Nuke

existing platforms are adequate for maintaining a status quo in the space industry. sls falls into this trap, but so does falcon. falcon did however raise the bar and everyone else is playing catchup, and that's good for the industry as a whole. the consequence of starship failing is we have a new status quo, and spend decades merely maintaining it. worst case scenario it bankrupts the company and we lose falcon. a better space future requires starship, and i would really like it to see sls made completely obsolete. but so long as sls does things that falcon cant, there is a reason for its existence. though if were being honest i think that sh could be quickly retrofitted to a disposable config and still out perform sls in the costs department. the booster performed excellent to the point of staging. stick a bare starship up top and run it disposable.

nothing local. little town on a little island in alaska. mom wants to move but we cant afford it in the aftermath of covid. there are jobs here, we got several fish canneries, fishing boats always need greenhorns, and the alaska marine highway is hurting for crew right now. my tech credentials are stale and there really is no tech sector in this state.

in my case i had just turned 21 and started partying. i was already starting to burn at the time, with work, school, a family that used me as their personal scapegoat, and not much else. it cost me my paid internship and i almost failed a class for skipping too much. fortunately i recognized the problem early and decided to focus on my studies better. i tried to join the marine corps after college. i knew i had deficiencies coming out of school and failing to find work. i needed some hard discipline and what better than the marines. but all those diagnoses i had from being in spec ed were in my records and i was 4-f. i ended up in a bunch of minimum wage jobs, one of which was a really toxic workplace, and one was a manual labor job that didnt even pay enough to cover rent, let alone therapy. even with help ive not been able to correct my deficiencies. if not for the professional entitlement collector i have for mother i would probibly be homeless. i like to think im being useful, but i know im a waste of space. everyone thinks im disabled, and everyone treats me as such, except of course the disability people.

flying is a lot different than flying and not exploding. just because someone has a fusion reactor on the drawing board or even a test reactor, doesn't mean you should demolish all your fission plants. starship i think will make it in the long run, how long really depends on how much time the regulators and detractors waste. sls is an adequate mr. backup.

i had "childhood disabilities" myself. k-12 schools just love to hand those out to pretty much any child that is difficult, usually as a means to get them out of their class. teachers aren't supposed to be making diagnosis, but it usually gets bucked up the chain until someone with a phd in psychology can rubberstamp it, and ship 'em off to special ed. which is precisely what happened with me. informing children that they are not right is a good way to ignite the entitlement firecracker. and this was over 20 years ago, now its much worse. my mom had really abusive parents, they would call her stupid and things like that, to this day she is convinced she is stupid. ive seen her iq test results, she scores well above average. when things dont go her way, shes "stupid", and someone else (usually me) has to come in and fix the problem. these childhood labels do not go away, ever, i dont care who's handing them out, you just undermine them before they get started. maybe the teachers shouldn't have snoozed through the part on self fulfilling prophecy when they were in school. i did go to college and got my degree, and i had my own issues getting assignments done. my political science report was complete trash and i barely scraped by in that one. and i really crapped out in one of my linux classes because i was too busy partying. i think i got a d and b in those, respectively, i was ahead of the curve in a lot of other stuff. but im still completely non functional in society. now im an unpaid caregiver for my mom, a burden on society at large, and my retirement plan involves a bullet. i generally think you did the right thing, at some point all the pandering to personality flaws needs to stop. its a shame it didn't happen earlier, this time blindness bs is going to be over that girl's shoulder forever whether its a real phenomena or not.

you didnt see this yet did you:

im also not sure we have ever had a rocket explode twice in the same lauch before (excluding not missing the ground or secondary explosions on the ground).

you still need to get it to orbit without exploding.

i wish common sense would sometimes intersect with the holiday spirit. the holidays are not only depressing but also physically demanding. ive been practically laid up a for a week after carrying a load of packages home from the post office so a senior citizen can play with dolls. there will also be public events that i dont want to go to, excessive feasting that my system can no longer handle. meanwhile people calling me scroodge and grinch because im too exhausted to festivize. less is more people.

what no hadean?

i had a set of those once, they lasted a month.

prego jars are the best fine china there is. the things bounce. get a fancy glass from an expensive store and it will be shrapnel within the week. fancy dishes, thats another thing mom does to annoy me. im always worried about dropping her designer brittish bone china when im doing the dishes. she bought this silverware that is freakishly heavy. never should the two meet with any velocity. upon which i serve sloppy joes and chili dogs. she still hasn't figured out that we po'.

the other way around is more feasible with near present tech. for asteroid mining i imagine a small number of humans managing a big swarm of probes, unmanned transfer vehicles, and mining machinery. an industrial station would be the center of activity, placed in an orbit where it can get to a lot of asteroids. multiple stations could be set up to handle different parts of the belt. most of your ore, final products, and machinery are going to spend most of their time in transfer orbits. it might take years to break down any one asteroid enough to start seeing a profit. so you manage several in parallel. its a lot of management and maintenance, a shirt sleeve environment where the only space walks are for station maintenance. you might have an intercept team to set up asteroids for autonomous mining ops, but they are going to spend most of their time in transfer orbits and probibly only go to the station for maintenance and resupply.

i think she has nihilism confused with fatalism. people use nihilism as an excuse to be bitter hateful people, unfortunately this behavior is not limited to nihilists. my mom does that "im too stupid" crap and it bugs the hell out of me. thing is she is a bona fide bible thumper. im the nihilist that does all the work and manages the household. so its kind of the other way around. for me nihilism is a way of letting go without all the bs that usually comes with religion. its actually not far from one of the main tenants of budism "life is suffering". so when i behave responsibly its because that was the trajectory i was on. nowhere does nihilism say you should kill yourself, thats usually the rhetoric of its opponents.

maintenance, lol. also i tried the superglue and baking soda trick thats been showing up in youtube a lot lately. aparntly they left out the part that the reaction is very exothermic so instead of the usual glue stuck to my fingers (and usually not the thing im trying to fix) i instead got some burns. the trick works though. mom bought one of those hopping bunnies off if temu, but it came broke. so i had to skin it, glue it, and re-fur it. it worked, initially. but a cat knocked it off the counter and broke it again. now im out of superglue and have to get into my epoxy. i hate working with that stuff. once you open the tubes their shelf life is about a week. i bought it for a project but now i forget which one.

i think im gonna get a different kind of christmas tree and watch die hard.

i did something to my finger on tuesday, its swollen and hurts when i use it. all i did was pick up a 12 pack. also im tired of people telling me not to stuff my bird. nothing quite as good as in-bird giblet stuffing (our bird didnt come with gibs unfortunately). the same people also make mushy inedible stuffing. i always make my stuffing a little dry to draw out the juices of the bird. this would make the bird dry if not for multiple butter and chicken stock injections. an air gap helps on large birds, ours was only a 10 pounder. cooking low and slow and use the meat thermometer to verify all the usual red spots are at an acceptable tempurature. people trust the little plastic popper too much. that just the indicator to start probing. the end result is some of the best stuffing you can get. side dressing doesn't compare.

the turkey has landed... ...in the oven. and now on my plate. it was delicious.

we have kind of been down this road with skylon. it can work but the payload delivery will be a lot less than starship's. think it would be better using the engine in a suborbital space plane, and releasing the payload outside of the atmosphere so you just need a vacuum rated kick motor to circularize. sort of like air launch but release takes place above the karman line. the same ship could have orbital capability for lighter payloads (like astronauts), and maybe on return from orbital missions you can retrieve your kick stages and other space junk. it still solves a lot of launch infrastructure problems that starship has, and the ability to launch from anywhere with a sufficiently large airport will make more optimal orbits possible. i really dont think they need to be in direct competition either, there is a place for both. its just an ssto spaceplane is a harder nut to crack and will be late to the party.

its such a great book that many say is not adaptable. idk how a movie about worm worshiping amazon women would fail at the box office. even the goons who would adapt it for "modern audiences" would find very little to change about it.

im really not that happy with the state of modern oses. i dont like win11. i dont want to buy into the apple ecosystem ("product ecosystem" is just another term for lock-in). linux is getting better all the time, but still far from something i can use for everything i want to do with a computer. but even then all are bloated messes that are far more complicated than they need to be for the typical user. bring back dos. i miss running an airgapped system with anonymously obtained software.

shut up and take my money

my kitties help sometimes, but they also frustrate the living hell out of me sometimes. especially when im trying to get the turkey in the oven. food may contain cat hair.

death. someday this misery will end. thanksgiving feels weird having skipped halloween. if only we could have skipped christmas instead.

with how many times part one got postponed im not holding my breath. rumors are that they want to do dune messiah as a part 3, so they can finish paul's story.