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1. In a world that is apparently getting both warmer and colder because of global warming, how is it that we can increasingly rely on non-dispatchable (i.e., intermittent, usually unavailable), weather-dependent electricity from wind and solar plants to displace, not just supplement, dispatchable (i.e., baseload, almost always available) coal, gas, and nuclear power? In other words, if our weather is becoming less predictable, how is it that a consuming economy like ours can, or should even try, predictably rely on weather-dependent resources? //

2. Climate change is a global issue, so how is it that we can claim climate benefits for unilateral climate policy. For example, U.S. gasoline cars constitute just 3% of global CO2 emissions, so how will getting rid of them impact climate change? //

3. How on Earth could anybody expect those in Africa and the other horrifically poor nations to “get off fossil fuels” when the rich countries haven’t come close to doing it.

[…]

5. But, perhaps I’m most confused about the whole air quality thing. The obsession over it gets attached to all energy policies. But there’s clearly a strawman to the “we need cleaner air now” demand. First, the air quality conversation in the U.S. reminds me of Voltaire’s “the perfect is the enemy of good.” Americans seem completely unaware how drastically our air quality has improved. Check data from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), our criteria pollutants have been plummeting over the past many decades. //

Clyde Spencer
Reply to
KevinM
May 23, 2023 7:45 pm
… statisticians should be fined for associating life expectancy gains with any factor at all.

There is general agreement that the availability of soap (better hygiene) was an important factor in increasing longevity. Also, the control of bacterial infections with antibiotics, and the dramatic reduction of fatal childhood diseases, resulting from vaccinations, played an important role. Additionally, the availability of affordable, effective insect screening, along with programs to reduce mosquito breeding areas did a lot to reduce malaria in the US. There were many factors, most correlated with economy of scale made possible by inexpensive energy.

The forced energy transformation crowd continues to be in denial about how badly the California grid has been compromised by wind and solar, how expensive the battery solution is, and the prospect of Big Brother in the home (setting temperatures and restricting power use at will). As Ludwig von Mises observed, the failure of government intervention leads to more and more intervention, posing a choice between free markets and Leviathan.” //

AdenW
May 24, 2023 6:03 am
A simple solution. Smart meters and virtue signalling.

1. Greens sign up to a Green register, get the badge they can display to show how good they are.
2. Smart meters
3. Greens have to sign up to renewables only electric supply
4. Then when the wind doesn’t blow, the sun doesn’t shine, a message is sent to the smart meter and click, they get cut off.
   Once a green, always a green, you are on for life.

The New Pause has lengthened by a further two months to 8 years 11 months. The least-squares linear-regression trend on the UAH monthly satellite global-temperature dataset for the lower troposphere shows no global warming at all from June 2014 to April 2023. //

NOAA thinks there is a 62% chance of an el Niño developing. If it does develop, it will probably bring the latest Pause to an end. Nevertheless, these long Pauses are a visual demonstration of the now-undeniable fact that the rate of global warming predicted by IPCC in 1990 has proven to be greatly in excess of the subsequent outturn. //

In fact, IPCC’s midrange prediction in 1990 of 0.3 K/decade business-as-usual warming since that year exceeds the 0.136 K/decade real-world global warming rate observed since then by a startling 120%. Indeed, even the 0.2 K/decade lower bound of IPCC’s 1990 prediction exceeds observed reality by close to half. Yet policy is being made by scientifically-illiterate governments on the basis of the 0.5 K/decade upper-bound prediction, which exceeds observed reality by a shocking 268%.

But if you are over a slow network or with huge files, it would be nice to have a progress bar. Sure, you could write your own version of copy, but wouldn’t it be nice to have some more generic options?

ONE WAY
The pv program can do some of the things you want. It monitors data through a pipe or, at least through its standard output. Think of it as cat with a meter. //

There is also progress. It looks around for programs running like cp, mv, dd, and many more, looks at their open files, and shows you progress information for those programs. It only does this once, so you’ll typically marry it with the watch command or use the -M option. //

If you want to add a progress bar to your shell scripts directly, try gum

According to ShortFinals.org, in 1941, in Trafford Park, Manchester, Ford UK had two assembly plants where they were told to build Rolls-Royce Merlins – lots of them! At the time, this engine was in the vast majority of British fighters and bombers, including the two which had just won the Battle of Britain, the Supermarine Spitfire and the Hawker Hurricane.

In his book Not Much Of An Engineer, Rolls Royce supercharger designer Stanley Hooker states that Ford UK looked at the Merlin engine drawings and said “we can’t build an engine to those tolerances.” Hooker said loftily (his words) “I suppose the tolerances are too tight for you?” ” No, they are much too loose – we use much tighter tolerances for car engines so all the parts are truly interchangeable without any hand adjustment needed.”

Ford re-drew the blue-prints for the Merlin, making it more suitable for mass production, and by 1944, over 400 engines a week were flowing out of the plants.

The first Merlin engine developed 880hp but by the time the last mark of Merlin was produced the power output was 2030hp.

The Merlin engine was then enlarged still further and named the Griffon. Aircraft which were powered by the Merlin engine include the Lancaster, Spitfire, Halifax, Hurricane, Battle, Defiant, Whitley, Mosquito, Hornet, York, Lincoln and North American Mustang.

The movie star reportedly owns at least seven jets along with other smaller aircraft.

John Travolta is much more than just a Hollywood star. The actor is known for his love of aviation and has several jets in his private portfolio. Travolta is certified to fly 11 different aircraft and owns a number of planes himself. //

Perhaps the actor's most prized possession was the Boeing 707-138B that he picked up over 20 years ago. Travolta initially acquired the 707 from Qantas on a rental agreement before the airline handed him the jet as part of his brand ambassador role.

The 150-seater former Qantas jet was revamped to carry just 15 guests and boasted two bedrooms and a full-size bathroom.

Valve boss says service, not price, the big issue for consumers and publishers.

Here's Valve's co-founder and CEO Gabe Newell talking about piracy in the games industry. The man behind online retail service Steam tackles those who claim that lower prices for games will make piracy go away, and he takes on companies that seek to fight piracy by inconveniencing consumers. //

"We think there is a fundamental misconception about piracy," Newell said. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem. For example, if a pirate offers a product anywhere in the world, 24/7, purchasable from the convenience of your personal computer, and the legal provider says the product is region-locked, will come to your country three months after the U.S. release and can only be purchased at a brick and mortar store, then the pirate's service is more valuable.

"Most DRM solutions diminish the value of the product by either directly restricting a customer's use or by creating uncertainty."

He adds, "Our goal is to create greater service value than pirates, and this has been successful enough for us that piracy is basically a non-issue for our company. For example, prior to entering the Russian market, we were told that Russia was a waste of time because everyone would pirate our products. Russia is now about to become our largest market in Europe.

I have a mixed-use scenario; I am fine with paying for content and streaming it using proprietary applications. "Piracy is almost always a service problem and not a pricing problem" remains one of the most insightful things anyone has said about media consumption in the last twenty years. But I have plenty of content that I have, at some point, paid a license for, and ripped to an unencumbered format that I can use going forward. //

There's no question that Downloader is frequently used to load programs that, in concept, can "enable piracy". But that almost always indicates that people want to consume content that is region locked, under onerous licensing terms, or no longer available through legal means. If I want to watch an Israeli TV show in the United States, and no one wants to sell it to me, what other choice do I have? It probably takes more effort to block those services by region than it does to sell it everywhere. Instead, grey market streams, private torrent trackers, and VPNs make money because they are serving a market. That people are paying for ways to circumvent restrictive licensing and content delivery is evidence in itself that the providers could make money by selling the content instead of blocking it. They don't even have to make a physical product! Just let some bits go one way instead of restricting them.

Wikipedia's information is a little ambiguous:

The booster's tanks were reported as holding 3,600 t (7,900,000 lb) of propellant, consisting of 2,800 t (6,200,000 lb) of liquid oxygen and 800 t (1,800,000 lb) of liquid methane. However, current booster prototypes can only hold 3,400 t (7,500,000 lb) of propellant.

Depending on how current "current" was when that was written, the booster carries no more than around 800 tons of methane fully loaded; 14% would be 112 tons. Add another 30% or so for Starship and we're up to 145 tons.

The total amount of methane in the atmosphere is about 5,000,000,000 tons, so this is an increase of about 0.0000029%.

Note that the FTS is designed to get combustion started, so most of the remaining methane was actually burned. Even if none of the methane burned, the destruction of another 344,000 Super Heavy boosters late in ascent would increase atmospheric methane by 1%. //

for comparison May 22, 2023 Pipeline Technology Journal: Two Fields In Turkmenistan Leak More Greenhouse Gases Than The UK: Leaks Could Be Easily Fixed estimates 2.6+1.8=4.4 million tons per year (2022) for just these two newly-discovered leaks. So the max here is 0.0002 "newly-discovered annual Turkmenistan leak units". It is true that burning it and converting it to CO2+H2O might be greener, but... –
uhoh
11 hours ago

South Africa is heading into the southern hemisphere winter with the prospect of the country's worst-ever power cuts - up to 16 hours a day. The roots of the problem lie in poor management, corruption and sabotage.
Short presentational grey line

Late one Thursday afternoon, last November, a maintenance contractor reached his hand under a huge rotating shaft at an ageing power station in South Africa.

It took the man just a few seconds to unscrew a steel plug, smaller than a coffee mug.

As he moved away from the scene, precious lubrication oil quickly began seeping from the innards of the shaft. The steel bearings inside overheated and before long the coal mill, and with it one of the station's eight turbines, ground to a sudden, and expensive, halt.

What is certain is that the sabotage at Unit 4 was not an isolated event.

Instead, it was one relatively small act in a vast, ongoing, and highly successful criminal enterprise that involves murders, poisoning, fires, cable theft, ruthless cartels and powerful politicians.

It is an enterprise that risks derailing international attempts to nudge South Africa away from its dependence on coal and towards renewable energy sources. //

At major road junctions across the nation, unemployed and homeless men now earn a few rand from drivers in exchange for directing cars when the traffic lights are off.

The image of people in luxury vehicles tossing coins to beggars for helping them navigate the country's failing infrastructure seems like a fitting metaphor for the current struggles facing this deeply unequal society.

Despite a higher risk of a fire, pure oxygen also has some advantages.

First, the internal pressure of the vessel is only a fifth of a normal breathing mix, allowing less structural load on the hull of the spacecraft. The resupply system is also simplified, because a system including nitrogen must have an extra tank for the nitrogen. (If you had them mixed, you end up with a higher and higher nitrogen pressure over time). A small mass saving is therefore achieved. For a minimal spacecraft where you simply open the hatch and vent the cabin air when performing an EVA, pure oxygen simply means less air wasted. Nitrogen narcosis seems to not be an issue, as I find it difficult to imagine an accident of increase in the pressure.

As for the decision making process in the early US space programme, the slightly higher complexity of a nitrogen system must have felt a little redundant. The early US Mercury and Gemini also used pure oxygen, but the early Soviet spacecraft, like Vostok, used a normal atmospheric breathing mix. Note that modern EVA suits do still use pure oxygen. ///

At 5 PSI there is not enough atmosphere to support fire, even with 100% oxygen atmosphere.

Q:

I am curious what aspects of the Apollo program were impressive/advanced from an engineering perspective, in the 1960s and 1970s. That is, what would have made an educated engineer say, “Wow, they solved that problem?”

I ask the question because I know that as an engineering layperson I know I have very poor intuitions about what is technically difficult in spaceflight. For instance, I only learned from this website that maintaining 1 atm of pressure in a spacecraft isn't very difficult. Also, some technologies like pressure suits and rocket engines had already been developed. So it is not obvious (to me) what the actual innovations and engineering achievements of the program were.

A:

There was no one breakthrough that made it possible. The "big deal", in the mind of the world, was just that an obviously very hard thing was accomplished. And, if you doubted how hard it was, people can point out that no one has done it again in more than fifty years.

However, there are some good examples of challenging problems that had to be solved.

Problem 1: Rocket Size. Before Apollo, everyone thought we would send the top of a multi-stage rocket to the moon, it would land on its tail and launch again to return to earth. When you run the numbers on that, you end up with a pretty big lander requiring a lot of fuel, and a huge launcher to send it on its way; much larger than Saturn. The trick ended up being to only send down a little bug, and even leave part of that behind on the moon. If we had stuck with the giant lander we would never have been ready in time.

Problem 2: Rendezvous. The new method required being good at approaching and docking with another spacecraft. That's a hard enough problem that, even though the physics was well understood, they didn't really see the issues until they actually tried it. (I always get annoyed when characters in science fiction stories fail to foresee problems that the science should have told them beforehand, but sometimes that's how it works.) Wisely they tried it in Gemini in low earth orbit and had the hang of it by Apollo.

Problem 3: Rocket Size (Again). Even with the trick (called Lunar Orbit Rendezvous) used to solve Problem 1, they needed a much bigger rocket than anyone had built before. And so they built it. To get it to the launch pad, they built the crawler transporters, some of the largest land vehicles built up to that time, and to have a protected place to stack the stages, they built the Vehicle Assembly Building, one of the largest buildings by open volume in the world. I think seeing a tower the size of a 36-story skyscraper rise into the sky made a lot of people say, "Wow, they solved that problem?" I was too young at the time, but it was the initial uncrewed Apollo 4 launch of the Saturn V that made my dad think, "Huh, they might actually pull this off!"

There are many many more, but it was really the cumulative effect of solving thousands of hard problems that was the big deal. //

Number 2 is a small example of the large original research involved. A guy, later known as "Doctor Rendezvous", did his Ph.D. thesis at MIT on it in 1963. His next job was to fly it! Here's Buzz Aldrin's thesis: dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/12652 –
Adam
May 19 at 1:38

The "slow down to catch up, speed up to slow down" stuff of orbital rendezvous was reportedly very confusing to the non-engineer test pilots and required someone like Buzz Aldrin to truly figure out. It's one thing to draw the equations out on paper but a whole other thing to actually do it in the cockpit. –
Jörg W Mittag
May 17 at 19:48

@JörgWMittag I think its still confusing to a lot of people today, mainly because of the terms "slow down" and "speed up" in that phrase are ... wrong, but appropriate? –
Moo
May 17 at 21:32

@Moo - If you go faster, you also go higher. Now that you're higher, you've got farther to go, so you're actually going slower –
Richard
May 18 at 18:36 //

A:

what has ALWAYS impressed the heck out of me is the sheer magnitude of scale involved... not physical size (although its size was truly impressive) but rather the huge number of complex problems that needed to be all solved in a complex optimization matrix to arrive at a suitable overall solution. This was the largest systems integration project ever to date and on a tight timeline. Project management on an unheard of scale and scope. That to me was the "Wow... they solved THAT problem" thing.

Yes. Apollo was a triumph of project management as much as, or maybe even more than, it was a technological feat. –
Wayne Conrad
May 18 at 2:40

I would argue that project management was born within the Apollo program. I don't think it even had a name beforehand. –
Vladimir Cravero
May 18 at 8:18 //

A:

It was fractally hard.

Everything they did was Voltroning hard problems together to solve other hard problems. And this was all done in a coordinated way on an incredibly tight timescale.

The long answer would fill a series of books. E.g. for a high level overview of the effort involved in the LEM alone, you can look at Tom Kelly's Moon Lander (and you should; it's great).

But to put a quick gloss on top of it, Apollo was not an aerospace engineering triumph, Apollo was a systems engineering triumph. Everyone solved hard problems in every field, but the real accomplishment was orchestrating those solutions in a way that led a seven-year program from zero to the moon.

Apollo systems engineering built upon Polaris (see en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UGM-27_Polaris). –
Jon Custer
May 18 at 20:42

@JonCuster Sort of, but it's more complicated than that. I'm not putting a history of SE in this answer though. Recommend Morris' "Management of Projects" from 1990 or so if you want an overview of the most relevant thread for Apollo/ –
fectin
May 19 at 0:55

Editor’s note: based on industry research (from Chrome and others), and the ubiquity of HTTPS, we will be replacing the lock icon in Chrome’s address bar with a new “tune” icon – both to emphasize that security should be the default state, and to make site settings more accessible. Read on to learn about this multi-year journey.

A:

After depressurization of the cabin though there is, obviously, no environment to condition, and during repressurization fresh oxygen needs to be supplied at high flowrate from oxygen tank at cryogenic-temperature to fill the entire cabin. What heating mechanism was applied to heat up the supply of fresh cryogenic oxygen for CM cabin repressurisation?

P.S. In original question I asked about repressurization of both CM and LM, but it seems LM stored oxygen in compressed gas form rather than cryogenic liquid or supercritical fluid, therefore I have removed LM from the question.

A:

Unsurprisingly, it worked exactly like it did in shuttle.

To assure uniform flow, the capillary restrictors are coiled around a warm water-glycol line to increase the oxygen temperature.

Page 2.7-3

The aforementioned oxygen supply capillary restrictors are wound around the line routed to the space radiators and relief valves. The other line is routed to the mixing valve. To insure proper operation of the oxygen supply restrictors, in the line between the cryogenic O2 storage in the S/M to the surge tanks in the C/M during cabin repressurization, full water - glycol flow through the line to the space radiators is required. Sufficient heat must be available to prevent cryogenic oxygen entering the C/M oxygen system and preclude the possibility of freezing the water-glycol. To achieve this, the mixing valve must be manually placed to the full closed position 15 to 30 minutes before repressurization and remain closed until the surge tank returns to maximum pressure after repressurization of the C/M.

Q:

Does anyone know what the approximate Apollo cabin temperature and humidity was kept at? I am curious if the unusual 100% O2 atmosphere affected other aspects of the cabin air.

A:

From this NASA report:
https://history.nasa.gov/SP-368/s2ch5.htm

The design range for temperature and humidity control in the Apollo Command Module was 294° to 300°K (70° to 80°F) [i.e., 21 to 27 °C] with a relative humidity of 40 to 70 percent. Similarly, the design range for the Lunar Module was 291° to 300°K (65° to 80°F) [i.e., 18 to 27 °C] with a relative humidity of 40 to 70 percent.

We are in a new era. And the erasure of gay men and lesbians is intensifying.

ANDREW SULLIVAN //

These activists, marinated in critical gender and queer theory, have picked several unnecessary fights and, especially since the convulsions of 2020, have pushed and pushed a woke revolution until a dangerous backlash was inevitable. //

we have to be insistent that the gay experience is distinct and different and not intrinsically connected to either queer ideology or the trans experience. We have to demand that children’s bodies — gay, straight, trans, gender-conforming and gender-nonconforming — be left alone. And we must do all we can to make sure that the trans-queer revolution does not result in what it seems to be moving toward: the eradication of homosexuality from public life.

Statistical Ars Legatus Legionis
12y
50,437

Also the longer the slant the larger area the weather is impacting you. If the beam is coming in close to the horizon it isn't just the weather where you are that matters it is the weather along the entire slant potentially a thousand or more kilometers away. It could be bright sunny day where you are at and the signal has to punch through a dozen storm systems to get to you.

It is why Starlink was such a big deal for the Antarctica bases. Prior to that they were limited to very expensive MEO constellation services or a 2 or 3 GSO sats (one of the TRDS sats) that are actually at an 8.7 degree inclination instead of the normal 0. The sats are in GSO not GEO. It means the sats trace a figure eight around the equator instead of being exactly on it. It also means that they move in the sky as seen from Earth which is very much non-ideal for most applications BUT it means that for roughly 12 hours out of each day they are just barely over the horizon from the Antarctic bases to allow service. Bad news that 12 hour availability window shifts by 3 minutes each day. Being a network engineer in Antarctica prior to SL must have been a challenge prior to SL.

The Antarctic specific satellite mission is the only polar GSO service I know of. SL pretty much overnight changed that. Not only are their official SL dishes but there are now dozens of user owned terminals. Throughput to Antarctica was in the 1 to 5 Mbps range for decades and now is in the hundreds of Mbps and gigabits is possible with enough user terminals.

MMarsh Ars Praefectus
7y
3,252
Subscriptor
From a "can it be done?" tech standpoint, I think this is very cool.

From a "can you offer a profitable and economical service this way?" standpoint, I'm not optimistic, for a few reasons.

The first problem is the latency, of course. That's going to be just as bad as with any other GEO satellite. We put up with it for decades when there was no better option, but now that LEO constellations exist, a 700 ms ping time is a hard sell unless there are other compelling advantages.

Which brings us to the competition. Inmarsat and Iridium, being part of GMDSS, have the advantage in the commercial maritime market. Starlink is rapidly replacing Viasat and Hughes in the terrestrial residential, business, and vehicle-portable markets; OneWeb and Kuiper ought to be nipping at its heels sometime soon. Who is the target market for a product that can't compete with Inmarsat or Iridium on coverage, and can't compete with Starlink on throughput or latency?

And then you get to the tech aspects of it. Yes, it's possible to put a small satellite in GEO and relay comms from it, and it's an impressive technical achievement. But the physics of antennas and of RF propagation don't change. How much performance was given up to make it work with less power and smaller antennas? Could more efficient use of that same RF spectrum have been achieved with a larger satellite with more power, more spot beams, and larger antenna apertures to allow the use of tighter geometry in those spot beams?

If the target market is Alaska, then in the panhandle (eg. Ketchikan) you're aiming your ground station antennas about 35° above the horizon. That's tolerable as long as you have clear land or ocean to the south. Up in Anchorage, though, that angle drops to 29° and in Nome it's 25°. Hold your hand at arm's length, put your thumb on the southern horizon, and stretch your pinky vertically above it to full span; that's 25°. If there are trees or mountains or weather below that mark, you have no chance of using any GEO satellites from that location.

To date Astranis has raised $550 million and is well capitalized for growth with a team of 300 people. The company has already built four more satellites—one of which will serve a customer in Peru, two for airline Wi-Fi, and one for an unspecified customer—that will launch on a dedicated Falcon 9 mission later this summer or early fall.

Now that the company has confidence that its custom-built technology works, it plans to scale up production to two satellites a month, Gedmark said. The 1-meter-by-1-meter satellites, which have a mass of around 400 kg, will be built to serve whatever demand there is, wherever in the world it's needed.

"We’re just going to keep launching them as long as there is demand," he said. "And we think there will be a lot of demand for that. We absolutely plan to launch dozens and then hundreds."