There was a comment in my previous post about my laptop problems that Vista doesn’t play well with others when it comes to dual boot. Could this be gotten around by booting Linux from a flash drive, or a CD?
[Update on Sunday morning]
How about a separate USB hard drive for the other OS?
And the sad thing is that he thinks he’s smarter than those of us in the business. Clark Lindsey has a rejoinder in his comments section. I will add that this doesn’t inspire confidence in his analysis:
SpaceShipTwo actually will only barely scrape space, eking out a scant 68 vertical miles before succumbing to the gravitational dominance of Earth. The craft musters only about 1/16 the energy needed to reach even low orbit 100 miles up. The space station, reposing 200 miles from the earth’s surface, is completely beyond reach.
Attaining such distances requires enormous energy…
No, it’s not the distance that’s the problem, it’s the velocity.
Sigh.
And Jeff Foust has found another idiot who wants it to be made illegal on environmental grounds. And because it’s “selfish.”
Falcon 1 goes up at 4 PM Pacific Time. That’s 7 PM for me, and we already have tickets purchased for Dark Knight, so I guess we’ll miss it, if it goes on schedule. I’ll have to watch the replay.
[Update at 10:30 PM EDT]
Back from the movie, which was very good. Ledger can certainly expect a posthumous Oscar nomination.
There have been launch delays, but they’re currently reloading fuel after having drained it (there was apparently concern that it was getting too cold during other delays) and are now expecting a launch at 11 PM EDT (8 PM Pacific), in almost exactly half an hour.
[Update a couple minutes later]
They must plan for an 8:05 liftoff, based on the count I just heard. T-32 and counting at 7:33. Weather is green, though there’s some cloud cover.
[Update about ten till the hour]
There must be a delay or something on the web feed, because they’re still saying it will be an 8 PM PDT launch, even though their count makes it come out three or four minutes after that. I wonder if there will be a transmission delay on the launch itself of a couple minutes? If so it won’t quite be live, but it will be close enough.
[Update shortly after scheduled launch time]
They had a (literally) last-minute abort. The window closes in an hour, and I doubt they can turn it around that fast, since they still have to look at the data to figure out what happened. Better luck tomorrow.
[Update a couple minutes later]
That was fast. Now they’re saying they think they may be able to recycle from T-10, so it still may be on tonight.
[10:30 EDT update]
Now they’re at T-7 and counting again.
[Update shortly after launch]
Uh oh. Sounds like strike three. The picture was lost at about 35 km altitude and a thousand meters/sec. They announced an “anomaly.” That doesn’t sound good. The last update on the site was that it was about to enter inertial guidance (not clear what they were doing prior to that). Did something go wrong with an IMU, or some other part of the GN&C?
Fortunately, you’re allowed more than three strikes in this game. It has to be a huge disappointment, though, unless the anomaly was merely a loss of signal, and the vehicle’s doing all right. The webcast is over, though. I think that I’d assume that the news is bad.
Jim Manzi explains it to Barack Obama. Unfortunately, both presidential candidates are economic ignorami.
I have a new piece up on this week’s non-discovery of water on Mars.
Well, I got what I thought was a good deal on a laptop.
Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn’t seem to work. That’s an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn’t seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn’t occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux–I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn’t an issue any more. So I’m considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.
Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn’t cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it’s an issue.
Well, I got what I thought was a good deal on a laptop.
Two problems (well, three, one of which is caused by the other). First, the integrated WLAN adaptor doesn’t seem to work. That’s an annoyance, but I have a USB adaptor. More seriously, it doesn’t seem to accept Linux. When I tried to do a Fedora 9 install, it hung on one of the devices. It didn’t occur to me to check to see if it was compatible with Linux–I had just assumed that it had evolved to the point where that wasn’t an issue any more. So I’m considering returning, but not sure how to avoid the problem in the future.
Oh, the third problem? It comes with Vista installed. I hadn’t cared when I thought that it would running Linux most of the time, but now it’s an issue.
They did a full nine-engine static test of the Falcon 9 yesterday. No mention of burn duration, but I assume that it wasn’t a simulation of a full ascent. I also assume that they have run individual engines at full duration. If they launch Falcon 1 this weekend or early next week, it will have been a pretty momentous week for New Space, with the WK2 rollout, the rocket racer debut, and the SpaceX achievements.
Clark Lindsey has the press release from Scaled about last summer’s fatal accident. Short version, by my reading: we still don’t know what happened and probably never will, so we’re just going to be a lot more careful in the future.
I still think that they continue to overestimate the safety of hybrids, and that it wasn’t a great choice for propulsion. I suspect that if Burt were starting from scratch now, he’d go with a liquid, but shifting to one at this stage would involve too large of a redesign of the airframe.
Is climate change racist?
Sometimes these people become parodies of themselves (as in the old gag New York Times headline: “World Ends–Women, Minorities Hit Hardest”).
I’m sure glad that this issue hasn’t been politicized.