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).
Huge SpaceX rocket explosion shredded the upper atmosphere
Submitted 2 months ago by vegeta@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02841-4
Comments
Wxfisch@lemmy.world 2 months ago
sorghum@sh.itjust.works 2 months ago
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.
scarilog@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Wireless engineering concepts are simultaneously interesting while also making me want to take my own life.
It’s s quite the dichotomy.
Johanno@feddit.org 2 months ago
Another one.
I mean I am not against rocket research, but isn’t there another way without destroying several millions worth if equipment?
pipe01@programming.dev 2 months ago
There is, you can be billions over budget and years behind schedule like NASA
alcoholicorn@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
So we can either put billions into one corporation in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do, or we can put billions into a bunch of corporations in hope that a trickle of it lets the scientists and engineers do the thing scientists and engineers do.
sharkfucker420@lemmy.ml 2 months ago
Or like the military…
iAvicenna@lemmy.world 2 months ago
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 landback and be reused.
masterspace@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
This is *literally *the first one. There’s only been a single Starship explosion in the upper atmosphere.
And no, that leads to spending decades of time going down paths and intricately designing and simulating every possible detail of a system, only to build them, have something unexpected happen, and then realize that the team never considered X effect in Y, Z, etc conditions, and then have to spend years redesigning everything.
Design it, build it, test it, and get it immediate feedback on, and then redesign it. One way or another, it almost always has to go through that cycle, it’s a lot cheaper to do it upfront.
catloaf@lemm.ee 2 months ago
Sure, you can do it for real and destroy billions worth of equipment.
Shit happens in R&D. Some loss is expensive.
Diplomjodler3@lemmy.world 2 months ago
There is. The SLS. That is much more economical, right?
Wanderer@lemm.ee 2 months ago
That sounds so futuristic.
As it’s NASA is it using technology decades more advanced than the competition?
ripcord@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Another one what? Did you only read the headline…?
Noodle07@lemmy.world 2 months ago
Earth gravity is a bitch
Cocodapuf@lemmy.world 2 months ago
That’s literally exactly what spaceX is developing, rockets you don’t have to blow up every flight.
Fully reusable rockets have never been done before, but they’re coming.
walter_wiggles@lemmy.nz 2 months ago
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.
earthsky.org/…/spacex-launch-punches-a-hole-in-th…
leftzero@lemmynsfw.com 2 months ago
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…
GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca 2 months ago
This is about rocket launches, not satellites.