Numlock News: February 16, 2024 • Classified Satellites, Carry-On, Space Fire

Feb 16, 2024

By Walt Hickey

Have a great weekend! We’re off Monday in observation of Presidents’ Day, we’ll see you Tuesday.

Satellites

The U.S. Space Force has cut $2 billion from a Northrop Grumman contract to develop classified military communications satellites amid increased costs. The satellite(s) was and/or were related to Northrop’s “restricted Space Business,” which means the classified stuff. This hardly means that Northrop Grumman is out of the game, as before the cut it still had a $40.4 billion backlog in its space business. The funding for the program was in an $841 million procurement request, which was cut in 2024 due to a $497 million classified overrun. This is bad news for the ■■■■■ ■■■■■ program, a longtime staple of the ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■ division that ■■■■■■■■■ several different ■■■■■■■■■ in ■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■■■, ■■■■■■ and ■■■■■■, and likely means that ■■ ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■ ever since ■■■■■ ■■■■■■■ ■■ ■■■■ ■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■ Four Loko ■■■ ■ ■■■■■■■■■ ■■■ ■ ■■■■■■■ ■■■■■■■ MoviePass ■■■ ■■■ ■■■■■■■■ ■■■■.

Anthony Capaccio, Bloomberg

SIKU

A decade ago, a group of Inuit elders and hunters from Nunavut came up with SIKU, which is a small social networking platform that serves the community when it comes to monitoring sea ice changes in the southeastern Hudson Bay. In 2019, it was upgraded from a portal where data could be logged to a social network, where users could upload photos of conditions and dangers they observe on hunts and trips on the ice. Since early 2024, over 25,000 people from 120 communities in the north have made over 75,000 posts on SIKU, in multiple languages such as Inuktitut, Cree, Innu and Greenlandic.

Hannah Hoag, Hakai Magazine

Saffire-VI

Usually, you want to avoid having any fires at all whatsoever inside of a spacecraft, for reasons that are probably obvious. NASA has been conducting a number of Spacecraft Fire Safety Experiments, or Saffire, over the past eight years, designed to better understand how fire behaves in space. The latest battery of experiments, Saffire-VI, consisted of 19 different runs, where the impact of fire on different materials and under different air conditions was measured in what is essentially a wind tunnel in space in the orbital laboratory of the uninhabited Cygnus spacecraft.

Lauren Low, NASA

Telescopes

Yesterday a commercial spacecraft took off carrying two telescopes bound for the moon. The far side of the moon is protected from Earth’s radio noise and can pick up signals that terrestrial telescopes can’t, all without needing the sunshields and coolants that orbital telescopes need, given that the moon is the best sunshield of all. Only two telescopes have made it to the moon — one on Apollo 16 in 1972, the other in 2013 on China’s Chang’e-3 mission — and the IM-1 mission is on contract with NASA to see about putting another one on the moon next week in a crater 300 kilometers from the lunar south poll. One instrument, ILO-X, has a 3-centimeter aperture that’s angling to image the Milky Way, while the ROLSES telescope will consist of four 2.5-meter antennas that can study magnetic fields.

Daniel Clery, Science

Warehouses

Retailers are cutting back on storage space, meaning that lots of them are subleasing that space and the warehousing market is flush with available supply. The market exploded in 2022, with rents up 24 percent year over year, vastly higher than in 2019 when rents rose just 6.3 percent. In 2023, rent hikes slowed down, up 12.5 percent year over year. In the final quarter of 2023, the amount of warehouse space available for sublease was at 156.2 million square feet, up from 75.6 million square feet a year earlier.

Liz Young, The Wall Street Journal

Carry On, Carry On

We’re rapidly approaching the end of the road when it comes to the current social contract around carry-on baggage. Airlines overbook, because it’s way easier to stow the overflow than deny a carry-on up front. Sure, a Boeing 737-800 has 28 large overhead bins, which can each hold six bags, enough for 168 bags, but passengers abuse the system, as a whole lot of carry-ons are conspicuously less well-constructed or larger than the standard 22-inch-by-14-inch-by-9-inch limits. The hard-shell style of bags are also less easy to cram than the soft-shell bags that used to be popular. The quest to build a bigger overhead bin is an arms race between Boeing and Airbus, and carriers love it: 80 percent of the American Airlines mainline fleet has the new, larger, optional Boeing Space Bin luggage bins.

Ian Bogost, The Atlantic

Dating Apps

A new study published in Mobile Media & Communications found that people who use dating apps tend to be less satisfied overall with their relationship status than those who don’t. The study surveyed 1,054 people in the U.S. and U.K. who were under the age of 35, asking about their mobile dating app usage and whether people are satisfied with their relationship status. Most (93 percent) of those using a mobile dating app were single, and most (81 percent) were heterosexual. On a scale of 0, which means “not at all,” to 3, meaning “to a great extent,” participants were asked to rate how happy they were with their current relationship status. They found a statistically significant difference, with the average dating app user coming in at 2.07, while the average non-user coming in at 2.34.

Radboud University

It’s been a great couple editions of the Sunday edition, and there’s never been a better time to subscribe.

A week ago, I talked to Matty Merritt, who wrote “High School Musical changed everything: An oral history of the Disney Channel Original Movie” for Morning Brew. That was a fascinating conversation about a particularly interesting era of television, and one that has significant reverberations to today. Check that interview out.

Then, on Sunday, I talked to the brilliant Zeyi Yang, who wrote “Why the world’s biggest EV maker is getting into shipping” for MIT Technology Review. You may have seen the company BYD appearing more and more in the newsletter; I think it’s a really interesting company that reveals a lot about how both the global economy as well as the future of the car business actually works. It’s a great read. Yang can be found at MIT Technology Review and on Twitter. Check out the interview!

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