The boffins continued to eat through their four-hour launch window
How many other people read that as "lunch"?
Grim weather at Cape Canaveral almost caused a scrub of this morning's Falcon 9 launch as heavy cloud and lightning storms blanketed the region. Rocket fans remember all too well the fun and games that happened in 1969 when Apollo 12's Saturn V fired through the clouds. A lightning strike left engineers and astronauts …
"delighting the SpaceX fanboys with yet another successful touchdown, this time aboard the drone-ship "Of Course I Still Love You", stationed out in the Atlantic."
This is the problem, every time Musk is a twat, the naming thing is such a plus point.
And I feel that there are many at The Reg who also have this issue - being huge Banks fans.
Because I'm not all that interested in Tesla, I've mostly missed Musk being an idiot. So have been able to enjoy the exploits of SpaceX in blissful ignorance.
But I was closely following the rescue in Malaysia - and couldn't ignore his rampant arseholery. The fact that he's gone all Trump and doubled-down on his bollocks since, rather than shutting up or apologising, is extra depressing. He's even made quite specific claims, suggesting he's done some research on the guy, only for journos to check them out and find them to be bollocks. It sort of takes the gloss of reading about SpaceX being successful at the moment, which is a shame.
And I feel that there are many at The Reg who also have this issue - being huge Banks fans.
I also think that if Musk wants to be taken seriously in the manned space flight business, all his vehicles should be infra-black.
(That's not a Shadows reference, but another band..)
More seriously, I guess there's a lot of truth in Musk's comments about taking Tesla private. So every quarter, we get to pick over Tesla's financial details, and then gamblers can play the higher/lower games. With SpaceX being private, we can ignore all that and just geek out in front of the launches.
(and never mind flamethrowers.. develop a mechanism that lets us eperience the full infrasound from a launch via the 'net. Neighbours may complain, but it's progress baby!)
His ideas are getting progressively weirder.
1. Make cool electric cars: that's a great idea.
2. Make reusable space rockets: risky, but luckily it's going well.
3. High speed trains inside vacuum tubes! That's just loopy.
4. Dig loads of tunnels and put all the cars underground: he's reached a new low with this one.
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"@I ain't Spartacus, exactly how close were you following that rescue in Malaysia (sic)?!"
About as closely as you've been following the twat's tweets would be my guess - you appear to be unaware of last week's outpourings on the same subject.
I've yet to see any news of apologies and remorse for his latest allegations.
The real problem is that
1. the spacewalking astronauts are scheduled to come back down on Soyuz on Oct 4, so there's kind of a hard deadline there and time's getting tight.
2. The ground needs to use the robot arm to pre-position the batteries for the spacewalk, which takes 3 or 4 days. That's bumping up against the time left too. If the flight docks by the 16th, which is the earliest possible now... then they've got 4 days. Tight.
As astronaut repair crews have been saying since time immemorial, "Weeeeelll, you can't get the parts guv. I mean I've spoken to the depot til I'm blue in the face, but do they listen? They just fob you off with rubbish about typhoons in Guam. I mean! I ask you! And then you've got your labour, and your wear-and-tear, space ice cream... I don't know, people are just so impatient nowadays. Everything's rush-rush-rush. Look, I'm not promising nothing, but I can probably fit you in next Tuesday. And what cowboy put this thing in anyway?"