SpaceX lands Falcon 9 booster on Just Read the Instructions drone ship
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
It's pretty cool that recovering used rocket boosters is becoming a norm
This is becoming the norm for kids now. Children yet to be born may not remember a time when such crafts weren't common!
The sense of awe sticks around though. I don't know, I still will from time to time get a little sense of vertigo when I'm in an airplane and the landing gear leaves the runway. The scope and scale of human accomplishment to get to the point where this miracle has become mundane will occasionally hit with the peculiar warmth that accompanies the loss of meaning of a word spoken one too many times. It briefly becomes new again, and amazing.
It is pretty cool indeed.
I get that feeling alot when I consider think like that I have a device in my pocket more powerful than a 1980's supercomputer.
2.0 Gflops = top 250 in 1993: https://www.top500.org/list/1993/11/?page=3
https://www.integralmemory.com/product/smartphone-and-tablet...
For example: old crufty rant about how no one talks to each other and everyone is on their phones. Get a video from the 1960s of people on a train in NYC. Everyone has their head in a book or newspaper or magazine. By the 1980s, some nerds have walkmans. By the 90s everyone has discmans, plus their book. Today every has their phone, on which their either reading a book, a magazine or listening to a podcast or music. The media is different, it's a bit more interactive, but it really hasn't changed that much.
https://familybreedscontent.files.wordpress.com/2011/04/befo...
Of course people don't interact on mass transit.
The media is different, it's a bit more interactive, but it really hasn't changed that much.
It has been a progression. More and more interaction has been mediated electronically, where it's been widely known since at least the 80's that interpersonal cues do not work in the same way. Of course non-interaction on mass transit is going to be a constant. It's socializing in the home, day to day, where things have changed.
Things have changed.
They are also on social media or playing mindless addictive games walking down the street, at restaurants, in stores, in the park, intermittently during the workday, in bed, on the toilet, ...
(Citation: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/IS.AIR.DPRT?end=2017&st...)
Mildly aerophobic here: i took the plane when I had to, but definitely never enjoyed it.
I thought to myself "I bet they don't land both boosters at the same time in the actual landing" and then several days later they did. It was amazing.
Curious what the minimal wind, wave requirements for such landing....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_spacecraft_in_the_Cult...
The Culture setting is a sort-of utopian socialist society, its people literally don't have money, and the most obviously valuable "things" made in their society, Ships, are people, not products. Musk doesn't look like any flavour of socialist to me, let alone a Utopian one.
The book those two names are from, specifically, is about the Culture using below the belt tactics first on our protagonist (he's blackmailed into doing what they want), and then on an entire alien civilisation, sparking a massive civil war apparently as a means to the end of regime change.
It's very easy to be gung-ho about the Culture's intervention here because the alien civilisation in question is clearly both corrupt and bigoted - but the thing about massive civil wars is that even if you like the eventual outcome it sucks for ordinary people caught in the crossfire.
Hey, that has not stopped anyone since whenever.
Especially those hell-bent on installing Paradise on Earth soonest.
But difficult to see anything.
Also, the first Ariane 6 test flight is currently scheduled for 2020.
Meanwhile, the next generation SpaceX platform, the BFR/BFS, is also expected to start orbital testing in 2020. BFR/BFS is 100% reusable, and will bring lift costs down at least an order of magnitude.
Now, everybody knows about 'Elon time', but the 2020 estimate comes from their COO, Gwynne Shotwell, who is without a doubt far more realistic with estimates.
I'm obviously a pretty huge SpaceX fan, but I really hope there is some meaningful competition for them in the future. It seems to me that Blue Origin might be the only possibility there.
I can't imagine they'd taste very good.
(Sorry, I couldn't resist and have karma to spare.)
Landing happens at about 23 minutes, but the video connection from the drone ship drops out as usual. Link goes to an earlier time because it's neat to see the grid fins silhouetted in front of the engines at night.
Here's today's Iridium-7 NEXT night landing, again without good video: https://youtu.be/vsDknmK30C0?t=1749
The lack of common sense / shortsightedness in this industry is deafening. Speaking of which, this site uses oath and thus one of the most asinine GDPR-violations thought up by man.
Of course, that does not excuse poor web design.
Disclosure: I have a vested interest in getting more people to disable JS, as it means developers are more incentivized to design with us in mind.
For chrome on Android, go to setting -> site setting -> JavaScript and then disable it.
[0] 1Blocker X by Salavat Khanov https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/1blocker-x/id1365531024?mt=8