Posts by John Smith 19 16330 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"1. There is no pilot, it's automatic.
2. It's 30 passengers:"
Actually both are design studies. Passenger modules are expected to be handled by 3rd parties. However part of the flight test programme does call for flights to and docking with the ISS.
My information came from a Q&A with Mark Hempsell on The Space Show 2nd July 2012. No a pilot is not necessary but crew rating seems to prefer having the option for manual control.
No this is not an orbital vehicle.
However it will give quite a few people (if it flies) experience of "near space," and perhaps an interest in going to full orbit.
BTW A Study by Reaction Engines Ltd indicates that a Skylon could carry 24 passengers. Dropping out a seat for a pilot and flight attendant that leaves 22 seats. They estimate that seats could be charged at $500k-$1m a seat for flights to a location lasting < 10 days.
So thumbs up for the test flight and moving forward to actually flying on this.
Bottom line. The internet needs a new series of protocols based on some new assumptions.
a) The route and all intermediate nodes must be treated as hostile.
b) No 3rd party certification can be trusted either. It might not coming from who you think or they may be subverted.
c) All transfers should be encrypted by default including (and this is the tough part) the packet headers.
d) All crypto must have a use by date when it should definitely be viewed as compromised.
The price we pay for this may be that we end up paying for things. I'm not in principle opposed to that, provided we're looking at a micro payment system, rather than something ridiculous.
Sorry folks, the future arrived and it's not what we thought.
"AES cannot be assumed to be secure "because it's approved for use by the NSA"."
It can be assumed secure because it's an open standard that's been reviewed by a lot of people who are not with the NSA.
Never trust a crypto algorithm that is not published. "Security by obscurity" is an immediate fail flag.
Look up the "Clipper" chip BS.
"Sure: they can find stuff if they know where to look. However that knowing is still dependent on and limited to other more traditional methods of surveillance. T"
Wrong.
The stuff is being archived indefinitely regardless of who you are.
How's your plan now?
"As John Smith 19 points out above, almost no air --> almost no drag, so yes they are relying on free fall to get it to Mach 8. "
I finally applied Newton and yes, in principle, most of that fall speed can be gained by a straight free fall from that altitude. I'm guessing htat saves them the cost of a booster rocket pointed down (yes that has been used before) to increase the speed. I think there will be some thrust produced and they get to study it's flight from 0-M8, which is difficult if you go from +x 1000s mph up to -x 1000 mph down.
Hopefully they will get positive thrust when it fires (that's not guaranteed. They only started getting thrust in 2004).
One thing they did not mention was (if they have someone on the water) they will get some great data about what does happen when an object at M8 hits the water.
Short answer. There will be one hell of a bang and water plume (for such a small object) as it transfers its kinetic energy to (a lot of) water.
"This is useful supersonic ramjet research. "
I'm sure it will increase the number of PhD's in hypersonic flow. Some may even find work in the field as well. That would not include yourself by any chance?
"Since no-one has really got a SCRAMJET to work well yet (despite these tests in the 60's? Really?), "
Yes really. The work was finally de-classified in the late 80s when the AIAA released a history paper on it. The first time even a small vehicle achieved positive thrust IE switching on the engine speeded the vehicle up was around 2010.
And yes the US X30 was basically built around one of these. Something over $1Bn they discovered a)They should have checked the Principal Investigator had used the right values for basic physical constants and b) It's damm tough and pretty much anything else is simpler.
If you want to play the conspiracy theory card I'll simply say that if the US had got it working decades earlier (which is what your implying) they would have either not bothered to fund this or focused it in areas away from such technology.
I recommend you go away and down load TA Heppenheimers "Facing The Heat Barrier."
"I'd have thought that the speed would drop fairly rapidly as the friction with the air built up - true, momentum will probably keep it above terminal velocity, but I doubt it would retain enough to hit the water at Mach 8."
Wrong. 320 Km is roughly 1.05 million feet.
Like the Swiss skydiver. Almost no air --> almost no drag.
Vehicle picks up speed. Not sure it'll get up to SCRamjet ignition speed in free fall on its own, But I'll take their word for it.
When it hits dense air OTOH....
"Surely the "SC" bit of SCRAM jet means that they don't need to slow the air to below Mach 1 for combustion?"
True.
I was talking about a useful ramjet research programme.
That's something that would give a flight vehicle, or vehicle upgrade, within 5 years.
The first SCRamjet tests were done under classified USN Programmes at the APL of Johns Hopkins in the early 1960's.
We are still waiting for an actual application vehicle to fly.
My prediction is (funding permitting) Skylon will be in service and flying to orbit before this idea gets anywhere close to a working flight test vehicle.
Which may leave the American's slightly miffed, given they are much better funded.
SCramjets back a great research subject but their practical uses seem pretty limited. They are very far below the flight readiness of a regular (subsonic combustion) ramjet and take a lot more grunt to get to working velocity.
TBH if you were looking for a useful ramjet research programme you'd want to a)Widen their operating Mach range (realistically it's about 3 Mach numbers and has been since the '50's). Widening this would mean a smaller booster to get to the same high operating speed. EG A M5 ramjet needs a M2 booster to get to ignition speed would now need a (much smaller) M1 booster.
b) Lower the amount the inlet has to be slowed down before reaching the combustor. Historically that has been to M0.5, but raising that to say M0.9 or M0.95 would lower the drag losses quite a lot (and the amount of heat the airframe has to absorb doing so), and since it's it's already pretty hot ignition should not be a problem.
So thumbs up for the Australian effort but I won't hold my breath this is anything close to flight ready.
"What defines a 'link'? I think American laws allow detailed searches on friends of friends of friends. So are they saying here 1-in-5 applicants knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who once went to a radical Mosque somewhere? That I could believe."
In fact if you read the autobiography of one ex spook they look to recruit such people as assets
It's the whole six-degress-of-separation thing. Some one who know "everyone" knows someone who knows someone who can introduce them to their person of interest.
"What they should do differently is to lock the civil servants in a room with several reams of paper, some pens, some empty boxes and some string.
The boxes represent each system, the string is tied between boxes showing which systems are connected and the paper shows all the inputs and outputs with the details written on the paper."
Simple yet quite brilliant.
Thumbs up for the idea, not the clusterf**k that spawned it.
Yet again
Here's the thing that Ministers don't seem to get through their tiny little minds.
lots of systems x lots of data x lots of sites lots of changes (over maybe a 30 year life) --> Big f**king problem.
And with 6 different major benefits (with partly overlapping partly non overlapping) claimants that problem will be huge.
"Just to refresh my math, I did the calculation. Assuming 4m inner diameter and 8m outer diameter (2m thick walls), and the density of polyethylene at 0.94 g/cm3 (= 940 kg/m3), the weight of the sphere works out as 220.5 metric tons. I think more than one launch is needed with current rockets."
My mistake.
I was picturing a bubble-within-bubble water tank.
Current payloads are running about 20-25mt and of course Spacex's F9H is scheduled for takeoff next year at 53mt of payload.
So you could send up a pretty thick airtight inner shell and build up the outside in between 8-10 current launches or 4 F9H's.
Not impossible. But commandeering an asteroid is not starting to look quite so hard from my PoV.
Not sure about his choice though.
And beaming solar power from the Moon was evaluated in the 1970's as well.
It was viewed as a turkey, however I'm not sure if the study thought you'd bring the panels from Earth or mfg in situ. In principle the latter lowers the input mass considerably.
" The will is there, but the cash...the cash dried up years ago."
Actually the cash is there, but the Legislature deems it can only be spent on building a rocket whose single launch will consume roughly 1/12 of the whole NASA yearly budget (not just the human space flight bit).
And probably 80-90% of that mass is propellant, the single most easily subdivided element of the whole structure.
Once you know that fact you have to ask why NASA has wasted decades talking about the importance of on or orbit transfer and gauging but not actually doing something about it.
Unless of course you happen to have say a 10m thick wall already in orbit. Getting it moving is tough, but not impossible by a variety of methods.
Or NASA actually funded some research into radio-protective additives to the atmosphere or food suppliers.
Or perhaps do a bit more work on GCR other than 1 sensor in the whole Mars exploration programme.
Including the Governor of the state that put out its "annonymized" medical records to allow data pimping.
Which is where the core data came from.
To even start to do this properly you start by disordering the starting records if you're deriving some kind of unique number from them, otherwise you need a truly random number generator to assign code numbers.
And as I'm no expert I wouldn't trust even that
I wonder how the Minister would feel if someone managed to de-annonymize his records for example?
"Why aren't Big IT projects run like civil engineering projects where they get specialists in for each area (specialist steel, specialist glass, architects, Lifts, A/C, Quantity Surveyors etc. etc.) . "
I can explain part of it.
a) Tender process takes (literally) years to progress and choose a "winner." Very few companies have the pockets deep enough to keep some competent people waiting around for IDS to talk to them and ask stupid questions.
b) The project is priced by the total spend EG £10Bn for the Snoopers Charter, not £500m/ yr.
So either the dept or the Treasury says "We must have company that can handle that level of risk," because they might go bankrupt and f**k us up.
Instead you'll get one of "The Usual Suspects (TM)" who will definitely f**k it up instead.
<profanity filter off>
No shit.
Let me guess, no thought about training the 10s of 1000s of staff who are going to be involved.
I'll Guess Ms Reynolds quit when she realized IDS was going to continue with the bullshit and not admit the project needed be re-scheduled and re-resourced (but let's not forget the Mythical Man Month on the effects of throwing staff at overdue projects).
I presume the usual fuckwits suspects are being employed on this because, heavens you can't have anyone who might actually know how the existing system works, could you?
Some things are unforseeable. They are "Acts of God." But this one had all the usual hallmarks. Epic ambition, no buy in from senior management. etc. Presumably it will be interfacing to the NIRS II system, a previous generation fuckup.
I think I'll leave it there as my comments might become rudely personal.
</profanity filter off>
"riend came back to the US from a trip to Aus/NZ and said "it doesn't feel like I'm coming home, it feels like I'm just returning to custody""
Why?
All that extra "security" is for their benefit.
To make Americans feel more secure and protected.
Same with all the telephone and email monitoring.
Don't they?
"There's a game people play online. Find a vocal anti-gay campaigner, note their name, then find them again in a couple of years and see whether they've been caught paying a rent boy to carry their bags up to their hotel room."
Damm right too.
What consenting adults (note those qualifiers) do in their bedroom is nobodies business. If someone's gay and they don't want to shout it from the rooftops, fair enough. When they start going on (for whatever reason) that it (or whatever their particular bee in their bonnet is that they also secretly practice) they should be exposed, not for the behavior, for the hypocrisy
I think it would be a public services if the sysadmins emailed a list of blocked sites to the offices where the requests were received.
Just to give MP's a sense of what if feels like to have yourself under constant surveillance.
As Joseph Kenneally commented "If you thought Orwells Big Brother was bad, wait till you meet Big Sister."
Given all that "Premium product, because it just works" BS I'd expect them to a) Issue a bug fix b)Scan all their code to find similar code sequences c)Update those as well.
IOW not just the bug, but the pattern of the bug.
Let's see if we revisit this gag in the future? Different string, different function, same epic fail.
Should not be possible, and yet......
Excellent article and very detailed low level stuff.
Make the tablet a decent keyboard and project images onto the nearest convenient surface.
Now for real trickiness allow that to include the human eyeball.
After all with Bluetooth headsets it's possible (in principle) to have a whole conversation with the phone in your pocket. Why not just sitting on your desk/table/nearest convenient surface?
If course if you could also manage some kind of audio projection as well.
Just a few thoughts.
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