msl

> Uploading/flashing code is annoying [...]

A nice thing about MicroPython is that you only need to flash the chip once - at least if it has enough flash storage to support a file system. Once flashed, you can work on a REPL (over either UART or WLAN) and write files.

The F1 engine [1] (Saturn V, first stage) used another interesting way to improve efficiency with a gas generator cycle: using the turbopump exhaust gas as a cooling film in the engine nozzle. The fuel-rich exhaust was relatively cool compared to the flame generated by the rocket engine itself, and thus protected the nozzle from the most intense heat.

This is why, close up, the flame looks almost black close to the nozzle [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocketdyne_F-1

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/71/F-1_Engi...

Edit: Hopefully clarified a little, and changed the link in [2] (from https://youtu.be/DKtVpvzUF1Y?t=125).

I just tested it with Wine. The process seemed to consume about 320MiB of RAM.

If you use Firefox, go to about:config and set "media.autoplay.enabled" to false. A few web sites throw a fit when they can't autoplay, but that's a price I'm willing to pay.

> I feel that this is up to government regulation. The government should prevent unsafe cars from entering the road, not leave it up to the judgment of car-company CEOs.

Unfortunately, this might be asking your government a bit too much. If a car company decides to cut some obscure corners and keeps quiet about it [1], it will be very difficult for any outsider to catch it in time to prevent loss of life. Sure, you can punish them later, but by then, people will already have died.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_ignition_switch...

EDIT: Changed the link in [1] (from http://www.cbsnews.com/news/another-fatal-crash-may-be-linke...).

Plastics tend to consists of carbon and hydrogen chains. See for example polycarbonate [1], polyetene [2] and ABS [3] (contains nitrogen). They might however contain all sorts of additives. In order to produce just water, carbon dioxide and nitrogen the burning must be carefully controlled [4] - in your experiment the burning was probably not complete, which explains the fumes (that might have been carcinogenic [4]).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polycarbonate

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyethylene

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acrylonitrile_butadiene_styren...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plastic#Incineration_of_plasti...

A heat pump extracts thermal energy from, say, air. Electricity is not converted into heat, but used to create a temperature difference (one part of the system gets colder, the other gets hotter). This is vastly more efficient than using resistive heating elements. Such a system can appear to be more than 100% (up to around 400% [1]) efficient, if you look at the electricity going in, and the heat coming out.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heat_pump

The space shuttle Columbia was destroyed with all hands after it was hit by some insulating foam from its own external propellant tank [1]. The noise from its launch was also a serious threat [2]. I think it is fair to call it fragile. Of course, all space launch vehicles are fragile, but for a manned vehicle the shuttle sure had tight tolerances for safe operation.

Edit: I would argue that the huge mass of the (STS) oribiter was pretty much its greatest problem, and could be largely attributed to the requirement that the whole thing must be reusable. Not only was it problematic to bring all that mass down, but consider this: the system could bring almost as much mass to orbit as the Saturn V rocket [3], but almost all that capacity was consumed by the orbiter, leaving "just" 27,500 kg for payload. Of course, that is still a huge payload capacity, and the orbiter itself could, to an extent, be considered useful payload.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...

[2] https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/sound-supp...

[3] The maximum takeoff weight of a space shuttle orbiter was around 109,000 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_orbiter#Shuttle_...) while the maximum LEO payload of the Satrurn V was around 140,000 kg (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V).

Well, this is NASA. They are not exactly rolling in cash. Maybe you could look at it as a sort of a voluntarily paid tax, earmarked for space exploration? I, for one, would be happy to donate some of my time for the cause, if they were willing to let me.

> is this the future of work?

Not just the future: many people have contributed to open source projects that have ended up being used in commercial projects, and never received any payment for their work.

Why? What will kill it before then? What kind of a battery would have a long enough shelf life?

> None of it put any infrastructure for the long-term access of space into place, or anything to make future moon landings easier.

This is not entirely fair. The actual landings (which did teach us a lot about the moon) were just the tip of an iceberg. Consider project Gemini [1] for example. A dozen missions and several astronaut-weeks of space time to get hang of such consepts as rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft and extra vehicular activity, all of utmost importance in modern space exploration. Much of the hardware developed for the Apollo program was also very versatile, as demonstrated by, for example, the Skylab program [2]. A lot more mileage could have been extracted from the investment by means of the Apollo Aplications Program [3] had it not been killed to make way for the STS (I'm simplifying the history somewhat on this point).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Gemini

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_Applications_Program

Are we looking at the same image? The one I see shows a search for the term "hdtv" with some results from an idexed site. I really can't see how the user has in any way violated anyone's copyright.

Edit: Removed an irrelevant addendum.

I really cannot see copyright being violated in that screenshot. It is just a listing of torrent files available on one of the indexed sites. You could use Google search to produce a similiar effect (showing links to torrent files being hosted on some web site).

Edit: I'm not trying to be snarky or overtly pedantic, and the list of supported sites does suggest that this might be intended to facilitate piratism. Still, this is interesting and potentially useful technology, and seeing it merely as a tool for copyright infringement misses an important point.

One thing that the Space Shuttle had going for it was that it could be used as a Canadarm[1] platform. Bringing the arm back home in one piece was handy, and the orbiter's huge mass probably made it easier to reason about the physics involved.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadarm

You don't need to wear a space suit aboard the space station. These suits are worn mostly just during launch and returning to the surface - a few hours or a couple of days at a time.

The Soviet Union managed to produce their Soyuz-U rockets at a higher pace than that some four decades ago [1] while achieving a success rate of > 97%. Sure, it's a different rocket with different capabilities, but it was also a long time ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz-U

While I can not from the top of my head think of all that many actual books, I would recommend considering a couple of tv series: From the to Earth the Moon [1] and Moon Machines [2]. The former is based on a book [3], but I have not read it.

There is a lot of information available on the American space programs all over the internet, but if you would like to read about their Soviet counterparts, give Rockets and People [4] a go.

Finally, to get an idea of what it is like to live in outer space nowadays, Chris Hadfield's autobiography An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth [5] is a good read.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/From_the_Earth_to_the_Moon_(mi...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moon_Machines

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Man_on_the_Moon

[4] https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta...

[5] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18170143-an-astronaut-s-...

A GPS receiver is not supposed to work at an altitude greater than 60000 feet or while travelling at over 1000 knots, but the system itself does not in any way enforce this restriction [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Rest...

> Galileo was originally designed to be on an independent frequency, and the US has pushed to have it so close to the US GPS frequency that jamming will effectively kill both.

This (as I wrote in another comment) is the exact opposite of what actually happened [1].

Edit: Added a reference.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Positioning_System#Rest...

The "patch" was changing to a different frequency band, allowing anyone to block only one system without affecting the other [1]. This is very much different from being able to turn it off.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galileo_(satellite_navigation)...

And anyone interested in the history of old NASA computers might enjoy this: http://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html

Nuclear reactors have actually been launched into space multiple times [0][1]. Note, however, that their power output was on the order of a few kilowatts.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US-A

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TOPAZ_nuclear_reactor

> You pay for the cost of government elementary schools even if you homeschool your kids.

Which means that your kids will live in society largely made up of people who have received some education. You could argue that there is more value in this than there is in providing parking.

The Wikipedia article on Cascading failure [0] lists a few examples of this kind of a large scale grid failure. You start by taking one (or some) power plants down, thus overloading others trying to reblance the system, and possibly failing too. Such a chain reaction can, over multiple generations, take a great many power plants down.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cascading_failure

Not every two countries use mutually incompatible mains systems; see for example [0] to see a real time map showing an electricity market with multiple nations as participants. Note also, that your AC grids do not need to be compatible to transfer power between them, and even if they are, you might want to convert to and from DC in between - see [1] for examples of this. I have no idea why it is impossible for the Japanese connect their grids, but I am guessing the problem is not one of technology.

Edit: Reading the Wikipedia article on the subject [2] it seems that the incompatible Japanese grids are indeed interconnected to a degree. It also seems that the electricity market in Japan being currently liberalized, which I take to mean that it has traditionally not been particularily open for competition. That might explain why nobody has been in a hurry to improve the system as a whole.

[0] http://www.statnett.no/Kraftsystemet/

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-voltage_direct_current

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electricity_sector_in_Japan

> You could buy quite a few solar panels and lease several electric cars for less than it would take to move to NYC.

Neither of which is nearly as good for the environment as simply using less energy. Solar panels and electric vehicles take a lot of energy to make, and are not guarenteed to become carbon neutral during their usable life.

I am not sure I would call not building two space stations for the purposes of the program crazy. Remember, that the Apollo program was initiated before anyone had performed an orbital rendezvous of any kind. For quite some time the preferred (by most) approach to the moon landing was direct ascent [0], as rendezvousing seemed just too scary.

The approach of sending a large, but modular spacecraft all the way to the moon also proved to have the ability survive some rather interesting failure modes [1] so maybe it was not so crazy after all?

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_ascent [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_13#Accident

Could you elaborate a bit? What was "the crazy scheme of Apollo?"

It is quite unclear. It seems, however, that it runs at 5 volts, so I guess we are looking at 370mW and 1,15W. Explaining the power requirements clearly would really be important for a product like this.

See also esp-lisp [1] for a perhaps more practical Lisp on the platform.

EDIT: I created a new submission [2] for it, should someone want to discuss it.

[1] https://github.com/yesco/esp-lisp

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12707111