What's happening in space (that's interesting)

It came from outer space?

Water, water, everywhere. Or so some scientists think.

Appropriate for the times.

https://www.bizjournals.com/orlando/news/2018/01/15/see-what-ula-is-shooting-to-space-in-january-from.html

Thar she blows! SpaceX finally gets a static test fire of the FH off. Looks to be successful.

So purdy! From another vantage point:

AWESOME!

Hrms.

People can complain all they want about stuff like this but we’re never gonna leave LEO again unless it’s treated like the singular focused Apollo in the 60s.

Also there’s no mention that by that time the ISS will be past is designed life. So the potential danger of aging components becomes a real issue.

In case anyone doesn’t know, this isn’t really a change of plans. The ISS was intended to run until 2020, and the Obama administration along with our international partners (and the US congress to a degree IIRC) agreed to extend it through 2024. We were actually getting a lot of pressure from the Russians to discontinue it sooner, though that may have been a bargaining tactic to get more money.

The NASA budget simply cannot support manned lunar or Martian exploration programs while still paying for ISS. They would need several billion $ more per year to do both at once.

The other part of the US plan on the table for months now has been to find a way to divest the ISS in the late 2020s. The idea is that if space commerce takes off, some kind of companies might want to manage it or lease/buy it. It’s not clear how that would work finanically, and they’d probably have to figure out how to disconnect non-US assets or buy them from the owning countries to do so. I’m not convinced this will happen.

I’m more hopeful that new commercial space stations will be built in the next decade and will be able to rent space to NASA, universities, and companies needing to perform microgravity research.

“No matter where you are in the world, or what is happening in your life, everyone will be able to see the Humanity Star in the night sky,” said Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck in a statement.

Jonathan McDowell, a satellite-tracker and astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, commented: “The irony is that it’s poorly placed for observation right now - low on the horizon for evening passes in New Zealand and not visible from the USA until March - if it stays up that long.”

An amateur radio hound discovered an old satellite that had died had come back to life. Back in 2005 when it died it was theorized that due to the nature of the fault a solar eclipse in 2007 could reset it back to life. That never happened apparently, but something eventually did.

Noice!

Tonight is the first Super Blue Blood moon in 152 years.

Jam your zip code on this site for the details in your location.

https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/

Space is big, but you’ve got to go small sometimes.

Wow. So how do they implement this in practice? Is it to design new mirrors knowing the exact distortions and then apply the algorithm to everything it views? Or is is to make new mirrors with perfect dimensions?

Allow me a partial answer

So at least one factor is hyper precise mirrors. I mean look at the time they take to make a single mirror, it’s months!