Recent content by movieman

This would presumably be one of the first paying payloads that actually needs one. It's not as though there's much point flying it if no-one has anything to launch on it.

Um, yeah. Like having blown up the pad that was supposed to be launching paying payloads while they tested Falcon Heavy from 39A. Until that's fixed, they're not going to be able to find much space in their schedule for launches that don't produce any income.

Anyone else tried this? It has a bunch of technical inaccuracies, and is primarily a 'documentary' rather than a game, but being inside the Apollo CSM during the launch and re-entry rather than just watching it on a monitor is pretty neat. (Someone on reddit said that stepping out of the CSM...

How much money, and how many years, would NASA have spent to build a non-reusable Falcon 9 with a traditional aerospace development model? Let alone one that could land on a barge at sea? If I remember correctly, they spent about as much to put a dummy second stage on top of a shuttle SRB and...

But mass manufacturing produces a product someone else wanted. 3D printing will increasingly allow us to produce the products we want, when we want them. To give a simple example, the mass-produced Ziploc containers we have are almost, but not quite, large enough for me to put a samosa in there...

The 657BB part number found on it is for a 777 flaperon leading edge panel, and there's only one aircraft known to have lost two of them in the Indian Ocean. Hopefully there's still a serial number somewhere that can positively link it to MH370. Edit: Actually, looks like that part number is...

Actually, it looks like they travel from the search area off Australia, right past the island where this was found: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/d5/Indian_Ocean_Gyre.png

Haven't there been a few case of pilots doing otherwise inexplicable things when running out of oxygen? I know a couple of planes have crashed that way. The only explanation that seems to explain everything is a crazed murder/suicide pact by the crew, but there doesn't seem to be any evidence...

However, the CVR pinger battery still had a few months before its replacement date, so that should have continued pinging for at least the full 30 days. I won't be entirely surprised if it turns out to be a cargo fire leading to hypoxia and the pilots flying off into nowhere due to lack of...

These days, I believe it boots into the LiveCD, and you have to actually run the 'Install' program off the CD to install. I presume they had too many complaints about people accidentally trashing their system with the old disks that defaulted to installing.

A guy I worked with was once performing remote maintenance on the server running a customer system at their backup site, and rebooted it... then realized that window was actually logged into the operational site server and they'd just knocked it out of service for several minutes while the...

Yes. Though the odds are reasonable that it is somewhere in that search area (which, obviously, is why it's being searched first). It really all comes down to how far it could have flown from the final satellite contact, and how accurate the calculated position of that contact may be. There's...

Explosive yield, yes. But maybe not worse in terms of long-term radiation, as many reactor byproducts much have longer half-lives than bomb fallout (plus, most of the bombs were exploded underground). Wonder if that's why they didn't take us around the NERVA area on the tour?

I have a Transformer and wasn't that impressed with it; the keyboard dock seems like a good idea until you try to use it, then it wants to topple over all the time because all the weight is in the tablet. I don't think you can buy netbooks any more, because I tried to find one when the keyboard...

Yeah, looks like they're going to search around the entire southern arc given by the satellite calculations, starting in the most likely areas. Now the ULBs have died, that's probably the only way they're going to find it. I thought the ULB detection was pretty suspicious, as it seemed far too...