JoeSchmuckatelli

The awesome thing is that political will (meaning money) provided the impetus for the engineers to solve so many problems in just a decade. 10 years ago, the doom and gloom 'it's new and will never work' crowd actually had plausible arguments. Factually, EU's goof's can be seen as iteration (road to someplace is paved with good intentions)... so people tried it, learned what worked, what didn't and some efficiencies - meaning that current adopters have some prepared ground to work from. Proving to be an interesting read: thanks! Climate migration is real - its going to be a massive political and economic test (already is, frankly).

What are we looking at? All I see is a floor, some chairs and a wall

Well - once again, I bring up the difference between inconvenience (and economic cost) vs existential threat. From a species perspective, high heat and humidity are an inconvenience. Sure, the individual in an overcrowded city, reliant upon air-conditioning when the power goes out and the windows won't open is at risk... But as a species, we are adapted. Plants love these conditions, btw. Contrast this with reduced food production when it's too cold. Hard to put a sweater on your crops. ... We've talked about feedback loops - and there's an interesting one that you touch on: people's adapting to heat-island cities. We've done this by pumping in water and providing air-conditioning in modern buildings. But lots of people in the world live in buildings that date back to before central air was part of the design. Given the high cost and ugly appearance of retrofitting, many older buildings don't have such amenities. Those are the places where the heat-stroke is happening. In a hotter world, demand for such nice to haves will rise, with it the demand for more cheap power - and what's the cheapest source of power right now? No-one wants grandma to cook (well, except at dinner time) - and she doesn't want to miss out on the happs in town; so because people demand to live in overcrowded conditions... the cost has to be paid in one form or another.

...and you thought cow farts were bad I will point out that Out-of-Africa humans do well in hot and humid environments. Little Ice Age demonstrates that cold is more dangerous than hot. .. I will also point out that @kerbiloidlives in one of the places that are becoming more temperate and the region likes cheap booze, so his suggestions are a natural fit.

Meanwhile over at BO: it's Hawaiian Shirt Day tomorrow!

Fine - let's start a go fundme so I can be the first person taller than 6'4" into space - we need to push back against the tyranny of the short! THEN we can have a ship named 'Falling With Style "

Dear Space X, Your Boat Naming Scheme is more interesting than your Dragon Capsule Names. Please quit letting committees put bland, previously used names on these. Consider "Falling with Style" for Dragon 5? Joe

Derp. I just learned a new phrase: "Linear Actuator" SMH

Submarine? Spaceship? One could designed to rise again - and the other to sail on stranger tides

It's just a glitch

@sevenperforce pointed out a few pages back that while we are not seeing more storms (by number of storms) we should be seeing more larger storms... Italy got a massive rainfall this week https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.cnn.com/cnn/2021/10/06/weather/italy-flood-oman-climate-change/index.html Oman got hit hard, too https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-58783992.amp And last year massive storms hit North Africa and the Middle East https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_Middle_East_storms The projections that make sense call for an increase in the humidity of regions that are currently arid - like the Arabian peninsula and North Africa. While short duration heavy rain can be economically devastating - I wonder if the projections are true whether we might see a reversal of desertification in those regions. Paleo humans saw hippos in what is now the middle of the Sahara and Saudi Arabia used to have a lake district (although my reading suggests Earth's tilt was causal in that wet period) Interestingly - a wet Sahara might be a long term boon to people in NAfrica - but adversely affect the Amazon rainforests which rely on Saharan dust

That looks like one of those screw rods that allows pretty precise alignment of the shuttle along the length of the rod. With small, light stuff that's not a problem - but if it's heavy and mechanical I'd be worried about binding if it's supporting /pushing something heavy

I'm no scientist - and while I find condensation as you suggest, plausible... my reading of the article suggests that it's a gas giant and the day side atomized iron rains on the night side... Thus, with no surface to condense on... It likely follows a similar pattern to rain here where the water molecules first bind to some other dust particle before gathering other water molecules sufficient to overcome the atmospheric uplift enabling it to fall.

That's the $64,000 question, isn't it? It's also why NASA's budget is so easy to slash when someone needs a tax cut or entitlement to get reelected. Absent some smart guys in academia or some brave folks in industry finding a need to get up there regularly... This whole endeavor is a "we do this because we can" thing and not "because we need to" (or because it benefits us) thing. Frankly - that may be a true answer. If so, we are just wasting time and money. If not - then every dollar spent now will pay divideds down the line. So either the collective smart and self interested people of the world find a way to make it worthwhile - or we are just entertaining the few of us who think this stuff is cool

This - unless NASA has an affordable, competitive market to choose different launch platforms and vehicles from, it's current structure is untenable. Problem is - outside of NASA as a customer, can we really expect anything other than bored billionaires to buy flights? (It would be great to see some of the DEEP pocket educational institutions (Harvard, Stanford, etc) purchasing flights outside the aegis of NASA.)

I think you guys are talking around each other. The pencil can stand if you have an active controller keeping it upright, but will fall if it's just a passive stick. Traditional design says that the ship should be stable when turned completely off. Hence low COG / wide legs. I'm not sure you can turn SS Moon / Mars completely off w/o legs... It is likely to need a big gyro and stability system running at all times

Well - I was going to say this, but he's done an excellent job.

Ironically (serendipitiosly?) just as we are talking about Iron Rain... This: https://www.cnn.com/2021/10/05/world/iron-rain-exoplanet-scn/index.html

As someone who has written a few briefs... I find this interesting. Its not uncommon for parties that regularly work together to find themselves in litigation - but you don't typically cast a party you might want to work with in the future in such a disparaging way. Blue hasn't done themselves any favors, IMO. Aside from that - it also exposes perhaps some existential dread on the part of NASA who looks at a congress debating how to spend an ungodly amount of money - but hasn't yet debated where to get the money... And NASA is a place used to budget cuts. Absent the inertia of progress, projects still in the planning phase are easy to cut.

They do need to land a camera platform first so we can watch the attempts. Need another 'keep crashing 'till we learn' vid

woman-laughing.jpg (1098×709) (arn.com.au)

Okay - for fun - an anecdote about this: I am a phenomenally intuitive person - so much so that I generally trust my intuition about people and things... because I am usually right. This used to drive a friend of mine insane. He's the type who is so literally literal, he just cannot grasp or understand something being true in the absence of facts or proof. He'd constantly ask me the 'why' of an opinion or for the data supporting an assertion, and when I would not (or could not) provide that information in a linear, progressive format, he would declare it false out of hand. And then be liquided when I turned out to be correct.

@cubinator - a couple of months ago someone worked the numbers for terminal velocity on Mars - and it was fast.

Ah - thanks. I missed that. I hereby pronounce myself mollified. Um... Because methane rain? https://earthsky.org/space/titan-saturns-moon-weather-seasons-methane-rain-storms/#:~:text=Lakes on Titan's surface are,Titan's weather and surface erosion. Iron rain? 'The iron vapor had mysteriously vanished as it moved across WASP-76b’s night side. To the researchers, this could mean only one thing: rain' https://www.google.com/amp/s/amp.theatlantic.com/amp/article/619198/ Based on stuff like that I presume that any liquid that can form a vapor will form clouds and thus... rain (although now I wonder what an 'Iron Rainbow' would look like ') https://www.metal-archives.com/bands/Iron_Rainbow/3887 ... @kerbiloid

I'm guessing that the flaps are largely useless in the Martian atmosphere for that right up to when things get exciting... Which probably means 'too late'.