We've Falcon caught it! SpaceX finally nets a fairing half after a successful Heavy launch SpaceX's Falcon Heavy turned night into day this morning as the monster rocket successfully hauled itself from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A. The 27 Merlin engines illuminated the night sky in a manner to bring a nostalgic tear to the eye of those that remember the only Saturn V night launch: Apollo 17 in 1972 from …
The other is called Just Read the Instructions, and is also a character from The Player of Games.
There's a new drone ship being built that's supposed to be called "A Shortfall of Gravitas", which is almost, but not quite, taken from Look to Windward. The GSV in that book is actually named Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall.
Personally I'd have gone for the GCU; Not Wanted On Voyage.
Since I’ve got the book in Kindle version … it’s from when the game player is trying to get back in touch with Contact, after refusing them.
“Well, I’ve sent the message to my friends, but—” He had a sudden, paranoid idea. He turned to Chamlis urgently. “These friends of yours are ships.” “Yes,” Chamlis said. “Both of them.” “What are they called?” “The Of Course I Still Love You and the Just Read the Instructions.” “They’re not warships?” “With names like that? They’re GCUs; what else?”
That’s it. If they’re mentioned elsewhere in Banks’ works I’m not aware of it. They’re certainly not in “Player”
The "Gravitas" ship names were a running joke within the Culture. They were the result of another Involved civilisation which complained that such powerful and intellectually advanced beings as the Culture ship-minds should give themselves names with a bit more gravitas in light of their near-godlike powers. At least one Culture shipyard decided to give all its ships names on the "gravitas" theme, such as "Stood Far Back When The Gravitas Was Handed Out" or "Gravitas... Gravitas... No, Don't Help Me, I'll Get It In A Moment" or even "Absolutely No You-No-What". As I recall, Iain had a list of 20 or 30 "Gravitas" names.
"Experiencing A Significant Gravitas Shortfall" appears as a GSV in Look to Windward, and a GCU in Matter, and provided the inspiration for SpaceX's latest drone ship.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Merlin#Applications
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rolls-Royce_Merlin_alternative_uses
the combinations are too numerous to mention.
The merlin was a beast of an engine and has a lovley destinctive sound. Good old fahioned british engineering at its best.
SpaceX is now working with Guice Offshore to prepare a second boat with a big net. (GO now owns and operates the boat formerly known as Mr Steven, and was very lucky to have success catching the fairing during Tuesday's mission. They had recently bought the vessel and renamed it to a GO name, similar to their other boats, also used for SpaceX work such as towing drone ships around and pulling fairings out of the water.)
About SpaceX's occasionally whacky boss, as a relative newby to space stuff he has driven some aspects of rocketry and achieved some noteable firsts.
17 years ago after failing to buy refurbed Russian IBMs he decided to do it his way and hasn't done too badly.
Are there any old volcanoes on the moon for Elon to hollow out?
I beg to differ. "He" hasn't done anything except pay experts to do stuff. The prevalent assumption that the one who puts up the money should take the whole credit for advances in science and technology is deeply contemptuous of those who actually do the inventing and work.
To be fair to NASA, it has an Advanced Concepts office which works on stuff like that, it does a lot of cutting-edge aerospace R&D, and the planetary exploration (unmanned) office does incredible work that constantly pushes boundaries.
Manned spaceflight is governed by the pigs in Congress and the Senate, like Senator Shelby, shoving their noses in the trough so that NASA keeps jobs in their states. They've no interest in anything new that will threaten their votes or campaign funding, so they demand white elephants like the SLS and then underfund them so the the project never reaches its goals but the money keeps rolling into their pocket.
And then there's Trump, who wants to bask in the glory of a new space race but doesn't care about anything else.
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