PB666

14 seconds blast of air. Fewer popping. and 15 more seconds its at 63 heading to 68 inches. Much fewer popping. Not too many limiters left to free. and 30 seconds 66 heading to 68. and 9 seconds from 66.6. and its over 67 and considered done, moving to step 5. Module gas injection.

They just did a full 8 sec increase, previously 1 sec and occasionally 2 sec. I hear popcorn popping. 'Wow: you get this burst of popping sounds slow down and then start popping like craxy again, really starting to expand Forth fold is clearly separating from the third. Now opened fro what count was 9 sec and the popcorn is a popping again. Its going to be done.

Some low res snapshots for prosperity's sake. Its about halfway and a bit. It looks like the third fold is just starting to pull away from the forth, the tension is dropping and pressure is reflective ~ 13.5 about half of the peak on thursday.

You'll be pressed to convince some people, my past experience with c is that there is a certain amount of stuubornness. There is a believe out by some that a Mars manned mision can be done right now but there is some sort of conflict/conspiracy holding it up. A few individuals don't seem to understand there are areas where the science need to be improved or it could be very expensive. The technology in other areas of solid science needs to be fleshed out, and wrapping those things together is an engineering challenge that, in and of itself, could take years. Most aspects could be done now at great cost, e.g. a mars diemos or phobos manned sample collect is possible.

http://www.skyandtelescope.com/astronomy-resources/astronomy-questions-answers/science-faq-answers/galactic-gold-mine-explains-the-origin-of-natures-heaviest-elements/

Well they are back sort of, the quality of the feed is sporadic. Edit: well its over until 16:40 UTC, i believe. Summary. Thursday the pushed out to about 6 inches, 5 with new pressure and 1 more with latent pressure. The highest pressure was about 23 mm This morning they opened with about 19 mm, it then rapidly dropped and it moved out to about 10 inches rather quickly, This opened out the first rib- major fold With several pumps it moved out to about 17 inches. I went video dark for at least 30 minutes Once back they pulsed a few times and brought it to 23. This time we see the second rib separating from the third and is starting to inflate. The bursts get shorter and the equilibration tine is quick.

Well they we went video feed dark because of the orbit, they put operations on hold, and it looks like they are about to resume in 4 minutes or so.

Its pressure drops about 5 to 10 times faster after each pump burst, than thursday and they are gaing an inch every few minutes in length. Moving out faster now.

Its definitely inflating now, the first fold has swelled up with an ever so slight tilt downward. Thursday its hard to tell. Under the fold are stop straps, like tape, ther are ever so slowly pulling off, looks like, allowing the first fold and half to rotate up.

Well, they are live again.

More of the more of should go into the game, some sort of flight engineer, more parts. Off-world launch pads, the silly part lockers that allow you to carry things.

When you go into a dead stall because you don't believe the IAS and altitude are correct, and they are, its pilot error. Read the AF447 wiki. For the most part most aircraft and space craft have redundant systems. On AF447 only when all three disagreed momemtarily was a manual mode forced, once the craft had lost altitude the pitot tube reopened up but the pilots did not nose down, and by the time they did it was too late. You can look at the majority of crashes over the last few year, it if was not intentional, it was often pilot error, there are exceptions like the Alaska Air incident, so I'm not cherry picking.

Mainly human error. Af447 was cause by the pilots failing to trust their instruments, but it wasn't the flight computers ultimately that failed, but the pitot tubes.

Yeah it appears to have picked up some debris and caught fire.

Didn't change my view, having them buy and bring in TV sets to watch the landings at school, that changed my view, cause we didn't have TV at home. I think that the most important contributions that NASA has made, steps above everything else it has done was 1. The hubble space telescope, even in its redundancies with ground based scopes its made them so much more useful. Long live the HST, curse it be the one who pulls its plug. 2. The moon rocks, because from these we learned more than anything else how earth formed and why we have an earth moon system and the other inner planets either have none or asteroid sized moons. 3. The pioneer and voyager mission, if for no other readon demonstrate to people what tenacity and conservation when coupled can achieve, the average pc lasts about 4 years, these things are heading into thier fifth decdes and like the moon rocks still producing science, still producing publications, all three are legacy systems that just crank. Looking at a blue marble does not tell you anything about life other than it oxidizes water and retints the atmosphere and land. I prefer to see my blue marble on a boat on a channel overlooked by boca chica.

As far as i can tell humans don't have built in gyroscopes or accelerometers or telemetry. Even if we did we would have to be a math savant and still only be able to interpret the flight data 100 times slower than a computer could. BTW most commercial pilots fly most of the time in autopilot modes. Particularly now you can program waypoints into the GPS system, its actually safer if all the craft are flying with the same equipment along the same GPS waypoints.(except when the pilots are surfing the internet and not responding to center). The newer Airbus are only exceptionally manual, its all flight computers unless you have flight system failure like AF447. I don't think ive ever heard of a computer controlled aircraft entering a deadmans spiral, its what they mean when they say for IFR, trust your instruments.

I think they are leaving the experimental phase of the F9 core and entering the production phase (as they have now recaptured 3 launches). They are going to prolly focus on testing other parts, such as F9 heavy. Congrads to SX, would have responede early but El Nino, who was suppossed to be gone has made another visit.

But think about this, if we can tweek the system to split the quantum state and deliver both outcomes, why can't we trick the system to deliver an outcome we want, forcing inverted collaboration to non-randomly present the entangled outcome on the other end. Radioactive decay is used to deliver the dead or alive outcome, because, we don't know what triggers decay, it is most certainly quantum, but the state of the outcome may be determined by the initial state of formation billions of years ago and interactions thereafter to the present. The experiment biases itself by using at-least a superficially random system, but like the above its all but a circular definition, if we assume (Or, should we assume) that radioactive decay is completely random quantum event, then the cats fate is only determined by decay randomness, it is either or dead or alive to itself, but both until we open the box and observe. If you want to review the various paradoxes, many of them faux, that observation creates you can read here. If you think these are answers, i think scientifically, unlike Bell's theorem, each are questions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_decoherence The essential problem in this model of decoherance is that you have a precise beam of light, and you force-wave like qualities on what is detected as a particle, what I would say on a beam of light that travels preferentially as a field of an ideal behavior as a wave or particle. If you place a double-slit in that ideal path, you get a measurement of the particle above, which everyone sees. A form of decision base uncertainty the consequence is variance that was not apparent in the previous state (a precise beam) but what added the variance the double slit or the forcing of a more wavelike quality to an electromagnetic field at least momentarily. We now observe uncertainty. But is that the natural behavior or a forced behavior. In otherwords if you interfere with a deterministic state you can force random states, but both might simultaneously exist, and at the same time you are forcing an unpreferred decoherance in the system that later has to be resolved. In this case the probability of the preferred state is lowered, the forced states grow, but all the various states can relate through the most preferred state before resolving and the quantum limits can expand to fulfill the need. Under unforced circumstances no energy needed to be added to allow for this final outcome and everything can be resolved locally. For the variance spread state, the specific might occur polling of the environment with some preferential pathway appearing to resolve the indecision. One could imagine that a quantum event traveling, spiraling, searching for a resolution, and other event passes by also searching for a resolution, and then they resolve as observed, both determined but apparently random. For this reason, as I have said in the past I cannot put a finite limit on the action of virtual particles, the may prefer to act in very small space but it is not neccesary if they are forced. Consider a graphene tube between earth and alpha centuari. on the inside there is half of a long 4n+2 orbital and on the other half is another, electrons of opposing spin states exist in either. Suppose I put two electrons in at the exact center and they circulate in that orbital as a wavefunction, I then send two clocks, precisely synchronized at the same speed to earth and alpha centauri (assuming both have the same gravity). If I sample an electron, (I have a selective two identicle devices that rotates its frequency in tune with the spinfunction of the electron so that I can only select that electron. By my choice spin -1/2 from the inside, and the wave function only allows that state to communicate at the speed of light. The other individual cannot sample another spin -1/2 from the inside with a similar device, because that molecular orbital can only have one electron of each type. The two electons existed apriori, I pulled one, the other exists and it could be at alpha centauri. If per chance I pulled both of the same state by forcing I created matter from very little energy, when (or) do I have to give the energy back? If many world exist, I get to keep the energy, some other world will have lost it. If communication exists I can only take the alternative spin state, because the entire orbital knows its state, whether and how many electrons exist and their state. I don't know the answer, but I still think that Bells theorum is not that, its a hypothesis, should be treated as such.

I selected the first choice, however because the direct linkage between quantum and classic physics is a grey area, im inclined to believe that the wave function collapses at the limitation of quantum distances and time, that there is communication between outcomes via unseen virtual forces that allow only one outcome to resolve. This new study suggests that you can observe both outcomes in our universe, so either the study has a major flaw or Occam's razor should be applied to the multiworld hypothesis. They would be forced to come up with a descriminator function.

That says alot right there. The radiators are not a theorectial limitation except when considering the non expelled heat of the ION thruster, However given the fact that ION thrusters can handle about 200 KW per meter of thruster. So lets just saw we have a 1.2 megawatt of power, we have 6 square meters of thruster exhaust area, we set the drive at a perfect eff of 1000 isp, exhaust vel of 10000 at 80% eff. What then have So lets calculate 2 x 1000000/ 10000 that gives 100 N of thrust, not good, but then lets consider the target such as venus, So now lets argue that you have the unobtanium battery, you have normal thrust of SEP uptonprojected termination at which poin you are behind mercury traveling from ? to 14000 m/s, drifting, but in the approach with SEP you managed to add over the 2 m km inside the hill sphere an average of 2 km/s or 1,000,000 sec at 2N , thats lousy N is 2,000,000 m/s*m at 10,000 ISP, lets say the space craft weighs 100 tons. Thats 20 m/s Then for 2000s you are 100N, thats another 2 m/sec. so you got 14022 m/s and going out you add another 20 m/s, this seems pretty miserable, we only picked up 41 m/s, so lets see, we enetered the hill sphere at 1000 meter per second, we would have had m*196000000/2 , at peak we had ~ 14032 ( Translating after gain energy back) looks really bad, but how bad was it At peak you had m*196,896400/2, on exit we have 500^2 + 896400 = m*1396400. I have to repeat that there are ION drives of ~70 to 83 percent efficient depending on v-pot that are rated to about 35 kw per 0.25 sq. meter face in space. The lowest efficiences are at the highest powers but these are only used for 2000 sec, and those are rated at ISPs of 19500. Now how bad did we do, we entered venus's hill radius with 1000, we left with 1671, we gained 671 dV and spent at an average of about 9999 sec ISP, thats pretty friggen good if you have all the time in the world tonspend, but can you imagine what that would do if you slid into jupiters hill spere with only 500 m/s. During the interem we can use the high ISP. You got anything that can match that? Again you said i could have an unobtainium battery, i made the problem hard, i set my craft at 100t, heavier than the falcon-9 second stage and dragon payload with payload. How much fuel can i carry? So what would be next, I would do what rosetta did, steering myself around the inner solar system, using these 9999 isps to get 700, 500, 300, 250 dV wherever i could I might even use jupiter to steer me into a mercurian intecept before i used that to throw me a one more shot through venus and then out of the system, using as many kicks on high insolance planets. I might even tune that ION drive to its highest rated ISP as I approached Mercury, taking advantage of the high level of radiation.

But, it would have been great if they could have grabbed a kilo of sample and put it in a circular orbit so that it could be retrieved. It only needed 2 m/s to break orbit.

Fuel cells 'burn' what they make eventually you have to find a way to store and reconvert back the products or you have carried their mass for no particularly good reason. Conversion of water to hydrogen and oxygen s terribly inefficient. Read what i wrote, using an ION drive at 0.9c would only be used in fusion powered craft, it can be done, 99.99% of the time it would be unwisely done. Heat efficiency is the issue, but if you read the link they are work on reducing heat, and if your read my past threads on solar power, this is a major limitation of solar power if you keep building bigger and bigger panels, you either have to add weight for power transformers and heat radiators or end up using bare cable copper and operating at near melting temperatures over much of the craft. In this sense batteries definitely are a bonus because they mean fewer panels, shorter wires and less amperage. Secondarily advantagous because with really big panel arrays, the heat radiators will interfere, were as with batteries you can radiate isolated from the insolating areas of the panels. You need alot of dV, that is true, and what's important is that ION drives need to be able to run at the mass efficiency ISP when entering a gravity well, that means more output at lower ISP. Definitely a problem is SEP and NEP craft. But then an efficient ION craft once out of the gravity well has alot of time and dV to steer itself again into another gravity well as to repeat the process. The point about ION drives and gravity wells, you have to be patient, which means neccesarily they may take longer to get to that destination sector, but they will be going faster once they get there. Third you don't really care if you expend all the power in one cycle, if the battery does not overheat, you have all the time after the fact to let it cool and recharge. And so what you damage the battery so it can only get 3/4ths the job in the future, you have pump that ship up as fast as it can go. Apparently you are not getting the juxt, I am not talking about what you think right now is the technology because obviously you seemed to be stuck in that, I'm talking about where the technology might be in 0 to 15 years. ION drives are a thing, we can expect more use of them in space, so that the new technologies that make them work better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilot_wave New study https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/speaking-of-science/wp/2016/05/27/schrodingers-cat-just-got-even-weirder-and-even-more-confusing/ http://www.sciencealert.com/schrodinger-s-cat-is-now-alive-and-dead-in-two-boxes-at-once-irl-experiment-reveals?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:%20sciencealert-latestnews%20%28ScienceAlert-Latest%29 So what do you think the implication of this study is and which model

Well if you can imagine how much effort it took to find a way to get Rosetta to 67p with the budget they had allotted. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/space/11222693/The-Rosetta-spacecraft-mission-an-animated-journey-to-the-comet.html

Over the past few days we have been having 2 threads (actually more if we count the last month or so) discussing non-nuclear high ISP space engines. So that I am going to through in some food for thought. The key element for any storage fuel is energy density available on its expulsion from the accelerated system. The more energy, the higher the exhaust velocity which we should all know by now is ~10 times the ISP. But the most mass efficient engines are the most difficult to use with humans. 1) they either deal unpredictable amounts of ionizing radiation 2) they don't carry energy of their own. The most efficient ION drives would take literally decades to burn through their fuel. There is actually nothing stopping engineers from having an ION drive that accelerates ions to 0.9c, the only problem is the power required, the mass of the accelerator, and of course the power conversion equation, which at 0.9c has to use lorentz transformations. So why am I posting about batteries, how would they help. As per the argument with Camacha last year (who did not like the links I was posting), I pointed out that it takes technological improvements in alot of areas to take what we have (space craft traveling outward from our sun in interstellar space at 16 km/sec) and make them go crazy faster. Essentially what you are doing is crossmultiply improvements (1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2 x 1.2) = 2.07. So that if you can improve your technologies in each area by 20% and it takes 4 areas to complete an operation you can increase your capability by 100%. So instead of leaving at 16 km/sec you are leaving at 32 km/sec. For the last 40 years we have been basically stagnate at this capability, but the science that currently exists allows us to break this and move on. http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2016/05/how-build-better-battery-through-nanotechnology So lets think about this. 1. If you want to kick an ION drive out of LEO without wasting fuel spiraling out (terribly inefficient you can lose as much as 50% of your fuel mass, more if you have to fight drag for endless periods) 2. If you couple an ION drive or possibly Cannae drive to waste energy from an NTG. The problem is that NTGs don't generate that much power and are sometimes used for experiments, the other problem is that you might want to kick on the ION drives as the approach the periapsis of some planet you are oberth-ing around. Let me make the first few premises. The mass of an ION drive is hideously low compared to NTGs and Solar panels. But there is a certain load density it about 200 KW per output meter you cannot go over, and safely its about 100 KW. So basically a high output ION drive system needs to 'roll' out in space, we could make the system about 1/10th to 1/5th the mass of the solar panels and the would still be underutilized. So what SEP and NEP space craft need are batteries with higher energy storage densities. What do we need solar electric power for, quite simple, we should not launch tugs into space that deplete their resources and float around the earth, moon, sun forever. What we really need are ships that sip fuel and run multiple missions. The problem is that SEP does not work well in fast decaying orbits, these are the orbits in which you would want them to refuel themselves and capture fuel and supplies from Earth and carry them into clean space. This takes care of so many problems at once, it gets rid of the space junk problem (fuel launches decay back into earth quickly) and since the tug is recycled it can carry fuel out, transfer and then dump the container in LEO before it picks up another, and the ship itself is not wasted. It can carry fuel to just about anywhere in the solar system using ION drives to leave earths orbit and potentially Cannae drives in transfer orbits. But to get out of LEO in orbits that decay within a years time, you really need an efficient battery, because the ION drive needs to both fight drag and increase velocity at its periapsis. So that it needs to be able to push into an eccentric orbit quickly, then keep kicking itself out at its periapsis until it apoapsis is at its target radius. To optimize this you need more ION drives and a battery that can store Solar and/or Nuclear electric power. As mentioned in the other post to take true advantage from the oberth effect while traveling around the sun you really need to approach the planet from above (relative to the sun), in intering the planets Hill radius and approach a safe distance from the planet you are borrowing thermodynamic energy, converting it into kinetic energy and while going the very fastest (at the periapsis heading prograde around the star) you add dV to that. At that perfect point you need to add as much dV as possible at that moment (the fraction of the KE you have to pay back on exit is alot less than you paid when dV is applied along the prograde at peak velocity). This of course is not possible, but most of the energy added will come on the dark side of the planet where direct SEP will not work. Some ION drives allow the lowering of ISP for greater thrust but there is a practical limitation to the efficient mass of ION drives, but the typical onboard batteries will not suffice to sustain operation of ION drives in complete darkness, the only real way to take advantage of the Oberth effect with SEP is to have highly powerful and mass efficient batteries. Just to make these points because some of the arguements get silly. Improving on a well made wheel is quite difficult, this is the nature of space now, dV improvments are not a simple example of improvement in one area, it requires improvement in many areas to get substantial improvements in performance. This is not limited to engineering and technology, but ultimately, better understandings of space and physics.