Posts by Yet Another Anonymous coward

Re: New! Improved! oxidiser

It's spraying out into space with a velocity.

In space there's no wind to blow it back.

Although it's a problem not to end up in a cloud of exhaust

Re: Why so long to fill?

The two chemicals are hypergolic = basically explode on contact with each other.

The craft cost $10bn and took 20 years to build

They do not wish to become featured in a future "Who, me?" column

> jamming, need devices in situ and are of limited range

But if you are using GNSS for military purposes you are generally in limited range of your enemy, and they are probably entirely within their rights to jam your signal.

The best approach is to stick to only attacking enemies with a medieval technological level and hope that Aliexpress don't start selling high power jammers

Galileo specifically has a USA kill switch - it was part of the agreement that the USA wouldn't jam it

The original reason for Galileo was that in the event of a US-Eu trade spat a very-stable-genius US president might turn off GPS across Europe crippling Eu transport - but might not go to the extent of shooting down NATO ally's kit.

Re: User count?

"Provided" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here - they provided it whether anyone wanted/needed/used it.

France having conveniently kept an empire - or at least a few bits near the equator

Re: The best technology of the '70's. Again.

>I wonder if Musk would actually build an Arthur C. Clarke style "spinning wheel" space station on his own

I'd be more worried about him building a spherical one

Re: Different way to launch small satellites

If you want the resulting payload in the same orbit as the ISS. If not you need quite a strong astronaut to chuck it into say a polar orbit.

Perhaps an East German shotputter or 80s West Indian fast bowler ?

And at this point if the purpose of the ISS was to learn how to keep people alive in space for the length of a Mars mission - we might as well send them to Mars

It kept Boeing-Lockheed-Martin-Grumman inc in business between the end of the cold war and the start of the war on terror.

It kept a similar bunch of Soviet rocket scientists from going to work on their tans and private projects in the middle east.

Re: Recycle

No way to boost it. Plan is to let it come down.

Once the panels and truss break off it becomes a bit more brick like and slightly more predicatable.

There are motors on some core bits to do a bit of control, but not enough to give it anything like the precision you would want.

Also to allow the Russian launch site easy access it is in quite a high inclination, so can potentially hit a range of Northern (and Southern but who cares about them) latitudes.

edit: Inclination is 51.5 deg so all of USA, the habitable bits of Russia and Canada and most of continental Europe, but only the southern coast of Blighty, are in the touch down zone

In the Royal Navy I would assume a button marked pre-wet would dispense a pre-lunch pink gin

re: I would have thought

And that Sir is what disqualifies you for a role in government.

But IIRC Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple and Microsoft do no business in the UK. All the sales occur

in Narnia

Re: Taking a local hostage

So any directors of Aliexpress store314159 that live in the UK better watch out ?

Re: Laugh

>Yeah, well. There also has to be a bit of enforcement, something that the UK is not too good at lately.

Didn't we just send a gunboat to show those orientals ?

Re: Ooops! - Watch nerd

It's nice - but everytime you knock it off the bedside table it explodes and throws the face back at you

Re: Well...

>I am wondering why those condtions aren't detected and lead the aircraft to abort takeoff safely.

Physics.

It's one thing for the computer to say. We are 1m from the end of the flight deck and 100knts too slow = sys.abort() . And quite another thing to stop in time.

And blown up.

They were special mil-spec tested batteries - specified for 6 hours use

The manufacturer tests them for an hour, then the importer, then the MOD procurement directorate, then the stores bloke tests them when they arrive, and again when they are issued and then the operator tests them for another hour before deployment.

A big enough bowl of rice and it'll be fine

Re: Would suspect the

>but I was told such survivors have back problems for the rest of their lives.

Less so on modern seats. Pilots are quite expensive to train. There is value in not only saving their lives but doing so in such a way that you can reuse the pilot.

So if they had thrown it faster it might have skipped across the water ?

Re: Ooops!

The bad news is that they are taking it out of your wages.

Re: Fake.

Have you seen the quality of the 'footage' it's obviously faked.

Still probably much cheaper to do it all in CGI rather than build a practical ship and aircraft set.

Re: Dan Dare

Just pointing out that historically, launcher programs (prior to SpaceX) had precisely 2 roles.

To hide/spread the cost of your ICBM program.

To demonstrate your national/economic/cultural superiority over the "other".

(And in the case of ISS - to give a funding to your defense companies now that WWIII wasn't on the cards and to stop the USSR's rocket scientists switching to Islam)

Re: first launchers gear up for a historic blast-off?

The Ariane launcher isn't ESA or Eu, it's a French company with 20% German and a bunch of minor partners. It started out a reused French ICBM vehicle and a reused French colony.

Re: Cash has been lobbed Cornwall's way to support a horizontal launch by Virgin Orbit

But if you launch eastwards from Cornwall you can hit Belgium

Re: Dan Dare

Back in t'day when I wor a young researcher (and dinosaurs roamed the Earth)

There was a French European plan to launch a couple of French European astronauts in a Apollo capsule with wings SpacePlane on top of a French European rocket to demonstrate the superiority of French European technology.

Suspicious that this was a French plot to engrandise France the Brits not only vetoed the program but introduced a law banning British involvement in any ESA manned mission

Among the UK scientists the mission, officially Hermes, was known as "Frogs in Spaaaaaaace"

Re: cheap publicity stunt

It's really, and I can't emphasise this enough, cheap.

For literally zero money the government is not only supporting SPACE RESEARCH but CHILDREN, EDUCATION, FLUFFY PUPPIES GLOBAL BRITAIN

Re: "temporary"

It's like tactical and strategic nuclear weapons - the only difference is the size of the bang when they go off

Re: COBOL in a nutshell.

If 4 digit years are your limit, you can probably retire without worrying about it.

Re: Rolls Royce solution

Our first interaction with American marketing people. They ask if we were a Cadillac or VW brand.

Oh definitely VW said the entirely European engineering team. Reliable, sporty , German engineering, (this was the era of Golf GTI not dieselgate)

Not some fat poorly handling, fuel burning American junk driven by old people.