Armando Iannucci would have scrapped this plotline for The Thick of It for being too implausible.
ETA: I thought Charlie Stross summed it up quite nicely on his blog.
Did you spot the bit about the Attack Macaque in Downing Street spaffing £500M (about $650M in today’s cash) on buying the wrong satellites ?
TLDR: the UK Brexited and kicked itself out of the European Galileo navigation satellite project, even though it’s not strictly an EU thing. (Adjudication via the ECJ was the deal-breaker, IIRC.) To their horror, they discovered that they could neither supply satellites for the cluster nor use it at full resolution if they flounced. So the Brexiters announced a grandiose plan to build their own GPS cluster. Then someone told them how much it would cost. (Hint: billions.) Then someone pointed out that the OneWeb low-orbit comsat network was going into Chapter 11.
So they bought a 20% stake in an incomplete, bankrupt, US-based broadband internet satellite system that was pushed into bankruptcy because basically it can’t compete with Elon Musk’s Starweb, because they appear to have mistaken OneWeb for a GPS cluster, because they’re a government of second-rate journalists led by marketers.
The Moon certainly ain’t made of cheese but it may be made of more metal than previously thought, sensor shows
The latest measurements from NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) suggest the Moon contains more metal than previously thought.
The result goes against a widely accepted theory that our home world’s natural satellite was born from a cataclysmic collision between a protoplanet named Theia and a young Earth some 4.5 billion years ago. If that theory is correct, the Moon should have roughly the same concentration of minerals as found on Earth.
UK government shakes magic money tree, finds $500m to buy a stake in struggling satellite firm OneWeb
The ongoing saga of OneWeb and the UK’s ambition to be a major space player took another twist today with the confirmation that $500m will be splurged by Whitehall on the satelite biz.
OneWeb, which filed for bankruptcy protection earlier this year, has been the subject of speculation in recent weeks as bidders circled. A consortium led by the UK government, which included another $500m from Indian outift Bharti Global, has won the day and snapped up the UK-based company.
Don’t beat yourself up for overeating in lockdown. This black hole scoffs equivalent of our Sun every day
The greediest supermassive black hole spotted by us Earthlings is an eye-popping 34 billion times more massive than our Sun, and gobbles nearly a solar mass of nearby gas and dust every day.
The behemoth goes by the name SMSS J2157–3602 or J2157, for short, and was discovered in 2018 by eggheads led by the Australian National University (ANU). Now they have calculated the black hole’s properties in fine detail using near-infrared measurements taken by a mixture of ground-based telescopes and spacecraft. The details were published in a paper in the Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society this week.
NASA trusted ‘traditional’ Boeing to program its Starliner without close supervision… It failed to dock due to bugs
At a press conference on Tuesday, NASA confirmed why Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner spaceship failed to hook up with the International Space Station last year. The answer: as expected, buggy code.
Crucially, NASA admitted it did not supervise Boeing closely enough during the craft’s software development stage because the agency trusted the aerospace corp’s seemingly “more traditional” engineering methods, and thought it had a good grasp on Boeing’s processes. NASA thus focused its attention instead on assessing rival SpaceX’s newer programming techniques.
Captain, the computer has identified 250 alien stars that infiltrated our galaxy – actual science, not science-fiction
Deep-learning software has singled out a group of 250 stars in the Milky Way that appear to have been born outside our galaxy. That’s according to a research paper published this week in Nature Astronomy.
The oddballs, known collectively as Nyx, were described as a “vast stellar stream in the vicinity of the Sun,” by Lina Necib, first author of the paper [pre-print] and a postdoctoral scholar in theoretical physics at Caltech.
That’s some top-notch boffinry to start with, and they follow through, it seems: The team were mindful they had to ensure their resulting AI system was grounded in reality, and reflected how the Milky Way actually worked, rather than predicting what would happen in a simulator.
In business, “Trust, but verify” is now “Trust no one.” Many big corporations with good reputations started reinventing themselves to erase their “traditional” ways back in the '90s. To increase profits, they pushed out experienced staff, relaxed/eliminated standards, outsourced, and cut corners on production. Now, we see a lot of events that never would’ve been allowed to escalate to this point in the “traditional” days:
As a client, I wouldn’t give these companies ten cents without having someone on my staff make sure they weren’t only doing a nickel’s worth of work and pocketing the rest. We need to get the government to stop trusting them with our tax money without enough oversight.
Road trip on Mars: Thrill as Curiosity rover races up to 0.06 miles per hour. Marvel as it takes a mile-long detour
NASA’s hardy Curiosity rover is on the move again: this time, a little road trip to avoid getting bogged down in Martian sand dunes.
The six-wheeled robot is investigating Mount Sharp, a sedimentary mountain whose layers of rock should give scientists a better idea of the watery world Mars once was. But to do so, it’ll have to complete a mile-long detour to avoid the sand drift in the way… at the blazing speed of 82 to 328 feet (25 to 100 metres) per hour.
Engineers have hit pause on attempts make the Mars InSight lander’s self-hammering mole dig into the red planet as boffins admit “the task is not likely to become easier.”
Here’s how boffins can prove Solar System’s mysterious ‘Planet Nine’ is actually a small black hole – wait, what?
The suggestion that the Solar System’s hypothesized Planet Nine is actually a small black hole could be solved by searching for outbursts of energy using the Vera Rubin Observatory, scientists say.
