grawl

I picture VR experiences of Earth most noisy crowded places to keep mental sanity up into the deep loneliness of space. Dozens of people have already gone that deep under the oceans, and safely at that. The ones lost here probably fell for it because of charismatic discourse and well crafted PPT... And the scale of this is event is closer to a Moon orbit tourist mission going bad, than a Mars one.

I think future Mars outposts will be more like the South Pole scientific stations, rather than a billionaire's rendez-vous hotspot like the Everest. Also, initial Mars manned missions may look more like the first polar explorers missions, with their boats getting immobilized or worse, crushed by ice, then keeping on with less and less assets until freezing on the way. These guys were outright crazy if you ask me ! I really don't see a billionaire going into such a maddening and self-destructing endeavour. But financing the project, publishing expedition's diaries in owned medias and then glorifying the fallen heroes if anything bad happens, yes, of course.

True that. But, a moon landing is a bigger feat than launching a bunch of simple sats. What's happening in the mind of an egotistical billionaire (might be a pleonasm) when he needs to assess he partly failed and need the help of another billionaire that partly failed as well, is what I find interesting here. Please note I'm not saying they won't do it if needed, I guess they don't really get to choose at some point even if reluctant about it. Also, maybe the ego war Bezos and Musk are showing (I'm not sure if its still going on btw) is just fake PR and they'll willingly cooperate for the sake of science, business and collective achievement.

That would be a spectacular example of cooperation towards a common goal, between seemingly concurrent industrials ! I'd find it wonderful for SpaceX and Blue Origin and Boeing to fit together this way. One launches, the other lands, and the last one returns. Everyone has a piece of the cake this way. BUT, one other thing I'm REALLY looking forward to hear about if this ever happens, is the reaction of Musk and Bezos when they'd be announced NASA said "now, kiss"

The perspective is hard to tell, but it looks like its legs hit a small sand ridge (the 2 darker bits that-looks-like holes in the sand), effectively stopping its motion abruptly, then it bounced back a bit to finally settle. What do you think about it ? And now, did the broken propeller : A. Broke when the vehicle tipped over while trying to land at that sand ridge ? B. Disassembled in mid-air for an unknown reason, messing up the trajectory and causing it to land in an unexpected way ? C. The answer C

I'll settle on the idea it has been struck by a meteor. A great ending at the level of the feats it accomplished. I know it probably is something boring like fatigue on the material but... Don't break my dreams, OK ?

You're right of course. It did perform well ahead of expectations. But the end of the series of successful flights would still be a bit sad. To put it another way, it's not because your great-grand-daddy is past 100 years old that you don't wish him to keep on !

That does sound bad... Fingers crossed !

And the Guinness World Record award for biggest Nerf gun goes to...

You should never get involved in a dispute with the italian mafia...

The PR they need now needs to be readable as well. And we get to see this part while it's moving horizontally. We'll probably never see it again as it will probably get crushed in pressure tests or something of that sort. ==> Hence the left-to-right horizontality. It totally makes sense. The flag remains a mystery to me, though. I guess they paint it first, then realize the orientation PR thing. Or maybe it's the result of a dreadful conflict in the way PR should be done in the space business ! Show-as-launched folks vs Grunts-must-read team. One team got to sneak in and paint the flag the(ir) right way C'mon I'm trying to get creative here

As a french citizen, I think what you did was cruel. Found opened software engineering positions. Green on all the requirements. Only then I looked up that ITAR thing. Just a little, tiny, meany "thing"... @darthgently Your link is broken btw, the page is blocked when there are query params in the URL.

That fits in the "increasing launch rate" category. Fatally, the more launches you get the more weather issues will arise. Is it THAT crazy to formulate the hypothesis that the increase of the launch rate has somehow reached the beginning of something resembling a bottleneck? That's the limit I'm talking about.

Or that they're slowly reaching the limits of reusability. Ageing furniture and an escalating launch rate ain't working well together sometimes...

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