Things don’t look great for Virgin Orbit

 AARRRGH, aircraft, Crazy, Gah., Hmm..., news, rockets, spacecraft, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 102023
 

Virgin Orbit is Richard Bransons space launch company. Their launch system, LauncherOne, uses a 747 to haul a more or less conventional expendable rocket into the air for launch to orbit. yesterday they flew a launch attempt, the first orbital launch attempt from the UK. Note “attempt.” It got close, but something went wring and the vehicle didn’t attain orbit. That’s never a good thing, but things apparently weren’t good at the company before then.

Even before Monday’s launch failure, Virgin Orbit’s finances were dismal

The math seems weird:

Independent estimates suggest that, over that time, Virgin Orbit spent as much as $1 billion to develop and test its LauncherOne rocket and air-launch system. The company made its first successful launch in January 2021 and has averaged one mission every six months since then.

An obvious question is this: With such high development costs and a low cadence for a rocket that sells for $12 million per launch, how can Virgin Orbit be financially sustainable?

How indeed. $12M per launch would require 83 launches to make a $Billion, and that’s forty years at the current rate. And $12M is the selling price of the mission, not the profit.

 Posted by at 11:15 pm

Classified Documents: Cautionary Tales

 AARRRGH, dumbassery, Forward!, Hmm..., news, politics, youtube, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 102023
 

The President of the United States has at least one absolute power: the power to declassify secret documents. There is some discussion about the process, but is *seems* that all he needs to do is say “this document is declassified,” and that’s that.

The Vice President does *not* have that power.

 

Biden and his legal team don’t know what’s in classified documents found in his private office, sources say

 Posted by at 9:17 pm

What could *possibly* go wrong?

 AARRRGH, Crazy, critters, dumbassery, Gah., Hmm..., news, politics, science, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 092023
 

Here’s your new “zombie apocalypse writing prompt:”

Study using mosquitoes to deliver vaccines has Chinese researchers buzzing

In an article published in the peer-reviewed journal Nature Communications on December 16, researchers said they had developed new technology that can turn a mosquito into a flying vaccine carrier to immunise animals in the wild.

Oh, goodie. Commie scientists studying ways to deliver vaccines, drugs, plagues, manmade horrors beyond your comprehension, etc. via skeeters.

The ChiComs have already announced that they are working on genetic weapons to target specific ethnic groups for everything from death to dumbing-down. This seems like a decent enough way to deliver such a weapon in certain geographic regions.

 

Now, is the idea of immunizing wild animals against pandemics a good one?  Quite possibly. Is the use of skeeters to do this a good idea? Possibly. Would I trust anything produced by people who think that Mao and his policies were good ideas? Not a chance in hell, Skippy. If you buy into socialism, you’ve demonstrated a sufficient lack of critical thinking skills and judgement that you should be kept far away from anything more scientifically complex than a wooden block.

 Posted by at 11:34 pm

So how are things going…

 AARRRGH, Crazy, dumbassery, Gah., news, ಠ_ಠ  No Responses »
Jan 042023
 

A couple of tweets showing the spectacular state of American cities today…

Someone needs a tazin’…

And New York City? Don’t go there.

Here’s a fun related article:

Remote Work Is Poised to Devastate America’s Cities

People no longer *need* to live in big cities quite as much as they used to. The pandemic helped this process along by forcing people to work from home; and once people – and businesses – realized that people could work from *anywhere* and not have to deal with commutes and the nightmare that is the urban area, a lot of people *wanted* to bail out of big cities. Turns out Poop Central, AKA San Francisco, is seeing a *lot* of empty offices as people pull the D-rings and flee that rathole.

 Posted by at 1:40 pm

Is there a polymer chemist in the house?

 AARRRGH, aircraft, art, Hmm..., models, science  No Responses »
Jan 032023
 

Something like 15-20 years ago I bought a 1/18 scale P-47D “Ultimate Soldier” toy. This line of large scale accurate fighter planes was sort of peak Golden Age Of Toys For Adults, even though they sold for a reasonable price at WalMart. They make great display pieces even without structural modifications or repainting, but they are generally screaming for such.

 

Anyway, the P-47D spent years on a shelf in my shop in Utah. From time to time it caught direct sunlight. This discolored the paint *slightly,* but it turned the originally crystal clear canopies milky white. I’ve left them in the dark for some years to see if that would help… nope. I boiled them… nope. I nuked them, if perhaps briefly, with UV; no change. Anybody got any ideas? Why did this happen? How can it be reversed? Scrubbing has shown that this is not a surface feature, but seems to be throughout the plastic.

At some point, recasting them with crystal clear resin might be the only solution, but it’s not one I’m fond of. None of the other canopies did this, so it would seem these two pieces of plastic came from a bad batch.

 Posted by at 8:56 pm

Cyanotype update: irritation edition

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Dec 282022
 

I have been poking away at resuming cyanotype production using the new setup and the old transparency negatives. In order to go forward successfully, I need to be able to print on transparent film up to 2 feet wide by six long. I have encountered a lot of trouble here, which has baffled me. No print shops within a hundred miles seem to be able to do that. I put in an order to buy a roll of the film myself to keep at one of the local shops to print off on as needed… and was informed today that the roll will be delivered no sooner than late *February.* The manufacturers don’t have the raw materials for it.

 

What’s baffling is that when last I worked with this, circa 2017 or so, getting these sort of prints was no trouble whatsoever. I’d send the files to a local print shop in Utah and within a few days the job would be done at reasonable cost, no sweat. Now, though… it’s just not done. And it turns out there is a reason: up until about 5 years ago, it seems people were still regularly using diazo-type blueprinting for architectural and other industrial diagrams, which required this sort of film. But around five years ago, digital printing finally drove the last nail in diazotypes coffin. Without the market, there’s no supply.

 

So, hopefully the film will still arrive. But I have a customer who kinda wants his custom job, and that’s an unreasonable wait. So something new is being done. The customers line diagram is being printed not on thin transparent film, but on thin *plexiglas.* I can see this resulting in superior cyanotypes; the plexiglass will be vastly less prone to being anything other than dead flat, so the prints should be sharper. But plexi is *far* more expensive (two full size prints will cost as much as the entire roll of film that’s hopefully coming)… and when not in use, I can’t just roll it up and stick it in the corner. If I get 24 inch by 72 inch prints on these, not only is storing them going to be a problem, I can’t even fit them in my car. Grrr. These are problems that will be solved, but, grrr. Everything is always harder not only than it needs to be, but than it used to be.

 Posted by at 1:57 pm

The War On Merit

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Dec 262022
 

We’re clearly being led by the very, very best:

The War on Merit Takes a Bizarre Turn

For years, two administrators at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology (TJ) have been withholding notifications of National Merit awards from the school’s families, most of them Asian, thus denying students the right to use those awards to boost their college-admission prospects and earn scholarships. This episode has emerged amid the school district’s new strategy of “equal outcomes for every student, without exception.” School administrators, for instance, have implemented an “equitable grading” policy that eliminates zeros, gives students a grade of 50 percent just for showing up, and assigns a cryptic code of “NTI” for assignments not turned in.

Spectacular.

I have hopes that the lawyers sure to be hired by the families involves *are* fans of merit and are the best at what they do so they can sue this high school and its administration into oblivion.

 Posted by at 9:00 pm
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