cubinator

Granted, you were the guy that spent a year cramped in a secret Soviet space capsule in 1972 and lived long enough to get out on Mars, plant a flag, and say a few inspiring words before dying of thirst. I wish the media would talk about something other than politics tomorrow.

If an earthquake ran for president, it'd win by a landslide.

Replacing broken windows is a pane...

I wish for self-paving roads.

Even better: Jar Jar shot first.

Luke shot first.

Gra-- --computer BSOD's-- I wish for it to rain tortoises tomorrow.

What does a blade of grass do when it's sleepy? It lawns.

Thank you for the marvelous idea...

What's the first number following the rule? You said you have to tell us that.

Like this?

It's nice that they're so common. For many astronomical phenomena you have to travel to exactly the right place over the entire surface of Earth, but Iridium flares happen once or twice a night, usually, in pretty much any place. Even if you don't use a tracker, you can see some combination of satellites, flares, and tumbling space debris just by lying on your back on a clear night and watching. Kessler syndrome is pretty.

I'd been digging around Google for good satellite trackers for a while. When I saw that this one had a sky map instead of just an Az/Alt table, I was hooked. Then I found out about Iridium flares, and decided to start watching them. It's really nice!

Yay!

I have no idea what's going on with this thing...it's launched?

I've read that Laika's capsule was overheating and she died from the heat about five hours in.

Man, artificial learning is scary in the deepest places...How long until something like this comes up with a quantum theory of gravity, I wonder... --Edit-- Just watched a bit of ARST ARSW, it was totally worth it.

It'll be a little early for me to watch live, but I hope it goes well!

http://www.satflare.com/track.asp?q=Iridium#MAP\ This is a website I found where you can track basically all visible satellites. It has a few key features other satellite trackers I've found don't: It shows a map of satellite paths through your sky, which can be set to any time You can use it to predict Iridium flares, when and where to look and how bright I really suggest checking it out and seeing when an especially bright Iridium flare will appear in your sky! It's great for all kinds of tracking and predictions.

I would definitely not do any cooking in an Apollo-style pure oxygen atmosphere...

When the NOVA theme song invokes warm childhood memories.

According to Elon Musk, the cost of the raw materials required to build a rocket is about 2% of the cost of a rocket right now. So it's not that we can't make rockets like we make cars, it's that we just haven't taken action to create a system to do that. That plus the growing possibility of reusability will likely start making space travel a lot cheaper than it was before, which will stir up more economic opportunities, leading to an upwards spiral possibly including cylindrical ping pong tables to be played in microgravity.

I think the toppings could easily be squished on with a pressure plate, and reentry heat could be conducted through metal wires into the capsule and converted to IR radiation to cook the pizza nicely on the way down. Accuracy is a hard one, but if we can scale down the sort of tech SpaceX uses on their Falcon 9 it could actually be feasible (well, as feasible as putting any complex machine in space is). I don't see any reason why this should be impossible, aside from the fact that nobody wants to pay for a bunch of rocket launches and satellites just so they can have their pizza delivered in a fiery 9 km/s oven. Drone delivery will be only slightly less exciting.

I tried to ride skis through grass once. It was friction impossible!

Antares