An Open Letter to a Terrible Podcast
[I’m intensely interested in the current generation of space entrepreneurs. They really do have the capacity to transform the future of our species. I’m obsessed enough to listen to several...
View ArticleVoyager 2 leaves* the heliosphere
NASA have announced that Voyager 2 left the heliosphere on 5th November 2018 (*albeit the exact scope of the heliosphere is vague). A dramatic drop in solar particles leaves Voyager 2, the first of the...
View ArticleDiscussion point: what to do about drones being used to disrupt air travel?
According to the BBC, ‘persons of interest’ have been identified as responsible for flying the drone or drones that shut down Gatwick airport. As it gradually became clear that this was going on too...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
Just as Gutenberg’s printing press awakened the masses to the wisdom of the ancients, and the desktop computer put enormous computational power into the hands of ordinary people, low cost,...
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On this day in 1919…
John Alcock and Arthur Brown flew non-stop across the Atlantic in a modified Vickers Vimy, taking off in Newfoundland, Canada and making an incommodious but non-fatal landing in Connemara, Ireland.
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50 years ago…
…America faked the first moon landing. And I say: well done them. That can’t have been easy. What other country has faked a moon landing, eh? Take that Russia! And what about the Chinese? They can fake...
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
There’s sufficient evidence that Stanley Kubrick directed the fake moon landing film, but being a perfectionist he did it on location. – Runcie Balspune
View ArticleSamizdata quote of the day
Perhaps the first blow to the technocratic mentality came with personal computers, pioneered not by bureaucratic think tanks, but by college kids and hobbyists. Then in 2000, the private firm Celera...
View ArticleSpace regulations
United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Lockheed Martin and Boeing that can put payloads into orbit on expendable rockets. They launched 7 payloads for commercial customers in the last...
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You’ll believe a water tower can fly
Some time in the next week or two, pending only FAA aproval, SpaceX is planning to fly Starhopper, a test device for their next generation Starship launch system. Starhopper looks like a water tower...
View ArticleThe Starhopper has landed
Last night, SpaceX completed a 150m hop test of the Starhopper test article for the upcoming Starship spacecraft. (Recall that Starhopper is basically a water tower with a rocket engine at the bottom.)...
View ArticleGalileo in darkness
Kieren McCarthy has written an article for the Register that brings together two themes of interest to many Samizdata readers: “One man’s mistake, missing backups and complete reboot: The tale of...
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