This story reminds me of about thirty years ago, when I was pulling an all-nighter at Rockwell to finish a major deliverable to the Air Force on a study contract on launch systems. PCs were a relatively new thing in the workplace then (at least that one–I’d been one of the forcing functions to get them), and I accidentally munged a file on a floppy, apparently the only copy of it. Fortunately, I had a printout of the pages that I could insert into the document, but it had one section in it that contained the phrase “[Go ask [name of one of my colleagues]].” There was no way I was going to retype the whole thing — I had too much else to do to finish it, and I ended up just inserting the page as is (in a document of several hundred pages). I figured it would be an interesting test to see if anyone actually read these things. I never heard a word from the Air Force about it.
Category Archives: Space
The Latest NASA Safety Panel Report
As usual, Bob Zimmerman isn’t impressed. Neither am I.
Save The Far Side!
This seems a little overblown to me, certainly currently.
I agree that it’s a special place in terms of radio silence, and would be a great location for very large radiotelescopes. But I don’t know many people who would want to live there, and never see the home planet. And they could do comm via lasers — no need to pollute the local “air” waves with spurious RF communications.
Bezos’s Nude Pics
Is it a crime to threaten to publish them? Thoughts from (First-Amendment Professor) Eugene Volokh.
The Stainless-Steel Spaceship
…explained.
Space Resources
A bill has been introduced to have NASA establish a new institute to study them.
Raptor Update
They did a full-thrust test last night in Texas.
"Metric tons of force"? Don't you mean maganewtons?
— Rand Simberg (@Rand_Simberg) February 7, 2019
This program is moving along at a crazy pace. I wonder how close they are to installing them in the hopper?
Armageddon
No, they’re not going to “knock the asteroid out of orbit.” They’re going to knock it into a different orbit.
SLS
Eric Berger has the latest on the ongoing wasteful programmatic disaster.
[Update a while later]
Meanwhile, a French auditor says that Ariane 6 is “too conventional” to compete with SpaceX. I’ve been saying for years that it will be obsolete before it flies.
Location For A Mars Colony?
Bob Zimmerman (who is doing his annual fundraising drive) has found a fascinating cave.