As Russia’s war on Ukraine drags on, its knock-on effects are being felt far beyond the eastern Europe theater. And perhaps nowhere is this more acutely felt than in the space launch industry, seeing that at least until recently, Russia was pretty much everyone’s go-to ride to orbit. All that has changed now, at least temporarily, and has expanded to include halting sales of rocket engines used in other nations’ launch vehicles. Specifically, Roscosmos has put an end to exports of the RD-180 engine used in the US Atlas V launch vehicle, along with the RD-181 thrusters found in the Antares rocket. The loss of these engines may be more symbolic than practical, at least for the RD-180 — United Launch Alliance stopped selling launches on Atlas V back last year, and had secured the engines it needed for the 29 flights it has booked by that April. Still, there’s some irony that the Atlas V, which started life as an ICBM aimed at the USSR in the 1950s, has lost its Russian-made engines.
Bad news for Jan Mrázek’s popular open-source parametric search utility which made JLCPCB’s component library easier to use. We wrote about it back in 2020, and things seemed to be going fine up until this week, when Jan got a take-down request for his service. When we first heard about this, we checked the application’s web page, which bore a big red banner that included what were apparently unpleasant accusations Jan had received, including the words “reptile” and “parasitic.” The banner is still there, but the text has changed to a mor ..
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