cubinator

No, you need tangential velocity in order to not fall back down. If it's hovering there it would need to produce some kind of force to counter gravity.

There are water worlds made of mostly water in other star systems. They are usually larger than Earth. When you have an ocean compressed so much, the water turns into an exotic form of ice a thousand or so kilometers down, similarly to how hydrogen becomes a metal inside of gas giants. You might be able to get a smaller, moon-sized glob of water out of some sort of grazing impact, which might not have enough pressure in the core to turn into ice. It would likely boil away too fast to collapse gravitationally, though.

My clipboard is empty. How unfulfilling.

I can see every place I've ever been as a human from here! One day I'll have to zoom really far out for that to be true.

That would be far more catastrophic. The Sun would have to orbit it to stay around...

I'm not sure I follow you. This black hole's size is comparable to a fine sand grain. It takes up thousands of times less space in the sky than one of Neil Armstrong's footprints, and any photon that doesn't travel directly into it will continue out into space.

Only a tiny part of the light emitted from the sun goes towards the black hole. That light gets sucked in, sure, but any other light which goes in other directions, say towards Earth, would continue on unaffected. Earth would also not be pulled towards the black hole any more than it is pulled towards the regular, large Moon because its mass is no greater.

S2 started spinning, then when the payload separated it retained its own angular momentum. You can see how it drifts to the side of the view as the camera rotates away.

They spun up S2 seconds before releasing it.

I have a good feeling about this.

Nice cameras on the rocket, city lights and lightning storms were clearly visible!

-Launch base at base of Himalayas -Somewhat diagonal profile -Propulsive landing at the top means capsule is attached to booster -Is there really enough fuel to do two hops? If not...well it's not like you can take it back on a rail.

I suppose since I changed the title to include music (I don't remember when I did that) it would be appropriate to include my theme here: This would be the first of four movements, and the last one would be written when I finally achieve my goal, either in Earth orbit or outbound to some other world.

"But we can do better. We can do it in HALF an A press."

It's hard to say. Apparently NG will be ready in a couple of years.

I always liked the stark contrast between the light and dark regions on Dres. That and the craters' simple shapes make it look like it's made of clay.

It's a geometric space with four axes perpendicular to each other. We can show what it means with this diagram. With zero dimensions, you can only have a point. In 1D, you can extend that point along an axis to form a line. In 2D, you make another axis perpendicular to the previous one, to form a square. Then you form another axis perpendicular to both the previous ones, and extrude the square into a cube. This can only be shown on a 2D screen with diagonals, but you know quite well what it is like for a cube to have all 90 degree angles. We can keep going, though, and extrude the cube along another axis perpendicular to all three, to form a hypercube or tesseract in 4D. This shape does not fit in 2D or 3D without diagonals. It is like flattening out a box. That is why we see diagonals when looking at projections of 4D shapes - our brains are not willing to interpret them as right angles because we don't know what direction to put the fourth axis in. We've never seen anything from the perspective of anything but a 3D universe, and so don't know how to visualize in 4D. However...I do think it is possible to begin to "see" how a 4D being would, by visualizing how 4D objects behave in 3D space (cross sections), imagining having 360 degree vision to facilitate finding a direction entirely separate from all directions possible in 3D, and using drawings like those above (which should work just as well as any drawing of an object).

Jupiter's smallest moon, S/2016 J2 "Valetudo":

Some perspective here. I find it somewhat questionable to call this thing a 'moon'...

I think he'll fly to orbit, and maybe even make a visit to the Moon if things are really going well, but he's probably most needed on Earth until Mars colonization is well underway, and that's where he'll be until then.

KERBAL: Kinetic Energy Reduction By Augmented Landing It's landing on a giant bouncy house. Come to think of it, this would actually be a great name in so many ways for SpaceX's supposed "bouncy castle" for F9 S2. Somebody please tweet this to Elon for me?

I might make a series of "Star Destroyer for scale" pieces, just because it's fun to use it as a length unit, because you end up imagining the ship floating menacingly above whatever you're measuring it against. The Imperial Star Destroyers were probably my favorite spaceships as a kid. Awesomely huge, but just small enough to picture on the same scale as people and normal ships.

Phobos, visited: The drawing is to scale.

If you look closely, you should be able to see the darker spots right down the center of the band where giant dust clouds block out background stars. The galactic core is near red Antares, and our star system is moving in more or less the opposite direction from where you were looking before.