What a disaster. I wonder how long Lileks will hold out?
Category Archives: Business
The Martian Atmosphere
…just became slightly more breathable.
This is the kind of thing that NASA should be spending more money on, instead of unnecessary giant rockets.
The Latest Witch Hunt
…in Massachusetts. The last time they had one in Massachusetts, it didn’t end well.
Nelson’s Confirmation Hearing
Masking Children
In our continued overreaction to this bug, the nation has engaged in industrial-scale child abuse for over a year now.
Public-School Wokeness
…is belatedly fueling a public backlash.
NASA’s Choice Of Starship
…shows that the government fully (and finally) accepts capitalism in space.
I think there may still be a rear-guard action from Boeing and Lockmart’s bought-and-paid-for congressmen and senators, though.
Virtual Box
OK, so I’ve given up on restoring my previous Windows guest machine, and am going to create a new one (I only lost a couple files that I cared about). But now VB won’t work properly. Without getting into detail on the error messages, I’d like to just completely remove it, and do a clean install. But I can’t figure out how to do it.
I apparently installed it from a script, so there are no Fedora packages for it, so dnf can’t do anything. When I click on the details of the icon in Gnome, and select remove, it just shrugs its digital shoulders. Anyone have any suggestions?
[Tuesday-afternoon update]
Continue reading Virtual BoxWearing Masks Outside
It didn’t make much sense even at the beginning, give that we knew early on that UV killed it, and there was no evidence of transmission under those circumstances, but it’s come to the point at which it’s now just stupid.
[Update a few minutes later]
Why are Democrats so badly misinformed about Covid?
Why are they so badly misinformed about everything?
[Update a while later]
Team Blue should give up its unhealthy obsession with Covid panic porn.
[Tuesday-morning update]
The Great Barrington Declaration and ad hominem argumentation.
I met Dr. Bhattacharya in October, shortly after the declaration was drafted, at the Hillsdale event where I gave my presentation on the economics of space.
End Of The Line For Falcon Development
SpaceX is throwing in the towel on fairing recovery, at least in terms of catching them.
There is always a tradeoff between reusability and expendability in terms of minimizing cost per flight. Shuttle had some notoriously bad design decisions, because they anticipated a higher flight rate than they ever got. At the end of the program, it was clear that it would have been cheaper to expend the SRBs than to recover and refurbish them, because of the high fixed costs of the recovery fleet that had to be amortized over a low flight rate. Expending the ET cost tens of millions per flight.
Elon was determined early on to recover as much of the vehicle as possible (they spent years trying to figure out how to recover the upper stage of the Falcon), but he finally decided that the only solution was to scale the vehicle up, and go to stainless steel to handle entry heating, so the focus is on Starship now, and Falcon 9 has reached the end of its development cycle.