The countdown to the first step of humanity’s return to the Moon has begun. The countdown to Artemis 1 began Saturday morning, and if all goes well, the uncrewed Orion spacecraft atop the Space Launch Systems (SLS) giant will blast off from the famed Pad 39B at Cape Canaveral on Monday August 29 at 8:33 AM EDT (1233 GMT). The mission lasts about 42 days, which seems long considering that the longest manned Apollo missions only lasted about 12 days. But without the limitation of storing enough consumables for a crew, Artemis is free to take the scenic route to the Moon, so to speak. No matter where you stand on manned space exploration, it’s hard to deny that launching a rocket as large as the SLS is something to get excited about. After all, it’s been 50 years since anything as powerful as the SLS headed into space, and it’s an event that’s expected to draw 100,000 people to see it in person. We’ll have to tune into NASA’s live stream ourselves; Having witnessed the launch of a space shuttle in person in 1990, we cannot express how envious we are of anyone who gets to experience this launch up close.
Speaking of space, there are some interesting results from the James Webb Space Telescope this week, with the announcement of the first unequivocal detection of carbon dioxide on an exoplanet. The planet, named WASP39b, was discovered in 2011. It is located about 700 lightyears away in the constellation Virgo and is classified as a “hot Jupiter” planet, which is a gas giant that orbits close to its star. After being discovered by groundbased telescopes, both the Hubble Space Telescope and Spitzer took a look at it and discovered signatures of water vapor in its atmosphere, in addition to sodium and potassium. Then Webb took a spin and its ultracold infrared optics saw that the planet’s atmosphere strongly absorbed light from its star in the 4.14.6 micron range, right where the CO2 would absorb As exciting as this scientific result is, it’s also an engineering triumph that teases what this telescope is capable of.
A couple of months ago, we ran a story about Apple’s new attempt to appease the “Right to Repair” crowd by making available the tools and materials needed to perform repairs on some of its products. Talking about it on the podcast that week, we referred to it as a case of “malicious compliance” by Apple. But after reading this article on MacBook selfrepair, it seems that the huge tool kit they rent and the exorbitant prices for simple parts like batteries may have a different, more basic origin: the design conflict between usability and ease of service Apple has a brand: sleek, polished, easy to use and undeniably tactile, and that’s what all its designs should be about. If that means you have to glue pieces together to avoid visible fasteners, so be it. Maintaining that brand means making any of their products easy to take apart has to take a backseat to style, which is why so many specialized tools are needed to get the job done. You can and should still take issue with the price of Apple replacement parts, but for the most part, these devices are difficult to repair precisely because they are Apple products. In other words, if you want reasonable access to your devices, you might want to avoid the Apple ecosystem.
And finally, when your device cannot be repaired at all, what do you do? If it’s still under warranty, you usually send it in for a replacement, after checking all the usual customer service boxes. But a customer in Germany with a faulty SSD had an extra box to check: complete and utter mechanical destruction of the SSD. To return the Samsung 980 PRO SSD, the customer was instructed to either drill holes through the NAND flash or smash it with a hammer. Presumably this was done for privacy reasons, but the fact that they asked for video evidence of the procedure seems a bit odd. The tobacco film, with the weapon of choice as an angle grinder, is below; destruction begins at approximately 5:00 minutes.