Yeah, I started trying it on my old tablet recently because of Chrome issues (for some reason, Chrome started displaying embedded videos as just a green rectangle, and the fixes I found online did not work). Yes, it is somewhat prone to freezing/crashing. I'm also not a fan of the way that when you open a site from the home page, it opens in a new tab instead of the current tab, so I always end up with a ton of unnecessary tabs open. Weird behaviour. I don't think I'm going to stick with it.

It's only a cheap payload though, $79 million I think I read, very small beer in Mars mission terms. Plus if they miss the 2024 Mars window (likely), then it will probably have had several launches by 2026. But it does seem a little foolhardy nonetheless.

Ah, the good old days, when leaving my home PC's on 24/7 seemed perfectly reasonable. Yeah, the oldest bill I have with my current supplier is from 2019, £0.136/kWh, as recently as that. To be fair, I don't think it's much of a UK government issue, there are several countries in Europe paying higher charges than us, I think we're around the European average.

It's possible. My electricity rate for a recent week, factoring in the standing charge and VAT (sales tax), comes to £0.38, or $0.48 (without the standing charge, it's £0.28). However I'm a low-use electricity customer, being I'm single, work from an office, have gas heating and stove etc, so the standing charge makes a disproportionately high contribution to my bill. I suspect the figures you saw are simply out of date, because there was a period a while back when they were that high, shortly after the Ukraine war started and Europe was scrambling to find alternative energy supplies.

You can also get off-peak tariffs to charge EVs overnight etc at around £0.08/kWh from my supplier, so if you're in a position to take advantage of that, your rate can come way down.

The confusion comes from poor wording in the article, I think. The sentence in the article says "This magnetic damping device, weighing approximately 100 grams, is engineered to be attached to satellites nearing the end of their operational lives.", which does make it sound like it is to be attached to satellites already in orbit and reaching their end of life, but I think that's just the author's poor wording, or perhaps his own confusion. The description on Airbus' website doesn't use that wording. Seems to make much more sense to build it into satellites before launch than to need a whole extra mission to fit it.

Well, the other main problem with airships is the ballast issue. Yes, you can build an airship to carry an arbitrarily big payload, but then if you want to offload 100 tons of cargo, you need to take on 100 tons of ballast, limiting their destinations to places where a suitable supply of ballast is available (likely not the case in many disaster-relief scenarios such as they seem to be targeting). Nobody has really solved that yet. The Hybrid Air Vehicles approach of building a vehicle with some negative buoyancy offset by some aerodynamic lift works, but only allows for pretty limited payload. Compressing some of the lift gas to offset buoyancy requires heavy pumps and tanks, and nobody has made the maths work for that yet. The article says Pathfinder 1 can only carry four tons of cargo, and mentions water ballast, so they're not doing anything novel there, and that's why the payload is basically nothing. Without a solution to that, the usefulness of airships for carrying cargo is very limited indeed.

You can actually skip the first five words of your comment. Doordash has never been profitable, and probably never will be.

I can't believe you actually got upvoted for such an obviously factually incorrect comment. FYI the "Send To->Compressed (Zipped) Folder" Windows Explorer context menu function, which has been in Windows since forever (pretty sure it was introduced in Windows XP), allows "zipping stuff" natively.

The CAA is working on it; New trials move the UK closer to allowing everyday drone deliveries and flying beyond visual line of sight. No reason to think regulations will be a showstopper in the not-too-distant future.

You wouldn't sell $5 billion worth of bitcoin on a CEX, you would sell it via an OTC desk, the trades wouldn't go through the public order book, and thus the impact on the market price would be minimal. You probably wouldn't sell $5 billion in one go even so.

This article has screenshots of the ad. It's in no way a deepfake, and could in no way be mistaken for the real Tom Hanks. It's no clear if AI is actually involved either.

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.