Huge SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere
Huge SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere
Observations highlight threats to GPS and similar systems from natural as well as human-caused disturbances.
Click bait. From an article last year:
These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.
https://earthsky.org/todays-image/spacex-launch-punches-a-hole-in-the-ionosphere-red-blob/
These effects may be troublesome, but they are short-lived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up again.
The problem is when you've got enough short lived microsatellites and Starlink-like constellations and whatnot that you've practically got a whole Kessler's syndrome of the damn things constantly burning up in whatever's left of the ionosphere...
The article title is misleading, but the research is interesting. Essentially it’s saying that when the rocket self-destructed due to it performing off nominal (as the first test ever of this vehicle) it ionized a large swath of the ionosphere from Mexico to the SE US which can impact the accuracy of GPS for systems that require high precision. The ionosphere reionizes very quickly naturally though so the effects are short lived (hours to maybe a day) and the impact to navigation at least should be small because of how GNSS works with built in corrections for exactly these types of errors. It feels like Nature is stretching a bit with the doom and gloom headline that the authors don’t even point to in the article (though I have not read the paper to be fair).
And to be fair, there's a lot more terrestrial things that causes GPS interference. I work with a guy that runs a boosted CB radio and it causes havoc with GPS signals. EM geometry is really interesting on how signals get encoded. It was fun studying how CDMA and GPS work.
Wireless engineering concepts are simultaneously interesting while also making me want to take my own life.
It's quite the dichotomy.
All the different ways we've managed to chop up EM waves to implement the incredible wireless technologies we use daily is fascinating. But the math... Dear lord...
Another one.
I mean I am not against rocket research, but isn't there another way without destroying several millions worth if equipment?
There is, you can be billions over budget and years behind schedule like NASA
Or like the military...
So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.
If only there was an alternative.
I mean to be fair I think they are probably the first (and maybe still the only?) company that tries to build rockets that can land back and be reused.
There's others that are trying, Blue Origin has their New Shepherd rocket that is able to land, but it's a suborbital tourism vehicle that's basically just a toy. They're working on a partly-reusable orbital launcher that's like a souped up Falcon 9 but it's still in development. Several other smaller startups are working on smaller Falcon-9-like launchers with expendable second stages, and China is building a straight up carbon-copy of the Falcon 9 and Starship. But SpaceX is the leader in this field and currently the only one who's actually successful. Everyone is following in their wake at the moment.
This is literally the first one. There's only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.
And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything. (Not to mention that at the end of all that we still had two Space Shuttles explode in the upper atmosphere, but with crews on board).
Design it, build it, test it, and get immediate feedback on it, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, and it's a lot cheaper to do it upfront.
Sure, you can do it for real and destroy billions worth of equipment.
Shit happens in R&D. Some loss is expected.
This was last year during the first IFT.
Another one what? Did you only read the headline...?
That's literally exactly what spaceX is developing, rockets you don't have to blow up every flight.
Fully reusable rockets have never been done before, but they're coming.