Ben Brockert

That’s fun, there’s a site for everything.
I am weirdly proud to have beaten you in Spain and the Balkans, but you’ve definitely done vastly more of the pretty Central Europe lines.

2026-03-17 15:21:55 UTC

Happy New Fat Proton Day, everybody. https://home.cern/news/news/physics/lhcb-collaboration-discovers-new-proton-particle

2026-03-02 14:11:48 UTC

Spain being some kind of crazy outlier by suggesting that the UN charter is worth following.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/us-aircraft-leave-spain-after-government-says-bases-cannot-be-used-iran-attacks-2026-03-02/

2026-02-27 23:16:39 UTC

https://glashrvatske.hrt.hr/en/domestic/croatia-declared-free-of-landmines-after-31-years-12593533
Absolutely badass. The deminers who gave their lives to that project are heroes of humanity.
If I was a billionaire, I'd fund mine removal in Bosnia.

2026-02-20 14:16:55 UTC

Early DAQ and remote control of rocket testing:
"[Robert] Goddard at his launch command post, Eden Valley, late 1930s. The telescope focused on gauges connected to pressure lines on the rocket in the launch tower. When readings were right, he could operate fire, release, or stop keys on the panel in front of him."
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/103/377/933/163/572/original/f2ff56b331e847ae.jpeg

2026-02-19 23:22:49 UTC

New Nasa admin released his first "what the fuck was Nelson doing" message. I'm hoping another follows for Mars Sample Return, and another for Russia's role in ISS.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1r98f1h/comment/o6airtr/

2026-02-17 13:21:02 UTC

Buy one DJI roomba, get the security keys of thousands of others for free.
https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2026/02/hobby-coder-accidentally-creates-vacuum-robot-army

2026-02-12 16:08:22 UTC

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Well if something goes wrong with the solid rockets, they’ll fire the escape motor, which is, uh…

2026-02-11 12:09:59 UTC

I've seen a lot of discord (ayy) about the Discord age verification news, and no doubt they will do it incompetently and then lose the PII. But I'm still left with the question: are a lot of people on "adult" discords? I'm on ten servers, though I only read a couple, and none of them are "adult content". It's mod chat and talking about rockets.
Is it that people think it will eventually expand, or just that everyone is responding to headlines rather than reality?
https://www.theverge.com/tech/876575/discord-age-verification-vast-majority-users-inference

2026-02-07 22:00:36 UTC

Brand new map of the area from which you might see an asteroid hit the moon on December 22, 2032. Sounds like a trip to the desert in Australia is in order.
https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/1qyq4su/asteroid_2024_yr4_currently_has_a_4_chance_of/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/116/031/590/099/618/474/original/4f9488ae9b278abb.png

2026-01-27 14:51:23 UTC

People complained that James Cameron didn't get the stars correct for the night time scenes of the sinking Titanic, but he did include the correct number of jumbo jets overhead on transatlantic flights.

2025-12-23 09:34:39 UTC

Korean commercial launch company Innospace had the first liftoff of their Hanbit-Nano rocket last night. It cleared the tower, but during the first stage burn it crashed and exploded.
The first stage is a hybrid motor, meaning it uses liquid oxygen like most rockets but solid paraffin wax as the fuel. Hybrids are generally terrible for a variety of reasons for which I could go on about at length. Australia also has a hybrid launcher that failed this year.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/768/189/591/089/857/original/97328205ccfaf9c2.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/768/190/140/407/618/original/41661df8316a65e0.png

2025-12-21 08:40:40 UTC

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One more this morning on my walk to the train station, felt a bit “liminal spaces”.
M̴a̴n̴y̴ ̴B̴o̴t̴h̴a̴n̴s̴ ̴d̴i̴e̴d̴ I missed free hotel breakfast to find out that the Pristina-Skopje train is not running, despite the 2025 schedule posted on their website.
In the unlikely chance anyone finds this via search, the only train running in Kosovo is the Pristina-Peja 2x daily, as far as I can tell.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/756/646/914/363/667/original/753a873660f75c3f.png

2025-12-20 22:17:19 UTC

Very atmospheric freezing smog tonight in Pristina, Kosovo. They really go all out for Christmas in a >90% Muslim country, it takes a while of wandering around to notice that there's nothing specifically Jesus-y. Just Santas, lights, trees, baubles, and two squares covered in temporary restaurant stalls.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/754/169/123/323/073/original/bf09af1b5fd4c721.jpeg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/754/170/325/748/638/original/67603c01f3a05700.jpeg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/754/171/086/495/562/original/0876b589d47dc5e2.jpeg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/754/171/803/507/670/original/b18cb8e22bf183c4.jpeg

2025-12-19 17:24:12 UTC

Kenya is looking to build a commercial spaceport. Their site idea actually looks pretty good compared to some of the proposed ones in the US; lightly populated, could launch polar with a moderate dog leg and to a middling range of lower inclinations. About 2.5 degrees below the equator, but demand for equatorial inclination has not historically been very high.
I've also heard that stuff in equatorial is very poorly tracked by the current array of space radars.
https://ksa.go.ke/assets/files/TERMS-OFREFERENCE-TRANSACTIONADVISORYSERVICESFORDEVELOPMENTOFACOMMERCIALSPACEPORT-DECEMBER2025.pdf 24pg PDF

2025-12-12 16:24:38 UTC

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I can' tread the article because I'm not in the US, but it seems like 90% of life's problems in that it could be solved by a pack of wolves.

2025-12-08 18:21:14 UTC

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New Zealand is fastidious about bio safety, when you tell them that you live on a farm you may get the most thorough shoe cleaning that you've ever had.
Douglas Adams has a bit about it in his excellent book "Last Chance to See".
Be super super careful about taking any food! (though this is from NZ...) https://au.news.yahoo.com/passenger-77-at-aussie-airport-fined-3300-for-sandwich-in-bag-044212555.html

2025-11-21 21:01:54 UTC

The recent solar storms had one victim: the last object still in orbit launched by Virgin Orbit. Everything VO and Astra launched has now reentered.
https://www.satcat.com/sats/48876
Vanguard 1 launched by the US to a higher orbit in 1958, perseveres.

2025-11-17 18:45:13 UTC

Really minor thing in the scale of things lately, but I feel bad for this rock. Was a great big rock sitting on top of another rock on top of a hill, and kind of looks like a head. Would have been a landmark for people walking around in what is now Australia for 50,000 years.
Somebody built a house beside it, and then presumably somebody else decided that they didn't want a rock next to their house, so they demolished the rock instead of the house.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3CG83UcN9K0
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/566/508/311/123/265/original/ad04e7774f78a05a.png
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/566/508/380/085/532/original/b1998536b07cd723.png

2025-11-01 17:04:41 UTC

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The amount of steel to hold the hoop stress is roughly the same though, maybe much easier then to make wrought iron rings than sheet metal, or it made shipping easier.

2025-10-31 23:47:53 UTC

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Modern ones are all sheet metal, but the old ones were some kind of special shaped brick with steel bands around them for the hoop stress. Despite being from Iowa I have no idea why, maybe they were porous enough that the corn wouldn’t rot, and now they just run driers?

2025-10-31 00:25:50 UTC

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My favorite of the strange physics is the grain silos that shuffle across the ground as each layer buckles, like at 3:00 https://youtu.be/dOo_6OdXY6g?t=180

2025-10-30 23:50:12 UTC

Interesting video of the explosive demolition of a coal power plant in Louisiana. One drone shot looking toward the sun shows the acoustic pressure waves, including a big low-frequency one when the smokestack hits the ground.
https://youtu.be/xo-qRIi5E28?t=39
It's common to see them from high explosives, often mistakenly called "shockwaves", but that's the first time I've seen one from a big purely mechanical impact. Also has a much longer wavelength than the ones from the explosives.

2025-10-22 20:34:38 UTC

Random rocketry/chemistry rant: it’s stupid how hard it is to make hydrogen peroxide.
It’s just H₂O₂. You’d think “you take some water and stick some more oxygen on.” And you can do that to make ozone from O₂, or that even that BFRC of N₂O₄. You can make one of the nastiest rocket propellants in your garage, with a spark gap and a refrigerator.
But no, peroxide is a pain in the ass, which is why it has only ever seen niche uses, even though it’s storable and dense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_peroxide#Production
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/419/720/857/336/228/original/8a34a87e7d6ec119.png

2025-10-14 13:09:37 UTC

Is it just me or is the official iOS app just getting worse and worse? Today it’s micro-stuttering when I scroll, I’m guessing because of one of the media posts, and the white space has completely exploded. It now fits one squonk per screen.
(Also, in that screenshot: apparently we’re all olds here?)
[I added vignette because it’s annoying how screenshots blend in.]
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/372/675/881/771/564/original/ee870a08ce9365b0.png

2025-10-02 12:52:51 UTC

A slice of life, the operations of the cafeteria at Tanegashima Space Center in Japan. They say it's open to the public, and looks like a very nice lunch for around $6.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciJ7_L9ZZag

2025-09-22 12:49:33 UTC

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That's interesting, I'm fairly sure there's a bunch of gauge changing trains in Spain. I always thought it was interesting going through the shed and would love to get a tour, but I didn't know they were uncommon.

2025-09-14 19:46:51 UTC

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I know you're more into the trains, but I was surprised that a room on a ferry is also fairly reasonable. A four berth exterior room with bathroom, for solo use, from Rome to Barcelona was 120 in April last year booked last minute. It's about a 22 hour ride and there were dolphins at the end.

2025-09-13 14:15:39 UTC

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I'm wondering what San Diego-esque song would be internationally recognized. Surfin' USA?

2025-09-12 12:03:26 UTC

Here's some solidly ambivalent energy news. A plan for a non-polluting cargo ship! Progress in commercially-viable modular reactors!
Except that it's a Liberian-flagged, hijackable mobile nuclear reactor that will be hauling fossil fuels.
https://gcaptain.com/nuclear-powered-lng-carrier-design-receives-landmark-certification/

2025-08-28 10:36:55 UTC

Very high density infographic of incidents in human spaceflight. You can click any of them for more info.
https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/115/105/949/980/364/289/original/cbe61f7e5f5bcf50.png

2025-08-27 20:45:06 UTC

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A single F-35 and its share of the development program is more than the cost to hire a team and build a new orbital rocket from scratch.
They could have built the Superconducting Super Collider as a side project in the F-35 program and it would have been a minor footnote in the budget.

2025-08-27 20:40:36 UTC

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> At that point, the F-35’s sensors indicated it was on the ground and the jet’s computer systems transitioned to “automated ground-operation mode,” the report said.
> This caused the fighter jet to become “uncontrollable” because it was “operat(ing) as though it was on the ground when flying,” forcing the pilot to eject.
https://edition.cnn.com/2025/08/27/us/alaska-f-35-crash-accident-report-hnk-ml

2025-08-27 20:40:05 UTC

I have made up a bunch of processes around the design and testing of very hazardous rockets, and have sometimes thought I couldn't possibly be doing it as well as heavily resourced programs.
And then I get insight into a trillion dollar program where they are filling the hydraulic system with water and operating it in Alaska, and writing software that misinterprets touch-and-gos and crashes the plane.

2025-08-20 16:01:14 UTC

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That's a neat device, I hadn't heard of it. I'm inevitably going to get into brewing again, will have to feed that into a household time series database.

2025-08-05 17:49:23 UTC

If you live in the US and listen to podcasts, you really should get a VPN on your phone and set it basically anywhere else.
Podcasts that have ads and are using one of the big podcast distributors, and podcasts from professional media companies, all localize their ads. Which changes not only what the ads are, but massively changes the total ad load.
Sometimes I VPN into the US and if I accidentally leave it on, the quantity of ads on podcasts makes them close to not worth listening to.

2025-08-04 20:19:41 UTC

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<loeb> Or alien spacecraft!

2025-08-03 15:12:34 UTC

I enjoyed this paper that points out how bullshit quantum computing claims are. Their BS has been vastly eclipsed by all the BS coming out of LLMs, but they're still out there, claiming breakthroughs like factoring small numbers where they start with the answer. Or factoring a product of two primes where the primes are x and x+2 which is to say basically doing a square root.
https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1237.pdf
"Replication of Quantum Factorisation Records with an 8-bit Home Computer, an Abacus, and a Dog"

2025-07-21 19:03:13 UTC

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I've ridden one of those between SF and San Jose. Didn't have the grating over the center though. It seems like it was built specifically to be a set for an elaborate parkour/kung fu fight.

2025-07-21 12:34:53 UTC

Since the telescope at Vera C. Rubin observatory can move “crazy fast” I wondered if they could do some heliophysics at the next solar eclipse, by being able to quickly look at it and then look away during totality. They only have to keep operating for 49.5 years. https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/solar/2075-january-16

2025-07-19 20:29:42 UTC

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I grew up near the USG plant in Iowa. Boringly they shipped it all on trucks, even though there was an old rail right of way within sight of the factory.
Always want to see the mine, never made it happen. It is supposedly extremely large and also quite deep underground. Fairly rare in Iowa for anyone to actually care about subsurface mineral rights.

2025-07-17 19:05:34 UTC

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Why respond? I think of Alexander Abian as part of my education at ISU even though I didn’t overlap with his tenure, but it doesn’t seem like any professional astronomers or astrophysicists replying to him were making good use of their time.

2025-07-03 13:54:10 UTC

I enjoy that there are slightly absurd subreddits like r/Minoans. There's probably some immortal Minoan in the style of "The Man From Earth" who has gotten banned from there for arguing about how things actually were on Crete 3500 years ago.
Anyway, via crosspost from there I learned of an archaeological find of 3k+ year old sea trade between Cyprus and Egypt: https://greekreporter.com/2025/07/02/cypro-minoan-inscription-israel-egypt-cyprus-trade/
(I've spent about two years in Cyprus, it's a very nice island with very weird politics.)

2025-06-30 21:55:26 UTC

I was trying to figure out if I could use reading glasses to source a cheap lens for a camera obscura. Trawling Jeff's Site of Cheap Junk I found that you can get down to 0.25 diopter reading glasses, but also 0.0 diopter, which is to say not lenses at all. I guess for the people who want the gravitas of putting on or taking off reading glasses, but cursed with good vision?

2025-06-23 12:38:37 UTC

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There's no end to photos of Europe on Wikimedia Commons, seems like a waste to pay an exploitative American company for stock photos of Europe.

2025-06-22 17:15:12 UTC

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The Apollo LM was 16.4 Mg. F9 can put 17.4 Mg into LEO. One LM launch, one Dragon launch, and however many "Storable Modular Propulsion Module"s it takes to get to the moon and back, and you can land in the moon in a few years.
Starship was never necessary, it's there to get the USG to pay some of the development costs for a Mars mission.

2025-06-22 16:29:13 UTC

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Mr. Szewczak kindly made me the linear-linear version, which really shows how much of an outlier all those (mostly) Starlink launches are.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/727/952/292/482/257/original/a9edbcab5ed62540.webp

2025-06-20 10:15:14 UTC

Quite a diagram by Alex Szewczak of the mass of stuff launched into orbit over the last year, as of yesterday. 4.7 times the mass of the International Space Station, in a year.
I asked him if he could do it with linear scales which would make it nearly unreadable but make the situation even more obvious for those of us who don't think in log/log.
https://aaszewczak.substack.com/p/spacex-has-delivered-more-than-2
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/715/161/692/379/202/original/c6953713ab153b5e.png

2025-06-15 17:41:30 UTC

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I wonder how they would decide that it was a dead end. Wait for low tide and taste the water? Even then you’d probably have to go upstream a bit.

2025-06-12 17:41:16 UTC

This is the 100 year anniversary of humans having an idea of what the heck the sun and all the stars actually are. If you had asked a leading astronomer in 1925 what the sun was, they would say that it's basically the same as Earth, but very hot.
In Cecilia Payne's doctoral thesis she was the first to say, from spectral data, that the sun was overwhelmingly made of hydrogen and helium.
It was later described as "the most brilliant PhD thesis ever written in astronomy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cecilia_Payne-Gaposchkin

2025-06-10 19:01:29 UTC

In that the world we currently live in includes that corporate spending is free speech, the massive endowments of American universities have been startlingly bad at speaking.
Any of multiple universities could have out-spoken Elon with zero, or quite positive, effect on their long-term balance.
They would clearly find that distasteful. But campaigning for education is not a bad thing. And as has been said when it comes to rules of acquisition, “dignity and an empty sack is worth the sack.”

2025-06-05 19:18:06 UTC

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It did not appear to achieve the minimum pieces approach to landing.

2025-06-05 18:13:33 UTC

ispace will have a lander on the moon, one way or another, in just over an hour. Webcast: https://www.youtube.com/live/BVSMXQPeTcw?si=IqjEvpMFEV3UwiOS

2025-06-04 16:07:29 UTC

Good news, tomorrow there will be a Long March 6A launch from China which will carry the 100th satellite (and also the 91st through 108th) in the Qianfan LEO comsat network, also known as G60 Starlink or Thousand Sails.
Meant to be 1300 satellites by 2027, eventually supposedly becoming a constellation of 15,000 satellites. So far they don't appear to have taken any steps to reduce the brightness of their satellites.
Whoops, typo at the start where I said "good news".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qianfan

2025-05-28 13:11:45 UTC

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I’m just replying with memes today.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/585/610/788/121/893/original/71d016f26dfb4db3.png

2025-05-18 11:06:39 UTC

Any time there is a failure in aerospace there will shortly after be some kind of euphemism. One of my least favorite new ones is "an observation".
Tory Bruno used it after a Vulcan SRB nozzle fell off: “We did have an observation on SRB number one, and so we will be off looking into that”
NGIS started it during a solid test in 2019: "we observed the exit cone and maybe a portion of it doing something a little strange that we need to go further look into"
Now ISRO is doing it:
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/528/497/573/852/598/original/2ed71fcbb48dfcdd.png

2025-05-16 10:19:48 UTC

“NYU is deeply sorry that the audience was subjected to these remarks” is an insane thing for a university to say. Just shut down the university if you can only allow speech that is condoned by the government.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/15/nyu-withholds-diploma-israel-gaza-speech

2025-05-13 12:36:41 UTC

One of the strangest aspects of taking the train in Serbia is that there’s usually a guy in the station wandering around with a war hammer.
Probably the deputy station agent, and probably ceremonial role play as a “wheeltapper”, but I guess good to know that if the station is attacked by a knight in shining armor that we’ll have at least one line of defense.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_hammer
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheeltapper
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/500/544/936/227/120/original/7626c29b88df817a.png

2025-05-02 14:51:03 UTC

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For Kuiper or Starlink it seems like it would make sense to cache whatever the current hot thing is on streaming, just so that you're not wasting half your uplink on the latest episode of Andor.
Otherwise, yeah.
Similar to SBSP. Every Starlink launch puts up an ISS-worth of solar panels. Makes sense if you're using a bunch of power on orbit, makes zero sense to do SBSP on its own.
Maybe the SBSP and the ODC people will get together with the Spinlaunch people.

2025-04-27 17:14:22 UTC

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I was a bit glad and a bit sad to look up the encapsulation photo and find out that they didn't launch the 80/20 frames.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/411/041/702/662/203/original/7b7eeb9301106927.jpg

2025-04-27 15:24:13 UTC

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stargazer_(aircraft)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northrop_Grumman_Pegasus
The last launch of Pegasus was in 2021, and the launch before that was in 2019. I guess someone really wants to keep this capability, even though F9 or Vulcan can launch anything to any orbit that Pegasus can.
I worked in Mojave in the late 2000s and the plane seemed neglected even then, parked next to the tower.
I'm surprised I didn't hear about this month's flight simply because it's the only chance for planespotters to see one of these fly.

2025-04-27 15:19:42 UTC

Quite a surprise for me: the Orbital Sciences' (now Northrop Grumman's) L-1011 actually flew this month. It is a three engine jet that is more than fifty years old, and the only one that has flown in roughly a decade. It is uniquely modified to carry the ultra-expensive all-solid smallsat launcher Pegasus, which mounts under the fuselage with its vertical stabilizer slotting inside the jet.
NG still has an active launch license for the rocket, for launches from Kwajalein. Which is also weird.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/410/581/804/675/894/original/d8e380e9e6faff47.jpg
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/410/582/283/549/281/original/51c8046572e85532.png

2025-04-26 09:00:48 UTC

An old failed Venus lander will re-enter from earth orbit next month, and it could land anywhere between 52 degrees north and south. Which covers basically all population in the southern hemisphere and a large majority in the north, leaving out the Baltics, Nordics, and Alaska.
It weighs a thousand pounds and is expected to reach the ground intact. Previous debris from the launch landed in New Zealand.
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2025/04/kosmos-842-descent-craft-reentry.html
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/403/440/620/933/921/original/321d3b000b277176.jpg

2025-04-22 15:03:54 UTC

Kilauea is very pretty today, if you need a bit of background Mount Doom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fiyttmA7YkA
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/382/221/458/030/250/original/04890a5b11b6f4e6.png

2025-04-18 20:01:04 UTC

Woohoo, it's another "Lucy flies past an asteroid" week. My bet is on another contact binary.
https://phys.org/news/2025-04-nasa-lucy-spacecraft-encounter-asteroid.html

2025-04-10 14:12:54 UTC

The train station in Almería Spain is out of service while they connect the town to high speed rail, so for now you take a bus between the station and an old stop on the old network north of town, between the settlements of Huércal de Almería and Viator.
Wiktionary tells me that viator comes from the Latin for “(road) traveler”, which is actually a pretty good name for an online travel service.
Though I imagine it’s annoying for anyone trying to search online for information on Viator town.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/314/058/864/473/544/original/364e0ef72ed92679.png

2025-04-04 20:20:00 UTC

Every year that passes, the Huygens spacecraft becomes more improbable/anachronistic. It's literally the only thing that has ever landed on anything out past the asteroid belt, and they did it twenty years ago. It's rarer than people walking on the moon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huygens_(spacecraft)
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/281/538/066/549/750/original/e34d3fa61dae8f76.jpg

2025-04-01 12:23:59 UTC

What do you do with 33 microamps of power at 3 volts? There's low power, and then there's really low power.
https://www.techspot.com/news/107357-coin-sized-nuclear-3v-battery-50-year-lifespan.html
One of those technologies that could be great for science missions, if nuclear batteries become a mass-produced item, and also not great to have more nuclear waste scattered around the planet.

2025-03-31 23:02:41 UTC

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Google Maps shows a bunch, many with nice websites, but I only found one that lists a price. None are on OTAs.
Now I'm wondering what the preferred foreign currency is. USD is always classic, but their largest trading partner is Turkey. Holding lira is a mistake though.

2025-03-31 22:18:40 UTC

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This prompted me to look up hotels in Damascus and it is unusually difficult to find prices.

2025-03-24 17:06:32 UTC

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Follow up from three weeks ago, the PM of Poland announced that he’d like France to position nuclear weapons on their territory.
France has nukes partly because they never believed that the US would risk nuclear retaliation to defend France, regardless of history or what any treaties say, which seems more true than ever. But that then opens the question of whether France would defend Poland to the death.
https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-tusk-plan-train-poland-men-military-service-russia/

2025-03-14 07:08:38 UTC

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Here’s my highest effort lunar eclipse photo, taken standing in the middle of Colfax Avenue in Denver in April 2014. It’s not a bad photo, but it’s maybe 1.5% as cool as a solar eclipse photo.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/159/522/581/434/773/original/45bc27d19fef2f7e.png

2025-03-14 07:03:21 UTC

Generally convinced that it is impossible to take a good photo of a lunar eclipse, because it’s fundamentally just the full moon getting darker. Great to go look at in person, and some of the composite photos are interesting, but by the nature of photography and vision you can’t take a single photo showing that something is dimmer than usual.

2025-03-13 15:59:59 UTC

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You had me worried for a second. I like salt, but their burgers are so salty as to be near inedible.
I 50:50 Heinz and Sriracha most of the time.

2025-03-10 23:25:34 UTC

Another one falls for the classic west coast blunder, that if you're a billionaire you have to have a rocket company.
https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/03/former-google-ceo-eric-schmidt-is-the-new-leader-of-relativity-space/

2025-03-07 00:23:15 UTC

Another "unusual tracks day" as commercial flights get diverted to avoid a huge fall area of space(x) debris.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/118/289/901/783/790/original/2153d4d89a98f80b.png

2025-03-06 13:36:44 UTC

I’ve had the thought of “it’d be cool to make an app that just shows data from all the phone sensors”. By chance I found one, “phyphox”, made by RWTH Aachen University and released under GPL.
I’ll have to run the barometer the next time I fly.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/115/749/316/785/695/original/ddb22ba3930e67b5.png
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2025-03-05 22:23:42 UTC

Sure are a bunch of people working this year to get added to the
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2025-03-01 17:36:05 UTC

At this point I'm wondering how many countries quietly started nuclear weapon programs in the last couple of years.
Canada, Taiwan, South Korea, and Kazakhstan all have nuclear power but not nuclear bombs, unfriendly neighbors, and security guarantees that aren't worth much any more.

2025-02-27 13:33:23 UTC

Nice shot by Intuitive Machines, including a rare view of an upper stage in space. https://www.intuitivemachines.com/im-2
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/114/076/098/320/082/733/original/14a2b232b32f0a41.png

2025-02-24 14:49:32 UTC

We should send a diversion mission to make the asteroid hit the moon. As a proof of capability to actually deflect a NEO, as the first city killer to be completely gotten rid of, and as an excitation source for an incredible seismic analysis of the moon before there's any permanent missions operating there.
It'd also just be one hell of a show, if we can do it on the near hemi.
(Will need to land some seismometer stations on the moon first, but that's well within our capability as a species.)

2025-02-12 21:14:57 UTC

Australian radio telescopists almost discover that adding an ADS-B receiver to their system would improve the data quality.
https://phys.org/news/2025-02-unexpected-tv-method-filtering-unwanted.html

2025-02-03 21:40:48 UTC

I am in a footnote in Ashlee Vance's article about the Boom supersonic flight, which is a strange place to be. Like Mojave. https://www.corememory.com/p/life-in-the-supersonic-corridor-boom-xb-1

2025-01-31 21:14:49 UTC

Making myself sad with statistics: according to actuaries at the Social Security Administration, a 78 year old American man only has a 5.3% chance of dying in the next year, and a life expectancy of nearly nine years.
https://www.ssa.gov/oact/STATS/table4c6.html

2025-01-29 19:49:19 UTC

Eggs in the free market of the US, with an administration that said they’d reduce prices, are over $6/dozen in many states.
In Spain, with their burdensome regulations from the country and the EU that require space to nest, perching, litter to allow pecking, and unrestricted access to food and water, the price of a dozen eggs I saw today is $2.15.

2025-01-29 18:19:19 UTC

Nice for ATLAS to get a hit doing what it's meant to, rather than finding yet another "ATLAS" comet.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/planetarydefense/2025/01/29/nasa-shares-observations-of-recently-identified-near-earth-asteroid/

2025-01-23 19:07:55 UTC

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I did it a couple times last year or the year before. The one thing I remember is that the lower floor window seems like it’d be spacious with the wall curving away, but it just means the foot space is tiny and then the wall awkwardly far away at head level.

2025-01-22 12:10:18 UTC

It’s obviously impossible to have sustained supersonic wind, wouldn’t it be a bit more reasonable for something traveling at orbital speed near a planet to be rings in orbit around the planet?
https://www.independent.co.uk/space/supersonic-winds-alien-wasp127b-b2683841.html

2025-01-17 22:54:39 UTC

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News articles on this: "Dozens of flights diverted, delayed after FAA warned of SpaceX rocket debris"
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/16/dozens-of-flights-diverted-delayed-after-faa-warned-of-spacex-rocket-debris-.html
"Regulators are investigating reports of property damage from SpaceX Starship’s explosion" in Turks and Caicos
https://www.cnn.com/2025/01/17/science/spacex-starship-explosion-investigation/index.html

2025-01-17 00:12:43 UTC

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Multiple flights seem to have diverted to avoid the debris, some are coming back to the US. I hope all those unlucky passengers are able to get compensation, but it never really compensates you for messed up plans.
Screencap from just now on adsb.fi
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2025-01-17 00:06:04 UTC

SpaceX launched a Starship which exploded, leaving a long trail of multicolored burning debris visible in the sky from much of the Caribbean.
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/63IgbYFcBvI
(video is stolen from unknown source, I just picked one of the dozens of copies on YouTube.)

2025-01-16 21:15:22 UTC

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The GNC and other avionics wasn’t in Buran? Claiming a vehicle where they recovered nothing to be a reusable success, compared to a vehicle where they recovered something, doesn’t make sense to me.

2025-01-15 06:46:51 UTC

That was cool. Always fun to see moon missions launch, but the view was really good tonight. Through a 10x pocket monocular I was able to see the reentry burn and the upper stage in the same field of view; I don’t remember ever seeing a reentry burn at sea before. Kept track of the upper stage through its entire burn.
Photo: launch of ispace and Firefly lunar landers at 1:11 AM today. A mostly empty beach aside from a couple people in cold weather clothes. Blue Origin’s pad lit on the horizon.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/831/013/573/908/723/original/c8eb2042e4c7f37a.png

2025-01-10 21:36:17 UTC

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Landed very early on Tuesday, have seen two orbital launches by Friday afternoon. Almost missed today’s, I’m out of practice of paying attention to launch schedules.
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2025-01-08 13:46:49 UTC

Overheard a mom to her kids at hotel breakfast, “are you ready to go watch the rocket launch?”
I’m back on the space coast to deal with some loose ends and bureaucracy, and it didn’t even occur to me that it meant I’d be able to watch some launches. Suddenly I’m more invested in Blue launching than I was a week ago.
I flew into Melbourne airport for the first time, and even there the airport walls have framed launch photography for sale.
It’s nice there’s a place really into space launch.

2025-01-07 22:53:23 UTC

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I think at that point they thought a reusable upper stage would be easy, and then I guess actually did the analysis.

2025-01-07 22:30:39 UTC

Headline from eleven years ago today: "Gwynne Shotwell predicts reusable Falcon flights at $5-7 million".

2025-01-07 01:03:56 UTC

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