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September 18, 2021 Archives

Saturday, September 18, 2021

THE HAPPENING WORLD: U.S. Federal Aviation Administration Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment for SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project

Here is the main page, “SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Project at the Boca Chica Launch Site”, which has links to the full documents, all of which are PDF. The main text is (deep breath), “Draft Programmatic Environmental Assessment for SpaceX Starship/Super Heavy Program at the SpaceX Boca Chica Launch Site in Cameron County, Texas” [PDF], which is 143 pages long. There are seven separate appendices which provide additional technical details, including a 109 page “Endangered Species Act Section 7 Consultation” [PDF] in which you will learn of the potential consequences of humanity's escaping the Earth's gravity well on the Northern Aplomado Falcon, the Gulf Coast Jaguarundi, and Kemp's Ridley Sea Turtle.

Public comments are solicited and should be submitted by October 18th, 2020, and there will be two “virtual public hearings” (whatever that is) on October 6th and 7th with a presentation and opportunity for public oral comments.

It remains to be seen whether Elon Musk is heard muttering to himself, “…emigrated to the wrong country.”

Posted at 14:37 Permalink

THE HAPPENING WORLD: SpaceX: Inspiration4 Reentry and Splashdown

Splashdown off the coast of Florida is scheduled for 23:06 UTC on Saturday, 2021-09-18. Coverage of the return to Earth will presumably start some time before that.

In other monuments of space exploration, Inspiration4 mission commander Jared Isaacman placed the first Las Vegas sports bet from space on 2021-09-16.

Posted at 12:00 Permalink

CONTEXT: Extreme Ultraviolet Lithography for Semiconductor Manufacturing, Part 1 of 3

The latest generation of integrated circuits have device geometries far smaller than the wavelength of visible light. The shortest wavelength the human eye can perceive is around 380 nanometres, while feature sizes in production chips are as small as 7 nanometres, with the next generation expected to be 5 nanometres. To expose the circuitry on a silicon wafer requires illumination on the scale of the feature size, so visible light has become hopeless. Extreme ultraviolet (EUV), which occupies a band of the electromagnetic spectrum just below soft X-rays, provides a way to reach such geometries, with a wavelength of 13.5 nanometres used in semiconductor manufacturing today. But it isn't easy: almost all materials absorb EUV, so lenses cannot be used to focus it and all processing must be done in a vacuum. The best mirrors, which are themselves hideously difficult to manufacture nanoscale structures, reflect only around 70% of incident light, and EUV and the means used to generate it rapidly degrade materials. The process of taming EUV and applying it to mass manufacturing has taken over twenty years by a global collaboration of researchers, technologists, and industry. This video series traces the story of its development.

Posted at 11:15 Permalink

CONTINUITY: Apollo Spacecraft S Band Communication System, Part 1

The Apollo Unified S Band Communication System multiplexed voice, telemetry, computer data up- and down-links, ranging, and television onto a microwave channel sent to the ground by an 11.6 watt transmitter through the service module's high gain antenna. In this episode, original ground test transponder and amplifier units are opened and examined and the architecture of the communication system explained.

Posted at 10:55 Permalink