I must say that when I read about nuclear engines from Rolls Royce my first thought was Fab-1, the nuclear powered Rolls Royce belonging to Lady Penelope in the TV show Thunderbirds

I am waiting for some high speed trader to realise that they can shave microseconds off their trade time over long distances if they eliminate the curve of the earth and send information using particles that can go straight through. Once they realise that, expect a lot more funding into how to detect and manipulate neutrinos.

SpaceX certainly are, but Blue Origin are very much in the old space/go slow model. They might come the party with a great spacecraft, but until they do I'll reserve judgement. On the plus side they are doing it on their own dime (except for some relatively small grants from NASA), so there is no great loss if they deliver late or not at all.

The other New Space success story is Rocketlab, with their economical rocket for small satellites. They have an innovative design, a high launch rate, and like SpaceX are starting to work on reusability.

I think the choice of name is an ... interesting piece of marketing.

Here in Australia, Libra is a brand of feminine hygiene products.

It it had been, they would have demanded that the only real Fucking was what happened in the village, and anything else had to be referred to as "Excited Intimacy".

While I expect that the joke would wear thin, I am surprised that some local entrepreneur has jumped at the chance to make money off the tourists. Postcards, t-shirts, souveniers - the captions almost write themselves. Did nobody think that this is a golden opportunity to make money?

Did you? I remember thinking that you did, then being surprised when the Space Force was being discussed as the "Sixth Branch of the US Armed Forces" to discover that the other five were Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines and Coast Guard - not a Cyber Force in sight.

Surely an arena of such huge commercial importance and affecting such a large number of people needs to be protected.

This sort of thing makes me think that the US should have set up a Cyber Force (or Cyber Guard or whatever) to deal with these sorts of threats, rather than a Space Force.

Something I have been struggling with for a while is identifying a good source for general news. That is, a source which is comprehensive, unbiased, timely, and readily available. Something like a daily newspaper or TV news report as I would wish them to be (but as they probably never were).

Youtube and others are, I think, good if you are looking for something specific. I do use the likes of Youtube or Reddit for information about specific topics (say, movie trailers, or the latest SpaceX launch), or sites like Slashdot for stories in specialty fields. Something reliable for general news eludes me, though.

Any suggestions?

The other solution is to read a web site that doesn't have an endless feed, like Slashdot. If you sit down to read here there are only a limited number of articles to look at, so you can get to the end and stop.

For me, Ian Holm's most memorable role was that of Frodo in the 1981 BBC Radio dramatisation of The Lord of the Rings. Which remains the definitive adaptation of that book, in my opinion.

Whoever downvoted this mustn't have got the allusion.

Where I work (government department, 20K employees) WFH is being trialed. Officially the trial is for ~500 people to test how well the system works. Before that got going we had a discussion within out team and my boss told us that we could work from home if we wished to. I took her up on it, and the other team members have been making sure they have the equipment and software permissions to do it if they have to.

In the mean time we are awaiting the results of the trial and further developments.

Don't you know how expensive it is to send people into space? The more astronauts you can squeeze in to one body, the better.

Maybe the Galactic Ghoul has given up on Mars and decided to move to the Moon.