cubinator

Standby tickets to Mars sounds way, WAY worse than on airlines.

Even still, aren't centuries 0-indexed? So it's the 22nd year, not the 21st.

"NASA did not identify any significant strengths within Blue Origin's technical proposal" BO didn't get full points on any one section.

It's for launching something smaller than Apollo ALMOST to the Moon.

No it isn't.

Deltarune is reverse Hollow Knight

I feel like we're at a level of technology where we could make a drone like that. In fact, they have a bunch of similar things on the ISS right now, they are functionally the same except I think they use little fans to fly around the pressurized area. If you play it right, you can get the centripetal force of going around Earth to do most of the work for you, looping around slowly. I bet it wouldn't be too hard to make a little gizmo with enough juice to not get lost doing a couple donuts around the ship. Carry a spare deorbit-stick if there's concern.

The Dragon heat shield is definitely designed to fly multiple times without being replaced. It should be thick enough for a few reentries.

Thanks for the actually useful comparison. Indeed, the SpaceX launch site will generate less greenhouse gases than the US, and they will also launch less mass to orbit than that of the Earth.

Venus is perfectly habitable, provided you live in a balloon 50km up.

This seems unnaturally fitting.

I loved seeing that face from her! For orbit, yes!

Prop loading yet?

Looks like Inspiration4 will begin to pass over the US at about 20:42 GMT-5, over Texas.

ISS emergency rescue availability? (Yes, I know there is basically no situation where this would be better than deorbiting the Dragon outright)

I've got class at liftoff. Won't stop me from pulling it up on mute, though.

Hey isn't this locked?

There are snails in the deep sea that eat metal and incorporate it into their shell. So my guess would be that you'd just have an animal that eats a lot of iron and whose body can move that iron into a magnetic structure on their hands and feet. Maybe they could have muscles, bones, and neural circuits that pull the magnets back to the right distance if the surface they're climbing is too strong. This wouldn't require any electric power, but I think the creature would probably end up looking more like a night terror than a human. Here's what I envision: Maybe they could have metal plates acting as a capacitor, charging by mechanical energy from their body, and could occasionally discharge it. I don't see any reason why it couldn't exist, although it would be pretty weird to have an evolutionary advantage to eating that much metal. I think that a creature like that would only evolve in a place that has a LOT of magnetic rock, so probably a volcanic planet with lots of fresh lava rock. The creature would also have to be eating that rock, so maybe the creature eats something that lives on or in the rock and eats up a lot of rock in the process of feeding.

Not this time. The grid fins don't add a lot of drag when deployed, but the mechanism to fold them up does add a lot of mass. By taking out the requirement to fold the fins, they save a lot of mass for a minimal loss. So the grid fins on the booster will not fold up.

I held a wasp today.

One reason might be because plutonium is hot, and the telescope needs to be very cold to operate well. So the hot plutonium could interfere with the functionality of the telescope and need a lot of extra insulating mass.

Certainly not, however it can perhaps be done in fewer than 10 years. I think the current plan is a Rube Goldberg machine that will come to fruition at the same time as Starship performs the same task.

Kessler many.

The red stuff at the very tip is some glue, like what the Space Shuttle used.

That's a lot fewer tape strips on that thing.