dabluecaboose

Yeah I just did a double take at my desk reading this

That's because the same guy posts the comment every time Kagi is mentioned

"I'm sorry, due to excessive civil unrest in the vicinity I cannot take you to that location" is the first thing that springs to mind, personally

This mission also illustrates how confusing the old STS mission numbering scheme used to be.

STS-51-F is the only exercised launch abort, and the Challenger was the orbital vehicle.

STS-51-L, which occurred the following year, is the famous Challenger disaster.

Originally, the numeral in the mission designation indicated the federal fiscal year of the mission and the launch site (51 being 1985 and launch site 1 (KSC, 2 would have been used for Vandenberg). The letter indicated the sequential launch index, so A=1m, B=2, etc.

This was originally done after STS-12. Superstition around Apollo 13 created the desire to avoid an STS-13. The numbering system returned to a strictly sequential schema after STS-51-L, with STS-26.

I've heard a lot of arguments against human space exploration, but "We could put that energy into working less" is probably one of the more out-there arguments that's hard to take seriously.

I don't see any of those discussions. I see people complaining that Kenton is "privileged", that him enjoying himself his somehow harmful, that his house is too big, and implying that all is a problem; with little to no specifics on how or why.

You're completely welcome to make a post that raises those questions, but I think its irrelevant here. I don't think its productive for every fun project posted to have an inquisition in the comments on whether or not the project deserves to exist.

> May I suggest the problem is not with the questions then?

It's against the guidelines to make swipes like this.

By contrast, I think that every post on HN doesn't need a bucket full of crabs complaining that they can't do the same thing. It's not intellectually stimulating.

Hi Kenton! Big fan of the build and the writeup. The "cat bathroom" and cat-walk has lived rent free in my head since I read this the first time, and I fully intend on replicating it if ever I'm lucky enough to build a home.

Thanks for sharing this awesome project!

Rocket Scientist here. Quick (simplified) primer on engine nozzles and why aerospikes are advantageous:

A rocket engine bell is a supersonic nozzle. Subsonic nozzles, like on your garden hose, typically go from wider to narrower to increase pressure and velocity of the exiting flow. Supersonic nozzles generally narrow to a point; This point is calculated to be exactly where the exhaust stream reaches Mach 1 (Supersonic flow). Once a flow is supersonic, it behaves differently and somewhat counter-intuitively. The nozzle widens to increase velocity and decrease pressure. The bigger the engine bell, the less the pressure is at the exit, and the faster the flow.

Generally, rocket engine bells have one ambient pressure value that they produce optimal thrust at. This is equivalent to the exit pressure at the very end of the bell. Take a look at the engine bell for the Apollo service module- It's quite large in order to expand the flow as much as possible to perform well in a vacuum (Very low pressure)[1].

If the ambient pressure is higher than the exit pressure, your flow is underexpanded and you get shock diamonds, as seen here [2]. The SR-71's engines were optimized for a higher altitude/lower pressure, so on takeoff the ambient pressure is pushing "inward"; the flow is underexpanded.

If the ambient pressure is lower than the exit pressure, and you see a large plume expanding outward from the nozzle, as seen here [3]. The flow is pushing "outward" at a higher pressure than the ambient; the flow is overexpanded.

Most rocket engines are optimized for an altitude/pressure ~midway through the stage's lifetime, so they're underexpanded at launch and overexpanded at engine cut-off. You can see in both examples that the velocity vector of the escaping flow isn't parallel to the rocket- it's going inward (underexpanded) or outward (overexpanded). This is the source of inefficiency with respect to engine bells.

---

The main advantage of an aerospike is that the ambient pressure effectively provides the outer shell of the engine bell- the flow is always optimally expanded at every altitude. This means you don't need to pick an optimal "midpoint" to design your engine around- the flow is always optimal from launch to orbit.

This massive upside comes with a downside. Staging generally provides two advantages to a rocket: The ability to shed dead mass, and the ability to "upgrade" to a more optimal engine bell. With an aerospike, you have an expensive engine that you don't want to drop (because it's perfectly efficient at every altitude) but now you have to figure out how to shed the dead mass as you go.

Personally, I've always envisioned an aerospike working well on a Space Shuttle type vehicle- the engines are kept and the fuel tanks are discarded. I'm interested to see if aerospike development comes with a change in how we see launch vehicles in the post-shuttle era that's largely dominated by disposable or VTOL-recoverable first stages.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c0/Apollo_C...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/d3/SR...

[3] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e2/Apollo_1...

> Lot's of HN (and "social" media) commenters in this world evidently are; nothing ironic about it.

I suppose what I'm trying to say is that it's ironic that the one guy providing these consumer-friendly features is considered anathema by many of the people clamoring for those features. You, yourself even mention downthread that you'd otherwise be interested in the M64 Pro controller, but won't consider it.

I was just trying to make a genuine comment remarking on the dichotomy, but I guess people are more interested in making quippy one-liners.

I believe you're correct! Two such stations with that orientation should warrant a mention.

I'm surprised they didn't mention the Pentagon metro, which always stood out to me since instead of having side-by-side platforms, they're stacked vertically within the same vault.

I guess it falls under "Waffle" style, though.

Comparing a run-of-the-mill defense contractor to a serial rapist and murderer is certainly up there in the most unhinged justifications that I've seen on HN.

A friend of mine did posit the quandary that an "unpalatable" individual such as Luckey appears to be one of the few making consumer-friendly products: Removable, swappable battery packs, AA battery support, standard USB-C charging, easy interoperability, open sourced designs, exposed screws, teardown instructions, etc. Apparently ModRetro is even looking into making dumb TVs for gaming.

It's ironic, in another world HN commenters would be lauding Luckey and ModRetro for all these virtues.

Good to see Kotaku's admirable journalistic practice of posting a list of histrionic tweets is alive and well

Are you looking to make homemade homebrew carts? If the M64 carts are anything like ModRetro's chromatic carts, the boards will be flashable. ModRetro has also stated they're planning on open-sourcing the design, so if we're lucky there could be a large variety of people making flashable blank carts in the near future.

I'm really looking forward to the Epilogue 64 Operator. I have the GB Operator, and it's been amazing to be able to flash romhacks onto carts and play on bona-fide hardware.

> Does Modretro's target market buy this type of stuff? Or are they the type to just download and emulator and ROM.

Speaking as someone who spent all weekend playing his new M64: Yes, the target market often does buy the cartridge. I've got a brand new copy of Xeno Crisis sitting on my shelf, although Xibalba was a close 2nd. (Tied with Buck Bumble ;) )

That said, there's definitely a crowd that would rather buy a summercart and pirate all their roms. Personally, I'm interested in more thoughtful and intentional electronics, so I'm attracted to the idea of old school "buy the game on a cartridge" mentality.

> I'm unaware of the Californians attempting to seize anyone's domain name over this issue.

They may not be attacking the domain but they're attempting to leverage the US Legal system to shut down operations. Arguably that's even worse- they can't just move to another domain/tld.

> The idea that a state court in one particular state can enforce such an absurd law against a company that likely has no business operations or servers in the state is ridiculous.

I agree. California has been doing this since 2022 [1][2] and it's equally indefensible.

States should not be allowed to wield their size and influence as a cudgel against other states and jurisdictions.

[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtm...

[2] https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/ghost-gun-crackdown-a...

"Anomaly" is one of those words that, in the space industry, can mean anything from "Our payload isn't behaving as well as we're expecting" to "Someone stepped on it" to "A rock hit it"

You can use it to describe literally anything that's off nominal. It's fantastic.

The cool thing about geostationary orbits is that they're far enough out that they get 24/7 sun (Except around the equinoxes). We could easily fit a solar worship break in the schedule in between imaging and momentum dumps.

Hah originally making an animation was my plan, but as so often happens it fell on the backburner and then I ended up with a massive archive. I just deleted it once I realized that A) Better archives exist elsewhere and B) I wasn't going to do anything with it.

I still have the script somewhere. I should throw an LLM at it and see if I can't sand off a few rough edges.

They're concerned because GOES-19 deployed with the newest Rothschild Space Weather Laser, which could disrupt their atmospheric camouflage

We don't need a bloated React framework to show a plaintext file with the fuel tank levels. It's NOAA, not Microsoft.

Looking at the timestamp, that's from yesterday. Nominal product delivery happens ~every 10 minutes.

Former GOES engineer here. At this point I'd almost be surprised if 19 didn't have something go wrong. We had issues on almost every other satellite. GOES-17 had the loop heat pipe anomaly(Supposedly from someone stepping on it in the cleanroom...), GOES-15 (IIRC) had a micrometeorite strike, and GOES-13 had a fuel tank anomaly right before deorbit.

GOES-16 and GOES-17 are on-orbit spares, so in the extremely unlikely event of a total failure there's at least another spacecraft on-orbit ready to take up station.

That said, I have every faith in the GOES team to get to the bottom of this. They're the best, and I often wish I was back there working with them.

While it may not be flashy, I personally find the GOES sites extremely useful. Things are often simply placed at obvious and expected URLs, so scraping or monitoring is extremely easy.

I wrote the script that provides the GOES NavSum [1] and it pretty much just builds a standardized text file and drops it in the folder. The neat thing is that this makes it really easy to programmatically scrape and parse the data.

I wrote a personal script at one point that would download the GOES-EAST CONUS image and both EAST and WEST full disk images and composite them into a wallpaper. At one point my server had 500GB of archived GOES imagery. I liked to joke with my former coworkers that I could report image anomalies before they notice because my desktop wallpaper would change every 10 minutes.

[1] https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/resources/cemscs/navsum.txt

> Please note: This status information on this website is generally updated on a monthly basis. Recent outages and anomalies on data flow are highlighted at the top of the page.

> He was a cancer on Reddit and I’m sure he still exists under different monikers. But now there are 100s of gallowboobs.

Yep, for example: If you mention the name "TurboStrider27" on /r/Games, your comment gets shadowbanned.

The term GP was looking for is "Caseback Knife":

https://diplomatwinders.com/cdn/shop/products/55035knife_102...