idlewords

5 ms·

31.
by idlewords 7mo ago
They do not, except for some of the avionics.
32.
by idlewords 7mo ago
I never worked at NASA. Maybe you're confusing me with Casey Handmer, who has also written on this topic?
33.
by idlewords 7mo ago
I'm sorry it bugs you!
34.
by idlewords 7mo ago
I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.
35.
by idlewords 7mo ago
The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.
36.
by idlewords 7mo ago
You would be the first person to ever accuse the Orion program of cutting costs.
37.
by idlewords 7mo ago
If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here. The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle
38.
by idlewords 7mo ago
The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences: 1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of
39.
by idlewords 7mo ago
They do iterative flight testing. Starship is I believe on its twelfth flight test; the first one was in 2023.
40.
by idlewords 7mo ago
It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit. There are rumors (that I've never bee
41.
by idlewords 7mo ago
The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test facilities can only test small material samples in these facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.
42.
Artemis II is not safe to fly(idlewords.com)
909 points by idlewords 7mo ago|638 comments
43.
by idlewords 1y ago
Getting on the train that's physically in front of you, no matter how crowded, is the rational decision basically everywhere outside Japan, where you can have metaphysical certitude that the next train will show up as scheduled.
44.
by idlewords 1y ago
Grug use few words, make it easy read grug.
45.
by idlewords 1y ago
The style is the most charming part of this essay.
46.
by idlewords 1y ago
And for the lazy, there's the 1:1 scale model under your feet.
47.
by idlewords 1y ago
The universe is a UI nightmare
48.
by idlewords 1y ago
An exponential curve looks locally the same at all points in time. For a very long period of time, computers were always vastly better than they were a year ago, and that wasn't because the computer you'd bought the year before wa
49.
by idlewords 1y ago
My blog is static files. It preserves a moment in time when PHP was complaining, forever.
50.
by idlewords 1y ago
Reading Graham's essays on writing always puts me in mind of the videos where Mexican moms react to Rachael Ray trying to cook ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zFN2g1FBgVA ), or a Malaysian guy has to watch a BBC cook m
51.
by idlewords 1y ago
What's the useful part of Pocket's feature set that doesn't overlap with Pinboard?
52.
by idlewords 1y ago
I'll take it off their hands.
53.
by idlewords 2y ago
In this thread: all the difficult employees
54.
by idlewords 2y ago
Great, now who is going to bring back web rings? Discoverability remains the one great problem of online self-publishing. A history of how solutions have changed over the years would make for a fun history of the web.
55.
by idlewords 2y ago
The 2-3x uncertainty in tumor risk comes entirely from the heavy ion component of GCR. Please go back and re-read that section of my post if you need to.
56.
by idlewords 2y ago
1) Radiation 2) Partial gravity
57.
by idlewords 2y ago
It does not; see the paper cited in my other reply to you. GCR dose is 1.5-2x on Mars compared to ISS. The mention of "quality factor" here just begs the question. The reason we need research on biological effects of high-Z ion ex
58.
by idlewords 2y ago
I didn't choose AL shielding as the reference standard to use in the literature; I'm sorry it bugs you. You can read the author's other work, that goes into great detail about different types of shielding, if you want to gain
59.
by idlewords 2y ago
Total GCR dose is 3-5x in transit to Mars compared to what you get on ISS; on the Martian surface it's from 1.5-2x the ISS dose. (see https://www.swsc-journal.org/articles/swsc/pdf/2020/01/swsc2
60.
by idlewords 2y ago
No one has ever done a "years long" expedition to ISS, and the radiation flux in transit to Mars, in particular GCR dose, is much higher than experienced on the space station.

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