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.
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…
This is about rocket launches, not satellites.
Another one.
I mean I am not against rocket research, but isn’t there another way without destroying several millions worth if equipment?
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.
There is, you can be billions over budget and years behind schedule like NASA
Keep licking them boots.
My god, the fucking dumbasses on here.
“Oh my god, Elon Musk’s companies make electric cars, therefore electric cars must be bad”.
Great logic man! Yep, hardware rich development programs and fixed price government contracting must also be bad because SpaceX has used them to lower launch costs for NASA by orders of magnitude.
Jesus fucking christ, the dumbass blind hate for SpaceX is fucking mind numbing.
Indeed, I’m surprised this dumb clickbait title didn’t literally include Elon Musk’s name like so many other “Elon Musk’s <Company Name> Does <Thing That’s Actually Normal But Sounds Bad>!” headlines.
Yes, Elon Musk has some awful views and does some awful things. Doesn’t mean everything he does is therefore bad. Henry Ford was a colossal antisemite, as another example, and did some really weird and awful things to his employees. Unfortunately some of the same personal characteristics that can lead people to be innovative industrialists can often also lead to them being assholes.
