Mad Rocket Scientist

[Ninja'd] Is this slowed down after the first second, or is it sped up at the start? EDIT: Ninja'd by @CatastrophicFailure, by literally one second:

Opinion of Musk aside, what I don't understand about things like r/EnoughMuskSpam is why people would seek out something so unpleasant to them. There are plenty of people I dislike, but I don't want to look at examples of people talking about how great they are, even in the context of laughing at them.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/8690_sls_solid_rocket_booster_fact_sheetfinal03072015_508.pdf 1.6 million lbs wet. (Keeping with lbs, since it's probably an approximate number) I can't find anything exact for dry mass, but you could approximate from the space shuttle SRBs, since the SLS SRBs are the same as the shuttle ones with one extra segment.

Still sounds to me like the carbon fiber was just not working how they hoped. What's really surprising is how cheap steel is though, I knew carbon fiber was horribly expensive, but I didn't know how cheap steel was. "Part of the Merlin’s qualification testing involves feeding a stainless steel nut into the fuel and oxidizer lines while the engine is running—a test that would destroy most engines but leaves the Merlin running basically unhindered." https://www.airspacemag.com/space/is-spacex-changing-the-rocket-equation-132285884/?page=2

Reading posts you made in an old thread: The airplane on a treadmill thread: https://i.imgur.com/vGkcQNh.gifv When all the major space agency discussion threads got merged into one https://i.giphy.com/media/P2Zluyghl1AWY/giphy.mp4 Arriving at the thread for a real life launch a few minutes too late: https://i.redd.it/cmp54j05uae01.gif Threads that cover the politics of spaceflight: https://gfycat.com/SpotlessOpulentCrayfish EDIT: Why is the forums randomly not embedding the gifs, and why is imgur randomly hijacking the direct links?

Got a hand-me-down second monitor set up today. It's a different size than the other, so it isn't entirely practical, but it makes some beautiful screenshots:

Wow, they even have Cloud Aerospace on their list. IIRC, that only ever consisted of a post on this forum and CGI renders. EDIT: And a subreddit (of course) At what point will they remove these? EDIT: Why is Aerojet Rocketdyne a 4? Are they that shady?

It looks like they cleaned up the website and removed modded screeenshots. The old site: https://web.archive.org/web/20181229145213/https://www.kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/ It used Modular Rocket System parts as the backgrounds for the blog posts, and the scatterer shots seemed to be using realplume too.

I can confirm that, I just tested it here: https://forum.kerbalspaceprogram.com/index.php?/topic/102569-the-great-forum-test-thread/

The 4 bell poodle makes sense, the proportions of the bells look right too. Is that a LES on top of a shielded docking port? How will the LES work? Will it finally have a fairing when stack attached, like engines or heatshields do?

There were Zeros with squared off wingtips. I used airplane ID charts from WWII to find the planes, see the difference between "Zeke" and "Hap" in this chart:

Looks like SpaceX miscommunication actually: It still seems unclear whether just the prototypes or the production Starships will be built in Texas.

They must not need to have their design center near their production anymore, since they're not trying to get carbon fiber to work anymore. I wonder if they will continue testing carbon tanks there for future upgrades.

SpaceX updated their Falcon user's guide: https://www.spacex.com/sites/spacex/files/falconusersguide.pdf EDIT: They use +X as up? The monsters.

The first two are a mystery, the third is probably a Zero, one of the models with the square wingtips, and I'm very confident that the last one is a Zero version with the rounded wingtips.

If they give crew SCUBA gear, the prop tank could be the command module. Give new meaning to "wet workshop."

I think just adding a label on the thumbnail of each part with the diameter/form factor would be the simplest solution.

If I remove reactions from previous days, can I add back to my total count? Will liking and unliking something 25 times use up all the reactions for the day?

If you have Making History, the Mastodon with one of the small mounts might work.

Lock to current position would be great, if it worked like lock prograde and would always try to return to that direction instead of just trying to stay stable. Letting us switch from horizon or orbit relative would be helpful for spaceplane reentries as well.

I use a sticky note over my laptop's webcam, not because I think it likely that I will install malware, but so I can ignore phishing attacks without worrying. I know one person who got an email claiming to have webcam video, but nothing ever came of it when it was ignored.

Sorry, these kind of existential crises really can be a bummer. I personally like this philosophy for dealing with this kind of thing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBRqu0YOH14

If you're looking for realistic old sci-fi movies, you can't beat Frau im Mond by Fritz Lang, from 1929. Hermann Oberth was a technical advisor, and it was accurate enough that it was banned in Germany due to similarities to the V-2 project. It missed some critical things, like the fact that there isn't air on the moon, but the overall design of the rocket is pretty believable, and it invented the countdown before liftoff. My current profile photo is from it. Fair warning: The longest restored version is 200 minutes long.