Why is it always a helium leak? It seems whenever there’s a scrubbed launch or a narrowly averted disaster, space exploration just can’t get past the problems of helium plumbing. We’ve had a bunch of helium problems lately, most famously with the leaks in Starliner’s thruster system that have prevented astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from returning to Earth in the spacecraft, leaving them on an extended mission to the ISS. Ironically, the launch itself was troubled by a helium leak before the rocket ever left the ground. More recently, the Polaris Dawn mission, which is supposed to feature the first spacewalk by a private crew, was scrubbed by SpaceX due to a helium leak on the launch tower. And to round out the helium woes, we now have news that the Peregrine mission, which was supposed to carry the first commercial lander to the lunar surface but instead ended up burning up in the atmosphere and crashing into the Pacific, failed due to — you guessed it — a helium leak.
Thankfully, there’s a bit more technical detail on that last one; it seems that a helium pressure control valve, designated PCV2 and controlling helium to pressurize an oxidizer tank, got stuck open thanks to “vibration-induced relaxation” in threaded components within the valve. So, launch vibrations shook a screw loose inside the valve, which kept it from sealing and over-pressurized an oxidizer tank with helium to the point of tank failure — kablooie, end of mission. All of these failures are just another way of saying that space travel is really, really hard, of course. But still, with helium woes figuring so prominently in so many failures, we’re left wondering if there might not be an upside to finding something else to pressurize tanks.
Back on terra firma, we got a tip from a reader going by the name of [Walrus] who is alarmed by an apparent trend in the electronics testing market toward a subscription model for the software needed to run modern test gear. Specifically, the tip included a link to a reseller offering a deal on an “Ultimate Software Bundle” for Tektronix 4 Series Mixed-Signal Oscilloscopes. The offer expired at the end of 2023 and prices aren’t mentioned, but given that a discount of up to $5,670 with purchase of a scope was advertised, we’d imagine the Ultimate Software Bundle comes at a pretty steep price. The chief concern [Walrus] expressed was about the possibility that used instruments whose software is tied to a subscription may have little to no value in the secondary market, where many up-and-coming engineers shop for affordable gear. We haven’t had any personal experience with subscription models for test equipment software, and a quick read of the Tektronix site seems to suggest that subscriptions are only one of the models available for licensing instrument software. Still, the world seems to be moving to one where everything costs something forever, and that the days of a “one and done” purchase are going away. We’d love to hear your thoughts on subscription software for test gear, especially if we’ve misread the situation with Tek. Sound off in the comments below.
In this week’s edition of “Dystopia Watch,” we’re alarmed by a story about how police departments are experimenting with generative AI to assist officers in report writing. The product, called Draft One, is from Axon, a public safety technology concern best known for its body-worn cameras and tasers. Using Azure OpenAI, Draft One transcribes the audio from body cam footage and generates a “draft narrative” of an officer’s interaction with the public. The draft is then reviewed by the officer, presumably corrected if needed, and sent on to a second reviewer before becoming the official report. Axon reports that it had to adjust the LLM’s settings to keep AI hallucinations from becoming part of the narrative. While we can see how this would be a huge benefit to officers, who generally loathe everything about report writing, and would get them back out on patrol rather than sitting in a parking lot tapping at a keyboard, we can also see how this could go completely sideways in a hurry. All it will take is one moderately competent defense attorney getting an officer to admit under oath that the words of the report were not written by him or her, and this whole thing goes away.
And finally, getting three (or more) monitors to all agree on what white is can be quite a chore, and not just a little enraging for the slightly obsessive-compulsive — it’s one of the reasons we favor dark mode so much, to be honest. Luckily, if you need a screen full of nothing but #FFFFFF pixels so you can adjust color balance in your multi-monitor setup, it’s as easy as calling up a web page. The White Screen Tool does one thing — paints all the pixels on the screen whatever color you want. If you need all white, it’s just a click away — no need to start up MS Paint or GIMP and futz around with making it bezel-to-bezel. There are plenty of other presets, if white isn’t your thing, plus a couple of fun animated screens that imitate Windows update screens — let the office hijinks begin! You can also set custom colors, which is nice; might we suggest #1A1A1A and #F3BF10?
“hat have prevented astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams from returning to Earth in the spacecraft,”
Anybody else notice that many articles about the broken Starliner often lead off or only mention Mrs. Williams as being stranded?
If you haven’t noticed, the females of our species tend to require additional supplies not necessarily required by the males. There may be an insufficient quantity of these supplies onboard, and resupply is a bit in the future. Hence the term used would be appropriate.
She’s 58, dude.
Then she’ll be in desperate need of hair dye.
It’s more appropriate to label AI mistakes as “bullshit” rather than “hallucination”. See Slater, Humphries, and Hicks in Scientific American, subtitled “It’s important that we use accurate terminology when discussing how AI chatbots make up information.”
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chatgpt-isnt-hallucinating-its-bullshitting/
Bullshitting implies intent.
Which, if you read the article, is there. As far ans AIs have intentions, it’s intended to look convincing. And their designers do have that intention.
I refuse to buy products that are tied to a subscription (including things like Adobe software) or that require connections to a central server (where they could do what that baby product company recently did and force you onto a subscription).
Getting to use features that the hardware can do but “you didn’t pay for” is a proud hacker tradition. If capable hardware is ending up ‘worthless’ it’s not always a bad thing
I also loathe the whole Software-as-a-Service concept and fundamentally refuse to buy devices that can’t function without phoning home (whether or not it’s a paid service makes little difference, I object to the lack of privacy and autonomy).
It's felt to me for a while like the whole push to force users to accept a subscription model over one-and-done software licenses is nothing more than a greed driven ploy by the tech industry in response to the falloff of Moore's Law. Since it's no longer a given that end users will replace their computers every three years with one 4x faster and most truly useful software is mature and doesn't need any more features, they saw that revenue was at risk of declining and SaaS was their countermove.For a long time it was reasonable for them to expect everyone to buy a new perpetual license (or at the very least a discounted upgrade license) with everything hardware upgrade cycle and user were used to paying some fixed portion of their budgets (amortized over a several year time frame) without thinking much of it, and SaaS is an attempt to lock percentage in forever without needing to maintain for users even the illusion that new features were actually useful (rather than just providing bloat to soak up the resources provided by the last hardware refresh). Honestly, how many people actually do stuff with, say, Microsoft Office today that they couldn't do with it 20 years ago? Same question with Photoshop, AutoCAD, etc? I'm guessing very few.
There is an insidious side to several other "as-a-Service" pitches too, most notably "cloud" / Infrastructure-as-a-Service which makes it far too easy, in my opinion, for VC funded start-ups to kill off established competition by cheaply renting as much capacity as they need and offering free (or at least below cost) service just long enough to drown the established industry players and then hike prices in their now captive market. Back when you had to put up capital to buy your own servers, etc. that was an expensive bet, now it's cheap and easy.
Additionally, it seems suspicious that this all aligns so well with the current Wall Street preference for eliminating capital expenditures in favor of operational expenditures which are much more easily elastic (easier to break a lease than sell a building, easier to drag a slider on an autoscale group than wind down a data center and lay off your sysadmin staff, easier to halve or double your contract with that call center in Moldova/Myanmar/India/Mexico/Kentucky than hire or lay off full time employees) which aligns with quarter-by-quarter short term management keeping those fickle short term shareholders happy, but shafting R&D, minimizing job security, and creating an incentive for the subcontractors who run your cloud, call center, factory, etc. to come in with a lower bid even if it means doing unethical things like cutting corners on quality or screwing over their workers.
It's all of a piece, and frankly it disgusts me. If I had it to do over I would not have gone into tech as a career had I know what a toxic swamp it would become, and I still have a good 20 years to slog through before I can hope to retire.
Actually, photoshop is one of the few subscription apps that does drop new useful features.
But it still doesn’t explain why Apple can drop new features regularly for their paid apps (FCPX etc), on a buy-it-once and own it forever with free updates model.
Argon. Why not argon? Helium is tiny in the atomic size contest. it can leak out of nearly anything. Argon is big and fat; one might say huge! It is easy to contain without leaks. Helium and argon are both mono-atomic and inert. The argon boiling point is well below the LOX temperature.
Maybe as the LOX is burned away, the expansion in the tank drops the temperature enough for argon to condense?
Argon is 10x as heavy for the same volume.
Hydrogen?
*duck and run
I hear it pressurises LOX tanks very quickly 😂
LOL!
Trading off against losing a spacecraft, maybe the extra weight is worth it.
Argon is rare, helium can be had quite commonly,
Argon is half the price of helium, commonly available in liquid and pressurized gas. It’s 1% of air, so basically comes for free out of nitrogen and oxygen plants. It’s a very common industrial gas. It’s even used by the ton as a rocket propellant in Starlink satellites because it’s cheap and easily available.
Subscription instead of one-and-done purchase will lead to much lower sales. Because many people don’t need a machine like an oscilloscope 8/5, but will buy one because the price is low enough.
Subscription based will only work for high-end products, where people really need the product and will pay anything to have access to it.
@Dan Maloney said: “The chief concern [Walrus] expressed was about the possibility that used instruments whose software is tied to a subscription may have little to no value in the secondary market…”
Try dealing with networking equipment like Cisco routers. The entire Cisco business model is based on never-ending software and license subscription fees. The Cisco subscription fees have become so expensive, some of my customers have replaced their Cisco gear with free open source solutions [e.g. OpenBSD running Free Range Routing (FRRouting or FRR)] that actually work better and cost zero – forever.[One][Two]
References:
[One] OpenBSD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenBSD
[Two] FRRouting
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FRRouting