Posts by awavey 78 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Mar 2016
You are aware of this thing called Starlink? another batch launched this morning where Falcon 9 is really learning the reliability & reusability stuff with a 90th successful booster landing.
That alone cuts the costs of launching stuff into space and where you make big profits by not having to rebuild your launch vehicle every time,and that's before you start to capture the commercial benefits of providing broadband from space.
Boston Dynamics robot spot dog,has been used by SpaceX for months,who nick named it Zeus.
It's not a great leap of tech from dog shape to human shape.
Yes Musks timelines are always optimistic, but he is the epitome of shoot for the moon and even if you miss you'll land among the stars, he pushes people to think nothing is impossible, and sometimes they do achieve impossible things.
Which is alot better than the if we cant do it litigious style blocking approach his competitors favour.
In fairness it was remarks made by a NASA communications rep, who no doubt does think the sole purpose of spending 86billion dollars on the program is just to put the first woman or first person of color bootprints on the surface of the moon as the main priority.
The people working on the program who will be a mix of people of color, women and yes white men, might well think differently about its aims being more scientific and long term space exploration is the main priority and that the best people for the role to land on the moon will be selected regardless of gender or race backgrounds.
And if it does happen to be a woman or person of color then theyll be selected because they demonstrated they were the best candidate.
As we can see as the latest Cygnus resupply to the ISS mission craft named in honour of Ellison Onizuka because 35 years ago NASA picked people of colour and women to send into space, because they were the best of us all.
Incredibly risky mission for the astronauts even with Shuttle, its multiple times riskier now, it's something Starship is probably more capable of than Dragon eventually,but I think youd struggle to even get through the hatch of Dragon in a shuttle style space suit to begin with. Let alone "capture" the telescope in a safe manner that astronauts on EVAs could work on it.
Look it's done 30+ years of service, it was only designed to do 15, if you compare it to ground based telescopes the costs/science actually Hubble is a poor choice now, but it's pretty pictures capture the public imagination so it gets cited way more often as delivering that special science dividend,when we are learning more about the universe from stuff sitting on tops of mountains.
Let them try to fix it if they cant just accept it's done its job and move on, the James Webb telescope though not a direct replacement by any means launches in October assuming ESA can resolve the cargo fairings issue.
Yes I remember filling in what they called workplace pulse surveys that were badged as completely anonymous so you should feel safe to answer open & honestly your thoughts & feelings on your work environment,even though TPHB had lists of those that didnt fill them in.
But you had to fill in your gender and age for some kind of diversity in the workplace profiling.
Well when you were the only 30 year old woman filling in a survey in the workplace and your gender/age range made up about 1% of the company's workforce, you didnt need to wear a tinfoil hat to recognise you were instantly very identifiable if people chose to look at the data in certain subsets.
Whilst I doubt US companies will get upto any nefariousness with this medical data as I'm sure the NHS partners with plenty of UK ones who are more than competent of doing that themselves, whilst also accidentally leaving backups of it on trains, or with back doors on databases held on the internet, it's not going to be anonymous data and that alone should raise red flags to people concerned about their rights to privacy
The whole flight seemed to be shorter in length,but the cloud layer and the glitchy onboard video made it difficult to see when the flip happened to compare with previous flights.
And it was fairly windy at ground level 18-22knots, I'm not surprised the targeting was a bit off but how insane is this stuff that the general publics/media reaction to something roughly the height of Nelson's column,or 4 london double decker buses stacked on top of each other to use El Regs standard sizes, launches as a rocket 10km up in the air and then successfully lands relocated to a landing pad is led by well it didnt blow up.
Are we so used to something like this tech now which for decades was pure science fiction,that it doesnt even excite people when it works.
What on earth are they going to make of it when NASA launches their SLS and the thing just falls in the Indian Ocean taking 4 hugely expensive and historic rocket motors with it.
Im not sure as the silver bricks in my set had the exact same scratches, same angle,same size on every brick, its got to be a manufacturing defect,though Im not that fussed about it its not noticeable from a distance arguably it creates a pattern effect since they are so uniformly scractched and you can put it down to weathering from micro meteorites.
the Space Shuttle cost an estimated 300-400million dollars per launch, SpaceX charge 62million dollars to launch Falcon 9 commercially. divide by max payload capacity for LEO as that was the average mission target for Shuttle, and Shuttle costs just under 14000 dollars per kg, Falcon 9 costs just under 3000 dollars per kg.
but then is it even worth debating numbers with people who think you can turn Solid Rocket Boosters on and off again.?
it is, but Ive only held one personally in cash in 30 years,and I wouldnt even know what the current one is supposed to look like without looking it up online. I havent even held any notes or used a cash machine for over a year now, so it seems abit meaningless all told
The hardware isnt the issue,its nuclear battery should keep it powered up for at least 14-17 Earth years, these timescales they quote are always about the budget allocated to maintain mission control ops on it to run the primary science objectives, its not wow look it was only meant to last for 30 Martian sols and it's amazing to be running to 31+, its engineered to survive launch, inter planetary travel and a 10g reentry at 5km per second that gives it a fair bit of long term resilience by default, so of course it will last more than 30 Martian sols, but it has to have money behind it to keep extending the mission duration to run it.And remember they have to keep the tech & software here that runs it static & operational for the length of time the mission then lasts as well. Cassini operations was literally being run by a classic mid 90s spec PC to communicate with it,because modern PCs just ran the code too quickly to handle the data properly.
No most people dont have Facebook accounts, even optimistic estimates in tech savvy places like the UK have only 44percent reach and that doesnt account for all the ghost/fake/cat accounts that exist. Somewhere like Australia certainly isnt Facebook or Google world, why the politicians, who clearly dont understand how the internet works,should want Facebook & Google to fund news organisations is down to the reader to work out themselves
Are you kidding me ? What is it only roughly 5 years since their first successful booster landing after nearly 60 years of spaceflight,landing which is now so mundane and routine it isnt even reported on, and you are giving them grief that an experimental prototype which has only launched & flown twice using brand new types of rocket engines,cant quite instantly nail a successful landing yet,even though its comparable in size to the Space Shuttles external tank and attempting stuff never done before.
Starship will get people safely to Mars
Not necessarily remember SN8 launched,very publically,December 9th. So we are saying the FAA started an investigation straight away but only notified SpaceX of it or this licensing problem that prevented a launch nearly 6 weeks later,as SpaceX didnt seem to be aware there were any problems,which was then all resolved within a matter of days,without SpaceX seemingly having changed,or only changed a little, the public protection protocols theyd been using...plus the fact they launched directly in violation it would appear of the FAA has then been quietly forgotten.
Maybe the FAA have felt under pressure since their Boeing 737Max oversight to be seen as more a regulatory body flexing its power, than a mere rubber stamp.
Whilst Skype for business might be hard to love it at least did what it was designed to do well,and not try and do a hundred other things you dont need poorly and in so doing compromise the functionality of its core functions.
Teams is typical MS bloatware, it's like that swiss army pen knife that comes with 83 functions when all you needed was a pocket knife. it kills performance on most work laptops because generally businesses dont splash out buying top of the range kit with ooodles of memory and cpu to cope with it. It crashes, it buffers video making even the smallest of group video calls painful to watch,(of course whilst at home everyone blames that on their broadband). Its messaging system is like someone went back to the 90s and plucked some badly put together text only messaging via email service but thought people just want to share amusing animated gifs instead, not you know actually have a quick instant chat. It has a complicated file system and grouping system and a bunch of stuff that literally seems to be just MS trying to have an app for every eventuality
I can only assume it gets picked up by CIOs blinded by MS saying how wonderful it is to have everything in one behemoth application because they never actually use it for real.
Well yes, iirc Musks 1 in 3 chance of success came with a near guarantee it would result in rapid unscheduled disassembly at some point.
That it achieved everything bar the landing successfully IS a great success,and theyve got all the data they needed from it, 63 years ago this week the US,because NASA hadnt even been invented then, couldn't even get a rocket half the height & a fraction of the weight off the launch pad without it exploding.
I think people get too distracted by the pretty fireworks and take it for granted rockets can even attempt to land.
Plus 1 for the 5110, this week my phone will mostly be wearing a red cover :)
I wonder if the 33xx was more the corporate hand out phone,istr lots of people had them as work phones at the time,so hence why they get remembered as iconic, whilst those of us paying for them ourselves went for the more stylish, and cheaper,options :)
Because policies on health are best handled under specific health legislation, not under trade legislation, we dont specify how many non EU tomatoes can be sourced under a bill to build new hospitals. It was a wrecking amendment designed purely so the opposition could then shout on about how awful the government were for voting against it and not protecting the NHS
and therefore clearly selling it to the highest bidder, just like they did with their nurses pay amendment and most of the people shouting loudest about how awful it was think legislation is designed just like voting on some social media poll.
The NHS doesnt have to be protected within trade legislation for it not to be on the table when discussing trade.
not really the case at all, foam had fallen off the external tank since the Space Shuttles first launch, coincidentally was 39 years ago this past weekend, and what should have then been recorded as a fault, that got fixed and the Shuttle grounded till it was fixed properly, fell into launch & mission fever and accepted process as just one of those things that happened during a launch, and as launches happened successfully they used that as a reason to continue to ignore the foam shedding problem when it kept happening, any of the prior 112 launches to the loss of Columbia could have resulted in the same outcome had a foam strike hit the leading edge.
you say that, but actually the one thing this movie/documentary does bring home in spades is the tension of the moment those people were in at the time it was happening, those people you are seeing on the film didnt know how it would turn out, they were living the moment not acting it, knowing the risks, knowing the enormity of the fact no-one had done this before, so you do feel their emotion and the tenseness of the key moments and the relief when it works, they knew how big a risk they were taking, which I think in the post Apollo11 era, hey everything worked a charm why were worried, we forget how crazy an idea it was to strap people to a Saturn V rocket and send them off to the moon and do this stuff. You literally see how rudimentary & flimsy the lunar module was, it visibly flexes just under reaction control thrusts, its made of baco foil, and we sent people to the moon in it.
I was sitting there at the end through the re-entry part,which is incredibly moving, and thinking my god I know they made it, unless Ive slided into some weird alternate universe, but this is actually worse than watching Apollo 13 in realtime, because again the footage you are watching, no one can predict the future of whats happening, they are reacting to events.
I dont believe the next lunar mission will ever launch with only a 50/50 chance of success which are the best odds they had at launch of coming home for Apollo 11
see it in IMAX, get immersed in it, it wont be the same on the small screen
The Equifax breach was discovered in July 2017,it had been leaking details since May 2017 (at least),so it took 'months' to notice it was happening and a further month to bother telling anyone.A year later and we still haven't quite got the full detail released. It's not unreasonable or Daily Mail style to describe Equifaxs approach to reporting the breach as taking 'months'.
But it's spoilers isn't it, it isn't like the old days of films anymore where the big plot twist OMG moment gets spoiled just by Homer Simpson walking past the queue,thesedays it will be across all social media/interweb etc etc after the first midnight screening,you'd have to banish yourself to Skellig Michael to miss it till you got to see the film.
That said I don't recall much difficulty booking a ticket for a lunchtime screening of TFA on release day maybe only week or so before. So yeah overreaction but I can understand why it happened
cough Spielberg Jaws, I think Lucas was guided to John Williams by his friends :) and btw if you think the sound is good on Eps IV, why is the ADR so obviously different to the on set sound recording, which is basically any scene involving the droids because they made so much noise on set it destroyed the actors dialogue, and any scene involving a two way conversation with Vader.
which is why the SRBs were only lit at T-0, when you commited to launch. the Shuttle launch aborted 5 times I think within the final countdown sequence when all 3 main engines were lit (which happens at T-6seconds) ramping upto launch thrust, the closest they got to launch and aborted was within 2 seconds,literally a 5..4..3..2..abort, any closer might have got interesting. but it was an automated launch sequence abort and should have been possible right up to the command to fire the pyrotechnics at T-0
once the SRBs were lit, then you were going somewhere,and although the ability to stop them firing is seen as one of their main disadvantages,abeit taken against the quantity of thrust they produce,theres generally not alot you can do within the first 2mins of any rocket launch flight, where stopping a main chunk of thrust is really the better option, than just keeping going.
you stop the SRBs on the Shuttle during launch, and it would simply have crashed instead and you are still strapped to a gigantic aluminium tank of combustive fuel,the SRBs really arent the problem in that kind of setup.
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