Hackaday Links: March 30, 2025

The hits just keep coming for the International Space Station (ISS), literally in the case of a resupply mission scheduled for June that is now scrubbed thanks to a heavy equipment incident that damaged the cargo spacecraft. The shipping container for the Cygnus automated cargo ship NG-22 apparently picked up some damage in transit from Northrop Grumman’s Redondo Beach plant in Los Angeles to Florida. Engineers inspected the Cygnus and found that whatever had damaged the container had also damaged the spacecraft, leading to the June mission’s scrub.

Mission controllers are hopeful that NG-22 can be patched up enough for a future resupply mission, but that doesn’t help the ISS right now, which is said to be running low on consumables. To fix that, the next scheduled resupply mission, a SpaceX Cargo Dragon slated for an April launch, will be modified to include more food and consumables for the ISS crew. That’s great, but it might raise another problem: garbage. Unlike the reusable Cargo Dragons, the Cygnus cargo modules are expendable, which makes them a great way to dispose of the trash produced by the ISS crew since everything just burns up on reentry. The earliest a Cygnus is scheduled to dock at the ISS again is sometime in this autumn, meaning it might be a long, stinky summer for the crew.

By now you’ve probably heard the news that genetic testing company 23andMe has filed for bankruptcy. The company spent years hawking their spit-in-a-tube testing kits, which after DNA sequence analysis returned a report revealing all your genetic secrets. This led to a lot of DNA surprises, like finding a whole mess of half-siblings, learning that your kid isn’t really related to you, and even catching an alleged murderer. But now that a bankruptcy judge has given permission for the company to sell that treasure trove of genetic data to the highest bidder, there’s a mad rush of 23andMe customers to delete their data. It’s supposed to be as easy as signing into your account and clicking a few buttons to delete your data permanently, with the option to have any preserved samples destroyed as well. Color us skeptical, though, that the company would willingly allow its single most valuable asset to be drained. Indeed, there were reports of the 23andMe website crashing on Monday, probably simply because of the rush of deletion requests, but then again, maybe not.

It may not have been 121 gigawatts-worth, but the tiny sample of plutonium that a hapless Sydney “science nerd” procured may be enough to earn him some jail time. Emmanuel Lidden, 24, pleaded guilty to violations of Australia’s nuclear proliferation laws after ordering a small sample of the metal from a US supplier, as part of his laudable bid to collect a sample of every element in the periodic table. Shipping plutonium to Australia is apparently a big no-no, but not so much that the border force officials who initially seized the shipment didn’t return some of the material to Lidden. Someone must have realized they made a mistake, judging by the outsized response to re-seize the material, which included shutting down the street where his parents live and a lot of people milling about in hazmat suits. We Googled around very briefly for plutonium samples for sale, which is just another in a long list of searches since joining Hackaday that no doubt lands us on a list, and found this small chunk of trinitite encased in an acrylic cube for $100. We really hope this isn’t what the Australian authorities got so exercised about that Lidden now faces ten years in prison. That would be really embarrassing.

And finally, we couldn’t begin to tote up the many happy hours of our youth spent building plastic models. New model day was always the best day, and although it’s been a while since we’ve indulged, we’d really get a kick out of building models of some of the cars we had an emotional connection to, like the 1972 Volkswagen Beetle that took us on many high school adventures, or our beloved 1986 Toyota 4×4 pickup with the amazing 22R engine. Sadly, those always seemed to be vehicles that wouldn’t appeal to a broad enough market to make it worth a model company’s while to mass-produce. But if you’re lucky, the car of your dreams might just be available as a download thanks to the work of Andrey Bezrodny, who has created quite a collection of 3D models of off-beat and quirky vehicles. Most of the files are pretty reasonably priced considering the work that obviously went into them, and all you have to do is download the files and print them up. It’s not quite the same experience as taking the shrink-wrap off a Revell or Monogram box and freeing the plastic parts from they’re trees to glue them together, but it still looks like a lot of fun.