The Unraveling of Space-Time | Quanta Magazine
This special in-depth edition of Quanta is fascinating and very nicely put together.
Link tags: space
281
The Lunacy of Artemis (Idle Words)
Maciej rips NASA’s Artemis programme a new one:
Advocates for Artemis insist that the program is more than Apollo 2.0. But as we’ll see, Artemis can’t even measure up to Apollo 1.0. It costs more, does less, flies less frequently, and exposes crews to risks that the steely-eyed missile men of the Apollo era found unacceptable. It’s as if Ford in 2024 released a new model car that was slower, more accident-prone, and ten times more expensive than the Model T.
When a next-generation lunar program can’t meet the cost, performance, or safety standards set three generations earlier, something has gone seriously awry.
European astronaut rookies make the grade - BBC News
Rosemary and her dad are regular attendees of Brighton Astro so everyone is pretty excited about this news!
Okay, Color Spaces — ericportis.com
Everyone is quite rightly linking to this great interactive explainer on colour. It does a great job of describing complex concepts in a clear accessible way.
How NASA Learned to Love the Worm Logo - The New York Times
A delightful ode to a once-divisive design.
Monaspace
Five lovely monospaced variable fonts.
Erik Wernquist - Short Film: “One Revolution Per Minute”
Suppose you had a luxury spacecraft spinning at 1RPM to create 0.5g using centripetal force, as is often depicted in science fiction:
I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect - when it comes to the comfort of the experience - would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
Clamp calculator | Utopia
Oh, this is a nice addition to the Utopia set of tools: when you don’t need a full-on type scale but you still want to figure out fluid clamp() values, the clamp calculator has you covered.
It’s got permalinks too!
Why We’ll Never Live in Space - Scientific American
In space travel, “Why?” is perhaps the most important ethical question. “What’s the purpose here? What are we accomplishing?” Green asks. His own answer goes something like this: “It serves the value of knowing that we can do things—if we try really hard, we can actually accomplish our goals. It brings people together.” But those somewhat philosophical benefits must be weighed against much more concrete costs, such as which other projects—Earth science research, robotic missions to other planets or, you know, outfitting this planet with affordable housing—aren’t happening because money is going to the moon or Mars or Alpha Centauri.
404 Page Not Found | Kate Wagner
Considering the average website is less than ten years old, that old warning from your parents that says to “be careful what you post online because it’ll be there forever” is like the story your dad told you about chocolate milk coming from brown cows, a well-meant farce. On the contrary, librarians and archivists have implored us for years to be wary of the impermanence of digital media; when a website, especially one that invites mass participation, goes offline or executes a huge dump of its data and resources, it’s as if a smallish Library of Alexandria has been burned to the ground. Except unlike the burning of such a library, when a website folds, the ensuing commentary from tech blogs asks only why the company folded, or why a startup wasn’t profitable. Ignored is the scope and species of the lost material, or what it might have meant to the scant few who are left to salvage the digital wreck.
Space Elevator
Scroll up to the Kármán line.
Some simple ways to make content look good - Set Studio
This is a terrific walkthrough from Andy showing how smart fundamentals in your CSS can give you a beautiful readable document without much work.
Light Years Ahead | The 1969 Apollo Guidance Computer - YouTube
This video was in my “Watch Later” queue for ages but I finally got ‘round to watching it this weekend. It’s ace! Great content, great narrative, great delivery—would’ve made a good dConstruct talk.
Fujichia: Sayable Space
This game is hard:
Sayable Space is a television game for 1 or more people, it consists of saying “Space” out loud at the same time as Jean-Luc Picard (Patrick Stewart) during the intro to Star Trek: The Next Generation. Or actually that’s just half of the game. The second half is saying “Space”, and the first half is remembering that you are playing this game.
Inside the Globus INK: a mechanical navigation computer for Soviet spaceflight
The positively steampunk piece of hardware used for tracking Alexei Leonov’s Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Why Not Mars (Idle Words)
I’ve come to believe the best way to look at our Mars program is as a faith-based initiative. There is a small cohort of people who really believe in going to Mars, the way some people believe in ghosts or cryptocurrency, and this group has an outsize effect on our space program.
Maciej lays out the case against a crewed mission to Mars.
Like George Lucas preparing to release another awful prequel, NASA is hoping that cool spaceships and nostalgia will be enough to keep everyone from noticing that their story makes no sense. But you can’t lie your way to Mars, no matter how sincerely you believe in what you’re doing.
And don’t skip the footnotes:
Fourth graders writing to Santa make a stronger case for an X-Box than NASA has been able to put together for a Mars landing.
Designing a Utopian layout grid: Working with fluid responsive values in a static design tool. | Utopia
James describes his process for designing fluid grid layouts, which very much involves working with the grain of the web but against the grain of our design tools:
In 2022 our design tools are still based around fixed-size artboards, while we’re trying to design products which scale gracefully to suit any screen.
BBC World TV News interview of Ariel Waldman for the NASA Artemis I launch! - YouTube
This is so cool—Ariel was on BBC World TV News live during the Artemis launch!
Aegir.org | Five Moons
In a way, I find these pictures—taken by someone from the ground with regular equipment—just as awe-inspiring as the images from the James Webb Space Telescope.