#nasa mention

[madlichen]

There's a lot going on in the world of fusion right now.

A lot of people are missing why ITER is so expensive and why fusion research is just now getting to the point where it seems feasible for a lot of other companies that aren't ITER. Like, surely we could have just waited a few more years for the technology to mature before diving headlong into this stuff right? Well, no. That's not how anything works, actually.

The ITER project is the Apollo program of fusion. NASA's Apollo project was fucking expensive okay? Tens of billions of dollars, in the sixties! ITER is $22 billion now, which is peanuts compared to Apollo which had a similar effect on industry. The whole point of Apollo, and the reason it was so expensive, is because all the technology it used was new.

Integrated circuit assembly was slow and expensive at the time, but after Apollo everyone saw how well they performed, so an entire new manufacturing process was invented to mass produce them. Fuel cells and solar panels were never going to be a thing without satellites; they were too damn expensive so no one bothered making them. New stitching methods were developed to make the spacesuits, which just so happened to have similar requirements as medical-grade machinery. Each of these industries already existed at the time, but the push to make more of them faster also led to their mass-production and reduced their cost and complexity.

So too with ITER today. Superconducting tape has been a thing, but the amount of tape ITER needs for its huge magnets is currently resulting in the development of new manufacturing methods for it. Superconductors that would have been prohibitively expensive just 10 years ago are in the realm of possibility today. And new superconductors that don't need fucking liquid helium are just starting to become available in the large quantity one needs to be useful.

Also, ITER is designed to react to fusion plasma as it changes, because when it was designed computers weren't fast enough to predict how it would act. While developing the systems needed to do this, much has been learned in terms of how plasma acts when there is fusion happening inside it. This in turn has led to better equations that predict the behavior of plasma, that can run on computers, which will likely lead to better systems for everything that handles plasma.

Basically, now that ITER has done most of the hard expensive research for fusion, smaller organizations are cropping up which will try to do each piece better. This leads to competition which, in the scientific world at least, is going to lead to a wave of rapidly-accelerating technological progress.

In short, a lot of cool stuff is about to happen in the world of fusion research in the next 5 years or so.

[mobius-m-mobius]

#too soon NASA... too soon 😅🎄

[vvitchering]

Tagged by @lionsaint. I tried to pick my favorite and/or weirdest things that I have in my room.

[celestialdaily]

The celestial object of the day is E0102!

a supernova remnant located in the Small Magellanic Cloud. This object helps scientists study the chemistry inside stars, and it contains thousands of times more oxygen than the entire solar system!

[toenzy]

The privatisation of space exploration is a disgrace which spits on the memory of the Challenger crew, by the way.

[clickbeetle]

i’d always been jealous of objectums because they could find love in the simplest places, and i wanted to be one of them. and then i remembered i’ve literally had a crush on the planet venus since third grade.

[ilovejudestfrancis]

[feddy-34]

see one of the reasons why i hate elongated muskrat and his aerospace money laundering operation is because everything they make is SO GODDAMN UGLY

(engineer ranting below)(you have been warned‼️)

like look at this:

this is spacex's suit prototype for polaris dawn (which is another shitshow entirely that ill maybe make a post abt). now you may be thinking, but wait a minute! why is it so skinny? are they giving ozempic to space suits now??

that's because you're thinking of this bad boy:

this is NASA's EMU (extravehicular mobility unit) meant for performing tasks in space like, say, cleaning the solar panels on the ISS or repairing the million parts that have broken since launch. it's entirely self sustainable for over 8 hours, with its own life support, propulsion pack, and a bunch of other shit. it's been in use for over a zillion years and it's finally getting phased out for the artemis missions. thing is an absolute unit.

spacex's suit is a different kind of space suit, called an umbilical suit. these suits are not self sustaining, instead being attached to the ship/module/whatever via a cord. hence the name. the cord provides both oxygen and communications support. they were used by NASA during the 60s but were quickly abandoned because having a non-self sustaining suit for spacewalks is fucking stupid.

lets compare spacex's suit again:

(gross ugly lame boring puke emoji)

to NASA's version from the gemini missions:

thats fucking badass. do you see how badass that is? look at him. look at how cool he looks. you could never be that cool. ever.

[describingcolours]

A couple of people have reblogged this saying that its false equivalence or that the amount of effort nasa put into spacecraft is a little overkill for everyday objects.

That isnt the point. The point is that we know how to make things last through super harsh conditions. We know how to make things persevere. Read through the many other notes on this post and you'll see many people talking about fridges that their grandparents bought in the 60s that still work, or sewing machines over 100 years old that sew better than a modern one (i have a 1924 singer that needs a new treadle and works perfectly, but right to repair is a slightly different conversation).

And even if it was the point, why is it overkill to make everyday technology with the same effort and attention to detail as nasa would put in for example the jwst? Why should we settle for less?

Throughout human history, we've always put so much love and care into the things that matter and even the things that don't? Why is a microwave any different? Or a hoover? Or, if we want to be eco-friendly about it, the earth? The way we're getting through old shoes, phone batteries, etc is not sustainable.

This post got popular at a relevant time for me because a phone i had for 5 years had an update pushed through that purposefully bricked the battery. And google admitted as much. They offered a free battery replacement for all phones affected, but i expect this new battery to last all of one year. Google will have noticed that people with the pixel 4a weren't buying new phones, pushed this update with the excuse that it "stabilises the battery", offered the free battery replacement, so when this new battery no longer works people will remember the "brilliant customer service" and just buy the newest pixel.

I just hate that we're at a point where people will accept that things don't last and its through no fault of anyone's except time's. Things last. We just dont want them to anymore.

"well youve had it 6 years that's a good amount of time for that kind of thing to work"

"you should be grateful you got 3 years of use out of that thing, I'm lucky if mine last a year haha"

listen, in 1977 nasa launched the voyager spacecrafts to take advantage of a planetary alignment that takes place every 175 years. These 2 crafts were planned to flyby the outer planets of our solar system and gather data on them to send back to us. Voyager 2 launched first on the 20th of August despite its name because it was planned to reach our gas giants after its counterpart voyager 1, which launched a little later on the 5th of September.

The voyager mission was planned to end 12 years later in 1989. In that time, voyager 1 and 2 passed by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. They discovered new moons, confirmed theories about Saturn's rings, found the first active volcanoes found outside the earth, and they take close-up images of planets only seen at that point from telescopes.

On the 25th of August 1989, voyager 2 encounters Neptune, the last planet in our solar system the voyagers will meet. And that was that. End of mission. Now obsolete.

~

Less than 1 year later on valentine's day in 1990 voyager 1 looked back on the planet that had built it and sent with it a world's worth of hopes and dreams and took a picture. We called it the solar system family portrait and in it, we see ourselves. The pale blue dot nestled in the darkness of space

And then commands were sent to shut down their cameras. Preserve fuel.

35 years after launch, in 2012 voyager 1 sent back to us data about interstellar space. The very first manmade object to enter it.

41 years after launch voyager 2 did the same. Still operational, still going. Still sending back to us invaluable data, teaching us about our own solar system and the suns influence in our local bubble of space.

They are expected to continue to operate until the year 2025 - almost 50 whole years after they were launched and 36 years after their mission was supposed to have ended.

48 years of harsh space travel, battered by solar winds, pulled by gravity but fast enough just to escape, pelted by who knows how much space dust and radiation.

And even after that, they still have a purpose. Each craft was given a golden record. A disc filled with human knowledge and knowledge of humans and the planet they live on. Greetings and well-wishes to any prospective extraterrestrial life that could potentially pick it up. Co-ordinates, an invite. Samples of our music, the things we love, sounds of the earth, a story of our world. The surf, the wind, birds and whales, images of a mother, our moon, a sunset. Long after the voyager spacecrafts go dark, probably long after we are gone, they will still be doing their job; educating a species about our very tiny corner of the galaxy.

They are nasa's longest-running operation.

And it was all done using 70s technology.

So excuse me if I want a phone that lasts more than 2 years or a vacuum cleaner that doesn't break down after 6, or god fucking forbid, a refrigerator that will keep my food cold my entire fucking lifetime.

[literary-potato]

2012 also includes the line “the neutrinos are mutating” in the first 10 minutes of the film. And it just keeps escalating from there.

That neutrino line was also the precise moment it became a household classic that we rewatch almost every year in my family, because it’s just *so* terrible and scientifically implausible.

[michaelgabrill]

2024 AA Awards for Technology and Innovation (Group Honorable Mention)

eVTOL Propulsion Team, GRC * Denotes Team Lead NASA Glenn Research CenterAaron D. AndersonDevin K. BoyleJeffryes W. ChapmanPeggy A. CornellTimothy P. DeverJustin P. ElchertHenry B. FainXavier Collazo FernandezMatthew G. GrangerJonathan M. GutknechtMichael C. HalbigPatrick A. HanlonHashmatullah HasseebDavid HausserScott A. HensleyKeith R. HunkerMichael J. HurrellKeith P. JohnsonGreg L. KimnachJohn M. KoudelkaTimothy L. KrantzBrian P. MaloneSandi G. […] from NASA https://ift.tt/tqrUYbg

[crypticallylies]

I've been thinking about voltron (LD) again recently and I've realized the one thing that always gets me is when I find a fic that focuses specifically on Garrison-era stuff. Like they need to spend more time on Earth before they go fuck off into space. it just hits different

[kegbasher]

realistically i know i’m way too claustrophobic (not to mention countless other reasons) but this whole eclipse thing is really taking me back to my childhood-early teenage dream of becoming an astronaut

[marlynnofmany]

#or at least worn a spacesuit with human feet on the bottom

I live in hope that, NASA being as full of pranksters as it is, something like that will happen at some point.

Confuse the aliens! And more importantly, confuse every human to visit that spot after you!

Oldest human footprint discovered, made 153,000 years ago in South Africa.

Oldest human footprint in North America, made 21,000 years ago in New Mexico, USA.

Oldest human footprint on the Moon, made July 20, 1969 on the Sea of Tranquility, Earth's moon.

[alexiostheweirdovampire]

I’m not making any more fandom blogs. Everyone has to deal with my insanity, just without Ace Attorney or NASA.