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You mean the kind of stuff that contains .1*10^-38 moles/L (virtually not a single molecule of inert/inactive compound in the bottle) ? That also deserves facepalms.

Yeah, for this price you can have a nice Geiger counter... Actually this thing looks a lot like a Geiger wrapped in a plastic box to me... About scientists : You are 100% right ! I completely agree that scientists are way too often asked to know everything. (It seems so simple when you know nothing about it ! ). They are specialized in one or a few fields, but can have huge misconceptions on other things ! And i see it everyday with my biology teachers that know nothing about rockets and space in general ^^ Facepalm moment a few minutes ago when i talked to someone who honestly believed the amount of blood cells in 100mL of blood was equal to the amount in the whole body "because the concentration is the same, you always have the same number of cells, concentration doesn't change whatever the amount of fluid"

If it was zinc, she would have been right, in a way(exactly 50% right actually)... But gold... Definitely a metal ! Haha Here's another one : This time it's not my genome teacher but my chemistry teacher : [Talking about how hydrogen bonds are important and make water liquid at room temperature, thus being essential to life on Earth, and about the fact that a polar solvant such as water is essential to life] " And this is why space agencies around the world send probes in all the directions of the solar system to scan for liquid water in interstellar space " Even brilliant scientists can be heavily mistaken in the large orders of magnitudes that you deal with when talking about space ^^

I facepalmed today when my genome teacher described the lambda bacteriophage infecting a bacteria : "it's pretty much like a space shuttle closing in and landing on the moon on it's landing legs" Urgh, he's excellent in genetics, but probably not in so much in rocket science ^^

It looks ugly to me... Not bulky enough ! That's what makes a spacesuit look like a spacesuit ^^

Oui, des ajustements de l'atmosphère sont prévus notamment pour éviter l'explosion instantanée des vaisseaux dès qu'ils touchent l'atmosphère de Jool (peut-être aussi de Ève?). En 1.0.4 je déconseille fortement de tenter un aerobrake àJool, des qu'on s'enfonce d'un seul mètre dans l'atmosphère on a droit àune belle destruction. Pour le grand tour, je te conseille un vaisseau mère assez petit, des générateurs électriques àessence, et biensûr un tas de NERVAs et une ISRU... DeltaV infini surtout si tu attrape des astéroïdes en passant par Dres (en capturer un petit et l'emmener avec soi est aussi une possibilité) Regarde le "Grand Tour Challenge Thread", il y a des mecs très très bons qui l'ont fait ^^

I always end up arguing with this smartS. It often gets pretty impolite and annoying... And every time i try it i leave after a minute because i can't stand it !

Just looked through the list and... Japanese names... Japanese names everywhere

Well, not sure about the values, but the sun releases its energy in a vast range of different wavelengths including light and infrared, but also a lot of UV and probably some X-rays and energetic electromagnetic waves. So between all those different wavelengths, the percentage of it that is visible light is probably very low in terms of energy, especially considering that the sun emits a lot of UV, that are very energetic.

The pumpkin is pretty soft and agile already (actually, it's very soft agile for a spacesuit). It may not be very recent, but it fits perfecty for an escape and emergency suit. I suppose SpaceX's suit will be a lot similar (they are actually creating a suit currently)

The theory that is explained in the first 2 posts of this thread :

Gimbals are really enough IRL... It's brute force to counteract the airflow, but it works fine... Excepted in KSP where the gimbals are ridiculously limited ^^

I thought ULA was valuated at more than $2B... I find this news surprising... What is Atlas VI exactly ? Would it have the same engine-recovery system as Vulcan would have ? Is Rocketdyne into the reusable rockets trend ?

I really don't like the stock fairings... They seem flawed from many aspects : -they seem to add a lot of drag -they cannot be rounded, there are always some ugly angles... -the "cannot start engine while stowed" Bull. -you can only make interstages between some specific parts -interstages add no structural reinforcement although that should be their primary fonction... They look like interstages, but they are only welded to the base, and not to the upper part. ---->wobble wobble wobble -interstages require a fairing base, usually heavy and thick -interstages cannot be separated in a single piece, Saturn V-like. They always do the chips bag explosion effect. -difficult to place: sometimes the game won't let me close a fairing at some point, but if i move the mouse around and try again it suddenly will let me, and vice versa... -ideally used to protect the payoad from mach 6 airflow, but parts ingame can withstand such stress with ease -usually negatively affects the DeltaV budget instead of making it bigger -And the worst of all, the thing that i really, really can't stand : they do not match the size of the adapters. Example : You have a 2.5m fairing base, then on top of it you have a 2.5-1.25m adapter, and on top of it is the payload. You can not make the fairing straight up and make it a cylinder with a 2.5m radius. The fairing will ALWAYS clip into the above adapter. You have to do a small lip every single time even if your payload doesn't require it. It often looks wrong, adds mass, price and drag, and it prevents me from making ariane 5-style paload fairings where the fairing is a prolongation of the core. And while we're on it, could the fairings also have a less ugly texture ? Pretty please... That yellow line... Urgh. And maybe some visible structure on the inside ? Not even talking about separation ; i've heard that some people like it so... As long as the clamshell sep mod is working, i won't complain about it.

"Maths" is short for mathematics in a lot of latin language... On topic : it's weird because highschool math in France is way more advanced than in US highschool level (i frequented both and trust me i liked America better because math was guaranteed A+ ) (don't get me wrong it may be different from school to school, not trying to say anything mean about USA's educational system ). However we do have the exact same problems in France : Too many 30 years old folks incapable of telling wether a cubic meter is more or less than 100 liters, or not understanding what a parameter is (although it's so very freaking useful). That article in the OP suggested implementing a baccalauréat exam, but i'm not sure it would make much of a difference ^^

This is awesome ! I can already imagine launching dozens of those (probably scaled up to carry scientific experiments) in a single launch on low gravity bodies to explore a huge part of their surface.

I don't think so. The whole mission from design to end of mission (3 years initially but that's probably going to be shorter now) costs 916 million dollars. A manned mission would cost a few millions. Unless they built the exact same satellite, a new soil moisture program would likely cost another 900 million bucks...

So the radar dish on the Soil Moisture Active Passive (launched atop delta II january 2015) has stopped responding and transmitting data a few weeks ago and today the engineers gave up on trying to recover it... The satellite has seen its resolution go from a sharp 3km to about 40km now. (Because instruments are supposed to work in tandem). However the radio instrument is still online and the mission is still going on. Source JPL

Hey, there were still quindar tones !

I facepalmed when some science-ish youtuber said that apollo hoaxers were wrong since with a medium-big telescope you can see the LEM. Urgh. The kind of unverified claim that actually has a negative effect and makes the right people look like idiots...

Hmmm technically you could have an instable propellant that would react with itself... Or say a racemic mixture with one isomer reacting with the other... Although its pretty much impossible.

It's an alright name i guess. It may be inappropriate since CST-100 is very likely not going to visit any stars, but it sounds good and makes me think of a space-airliner

So that's B- ! Interesting page ! Not enough time to finish it right now, but i definitely will Thank you and have some rep

I posted this on the "questions that dont merit their own thread" thread, but couldnt get an answer so i figured that a proper thread could be deserved : Wich one of the three isobaric radioactive desintegrations renders a continuous spectrum due to probabilistic repartition of the energy between emitted particles ? I used to think that it was B+, but that doesn't seem possible... It's not electronic capture for obvious reasons, so that leaves B- ! But B- seems weird to me : it would mean that the spectrum is from the electrons ! Is it even possible to observe an electron spectrum ? Doesn't it have to be from electromagnetic waves ? Thanks a lot !

The only problem i can see is dumping diamonds into space you could probably build an efficient radiator for half the price (depending on how much diamond you jettison) EDIT : can anyone help me out with my radioactivity question there ? Pretty please...