I just got a review copy of what appears to be an interesting new book
Category Archives: Technology and Society
More Antares Coverage
Michael Belfiore has a piece at Popular Mechanics, quoting me, and over at The Atlantic is one by Michael Lemonick (I haven’t read the latter yet).
Krill Oil
Failure Is Always An Option
SciAm has a list of all the recent launch failures.
Note that for the past three and a half years, every single one (including last night’s) was built in Russia or the Ukraine. And the last two American ones (not counting last night’s) were both Orbital (separation problem on Taurus). Prior to that, the last American one was the Falcon 1 test program, which should really count, since it was in fact a test program. Orbital has no experience with liquid propulsion, which is why they outsourced it to Ukraine. That appears to have been a mistake.
[Update a while later]
Orbital’s stock is down 17% this morning.
[Update a while later, just before Atlas V launch]
Eric Berger’s thoughts on the implications. I agree that it’s not that big a deal, but I hope it accelerates and end to our reliance on Russian hardware.
Fedora And Open Office
The latest Fedora 20 update seem to have broken it. It attempts to launch, and then dies with: /usr/bin/soffice: line 121: 6490 Bus error (core dumped) “$sd_prog/$sd_binary” “$@”
This is not good. I need that program. I may have to install Libre Office until it gets resolved.
Interstellar
[Tuesday-morning update]
Christopher Nolan’s epic new sci-fi film Interstellar has received measured acclaim from critics, who have praised its ambitious scale and effects but were less convinced about the story.
That was the problem with Gravity, too.
[Bumped]
Reusable Rockets
An article at Technology Review about Elon’s plans for next year.
The One-Way Trip To Mars
Why it’s doomed to fail?
It’s never looked technically/economically realistic to me.
A Boat In The Box
They just scrubbed the Antares launch of Cygnus to ISS, because the range was red due to a boat downrange. Am I the only person who thinks that this rule is stupid, and needs to be revised? As I said on Twitter, I don’t care if there’s an armada of boats in the box, as long as someone is flying a banner “AT OWN RISK.” Holding up a flight over this is insane. It’s the kind of hypercaution that keeps us from making more rapid progress in space.
#Gamergate
Who is the player, and who is the played?
Physical threats against women are unacceptable, but it’s not clear who has been doing that, and being threatened doesn’t magically place you beyond criticism, though the Left would like to wrap her in moral outrage as a noble victim.