Exactly this. You really shouldn't start a PhD with the expectation that you will get a job as a professor. There are plenty of other good reasons for doing a PhD, and you might become a professor, but you probably won't. The proportion of people completing PhDs who end up with permanent faculty positions is something like 4% in the US.

A while ago I was looking for a supplier for a certain type of material for a small satellite project, and wanted to use something similar to a material that NASA had launched on a few of their satellites in the 1960s. Imagine my nerdy excitement when we found that the US company who had made the material for NASA in the 60s was still around. We asked them about making some for us, and they said something like “nup, we can’t make that any more – the adhesives involved in the process are too toxic”. They did offer to make us a slightly inferior version, which didn’t work all that well. However, we had no trouble finding a supplier in China who was more than happy to make exactly what we wanted for cheap, and at a surprisingly high quality. Still feel a little guilty about that.

https://www.thisamericanlife.o...

The stress distribution in the composite part of the hull is likely to be quite complicated, depending on things like the boundary conditions (how it is attached to other parts of the hull), and the specific layup of carbon fabric used in manufacture.

The orientations of the fibers matters a lot, but if you imagine a unidirectional (all fibers in the same direction) composite plate, loaded in the direction of the fibers, then the behaviour under tension and compression is not as different as you might think. The stiffness in both tension and compression will be very similar, although the strength (load to failure) in compression does tend to be a bit lower than the strength in tension. The compressive strength is still fairly good, as the carbon fibres are prevented from buckling by the polymer resin that surrounds them. The fibers act as tiny columns under compression, that are held in place laterally, making them much stronger than they would be as a dry fabric.

Composites made from woven fabrics have more of a problem in compression as the fibers weave up and down within the fabric, making them look 'pre-buckled' to an in-plane compressive load. In these structures, both the strength and stiffness tends to be a bit lower in compression than tension.

This study was clearly sponsored by Big Scooter.

on yahoo.com

It was called Znamya, and there were a couple of launches https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... The second one had problems with deployment, which may be why it wasn't pursued. It was quite an impressive project - well ahead of the more recent solar sail demonstrators.

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki...

The Italian Jobs?

I think you're partially seeing the effect of this having happened already. I studied in the US as a foreign student (twice), and now encourage the students I teach to do the same. However, the advantages of them doing so aren't as clear any more. The US is still an intellectual powerhouse, but educational institutions in many other countries (particularly China) are growing in prestige. To go to a top level university it isn't absolutely necessary to go the US or UK any more. People in other countries have been putting the effort into their own institutions, and it's starting to pay off.

Surely it would have been easier to check if he was an engineer by forcing him to try to talk to a girl?

Why are the SI units relegated to the brackets? We're nerds, we can handle it.

Does this qualify as misleading?: Facebook Terms, Section 9.3 - "You understand that we may not always identify paid services and communications as such"

The proposal’s technical attachment does contain a reasonable de-orbiting plan for the satellites, involving reducing the perigee to around 300 km which would result in a fairly rapid re-entry. The problem is that guidelines about time to removal (including the remarkably arbitrary 25 year recommendation) are just that: guidelines. There is no real international agreement about this either. Satellite manufacturers currently do little more than pay lip service to debris mitigation, and will use the cheapest, untested debris removal technology they can, with little expectation that it will actually work. Beyond an altitude of 600-800 km (depending on solar activity levels etc.) solar radiation pressure overtakes atmospheric drag as the dominant force acting on a satellite. SRP generates tiny forces which tend not to be applied in a way likely to accelerate deorbiting. The satellites as described in this article are likely to have a ballistic coefficient which will leave them in orbit for hundreds, if not thousands of years in the very likely case that their end-of-life manoeuvre fails. There just isn’t an incentive for Space-X to make it reliable.