Grab a helmet because retired ISS batteries are hurtling back to Earth A pallet of used batteries from the International Space Station (ISS) is due to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere at some point in the next day, and some parts of the 2.6 metric ton mass are likely to hit the ground. The pallet contains nine batteries in total and was released from the ISS on January 11, 2021. According to ESA's …
34K Big Macs and still standing...
I remember going to a burger joint few days after seeing "Supersize me" with my wife and daughter.
We were eating outside (cold but sunny day in February), and the girl noticed a very round sparrow moving between the tables and eating bits of fries.
She stopped going to McDo & the like that day (she was 10).
Went yesterday with wifey and our two sons (7 and 9).
They all wanted cheeseburgers.
"You don't like melted cheese mixed in with your food" is what I told them (while showing pictures of other stuff available for purchase).
Of course they didn't listen. And of course they gave up after a single bite.
I doubt McD will be on our map in the foreseeable future. (my burger was okayish: Dry meat, spongy flavorless bread and no other taste than the small piece of sugared cucumber-from-a-jar hiding inside there somewhere)
What kind of cretin doesn't like melted cheese?
Not that SickDonald's serves cheese, of course. Nor meat, nor bread. It's just plastic and cardboard.
Pretty sure the pickle doesn't have any sugar, if it did I'd have noticed and retched, I despise sweet pickles. Those and the onions are about all that place has that's edible, even the lettuce is somehow substandard.
How did they check? When Whitby Abbey did their vampire stunt a year or two back they had one invigilator (and one really was far from enough to stop it sliding into chaos) checking outfits and counting. Maybe they counted all the receipts and boxes but how do they know they were all his?
> "The re-entry will occur between -51.6 degrees South and 51.6 degrees North." This is quite a large area,
Yes, yes it is.
As you don't give any range of longitude, that is pretty much - everywhere[1] that we are on the planet.
[1] not good enough with the old mental arithmetic to calculate the percentage of the Earth's surface that lies between those two, but "most" is not inaccurate.
《As you don't give any range of longitude, that is pretty much - everywhere[1] that we are on the planet.》
My calculation makes it 78.36% of the Earth's surface assuming longitudes 180E to 180W.
Or
0.5 × (long_1° - long_2°)÷360° × [sine (lat_1) - sine (lat_2)]
with E. and N. positive and W. and S. negative.
You would be safe in your igloo. ;)
Even between 30°N and 30°S covers half the globe although I am not sure those latitudes would worry el Rego readers overmuch.
Of the 78% a goodly proportion would be ocean but Sod's laws would drop a couple hundred-weight of debris on a deckchair aboard a luxury Carribean cruise while you were sunbaking.
I can think of a dozen or so world figures whose contributions to history could be improved by having a decent chunk drop on their heads but those are 1 in a million chances that the lady never favours.
Thats a big area and it covers the area controlled by my local council, They are red hot on catching fly tippers. So much as one discarded cigarette end could catch a fine of £400 pounds. A pallet full of batteries deliberately dumped in a country lane would attract the maximum fine.
There is a Starship load of stuff Musk does that I wish he didn't so there is no need to add fiction.
Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space. Progress has been so slow that he is likely to die of old age before we find out if this is genuine intent or just public relations.
No, I do not trust Musk or Bezos. Yes, I am very aware that they are both arseholes. Here are some techniques for failing to get your message across:
*) Preaching to the choir.
*) Accusing an arsehole of doing something that a different arsehole is far more guilty of when there is a long list of horrid things the first arsehole has boasted about doing.
You are not going to convince me because I was convinced long ago (about two weeks after "Funding secured", I started looking for evidence, found Solar City, deisel powered Tesla chargers and thing went down hill from there). You are not going to convince any Musk fanbois - mostly because it is impossible to convince someone with a financial interest in not understanding but partly because any time you get a fact provably wrong they will dismiss anything else you say even if it is right.
I genuinely believe Bezos' "millions of people living and working in space" is a public relations statement, not an ambition he will dedicate his life to. I do think he will stay in the space business until Kuiper crushes Starlink. I think progress on that goal will be glacial and I will be dead before it happens. While Bezos is working on that goal I will not be able to prove his Expanse promise is worth less than an Amazon sourced fake SDHC card so I will stay with the abundant shit that can be proved.
"he will stay in the space business until Kuiper crushes Starlink."
Neither will be around that long. Gwynne has already admitted that the life expectancy of the Starlink satellites is 5 years. Elon has said the fully deployed constellation will be 42,000. Going from memory, after build out, it will take around 70 replacement sats being launched every 3 days, forever, to keep the slots full. For two services to be doing that is insane. Even having one is criminal.
"Musk like Bezos will say anything just to get contracts from the us gov."
Blue Origin has had one contract for ~~ $165mn other than the contract for building a lunar lander now that it's obvious SpaceX hasn't a chance in hell of delivering on time/ever. Jeff has been funding BO out of his own pocket by selling Amazon stock. He doesn't need to beg for money from the government to keep the doors open.
Bezos is so wrong - Millions - pah! as even if they were working in space it would at best be a two day week and they would expect to be WAH (watching Bargain Hunt or the like) the other 3 days as week and expect to be transported on someone else dollar.
To that end he'd just have a ghost town (Cue the Specials) for 5 days out of 7
"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space."
Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey.
...
Nah. Can't think of one. Not for the first time I'm left thinking that these "tech billionaires" are actualy just billionaires and haven't a clue about the tech. They're businessmen who got lucky early and haven't regressed to the mean yet. (Though Elon is having a damn good go. I wish him luck.)
"Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey."
There's some interesting science to be done in micro-G, but millions? I don't see it. It would be far cheaper to make things in the moon that to support a million people in space. We already know that us meatsacks do very poorly spending extended periods of time in space. What isn't well known is how much better we do in fractional G. The moon could be healthier for humans and even with that, a million is not going to be sustainable.
"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space. Progress has been so slow that he is likely to die of old age before we find out if this is genuine intent or just public relations."
Jeff is big on that as Gerard K. O'neil was one of his professors. Whether Jeff thinks it's possible within his lifetime is far different than Elon promising there will be a manned colony on Mars in a couple of years. Of course, Elon promised that years ago and the first of the 100 person Starships should have been on its way by this year, at least.
I've been casually looking for news of where this landed. By the absence of news, I'm guessing it wasn't anywhere important or it would have made the news. Or maybe it landed on a EV battery factory and the news is being suppressed to stop people panicing over the opening shots in the Rise of the Machines.
"Too bad they couldn't strap a couple small thrusters on the puppy and aim it at the sun."
Too bad they can't strap it to a prototype lunar lander and try to set it down on the moon. The more refined materials there are on the moon, the easier it will be to do things. It would be interesting to design something like an ore processor/smelter for the moon and send parts for it up as parts of other things destined for the lunar surface. If lunar landers that won't be used again were made like something from a Mechano/Erector set, there would be more and more uniform bits and pieces that could be turned into something else once there. ISRU is great, but the first steps towards that are the most difficult.
At the velocity this debris will be traveling a helmet offers zero protection. Take a look at shuttle radiator damage from paint chips many less than .5 mm in size, Note one of the holes was from a .3mm piece of plastic circuit board. The width of a human hair is .12mm, so the 1.6mm paint chip is the size of 13 human hairs. I would guess the debris surviving the re-entry of this battery pallet will be considerably larger.
https://hvit.jsc.nasa.gov/impact-images/space-shuttle.cfm
"the probability of debris hitting Germany is considered to be very low."
The probability of it hitting any particular place is very low. That doesn't make any difference to the fact that the probability of it hitting somewhere is one.
What's the equivalent in Boeing 737 door plugs which must surely be the Register unit of falling objects?
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