cfraenkel
Joined 201 karma
- This article might point to a way: https://neuburger.substack.com/p/cities-panic-over-having-to...
- A long time ago, worked on a comm satellite program. It used a whack of tuned cans to combine high powered transmit signals with harmonics in each others' frequency bands to feed into the antenna. I once asked how they worked. The answer was 'magic'. I mean, they were physical RF filters, but no one could explain or reproduce how they worked. There was this one guy who could tighten the screws that adjusted the inside baffles so they 'worked'. No one else could.
- To begin with, airplanes do fall out of they sky, sometimes right on your backup generator. (speaking from military experience where yes, there is an entire backup studio waiting to take over, just in case. Or rather, the 'studio' is geographically dispersed, with 100% redundancy, which is another way of saying the same thing.)
But more importantly, *this* is what you noticed from that article?
- An aspect missing from the article and comments here is that magnesium is also available as a topical application. I have some in a spray that I can apply to my knees before bed, we also get some from a local source in a cream base for massaging into muscles. That lets you focus the application without dosing your entire system with it.
- Checklists are great! Until TPTB decide everything should be a checklist, and then that everyone needs to be trained to the checklist and no more than that, and then start punishing any deviation from said checklists, and the all the newbies go 'why should I learn all this technical stuff, it's not needed for the checklist?'.
And then something changes and no one knows how to do anything but follow the checklist that doesn't work anymore....
- You obviously didn't live through it, or you wouldn't be spouting such offensive, naive nonsense. How many working class families do you know that can afford to buy economically significant amounts of T-bills, as opposed to, you know, eating, or paying for car repairs, or kid's back to school supplies. When is the last time you saw a bank paying anywhere close to the prime rate on savings accounts, which is all a working class family typically has access to. (as opposed to pocketing the difference as profit, thank you very much)
- If you only want to see what you want to see, it's easy to find evidence. On the other hand, look at the commonly posted wages vs productivity graphs (productivity goes up pretty much unbroken, but wages flatline since roughly mid-70s), or compare the 'US is #1!!' GDP per capita numbers against the *median* income numbers. Bit of a difference when you remove Musk, Gates, Bezos et al income from the comparison.
- It was spin stabilized. A stuck relay would have just created equal thrust all the way around the spin - ie the thrust would cancel out to zero. This design required thrusters that fired for very short intervals at a given delay after the earth sensor saw the earth, so the thrust would line up in the desired vector. In other words, no a simple malfunction cannot result in an orbit change.
That said, it's an assumption in the article that the orbit change wasn't due to the cumulative effect of the normal gravitational perturbations the pull on all these vehicles. You'd need to dig up what orbit it was in 40 years ago and then calculate how the orbit would have drifted over those 40 yrs. Good luck.
- *Dead* satellites are supposed to be boosted into a graveyard orbit so they don't clutter up the neighbourhood for everyone else. Of course if it just fails, and can't be commanded there's not much anyone can do, but that's relatively rare. Most will be drifting at a pretty good clip, +100 km or more above geosynch.
- And also made missions at least 3X more expensive..... It wasn't just the on-paper launch costs. Everything had to be man-rated, meaning, among many other things, everything that operated during the launch had to be triple redundant, all the pyros had to be unpowered while onboard the shuttle (meaning you had to design another system to then power up the pyros and make it reliable), you needed three full launch crews (Cape, Johnson, plus wherever you actually ran your own ops) and all three launch crews had to support an endless set of rehearsals and launch delays.... The costs kept mounting. (source - was in program office of expendable launch comm sat, each satellite was ~$150M, launch was ~$80M. Roughly comparable mission down the hall cost ~$300M / satellite, ~$500M / launch.)
- All these other comments should just go read the book, it's worth it and a good, if horrifying read. What 'no mechanism' above means is that for many decades the SIOP consisted of 'launch everything'. The only way it was a 'plan' was to time the arrival times to avoid fratricide. This btw meant that even if there was a 'tactical' shooting event in Western Europe, all the targets in China would have been hit, even if they weren't involved. Needless to say, Japan was never informed of this....
- Design constraints aren't an issue for prototype runs, since you'll have the same constraints for the production mold. Actually, now that I'm writing this out.... the constraints issue is a plus, since it's a dry run of how the actual production parts will be produced. Doing the 1000pc run on a 3d printer won't expose an 'oops' that can't actually be made in a molded part.
- also, in this case (as with all 'debris'), one of the vehicles is dead, so you can't do active ranging on it, just passive radar. Much less accurate. Active rangefinding is good to ~ meter accuracy at geosynch, passive radar is nowhere near that close. The two factors for how good your orbit fit are how good your range data is, and how frequently you get samples. To get accurate orbits, you need to look often, and there are lots of objects up there - way more than there are antennas on the ground keeping track of them.
- It's not a model that is poorly calibrated - you seem to be taking a software-centric concept far away from where it's useful. The uncertainty at initial observation is because when you first observe an object, you only have observations covering a tiny bit of the orbit, resulting in very wide error bars. The "model" (Newtonian orbital dynamics) is one of the most precise models we have. Doesn't help when the observations are noisy.
There's a huge difference between a utility scale power plant (you know, with things like tall chimneys) and "truck mounted" generators in the impact to the local air quality. But you know this and are playing word games.