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cubinator

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Everything posted by cubinator

  1. "What do you mean you can't show us the real color?" Y-shaped diffraction spikes will also be a large point of conversation.
  2. Gordon Cooper, for literally eyeballing his reentry burn in a Mercury capsule and landing four miles from the recovery ship.
  3. I think they should just wait for the next one.
  4. I still want them to launch two at the same time...
  5. Don't you know, they just landed on the engine bell.
  6. We can separate protons and neutrons and electrons to know how they act on their own. Protons have positive charge, and electrons negative. We can break apart protons and neutrons to know the quarks they're made of, and confirm those charges. We can image the atom orbitals to know that they have those shapes. (https://www.nature.com/articles/498009d) All of chemistry also relies on the balance of electrons in their orbital clouds and protons in the nucleus. Nuclear fusion and fission theories also work based on these models.
  7. It would be at least as expensive as building a similarly capable telescope on a mountaintop.
  8. I would start with guessing that Energy required to be in orbit at the desired altitude = Energy you spent getting there - Energy you lost to drag, gravity, inefficiencies, etc. The energy required comes naturally from Newton's laws and can be calculated from the mass of Earth, your spacecraft's mass, etc. Your rocket is generally going to get its energy from chemicals inside propellant tanks. It's pretty easy to calculate the theoretical energy contained in those tanks, and be sure that there's more than enough of it to lift the rocket to the desired orbit. When you fly your rocket, you can see how much propellant is left in the tanks and calculate the energy you spent to get into orbit. Typically it's expensive to fly rockets, so while engineers to perform test flights to determine stuff like this a lot of it is worked out by simulation. From there you can easily know just how much energy you lost. The harder part is finding out where exactly the losses happened. For gravity vs aerodynamic loss, I would say you'd have to run simulations of your ascent that take into account air flow around the vehicle, and from that you might be able to figure out how much the air is slowing you down. It's going to be pretty complicated, though, because it depends on the exact shape of the vehicle and the properties of air change pretty drastically over the wide range of speeds and air temperatures the rocket goes through.
  9. So as a Minnesotan, I am already familiar with the environment of Mars. I even know how to put on a special suit to survive outside. Today I found out that you can observe cosmic rays or radioactive decay with extremely simple household items. https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/0031-9120/47/4/429/pdf Perhaps a useful tool to have around during the next supernova.
  10. The mirror is made of beryllium metal coated in gold, not glass. It won't break.
  11. It has about 60% of the sky available at any time. As it goes around the sun, it can see the full sky over time.
  12. .073 atm is 1.07 psi, which is most certainly enough to hurt you. Like you said, you'd have ten times the atmospheric pressure of Mars wanting out from inside your fragile lungs.
  13. There should be no way to mess that up with adjustable segments.
  14. I think you've dropped an order of magnitude somewhere. Mars' pressure is 0.006 atm, humans need a pressure much greater than that to get enough oxygen while preventing our lungs from bursting from positive pressure. They would still need a pressure suit of some kind.
  15. Falcon Heavy center core is cursed and can never be recovered.
  16. Indeed. So if you're going somewhere in a straight path you're good to go. But if you want to turn you might want some posts to grab onto with your hands - maybe even to carry around something like a ski pole to stop yourself. Of course, on Titan moving around can be a lot more fun.
  17. For how to leap through the air in an environment where we can move all over, I'd look to our cousins the monkeys. For worlds as large as the Moon, I think walking and hopping will be effective. You might even be able to get up to running speed and keep yourself there without much effort.
  18. I hope the sky clears for this launch, I might be able to see it one orbit later. Wait, they're going south with it? Never mind
  19. More like a swarm of bees than a human society - unified purpose to the point where no one has to be in charge.
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