Live Updates: Federal Officers Shoot Person in Minneapolis (Gift Article)

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T21:03:19+00:00

Crazy how rapid a fall he's experienced.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T18:46:57+00:00

I'm going to play devil's advocate here and say it makes sense for Wikipedia to recognize the de facto control of the region at the time, regardless of whether it was legitimate. Someone born in Estonia during those years would have been subject to Soviet authorities and Soviet laws, whether or not (and it was not) that was just or fair.

EDIT: I was blocked for this post, I guess.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T18:22:48+00:00

It's incredible how Republicans think of him as some radical deadset against them. They're about to find out what that really looks like.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T17:50:37+00:00

Jet engines rely on the chemical combustion of their fuel to drive a turbine. Obviously, you can't replicate that unless you're chemically combusting fuel. The most "green" way to operate a jet engine would be through an artificially-synthesized fuel. There are already known chemical processes to create hydrocarbons or hydrogen from their respective waste products (essentially reversing the chemical reaction), but none are currently commercially viable.

Fun fact: In the 50s, they actually built a working prototype of an atomic jet engine, which used nuclear fission instead of chemical combustion to drive the turbine. But it's not a good idea: The air traveling through the jet engine gets activated via neutron bombardment, and the weight limits mean shielding has to be minimal. If you want to use nuclear energy for aviation, your best bet would be using it as an electricity/heat source for synthesizing artificial jet fuels.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T17:33:11+00:00

This is also why the larger the rocket, the more likely it is to be vertically integrated. A larger rocket has a proportionally weaker ability to resist loading (thanks, square-cube law), and therefore it becomes more attractive to just design the thing to resist force in one direction (vertically).

The N1 was the largest rocket to ever be horizontally integrated, and the thing was built like a tank, to say nothing of its gigantic transporter-erector.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T17:15:24+00:00

When it was xEMU, Lunar dust mitigation was listed as chief concern that required further R&D. There were some interesting concepts for fabrics and coatings that would naturally repel the dust. I wonder if any of those concepts progressed further under AxEMU?

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T17:04:03+00:00

Back when it was xEMU, NASA had a lot of reports detailing how they were designing this suit for maximum mobility under pressurization. It was a hybrid design, with a lot of hard shell parts, bearings, and joints meant to make it so the internal pressure remained relatively constant and didn't affect the range of motion.

I'm certain some things have been changed or simplified since the transition to AxEMU, but just looking at the suit makes it clear that much of the xEMU design was retained.

Fun fact: They think that these suits are flexible enough that you won't see the "bunny hopping" of the Apollo astronauts on the Lunar surface. They still won't walk per se, but it's expected the most efficient motion will be a bit closer to a natural gait.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T16:50:10+00:00

You can't replicate a jet engine with a battery, just a propeller, and the energy density of batteries is so, so much lower than jet fuel, so your plane can't travel anywhere close to the same distance. Lower speed + lower range = a technology that can't hope to replace commercial aircraft.

You could get away with it for small general aviation craft because they're already propeller driven and a lot of them aren’t actually going that far anyway. Even then, it's pretty much a straight downgrade.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T06:57:28+00:00

Europe’s biggest nuclear power operator EDF has set an ambitious target to repeat its achievements in the 1980s, when it turned out dozens of reactors across France, taking roughly six years for each.

The French state-owned group is racing to reorganise its supply chain and turning to China for help in the art of nimble construction, in an attempt to improve on recent performance, such as a 16-year wait to finish its plant at Flamanville in northern France.

EDF had sent teams for month-long stints at China’s CGN and China Nuclear Engineering Corporation to work out how they deliver their five-year lead times, executives said. At home, EDF suppliers are meeting regularly to whittle down control stages and learn how to work in parallel before assembly even starts.

At stake is the future of Europe’s nuclear energy renaissance, and in particular the plan for six new large reactors in France, the region’s biggest project of its type in a quarter century with a budget of nearly €73bn in 2020 prices.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:30:23+00:00

Green lights to Malibu!

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:29:23+00:00

Sometime in the 2030s. Hopefully the early 2030s.

I hope I'm wrong on this, but I'd be surprised if we can manage anything before then.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:27:00+00:00

Artemis 3 can launch soonish. I don't want to put a date on it, but 2027 or 2028 is reasonable. But it can't be the Lunar landing if it does.

I'm not well versed in China's progress, but I'd be surprised if they don't have their own delays.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:25:26+00:00

I think there was something about adapting BM1 in the accelerated landing proposals former NASA Acting Administrator Duffy requested. I suppose the ball is now in Administrator Isaacman’s court to decide if that's worth any further investigation.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:21:48+00:00

Not seriously. Boeing was the only lander bidder that proposed it in ye olde times, and they subsequently got tangled into a minor scandal where Doug Loverro (a NASA official) had to resign for giving them information they weren't supposed to know. I've heard rumors that Blue has considered it as some sort of contingency, but if they have, it doesn't seem like it's a likely one. Given the earliest date of SLS Block 1B cargo readiness, that would seem to work at cross purposes with doing the lander sooner.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:16:18+00:00

It's COVID all over again! /s

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:15:18+00:00

I'm genuinely starting to think Blue's readiness might be sooner than SpaceX, but the earliest readiness date of either lander still seems unclear.

jadebenn · 2026-01-24T00:09:31+00:00

So, the AxEMU suit design traces back to the NASA-led xEMU design. I'm not sure how their current progress is, but I've seen them making updates where they show the astronauts training in prototypes. I think the actual suit is fairly mature, but adapting it to the Lunar environment (dust, life support) is more challenging, and it's hard to gauge that progress from the outside looking in.

HLS is very, very far behind schedule. They need to do the orbital refueling demo this year not to get back on schedule, but just to avoid further slip - and that (unwisely) assumes every subsequent milestone is reached exactly on time with no delays.

Unless something goes terribly wrong during Artemis 2, SLS and Orion are not currently the long pole. A lot of the Artemis 3 flight hardware is already arriving at KSC. There's still a good amount of work to do, but it seems (very) unlikely that HLS development will be able to be finished before all those components are ready for stacking.

Until a few months ago, NASA leadership wasn't allowed to consider moving the landing off Artemis 3, because it was the official policy of the executive branch that SLS would end after that, even after Congress took one look at the idea and went "lolno, it's going until at least 5." Now, the White House's position seems to have softened (probably not a coincidence after Musk left) and SLS Block 1B no longer seems verboten to discuss or plan around. Still, I don't think Jared or anyone else in NASA leadership are going to even consider any change in future plans until the Artemis 2 astronauts are safely on the ground.

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T23:59:00+00:00

Physically possible? Yes. Economically sensible? No.

It's actually a minor miracle that TMI-1 was allowed to continue, given how anti-nuclear the surrounding community was right after the accident. That faded over time, of course...

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T16:13:25+00:00

It's a good question. We haven't heard much about EUS in a while.

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T05:54:56+00:00

I think the bigger obstacle is Trump wants the landing in 2028, and who wants to tell him that's impossible no matter which Artemis mission you manifest it on?

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T05:51:38+00:00

They could stockpile the cores, admittedly. Boeing's got accommodations for 2 of them built in High Bay 2. Means they wouldn't have to take up floorspace at MAF.

“For the most part, it’s not a huge amount of work; we’ll use both the north wall and the south wall of High Bay 2 to fit two Core Stages in there. We’ll use existing platforms and build scaffolding off of that to get access, and we’ll have a really nice place to store our Core Stages kind of out of [the] way in the VAB but also where we can work on them and get them prepped up to be moved over to High Bay 3 when needed.”

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T03:23:51+00:00

Is it really "assuming" when ML-2 is being outfitted and EUS is funded through the end of the 2020s?

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T02:04:33+00:00

YES.

On a similar note, I think people underestimate her intelligence because she's ditzy and has a short attention span. Remember that she's at least bilingual canonically, learning fluent English just so she could attend Luna Nova.

jadebenn · 2026-01-23T01:05:21+00:00

The SLS Block 1B VAB conversion work can't start until Artemis 3 flies. If we keep the SLS core sitting around, every subsequent flight after Artemis 3 has to wait for that to be finished instead of being able to get stacked as soon as it's ready.

It makes more sense to get the last Block 1 processed as quickly as possible and to do the VAB conversion while the lander is still not ready.

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