Minmus Taster

Looking forward to (hopefully) being able to play this game consistently with all the performance improvements! Only a couple hours now, all systems are go for liftoff!

He would get further by spitting on the bills

Rockets are hard and always will be, but money is harder. 24 or even 16 Starship flights for a single lunar mission is never going to be economic unless starship can launch and land at full throttle and be reused in a matter of days without any repairs. And since starship needs to be economical in order to operate in the scale it needs to I just don't think the vehicle has the capability to preform all of this. And that's before even touching on what happens when there's inevitably a failure of some kind and the program is grounded to investigate. I like starship and I think it will work as a heavy lift vehicle, but anything more is stretching way too far. And sadly since NASA is already almost at max capacity at this point monetarily it needs to put all it's eggs in one basket. All of this for a single trip to the moon. That's what I meant when I said artemis was "crumbling", it just cannot be sustained with so many different components that all need to be paid for and then work perfectly.

I think it's time to press the 'panic' button for artemis and perhaps even starship. The entire thing is crumbling as we speak.

Seems fairly clear the pilot or maybe co-pilot did it, though motive is hard to pin down. My personal hunch is that it was politically motivated (won't be going into details on that obviously) but the plane is reported to have circled over land for some time, the pilot could have tried to negotiate with the authorities and the malasian government chose not to divulge this in fear or possible sociopolitcal repercussions. Some or all of this could be total bogus but the mass murder-suicide theory doesn't seem to be something the pilot would do. He had a wife and family and apparently loved his job, while not everyone has an outward reason for ending their own lives it just doesn't make sense why he would choose to take so many with him. Regardless of motive its clear the plane was manually steered to the most remote area possible to avoid it ever being found. The little wreckage found indicates that it nosedived into the ocean and probably totally disintegrated, weather this was intentional or not I cannot speculate on but it makes detecting the wreck even harder on the bottom. If it is somehow found the blackbox is likely useless at this point. A very sad story and certainly mysterious but not impossible to decipher with what we already have.

I previously mentioned I was getting into model making, well today was my birthday and my father's gift was a 1/700 Tamiya 'Taiho', mostly as a practice model. Started some construction including gluing the smokestack and an AA Gun together just to start it up. Wish I could post images but it's not working for some reason : / I'm thinking of starting a thread just to show my progress on Taiho and eventually the Shinano.

Orion reentry as seen from onboard the spacecraft: https://images.nasa.gov/details/art001m1203451716 So THIS is what Jeb goes through when he reenters from Eeloo at twice the solar escape velocity.

Ooooh, maybe a falcon heavy launch for my birthday

It's been awhile but I wanted to share some images I found off various sites of Akagi and Kaga. Kaga: Akagi: There are more images including ones from other expeditions I did not include.

Thought I'd get into model building, decided to order a 1/700 scale "Shinano" since it's one of my personal favorite aircraft carriers. I'll fully admit that I'm probably going to butcher it but I'm gonna give it my best shot. Does anyone have any tips for building something like this?

Sorry for the necromancing but Dragonfly's review and launch have been postponed and liftoff is now targeted in 2028; https://spacenews.com/nasa-postpones-dragonfly-review-launch-date/ I'll admit I'm starting to become concerned for this mission, at least in it's current form, these cuts to the budget are quite extreme.

I thought that meant that you just needed a durable enough experiment to survive the local conditions, could also just be talking about a crewed flight which would definitely belong in late progression (to this day I've never actually returned a Kerbal from Eve's surface, not for lack of trying )

Dinkimoon now has an official name; "Selam" or "Peace" in Ethiopian.

The only thing that comes to mind for a quick ending to an interstellar species would be a supernova, that is of course assuming that said species as only spread to it's local neighbourhood. An old star explodes and fries everything in a couple hundred lightyears. Even then some of the further colonies or bases will probably survive if they've spread out far enough but any civilization they once had has been destroyed. A slower ending would be a galactic collision, which would take place over billions of years, though beings that evolved to somehow live that long would have to prepare for it. Though it would probably just disperse the 'species' , not that were looking at anything biological (or conceivable) at this point, they may not even care or notice.

Great animation, maybe they could extend the header tanks to also use for the start of the boostback?

Come to think of that, what is the price of a fully expended vehicle? I assume it's cheaper than a typical rocket of this size but probably not economical to have without it being reusable, especially with all the engines.

I believe elon has said that a flater nose is actually better for reentry but wanted to make it pointy. Classic Elon

I'm sure they'll both have 'important personal matters' if that thing becomes clear to fly and promptly retire afterwards ; )

It's just too clunky to make practical I think. It's been proposed many times and since the 60s for even the Saturn V. Just too heavy and too light lift even with wings.

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Not sure how to feel about that, on the one hand the ship was effectively destroyed and even surviving chunks would burn up shortly afterwards. On the other hand this could be grounds for another months long investigation which wouldn't be good for the program given previous delays. Also: It's possible more pieces survived because the fuel tanks were nearly empty, without the extra help only the installed system would be tasked with the termination (B9 clearly still had a lot of fuel inside it's tanks when it came apart)

Looks mostly intact, if a little charred. They'll probably have to reenforce the tank farm in between flights though, I don't think that unused tank is gonna take another flight.