https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02841-4
Observations highlight threats to GPS and similar systems from natural as well as human-caused disturbances.
Click bait. From an article last year:
These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/spacex-launch-punches-a-hole-in-the-ionosphere-red-blob/
These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.
The problem is when you've got enough short lived microsatellites and Starlink-like constellations and whatnot that you've practically got a whole Kessler's syndrome of the damn things constantly burning up in whatever's left of the ionosphere...
This article seems to put the blame on the shockwave from Starship's rapid unscheduled disassembly in the upper atmosphere (not its launch) but there's also been recent warnings about the effects of metal particulates from such explosions, satellites burning in the atmosphere, and similar pollution on the ionosphere.
All in all, burning or blowing up metallic crap in the upper atmosphere seems to be quite a bad idea.
The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).
And to be fair, there's a lot more terrestrial things that causes GPS interference. I work with a guy that runs a boosted CB radio and it causes havoc with GPS signals. EM geometry is really interesting on how signals get encoded. It was fun studying how CDMA and GPS work.
Wireless engineering concepts are simultaneously interesting while also making me want to take my own life.
It's quite the dichotomy.
All the different ways we've managed to chop up EM waves to implement the incredible wireless technologies we use daily is fascinating. But the math... Dear lord...
Another one.
I mean I am not against rocket research, but isn't there another way without destroying several millions worth if equipment?
So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.
If only there was an alternative.
So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.
What are you talking about?
NASA spends a fixed amount of money for launch contracts to put stuff into space.
NASA's traditional method of contracting, where they would design something, and then having Boeing on retainer to keep asking for more money to build it, and then have congress step in at every step and tell them to use X contractor because it's in their district, and then not actually get to build or test anything for decades, and then discovering problems and paying Boeing a fuck ton more money to "fix" those problems later, led to massive cost overruns and subpar performance on literally every single launch program they've had for the past several decades.
Now NASA is spending that fixed amount of money to SpaceX, Blue Origin, Boeing, etc. and gets a) orders of magnitude more stuff into space and b) does it with no risk of cost overruns since they're all fixed price contracts.
Competitive bidding on fixed price contracts, is literally the alternative model that the government should have been using this whole time instead of subsidizing their traditional contractors with cost+ contracts.
The alternatives are setting up SoEs to build your rockets, or putting people responsible to the state and not the shareholders on the board to ensure the CEO is similarly minded.
There is a core conflict of interest in that every dollar of profit these companies make is a dollar that isn't going into building the rocket or lowering the cost.
But SpaceX has literally lowered the cost of a launch by an order of magnitude. They also are flying one of the most successful rockets ever flown.
My god, the fucking dumbasses on here.
"Oh my god, Elon Musk's companies make electric cars, therefore electric cars must be bad".
Great logic man! Yep, hardware rich development programs and fixed price government contracting must also be bad because SpaceX has used them to lower launch costs for NASA by orders of magnitude.
Jesus fucking christ, the dumbass blind hate for SpaceX is fucking mind numbing.
Indeed, I'm surprised this dumb clickbait title didn't literally include Elon Musk's name like so many other "Elon Musk's <Company Name> Does <Thing That's Actually Normal But Sounds Bad>!" headlines.
Yes, Elon Musk has some awful views and does some awful things. Doesn't mean everything he does is therefore bad. Henry Ford was a colossal antisemite, as another example, and did some really weird and awful things to his employees. Unfortunately some of the same personal characteristics that can lead people to be innovative industrialists can often also lead to them being assholes.
I mean to be fair I think they are probably the first (and maybe still the only?) company that tries to build rockets that can land back and be reused.
There's others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it's a suborbital tourism vehicle that's basically just a toy. They're working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that's like a souped up Falcon 9 but it's still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who's actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.
This is literally the first one. There's only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.
And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything. (Not to mention that at the end of all that we still had two Space Shuttles explode in the upper atmosphere, but with crews on board).
Design it, build it, test it, and get immediate feedback on it, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, and it's a lot cheaper to do it upfront.
Sure, you can do it for real and destroy billions worth of equipment.
Shit happens in R&D. Some loss is expected.
Indeed. And Boeing is the main contractor for it so you can be sure it won't suffer any mishaps.
That sounds so futuristic.
As it's NASA is it using technology decades more advanced than the competition?
Are you joking? Well the answer is no, no the SLS is about 40 years behind as far as technology goes. It's basically a shuttle derived launch vehicle, the boosters are similar to the shuttle side boosters and it uses 4 slightly updated RS-25s (the space shuttle main engines) in the center stage.
Except instead of getting with the times and attempting some reusability, it actually has less reusability than the shuttle had. They actually throw away all of those expensive high performance hydrolox engines on every launch.
That's literally exactly what spaceX is developing, rockets you don't have to blow up every flight.
Fully reusable rockets have never been done before, but they're coming.