cubinator

Fingers crossed....

Does everybody have their own peanuts this time?

Someday we will be able to come here and see this view in person.

Perseverance's location as of a few minutes ago.

blown away by the hot end of a giant rocket booster. I'm pretty sure they'd be killed by the sound alone and they were way too late to start flapping away from a rocket stage dropping out of the sky. I'm sure they're well prepared for regular falcons, but this Falcon is entirely different.

I guess you could call that a 'landing burn'.

I was fully expecting to see seabird roast in a few seconds there. Looked like the landing burn started, you could see it in the clouds. I wonder if the engine aborted or if it exploded in flight.

Oh my god, STAGE 1 SACRIFICED ITSELF FOR THE BIRDS

Engine plume looks kind of like a spider sometimes. Stage 1 telemetry

https://nanoporetech.com/products/minion I just found out about this a few days ago and I am very impressed that such a thing exists. May be old news to some of you in the bio fields but I find this just wondrous.

I must be Frank.

Is it?

Well that just means that Laythe is probably alive. Perhaps it's where those crashed saucers came from?

I chatted with a BO person a while back and they said they really are doing a bunch of stuff, but won't tell anyone about it who doesn't work at the company. So, rockets, I imagine they're building a lunar lander as well...

That looks like a New Glenn all right.

You're right, I must have been thinking of some other things. Let me try to get it right this time: E=−GMm/(2a). So, the correct statement is: Orbits with the same semi-major axis have the same energy, even as eccentricity changes. And area varies by cos(e) or something along those lines.

I think the extended mass inside that fairing would be the cause of that penalty.

Center core gets expended anyway even if it lands because it's cursed

I can imagine the orbit getting more elliptical, driving the periapsis into the Moon without changing its energy. Remember, energy is equal to the area of the ellipse. I don't think that's the dominant effect. Exhaust from the LEM rocket engines caused a significant addition to the lunar atmosphere. Sure, there is solar wind and photon pressure, but the reason Moon orbits are especially unstable is that the Moon has irregularities in its mass distribution. The largest one that comes to mind is the planetoid chunk buried under the Aitken basin.

The transfer speed from a solar orbit is faster than orbital speed - but by aerobraking from the Sun you can lose all your velocity all the way down to the surface with just the atmosphere. Entering orbit first requires firing engines, but it helps reduce the intensity of atmospheric entry.

It's beautiful!

You know, I think I will print one in red.

Still not a fan of that gigantic ladder. It ought to be deployable as stairs or something.

Exciting!

Per the Inspiration4 raffle rules, Crew Dragon's astronaut height limit seems to be 6'6". This is three inches better than the Shuttle.