It's 'compatible' in that they can do the work to integrate it with another rocket if needed, which isn't really saying much because most payloads are like that. It isn't compatible with Falcon 9 in its current state, and IIRC because it's wider than F9, actually flying Starliner on F9 would require a lot more structural work too (devising an appropriate aerodynamic adapter and ensuring structural loads are acceptable).
Plus, NASA crew rates the full stack rather than treating the rocket and capsule separately, so integrating Starliner on another rocket would require the crew rating process to be repeated (granted, it'd be a bit easier since F9+Dragon is already crew rated).
That is kind of an interesting question. The above quote from " Surely You're Joking Mr Feynman", (by my memory) is from a chapter that, iirc, deals with his time there giving talks trying to inject some logic amidst the woo.
This is brilliant, thanks for posting. Things like this make me miss my deceased father. I would love to discuss this with him. He was the only person I knew of that genuinely loved thoroughbred horse racing for the beauty of the animals and for the sport. We would camp out right on the finish line at Belmont park (and often on random weekends when the place was mostly empty) and stay put for hours waiting for the Belmont Stakes. He was an amateur photographer and once got a press pass to photograph from the trench along the outside of the track. I noticed the tall narrow mirror mounted to the finish line pole, and he said it was for the photo finish camera but, not much elaboration beyond that.
>There's too much focus on the "what we know" like Kreb's cycle, which is easily examinable. The focus should actually be "how we found out"
I read Asimov's Guide To Science about 10 years ago, and came to the same realization that, for most people, understanding why we know what we know is probably more important than what we know. It's better than thinking that science is a series of facts about the world, rather than a process. It treats the current state of understanding (as of the book's writing) in several subjects as a series of developments, each raising new questions and problems, which are studied further.
There's a limit to what a prof. can pack in, if the development of understanding needs to be covered too. And for a student focused on efficiently learning the subject matter it's a digression.
As a separate class though, it'd be good, and enlightening.
> I was reading about survey grade compasses, and they are balanced to account for magnetic dip, the closer you get to the poles the more dip you have.
Wet, or whiskey compasses used in aircraft are counterweighted to account for this. There are mnemonics for pilots to know how to handle the error induced by this counterweight: "OSUN—overshoot south, undershoot north" and "ANDS—accelerate north, decelerate south".
And generally if you're using the whiskey compass, something is wrong, because most aircraft besides the most basic of VFR bugsmashers have other devices as a primary heading reference, be it a simple gyrocompass on a Cessna 172 or a full GPS-enabled strapdown inertial navigation system on a jet aircraft.
"Everything is overtones", or so I've heard somewhere. The pitch, or note you hear from an instrument is the fundamental frequency, and the combination of overtones determines the timbre. These overtones are other sine waves at different amplitudes and frequencies, and the combination of these are instrument dependent. Additive synthesizers do this to approximate "real" instruments.
Having worked on one of the components of this spacecraft, including design and testing, I've been loosely following this program. By the time it reaches Europa, it will be about 10 years since my contribution.
My understanding of the situation was that they had to design for 2 very different mission profiles depending on the launch vehicle, which was very burdensome to the engineers. The implied politics as I could infer, was the requirement to design for use of SLS as a launch vehicle (naturally, for a NASA mission), which some engineers had low expectations of being operational in time.
It sounds like you just described "choked flow"[0], where reducing the downstream pressure no longer increases flow velocity. It's been many years since I learned it, but I think this occurs at only about 2:1 pressure ratio across the venturi. If I'm remembering that right, just letting the air out of your tires would result in choked supersonic flow.
Edit: I got excited to reply before actually reading the wiki I linked. Looks like I was close, with pressure ratios between 1.7 and 2.05 resulting in choked flow, depending on the gas.
I'll add my anecdote here. The framing at the beginning of this article is very interesting, and brought up my own relationship with my cousins.
>Despite being related by blood and commonly in the same generation, cousins can end up with completely different upbringings, class backgrounds, values, and interests. And yet, they share something rare and invaluable: They know what it’s like to be part of the same particular family.
This especially crystallized my thoughts. My aunt had 5 kids, and their family experienced a major traumatic event when I was too young to understand. They were all older than me, and the ripple effects of that event are still occurring ~ 40 years later. They all indeed had a completely different upbringing and class background than I. For a stretch of time into my adulthood it was hard to be around them, and we drifted apart, with apathy filling the space. We would avoid or ignore invitations and justify it by not wanting to experience the generally chaotic and haphazard experience of being in their company.
Largely by the efforts of one persistent sibling, we finally attended one family event with low expectations. I left that gathering with a completely revised perspective, and a heaping pile of shame. We hit it off right away, as if no time had passed, with the deep rooted familiarity of growing up together, with the same patriarchal/matriarchal role models and propagated personality characteristics. My thoughts while leaving that night were "these are my people". They implicitly understand. Their roughness is endearing, with absolutely no pretension whatsoever. Being older than me, they knew my recently deceased father for longer than I had, and it was very therapeutic to talk about him with people who knew him so deeply.
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