Google engineers have given up on it:
At the start of RE
Anyone who understands basic math and physics knows that the notion it could replace fossil fuels was always insane.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Faith, Hope And Tragedy
Alan Boyle has an inside look at how VG employees are responding to the loss of Alsbury and the space ship. Note that the official schedule now is “ground testing” in the first half of next year. That’s a lot more realistic than past predictions, I think.
UK Spaceports
Here’s the final report from the CAA, for those who have time and interest. There seems to be quite a bit of enthusiasm. Of course, the Brits have been out of the space game, in terms of launch, for decades.
XCOR/ULA
An interesting milestone:
Mojave, CA, November 20, 2014 – XCOR Aerospace today announced it has completed the latest test series for the liquid hydrogen engine it is developing for United Launch Alliance (ULA). This is an important milestone in the long-running LH2 (liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen) program. It is also a step toward running the engine in a fully closed cycle mode.
In its most recent milestone, XCOR successfully performed hot fire testing of the XR-5H25 engine’s regeneratively cooled thrust chamber,with both liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen propellants supplied inpump-fed mode, using XCOR’s proprietary piston pump technology.
“This test marks the first time liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen have been supplied to a rocket engine with a piston pump,” says XCOR Chief Executive Officer Jeff Greason. “It is also the first time an American LH2 engine of this size has successfully fired liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen together in pump-fed mode. We are happy to be making solid progress on the engines. This will also bring us to a new phase in our plans for orbital flight.
“ULA has an ongoing effort to develop rocket engines for our next generation upper stage, and we are thrilled to see that progress continuing with XCOR,” added ULA Vice President George Sowers.
Upcoming test series will fully integrate the nozzle with the engine and piston pumps. Fully closed cycle testing will follow soon afterwards and will complete the sub-scale demonstration engine program.
The XR-5H25 engines are being developed under contract to ULA as potential successors to the Delta and Atlas series upper stage engines currently used. These engines will also help power orbital launches.
I suspect they’ll find it useful for their own launchers as well.
The Grubergate Insider Problem
A long but useful essay from Megan McArdle.
We have a similar issue in the space industry. I see all the hype about the upcoming Orion flight, and as an industry analyst (though not quite an insider) I know that it’s nonsense, but it’s hard to get people to realize that NASA officials are often forced to dish nonsense to placate rent-seeking congresspeople; as outsiders, they are still in awe of the government agency that put men on the moon four-and-a-half decades ago.
There is also this:
…when I see journalists saying that Gruber’s revelations don’t matter because he’s just kind of awkwardly saying something that everyone knew, I get a little jittery. I am not “everyone,” and neither are any of those journalists. We’re a tiny group of people with strange preoccupations who get paid to spend our time understanding and explaining this stuff. The fact that we may have mentioned it once to our readers, in the 18th paragraph, does not mean that readers read it and understood what it meant. (In fact, if you actually interact with your readers, you’ll be astonished at how little they remember of what you told them, especially if you didn’t go out of your way to headline it. Their minds are already crammed full of information that they need to, you know, live their lives. So they tend to take away a few big bullet points, not the piddling details.)
I see the same thing when I argue with people on Twitter, or in comments — we often go around in circles because they seem to have forgotten some previous point I’d already made, or read what they wanted to read instead of what I actually wrote. The dismaying thing is that these are often people who love space, but they end up being cheerleaders for things (like SLS/Orion) that are roadblocks rather than enablers.
Branson’s November 1st Press Conference
Doug Messier has a belated review. He pans it.
A Crowd-Funded Lunar Mission
How in the world would this cost a billion dollars? They must be using NASA cost models.
Those Back-To-Back Commercial Space Disasters
Frank Morring says they were coincidence, and that failure is inevitable. I made the same point at PJMedia last week:
…it is important to understand that there was absolutely no relationship between OSC’s and VG’s accidents, other than they were both commercial activities. It was pure coincidence that they happened within a span of three days. But in both cases, response was rapid.
Nonetheless, a lot of ignorant people will try to use these events to shut down commercial spaceflight.
The Mars Colony Transport
I haven’t read it deeply, but here’s some extensive technical speculation.
The Inuit
How adapted to fat are they? Carbs can be literally deadly to them.