JoeSchmuckatelli

Not how congress works: you do realize that if it looks like an entitlement, walks like an entitlement and quacks like an entitlement, its not an entitlement if they have to look like they're working for it and its high tech or farm related.

The decompocatalyze ray was discontinued for civilian applications after NBC leaked the footage. Watch Saturday Night Live Highlight: Amazin' Laser - NBC.com

Question about the harpoon and tether idea: won't any rotation of the target at all result in it becoming a spindle of whatever circumference matches up with the direction of rotation? So - the craft has to take a LOT of line just to keep from becoming a birds nest attached to the asteroid... Right? Although - couldn't this technique be used intentionally to wrap up the target, allowing it to reel in a thruster for slowing down the rotation prior to resource harvesting?

Better than duct taping the cow after every fart

...and the amount of required paperwork is the same. I've never really thought about scalable nuclear in the sense of private / base uses (ala gas generators)... But my 'industrial production' presumption is that given the host nation's insatiable desire for power, the largest plant that meets the intersection of affordable and relative safety is what gets built.

In Geneva, observers note that Belgium is waffling on this issue. The French, however, say the issue is toast.

European satellites show massive methane leaks https://www.google.com/amp/s/mobile.reuters.com/article/amp/idUSL1N2DZ0KI "early results show leaky oil and gas industry infrastructure is responsible for far more of the methane in the atmosphere than previously thought" Color me unsurprised

Which is why I specified FRICKIN LAZERS in my solution, above!

They are always both. That was also when the Green and other Progressive / youth led organizations were virulently anti-nuclear... Even if not often persuasive, they were certainly loud. Put it all together and just getting money and talent was and is half the battle. The major - and to me somewhat surprising (and pleasantly so) - difference is that the modern Green /Environmentalists see Global Warming as the ultimate enemy, and that nuclear can be a solution. As religiously anti - nuke as so many were, to hear even grudging acknowledgement that nuclear plants are acceptable is a sea-change.

Here; use this... (Although, first off - are you familiar with 'corning' of gunpowder?) You have a nice big sci-fi ship with safe storage for corned, granular fissionables. When it's time to go zoom, you rapidly convey the solid fuel to the engine where through lasers and really strong magnets it all gets so hot and dense that the reaction kicks off and you get the super fast burn of fission, albeit controlled and the magnets can also define the nozzle so instead of the bang you get a whoosh. When you want to go faster, feed more fissionables, when you want to stop... Cut the feed. So easy

I think you are not leaning into this enough. Take a pinch of gunpowder. Touch a match to it you get a flash of light and smoke. Package that pinch up tight and you get a bang... Put the tightly packed pinch in a tube with one open side and you get a rocket. The bang seems big with a nuke - but the energy is being released in all directions... But you want to put a pusher plate on one side to capture some of that energy and get it to do work? Why? ... Because back in the day someone came up with it as an idea for getting work out of super tightly packaged combustion they couldn't control. So lean into this - have your sci-fi guys figure out how to not just have a nuclear bomb, but instead a nuclear candle. Get a burn - not a bang. Zoom.

Weight and volume compared to oomph. Math just doan werk out If you think about it - traditional rocket is a fuel air bomb just with a controlled burn.

We are not going to have one of those situations where someone forgot to peel off the protective film before launch, are we?

But so much more sanitary than dumping a bucket out the window into the street (looking at you, France).

If NASA were a business, sure. It's not. Functionally SLS is a program designed way back when to keep current the people working on space, and to retain the ability to build rockets. The program kept both personnel and facilities open at a time when they might have dispersed, closed, or gone on to other work. Why is that an important consideration? Read anything about what is going on in the automotive industry related to the chip shortage: when you shut down a program/line... it takes way more effort to get it up and running again than one might think. Sure, SLS has been eclipsed (now) - but wasn't at inception. Derp - I've already answered this, previously. Silly forum

Ouch Similar mistrust of the media in general here, too Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media (gallup.com)

That's interesting - will have to look into that

Sociological question: how skeptical are mainstream Chinese audiences about the media? (and reports like that, above) Analogous to Russian audiences or something else entirely?

I hadn't thought about contamination - and I knew escaped Helium wasn't a combustion /explosion risk; rather my concern was the slow loss of coolant in a proliferation of small reactors (increased likelihood of negligent maintenance) - where one placed in a populated area could overheat and... Well, you know. Thanks for the informed responses!

We've talked at times about the accidental PR success /brilliance* of SX... And this kind of thing is one of the reasons. We are seeing 'spaceflight adjacent' stuff going on... And it's really a cool showcase of human ingenuity and our engineering success. Like - how often do you see something like those crawlers moving something huge? The public exposure (which SX initially resented) gives the public a fairly regular, free, unfiltered view that something is going on - even if it is not a flight or rocket test. *SX is notably better at their intentional PR than others - but the unintend, uncontrolled videos we get from neighbors is fantastic

Does Helium like to play fast and loose with its pipes like hydrogen - or is it considerably better behaved?

Looked around and most of the original sources for the 'American Analysts stunned' part seem to be non credible. When you watch a country land something on Mars, you should probably have a pretty high expectation of their capabilities. Especially when you know that they have acquired tech from the US, EU and Russia... There is little reason to be surprised by them testing something that the US. EU and Russia are working on. This whole thing reads more like a self congratulatory puff piece than real news

Links don't appear to function

There is a good video I saw recently about turbopumps and fuel mixing /premixing - did not specifically speak to the complexity of the whole system - but it's a start. Don't remember where I saw it - but if I find it I will link it

So launch to docking in 3 hours? Kinda hell bent for leather - but it does show off mature command and control