now? Hmm I must have missed that aisle.
The captain already has something to make it difficult for potential terrorists to take over. It's called the yoke. Can the pilot depressurize the cabin?
I think there are terrorists everywhere constantly planning attacks the same way there are people everyone planning on what they will do when they win the lotto. Luckily for us both groups are mostly idiots. Like that "bomb" in Times Square. That was the biggest joke. What did he have some propane tanks and gas cans? Was he trying to make bomb with what he found at Home Depot?
Yes but Ahkmed is funnier. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Ahkmed
I've been arguing for years that we can do with less security. Go back to 9/11 and what was the real cause that they were able to pull off the attack? It was the FAA position that we should cooperate with hijackers. Once the people on the 4th plane learned what was going to happen they tried to take the plane back. I'm sure the whole time on those planes the fight attendants were telling everyone to stay seated and be calm and it would be over soon like they were trained to do. So to prevent this in the future you don't need the TSA and flight marshal's and no fly lists. All you needed was a change in attitude that passengers no longer will comply with hijackers. Done. Just let the regular airport security do their job of keeping guns off the plane.Reinforcing the cockpit door wasn't a bad move either. But besides that nothing more needed to be done. Notice all of the near misses prevented by passengers since then. What is great too is that passengers are allowed to profile. While the TSA is frisking Mexican Abuelas every passenger is keeping their eye on Ahkmed. Now Ahkmed may be a fine upstanding man but passengers will watch him the whole flight and if he does something out of the ordinary will do something about it for self preservation.
I know I'm dating myself here but I remember my first CD ROM drive. You had a little case that had a sliding door similar to what a 3-1/2 disk looked like. It was great because you didn't have access to the disc surface and you couldn't scratch them. I have kids and it's hard for them to properly hold a CD so they always get finger prints on them.