Viewing profile — mkn

I've always been skeptical of these liquid-air cycles, but this scheme strikes me as especially problematic in that an ejector ramjet would be mechanically simpler and have the sam…

I find your comment amusing in light of my particular frustration with the near anonymity of SpaceX in relation to its accomplishments, especially in addition to the nearly univers…

Item [8] was mentioned in this talk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3kEfedtQVOY by Meredith Patterson. She contends, and it seems sound to me, that the time has passed to be "toler…

We could be saved by the square-cube law, or, The Power of Being Big. In essence, let's assume you've made your own fully-shielded space capsule for one, and that you need, for exa…

There a couple of things that allow him to make these claims without being "laughed out of the room," as you say, but they don't have to do with his personality in the sense in whi…

I hate Neil DeGrasse Tyson. Not on a personal level, mind you. He's probably a nice guy to have beers with. But he's a shill for NASA. He's a good shill, but he's a shill, nonethel…

After seeing that clip, I wondered how Cernan and Armstrong could have said the things they said and, eventually, how they could even feel qualified to comment. I think the answer …

Actually, it turns out that it's neither heinous nor poisonous. You seem to be having an allergic reaction to the contrast between advice about how the actual world functions and h…

I can see why people get all fuzzy and romantic about their children and their children's future, but these people are just going to end up crippling their children for lack of rea…

"Human hearing is limited to 20k because frequencies higher than that are perceived as painful? Dont agree with that one." Yeah, that's a silly one. I disagree with it, too. It's a…

I think the entire discussion would be helped by the simple realization that programming is not really all that glamorous nor scientific. It seems like a lot of programmers have ma…

Huh. I really thought the days of the (she-was|they-were)-asking-for-it-I-mean-look-at-how-(she-was-dressed|well-covered-their-market-was) argument were over. Wonders never cease, …

The cost per kg currently around $10k, about half what it cost on the shuttle. If you assume a payload mass fraction of 2% and a vehicle mass fraction of 10%, you have a fuel-to-we…

The stupidity of ideas like this is they are counterproductive. If your employees are 'shopping around' or seriously entertaining recruitment offers it likely means they are unhapp…

This is a hi-fidelity recapitulation of one of the main pop theories of negotiation, that good bargaining is always hard bargaining, especially if it's brainless. However, I think …

What you've all just witnessed is power talk masquerading as service talk. What cdata has actually said is, "Sorry, you're not our customer. The websites that use us are our custom…

"The Internet is the first technology since the printing press, which could lower the cost of a great education and, in doing so, make that cost-benefit analysis much easier for mo…

It turns out that "relative efficiencies" from an energy standpoint is not the relevant consideration, by two or three orders of magnitude. Fuel costs for launch vehicles are a neg…

Human languages are far more complex and verbose than is required for talking to computers. This is mostly a quibble, but human languages are not more verbose than computer languag…

In U.S. dollars in the year 2000, it came to about $16 of fuel per pound of payload launched. We had a homework assignment to figure out that number in our propulsion class at the …

"Contrary to popular belief, the people in government who make laws and control regulation are not bumbling idiots." Actually, in the case of the export restriction laws in questio…