While it’s technically true that the transition from fully stopped to moving under power is a continuous one and there is an instant in time at any arbitrarily terrible fuel efficiency, I think it makes more sense to consider the fuel efficiency over some reasonable duration. One inch is plenty of duration, and most cars can get that far before a pit stop, even if they have a tank smaller than 15 gallons.
Presumably in the time that the Saturn V had moved 1 inch, it had actually burned 15 gallons of fuel.
Further points in the Saturn V’s favor: LH2 and LO2 are much less dense than gasoline, and cars don’t have to account for the volume of oxygen they burn in their fuel efficiency.
What’s more, the computer punch card has its origins as a railroad ticketing system, where the conductor would punch one of the images on the card to keep track of what the passenger looked like CPRR Discussion Group
Also, the size of the punch card is similar to the size of the “large-size” currency used at the time, to make use of existing office furniture and storage slots could handle. CPRR Museum
Are you sure about that?
I know it leaked, but I thought it was topped off just before taking off.
What tanker could keep up with it to do an in-flight refueling?
It didn’t go straight to Mach <loads> on take-off. Get airborne relatively light and stress free, then fuel up at an altitude that better suits the plane and the mission. Go fast after that.
Working in IT, something I have to explain frequently. Email is not and never was designed to be instantaneous communication. Receiving an email days after it was sent is perfectly valid and within specifications. Computer power is such that email is generally processed immediately now days, but it doesn’t “have to.”
Johnson Space Flight Center (Houston), used the same control room until 1995 that they used for Gemini, Apollo and shuttle missions, but what I love: the control panels used pneumatic tubes for sending documents back and forth.
In inflation-adjusted dollars, each launch of a Saturn V would cost $3.1 billion today. In comparison, a Falcon 9 launch costs around $100 million.
I can’t find a single reason that we should pay more for rockets than we already do. It’s like saying we should dump all the low-bypass jet engines so we can do back to the days of putting four or six engines on every airliner.
One of the earliest examples of simulation is the pipe organ. It can be used to simulate the sounds of other instruments and even singing.
What do you do if you come from a family of organ makers and are interested in flying? You build another simulator: the Link Trainer. The granddaddy of flight simulators. It even had bellows!
The smallest structures in modern semiconductor chips (in particular, the gate oxide layer in the transistors) are just a handful of atoms across. It wouldn’t work if there were five too many or five too few atoms.
The main silicon substrate was generally doped with boron or phosphorous. Until a couple of years ago I worked for a major supplier to chip companies (Intel, Samsung, TSMC, SMC, etc).
But back when international calls were costing $6 per minute, and I was a poor student, we were using email for international chat. The internet transitioned from UUCP to ARPANET around 1980, before the development of SNMP around 1982.
So in practice the turnaround time was actually quicker. Our SNMP servers were delivering email into our (file system) personal mail folder (rather than into a shared database), and our mail clients were doing fast polling.
