Daily Tech News 7 April 2025

• Turning your spacecraft off and on again and hoping for the best: The real story of Orion. (Ars Technica)
  
  Turns out more things failed on that test flight last year than they let on.
  
  At one point they were uncertain whether they could dock with the ISS or return to Earth. Not which one was safer, but whether either one was possible.

• Could fusion-powered spaceships cut the trip to Mars by half? Maybe. (CNN)
  
  We don't have practical fusion power on Earth because it requires a hard vacuum and it leaks.
  
  But a fusion-powered spaceship is traveling through hard vacuum and the engine is supposed to leak. That's how it would generate thrust.
  
  So all you need to solve is all the other problems.
  
  
  
• On a slightly more stable topic Gizmodo spoke to the Voyager project's mission scientist, who has been on the job for 48 years. (Gizmodo)

  I started working on Voyager in 1977, it was my first job out of college, and I had a choice between the Viking extended mission or the Voyager mission. I, of course, hadn't heard of Voyager. So I said, where's Voyager going? And they said, well, Jupiter and Saturn and onto Uranus and Neptune with Voyager 2 if all goes well. And I thought, oh my goodness - I remember in third grade, I got a little telescope I used to use to look at the Moon and look at Jupiter and Saturn, and look for little moons around Jupiter and see if I could spot the rings around Saturn. So the thought of a chance to go visit these worlds that were really only tiny dots in my little telescope, I said, "sign me up."

  It's cool and worth reading.
  
  
  
• The insanity of being a software engineer. (0x1.pt)
  
  It's like being a bricklayer. Except the bricks are constantly changing, and you're expected to be an electrician and a plumber should the need arise, and you're just supposed to know what the plans for the building are, and oh the client asked if you could make the bricks invisible. By tomorrow.
  
  
  
• The Minecraft movie... Didn't flop, maybe. (Variety)
  
  Despite a pretty bad initial trailer. It only cost $150 million and made $135 $300 million globally in its first weekend. So it's not entirely out of the cubical woods yet, but doing much better than some recent Hollywood efforts we won't mention.
  
  (Updated with more recent information with much larger numbers.)
  
  
  
• The laptop version of Nvidia's RTX 5090 is only slightly faster than the desktop 5070. (Notebook Check)
  
  I mean, the desktop 5090 draws 575W and is infamous for melting its power connector, so there's no chance of fitting it into a laptop, but still.
  
  
  

posted by Pixy Misa at 04:30 AM

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