Wow! Funny how you can have something like this flying almost under the news radar, just because the company doesn't have an egomaniac/megalomaniac CEO.
jfengel · 1h ago
The megalomaniac actually did the launch. Other lunar satellites have attracted a bit more attention than this, though, so I'm not sure why this is the first I've heard of it.
subw00f · 27m ago
No, he did not. Multiple teams of very capable people did the launch.
WrongAssumption · 1h ago
SpaceX did the launch.
macmac · 1h ago
No they did not, Firefly did.
UPDATE, my bad did not read properly.
No comments yet
niij · 1h ago
This is actually above the radar.
ikt · 2h ago
> Tokyo-based ispace
I cannot believe the old Apple naming scheme is still hanging around, I get that I'm irrationally hating this style of name but I just don't understand, why do I see it as peak lack of creativity?
It's like whenever you can't think of a name for something just go with e-thing or i-thing
wil421 · 42m ago
Didn’t IBM and others use it before Apple? IBM iSeries came out before the iMac. I think a few companies were using small e and i at the time for the “cool” factor. Intel jumped on the bandwagon after the iMac, IIRC.
akovaski · 11m ago
IBM rebranded AS/400 to iSeries in 2000, which is after the iMac came out.
Cisco had an ios and iphone before apple. though Im not sure the cisco iphone was actually ever released
wafflemaker · 22m ago
But AFAIK, Cisco IOS is all caps, not the cool lowercase i and big second letter.
Waterluvian · 2h ago
Up there is also “Spacr” or “Spacely”. Then next is naming your company after some famous scientist or engineer. Then adding X to it. Then naming it a division of an existing company. Then naming it after a living person. Then naming it something new.
I think the most creative name would likely just be a UUID.
tzs · 1m ago
Seriously, I wish each company would use a UUID as an alternate name. Same for each programming language, software project, and so on. The UUID should be on all their web pages.
People who write articles or blogs about them should use the normal name but somewhere should have a table giving the UUIDs of the things they mention.
Then when people are trying to find pages about things with names that are terrible for searching like X or Go they could use the UUID.
harpiaharpyja · 15m ago
A UUID wouldn't be creative, well, except for the very first time.
Sure, they are all unique. But also very high entropy.
varjag · 2h ago
It's not really better with the startup scene everyone here knows and loves. The hard -r apps that just won't go away (from Flickr to Grindr), endless Libyan domains that slowly gave way to -ify and other fads.
jfengel · 1h ago
It seems to be a matter of timing. The "r" fad happened when some important niches were being opened. The ly and ify fads just don't seem to have coincided with anything anyone needed or wanted.
I'm sure there's some new fad waiting around the corner in both TLDs and application domains. We'll have to see if any of the apps turn out to be useful and sticks around. The TLD fad will surely explode and then disappear.
ionwake · 4h ago
funny how the moon is almost exactly 400x smaller and 400x closer then the sun, perfectly sized for solar eclipess – makes you wonder how lucky we are to study coronal ejections and anomalies like that.
like im sure that not common right? maybe it is i dunno
an0malous · 2h ago
It’s one of many lunar anomalies, read “Who Built the Moon?” by Alan Butler if you’re curious.
It's extremely rare. It occurs nowhere else in the solar system, and isn't even true for the vast majority of Earth's history and future. We could survey a million exoplanets and likely not find even one single other example.
Neat, though.
dmurray · 3h ago
Couldn't you study coronal ejections just as well if the moon were bigger? You wouldn't see them on all sides of the moon at once, but in return you'd have more total solar eclipses.
From an aesthetic point of view, we're uniquely lucky to have the moon just the right size for beautiful eclipse phenomena like the diamond ring, but for science I don't think it makes a big difference.
ionwake · 2h ago
Apparently if being the perfect size allows for this: Gravitational lensing verification during a solar eclipse relies on the Sun being just barely covered to observe the bending of starlight near its edge.
If the Moon were significantly larger than the Sun:
The Moon would block not just the Sun but also the surrounding starlight, making it impossible to observe the light bending around the Sun’s edge.
As a result, Einstein’s prediction of light bending around the Sun, famously confirmed during the 1919 eclipse, would not have been observable.
I used chatgpt i ahve no idea wat it means
EDIT> previous comment i made was unhelpful because i forgot how to read
rssoconnor · 2h ago
It's also a temporary anomaly as the moon has been moving and continues to move further away from the earth. See Lunar Recession.
an0malous · 18m ago
Temporary on the scale of 600 million years or more
Luck is a funny thing isnt it. My favorite quote is "When skill meets ignorance, we call it luck."
ck2 · 3h ago
The thing about sentient life is we are always finding it odd that everything seems just right for our evolution when that's why it happened in the first place.
Temperatures, resources, distances, orbits, etc.
If there's a world out there without a moon and could not really see other plants and stars, would they have developed the math and science that we have without such motivation? Maybe but slower?
But without our extra large moon, at the right mass and distance, helping tides and lighting the night for hunting, would life even exist? Maybe but not as advanced or a lot slower evolution?
(it's kinda like that Star Trek Voyager episode where they inspire a planet to industrialize after being trapped in their orbit in a dramatic time dilation)
an0malous · 12m ago
Yes but that’s an argument for why life bearing planets might have larger moons relative to the planet’s size, how would the moon’s apparent size relative to the sun influence evolution?
I would like the lunar satellite to have the ability to broadcast messages to earth. Such an emergency communication, even one way like othernet.is
jfengel · 1h ago
Lunar orbiters spend half their time on the far side of the moon, where they can't access earth. You'd need a constellation to provide any kind of emergency system.
There must exist a lunasynchronous orbit that would remain over the earth side of the moon, though I'm not sure if its close enough to the moon to avoid being perturbed by the earth and kicked out.
dabluecaboose · 35m ago
>There must exist a lunasynchronous orbit that would remain over the earth side of the moon, though I'm not sure if its close enough to the moon to avoid being perturbed by the earth and kicked out.
Selenostationary orbits (The astrodynamics terms generally take the Greek name) are indeed unstable and vulnerable to perturbation. Instead, you can have a trajectory around one of the Earth-Moon LaGrange points (points where the gravitational pull from each body is equal)
jiehong · 1h ago
Is othernet easy to access? The receiver they sell on that website is sold out.
Is there a list of programs available?
intunderflow · 2h ago
I do worry the incentives for this will always be at the whim of state support for exploration, unfortunately there's no natural incentive to really kick private spaceflight off in a major way
tjpnz · 1h ago
Resilience is such a boring name for a lunar lander given all of the Japanese mythology about the moon. I hope someday there'll be a Kaguya-hime[0].
UPDATE, my bad did not read properly.
No comments yet
I cannot believe the old Apple naming scheme is still hanging around, I get that I'm irrationally hating this style of name but I just don't understand, why do I see it as peak lack of creativity?
It's like whenever you can't think of a name for something just go with e-thing or i-thing
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_eServer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IMac
I think the most creative name would likely just be a UUID.
People who write articles or blogs about them should use the normal name but somewhere should have a table giving the UUIDs of the things they mention.
Then when people are trying to find pages about things with names that are terrible for searching like X or Go they could use the UUID.
Sure, they are all unique. But also very high entropy.
I'm sure there's some new fad waiting around the corner in both TLDs and application domains. We'll have to see if any of the apps turn out to be useful and sticks around. The TLD fad will surely explode and then disappear.
like im sure that not common right? maybe it is i dunno
Neat, though.
From an aesthetic point of view, we're uniquely lucky to have the moon just the right size for beautiful eclipse phenomena like the diamond ring, but for science I don't think it makes a big difference.
If the Moon were significantly larger than the Sun:
The Moon would block not just the Sun but also the surrounding starlight, making it impossible to observe the light bending around the Sun’s edge.
As a result, Einstein’s prediction of light bending around the Sun, famously confirmed during the 1919 eclipse, would not have been observable.
I used chatgpt i ahve no idea wat it means
EDIT> previous comment i made was unhelpful because i forgot how to read
https://archive.is/2024.04.12-145123/https://www.nytimes.com...
Temperatures, resources, distances, orbits, etc.
If there's a world out there without a moon and could not really see other plants and stars, would they have developed the math and science that we have without such motivation? Maybe but slower?
But without our extra large moon, at the right mass and distance, helping tides and lighting the night for hunting, would life even exist? Maybe but not as advanced or a lot slower evolution?
(it's kinda like that Star Trek Voyager episode where they inspire a planet to industrialize after being trapped in their orbit in a dramatic time dilation)
There must exist a lunasynchronous orbit that would remain over the earth side of the moon, though I'm not sure if its close enough to the moon to avoid being perturbed by the earth and kicked out.
Selenostationary orbits (The astrodynamics terms generally take the Greek name) are indeed unstable and vulnerable to perturbation. Instead, you can have a trajectory around one of the Earth-Moon LaGrange points (points where the gravitational pull from each body is equal)
Is there a list of programs available?
0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tale_of_the_Bamboo_Cutte...