Posts by Vulch 598 publicly visible posts • joined 28 May 2008
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.
There was a proposal in the 60s to build something like four "energy parks" around the UK. Windscale, Dounreay and Dungeness plus one TBD were the locations IIRC. Each park would have one or two fast breeder reactors, a reprocessing plant and half a dozen plutonium burners. The idea meant that no highly radioactive material would ever need to be transported outside the parks, they'd bring in the starter fuel for the fast breeder which was relatively harmless, then the reprocessing plant would extract the plutonium to run the other reactors on site as well as deal with their end results.
Leakage of the hypergolic propellants out of the valves is a known problem on all spacecraft using them. The solution is to put each valve in a box that is vented to the outside so the leakage can evaporate away in vacuum. On the ground before launch the vent is usually covered by a "remove before flight" tag or a tissue paper seal that ruptures. Why this was not done or didn't work in this case is an execise left for the investigators.
When I were a mere lad working in broadcast TV, "Pebble Mill at One" was essentially a regular and frequent DR test. Pebble Mill in Birmingham was the alternative network control for the BBC if TV Centre went down in a sufficiently spectacular manner, and PM@1 was used to check things could be fed directly to the transmitter network without involving London.
It's the twists and turns around Drake's Island are the problem. There's an underwater ridge between it and the Cornish shore so ships coming out of the dockyard have to left hand down a lot to pass in front of the Hoe and then right hand down to avoid running into the Lido. Removing the ridge has been investigated, but all the modelling results in Sutton harbour silting up along with the entrances to the various dockyard basins.
Long time ago I saw the proper Ark Royal setting out through there. It had to leave the dockyard empty and do a first replenishment in the Sound, and could also only enter or leave on certain high tides when there was all of a foot (I did mention it was a long time ago) clearance under the keel.
The problem seems to be down to leakage through seals which was expected meeting humid air in the void behind which wasn't. In space the void is vented to vacuum to get rid of the leakage, but on the ground is connected to the outisde atmosphere and NTO plus water creates nitric acid which has corroded the valves. Humid air in Florida, who could have forseen that?
Unfortunately people have this tendency to want to breathe and eat and have something better than the floor to lie on during the high-g bits of the trip. The mass needed for an individual and their support works out at around a ton as a rule of thumb.
There's an ISS pass due over the UK starting just after 22:50* this evening. Watching last night I saw the ISS itself with two objects chasing it, one of those was Nauka and I suspect the other was the second stage of the Proton.
* Use something like Heavens Above to get exact timings for your location.
The ITV company I worked for once upon a time hired summer work experience students. One summer the maintenance department were contemplating putting calibrated markings on the floor by the monitor repair bench so they could estimate the EHT voltage by how far their student jumped/got thrown back when he touched the internals in an inadvisable manner. You'd think he'd have learnt after a couple of shocks, but this went on for weeks...
The delay on the first shuttle launch meant that the studio booking at Televison Centre for the BBC's coverage had run out. The only spare (BBC) studio available was in Bristol so all but one of the production team had headed down the M4, but Bristol had no videotape machines free. As a freshly minted VT engineer in the dungeons of TV Centre I was known to be a bit of a space enthusiast, and myself and a housemate got the job of feeding the inserts from machines in London to the studio in Bristol (and even editing some of the packages ourselves) for the duration of the mission, along with the remaining member of the production team who had been in her job about as long as we had in ours. We even got a day or two of overtime out of it as it was going to be tricky enough without the Bristol end having to deal with multiple sets of London engineers.
There's another problem in that the tankage is only certified for something like nine fuelling cycles. They've already used up two, the repeat will use a third, and they'll need at least one when it gets to the Cape to prove all the pad facilities work. A couple of last minute problems during launch attempts and they're looking at the possibility of having to take it all apart and use a new core stage.
Many years ago I had a removeable pack disc drive that would pick three questions from a pool of around six to make sure you really wanted to format a pack. Half the questions in the pool needed an answer of "No" rather than "Yes" so just clicking the "Yes" button three times usually wouldn't work.
From an interim report a while ago I think it wasn't so much a plug put in upside down as the plug that was supposed to go to unit 1 of something was plugged into identical unit 2 and vice versa. This meant that when the flight computer said "Left hand down a bit" the wrong unit responded and it screaming "No! Your OTHER left!" just made things worse. Splitting the routing of control and sensor feedback would be a sensible solution if it isn't done already, a test of "Left hand down a bit" with the feedback going through a different route would need at least two wiring errors to not give a result of "Left hand moving up a bit".
China may be far behind the Soviet/Russian space programme when it comes to automated docking, but it appears they beat the USA by a few years.
(Russia 1967, ESA 2008, China 2011, USA 2019. Corrections welcome, NASA did try an automated docking earlier but it failed and I can't spot a reflight)
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