A reminder that Crew Dragon was originally designed to propulsively land using its Super Draco escape rockets.
This was cancelled after the Super Dracos kept blowing up on the test stand. And because the toxic hypergolic exhaust completely contaminated the landing site.
Grand Canyon Railway was running steam today, and the dome car is totally worth it.
#trains
Congrats to (14331) Alyankovic, and he be safe in the knowledge that we try not to name potentially hazardous asteroids after real people (mostly).
(Personally, I'm behind renaming AI to Super High Intelligence Thingy)
I should note that they claim that any other location would increase registration fees by 75-100%. This seems dubious at best, and likely points to structural inefficiencies in the host organization (LPI).
The other big planetary conference (DPS, associated with the larger AAS) moves every year, and is typically as large as LPSC. It will likely continue to grow at the expense of LPSC.
One of the two big US planetary science conferences, LPSC, has been under fire in recent years that it really should move on from the suburban Houston conference center they have used for two decades. Last year, attendance was down considerably, as people decided to use their limited travel funds somewhere else.
And then today, after getting proposals for 23 other locations, they announced that they aren't going to change the location for 2027. So attendance will continue to decline, and the conference will continue its slip into obscurity.
Today in catastrophically stupid things that almost happened, United Airlines cancels 9/11 flyover escorted by fighter jets
https://www.9news.com/article/news/local/denver-warns-public-911-flyover-passenger-plane-escorted-by-fighter-jets/73-2fadacc3-82ee-4e95-a826-0845c23a07b3
"This is all back tested, it's all robust"
(30 sec later)
"There's like 30,000 lines of code and I have no idea what's in there"
The Boulder Lunch Experience: Listening to two techbros, one talking about his spiritual experience with psychedelics and the other his most recent vibe coded app. Not sure which sounded more obsessed.
(The beef noodle soup was good tho)
Should add that SpaceX management is desperately trying to kill Falcon ASAP, despite it being one of the most successful launch vehicles in history.
This is supposedly for Starship, one of the biggest wet farts in the recent history of space launch. And with recent events, space launch is almost irrelevant to SpaceX as a company.
I remember when Falcon Heavy was formally announced at Space Access 2011 by Shotwell herself, though it had been in the SpaceX customer guide since circa 2006 as the "F9S9" (as opposed to the F9S5 that used five engine boosters). Much like Delta IV, it was originally supposed to use crossfed boosters, so the core was full at booster separation (like Delta IV was supposed to do, b/c Falcon 9/Heavy was largely designed by ex-McDD Delta guys).
Good to see FH continuing to launch high value NASA science missions, rather than the much more troubled Starship...
USPOL in a nutshell
Much more special, the last regularly scheduled steam train on a national network in the EU, Pt 47 65 from Wolsztyn to Poznan. Great fun.
I was somewhat remiss in not posting all the many European trains I went on over the summer. Here are some cool ones.
PkP Eurocity from Berlin to Poznan. Nothing special, but cool for me, as it was my first time in Poland.
ITALY UPDATE: I ate too much pasta yesterday, have mild tummy ache.
WARNING: This mistake may be repeated.
And transonic is particularly useful in tunnels, as that's where the Navier Stokes equation gets real chaotic and the adaptive time step in your CFD starts to get real short.
That's why most airliners look alike, they can take advantage of decades of transonic research in the common shape.
Simultaneously hilarious and heartening.
SpaceX eschewed wind tunnel testing for a long time in favor of just using CFD (ie computer simulations). CFD is great when you are iterating designs, but super slow compared to wind tunnels when your design is (mostly) frozen. That's why F1 teams invest so much in wind tunnels.
I've seen a lot of stupid space startups over the years. A lot. @KO6YQ can attest that at least half the ideas at Space Access circa 2010 were extremely dumb (and that was part of the fun!).
But believe me when I say this is the second* dumbest space startup idea I've ever heard.
*Number one was a one way trip to Mars in a modified Curiosity rover
Ooof. Things not going well for the commercial reboost mission to Swift space telescope.
https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/swift/2026/07/28/commissioning-update-for-spacecraft-to-boost-nasas-swift/
(I swear I got a haircut after flyby)