This article is plagued by several almost-truths, and gets a lot mixed up.

The thing that is happening for the first time on this mission is humans personally observing much of the far side in daylight. For the Apollo missions the far side was mostly dark because they wanted a high sun angle at the landing site on the near side. Many uncrewed orbiting cameras and even a recent Chinese lander & rover have taken photos of the far side.

It also states that these will be images "from the surface" of the Moon which is wildly off base. Artemis II is not landing... Of course it's true that this O2O technology could be used for high bandwidth livestreams from the surface on future missions, if this test works well.

I don't even think this O2O system will be used for live video during Artemis II. This and several other similar articles all appear to reference a NASA press release that is about the technology in general. The mission-specific NASA reference I found[1] says they will transmit a pre-recorded video "in the lunar vicinity" at 4k using the O2O system, so I would guess this claim of a "livestream" is just misstated.

[1]: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/a2-reference...

But Artemis II launched during passover - so a day before the full moon. That means that for a 10 day mission, the flyby will be four days after the full moon. And the flyby is necessarily on the far side of the moon, that's how physics works. So they'll be passing over the far side of the moon four days after a full moon - the far side of the moon will be in almost complete darkness. Not even Earthshine lights the dark side of the moon when it is full.

My understanding is that even that small amount is more than the Apollo crews had. It's all a bit of a marketing line anyway. We can see a good portion of the "far side" from Earth due to the Moon's libration.

Still, it's true that parts of the far side are still unseen by human eyes (if you consider pitch black landscape to be "unseen" which I think is fair given the lack of any significant illumination as you point out).

I believe that Apollo 17 spent six days in lunar orbit. I'm not sure at what phase they arrived or left, but worst case they saw the far side three days away from full darkness.

The cynic in me wants to say that most of the web these days is pushing H.264 frames from a CDN to proprietary phone apps and the rest is pushing Widevine video from the same CDN to proprietary browsers and we'll never cooperatively own any of that, even if we wanted to.

The idealist in me says we should still build a simple to use publishing and discovery system for hypertext that can be self-hosted and self-networked for the day the next generations realize they need it (authoritarian control of the Internet, collapse of social media, infrastructure instability, climate apocalypse, whatever). I suppose my idealism is still pretty pessimistic, but then it is Monday.

Yes, while I was reading the article I couldn't help but think about notaries public. Seems like something like that would be government's go-to for this if they weren't quite so overfed on tech industry contributions that lead them down the path of AI solutions.

I'm not sure that's the right answer here, but I think it ticks a lot boxes for the state.

Direct link to the NASA report: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/nasa-report-...

Reading between the lines of the summary a bit, it sure sounds like NASA program leadership was essentially doing pro bono PR for ol' pal Boeing at the expense of crew safety to placate Boeing's feeling of SpaceX being NASA's new favorite. Followed by Boeing again falling on the sea of sharp daggers held by their army of subcontractors.

That said, the announcement of this mishap reclassification does have a certain fleeting, bias-shaped odor, given Isaacman's proximity to Musk.

The report was released internally last November, before Isaacman’s appointment. It’s a timely reminder of past shortcomings as NASA is preparing for high risk Artemis flights. Boeing itself didn’t dispute it. Would you rather they put it under the rug?

We could probably spin this around in the other direction, too. NASA and prior administrator behavior has a certain bias against SpaceX and Musk. It’s no secret that Musk’s, shall we say, eccentric personality caused him to find few friends in Washington up until he cozied up to Trump. It makes sense that there would be pressure to get an alternative to Falcon 9 and Dragon ready with that additional context in mind.

It's inter-organizational disfunction. Always more plausible than any conspiracy.

https://apnews.com/article/faa-el-paso-texas-air-space-close...

Pentagon wanted to test the new laser but didn't give FAA enough information to assure safety of the NAS and civilian aviation (when, where, effects, etc.) so they felt forced to pull the big TFR lever. They fired the laser of at who knows what and then FAA lifted the TFR.

Somewhere, in the deepest bowels, Skype still lives. I'm sure of it.

Lync is still there, lurking. With Communicator blocking every contact with the outside world. But eventually some message will pass through!

It actually does or at least did, until at least a few years ago. When you opened the audio mixer (alsamixer or pulse audio control?) on XFCE, you could still see MS Teams labeled as Skype there. Not sure how it would be now, because I only ever use MS Teams isolated in a separate Ungoogled Chromium browser now, and have given up on the client for GNU/Linux.

The broadcast nature of it is something that I missed just last night. I was walking past several bars as the Seahawks won a big football game, but of course each spot was on a different stream delay so instead of one full-throated simultaneous cheer echoing across the neighborhood it was three or four quieter, distinct cheers spread over 20-30 seconds. Not really a big deal but still, it felt like a lesser experience to this aging millennial.

Yep, and I'll add: the first reader is the first maintainer. When that is turned over to an LLM agent the organization's leadership had better be prepared to entertain rewrites (reprompts?) of significant portions of LLM-generated code on a regular basis. The call of the rewrite isn't new of course, but it'll be far more alluring since LLMs are at their most "productive" and least destructive when working from a clean slate.

From what I've heard (FWIW), Airbus released a version of the software for one of the flight computers that removed SEU protections (hence grounding affected models until they could be downgraded to the previous version).

There was still hardware redundancy though. Operation of the plane's elevator switched to a secondary computer. Presumably it was also running the same vulnerable software, but they diverted and landed early in part to minimize this risk.

So not just redundancy but layers of redundancy.

G, the gravitational constant is (as far as we know) universal. I don't think this is what they meant, but the use of "across the universe" in the parent comment is confusing.

g, the net acceleration from gravity and the Earth's rotation is what is 9.8m/s² at the surface, on average. It varies slightly with location and altitude (less than 1% for anywhere on the surface IIRC), so "it's 9.8 everywhere" is the model that's wrong but good enough a lot of the time.

It doesn't even hold true on Earth! Nevermind other planets being of different sizes making that number change, that equation doesn't account for the atmosphere and air resistance from that. If we drop a feather that isn't crumpled up, it'll float down gently at anything but 9.8m/s². In sports, air resistance of different balls is enough that how fast something drops is also not exactly 9.8m/s², which is why peak athlete skills often don't transfer between sports. So, as a model, when we ignore air resistance it's good enough, a lot of the time, but sometimes it's not a good model because we do need to care about air resistance.