...actually, I misread the chart. GEO is 3.8km/s from LEO. Lunar orbit is 2.4km/s if you transfer from GEO, giving a total of 6.2km/s. If you go straight from LEO to lunar orbit, it's only 4.1km/s... barely more than GEO. So, yeah, I reckon a technology demonstrator is definitely doable right now.
Even better --- they've just demonstrated the ability to go to GEO, which is about 14km/s from the Earth's surface. Lunar orbit is only another 2.4km/s, and the moon's surface another 1.6 on top of that!
Chances are that with the technology they have right now, that is, using a modified F9 with the GEO upper stage, they could send a probe on a free-return trajectory to the moon. Or even easier, an impactor. I suspect they won't; Elon Musk appears to have his sights firmly set on the upgraded F9 Heavy and the rocket-landing Dragon, and with that setup you could probably remote land a complete Dragon capsule. I'd be really interested to know what sort of delta vee the Dragon's internal rockets will have...
Luna-9's pictures were sent back using one of the standard encodings used for wireless newspaper photography transmission. During the transmission, the Jodrell Bank radio telescope in the United Kingdom was listening in (well, wouldn't you?) and the astronomers there recognised the encoding, phoned someone at the Daily Express, and as a result the first pictures from the surface of the moon ever were printed in a British newspaper while the USSR was still wondering what to do with them.
There is some speculation that the encoding scheme was picked deliberately to make sure this happened...
The RPi is an ARMv6, while this (along with pretty much every other modern ARM device) is an ARMv7. The ARMv6 has hardfloat but implements a slightly different version of the spec. Most OSes have standardised on the ARMv7 version which means that their code won't run on the ARMv6. So Debian armhf will run on this but will not run on the RPi: you have to use Raspbian instead, which is a version of Debian specifically compiled for the ARMv6. (Of course, Debian armel will run on both, but then you don't get any hardware floating point support.)
The Broadcom GPU is significantly awesome. It is, however, almost totally undocumented. There's a reverse engineering project which has mostly nailed down the instruction set, and there are even some C compilers for it (one of them is mine!) even though there's no gcc or LLVM support for it. You can write programs in C and run them on the bare metal. Unfortunately the GPU doesn't support double-precision float and the MMU is kinda weird, and it's probably going to be slower than the ARM for non-DSP-heavy code anyway, so it's unlikely you'll see Linux for it any time soon. But it's a beautiful, beautiful architecture to write code for. (And it's dual core! Not very many people know that...)
Note that in real life you do the gravity roll much earlier than you do in KSP --- this is to get the vehicle clear of the launchpad so that if you're not going to space today, the debris doesn't land on your technicians.
In KSP you leave the gravity roll quite late so that you waste as little fuel as possible pushing through the dense part of the atmosphere (I usually do it at 15km).
Yes, seriously. It's lightweight, it's free, it's integrated into Windows Update so it's really easy to get updates, and best of all it doesn't continually hassle you and go LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME! the way most of the other antivirus apps do. It just sits in your icon bar and does its job.
It's not brilliant, security-wise --- it's merely adequate --- but if you want something that hides itself away and gets on with things with a minimum of user panic, it's definitely the way to go.
I will see your pedantry, and raise you more pedantry: the stone is defined as 14 avoirdupois pounds; one avoirdupois pound is defined as 0.45359237 kg; therefore the stone is a unit of mass.
Yes, I was disappointed too. Still, we'll always have tons (which depending on the usage can be weight, mass, volume, energy, or power).
This restaurant was advertising breakfast any time. So I ordered french toast in the renaissance. - Steven Wright, comedian
