Good question. But the majority of the fuel isn't burned in space, or even that high of an altitude, it's the slow acceleration phase through the thick part of the atmosphere where most of the work is. By the time it reaches 12km (approx. cruising altitude of a typical passenger jet), a Falcon 9 booster has already burned about half its fuel, and 80% is burned within the envelope of the highest-flying jets. As far as the part of the emissions that are released at higher altitudes, my guess is it's actually less problematic than at lower altitudes. The whole issue with greenhouse gasses is they prevent heat from being re-radiated back into space, and instead trap it close to the surface. Greenhouse gasses released up in space can't do that, so you wouldn't have thought they would have much impact, from a greenhouse effect standpoint at least. But that's way not my field, so I could be wrong.

Emissions? If SpaceX achieve their goal of 100 launches per year (unlikely this year), and given that a Falcon 9 holds 155870kg of RP1 (1st and 2nd stage), that would be 15587000kg per year. Worldwide jet fuel consumption is 431878550000kg per year. So SpaceX would be using 0.000036 the amount of fuel of the aviation industry. I don't know what the relative fuel efficiencies of Merlin engines versus typical jet engines, but given that fuel efficiency is a key parameter in both cases, wherever it is in the likely range of values, that translates to a very small amount of emissions. Moreover, Starship, New Glenn, and many other next generation rockets, run on methane, with the express thought that they could run on green methane, and so be carbon neutral. Likewise, hydrogen-fuelled rockets could run on green hydrogen, as their only significant emission is from the hydrogen production. So there's zero reason to be concerned about emissions from spaceflight.

P.S. - SpaceX launches more rockets than the rest of the world put together; I can't be bothered running numbers for a ton of other rockets, but you could just double SpaceX's numbers to approximate the entire spaceflight industry.

It sounds like they launched while the re-entry license was still pending, I'm seeing articles from months ago about that. It seems they are applying under a new licensing scheme, so maybe that's why they are hitting a few kinks. Here's a quote from an Ars article;

"The FAA ensures commercial launch and re-entry operations don’t endanger the public. The FAA has licensed 53 commercial launches so far in 2023 for SpaceX, Rocket Lab, Virgin Galactic, Virgin Orbit, Relativity Space, and ABL Space Systems. But it has only licensed five re-entries this year, all for SpaceX’s Dragon crew and cargo missions returning from the International Space Station.

Once its license is approved, Varda Space will become just the third company to receive a commercial FAA re-entry license and the first under streamlined commercial spaceflight regulations known as Part 450.

“We would be the first to operate within this new regulatory regime (for a re-entry),” Asparouhov said.

In-space manufacturing startup aces pharma experiment in orbit

I was just looking through the videos on their YouTube channel to see if there were any use-cases demonstrated. Other than taking boxes on and off shelves, and carrying them around, I don't see anything. I guess we'll see, but if there were useful tasks it could do right now, I think they'd put that on video, so I'm thinking they're not there yet. Like self-driving cars, they may be assuming that they're nearly there, only to find that the step from "nearly there" to "there" is rather harder than they thought.

To be fair, in the abstract they say they offer the term noctalgia to express "sky grief", they don't claim it's a literal translation, although the usage in the title of the paper is unhelpful. But clearly it's the night sky specifically that is referred to, and I suspect that a Latin term literally translating as "night sky grief" would be unwieldy, which would be contrary to purpose.

The Nokia-branded phones seem to be quite successful:

"According to data released by IDC, Nokia phones are back in the top 5 smartphone companies in 23 markets in Q2 2022."

I would suspect that it's actually because the Nokia-branded phones have been a success, that they are doing this, looking to replicate that success with other partners. It will be interesting to see who the new partners are, and which segment of the market they target with the new partnerships, maybe they'll want to avoid the segment that the Nokia phones are already doing well in, no point competing with yourself.

It appears from the pictures to be an electric tilt-rotor, i.e. it takes off vertically but flies like a plane. That will allow much larger range than a quadcopter design.

I was going to ask how bad are the ads on the ad-supported tier, but I guess you've answered my question. If I was going to sign up for Netflix at all, I'd try the ad-supported tier, for the price difference between that and the Standard plan, 4 minutes of ads per hour sounds tolerable. Obviously some people hate ads a lot more than I do.

They probably haven't done it before because it's not really that big of a deal. If you weren't charging your Tesla with your excess energy, they you were selling it back to the grid, it's not as if it was wasted. Maybe it works out to be a bit more financially worthwhile to charge your car with the excess energy than to sell it back to the grid, but I doubt there's all that much in it.

Transport systems need multiple options. The exact locations of stations and airports, journey timings, price, and individual needs and preferences will determine whether any given passenger would be better off going by plane, train or car. Having a quick look at a booking site, Edinburgh to Southampton by rail is typically 7 hours plus, with 1-3 changes, so basically you're spending a whole working day travelling, whereas a direct flight is 1.5 hours, so I'm guessing for most business travellers, flying would be a no-brainer.

Uh? No. SHA1 has been vulnerable to faster-than-brute-force attacks since 2005

NIST and most other real security professionals were recommending against using SHA1 since 2010/2011-ish.

Unlike you, I do not claim to be a security professional, but even I know SHA1 has been unsafe for a far longer than a decade.

I feel sorry for your clients.

Because it contains much less carbon than kerosene, it does not decompose into a black mess inside the engine.

This is a huge benefit in a closed-cycle engine, such as SpaceX's Raptor engine. However, the ZQ-12 engine used in the Zhuque-2 is open-cycle, and as far as I know, the rocket is not re-usable, so that really negates any benefits from the absence of coking. It's really not clear what benefit Landspace get from using methane over RP1, but perhaps they plan a re-usable closed-cycle engine in the future, and want to gain experience with methane in a simple open-cycle engine first.

There's a link to a showcase of the projects in the article, although it doesn't really go into enough detail to judge whether the funds were well spent or not. Even on the basis of what is there though, I'm inclined to agree with Rishi that the money could be better spent at home. Do we in the UK really need to be funding "Incorporating green practices into the Chinese financial ecosystem"?

R.E. "Google has regresses". Yeah, remember the good old days when (from the "Why use Google?" page twenty-four years ago.)

Google only returns pages that include the terms you type.

Unlike many other search engines, Google only produces results that match all of your search terms, either in the text of the page or in the link anchors pointing to the page. No more frustration with results that have nothing to do with your search terms.

Those were the days. FWIW, I personally find "verbatim" mode does make it do a proper AND search, it's just a shame you can't make that the default.

CO2 (metric tons in 2020) per capita:

Germany's: 7.72
US: 13.68
Australia: 15.22
Singapore: 9.45

But Germany gets the fuck you? I don't think I'd hire you for your critical thinking skills.