I realize that moving the power source off of the craft is going to help some but isn't THE major problem in the rocket equation reaction mass? Rockets have to carry it with them and this craft seems no different. Unless this propulsion system produces much higher exhaust velocities I don't see how its going to help much.
Not that this specific technique won't need extensive testing, but chances are that on occasion you've already driven on a road using plastics as a base material. Geofoam is regularly used in road projects throughout the world.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
http://www.komonews.com/news/l...
If plastics which would otherwise go into a landfill or are already contaminating the environment can be used, if it has similar/better performance characteristics to traditional road materials and if its is a similar/cheaper in price then of course. But there are a lot of ifs in there.
No doubt government is always attempting to co-opt the press to portray only what makes them look good and they have been successful to a degree. But the various leaks, corruption/waste stories and abuse of power pieces over the last decade or so have show that there are some holdouts that scoff at the government line. Also to a degree the internet has taken over for some of the "shaming" of "oppressive officers" that was once predominantly taken care of the press, with blog stories, Debt clocks & internet video/audio.
The press in its various forms (blogs, newspapers and some filmmakers) are the defense attorneys of a free country. The Founding fathers wrote at length how the press and freedom of speech on its own was one of the major impediments to a government sinking into corruption & totalitarianism.
"The last right we shall mention regards the freedom of the press. The importance of this consists, besides the advancement of truth, science, morality, and arts in general, in its diffusion of liberal sentiments on the administration of Government, its ready communication of thoughts between subjects, and its consequential promotion of union among them, whereby oppressive officers are shamed or intimidated into more honourable and just modes of conducting affairs."
Continental Congress, 1774
This woman isn't some random person hanging out with "scum", she's an award winning documentary filmmaker. She also helped create the Freedom of the Press Foundation. Unfortunately the press has to hang out with various groups of morally/legally questionable people in order to get to what is important, most of those people reside in our various halls of government.
"To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries."
Key words spelled out right in the constitution at least here in the US are "Authors and Inventors" and "limited Times", both of which appear to be FAR beyond the veil here. The artists have been dead since 1946 and no one with their head screwed on straight wound consider over a hundred and twenty years to be a "limited time" especially when you take into account that at the time the constitution was written you considered yourself lucky if you lived into your 40s.
Hopefully this thing is just a proof of concept, any such system should be able to capture multiple pieces of debris whereas this this thing seems physically limited to capturing a single piece of debris and deorbiting. That simply is impractical with over 19k pieces of debris over 3.9 inches in size to launch a satellite for each and every one. Even if each satellite had the fuel and storage to capture 100 pieces of debris that would be around 190 satellites. A better concept might be to have a couple dozen LARGE satellites (Delta IV or Falcon Heavy) in different orbits each with a dozen or so retrieval craft that go out and collect a few pieces of debris and then return to the mother satellite and drop off their debris and refuel for another trip. After the mother satellite is either out of fuel or full of debris it deorbits itself along with its retrieval craft.
I may be reading from some overly cheerful sources but from what I understand the air cooler system was the only real technological hurdle needed to make the SABRE engine viable and it's been tested and proven. No doubt a full prototype engine will need to be built and flown to confirm the engines performance characteristics and viability but beyond that it appears to be "simple" aircraft design/development. Expensive no doubt, but not all that different from developing an advanced airliner which are usually in the $10-15 Billion range.
Who knows, maybe they'll be able to get Skylon up and flying. If that happens they'll be giving rides to the rest of the space-fairing nations. A long shot I know, but beyond SpaceX it is the only fully reusable orbital launch system in some form of active development that has some physical hardware built and tested and no fancy new "10 years out" technological requirements.
Maybe its just me but I found that article to be less than useless. Their company site may read like a commercial brochure but it seems quite a bit more informative about the actual technology.
I don't think 'anomaly' or 'problem' are the words I'd use as there is at times humorous attempt by agencies/contractors to use such terms to describe totally catastrophic failures.
As a thought experiment perhaps, but when factoring in real world requirements such as disposal, transportation, labor & logistics you're hard pressed to justify a major effort to replace bulbs wholesale.
The Model S may be in the same price range as other cars in its class but at ~$80K its way out of the ranger of your average person. Most people are looking in the $12-$30k new range. The battery packs alone are around $8-12k for all electric vehicles which is reflected in the price differences in ICE/Electric vehicles. A Ford focus for example runs about $17k in an ICE setup but even with government help runs $29k in electric. The issue of course appears to be the battery packs, they're just too expensive and probably have serious longevity issues (5-10 years). The best thing we can probably do at this point is a middle of the road solution, much smaller battery packs (7-25 miles) with a small gas engine that runs in an on/off fashion at its most efficient RPM range to keep the batteries above say 20%. That would be at least enough to take a big chunk out of our petroleum usage and begin moving us away from ICE engines to electric powertrains so that when we do find a battery technology that works the transition will be much easier.
"but PEPCO insisted that they didn't have enough data"
This situation sounds like a serious conflict of interest where the utility has at the very least no incentive to work towards LED street lights and could very well actively attempt to prevent such a switchover. Street lights by their very nature operate at night, a time where the system load has for the most part has dropped below the utilities baseload capacity. In simplistic terms they are generating power that isn't being used, so they aren't being paid for it. There is a significant impetus for them to WANT "someone" to use power in the midnight to 6 AM period and they're probably hoping that municipalities with power hungry street lights and homeowners with "security" lights will take up at least part of the slack.
A better methodology might be to simply stop buying standard bulbs and start buying LEDs. As standard bulbs go out swap them out. Sure you won't see the savings immediately but you also won't throw away a boatload of perfectly good bulbs and you won't have quite such a sticker shock. I can definitely see the use of this leasing service, but only in cases with especially pigheaded bureaucrats, kind of like those ones who claim the world is 7,000 years old or those who think we can convert 100% to renewable electricity and organic food and not have rolling blackouts and half the population starving to death.
Living on Earth may be expensive, but it includes an annual free trip around the Sun.
