A 1979 promo for TMP. Some interesting stuff here… work on the Enterprise model, Klingon battle cruiser models getting exploded (a scene later re-imagined) and Persis Khambatta losing her hair, and not being entirely thrilled by it.
Aug 032023
Aug 022023
If LK-99 pans out as a true room temperature superconductor, it really does seem like it’ll be world changing. That’ll be great: no more need to cryo-cool electromagnets, making maglevs practical and making CAT scanners and the like a hell of a lot cheaper. And making the nightmare scenario of running out of helium much less nightmarish. They’ll make electric motors run cooler and more efficiently and, so I’m led to understand, rings of superconductors can be fed vast amounts of electricity which will losslessy just zip around the ring until called upon. More complex than a battery, but with the potential for *vast* energy densities. At last electric cars might be truly practical: an energy storage system allowing for a thousand miles range and the ability to be recharged in minutes rather than hours, using storage systems based on *lead* rather than rare earths. What’s not to like?
Some preliminary studies by independent labs suggest that at least some aspect of LK-99 are panning out, though nobody is ready to declare victory just yet. And even if the stuff works as advertised, to become truly useful it’ll need to be manufactured at high quality on an industrial scale.We don;t know squadoo about doing that just now. It might turn out to be easy enough for laymen to whip up batches of the stuff. it might turn out to be very difficult.
Here is what I think would be the absolutely best scenario: it’s possible to make the stuff to *adequate* quality on industrial scales, but it’s difficult and expensive. Unless… manufacturing takes place in microgravity. Then the stuff comes in with glorious quality and reliability. This would not only make the world better for all the reasons that the superconductor would, it would kick off space industrialization. Woo.
I would, however, be satisfied with the stuff working and being ground-manufacturable. Decades ago the Shuttle was supposed to kick off space industrialization via microgravity manufacturing of crystals and pharmaceuticals, but people figured out how to make that stuff on the ground.
Jul 282023
Starships first not-exactly-successful launch was filmed not only from the ground, but from the NASA WB-57 flying at altitude. Apparently at least five cameras were trained on the launcher; video from two have been released, while three remain classified. i would *assume* that the classified three display some combination of:
1) better tracking
2) Better image quality – better sensor and/or telescope
3) Different spectra… IR and the like
Even with the somewhat dodgy tracking and potato-quality images, these are interesting. You really get a sense of how Starship flopped around the sky at the end there. Which was both sad and incredibly impressive… no other rocket would have survived as long flying *sideways.*
Jul 042023
Spiffy CG animation showing what will *hopefully* appear in the sky soon… Starship hot-staging off of Superheavy.
Jun 262023
Clothes are throwaway items now. Back In My Day, socks with holes in them were repaired; now, often enough, shirts are worn only a few times then tossed. Sometimes sent to thrift stores and the like, sometimes simply thrown out. But thrift stores have more clothes than they know what to do with. So often these discarded shirts and shorts are boxed up and shipped to third world countries where the trainloads of discards can be used to eliminate the local indigenous clothing production industry; this is why you often see some illiterate tribesman wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the logo of some midwestern high school baseball team. At some point I suppose this global traffic in clothes might end, but likely not before many places lose the knowledge and ability to make their own clothes.
Anyway, it seems to me the obvious solution for this is so obvious that it’s obvious: FIRE. Clothes are largely made from plastic and cotton; these will happily burn. Sure, some unfortunate fumes will be generated, from the toxic to the CO2; but if incinerated in a large and modern facility this can not only be done fairly cleanly it can also generate a lot of power. Use the combustion to boil water, run the steam past turbines, shazam, electricity. But for whatever reason we don’t much burn our garbage these days, preferring instead to burn rocks and goop we dug up out of the ground. So what happens to all these discarded garments?
If you’re Chile, you dump them in the desert. There it can be picked through by locals and by a company that is trying to separate out the various materials and make something of them.
High fashion! Mountain of discarded clothes in Chilean desert is visible from space (satellite photo)
A recent satellite photo shows the pile:
It’s a little difficult to judge scale from that. At lower left you can see an urban area; the pile is clearly a number of city blocks in expanse.
An article from 2021 shows the pile (from the ground) as it existed in 2021. It was *huge:*
Chile’s desert dumping ground for fast fashion leftovers
Here’s the location on Google Maps, satellite view:
Interestingly, the Google Maps satellite photo, which seems to have been taken in July of 2022, shows just bare Earth. It seems that there was a huge pile in 2021, it was dealt with in 2022, and its huge again in 2023. So processing seems to be keeping up. Or… when the photo was taken in 2022, the pile had been buried in the dirt.
Jun 152023
Sometimes I look at some of my goofier projects like the “2001 Briefcase Computer” and I think to myself “that’s actually pretty cool.” Then I see guys like this and I know that my nerd-cred is minuscule.
Jun 032023
Good news:
In a First, Caltech’s Space Solar Power Demonstrator Wirelessly Transmits Power in Space
This is *many* orders of magnitude away from a practical solar power satellite… but ya gotta start somewhere.
And on the other hand, bad news:
Boeing finds two serious problems with Starliner just weeks before launch
Problem one: bits of the parachute system aren’t as strong as they should be. Bad, but readily solvable.
Problem two: the wiring is flammable. This… is monumentally stupid, a problem that has been well understood since the Apollo 1 fire. this may well require that the capsule be largely disassembled so that *miles* of wiring can be replaced.
Good luck with *that.*
And while Boeing continues to struggle to get a capsule not fundamentally different from Apollo flying SpaceX continues to send crews to the ISS in Dragons.
19 years later… pic.twitter.com/2xead0zqaA
— Rare North American Space Koala (@culpable_mink) June 1, 2023
May 252023
Given the vast amount of money spend on Virgin Orbit to develop a rocket that promised to be cheap, the fact that the company failed is no surprise whatsoever (see HERE). But their failure is other companies gains.
No one should be surprised Virgin Orbit failed—it had a terrible business plan
Stratolaunch bought VO’s modified 747 with the intention of using it to launch things. This probably makes a lot more sense than their gigantic ROC carrier aircraft… too much airplane for many missions, and not exactly capable of landing on every runway in the world. Big as the 747 is, there are a *lot* of airports with decades of experience accommodating it.
Stratolaunch Expands Fleet with Virgin Orbit’s Modified Boeing 747
And the New Zealand/American company Rocket Lab has purchased a fair chunk of VO’s infrastructure:
Rocket Lab Bolsters Neutron Rocket Program with Purchase of Virgin Orbit Long Beach California Assets
Good for them. Instant growth, and, hopefully, continued employment for some VO staff. And if nothing else at least the ChiComs didn’t get it.
May 132023
Stratolaunch Successfully Completes Separation Test of Talon-A Vehicle
Stratolaunch LLC announces it has successfully completed a separation release test of the Talon-A separation test vehicle, TA-0. The flight was the eleventh for the company’s launch platform Roc and the second time the team has conducted flight operations in Vandenberg Space Force Base’s Western Range off California’s central coast.
May 092023
The James Webb Space Telescope recently took a shot of deep space, showing a multitude of galaxies lensed *spectacularly.* Full-rez version at the link.
https://esawebb.org/images/potm2303a/
That view is *littered* with lensing, especially on the right.
