Posts by Andrew Newstead

Me too

CE4 - cracking camera. Still got it and still works. Not used it for a while since going digital, though.

Chinon is not like the other Dixon brands, it was actually an independant Japanese camera company that Dixon's were the sole UK importer for. It had quite a good reputation for it's lenses, I still use my CE4's 50 mm lens on my digital SLR in manual mode - fast and bright.

Chinon used the Pentax mounting formats like a few camera manufacturers (Practika for example), this allowed them to take advantage of lots of 3rd party lenses made for Pentax cameras.

How about

Midsommer for next years Hols?

Unfortunately...

Product placement has taken the edge off what used to be a rather good way of adding realism to a science fiction film. Kubrik did it with 2001 as a way to ground his audience with the reality of his future images. There are many logos around the film but they are in context and subtly placed so as to extend a realism. Many other films of the period used the device too.

Bladerunner, on the other hand, may have gone a little over the top...

And as for Alien/s, well we all buy from Weyland-Yuttani now - don't we?

Space debris

The biggest problem in Low Earth Orbit is the growing issue of space debris. It has got so bad that it is agreed by the space powers that anything that is launched into LEO is deorbited so that it does not add to the problem. This will include the space station when it comes to the end of it's life.

Another problem for the ATV will be keeping it in orbit because it is too low to remain there when it fuel runs out.

Reuse would be nice but we are not there yet.

Or..

will we see a mass rejection of computer systems and modern communications?

No, I don't think so either, although it is not a long step to see that the most sensitive information may be declared not to be stored electronically, I suppose at least you can eat or burn paper...

I think we are moving to the the transparent society that the SF author David Brin have been banging on about for years, where it becomes impossible (and eventually illegal) to keep secrets.

This is rumour control...

This is story of the Americans blowing a huge wedge of cash on a space pen is mostly an urban myth.

The "Space Pen" was actually invented by Paul Fisher of the Fisher Pen Company as a private venture in 1965. NASA never actually issued a requirement for it and used pencils like the Russians.

Fisher then lobbied NASA to try the pen when NASA had discovered that broken points and bits of graphite presented problems in the zero g environment. Issues with flamability also emerged after the Apollo 1 fire. NASA essentially bought the pen of the shelf. The Russian space programme also came to this conclusion and ordered a batch of the pens fron Fisher in 1969.

Ah!

Found a witch.....

maybe...

bit o rock?

True - but...

I agree with your comment about Avatar (although I have read that James Cameron was quite careful with his space science), but consider the case of Saturn and Titan. Place Saturn in the "Goldilocks" zone and Titan could become quite a nice place to be for life. The same could also be said for Jupiter and Europa although there could be major issues regarding Jupiter's radiation belts (this might drive evolution faster through mutations though).

Regarding the day/night cycle, I not sure if this is a difficulty. We have a similar problem on Earth inside the artic and antartic circles and life does work in these zones, granted it's hard. A moon of a gas giant will have periods of eclipse but these periods will be short.

What could be more difficult are the orbital dynamics. Going back to Titan again, Titan has an orbital period around Saturn of about 16 days. It is also tidally locked to Saturn, that is it's rotational period matches it's orbital period, so it has a "day" of 16 dfays too. That means that Titan will have 8 (Earth) days of Sunshine and 8 days worth of darkness. This is actually quite less extreme than the situation in our polar circle regions so I feel that this could be quite managable for terresial type life. Eclipses could complicate things as these would last a few days during the daylight cycle but I don't know enough about Titan's orbit at the moment to comment on the frequency of such eclipses, I suspect that Titan's obital inclination takes it out of Saturn's shadow cone quite a lot.

The situation for Europa becomes much more easy as Europa has an orbital period of 3.5 days around Jupiter giving a 1.25 daylight/night cycle(it is tidally locked to Jupiter), much closer to our own. In the cases of eclipses for Europa these will happen every daylight period as Europa is too close to Jupiter to avoid Jupiter's shadow cone, but they should only last a few hours.

In all then, different, perhaps difficult, but not impossible for life to get going and to become complex on such a moon. I think these are very exciting possibilities and given the current state of exoplanet hunting I think these possibilites are more likely than not.

These are exciting times!

Andrew

hurricane

just commenting on the shape. I'm building a Hurricane model at the minute and have been looking at a lot of photos of the rear structure, it does bear a resemblance.

Just one point...

The Navy's choice of carriers does actually make sense in our current age. We have always need to have air support for whatever is happening on the ground, but we don't always have the luxury of airfields being available to us near the action. This is why carriers are good sense at the moment. For more reading on this I direct you to two books, Phoenix Squadron and Vulcan 607, both by Rowland White. Both of these cover (British) air operations where a presence was needed to demonstrate that we could strike a non Russian target during the cold war. Vulcan 607 covers the famous Vulcan raids on the Falkland Islands during the Falklands war, Phoenix Squadron deals with a lesser known mission to put a pair of RN Buccaneers over British Honduras during the seventies to deter Guatamalan aggression against the former colony. This latter mission was carried out from the previous HMS Ark Royal after an epic crossing of the Atlantic and graphically demonstrates the capability of carrier air power to influence events, where the Falklands raids were quite desperate affairs brought about by the lack of large carriers*.

Andrew Newstead

*(This is not to take it away from the people who made it work - Blackbuck was an incredable achievement)

Only...

Mostly I agree but bear in mind the conservertive gov of the eighties and ninties was also accused of being American poodles, Maggie and Ronnie Raygun immediately spring to mind.

America has had a big influence on the UK since WW2 and I can't an end to this just yet.

not quite...

The "hanger" is the nose cone fairing of the launcher and the "2-by-6-ers" are aluminium "egg trays" acting as sound deadning insulation. It gets noisy enough to phyically break things in there at launch.

Daja Vu!

Funny, I explained this one at the weekend in a comment to the article on ther Sabatier reactor that has been sent to ISS. In case you missed it here is a copy of the salient bits;

>Sending this to the space station may have a secondary agenda for the future exploration of Mars.

Interestingly this has been suggested as a means of producing rocket fuel and other resources on Mars (ref: "The Case for Mars", Robert Zubrin). The plan calls for an Earth return vehicle being sent to Mars ahead of the crewed landers by about two years. The return vehicle would carry with it a few tonnes of Liquid Hydrogen which is reacted with CO2 from the Martian atmosphere after landing to produce Methane and water (which is split back to H2 and O2, H2 being fed into the reaction again and the O2 stored). This way the lander manufactures the propellants for the return trip before the the astronauts are sent to Mars. With no need to take the return propellants with them them the crewed vehicle is much less massive and can built and launched much more easily than a completely self contained mission.

Note also that this technique also can provide the basic living requirements of O2 and water for the astronauts on Mars.

This can also be further extended if a ready supply of water ice can be found close to the landing site, thus allowing more H2 to be produced.

Zubrin has called this "living off the land" with respect to Mars and sees it as a "game changing" concept for human exploration of Mars and eventual colonization. It has been seriously suggested that this technique be trialed by using it to fuel a unmanned Martian sample return mission.

Anyone interested in finding more search for "Mars Direct" in a good search engine near you.

<

As I said before - look up Mars Direct

Andrew Newstead

Oh really?

Well my shower is only big enough for one person so I have to touch myself - least I'm honest about it...

Actually...

it does seem every other person has an iPhone and an iPod, at least it seems so on the train I catch every day to work. Seems to be a fair number of Macbooks too, come to that...

For the record the train is Derby to Chesterfield and back again, every day.

Oy!

Don't forget the other A in NASA stands for Aeronautic. It may not get the same reportage that the Space side does but NASA does very important work on plain old flying machines, basic research and testing of concepts that then gets spun out to commercial interests to turn into viable products.

An awfull lot of kit we depend on when we fly these days (as pilot or passenger) came through NASA first, no matter where in the world you are. I reckon the US tax payer gets a bloody good deal where NASA is concerned and their politicos ought to start realising that.

Andrew Newstead

Right type?

I'm not a doc but I do know that tissue compatibility is a major issue. Jobs was probably the only person that the available liver would actually match up to. In which case he was bloody lucky and and cash or importance had nothing to do with it. In fact it is more than likely Jobs could have died waiting for a compatible organ to come available, this is a fact of life (or death) for anyone waiting for any kind of organ transplant.

It is also worth pointing out that the liver is the only organ that can regenerate itself. Quite often part of the donor liver will be transplanted into one patient and the other part to a different patient, it is possible that this has happened here so Jobs may not have been the only beneficery of this liver.

The only way to improve on this situation for everybody is for us all to carry a donor's card or get onto the donor's register - or adopt Larry Niven's suggestion in the "Known Space" stories and execute criminals for spare parts...

X-35B

The X-35B (X-plane pre-cursor to the F35B) did demonstrate STOVL operations before the JSF contract was awarded, it's just taken this long for the full scale productionised design to get to this point.