More of an ignorant assumption. I asked ChatGPT now, and got this:
> In terms of shapes, the tiles were not uniform. In fact, there were over 17,000 different shapes used to fit specific areas of the shuttle's body. Each tile had to be individually manufactured and shaped to fit a precise location due to the complex curvature of the shuttle's surface. The unique shapes were necessary to ensure that every part of the shuttle received the proper protection against the extreme temperatures during re-entry.
Please don't cite LLMs for factual questions. They are prone to confabulation. Why not type the question "How many heat shield tiles did the Space Shuttle use?" into Google?
Since I mentioned I got the info from ChatGPT, people can decide for themselves how much they trust it.
Note that the question here is how many uniquely shaped tiles there was, not the total number.
This is interesting because if you have to manufacture and keep in stock 17,000 separate tile shapes, that will be vastly more expensive than SpaceX who, from what I hear, only uses a singe hex shaped tile everywhere.
It's not just cheaper, it's preserving capacity. Every pound of landing gear you carry has to be offset with fuel to lift it, and then that fuel has to have fuel to lift it and on and on.
There are two ways to lower weight. Eat less, and Ozempic. I don't think it's any of my business which one people pick. The important thing is that they become healthy.
I've realized people are very different. Some can just decide to eat less by applying a little willpower. For others, that's incredibly hard. If you're in group 1, it's easy to think everyone is and be appalled how others can't even put in that little bit of effort.
I guess young people don't always know this, but there are plenty of medications a lot of people take for the rest of their lives. Blood pressure and cholesterol pills are maybe the most common.
This gives a vast number of people 5-10 years longer lives, and I think this is great thing, even if some pharma executives end up getting rich.
Or insulin. I’ve been shortsighted since childhood and will need to wear glasses for the rest of my life (unless I get laser corrective surgery, I guess).
Many people in my wife’s family have thyroid gland dysfunction and have to take thyroid hormones their whole lives.
Not just young people. High blood pressure runs in our family. A cousin, despite being healthy in most indicators, developed high blood pressure at 23. She's still going in her 50s just fine but has had to take blood pressure meds for the last 27 years.
All the people I know who are on those for-life medications absolutely hate the fact that they have to keep taking those pills every day until they die.
eh, my inner "prepper" is annoyed by the dependency, the rest of me is pleased that I've already lived longer than any of my male ancestors. (Kind of hard to sneer at advanced technology given what I do for a living :-)
One problem is regular trips, such as commuting and shopping, where most people need to regularly go from residential areas to office areas or to commercial areas. Here, the vast majority of people, all over the world and with few local exceptions, use public transport (trains, subways, trams, buses, etc). The fact that you have to walk a little bit to the station and from the station to your destination is not a major concern, compared to the cost and the time difference VS filled city streets. If all the people commuting, say, by subway in Tokyo were each in a robotaxi, you'd need most of the day just to finish the morning commute.
Then there are more independent trips, where your schedule is not aligned with public transport, or where there is some urgency, or where your destination is very far away from a station, or where you have very heavy bags etc. For those cases, a car is of course the ideal, so lots of people, even many of those that commute daily by public transport in cities, also own a car.
True, so far. But the world becomes a little more global every year, which makes the time zone friction grow.
My guess is that using both local and UTC time will become very common within 1-2 decades. As in "The raid starts at 11:00 PST/20:00 UTC".
reply