Codraroll

Depending on what happened to the Admiral Makarov, which reportedly was blown up yesterday. Anyway, I recently re-read The Martian and noticed how some of the assumptions made in writing that book have changed as time goes on. It's not so much "bad science" as a change in the understanding of how things work. A major plot point in that book (which takes place in 2035) is that NASA doesn't have rocket boosters available that can hurl even a small probe to Mars on short notice, and only one extra chance is given when China repurposes one of theirs. Now, barely ten years after the story was first written, rapid reuse of Falcon 9 boosters would make this predicament much less of an issue. Even a single Falcon 9 can get 4 tons to a Mars transfer orbit, while the Iris probe in the book was only 900 kg. You may not exactly be able to dial SpaceX and have a supply probe on the way to Mars by the next month, but ... hmm ... actually, may you, if it's enough of an emergency? Also, the listed capabilities of the Ares mission solar panels and rover batteries seem kind of bad. 10.2% efficiency is far from great for a solar panel these days, and the rover batteries were stated to have a capacity in the low tens of kilowatt-hours - less than what you'd find in any modern electric car. But I guess these can be excused by "space-grade gear has lower specs than Earth-based gear because concessions were made to weight/radiation hardening/dust protection/something".

"Hey, we promise to do this really cool thing if you pick us! Of course, we would probably spend a fortune without making much progress and it'd take years to even see if we got anywhere, but consider this: Cool thing! Come on, let the pork flow to us like before! For the sake of the cool thing!"

It'd probably be too big to be attached to the nose of a rocket booster, instead having to ride attached to its side. Maybe even a couple of SRBs would have to be used to give some extra oomph to get it off the pad. But on the positive side, you could put the main booster engines on the spaceplane instead of the main rocket, and recover them after the flight. The "main rocket" would then just be a big empty tank, which could be ditched after every flight without representing too much of an expense. I think we're really onto something here.

It still saddens me a bit that we've yet to see proper capital ship-to-ship combat in a Star Wars movie (Revenge of the Sith had some of it, but mainly in the background while the heroes zipped around in their little fighter craft). Both sides deploy these huge hulking capital ships bristling with big guns, yet they are constantly fought by fighter squadrons and destroyed by lucky hits on exposed weak points while AA is sprayed everywhere, while the big guns never get to shine. I guess it makes more dramaturgical sense that the heroes in their tiny spacecraft can take out the big ships on their own, "slaying the dragons" in personal combat as it were, but just for once it'd be cool to see the big ships trade salvos too. That sort of battle can still make an exciting movie scene, just a little bit different from the usual trope of "the hero in their little spaceship against the hulking enemy cruiser".

In light of that, perhaps the M142, whose only nickname is just a boring acronym of its official designation, ought to be called "Weedwacker"?

I heard a neat analogy from the Norwegian pilots who are learning to fly the F-35. It's been a while since I read the article, but it went something like this: "Engaging in aerial combat with an F-16 is like going into a knife duel. Hot and violent, where you look the attacker in the face, size each other up, and charge, trying to get your own blade into the opponent before he gets his into you. Fighting against the F-35 is like going into a dark room containing a ninja wielding a baseball bat and silk slippers. You neither see nor hear him coming and you're out cold before you even realize there's a fight. Everything seems peaceful and quiet up until the point where your aircraft detects missiles behind you, and then you lose." So "F-35 Ninja" has a nice ring to it.

It's for signal intelligence. If memory serves correctly, the antennas of those are more than a hundred meters across. I guess that's the size of antenna you need to intercept phone signals from mobile phones at a distance of several hundred kilometers.

I was just made aware, through Ars Technica's weekly rocket report, that this might actually have been the last-ever commercial Proton launch. With Angara slated to take over, there remain only a few Protons to "use up", and with the commercial launch market having dried up, they are likely to be used by the military and not commercial customers. It has had a long service life as a "workhorse" for Roscosmos, now it's time to see if Angara will have the same success. It's a dispute over payment, he's not likely to withdraw the service. The price he asks is chump change for the Pentagon: the war in Iraq cost a billion dollars per day. It's not an unreasonable demand either. The factories that make the gear donated to Ukraine aren't working for free after all, so one shouldn't expect Starlink service to be free either. But I guess this discussion is more relevant to the Starlink thread. None of this takes place in Russia, after all.

"Sod taking over Ukraine, let's go for something easier and more achievable. Like the moon."

Space always has the fundamental hurdle that it's far away and there's nothing there. That's great for communications, which aren't too fussed about the distances involved, but sending anything other than electromagnetic waves through space is quite expensive. I guess some industries can take advantage of the "nothing there" bit, but the "far away" thing becomes such a cost driver it's probably not worth the bother. We can always hope that costs are one day driven low enough to overcome the fundamental hurdle in at least some cases, but a lot of money has to be invested until then. It'll be interesting to see if we get there in my lifetime.

That would put Musk in a whole world of trouble with the US government, so it's probably not his doing. Turning off Starlink to the Ukrainians wouldn't award him a "slap on the wrist" type of punishment, but years behind bars. Aiding the other side in a conflict where the US is involved by sabotaging services bought by the US government would be an act of treason. I've seen speculation that it could be a type of geofencing. That Starlink only broadcasts noise in the Russian-occupied areas, and Ukrainian units are advancing across that geofence before it can be updated. After all, it's bad for operations security if you're constantly on the phone with your service provider telling them where your troops are. In that case, the issue could be solved by pulling back the geofence a bit. It's not like the war would be turned at this point by letting the occupied territories access Starlink. It could also be a type of ECM, but the war has shown a certain disparity between the claimed capabilities of Russian ECM and their actual performance. If they had had the capability to jam Starlink extensively, it would have been put to use much earlier.

The problem in this case is, well, the elephant in the room. Or the Mûmakil, as DDE put it, because the ordinary allegory doesn't quite suffice. The US and EU might have issues with their economics and domestic policies, but Russia has issues. It is difficult to go into details or provide any sort of context without sounding overly negative or coming off as unpleasant, because there's just so many aspects that create worry for the space program. And without details or context, what sort of discussion is there to be had? I think “The Russian economy isn’t doing too well, they may not be able to afford their new space station” is putting it very mildly. I dare even call it a euphemism. The aforementioned issues have broader and deeper implications than calling into question the space station project. I wouldn't consider it an exaggeration that the Russian space program itself is in danger for multiple reasons, half of which aren't even related to the, er, "events of 2022". It is kinda difficult to have any sort of discussion of the Russian space program without acknowleding that it is threatened by all sorts of concurrent perils at the moment. I would consider it relevant to (if not entirely overshadowing) pretty much any sub-topic worthy of discussion. But if discussion is only permitted if the issues aren't mentioned, or swaddled in multiple layers of euphemisms, it loses all purpose. How can one meaningfully talk about the Russian space program without acknowledging any of the numerous complicating circumstances under which it is presently operating? Things are, or at least seem, bad at the moment. They've seemed bad for a long time, but now it's really time to bring out the italics. Following the rule of caution, I haven't responded to several posts that responded to mine. I definitely think there are fallacies in them, but I keep them to myself because it's pretty much impossible to formulate a counter-argument without stepping over the red line. Sure, it keeps the thread clean, but I really think it stifles the discussion. So what is left to talk about? Laconic reports on the various launches along the lines of "A Soyuz launched today", with a strict "never discuss matters outside the frame of the picture/video" policy? Pretending that all is fine and dandy with a "no negative news" rule? Saying nothing? Because if the inconveniences are to be ignored or never talked about, there's precious little else to discuss regarding the Russian space program at the moment. Never mind that forcing silence about political issues can be a political statement in itself. In that case, you might as well lock the entire thread instead.

Isn't that rover lifted straight from The Martian?

The problem is that space policy is politics. Nothing can happen without money, and the money has to come from somewhere. When sources of money are drying up, or the relevant government gets other pressing spending priorities, there will be implications for spaceflight. If we overlook the political landscape and only discuss the fancy renders and lofty plans crapped out by agencies whose ambitions far outpace their abilities, the discussion will eventually become very incongruent with reality.

Again with the whataboutism. The fact that the UK or EU doesn't have a crewed space program will not change Russia's prospects of being able to afford one. The main engine of the economy is shut off, the workforce is fleeing the country or dying in the fields of Ukraine, a mix of sanctions and draconian domestic policies hamper any prospects of industrial or commercial development, and military expenditure will be dominated by the need to replace war losses for many years to come. UK/EU cooperation with Russia will be off the table for a decade or more, if Russia remains on its current course. But as the situation becomes ever more untenable, a total collapse seems more likely. Or at best a situation where expenditures are cut to the bone, and crewed spaceflight is the first to go on the chopping block. Space activities might be reduced to military applications only, i.e. satellites and missiles. All the "what about"s don't change the fact that an economy that was barely the size of Spain's got hit by an economic and military broadside with long-term implications. It will be a big surprise if a space program, one that has barely run at sustenance levels for three decades before this, can emerge on the other side unscathed.

Indefinitely, then. Or at least until the end of the ISS. If there even exists a Russian crewed spaceflight program by then, I'll be surprised.

This prediction turned out to be exactly right:

Public transport in the US has bigger challenges than just the salary cost for the drivers. Chief among them is the extremely low density of urban development. Consider for instance the city of Des Moines, Iowa (map link). The footprint of the city is about five times the size of Amsterdam, but it contains less than one-ninth as many inhabitants. Downtown Des Moines primarily consists of a handful of large office buildings, a stadium, a convention center, and a hospital, and vast amounts of parking space where visitors can leave their cars while attending to their business downtown. Nobody lives there. Where people live is in single-family houses sprawling from the very edge of the downtown core and for a dozen or so miles until countryside takes over. One building per household, one driveway per building, a dozen or so driveways per street, a dozen or so streets per suburban subdivision, all housing and nothing else. No restaurants, no street cafes, no corner stores, not even a newsagent. Those are all wrapped up neatly inside giant, boxy malls or smaller, separate strip malls, both in their own zones, surrounded by further oceans of parking lots. Add some industrial areas, some outside-downtown office parks (to accommodate more parking directly servicing each building), and the occasional school or church here and there, and you've got yourself a typical American city. People live, work, and shop in very separate areas, often on opposite sides of the city. Even if you live right on the border between two zones, you usually have to cross a highway or an eight-lane stroad to get from one zone to the other. Now try to draw up public transport lines in this thinly stretched mess. You will quickly notice that destinations are very far apart. Downtown is fine enough, enough people work inside each office skyscraper to support its own bus stop. But where does the bus line go from there? The residential areas are too sprawled. Hardly anybody lives inside a reasonable walking distance from each individual bus stop, which means the line will need to stop on every other street corner to service enough potential passengers to be economically feasible. Problem is, nobody wants to take a bus that stops on every other street corner, because then it takes forever to get anywhere. Likewise in the commercial areas, each shop is surrounded by so much parking and so little pedestrian infrastructure that you can hardly walk from one to the other, necessitating a bus stop for every shop. But again, hardly anyone would use each individual stop, but they add to the travel time. There's simply not enough people in any one place to make it feasible to establish a public transit line. It remains faster to go by car, and so cars are prioritized in street design, which further diminishes any alternatives. So before public transit can be established, something needs to happen to the city planning. I think the lowest-hanging fruit is to reduce the amount of mandatory required parking for shops and offices, which would allow them to group up in smaller, more walkable clusters. It would also free up oodles of downtown space. Second, build some mixed-use development with apartments, shops, and offices together. Then you've got enough density to make a public transit corridor worthwhile. Then further development can be concentrated around the transit stops. And for Pete's sake, extend the transit corridors to the airport. That's a rarity in US cities. Las Vegas is the worst offender, with an airport right in the middle of downtown and millions of visitors arriving every year for temporary stays in hotels not three miles away. The city even has a monorail line that runs between most of the hotels. Yet lobbying from car rental and taxi companies prevented the monorail from being connected to the airport. Hence, visitors to the city rent a car instead of using public transport, the public transport ends up being mostly unused, and then its passenger numbers is used as an argument against building more public transport. I just can't even ...

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and the US-Mexico border, reducing vehicle traffic in pedestrian oriented areas is simply the default way of building cities, and it hasn't led to any of the things you describe. Property values are sky high, retail is booming, and ghettos are nowhere to be seen in the downtown of most big European and Asian cities, even though there are really few cars around and driving is a nightmare. Most people just get around by other, more convenient means. The US and Canada are fairly unique in designing urban spaces exclusively for cars, and it has led to some of the worst urban hellscapes the planet has to offer for those without a vehicle. One of the main issues is the lack of a good distinction between streets and roads. To give a short recap: Roads - transport thoroughfares that take cars from A to B, where A and B are intersections with streets or other roads. A road is never a destination. A highway is usually the typical image of a road. You would never have your driveway on a highway. The lack of crossing traffic streams means the road can be fully designed with capacity and speed in mind. Streets - low-speed branches of the transport network, where driveways are connected. Your destination is always a street, or more probably on a street. Low speed is necessary because there are crossing traffic streams everywhere. Also, since you're not meant to drive for long along a street, speed is not important. Driving along a street means you're at the beginning or end of your journey, not the "must go fast" stretch in the middle. The problem starts arising when traffic engineers begin to mix up the two and create the unholy hybrid, the "stroad". A transport corridor built to accommodate high transit speeds/volumes and driveways. Lots of crossing traffic streams from cars driving out of/into driveways, and lots of cars that are simply on a thoroughfare, trying to get from A to B. Those unholy hybrid stroads are almost impossible to navigate without a vehicle (lots of turning lanes makes the stroad too wide to cross without a signaled pedestrian crossing, and those exist very sparingly because they slow down the thoroughfare traffic), and still difficult if you're in a vehicle, because of the high speeds and crossing traffic streams. Stroads are inherently dangerous for that reason. The US experienced an increase in traffic fatalities as traffic went down during Covid lockdowns, because what prevented stroads from killing more people under ordinary circumstances was that they are usually too clogged with cars for drivers to build up speeds that cause fatal collisions. There's an upside even to induced demand, I suppose. Car-dependent city design is just plain bad. It wastes ungodly amounts of space, it reduces your number of transport options to one, it's too low-density to facilitate public transit, it does not reduce the amount of time residents spend in transit compared to a conventionally-designed city, and it bankrupts the cities that have to pay for so many square miles of asphalt (and miles of water/sewage pipes, electrical wires, Internet cables, road signs, etc.) with the tax revenue from so few people. The YouTube channel "Not Just Bikes" has an excellent series of videos on the subject, I recommend starting here:

Ahh, the ultimate conclusion to the "the best part is no part" philosophy. One must admit, it does make rocketry a fair bit easier if one doesn't have to bother with the fragile payload and all the moving parts required to release it.

It can get to a point where the discrepancies between the movie and reality become very distracting, though. Usually when the writers fall back on "... and then this happens!" as a major plot point or set piece, and the audience goes "Umm, that wouldn't happen at all". I think the worst example I've seen in a blockbuster movie was that G.I. Joe movie where a seafloor base underneath the Arctic ice cap is destroyed by blowing up the ice sheet above it. Huge chunks of ice then sink down at freefall speeds and crush the base. Some visual effects director must have had this great vision he pushed through, unaware of the fact that ice floats in water. Hence why it forms on the surface to begin with, and not on the seafloor.

Isn't the force on a human foot during running something on the magnitude of 100G on impact? I've also heard four-digit G numbers about the relevant parts of the body during actions such as blinking or finger snapping.

It's that time of year again! The time when the most prestigious prizes in all of science are awarded. The 2022 Ig Nobels have been handed out! https://arstechnica.com/science/2022/09/maya-ritual-enemas-and-constipated-scorpions-the-2022-ig-nobel-prize-winners/ The URL alone should give you some idea of the absolute insanity that is science sometimes.

The weather forecast also uses it as soon as clouds are present. "Partly cloudy, no rain" translates into "delvis skyet, oppholdsvær" after all. Also typical of the Norwegian weather and language is that there are no commonly used words to discern different types of heat ("warm" is pretty much all there is) and no word for drought, just "dryness".

Another one, then: The Norwegian language has a word for "not-rainy weather", which is "oppholdsvær". Directly translated it means "pause weather" or "interruption weather". Norway is a slightly rainy country, to put it that way.