Comment Re:This one can fail (Score 1) 62
(Also, when seeing these numbers, keep in mind that Starship also has a lot of dead mass dedicated to being reusable)
(Also, when seeing these numbers, keep in mind that Starship also has a lot of dead mass dedicated to being reusable)
It is the largest rocket, and it's the most powerful in terms of raw thrust, but it isn't the most powerful in terms of thrust-to-weight ratio
What the heck sort of metric is that supposed to be? T/W ratio determines how fast you accelerate. You want us to award "most powerful rocket" to ballistic missile interceptors I guess?
, and the thing is practically useless past LEO.
Given that it was literally designed for Mars, it distinctly is not. Even without refueling, its payload capacity to GEO is 27t (vs. 100-150t for LEO), which isn't even remotely "useless". By contrast, Delta IV Heavy is 14t to GEO. Vulcan is designed for 8,5t to GEO. Ariane 5 maxes out at 10,5t. Etc.
I assume you got this erroneous misconception based on the fact that its upper stage isn't hydrolox. But ignoring that it has higher ISP and than kerosene, and MUCH lower tankage mass than hydrolox, people who make this argument always boggle the mind to me. Because all this means is you change the optimal staging ratios. That is to say, a satellite designed for a launch vehicle with a hydrolox upper stage will generally have a smaller propellant tank and have the launch vehicle do more of the work, while a satellite designed for a vehicle with a non-hydrolox upper stage will generally have a larger propellant tank and do more of the work itself. Wherein what you effectively now have is a three stage rocket, which gives you far better performance for high-delta-V launches than a two-stage with a hydrolox upper.
But even ignoring that, the difference between hydrolox and methalox upper stages isn't THAT huge to the point where you can say "It's awesome in LEO but worthless beyond LEO!" It just doesn't work that way. There's greater falloff in performance with methalox, but if you have 100-150t LEO performance, you're still going to have great GEO performance.
That's the advantage of rapidly churning out new models: iterate, iterate, iterate. Wasn't an option for something like the Shuttle where every single orbiter cost a small fortune.
E-band is very easily blocked, as water vapour absorption in this band is very high, and more temperature sensitive. So E-band can only be supplemental to other bands, but provides a significant boost when it's usable. On the upside, it's much more directional, so you can have a significantly smaller number of users sharing a given beam.
Old-school automakers strike again. It always goes like this. People project what old-school automakers actually are doing onto Tesla.
Tesla offers insurance, as an option, sign-up only, for people who want their data to be used in exchange for a potential discount? F*** YOU! But then mainstream automakers just sell your data without your consent, for THEIR exclusive profit.
Tesla offers nuanced data-collection options for users to choose what to share and not share? F*** YOU! But then old-school automakers just collect, and even sell, whatever user data they're legally allowed to in any given jurisdictions.
Tesla structures pricing to avoid subscriptions and "nickel-and-diming", ongoing-charging only for (very reasonably priced) mobile data service, but then - after being hassled by a minority of buyers for years to LET them pay for things they CHOSE not to buy - offers a small handful of subscription services? F*** YOU! But then many old-school competitors make bloody everything a service, by default, often as the only option.
On and on. It honestly gets tiring. It's the same thing that corrupt populist politicians do to their opponents.
It's the same problem as the question, "The loss of which hair makes a man bald?"
Western governments have been easily exploited by less-than-unambiguous means of warfare by less scrupulous actors. But this situation is slowly changing. It has to be clear that hybrid warfare leads to harsh enough responses, from the perspective of the attacker, that it functions as deterrence - and "strategic ambiguity" (deliberately murky attribution of the attack, etc) doesn't work.
And thankfully, what attackers fear, they generally wear it on their sleeve. In Putin's case, he unambiguously fears his own people and tries to shut down any means to organize, and any means to resist. So he's painted his own target for hybrid-war countermeasures to Russian hybrid-war attacks. "Man, all those opposition media resources that you tried to starve of funding, somehow they got funded! Oh man, all those protestors who previously were communicating openly on the internet where they were easy to track, somehow they managed to make themselves secure communications networks! Oh man, someone hacked into your domestic security apparatus and bricked your facial recognition cameras! Oh no, all those underpaid military subcommanders, someone just informed them of the vast wealth their commanders have been embezzling, at their expense, with photographs! Oh man, those Dagestanis that are protesting somehow got their hands on a stock of old Soviet light arms - I hear you can get those in any military surplus store, you know!"
So, minor fun fact.
In Slavic languages, the root "Vlad-" relates to governmental rulership and power. In modern Russian, you have vlast' (power / authority), vladet' (to own / rule / possess / subjugate), vladyka (lord / ruler), etc. Similar in Ukrainian - for example, vlada (power / authority). While the "-mir" comes from the same Germanic root as the English "more", meaning "the great", modern folk etymologies relate it to "mir" (meaning either "peace" or "the world"). Orig. "The Great Ruler", modern closer to "Ruler of the Peace" or "Ruler of the World".
Of course he'll trace his name back to who he refers to as "Vladimir the Great", who solidified the rule of the Kyivan Rus and converted to Christianityi (to marry the daughter of the Byzantine Emperor). Ukrainians of course refer to him as *Volodymyr* the Great (myr, BTW, only meaning "peace" in Ukrainian, not "the world"). Historians commonly spell it more like Volodimer. As the Kyivan Rus was closely tied to Varangian vikings, the name has cognates in the Nordic world, such as the Icelandic "Valdimar" (Vald = power in Icelandic as well).
Note that in Russian, the nickname for Vladimir usually isn't "Vlad" (that's for Vladislav), but rather Vova or Volodya. The latter is a diminutive form, so it's sort of mocking to use when referring to a ruler. For example, there was a video from early in the war when an ethnic Russian family in eastern Ukraine filmed themselves in front of the flaming remains of their burning house after an attack, mockingly saying, "Good job, Volodya! Thank you for freeing us - this is everything we ever expected from you!" (gestures at the fire) "Now we can be warm this winter!" (leans over to her child) "Say thank you to Mr. Putin!" (Child) "Spasibo!"
"Good Job Volodya" has since become a meme, referring to backlash from the Russian invasion. For example, Sweden and Finland join NATO? "Good Job, Volodya!"
Ugh, yes. I shuold porfraed beter.
You could also start with:
- two molecules that (moderately) accurately copied each other (though getting them both at the same time makes the time scale to the big event much longer.)
- A molecule that makes NEARLY always inacurate (but occasionally acurate and complete) copies of itself. (This also drastically pulls in the time to a two-molecule solution.)
- A molecule that makes inaccurate copies but with string of typical errors that occasionally loops back to an accurate and complete (mod a few errors in unimportant places) copy of a previous version.
These could eventually mutate into a version that can perform a one-step copy-itself loop.
=====
I've always been partial to an RNA-only origin. RNA can do it all (self-copy, enzymes, energy transport batteries in at least two sizes with self-pluggin-in connectors: ATP/ADP and UTP/UDP, expression regulation, directed genetic code editing, etc.). It's also still doing a lot of that in current lifeforms, especially in key parts (such as many of the components of the DNA duplication, DNA repair, DNA-to-MRNA copy, gene expression regulation, MRNA exon-eliminating editing, and MRNA directed protein synthesis machinery)
(To be fair, it's not JUST the magnets that have advanced - liners, cooling/breeding blankets, and basically everything have advanced over the years. But the magnets are the really big deal)
These comments are so predictable, from people who have no understanding.
The origin of this notion of "fusion is always said to be close, but it never shows up!" dates back to the progression leading up to, and past, ZETA in 1957. Russia had just launched Sputnik, embarrassing the west, in this ideological war of civilizations. But ZETA offered hope from a PR perspective: "Oh, sure, you launched a satellite, but we just invented limitless power!"
The problem was that the early ZETA numbers turned out to be wrong due to measurement errors. At the time, there was literally no way anyone could hope to model fusion on a computer, and very little understanding of what they were doing in general beyond a basic particle physics standpoint. The steady increasing understanding of what went wrong was then compounded over the next couple decades by more projects which increasingly showed that the barriers to overcome for different fusion mechanisms were much greater than expected.
We now understand all this, and since the advent of modern computing, we can model it all readily (except for some edge cases, not applicable to e.g. tokamaks). And that's what's being discussed here: bog standard tokamak fusion. This isn't new ground. We know how tokamaks work. We know that if you build them big enough, you can get sufficiently net-energy-positive fusion. It's that "big enough" - and doing so economically - that's always been the barrier.
However, in recent decades - well after the start of ITER (and thus not employed in its design) - there was a massive change on the scene: the commercial bulk availability of room temperature superconducting films. These allow for magnets with double the field strength, which basically lets you scale down the size of a commercially viable reactor by an order of magnitude. And not only that, but they offer a whole host of other advantages, including easier / cheaper cooling, easier ability to open up the reactor to get inside to replace the liner, and so forth.
It's a complete game changer for the industry. That doesn't mean "viable nuclear power overnight". Heck, it doesn't even prove economic viability at all - you can't predict that really well in advance. But what it does mean is that, yes, at a reasonable scale, we can build productive electricity-genereating fusion reactors. This isn't some exotic, "This One Weird Trick Lets You Make A Great Fusion Reactor" thing - this is well established, well researched physics here. Just with better magnets. And those better magnets makes a *huge* difference.
5 to 300 tonnes of minerals from space enter Earth's atmosphere naturally every day; get over your ginned up outrage.
Pollution isn't just *that* a thing is emitted; it's about regular influxes, and concentrations in particular areas. Neither of these are applicable here. The "regular influxes" are minute compared to natural sources, and the "area" is "spread out across the entire planet".
Who are these children who are out there prompting for "pro-choice"?
..., gets horrible things back. News at 11.
Machines have less problems. I'd like to be a machine. -- Andy Warhol