Well, gosh, apparently the first pillar of modern science has been a bit shaky all these centuries. Newton’s apple may have been misread all along.
Scientists reconstruct the Pioneer spacecraft anomaly
Of cour they hedge a bit by citing “uneven heating” as one of the possible causes of anomalies in the paths of the two Pioneer space probes.
Could it be that one of the founding principle of modern science, Newtonian gravity, cannot be subject to scientific consensus? If scientists can misjudged this, can they presume to predict the weather more than five days from now? Don’t get us started.
Direct hit on the dead satellite from the missile cruiser USS Lake Erie. Nice work. Pay no attention to the whining from the country who does their own space war target practice. Free countries get to defend themselves too.
From the “Who do we expect to be believe that?” column, the Pentagon admits that it may be a bit more than a space debris clean-up . Well duh. And kudos to the WashTimes for the headline:
Satellite shoot-down shows missile muscle
And here’s the New Scientist with some juicy technical details. Oh, it just happens that the launch platform will be one of the Aegis boats now on patrol shielding Japan from the Norks. Chicoms should get a good look too.
‘Jury-rigged’ missile to destroy falling spysat
Deny all day long but with everyone and their brothers throwing stuff up into space, including those wacky Iranians, might as well see if we can bring stuff down, eh? Awfully convenient, that malfunctioning satellite.
Pentagon plans to shoot down disabled satellite
I’ll try to keep up the pace but I have to get some themes I picked out weeks ago up here at some point.That cool song “Mission Control” in the opening movie is by one Julia Othmer. It might be the second song that comes up once you enter her site. Was for me, twice.
There is quite brief tutorial in Space Station Sim? After that the narrator recommends going off to the Components Desk and told to follow the instructions there. Other than that, looks like the mysteries of the game are left for the player to disover on their own. The main in-game control screen is a depiction of Mission Control, with each desk reperesenting a different aspect of the mission. Erring on the side of inclusion it looks like the game makers have been a bit generous on gender and age diversity; there’re significantly more women than you’d expect and the age scale skews way way young. Good for marketing demographics, we suppose, but not very simulating.
NASA Space Shuttle Mission Control
Space Station Sim Mission Control Screen
In the tutorial you’ll learn how to move around the station to view it from all angles and how to open it into the cutaway view to look inside. Once in there you’ll learn how to assign tasks to the crew and about the various indicators of both crew and station health.
When it ends be sure to listen closely to the two items it mentions you’ll need to build in the recommended next step. If not then you’ll have to sit through the whole astronaut tutorial again.
Unless you’re reading this post, that is. What the guide says is “toru” and “exercise bike”. If you don’t know what a toru is then you may not think you heard right and your brain is likely to go blank. This led to the question of whether there is a central database of information, a Space Station Simopedia of general knoweldge, for the game and so for the real thing as well. So far we see no evidence of one.
On the computery side, it looks like the SS Sim takes over the presentation resources of your computer completely. You cannot ALT-TAB the PC between it and other running applications. Annoying for the reviewer-blogger, yes, but perhaps a turn off as well for those who enjoy letting games run in the background while doing work or surfing the news. Nope, if this sim is running it demands your total attention. Not a good aspect in this multitasking day-and-age. Some may not turn oit back on. The only way to switch away via the Windows Task Manager. Not quite the same.
We’ll pick up tomorrow at the the Components Desk.
Finally got a hold of this simulation of human activity in LEO – Low Earth Orbit. Thank you, Mr. Mueller. And so this will be the first post of an in-depth as-we-experience-it InfinityBound software review.
LEO, along with the space stations and humans that work in it have a special place for us hereabouts, and hoefully soon we’ll be in a postioin to elaborate. For now though, we’ll take the arrival of this interesting title as a good omen.
We had our InfinityBound elves install the software while busy elving for others at work today and soon as we were able we started it up. The install must have gone well or the elves would surely have called in for help.
On start-up the sim immediately scanned for updates, so we brought down the 31-meg patch that takes us to version 2.2.0.0. The Conf igure button on the main screen has, among others, a tab for Updates that toggles the automatic update scanning.
Start up was clean and with no saved games in the big white window somewhat empty.
Not a screen we’ll spend a lot of time in, though, so not a big deal.
The package comes with its disk and a full-color book, a quite thin one, but a book nonetheless. Give it that over any package that ships merely with PDFs on the disk. Scanning through the book will take just a few minutes and gives you all the basics to get you started.
So let’s see how it goes.
Pioneer, gravity, space | bshears April 19, 2008 | 
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