Category Archives: History

Chernobyl

New York Times: Chernobyl: Capping a Catastrophe. By Henry Fountain. Photographs by William Daniels.

“Against the decaying skyline here, a one-of-a-kind engineering project is rising near the remains of the world’s worst civilian nuclear disaster.

An army of workers, shielded from radiation by thick concrete slabs, is constructing a huge arch, sheathed in acres of gleaming stainless steel and vast enough to cover the Statue of Liberty. The structure is so otherworldly it looks like it could have been dropped by aliens onto this Soviet-era industrial landscape.”

Link via dangerousmeta!.

Update: There’s a related thread on MetaFilter now: “What’s been the biggest challenge? Every single thing,“ he said.

Related, but from last year: The Engineer: Building Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement. By Jon Excell.

Good old times…

Back in the late 1980s my father bought his first computer, a Commodore PC20-III. I remember playing “Reflections” on it, a game in which you had to direct a laser beam using mirrors, splitters etc. to hit several light bulbs. I just found a flash version of the game: Laser Reflections. Of course, back then there was no cheating by looking up the passwords and solutions for each level on the internet because there was no internet, but at least it was one of the games where it didn’t matter much that the monitor was just black and white. ;-)

The Eagle has Landed

Continuing yesterday’s space theme…

First Men on the Moon:

“This project is an online interactive featuring the Eagle lunar landing. The presentation includes original Apollo 11 spaceflight video footage, communication audio, mission control room conversations, text transcripts, and telemetry data, all synchronized into an integrated audio-visual experience.”

Link via MetaFilter: One Giant Leap.

This rescue was considered challenging but feasible.

Ars Technica: The audacious rescue plan that might have saved space shuttle Columbia. The untold story of the rescue mission that could have been NASA’s finest hour. By Lee Hutchinson.

“At 10:39 Eastern Standard Time on January 16, 2003, space shuttle Columbia lifted off from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. A mere 81.7 seconds later, a chunk of insulating foam tore free from the orange external tank and smashed into the leading edge of the orbiter’s left wing at a relative velocity of at least 400 miles per hour (640 kph), but Columbia continued to climb toward orbit. […]
Sixteen days later, as Columbia re-entered the atmosphere, superheated plasma entered the orbiter’s structure through the hole in the wing and the shuttle began to disintegrate. […]
That’s the way events actually unfolded. But imagine an alternate timeline for the Columbia mission in which NASA quickly realized just how devastating the foam strike had been. Could the Columbia astronauts have been safely retrieved from orbit?”

Link via MetaFilter.