idlewords

Thank you! I realize people have subscription fatigue, and that on this site in particular there's a culture of expecting to read the full text of everything for free. So I try to make the previews substantive enough for people to participate in discussion whether or not they sign up.

I do feel like the free sample guy at Costco, confident that once people try the cube of summer sausage on a toothpick, they'll want to buy the whole thing. But I sure appreciate someone else saying it!

I am trying to be friendly with the paywall.

A lot of the work was done to a design point of 0.25 seconds, and Dyson's book says the issue there wasn't the blast clearing, but just being able to move the machinery fast enough. I kind of share your puzzlement; I can see the blast clearing this quickly in space (the debris moves at tens of thousands of km/sec) but not in the atmosphere.

Kicks in just after it starts to get interesting.

What a funny coincidence!

Hi everyone,

The domain should be back up within the next few hours.

I had the domain set on auto-renew but unfortunately something went wrong, and I didn't get an email from the registrar about it (or it got misrouted to spam).

I've renewed the registration but it seems to be taking a while to propagate back to the .IN servers. An interim measure is setting an /etc/hosts record for pinboard.in to 64.62.134.190.

My sincere apologies for the outage. The TLS cert for Pinboard renews in October, and in my mind I thought the domain renewed at that time as well, or I would have paid closer attention. Irked at my own carelessness here.

It's fine to dump sewage overboard if you're far enough from shore. Cruise ships treat it to some extent, but ultimately it all becomes fish food.

There's a nice paper on this, ICES-2018-123 "Dimethylsilanediol (DMSD) Source Assessment and Mitigation on ISS: Estimated Contributions from Personal Hygiene Products Containing Volatile Methyl Siloxanes (VMS)". The upshot is more than half of the siloxane burden on ISS comes from God knows where (packaging, plastics, machinery, you name it).

https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/items/ff1a240e-1fb1-4b04-acb2-42e9c45...

The atmosphere has a perfectly reasonable 110 hour day/night cycle.

I thought so too, but the phosphine signal turns out to be small but real. What everyone involved in the back and forth debate over it agrees on is the need to send better sensors.

Landis has a ton of good papers around Venus for those who want to nerd out deeper.

Give it a few hours!

Thanks so much! I'm delighted you enjoyed the piece.

It's not an absurd question. The threshold value is the one that breaks surface tension and effectively pulls waste away from the body. It will be more than a few hundredths g but less than 1g.

Unfortunately we have basically no data on the effects of partial gravity, in this context or any other. We can try flying partial-gravity parabolas in aircraft and simulate a Martian toilet the same way they tested the design for Skylab; I don't think this experiment has been done.

You can try it with small capsules and tethers, but it's still a pain.

The hose is the same but there are different funnel attachments (the part looks kind of like the cup from a jock strap, and is longer and narrower for women)

It's all flat files on the server

Thank you! Like NASA, I hope to up my operational tempo.

They do not, except for some of the avionics.

I never worked at NASA. Maybe you're confusing me with Casey Handmer, who has also written on this topic?

I'm sorry it bugs you!

I think you mean Artemis IV (the moon landing)? Artemis III is now a near Earth orbit mission to dock with whatever mockup lander SpaceX or Blue Origin can throw up in time.

The next two Soyuz launches are this Wednesday and Saturday.

You would be the first person to ever accuse the Orion program of cutting costs.

If you play a single round of Russian roulette with a revolver, it is likely you will not die, but it is also not safe to do that. The same idea applies here.

The foam shedding/impact problem was heavily analyzed throughout the Shuttle program, and recognized as a significant risk. Read the CAIB report for a good history.

That report also describes the groupthink dynamic at NASA that made skeptical engineers "come around" for the good of the program in the past. Calling Camarda an outlier is just a different way of stating this problem.

The Apollo command module used Avcoat, the same material as Orion. But there are two key differences:

1. The application method is different. Apollo applied it to a metal honeycomb structure with very small cells, while Orion uses blocks of the material. (NASA tried the honeycomb approach for Orion, but it was too labor-intensive).

2. Orion is much bigger and heavier than the Apollo command module. The informal consensus is that Apollo may have been at the upper size limit for using Avcoat.

They do iterative flight testing. Starship is I believe on its twelfth flight test; the first one was in 2023.

It couldn't, for a funny reason. Everything on a Shuttle flight could be automated except lowering the landing gear just before touchdown, which had to be done by hand from inside the cockpit.

There are rumors (that I've never been able to run down) that the astronaut corps insisted on this so the Shuttle could not be flown unmanned.

The Orion heat shield is sixteen feet across. NASA's test facilities can only test small material samples in these facilities, not capture how the entire heat shield will behave.

Getting on the train that's physically in front of you, no matter how crowded, is the rational decision basically everywhere outside Japan, where you can have metaphysical certitude that the next train will show up as scheduled.

Grug use few words, make it easy read grug.