cubinator

The satellite in GEO has a lot more angular momentum than you because it's rotating around a really big radius. That means that if you go straight up towards it, you'll start drifting west because you only have the angular momentum you got from the ground, which is a lot less than you need to orbit the Earth high above it. In order to match the velocity of the satellite you'd have to pitch eastward at altitude and accelerate, but by then the sat that was originally right above your head would be much farther along. The most efficient way to get to the satellite would be to get into low orbit as usual, then do a Hohmann transfer.

It turns out that we already look at things in smaller dimensionality than they actually are. Consider looking at a cube on your computer screen. There isn't really a cube there, it's more likely a hexagon with some lines through it. We "squished" the 3D cube to fit it on a 2D screen. We do that all the time with screens and even with our eyeballs - you don't see in 3D, you see in 2D. But we can use that 2D vision to view and manipulate 3D objects pretty easily. Our brains are wired to understand those 2D images as representations of 3D objects, because we live in a 3D world. But it turns out that we can actually do the same thing, with a little bit of math, to make images of 4D objects too. We just have to "squish" the hypercube twice: The first time to get it to fit in 3D space, and the second time to get it into your computer screen. A 5D cube would have to be squished down once more. So when you look at a picture of a tesseract, like this one, which is spinning, that's really what it actually looks like. The only limitation of why you can't "see" it as more than a strange 3D object is that your brain isn't already wired to interpret images of 4D shapes from a 2D view. You could conceivably learn how to imagine 4D objects and space, but it is tricky. Or you can look at a flattened image of the 4D Rubik's Cube on your computer, and learn how to manipulate it from your limited point of view.

I live up to my name: -Solves the original cube quick -Has a respectable collection -Has solved the 4D hypercube -First person to build a Rubik's cube in Kerbal Space Program -Only Moon topology Rubik's Cube in existence is my creation I like to do really challenging things...Now that I think of it, I should make a Mars puzzle as well, maybe out of some other shape like the Megaminx...Maybe I'll wait and do that when I can outsource some nice color printing, that would look gorgeous.

When cubinator starts using yet another multidimensional Rubik's cube

When I tell people about exoplanets I always mention what we really know about them, and that is: -Where they orbit the star, and therefore how much energy they get -Roughly their mass, sometimes -Roughly their atmospheric composition, sometimes Everything else is speculation. There are probably a lot of small, Mars-like planets, and there are probably a lot of icy worlds way outside the so-called "habitable zone" with habitable subsurface oceans full of chemical energy sources, and that's just if water is the only stuff that life can come out of. In short, there are a lot of planets, and each of them is a little bit unique, with many possibilities.

this statement is false

Quarantine has officially gone too far...I am downloading a 5-dimensional Rubik's Cube...

Somebody left their can of pepsi on the bottom right for scale.

I think we should be looking around for alien life, and for anybody else who we might be able to have some mutual understanding with. I don't think it's likely to happen with radio messages, though. Most likely the first alien life will be discovered either by advanced telescopes seeing it covering extrasolar planets, or by Martian fossils, or by exploring inside the oceans of Enceladus and Europa.

https://wiki.kerbalspaceprogram.com/wiki/TD-37_Decoupler

BOOTS ON IKE PUT MONEY IN THE TANK! Lander 2 separated from CLOUD ONE early in the morning, although the station itself has little sense of the passage of time beyond seconds elapsed...Now that landers have arrived at Duna and its one moon, the crew on the station has clocks for the local times for their friends on both Duna and Ike, as well as the KSC local time. Lander 2's transfer to Ike was achieved with a small burn from the station's elliptical orbit, and capture was similarly smooth. The landing on the small, airless moon was a perfect descent capped by a light touchdown on the top of a mountain ridge. An eclipse engulfed the landing site just minutes after the first steps were taken, and the site was appropriately named 'ECLIPSE' to commemorate. Now all tasks for the Duna system which the space program has been contracted to accomplish have been completed, and fund levels have been restored to sufficient amounts to develop and launch new components to CLOUD ONE when it returns to Kerbin at the next Hohmann transfer window. At the moment, findings from scribbles discovered on a napkin left in the engineers' cafeteria suggest a large apparatus for converting asteroid regolith into fuel as the primary module to be added to the station, while another engineer said they were working on a new type of engine that could be very useful on probes launched from the station. Meanwhile, research on the Duna sand castle situation is progressing, with the astronauts obtaining more information about the properties of the sand. They have thus far determined that the sand appears to be "coarse, rough, and irritating" and that "it get's everywhere". These milestones will progress research towards the perfect Dunan sand castle in record time!

An amalgamation from a madman's mind of a robot, a lie, and an interdimensional being...A fair match over many planes of space and time, at the very least.

I dreamt I went back in time to 2009 and was at a family party, and we talked about phones.

BOOTS ON DUNA! What a ride! The seven-Kerbal crew of CLOUD ONE's Lander 1 detached from the station and made their descent to Duna's surface today and are taking their first steps on the sandy red surface as we speak. Megvey Kerman placed the first footprint, radioing the charismatic message, "Wheeee!" as she jumped off the nose of the ship and onto the sand. In the first minutes of fiddling about with the sand, the crew reported that "It kind of sticks if you get really deep" and "might be worth trying to build a sand castle. Where'd we stick the buckets?". We will excitedly wait for the publications that result from this experimentation.

Definitely not a good option when the landing is happening on Mars, where there is no ocean to divert to...

Along with every other star, if you're deep enough.

No, that would be a Dyson sphere and portals (dunno if you've read Epistle 3), and if half of Kerbin's ocean was drained away.

It would be cool to see larger asteroids and comets with very low but perceptible gravity orbiting the stars. Something more like a celestial body than a stone that you leech fuel out of.

I have a tabletop arcade box at home with all the old arcade games. Xevious, Galaga, Donkey Kong, Mappy, Pac Man...Even though I'm a generation younger than those games, I was lucky enough to be introduced to them. I also play Mario 64 and Sunshine, and Pikmin on occasion (I managed to get these all working in virtual reality for a time, too!)

Today's xkcd...

I remember when they added contracts.

But that could only be observed during a rare event, and comparing it to the view from months away. A black hole at this distance would let you know it in one look.

No change. It would be dark, and the warping effect would be visible through a small telescope, but Earth's orbit would hardly change.

I am working on a fun Arduino project, I am making some Animusic lasers in real life. As a byproduct, my piano keyboard is now usable as a computer keyboard...

>sends entire Gateway in one trip