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Cool links for today...
Sep. 30th, 2013 01:41 pmI don't often do links and it's either cool links or a LONG REALLY REALLY PISSED OFF RANT ABOUT THE INSANITY OF THE AMERICAN POLITICAL SYSTEM.
Firstly, from my corner of the world, the Picobrew home brewing system. An automated 'espresso' maker for brewing. This looks amazing. simple to use and play with and deposits the beer in a 5G keg ready for your kegorator. I may well donate. Apparently the excellent Fremont Brewing Company have been using it to prototype their batches.
Secondly, the results of the Space-X test flight of the new Falcon-9. Basically, after separation of the 1st stage, it was able to rotate in flight and restart its engines. It then attempted a powered descent. There it hit a problem as the stage started to spin which forced the fuel against the sides and starved the engines. That's not entirely a surprise and relatively easy to fix.
Even more impressive was the tried to do the same with the second stage. That didn't go so well as they weren't able to restart the engines due to a pressurization problem. Again, they got the data on that and think it can be fixed.
This is a huge step to lower cost space access(*). Huge.
(*) - I refuse to use 'cheap' in this context. Space travel ain't never going to be 'cheap'.
Firstly, from my corner of the world, the Picobrew home brewing system. An automated 'espresso' maker for brewing. This looks amazing. simple to use and play with and deposits the beer in a 5G keg ready for your kegorator. I may well donate. Apparently the excellent Fremont Brewing Company have been using it to prototype their batches.
Secondly, the results of the Space-X test flight of the new Falcon-9. Basically, after separation of the 1st stage, it was able to rotate in flight and restart its engines. It then attempted a powered descent. There it hit a problem as the stage started to spin which forced the fuel against the sides and starved the engines. That's not entirely a surprise and relatively easy to fix.
Even more impressive was the tried to do the same with the second stage. That didn't go so well as they weren't able to restart the engines due to a pressurization problem. Again, they got the data on that and think it can be fixed.
This is a huge step to lower cost space access(*). Huge.
(*) - I refuse to use 'cheap' in this context. Space travel ain't never going to be 'cheap'.
