The zip code issue is not unique, and nor are the post codes broken. Postal codes are for mail routing. They get your mail to the correct mail centre for sorting and distribution. There is no need for the postal codes or mail centres to align to rational boundaries like states, counties, localities, suburbs, or any other reasonably controlled, surveyed, and relatively consistent dataset.
The real perversion here is a software developer deciding to use postal codes, which were designed for something entirely different, and which are maintained by a postal carrier, to locate and veryify addresses physical location. They've not recognised that within a post code could exist multiple towns, or towns in multiple states, etc.
> rational boundaries like states, counties, localities, suburbs, or any other reasonably controlled, surveyed, and relatively consistent dataset.
Those boundaries aren't necessarily rational either.
But not only does your post code not reference your political boundaries. Your postal city may not be a political city, or may not match your political city. I've lived in several places where I needed to write the city that the post office serving my house was in, if I wanted to receive mail. It's really more of the name of the post office, there are plenty of post offices in unincorporated county land, which doesn't belong to any city.
I live in unincorporated San Mateo County aka West Menlo Park aka Menlo Park aka University Heights. The zip code is the Menlo Park zip code. The nearby branch post office, outside the city limits of Menlo Park, names itself West Menlo Park but shares the same zip code as Menlo Park.
I use Menlo Park for my mailing address incuding zip so no credit card problems. The city library does think I am a Menlo Park resident even though I don't pay their taxes. Other city services may check more closely.
To further complicate matters, I live one block beyond the Menlo Park city limits, but within the boundary of the Menlo Park City School District. So our street is its own voting precinct since we vote for city school measures but not for say, the Menlo Park City Council. And maybe because it was too small, 20 years ago, our precinct lost in-person voting on election day.
One final boundary condition: Atherton, Menlo Park, and unincorporated San Mateo County all lay claim to parts of Valparaiso Avenue. Atherton has one side of the road, Menlo Park the other until the entire road becomes the County's. The construction standards for the three sections vary. Atherton, not surprisingly, used the best materials and methods when the road was rebuilt. On the other hand, recently, the county was the first to repave its part of the road.
What this is saying is that the US zip code system is broken
The "Z" in ZIP is "Zone." If ZIP Codes were supposed to line up with cities, they'd be called CIP Codes.
compared to other countries' postcode system
And by that you mean "compared with the single small area of the country in which I live, which somehow makes me an expert of every method of routing mail in every one of the 200+ nations on the planet."
here in the UK the first part of a postcode is almost always a two letter code for a town or city
The first part of some of your UK Post Codes don't indicate a town or a city. They indicate a nation, like JEn for Jersey.
then a number for the large area within it
Which is not always true. PCRN and ASCN are UK Post Codes, but have no trailing numbers.
London is so big and densely populated that it has multiple virtual town codes allocated to different areas
In the U.S. if the address density gets too high, we just roll out another ZIP Code. I used to work in a building that had enough offices that the building had its own ZIP Code. No need to confuse people by inventing imaginary towns like in London.
Are you sure your country's post code system isn't the one that's broken?
(There are better counterexamples but I don't think it's relevant.)
London's codes aren't "virtual", they stand for North, North East, East etc.
I think the British system is a bit more human friendly, as the letters are usually mnemonics for large towns or areas, and just 5-7 characters is specific to about 20 addresses. (It can be a single business within a building, or apartments on 2-3 floors.) However, just like ZIP codes the boundaries don't align to political regions.
The over-verification problem would be surprising in Britain due to the codes being very specific, the whole address is easily verified. Usually this works the other way around — you type in the postcode first, and select from the 20 or so full addresses within it.
The most common problem is new addresses not being in the database used by a website, and them not allowing manual entry.
This is probably partly a consequence of our complicated federal system.
Municipalities are established by states but the postal system is federal. Depending on the state, it’s possible for an address to be in multiple municipalities (New York has villages inside some towns, for instance) or none. It’s not always the case that residents use the innermost municipality in their address.
Some US addresses refer to a place, sometimes called a hamlet, that may have no legally defined boundaries. Basically the equivalent of a city neighborhood, but at a rural or suburban level. Levittown, New York, is a famous example.
There are also Census-designated places, which are basically simplified versions of this weird geography used for the federal census. They won’t always match what local residents or state governments consider to be in a certain place.
This is probably partly a consequence of our complicated federal system.
I don't blame the postal system. I blame the people who made the Samsung web site.
Computers are supposed to work for people, not the other way around.
One of the more atrocious things I've noticed recently is that there's a address verification backend that more and more companies are using that is actually built on crowdsourced data. Think about that: Crowdsourced verification.
The next time you're on one of those sites where you type in the name of a city and it tries to auto-complete with a bunch of suggestions, enter "Houston" and see if it suggests "Clutch City" as an option. Yep, somehow a sports slogan from last century is considered a valid mailing address by some online stores.
I have a friend I send Christmas gifts to in Houston, and I've run into it three times so far on web sites in the U.S. and Europe, so I presume that it's some kind of back-end plug-in that multiple companies subscribe to.
>What this is saying is that the US zip code system is broken (by design), especially compared to other countries' postcode system.
How is a published author so illiterate? The bottom of the post specifically praises the US zip code system's efficiency for its designed purpose at the end! The UK postcode system is similarly used (and abused) by many entities for purposes that have nothing to do with mail delivery. You know this, yet bleat this nonsense.
I still have a (printed on dead trees!) manual for Coherent 3.2 (286 version, circa 1990-91) kicking around. Ran multiuser (login via tty or virtual terminals on the console) in 640Mb of RAM, off a 10Mb fully installed setup. If I remember correctly you were limited to 64Kb code & 64Kb data per process, though ... (Coherent 4.0 removed the addressing limit).
Worth noting is that because Starship HLS carries astronauts, it has to be capable of abort-to-orbit -- that is, to cancel the landing at any point and return to Lunar orbit. The Apollo LEM would have done this by shutting down and dumping the descent stage then lighting the ascent motor: Starship is a single stage that should have enough fuel and oxidizer left after a successful landing to lift off and return to orbit with a minimal payload.
I expect if astronauts aboard HLS lose their altimeter they'd have to abort the landing immediately -- to proceed without it would be the height of recklessness. But Odysseus had no abort-to-orbit capability so was committed to landing.
Huh, then you're one of today's lucky ten thousand!
Apollo 14 had a piece of loose solder in the button triggering abort-to-orbit, so it occassionally triggered itself. This wasn't a problem en route to the moon, but the second the descent phase started it would have been a Poisson-timed bomb that would prevent the landing.
There was a bit of memory that could be set to ignore the state of the abort button (this bit was the reason the abort sequence wasn't triggered en route). The problem was this ignore bit was reset by the landing sequence (to allow aborting once landing started), and they did not believe the astronauts would be quick enough to set the bit again before the button shorted out and triggered the abort.
(Ignoring the abort button was fine because an abort could be triggered in the computer instead. Takes a little longer but was determined a better option than scrapping the mission.)
Don Eyles came up with a clever hack. Setting the program state to 71 ("abort in progress") happened to both allow descent to start and prevented the abort button from being effective. So this program state was keyed in just before descent.
The drawback was that it obviously put the computer in an invalid state so some things were not scheduled correctly but Eyles and colleages had figured out which things and the astronauts could start those processes manually.
Then once the computer was in a reasonable state again the ignore abort bit could be set and the program mode set correctly and it was as if nothing had happened.
>I have never once read about abort-to-orbit capability as a concept
ATO was an abort mode [1] on the Shuttle program and is notably the only abort mode that was successfully used in the entire program, on STS-51f [2] . Challenger suffered an engine anomaly on liftoff that resulted in a lower orbit than was intended, but otherwise the mission went off without a hitch.
Thanks! I’d seen about the bailout capability mentioned in passing, but had always wondered what it would be in practice (spoiler: a pole!). Also, I didn’t realize a second engine almost shut down on STS-51-F .
Per the links:
“A particularly significant enhancement was bailout capability. Unlike the ejection seat in a fighter plane, the shuttle had an inflight crew escape system[12] (ICES). The vehicle was put in a stable glide on autopilot, the hatch was blown, and the crew slid out a pole to clear the orbiter's left wing. They would then parachute to earth or the sea. […] Before the Challenger disaster, this almost happened on STS-51-F, when a single SSME failed at about T+345 seconds. […] A second SSME almost failed because of a spurious temperature reading; however, the engine shutdown was inhibited by a quick-thinking flight controller. If the second SSME had failed within about 69 seconds of the first, there would have been insufficient energy to cross the Atlantic. Without bailout capability, the entire crew would have been killed.“
It's doubly confusing that STS-51-F, with the Challenger, is the only exercised launch abort; while STS-51-L is the famous launch disaster for which Challenger is most well known.
> “As a result of the changes in systems, flights under different numbering systems could have the same number with one having a letter appended, e.g. flight STS-51 (a mission carried out by Discovery in 1993) was many years after STS-51-A (Discovery's second flight in 1984).[6] It wasn't until STS-127 in 2009 where the flight numbering system returned to a standard and consistent order.”
Ouch, shortly after they get standardized and consistent flight numbers, the shuttle program gets cancelled. I guess computer science doesn’t have a monopoly over the difficulty of naming things.
Among last-ditch options considered for the Apollo programme (specifically several planned but eliminated long-duration, two-week missions), was the ultimate LESS-is-more approach: "Lunar escape systems".
This was basically a lawn-chair rocket for two which would utilise a disabled LEM's (lunar excursion module) fuel tanks, and would be hand-piloted without any guidance computer to an intercept orbit with the Apollo Command Module, with the hope that a rendezvous and crew transfer could occur within the four-hour window of space-suit oxygen supplies. Given that the CM's orbital period was two hours, this meant at best two chances for a successful intercept.
(I'd run across this from the recently submitted MOOSE article, "Man out of space, easiest", a strap-a-foam-mattress-to-your-ass reentry concept: <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE>.)
Apollo Lunar Module had an abort-to-orbit that was also used to lift off the surface of the Moon after successfully completing the mission. It used explosive charges to throw the lander frame away and involved Apollo Guidance Computer manuevering into orbit at any point of the mission up until the landing.
Dragon 2 has abort to orbit capabilities, too. The abort zones they call out as the rocket's IIP advances up the east coast continue until Ireland, and then after that, it's abort to orbit, where the superdracos will carry the ship to orbit without the second stage.
Abort-to-orbit is a confusing term since it suggests the Shuttle's specific ATO mode. I presume the requirement is "safe abort at all points during lunar descent/landing" rather than specifically to orbit (e.g. an abort mode that put them directly on a return-to-Earth trajectory would probably also be fine).
Sure. I meant more generally, presumably NASA's requirement is "has an acceptable plan to safely return them to Earth after abort" rather than specifying particular orbits.
I think since then Elon has mentioned that abort via the main Starship engines may be possible through all points of a launch (putting aside the landing process for now). Probably also helped by the hot staging related changes, since IIRC the concern regarding abort modes was whether or not the engines could safely ignite and separate from the booster.
It does still leave the system without a means of aborting if the ship's main engines have trouble, although I suppose they do have a good bit of redundancy there.
I expect if astronauts aboard HLS lose their altimeter they'd have to abort the landing immediately -- to proceed without it would be the height of recklessness.
In addition to the obvious, it should be taken into account that the absence of atmosphere makes very difficult to assess distance and scale. Videos of approach seem like a fractal browser.
I think GP was saying that the lander is single-stage. By the time of a presumptive lunar landing, there's no lower stage to drop as with the Apollo LEM.
Assuming the landing is soft enough to survive, shouldn't it be fairly trivial for the astronauts to disembark and right the lander? To the extent anything in space is trivial.
Even if it's a bit more than doable by hand a ratchet jack should make short work of it.
The Apollo LEM, only craft that has ever taken humans to the moon's surface, weighted somewhere around 20,000 kg after landing. Since it only ever operated in space and lunar gravity, it could be built with a much higher mass fraction than a rocket launched from earth requires - greater than 30%, where a Falcon 9 in comparison has a mass fraction below 5%. Even then, the LEM structure had to be built incredibly lightly. While the LEM structure could obviously be lifted by crane and survive launch and docking stresses, those were are at designed points in the structure. Without the presence of a crane capable of lifting the whole LEM, righting an LEM that had landed on its side would have been effectively impossible. Basically all of the modern proposed manned lunar landers are considerably larger than the LEM, and thus considerably heavier.
For comparison, a craft built for earth launch mass fractions probably wouldn't survive falling over in the first place - when that happened to a Falcon 9, the whole rocket simply exploded.
>shouldn't it be fairly trivial for the astronauts to disembark and right the lander?
I don't think that is an assumption you can make. In the worst case scenario the lander lands on the door. In which case the only way to disembark is to lift the lander.
Yup, jack points in the right place, jacking equipment with sufficient range of motion, AND solid lunar soil in the right place under the jack points.
Plus, you've got to get the whole jacking operation done without damaging any of your main or control thruster rockets, and without tipping past the upright point over to the other side, or just effectively rolling onto an adjacent side.
I wouldn't want to go on a craft where [jacking it back upright] was in the top ten on the list of recovery options to get home.
All the extra mass budget would likely be better spent on a more robust attitude control system to avoid flopping over in the first place. Unless you need it for something else anyway.
>I wouldn't want to go on a craft where [jacking it back upright] was in the top ten on the list of recovery options to get home.
For a counter, I wouldn't want to be on a lander so fragile[0] that being manipulated upright is infeasible. Something will go wrong, maybe not on that lander, but when it does go wrong it'll have to get duct taped together.
[0]Not just mechanically, but in terms of operation scope. Planning that everything must go perfectly or people die is a recipe for the latter.
I deliberately did not say I wanted jacking to be infeasible — but I DO want it quite far down on the options list, as in there's >10 better things to try first.
(And yes, I've done a fair amount of wrangling vehicles, gear, etc. in snow, dirt, mud, & rocks, and eventually it can often be gotten out. But on a different planet/moon, it really should be not be anything close to a primary option. OTOH, if it's got a set of 6+ pop-out lever-legs to upright itself, tested, etc., that's a different solution)
agree - which is probably why Elon Musk is so obsessive about increasing the efficiency and thrust of the merlin and raptor rocket engines, a huge amount of downstream capability can be achieved by increasing that number (all other things being equal)
So if the lander falls over because two of the feet land on regolith, odds are good you don't have a solid point on that side of the craft to put the jack...
Astronauts must be nervous stepping onto the first manned flight of a new craft that has a 100% success rate in the sole previous flight, but might have only a 50% success rate by the end of their mission...
With both Crew Dragon and Starship, there will have been _many_ successful missions involving un-crewed variants of the spacecraft (Falcon 9 and Cargo Dragon were both well-proven systems before crew was a possibility).
Well at least they would have no one else to blame but themselves. As far as I remember it was the pilots that insisted on the shuttle to be not be 100% automated, so they had to do it this way. The soviets just made the whole shuttle automated so it could be tested without risk to crew.
$90M goes a lot further in India, though. But yes, you’re still correct that this mission doesn’t prove that private is cheaper. I’m sure that Intuitive Machines took a big loss on this in order to get the deal, and it still cost this much.
Does it? For the person who cleans that restrooms that money goes a lot farther. For the quick boot camp and we will write html it also goes farther. However for the good engineers it doesn't go nearly as far. Great engineers in India are in demand and their prices have gone up to match. I wouldn't attempt a project like this without a lot of great engineers. (Great engineers in India make less than the US equivalent, but the difference is narrowing)
You are correct, the costs of salaries alone should show a significant difference. I wish people would actually have real conversations about what things actually cost per country. It's disingenuous to compare the USA and India without a true cost analysis
The problem with aviation is that if you get your innovation wrong, people die.
With E-VTOL, which is presumably aiming for local-to-local flights, you have the added problem that if you get your innovation wrong, potentially bystanders on the ground die when your flying car falls on them.
It's absolutely not impossible to do it right (i.e. with nobody dying). But if you do that you need to hit existing aerospace engineering safety standards for stuff like multiply redundant flight control systems, traffic routing that avoids extensive flight over densely populated areas, and so on.
And then you discover you're competing with an unexpected combination like, say, robo-taxis feeding a high speed rail station with 220mph trains running every 15 minutes and your business model turns out to be the new Zeppelin, not the DC-3.
For example some E-VTOL systems have six quite independent systems, each with a battery, motor and propeller. I think it helps the design to be more fault tolerant. Helicopters are allowed many things even when they are noisier and don't have similar redundancy.
There was a scheduled helicopter between Helsinki and Tallinn. It was somewhat expensive but not unreasonable. Much faster than a ship of course. It crashed, everyone died. They continued later but stopped eventually. They are complex mechanical solutions with very high maintenance requirements.
Short inter-city distances over land run into competition from high speed rail. Which I know is not a thing in the Americas, but is all over Europe and can compete with turboprop airliners on point-to-point time. (Remember, railway stations are almost all in the centre of the departure/arrival city and there's no security theatre to delay your boarding: also, service frequency on some high speed inter-city routes is as high as one departure every fifteen minutes, utterly unlike Amtrak.)
Scotland isn't really a market for short distance electric flights unless you're thinking of the Highlands and Islands, where less than 10% of the population is scattered across crinkle-cut fjords.
France/Netherlands to Sint Maarten/St. Martin is, IIRC, served by wide-body airliners because it's both legally part of France itself (at least the St. Martin half of the island) and it's a significant tourist resort.
And if you think the EU and UK have laxer safety/regulatory standards than the FAA, you might want to re-think your position ...
It was published in 2005 -- actually I wrote the 9 novelettes that went into it from 1998-2003 (they were originally published in Asimov's SF magazine from 2002-2004 before I assembled and rewrote them to make the book).
Thank you for your work! Last time I praised Accelerando on HN you commented that I should read The Rapture of the Nerds. I read it shortly after and loved it!
Amusingly (or enragingly) one of the effects of the Sad Puppy voting slate in 2015 was that it pushed William Patterson's magisterial and definitive biography of Robert A. Heinlein -- who the Puppies mostly adored -- off the shortlist for Best Related Word (a Hugo category usually occupied by scholarly works of SF history and criticism) in favour of utter garbage like "Wisdom From My Internet" by Michael Z. Williamson because the Sad Puppy organizers were so out of touch with events outside their bubble that they weren't aware the biography had been published.
You can take this as an illustration of the risk of an organized voting slate scoring a huge own goal.
