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MinimumSky5

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Everything posted by MinimumSky5

  1. It's much easier to find a good landing site, than plot out a route to drive in a boulder strewn landscape, as you don't need anywhere near the amount of good terrain. Also, aerial photograph really helps these things!
  2. Naaa, that just Elons latest plan for Mars colonisation!
  3. Carbon is very common, it's the 4th most common element in the universe. It's very abundant across the solar system, with the exception of two bodies (that we know of): Mercury, and the Moon. Both bodies are depleted in lighter compounds, but the Moon is highly lacking in hydrogen and carbon.
  4. @arkie87 Yes, you can calculate the force that the water being dragged behind the object is causing, we call it drag! You're asking for an equation to calculate the low pressure, turbulent region behind the moving object, but that requires the speed of the object, the objects geometry, surface texture, rotation rate, turbulence of the water, and a supercomputer to calculate it all.
  5. Also, you're paying for your time on the ISS itself, which runs something like $37,500 a night. Launch costs here are likely only half the cost of these seats, if that.
  6. There are quite a lot of high tech process that require vacuum at some point, such as ion deposition for solar panels and computer chips, and the vacuum that the ISS orbits in is much more rarefied that anything we can create on Earth. That being said, I can't imagine us fabricating chips or solar cells in space and taking them back down to earth, unless microgravity also assists their manufacturing.
  7. I'm more interested in seeing where the landing engines are for that thing...
  8. The true purpose of Starship: Terminator Dropships!
  9. Err, I don't think that this is intended to be halfway between them! Though, you could use it like a Hermes, I suppose.
  10. "Did you know, that the US governments pork distribution scheme reaches millionaires in all 50 states with a ridiculously convoluted and difficult to trace supply system?" There you go, fixed it for you! But yeah, there are many logistics experts crying tonight, at this tweet.
  11. If the turbine starts pulling in air, then it will rapidly start to overspeed, and will very likely fly to pieces, or the bearings will overheat. When SpaceX (or any rocket company) says that the stage is out of fuel, what the mean is that a sensor at the very bottom of the tank, where the fuel pipe is, has detected a lack of fuel and shut the engine down. There is still fuel left in the plumbing and often the tank as well, its just not safe to continue using it.
  12. While SpaceX can be many things, discrete is not one of them!
  13. All liquid rockets leave a small amount of fuel in discarded stages, to prevent the engines undergoing RUD's when the turbines start sucking air.
  14. Oneweb: We've just launched our first 6 satellites! Musk: Hold my beer.
  15. Dark Energy is what's pushing galaxies away from each other, and it's nothing to do with dark matter. We're fairly certain that it can't be black holes, as we would see significantly more microlensing events if more stellar mass black holes were present, and small Primordial black holes would be detectable from their hawking radiation. Also, we've seen galaxies that have had their dark matter removed somehow, and I'm not sure how a natural process would remove only black holes, without moving anything else in the galaxy.
  16. It's the fact that in most areas of the US, there is only one Internet supplier. Given that I can chose between 6 national suppliers and a few local ones, and I'm not in a particularly big town, it's always struck me as one of the best examples of crony capitalism.
  17. Whenever I hear about LEO Internet constellations, I wonder why they'd be competitive with ground based Internet. Then I remember how ridiculous the Internet is in the US, and it all makes sense again.
  18. We aren't talking about maths, we're talking about quantum superposition. Here's a thought experiment to explain they you cannot simulate a quantum computer using a classical computer. You have a room, which you place into quantum superposition at will, and including all of that rooms contents. You give a friend a phone book and a phone number, and tell them to open to a random page in that book, and see if they can find the owner of that number. If the do find the owner, they are to leave the room and tell you immediately, but if they don't, they should wait in the room for a few minutes. They go into the room, and you put the room into superposition. You can be fair confident that in a few seconds, your friend will re-emerge, telling you who owns the number, because your friends quantum state has collapsed into the one you wanted, as you set that particular state to collapse first. That's hugely simplified, but it gets the point across. It's not that quibits can store a large amount of states, but that they can be in a huge number of states simultaneously, and you can hopefully collapse those down into whichever of those states you wish.
  19. Those docking ports look like CADS systems. Is there any link between the two systems?
  20. But germ cell lines by definition must also produce it, so there is a regulatory system that can control telomerase and also prevent cancer. I'm not completely disagreeing though, given that ovarian and testicular tumours are quite common causes of cancer, but I don't buy that simply increasing the expression of telomerase would automatically lead to cancer.
  21. Very useful, as you could theoretically make much more efficient refrigerators with this, but it hardly breaks the laws of thermodynamics.
  22. Is it just me, or did that explosion happen near the top of the capsule? Superdraco engine breaks off and shoots through the capsule like a bullet, exiting out of the docking ring?
  23. Yeah, no, fair point there. As @Bill Phil pointed out though, centrifugal forces should mitigate these effects.
  24. Telomeres: Yeah, fair enough, that had me worried too when I saw that. That being said, as his telomeres lengthened during his stay at the ISS, that hints that there is a way for adult, mature cells to lengthen their telomeres, and so there might be a pharmaceutical work around to this. Which would also, incidentally, be a potential game changer for geriatric medicine. Cognitive changes: remember that this is a guy on the sunset side of 55, so over one year he almost definatly would have a small but detectable decline in his cognitive abilities.
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