Posts by Zack Mollusc 518 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Jul 2008
Putting your findings on the internet IS informing Apple in the best way possible. Apple's PR department finding out about a bug that harms their image will get the issue addressed far sooner than an easily ignored quiet word to the engineering department that hasn't been allocated sufficient budget to test for bugs.
I hear this a lot, rockets have been done, propulsive landing has been done, re-entry and re-use have been done etc. All true, but only spacex is putting them together to build a useful system. Why has nobody else stolen and implemented all this prior work from the last century if it is so trivial?
Wright brothers did not invent the field of airodynamics, internal combustion, control surfaces etc but they managed to put it all together into something which could sustain controlled flight (granted, it needed rails and a pulley to get airborne).
Well, speed is only the thing if you want to get back to the moon before the Chinese land people there.
If you do a quick flag plant and return, the Chinese will say "Big deal, you did that in the sixties and have obviously stagnated since then. We are building a cool moon base with blackjack and hookers."
You will look even worse if you try and do a flag-plant and scoot but something goes wrong and people die.
Better to fail on a more ambitious mission than a repeat of a simpler one
These are just the propaganda and political reasons which can be grasped by the gormless public, the scientific reasons for developing moon base technology are less easily understood.
Apollo was a fantastic technical achievement and all involved are heroes as far as I am concerned. It proved that it is possible to go to the moon and come back. They couldn't stay more than a few days, but by jingoes they did it
1. If you want to go to the moon to do science, stay there for months at a time, learn how to live in reduced gravity and cope with extremes of temperature etc, you will need a moon base of some kind.
2. A moon base, according to various studies will have a mass of at minimum 150 tonnes (much more if you are trying out manufacturing or mining). For comparison, ISS is about 450 tonnes.
3. Landing a 150 tonne moon base Apollo-style from a single launch will require a rocket of enormous proportions, in the order of 20,000 tonnes ( 10 times the mass of Space shuttle, 7 times the mass of Saturn 5 ) and will need a rocket launch pad of correspondingly enormous scale.
Nobody is building such a monster.
The alternative is to launch many (at least in the order of dozens) smaller (approximately Saturn 5 sized) rockets and either assemble a huge moon lander in earth orbit or assemble the base on the lunar surface.
If you are launching dozens, scores or perhaps hundreds of rockets, they need to be cheap, reusable or both.
Transferring cryogenic propellants from one craft to another in zero-g is difficult new technology that needs to be developed
Storing cryogenic propellants in space without them boiling away before use is difficult new technology that needs to be developed.
Companies need to purchase new networking hardware to get the full benefit of AI?
Rubbish! We have done extensive and expensive research into AI and worked with every big AI vendor and the obvious and unanimous conclusion here at International Ferret Breeders Incorporated is that companies efforts to use AI are doomed unless they purchase vast quantities of ferrets. It is just common sense.
Interesting. Wouldn't a smaller (than starship) upper stage have to deal with more heating?
I thought there was an advantage for big blunt objects re-entering the atmosphere?
Also, how small can you make an upper stage that has to carry control surfaces, thermal protection and either a dash of fuel for landing or big parachutes and airbags?
It may be possible to weed out the evil foreign spies, but that would take competence, effort and money. If the companies were competent and willing to put in some kind of effort and spend a little money, they would not be recruiting remote workers from the ends of the earth.
"Then there's the puzzle of the Crimean War. Everyone knows about it thanks to the Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale, Balaclava Helmets (aka 'ski masks') etc. but surprisingly few of us know where, when and why this war happened."
I am not a historian, but I reckon I can guess where the Crimean war happened.
Just like Evil Stupid Musk's Starship, this is an embarrassing failure.
1. Utterly failed to achieve orbit.
2. Utterly failed to take any crew into space.
3. Wasted trillions of U.S taxpayer dollars.
4. Utterly failed to colonise Mars
5. Doesn't bring anything new to science, rockets are an old technology which have been in use for over a century.
6. etc
If the problem is resonance, a scale model would not have revealed it. Hopefully they can alter the shape enough for it to not resonate with whatever frequencies are hitting it, without adding too much mass.
Or maybe Starship will never work. If that is the case, how else will we get hundreds of tons to the lunar surface?
Very true. There is a chemist and accountant on youtube who has been carefully monitoring the Starship programme. The first test flight of starship wasted three billion dollars of taxpayer money. The second flight was a waste of three billion dollars of taxpayer money, as was the third and so on.
Also, and I don't know if anyone else has spotted this, Spacex has yet to land a single colonist on Mars. It is all broken promises.
Hehehe, all the magazine and therefore web articles on 'how do I make some money?' assume.
a) you have huge outgoings which can be cut ( don't pay insurance on the Bentley when you only use it two days a year!)
b) you have assets sitting idle ( did you know gold has monetary value? Sell a few dozen of those gold ingots you have in the loft) ( why not rent out some of your properties in Monaco ?)
Even if this were possible,
A) the software would still be microsoft code, full of bugs and bottlenecks and spyware.
B) giving away the software for free would not stop companies from paying $millions to microsoft for the same or inferior versions. If there is no money involved, how do you skim any of it off for yourself and who will bribe you to sign the contract?
Hmmm... Starship is not close to being a functional system in the same way as the shitty Wright Flyer completely failed to carry any passengers at all and the pile of crap that Lindberg threw together never got anywhere near crossing the Atlantic to England.
Ideally the signalling would be in an 'open-source' kind of format so that it is easily recognised by all. If the signals were in a form that humans could detect, that would be even better. Maybe a bright purple light positioned so that it shone towards the following traffic and was triggered by the decelleration of the vehicle it was mounted on.
That is my suggestion: an AI system continuously monitoring the vehicle's velocity via gps, lidar, cameras, gyroscopes ,magnetometers and ouiji boards so that it can detect when the brakes are applied and light up a bright purple light or lights on the rear of the vehicle to inform other road users, robotic and human, of the braking manouver. Simple but effective.
Jesus, has anyone here ever been employed in business?
If someone employs you to do something, be it create a workflow from an existing process or whatever, nobody is interested in that goal being accomplished. The only thing that matters is that it looks like you are doing it and you have some result which looks like what was expected.
If an LLM hallucinates its way to a plausible outcome, that is mission accomplished. Perception is reality.
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