One of the biggest “David versus Goliath” stories in tech right now is the towns beset by AI data center projects they may or may not have asked for. Powered By Who is tracking data center development in the US on this convenient map.
Currently, there are over 2,100 data centers being tracked by the project ranging from proposals to sites fully up-and-running. While you have to build bypasses data centers to keep the internet running (which we’re partial to here at Hackaday), there are certainly questions around the amount of power and water consumed by these sites, the emissions they’re sending into the surrounding community, and who exactly is reaping the benefits.
Whether you’re pro, against, or ambivalent about the proliferation of “AI” data centers, the map offers an engaging way to look at what projects are happening around the nation, especially when you start looking at clusters and how that interacts with the power generation and political makeup in a region. It’s particularly interesting how only three states account for roughly 70% of all the projects. Let us know if there’s a similar tracker in your area if you’re from one of the other parts of the globe!
Since the first V2 rocket sailed above the Kármán line back in 1944 and right up until the modern era, the trajectory of most space-bound rockets was more or less the same: after expending their propellants they would either crash into some desolate steppe or plunge into the ocean. In either event, the rocket was disposable. The important bit up top might go on to explore the stars or send a human crew off on their mission, but the booster rocket that lifted the spacecraft out of the atmosphere was always going to be sacrificed for the cause.
But in the 1970s NASA had a wild idea: what if we didn’t smash a brand-new rocket valued at millions of dollars into the ocean every time we wanted to put something in orbit? Instead, they would build a hybrid space vehicle that blended the vertical takeoff and raw power of a rocket with the capabilities of an airplane, allowing it and whatever it was carrying to make a gentle runway landing at the end of its mission. As such, the Space Shuttle was born.
With the benefit of hindsight, we now know the Shuttle wasn’t quite the spaceflight revolution that NASA had hoped for. The age of reusable rockets didn’t truly begin until 2015, when SpaceX landed the first stage of their Falcon 9. To date they’ve repeated the feat nearly 600 times, all the while increasing the reliability and speed of their operations. Today the Falcon 9 is the most prolific launch vehicle in history, and nearly every other rocket in active development is being designed to include some element of reusability.
Most recently, China demonstrated that they could recover their Long March 10B rocket by gently bringing it down into what amounts to a giant butterfly net. While it might seem a bit quaint compared to rockets that land on their tails like something out of a 1950s sci-fi movie, the idea offers considerable promise.
There and Back Again
But why did it take 70+ years before we were able to regularly refly orbital-class rockets? It’s not that there’s anything inherently complex about reusing a spent rocket. Sure, there’s a case to be made that material science improvements have made the engines robust enough for repeated use. But even if you had to rebuild the engines after each flight it would still be better than slamming the whole vehicle into the ocean. Similarly, there’s nothing particularly unique about the structure of the Falcon 9 that enables it to fly multiple times — it’s a big metal tube with tanks inside of it, just like essentially every rocket that has flown before it.
The revolutionary technology demonstrated by SpaceX in 2015 didn’t have anything to do with making their rocket go up, it was that they were able to safely bring it back without damaging or physically altering it. The Falcon 9 first stage that came back to Earth was in the same condition it was when it left the launch pad eight minutes or so earlier, albeit with empty propellant tanks and a layer of soot on the outside.
As such, most of the variability we see when comparing the reuse of past, present, and future rockets comes not from how the vehicle ascends, but how it ultimately comes to rest back down on Earth.
Splashdown is Easy, But Rough
Without question, the easiest way to recover a rocket intact is to simply slow it down before it hits the surface of the ocean using parachutes This is how all American crewed capsules, and more applicably the Space Shuttle’s Solid Rocket Boosters (SRBs), have been recovered after their flights.
Once pumped out, the hollow SRBs could be towed to shore.
But even when descending under multiple huge parachutes, splashdown isn’t exactly a gentle event. It could probably best be described as “survivable”, in that the vehicle and crew will come through the experience in one piece, but neither is likely to be terribly happy about it.
The situation of course ends up being even worse for the rocket, as its structure is going to be subjected to the brunt of the impact force. Additionally, a complex aerospace vehicle getting partially submerged in salt water is a recipe for corrosion and electrical issues, to say nothing of the thermal shock the hot engines will experience when getting dunked.
One could argue that the only reason this method of recovery worked for the Shuttle SRBs is because of their relative simplicity when compared to a liquid-fueled rocket capable of independent flight. At the risk of oversimplifying the structure of the SRB, at splashdown it was effectively a hollow tube with minimal avionics and thrust vector control (TVC) hardware that could simply be replaced before the next flight.
Still, the NASA document Solid Rocket Booster (SRB) Refurbishment Practices goes over the considerable work required to bring each booster back to flight status after coming down in the ocean. Given the challenges of refurbishing the boosters, it’s perhaps unsurprising that NASA elected to forgo their reuse on the Space Launch System despite its SRBs being largely identical to their Shuttle predecessors.
Teaching Rockets New Tricks
In the very early days, while they were still trying to reach orbit with the Falcon 1, SpaceX had actually considered a Shuttle SRB-style recovery procedure. But in the end they decided to outfit the Falcon 9 with deployable landing legs and the rest, as they say, is history.
Landing legs allow a rocket to come down on effectively any flat surface, be it a concrete pad next to the launch facility or a floating platform. But there are some fairly serious drawbacks to this approach. For one thing, the requirement for precise terminal guidance means parachutes are out of the question. The rocket needs fins, attitude thrusters, or other control surfaces to come down on the center of the pad.
It also means the rocket needs to perform a propulsive landing. That is, use its own primary engines to bring its velocity on touchdown to as close to zero as possible. This in turn requires engines that can not only restart in flight — a capability that has not traditionally been required by first stage boosters — but are able to throttle down low enough to control the rocket’s descent without simply pushing it back upwards. It’s difficult to overstate how unnatural a state of operation this is for a rocket. Indeed, it’s the antithesis of how nearly every rocket has operated since the Song Dynasty started experimenting with gunpowder in the 10th century.
Even if you can accomplish all that, the true cost of landing a rocket is in the extra mass. Although the legs will be stowed away and unused for 99.8% of the rocket’s flight time, it still has to lug all that weight uphill. If that wasn’t bad enough, there’s also the extra weight of whatever control mechanism is in place to guide the rocket’s descent trajectory as well as the propellant that needs to be kept in reserve for the landing burn.
All told, landing a rocket on legs comes with a massive payload penalty. In the case of the Falcon 9, the rocket’s maximum capacity to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) in its expendable configuration is approximately 22,800 kg (50,300 lb). But when outfitted with the hardware necessary to land, that number is reduced by nearly 25% to 17,500 kg (38,600 lb).
Dropping the Dead Weight
There was a time, not so very long ago, when critics doubted the financial viability of recovering and reusing rockets like the Falcon 9. But today, reuse has gone from theoretical to standard operating procedure. Outside of a few Old Space holdouts, it’s top of mind for every launch provider and critical for remaining competitive in a fast-moving commercial market. In November, Blue Origin even managed to land their New Glenn heavy-lift rocket on only its second flight.
So at this point the question isn’t whether or not future rockets will be reusable, but rather, what is the most efficient way to achieve that reusability?
The first stage of Starship after being caught in mid-air.
With that in mind, it’s easy to see the appeal of China’s net recovery. While the rocket must still perform a propulsive descent — although in theory the necessary positional accuracy, and therefore the technical challenge, is somewhat reduced — it doesn’t need to have landing legs installed. This mass savings increases the vehicle’s useful payload capacity, which in turn makes it more profitable to operate. Achieving the same end goal while being easier and cheaper is an improvement in anyone’s book.
Admittedly, having the rocket come down in a huge net adds a certain amount of whimsy to the whole endeavor, but the overall logic is sound enough. It should also be said that SpaceX, for all the success they’ve had with landing their Falcon 9 on a set of deployable legs, are themselves planning on catching both the first and second stages of their next-generation Starship vehicle. Instead of a net, their goal is to pluck the rocket out of the air with a huge robotic pincer mechanism.
One is reminded of the old joke about how the Americans and Russians approached the problem of writing in space: NASA spent millions of dollars developing a pen that would work in microgravity, while their Russian counterparts simply used pencils. If China can demonstrate the ability to reuse a rocket they snagged in their net, the more elaborate methods of recovery employed by American rockets may one day look like a similarly overengineered solution.
Swatch’s latest MoonSwatch is the Mission to the Moon 1969, a limited-edition model with components crafted from Omega’s 18K Moonshine Gold. To get one, you'll have to join a lottery.
I’m sick of “opt-out” toggles for automatically enabled generative AI features. It’s past time to make “opt in” the default setting for sensitive features.
The original OnePlus phone disrupted the mobile market 13 years ago with its affordable price and top-end specs. Now, the company is exiting North America and Europe to focus on China.
Skullcandy’s audio products aren’t exactly known for their stellar audio quality or noise cancellation, but its latest headphones are getting an assist from Bose to turn things around.
If you want to stream local media, this free and open source media server is just as good as Plex. But if you rely on remote access or live TV, prepare to tinker.
Apple’s revamped Siri is more than a voice assistant; it’s now the backbone of the iPhone user experience. You can try it now through the iOS 27 public beta.
Along with the many displays of outrage, gnashing of teeth and other displays of profound grief at the recent news that Sony will no longer manufacture physical game discs come 2028, we have also heard some voices pipe up with a variety of statements, such as that this decision makes game archiving basically impossible. Of course, the truth of the matter is that software archiving in general has become much harder already over the past decades, while game consoles are just late to the archiving-hostile party.
As an example, one merely has to contrast Sony’s PlayStation with e.g. the Valve Steam store and software by juggernauts like Adobe and Autodesk. Here the former moved after the Creative Suite (CS6) series of Photoshop and other tools fully over to the Creative Cloud (CC) subscription model, where DRM and constant rental software renewals are in order. Unlike that disc copy of CS6 Master Collection that will stay good practically forever, there’s nothing really to archive with Adobe’s CC software.
Similarly, with digital game downloads and their constant patches now put inside a heavily encrypted environment that relies on a special launcher, preserving video games has been turned into into a virtual nightmare for many years now.
Why Archive
Archiving is about accumulating historical records or materials. The scope and reason for a particular archive can differ, such as a company’s archive with financial records, an engineering department’s archive of technical references, or a museum’s archive of physical artefacts. Whatever the reason, the same goal applies: the maintaining or creating of a historical timeline that can be later referenced as needed.
An essential part of archives is to act as a primary reference source: where possible archives contain only the original documents and artefacts, making them as close to an objective source of history as possible. This is both extremely useful for a company when the tax office does a surprise inspection, but it is also for anyone who wishes to do any kind of historical research. This includes research into the development of a certain kind of software over the centuries and all types of related hardware.
Within the world of software archiving not much changes about this primary mission, except for the digital aspect that earns it the title of digital preservation. At least until fairly recently this meant mostly making copies of physical storage media and any associated physical media like documentation and manuals, but increasingly the subject of such preservation and archiving entails digital data that never was bound to or accompanied by any kind of physical media.
Such digital preservation is a big part of organizations like the Internet Archive, whose archives contain copies of software and games that might otherwise have been lost to the ages. The cases of retro enthusiasts coming across a floppy disk or CD containing some obscure game or set of drivers and uploading a copy to the Internet Archive are both numerous and an excellent example of digital preservation.
Other archives like the Video Game History Foundation (VGHF) have a more narrow focus, as their name implies. Their basic mission is no different, of course, with creating an archive that preserves history. Here the best part about digital preservation is that it makes it possible to create virtually infinite bit-perfect copies of the materials, making it incredibly easy to share and enjoy multimedia, gaming, and other content from these archives.
Of course, if that was all that there is to be said about digital archiving and preservation then this is basically where we could conclude merrily that all is well, and that whether software is distributed digitally or on some kind of physical storage media is of no concern. In this scenario said software can be copied around to one’s heart’s content, burned to optical media and so on without restrictions, ensuring its preservation.
With distributors of software having had fits about how easy it is to copy and distribute said software since at least the 1980s, it’s little wonder that they haven’t seen fit to rely on the fact that copyright infringement is illegal, and instead sought to make it impossible to copy the data of software. This led to a wide variety of copy restriction implementations, including on floppy disks, such as Electronic Arts’ Interlock system, while Nintendo’s game cartridges mostly relied on this more obscure format to keep people from creating their own cartridges.
In the face of these hurdles, the US Library of Congress notes that, for some software, it’s not enough to have the software on some medium, but also the console or hardware to play it on.
These copy restriction mechanisms are a form of digital restrictions management (DRM), euphemistically called ‘rights management’, since DRM only removes rights. As software became decoupled from physical media by the late 90s along with multimedia content like MP3 music, alternate DRM schemes were developed that restrict copying, generally through encryption and a convoluted decryption scheme that even includes hardware-level encryption such as High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP).
The upshot of all these copy restriction schemes is that you have to jump through many hoops to still create a copy, whether it involves breaking a floppy copying scheme, using an HDMI splitter that accidentally forgets to re-apply HDCP before sending the content off to a capture card, catching a lucky break with a leaky DVD CSS implementation, or using the analog hole to create that ‘good enough’ copy.
Nobody buys games on DVDs anymore, however. When a digital game is provided via an online store service, how can this be preserved in a digital archive? Since all of these rely on an internet-dependent DRM scheme which fails the moment there’s an issue anywhere in the chain, or if said authentication servers are turned off in N years from now, all preservation schemes here are by definition flawed or at least legally awkward.
A Digital Void
When EA created its Interlock copy restriction scheme it was likely not concerned with whether or not copies of their games would survive into the 2020s, never mind whether anyone would still be using FDDs. It does however indicate the central problem here, one that goes far beyond a black-and-white physical media vs digital-only show-off. Especially since physical media could be argued to be flawed enough that it deserved it to die.
In today’s inevitable march towards a future in which we’re all consuming content using ‘our’ Smart Terminal Devices that rely on any number of paid subscriptions to gain access to the actual content stored on the servers of our benevolent Content Overlords, what probably rankles people the most about the PlayStation physical media announcement is less the demise of physical media and more a reminder of how much has already been taken from us.
In a statement made by VGHF director Frank Cifaldi on the end of physical PlayStation discs – and the concurrent announcement of the shutdown of the PlayStation 3 and Vita online stores – this is put in the broader context of the digital void that we’re facing, in which a large part of video game history simply cannot be legally preserved.
The Legal Conundrum
Here we have to address the rather sizeable elephant in the room, in the form of copyright infringement. Here we see large groups of very nice people in friendly online communities who carefully strip any offending DRM that may even prevent the game from working, while ensuring that the freely provided bundle is kept up to date with only the best patches and anything of relevance.
Within these communities you can find entire swathes of video game history preserved for the enjoyment of connoisseurs, including tutorials, manuals, carefully curated collections mods and extensions, plus everything else that would make a professional digital archivist salivate.
But these ‘shadow archives’ are definitely illegal according to copyright law, ergo the only option available to VGHF and other organizations that are trying to stay on the light side of the law might be to wait a few decades, see which games enter the legal grey zone of ‘abandonware‘ and see whether they’ll still get hit by DMCA takedown request in 2050 for a game that ceased being offered for sale in 2026.
Login
But in the 1970s NASA had a wild idea: what if we didn’t smash a brand-new rocket valued at millions of dollars into the ocean every time we wanted to put something in orbit? Instead, they would build a hybrid space vehicle that blended the vertical takeoff and raw power of a rocket with the capabilities of an airplane, allowing it and whatever it was carrying to make a gentle runway landing at the end of its mission. As such, the Space Shuttle was born.
