Some Ekranoplans (like the Lun mentioned in the article) have the ability to fly above the ground effect zone, though less efficiently.
If rogue waves (or other rough sea) can be spotted far enough ahead, the plane could increase altitude over brief rough spots, settling back on to its ground effect cushion once calmer waters were reached.
Because it's travelling so much faster than surface waves, the lidar (or whatever scanning system) would only have to consider a relatively narrow field of view in front of the craft.
Does SpaceX document all their tests publicly? Or are we just seeing the successful ones? (If they've all been successful ones, will we see unsuccessful ones if they come in the future?)
Ahh, yes. A little digging shows that these tests are done at their McGregor, TX test site, and McGregor is well within hearing and visual range of the tests.
A launch is completely different from a private short-range test on a closed site.
You could watch a launch live, and they are very public about the timing, purpose, and location of launches before they happen.
The Grasshopper tests (to my knowledge) are not open for public observation, and I haven't seen any media coverage prior to tests, so if there was an unsuccessful test it wouldn't be as obvious as an unsuccessful launch attempt.
My question was whether this is by design, and if there was an unsuccessful test whether they would showcase that as well, in the manner that unsuccessful launches are well documented public 'learning experiences'.
Pretty sure there is no company in the world that would publicly showcase their R&D failures. I think I understand where you're coming from, that you don't want to be misled about the safety and reliability, but it is still in an early testing stage.
I think posting a video of a rocket crashing would be way beyond any reasonable expectation. That's not contributing to any public learning. That's just doing significant damage to your brand with extremely small upside (gaining "honesty" cred with some small subset).
Oh the edge cases will be so angry. There are a very few engineers at Google who have Gmail account names shorter than 6 characters. It's not the norm, but they exist. Their addresses can't be validated.
I'm sure there are special cases all over the place. It would be nice if Mailgun differentiated between 'this address is just malformed' and 'from what I know of [ISP], this address oughtn't exist'.
Well, you are not forced to reject the email, you can just stick to the unobtrusive spellchecker, that just suggests in case if something suspicious. So the end decision is up to your app.
The spellchecker doesn't actually kick in all that often. The better solution is to give flags back differentiating between 'unlikely' and 'impossible' email addresses.
