I keep changing my mind, but it feels like it was a deliberate choice to aim the shield at the camera. It’s so perfectly centered!

booooo

It’s wild how quickly they adapted the OLM for Ship testing.

I found this insightful. Eager Space has lost a lot of optimism about the program, and argues that SpaceX is now at the dreaded threshold of hubris. The Apollo program faced a similar crisis after the Apollo 1 disaster.

I find myself agreeing, especially with the spreading “block 3 will fix everything” mentality online. It doesn’t feel that simple.

Thanks! Time flies.

The static fire (at Massey’s) hadn’t actually started. Unclear how the ground systems are doing. At least it’s a pretty night explosion?

Just sent you a message!

Glad it wasn’t just me. That seemed like a ton of venting.

This article is worth the read. Starliner was in an extremely precarious situation that we didn’t previously know about.

It’s so disappointing. Now the next person to write valid, honest critiques will have to overcome this author’s selfishness to get attention.

Berger suggests that “another launch before this summer seems unlikely”.

I think that’s speculation rather than reporting, but it’s nice to have a non-CEO reference point. Hopefully employees get a breather during this redesign, somehow.

I’m struggling to think of a reason that Starship shouldn’t be grounded for 6-12 months after this (I know they won’t be, but I’ll be mad about it). This is a consecutive uncontrolled failure during the “easy” part of the flight over a highly populated region. It seems like pure luck that the RUD didn’t happen early enough to impact land. They’re still doing a great job, but today was rough.

Maybe it’s time to rethink the Texas plans?

I think you’re right that Canadians and Mexicans know this and still want to be friends, but it doesn’t matter. The United States has officially and democratically become hostile to them, and they’re going to have to change the way they think about the relationship. An America that can’t be trusted reliably simply can’t be trusted.

Edit: But this doesn’t mean further conflict is inevitable! The sane citizens of each country will just need to work around the problem.

I don’t think they feel betrayed by Trump, but rather the United States. One of their closest friends just declared economic war on them for no reason. The shattering of trust isn’t less painful because they had advanced notice.

That onboard footage was GORGEOUS. So cool.

But ouch, I hope no one was hurt by debris. Initial reports look like the broken ship flew pretty close to some caribbean islands. This feels like a pretty big setback and I’m expecting an extended investigation. I wonder whether this was a fluke or something related to V2 upgrades.

BookWyrm is an open and federated alternative to goodreads. I use my instance’s website and it’s a decent experience. There’s an Android app too but I haven’t tried it.

I’ve been curious about Scorn for a while, if it’s available. Regardless, thanks for doing this!

NieR: Automata

For some reason this New Scientist cartoon lives in my head. Maybe because it challenges the way I think about the future? Or maybe it’s just cute.

Original source, by Tom Gauld

Thanks so much for doing this! I almost forgot to enter.

If it’s only the on-screen flap that had issues, hopefully that points to a minor fix instead of a major one. I wonder what sort of data they have on this. How many thermal tiles were lost on each flap? Where did the issues start? Are the other flaps alright? Hard things to track.

I’m sure it’s reasonable, but I’m deeply unsettled by the thought that someone is going to press a “depressurize our entire spacecraft” button.

Excited for more details though!