YNM

Have you not seen kei cars ? There's apparently a case that the sole reason why cars have gotten larger these days are due to emission limits being tied to footprint of vehicle. Sadly rather than developing more efficient engines they're just making the cars larger (though to be fair to them it's not like you can raise the efficiency easily, and admitting defeat would just put them out of competition entirely with non-combustion methods). (emphasis mine) It's 4:45 AM in the morning for me and I'm not sure if it's you that's not making much sense or I can't make any sense of things anymore. InSight doesn't have a drill for taking samples, just for putting in a subterranean temperature probe, and yes it only have one of it. Yeah, to be fair it'd take a newly-designed mission a decade until it can actually be launched. Honestly this is one of the questions I do have for Starship. Sadly SpaceX doesn't report operating profits and losses as it's not a publicly-owned company. Yeah, the whole assembling truss autonomously is cool, the inflatable habs as well.

Are you suggesting to add the development cost in there ? And paying for a prototype ? I'm sure their cost would rise up way more. My official answer to that particular question would be to "wait until we have better technology". It will be possible one day, perhaps. Yes sure that if you want to lift more people you're going to need more things, and as such more mass, and more propellant. As for the cost per person, there's a tendency that because areas are squared while mass are cubed, you need slightly less material when building a larger thing. But this still equates to less mass used overall. Honestly here's the only point that you're getting, sadly not everyone is willing to pay more than what they are needing to, otherwise we'd have been launching Saturn Vs (or similarly sized and performing rockets) since the 70s. Depends on the volume being shielded. A prototype or mass production ? How many more years in the future are you expecting it ? You'd be basically doing the same thing I'm doing when answering your first question - "wait for better technology". But given the exact same technology ? Less mass is less cost spent. And there's still the question of you need to fill it up for it to turn a profit. Not everyone wants to fill up a Spaceship when all they want is just to get something simple somewhere specific. There's an argument to be made further that Starship would make the space industry more attractive and as such it'll take the demand up, but we'll see how long it takes. (I'm confident it'll take not too long but not too short, betting like a decade after being introduced.)

On the side of the physical stuff themselves, we're doing away with smaller and smaller lithography, therefore reducing the size of circuitry, therefore enabling reduction of the electricity used. Same goes to the screens, they've been made to be as thin as it could be because a thicker panel means you get more internal reflectance, and this reduces the efficiency of the illumination and raising the electricity usage. As a result I can use a smaller battery that'd last longer. There're more than one side when it comes to electronics, you can either use less power and therefore increase the time the device will remain on over the same battery capacity, or raise the capacity of the battery. To be able to use less power you'd most likely use something that's smaller as well. We've also used better and better batteries, and if anything phones these days are unbelievably cheaper than it used to be, given the increase in capabilities. Here are some of the phones me and my family had been using (data based on gsmarena : 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) Based on the table alone, I'd say that the technology has leaped once between the first smartphones we used vs. the latest ones (and the latest one is 3 years old now). Newer phones are barely heavier than the latest one on this table. I also don't include the size of the device here, which obviously changes the amount of material that has to be used. (seriously, phones are much bigger now than they were, at least in width and length.) So yeah, I'd still say that lighter (using less materials) is still cheaper, if anything the reason the price kind of hovering is because we're given more features than we used to.

I've deleted my own Twitter account a good while (few years) ago. Stopped checking it from before then anyway. I can't access my Facebook account anymore because Facebook themselves locked it (I still can change the password there, but once logged in, they'd ask me to verify myself in a way that'd be very, very difficult for me to do it). idk if I come to their office in person if they could open it for me... While I don't do much there it's pretty much the only place where I have my old friends, certain groups etc. Someone actually misused my e-mail address and made an Instagram account using it. (well ok it's not exactly an address misuse, rather due to the odd way a certain large, free e-mail provider do their e-mail addressing that omits certain characters.) The odd thing is, I'm actually following people's twitter account now simply by accessing them logged off. Doesn't reduce the experience one bit as I'm only finding informations anyway. And I'm glad that twitter allows this for those who haven't set their account private, unlike Instagram or Facebook...

Unless they're living on an undifferentiated minor planet, all that gold would've sank into the core of the planet. Same story here.

Wonder if EMAS would be more common... They can magically add stopping length without actually having all the space. (there's a limit to the magic ofc.)

Depends on where you are I guess. But if most airports you have are remnants of WWII fields then 2.3 km runway is pretty long. But yeah, 2.3 km runways would see commercial aircrafts like 737s or A320s or Embraers or A220 / Bombardier CS in. Exactly the point of private jets... Though I suppose if you really need to go to somewhere that's really remote using air transport is already considered quick enough compared to other options. So this is the plane for those who manage like operations in two large cities or something. Not if you have to go all over the world to remote places.

About 2300 m (2.3 km)... pretty long. So I presume that the only way you'd be able to fly with their plane to smaller airports is by taking the fuel to near exhaustion (less landing weight so less stopping distance), then load only a bit of fuel (less takeoff weight so less takeoff distance), to then refuel again on a preferably nearby larger airport... IDK but kinda takes the edge off the point of using supersonic airplanes.

Wouldn't a private jet be preferably capable of landing on smaller airports ? I mean if it needs a long runway to takeoff / land then it'd limit the airports they could fly to/from.

Probably the flower bouquets. Anyway, while we're in the thread of AI cars, I have to say though that humans can't identify everything perfectly either. I've missed out a few things on those CAPTCHA tests (that the system take for granted, so it was asking me for it), plus I'm sure I've miscategorized zoomed-in rumble stripes (so road side lines that's dotted) as a pedestrian crossing without thinking many times (and I'd always realize what is it after looking at it again). Are there anyone who're properly checking what the training data the system is fed with is entirely true ? Also, are there retrospective checking for the things that this system is identifying once it's out there ? There are efforts to make autonomous racing cars and events entirely done with autonomous cars I think. They're all electric. This is beside Formula E.

Last I checked they asked me to pay more if I want a 3-person couch vs. the same couch line but in 2-person configuration. Materials and the effort that goes into making them cost money. It'd be like dropping them down to the ground though, for the rotating EVA part. Hence I was wondering what exactly is it for... I presume the only way you'd service this thing is with some sort of gondolas, kind of the same you'd see off tall buildings, but rather than being on winches going up and down it'd be going on rails sideways along the whole ring.

Less materials still means less cost overall. The cost of concrete for building Burj Khalifa will always be more expensive than the cost of concrete to build your house. Less material generally* also means faster production, takes a good few years to make a skyscraper but building your house is a months long thing at most. Although I'm not saying that we shouldn't make large stuff in space - if it's for humans to live up there then it'd be good to have enough space for everyone. Most interesting part that I just noticed is that the access space are basically "above" the abode pods... so you don't really walk in and out of it, you more like climb up and down to/from it. Wondering what the ring EVA is for, though, but I suppose it'd be better to start off already rotating if you're going to service a rotating thing ? idk, wouldn't stepping off just hurls you away really fast ? * With the advent of off-site pre-fabrication it's true that the on-site assembly can be very fast, but it'd still be reflected in the size of the plants and the cost incurred. Though for space stuff it'd still be easier to make things here then ship it out ready to be assembled, at least for the near future.

They can only push themselves once they have captured the body and start extracting it (therefore it's no longer what it was). They'll then dispose off part of the object itself as propellant, so whatever is it that they're carrying back is not the mass of the original anymore. How far the loss will be and whether they'll have to leave parts of the object behind is still not exactly known, since we haven't found a lot of objects in their target range. It's not like we've been entirely mindful either - satellites with hazardous chemical / radioactive materials on it have fallen on the Earth, and we have crashed 129 tonnes of space station before, which resulted in a littering fine. (pretty sure would've been different if it did went on a city.) We're also still pretty bad at detecting asteroid impacts before it happens itself. (fireball and bolide data here, the only three example of us discovering them before it hits (one only maybe hit).) So I guess it could be counted as being the same as leaving things as-is... But I get the worry - being unable to manoeuvre something is going to be really bad, ie. if the water-based thrusters becomes disabled or something. Although I'll say that a possibility is just for them to keep the orbit away from an impact trajectory in much the same way we have manoeuvred spacecrafts returning samples. As for keeping intents in check... well no amount of regulations would ever be able to tell anyone what their intention should be.

Yeah but you get all the extra ring stresses from the tank pressurization, which generates tension, which negates the compression. Pressurization and compression-tension is a different thing since we're talking about a tank skin that's used to store pressures inside larger than outside.

They're planning to use NEAs exclusively. Their simulations involve "4000 random low delta-V targets" and they determined that 600 of them could be in a viable position. A lot of the bodies will have to be discovered first I presume.

And they'd lose all this pressure upon touching down and depressurization... Hanging them down sounds like a pretty good plan if they really want to make it as balloon-ish as possible. You can train the PID controls, you can change the grid fin size and strength, you can even build windbreaks (idk if they're considering that). But the thickness of the tank is a basic feature of the forces acting on a rocket... Also, perhaps just to be clear if anyone is wondering, tank pressurization doesn't increase the strength of the material per se - what it does is that it ensures the material remain in tension and not compression due to ring stresses from the pressure inside. Doing this means that buckling of the material is avoided - and buckling is not a good thing, it lowers the usable strength of your material down because it happens without any yielding happening beforehand.

Yeah, they could just make a good amount of spare and roll them through the inspection-repair-recertification process. Well, how fast are they turning around F9/FH Block 5 boosters right now ? Honestly, when I think again about why are they suspending a tank in the air, there's one advantage to this than supporting it from the bottom : the walls of the tank are under tension when suspended vs. under compression when supported from the bottom. Steel under tension cannot undergo buckling, unlike steel under compression... Does this mean that to some extent they're doing a balloon tank sort of thing ? Centaur stages have stiffeners next to them to resist compression when unfueled, here they just keep them hanging.

F9 and FH as-is requires very clear weather both on the launch site and the landing site (well it is one site already if they do the LZ that's closer to the launch pad). Landing back at the launch site is actually one less parameter to worry about - weather. But we'll never see this kind of business done in the middle of a blizzard, like Soyuz do. They can also fail merely from fatigue. The loads they see may never reach anywhere near the yielding point, but there's a reason why we count lifespan in load cycles and ASD uses merely half the yield point to determine failure. Then again you'd repair this machine everytime it's done flying... right ?

How does that work ? Wouldn't it mean it'd just work on one side of the wing array ? Would it be the new side of the wing array or what ? I could imagine that the idea is to increase the effectiveness of the arrays... since not all the light are absorbed you can still put a PV behind another one and it'd work albeit less efficiently compared to direct illumination, but it'd increase the efficiency of the whole system wrt. the exposed area of the array. I wonder if it's the same solar panels that'd be used for Gateway and other Artemis missions.

No problem. We only have very few data to work with anyway. I've been wondering if the reason they only took so few debris was because there aren't any large parts left anyway, and/or they're piled on so you have to take up the bits on the top first... Like you most likely wouldn't be able to lift out any part of the plane intact. If this was the case then yeah this might be closer to a slamming break into the water. A stall/flat spin would do that sort of thing I suppose. Well, this is a medium-sized airline, so it sees a lot of stuff but it doesn't have every stuff. The largest airline (Lion Air) have their own training/simulation centre, and the flag carrier (Garuda Indonesia) owns a large maintenance facility. Most of the other airlines here use their services AFAIK.

Given your question, I actually wonder whether fool's gold (FeS2) would look much more convincing to human eyes under the lighting condition. Fool's gold is pretty much just grey under strong sunlight (hence you can tell them apart easily, actually) but in a mine when your source of light is only a torch (so reddish light) back then it's easy to be fooled.

I'm not sure, we haven't even found the majority of the aircraft's body yet. The altitude when the crash happened were only at 3000 m. The sea there is fairly shallow (not beyond 50 m deep). Black boxes signal has been found last night, said "only 200 m apart from each other", but it hasn't been recovered yet. (translated / original) Also, some have drawn some lines to the bleed air check valve corrosion that might happen if the type was parked for a long time. (translated / original) I'd say that this might not be it though until we have more data available. In any case, it's an odd crash. But I expect it to be nothing like the MAX just for the reason that it survived flying for 26 years before it.

What are you imagining, here ? Something that doesn't require surgeons, close inspection and continuous feedback all handled by humans ? If it's what's in the spoiler then the answer is likely closer to "no". What you're describing with the video is a lot closer to motion sickness and G-tolerance. You can't train them at all. But they'll go away once you have adjusted to it. That being said, we've at least been able to speed up ageing through genetic modification. Slowing down is much harder, although it's not really that it's much harder - it's just that, it turns out, your systems do work harder and better in rougher conditions... and that's usually not comfortable for anyone. There's a genetic-modification way, but it's only possible on the scale of tissues so far, not a whole organism.

I mean, it's inside the crew compartment without additional protection, like a 0.5 cm thick armor floor. Calculating the ratio of radiation between "top of pusher" vs. the crew area does give a distance ratio from the detonation center of 2:1, which is about what's shown in the pic, so I presume this is the case that the crew area shielding hasn't been included. (although the "top of pusher plate" figure has been calculated with the shielding effect because the top of the pusher plate is not 7 times farther from detonation center compared to the "bottom of the pusher plate" as the radiation ratios would show.) But yeah, Orion is deffo pretty darn difficult to justify still. Though if we really want to go interplanetary then it won't be doable with merely chemical-reaction rockets. Have you not seen the Boston Dynamics dog thing ? It's basically that.

At least try the demos... they're more than enough to tell a lot of things, although it might push you to actually buy the thing... XD