Comments by "Tony Wilson" (@tonywilson4713) on "Real Engineering" channel.

  1. Do you think he's alone?? I'm an aerospace engineer who works in industrial control systems and automation. A lot of that includes safety control functions like Emergency Stops and Safety interlocks. You know that stuff that keeps hands attached and prevents stuff blowing up. I eventually got the second highest qualification any engineer can get in that field. Getting that qualification has kept me OUT OF WORK. The last time I saw a job specifically asking for that qualification I called up the recruiter to enquire. By that time my qualification needed to be renewed, but that was just a fee. I asked that if I was offered the job I'd pay the fee before starting. The reply was "Your the 4th or 5th person to put that too me today" and then they hanged up. That meant that other engineers had been experiencing EXACTLY the same situations I had. That's what being qualified means to engineers these days. You work you ass off to get your degree which with all the math and applied math classes is damn lot harder than any arts degree. If you then take the effort to get further qualified your job prospects can GO DOWN not up. People like Managers and their Human Resource minions don't like people who speak out and people with qualifications are often caught out. Their employment contacts often include clauses where "if you know something you must speak out" which clashes with the reality that if you speak out you get your contract cut WHICH HAS HAPPENED TO ME just like it happed to the submariner/engineer David Lochridge who's suing Oceangate. If you think engineers are angry over this sort of crap YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT and its about time there were some actual laws that protected us. Because when we're allowed to do our jobs YOUR LIVES are safer. - When your driving a car its mechanical engineers who designed the brakes to help you stop before the tree; - When you plug something in its electrical engineers who make it so you don't get shocked; - When you drink a glass of water its chemical engineers who make it so you don't get poisoned; - When you get in a jet to fly off on your holiday its aerospace engineers who keep the wings attached. We keep you clowns alive in 100s of ways every day. And before any of you complain just note you wouldn't even be able to read this with out engineers.
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  2. What you are describing isn't just a Boeing issue its RAMPANT across the entire engineering space. I did my degree in aerospace but have worked in industrial control systems, robotics and automation for 30+ years. I have worked across a number of industries with most of my time in manufacturing and mining. the thing I have seen infect industry after industry is a culture of profits before everything with CEOs and other senior executives driven purely by the bonuses they get. Everything you are describing I have seen in EVERY INDUSTRY I have worked. Its made working as an engineer almost impossible because you're constantly being asked to compromise under a threat to lose your job which is made worse by the fact that most engineers now work as contractors and they can just cancel our contract.
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  3. Its why engineers end up hating clowns with arts degrees. I did aerospace engineering and I had to do 2 additional pure maths classes before we started on the wonders of aerodynamics and other fun stuff. The actual number of classes I had to take added up to the equivalent of an extra semester but planned to be done in the same time as an arts degree. I have spent most of my career in industrial control systems and automation. A lot of that includes safety control functions like Emergency Stops and Safety interlocks. You know that stuff that keeps hands attached and prevents stuff blowing up. I eventually got the second highest qualification any engineer can get in that field. Getting that qualification has kept me OUT OF WORK. People like Managers and their Human Resource minions don't like people who speak out and people with qualifications are often caught out. Their employment contacts often include clauses where "if you know something you must speak out" which clashes with the reality that if you speak out you get your contract cut WHICH HAS HAPPENED TO ME just like it happed to the submariner/engineer David Lochridge who's suing Oceangate. You can't imagine how much I hate recruitment people these days. If you think engineers are angry over this sort of crap YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT and its about time there were some actual laws that protected us. Because when we're allowed to do our jobs properly YOUR LIVES are safer. - When your driving a car its mechanical engineers who designed the brakes to help you stop before the tree; - When you plug something in its electrical engineers who make it so you don't get shocked; - When you drink a glass of water its chemical engineers who make it so you don't get poisoned; - When you get in a jet to fly off on your holiday its aerospace engineers who keep the wings attached. We keep you clowns alive in 100s of ways every day. And before any of you complain just note you wouldn't even be able to read this with out engineers.
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  4.  @existentialcrisisactor  Go look at the photos of that boat leaving the dock in Tunisia. It was a tragedy in the making from the moment they put 700 people on board that rust bucket. Absolutely tragic, but also just as stupid as Oceangate.
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  5. I hate to bust anyone's nuts on this, but as an aerospace engineer this looks like a senior year project that's somehow managed to get funding. They have taken a novel idea and progressed it further with funding. But there is one major issue that your video totally did very good job of dismissing and that's the structure of the satellite itself and where that 10,000G loading is. And before you dismiss me I was doing Finite Element structural simulations on discarding sabot projectiles at 200,000G while an undergraduate in 1987. Also from that time. When the Challenger accident happened the biggest issue for satellite manufacturers was that all the satellites built for launch on the shuttle had to wait until the shuttle could fly again. They'd all been built for launch on a vehicle that took of at 4G of less. They couldn't just be moved over onto a Delta or other because the tended to launch at over 20G and some over 30G and the satellite structures were not up to it. Also from that time is the Pegasus air launched vehicle which has since become one of the most reliable launch systems ever (3 outright failures, 2 partial failures and 45 successful launches including the last 31). When it was being designed I remember the discussions of how they had to redesign for the horizontal launch and consider how that affected the vehicle structure and the payload structures for those loads. A capacitor and other parts on a circuit board is one thing, but the physical structure of the satellite is another thing entirely. This was actually where project HARP failed. By the time they had satellite structures strong enough to handle the launch loads there wasn't much left for payload. Is this system novel? Yes Does it have some things worth spending some money on? Probably Is it going to be a came changer? NO. Where I think this system is going to come unstuck is with that much mass swinging at those revolutions any failure is going to massive damage if not destroy the system. No matter how hard people try things fail. I have worked in safety systems and failure analysis and this screams on the what happens when things fail scenario.
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  6.  @lordsamich755  Actually you are quite wrong there. Sorry if this is a bit long, but there have been dramatic changes in what we now know about the financial aspects of renewable energy. The Germans spent €1.3 trillion on renewable energy and did NOT the outcomes they expected. I'm Australian engineer and I've worked with German engineers and they are bloody smart and they worked out some things. The first thing they realised is that wind and solar are most reliable at different times of the day. Solar is obviously best when the sun is up. Wind is most reliable in early morning and late afternoon, because its driven by the different rates the land and oceans heat up and cool down. What the Germans worked out is that if you balance the amount of wind versus solar efficiency you can save around 23% in outright costs, because you don't need to install as much to get the same delivered power. Normally you need to install about 2.2kW of renewable power for every 1kW of coal or nuke you turn off. With a balanced wind solar system the Germans claim that can come down to about 1.7 kW (about 23% less). That saving on wind turbines and solar panels can go into storage where there is an even bigger advantage. The Germans worked out that FINANCIALLY the worst thing for renewable energy is the exact opposite of what most people thought. Its not when there isn't enough wind and sun its when there's too much, because it overpowers the grid. Basically if you inject to much energy into a grid the voltage climbs and stuff starts melting. From a financial investment point if your renewable energy system has to be disconnected or locked out. The its NOT making any money when it should. Even worse is if you have to pay someone to burn the excess off and that's happened in Germany. With storage you don't lose that excess energy you get to sell some of it when the wind & sun die down. In the system described here instead of earning nothing for that excess energy you get $0.70 of it back (he said its got 70% efficiency). The Liquid air battery being developed in England only gets 60% but it can be massive and can store for longer. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMLu9Dtw9yI That's the really big lesson from the Germans. A smarter design that balances the wind, solar & storage costs less and works better and EARNS MORE. I hope that helps - sorry if its a long answer.
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  7. I was doing my degree in aerospace when that happened. I was actually in Florida only weeks before and watched the previous mission take off from about 60 miles away. Even at that distance it was impressive. A year later when I was working in the summer for my professor in some of his consulting work I walked into his office one day to see him head in hands. When I asked, all he said was "They're going to do it again." He'd actually been at Morton Thiokol the day before to meet with the engineers from Lockheed to discuss their simulation results on the redesign for the SRBs. My professor's specialty was the structural analysis of axisymmetric structures using computers. What we call Finite Element Analysis (FEM). At the time he was one of the top 2 or 3 in the world on the subject. He was so dismayed by the behavior of the people involved that he predicted they'd lose another Shuttle. The SRBs didn't fail the second time but the ATTITUDES of people making decisions certainly played a major factor in the loss. So you know - the engineers knew within a few hours that there had been a significant strike to the wing. They had requested it be examined by re-tasking a spy satellite to take photos. They were overruled because someone decided they couldn't do anything anyway and that the photo would cost too much money. What that did was take away ANY OPTIONS. By doing stupid things LIKE NOT having a backup ROV on the support vessel Oceangate took away ANY OPTIONS that might have existed once they started getting into trouble.
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  8.  @ckdigitaltheqof6th210  Sorry but there's a monumental difference between what the X-15 needed for thermal protection and what anything coming back from orbit needs. I get where you are coming from but its just not the same thing. The X-15 was a ballistic vehicle NOT an orbital vehicle. There are some small sounding rockets that can lift over 100kg to 500km which is higher than the ISS but they can't put anything into orbit. To go into orbit is a matter of velocity as well as altitude. On coming down that velocity shows up as kinetic energy and its that kinetic energy that burns up satellites, meteorites, etc. Its why the Shuttle needed that tile system. Its a cute idea to bring the ISS back, but its also totally impractical.
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  9. Dude you are usually very good on your technology - your video on ventilators was a 12 out of 10, not just a 10 or an 11 it was a 12. It shut up quite a few people who were building ventilators out of industrial components that WOULD have killed people. I do industrial automation and I know industrial equipment cannot work accurately enough to match the requirements you described. That video may well have saved lives. But on this one you have screwed the pooch a bit on the South Australian information. Like most industrialized countries its simply not accurate to say that power grids are designed. They don't simply design and plan power grids. The y are constantly being reviewed and added to and are better described as "evolved." South Australia's real problem was that they turned of both of their base load cola fired plants before they had *ANY alternative generation let alone renewable generation ready. As for the Tesla "big battery" it does NOT respond to frequency it responds to voltage. Possibly that was just a mind slip. What design there is in Power grids comes from the standpoint of where power is generated to how it is distributed. In Australia we now have a huge issue with WHERE our power is now being generated. In Victoria (where I am from) our grid evolved around 3 major coal fired units in the Eastern part of the state and we now generate vast amounts of wind energy from the Western side of the state. So our grid was designed to inject power in the East NOT the west. In South Australia there grid evolved around 2 coal fired units right next to each other in Adelaide. Now its generated 100s of kilometers away. Now one of our biggest problems is that where we generate the grids cannot handle the power we are trying to inject. On the liquid batteries this was fantastic. I have seen other vids on them and they are potentially a game changer. Having each house have its own battery is very nice for the shareholders of Tesla but its totally uneconomical for an entire society. We will move to large localized batteries in future, because most substations have room around them to do their job efficiently. The most important thing about batteries is that they stabilize the grid and with more and more small scale generation (including domestic solar) getting connected to the grid large local batteries (sometimes called community batteries will become vital for grid stability. BUT for actual backup power for grids batteries are unlikely to solve the problem. They are great for transient dampening but suck if you need to keep a power grid up for a couple of days. Pumped hydro is great for massive storage the Snowy 2.0 project is planned to have 7 days of energy reserve. BUT pumped hydro has 1 massive issue - you must have suitable geography for it. Hydrogen is a great possibility because if you can generate enough and cheap enough you can simply use it instead of coal in existing power stations. It has one huge issue and that is its basic nature. I work in automation and control systems. I'm trained and certified in EEHA and hydrogen is a bitch because you have to be extra careful because of how easily it ignites and how violently it explodes and hot hot it burns. Hydrogen really is a bitch to do any electrical work around. One technology I had not hear of until recently is the liquid air battery. I find this really interesting because it uses a lot of off the shelf technology that we know and understand. In automation we call that kind of design work "integration' where we take bits form other solutions and combine or integrate them into a new solution for a similar or unrelated problem. Here's a link to the vid done by Dave Borlace on his channel Just Have a Think. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMLu9Dtw9yI In that system large chunks like the compressors, liquid air system and turbines are fairly standard items. The thermal storage part is the innovation. My opinion is that is a technology that should be pursued because it can provide several days of backup.
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  10.  @t60-flying95  Great question. I have no answer as I'd not heard of them before your question. I am aware that there is underdevelopment at the University of Illinois- Chicago a Lithium-Air battery. Its advantage is that it uses the air around the batterie as the other half of the battery and has the potential for a massive change in storage density. The concept isn't new but they have struggled to make the membrane work. They did have a "break though" about mid 2018 and had batteries that they did something like a 1000 recharge/discharge cycles with. So there is a lot of work going on in the storage area. Elon's new battery is apparently a big step forward. Sandy Munro (here on YT) did an extensive vid on it and why its so much better.
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  11.  @lordsamich755  Simple your statement "Any process to store wind or solar energy is going to increase it's cost. Any honest assessment of the full requirement. Is always going to place wind and solar energy as substantially more expensive that it needs to be; were it a truly viable option." Its fundamentally flawed because it does not consider the lessons learned by the Germans about renewable energy grid design. Its also ignores the facts that as renewable energy systems develop and production of those technologies scales up they are getting more efficient and less expensive. So the profitability is getting better all the time. I just had a face to face argument the other day with yet another old school pro-coal clown who whined about how it cant be done without subsidies. That's just so hypocritically ignorant and infuriating because it ignores all the subsidies and government handouts the carbon industries have had for decades. That said renewables CANNOT do everything and I argue that all the time with Greenies. We've always had a mix of energy sources and we'll continue to have a mix of energy sources. I don't know why people don't get that.
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  12.  @lordsamich755  On your other question YES. Increased energy storage makes renewable energy more PROFTABLE. Its not so much that it reduces the price you just have more energy to sell from the assets you own. Think simple economics. If you have a wind turbine that CAN generate 100MWH a year but the network manager only lets you sell 80MWH then you didn't make as much money as can. I don't know about you but if I own a 100MWH turbine I'd like to sell a 100MWH of energy and make as much money as possible, but I also know that's not how energy markets work and at times the network manager will tell me to lock it down.. But if you can keep the turbine spinning and capture that other 20MWH with a liquid metal battery then at 70% you can then sell 14MWH later when the network wants it. Yes initial costs are more because you had to buy a turbine and a battery but you have more energy to sell and if you do your math and manage your assets you'll make more money. In future renewable Energy will be like any other commodity.
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  13.  @lordsamich755  Red herring I can call that bullshit and say that all you are doing is arguing in circles. Its strange how you keep writing things that make sense and then you run off on tangents that make no sense at all. You say batteries are no good and then pumped hydro is the solution. You clearly haven't done any actual research because you just parroting stuff I already know. Yes Pumped Hydro exists and has existed for decades. A boss I worked for who had been in that industry explained that to me over 25 years ago. It has one huge flaw its limited by geography as all hydro is. Do you even know WHY it has existed for decades? Hmmm - Clearly you don't or you wouldn't be arguing nonsense. Hydro turbines take time to spin up and shut down they do not have a fast response like gas turbines and stream turbines. Once spinning and synched to the network the operators & owners don't like turning them off. So when demands drop they have 2 choices dump energy or recover it. That's why they have pumped hydro its a way to recover and store energy for when network demands rise. Australia is currently building the biggest pumped Hydro in the world Snowy 2.0. I argue with people all the time about how important it is. They think it will clash with the renewable sector when instead it will help support it, by providing the storage needed. Yes it has issues, but they'll get sorted out. Wind turbines matched with batteries is the same principle as traditional hydro & pumped hydro with but with different technologies. Now if you wan to learn something fine if you want to just be an argumentative clown bother someone else.
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  14.  @lordsamich755  I am Australian you effing clown - how do you think I know about Snowy 2.0. I also know it has several major conceptual flaws that need to be dealt with but probably wont. Some of the stupidity surrounding it is so bad we should reintroduce hanging. But on the other hand if you actually understood the engineering issues with renewable energy you'd know its one of the most important projects Australia will do in the next 50 years. If you understood the issues with hydro it always comes down to geography. As for our rivers that's our saddest joke and its you New South Welshmen right in the middle of that screw up. Your governments corruption and mismanagement there is staggering. They bought back low class water at nearly 10x the value they sold it netting close to $50 million for a company based in a Caribbean tax haven. Then there's stupidity of the $470M NSW spent pumping water out of the Murray UPSTREAM to Broken Hill. Gladys Brainspace is arguably the stupidest political leader in Australian history, but sadly others are challenging her for that title. After the stupidity of water rights there is the straight out theft that's gone on because the NSW government disbanded the police unit set up to investigate water theft. And that's before we get onto the bullshit the Queenslanders have done which is almost as stupid and what the South Australians wont admit to which is equally as stupid or the issues Victoria ignores which are just as disgraceful. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-06/billions-of-litres-of-water-missing-from-murray-darling-basin/10873782 Don't tell me about the water mismanagement. Our space Agency commissioned the "Space Road Map" one of the few things they did well. Its first item was advanced space based water management but put it its delivery at around 2035.* My degree is in aerospace and I spent a year of my life working out how we could start to deliver that in 3 years. The Space Agency were so stupid they ignored their own report. They claimed it could no be justified and instead wanted to spend their money on GPS, because Suzie Super Brain and the rest of the millennials need to know the location of there mobiles to the nearest centimeter. Yeah - Our Ag and tourism industries which rely on water are worth over $200billion a year and employ over 850,000 Australians. If you want to ague that go argue with Deloitte and the Farmers Federation they gave me those numbers. I asked for $720million over 6 years (which was based on half the Manus Island contract) and that was too much but then they gave the Airforce $7 billion for a their version of Space Force and the navy $55billion for new submarines that's since blown out to $80 billion. That's why were aren't getting any major advancements in water management. The navy needs subs and the air force wants more toys and we know many other ass holes want their money too. If I sound like a pissed of frustrated angry engineer ready to tear the head off the next idiotic clown - FINE, that's what I am. As far as energy goes I scored a small consult job a few years back with a Taiwanese investment firm who handed me the 2016 clean Energy Council report asked me to make sense of it. Combined with PowerStation data (ages & commissioning dates) from Wikipedia the cost of kW for kW replacement of our aging coal fired power stations over the next 15 years was ~$80billlion. But from other research that needs to be multiplied by 2.2 and it jumped to ~$176 billion then you ad in the fact our population has risen from 20 to 25 million with out building a single baseload power station and its expected to rise to 35million by 2035 and that number is above $260billion. That's why arguing about semantics is fucking worthless. The idiots in Victoria turned of 3 power stations with no replacement and South Australia switched of both theirs without replacement. All that has been built is renewable and according to the clean energy council less that 20% of what has been turned off has been replaced. What's actually saved Australia has been the domestic solar which has installed so much its the equivalent of a big power station BUT WITHOUT STORAGE it creates issues. So those German engineers who were defending their work a few years ago while assholes like Michael Schellenberger played their misdirection games might just be able to save us a $30, $40, $50 billion or more. Go check the Clean Energy Council Reports and International Energy Agency reports because its not just Australia the entire world is heading into an energy crisis. It started 20years ago when we stopped building power stations while various groups squealed and screamed at each other.
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  15. GREAT TO SEE YOU CALLING OUT CORPORATE STUPIDITY I'm an aerospace engineer who works in industrial control systems and automation. A lot of that includes safety control functions like Emergency Stops and Safety interlocks. You know that stuff that keeps hands attached and prevents stuff blowing up. I eventually got the second highest qualification any engineer can get in that field. Getting that qualification has kept me OUT OF WORK. The last time I saw a job specifically asking for that qualification I called up the recruiter to enquire. By that time my qualification needed to be renewed, but that was just a fee. I asked that if I was offered the job I'd pay the fee before starting. The reply was "Your the 4th or 5th person to put that too me today" and then they hanged up. That meant that other engineers had been experiencing EXACTLY the same situations I had. That's what being qualified means to engineers these days. You work you ass off to get your degree which with all the math and applied math classes is damn lot harder than any arts degree. If you then take the effort to get further qualified your job prospects can GO DOWN not up. People like Managers and their Human Resource minions don't like people who speak out and people with qualifications are often caught out. Their employment contacts often include clauses where "if you know something you must speak out" which clashes with the reality that if you speak out you get your contract cut WHICH HAS HAPPENED TO ME just like it happed to the submariner/engineer David Lochridge who's suing Oceangate. If you think engineers are angry over this sort of crap YOU'RE DAMN RIGHT and its about time there were some actual laws that protected us. Because when we're allowed to do our jobs YOUR LIVES are safer. - When your driving a car its mechanical engineers who designed the brakes to help you stop before the tree; - When you plug something in its electrical engineers who make it so you don't get shocked; - When you drink a glass of water its chemical engineers who make it so you don't get poisoned; - When you get in a jet to fly off on your holiday its aerospace engineers who keep the wings attached. We keep you clowns alive in 100s of ways every day. And before any of you complain just note you wouldn't even be able to read this with out engineers.
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  16. Go and read Arthur C Clarkes novel 2010: Odyssey Two or get the film. Its got that exact scenario. So sorry, but as a scenario it was covered 40 years ago.
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  17. ​ @RealEngineering  AEROSPACE ENGINEER HERE: Aside form the mishap with 200 versus 2,000 there's a glaring issue with this proposal that makes this look like one of those "what if we tired this" projects where they started with a what if and then started brainstorming ideas without fact checking what they said. 1) YOU CAN'T USE Carbon fibre composites in Space because the radiation breaks down the resin matrices used. So unless they can come up with a new technology its a NO on that front. BUT THEN if they were putting it forward with a list of - here's the new technologies we'd need then I'd strongly recommend they keep funding it because such projects tend to produce things that other projects then use. 2) Robot construction on the moon is TO DATE a myth. 1st its never been done and 2nd nobody has yet worked out the maintenance issues. A couple of years ago I was sent the complete set of publications from a NASA conference on Lunar projects. It was about 200 pages and had all of 1-1/2 pages on maintenance with the claim it would all be done by robots. I have actually worked for most of the last 20 years in Australia's remote mining industry. I went there after meeting Apollo 17s Harrison Schmitt in 2002 and he directed me to look into Helium-3. yeah I know Helium-3 is and isn't a thing but what I got was a hell of a lot of experience in building and maintaining mine sites in remote harsh environments. I CAN STATE 100% that NASA has not go their heads around the maintenance issues. People forget they (in general) don't maintain their systems except for software. They launch them and they work until they don't. Do I think this is a project to keep funding? YES Do I think getting 200 instead of 2,000 is the end of the world? NO And YES I know your also an engineer. I remember your video on respirators which was arguably one of the BEST EVER technical information videos in the history of all media. It was timely, it was important considering all the clowns who were doing dumb stuff at the time and MOST IMPORTANTLY it was accurate. On behalf of the engineering profession KEEP DOING what you do and don't worry about the inconsequential mistakes - we all make them.
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  18. Aerospace Engineer here - this is easily the BEST VIDEO I have seen on the Space Shuttle in a very long time and easily one of the best videos I have ever seen on the Space Shuttle because without being verbose, over-hyped or over-geeky. Its simply explains some of the complexities used to make it work like with the way they controlled the thrust of the boosters. What I particularly like is that for some time I have been trying to tell people that the Space Shuttle was BOTH an amazing technical achievement and tragic failure. Its so easy to simply say the shuttle failed because of the 2 disasters. Yes that is true but in some ways that wasn't its biggest failure. Without ignoring or being callous to the loss of life in those disasters and that was to me and my classmates very personal. Being objective the Space Shuttles bigger failure was it stifled development of many other technologies because it consumed so much money and required so many more people that first planned to keep it working. Just so you all know. I did my degree in the late 80s Graduating in early 88. On 12 January 1986 I was in Orlando Florida with my swimming team for a training camp. A few of us stood on our motels balcony and watched the Space Shuttle Columbia take off. Despite being about 60 miles away it was still incredibly impressive to watch. Even though it must have been 100s of miles down range we could still see the trails of the boosters after they detached and even minutes later still clearly see the glow of the main engines. 16 days later my classmates, professors and I all had our futures broken when Challenger happened. It especially hit one of my aerodynamics professors as he lost a good friend in that disaster. But what happened to us paled in comparison to those directly involved at NASA and that all paled in comparison to the families involved in Challenger or Columbia (16 January 2003). So, please, don't anyone think for an instant I am ignoring that disasters. However being objective the worst outcome of the shuttle years was the denial of money and personnel to other programs. One of the main reasons we have not been back to the Moon and set up a permanent outpost is because there's literally 100s of technologies yet to be developed to a point where they can be deployed. Chief among those are life support, but there's also power and logistics. Human beings need oxygen, water and food and a means to re-process waste back into more oxygen, water and food. We actually live on a solar powered self sustaining human life support system called Mother Earth. We haven't yet (despite some amazing efforts) been able to replicate that or even just enough of it to make any permanent off-world base viable. So the Space Shuttle was as this video shows an amazing technological achievement but also a tragic failure.
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  19. @ Engineer here: 2 great points that are not mentioned often enough. There are other problems too. 1) Most notably the actual temperature is NOT high enough. This was the problem we had in Australia with Geothermal. We have a number of hot spots various parts of Australia but the pilot plants we ran on them just never proved viable or economical. It might sound strange to non-engineers but you really want dry-steam (that has no water vapor) rather than wet steam (which still has some water vapor) so that you get the best efficiency out of the turbines. To get that you need around 600C the 400C in the mantle just isn't enough. Also in that part of the process where the turbines are you wan to use 100% pure water to avoid scaling and that means using heat exchangers between the the water going into the ground and the water being used to drive turbines and that also reduces efficiency. 2) Our biggest problem was that these hot spots were so far off grid the cost of extending the grid made any geothermal in Australia economically unviable. That might change because we are now extending our grid outwards for the solar generating systems. 3) The best places for this technology are in geologically active places like New Zealand and Iceland which already have substantial geothermal power. The other place where the raw heat is conveniently close to the surface are active volcanoes, but then who's going to risk several billion Euro, Dollars, Yen or Yuan building a power station next to an active volcano?
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  20. As an aerospace engineer that's totally idiotic. For starters like most aircraft the maximum take-off weight and maximum landing weight of the Space Shuttle were quite different. The maximum landing weight is 14 tons of payload. So take the current ~200 tons and divide by 14 then multiply by $300million and you'll have an approximate cost for your museum piece. Because that's about what each Space Shuttle flight cost and why the Space Shuttle was actually a horrendous failure. What would be far smarter is reusing the materials from the ISS. At just the basic cost of $10,000 per kg to space those 200 tons are worth about $2,000,000,000 (200t x 1,000kg/t x $10,000). if you then accept the reality that most stuff to space actually costs between $40,000 and $60,000 per kg then $2 Billion is low balling the value. And yes there are people (not that many) who are screaming as loud as possible to NOT just dump the ISS, but salvage or recycle as much of it as is practical. Going against that are the big space contractors who are eyeballing those juicy NASA contracts to replace it. You know those same companies that never seem to get anything done no matter how much funding NASA gives them.
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  21.  @ckdigitaltheqof6th210  Seriously don't be so damn stupid. I'm an aerospace engineer and I know what I am talking about. You can't use X-15 technology to land ISS components. Stop listening to idiots.
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  22.  @erepsekahs  Dude there's the problem Elon is an egotistical clown full of imagination stuff all technical skill which has been repeatedly demonstrated. He's been insanely lucky a couple of times. First with PayPal, despite being a lousy code writer. With Tesla the car was already developed. With SpaceX he scored a group of incredibly talented people who were disgruntled with the rest of the aerospace industry. By whatever chance Elon somehow managed to get out of their road and that's why the Falcon series has been so damn successful. But Elon has shown his true nature more recently with driverless cars, hyperloop and every 1950s space cadets fantasy Starship. When it actually comes to technology development Elon Musk is a clown.
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  23.  @leyio7453  yeah but trying to reason with idiots is damn hard.
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  24.  @danasmith3288  I have spent more time in the last few years informally studying economics than anything else. The simple fact is unless I can make the economic arguments then I can't get anything done. Economists simply dominate the big decisions that affect all our lives and unless you can deal with them face to face then you're stuffed. To do that takes time and effort to learn their language.
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  25. In terms of money $89 Billion is not even that big of a number anymore. Its not a small or trivial number but its not that big either. I'm Australian and the new gas plants at Ashburton, Darwin, Barrow Island and Curtis Island totaled well over $100 Billion. At the current rate of renewable energy Australia is faced with a bill up around $200 Billion for new clean energy generation. Not only do we have to replace existing plants but build new ones for an increasing population. The British spent over £200 Billion just cleaning up Sellafield and are now building a bunch of new nuclear power stations. The Germans spent a reported €1.3 Trillion (€1,300 Billion) on renewable infrastructure. So you all need to consider that number in the context of current engineering project size. What they should consider is converting some of that energy into Hydrogen and piping it across Europe. Pipe lines are actually not that expensive in relative terms and we know how to lay them. Yes it takes exergy to make, energy to make and its not that efficient to convert back into electrical energy but it has a couple of big advantages: 1: The power stations at the user end are BASE LOAD in that they can run 24/7/365 (except for maintenance. 2: If they build hydrogen fueled power stations on the existing power station sites then the grid connection is already in place saving a lot of money. 3: Hydrogen can be stored with very little (mainly leaks) loss. The only question is how much needs to be sent as Hydrogen to keep the power grids of Europe stable.
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