Posted on 10/27/2019 11:15:29 AM PDT by BenLurkin
I wasn’t with Raytheon, I was IN the US Air Force. 22 years.
But I don’t disagree with anything you’re saying.
I worked on main frame computers systems that spanned three stories and had a whopping 1 Megabyte of core memory, which had to be cooled by copper water pipes.
Yet the computer I’m using right now has 32 GB of RAM.
We’ve come a long way, baby!
Thanks fieldmarshaldj.
Thanks for your service.
What’s even more ‘frightening’ about the advance of technology is not that your desktop has 32gb of RAM... but that you can get a tablet with 32gb, and it’s aircooled.
I wonder how they solved the thermal tile separation/ablation issues...
More modern materials, or ...??
It looks fairly pristine in that photo
Maybe it was taken before it took off.
They truly were the Greatest Generation.
Did it deploy the Space Selfies satellite which fell to Earth this morning back east? Can’t find the link from this morning.
No, and it didn’t even achieve orbit. Samsung used a high altitude balloon to launch it. https://www.samsung.com/uk/explore/samsung-within/innovation/space-selfie-behind-the-scenes/
I am having trouble finding the article which I saw back in July or August.
IIRC, they figured out a way to change the course of it without firing thrusters by having it “bounce” off the atmosphere. Apparently, having it fire thrusters made it easy to see and track.
See my above posts - even the smallest attitude thruster firing (except for Cold Gas, and even then...) can be seen out past the asteroid belt and much of the way to Jupiter.
Atmospheric braking and bouncing off the atmosphere isn’t a new idea either - and if you know that a craft is doing that, you can track it on IR and figure out where it’s going before it cools off. Again, if you know what it’s done, you know where it is. They were trying it when they thought nobody was looking. Not so much a thing any more.
That said, the advent of commercially available Virtual Very Large Arrays is rather the end of even that being terribly effective.
Be sure to have it in front of a single-wide with about four mangy dogs looking out from under the frame porch. LOL!
>>She’ll never leave Fred, and we know it.<<
I never thought about the Wilma/Betty dichotomy. :)
You’ve never been in space too long...
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.