update: TechCrunch's SpinLaunch spins up a $35M round to continue building its space catapult is worth a read and contains this cool rendering.Click for full sizeArs Technica's Edition 1.34 of the | Continue reading
The Engineers at NASA's JPL made Curiosity's tires have a morse code imprint on them so that it would spell out JPL in the Martian soil.However, it has led to many cracks and deformations in the... | Continue reading
The BBC's Virgin Galactic: Sir Richard Branson rockets to the edge of space includes the image below.Much of the Unity spacecraft appears (almost) transparent in this image; you can see the blue sky | Continue reading
Earlier, there was news about a proposed concept for Starship to include "transpirational cooling" in its reentry heat shield design.These days there is less news about this and tests so... | Continue reading
I was listening to Sphere Packing Solved in Higher Dimensions; A Ukrainian mathematician has solved the centuries-old sphere-packing problem in dimensions eight and 24. and reading the transcript t... | Continue reading
If a rocket flies into space there is a possibility that it will encounter a piece of space garbage; even a small screw can be fatal.What are the chances that such a collision really takes place? ... | Continue reading
The altitude of a satellite is the distance between the Earth's surface and the satellite, but the Earth itself is not spherical. At the equator the Earth's radius is 21 km more than at the poles, ... | Continue reading
The International Space Station is in a different gravitational field than us on the Earth's surface. Almost all computers / protocols depend on the Unix epoch being consistent everywhere. The Unix... | Continue reading
From my understanding, space is not entirely empty. Infact, between the voids of space are molecules or maybe individual atoms of hydrogen just floating around. I understand that gathering massive | Continue reading
What precautions are planned to prevent samples returned from Mars crashing and releasing organisms on Earth? and this answer to Why would bringing samples from Mars back to Earth be a “civilization- | Continue reading
I don't know if this would be public, but what CPU / Microcontrollers are used and what software do they run on the Falcon 9? Do they use an OS or is it just bare metal programming?I found some m... | Continue reading
I don't know if this would be public, but what CPU / Microcontrollers are used and what software do they run on the Falcon 9? Do they use an OS or is it just bare metal programming?I found some m... | Continue reading
I don't know if this would be public, but what CPU / Microcontrollers are used and what software do they run on the Falcon 9? Do they use an OS or is it just bare metal programming?I found some m... | Continue reading
In a Falcon 9 launch, the second stage looks like it achieves orbit along with the payload. But is that impression accurate? Does SpaceX need to do anything to deorbit the stage?I can see a few | Continue reading
Incidentally I don't mean "on the lunar surface, asleep laying on the surface of the moon" :)So (A) who (if anyone) was the first human to actually be asleep (that is to say, presumably inside the | Continue reading
I have seen videos of simulated lower gravity (possibly for training astronauts). I am curious what methods/techniques can be used to simulate lower gravity like environments without leaving the pl... | Continue reading
The following answers mention the use of parity bits in the Apollo guidance computer:this answer to Bits per core for the different versions of the Apollo guidance computer core rope memory?this | Continue reading
In the Smarter Every Day video How did NASA Steer the Saturn V?- Smarter Every Day 223 Destin is talking with Luke Talley about the memory modules used in the Saturn V LVDC computer. This computer | Continue reading
We have it on good authority that Ada is widely used for "safety critical software" on at least the US side of the International Space Station.Of all the possible languages to choose from, what a... | Continue reading
During the launch of Apollo 12 a major malfunction was caused by 2 lightning strikes. See http://www.realclearscience.com/blog/2013/02/apollo-12-struck-by-lightning.html for more info.The solutio... | Continue reading
New Horizons will fly past the Kuiper Belt object 2014 MU69 in January 2019. This will use 56 m/s of the remaining ∆V budget of 130 m/s (1). The encounter will occur near the inner edge of the belt... | Continue reading
People will tell that there is no air, and this is why we cannot. But if I read on the internet, there is air in space, much less, but still something.for example,100 km - 0.0000006 times as muc... | Continue reading