Firefly Aerospace became the first private company to land a spacecraft on the moon when Blue Ghost lunar lander touched down on the moon on March 2nd.
What an incredible achievement – and that 4K video from the lunar surface is just mesmerizing.
Jason Carman’s S3 project has been relaunched (no pun intended) as The Story Company, continuing his incredible work on documenting the hard tech scene.
At the start of the year they published their first feature documentary, New Space. A story about the current state of the space industry, and what’s different this time in the marriage between government-backed and private spaceflight.
The Carina Nebula. Only 8,500 light years away.
The launch complex at Cape Canaveral.
Ruins.
Space mushrooms.
The Valles Marineris canyon on Mars.
2,500 miles long, 120 miles wide, 4.5 miles deep. The largest canyon in the Solar System.
I dig Noriyoshi Ohrai ’s spaceship concepts.
Cylindrical space colony. Rick Guidice.
The collapse of the Arecibo Telescope in Puerto Rico.
I want a future of ringworld colonies and Dyson spheres.
It’s amazing we get to watch these on livestreams. SpaceX willing to expose its R&D process and high-risk work to the world in real-time. The world definitely needs more companies taking big risks and pushing forward.
Beautiful and inspiring stuff from SpaceX:
A convincing case for Elon to put his focus all-in on SpaceX, and not 6 other ventures at once.
Byrne Hobart makes the case for Starlink’s business model:
The line between a vision and a sales pitch is always blurry, and Elon Musk is unusually good at using this to his advantage. There’s a reasonable case that Starlink is just a natural way to amortize the fixed cost of SpaceX’s investment in launch infrastructure. But a sufficiently compelling sales pitch has a way of coming true, and if part of the pitch of Starlink is that it’s a censorship-resistant communications medium that creates access to the global Internet, not individual countries’ more restricted versions of it, then that may be what it becomes.
I set an alert on the SpaceX YouTube channel a few months ago, which gives me a closer perspective on how much they’re investing in Starlink, their satellite internet constellation. Multiple times a month I get a notice of a live-streamed Falcon launch with a flock of new Starlink sensors being put into orbit.
Each of these payloads puts 60 new birds into space. Now Starlink is in beta with early customers, and I’ve seen some amazing posts from folks at their off-grid cabins, now with 300down/20up connections where they used to be dozens of miles from connectivity of any form.
SpaceX’s Starlink constellation is getting pretty dense. So far they’ve put over 1,000 in orbit, with a goal of eventually reaching tens of thousands.
Someone put together this map visualization showing the orbit position of each bird, animated.
The resemblance between Martian and Terran topography is amazing. Mars has volcanism, plains, valleys, and hard evidence of water formerly everywhere.
Great shots here with renderings of Martian topography.
Bryan put together this neat little utility for merging point data with containing polygon attributes with spatial join queries. It uses Turf.js to do the geoprocess in the browser.
Amazing photography of the Mars surface:
NASA’s Curiosity rover has captured its highest-resolution panorama yet of the Martian surface. Composed of more than 1,000 images taken during the 2019 Thanksgiving holiday and carefully assembled over the ensuing months, the composite contains 1.8 billion pixels of Martian landscape. The rover’s Mast Camera, or Mastcam, used its telephoto lens to produce the panorama; meanwhile, it relied on its medium-angle lens to produce a lower-resolution, nearly 650-million-pixel panorama that includes the rover’s deck and robotic arm.
- “Easy” because there’s a delay between benefit and cost.
The cost of exercising is immediate. Exercise hurts while you’re doing it, and the harder the exercise the more the hurt. Investing is different. It has a cost, just like exercising. But its costs can be delayed by years.
Whenever there’s a delay between benefit and cost, the benefits always seem easier than they are. And whenever the benefits seem easier than they are, people take risks they shouldn’t. It’s why there are investing bubbles, but not exercise bubbles.
This is a physics simulator that replicates the physics of interstellar objects. You can simulate massive planetary collisions or supernovae in the Earth’s solar system, in case you want to see what would happen.
A neat catalog “map” of mathematics, with visualizations of things like prime numbers, symmetry, calculus, and more. Quanta Magazine does fantastic work.
In 2019, there were over 33,000 businesses in Japan over a century old, according to research firm Teikoku Data Bank. The oldest hotel in the world has been open since 705 in Yamanashi and confectioner Ichimonjiya Wasuke has been selling sweet treats in Kyoto since 1000. Osaka-based construction giant Takenaka was founded in 1610, while even some global Japanese brands like Suntory and Nintendo have unexpectedly long histories stretching back to the 1800s.
This is a neat clip from Walt Disney’s Disneyland TV series. Wernher von Braun explains the future technology that’ll take us to the Moon, in 1955, several years before the Mercury program even began.
Bloomberg has been publishing this video series on future technologies called “Giant Leap.” It’s well-done and a nice use of YouTube as a medium.
This one explores a number of new companies doing R&D in microgravity manufacturing — from biological organ “printing” to creation of high-quality fiber optic materials. There are still some challenges ahead to unlock growth of space as a manufacturing environment, but it feels like we’re on the cusp of a new platform for industrial growth in the near future.
This is an absolutely phenomenal project showcasing each of the major satellites in the Solar System. The full interactive maps of each one are incredible. It shows how much data we’ve gathered about all of these bodies with imagery on each one and thoroughly mapped with place and feature names.
A cool piece of news here. We bought our house with Redfin and had a great experience with it, after using the website heavily during the house search process. Opendoor is also in the real estate space, but their core business is around buying up properties themselves, offering easy liquidity to homeowners needing a rapid sale. I like that Redfin sees the potential there. Hopefully it’s a good fit for each business.
The study found that walking indoors or outdoors similarly boosted creative inspiration. The act of walking itself, and not the environment, was the main factor. Across the board, creativity levels were consistently and significantly higher for those walking compared to those sitting.
I definitely feel like many of my best ideas and possible problem solutions come to me while running. This research shows that the act of cardiovascular activity spurs something creatively that you don’t have while sitting.
NASA has developed a portable atomic clock that would allow deep space probes to navigate on their own. As Geoff Manaugh notes here, when you’re traveling in space with no access to a frame of reference, travel time from a point of origin is how one orients:
One might say that the ship is navigating time as much as it is traveling through space—steering through the time between things rather than simply following the lines that connect one celestial object to another.
The general problem of ship orientation and navigation in deep space is a fascinating one, and it has led to ideas like using “dead stars” as fixed directional beacons, a kind of thanato-stellar GPS. This is “the long-sought technology known as pulsar navigation,” Nature reported last year. “For decades, aerospace engineers have dreamed of using these consistently repeating signals for navigation, just as they use the regular ticking of atomic clocks on satellites for GPS.” You head toward something that’s only consistent because it’s dead.
We took the kids over to Kennedy Space Center on Saturday on the way up to Jacksonville. A quick stopover in Titusville Friday night then morning over at the Cape.
I always loved visiting KSC when I was younger. We had the opportunity to go and see multiple launches over the years, including a couple of Space Shuttle launches. Visiting again brought back memories since they’ve got several things there that haven’t changed much over the years. On the way in you get to walk through the Rocket Garden, which showcases some of the rockets of NASA’s past programs including the Redstone and Atlas rockets from Mercury, the Titan from Gemini, and the Saturn 1B from early Apollo lying prone in the back. Of course the kids loved the chance to sit inside the Mercury capsule.
There’s a new (since my last visit) exhibit called “Journey to Mars” where they’ve got a nice presentation on the past and future of Mars exploration missions. The highlights here were the replicas of Sojourner, Spirit, Opportunity, and Curiosity. It’s amazing in that display to see the increasing size and complexity of robotics we’ve been able to successfully land and use on Mars. Makes you wonder what we’ll do next.
One of the other classics from when we used to visit as kids is the astronaut memorial. There’s nothing terribly spectacular about it, but it’s an important reminder of the sacrifices made throughout the nation’s research, experimentation, and launch attempts to explore space. We had to go check this out for nostalgia’s sake. I still find it impressive and it reminds me of the times when our manned space program was active and astronauts were like mini celebrities.
The last part we checked out was the new Space Shuttle exhibit with the old Atlantis orbiter on display. It reminded me of how advanced the shuttle really was for its time, as a technology of the early 80s, and also how large the orbiters were. In hindsight the whole thing seemed pretty impractical, but the set of dozens of exhibits serve as a reminder of all the amazing things that were enabled by routine trips to orbit by the Space Shuttle. It was cool to get to stand up close to something that went into space 33 times.
For our next visit I’d love to go out to the Saturn V exhibit, to which you have to take a bus tour. Maybe it’d be a better time then for the kids to get out on the deeper tour that takes you to the VAB and the launch pads. I always loved getting to see that stuff.
This is a neat interactive tool to visualize distortion due to map projection using Tissot’s indicatrix, a mathematical model for calculating the amount of warp at different points:
Nicolas Auguste Tissot published his classic analysis on the distortion on maps in 1859 and 1881. The basic idea is that the intersection of any two lines on the Earth is represented on the flat map with an intersection at the same or a different angle. He proved that at almost every point on the Earth, there’s a right angle intersection of two lines in some direction which are also shown at right angles on the map. All the other intersections at that point will not intersect at the same angle on the map, unless the map is conformal, at least at that point.
A typeface designed to mimic the National Park Service signs that are carved using a router bit.
Perfect timing on finding this one. I’ve been working on a cartography project to simulate a USGS-style topographic map in QGIS, and this could work perfectly in that design. Excellent work from the Design Outside Studio.
SpaceX is developing a space-based broadband internet system of 24 satellites. The design of this hardware looks incredible. I hope it gets traction and sparks a consumerization of this sort of tech. Between projects like this and the work of Planet and others with microsatellites, that industry seems like it’s on the cusp of some big things.
This is an old announcement, but new to me. CloudFlare now hosts privacy-centric DNS at 1.1.1.1, available to all:
We talked to the APNIC team about how we wanted to create a privacy-first, extremely fast DNS system. They thought it was a laudable goal. We offered Cloudflare’s network to receive and study the garbage traffic in exchange for being able to offer a DNS resolver on the memorable IPs. And, with that, 1.1.1.1 was born.
The Mars rover Opportunity is now out of commission. This Twitter thread from Jacob Margolis goes through a timeline of what happened to the rover. It first landed and began exploring the Martian surface in 2004. The system exceeeded its intended planned operational lifespan by “14 years and 46 days”. An incredible feat of engineering.
I don’t post much about politics here, preferring to keep most of that to myself. I did find this piece an interesting perspective on the rise of a particular flavor of socialist-oriented ideology, and the too-common notion that so much should be guided, directed, or outright owned by government. On the risk of regulatory capture vs the value of the market:
Bureaucracy at any level provides opportunities for special interests to capture influence. The purest delegation of power is to individuals in a free market.
