JoeSchmuckatelli

Can one of you smart guys explain this? Why does a rocket engine, designed for high-heat operation, require a thermal protective cover? (And what dictates when you need one vs when you dont) thanks in advance

I'm always amazed that the US can even catch foreign spies. Especially since the 1980s; we've such a pluralistic society that we literally have someone from everywhere... everywhere. We have our stories of displaced African kids who were refugees from the child-soldier days staring in wonder at water from a tap. We have enclaves of 'Little' everywhere in many major cities. Best thing: they all bring their food with them! Frankly, the most common give-away for being an American Stranger in a Strange Land is this:

Always do. (looks cooler that way)

I understand Russian to be a fairly precise and rules-bound language. American English is much more forgiving. Heck; most of us don't know the rules, ourselves!

Bonus: we can gather the ejecta after it rains down upon the Earth as meteorites!

I can respect that: every person has to weigh how and whether to experiment upon themselves in light of their own experiences and particular situations. I'd just caution you to read my latest post above. Even a mild case of covid leaves lingering problems - and while my doctors and I have not actually concluded that the brain / neurological symptoms that have affected me since August are Covid related, losing your sense of smell is maddening enough. Best of luck to you.

Short, sweet, too the point and informative. Seems better than what BO has been putting out. Looks like ULA is learning how to PR in the modern era!

Any word on the tiles that fell off during static fire?

Not enough Jeebus. Look, when USSR decided to stop being Evil and become Russia, it left a vacuum. The US rushed in to fill the void, playing both roles. We run around telling ourselves we are Luke - but to much of the world, we are Vader.

My fellow Marines have had some fun with Covid and our history of being inoculated (and other stuff) against pretty much everything: The thing is: there's not enough info out there about what a 'mild' case leaves behind. Sure, you hear all about the deaths, and the hospitalized w/reduced lung function... but Covid does some weird stuff. They should (without hype) tell people how even surviving a mild infection can leave you with something that sucks. Like in my case: lingering (months long) headaches and no sense of smell. COVID-19-related Loss of Smell and Taste Linked to Viral Staying Power in the Human Nose (genengnews.com) I got covid last January and documented some of my experiences here (and in subsequent posts): The headaches stopped around June, and taste returned - but the loss of smell persisted. So fast forward to today - and now I'm having some suspicious things going on. Since mid-August I've had daily headaches (and I don't get headaches, often) and am having weird perceptional problems that make it so I cannot drive at freeway speeds or at night. The symptoms have gotten progressively worse since then. Not debilitatingly so - but you'd be surprised at what a pain in the keester it is to try to live a normal life in America without being able to get on a highway or freeway. (The perceptional problems are weird: at some point my brain simply refuses to process information. Like I can see everything, but it stops having meaning. The other day I stared at a red light as I was driving wondering why it was there - until with a jolt of adrenalin I realized it was a RED LIGHT and I was approaching the intersection and needed to stop. WEIRD -- and very disconcerting.) I'm going in for an EEG and a nuclear MRI of the brain at the end of the month. One of the possible explanations for my symptoms? Post-Covid neurological damage. Large-Scale Study Finds One-Third of COVID-19 Patients Suffer Neurological Damage | BioSpace FUN! ... Anyway - its been said that people who are young and healthy don't really have to worry about dying from Covid, and that's true. But I would caution everyone that you don't want to survive a mild case and be crippled for life. Polio did not kill everyone, either,

I love people whose brains work like yours does! Wish I could give you a ton of upvotes. Very KSPF post; both informative and entertaining!

Actually that is a losing scenario for any virus. You don't want to kill the host too quickly. Instead, you prefer long illness where the host can shed viral loads throughout the population and they enjoy a lingering illness and can shed more. The Delta is a prime example - higher transmission and breakthrough of inoculated people with a lower mortality rate is a more ideal version (from the virus' standpoint) than was the first infection.

Leaving the absurdity of the hype-ER... Whatever aside The sheer number of planned and approved missions are exceptionally aggressive. While an impressive achievement if they can pull them off... I wonder how much of it is sustainable / achievable from a financial perspective. I don't know much about Chinese bureaucracy, but if anything like US & Russian - there are likely to be a lot of aspirational projects that can get initiated only to disappear unexpectedly. Anyone got a guess as to whether similar fates await the Chinese space industry, or is it too young* to be making such predictions? *I know China has been in space for a while, but this newly capable Chinese Space enthusiasm seems a different beast from 20 years ago

Amazing, isn't it?

Did they actually complete the mounting of the arms yesterday?

You had to do more than breathe to catch AIDS. Thus, not comparable. Although both have been a boon for the personal protective gear industries. That's about it

In the sense of 'Things that are interesting', I bring you another tidbit (with a bit of backstory). I grew up in California, which aside from just being California is steeped in the history and philosophy of the American West; in other words we respected 'rugged individualism'. To me, being both self sufficient and willing to help a neighbor (who was already in the process of self-help) was a natural thing. I know this cuts against some of the prejudicial impressions folks have about Cali, but it's a big state. I've also lived a good portion of my life in Arizona and Texas - and if you were a kid of my generation who could not fix your own car... Well, you was 'one-a those.' (Millennials, please don't hate me... I know you grew up in a disposable world). My kind of people can fix their cars, build their own computers, repair a VCR or TV and yeah, do a little programming. You grew up, worked your way through college and then got a job and visited your parents on holiday... or hosted them once you had kids. The idea that you might owe anything to your parents, other than care when they were ill or needed a little help moving something was absurd. Learning about other cultures in the world, I always struggled to understand places where collectivism was the norm. The entire idea of filial piety, ancestor worship and putting the needs of the group ahead of individual rights was utterly foreign. When I had friends who had to rearrange their household to have a parent move in with them, it was most commonly my first or second-generation Asian-American friends; and for them it was as natural as having a recent college grad living back at home these last couple of decades. (For those of different cultural backgrounds, it was often a huge burden imposed upon them). Point is: it's hard growing up in one culture to try to understand the cultural norms of another. Clearly in parts of the world, collectivism and conformity work: they're the norm. My political science and history studies often showed that the farther east one travels in the Eurasian land mass, the more collectivism is the norm - and conversely, the farther West, the more individuality and personal rights become the norm. Thus, the American West is possibly the most extreme version of "West=individualism" and China the most "East=Collective/Conformist" - as far as 'natural' perceptions of those living in the disparate regions as they view their own duties to the societies they live in. I've seen a lot of attempts to describe the causes of this - some based upon religion, some on population density, but this one strikes a chord. It's about farming. Historically rice-farming societies have tighter social norms in China and worldwide | PNAS Hope you find it as interesting as I did.

That's not the correct take-away. The vaccine isn't 100%. It does seem to provide some (most) people with the ability to not get sick at all, some people who do get sick have mild symptoms and less fatality, and then there are a very few who (likely because their immune systems are already compromised) have serious cases. I've two exceptionally healthy friends who were both vaccinated (one Moderna, one Pfeizer) and both got breakthrough Delta variant: neither had to go to the hospital, but for one of my friends it was touch and go whether he should. (Anecdotal, I know). The problem is that there are too many variables: such as the blood type thing. Lots of Type O Pos people had light symptoms, whereas others with differing blood types had harsher runs. That's only one example -- but it shows that while effective, the vaccines alone are not the whole story. We've yet to see any studies (afaik) corelating blood type and break-through cases (likely because breakthrough is statistically rare). Yet absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. (My friend who maybe should have gone to the hospital is not O Pos.)

Probably. Sadly that is likely to be both the best scientific and non scientific guess at this point. My advice is to read as much as you can, and then make an intuitive judgment - because you are the Guinea Pig for future generations either way

Norse settlement in the Americas dated to 1,000 years ago https://www.nbcnews.com/science/science-news/tree-rings-radioactive-carbon-signs-vikings-north-america-rcna3383

That is direct from the sauce - NBC. It's one of the few snl clips that cannot be found on UtUb (in case if even mentioning yutub is a crime in SovietCanada)

I have read similar articles - I got pfeizer so if I were to get a booster I'd pick one of the other two. However in my equation, there is also the fact that I got covid last January (still can't smell, dadgumit) - so I feel like it's not a priority for me to get a booster any time soon. (Presumes I have antibodies from surviving the disease) Still - from what I have read mix and match provides a better boost than sticking with the original Oh - and if anyone reading this is one of the idjits who does not want the vaccine... Trust me you DO NOT want the disease... Even a mild case has long after effects that are not fun

See - I just knew someone smarter than I would have thought about it! Thanks @kerbiloidand @KSK for the links!

Boeing could still surprise everyone

So what about my idea? When we set off a bomb, we say it 'explodes' but what we are really seeing is very rapid combustion. Take the same stuff in the bomb and give it a single / preferred direction and you've either got a penetrating warhead or a rocket... ...so could we pelletize some fissionable material, shoot it through and crush it in a magnetic field and capture the resulting micro-nuclear explosions in a rocket bell for propulsion (eliminating the need for a pusher-plate)? AFAIK the smallest warhead built produced energy analogous to 10 tons of TNT - is that still too much to get a nuclear rocket that works analogous to a solid fuel rocket? Fusion Power Advances in Magnetic Crushing Test (nbcnews.com) (I guess what I'm asking is ' whether physics prevents the nuclear candle idea' -- i.e. if we're stuck with just bombs and reactors)