I’m not sure a three-storey fire is nominal, but still, hooray!
Banzai
4394
Perhaps firefly aerospace will pick up the slack soon.
https://firefly.com/
CraigM
4395
A decent breakdown of the roulette wheel that is the Chinese booster landing site
Takeaway: China is in the 1970’s with orbital planning.
NASA captures the first audio of a human machine in operation on another world - the distinct helicopter whine of Ingenuity in flight!
Neat
Anderson Cooper did a good piece on 60 Minutes on Ingenuity
So, are the American and Chinese Mars landers going to like duke it out for supremacy and who gets to claim the red planet?
The answer is simple. Airpower rules.
Cosmic Mars Chopper for the win!
For you, current software engineer this is pretty interesting. Most of it went over my head.
But I did understand this.
Q: How many collective hours do you guys have playing Kerbal Space Program?
A: INT_MAX
Some really neat stuff in there.
A: We try to roll out new builds to our entire fleet of assets (satellites, ground stations, user terminals, and WiFi routers) once per week. Every device is periodically checking in with our servers to see if it’s supposed to fetch a new build, and if one is available it will download and apply the update during the ideal time to minimize impact to users. This means we can really easily test builds on a small pool and move to exponential deployments by changing a few configurations in a database. We’ve designed our system so that each asset (which can contain dozens of separate computers) updates atomically by first fetching a new package to a central node, and having all of the other computers fetch updates from that central node. Every device also retains a backup copy of the last good software so if anything goes wrong (like a radiation induced power fault) during the update it automatically recovers by booting into that backup. Nearly all of our deployment and testing tools are built in house, mostly because our architecture is so unique and the various constraints we have to work with would require significant customization of off the shelf tools
That is pretty clever. A radiation induced failure, I wonder if they watched Season 2 of for All Mankind.
I didn’t really think of SpaceX as a software company, but clearly, I’m wrong
Also nice to see that 3 out of the 5 engineers in the AMA were women. I’m always a bit cynical when tech companies showcase women engineers, but if they act as role models more power to them.
More of a ‘what happened in space’, and it was already mentioned in the podcast-thread, but in case people here don’t know about that thread: I am currently listening to the BBC-podcast ‘13 minutes to the moon’, and it is absolutely awesome. So much so that I find I extend my walks just to be able to listen to it longer. Which you all probably already know because you have listened to it years ago, but maybe there are more slow people like me… :-)
Wasn’t this first discovered by that great explorer, Dr. F. Zappa?
https://youtu.be/u4hzVpYAP-U
Christian’s favorite Space Barrons are going at again.
James Webb telescope set to launch Oct.31, but it looks like it might be delayed again. But this time it’s due to problems with the Ariane 5 rocket.
Details on this 11 minute YouTube video - couldn’t find a printed news story on it, but everything you need to know is below.
(Honestly, the telescope is so complicated I’m not holding out much hope it will work.)
