jccooper

NASA missions still routinely overperform. Curiosity's been operational on Mars for a good 12 years now.

Elon's a master at saying things that people read as something more than he actually said. I knew without seeing it that there's 0 chance that he (or anyone) actually said they're autonomous. But also that he didn't say they're not.

Well, Congress specified it to use SLS, since they were looking for extra payloads. And then uncoupled it from SLS when it became clear it couldn't even handle one extra payload.

NASA, wisely, always benchmarked the mission on Falcon Heavy, and bailed from SLS as soon as they were allowed to.

Clipper on SLS was more of a "wouldn't it be neat" scenario than the intended mission design.

There's also a very impressive sensor and actuator story.

That's probably venting of excess pressurants and/or an engine purge.

Yeah, that's a fishy claim. You could perhaps say it's technically true he currently holds title... until a court rules otherwise. Which is certainly would, unless Italy is doing something very unusual.

I expect that's the statement of a lawyer in CYA mode; at some point he goes from unknowing victim to knowingly holding stolen property, which can start to cause legal issues.

It's a silly thing to say, because ship losses are largely driven by German submarines in the Atlantic and American submarines in the Pacific, which are about as disconnected as things get in WW2.

You can see clear trends in the data in each of those theatres, both of which turn drastically in the Allies favor later in the war. The main driver for that is American war materiel production, but there's also plenty of decisions in strategy, tactics, and weapons systems that are entirely different.

Terminal has historical bindings to Ctrl-C and Ctrl-V that aren't copy/paste. (Ctrl-C is especially common, being "interrupt" or "quit".)

Use Ctrl-Shift-C and Ctrl-Shift-V for copy/paste.

> an error in properly vetting and fact-checking the phrases provided by the consultant

The error was "not doing it".

Though a large batch and large amount of flights by space standards, Shuttle was basically all prototypes by normal manufacturing standards. The 135 STS flights wouldn't even make a dent in an airliner certification and test campaign. It's not surprising they kept encountering problems.

Debian doesn't depend on CrowdStrike. That's about people who installed it on such systems.

I'm very much on board with cuts and/or emendations to remove or update archaisms and obsolete cultural references, and align better to modern expectations with regards to length and intermissions and such. Unless your mission is explicitly historical accuracy, you're probably doing a disservice to your audience if you don't.

But Shakespeare doesn't need translating after you've done that, as I think all the attempts at doing so have shown. They're dreadful.

Whales and bison were subject to very modern techniques. While sailing whalers did stress whale populations, it was the steam launch and exploding harpoon that really did the whales in. Bison were destroyed with rifles, which are new in themselves, but the mass-slaughter behavior was enabled by rail transport. Plus they were plenty stressed by competition with cattle, bred for rail transport, and enclosure of the prairie by barbed wire.

Earlier lithic-technology subsistence whale and bison hunting doesn't seem to have been a big problem for either. I won't say that early human hunting didn't contribute to or cause mega-fauna extinctions (in fact, it seems quite likely) but that's not highly analogous to these more recent events.

SLS uses improvements made late in the Shuttle program. Lower temp materials and some larger diameters. Presumably that exact problem is fixed. Others? Who knows.

Using a segmented solid was dumb from the start. Not to mention using a solid at all on a supposedly-reusable and/or human-carrying vehicle.

You must have some wild dreams. Starship and New Glenn are basically as dreamy as Ariane 6. Starship is essentially operational as an expendable launcher already, and NG is starting the paperwork for first launch.

Ariane 6 will serve fine as an "assured access to space" for the local market (which is important), and good on them for finally getting it off the ground. But it's design goal was "Falcon 9 competitor" and it certainly isn't.

From about 1990 to about 2016 Arianespace was the leader in commercial (meaning mostly GEO) launch, and acted like it. (Actually, they still do, just it's less believable now.)

In retrospect, I don't think they ever really had the eye of the tiger; mostly they managed to be less terrible than the competition. The US competitors got far too fat at the government teat and didn't even try, and the Russians couldn't keep Proton from 'sploding.

They'd probably still be king of the (small and expensive) hill without SpaceX. But they'd be in hot soup today, if some sort of LEO constellation market had come around without Falcon, 'cause they wouldn't even have started on Ariane 6 and Ariane 5 isn't well suited for that, and "Europeanized" Soyuz, which they'd use for that, would be unavailable due to Russian imperialism.

That's a very long time for anything to survive. Like, notably, their bones.

But we do have evidence of some traditions from ~12kya, so it's possible some shadows of the idea are left. It can be thought that the folklore tradition of crypto-peoples (the elves, dwarves, green men, etc) may contain some echo of other hominids, though any specific connection or detail is unlikely.

Dragon has capability for a Hubble servicing mission. It would need more development than a Shuttle visit, but it's not a huge hurdle since the last visit installed a soft-capture mechanism. (It'd probably cost less than an equivalent Shuttle mission, just due to Shuttle's high launch costs.) SpaceX even prepared a proposal in a Space Act Agreement but NASA declined it recently. Sierra Nevada also has looked at doing it with Dream Chaser.

Sure, Hubble's way past its design lifetime, and it can probably limp along for another decade as is, and maybe something besides gyros will fail soon. But also there's no equivalent capability successor that's more than a study, and even if they manage to build HWO or something like it, it won't be operation for at least 20 years. A Hubble servicing mission would be a relatively cheap way to get a decade or two more time on a high-capability instrument.

I really like how Vue lays things out; very clean and comprehensible. The official docs are pretty great, and there's generally one obvious forward path.

But if you're doing anything weird there's a lot more out in the world for React. Even though it's kind of a big mess, quantity has a quality all its own.

Despite their intention of debris lasting a minimal amount of time ("weeks") some of the generated debris lasted for several years. While this was much better than the particularly reckless Russian destruction of K1408, orbital collisions are chaotic and energetic events, and there's no particular way to do it safely.

Small generating turbines are almost always natural gas. For logistics purposes, the Antarctic program uses only aviation fuel, which is very diesel-ish, and for diesel piston engines are the rule.

If you really wanted, I suppose, you could get a liquid fuel turbine, but it would be military or aviation, and much rarer than what they have. And they need to have things as simple as possible, given their staffing constraints.

Also, they seem to like several smaller gensets, to allow for problems and maintenance, which leads to relatively small generators. (They're 750kW ea.) Turbines aren't really common that small. They mostly want to start at several MW.

An airless Earth would be extremely hard to land on. You could easily get to quite low altitude, but orbital velocity at sea level is almost 8km/2... faster than at "orbital altitude".

Once you hit an orbit intersecting the ground, you have to scrub all your speed in whatever that amount of time is, which is gonna be short. It's basically an orbital launch in reverse.

Yes, but that's not the case for most objects you interact with in everyday life. All, most likely, unless you're in a particular job.

That'd take a human with taste a terrifyingly large 5 minutes, whereas AI trash can be entirely programmatic, with maybe an intern picking the best of 4 in a couple seconds. Think of the savings, and with only a moderate impact on the reputation of your service.

"So does that mean that Autosteer actually makes crashes 59 percent more likely? Probably not. Those 5,714 vehicles represent only a small portion of Tesla's fleet, and there's no way to know if they're representative. And that's the point: it's reckless to try to draw conclusions from such flawed data. NHTSA should have either asked Tesla for more data or left that calculation out of its report entirely."

Young terrestrial planets should tend towards a reducing atmosphere, due to all the rocks and such oxidizing. It took ages for life on Earth to produce sufficient oxygen to switch to an oxidizing atmosphere. We have evidence that Mars did start reducing and switch at some point. That Mars became oxidizing is certainly curious, considering the reason that happened on Earth.

There's situations where they make sense to rent and vice versa.

Business traveler who just needs to go between the hotel and the airport? Great; may not even need to charge.

If I'm flying into Vegas to do a roadtrip to the Mighty 5? Nope.

Rental companies already have lots of different categories, so it's fine to have a mixed fleet. Just requires some extra infrastructure and consumer education. Which, I know, is in short supply, but can be done.

The locks are all gravity powered. They certainly could operate the locks by pumping uphill instead of releasing downhill, and thus lose almost no water. I expect the expense of this makes it a non-starter.

I think the idea is that a foreign-owned major media company might be directed by that foreign government to work against national interests. Which idea is not so far-fetched.