It’s been a busy week in space news, and very little of it was good. We’ll start with the one winner of the week, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1, which landed successfully on the Moon’s surface on March 2. The lander is part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and carries ten scientific payloads, including a GPS/GNSS receiver that successfully tracked signals from Earth-orbiting satellites. All of the scientific payloads have completed their missions, which is good because the lander isn’t designed to withstand the long, cold lunar night only a few days away. The landing makes Firefly the first commercial outfit to successfully soft-land something on the Moon, and being the first at anything is always a big deal.
Slightly less impressive was Intuitive Machines’ attempt at a landing a day later. Their NOVA-C robotic lander Athena managed a somewhat controlled landing, but the spacecraft is lying on its side rather than upright, a surprisingly common failure mode for recent lunar landings. Also in the failure category is the loss of the world’s first private asteroid mining mission, as well as SpaceX Starship test flight 8, which ended in spectacular fashion this week as Starship exploded soon after booster separation. As usual, Scott Manley has the best analysis of the incident, which seemed to involve a fire in the engine bay that led to a rapid loss of thrust from four of its six engines, and sent the spacecraft tumbling before tearing itself apart. The only good news from the flight was the third successful catch of the returning booster by the chopsticks, which just never gets old.
What does get old is stories about printer manufacturers and their anti-consumer hijinks, especially when it involves one of the only manufacturers who wasn’t playing the “buy our consumables or we brick it” game. In addition to just about every other printer maker, Brother now stands accused of sending firmware up to printers that turns off functionality if non-OEM cartridges are used. The accusations come from Louis Rossman, well-known for his right-to-repair advocacy and, ironically, long-time proponent of Brother printers as least likely to be bricked. His accusation that “Brother is now among the rest of them” is based on a pretty small sample of affected users, and a self-selected one at that, so take that with the requisite amount of salt. For their part, Brother denies the claim, stating simply that “Brother firmware updates do not block the use of third-party ink in our machines.” They don’t go much beyond that by way of an explanation of what’s happening to the users reporting problems other than to say that the users may be confused by the fact that “we like to troubleshoot with Brother Genuine supplies.” What the real story is is anyone’s guess at this point, and the best advice we can offer is either to avoid printers altogether, or just buy the cheapest one you can get and harvest it for parts once the starter cartridges are empty.
If like us you’ve accumulated a large collection of physical media films and TV shows to while away the long dark days of a post-apocalyptic nightmare where Netflix and Hulu are but a distant memory, you might want to rethink your strategy. Some DVD aficionados have found a troubling trend with “DVD rot,” especially with discs manufactured by Warner Brothers Discovery between 2006 and 2008. It’s not clear what’s going on, but it looks like the polycarbonate cover is delaminating from the inner Mylar layer, resulting in cloudy areas that obscure the data. Warner is aware of the problem and will replace defective discs with the same title if possible, or exchange it for a title of like value if the original is no longer available. We’re dismayed that this defect probably includes our beloved Looney Tunes collection, but on the upside, now we have an excuse to sit through forty straight hours of cartoons.
And finally, if you were a NASA rocket engineer in the 1960s, skipping leg day wasn’t an option. That’s because the Saturn V full-stack shake test on the Apollo program was a very hands-on feet-on process. The shake test was performed to make sure nothing was loose on the stack, and that it would be able to withstand not only the shaking induced by those five massive F-1 engines, but also the occasional hurricane that Florida is famous for. To get the rocket shaking, engineers sat on the deck of the gantry with their legs bridging the gap and their feet up against the side of the service module and gave it all they had. Other engineers literally backed them up, to provide something to push against, while another team on the uppermost platform used a rope to play tug-of-war with the command module. They were able to get the stack moving pretty good, with a meter or so of deflection at the escape tower. It does raise the question, though: what would they have done if the test failed?
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