FlyMoreRockets

> It really only takes about 100M vaccines to hit herd immunity.

Citation please? Dr. Fauchi says we need 70% innoculations to achieve herd immunity. https://news.yahoo.com/fauci-america-reach-herd-immunity-004...

From the numbers I've been able to gather, you need 200M vaccinated people to achieve herd immunity, which is 400M doses.

Sources:

Wikipedia gives the US population as 308,401,808. Seventy percent of that is 215,881,266.

Latest COVID-19 infection totals come to about 16 million. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/coronavirus-us-c...

Unclear why I'm being downvoted.

Generally, health care workers and those most at risk are being granted early access.

From a public safety perspective, I wonder if perhaps those most likely to spread the disease should be the first to be innoculated rather than those most likely to have a bad outcome.

> Sweeping opinions you don't like under the rug doesn't make them go away.

Memes require connectivity to replicate.

I think YouTube should be applauded for protecting democracy. Why do you think they should be shamed for doing this?

> Because YouTube has a practical monopoly on user-generated video in the US.

More specifically, YouTube has a practical monopoly on publishing and promoting user-generated video in the US.

Anybody can generate video and a great many do. Promoting your video to millions of viewers is a bit more challenging, though can clearly be done wihtout YouTube: https://www.lifewire.com/videos-that-went-viral-before-youtu...

This doesn't even get into the really early viral videos like the charcoal briquettes lit with liquid oxygen, or the massive viewership of the comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 impact way back in the day.

You missed the most important point. It bears repeating: an informed populace is the basis of democracy.

A misinformed populace acts to destroy democracy.

Clearly, they are poorly informed. The obvious solution is that public education should be improved, rather than abolished.

> Should I be forced to pay for public schools if I don't have kids or disagree with what they are being taught?

Yes you should. An informed populace is the basis of democracy. If you choose to continue living in a democracy, you have to help pay for its upkeep.

OKay, how many trucks are rolling coal in SF and Oalkand?

Not sure why I was downvoted. Are the moving pintle injectors separate from a throttle vavle?

I have studied a lot of pintle injector designs and it can go either way. Reguardless, a moving pintle injector typically only has two moving parts.

You touch on the primary flaw of "spend the money here on Earth" argument.

Money spent on space programs IS spent here on Earth. The money paid to engineers and fabricators and for raw materials goes to pay for house payments, durable goods, food and taxes of the individuals working on these projects. And those payments create jobs delivering these services, which benefits an ever increasing number of people.

It's not as if dollar bills were litterally burned to provide rocket thrust.

Apparently, there are 310 cities and nearly 19,500 total number of incorporated cities, towns, villages and boroughs across the U.S. Twenty five thousand small towns is a reasonable estimate.

https://www.reference.com/geography/many-cities-united-state...

Okay, I'll bite, How many moving parts do the SpaceX engines have?

Assuming the fuel and oxidizer impellers are on a common shaft, that's one. There must be a throttle valve somewhere, so that's two. What am I missing? Are there reduction gears?

I live in a small town, population around 9,000. There are several dozen trucks rolling coal here.

How many small towns are there in the USA, each one of these trucks belching soot equvalent to over a hundred vehicles?

Even if there are only twenty five thousand small towns, that's a quarter million additional soot stacks on the road.

Coal isn't even all of the problem. "Rolling Coal" is a personal political statement of thousands.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolling_coal

Greenland once had a booming ecotourism industry, driving people across the ice sheet in diesel powered trucks. That is, until the diesel soot particulates destroyed the routes across the ice sheet.

Or you buy a nice vintage item, used. They are better made and more affordable.

We have see again and again that people don't take common sense measures to protect themselves and others until scared by climbing death rates. Once this happens, positivity rated decrease. Then they get COVID fatigue, relax these behaivors and the numbers climb once again.

Thanks for your most informative post. Elecrochemical oxygen extraction from lunar regolith has been a thing for decades, experiments have even flown on the Vomit Comit to demonstrate effectiveness in lunar gravity.

Helps if you go to the asteroids instead of the moon. 16 Psyche has tons of the stuff just lying around.

Somebody should mention CAELinux and LinuxCNC at this juncture.

https://www.caelinux.com/CMS3/ https://www.linuxcnc.org

Those two projects should get together an spawn a new era in computer aided design-fabrication.

Because somebody has to pay for the things that enable growth: roads, schools, libraries, airports, hospitals, etc...

Current US tax rates increase taxes on the wealthy (in theory, anyway). A flat tax would burden the relatively poor with increased taxes. Since the wealthy don't greatly contribute to growth and the relatively poor do, I don't see how an increased tax on the growth producers actually helps to crete growth.

Copper? I thought batteries were primarily lead.

By this time, there will be a demand for the development of space resources.

> By the same reasoning, one could build a piston engined supersonic aircraft...

Now that's a thought provoking engineering problem! Assume a supersonic propeller is required. Using the Thunderscreech as a baseline, which admittedly didn't quit go supersonic, but it gets us close. Its powerplant produced nearly 6,000 horsepower. That is certainly doable with a piston engine, top fuel dragster engines produce roughly 10,000 horsepower. For about ten seconds.

If this plane burned nitromethane, it wouldn't even need much atmospheric oxygen, nitromethane required roughly one tenth the amount of oxygen per mass of jet fuel. Of course, this means it has to carry a lot more fuel

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Fuel#Performance

> Another idea is to make a turbo-jet engine heated by electricity instead of fuel.

I was going to decry the inefficiency, then remembered that a resistor is only device with 100% efficiency.

This is a valid assumption. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Prototype

You should check out this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Republic_XF-84H_Thunderscreech

Yes, an aircraft employing a supersonic propeller first flew in the 1950's. It wasn't terribly efficient, but it was terribly loud .

> Any idea if others are following?

Well, we did just finish the Leonids meteor shower and the Geminids meteror shower is coming up in around a month, so the answer to your question would be "yes".

https://www.timeanddate.com/astronomy/meteor-shower/

I really enjoy Mr. Foster's work and in support, I am boycotting Disney until they pay up.