Fantastic Plastic has released the 1/200 scale model of the Deep Impact “Messiah” spacecraft that I mastered for them in CAD a few years ago. Took a long time to get here, but it looks like a really spiffy model. At 27 inches long and 200+ pieces including photoetch, it’s kind of a beast.
Even more Utah skies via phone.
Yes, you too can have nuclear power in your own home. Seems to actually work. Only one problem…
In short, little sealed glass vials of beta-emitting tritium with a phosphor coating on the inside to convert the beta radiation into visible light are sandwiched between two PV cells. This leads to a battery that puts out just enough juice to power very small devices. Cool! The problem is that those tritium vials cost about $15 to $30 a pop, so you’re looking at more than $30 in parts to make said nuclear battery. Is it cost effective? Is it fundamentally practical? Mmmm… probably not. But for less than a hundred bucks, you end up being able to boast that your thermometer or some such is Nuclear Powered.
Here’s another, talkier video describing much the same thing:
Leave it to the cartoon squirrels to say (using NSFW language) what we’re all thinking:
Some more Utah skies via phone:
Probable correction:
Color me stunned, but the article is written in a way that seems to exaggerate the actual claims. For the moment I assume that the stage didn’t so much “splash down softly” as “plummet from the sky at terminal velocity.”
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Bwuh?
SpaceX has also had success recently in recovering Falcon 9 second stages and payload fairings, the nose cones that protect satellites and other spacecraft during launch. After its work was done on Saturday, for example, the Falcon 9 second stage apparently splashed down softly in the ocean southwest of Australia, Hans Koenigsmann, SpaceX’s vice president of build and flight reliability, said during Saturday’s press conference.
Hold up. The second stage soft-landed in the ocean??? Way to bury the lede, guys.
Some recent photos of the Utah sky taken with my 3+ year-old camera phone.
They launched a Dragon resupply module to the ISS today and successfully recovered the first stage. Not new. But this is the Dragon second flight; that’s new. They recover it and it’ll be *really* new.
Later this summer SpaceX will do their first Falcon 9 heavy launch, and they are apparently planning to *try* to recover the second stage, though they are apparently not very confident of success. But eventually they’ll get it, and then they’ll have a reusable first stage, reusable second stage and mostly reusable payload.
Yet no confirmation, might have just been an accident. But it sure sounds familiar…
Of course, accidents usually don’t involve stabbings. But you know, Europeans are a funny lot…
Eye witnesses report that victims were receiving CPR after being ‘stabbed’
Not unrelated to the immediately preceding post about Kekistan is the marvelous new invention I just read about, “Orcposting.” This one is an incredible fertile field to be sown…
