Jason Davis has a good rundown on it, and the implications for Europa Clipper. I don’t know how he knows this, though:
Any other rocket besides SLS—including SpaceX’s upcoming Falcon Heavy—lacks the power to blast Clipper directly from Earth to Jupiter. A conventional rocket would rely on three gravity assists from Earth and one from Venus, increasing the transit time from about 2.7 years to 7.5 years.
How does he know that? Has he run the numbers, or is he just taking NASA’s word for it? He’s also not considering the possibility of New Glenn, New Armstrong, Vulcan/ACES with a distributed launch, or BFR, all of which could be ready by 2022.
As noted in comments, making it a tech demonstrator effectively puts it on the chopping block next time it overruns. I think that NASA has to start with a clean sheet of paper how such instruments should be designed and built, in the coming age of low-cost launch and space assembly.
So I’m trying to move some files from my Linux desktop to my tablet. I suppose the easiest way to do it would be via USB, but it would be nice if I could do a file transfer over the wireless network. I set up the Android with a linux shell, and I’m able to ssh into my desktop with it. But when I use the Android app “andFTP,” which everyone seems to praise, to scp files, it won’t authenticate. Anyone have any idea what the issue could be?
Replacing carbon “pollution” with light pollution. This is a much more serious problem than people realize. Most kids probably don’t even know what a dark night sky looks like.
Fifteen years ago, when I started blogging, it was common to hear that “the internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.” You don’t hear that so often anymore, because it’s not true. China has proven very effective at censoring the internet, and as market power has consolidated in the tech industry, so have private firms.
Meanwhile, our experience of the internet is increasingly controlled by a handful of firms, most especially Google and Facebook. The argument for regulating these companies as public utilities is arguably at least as strong as the argument for thus regulating ISPs, and very possibly much stronger; while cable monopolies may have local dominance, none of them has the ability that Google and Facebook have to unilaterally shape what Americans see, hear, and read.
In other words, we already live in the walled garden that activists worry about, and the walls are getting higher every day. Is this a problem? I think it is.
I keep forgetting about them. It looks like they’ll be a player in suborbital soon, just not for human spaceflight. I expect I’ll see Russ and others at the suborbital research conference in Broomfield in December.