627: Artemis II & Astrovan, Waymo, Zuck & Demis Hassabis, Old GPUs Aging like Wine, Demis Hassabis Bio, Redrawing the Intelligence Map, Christensen & Dediu, Nvidia + Marvell, and Hollywood Recession
"Astronauts love traditions"
Science does not know its debt to imagination.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson
👨🚀🚐 🚀 Every astronaut who rode the Space Shuttle to the launchpad did so in the same 1983 Airstream motorhome. It’s a modified Excella RV with bench seats and holes cut in the floor for suit-cooling units. They called it the Astrovan, and it was in service from 1983 to the final Shuttle mission in 2011 (👆).
The best part? Astronauts love traditions and actively argued against upgrading or replacing it even after it was pretty old.
Airstream also built the Mobile Quarantine Facilities for Apollo 11, 12, and 14 (those silver trailers where astronauts waved at Nixon through a window after returning from the Moon). When the Artemis program needed a crew vehicle, the original plan was custom electric vans from a startup (Canoo) that went bankrupt, but they ended up going with Astrovan II: an Airstream Atlas on a Mercedes Sprinter chassis, built in Jackson Center, Ohio, 14 miles from the Neil Armstrong museum. 👇
Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen rode it down the road to Pad 39B for Artemis II — the first crewed lunar mission in over 50 years, expected to fly by the Moon on Monday (🌔). The most advanced rocket NASA has ever built, and the ride to get to it is a modified Airstream.
Here’s the orbital mechanics involved in the translunar injection (don’t those words just sound cool?):
(Note: if you don’t see the animation above in your email app, you may need to click through to the website)
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