Spacecraft that told us 'you're screwed' finally gives up the ghost after doubling its shelf life How's your World Space Week shaping up? Baked a rocket cake or two? No? Nevermind. Take some time out to catch up with this week's roundup of space stuff. Italian Air Force going to space* with Virgin The Italian Air Force has signed up with the Bearded One's Virgin Galactic to take a jaunt into space aboard the company's …
Fill the new spacesuits with gel, then they don't need to be pressurized, which makes them much easier to move in :)
But much more messy to get out of. Showers being a bit of a luxury, if you make the gel from that powder that turns into a gel when wet, then turns back into a powder when dried, you should be able to get clean with a hair dryer and a vacuum cleaner.
Apparently it keeps quite cool too. And the volume of water involved might make a pretty useful radiation shield too, but would probably be quite heavy.
There's probably a million reasons why this won't work in reality, but it's fun to speculate :)
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>There's probably a million reasons why this won't work in reality,
Because there is no way you are going to get USA Space Command (tm) to smear KY jelly all over the bodies (*) of their intrepid USA Space Command (tm) Space Heroes before they boldly go doing whatever it is that USA Space Command (tm) Space Heroes do
* the USAF on the other hand .....
>Scuba gear. Stops people from inhaling liquid every day. Keeps them breathing too.
Although it does work by ensuring that the pressure inside your lungs is equal to the pressure outside your body.
At the point where the pressure outside your body is zero, as in the proposed unpressurised space suit - it is apt to get rather untidy.
Ususally scuba gear has to be quite high pressure to balance the much higher water pressure outside your body, so you'd need much lower pressure scuba gear, enough to balance whatever inward pressure could be generated by the elastic suit mentioned below but not enough to inflate the astronaut?
No, as mentioned SCUBA gear delivers air at ambient pressure, not high pressure. As also mentioned, in this instance ambient is around zero. As such there are only two outcomes:
1. Astronaut suffocates when no air is delivered.
2. Astronaut explodes because someone who doesn't understand pressure modifies the system to deliver air at above ambient pressure.
3. Astronaut burns in a fiery accident sequel because someone else who doesn't understand fire used pure O2 to reduce required pressure. Again.
10 meters depth is double atmospheric pressure, 20 meters treble, etc. 40 meters for a deep dive is 5 bar, which is pretty high pressure. (for me anyway, it's enough to drive some pretty serious air tools. it's not high pressure like in the tank though) So, as mentioned, the breathing gear would be scuba gear that delivered lower than atmospheric pressure. The pressure in a pressurized space suit is about 1/3 atmospheric pressure, and they do breath pure oxygen at this pressure.
I'm wondering if you could have an elastic suit that compressed your chest cavity to 1/3 atmospheric pressure to provide the ambient pressure, probably that can be tightened and loosened in the airlock so it's possible to breath once the air pressure raises again.
You've still misunderstood. When you're at 10m depth the pressure is 2 bar and the SCUBA gear delivers air at 2 bar. At 20m air is delivered at 3 bar. The gear literally delivers at the same pressure you're at, so it's not high pressure it's zero pressure compared to what you experience. As such, ANY pressure at zero ambient (aka space) will explode the human.
I think you need to stop wondering and start reading some science ;)
I did :) I read the documentation from NASA and MIT about mechanical counterpressure suits, which work pretty much as described, the pressure on the body is provided by foam that wants to expand but can't due to a non-stretchy layer over it, this provides enough inward pressure on the body to allow humans to breath air at a much lower pressure than normal atmospheric pressure, and also not explode. It also contains a bladder inside the suit to provide back pressure on the breathing gear to stop all the gas escaping in one go.
I suggest you provide a recommendation for a useful alternative to the breathing apparatus to enable such an unpressurized suit to work instead of saying 'that won't work', because that's how science works.
Boiling point depends on pressure. Drop the pressure to about 0 and the boiling point is about 0K (-273°C). In vacuum body heat will boil any liquid: blood, urine and this magic gel. The good news is that boiling things requires energy. As liquids boil away they take heat away from where they were. The temperature of your gel covered astronut would drop until the liquids froze solid. That would not stop some of them from subliming (going directly from solid to gas). Sublimation would continue but slow down as the temperature dropped. Freeze drying is an effective method of preservation. If you returned your freeze dried astronut to a warm pressurised environment much of the appearance, texture and taste would be restored.
Sublimation of the gel would only occur if the material is directly exposed to a vacuum though, so some kind of insulated sealed elastic outer suit will be required then, to prevent heat loss to space, evaporation and maintain some pressure on the gel inside by squeezing against the astronaut? Something like a cross between a wet suit and a dry suit. Maybe an air tight inner elastic layer like neoprene, then the gel, then an air tight outer layer squeezing the gel. Quilted in such a way to prevent the gel from moving about to much, no point squeezing it all into the gloves every time you move.
Basically, if you put one of those air free foil pouches of cat food into a vacuum chamber, how long would it take for the cat food inside to freeze dry?
I doubt they are correct there. The bunny hopping wasn't because of the suits, it was simply the most effective way for us bipedals to move in the low gravity environment (Compared to what we are used to).
And the falling will happen too. Because humans are clumsy and not used to a low gravity environment.
The article quotes a rise in sea level of 5cm in 11 years. This is roughly 20 inches per century.
Since the peak (trough?) of the Ice Age 20,000 year ago, sea level has risen about 300 feet, or 18 inches per century, with almost all of that long before men were burning coal and oil. It is good to see these changes continuing at about their pre-industrial level.
Of course, I suppose that depends on whether you think the sea is on a globe or a flat earth
How many times do we need to talk about this? The world is a disc on the back of 4 giant elephants (previously 5) standing on the back of a giant star turtle! Everyone knows that!
This is silly! If we stop building these stupid Jason satellites, the sea will stop rising. It's obvious. Basic quantum thingamijigs innit. The act of observing a thing, changes it.
We ought to be more like the ravenous bugblatter beast of Trall. i.e. if a problem can't see us, then we can't see it.
Similarly we should cut all research into stopping big scary meteorites and all astronomers from looking for dangerous near Earth objects. It only encourages them. The fact that the more we look for them, the more we find proves this! They just want the attention...
Shh! Not allowed open eyes and thought here you evil denier! One must buy into the bullpuckey without even the least bit of critical thought!
Just this last week I was out at parts of the southern coast of the North Island with some mates, and showing them how much higher the sea was not too long back. It may have risen 5cm in the last 11 years but it has dropped several metres vs a few hundred years back. Some of this is due to local tectonic activity (as is some of the changes to sea level), but lots to do with other factors as well.
A road I often travel is bugger-all above the high-tide mark, and a gentle northerly at high tide causes water to lap over the road - has been thus for the near 30 years I've known this road.
(see https://www.google.co.nz/maps/@-41.1052649,174.9044947,3a,75y,27.36h,60.48t)
Places like this - a 5cm sea level rise would be easily noticeable. This road has been in place since the 1870s (according to WP), and it is clear to see even from the google maps imagery that there's not exactly been a great deal of work done since then. The wetlands - quite susceptible to even small sea-level changes - are also doing fairly well and, well, still there.
I spend a lot of time near the coast, have done all my life. There's other markers pre-dating even my grandparents that laugh at the idea of even 1cm sea level rise in the last 120 years let alone 5 in the last 11, and I see from people in many other places around the world that such markers are widely known and widely ignored. If we point at the marker and say "This shows the high tide level as at 1 June 1827, and the high tide level today is the same" we get called "deniers" etc despite the physical evidence available to us clearly refuting the other side's stuff.
IIRC around 14 years back Gore said that sea levels would rise 5 metres within a decade. My city should largely be under water by now. There's also all the absolute rubbish about carbon/CO2. If the warmists are wrong about those things - which are measurable and understandable quite easily if you have the means to actually think, why should I believe the rest of their stuff?. Given his house purchasing decisions, Gore clearly doesn't believe it yet he's still largely the hero of the warmist cult.
"So what did he say then?"You brought Al Gore into this, so why don't *you* give us a quote from him that backs your stance rather than telling the rest of us to do your research for you?
IIRC my hairy arse...
IOW, I'm quite correct and the coasal-property owning massive-carbonfootprint-house-dwelling swindler did actually say that or something very nearly that.
As I've said before. Al Gore clearly does not believe what he claims about the climate, one glance at how he lives would show that. If he doesn't believe it, why should I?
(And no, I'm not going to watch his foul propaganda-piece that he seems to have been using to sink land values in certain areas so he could get some cheap additions to his mansions [and an edit to remove stuff that probably never would've made it past the moderators anyway])
So what did he say then?"You brought Al Gore into this, so why don't *you* give us a quote from him that backs your stance rather than telling the rest of us to do your research for you?
There were two potentially seperate but very closely juxtaposed quotes. I did give you time to find them yourself but clearly you're aware I'm right.
I'll slightly paraphrase. One was "We will be in a climate crisis within the next 10 years". The other was "Sea levels will rise 20ft in the near future" (20ft=6m, ie~5m), Even if the two phrases weren't intended to be linked (but the phrasing and tone of matters would indicate that's exactly what he wanted people to take away), he's still a long way out on the "near future" and "20ft rises".
Do some research before your lifestyle does more damage to the planet and the people on it.
In all seriousness, since I would love a simple explanation. how do you measure sea level anyway, What is it measured relative too? The Sea is moving around all over the place, all the time, as indeed is the land. The rates of change in sea level claimed are on a similar scale as tectonic plate movements and only a fraction of that in geologically active areas where a single earthquake can move the land many metres within a few minutes. How does the satellite measure where the surface of the sea is? mm Radar? Lasers? How do we know where the satellite is to within the mm needed to make these measurements? Radar? Lasers? based on land that is also moving? Much the same applies to GPS of course which also makes claims of incredible precision as to location when fully utilised. I could google it of course, but it is much more fun to have a proper and concise explanation from somebody who actually knows.
Since nobody else has answered, I'll have a guess. We know the speed of light pretty accurately and have a century or so of experience of propagation of radio waves through various bits of the atmosphere. (A new record, five "of"s in one sentence!)
They probably just ping it repeatedly with radio waves from various ground stations. After a few orbits you'd have the orbital parameters tied down. Once you know the position of one satellite I guess you can use inter-satellite comms to pin things down further. (Assuming you have more than one satellite.)
Millimetre accuracy is a bit of a puzzler, though.
Ignoring any other flaws in this argument, coastlines are not vertical walls. As the sea level rises, it takes a greater volume of water to produce each mm rise.
You haven't seen some of the coastlines around these areas! :)
But even so.. We were supposed to see rises of several metres by now. I should need scuba gear to stand on the Petone foreshore as it was in 1995, but I can stand at the low-tide mark of the 1980's with no visible sign of sea level rise since then. Petone itself should be under water based on the alarmist warmist 'predictions' of the 90's, but this hasn't happened.
Their predictions are way off, especially when you take into account the land being eroded and washed into sea which would make their predictions less than the actual effect (since they only took into account glacial/polar ice not the somewhat steady rates of erosion).
NZ's coastline s actually quite interesting from a historical sea level stance. We can see in many places the remains of rivers that have long since disappeared beneath the waves, and in other areas (around the Wainuiomata coastline for example) you can see where the sea was at least 5m higher than it is today and not that long ago (most likely related to the quake that brought the land that is now Wellington Airport out of the sea). Look at the South/Central Taranaki coastline (especially a few hundred metres back from the coastline) and you can see where the beach was a few thousand years back (much upheaval in the land there thanks to the oversized zit).
The science is terrible in most warmist/greeny fields, and that is disturbing as what they seek to use to 'mitigate the effects' will actually do a hell of a lot more damage to the planet. So many things done or tried that are terrible for the environment and cause far more, not less, pollution or direct damage. Hopefully some day soon we can treat them like attorney-drones and start getting a bounty for each one we despatch. My dislike for them stems from simply loving the land and wanting to protect it, and seeing the stupid things these people are demanding which will wreak havoc on the land and the natural life that inhabits it.
"Engineers dropped the spacecraft into a slightly lower orbit away from other satellites, which meant that [...] there was a reduction in frequency of observations of the same location"
Can someone explain that to me? If the orbit is lower, then the orbital period should decrease too (Kepler's 3rd law), so the frequency should actually increase.
"Depending on where you think the Kármán line lies"
And because it is entirely arbitrary, a matter of opinion, without any particular scientific relevance, it simply doesn't matter.
Indeed, the only people it matters to are those determined to get a 'I r a Astronaut' badge, which is where Branson's daft trips to nowhere come in. He's moved the Kármán line down by 20km so that he can still claim he's reaching "space", because his equipment cannot reliably and safely reach 100km (and personally I'm still a tad sceptical about the safety of the system at all—not sure that Beardie should have said he'll be taking his kids on the first flight). It's all just marketing rubbish designed to separate rich idiots from their money in exchange for a few minutes of vomiting and a tin badge. If you want a momentary freefall experience, go on a rollercoaster.
As any true astronaut will point out, "Orbit is what counts". The differences between sub-orbital vomit-comets and true orbital spaceflight are orders of magnitude. It's a real pity the money spent on the Branson silliness didn't go towards proper spaceflight.
As I said years ago when all this Bransons thing was just kicking off. As a technology, it is clever enough. But it is simply repeating the work of the X-15 project of the 1960's. It isn't the 100,000 Meters that is where it really counts. It is the 11Km/S. The difference between Bransons roller-coaster and true space flight is the difference between holding your breath and having a quick look around underwater and diving with scuba gear.
And because it is entirely arbitrary, a matter of opinion, without any particular scientific relevance, it simply doesn't matter
I challenge you to repeat that statement when travelling at orbital velocity in the upper atmosphere without glowing ostentatiously...
MSL from reliable and geographically stable locations is closer to 1.5cm for 11years (+/-0.2) to start of 2019 (trend of 1.36mm/yr). Fort Denison (Sydney, Australia) is barely moving compared to places built on sinking mud/sand (like Jakarta which has huge buildings on soft ground which they pumped the water from under their feet so it sinks more). Did they tell you they calibrated the satellite results by adjusting sensor output by upto 75cm (early in orbit) and data is readjusted for drifting times&locations. How can they say these Jason satellites are more accurate than other sources to measure mm changes. Some physical data from Pacific Islands are garbage because sensors have lost backup battery capacity and only work during hours of sufficient sunlight. A NZ study found Pacific Islands were on average, not shrinking https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-018-02954-1.
Antarctic sea ice coverage returned to 1979 level in the last few weeks.
While we are on the subject of pacific atolls. We are currently being told that a couple of inches sea level rise and a couple of degrees warmer water over the next century will destroy them. What happened 10,000 years ago (Or so) when, in a comparatively short timescale, sea levels rose by hundreds of meters and the water got a lot hotter?
What happened 10,000 years ago (Or so) when, in a comparatively short timescale, sea levels rose by hundreds of meters and the water got a lot hotter?
Well it's quite simple. They were completely and utterly destroyed as was all life on earth, only to magically come back into existence when the sea levels fell again.
(Although some of these islands may be the result of much more recent volcanic/tectonic events and thus far more likely to appear and disappear due to that or the effects of sea motion on unstable rapidly-cooled volcanic rock)
The thing about coral atolls (Tuvalu etc) that everybody seems to miss is that they are not made of rock. They are living structures. The "Land" is composed of washed up dead coral. The land surface on an atoll is only ever going to be no more than a couple of metres above sea level. As sea levels rise, the reefs will rise with them and so will the land level. As sea levels fall, the reefs will sink with it and exposed "Land" will be rapidly eroded away. How well coral growth can keep up with rapid changes in sea level and changing sea temperatures I do not know. 10,000 years ago, many of todays atolls may well have still had their central sea mounts above sea level But I cant help feeling that these living islands are a lot more than 10,000 years old so that suggests that coral can actually adapt to really very rapid and indeed drastic changes. Changes that make the wildest doomongering of the warmist lobby seem utterly trivial IE Metres/Year, even 10's of metres/year on occasion (Say when a large glacial dam breaks releasing its pent up water) as opposed to the, perhaps, couple of inches/year we may now be experiencing, or not...!
As sea levels rise, the reefs will rise with them and so will the land level. As sea levels fall, the reefs will sink with it and exposed "Land" will be rapidly eroded away.
Great post, and a concept even I'd not considered. Thanks very much for teaching me something worthwhile before my day is even really started!
How well coral growth can keep up with rapid changes in sea level and changing sea temperatures I do not know.
I honestly don't believe it's temperature we have to worry about.
The plastics and other pollutants we dump into our oceans however - that's a whole different matter.
"It was only supposed to last three years but spent 11 sending measurements back to Earth after its June 2008 launch." Someone needs a lesson in basic arithmetic."
What really happened was they lost the data backup just as the 3 years was up and had to start again ....... this happened twice more (Win 10 Update at the wrong time & Ransomware) and now the 'Batteries' have run out before the last attempt finished.
:) <JK>
It was only supposed to last three years but spent 11 sending measurements back to Earth.
Perhaps a review can establish where components exceeded requirements and a cheaper version can be developed next time based on identified savings using lower quality materials.
;-)
p.s. as in my washing machine fell apart on the day the guarantee ran out - worked as designed
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