Nuke

arm's low power capabilities are likely very useful for space applications. assuming rad-hard parts are currently available. its usually a long process to convert a design over and could take close to a decade due to all the long term verification testing they need to do. so you usually end up with a processor that's 10 or so years behind the curve and less performant than the cpu it was based on. my concern here is that this was just luck and that this method of recovery might be failure prone and not be suited for manned operation. this is more relevant to catching starships than boosters though. you can catch boosters all day every day and if you blow up a tower every now and again its still cheaper than throwing away a rocket every time you launch. i have a hard time comparing a test flight to apollo 11 though.

cant wait for space telescope spam. you thought the eht was awesome, wait till your aperture is the size of the inner solar system.

mechazilla doing the moon walk was pretty cool.

you could see parts of something coming off of the flaps during the earlier parts of reentry. i assume this was the ablative coating they had under the tiles. also while the flaps did get pretty toasty, i didn't see them turn to liquid, and eventually the glow started to dim. so i think its an improvement. with the new leeward flaps and the coating i think they might have this figured out.

i suspect it wouldnt do that on a tower catch.

it looked to still be floating on the surface when the camera cut out. the explosion was probibly caused by the rapid cooling of the nozzels from the sea water.

first plasma.

sounds like were getting ready to melt some flaps. also i ran out of likes.

with all the excitement about the catch i realize i never inquired about the plan for the ship.

and they stuck the landing.

in the immortal words of jim morrison, come on baby light my fire.

im still partial to the cat lady action figure.

i know ive been avoiding the whole thing since my relationship with my mom is not great. and at some point she will either be too much for me to handle or will be gone, and i will have nothing to show for my years of caregiving but a funeral bill and an uncertain future. you have my condolences and at some point my understanding. anyway i came to complain about hack-a-day again. they put up an article declaring that they will join the ranks of the thought police and crack down on "negative" comments. then proceeded to delete over 100 posts of what was mostly constructive criticism of a blatantly inflammatory article. its clear they no longer embrace the values core to the hacker/maker community by attacking same. now im debating removing their icon from my bookmarks bar. but that really doesnt stack up with losing your mom, so im gonna stop there.

still working on the zero-g deep fryer.

still waiting for you guys to send the first moose to space. also what is the isp of maple syrup/lox? you can use pancake batter in your deluge system, or french toast if you set up in quebec.

defund california? can we have your stuff? yea but california is the poster child for ineffective bureaucracy. they are almost as bad as dc.

your matrix has no power over meow.

so girl who was emailing me for two months and then fell off the internet a month ago called me today. i thought she gave up on me. i still dont know her name or what she looks like, but she sounds nice. my complaint about the 700 is the seats are too close together. its better on the 900. even the combi we used to have was well spaced.

im not going out there, i dont want to get wet.

i think the control systems can handle it. would be curious what the full range of actuation and rate of same is. all you have to do is get the catch points in the box, zero velocity, and the mechazilla will handle the rest, in theory. thing i worry about is when you got two control loops doing the same thing, rocket trying to stay "in the box" while mechazilla tries to target and grab the catch points. you might get a feedback loop where the control systems destabilize eachother. but im not too sure the time to grapple is long enough for that to happen. the fireworks will be interesting in any case.

no but hurricane/tornado/rainy seasons happen annually. there is no excuse for not having a plan when certain disasters occur regularly. good planning is the difference between storm season and disaster.

its katrina all over again. except a different party is at the tiller. any politician in office usually spends their entire first term trying to get re-elected. so its no wonder none of them bother to plan for the predictable reoccurring disasters. the netherlands dont have this problem and they are mostly below sea level.

it has now been 3 months since my last rant about office chairs. every chair made in the last 10 years seems to have the same failure modes, and not one chair manufacturer has taken steps to rectify them. you either get a catastrophic failure of the gimbal that can crack your skull and send you to the er. or the less injurious but equally chair killing failure of the latch mechanism which keeps the back from going to far back and turns the chair into a stool, some times there is a bar type where the pin only engages one side and causes the chair to lean when the bar inevitably bends, a lopsided stool (who uses this feature anyway? it seems to serve no other purpose than to break and make the chair unusable). poor quality casters being the third but nothing you cant fix with a run to the hardware store (or in my case i have a bucket full of casters from chairs that failed to chair). looking at name brands that i recognize (and no arbitrary strings of fullcap characters indicative of chinese brands for explort). even a perusal of the comments section on those name brands reveal the same failure modes. they are probibly also made in china except the companies care enough to make sure they dont skimp the quality to the point where it tarnishes their brand name (not that there are any left whom i trust). if were being honest, they are probibly all using the same gimbal design. there used to be a variety. one chair i had years ago had this robust cast iron gimbal that was pretty beefy (and it cracked clean through), another had a lamination of layers that used friction to clamp together, and it works until all the abrasive washers grind smooth (of course no way to replace them because they rivet the bars holding it all together). various stamped and welded sheet metal type are the most common, and also the most prone to failure (to be fair they all fail but these fail faster). in a world where we can land a rocket on a barge or catch it with a mechazilla, build cpus one atom at a time, or cars that drive themselves, we still cannot manage to manufacture a desk chair that works. my kingdom for an amish woodworker.

nuclear powered megafreighters. wont go through any canal but can stock every walmart in a reasonable sized city.

i dont know if using orbit as ammo dump is a good idea, orbit such an asset over a hostile country and they are probibly justified firing their asat weapons at it. you are better off with point to point rockets that are more unpredictable and harder to intercept.