Posts by Spherical Cow

Aussie rocket foiled by premature fairing pop

Re: That typically happens much higher up than the launchpad.

Vegemite is perfection.

ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES

DARPA zaps popcorn with laser power beamed 5.3 miles through air

Is there anything new here?

There is a science museum, optimised for school children, near where I live. It has a feature which has been there for at least three decades that i know of: a pair of parabolic steel mirrors on opposite sides of a large courtyard. When one child whispers at the focal point of one mirror, their friend can clearly hear the whisper at the focal point of the opposite mirror.

"the beam strikes a parabolic mirror that reflects it onto dozens of photovoltaic cells housed within the device"

OK, that checks out, but it's hardly ground-breaking tech, is it?

When LLMs get personal info they are more persuasive debaters than humans

Re: An Alien Art Phorm Merging with Singularities to be Posed as Existential Threats or Treats‽

Two downvoters are not familiar with the much beloved and long-standing Reg account amanfromMars 1, an early implementation of computer generated replies.

Next week's SpaceX Starship test still needs FAA authorization

I'm just here because I like rocket stuff. Not sure what you're banging on about.

Re: According to some

It has plenty to do with punk rock era dancing. Both the dance and the undesirable rocket vibration are named after the same thing: the pogo stick. Both are so called because of the repeated up-down (or long-axis) motion occurring.

SpaceX Dragon cargo capsule docks to the International Space Station

Time to rug up, it's getting chilly.

"meals flown on this flight will ensure the crew has sufficient supplies to last through the summer"

Summer? Winter? The ISS spends half its time in the northern hemisphere and half in the southern hemisphere. If you want to specify from the point of view of someone living down on the ground then FWIW it is currently autumn where I am.

Brrr. I'll get my coat.

No rest for the rocketry as NASA's Easter weekend heats up

Re: Go home musk

Gates is at least trying to make the world a better place through his philanthropic foundation.

Canada OKs construction of first licensed teeny atomic reactor

Re: could power up to 1.2 million homes

The rotational energy is stored at power stations, not in homes.

SpaceX scores $5.9B lion's share of Space Force launch contracts

Re: 7 years of bad luck

"They charge nearly what the Russians were charging per seat to send astronauts to ISS before the Crew Dragon craft was approved"

Why undercut your competitor by a lot when you only need to undercut your competitor by a little?

Re: Who would have thought it!

> Apollo goto the moon 6 times with 6 rockets.

Apollo got to the Moon 6 times with 34 rockets, 3 deaths, and 3 near-deaths.

Starliner astronauts' stay drags on as Crew-10 launch scrubs

Hasn't she already set a new record for most total time in EVA?

Rocket Lab says NASA lacks leadership on Mars Sample Return

Re: Architecture

It does have to survive months of harsh interplanetary environment on the way there.

Athena Moon lander officially FOADs – falls over and dies – in crater

Making it tall and narrow doesn't seem very... intuitive?

SpaceX's 'Days Since Starship Exploded' counter made it to 48. It's back to zero again now

Re: Raptor vacuum nozzle failure

"more physics than expected"

I had thought "RUD" was the best ever term for a spacecraft explosion, but Jellied Eel has raised the bar another notch. Well done, have a beer!

Re: "Blowing up Starships can’t be cheap."

That's not how contracts work.

Re: Tariffs

"So NASA will eventually have to foot the bill, one way or another."

Starlink customers?? And there will be a lot more of those, so one more lost prototype isn't a big deal in the long term.

ESA's Integral gamma-ray gazer gasps its last

Re: Long Life

Also reaction wheels. There aren't many moving parts in a satellite so it's not surprising that a part which spins a bajillion times may be the first part to stop working.

The red color of Mars might have an earlier, wetter origin

Re: This is great news for Elon

Is it possible to have a sciencey discussion without mentioning him unnecessarily? Please?

And now something fun for a change: Building blocks of life in Bennu asteroid samples

Re: Fun? Challenge accepted.

"The material that makes up Bennu... ...never melted and differentiated"

That alone rules out ejecta from Earth. Your suggestion was still fun though.

Asteroid as wide as 886 cans of spam may hit Earth in 2032

As do I... and my top pick, given the area they think is in the firing line, is the middle of a very uninhabited part of the Sahara. I would actually prefer that to a complete miss, because the footage and the science would both be amazing!

China claims major fusion advance and record after 17-minute Tokamak run

Re: "not peer-reviewed work"

I worked with ColdFusion for a couple of years. Not my favourite markup language.

Neural interface lets paralyzed person steer virtual quadcopter, opening new doors for gaming

Stephen Hawking demonstrated how much is already possible with very minimal manual input. It probably won't be long until that level of input can be read directly from the brain.

Words alone won't get the stars and stripes to Mars

Re: "The Martian" was not a documentary

"But various iterations of Starship have added mass with additional stringers & strengthening, heat shielding which reduces the mass to orbit and thus increases cost per kg."

The version which ferries people from LEO to LMO won't need any heat shielding or wings/flaps. It just goes from orbit around one planet to orbit around another.

Having said that, it will need a different kind of shielding: radiation.

SpaceX resets ‘Days Since Starship Exploded’ counter to zero

"For one it would have still been over 3/4 of the way full with oxygen and methane (so over 2500 tons of the stuff)"

Looking at the tank indicators on the feed it had only around 15% oxygen remaining, and in the short time before telemetry was lost the methane level quickly reduced from around 15% to around 5%.

So, we know the leak was methane, and we know it was not "over 3/4 of the way full" but actually mostly empty.

SpaceX will try satellite deployment on next Starship test

Re: Suborbital

You have forgotten that three people died in Apollo 1 and three more people nearly died in Apollo 13. Space is more than just hard, it is also dangerous. Caution is to be commended.

Chinese boffins find way to use diamonds as super-dense and durable storage medium

Dammit, I didn't realise your comment was already on 42 likes until after I clicked Like. Sorry for the like.

China starts building world's largest fully steerable radio telescope

Re: the reasoning.

Biggerer.

SpaceX claims another Starship success, but fumbles the catch

Re: Shouldn't the first stage recovery be the *easy* bit?

*checks the app*

As I type this, the ISS is at 420km going 27574 km/h, approaching Mexico... it will pass almost directly over Boca Chica.

Re: Huge progress?

Silliness like this is why we love El Reg commentards. Have a beer!

What might a second term of Trump mean for the US space program?

Re: A kick in the Mars

True, Texas is bigger than everything else. Except New Zealand because it isn't on the map. And maybe Greenland but we don't know for sure because there's no data.

Re: Elmo rubbing his hands together in glee.

NASA uses metric. A quick glance at the SpaceX website shows metric units displayed first and in bold, followed by imperial conversions without bold. Metric is the logical choice and rocket engineers are logical people.

https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/dragon/

SpaceX Dragon gives ISS a helping hand with altitude

7/100 of a mile

Oof. I'm used to seeing distances quoted in miles/feet instead of proper kilometres/metres, but trying to visualise 7/100 of a mile is just nasty.

NASA fires up super-quiet supersonic X-59 aircraft

Re: Meanwhile the planet burns.

"Posting AC but even though I'm not in the USA, I see the local FBI office (you probably have one in the US Embassy) or the CIA to come knocking at the door..."

I hope you don't think posting AC is actually anonymous. Your post is still linked to your user account in the El Reg system.

Astroboffins tune into the wild origins of fast radio bursts

I'll just Parkes this here...

The cause is most likely an alien species opening the door of a radiowave oven before it has gone ping. They should be careful: eating undercooked food can cause peryton-itis.

The hunt is on for the scum who stole Britain's largest inflatable planetarium

Re: Was it locked?

Is that a big red lock on the hitch?

Reaction Engines' hypersonic hopes stall as funding fizzles out

Re: SpaceX may have killed this

This could have had a completely different use case though. High speed long distance passenger flights between major city airports, e.g. Sydney - LAX in 1 hour instead of 14. While Starship could do that it doesn't look like they're going to, and a spaceplane has the advantage of being able to fly out to sea before noisily breaking the sound barrier, and can use existing long runways. And due to the much shorter flight time and considerable unpowered glide, fuel costs could have been lower than for a conventional aeroplane too, making tickets cheaper.

Japan's space agency to build a digital twin of its ISS module – right before it retires

Re: Int-Ball?

It's just someone's belly button fluff. Lint-Ball.

China's first space tourism venture sells first pair of tickets

Only two of the Mercury 7 (Shepard, Grissom) didn't go into orbit during the Mercury program, both went into orbit in later programs. The X-15, while very impressive and achieving very high altitude, is an aircraft not a spaceship.

I know what the current official astronaut definitions *are* (USAF and FIA), I'm just saying I think they should be different.

It's good they are going above 100km, other definitions of the Kármán line don't quite seem enough.

On the subject of definitions, I think we need to be more clear about what it means to be an astronaut. A straight-up-and-down joyride isn't enough. You need to go orbital to be a real astronaut. What does orbital mean? Well, even though Yuri Gagarin didn't quite complete one full orbit, if his craft hadn't done a re-entry burn it would have stayed in orbit for about 20 days, so he was definitely orbital. So that's my definition: achieve an orbital trajectory to be an astronaut. Yuri is in the club, Beardy Branson isn't.

Re: And why....

Show me a large western organisation that doesn't like to exploit loopholes, e.g. one which pays full taxes in every country where it does business. The Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, even Ireland are doing very well by providing lucrative loopholes. It's a global thing, not just an eastern thing.

AI's energy appetite has Taiwan reconsidering the nuclear option

Re: Hmm

"Thats ok, there is little land and lots of water so off shore wind!"

Most of Taiwan's waters are too deep for fixed offshore wind. The east coast is too deep even for floating wind.

On the other hand, the big central mountain ridge would be ideal for wind turbines.

The Astronaut wore Prada – and a blast from Michael Bloomberg

Re: Color me intrigued

In the IT world a hardware addition is sometimes called a dongle. You have a dongle dongle.

Re: Patches

I also knew a maths teacher who was a navigator in Lancasters in WWII, it must have been a common assignment. He was very tall though, and the navigator's table area was too cramped for him, so he switched role to bomb aimer because he could stretch out his long legs while lying down. He was shot down twice, the first time over Allied territory, the second time behind enemy lines so he spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.

China launches plan to lead the world in space exploration

Re: I can support that

Standard Chinese, obviously. It is designated as the official language of mainland China.

Netflix on Mars? Yeah maybe, thanks to NASA's laser comms demo

Re: Timeouts?

There's also the possibility of encasing the avian carrier in a protective cylindrical structure, as per 1944's Project Pigeon guided bombs. But then you've basically built a space mailtruck.

Re: Timeouts?

African or European avian carriers?

SpaceX Falcon 9 grounded again after second stage hits wrong part of ocean

Re: Too fast?

But we weren't taking about a random tumble, there's no suggestion that happened. The scenario in question is just not getting full thrust before capsule separation, as did happen after capsule separation.

Re: Too fast?

But we weren't taking about a RUD, that didn't happen. The scenario in question is just not getting full thrust before capsule separation, as did happen after capsule separation.

Re: Too fast?

"had it underperformed earlier in the flight we could be looking at a very suboptimal outcome."

What's the worst that could happen? Unless I'm missing something, the Dragon can separate and come down for an early splash-down. It has some thrust capability itself, hopefully enough so it can choose to come down over water instead of on dry land. Then they just bob about waiting to be picked up, like 007 and Amasova at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me.

Scientists demonstrate X-rays as a way to zap asteroids out of Earth's path

Re: 12-millimeter-wide dummy asteroids

My guess - larger than 12mm.