ACARS. Already built.
It's rather low-bandwidth though.

...and pretty much the coolest name ever for a place being used for space operations.

I knew Spacex has done some new and inventive things in propulsion systems.
But oxidising rocket fuel ants? That's just plain weird...
I guess the new facility in Texas will include their own ant farm to keep down cost.

Just simple geometry:

Imagine a planet completely covered with water. Now throw in a big stone at one of the poles:
This results in a circular wave expanding from the pole, parallel to the latitudes.
As soon as it crosses the equator, it starts converging again, until it arrives as a peak at the
opposite pole.

Distance from pole to equator: circumference/4.

This works with a stone drop at any other point on the globe as well, I just used poles and
equator because it's easier to imagine. In reality, land masses complicate things a bit of course.

kWh, dammit. Go learn some very basic physics, or you won't even understand what you are being billed for.

There is no German power grid: A huge part of Europe is part of a single, phase-synchronous
grid larger than any of the ones in the US. Germany is part of that grid.

Yes, storage of electricity from uncontrolled sources to always be able to match supply to demand on a
large scale is still pretty much an unsolved problem. It's being worked on.

But I'm sick of the "of course it works for them, but it can never work for us, because we're oh so totally
different!" argument. That's just not true, and you have no point.

If anything, the vast amount of empty space makes large-scale facilities of any kind easier. I'm not sure
large-scale anything is the solution though, distributed generation and storage seem the sensible thing to do.
And doing it is just a question of (political) will.

Hey, you! Your ligatures aren't showing!

Oh, yeah: 25 March 2014 21:17:23 UTC – 27 March 2014 23:53 UTC

The improved orbital geometry might make the long way around shorter as well.
Or, as it was only a "late failure", part of the shortcut was taken already.

Thanks for pointing that out.

Uh? SpaceX build all their engines in-house.

That's a human consumables issue. Nobody is living in those Soyuz during that time.
They never tried something like this with the Shuttle, but just docking an empty one for
a couple of months would probably have worked too. A Shuttle landing never required
a maintenance crew (although, in hindsight, this would've been nice. The known problems
were still all launch issues though).

That's a very recent development. It has been used how often now, three, four times?
And of those times, it failed once, falling back to the traditional 3-4 day approach.
Also, it only works because the ISS's orbit has been altered to accomodate this approach mode.
And there's no reason precluding Dragon from doing the same.

It has a very, very impressive track record. Matching this will - by definition - take time and many flights.
But I don't see any capability making Soyuz inherently superior to the alternatives in development.
However, it is about to lose big on price, which is a big one.

Two factors:

- size doesn't matter (that much): For CPUs, you are creating large (relatively speaking) rectangular
objects on a circle. Thus, the closer your circle outline approaches a straight line (i.e., the larger the circle is),
the less waste silicon you have to cut away. For tiny LED dies, you can basically use the full circle even on
smaller wafers.

- For CPUs, the price is in the processing; for LEDs, it's the materials: LED structures are gigantic compared
to those found on a CPU. They are built using a handful of low precision (again, relatively speaking) production
steps. CPU production is as close to magic as we can nowadays get and uses dozens to hundreds of processing
steps (a wafer for a modern CPU spends about a month inside the fab), where a machine for a single step costs
millions. The cost for the raw wafer itself really doesn't matter.


So:

LEDs are cheap and fast to manufacture, and basically fit on arbitrary wafer shapes:
Raw material prices matter, wafer waste is minimal and doesn't. --> cheap, small wafers.

CPUs are damn hard and slow to manufacture, really only fit on rectangles:
Who cares about wafer prices, but we want optimal yield per processed wafer, so as to have
as little waste as possible --> wafers as large as possible, damn the cost of the wafer.


And lastly: There is no structure size progress in LEDs as there is with CPUs: Once you have a
factory for LEDs, you can use it for a while without upgrading to the newest and smallest process
all the time. So why buy new equipment if the old is perfectly competitive?

This might have been the Mercedes-Benz F200 concept car -
driven by completely electronic sidesticks.

This allowed for some cool features, e.g. completely vibration-free controls on
cobblestones while the electronic steering made continuous tiny adjustments to
the front wheels.

It also means it had no chance to be certified for public roads.

The particle triggering the radiation is, the Cherenkov photons themselves are not -
that's what makes those nice Mach-like Cherenkov cones.

Not as ISS crew. This was only temporarily, while the Shuttle was visiting (record number
of people on board the ISS is 13, but just for a couple of days: 6 ISS + 7 Shuttle).

ISS design crew initially was 7 - but that has been reduced to 6 for the time being,
due to the unavailability of full crew rescue vehicles.

At the moment, 2x Soyuz are used as escape pods. A parked Dragon would help to get
back to the initial crew size and free up a docking port. Very cool.

Correct.

Yeah. What's your point? Nothing prevents you from performing a CAT III landing
under cloudless skies in bright sunshine. You wouldn't normally do that though, because
it's a lot of work to set up and monitor, and just visually landing your aircraft is much easier.

The grandparent however claims CAT III autolands to be happening most of the time,
regardless of weather conditions.

I doubt that.

Using ILS, I totally believe. Full autoland, i.e. flare, touchdown, rollout: I'd like to see a very good source.

Considering that autoland requires that the runway be equipped with ILS CAT III(b), this seems unlikely: China has one FAA approved CAT III runway, Hong Kong 25R.

There are none in Singapore, none in Thailand, there's one in Australia (Melbourne 16), three in India (all the same airport though, Delhi).

Of the 1369 ILS-equipped runways in the US (Excel warning), just 113 have CAT III (no idea whether those are level a or b).

Sure, most of them are at the biggest an busiest airports, but considering that an autolanding
plane severely limits a runway's capacity due to increased spacing requirements, I doubt ATC
would be too happy to accomodate lots of autolands especially on those.

They just don't have the timeslots.