PakledHostage

A related question about satellites in GEO: Are there any requirements (i.e. international agreements or even just industry standard practices) that require satellites in GEO to carry enough fuel to allow them to be moved to a graveyard orbit when they've reached the end of their service lives? It would seem that real estate in GEO is valuable enough that this would be a good idea?

It is clear from your various posts on this subject that, even though we both support nuclear energy to some degree, you are further towards the "everything nuclear is always good and harmless" extreme than I am. You are certainly more dismissive of the risks than I am. And this, btw, points to a problem with your argument. Your previous post talks about reasonable compromises where room for such things exist, and unreasonable compromises when "answers are binary complements" of each other. You then go on to describe a situation where one party in a debate has reached its own compromise solution and is then forced to further compromise with an "extremist" opposition. Presumably you see these as binary opposites where the party that has reached its own compromise is "right" and the extremists are "wrong". Trouble is that the "rightness" of the group that reached its own compromise is subjective; the two positions cannot be binary complements of each other. If your characterization of your "right" and your "wrong" is valid, then any number of other characterizations (including my belief that you are willing to take unreasonable risks) must also be valid.

And a notable subset of those people are called engineers. Almost every technology has risks and requires compromises. Certain technologies, such as nuclear and aviation, also require strict regulatory oversight to prevent people in those industries from cutting corners or repeating past mistakes. Nuclear energy proponents who dismiss the risks do just as much damage as environmentalists who dismiss the environmental benefits of nuclear energy. Both parties may base their arguments on science (i.e. physics and environmental sciences), but their "demagoguery" costs each side credibility. I admit that I have learned some things about nuclear energy from some of the contributors to these forums, but it wasn't from people who see it as a black vs. white issue. We need to have informed debates, work to educate the voting public and politicians about the issues on both sides, and (sadly) reach compromises.

Right. Not even rkman said what you seem to think he said. Your own bias and demagoguery are leading you to read more into rkman's comments than what others here are reading. I am not going to defend rkman's "excepionalism" remark, but the other two remarks that you called "straw men" are entirely reasonable as evidenced by the fact that they are echoed by many of the more knowledgable, reasonable and even pro nuclear energy contributors to this thread.

That reminds me of a quote by Wernher von Braun that went something along the lines of:

Just ignore MBrobrik when he accuses anyone of making a straw man argument. It is his stock response to anyone who doesn't agree with him. I think he may actually be a hipster who enjoys using the term ironically. So often, the accusations are themselves straw men arguments in so far as they misrepresent his opponent's position and then attack that misrepresentation.

The OP's question was obviously not meant to be literal... If you did want to deal with the logistics of interfacing an iPad or other such device with the old hardware, it would be a lot easier to build and certify an electrical interface to the existing equipment than it would to design and build an entirely new ship around a modern hand-held computer.

I'm afraid that I don't understand the question?

It is a complex combination of viscosity effects, temperature/pressure variations throughout the atmosphere and coriolis effect. And gravity. In a nutshell: Gravity holds the air down. Viscosity keeps it rotating with the earth's surface. Temperature and pressure variations throughout the atmosphere cause the air to move continuously. As TheGatesofLogic mentions, Coriolis effect causes weather systems to rotate about their low/high pressure centres as the air in them moves about on the surface of the earth.

About jwenting: Keeping things positive, I like jwenting's avatar. It is visually appealing. The loon has a certain je ne sais quoi...

Can you please provide a reference? I don't see anything that gives an alternative spelling other than an "American" spelling. The NIST has produced a document which clarifies local interpretation for use with American English, but to my knowledge "American English" is only used in America. The spelling I mentioned isn't just "in vogue" in Canada, it is correct.

At the risk of being accused of being pedantic, I'd like to point out that "litre" is a unit of volume (non SI, but accepted for use with SI) and "metre" is an SI unit of length. A "meter" is an instrument (i.e. voltmeter). I am not sure what a liter is other than the American spelling of litre, but as a non metric country, I don't think Americans have any right to dictate the spelling of units they don't even use. [gets down off soap box]

A bit OT, but I found these two comments interesting... It may be technically improper to start a sentence with "And" or "But", but we do it all the time in colloquial speech. To me, it seems that the usage tends to come after a pause for thought. I sometimes use "And or "But" at the beginning of a sentence to try to convey a more causal tone. It has often been said that email and similar written mediums are poor forms of communication because it is difficult to convey tone, and phrases often have multiple meanings. The image below is a classic example. A comma after the word "slow" would help eliminate the ambiguity in that road sign, but more generally, maybe written English needs a formal system of conveying tone? A sort of "for dummies" system that doesn't require you to be a poet to use it effectively?

While I grew up in Canada post metrication and I prefer using SI units for many of the same reasons that have already been mentioned by others, there is still one non SI unit of measurement that I cling to: The nautical mile. IIRC, the kilometer was initially defined by the French as one 10 000 th the distance between the north pole and the equator on a meridian running through Paris. That definition probably went hand-in-hand with the contemporary definition of the metric degree as 100 degrees of arc in a quarter circle. The metric degree was abandoned almost as soon as it was defined, however, and we reverted to 90 degrees of arc in a quarter circle and 60 minutes of arc in a degree. The nautical mile is therefore very intuitive when navigating around the globe because a nautical mile is conveniently defined as a minute of arc of latitude*. *Before anyone gets picky, I realise that the nautical mile isn't always EXACTLY a minute of arc of latitude. It is actually a bit more complicated than that. Such is the way with standards... There are various definitions of the nautical mile with esoteric differences between them. They are all, near as makes no difference, equal to 1 minute of arc of latitude.

I agree. The main thing that has kept me active on these forums for as long as I have been is the level of knowledge of so many members and their willingness to share. At times, a juvenile mentality reminiscent of a highschool schoolyard creeps in, but then a bunch of posts from people like Tiberion, Kryten or K^2 (among others) restore my faith. BlackBicycle, crazyewok, etc, please take notice: These guys you are arguing with have earned the respect of a lot of readers on this forum. Going at them in much the same way that a socially awkward teenager might isn't going to make the rest of us pay attention to your opinions.

That's quite funny that someone worked that into their short film. And interesting, too, that two real-life stories of people being isolated somewhere and forced to rely on their own ingenuity and perseverance to get home happened in the snow. If readers of this tread enjoyed Gravity, they should also check out documentaries about Sir Ernest Shackleton's failed trans-antarctic expedition in 1914-1917 and Joe Simpson's struggle to get down off Siula Grande in Peru ("Touching the Void"). In my opinion, those two stories were orders of magnitude better than Gravity because they were real, among other things.

Yes, Merry Christmas to everyone here who celebrates in one way or another. In our household, it has become a tradition to watch the Apollo 8 Christmas Eve broadcast. The kids don't get the significance of it because it happened so long ago (it happened before even their uncle was born!), but I try to explain to them that it really was one of the greatest adventures of all time.

You've been going on about this subject in this thread and in the How would you improve the Shuttle design? thread long enough that we all know that you love the idea of this science fiction. Sadly for you, the vast majority of sane individuals and their governments are averse to "s**t*ing in their own nest" to that degree. It may be possible to reduce fallout with modern weapons, but you won't eliminate it all together. What amount of fallout is too much? And what of the other effects besides fallout? Many of these are quite severe and poorly understood due to the limited number of tests performed. Ref. Upper Atmospheric Disturbances Due to High Altitude Nuclear Detonations Some Effects of Nuclear Explosions on the Ionosphere

I agree just imagine what inspiring things we nerds could do with that kind of money? Trouble is that us scientists and engineers are not going to get that kind of funding any time soon.

It wasn't the World Cup of football (soccer) either... The chart says Qatar is spending 207 billion USD to build a city for the 2022 World Cup event... Jocks 1, Nerds 0.

It seems that this forum's two primary references are Wikipedia and xkcd... Here's a relevant link to the latter: xkcd Money chart The chart's legend says that all values are in 2011 US dollars. According to the chart's "Megaprojects" area in the Billions region, the Apollo program cost 192 billion. The ISS has cost 138 billion so far, and the space shuttle program totaled 195 billion. I am going to leave it to others to decide how to break up the 192 billion cost of the Apollo program on a per launch basis.

It does change quickly. Below are two screenshots from the astronomy app on my phone. The first shows how the moons were positioned at about the time I took the picture on the previous page of this tread. The image on the right shows how they are currently positioned.

It sounds like I have some reading to do. The tone of KASASpace's posts are in line with a socially awkward highschool student rather than any sort of authority, but I will take your word for it. It surprises me that you can get one to work at speeds that low. The diffusers (inlet cowls) on the large turbofan engines that I am familiar with work the opposite way. They slow down and compress the ~Mach 0.82 free stream air before it reaches the engine's fan and compressor. Diffusers ahead of the turbojet engines in fighter aircraft do the same as well.

How are you going to get a ramjet or scramjet to function at 300 m/s? The speed of sound in air at sea level under ISA conditions is 340 m/s.

It was clear out this evening so I took my camera out to help put this discussion into perspective. Below are two pictures that I took through a 300 mm lens on a standard DSLR camera (no telescope was used). Both images were cropped to 800 x 600 and then resized to 50% of their original size to fit this page. The scale of both images are the same. From left to right in the bottom image are Ganymede, Jupiter, Io, Europa and Callisto.