Bill Phil

60 years. Man, that's a long time. Almost, though not quite, as old as the Space Age itself. Here's to another 60.

Well, we do have research bases on Antarctica. And people have been born there. I don't think we should colonize space for fear of asteroids. With a smart space program we can track and divert asteroids regularly, no colonization needed. Rather, space offers a massive expansion of our civilization. The resources of space are nothing to sneeze at. And people live in Siberia and northern Canada. Not a lot, but they live there. And we aren't realistically considering colonizing Mars. Musk is a dreamer but SpaceX is a business first.

Burning back into LEO may not be entirely necessary. Could get away with less propellant and use some aerobraking. Not necessarily deep into the atmosphere, but enough to slow it down so that the delta-v to brake is substantially less.

That's certainly one way of putting it...

Not really today, but... Canoed 25 miles over the weekend. Slept in a wet tent... got rained on. Still pretty fun.

Probably. Especially when space tourism picks up. But as it stands now that's the way it is.

Yes. An astronaut is anyone that has earned Astronaut Wings, or an Astronaut Badge, or an Astronaut pin.

Have it, rarely use it. The parts don't really do much for me. I'm not a fan of how they're balanced. I do sometimes use the thrust plates, which need to be stock, but that's mainly because... well, they need to be stock. They allow clustered engines.

Oh it's definitely an artificial destination, and arguably necessary for a deep space mission. The failings of SLS are the main reason for its problems. Block 1 can't throw enough mass to TLI to send anything other than Orion. We may see commercial programs for the gateway, though, which would be a good excuse for it - serving as a source of juicy government contracts that help justify development of commercial capability in cislunar space. I'd much rather NASA have a bigger budget, but that's not likely.

And that's partly what the plan is.

I don't see how that's relevant. ISS isn't going to the Moon. I mean, kt probably could, but it's not designed for that and is about 10 times as massive as the largest thing we've sent to TLI. We need to learn about deep space vehicles for human use. LEO isn't deep space.

The federal government cares. That's the problem. Since Musk is involved in companies with federal contracts and stuff.

It appears that 4+1 would be unstable...

Probably. No reason it couldn't be something else as well. Will the first one be called Heart of Gold? If so...

That sounds like the number of engines ITS had on the booster...

The backup idea for colonization isn't really a justification for space colonization, but that's a different topic.

Basically you have to use higher patched conic numbers and play around with maneuver nodes. Capture at Jool is easy enough, but playing around with gravity assists to lower moon capture delta-v can be very tricky.

I guess that works in more than one context...

Plenty of time to catch up on playing KSP...

Crash test dummies.

The AI is more like offspring in my point of view. In that way it's still "human" in a broader sense of the term. You see, we're already at a point where most humans don't bother to learn things. We have technology and don't know how it works. Just because this trend would continue with AI doesn't mean much. It's already happening, for better or worse. For example, how many people actually do anything with relativity? Or quantum physics? A lot of people are involved, but compared to the total population it's a small number of people. Another, more ubiquitous example would be computers. Hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people use computers. But how many of them could actually build a computer? Sure, a decent number of them may know what computers are and have knowledge of how they generally work, but so few have the skills required that there is already a disconnect between most humans and the humans that create technology. I don't think there's a problem with AI that goes beyond our abilities. As long as we raise them right, that's fine. They don't have to represent us. Rather, what's more important is whether or not they provide benefits to the species. I'd like humanity to be able to jump higher, even if jumping higher requires something that has evolved beyond us. Sure, we can do great things. But there are limits to what we can do, if only due to the limitations of our minds. As such, we would need to go beyond our current state, perhaps to a state that no longer represents us now, to do even more.

I don't see why they can't or shouldn't solve our problems for us. To an extent computers already do this, AI would just do it more. And in the the end, we built the AI, so any problems it solves were solved because we used the AI to do so. Even more, scientists and engineers and others help solve society's problems, no reason that AI can't do the same. We should be wary though. AI can be smart but not necessarily mature. So we would need to raise them, I think. Or at least teach them.

This one gets me all the time. I write it as fourty. I am also perplexed by this though... Apparently "fourty" is obsolete. Let's bring it back. Like the thorn...

I feel ya.

The idea was to put one in the Pacific...