MinimumSky5

9:22, just after I get to work. Is there anyone for who this actually a reasonable time to watch?

Can we also sack the camera oparetors, who seemed to go on a smoke break juat after the rocket plume dissapated? Or the people who thought that what we really want to see, rather than the second stage ignition, it the TEL leaning serenely inti the breeze?

Don't forget: 2023: Yusaku Maezawa waves on his way past!

Something I've been wondering about concerning the Antares, is are they trying to sell it as a commercial launcher? Wikipedia lists several varients, but I can only see launches of Cygnus vehicles. Are they not selling it to others, or is it just not popular?

5th nation to touch the moon ain't nothing to sniff at!

It looks like they were at 134 m/s at 149m. RIP Beresheet.

It's especially jarring given that their live visualisation has English labels. But still, good luck everyone!

@Flying dutchman It happened, it apparently went well, but SpaceX are mulling over another one day delay, to Tuesday.

No, it's saying 'here are several pages describing the hypotheses behind the K-Pg extinction mechanisms, and we will not be giving you a firm answer, because that would be dishonest, as no one has a firm answer' Not all questions in science can be answered with a simple sentence, many of them require whole books to explain. We're not passing you off here, we're directing to to the best answer that we can give i.e. it's complicated! Oh, and the idea that the dinosaurs were at a low species diversity during the Late Maastrictian is just bad science IMO. We do only have one good Lägerstatten from that age (the Morrison Formation, from which we get our aquatic friends mentioned in the OP), but that could simply be a sampling bias. Here in Britain we have no rocks of that age, and continental Europe is similarly impoverished, so drawing conclusions based on that, doesn't seem very scientifically valid.

@kerbiloidit's kind of been proven that at least theropods were homeothermic, based on bone studies.

I'm not sure that it actually will change all that much in the debate between Chixulub and the Deccan Traps being the major stressor event. They've confirmed that fish were killed fairly close to the impact site, and while those fossils are fascinating and awesome to consider, no one was seriously suggesting that nothing was wiped out by Chixulub, its always been accepted as the major causitive event of the extinction in the western hemisphere. The debate was over the extinction events in Eurasia, Africa, India, and Austro-Antarctica, and the Hell Creek Formation doesn't have much to say about those localities. Beautiful fossils though!

Somehow, I doubt that SLS will only be delayed by half a year. Even if it isn't, and somehow the program accelerates to the point the SLS does in fact launch next year, the core stage is horribly oversized for its upper stage until the EUS gets funded, so switching to a commercial launcher is just generally a better idea.

This is a reversal of time, in a sense. It's like throwing a vase onto the ground, and then reversing your arm movement, and having the vase put itself back together in your hands. Not really time reversal, but it's actually easier to understand it if you think that time has actually reversed. So, the implications of this discovery in the context of reversable computing: Discuss!

I don't know exactly who, but they've been training 2 NASA astronauts for Demo - 2, so they do have quite a bit of experience in that department.

I still think that the most impressive part of this is the interior of Dragon 2. It doesn't look like a spacecraft, it looks like an airliner.

The Saturn 5 was oversized and expensive for post Apollo uses (as was planned at the time), so they stopped building them. As the engineers and designers that worked on it retired, the knowledge of how to build them was lost to NASA and its contractors, and so, we can't build them now. You need a heck of a lot more than blueprints to build any complex machine, and there is a good reason that S-5 is regarded as the most complex machine we've ever built.

Please tell me that that song will play out when Dragon 2's hatches are opened!

I seriously, sincerely think that we are alone in our supercluster, let alone galaxy. It makes no evolutionary sense for a species to just stop expanding its numbers, as nature is simply not kind to those who stop trying to (yes, that is fairly irrelevant to an advanced civilisation, but by the time they are spacefaring, they'd have spent billions of years having this baked into their instincts and psyche.) Even if they do stop, would all civilisations stop, enerringly, every time? Would everyone in that civilisation stop having more children than nessasary to maintain themselves? With no exceptions? IMHO, Rare Intelligence means that there likely is no extraterrestrial civilisation for us to reasonable meet.

Has something happened to the Atlas performance graphs on the Github wiki? The Imgur links aren't worked, and I for one was finding those things very useful!

That's why I'm thinking this is the solution. Hit a puddle of kerosene with a blowtorch, and it'll happily sit there, heating up and silently mocking you.

Idle speculation on a series of events... 1. "Engineers" connect LOX and kerosene pipes back to front. 2. After a few liters of propellant is loaded, problems are noted. 3.Rather than delay launch, they simply reconnect the pipes in the correct orientation, and carry on regardless 4. LOX in the kerosene tank simply vents relatively harmlessly, but kerosene in the LOX tanks becomes a viscous gel in the LOX, which would likely float as LOX is quite dense. 5. In the latter stages of engine burn, a semi solid lump of kerosene enters the feed line. Some form of sensor detects the lump, and shuts the engine down. OR Lump of kerosene enters the LOX turbopump or preburner, and causes a RUD of at least that part of the engine. 6. Fregat saves the day! Egypt starts spying on us. I know that LOX will ignite with most things given half a chance, but LOX + kerosene is not hypergolic, so could this situation last long enough for kerosene ingestion into the oxygen side of the engine?

ULA misunderstanding SpaceX's goals of "airliner levels of safety"?

Bear in mind that liquid oxygen at its boiling point has a density of 1.141 g/cm3, with kerosene having a density of about 0.8 g/cm3. That gives us 13.76 m3 of LOX, and 9m3 of kerosene, which still doesn't quite add up, unless the Soyuz is using deep cryogenic LOX.

Very likely. Scott Manley has said that they intend to detonate the entire rocket, to see if the capsule can protect the astronauts from the worst possible situation it is designed to survive.

I'm going to shed tears over an overacheiving camera on wheels tonight, and I will not apologise for that. This rover has been around for two thirds of my life, and with the demise of Opportunity, all of the probes that inspired my love of astronomy (MER, Cassini, Kepler, and Dawn) are now dead. We will continue to explore space, and I will get to see Opportunity displayed in a museum on Mars, even if I don't get to return.