5176
5177

To finally have all the engineering go right, to have a flyby pebble ruin things would be beyond awful.

5178

Is this a normal occurrence, or a one in a billion bad luck?

5179

It’s in the article:

But don’t panic: Neither the observatory’s schedule nor its scientific legacy is expected to suffer.

“With Webb’s mirrors exposed to space, we expected that occasional micrometeoroid impacts would gracefully degrade telescope performance over time,” Lee Feinberg, Webb optical telescope element manager at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, said in the statement. “Since launch, we have had four smaller measurable micrometeoroid strikes that were consistent with expectations, and this one more recently that is larger than our degradation predictions assumed.”

5180

Yeah. It was expected, but, unexpected. Of course there is massive redundancy.

5181

Part of the reason they chose an unstable Lagrange point is because it’s unstable. A stable one might capture micrometeroroids for a very, very long time. But, yeah, interplanetary space is still full of shit.

Still unnerving to hear they’ve had three impacts in six months. This is supposed to be a decades long mission (knock on wood).

5182

Feels like the beginning of the movie… At first there was a small increase in debris around the Lagrange points…

5183

https://youtu.be/5jdSnREyPRM

5184

Awesome, but are they that close together or are they doing some modification of the field of view?

5185

They are aligned this month, but I think that stream is doing some trickery.

5186

Boy it would be nice if it stopped raining so I could see them.

5187

The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

Prolonged national grid failure is new territory for humankind. Documents from an assortment of government agencies and private organizations paint a dismal picture of what that would look like in the United States. Homes and offices will lose heating and cooling; water pressure in showers and faucets will drop. Subway trains will stop mid-voyage; city traffic will creep along unassisted by stoplights. Oil production will grind to a halt, and so will shipping and transportation. The blessing of modern logistics, which allows grocery stores to stock only a few days’ worth of goods, will become a curse. Pantries will thin out within a few days. The biggest killer, though, will be water. Fifteen percent of treatment facilities in the country serve 75 percent of the population—and they rely on energy-intensive pumping systems. These pumps not only distribute clean water but also remove the disease- and chemical-tainted sludge constantly oozing into sewage facilities. Without power, these waste systems could overflow, contaminating remaining surface water.

As the outage goes on, health care facilities will grow overwhelmed. Sterile supplies will run low, and caseloads will soar. When backup batteries and generators fail or run out of power, perishable medications like insulin will spoil. Heavy medical hardware—dialysis machines, imaging devices, ventilators—will cease to function, and hospital wards will resemble field clinics. With death tolls mounting and morgues losing refrigeration, municipalities will face grave decisions about how to safely handle bodies.

This is roughly the point in the worst-case scenario when the meltdowns at nuclear power plants begin. These facilities require many megawatts of electricity to cool their reactor cores and spent fuel rods. Today, most American plants run their backup systems on diesel. Koroush Shirvan, a nuclear safety expert at MIT, warns that many reactors could run into trouble if outages last longer than a few weeks.

5188

You’re missing the kicker - not only are we badly unprepared for an inevitable solar event, but we won’t be able to fix widespread damage for years.

A 2020 investigation by the US Department of Commerce found that the nation imported more than 80 percent of its large transformers and their components. Under normal supply and demand conditions, lead times for these structures can reach two years.

I’ve seen reports similar to above going back decades - but as backwards looking society we’ll never do anything to mitigate this, even as experts have literally warned us about the danger (and how to fix it) for generations.

5189

Yeah, as my totally ley person’s memory serves me, the main struggle won’t be getting power generation going but rather delivering it along the fragile electric infrastructure to its destinations.

It should be noted my only electrical expertise was being within earshot of what triggered the 2003 blackout, lol

5190

This seems like a very good argument for nationalizing the electrical grid. The article discussed several ways that industry players are dooming us to this calamity (which is far more likely than something like a major asteroid strike) because they are protecting proprietary information.

5191

NASA - SpaceX Launch Pad Safety Review:

I don’t see how a Starship pad explosion wouldn’t damage the nearby pad, I know the Starship uses different fuel, but I imagine such an explosion would be on the order of the Soviet N1.

5192

We do have quite a few examples of Starship launchpad explosions.

5193

None without full fuel however.

5194

Not only have the Starships that exploded been almost empty of fuel, none of them have been the Super Heavy booster. When fully loaded the Super Heavy will have many kilotons of liquid methane and liquid oxygen.

5195

New (well, a week old) BBC doc on Perseverance: