Note, this text was originally posted as a comment on Rob Coppinger’s Hyperbola blog at flight international.
I hope there was more expansion in the “third way” for space journalism, at the moment it’s more like the big professional publications relaying NASA and ESA etc PAOs and company press releases, while blogs and forums are pushing [...]
Archive for November, 2008
The Third Way for Space Journalism
Posted in Demotivation, ESA, Journalism, NASA, Navelgazing, industry, tagged EADS, flight international, Galileo, Journalism, space journalism, Surrey on Tuesday 2008.11.25 | Leave a Comment »
FLEX – Flexible Exploration Architecture
Posted in Architecture, Depot, ISRU, Lunar, Models, Motivation, NASA, RLV:s, Spacecraft, industry, tagged Architecture, Ares V, ESAS, exploration, FLEX, Griffin, liquid oxygen, NASA, propellant depot, VSE on Friday 2008.11.21 | 17 Comments »
I wrote this architecture proposal, FLEX, a few years ago. It analyzes NASA’s approach that the ESAS study picked and notices how most of the mass in a lunar exploration stack in LEO is actually liquid oxygen. By using a propellant depot, the LOX can be lifted with tankers and any launchers imaginable (I wouldn’t [...]
Anthropogenic Global Warming and Ice Age
Posted in Demotivation, Science, tagged global warming, ice age on Monday 2008.11.17 | 3 Comments »
Very shortly: Anthropogenic global warming is a trouble of the current and coming centuries. Ice ages are slower phenomena happening with thousand and tens of thousands of years time scales.
If there will be an ice age 100,000 years from now, it doesn’t remove the problem of global warming in 100 years.
I do not understand what [...]
Flight at Small Scale
Posted in Motivation, Science, Uncategorized, tagged flight, ladybird, ladybug, slow motion on Friday 2008.11.14 | Leave a Comment »
Beautiful video.
It resembles a propeller more than a bird, just that it doesn’t revolve but reciprocates and reverses the pitch.
Electronic Voting Sucks
Posted in Motivation, Navelgazing, Uncategorized, tagged critical systems, electronic voting, Finland, lottery, ray, veikkaus on Wednesday 2008.11.12 | 1 Comment »
Finland had communal elections a few weeks back. Some communities tested electronic voting machines, and naturally it failed miserably. Now the communities are working on having new elections. The central ministry that should be taking care of these things is silent – except for the justice minister who said the electronic voting thing was decided [...]
Pump Power
Posted in Models, Motivation, Science, Uncategorized, tagged pumps, SI on Monday 2008.11.10 | Leave a Comment »
There’s been some discussion of pump power. It is extremely easy to calculate it when using SI units.
A flow front in a tube has a power:
W power, F force, v speed.
The force is
Where A is cross sectional area and P the pressure.
Also,
Where V is volume so its time derivative is the volume flow.
Thus we can [...]
Optics
Posted in Science, Uncategorized, tagged 3d camera, achromatic, apochromatic, chromatic aberration, eye glass, ladar, LIDAR, vision correction on Wednesday 2008.11.05 | Leave a Comment »
This is a nice TED talk about a 3D camera technology. A bright femtosecond laser pulse illuminates the whole scene at once. No need to slowly scan around with an ordinary laser, like current LIDARs do.
It can see through some dust and liquid water drops too. This could be useful for some navigation systems. Among [...]
Suborbital is Next to Useless for Point to Point Travel
Posted in Architecture, Demotivation, Models, Motivation, Science, Spacecraft, Suborbital, tagged ballistic, narrow surborbital ballistic corridor, point to point, Suborbital, transatlantic on Tuesday 2008.11.04 | 3 Comments »
Spacetransportnews has a link to another in the long list of nontechnical space dreams.
Earth’s radius is about 7000 km. The Van Allen belts start somewhat above 500 km from Earth’s surface. Hence, ballistic arcs have to be either very short or then very shallow. And shallow arcs mean high speed. Close to orbital. New York [...]
