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Comment Re:Seriously? (Score 1) 366

That being said, it is shoddy programming to blindly write to a log on a resource-constrained embedded platform (or any platform, really. Just especially so on something like this), so somebody definitely goofed.

Maybe they did not blindly write log on a resource-constrained embedded platform. Depending on how much memory they had, and how short the mission duration was, they could have computed that 32MB/(2d) * length_of_mission was sufficiently smaller than available_space

But as a test engineer in the space industry (having working on big and expensive and too much paperwork satellites, not on the new space version of cheaper, less doc and simpler tech, which really looks interesting, but I don't know to what extend they test) I'm really surprise that they did never saw this bug before. They never run a rehearsal for more than two days with a sufficiently representative model ? Maybe this bug appears only once every [n] times, with n sufficiently big. Anyway, it's strange, I hope they will get an opportunity to patch it after a reboot, I'm interested in the results they could got from solar sailing.

Comment Re:and yet, the GOP blocks private space. (Score 1) 96

It cannot be due to the Western embargo. Here is a quote from Putin: “The response of the Russian Federation to Western sanctions is legal and valid. It will help, and not harm our domestic economy,

The russian space industry being part of the russian domestic economy, the embargo cannot be the cause of these failures

.

Comment Re:Deniers (Score 1, Interesting) 525

We should then ask Englert and Higgs to give back their Nobel price? If I remember correctly, their initial paper did not even proposed a mass for the boson. The firsts experiments later only concluded that its mass, if it exists, was "not below 18 MeV/c. This kind of statement is so inaccurate [18MeV/c to infinity, quite a large uncertainty] that it's not science, by your logic?

Comment Re:Very myopic study (Score 1) 280

"“When you consider all of the man-made radiative forcing and all the changes we’re making that can affect climate, contrails are one of the smaller effects, compared to carbon dioxide and other emissions,” Spangenberg said. “Globally, you would have to increase the contrail effect by roughly 100 times to get the same effect as all of the anthropogenic carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.”"

Comment Re:With REALLY Huge Fans... (Score 1) 280

You speak about aerospace where you should probably speak about aeronautics. In the aerospace sector, people rely a lot on non carbon energy, except for the launch part. Of course a launch is a big energy consumption in a short period of time, but on the other hand the S/C will usually be used for 10+ years, running on solar energy. And more and more S/C use "electric" propulsion, where you have still a "fuel" of course, but most of the delta-V comes from electricity.

There are some people who want to use renewable also for launches. Or at least it's a side effect of trying to simplify/reduce the launch cost. For example zero2infinity is planning to use balloon for launching rocket from high altitude, avoiding the dense atmosphere (even better, they use it) and the drag, and also starting from higher slightly reduce the delta-V.

Comment Re:Ok, there's only two questions to ask (Score 1) 71

It's a group of national government which have decided to overrule the EP. Which ones ? I don't know. But just a possibility. If roaming becomes free, some operators will lose money. And some European operators are partially owned by countries: Orange (France), Deutsche Telekom (Germany), Belgacom/Proximus (Belgium), ... So they may have a reason.

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