A major hurricane has formed in the Atlantic and is aimed right at the Caribbean. It’s currently category 3, and expected to be category 4 when it hits the windward islands early tomorrow. The projected path after that is a worrying one.
Awesome! I’m doing the same today with Toronto pride. The people I normally go with can’t make it so it’ll probably be a solo trip. But those can be fun too.
Easily the best Trek since DS9 went off the air. And I’d argue that the season 2 finale is the best in Trek history.
If this arstechnica article is accurate, Eumetsat may have a damn good engineering reason to want to switch to Falcon 9. That Ariane 6 flight would have been the very first to use the four-booster variant, not the two-booster variant which would have actual flights prior to the now-cancelled flight.
In fairness this could have been a purely technical decision and not a political one. The Falcon 9 does have an excellent track record in performance and safety. Falcon 9’s only launch failure was in 2015, using a long-obsolete variant. It’s had over 330 successful launches since then, most of which were the current final variant. Ariane 6 has never yet launched, and new-design Ariane rockets have historically had teething issues. For example, the Ariane 5’s first launch failed because it was using guidance software that was almost unchanged from the prior Ariane 4, despite being aerodynamically a very different vehicle. I’m wondering if Eumetsat’s engineers don’t like what they’re seeing in the Ariane 6, which is due to fly for the first time in two weeks and is many years late in development.
It’s an interesting time in spaceflight. Several new unproven rockets becoming available (Vulcan-Centaur, Ariane 6, New Glenn). Several proven rockets no longer available as they’re being retired or are already retired (Delta IV, Atlas V, Ariane 5). European agencies looking to launch heavy satellites just don’t have many options if they’re legally constrained from launching on Chinese or Russian vehicles. Falcon 9 may have literally been the only alternative that met Eumetsat’s legal and engineering requirements.
A side rant, because where else am I going to rant about Ariane 6’s design? I’ve always been disappointed by ArianeGroup’s choice of using solid-fuel boosters in the Ariane 6 instead of going with kerosene or methane fueled engines that are powerful enough to not require booster rockets. Hydrogen engines are typically very fuel efficient, and they burn clean. The only exhaust is water, there’s no carbon chains that can clog engines. This translates to reliability for multiple engine ignitions while in space. That fuel efficiency and re-ignition reliability are both very useful traits in upper-stage engines where pure power isn’t needed. But hydrogen fueled engines are usually not very powerful and often need boosters just to get off the ground. That’s why the space shuttle had to augment its three hydrogen fueled main engines with two big solid-fuel boosters. It’s unfortunately unsurprising, as it’s also France’s way of quietly subsidizing development of their submarine-launched nuclear missiles through ESA funds. Those missiles are heavily based on P80/P120/Vega solid-fuel rocket technology. The US isn’t the only country out there that’s shackled its space exploration efforts to its for-profit defence contractors.
Laughs in Farscape
I am getting more and more convinced that it’s actually Obama who really knows where all the bodies are buried, figuratively and literally. He pops his head up every few years and his whim instantly becomes DNC law.
Don’t worry about it. Those of us who have english as a first language couldn’t understand him either.
But 9/11 was a national tragedy.
National tragedy, international comedy.
Nukes are still lurking quietly in the background, of course, but the Resistance is perfectly aware of that and still seems confident to go ahead with operations, so I can’t really do anything but shrug and say that I trust them to do what’s right.
In my more conspiracy-minded moments I wonder if there’s a secret agreement among the counter-zionist groups and countries that the only sustained attacks against Israel come from geographic areas that it would be radioactive-fallout-suicide for Israel to nuke.
That reminds me, I think I’ll take advantage of the downtime tonight to read Her Soul to Take by Harley Laroux. I’ve heard good things about it from a friend who knows my tastes.
At least we still have hexbear at home.
Good thing America takes public health crises seriously.
He who controls the flow of money controls what people are exposed to.
The golden rule: whoever has the gold makes the rules.
The zionists are high on their own supply of Six-Day War nostalgia. In 1967 the Israeli government wasn’t fighting against forces with cheap high-precision ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and drones in mass quantities.
The funny thing is that he kinda-sorta already has in “Apollo 13”. The Apollo CSM was built by North American Aviation, later named North American Rockwell after a merger. They changed their name to Rockwell International in 1973, then sold their space division to Boeing in 1996.
Rockwell also built the space shuttle. So Rockwell also has the dubious distinction of having built every American crew vehicle that killed its crew.
what the fuck am I supposed to do with myself
That is a really bizarre structural failure of the test rig. I’m been a space nerd for my entire life and I’ve never seen footage like this. For this rocket to lift off vertically, all the mechanisms holding it down had to have failed simultaneously. If they failed at different times it should have gone wildly off-course from the start. That simultaneous failure is statistically unlikely to say the least. I’m wondering if it wasn’t mechanical failure, but a failure of the control system managing the hold-down mechanisms.
For comparison, here’s what a Falcon 9 static fire looks like. They don’t just use the normal launch clamps at the base of the rocket, they also have a heavy cap on top (the orange part) with a cable rig system anchoring it down to make damn sure it doesn’t go anywhere. They run all systems of a production rocket at the full thrust and full duration of an actual launch to test everything as a unit.