Everybody who could afford it adopted psychostimulants in WW2. Go pills have been part and parcel since then. Some countries have adopted modafinil, but the US still uses amphetamine.
I am an adult with ADHD and have never been able to get past the side effects that I have to drugs such as amphetamines and SSRIs. I was prescribed Modafinil for a short period for "Shift Work Disorder" when I worked shift work as a Stationary Engineer and it was glorious in regard to my ADHD symptoms with effectively zero side effects. I wish the US would expand its usage.
Modafinil is only a Schedule IV controlled substance so it's usually possible to find a doctor who will prescribe off label if you want it. (This isn't medical advice.)
Just a note for anyone passing by. The side effects are rare, except diarrhea and you need to watch your liver enzyme levels if I remember right. Everyone I know who's taken that had diarrhea the entire time (manageable with meds), and it will screw your liver long term.
I think the GI effects are basically the same between any of the -afinils, FWIW.
I wouldn't recommend them in general, but mostly because they last too long to really work with a normal 16/8 sleep cycle and the other stimmy effects can detract from things other than focus work.
I never took any long-term, but I've actually napped (purposefully) the afternoon after taking one in the morning, which is impossible on amphetamines.
Which is to say, they seem better to me, but maybe long-term use is different.
> In 1919, the Japanese discovered a more potent version of the drug — methamphetamine. The new drug was a crystalline powder soluble in water. In this form, it can be smoked, injected, snorted or taken orally. Users get an intense but brief high when they inject or smoke the drug, but if it's snorted or taken orally by capsule, the high lasts longer.
There was also a drink with same name hiropon that was generally available for some time.
I tried googling for more info but I haven't been able to find much in English and my Japanese isn't good enough to read at that level. I've only heard about it from my wife and a few other people in Japan. I've seen a few old posters for it at old bars.
An army of tweakers. I don't think that this aspect of the War and the Holocaust are discussed enough. Certainly no excuse, but it is very interesting.
> Chronic Meth users have deficits in memory and executive functioning as well as higher rates of anxiety, depression, and most notably psychosis. [0]
In more recent times of horror:
> After the fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria, large stockpiles of the illicit drug captagon have reportedly been uncovered.
> The stockpiles, found by Syrian rebels, are believed to be linked to al-Assad military headquarters, implicating the fallen regime in the drug’s manufacture and distribution. [1]
Im sure eventually whatever pills the Germans were taking back then were bad for you but I would imagine smoking huge doses of not so pure street meth is quite a bit different than something created in a lab.
That being said if anyone uses drugs to avoid sleeping for many days straight I would imagine it's quite horrible for your mental health
Highly recommend the book "Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich" by Norman Ohler, a podcast promo led me to get the book from the library and I really liked it!
Starship isn't exactly the same as Saturn V. It's bigger, for one.
The reason why it matters is that efficiency matters. It's fine if it takes longer, not so much if it costs way, way more, especially if such a huge rocket has limited applications. And as I understand it the consensus is that Starship (or at least a fully-loaded Starship) will never go to the Moon. Once it's in orbit it takes like twenty refueling launches and space rendezvous to fill it up again so it can make the transfer burn. In other words, it's never happening.
I think that understanding of the consensus is incorrect. The mission plan for Artemis 3 is that a specialized Starship upper stage will be refueled in LEO and then transfer to lunar orbit where it will wait for astronauts arriving on SLS/Orion.
Yes the mission profile is more complex, but that complexity can mostly be settled before the astronauts launch on their mission.
NASA seems to think it is a viable plan which is why they selected SpaceX to execute that part of the mission.
> After a multi-phase design effort, on April 16, 2021, NASA selected SpaceX to develop Starship HLS and deliver it to near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) prior to arrival of the crew for use on the Artemis III mission. The delivery requires that Starship HLS be refueled in Earth orbit before boosting to the NRHO, and this refueling requires a pre-positioned propellant depot in Earth orbit that is filled by multiple (at least 14) tanker flights.
I stand by what I said: not happening. I'll believe it when I see it.
Can you imagine if to make a sightseeing trip to another city you had to stop in the middle of the highway and then make 14 round-trips with a second car to fill your first car back up? I can't imagine why someone would approve this plan, other than corruption.
> Can you imagine if to make a sightseeing trip to another city you had to stop in the middle of the highway and then make 14 round-trips with a second car to fill your first car back up?
If the alternative was throwing away and building/buying a new car for every trip? Absolutely.
They said the same about landing a first stage booster - impossible and pointless to attempt. And it just happened for the 400th time yesterday.
False dichotomy - the mission profile dictates the refuelling station and all that, but it never was the only option. Somehow we've decided we needed to be able to do lots of trips to the moon for Artemis, but it's not clear to me that it's such a precious golden oportunity and warrants this spending/impact on the environnenent.
We didn't get to the moon with a refuelling station did we? How come we need one now? We're really seeing 15 starship launches per moon trip as reasonable, rather than just building a single trip program?
The mission itself is nonsensical. The problems are stemming from the SLS, I'll find a link to a relevant source.
> We didn't get to the moon with a refuelling station did we?
No. We did it by throwing away ~98% of the vehicle on the way there.
> How come we need one now?
Because building a new gargantuan tower and tossing that majority of it into the ocean/deep space every time we need to go the moon is not sustainable.
> We're really seeing 15 starship launches per moon trip as reasonable, rather than just building a single trip program
Yes. Because again. The alternative (dictated by physics) is that we expend the whole thing.
>The money is not "burned up" - it is spent right here on Earth.
If the idea was not clearly conveyed then let me try again: the money is spent building things that are intended to be destroyed (in order to fulfill their function, but nevertheless), when it could be spent building things that are intended to last.
>The technology developed for doing such a difficult task will inevitably benefit all of humanity.
I've heard this refrain several times. Please name a technology that was developed for the space program and that would have otherwise not been developed.
The Apollo missions landed two crew members in a tin can with extreme limits on what weight they could bring with them in either direction.
A single trip launch will always be constrained like this due to the tyranny of the rocket equation.
A modular mission system with multiple launches is the best way to expand capabilities and enable things like landing larger payloads for more advanced or long-term missions.
IIRC, the expected return payload for this is lighter than Apollo. In no small part because they're dropping all their return fuel and their entire return vehicle into the Moon's gravity well, rather than leaving it in orbit. Subjecting themselves to extra abuse from the good ol' rocket equation.
The vehicle that returns to Earth is Orion which stays in NRHO and does not bring its fuel to the lunar surface.
Return payload constraints are probably from using Orion as the return vehicle. Mass to the surface is much higher than Apollo since that is launched separate from the crew.
I thought the return vehicle was a to-be-developed direct-return vehicle from both SpaceX and Blue Origin (both got contracts, and supposedly both's versions will fly)?
[EDIT] Apparently there are multiple plans involving even more spacecraft, because why not I guess? It's as you describe for Artemis III, but then gets way more complicated with Artemis IV, involving more spacecraft for some reason.
As far as I know all of the known Artemis mission profiles only use the lunar lander to shuttle from NRHO (lunar orbit / gateway station location) to the lunar surface and back. All crew return is planned to be done with Orion for now.
NASA has optioned an additional lander from Blue Origin but that would be taking the same role as SpaceX's lander, shuttling from lunar orbit to the surface and back to lunar orbit.
There's never going to be long-term crewed missions to the Moon. It has no scientific value. Even the little exploration we did in the '60s and '70s were a dubious proposition. There's not that much we could do by sending people that we couldn't do by sending robots.
If you think there's no value to returning to the moon, building a base, etc. then fine. But you keep moving the goalposts of what you are taking issue with here.
And yet the boosters are not being reused. They're just making brand new engines for every launch. If we're generous they're being dismantled and recycled.
Alright, if we're talking about Falcon 9, I don't know what the cost savings are for a reusable rocket, or if there are any. If someone has that data, feel free to provide it.
> As of 2024, SpaceX's internal costs for a Falcon 9 launch are estimated between $15 million[186] and $28 million,[185] factoring in workforce expenses, refurbishment, assembly, operations, and facility depreciation.[187] These efficiencies are primarily due to the reuse of first-stage boosters and payload fairings.[188] The second stage, which is not reused, is believed to be the largest expense per launch, with the company's COO stating that each costs $12 million to produce.[189]
The mission is wildly more complicated than the Apollo missions. There's a whole oddball-orbit space station that has to be placed as a way-station, for one thing, and none of that's happened yet (remember how long it took to build the ISS?). Also, landing all your return fuel instead of leaving it in orbit, so a way heavier lander (with a smaller return payload than Apollo!), which is a pain in the ass. Multiple space ships launched by different rocket systems involved. The SLS still has to be finished for it to go forward. Orbital refueling of large fuel tanks is a hard problem that remains unsolved, and this goes nowhere without fixing that. The contracts for the return vehicles are disturbingly light on parts about making sure they can reliably work, including surviving re-entry.
I'm with you. Not happening. We're more likely to come up with a totally different, simpler plan, and do that instead, before this happens.
You can easily mathematically prove that orbital refueling increases mission efficiency. This is a simple fact, it's not about Starship or whatever. Your analogy does not hold.
"It's fine if it takes longer, not so much if it costs way, way more, especially if such a huge rocket has limited applications."
Taking longer at lower cost is a great trade-off for Starship but wasn't for Saturn V. The main driver for Saturn V was the space race against the Soviet Union. Economic interests played a very small role. It was all about being first and compensating for the Sputnik shock.
It doesn't take a lot of juice to send signals straight up. Iridium has been using transceivers to do similar IoT things for decades and my old Inmarsat satphone used a fraction of a watt to get my voice up to geosynchronous orbit just so someone standing next to me on an outdoor landing could hear a message from space.
The Inmasrsats are also way bigger satellites with correspondingly large antennas and ability to sniff out the weak signals from handsets. Starlink base stations use a lot more power and idle around 15w and go up to 20-50+ while transmitting from what I can find depending on the model. A good portion of that likely comes from things like the heater (is it smart and only powers on when it's cold?) and wifi router too but it's still a lot more than older satellite phone setups.
Amazing! Literally the premise of the HBO show _True Blood_ from the 2000s. Japanese scientists invent artificial blood which allows vampires to "come out of the coffin".
OK, I guess we'll wait and see about the vampires. But the blood substitute and Japanese scientists thing was spot-on, at least.
