Clark Lindsey has a lot of links.
[Update a few minutes later]
I said yesterday that they had a chute failure. But what I’m hearing now is that the stage broke up on entry, rather than when it hit the ocean, so the failure to open chutes was an effect of the vehicle breakup, and not the cause. That’s too bad, because a failure of chutes to deploy would be a lot easier thing to fix. I wonder how much of a setback this is to the goal of first-stage reusability?
Clark has a great roundup of the tweets.
Clark Lindsey has a summary.
[Late afternoon update]
Apparently, the range has finally signed off on the Flight Termination System, so they’re good to go tomorrow.
Gordon Young is trying to fund some reporting of one of our premiere post-industrial cities (and my home town). It’s sad to see how far it’s fallen from my childhood days.
..and men. Paul Breed says there’s a lesson about robotics to be learned from the oil leak (no, it’s not a “spill”).
The “sustainable agriculture” movement is senselessly starving people.
…for SpaceX. And they’ve rolled it out to the pad, and erected it.
It’s now less than forty-eight hours until their first opportunity, at 8 AM Pacific. On later flights, when they have to go to ISS, they’ll have a tight launch window (ten minutes more or less, depending on how much performance margin they have), but for the first couple flights at least, there’s no target they’re aiming at in space, so they can go any time within the window provide by the range (four hours, I think, on each day). As Clark notes, while I won’t be surprised if they’re successful (nor will I be surprised if they’re not, on this first launch), I will be surprised if they actually launch at 8 AM on Friday. I suspect that they’ll be operating on a hair trigger when it comes to anomalies that can delay them. There is a lot riding on success (and for those defending the old regime, a lot riding on their failure).
…turns Brown. Electric cars are bad for the environment. Diesel hybrids are best.
…or how Dilbert won the war. Though actually, credit has to go to the pointy-haired boss.
I think this also explains a lot about why we haven’t made much progress in space.
An interesting discussion of Obama’s glamour problem, and the perversities of health care.