Falcon already delivered DSCOVR to Sun-Earth L1, while PSLV only flew MOM to a highly elliptical Earth orbit and MOM had to use its own propulsion for TMI.
>> Falcon already delivered DSCOVR to Sun-Earth L1, while PSLV only flew MOM to a highly elliptical Earth orbit and MOM had to use its own propulsion for TMI.
I'm not sure why it's important to debate whether or not a company is a "serious interplanetary contender", but I do think it's important to get the facts correct.
> "SpaceX wants to use 42 Raptor engines which were initially designed for an upper stage single engine usage"
That's not what really happened, and anyway, Raptor is a 35% larger engine than BO's/ULA's BE-4. So by your definition, if ULA's/BO's engines are "big", then SpaceX's engine is "even bigger".
Coincidentally, this very book on auction theory was suggested to me by a fellow faculty member about three months ago. I guess I really ought to find some time to read it!
That may be fixable at compile time, I believe. In the worst case, you could write a patch. (Dijkstra would prefer a half-open indexing scheme anyway.)
And be incompatible with the universe of Lua programs.
The problem was that Lua reified 1-indexing into the language when they optimized to make arrays faster and then created length operators. At that point, 1-indexing got baked into the language.
"Passport-protected open network"...heh, that reminds of the "anonymous functions" in PHP (the ones documented with the sentence "Creates an anonymous function from the parameters passed, and returns a unique name for it") :D
It's not mixed-in, it's in a separate tank. But since the tank is an aluminum alloy (often with copper or lithium mixed in) these days, I wonder about its behavior in the presence of an ignition source (some magnesium in the bullet or perhaps even just friction?).
There's no Dewar vessel on the LV as far as I'm aware of. The surface of the stage is the propellant tank, made of simple Al-Li alloy, several millimeters thick. It works fine because of the large mass of the LOX and the comparatively short time of the stage's operation. You just can't transfer enough heat into the stage naturally in the short twenty or thirty minutes between fueling and launch to cause any trouble.
Before they started supercooling the LOX, it was even easier because heat transfer into LOX tanks is conventionally managed by boil-off (in launchers without supercooled propellants, latent heat keeps the liquid at a stable temperature and a trickle refills the tank continuously until a minute or two before launch).
.50 BMG is supersonic but drops in velocity rather quickly, like any other small caliber round. Depending on the position of the shooter (especially if opposite to the recording equipment relative to the LV, for example), chances are that the cameras with mikes recording the LV might have problems hearing it. I'm not sure at what distance it drops into subsonic region but the size of the target should allow for some pretty large distance. Powder load could also be tweaked. One has to assume a shooter with significant resources if a deliberate action against a multiple-$100M target is the premise.
