Despite the failure to land so far, it looks like SpaceX is making progress more rapidly than anticipated.
[Afternoon update]
Bob Zimmerman is writing the obituary for SLS. I hope he’s right.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
The Election
…wasn’t “stolen,” but it was underhandedly tilted.
Senator SLS
…is (finally) retiring. Here are four potential people to replace him. Brooks is from Huntsville. He and Ross Aderholt have been the biggest proponents of the Big Monster Rocket in the House.
Another Dumb Space Article
Sigh.
No, there was never a Trump plan for sending anyone to Mars by 2024, and the FAA didn’t cancel the SpaceX test.
SN9 Update
A good article about the landing failure at Teslerati.
The High Frontier
The movie trailer has been released.
I personally know almost everyone in that trailer (you can see a young Eric Drexler on the extreme right of the MIT mass-driver team). I’m supposedly in the film (I was interviewed for it).
Deranged Space Barons Like Elon Musk
Jacobin mag wants to regulate him.
The Dig
We watched this movie the other night, and enjoyed it. I did find the love story extraneous, though.
Sprinkler Update
So I got two free timers from Orbit after I called them.
I hooked up one of the new ones, and it still doesn’t work. There is supposed to be 24VAC at the terminal when it’s running, and the voltage is zero. Just to be sure, I checked the resistance on a couple of the solenoids, and it’s about 70 ohms (the reactance is no doubt quite a bit higher on AC). But clearly, if there is no voltage at the terminal, the solenoid isn’t going to open. I went to the Orbit site for troubleshooting, and it says that if there is no voltage at the terminals, the timer has to be replaced…
At this point, I’m wondering if the system is haunted.
[Update Saturday evening]
People commenting, go back and read the original thread. I’m not clueless. I’m pretty sure that if there was a short to ground, I’d see it when I measured the resistance on the solenoids.
[Noon update]
OK, it finally occurred to me to check that it was getting 24VAC input. It wasn’t. The upstream GFCI had tripped and the transformer wasn’t outputting…
One of the ones I took off had an indicator saying “No AC,” but I swear I didn’t see that when I was working on it. I now have five of them, four of them (AFAIK) functional. I’ll return at least three to Home Depot (since that’s how many I bought there).
[Update a while later]
And yes, I was a dumbass.
Space Force Journal
The first issue is out.
Looks like some interesting stories by top-notch analysts.