Editorial
Every Other Week
If you've been reading Tales for a while, you'll know I've talked about doing this for the enjoyment and because it helps me to keep up with things, rather than out of some sense of duty.
After seventeen issues, I've come to the conclusion that doing this every weekend is a little much, especially as I'm now travelling a bit more again as things open up. So, the newsletter will be moving to an every-two-weeks schedule.
Not much else will change, other than a few more articles in every issue, I imagine. Talking of which... look, I had at least two different space toilet stories to choose from this week. We live in interesting times.
Land
If Only The Planet Had Spare Carbon Dioxide
In what is becoming almost a textbook example of the fragility of supply chains, the UK is going through a series of rather nasty logistics challenges right now - the shortage of HGV (truck) drivers being one of the biggest - but the unexpectedly complicated development is the lack of carbon dioxide.
It turns out that most carbon dioxide (the useful, pure form) is created as a byproduct of fertiliser manufacturing. That fertiliser manufacturing relies heavily on natural gas. And, wouldn't you know, natural gas is going through a price crisis right now.
As well as carbonating drinks, CO2 is used for slaughtering animals and keeping things cold during shipments, so not having enough of it is really wreaking havoc on the food industry especially. The UK government is apparently stepping in to try and get production restarted - presumably by paying for that expensive natural gas for the fertiliser plants - but we'll see how well it works.
Someone Gave It Way Too Much Gas
Talking about that natural gas shortage in Europe - wow, is it causing a lot of issues. It turns out that shutting down most of your nuclear plants, having a lull in wind production, and then having a series of problems getting natural gas is not a good recipe for the prices of that particular resource.
Russia, of course, is somewhat involved, but for once this doesn't seem to be entirely their doing - not to say they aren't turning the situation to their advantage, however. As coal and oil power plants close, natural gas has become the primary choice for baseload plants, since it's the "cleanest" of the fossil fuels, not to mention its wide-ranging usage in heating homes as winter approaches.
And, looking back at the UK again, as well as many energy suppliers going bust as they can't handle the new cost of gas, there's also the slight problem of one of the electricity links with France catching on fire. Just not a good month all around.
What A Flipping Bad Idea
It's not particularly new news, but there's an article up from Astronomy.com about magnetic pole reversals and so it's probably time to read through the article and revisit what a bad time it would be.
Compasses not working is the least of our problems - the poles are what keep all those pesky cosmic rays and the nastier solar wind away from the planet, and if they were to, say, vanish and reappear at the other end of the Earth (as they do on a somewhat regular basis), we'd likely get a lot of wonderful auroras along with a lot of very nasty radiation.
With gaps of hundreds of thousands of years, though, the chance isn't super high it'll happen in the next couple centuries. Unlike another Carrington Event, which we are almost certainly overdue for and which is less deadly to people but quite bad for power transmission and data networks.
Let's Not Do The Time Warp Again
Samoa is the latest country to decide that Daylight Savings Time really isn't worth the effort (or the extra injuries it causes), and they've decided to ditch it and go back to just having the one timezone all year round.
Of course, they managed to do this with only one week's notice, causing literally everyone who maintains a timezone database to scramble to get the change out in time. Sometimes, I wonder if governments understand that passing a law is really not all it takes to get the devices in your country adhering to the new idea you just had.
Sea
Clean Ships All The Way
If you're at all interested in maritime infrastructure and logistics, you'll have heard of Maersk, the world's largest container shipping company. Now, their CEO Soren Skou has come out with a somewhat unexpected push - to remove fossil fuels from shipping with a similar "deadline date" to the 2035 one for cars.
This is not the first time Maersk have come out on the side of a greener shipping industry - they're already working on carbon-neutral ships - but unlike cars, there's not yet been a ton of breakthroughs on making shipping more efficient, and fully-electric ships is far more difficult due to the immense distances and weights involved.
Despite the rather dirty fuel they use, cargo shipping remains the best mechanised form of cargo transport per unit weight, so it's not quite as in need of an overhaul as you might imagine. Still, any and all progress here is very welcome.
Space
How Do You Build A Landing Pad Without Landing?
Something that is regularly under-appreciated about doing any significant visits or building on the Moon is the rather nasty nature of the lunar surface. Moon dust is incredibly sharp - no erosion to wear it down - so you really don't want to have it flying around.
Of course, that's particularly hard when you need to bring a giant rocket and point it at the Moon to land, so the popular solution is to have a nice, hard landing pad to land on. The trick is doing that without having to land first - and Masten are trying to do just that.
By injecting ceramics directly into the rocket exhaust, they plan to create a (temporary) landing pad using the same rocket exhaust that would cause all the trouble in the first place. Obviously, it's hard to test without going to the actual Moon, but their tests with "lunar simulant" do look promising.
We're All Civilians Here
Last week saw a pivotal moment in human spaceflight - the first all-civilian mission to space. Paid for by the billionaire Jared Isaacman, it saw four normal people take one of SpaceX's Dragon capsules up for a three-day trip to orbit - with not a single NASA astronaut in sight.
Of course, they still had to do a lot of intensive training before their flight - including survivalist training on mountains, the zero-gravity planes, and of course some time in the good old centrifuge, but they're still not career astronauts, who spend years and years training for the few flights they get.
One notable thing about this flight, though, is that it's the furthest humans have been from Earth since Apollo 17 - they took Dragon up above the Hubble Space Telescope's orbit, which was Shuttle's altitude record. Hopefully someone will get further out than that soon, though - let's see if we can't get at least a few Moon trips in before the decade is out, eh?
In Space, No-one Can Hear You... Uh... Maybe They Can?
Look, building space toilets is hard. The whole process of relieving oneself has a rather large dependence on gravity, so when faced with a microgravity environment, things get a little bit trickier and involve a lot more suction.
What's even harder than using one of these contraptions? Having to design a brand new one, as the waste management team for SpaceX's Dragon had to. It's not like you can just test them easily in a lab, or even in those weightless sections of the parabolic flights - they basically need to be in orbit to be studied properly.
And so, the valiant crew of the Inspiration4 mission were the first to use this new design (the previous Dragon crews have all got to the ISS fast enough to not need it), and it seems it has a few, uh, issues. Hopefully they can get that all ironed out for the next orbital flight, though on the plus side, you really can't argue with the view.
Silicon
I see USB-C. I see USB-C everywhere!
The EU is looking to finally round the last corner on their fight for standardisation of mobile phone chargers, and the result is that every single company in the industry agreed on USB-C - with one notable exception.
Apple are not happy at the idea of standardising on USB-C, of course, but it takes a lot more than one of the world's largest companies to stop the momentum of European regulation when it's in full force. It'll be at least two years until this makes into law in EU countries if it passes, but if I was a hardware designer, I might start thinking about it now.
Wireless charging is still not covered by the standardisation push - though, thankfully, everyone there seems to have mostly standardised on Qi, Apple included. If rumours are to be believed, that might be all Apple use if their "portless" iPhone comes out - with literally zero holes that can be covered by EU regulation.
And Finally
The Moon That Got Away
Is there anything funnier than watching some people chase after a giant inflatable moon in China? There probably is, but I haven't seen it recently, so please enjoy this fourty seconds of people being rather exasperated with their moon.