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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 16th, 2023

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  • The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.

    My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.

    NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.






  • Yeah they were attempts to either fool the Javelin’s sensor and make it fly too high or serve as improvised spaced armor to reduce the effectiveness of its HEAT round. FPV drones have much smaller HEAT rounds and a lot less kinetic energy so improvised spaced armor may be more effective.

    “Cope cages” to describe improvised armor was always propaganda though. US soldiers in Iraq put improvised armor on their humvees to protect against IEDs. In WWII solders piled sandbags and spare tracks on their tanks (you can see many pictures of tanks like this). Field improvised armor is as old as warfare. Often it was not effective. For instance, tank designers in WWII thought that improvised armor reduced the chance of a ricochet, which was a serious problem with the era’s AP rounds that saved a lot of tankers. Improvised armor gave the AP round something to “grab ahold of” and aid penetration.


  • Yeah the fediverse has lower engagement all around because the community is a lot smaller. This is especially true in “long tail” communities. However, the upside is that there are no bots, dark patterns, or manipulated feeds.

    That being said, while I appreciate the chronological feed I do wish there was some way to “weigh” less active communities so that I can see their activity in my feed without them being drowned out by the busier communities. I’ve noticed that I’ve gone to communities that I’m definitely subscribed to, and seen that there were several posts that I missed because the posts were drowned out by content in busy communities like, for instance, technology@beehaw.org


  • And before SpaceX the cost to do anything in space was extremely prohibitive.

    As opposed to now…

    With SpaceX they created re-usable rocket components

    Nobody had done that before? Wasn’t the promise that they would do few quick checks, refuel, and send it back up same day?

    Before SpaceX the U.S. was reliant on Russia’s soyuz to get us to and from the space station.

    Nasa had do use Soyuz because crew dragon was late. SpaceX won the contract then underdelivered a late product. Basically exactly what ULA or Boeing would have done.

    Wanna talk about Artemis?


  • The planned goal of the mission was to achieve orbital velocity but not orbital trajectory. This was because they had not yet demonstrated the ability of their vac engines to relight in space. If they go into a stable orbit but can’t relight they can not deorbit and they become space junk.

    They initially claimed that this was a success (they achieved target velocity) but subsequent analysis was they were quite a bit off. Also because their engine relight test was failed/cancelled they will also not be allowed to attempt a stable orbit in IFT4. They have to demonstrate relight/deorbit capability before they will be allowed to attempt stable orbit.


  • Which part of the video is wrong? The fact is that it failed to reach planned velocity. This is public record. If it did not reach planned velocity then it did not reach the non-circualized suborbit that they intended. They were not “just a circulization away from orbit.”

    The CSS channel was created when Musk and Shotwell were making bonkers claims about their Mars plans, as well as other crazy bullshit like the suborbital rocket airline stuff. The point of CSS is that none of their claims pencil out if you do even basic math, and they proved that by doing the math. They’ve also gone after other space grifters like orbital assembly.