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- Hacker News
- > though it does highlight a certain carelessness about how leftover space hardware (space junk) is disposed of.
My thoughts exactly.
by tempodox - Is there a discord I can join to follow along live?by polishdude20
- Space 1999by anonshadow
- something they didn't mention, what is in this upper stage? I'm presuming a rocket motor and some fuel is that right..? They do a calculation of energy release on impact, but I'm wondering if there is any fuel left and whether that would affect their equation?by clort
- I can't really think of much besides maybe some batteries. The fuel and oxidizer are supposed to be dumped shortly after payload deployment to prevent any issues with blowing up. Even if it wasn't dumped, its been a year, so it would have boiled off.by tekla
- Like most upper stages, Falcon 9 makes itself inert after a mission by venting any remaining propellant. Otherwise there's a risk that propellant could boil off, increasing pressure until the tank explodes, creating a debris cloud. Since pretty much any collision in space is catastrophic, it's easier to track and avoid one large piece of debris rather than a bunch of small ones.by ggreer
- What's really impressive is that, according to the picture with labels, it's going to crash near Mos Eisley.
EDIT: sorry, Moseley ; )
- > Generally speaking, such objects are very poorly tracked.
Why is there not any regulations about this stuff? So we can't throw a napkin out the window (not that I condone littering), but SpaceX can just literally throw stuff into space that either re-enters Earth (adds to air and environmental issues), swings around in space untracked, or hits the Moon without any reprecussions? Why isn't it on SpaceX to track the trash they're throwing up?
by bmitc - It's NASA's and the FCC's responsibility and this is allowed.
- Soon we'll need to call Roger Wilco to take care of all this junk.by glimshe
- Welp, my initial thought based on the link was that this was part of Project Pluto:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Pluto
https://web.archive.org/web/20200329022906/http://www.merkle...
It is not... This is a Falcon-9 rocket stage, not a part from the Flying Crowbar or any similar nightmare-device.
by norenh - After so much time hearing about how SpaceX dumps rocket debris all over Boca Chica it's kind of amusing that they're also leaving trash on the moon. It would be cool if we sent people back to the moon one day and they took photos next to junk like this. Or whatever is left of it.by dopamean
- You realize we've been smashing shit into the moon since Apollo right?
Also you know the literal trash bags of trash and poop that Apollo dumped overboard.
This smashing into the the moon will leave a random crater, and last time I checked, lots of craters on the moon.
by tekla - There is not much rocket debris in Boca Chica. If you do find something sell it on ebay.by ralfd
- This "trash" could provide a lot of valuable metal and maybe other stuff, for future moon missions. I wouldn't really call it trash.by whatsupdog
- > Over 600 Falcon 9 rockets have been launched. Most of the upper stages are either in orbits close to the earth or have already re-entered the earth's atmosphere. A few are orbiting the sun. The object that will be hitting the moon has been orbiting the earth for a little over a year.by sixtyj
- Just imagine what you could build with 600 Falcon 9 upper stages.by perilunar
- I love this page. Text, photos, links. Straight up HTML 4, maybe even using a template in a text editor and FTPed to go live. I didn't see any inline or referenced CSS. No scripts. No ads. No social junk. The home page even has a <table> just like it's 1994.
What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing? That's how I used to do things before publishing tools and CMS and platforms took over, but I know the security landscape has changed quite a bit, and such pages are always in the deep long tail of Google results (and therefore practically invisible to AI summaries, which often surface complete junk as sources).
by ilamont - > What are the drawbacks to reverting to this type web publishing?
It's nearly impossible to get overlapping text without css...
by toast0 - The author's email obfuscation holds up well against small local models too, just for kicks neither Qwen-9B, Gemma-12B, nor GPT-OSS-20B could read it, giving results like "poc.otulptcejorp@otulm".by accrual
- I wish the entire web was in this format. Really. May need a bit of work to navigate around but very fast, no BS, no tracking.
- You could easily make a browser extension that passes each page through an AI agent that will rewrite the page in the given style. It’s fun.by deadbabe
- We get submissions like this fairly commonly (we also get ones that are "modern" but use hand-crafted CSS, use only un-minified first-party-written JS for progressive enhancement, etc.). But a large fraction of them are about the style as well as exhibiting it.
The main drawback seems to be that larger communities than HN will, at best, not care.
by zahlman - And it's so fast even with pictures. I miss the old internet.by barbazoo
- The main drawback with the page's unstyled design is that the page is not mobile friendly.
Publishing web pages by manually editing HTML files is still very common today; any GitHub Pages blog does this.
by sheept - It highlighted something that I hadn't realised had been impacting me. The latency of the modern web.
There are a lot of hyperlinks on there and clicking around on various related articles was near instantaneous. It actually made navigation very useful and not feel like a burden. I will take that over any visual flair any day.
by ColdStream