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Cake day: June 18th, 2023

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  • The Linux software you can get as a regular user from your typical Linux distributions is absolutely not any more secure on average than your typical Windows software.

    I say this as someone who writes application programs on both systems.

    I think it’s really debatable whether the Linux kernel is really any more secure than the Windows NT kernel. Linux advocates have pushed the “many eyes, shallow bugs” line for a long time, but high profile lapses seem to really have put the lie to that.








  • The gist of it is that to reenter the atmosphere safely, you need to point the heat shield at the oncoming air. To do that, you need working reaction control thrusters.

    Boeing Starliner capsule apparently has some kind of latent failure mode with its thrusters where they start degrading and can fail in a few hours of operation. On the way up, the spacecraft was in transit for around 26 hours, and recorded five thrusters disabled, of which four relit in subsequent testing. One thruster is apparently really dead. The capsule has about fifty thrusters, so being down five doesn’t really compromise steering.

    Ground testing of these thrusters was performed at White Sands, NM, and apparently NASA really did not like the results. But I haven’t heard anything about what those tests found.

    There’s also a helium leak (active only when the RCS is warmed up), but it’s not clear if this is a critical factor. Compressed helium is used to force the fuel to go out of the thrusters.

    As far as I know, the actual estimated risk of failure for this capsule is still pretty low, but now believed to be high enough that they might as well not take the risk. (And remember these are test astronauts… They have a pretty high risk tolerance).

    Also, even if the risk of one reentry is maybe low enough to try it, the White Sands and orbital data probably revealed a systemic design problem with the RCS that now precludes operational certification. Since neither Boeing nor NASA is willing to pay for a second test flight, this capsule is effectively dead as an ongoing space program. So why take any kind of risk on a reentry if you don’t have to?





  • Especially crazy when Douglas Adams has a writing credit on the screenplay, and all indications are that he was substantially involved in it’s contents.

    Edit:

    The script we shot was very much based on the last draft that Douglas wrote… All the substantive new ideas in the movie… are brand new Douglas ideas written especially for the movie by him… Douglas was always up for reinventing HHGG in each of its different incarnations and he knew that working harder on some character development and some of the key relationships was an integral part of turning HHGG into a movie.

    - Robbie Stamp, Executive Producer