Why does it take 10 days?
Because it's not powered the whole way. You fire the engines briefly from earth to get to near-escape velocity, then coast to the moon, all the while slowing down because earth's gravity is pulling you back. It's like kicking a ball up a hill to get it into a dip over the top: you need to kick it hard enough to just get over the hill - i.e. when the moon's gravity is stronger at that point than earth's. If you went powered all the way you'd need a lot more fuel, and you'd also need even more fuel to slow you down when you got there.
I spent approx 1 year working on a very hush project at FDA. It (I shit you not) had requirements to allow rerouting of drug application and progress reviews (workflow system) around list of folks determined to be overly zealous in ensuring requirements were met. On top of that, our contract was terminated with one week notice (we met every milestone) and was awarded to the project manager's husband's company. My company threatened to sue and was awarded the entire contract amount.
I've long been a fan of HP Voyager series calculators. I used an HP-11c daily at work years ago. I still have it, an HP-15c, and and HP-12c. The 11c and 15c are both probably still on their 2nd set of batteries, after 40+ years.
Interesting. Nobody writes about the Rural Electrification project which was to run electricity to very remote farms, then high speed internet to them. Turns out satellite (or Starlink) can do it for a tiny fraction of their budget.
Also, nobody writes about the food pyramid which is totally non-science based.
These are under USDA tho, not directly USAID. Interestingly enough, USDA works for Big Agriculture producers to, not for consumers.
When I started we had a clear distinction between titles and the duties associated:
Assistant (entry level)
Associate (3-5 yrs)
Research (7 or more yrs)
Senior (typically >10yrs)
We transitioned from Programmer to Software Engineer during my 1st 10 yrs. It was a sore point for other company employees because we had nearly as many electrical engineers as programmers. They weren't happy with us becoming "engineers".
Chang resecured himself to the space station and made his way to the main hatch while Huan
brought Tiangong-3’s weapons online. The station crew had realized they were moving to war
footing twelve hours ago when Huan switched off the live viz feed of their activities. But it still felt
slightly unreal.
Once the taikonauts were all inside the station, Huan powered up the weapons module. The
chemical oxygen iodine laser, or COIL, design had originally been developed by the U.S. Air Force
in the late 1970s. It had even been flown on a converted 747 jumbo jet so the laser ’s ability to shoot
down missiles in midair could be tested. But the Americans had ultimately decided that using
chemicals in enclosed spaces to power lasers was too dangerous. The Directorate saw it differently.
Two modules away from the crew, a toxic mix of hydrogen peroxide and potassium hydroxide was
being blended with gaseous chlorine and molecular iodine.
This was really it, thought Chang as he watched the power indicators turn red. There was no
turning back once the chemicals had been mixed and the excited oxygen began to transfer its energy
to the weapon. They would have forty-five minutes to act and then the power would be spent.
The firing protocol for mankind’s first wartime shots in space was well rehearsed. The targets
marked in the firing solution had been identified, prioritized, and tracked for well over a year in
increasingly rigorous drills the crew eventually realized were not just to support war games down on
Earth. The long hours spent in the lab would finally pay off.
“Ready to commence firing sequence,” said Huan. “Confirm?”
One by one, the other taikonauts checked in from their weapons stations. Chang touched the
photo taped to the wall in front of him. His fingers lingered on the image of his beaming wife and
their grinning eight-year-old son. The smiling Ming, missing his two front teeth, wore his father ’s
blue air force officer ’s hat.
What the photo did not show was how upset his wife had been when he’d given Ming that hat the
night before. She thought it made her son look like a prop in a Directorate propaganda piece.
He moved his hand away from the photo and began his part of the operation, monitoring the
targeting sequence. He startled even Huan when he cried out, “Ready!”
For years, military planners had fretted about antisatellite threats from ground-launched
missiles, because that was how both the Americans and the Soviets had intended to take down each
other ’s satellite networks during the Cold War. More recently, the Directorate had fed this fear by
developing its own antisatellite missiles and then alternating between missile tests and arms-control
negotiations that went nowhere, keeping the focus on the weapons based below. The Americans
should have looked up.
Chang snuck another look at the photo and caught Huan pausing, his trigger finger lingering
above the red firing button. He appeared to be savoring the moment. Then Huan gently pressed the
button.
A quiet hum pervaded the module. No crash of cannon or screams of death. Only the steady purr
of a pump signified that the station was now at war.
The first target was WGS-4, a U.S. Air Force wideband gapfiller satellite. Shaped like a box with
two solar wings, the 7,600-pound satellite had entered space in 2012 on top of a Delta 4 rocket
launched from Cape Canaveral.
Costing over three hundred million dollars, the satellite offered the U.S. military and its allies
4.875 GHz of instantaneous switchable bandwidth, allowing it to move massive amounts of data.
Through it ran the communications for everything from U.S. Air Force satellites to U.S. Navy
submarines. It was also a primary node for the U.S. Space Command. The Pentagon had planned to
put up a whole constellation of these satellites to make the network less vulnerable to attack, but
contractor cost overruns had kept the number down to just six.
The space station’s chemical-powered laser fired a burst of energy that, if it were visible light
instead of infrared, would have been a hundred thousand times brighter than the sun. Five hundred and
twenty kilometers away, the first burst hit the satellite with a power roughly equivalent to a welding
torch’s. It melted a hole in WGS-4’s external atmospheric shielding and then burned into its electronic
guts.
Chang watched as Huan clicked open a red pen and made a line on the wall next to him, much
like a World War I ace decorating his biplane to mark a kill. The scripted moment had been ordered
from below, a key scene for the documentary that would be made of the operation, a triumph that
would be watched by billions.
Good article, but the author is using low numbers for the "speeding bullet" stats.
Like many jobs both around the house and industrial stuff, know what you are doing before you attempt it. But go away with the "it's too dangerous for mere mortals" speeches and special legislation to protect us all. Many people are capable and willing to do work that is hard and or dangerous. Snowflake legislation doesn't help the world work. Darwin awards work for the betterment of society.
And those $138 billion in loans were not "forgiven". That would be the loan companies, or the universities saying "don't pay us" or "don't pay us back".
What happened is AHIC said "let raise everybody's taxes. We'll print more money and 'inflate it'. Nobody will notice."
I'm a fan of affordable education. This is just vote-buying. If I'm re-elected, free ice cream for all.
Ladies and gentlemen of the Hacker News jury, I’m just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and runoff into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my mobile phone, I wonder: “Did little demons get inside and type it?” I don’t know!My primitive mind can’t grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know – when we get a "new" solution that replaces all the former solutions, and uses React or HTML, IT MUST BE MAGIC!
Geez... This sounds like one of those stories where somebody had just enough charisma to convince investors and employees that he knew what he was doing, when he didn't. Developing software isn't the same as running a business.
Love this topic. Early in my computing career I was trying to modernize our software testing. I wrote a small pgm to generate the Cyclomatic Complexity of our Fortran code. I was especially pleased after discovering an error while working thru the IEEE paper McCabe had published.
That's sad and unfortunate. Experts and dealers of such equipment are a dissapearing breed. I have 2 slide rules; a super cheap plastic unit from high school days, and a full-sized Dietzgen I bought for a dollar (leather case and all). It was in a junked car at a pick'nPull yard. My skills have gotten very rusty, so now I prefer my HP-15c handheld or my HP-42c emulators on my iPhone.