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...

Nothing more than : { border-radius: 10% }

I guess they reached the point where Best Part is No Part and Move Fast and Break Things cross their paths !

I put a dollar on a pixel-art like live projection of the descent. ** loud space boom boom plays in background **

I like learning some new code, and won't take any chances in trying to understand what jibber-jabber ChatGPT just got out. Would you please, @Gargamel, explain a bit the purpose of the Desmos language and the constructions used in the example ?

@snkiz Nonetheless, that's the way I chose to design my response. No harm or misinformation intended however, I just felt it was looking better like this, in a more concise and straight-to-the-point manner. And maybe I should have added a few smileys to highlight the tongue-in-cheek intention. Also, I would'nt call "the medical field", a narrow use case. Anyway, I'm curious about your idea of an AI learning to walk before to jump or whatever. How would you do it for, let's say, GPT-3 ? Or Watson (I'm really not knowledgeable on this one though) ?

Well of course ! They are AIs. What did you expect from them ? Maybe you've been carried away by the way they are marketed to investors and the general public.

The very issue of these AI systems is the way they are marketed. In no way they are like a person to chat with. The scope of their "knowledge" and use cases is just too broad. As @sevenperforce wrote, merely spitting words one after another, evaluating the probability of the combination and rewording if a better one is found later is not "making sense". It "making sense" is just a happy side-effect of the process. But, if properly trained, with a robust corpus of documents and a narrowed scope in mind, it can be very efficient. You can actually make your own GPT-3 talking head an expert in some specific field, by embedding context documents to the flow. As tutored here : OpenAI Cookbook : Question answering using embeddings

Overall, the only solid thing we know about is that we don't know what is aboard, as it's calssified. We can only speculate. As usual, some speculate wildly, others speculate in a more conservative fashion. The synthesis of these speculations is probably closer to the truth. Anyway, we'll know about it in, what, 50 years ? I don't remember the time needed for de-classifying stuff in the US. Time to take our pills, to last that long. Actually let's hope we won't discover it sooner, as it would mean some of the secret stuff has been used in a conflict.

Did I stutter ? ... ... Sry, I always dreamed to say this one More seriously. Yes, I understand his statements, and I do fail to understand why would they be considered absurd. As I wrote, army doing army stuff. That's their job after all. I don't think it's its sole property though. Could have been used once to test nuclear materials, another to try out some lasers, another for new fuel cell type, or whatever classified stuff you might think of. Or even all together for the same trip. Maybe just to test the craft itself as well. I'd be more doubtful about the orbital bombarment system way. But if the Pentagon decides to build a new, bigger spacecraft, it will have a lot in common with the X37, as much as will benefit from its R&D. And if they want it multi-role, it will be able to use an array of conventional and non-conventional weapons. @kerbiloid prediction might not be far off the bat in this case.

So, we do agree ! I missed your post a few pages back. Army spacecraft is doing army stuff. Not quite the surprise. I don't get the numerous posts over this question. What's the issue with this interpretation ?

@kerbiloid Regarding the long flights, I'd guess they are making long-term tests of exposure for some materials. What materials you'd say ? Probably some of them are fissile. But they can be many other things as well. Mystery goo comes to mind... Maybe some satellite imagery gear as well, but I doubt it. Maybe only for testing purposes. To answer your second question (why use the X37 ?), I'd say just because, it fits the requirements needed for the experiments aboard. And it happens to have the benefit of giving the USSF more knowledge in reusable winged spacecrafts. It's a win-win situation. Take it or leave it that's my uninformed opinion ! Thoughts ?