44 Replies to “I, For One, Welcome Our Convoy Of New Self-Driving Trucks”

  3. Power outages works well as well.
    Just had a double one in Muskoka at minus 31 Celcius. The power off 8 hours, back on for 15 minutes then off another 8 hours.
    Water crystals were in the line when I had 15 minutes interval . I did manage to get it back on another 8 hours later after 8 hours of having the gas furnace on.
    Whew…

  4. Hmmm… Question: If one had an issue with a particular satellite or satellites, why would you go through this laborious exercise to move it/them, rather than merely shooting it/them down with a missile?

    1. @Dumb Biker – “….rather than merely shooting it/them down with a missile?”

      To clear space debris for future Chinese Space Bases and satellites.

    2. If you blow up a few satellites, you can have a cascade effect where the debris from the blown up satellites impacts other satellites, creating more debris, impacting more satellites, in a positive feedback loop until low Earth orbit becomes useless for decades or longer.
      It is not in any nation’s interest to do this unless they become desperate, and given the current crop of western leaders, and their insane woke decision-making processes, this is a definite possibility.

      Personally, I like the space industry, but again, given the sociopaths who rule us, I won’t complain if they cut themselves off from low Earth orbit, as it would reduce their surveillance of the citizens.
      People would have to learn to read maps again, though.

      1. Fine, I get that, but didn’t the Russkies just blow up one of their own satellites with a missile? And, I guess I omitted the implication that I meant in a time of war.

        Like the original article notes, I have some difficulty believing the Chinese are doing this out of the goodness of their hearts.

        1. Yes, the Russians did blow up one of their own satellites, which I view as a warning shot for NATO, and I also believe that the NATO leaders pose more of a clear and present threat to the freedom of western citizens than the Russians do, what with their mass immigration, duplicitous MSM, etc, in fact, our own leaders are more of a threat to us than any foreign power.
          The ability to move satellites is part of any good space program. No-body does it out of the goodness of their hearts, they do it for pragmatic reasons, one of which is clearing LEO from junk, another pragmatic reason to be able to do so is military and defense reasons.

      1. It costs a lot of money in fuel to move things from low Earth orbit less than five hundred miles up to the almost quarter million miles to the moon, so they move them, say, 40 thousand miles up where its not anywhere near as crowded as low Earth orbit.

        1. All it takes is the first push to get it to the moon. After that, inertia takes over. Maneuvering up to 40k miles, stabilizing the new orbit, returning to LEO, that must be fuel expensive, as well.

          I remain to be convinced.

          1. Inertia will not do it, unless you get it moving fast enough, which takes more fuel, etc. Look at what it took to launch 3 men and enough air, food, water etc, to last a few days to the moon.
            Even just launching to low earth orbit costs many thousands of dollars/kg.
            Look at it this way, if you stopped a satellite dead in orbit, it would drop to the Earth without burning up, because its no longer moving at orbital speeds.
            Why don’t they do this? It would have made the shuttle heat shield redundant, saved the lives of the astronauts who burned up on re-entry.
            The fact is, it costs way too much to send up the extra fuel to stop a satellite, or a shuttle, or whatever.
            The Earth’s gravity well extends beyond the moon.
            Look how long it took the JWST to get to L2, and all the calculations it took to insert it there.

          3. There are other considerations, as well, like the trajectory to get something from LEO to the moon, consider, the relative speeds of the satellites in LEO are about 10x faster than a bullet, around 15 000 fps, sometimes twice that or more.
            For example, it is impossible to throw a baseball from the space station and have it in a significantly higher orbit. You need velocities on the order of km/second to do that. It takes energy to accelerate something that much. Energy comes in the form of fuel, or at least reaction mass in the case of very expensive solar powered ion drives, and, as I mentioned before, it costs thousands of dollars/kg to lift that mass to LEO.

      2. They stay up longer that way. But firing them at the moon is too expensive.

        Satellites don’t stay up forever on their own. There are several forces acting on them in orbit. Charged particles from the sun, the Earth’s magnetic field, and also atmospheric drag to name but three. Earth’s orbit is not a perfect vacuum, there’s still some drag.

        That’s why orbits decay unless the satellite has a rocket motor and fuel to burn. They have to speed up because of all the stuff slowing them down. Once they run out of fuel they can’t speed up anymore, and they fall out of orbit. The lower the orbit, the more drag and the sooner they slow down.

        Raising the orbit takes fuel, because you’re speeding up the satellite. The higher you want to go, the more fuel it takes. Leaving Earth’s orbit entirely and making for a lunar orbit takes a great deal of fuel. Lifting all that off the ground takes a BIG rocket. Very, very expensive.

        1. “Raising the orbit takes fuel, because you’re speeding up the satellite.”
          Actually, once its in the higher orbit, its moving more slowly, you’re trading kinetic energy for gravitational potential energy.
          So, in my baseball experiment, if I threw the baseball in the same direction as the orbit of the space station, at 100mph relative to me, it would wind up in a very slightly higher orbit, and me in the space station would eventually overtake it.
          %^$&%^&( counter-intuitive orbital mechanics!

      3. In addition, it’s unlikely that those satellites have a propulsion system with sufficient thrust to send them into a lunar impact trajectory.

        1. BA…

          They may well in fact, have that capability…the question is …. do they have the fuel.? possibly…but that would almost certainly wipe out any fuel needed for the regular orbital corrections to their speed/flight path/attitude etc….NO.?

          1. There’s also the aspect of the amount of energy the on-board fuel produces when it burns.

            Mind you, there was a case a while back when orbital maneuvering was possible with the on-board reaction control system. A number of years ago, the Japanese Akatsuki space probe was to go into orbit around Venus. The burn didn’t occur as planned, believed to be due to an engine failure, and the spacecraft continued on its trajectory.

            Mission planners at JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency–Japan’s counterpart to NASA) determined that the trajectory would take the spacecraft by Venus once again several years later and that there was sufficient thrust from the RCS to allow for orbital insertion. Through a series of burns, Akatsuki was able to go into orbit, but in a different one than what was originally planned.

            Of course, that meant that there was less reaction propellant left, which likely would have shortened the spacecraft’s useful life. The mission profile, however, had to be correspondingly revised, but Akatsuki was able to accomplish a number of scientific objectives.

    4. what if instead of blowing up the satellites you use a signal generator to cause all the self driving trucks to drive themselves off a bridge? or into a forest? or to a place where you can pick their carcasses clean?

    5. What ever you blow up, up there, floats around in even more space in about the same space. It just becomes more dangerous space junk.

    1. “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”
      — Edmund Burke.

      In other words, I agree with you.

      If space is not militarized, if the USA does nothing, then China, Russia or Iran could do quite evil things.

      1. Yep.
        Personally, I think everybody is gonna do evil things in space. I think that if any one country ever got a monopoly in LEO, and didn’t have to worry about what other competing countries/entities would do, the PTBs would make a surveillance apparatus that would have made the most ardent KGB man blush.
        That’s why I like StarLink, glonass, etc, the more people competing up there, the better, and militarization to keep everybody honest.

        1. A cheap little Starlink satellite can f- over a great big expensive Chinese satellite-killer weapon. Beer can vs. aircraft carrier at 17,000 miles per hour, baby. KaPOW. Beer can wins.

          In space, no one can hear you say “Oh sh–![pop, hisss, crackle].”

          1. Yeah, kinetic kill is pretty easy in space, just takes a bit of skill to aim the stuff.

      2. “If space is not militarized, if the USA does nothing, then China, Russia or Iran could do quite evil things.”

        The problem with that is the hope that a Hillary Clinton or a Trudeau clone doesn’t gain ultimate power in the US. To me the safest bet would be to have and enforce an international space de-armament like “mutually assured destruction”.

        Just saying that’s allot of power for crazy people in charge who don’t like their citizens freedoms. They are already taking our mini-14’s away…………..

  6. China should start with cleaning up it’s rivers before convincing the world it wants to clean space.

  7. My guess is that our leader in hiding would admire the CCP’s basic destruction of that part of our technological development as much as he admires the Chinese Communist’s basic takeover of our economy.

    1. Tim Houston: “”Nova Scotians have no patience for highway blockades and, personally … I have even less, so just don’t do it.”

      But they’re perfectly fine with having their rights & freedoms stripped from them…

      Fuck Tim Houston.

      1. Just entirely block the inbound lanes of 104 to Nova Scotia at the New Brunswick border.

        Sorry, Kate. Way O/T.

    2. Space shots are fabulously expensive, complex and delicate. One little thing goes wrong, the whole launch is scrubbed.

      Imagine how easy it would be to f- over their supply chain so they can’t get decent O-rings of a specific size, just for example. A failed O-ring once blew up a Space Shuttle…

      1. I bet a high-end 30 caliber platform on a stripped-down U2 at 100 000 feet could take out satellites pretty cheaply. Maybe use rail-gun tech…?

        1. In 1985, a USAF F-15 destroyed a defunct weather satellite in LEO by firing a missile at it.

  10. Two young neighbors placed solar panels over their entire roof, we’ve had storm after storm and said panels are buried under three feet of snow and ice. Here’s the kicker, NS power is charging them for usage, instead of allowing them to collect the solar power as points on their power bill. They bought into the whole solar panel fraud, paid for it and will now reap no financial benefits. EV are a waste of time, they are toxic-full of toxic rare earth minerals that we have no way to safely dispose of.

    1. Solar panels with a battery bank/inverter make sense if you are in Gods country with no grid around for miles.
      Coupled with some large propane tanks, wood fire place and a genny one can live a very comfortable life.
      Add in a Sat phone and Sat Internet and it becomes quite nice.

  11. I am surprised Unme hasn’t chirped up and explained to us dumb rubes how that would never happen. That the power will never go out or the GPS satellites would stop working because of an EMP attack.
    I guess he never made it as far as this thread.

  12. I dont know how to physically do thmis but someone should, put Justin in place of Hitler in the various Hilter memes. I’m sure he is looking to blame him?

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