Viewing profile — dr_orpheus

Yep, definitely already on people's minds: "China’s use of its SJ-21 to remove a GEO satellite that had been shedding debris to a very high graveyard orbit in January 2022 has been…

The FAA does have licenses over launch and they are trying to impose rules for upper stages of launch vehicles [0]. The FAA said they would complete these regulations in 2025 [1], …

There was a proposed theory on this the spread of absorption created more stability in the power generation of plants over different conditions. This was supposed to be a more impo…

I spent the last few years building up an immunity to lunar dust powder

I totally agree with the space is hard, it fails sometimes. I been in the space industry on both the super rigorous high cost, high mission assurance side of things and the low cos…

Never go in against a Sicilian when death (of a spacecraft) is on the line

Yeah, was cool to see Blue Ghost be successful. And do the point about tall and thin, the Blue Ghost lander is much more squat than the Intuitive Machines landers https://fireflysp…

Yep, most of the previous Mars rover prior to Curiosity did it this way. They had a number of balloons surrounding the rover and landed and bounced along the surface. Then the ball…

But don't forget about a local government in Australia fining NASA $400 for littering after debris from Skylab re-entry landed there. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Re-entry_…

I don't know how common it is, but this is the first time I had seen an announcement of a large solar installation with bifacial modules. I assume that the bifacial modules are mor…

If you want to look at someone that is further along on a concept like this you can look at SpinLaunch. Exactly what it sounds like with a gigantic centrifuge to spin and throw thi…

> I think NASA doesn't do a good job sometimes tolerating risk and then everything is treated as needing safety-levels of risk mitigation without considering that a 1/100th cost re…

For context on JumpCrisscross's comment in this thread: the 4 hours is between two separate launches on two separate rockets. This is absolutely not refurbishing and launching the …

Yep, they do! I had some of this discussion on a thread talking about the Mars helicopter here that Goddard does a lot of radiation testing on commercial chips. https://news.ycombi…

Yeah, you got a lot of it and the ripple effect of things that go out from it. In addition to the extra mass of the camera and solar arrays, there is extra mass for the harnessing …

Yep, for reference Europa Clipper is 6,065 kg [0]. It is an absolutely massive interplanetary probe. It is getting close in size to some of the largest GEO communication satellites…

Not a silly question. I don't think the images are actually cropped. JunoCam is described as a "push broom" imager [0]. The camera takes pictures as the spacecraft turns. So it's m…

> Wood should not be damaged by temperatures high enough to kill living cells Yep, in NASA's planetary protection guidelines they have bakeout timelines specified for microbial red…

Yep, and you can find lots of commercial companies that are doing this https://exoanalytic.com/space-domain-awareness/

Amazing, and so is the associated article: "In a recent piece on red-giant star Mira, we rather foolishly suggested that the "comet-tailed" body was travelling across the heavens a…

I believe what you are probably looking at (I'm having trouble loading it) is probably debris in the Geosynchronous Transfer Orbit (GTO). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostati…

Yeah, I have had this feeling as well. I don't think it is a direct cause of the coffee consumption and is more of an association that the tiredness is still building rapidly at th…

I've got a dumb Insignia TV that I think is getting ready to celebrate it's sweet 16! It's old, its heavy (I had to buy the TV mount that is typically for much larger TV's) but it …

If you squint at it, this is sort of the premise of a ground source heat pump.

Yeah, no pretty looking shock diamonds in that exhaust. Which makes me thing the exhaust velocity is pretty low, which I'm not too surprised by since the throat of that engine look…