CatastrophicFailure

I learned in KSP that a blood sacrifice to an eldritch abomination from outside reality can turn living beings into spaghettified Cronenberg horrors experiencing a new definition of pain and suffering and they STILL. DON’T. DIE. I thought this was KSP.

Not at all funny but bizarrely interesting... So yesterday, coming home from Costco (where some schmuck hit my car and destroyed my fender trim somehow WITHOUT triggering Sentry Mode ), the wife & I see a power pole down, cut in half & blocking a driveway. We realize it's a property we actually went looking at once, a long time ago, while house hunting. We came to call it the "Manson House." Because it's exactly the sort of ramshackle, weirdly additioned, oddly proportioned, creeptastic-doll-in-an-A-frame-shine-having place you'd expect to find Charlie Manson. Or maybe Jigsaw. Or maybe It. Or maybe all three playing canasta and making incantations to an eldritch abomination on a December midnight dreary. Anyways, that was... interesting. Then about 5:30 this morning, the power blinks off. Which is also interesting on a nice September morn, but only mildly so. Came to find out some time later that some doof had... cut down a power pole with a chainsaw. So, if I had a nickel for every time in the last few days some doof had cut down a power pole with a chainsaw, I'd have two nickels. You see where this is going. So then the information continues to trickle in on that Facebook thing (which we all know is such a trustworthy source of information)... and then the DOT app... and then Spitter... and then the ICSO scanner app... and then we hear the sirens... and more sirens... and MOAR sirens... And now the the whole highway is closed and there's an armed-freakin-standoff less then five miles away with a very mad man who's done some very bad things at... THE MANSON HOUSE. Apparently he's blockaded himself inside with said power pole before also trying to cut power to a certain individual for the sake of certain misdeeds, which he is reportedly blaming on incantations to another deity entirely, according to "sources." We are definitely living in a simulation.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magick. I’m more reminded of a certain scene from History of the World Pt 1…

The wonky gravity is more an annoyance, like a halo orbit it requires a craft to expend fuel to keep a stable orbit. There are some naturally stable low lunar orbits, but they’re inherently limited. It’s not an insurmountable problem at all but there needs to be demand for that comms, and that doesn’t exist just yet. MoonLinks would just be burning fuel for nothing right now. China’s relay is out at the Lagrange point, IIRC.

I like this dude. Every time he posts, my respect meter recovers a notch.

‘Tis on the list… as soon as we get past the point where everything just looks like a metal booger.

Wife & I broke in her new forge today. Garage: not burned down. Much ado just to make one end of a metal bit flat in order to completely re-engineer the chicken coop latch… as a bunch of highly evolved dinosaurs have apparently figured out how to open it.

Yeah but… it’s not just the yeet… it’s the anti-yeet at the other end, unless it’s supposed to just go sailing past Mars. Seems like a much bigger hunk of DV needed from Escapade too.

I had that same thing happen to me a while back, kinda sold me on wireless charging and USB-C, which doesn’t look like it can fail that way. Might be part of the reason Apple ditched Lightning.

It shall rest in Valhalla, sooty and dark!

Also worth noting that until the, er, riff-raff has boogered off, both docking ports remain full and Dragon cannot be berthed like the old Cargo Dragon. Also Butch & Suni aren’t exactly overstaying their welcome, they’ve been quite busy up there doing crazy astronaut stuff and since NASA is, actually, a rather capable and forward-looking organization, they’ve been previously trained on all matters of working on the ISS, experiments, even EVAs if necessary, so both they and NASA are getting their moneys’ worth, as it were, from the extended stay. (The taxpayers re:riff-raff are another matter) IIRC the two contingency plans are thus: Crew 8 Dragon is currently being modified with crew couches on the cargo pallets, this would be B&S’s ride home in an emergency once SL gets its “recall” so it can undock autonomously. Crew 9 will launch with only two astronauts, and extra IVA suits, and then B&S will officially become part of that mission and return in February. If there were some life-threatening emergency right now, they probably would just return on SL. I think that, at great and extreme need, they probably could, simply because they really do have the resources just “lying by the side of the road.”

One might even say shot… well. Gwynne just then:

That does indeed seem to be the case: How does this potentially affect your progeny? Is it onboard Cygnus for deployment from the ISS?

Mazel Tov. Does it have a Goo? Any proper science requires Goo.

So, this is interesting… At Vandy, I believe.

The gear design does appear overly complicated, more akin to aircraft landing gear. In comparison, SpaceX’s gear system is very simple, nitrogen pushers shove the legs out to get them started and multi-G deceleration does most of the actual work. This appears to be using hydraulics for active control. And that first door sticking out into a fast-moving airstream like that…

2015 someone said. Perigee is likely 138km, extremely not norminal.

Bringing down a couple of modules on Starship sounds entirely realistic to me. Perhaps not easy, or cheap, but “we choose to do the things because they are hard” & all that. Could be a good excuse to demonstrate robotic construction tech, use that instead of EVAs to disconnect the various fittings. Doesn’t need to be pretty or maintain function, after all, and if something gets damaged it’s all going in the drink anyway. Someone did a plot of IFT-4’s reentry loading and it only peaked around 1.5G, ISS modules should have no trouble withstanding that. At the very least an off-the-shelf crew Starship could strip most of the interior, maybe the Coupola, for recovery. Even that would be a, well, coup… Mockups in a museum just aren’t the same as even a piece of the genuine article. Cue Indiana Jones.

Got a new toy. Puppy approves. …sort of.

“Solved” wrt to Starship and its reuse is the context here. SpaceX will be getting plenty of data from a similar atmospheric regime (hypersonic/translunar speeds in the upper atmosphere), enough to extrapolate to Mars, so it’s not reinventing the wheel, either. We’ve already seen from some of their earliest BFR renders that they already have some idea, carbon-Starship is shown flying a Mars entry inverted at times, using aerodynamic lift to actually hold itself down in the atmosphere. So, it’s an extension and further optimization of work they’re already doing. Dunning-Kruger…

I would say no, not at all. Once Earth EDL is solved, which they are very near to now, and which is necessary for both Earth and lunar operations, extending that to Mars EDL will be a relatively simple problem. Long before they ever start bending metal for such a mission, they will already have LOADS of data on how Starship handles during a similar entry regime. And now that no mishap report is (likely to be) required for IFT-4, I think we’re going to see the pace of development rapid ramp up, then again after the first successful catch, then again after the first reuse. Just like HLS, a Mars sample return is a natural and “easy” extension of stuff they’re doing anyway.

Fwiw I’ve had Starlink for a couple years now, still waiting on that reliable 3G cell tower, let alone 5G… Also outta likes so… Only 1.5G? That is very gentle for a reentry! (Looking at you, Hubble.)

Because it’s really and truly flying. Also keep in mind this descent would otherwise be much steeper, it’s only 3/4 of an orbit with perigee below the surface somewhere around Hawaii. On a “normal” trajectory that pe would still be above the surface, so this crazy reentry may be even more punishing than “usual.” Of all the posts to run out of likes on…