They have hypergolic-fueled engines on the Dragon spacecraft. They're already in development on a more powerful hypergolic engine that could be useful for a lander.

In 2005 I was a sysadmin at the IceCube Neutrino Observatory headquarters in Madison, Wisconsin. Biggest project I worked on was porting RS 485 serial drivers from a legacy unix system to Linux 2.6 and setting up the HP rack servers which we then shipped down to the pole from New Zealand on a C-130 Hercules. Also, I built a data visualization system in python+django which ran over a 1km-long DSL network between the drilling site and the south pole base. Never got to down there myself (my FTE boss did), but it was a fun project for a student and looks good on the resume and all. Did I mention SSH connections over satellite to Antarctica are pretty slow?

Read the guy's blog. He eats "normal" food on social occasions, or when he just feels like experiencing a certain taste. Soylent is just supposed to be about the vast majority of meals you eat where it's just about fueling your body so you can get on with more important things.

The product being shipped to customers is not being produced in that warehouse. The warehouse in the article was for prototyping. The facility the consumer version is being produced in is an FDA regulated and inspected facility.

The actual product being shipped to customers is being prepared in a fully FDA certified and inspected facility. The place where they were making the prototype formula was just that - a place for prototyping.

Orbital and SpaceX could easily take their craft in for docking themselves, but NASA's rules require them to do it this way. NASA's rules are that nobody is allowed to put something on a trajectory that intercepts the ISS, even for an instant, for any reason. This is the reason that a secondary payload on an earlier Falcon launch wasn't allowed to be put into its desired orbit. An engine failure on the Falcon's first stage required it to take a modified trajectory into orbit, at which point boosting the secondary payload would have required that, for an instant during its boost, its trajectory pass through the ISS. For this to be dangerous, it would have required the engine to fail in the middle of its burn at a very precise instant. NASA disallowed it, so the secondary payload wasn't able to perform its mission.

So, bringing a spacecraft in for docking requires you to put your craft on a collision course. Docking is just a low-speed collision, after all. NASA will not allow this, so anyone bringing payload to the station has to rendezvous and place the craft within range for the ISS to grab it and bring it in.

The big win with kerosene over LH2 is that kerosene is much denser, so a) your tanks can be smaller and b) it's much easier to generate high levels of thrust since you don't have to move as much liquid through your engine.

What do you think of SABRE?

> That means the musicians need to get .wav files instead of things like ProTools files.

Protools stores its audio as wav or aif files.

If routine commuting is "fun," then you're doing it wrong. Driving safely and efficiently is, and should be, boring as hell and I can't wait for it to be illegal to operate a vehicle manually on public roadways so I can spend my commuting time doing more interesting things.

You'll always be free to do your driving for fun on private roads and tracks, but keep your "fun" off the roads that I have to share with you.

A "need" is not necessarily something you have to have or you will die. You won't die if you're locked in a room for the rest of your life with no human contact, but there's a reason that solitary confinement is considered a form of psychological torture. Social contact is a human need, emotional bonding is a human need, sex is a human need. Hell, Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs puts sex in the *bottom tier* of the pyramid.

Yeah, I think the effort of space colonization and life extension would be more appropriately put toward making the human race *worthy* of exploring the universe and living forever.

>Cut the deficit all the way to negative. ASAP. Because austerity has worked so well for everybody else, right?

Look up how delta-sigma ADCs work some time.

No, there is no audible difference, because the harmonics of that 22khz sawtooth which *make* it a sawtooth instead of a sine wave are above the limits of human hearing. Filter out those harmonics and what you have left is a sine wave. Not to mention that 22khz is itself arguably above the limits of human hearing itself.