cubinator

Fueling! Scott Manley is on the Lab Padre stream!

Venting has started! You can now watch billowing clouds of gas, if you think that's exciting.

I like Interstellar because it plays out like a dream. The most realistic thing about the movie is probably the visual depiction of the black hole and exterior of the wormhole (and the idea that dumb humans backed ourselves into a corner), but it really feels like space travel in the way that I feel when I literally dream about space travel. It also embodies the collective dream that humanity has to travel the stars really well. Cooper starts out on Earth, living a simple life where no one around him really cares about looking up. Then, he's very suddenly transported into space, where he experiences various absurd alien settings with a vivid emotional reaction to what are essentially dead, silent natural processes. That's what astronauts felt when they walked on the Moon - They were emotionally moved by the motionless rocks and hills, which are fairly ordinary as far as the universe is concerned. The movie makes me feel that way too! So I think it does a good job with that, and I interpret the plot more like a dream than something that works in real life.

Quite a few of them, in fact:

I went outside to wave this evening, Bob and Doug's capsule looking shiny from the ground! I wonder if they were still taking photos by that time...? I wish them good night and a safe return home tomorrow morning!

No, the planet has experienced far less time than anywhere else in the universe.

Play the stream with KSP music on shuffle in another tab for greater authenticity.

Those fairings really flex a lot after separation! What's their thickness?

Yes, the rockets were overpowered, especially the Rangers. I think they are meant to be plasma rockets, but still - Ranger can drop down to Miller's planet, a super-Earth with 130% surface gravity, and lift off all the way back to the Endurance in one go? It had to be done for the sake of the plot. The black hole's accretion disk provides plenty of yellowish light, probably more than the barely-mentioned neutron star.

Do these hold true on the far sides of the moons, or is it safer there?

I think I might have to snag the new Microsoft Flight Simulator!

**Falcon Heavy flashbacks**

It's nice that they have cameras on it in case anything happens, at least. But I agree, for those who don't know: The difference between watching this video and actually participating in an aerospace test is in a real test you occasionally get to press a button or read a number aloud.

The blades can probably rotate at the base. They spin in opposite directions.

Pgo is 100%!

It sounds a bit similar to a binary planet, which is in the game. I wouldn't count it off as impossible, especially if they added some smaller, unusually-shaped bodies.

You forget that we are going to strap 100 giant nuclear-pulse engines together with struts and duct tape and slingshot around the biggest star in the game with the monstrosity.

Today I located some of the important information that I need to start designing an experiment based on the ISS payload installation system. I hope I can soon come up with some CAD models of what I want. If you want to send your very own experiment to space, you might want to design it around this document: https://biospaceexperiments.com/index_html_files/2009 EXPRESS Rack Payload interface Definition Document.pdf

Live presentation going on now! Tech on Perseverance that translates to human exploration. Landing hazard avoidance, weather forecasting, ground regolith study, oxygen manufacturing...

The new Perseverance rover will be launching from Earth in three days. This thread is meant for discussion about the rover and its adventures. This rover will arrive on Mars in February. It will record video of EDL, and audio for the first time directly. Its chassis looks similar to Curiosity, but its computing is more capable than Curiosity and it has greater autonomous driving and hazard detection capability, meaning the pathfinding need not be done so painstakingly by humans. It also carries the first aerodynamic flying vehicle to be deployed on Mars in the form of a small helicopter, and the ability to create caches of surface samples which can be picked up for return to Earth by a separate vehicle in the future. Oh, also it's mainly looking for stromatolites.

Mercury is interesting because it's theorized that it formed farther out from the sun, in the vicinity of Earth, and hit another planet in a way that caused it to lose most of its outer material. (Sound familiar? That's why I'm perplexed by Mercury, I need to know what happened!) Venus' entire surface is apparently about 600 million years old. That means the entire planet erupted in one giant volcanic event at that time, possibly even while Earth was frozen over. Who knows what the planet looked like before then (probably about the same, since there's been enough time that this could have happened many times, but maybe it had less atmosphere and less CO2 before)? While all the planets are layered, Earth has one layer that no other planet has, to our knowledge: the biosphere. Almost the entire surface and most of the volume of the oceans is alive, and elements and chemicals are recycled through quadrillions of active, interactive bodies in a way unlike anywhere else we've seen. Recently, Earth has gained the ability to observe itself and deduce complex information, even looking out to the most distant galaxies and learning about them, and even to send living pieces of itself to other planets. Mars is curiously similar to Earth, except there does not appear to be much life there at all. Once there was water flowing on its surface, but now only a little ice remains underground and in the poles. Still, though, Mars is home to the largest mountain in the solar system and the (second?) largest valley, making for stunningly beautiful landscapes all around the planet. I would love to visit Mars someday, even if I have to spend several years away from my home, Earth. Jupiter is the largest planet around and it is so heavy on itself that hydrogen turns into a strange molten metal in its core. It has beautiful colored cloud bands with swirling storms with lightning strikes so powerful they would arc across a continent here on Earth. It would be excellent to watch the storms swirl - from a safe distance, of course - perhaps from the surface of one of the four amazing large moons. Saturn is notable because it has the brightest rings in the solar system right now, which swirl and crash together in waves with the icy remains of a destroyed moon. Come to think of it, one of its other moons looks very similar to a fictional device that was made to destroy moons. Hmmm.... Saturn has the most diverse and exciting moon system around it, with geysers of snow coming from mysterious subterranean oceans, and a moon where it actually rains and there are rivers and lakes, with so much air that a person with wings could fly. Uranus has the strangest axial tilt, and all its moons orbit along with that tilt as well. One of those moons has a sheer cliff with a drop bigger than the altitude of Mount Everest. In the sky above that cliff you can see the perfectly blue-green planet, which doesn't have a lot of weather because it's so cold that there is not enough energy for storms. What a view! Neptune is very blue and very windy, with storms racing around and around several times faster than they ever could on Earth. Its largest moon, Triton, gets a great view from outside the ring plane in its retrograde orbit, and you can also watch the geysers erupt from its surface and the clouds roll by overhead. The surface is very active, maybe there is even more going on underneath it! The other solar system bodies are also very exciting. We have comets made of ice and the building blocks of what we're made of, asteroids of all shapes and with moons and rings, icy worlds in the outer solar system which have mountains made of water and plains made of nitrogen. Some of these planets are shaped like pancakes, and some of them are shaped like two pancakes. I made a guess that we'd find a donut, but that's almost as weird.