And will there be any detectable emissions?

Well, burning up a single satellite would be equivalent to setting fire to something like a large motorbike , when you look at at mass and components used.

Burning up 40 of them a week in the upper atmosphere is basically undetectable compared to the sheer quantity of general materials we set fire to on Earth each week.

Now if instead of satellites you burnt 40 cargo ships a week, that would be detectable.

It seems they had some unexpected new learnings about some corner cases and failure modes.

Chain of events seems to be:

1. Lots of drag from raised atmosphere -> put sats in edge-on "safe mode" for minimal drag.

2. Go to take sats out of "safe mode" -> can't for some reason*.

3. Sats de-orbit.

* Reasons could be along the lines of:

- Couldn't unfold solar panel again because drag on panel stops them getting to normal operating position for thrust,
- Can't activate thruster while panel is folded because of software interlocks to prevent power issues when panels aren't pointed at the sun.
- Unfolding panel to give more power increases the drag to greater than thruster ability, etc. etc.

A bit unfortunate, but that amount of sats is going to deorbit every week if the full constellation gets installed. The scale of it all, from the production line of sats to launch rate to on-orbit management, is quite mind-boggling,

have no problem with helping other countries. Hell, if you look at past track records of the US with catastrophic events, we are often the first people there helping (Hati and those fairly recent tsunamis that struck somewhere come to mind).

But geez, like a family in troubled times, you take care of your own first and THEN help others.

What if retards in your country don't want your help and you've got excess resources as a result? Should you force your help on them? Or give resources to others that need them?
What if your government doesn't want to spend money on its own citizens, arguing endlessly about a paltry $2000?
Let's not forget the absolute shitshow of privatised healthcare. That arguably killed a lot of people in the US last year when they didn't go to hospital because they were worried about the cost of treatment.

India's fucked it up, but the USA and it's constituents also suffer a lot from "fuck-you-got-mine" syndrome, and it would be nice to see that change a little one day.

"No. We don't need your power right now."

And when they're begging for power, you can set your sell price too, right?

I copy the second or third most upvoted answer, simply because the first is (usually) a pedantically-long-winded way of doing something that takes into account every single possibility, and all I need right now is the quick'n'dirty hack that I can run to massage a bit of data from *over here* into what I need *over there*.

Sure if I'm writing something that will last 5 years and have the general public banging on it's inputs, then I'm going to look into things properly and do it the right way.

But when it's internal, using data from another program or source that I wrote, and will be tossed into the bitbucket next week, then yep, here comes the 95% solution.

This modification didn't behave as expected - pressure dropped below a threshold they set for this test.

Huh, I would have assumed that a non-trivial change to an APU design would involve performance and flow-rate testing on a test bench somewhere, and someone signing off on it as being up to the task.

I would have then thought that they would have done numerous tests with the APUs in their proposed configuration, spinning them up and then gimballing the hell out of the engines in situ until they were happy with their performance.

To light the whole stack and then have an APU / gimballing issue is a little bit embarrassing. Weren't they originally going to fly the first one without the whole mission-duration hot fire?

Are you unaware of how ROM is updated, changed, worked-around?

You mean the permanently-programmed boot ROM in the phone's processor?

Are you unaware of Intel's fixes for security and other problems in many of their CPUs and of their collaboration with M$ and other OS publishers?

You mean those CPUs with rewriteable microcode, auxiliary processors, and flashable ROMs, unlike the ROM in Apple's A5 to A11 series CPUs that this exploit affects?

This ROM is the very first thing to run on those CPUs. It's (unfortunately for Apple) actual, masked Read Only Memory, and it is not rewriteable. Break this ROM and it's a CPU replacement to fix.

LCD panels aren't vacuum rated though - the liquid part boils off. So they'd need to be sealed or encapsulated somehow.

Crew Dragon has some pretty fancy displays. They look like LCD touch panels, but they're probably OLED or some such. I wonder how they take a sudden loss of pressure?

Apart from displays there's a bunch of other electronics that wouldn't appreciate a full vacuum. Electrolytic capacitors, for example, have a burst disc on top of them in case the pressure in the can gets too high - these would also have to be rated for vacuum. Crystal or MEMS oscillators might shift frequency in vacuum (iPhones will actually stop working in helium contaminated atmospheres because of this). Backup batteries with semi-solid or liquid electrolytes will suffer.

I know that all of this would have been looked after already, I'm just curious as to what they're using.

1GB of 4G LTE mobile hotspot data plus 3G speeds after that. Streaming video at 480p is included, as is Mobile Without Borders which offers unlimited calling and texting between the US, Canada, and Mexico. First responders can choose to upgrade their plan for $15 per month and get 20GB of mobile hotspot usage

I really dislike the arbitrary separation of hotspot and phone data in the US. It's just a handy way to charge more for data that's still just sent to the one device on their network.

I have a plan here in Australia that is 60GB (and unlimited calls, etc) for AUD45. That 60GB can be to anything, my phone, my laptop, my entire house, whatever. Deliver the data to me, I'll decide what to do with it after that. And currently that 60GB plan is unlimited due to "these uncertain times" - although I just barely use 10GB of it a month. Maybe they figured that 50GB+ usage caps are rarely reached for most users anyway, and it's better PR just to let it be wide open.

Lol, it's always about shadowy people in your country - and only your country - pulling the strings, seeking to enslave you and your kin to fulfill their Nefarious Goals, whatever they may be.

Here's a stunning revelation for you: Nobody gives a fuck about you, good or bad, whether you,personally, live or die. You are vastly overestimating your importance in all of this. So if you want to believe the CDC is pushing big pharma and death agendas, go right ahead.

Personally, I would prefer to believe that there is a global collective of health professionals all working like maniacs to determine the best way to treat COVID-19. Because it sure looks that way in Europe and Britain and Canada and Russia and China and Japan and Singapore and Australia and New Zealand, and in just about every other developed (and underdeveloped) nation on Earth.

No people are involved, it's all computers.

Each engine is relatively compartmentalised and is chock-full of high speed sensors. If you look at the footage, it's barely a flash in the exhaust stream before there's only 8 engines running.

In that time, the control system has sensed a failure, shut down fuel and oxidiser to that engine, gimballed the other engines to compensate for asymmetric thrust, and ramped up power to those engines to ensure that performance at main engine cutoff will remain adequate. (Engine thrust is lower near the end of the burn to keep acceleration down to acceptable levels, so there's plenty of spare capacity across the other 8)

Before someone on the ground could say, "oh shit!", all action has been taken.
 

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Oh slashdot, you may think you achieved perfection in 1999, but twenty years on, is unicode that hard to work around?

At least when Pebble went broke they were kind enough to provide one last firmware update that allowed their watches to be configured to talk to other servers.

And so the community created Rebble, and it was a relatively simple process to point your watch at their servers, and things were good again.

And it's NFC, so you have to basically put your phone on someone else's phone - and they also have to be at the "send this file or app to someone else via NFC" stage on their phone for this to work.

And then you have to tap a button to install said app on your phone.

So..... is this a big deal, really?