Re: dollars over sense
elect him president of Mars
That's just nominative determinism, as predicted by no less than Wernher von Braun in his book "Project Mars: A Technical Tale" over 20 years before his muskiness was even born.
589 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2008
Many weren't that complicated and were things SpaceX had already identified and were either working on or had completed. The 57 required for this flight (the other six were longer term) were completed in September, see this tweet from His Muskiness for the list.
Once upon a time I had a SCSI drive with removable disc packs. To format a disc pack you needed to answer three prompts chosen randomly from a pool of six. Three of the pool questions needed a 'Y' to proceed, the other three needed 'N', so you actually had to check the prompt before clicking through.
Also it's all very well being able to put down a spot beam, but the tighter the spot is the fewer phones are actually in the coverage area. At the limit the entire spot is focussed on Auntie Mabel chatting to Cousin Doris and a mile away there's a damaged hiker trying to dial the 9's and unable to get a connection. Starlink on the other hand is providing service to the entire National Park with its ginormous footprint.
and 1,000W grid stacked core wound motor on it
Whatever one of those might be, it's 4 times the permitted power for an e-bike unless it's registered with DVLC with all the associated faff needed for a motorbike. Don't want to attract the attention of a head office jobsworth who might deny the claim.
A lot of it appears to be disguised subsidies to UK companies. It tends to go along the lines of "Hello Foreign Aid Recipient, here's X currency units. Use it to buy Y widgets at Z currency units each from Thingies Ltd based in MarginalConstituencyShire, England" rather than the brown envelopes many people imagine.
At one company I was employed by I landed up being designated "Company Drug Pusher" as the admin lady had taken the required first aid course when we got large enough to need one, and as such she was no longer allowed to give people drugs of any kind. This meant the packets of aspirin, paracetemol and ibuprofen moved to one of my desk drawers and I let her know if they were getting low so she could buy replacements on petty cash.
The plumbing isn't too bad on Super Heavy, the Raptors are directly connected to the bottom of the methane tank and a spider/octopus arrangement feeds them oxygen. One of the major problems with the N1 was the wiring, many, many individual wires carrying analogue sensor information running from each engine to the control unit and inevitably some of them got connected to the wrong terminals resulting in perfectly good engines being shut down because of sensors on other engines showing fault conditions. The individual Raptor engines each have their own control units built in and talk to the central controller(s) via digital data buses.
You can't tack properly with a solar sail as there's no way to emulate a keel. Wind powered ships rely on being able to balance the forces caused by the wind against those caused by the water, a light sail at best can have the forces go perpendicular to the light source, never towards it.
I believe the standard is as described by Messrs Flanders and Swann.
The blokes in sheds still discover a fair chunk of asteroids and comets, particularly ones that are coming from odd directions. The stuff in orbit may be very Shiney (tm) and looking a long way out, and the professional observatories on the mountain tops do their bit, but there are lot of sheds with roll-back roofs dotted all over the globe.
It's a trade-off. If the satellite is in LEO it's only in sight of each ground station for a short time each day and the beam has to be actively steered. Losses are greater if it's in GEO, but the satellite is always line of sight to the ground station and beam adjustments are minimal.
Basically yes. Most simulations of Solar System formation have several largish (up to the size of the Moon) bodies forming in the asterid belt and either colliding with each other or being ejected following close misses with each other and Jupiter. The asteroids we see there now are the debris left over from the collisions.
They are a lot heavier, not just a bit. The ones currently in orbit are between 250kg and 300kg, the earlier ones didn't have the laser links so were lighter. The v2 satellites are 1250kg so 4 or 5 times more massive than the current ones, they're also twice as long so don't fit the fairing when flat and would have to be stood on end for launch on an F9.
Under the raised floors at the ITV station I worked at were like that. Studios built and wired for 405 lines monochrome, rewired for 625 monochrome, rewired again for 625 colour, new studio built with all the extra wiring for that, sound rewired for stereo, franchise lost and studios demolished before rewiring for full digital was required.. Can't pull the old cables out until the new has been shown to work, can't pull them out then as there's too much weight on top of them. Nothing quite with enough layers to stop the floor tiles going back down, but close...
The article is repeating a mis-conception, for your 100 or 150K USD you get a complete *system*, not one drone. The system comprises a control centre, launch rail, five or so actual drones, and a truck to carry everything. Subtract the likely cost of the truck and control centre electronics and the choice of drone components makes more sense.
The first version used a centralised and not anonymous data store, Big Brother knew who you were and where you'd been. Google and Apple didn't allow that sort of app access to the low-level API so it chewed battery and I think had problems running in the background. They then switched to the anonymous decentralised model which helped with both. When chased for up to date source in their GitHub repository the developers stated that regularly updating was too difficult, and issues were either ignored or dismissed. At that point I decided I was never going to install the software and lost interest in following the development.
67 million USD for a standard launch. Discounts available for booking multiple flights.
They're not hugely better. The USA limits commercial image providers to 30cm resolution, but when you get down to 15cm resolution atmospheric effects start blurring the results. That's one reason photo-reconnaisance from aircraft still has a place, less atmosphere to peer through.