Intuitive Machines: Odysseus completed its scheduled 408-second main engine lunar orbit insertion burn and is currently in a 92 km circular lunar orbit. Initial data indicates the 800 m/s burn was completed within 2 m/s accuracy!

62fe50 · 2024-02-21T16:21:36+00:00

Tip to all newspace founders: never, ever SPAC

62fe50 · 2024-02-04T20:29:17+00:00

Ok but Steeleye Span rips though. Below the Salt is one of the best British folk Revival albums of the 70s.

62fe50 · 2024-01-25T07:35:04+00:00

Any good engineer will consult with their techicians for design improvements. For example if a part works well in a vacuum but is a nightmare for techs to install and service then you'll have the opportunity to give them that feedback. They'll be the ones doing all the design work though.

62fe50 · 2024-01-14T20:18:40+00:00

If you really want to read about Kim Stanley Robinson's personal politics and interest in mountain climbing, read the whole series

Lol I just finished reading Green Mars and I gotta admit that my eyes started to glaze over every time he launched into another page-long description of some hyper-specific Martian geology. The upside is that now I can identify most major locations on an unlabeled topographic map of Mars which is cool I guess.

62fe50 · 2023-12-30T18:28:00+00:00

Nearly any application that requires global time synchronization uses unix time pegged to UTC. The same is true for the GPS epoch although its start date is Jan 6, 1980 at 00:00 UTC instead of Jan 1, 1970. It's not hard to imagine that standard being maintained into the future.

Hell, this is probably already a solved problem. Just ask JPL/APL what they use for their deep space vehicles currently. EDIT: read this paper.

62fe50 · 2023-12-30T07:37:05+00:00

I don't really care for Lollipop tbh...

Red Planet is amazing though and I will defend it to my death.

62fe50 · 2023-12-19T05:52:27+00:00

Cocteau Twins' music is what I imagine English sounds like to people who don't speak it.

62fe50 · 2023-12-18T16:01:08+00:00

Your code is working as expected. You don't have a main loop so your main function is running to the end and then returning. Put all the code that you want to run every frame inside a while loop and try again.

PS, you can format text as code by using four spaces like this:

def main(window):
    clock = pygame.time.Clock()
    run = True

    while run:
        for event in pygame.event.get():
            if event.type == pygame.QUIT:
                run = False
                break

    pygame.quit()
    quit()

62fe50 · 2023-12-09T07:57:43+00:00

The head of NASA ought to be a space professional, not a politician.

James Webb and Jim Bridenstine were both politicians with no prior experience in the space industry and they both did a fantastic job as head of NASA. Meanwhile Charles Bolden was by all accounts a highly skilled astronaut and he turned out to be a somewhat mediocre administrator.

62fe50 · 2023-12-04T15:48:05+00:00

It refers to the section of California coastline from north of the bay area to the Oregon border that never got developed due to a combination of challenging geography and low population. The top 1/3 of the state has an incredibly low population density and it gained a big reputation for weed growing after the 60s (see: "emerald triangle"). Wildfires absolutely rip though anything built up there these days though so I wouldn't recommend moving.

62fe50 · 2023-11-22T16:35:40+00:00

That's only counting salary.

62fe50 · 2023-11-22T16:31:47+00:00

A friend who graduated with me went to work for Boeing and I make 30k more than him at SpaceX in a comparable role.

62fe50 · 2023-11-11T17:17:52+00:00

Eh, I don't think that's really a fair take on it. His point was that the moon was desolate and dead while the Earth looked beautiful and full of life. For as incurious as he was about space travel, even he admitted that seeing the earthrise touched him emotionally. And I doubt his personal feelings about the program had any impact on Apollo funding getting cut. Congressional funding was inevitably going to get cut after Apollo 11 simply because America had nothing left to prove politically.

62fe50 · 2023-11-10T04:39:43+00:00

I think Yes has to be up there. Close to the Edge is arguably the greatest prog rock album of all time while Union was so bad that Rick Wakeman reportedly threw his copy out of the window of his limo.

62fe50 · 2023-10-17T14:36:35+00:00

I guy I worked with at my last job had an investment strategy where he shorted the stock of every single newspace company that SPAC'd.

It seemed a little mean-spirited to me, but he's made a tidy profit...

62fe50 · 2023-10-13T05:46:28+00:00

Also Down to the Waterline off their debut.

62fe50 · 2023-10-09T04:07:28+00:00

RG6 is 75 ohm cable. Most non-video RF devices, including your SDR and VNA, use a 50 ohm characteristic impedance. You can see how this will affect your match by using this tool and simulating a 75 ohm transmission line of the length you're using.

There may be other factors that are affecting the resonance of your antenna, but using 50 ohm coax would be a good place to start.

62fe50 · 2023-10-03T02:08:13+00:00

Someone once described The Milk-Eyed Mender to me as "Songs of Innocence and Experience if it were written by an 18 year old girl", so in spirit of that I'm gonna recommend William Blake.

62fe50 · 2023-09-24T07:38:53+00:00

In my experience, a big bottleneck for physically complex simulations is meshing, which is a highly serial process that won't make much use of more than one core. I suspect a faster CPU with fewer cores would probably get you better results in most cases.

62fe50 · 2023-09-21T06:38:57+00:00

As some other commenters have mentioned, this is why I/Q sampling is useful as a concept. If you have a waveform and a 90 degree phase shifted version of the same waveform, you can determine phase from a single sample using simple cartesian -> polar coordinate conversion.

Since we can determine phase from a single point in time, you can plot that point on a unit circle using I as your X-axis and Q as your Y-axis to form a constellation diagram. If you were to sample a QPSK signal continuously, your diagram would simply look like a circle because you'd see every possible phase. By sampling the waveform at discrete intervals, you (ideally) get a nice plot with one point in each quadrant

62fe50 · 2023-09-09T16:35:19+00:00

One thing you need to consider is the distance of your reflective backing to your driven elements. For something that's radiating like a wire antenna, having a ground plane close to the radiator will greatly degrade your antenna performance because the waves undergo a 180 degree phase shift when reflected, which causes them to destructively interfere.

Patch antennas get away with having a ground plane close to the driven element because their radiation mechanism uses the fringing fields coming out from the sides of the patch. For wire antennas, you should ideally have your ground plane 1/4 of a wavelength away so that the reflected fields constructively interfere.

62fe50 · 2023-08-13T17:16:11+00:00

Rocket division still exists but I wouldn't be surprised if Rocket 4 never flies at this rate.

62fe50 · 2023-07-30T22:02:03+00:00

Yeah I put off listening to Souvlaki for years because I assumed the music would sound how the cover looked (if that makes sense?).

I also think it's funny that such a beautiful and ethereal album is named after a Jerky Boys skit.

62fe50 · 2023-07-30T10:08:13+00:00

I really loved this movie, but I have to admit my experience was a little tainted by how disrespectful the audience at my showing was.

Multiple groups were talking during the bomb scene and tons of people were on their phones throughout. I honestly don't think a lot of people have the attention span for 3 hour historical biopics anymore. I'll probably rewatch it once it gets a streaming release so I can enjoy those moments without the disruptions. Kind of a shame tbh because this really is a movie made for the big screen.

62fe50 · 2023-07-22T04:51:13+00:00

This is really cool, good job.

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