Clearly in retrospect they made the right call to go ahead though. The heat shield held up fine.
Arguably NASA played it extremely safe this time round, high first orbit, no direct TLI, no lunar orbit that you can't come back from if the engines don't fire back up. I think they're very aware of the poor quality of modern manufacturing they're working with, which is why it's all the more impressive that everything went as planned, Outlook aside.
It's still extremely dumb they're throwing away RS-25 engines for this, but no competence survives contact with political management.
Just because the heat shield held up fine does not mean it was the right call. Nobody who knew anything was saying there was a 100% chance of catastrophic heat-shield failure, they weren't even saying there was a 50% chance. They were saying that there was a small chance of failure which was nonetheless unacceptably large.
Quote from the blogpost about it being unsafe: "It’s likely—hopefully very likely—that Artemis II will land safely. But do we really have to wait for astronauts to die to re-learn the same lessons a third time?"
NASA themselves set a safety target of a 1 in 30 chance of crew mortality for the mission. That's an insanely high risk tolerance for something that'd be so public, and would have been so incredibly demoralizing and tragic if the world had to watch this crew die on re-entry.
With everything dark going on in the world right now, a lot of people saw this whole thing as a small glimmer of light and something to just be happy and excited about. Having them burn up and die after inspiring that hope would have been crushing.
Space travel is not safe and never will be, you can always get randomly sideswiped by a piece of debris in LEO and that's that, even if everything goes perfectly. If the astronauts understand the risks involved then I would say it's their call. Living on Earth isn't safe for that matter, driving has a 1 in 100 chance of death throughout your lifetime, so that margin isn't significantly more given that you get to go to the frickin Moon.
I don't really buy the "if they die, it strands human spaceflight for years out of PR reasons" argument since what that argues for and against has the same result: nobody goes space for a while. In the end there will always be someone willing to roll the dice. ESA is already playing it 100% safe, that niche is covered.
There's a difference between quantifiable but unmanageable situational risk and predictable, manageable technical risk.
The heatshield issue is the latter.
$100 billion has been spent on this project. Ablative heatshield coatings have been used since the Atlas ICBM in 1957. Yet they still flew Artemis with significant technical risk on a political grandstanding mission that delivered no significant science.
That NASA’s budget is so influenced by politics is why they can’t take the rapid iteration process of SpaceX - NASA can never fail in public. Any failure (even launch delays, as happened with Challenger) gets blown out of proportion and fuels the risk of further budget cuts, which push them to a “safer”, incremental, but very costly process of refining what is already proven rather than researching the less proven technology.
I use unbound (recursive resolver), and AdGuard Home as well (just forwards to unbound). Unbound could do ad-blocking itself as well, but it's more cumbersome than in AGH. So I use two tools for the time being.
The upside is there's no single entity receiving all your queries. The downside is there's no encryption (IIRC root servers do not support it), so your ISP sees your queries (but they don't receive them).
I don't mind Scheme - love it. But MMIX is one heck of a convoluted, "fantasy-alien" assembly language that I cannot stand. Gave up reading TAOCP because of it. Knuth should have stuck to pseudo-code or plain C.
Not sure if that's sarcasm or not, but when I was in uni (late 90s), it was C++, which was very much a practical real-world language. There was a bit of JavaScript and web stuff, but not much (but Javascript was only 4 years old when I was a senior, so...).
Except they won't. They will just hire those new people away from the firms that trained them. That's what happens now and there's no reason why it won't happen in the future.
This is why firms that do actual training have clauses written in the employment contract that says if you receive x months of training from them then you have to work for them for at least y number of years otherwise if you leave then you have to pay them for the cost of training you (which is written as a dollar amount in the contract).
Companies that don't have that kind of clause in the contract are going to get screwed over when their newly trained employees get poached by other firms.
I started my career with a graduate program from a larger company. I stuck around in that company for close to 5 years and would have liked to stay longer. My reason for leaving were the absence of a career progression. The first 3 years, the company had a great career progression path. Clear outlines what it needs for a promotion, fair and transparent pay, etc.
That changed and despite hitting/exceeding my goals, I was denied a promotion twice with no good reason. My boss, who is fantastic, told me that he cannot give me a good reason because he himself did not receive one. So I left.
Generally speaking, my cohort of the program was part of the company much longer than most employees. I don't think a single person left in the first 3 years. Attrition only started now that there was a general shift in the companies culture and communication.
It might happen, but there are risks. The obvious one is that the existing employers will make an effort to keep the best (promotions and pay rises) so people hiring away from them will get the people they do not need to keep.
Those sorts of clauses are not legal everywhere. They would certainly be at least heavily restricted in the UK (on the other hand there are subsidies for some employer training and education here - which is why my daughter has an engineering degree without paying any fees). The author of the article is in Israel, and as an academic is in a different position to people in businesses.
It honestly seems a little control freakish to think this way. People leave companies and that’s a good thing, they explore the industry and generally become more capable. If you leave on good terms there’s nothing holding back a renewed relationship, now with the added benefit of new perspectives; maybe meeting at conferences or working on a project. My gut is telling me these companies don’t part on good terms with their employees.
I'm surprised nobody else has pointed this out. The entire YouTube video has only two short clips of the actual rocket being fired, and in both cases the clips are very short and only show the rocket being fired and then following an erratic flight path, and then get cut before showing the rocket hitting anything.
For all the technical info given in the video, there is a curious lack of any data regarding the actual accuracy of the system. What percentage of rockets tested managed to hit anything and at what range?
I get 3-5W, mostly 4W on my N100 nuc. WiFi disabled through bios. And I ran powertop and made the suggested changes. 1 stick of 16gib lpDDR5, 1 nvme ssd, 1 4TB SATA ssd. Under full cpu load usage goes up to 8-12W. When also the gpu is busy with encoding the consumption grows to 20-24W. This is with turbo clock enabled. With it disabled power draw stays around 4W, but it is annoyingly slow I enabled turbo again and just content with the odd power peak.
China does not have a "massive" excess of males, just around 3-4% overall. The worst hit generations showed 15% more males than global averages, but this seems to be largely an administrative effect where girls were simply reported with a delay.
That being said, China does face a bride price crisis (caili), that has reached tens of thousands of dollars, an exorbitant sum for the the rural areas where it is common. This has led to unrest and public pressure on the government to intervene and regulate this market.
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