If any of the engines has a TWR above one when landing, even at it's lowest setting, i can't help but wonder why don't they use a smaller engine which can be more effectively used to land.
I'm sure theres a perfectly good reason for this, there's a reason SpaceX has its reputation, but i'm curious as to why.
Mostly, I think, because they'd prefer to avoid having several types of engine involved. SpaceX is big on cost savings through commonality. The development and tooling and testing etc. for creating a smaller landing-only engine would probably cost darn near as much as for the main engines, so if you can get it done with them, it makes sense to do so.
If they can't get them on the ground reliably with just the Merlins after trying enough, then maybe they'll do something like that. But if it's a simple matter of software and a handful of tests, as it seems may be the case, then they've saved a lot of effort and cost.
The other answer is that the F9 architecture was designed (and flying) before this mode of recovery was "the one". And they'd prefer to not redesign the thing if it can work as-is. So they'll try it and see before spending gobs of money on a re-design. Rockets aren't software (except to the extent they are) and changing things about them is dangerous and expensive.
For one, developing reliable rocket engines takes a long time, you can't just whip up a new one. The current Merlin has a very large throttling range already when compared to existing engines. The size of the engines they use now is defined by the need to get payload's to space, the landing has to be secondary.
Grasshopper was able to hover, or even perform a powered descent and was probably lighter than an F9 first stage, so I don't think this can't be it. They likely do have an engine configuration capable fo a lower minimum thrust, but they're choosing not to use it presumably because it's not optimal for the primary mission, and they believe it's not necessary for the landing.
Seems kinda hacky, instead of investing the time & money needed for full reusability, they'll do a fraction of the work and hope for a successful helicopter recovery, which seems kinda hard. I know they tried a capture like that with some probe and it failed.
I can't figure out it that's brilliant or stupid.
Catching things falling from space is actually something that was done pretty regularly in the past. Before we had digital imaging sensors spy satellites had to rely on film. Orbiting imaging platforms would 'drop' film canisters, which would be caught by waiting aircraft, and flown back to a processing center to be developed.
I'm kinda surprised that we haven't seen a price decrease, since AWS keeps reducing prices. I can understand they wanting to decrease the 'freeloaders', but it seems shortsighted, those people are their future paying customers.
Their new pricing makes it more economical to just get a small droplet from digitalocean, i'm surprised they chose to be above that point.
I wouldn't be so quick to assume they're being shortsighted. I have no idea what the details are, but I've got to assume they have very explicit data about who and how many people convert from free to paid tiers and that they're taking this data into account.
Again, assumptions here, but maybe they found that only a very small % of users start with a completely free 24/7 app and move to paid? Maybe the folks who convert start with a low-utilization (<= 12 hrs/day), hence the limit.
I dunno. I'm just guessing that there's some logic behind the decisions.
So, in this scenario, losing the device (phone, tablet, computer) will mean losing access to the account right? It is coupled to device ID or some cookie right?
I am going to add an addendum about this which I will do now. On the app we are developing, the app installation has a unique id. Every once in a while, all of the "history" is stored in a secure fashion back on the server. So a device migration can be done. I must admit, losing a device is trickier because you wouldnt which id to use to restore on a new device. Let me think about this a bit
But seriously, this is literally the problem that logins were designed to solve. With a login, you are defining an external concept of "user" that is distinct from the device.
Available security factors are: something you are, something you possess, something you know. Right now, you're using something you possess (the device). The problem is, if I lose the device, I've lost my security credential, and no longer "own" my account.
To fix this, you could collect an email, and when installing your app, you could prompt the user if they want to use an existing account or create another. But then, you probably want to add some security in the form of a password... and then you've created a login.
> I must admit, losing a device is trickier because you wouldnt which id to use to restore on a new device.
This will happen. It will happen all the time. And when it does, people will be disappointed. People will stop using your app because they lost everything. I've seen this happen.
This system can work if the data is not important. But the nature of apps that store data or have a concept of "your data is stored" needs to account for cases where the original device is no longer accessible/usable.
> So a device migration can be done.
Relying on device migration is foolish. It will fail. And I will blame your app for losing my data.
Yes, but in Mars you're ,in theory, prepared to live and maybe thrive in that harsh enviroment, and it might actually help earth population to know how to survive an enviromental disaster.
Short term, i agree it makes little sense to try to colonize other planet, but looking at it as a long term survival of the species type of affair, it makes a lot of sense.
Does someone have a high level overview of how this works? The only route in is through signing up and i don't want to hand over my CC# just to see what's this about.
Forge is essentially a platform that makes it very easy to provision a Laravel-ready server (though it states it works with other frameworks too). It's a replication of Laravel Homestead (http://laravel.com/docs/homestead) on a server, so you can have the same development and production environments.
Hey munyukim, really good site and story, i have a question and an offer:
question: What is your plans for monetization? How do you plan on making money with this?
Offer: Private Message me if you need help with then programming, i'll be happy to help (been programming in php/mysql for longer than i care to remember)
SEEKING WORK - Buenos Aires or Remote
I'm a full stack developer with experience in big-scale projects. I do node.js/php/python/js/mysql/redis work mostly, and i know Hadoop (Hbase/MapReduce/Hive). I'm a an AI begginer, but i'm interested in learning from that field.
I'm sure theres a perfectly good reason for this, there's a reason SpaceX has its reputation, but i'm curious as to why.