cubinator

Well, besides demonstrating that the flip maneuver can be done.

I just saw the Starlinks from today...Incredible! I saw a perfect linear reflection of the Sun's diameter in the glint! I also saw second stage spinning in front of the group.

Indeed...they'll surely toss one off at Mars of their own volition as soon as they're capable of refueling. Then we'll get to see a picture of the crater from MRO.

Right in the middle! Looks like it made an impressive translation to get there. How long will the second stage stay in orbit? Would it still be up there after five or six orbits?

I think this next Starlink launch will have good viewing opportunities in the US this evening.

SpaceX should have named their large steel rocket "Millennium". It fits the existing naming theme, and better reflects the rocket's goal of extending humanity into the solar system. "Starship" just doesn't quite feel right for a planetship.

Thought the TFRs were gonna be for afternoon. Either way, Starship test and Starlink launch on the same day would be quite something. (Of course, they HAVE to launch the Falcon on May the Fourth.)

I agree. I would rather see a future in which such modifications can be done surgically and consensually, everyone lives in a virtual universe where they can choose their form at will, or everyone is an android who can simply upload their mind into whichever hyperadvanced mechanical body they choose. Or everyone is a shapeshifter, but that one seems less realistic. "Designer babies" is a thing that has been talked about, and my impression is that it would pretty quickly be made illegal in most countries.

Black Mesa was evidently no better...Administrator Breen pushed forward with a test that was tearing their equipment apart, with scientists having to rush through risk assessments of possibly tearing a hole into another dimension...He may have been reluctant to do these things for the G-Man at first, but when the experiment did go wrong, he accepted intermediate rule of the Earth under the new alien overlords. So Portal's world has two such CEOs. I think a good measure of how realistic this kind of stuff is would be to imagine the maximum amount of bad stuff you would tolerate from real CEOs like Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos before protesting. Long hours and harsh working conditions? Exploiting the poor and homeless? Sentient AI experiments? Mantis men? Tumors and asbestos? Alien vivisections? Xen crystal experiments? Ask yourself where is the line between well-meaning visionary and villain.

They say steel has really good thermal properties - it can stay strong through atmospheric reentry as well as handle the cryogenic fuels. It also happens to be cheap and easy to weld together like a grain silo.

Very pretty! This is the sort of picture I was looking forward to from Ingenuity.

Success!

I like how later in that movie they mentioned that the station has traveled "OVER FIVE HUNDRED MILLION MILES" from Earth since its conception. Great. It's halfway to Saturn. Call somebody from Earth to come help with whatever?

Oh, ok, that makes sense. You'd just go through, and you'll still be in the same part of the universe.

It just feels wrong to me that something you tried to toss into a gateway like that would simply bounce off harmlessly, rather than explode with a tremendous burst of energy and destroy everything nearby.

I think the general idea of 'matter' in this sense would be stuff like atoms, molecules. If you tried to put an object through, it would be destroyed and turned to all kinds of radiation, but you can shine a radiation beam through the portal and it will come out the other side.

Which will be delivered to Earth first? The sample tubes on Perseverance, or 100 tons of excavated Martian rock on Starship? It seems kind of close.

Doesn't seem to be stopping Tom Cruise.

I agree. Test the damned thing as far away from Earth as you can, though.

Getting anything to last long enough to be part of an interstellar spaceship is a challenge. Perhaps we'd do better to spread our consciousness within the cosmic dust itself? In any case, nuclear pulse is VERY tough to make comfortable.

Are nuclear thermal rockets...quiet? A chemical rocket has basically a bomb going off in the combustion chamber with all the associated noise and vibration, but a nuclear rocket just heats up a gas to get it going fast. It would basically be like a multiple-km/s wind. I also imagine that a spaceship moving under NTR propulsion would feel totally smooth, unlike shaky chemical propulsion. It would be like driving an electric car vs. a gas car. It seems to me like nuclear thermal propulsion would be very quiet even when running at full power, like maybe you could stand near it with standard shop earmuffs and not be hurt by the sound (of course, you wouldn't actually want to do this because you'd be hurt by the, you know, nuclear).

Aw man, now it's even earlier. Am I gonna be able to watch this live?

That is an interesting idea! I never thought about portals that would only transmit energy instead of matter, but it sounds a lot more plausible than a portal you can just walk through (though it probably violates some laws of quantum dynamics as we know it anyway).

Now that's just a really nasty move.

Weather station, camera mount, protecting spirit...