It's space flight, or orbital flight. Different from atmospheric flight. But this is a stupid semantic debate I'll avoid.

At a hiring event at a hotel, I overheard a hiring manager of a large defense contractor in the restroom ranting about the college kids he was interviewing. Paraphrased, "They're all technically competent as engineers! But there are no social skills, no fit!" He was yelling. He went on to rave about a female engineering interviewee, who was "confident without being arrogant, funny, and personable" and how she would be a perfect hire, because she was sociable. I can guarantee the "work, not talk" line wouldn't have worked on this guy, at least.

Also, have you ever read The Art of War? It's not about avoidance and being a lone wolf. It is about facing conflict head-on, adapting to the environment, while stressing unconventional approaches (attacks). Eating lunch alone, cold shouldering coworkers, being an oblivious worker drone - this is exactly what Art of War warns against.

Wikipedia isn't an indiscriminate repository of information. It is finite, not only because of finite resources (note how often they ask for donations? storage and bandwidth aren't free.) but also because each additional article requires more editor attention for copyediting and preventing abuse. Every article about something no one cares about draws editor attention away from articles that matter. I eventually stopped contributing to Wikipedia (beyond minor fixes) because of qualms with the editing process, but the greater discretion in deleting articles is something I welcome. It was absurd how many Slashdot-related articles there were when 99% of the first world's adult population has never heard of it. Granted, we still have garbage like Dalek, and by most measures, it's still the encyclopedia Slashdot built.

Learning french doesn't mean you forget english. I've been a full time Dvorak user for six years, except for public terminals at university and public library computers. They all use qwerty, and I type on them nearly as well as in Dvorak (maybe 70 wpm versus 80-90 wpm on Dvorak). I have lost some speed in qwerty, but the comfort and lower chance of RSI is well worth using a non-standard layout. Reaching 70 wpm in qwerty is hardly crippled typing.

The specs say differently:

Environmental requirements

Operating temperature: 32 to 95 F
(0 to 35 C)
Nonoperating temperature: -4 to 113 F
(-20 to 45 C)
Relative humidity: 5% to 95% noncondensing
Maximum operating altitude: 10,000 feet (3000 m)

You have got to be kidding me!!!

*Minimum* operating temp of 32 F?!?!?!

How the F can they sell this phone in northern climates? I live in WI and in Feb I will frequently go outside on a nice day to take a conf call and get some fresh air. A nice day being, at least, in the upper 20's.

Seriously dude, WTF?

/First /. post in like 5 years
//Apple makes some very nice products, but their arrogance is huge.
///Jobs was born is SW WI.

They're worrying about CAD when they should be worrying about calculations and broad, system-level design. Remember, the first moon missions took place without the use of CAD. Detail designing the parts is a relatively small part of aerospace engineering. A better approach would be to prove their engineering legitimacy by analysis, then impress IBM/Dassault enough to donate a CATIA license to them. Give the rough launch vehicle design, the mission orbit design, the reentry vehicle type, and detailed quantified justifications and tradeoff studies for everything. It should be heavy with physics, and the calculations should be airtight. Expect a 500+ page technical report for this scale of project at this preliminary stage. Any explanatory sketches can be done by hand or any illustration program. You only need CAD when you're (1) ready to machine parts or (2) ready for detailed computational analysis. These guys are jumping the gun.

CAD isn't just about coming up with the part geometry by the way. Modern CAD/PLM involves massive amounts of metadata about materials, dimensions/tolerances (all locked in proprietary file formats), and keeping track of the relationships between parts, sub-assemblies and assemblies. You don't want to manually copy & paste 300 fasteners each time you recalculate stresses on a rocket nozzle, do you? It also automates many tedious design efforts. Want to figure out how to snake twenty miles of wiring, hydraulics and other tubing through a rocket with a hundred thousand parts? Oh also, each type of cable/tubing has a different minimum bend radius because of material stresses. Arc it too tightly and it cracks open during the launch vibrations, after having fatigued due to ambient thermal variations. And these are just a couple mechanical aspects of such a sprawling project that CAD must handle. You could "draw" the parts of just about any modern machine (fighter jet, car, bicycle) with an old copy of Maya used for the CGI in Jurassic Park. It'd be useless for analysis though because of the low numerical precision, and impossible for engineering because they have the most primitive handling of parametric modeling, and crude ability to work with multi-component (thousands) geometry.

Any teenager can come up with some gee-whiz 3d animation (that Mars lander animation from years ago was done by one). Could any teenager get funding for a mission to the moon? Work on your numbers first, then worry about software, you IT geeks you.

Is this a joke? Your team page shows you have at most four engineers, who are mostly IT geeks, not experts in propulsion, aerospace structures or astrodynamics, with the possible exception of Dr Snyder. You have a fricken artist before having a real engineering team, or anything solid to promote. You guys make Armadillo Aerospace look like Lockheed Martin. At least SpaceX etc. while lacking other things, started with something (usually money), you guys don't have anything. Quit wasting your time.