For a minute there it looked like the worst wrap I’ve ever seen till I realized it was a loaf of bread. Looks very good!

Yes, it was sold as being one Starship in LEO, one Starship to refuel it and off it went. But now they’re onto this plan with a ship to do the mission, a ship with a different design to act as a fuel station and then at least 4 fueling missions, but more likely 8 to 12. It’s ridiculous really, to expect all of this to work out.

At the same time Nasa can’t get SLS to do what they want and that’s just a single mission. A more complicated one for sure, but still a single mission, not a dozen within two days.

A lot of the Moon mission hinges on Starship being a reliable machine that does all of the things Musk promised. I have no doubt that SpaceX in time could build something good, they do have a lot of good people working there. But the time lines given by Musk to the government in order to get the contracts weren’t viable. And as usual Musk overpromised about the capabilities.

One of the biggest doubts at the moment is about Starship being able to go to the Moon. The plan was to send up a Starship into LEO, then send up another Starship to refuel the first one. That way it would have enough fuel to go to the Moon and work as a lander there. It doesn’t need to do much, just get to the Moon, take the people to the surface and get them back into Lunar orbit.

The issue with this is, a lot of things need to go right in order for this to work. You’d need two functioning Starships, they need to both launch into the correct orbit and rendezvous. Then they need to dock and transfer fuel, undock and separate. This is pretty much never been done, so they would be doing something new, but in theory it can be done. Hard and experimental, but in principle achievable.

However when calculations were made, it turns out once you put a Starship in the right orbit it’s not possible for it to have enough fuel to fully refuel another Starship. So Musk said they would simply stretch a Starship and use it as a fuel station. Nobody is really sure if this stretching is even possible, as this wasn’t part of the original design, but let’s say it is. Now the mission become more complicated still, you’d need the Starship that does the Moon mission. Then you’d need the fuel station ship and another ship to fuel that station. And all of this has to work and be timed properly for the Moon mission to work.

But then further calculations were made and nobody is sure how many Starship launches would be required to fill up that fuel station. Partly because Starship isn’t finalized, so the exact specs are unknown. But back of the napkin calculations put the figure at something like 6 launches. A big problem is the fuel used is very hard to store for any amount of time. As it’s cryogenic, it needs to be kept cold. On Earth this is done by using very thick and sturdy pressure vessels, combined with a bunch of machinery and off-gassing. But in space this gets harder, since the pressure vessels need to be light, they can’t be as sturdy. And there isn’t room (both in volume and weight) for all of the cooling machines, which would require too much power and cooling themselves to even work. So we end up with only off-gassing to maintain temperature. This usually doesn’t matter, on Earth the fuel that’s lost gets replaced right away up to the point of liftoff. After that the fuel is used to fly the mission and usually the rocket’s main fuel tank is empty after that. This puts a lot of time pressure on the whole thing, that fuel station in orbit is losing fuel all of the time. So it’s a race to fill it up faster than it’s losing fuel. So those 6 missions need to be flown within a day or maybe two. And if it turns out the amount of fuel being delivered is lower than expected or the loss is higher, there would need to be 12 fueling missions within a day. Not strictly impossible, but not exactly easy. And the not knowing is making people nervous.

They are so far behind schedule, on a system that hasn’t been finalized, let alone tested, it’s very doubtful they could do it anywhere in the near future. Nasa has since asked other companies if they could build a lander if SpaceX can’t do it. But canceling the whole landing part is an option as well.

On the other hand, I can get really annoyed when writers get stuff like that wrong. Especially when it’s crucial to the plot and it happens to be within my area of expertise. So I do appreciate writers that do their research.

I’ve consulted on a couple of books and I’ve seen two kinds of fiction writers. The first one simply starts writing and only stops once the story is done. They might get writers block in between or reorder some stuff in editing (if they do editing, some don’t), but mostly the story is written from beginning to end in one go. The second one is the one that does plenty of research beforehand. They might have an idea of the plot, but it’s more of a concept and not finalized. They start building plot points, characters and story lines. They decide on things like structure, pacing and point of view. Small details crucial to the plot get thought out and researched before hand. They write the important stuff first, then fill out the rest and make sure there is a natural progression from one point to the next. They make sure everything fits within the designed character profiles and backstories. Often they edit a lot and entire chapters get deleted and rewritten. This is the kind of writer that works with others, sometimes multiple primary authors, often other people that do the editing. I vastly prefer the second kind and love working with those people. I feel like they write better books, regardless of how much time it costs them or how successful their books are. But a friend of mine is the first kind and he’s had some success with his books. He likes to let his creativity flow and outputs more books, so more chances of capturing an audience. But I do feel you sometimes need to turn your brain off a bit to read those kinds of books.

It would be funny if it wasn’t absolutely true for anything and everything

Wait you guys are having success?

And because they are all gamers, they focused on getting a high framerate, even though that makes zero sense in context.

Usually the previous registrar will hold on to the domain for 6-18 months in case the customer wants the domain back. After that it’s automatically sold in bulk auctions. The companies, sometimes called domain squatters, buying those domains in bulk hold on to them often for years asking a premium price. The idea is once someone thought that domain name was valuable, it might be valuable again. They buy 1000 domains and maybe sell a dozen or so, but as operating costs are extremely low it’s still somehow worth it. It’s all highly automated at this point, so just a fact of life. I’ve seen domains being held for over 10 years.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cybersquatting

I especially hate it when the source is already the same as whatever the target is, but it still breaks the image. Removing the format parameter suddenly makes the image work again, it’s so dumb.

I don’t think you have any idea how hard EUV actually is. ASML was told for decades it could never be done and they were throwing money away by trying to make it happen. Even inside the company a lot of folk were against the whole thing, stating it was not possible. If it weren’t for the leadership having stuck by it during development, it would never have been done.

It took advances in physics, math and engineering to even create the technology, let alone make it reliable, fast and cheap enough to make it usable for mass production purposes. It’s a huge advancement and has a good few years in optimizations and improvements ahead.

What’s next after EUV? I don’t think anyone really knows, this might be the end of the line as far as shrinking node sizes goes. And we’ll need to look into novel structures and materials. Or who knows, ASML might have something else cooking in a top secret project.

Grim Dawn is one of my favorite games of all time. I’ve played by myself and with others. Really fun doing challenge runs and trying out all sorts of builds. I love the atmosphere and the story, on top of that it has very good gameplay.

His eyeball pops out as I sit at a table nearby eating my spaghetti diner. And I can tell you, that’s the best spaghetti I ever had.

:-)

Just so you know, in the game this meme is from the small dude beats the big dude. But the meme is used in reverse so much, most people don’t know or care at this point.

Seems like a bit of a jump? Why would this impact screen recorders and stuff like OBS? Those tools can be used for plenty of use cases outside of the one mentioned.

DELTA SHIIIIIIIFT HYPE

Most explanations you read/see about how the immune system works do a lot of anthropomorphising unfortunately, usually because the actual processes are too complex to explain. White bloods cells don’t do anything, they are just cells, they float around. They have no agency, they have no purpose, they have no directive.

They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should.

Second floor basement?!?!!

You spend all your time learning to become a doctor, working in sickbay, but do they call you Beverly the doctor? No. So you literally save the lives of your colleagues and lots of other people, do they then call you Beverly the life saver? No. But you fuck ONE ghost and all of a sudden you’re Beverly the ghost fucker.