Yeah, Vulcan already has their first launch window scheduled for Christmas. (Well, December 24-26.)

The deluge system’s environmental review being the blocker actually explains a lot about why SpaceX seemed very interested in building a system that didn’t need one, even though it’s a relatively simple solution to a problem any rocket of this size will face. Trying to bypass bureaucracy with an inadequate technical…

No, it’s based on the fact that Europe has a large space industry of their own, but both of the rockets they could use to launch Galileo satellites, are out of commission.

This implies that Blue Origin currently has a presence or capabilities in space. They do not. Unless they plan to launch this tug on Falcon, they should probably prioritize getting their own shit working, before announcing yet another grandiose bit of vaporware.

I would say that Starlink’s financials aren’t just aided by SpaceX’s lower costs, the company only exists to better exploit SpaceX’s cost and capacity advantage.

Interesting that the article didn’t mention why this was launching on an Atlas V, or what’s going on that could easily doom the whole project.

The thing I remember most about this book was just how long it took me to get my hands on it. As a kid, I devoured every SWEU book in my local library, which was many, but Courtship wasn’t among them. Best I could tell, there was one copy in the entire county’s library system, and it was at the only one I never went…

The ROG Ally costs twice as much as the Switch and three times the cost of the Switch Lite. Much of that cost is due to the more powerful cooling system, and the basic size increase of the console in order to accommodate it.

So even if we accept your highly optimistic estimate of “double the power efficiency on a successive fab node”, that results in a 35W handheld. Which is over double the power budget of the current Switch in docked mode, and about five times the power budget of it while handheld. We might also compare it to the…

I think everyone with any sort of technical knowledge read the “Rift Apart can’t be played without an SSD” not as “the game won’t even run” but “the game will stutter and hitch so severely that you won’t be able to play the game”. File access is something that’s very heavily abstracted, the game just asks “give me…

Oof, solid motor failures are a lot more energetic than liquid rocket failures. They’re basically just bombs that explode slowly in one direction. When they go wrong, they don’t tend to go wrong neatly and quietly.

https://scryfall.com/card/ltr/246/the-one-ring

Fun fact, the actual game of the original FF7 fit onto a single disc, and in fact all three discs contained the data for the full game, all the textures and music and gameplay data. The only thing different was which cutscene FMVs were stored on each disc, as that was the majority of the data usage.

The goal of this flight was not “put a payload into orbit”. There was no payload. The goal wasn’t even “prove that we could have put a payload into orbit, if we had had one”. The goal of this flight was “get a lot of data about how the rocket works in flight and what needs fixing before we try putting a payload on this…

The main bit of RNG hell in Minish Cap is if you go for 100%, trying to get all those capsule-style collectibles.

Well, glad to see the only two FE games I’ve played were the best. Guess I really know how to pick them.

Yes, under the USSR, there were multiple rocket design bureaus, spread across the republics. Yuzhnoye was one of them, worked on the side boosters for Energia and the related Zenit medium-size launchers, among other things. They continued their work after the Soviet breakup, and have found a bit of a niche…

This was its first test flight. There are some things you just can’t find out, except by actually launching the thing. It could be something that only happens in a vacuum, or only happens with the heavy vibration of solid boosters, or only happens with a tank full of cryogens sloshing around in microgravity. There is…

Yeah, Punchy’s normally a good runner. It just happened at like 4AM my time. I’ll make sure to get to that in my first pass through the VODs, though, it sounds like fun.

Going to once again shill my own little project here, like I do every six months: