Programmer and sysadmin (DevOps?), wannabe polymath in tech, science and the mind. Neurodivergent, disabled, burned out, and close to throwing in the towel, but still liking ponies 🦄 and sometimes willing to discuss stuff.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 26th, 2023

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  • Everything we’ve put into that level of orbit is falling, it is just falling so slowly […] go from a spiral to a more dramatic arc […] Once within the atmosphere

    This is not correct.

    • Anything in orbit, is constantly free-falling at barely less than 9.8m/s².
    • “Orbiting”, is having enough lateral momentum to keep missing the Earth.
    • In the absence of an atmosphere, or any other external influence, an object would keep orbiting forever.
    • However… Earth’s atmosphere doesn’t just end, it gets thinner and thinner instead… up to the Moon and beyond (thanks to the solar wind blowing it out)
    • The reason for an object in LEO to “fall”, as in “decrease its orbital height”, is precisely because it’s been in Earth’s atmosphere all the time!

    The reason for a “more dramatic arc”, is that as an objects looses orbital height, it keeps hitting ever denser atmosphere, until it ends up losing enough momentum to not be able to complete an orbit, which precipitates things (pun intended).



  • Simple explanation: 21st century tech.

    A palm sized quadcopter, has more sensors and processing power, than many 20th century rockets.

    SpaceX can afford to build dozens of (relatively) cheap prototypes, fill them with all kinds of sensors, hook them up to StarLink, and gather massive amounts of real-world data instead of some make-believe simulations, even when the rocket turns into thin dust. No video or flight recorders required.

    For this latest flight 4, keep in mind that the damage to the flap would have thrown any simulation-based and verified flight computer program into the ground… but whatever they used, managed to adapt, compensate, and essentially land a rocket that was falling apart… all the while streaming live video and telemetry.

    In software, a problem once solved is gone forever

    That is not correct, and why having tests to detect regressions is important.

    Not sure how much “technical debt” SpaceX might be incurring, but my guess is that each of these flights is providing massive amounts of data to plug into simulations of future designs, which might be more valuable than having a single “meticulous design” that would fail spectacularly if something like a rubber seal were to get too cold the night before.


  • Occam’s Razor is not a proof, it’s a way to prioritize resources onto more likely hypotheses.

    last 100 years of radio until we die as a race.

    Based on our own experience, over the last 100 years, radio signals have gone from very scarce, to a cacophony of millions of high bandwidth compressed and encrypted emissions that look like random noise from anywhere outside our solar system.

    If we consider an intelligence with an evolution similar to our own, “in the clear” transmissions that might’ve reached Earth 200 years ago, would’ve gone completely unnoticed, while now we could be getting the sum of their thousands of Tbps of encrypted memes, and be none the wiser.










  • recycle materials in space to build space parts/ships/stations

    If you mean in orbit, that’s orders of magnitude harder than reaching the Moon, and possibly harder than colonizing Mars.

    We don’t have some scifi “gravity plating”, with some force fields to keep air in, to build a space dock, or a factory on a space station. Microgravity is fun for the first half hour, after that moving stuff around is a whole challenge on itself, something like screwing in a screw, or a lightbulb, is a separate challenge. Most of the knowledge about processes and logistics we use down the gravity well, with an atmosphere made primarily of nitrogen, goes out the window in microgravity.

    The nearest “practical” place to recycle any materials, would be the Moon.