So they had no issue relying on Russia to service the ISS ever since they shutdown the space shuttle, but now they’re afraid of China… doing space science faster?
Ignoring the fact that this is not even a real concern, maybe don’t spend morbillions on free munitions for Israel or Lockheed’s next stupid idea.
They defunded NASA so hard that they started hallucinating about going back to the moon with 15% of the Apollo budget.
At the time, Russia wasn’t as……problematic. We had been working with Russia as an International Partner since the very early days of ISS and even during Shuttle/Mir.
Obviously they did become problematic, but we didn’t have other options until SpaceX. Now that’s….obviously got its own issues, but Russia is vastly different than China when it comes to space. Russia needs the money, China already has it.
The fact that NASA had to rely on Roscosmos in the first place is shameful. It highlights long standing issues facing the space program. I think some of these problems trace back to the cost of the ISS. It’s been hard to convey the importance and investment into the future the station provides.
For China their station provides proof of concept that they can achieve similar results one day both to themselves and the world watching.
The amount of money spent on Apollo was insane. A reduced budget should have been sufficient. It’s just been weighted down by shit cost-plus contracts and the abomination that is SLS.
The fear of China here is that they are basically single handedly their closest competitor. They’re the only other nation thats managed a Mars Rover landing, building space station, and have their own plans for Moon and Mars with taikonauts( astronaut equivalent) on the ground in the future.
There’s a cool old documentary about the place called Plagues and Pleasures on the Salton Sea, narrated by John Waters. It goes into the history of the place and shows a little of how dilapidated and decayed it now is (well, now was, when it came out in 2006).
It tries to livin up the modern day stuff by showing some of the “colorful” characters who lived there. I have to imagine there was a lot not being said, and I’m sure 20 years of further decay have not made it the friendliest and funnest place to be.
Edit to add: Apparently some enterprising soul has uploaded it to YouTube: youtu.be/8TjGAWxL23c
In the last year or so I heard about how the water level is dropping due to drought which is concentrating all the pollutants in the lake. It’s also becoming l so saline that the few species living in the lake are dying and washing up on shore. Then the high winds are blowing around extra salty sand combined with dead carcass particles so it’s actually a breathing hazard to be around. This is also combined with the runoff of pesticides from the farms to the north that also polite the water. So it sounds like a great place to hang out!
It’s been like that for decades. I was there about twenty years ago, the stench was gag inducing, and there’s no getting used to it. The banks in every spot I visited were made up of rotting marine life 12 - 18 inches deep.
Okay but at least they have their dishes out there for 20+ years. While musk has his starlink for 4 years before self destructing in the atmosphere. Why not fine him for wasting resources and have his dishes last 15-20years
End-of-life satellites must either be deorbited or moved to a graveyard orbit. The issue isn’t about wasted resources - it’s having inert, untrackable debris in an orbit that could be used by others, rendering it useless and dangerous. It’s not an issue for Starlink because they encounter a much greater atmospheric drag compared to most telecommunication satellites, so that issue is fixed with time.
Adding onto what the other commenter said, LEO satellites (the orbit Starlink uses) just don’t have the same operational lifespan as geostationary satellite (the orbit of this Dish Network satellite). They experience a ton more drag because they sit under 1k km, while geostationary are up at 36k km and as such LEO satellites require way more fuel to stay in orbit.
This is not to say 4 years is not on the lower end of LEO satellites which are usually expected to last 7 years, but geostationary satellites are over double the expected life span at 15-20 years. Finally, even though Starlink is more wasteful, their satellites will fall out of orbit pretty damn fast (within a couple years) compared to geostationary satellites (30+ years).
A new diffraction-gated real-time ultra-speed mapping technology threatens to undercut cameras costing $100,000 with off-the-shelf parts.
The threatens to undercut part. Rather than talking about how it is going to make things more affordable, it talks about how it is going to ruin the exiting markets pricing. At least that is how that reads to me. Note, I am not talking about the whole article - just that one abstract, which is what is shown here and leads a completely different tone to how the article is actually worded.
I am an engineer that has worked in the space industry my entire career, and here are my thoughts:
GOES and METEOR weather satellites transmit images publicly that are NOT real time, but are downlinked, processed, and uplinked for public broadcast. This is pretty simple and saves a lot of processing power on the spacecraft side. That's important because the biggest constraints on spacecraft processing are: power budget, radiation hardiness, and thermal.
I was able to find an image of the actual satellite in assembly. From this we can guess that there is probably not more than a square meter of solar on-board, so we can give it a round 1300W of power. I couldn't find any orbital parameters(If Gunter doesn't have it, who does?), but given it's main task is as an imager, we can assume LEO, and so this 1300W isn't going to be constant since the spacecraft will most likely be eclipsed part of the time.
Generous 1000W average solar flux, generous 25% panel efficiency, 250W/h.
So lets look at rad hard processors. They have to be either shielded or run multiple and do voting, though even that isn't fully acceptable as some SEU (single event upset) can cause permanent damage and leave you down a voting member. The latest and greatest RAD5545 advertises 5.6 giga-operations per second (GOPS) at 20 watts, so if we assume (artlessly, and likely incorrectly) a linear power usage, the 80 TOPS of the WJ-1A should need some 280kW. So we know they aren't using a typical rad-hard CPU topology for their AI models. I see that Corel/Google advertise 2 TOPS per watt on their edge TPUs (Tensor Processing Unit).
So assume a large ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) at the same efficiency of 2TOPS/W, with 4x multiples for voting and we get a far more reasonable 160W. Still a LOT of power on orbit for such a small spacecraft, but actually possible.
So for thermal limits, do they run the TPU only on the dark side in place of their on-board heater? The have some white panels that might be radiators, but it's hard to say.
Hard to say from these fluff articles. I really want to hear:
What's the efficiency on the TPU?
How did they make it rad-hard, and how long do they expect it to last?
What models do they run on the edge?
What is their downlink budget? Can they pull full imagery if they want it or are they limited to ML analysis only?
I expect to see more ML in space, but to be honest I did not expect it to be in such a small form factor.
It may often get overshadowed in an age where AI, superconductors and other tech dominate the news but I sincerely belief meta materials will be the biggest game changer anyone of us will know in their lifetime.
(Half chatgpt half me) Meta materials or nano composites (they have a few names) are materials engineered to have properties not found in naturally occurring materials.
They are designed on a microscopic scale to manipulate electromagnetic waves in specific ways. This can result in unique optical, acoustic, and thermal properties, like being able to bend light or sound waves in unconventional directions. Common applications include advanced optics, wireless communication enhancements, and even invisibility cloaks and self cleaning surfaces in theoretical designs.
There is a really cool tinfoil hat (!!!) story on how we discovered they are possible, Lets say that since certain events in Boston and Roswell The US Air Force seems to have kickstarted and is often involved in this research. In the posted article the The US Air Force Office of Scientific Research was also stated to be funding this research. Take it with a cool grain of salt.
Why does the army need to buy a piece of a spaceship from a conspiracy theorist to do research, if according to the conspiracy theory, they have that spaceship in a hangar?
[tinfoil hat on] They don’t. They have pieces of things they didn’t understand, electromagnetic waves hit it one way and come back stronger. Eventually a scientist must have handled one and realize the potential.
[tinfoil hat off]
Regardless if this material is natural or artificial we cant just make it ourselves, our own technology and industry has yet to get to the level of the example material. Hence the funding.
There is a popular(*?) podcast or interview where a scientist shows some of it. Apparently if you have the right credentials you can borrow what is essentially a plastic bag labeled “Boston” with some black rock shards in it. Of course the nature of origin remains pure speculation but i really wish i knew the link to send you.
*I rarely watch podcasts, but it looked credible and serious to me and i’ve seen their face before, not joe rogan
It converts it to co2 and its a structure like carbon capture stuff. Im not big on carbon capture but if you running this thing anyway it might make sense to run the output into some carbon capture scheme as it should reduce both the production and running energy since it can use some of what this is already doing as far as pulling in and exhausting the air. might be good for the exhaust to go down an old well or something to.
Not sure if there is much chance for effective carbon capture. The article states that this works for getting rid of very low concentrations of methane (so burning is not possible). That means that even with the methane 100% turned into carbon, we are talking about very small concentrations.
well there would be the native co2 in the air its taking in too. My point is if it was worth it enough to do on its own its already done most of the heavy lifting so I bet if a carbon capture technique was worth it, it would be riding the output of this.
The team named the supercomputer DeepSouth based on IBM’s TrueNorth system, which started the idea of building computers that act like large networks of neurons, and Deep Blue, the first computer to beat a world chess champion.
The name also gives a nod to where the supercomputer is located geographically: Australia, which is situated in the southern hemisphere.
I mean ok, but still, to call anything related to a brain DeepSouth 😶
The concept of the Deep South, a geographical region historically associated with bigotry, injustice, ignorance, poverty, etc., in an American context is simply non-existent in an Australian one. As such, the irony of that name doesn’t really apply outside of the United States.
I recently switched cell providers to save a pile of money, but the new one doesn’t have call control like the old did. 100% of my calls over the last two weeks were spam calls. I keep telling myself the savings are worth it, but my God it’s annoying.
Tell me that you don’t understand the difference between airframes and engines without telling me you don’t understand the difference between airframes and engines
Nah. We’re not being assholes. We’re irritated because you’re clearly done absolutely ZERO digging on the topic, and are just throwing out wildly inaccurate statements, and then expecting everyone to bring the info to you - not, I suspect, that you’ll actually read any of it.
No, but the difference is in the linked article. The commenter in question would have likely been able to understand that the real issue was with GE, not Boeing if they’d read more than the headline.
Yes, really. For civil aircraft, the prevalent nacelle/pod design these days makes it fairly easy to re-engine a plane, and to adapt to new engine technologies as time progressed. This is extremely obvious if you compare images of a 737-100 and a 737-MAX9. This is common practice for both civil and military aircraft.
On a side note: Seriously, are you genuinely so lazy that you can’t throw a couple queries into your search engine of choice and find, like, all the sources that indicate that this is common practice? Or, like, go to a Wikipedia page about a couple civil aircraft and find the section that’s titled “engines”, read a couple paragraphs and see the images, and understand that yes, planes can support multiple engine types from different manufacturers? Maybe I’m overreacting, but this sort of “I’m going to force everyone else to bring facts to me to disprove my wildly inaccurate and baseless assumptions” bullshit is pretty fucking obnoxious.
It was a different user. But the number of people who clearly haven’t read the article or done ANY background research - even briefly - is a bit annoying on topics like this. If you want to participate intelligently in the conversation, do so. If you’re just going to pull things out of your head on topics you have zero knowledge on and zero willingness to increase that knowledge by, you know, looking for sources and reading… lurk moar.
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