Most of the content of that report is about the deluge system for the launch pad. Since it tentatively appears that this worked, I have high hopes for much more expedient environmental reviews of future test flights.
1,354 karma · joined June 16, 2016
https://arstechnica.com/science/2023/03/the-launch-of-japans...
The Soviet N1 rocket never even got past first stage separation, in 4 launches. They got closer every time, but after the 4th stage blew up during main engine cut-off, they canceled the program, and never flew a cosmonaut beyond low-earth orbit.
Apollo 1 is highly analogous to the current testing of Starship. New spacecraft, highly ambitious, coming together for the first time.
Its conflagration was predictable, and a total waste of the life of the astronauts onboard. Only their deaths forced the whole spacecraft to be redesigned the way it should have been before any astronauts were onboard. Even afterwards, a second electrical fire nearly killed three more astronauts, far from any safety though their shiny new door.
The Space Shuttle ran much the same way. Carrying astronauts on its very first flight, people though it was safe, right up until it spectacularly killed seven astronauts. After that, it was flown much less ambitiously, and then it killed seven more people, and then we still kept flying it because it was all we had, and our bureaucracy was stuck with it.
Starship blowing up today poses no risk to human life, or to any organizational ambition. Rather, its present failures represent progress towards future success. Somebody is trying to do better than has been done in the past. If they learn all the things to not do to their rocket before valuable payloads and people fly on it, all the better.
Anything built outside of currently-known parameters might fail, so you design as much of the rocket as possible to operate within the limits of current knowledge.
Some of those limits turn out to be feasible to push in a laboratory. So you build and conduct experiments on those parameters, record the results, and design your rocket accordingly.
But for some parameters, the lab experiments required to test them are incredibly costly. Especially for parameters that vary strongly with scale (like turbulence), a system with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket can only be predicted by an experiment with the size and energy of the world's largest rocket.
Say it costs a billion dollars to build and launch your new rocket, but it will operate with ten unknown parameters, each of which will cost 200 million dollars to individually test on the ground. You could spend two billion dollars on experiments, then one billion dollars on a rocket you're confident will work. This is more-or-less the model that NASA used for developing the Space Launch System: do as much science as necessary, ask Congress for as much extra time and money as the contractors say they need, so they can be extremely confident that their new biggest rocket will work perfectly the first time. NASA doesn't like launching rockets that they don't know will work, because Congress doesn't like when rockets they paid for blow up, and NASA depends on Congress for all of their funding.
However, for the same money, you could build your rocket best-guess within the known unknowns and fly it. It's likely to blow up, because you guessed on ten unknowns. However, if the results of the flight allows you determine some of the parameters with greater confidence than one billion dollars in ground experiments, then it was worth the while, and you re-design your rocket according to the newly-understood parameters. You can do this three times for the cost of building the experiments and flying once. That's a decent chance at learning the parameters, and as a bonus, you get to practice building and flying the rocket, productively employing all of your staff and facilities.
That's more-or-less the model that SpaceX is developing Starship on, and previously Falcon 9. Blowing up prototype rockets only costs SpaceX time and money, and as long as it costs less time and money than running ground experiments (and keeping their production and launch crews on retainer, and maintaining their facilities between rockets), they're saving money by launching rockets they expect to blow up.
Sarcasm aside, NASA has blown up plenty of rockets. It's not a problem to blow up a rocket if it doesn't pose any substantial risk. NASA doesn't much like to blow up rockets anymore because it's contrary to how their operational model works: Congress gives NASA a task, a deadline, and a budget, and NASA is expected to deliver on the task, and can ask for more time or money down the road. Any kind of high-profile public failure is risky to NASA because it looks bad to Congress, who might cancel the project. Asking Congress for more time or money is normal, so the safe strategy with NASA's undertakings (especially high-profile ones like the James Webb Space Telescope and the Space Launch System) is to deliver flawless performance, usually late and over-budget. Congress doesn't need to be paid back, and history mostly remembers program success rather than schedule and budget overruns.
Of SpaceX's current programs, Falcon 9 is operated most similarly to NASA. It's expected to be mature and reliable; it is trusted to fly billion-dollar spy satellites and human crew. Any kind of failure will be heavily scrutinized, so SpaceX is only pushing the envelope of reuse and flight performance with their in-house payload program, Starlink. All of their customer flights get to operate well within the established safe performance envelope of the rocket. With over 200 successful consecutive flights now, SpaceX's Falcon 9 obviously can be depended on.
Starship, on the other hand, is not being depended on by anybody at the moment. No project gets delayed or cancelled when it explodes; no missile complex goes unwatched, no humans get stranded in space, smacked into the ocean, or burned alive. Nobody, least of all SpaceX, needs it to be perfect now. What they need is for it to become good enough to sell, to sell lots once they're selling it, and to not cost too much once they're selling it, all of this ideally sooner rather than later. They have access to lots of money now to make this happen, but investors' money has to be paid back someday.
So the bar for Starship isn't set at "succeed". It's set at "maximize future return on investment".
SpaceX is counting on present failures to save them money in the future by proving exactly what is necessary to succeed, at a time when failure is relatively cheap for them. They've clearly improved from the previous launch. Key milestones were passed. Telemetry was collected, and the flight safety systems executed an authoritative conclusion to the flight. With the investment of only 212 days of time and money since their previous high-profile Starship explosion, SpaceX has gotten demonstrable progress towards future flight success.
One of my two bicycles is a secondhand Schwinn Loop, a cheap folding bike with 20" tires and an extremely rearward weight distribution. After riding ~1,600 miles on it, I just recently replaced the rear tire because it wore thin. I had gotten 5 or 6 flats on that tire. I was able to keep using it, and tube, by removing the nail/staple/glass and patching the tube. I still have the same tube under the new tire. The patches seem to be permanent fixes.
(My other bike is a 700c hybrid bike from Bikes Direct, which I've put around 3,500 or 4,000 miles on. I've only gotten two flats, patched them both, and still haven't worn out the original tires.)
But also, it's my understanding that Krita is not a photo editor, but rather a digital painting program; that any ability it has to edit photos is just because digital paintings are stored in the same file formats as digital photographs. Saying that Krita is unsuited for editing hundreds of photographs is analogous to saying that Visual Studio is unsuitable for creating ASCII art. There are other tools that you're supposed to use for those tasks. For editing hundreds of photographs, I understand Adobe's Lightroom or Bridge to be the intended tools, not Photoshop, nor any tools which are highly similar to Photoshop (GIMP, Krita, or otherwise).
yt-dlp -f "best[height<=480][fps<=30]"+bestaudio --cookies cookies.txt --download-archive archive.txt --all-subs --embed-subs --embed-metadata --merge-output-format mkv --sponsorblock-mark all -o "%(channel)s/(%(upload_date)s) %(fulltitle)s.%(ext)s" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?list=LL"I've never used Krita, but I was skeptical that it can't do this, so I just now installed it and gave it a try. It does have this feature! I made a crop rectangle, then right-clicked on it. A little menu popped up, titled "Crop Tool Actions". One of the things in the menu is a checkbox labeled "Lock Ratio", which was unchecked by default. I clicked the checkbox, and then I could resize the crop rectangle with the mouse without changing its aspect ratio.
Took me under a minute to figure out, having never used the software before or read any documentation. I'd say that's one sign of a decent UI.
https://www.blender.org/about/
4 sources of income: one-off donations and recurring donations (from individuals and businesses), subsidies and co-development funds from businesses, and subscriptions to their cloud service.
https://www.largus.fr/actualite-automobile/dacia-spring-pres...
That number is more reasonable; given that they're assuming 5-year loans, and the average car in the U.S. lasts 14 years. 5 years is close to 34% of 14 years.
https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/introducing-raspberry-pi-5/
https://spacenews.com/spacex-seeks-to-accelerate-falcon-9-pr...
The NASA Authorization Act of 2010 directed NASA to develop a new rocket called the Space Launch System. It set performance requirements for the rocket (use just two stages to lift 70 tons into low-Earth orbit, use a third stage to lift 130 tons to LEO, carry cargo and astronauts to ISS, carry deep-space crew capsule, support gradual increase in performance by "evolutionary growth" with new stages), and required that, "where practicable", NASA should maintain existing Space-Shuttle and Ares contracts, workforces, infrastructure, and technologies, and that the rocket be scheduled to launch no later than the end of 2016.
The precise requirements were written to force NASA to design a rocket that maintained lucrative Space Shuttle-era contracts.
https://spaceref.com/press-release/hatch-passage-of-nasa-rea...
Also, the requirement to upgrade existing infrastructure ensured that billions of dollars went into Bill Nelson's district in Florida. (He is now the highest-ranking official at NASA.)
The law did not establish long-term funding for the development of the rocket. As with all NASA projects, money is granted one year at a time in Congress's annual budget. In 2011, NASA announced the plan to build this rocket. In accordance with the law's requirements and intention, it re-used almost all core technologies, infrastructure, and major subcontractors of the Space Shuttle. There was actually some fuss about this at the time:
https://spacenews.com/shelby-nasa-hold-competition-sls-boost...
but the strategy of "give Congress what they want" has worked: the Planetary Society shows that Congress has consistently granted NASA more money than asked for to fund SLS.
https://www.planetary.org/articles/why-we-have-the-sls
In particular, Richard Shelby (senator from Alabama, which is home to many NASA facilities, and Chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee from 2018–2021) was a powerful political supporter of the SLS, ensuring its continued funding, and attacking anybody who even suggested it might not be necessary.
https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/02/so-long-senator-shel...
https://www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/solarsystem/hubble_moon...
On the other hand, some Lunar-orbit spacecraft have directly photographed prior landers. Here is an article with nice photographs from NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter of the Apollo 17 landing site, in which the descent stage of the lander, and tracks leading to and from it, are clearly visible.
https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/news/apollo-sites.htm...
and here is a timestamp showing an image that India's Chandrayaan-2 orbiter took of the Apollo 11 landing site and descent stage.
China has successfully soft-landed on the moon all three times they've tried. India's much lower-budget program has failed twice, but given their success in their other space endeavors, they probably have pretty good odds of making this landing.
https://geohack.toolforge.org/geohack.php?pagename=Chandraya...
Also, every lander that's ever landed on the near side of the moon is still there.
Nitpick: it's the far side of the moon, not the dark side. Unless you mean "dark" as in "mysterious", but that's just misleading.
Roscosmos (the Russian Space Agency) didn't do any of those. Those were all accomplished by the Soviet Space Program, which had major centers across the Union, and ceased to exist after the USSR broke up. Roscosmos was created in 1992, and every one of their lunar and interplanetary missions has resulted in failure before even reaching their destinations.
Years later, I figured out that you're supposed to use the spacebar to select/toggle UI elements, not the Enter key. Nobody told me that, and the text-mode installer certainly doesn't tell you!
Ubuntu 11.04, on the other hand, was no trouble to install.
Also, Falcon 9 has delivered multiple payloads to lunar orbit. Examples are ispace's Hakuto-R Mission 1, SpaceIL's Beresheet, and South Korea's Danuri. In interplanetary space, the Double Asteroid Redirection Test was launched on a Falcon 9.
This project cites llama.cpp as inspiration, but seems much-simplified. It only supports llama-2, only supports fp-32, and only runs on one CPU thread.