• 0x0@lemmy.zip
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    3 months ago

    Honda giving a whole new meaning to crotch rocket.
    Oh wait, it’s an actual rocket!

  • Kindness is Punk@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    And Hyundai is making hydrogen powered tanks, what a world. I wonder if hydrogen fuels poses any unique risks as compared to petrol.

        • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          Well, different. You’d have highly compressed hydrogen in a cylindrical pressure vessel.

          The Hindenburg just burned, actually it was mostly its highly flammable paint that caught fire. When a pressure vessel is ruptured, it explodes in a big way, or it quickly removes itself from the vehicle like a mini rocket.

        • Jrockwar@feddit.uk
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          3 months ago

          In different ways. For example, it’s very rare for a car to explode in a collision, other than in movies.

          One of the reasons that make hydrogen difficult to work with in this sense is that hydrogen (H₂) molecules are so small that they can permeate most materials, such as steel. Then it can get somewhat easily to wherever there is a spark, and chaos ensues. Annoyingly you don’t even need 100% Hydrogen for that to happen, as it can ignite with a concentration of just 4%.

          After we stopped using Hydrogen mostly as a consequence of Hindenburg’s accident, it’s taken years to perfect hydrogen fuel cells to a safety standard that can be used in cars. As far as I know, its use has been limited to rockets/space propulsion otherwise (where you can just throw millions at the problem to make it safer).

          • xavier666@lemm.ee
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            3 months ago

            (H₂) molecules are so small that they can permeate most materials, such as steel

            Okay, I knew from texts books that H2 is small but I never thought of the real-life consequences of it being so small. Then theoretically, Helium should also be “leaky”, right?

            • MysteriousSophon21@lemmy.world
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              3 months ago

              Yep, helium is even worse for leaking! It’s actually the smallest noble gas and can escape through tiny pores that even hydrogen can’t fit through. Thats why helium balloons deflate faster than air balloons - the atoms literally seep through the balloon material.

              • stephen01king@lemmy.zip
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                3 months ago

                How does Helium fit through places that Hydrogen can’t even though its bigger? Is it because Hydrogen would react with things along the way while Helium won’t?

                • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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                  3 months ago

                  I’m also curious, I thought hydrogen was the worst in this regard.

                  I like your theory on hydrogen reacting as it moves through materials.

                • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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                  3 months ago

                  I suspect it’s because the hydrogen molecules are bigger than a single helium atom, which doesn’t form molecules (since it’s a noble gas).

                  So the hydrogen molecule only seeps through if it’s oriented right (since the hydrogen molecule is a stick-shaped molecule).

  • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    3 months ago

    Since when is Honda a rocket company? This is literally the first im hearing about this. They kept this quiet for a while, and im not sure why.

    • minkymunkey_7_7@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      It’s new. Honda Space Development Division.

      Honda R&D to Conduct Testing with Sierra Space and Tec-Masters on the International Space Station | Honda Global Corporate Website https://share.google/3CwIsYUh8eWsohht4

      A lot of the global conglomerate Asian based companies do R&D across many fields, rather than just the product they’re most know for. Toshiba makes nuclear reactors! Samsung has phones and sewing machines and microchips… and nuclear reactors research.

      • NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        Good for them, Asia is getting their rocket programs in order while the U.S. tries their best to destroy ours. Man i wish I could move.

    • Bobby Turkalino@lemmy.yachts
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      3 months ago

      I imagine they poached a lot of Spacex engineers by simply telling them “we won’t make you work ungodly hours, nor will we subject you to a narcissistic manchild with no engineering education dropping in on your meetings and trying to tell you how to do your job”

        • rottingleaf@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          “… it’ll be the same, but it’s a huge honor to work on this project in our company.”

          • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
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            3 months ago

            And we reward you for this huge honour with the worst working conditions you can imagine. You’ll live at your desk.

      • jaybone@lemmy.zip
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        3 months ago

        Tbf doesn’t he have a computer science degree? Which is a type of engineering degree?

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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        3 months ago

        I bet they poached 0-3 engineers.

        You left out the “but you have to learn Japanese and move to Japan” part of the job pitch. That makes it a harder sell for most people.

      • hddsx@lemmy.ca
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        3 months ago

        You do realize it’s Japan right? China, Japan, Korea all have work life balance issues.i wouldn’t want to work 996 or 007 lol

        • webghost0101@sopuli.xyz
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          3 months ago

          We would like to contact you for job offer in the same role as your current.

          We cant pay you as much per hour but we can give you more hours to match it.

          “Promise me i wont ever have to deal with Musk and i am in”

        • nasi_goreng@lemmy.zip
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          3 months ago

          As much as it’s true, not all company are doing this. There are plenty of good East Asian company with good work life balance, especially newer company that already recognize the issue.

    • frezik@midwest.social
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      3 months ago

      Eh, it’s just a start of development. It only goes 300 meters. Blue Origin goes higher, but even they aren’t in orbit.

      Japan also has some odd limitations on their rockets as part of their self defense only constitution. They don’t build a rocket that could potentially be used to strike mainland Asia.

      https://youtu.be/UZaIs6oSlOI

        • frezik@midwest.social
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          3 months ago

          The Estes Corporation makes rockets that will do 600 meters.

          It’s great that Honda is doing this. We really need other companies in this area, because SpaceX is dominating it. Even if Elon weren’t a walking disaster, we don’t want one company so badly outclassing everyone else.

        • ch00f@lemmy.world
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          3 months ago

          The issue is not going up, it’s going over. If we only cared about the private sector getting people into space, that happened on a fully reusable vehicle twenty years ago.

          The problem is getting things to stay in space. Not trying to Elon-stan here, but getting a rocket into orbit is many fold more difficult than just getting into space.

          • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de
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            3 months ago

            Yeah, if by “going over”, you mean accelerating in the horizontal direction, then you’re right.

            Just to illustrate this: Consider we want to put 1 kg of mass into orbit.

            First, we have to raise it by 100 km. That requires 1e6 J = 1 MJ of energy (formula is m*g*h).

            Then, we have to accelerate it sideways, to a speed of 8 km/s. The energy to do that is 32 MJ (formula is ½*m*v²).

            So, most of the energy (97%) is actually in the sideways movement.

      • untakenusername@sh.itjust.works
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        3 months ago

        probably

        no one in the private sector was gonna take that kind of risk for a while and then SpaceX took the gamble, won and now tons of players see vertical landing of rockets works so their all looking into it.

    • FreedomAdvocate@lemmy.net.au
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      3 months ago

      How does it make spaceX’s accomplishments less impressive? SpaceX pioneered it. Space X did it first, with a significantly bigger rocket and at a significantly higher altitude. Honda no doubt achieved this by looking at what spacex did and how they did it and copying it.

      This actually makes spaceX’s accomplishments look even more impressive.

    • NotMyOldRedditName@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Up and down isn’t a hard problem in the grand scheme of things. It’s expensive and doesn’t offer much benefit which is why people generally haven’t bothered.

      Going up and over at orbital velocities and coming back is the hard part, and none of these new spaces companies have done that successfully yet, and SpaceX has now done it with 2 vehicles and reused them both.

      New Glenn from Blue Orgin might be the first after SpaceX but it blew up coming back on their first attempt, but it’s been designed to be orbital and reusable

    • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Um, no it doesn’t… At all…

      This is a first step landing test, not even suborbital, it flew to a height of 300 meters. This is the point that SpaceX was at in 2011 with their grasshopper rocket.

      SpaceX is regularly landing orbital hardware and working on a fully reusable rocket with a greater lifting capacity than anything else ever. It’s not really the same…

      But fuck Elon, no argument there.

    • papertowels@mander.xyz
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      3 months ago

      Reusable rockets, in particular.

      Imagine having a reusable car in a world where they were all disposable.

    • Cocopanda@lemmy.world
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      3 months ago

      Because the last stage of existence on this planet. Will be febel plans to try and colonize other planets. Because our planet will start to poison us as a defensive mechanism. All of these Corporations need a plan to get off planet.

      • gerryflap@feddit.nl
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        3 months ago

        Imo it’s a good thing tho. Spreading our civilization across multiple planets is the only way to guarantee long long term success. Obviously we should also fix the climate change issue (and many others). But still, being spread across the solar system would give our species redundancy. An extinction event on earth like a large meteor strike would no longer be the end.

        • Crikeste@lemm.ee
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          3 months ago

          Well good thing it will never happen. ☺️

          Imagine trying to undo thousands and thousands of years of evolution surrounding…. Earth’s gravity.

          But you go ahead and fantasize about us destroying all the planets in the universe. After all; we’re the only thing destroying ours.

      • Echo Dot@feddit.uk
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        3 months ago

        It would take a lot to make Mars more habitable than Earth. This isn’t about colonisation this is simply that it’s cool to build rockets.

          • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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            3 months ago

            It’s the only planet we can terraform (As in repairing some of the damage we’ve done), we are nowhere near able to terraform Mars, not even theoretically and disregarding cost.
            Maybe in a century we can. But only maybe.

            • Bravo@eviltoast.org
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              3 months ago

              Hypothetically, we could terraform Venus. At the very least, it shares a lot of the issues that we’re trying to fix on Earth, just dialled up to 11 - its main problems are that it’s way too hot, the atmosphere has way too much carbon in it (96.5% vs Earth’s 0.04%), and the atmosphere has way too much sulfur (0.015% vs Earth’s 0.00000002%, making the atmosphere highly acidic). So if for example scientists had an idea for causing a chain reaction in a planetary atmosphere that rapidly sequestered all atmospheric carbon but were worried about unknown strength or side effects, instead of testing it on Earth where it could kill us all, they could test it on Venus where any failures would have no serious consequences. And if it worked, not only would it mean that we fix climate change on Earth but we partially terraform Venus into the bargain.

              Venus has roughly similar gravity to Earth and has a ferrous core which could hypothetically be turned molten (and therefore ferromagnetic) to provide the same kind of magnetosphere that Earth’s core does. Mars has neither of these things and would therefore never be able to sustain human life naturally - Venus potentially could. On Mars, the atmosphere is just one of many obstacles. On Venus it’s THE obstacle. Solve the atmosphere, you solve Venus.

              • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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                3 months ago

                Hypothetically, we could terraform Venus.

                Mars is the best option we have, which is why I mentioned that. Venus already has selfenforcing runaway global warming, and we can’t even land a probe there, because the environment is extremely hostile.
                Mars is by far the easier option.

      • Tja@programming.dev
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        3 months ago

        The planet isn’t doing anything, we are poisoning ourselves. Or as lemmy puts it “big evil corporations (which we support everyday because it’s cheaper than buying local/sustainable) are poisoning us”.

  • MystikIncarnate@lemmy.ca
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    3 months ago

    Honda built a rocket

    Me: of course they did.

    They launched the rocket

    Me: naturally.

    They landed the rocket.

    Me: on the first try?