Author: Lee Hutchinson

HOUSTON—I'd guess that the majority of Ars readers are familiar with XKCD, the stick-figure Web comic drawn by former NASA contractor and engineer (and now Hugo award winner) Randall Munroe. It's rare for Ars to stop by a workplace to interview a source where there aren't XKCD comic strips festooning the walls (the "sudo make me a sandwich" comic is particularly popular among sysadmins), and discussion threads on forums across the Internet will frequently include a "relevant XKCD" link to emphasize or summarize a particular point with a comic on the topic.

Munroe draws and releases XKCD under Creative Commons licensing, and makes the majority of his income these days from XKCD merchandise—like his new book, Thing Explainer, which Munroe is currently promoting. The book takes the conceit demonstrated in the "Up-Goer Five" comic—labeling a diagram of a complex machine using only first thousand most-common English words—and goes nuts with it, breaking out dozens of different drawings with a similar labeling style. Highlights include "the pieces everything is made of" (the periodic table), the bags of stuff inside you (the organs and systems inside a human body), and "the shared space house" (the International Space Station).

Ars caught up with Munroe before a book-related talk at Space Center Houston, and he was kind enough to give us a few minutes to talk about space, Up-Goers, and the iterative process of explaining things.

HOUSTON—After days of delay, Orbital ATK's CRS Orb-4 (for “commercial resupply services”) launched successfully from Space Launch Complex 41 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida this afternoon. The Cygnus spacecraft took flight atop a ULA-produced Atlas V rocket—an older launch vehicle with a relatively high success rate.

The launch is the first for Orbital since their disastrous CRS-3 launch last year, where a turbopump fault in one of the Soviet-built NK-33 engines powering the rocket’s first stage triggered an explosion that destroyed the launch vehicle and its cargo and also caused significant damage to the launch pad at Wallops Island, Virginia. Orbital switched its launch plans over to utilize an Atlas rocket (which uses more modern, but still Russian-sourced, RD-180 engines) while retrofitting its Atlas rocket design.

Sunday’s successful launch was the fourth attempt this week to get CRS Orb-4 into space. Three previous launch attempts—one per day since Thursday—were scrubbed due to foul weather at Cape Canaveral. The CRS-4 Cygnus capsule is currently en route to the ISS, carrying about 7300 pounds (about 3300kg) of food, hardware, and scientific equipment for the Expedition 44 crew on board the ISS (which includes US astronaut Scott Kelly, who is more than halfway through a year-long stay aboard the station).