George Dvorsky's saved articles

To put this into perspective, 394,736 mph may seem screaming fast, but say we want to visit the closest solar system to us, Proxima Centauri? It is approximately 4.25 ly away. The speed of light is 671, 000,000 mph. Read more

I love articles like this. Gizmodo is a tech site, and this wooden structure was likely among the earliest forms of construction technology ever created on Earth.  While it’s true that “modern humans” didn’t appear until later, if we learned anything from the study of Neanderthals, it’s that other species of hominids… Read more

He should try to spend more than 15 seconds having sex. Read more

Short answer: “No comment” Read more

Tech bros don’t do paper work.
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How do you procede with launching an expensive/critical thing like this without having pre-approval for getting it back? Read more

“in, from, and to space” Read more

Rocketlab is the most likely successor there. Blue Origin can keep going as long as Bezos funds them, but it’s been a long hard road for them to deliver on hardware - Bezos has been giving them serious funding for eight years (IE billion dollars a year or such), and what they’ve got to show for it is a rocket engine… Read more

“Though the Moon boasts resources that can enable extended habitation, and asteroids teem with metals that are highly valued here on Earth, a space mining industry cannot thrive without a market for these commodities.”

This also illustrates why feasible Moon/asteroid mining is going to require a wholesale change in… Read more

Video.

Oof, solid motor failures are a lot more energetic than liquid rocket failures. They’re basically just bombs that explode slowly in one direction. When they go wrong, they don’t tend to go wrong neatly and quietly.
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It’s frustrating that more people don’t read the papers which are the basis for pop-sci articles before “akshuly-ing” the author. I understand the tendency, because there is a LOT of cruft, but this is not an example. I mean look, the comment received over 30 likes, presumably by other people who didn’t bother to… Read more

Someone didn’t pick up after their dog?

I once had a dream about an Ariane V rocket. I told my husband about the dream, and now he absolutely will not let me live it down. :-) So now I will share it with you, because it’s funny. Read more

This Telescope does it for me. Read more

It’s oddly aggressive. The sort of change engineers would usually make after they’ve worked out most of the known failure modes. Read more

Hot-staging is an interesting late change to make. It addresses some potential problems, while also introducing new potential failure modes, so I don’t see it really as a risk-reduction move. especially this late in the game.  It feels more like addressing a perceived performance concern.
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The fact that they’re rolling out some substantial changes to Starship before the next launch makes me think we’ll probably get a schedule slip on it into early 2024 (I figured they might be able to get another launch before the end of 2023 if everything went well at the pad, but that wasn’t factoring in changes to… Read more

I try to make it immediately clear that this is a perfectly ordinary and harmless event, because I am similarly annoyed by headlines that intentionally leave that out. Read more