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from the if-at-first-you-don't-suceed... dept.
Elon Musk's latest SpaceX idea involves a party balloon and bounce house:
Elon Musk took to Twitter Sunday night to announce a new recovery method for an upper-stage SpaceX rocket. A balloon — a "giant party balloon" to quote him directly — will ferry part of a rocket to a bounce house. Seriously.
[...] This isn't the first time a balloon has been used to return a rocket. Legendary programmer John Carmack's rocket company attempted to use a ballute in 2012 to return a rocket body and nose cone. It didn't work as planned and, according to officials at the time, the rocket made a "hard landing" around the Spaceport America property in New Mexico.
SpaceX has yet to recover the entire Falcon 9 fairing despite adding a parachute and positioning a boat to catch it.
The TESS launch has been delayed to Wednesday.
Also at Engadget and Space.com.
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Wednesday April 18 2018, @05:34PM (1 child)
Helium is, indeed, a limited resource on Earth. Most of the Helium we get (I believe essentially all) is a side effect of natural gas production. When that stops, no more Helium. I'm not sure that it's recovered during fracking, but it ought to be.
IIUC, essentially all the Helium on Earth is the result of radioactive decay. (Anything that emits alpha particles is emitting Helium, as Helium is just an alpha particle that's slowed down and acquired an electron or so.) But that's a very slow process.) Stars make Helium by fusing Hydrogen, but that's not something we're up to yet.
So we should be banking and conserving Helium, because when it's released it's gone. It's average molecular velocity at stratosphere temperatures is above escape velocity. And it doesn't form molecular compounds to slow it down.
All that said, there's more Helium available at the moment than we currently use, and we're currently acquiring it faster than we are using it. (But since we aren't saving it, this is of doubtful consequence. If we start needing a bunch for, say, superconducting power lines, we'll need more than is available.)
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 18 2018, @07:57PM
Giant Cryonic containers for it. The larger the container and the smaller the surface area it can heat through the cheaper you can store it over time thanks to economy of scale.
If we started doing that we could have enough helium to provide for any major industrial use until we are in a position to recover more either on-plant, or off.