JoeSchmuckatelli

Well played, sir Won't lie - was worried there was an issue and they were keeping it closed for safety. Quite glad to see it's open - will make for a much better Netflix episode

Suspect that means it may not open the whole trip.

How come we are not seeing 'Inspiration'al videos of the tourists in spaaaaace?

Well - there is this convenient atmosphere betwixt you and it. Up there all they have is the magnetic field

Was surprised to learn that wolves are ranked below lions... but I did know that the apex predator of Africa is the African Wild Dog: Apex predators in the wild: which animals are the most dangerous? - Discover Wildlife Still, in the tundra areas - wolves are pretty efficient. Of course - if we change the tundra/taiga/steppe to include massive prey animals (veggie eaters)... something will adapt itself to take advantage of the new meat source. Not saying we will see a 'new' Sabertooth but a branch of tiger could increase in size or polar bears (which already hunt whales) could adapt itself to something like the short-faced bear and get big enough to prey more effectively on the new food source.

I was thinking it would be more like a big (really big) triangle, and an array like that could provide relevant info. Clearly if they're aimed at something along the orbital plane (like any of the planets) it would be, effectively, linear. Short of doing what Kerbiloid suggests with gravitational lensing... I was thinking about what the EHT did, effectively making an 'earth-sized' telescope, and wondering if there was an effective way for us to increase the surface area and hopefully get good info at both a reasonable cost and within our current technological abilities. Edit - I haven't had enough coffee: using the same words and phrases too much this morning!

True - but 'Passengers and Crew' tends to be a useful distinction in naval and airline parlance. 'Crew' usually denotes employee/person who works in or on the craft. Passengers? "No, we are not serving at this time." "Don't touch that!" "Sir - PLEASE RETURN TO YOUR SEAT" You guys are making me run out of "Likes" for the day! So this is clearly a view of the 'noon' side of Earth... what happens when they are near the terminator or not in the ubra? Do they have to close the hatch or just remember to not look at the Sun?

Quick: design a counter-rotating blade system for a helicopter-style drone/autonomous vehicle and make it as light as possible: GO! (All entries gonna look pretty much like that).

Dire Wolf Saber Tooth and Terror Bird were all present when Mammut walked the earth. Adults probably have little to fear - but the wee furry babies? The poor dears. FWIW - Columbian Mammoth probably a better choice given the warmer climate than the woolies

Could do a nano-robot symbiosis that adjusts the crystal matrix of the bones as needed. Mimic the natural process of osteoblasts

I just lost brain points

A large part of the achievement in space is to remind people that if you can hit a target far away, you can certainly hit one closer to home. Peaceful flexing with a touch of 'who me? I'm just doing science' thrown in

Could a 3-point array telescope, with satellites at L4 and L5 and this wet rock work? Are we already getting the benefits of that by taking separate images 6 months apart and then combining them? (edit - I know it would work, but would it be optimal to build one or are there more efficient methods?)

They try for Mammoth But They get...

So -- aside from being jealous that the Inspiration 4 winners get a trip to space... I have to be jealous they all got to fly fighter jets? ... Not that it would matter; I'm 'overqualified' Once again - the short people are showing their prejudice against us tall guys. Damn engineers don't seem to recognize that approx. 2% of the population are over 6'6". (Proven in Coach on EVERY AIRLINE and virtually every car backseat). Remember Shakespeare's 'let's start with the lawyers' line? Well for us tall people it's "There's those short engineers -- GET 'EM!)

...and people thought Jurassic Park was fiction

Ain't that the truth! ... Booster hasn't even had a hop, much less a test flight.

I don't think so. At least not intentionally - the people who run these deep sea excursions to sunken ships or waste fields have other priorities (historical, treasure, ecological) and the rocket stage is both fairly tiny and not worth the trip. I've seen deep sea footage of waste fields off the California Coast, and a bunch of shipwrecks - but never anything like that. Best hope would have been something related to Shuttle What did the Kittiwake do? (divetech.com) Okay - ignoring what I wrote above... From the quote and article cited: "Naval Sea Systems Command Report on the Salvage of the Space Shuttle Challenger Wreckage sitting in my inbox. This was the complete report from the US Navy, published in 1988 about their recovery efforts. " However - I've not seen any reports of dives that looked at their utility as an artificial reef.

Well - not one dive-able by tourists. But stuff like that does tend to collect life on the bottom. USS Johnston: Sub dives to deepest-known shipwreck - BBC News

Location makes recovery a bit easier.

The whole 'catch a rocket' thing is pretty bonkers. Especially without landing legs. That's just plain nuts. ....aaaaand yet, if anyone can do it (even if it takes a few tries) SX just might be the group to pull it off. My fear is that they're spending so much money trying to do this stuff, that they overcommit to one idea that ends up being a dead end (wasted effort) or destroy the stuff they've built in the first or third attempt. Everyone says, routinely, "Space is Hard" - but its also expensive. Starlink should give them an instant boost and a lot of ongoing revenue... but it will take a while to refill the coffers of money already spent on Starlink itself. Can't imagine that each individual satellite costs only a few hundred dollars.

I think that's the kind of thing players might end up asking for... especially if KSP2 is going to have boats. (I've heard there's a dock) Why else do we need boats, if not to land rockets on them? Exploration? Pfaugh. It could be a 'developmental milestone'. Player gets to a certain point in the tech tree, unlocks an Octo's ability to normalize (wording?) the orbit once launched, and the player gets to try to stick the landing of the booster. After enough of these, maybe we automate it (another career unlock?). Would be a way to advance the career mode - where 'normal tech' ways of getting to orbit with expendable stages suddenly gets cheaper with reusable stages.

JWST I Just Want it in Space Today

So - let me offer some observations. Humans, outside of the tool use and complex thinking super power, have two other superpowers that benefit us: 1. We are the premier endurance hunter, rivaled only by wolves 2. We are utter generalists - from diet to environment. To take a page from the role playing genre - if you are going to give your engineered species a different super power - you probably need to take points away from some other ability. I'm assuming you know this. But the other thing to remember is that a superpower unused becomes very quickly dropped by the organism in favor of more efficient energy use. Take the endurance hunter aspect. Far easier to stay in shape once there than it is to regain the ability. I know this for a fact. 20 years in the Marines and I could run 15 miles nonstop with a pack on or sprint out 3 miles in under 20 minutes for both decades. Follow that up with a single decade of relative laxity and occasional illness and today I can't run two miles. Not so much because I'm lazy (OK that is a part of it) but because my body has literally changed the way it processes food and builds muscle. This anecdote aside - there are hundreds of articles on this stuff. So if you have an engineered species that does not live in an environment that demands the use of its designed abilities - those abilities are going to disappear.