JoeSchmuckatelli

Best way to head off problems is to address them before they get out of hand. Exxon does this - and believe it or not, it helps them. (Yes, I chose the big boogieman on purpose... But they are also pretty easy to check out vis working with environmentalists, checkered history and all)

Translation is always an interesting art. You not only have to try to convert the meaning of the sentence contextually from one language to another - you have the added challenge of trying to convert colloquial or cultural nuanced phrasing (and aphorisms) into something that will be understood by someone foreign to all of that. Thankfully humans are smart - and we have a lot of experience with this! So in this sense - 'law' should translate into either 'best practices' at the low end, or perhaps something like 'principle' (e.g. Bernouli) at the high end - should such be discoverable. In other words - the plan is to do a bunch of docking and get really good at it.

I read his statement (in relation to the post he quoted) as a fire 'under it' being the exhaust plume as it launched. To which I agree - I want to see it fly

Officially learned a new word today. Thumbs up! 100k terminals at $100 per month? Niiise

Reading a recent article about worm-hole stability got me wondering: Would a black hole repel a negative mass star? For reference: https://www.space.com/traversable-wormholes-modified-gravity

Someone hasn't looked at the SLS / BO pages, lately. No one gets a free pass.

Unrelated to the current discussion - but I finally watched the EDA videos about SLS/Starship and the Raptor engine (1 y.o & 2 y.o., respectively). It's striking to see just how dated they are after only one year. https://everydayastronaut.com/sls-vs-starship/ https://everydayastronaut.com/raptor-engine/ That's what I find so fascinating about SX's pace. From a spectator standpoint... it's stunning.

My first thought as well. Boondoggle. Just build a 'jetwash berm' however many miles long and call it a day. MUCH cheaper Heck - using 'tilt-up' concrete wall construction techniques - they could build a building/ tunnel with a light covering of topsoil cheaper than trying to tunnel and keep dry for any reasonable length of time.

Trial by error - or have they done maths to determine the outline of this new law? (presumes 'law' translation is correct - and not some new CN regulation governing coupling)

FTFY (I've seen both shows)

@Spacescifi - look into what people are trying to do with Fusion. The magnetic control of plasma gets around your 'melt the engines' problem. Figure that out and we're off to the races!

Realistically - we're not getting out of the local system unless/until we discover some relevant exceptions to Einstein/Newton. It's why Warp/Hyper is all the rage in Sci-Fi. (I actually liked what Lucas did in StarWars - which he subsequently screwed up in the later shows... as did Disney). The interesting one is what Pournelle did with the Moties... but that's unlikely too. We need to UnDark DarkEnergy

I'll add this: don't get me started on some of the idiocy related to proposed solutions: "Could humans add sulfur dioxide to the stratosphere to combat global warming? Actually, maybe. We can’t control volcanic eruptions, of course, but scientists who advocate for the study of solar geoengineering say that we could potentially use airplanes to add diamond dust or sulfuric acid into the stratosphere, increasing the amount of sunlight reflected from Earth." Can we use volcanoes to cool the Earth off? (slate.com) ... These people are literally citing to volcanoes as the potential cause of the Little Ice Age without recognizing that a slightly cooler climate was pretty brutal for the people who lived through it.

One of the things that keeps me from getting all excited about some of the findings in science (especially related to Climate Change) is how papers (and researchers/editors) chase the money. Example: PLOS One has an article about e-bike safety in China. The title? "Quantifying the impact of COVID-19 on e-bike safety in China via multi-output and clustering-based regression models". Like, really? It's a total stretch to find a relationship between the two - but in this environment if you want to publish it - you gotta have the 'term du jour' in the article - and better yet, in the title. Currently the hype and money is chasing Covid - so if you are smart and want to publish... Chunk in the term. The last 15 years have been the same with regard to Climate Change. Want to write about the mating habits of turtles? Gotta have the key words. 'The mating habits of marine turtles may help to protect them against the effects of climate change' https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/01/120124200106.htm How about how the ice age influenced clades in spotted skunk evolution? Need to mention Human Caused Climate Change - even if it is unrelated to the subject of the article. "... while human-induced climate change has been causing major problems for wildlife as of late, changes in Earth's climate have impacted evolution for millions of years... " https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/05/170503131927.htm Or what relationship exists between European Colonialism and the climate? "... to study the influence of climatic factors on the colonial life and politics, such as hypothesized links between climate and violence..." https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/65708/4/Climate_Colonialism_pre_print.pdf&ved=2ahUKEwjs9PrCrcfyAhXRZs0KHTa9CI0QFnoECCIQAQ&usg=AOvVaw19FsiAei7usKqKeGvRJRqR The primary objection I have is that there is both an overt and a subtle influence on the findings of researchers to conform to the narrative. If you don't conform you don't get published. When you have to mention the cause celebre in unrelated concepts / disciplines it's insidious. It's also disingenuous. I don't really have a point, here, other than to suggest that there is a real risk of missing good science when requiring conformity to an agreed upon narrative. A consensus is a good way to state policy objectives - but is it good to defacto require conformity in all disciplines just to be published? Can't we simply read about how the ice age broke up populations of skunks and influenced the evolution - without requiring a passing mention of Human Caused CC?

Odd article apparently cribbed from another article... But the images are cool: https://www.google.com/amp/s/futurism.com/triple-transit-jupiters-moons/amp Triple transit (lunar eclipses) of Jupiter

Oh - good to know - but I was thinking about the route from NA/EU to there... https://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation-world/national/article245724595.html From last year

Confused. How does Thermite burn without producing gas? Something has to be liberated as gas to combust, doesn't it?

Except now I cannot stop thinking about it being Hurricane season in the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico. :-[

I absolutely LOVED that show as a kid... And when I saw it was available on Netflix or Prime I tried to watch it again for nostalgia... And couldn't. So BAD A question, though, about the configuration - would anything like that be possible? Or would it be so tail heavy as to be impractical?

Ahem... While people love to beat up management - isn't part of the issue with the BE-4 an engineering problem that needs solving? I get that 'parts rich' is a management decision... But CAD does not slow down because you don't have titanium in the warehouse

I'll ask here - because it seems on topic... Does a hot burning solid like Thermite produce more gas expansion than something cooler like powdered aluminum? (And would Thermite be a good SRB material?)

So we can build that?

A good article on the limitations of current modeling. "Even today’s fastest supercomputers are too slow to simulate 2,000 years at a relevant scale." https://slate.com/technology/2021/08/ipcc-report-climate-models-redwoods-future.html "For the first time, the IPCC released an interactive atlas so nonscientists can explore the futures these models predict. If you obsessed over “flatten the curve” graphics early in the pandemic, this may be a fun, soothing way to prepare for the apocalypse"

Now I'm getting images of a galactic cheese slicer. If the hair-thickness, 36,000 km cable has the tensile strength to support its own 20 ton weight, what won't it cut through?

Well... At only 100 tons per kilometer for a 6 inch diameter steel wire cable we should get started. 36,000 Superheavy launches should get the first strand going - plus a few more for connectors... That's only 3,600,000 tons of steel for the first 6 inch strand... And steel is only running a bit over $700 per ton - $2,520,000,000 if we can get wholesale pricing, just for the cables, so maybe another $100,000,000 for the connectors (and other stuff) - so let's round up to $3bn... And then double that for the counterweight... So $6bn... Not quite within NASA's budget - so we need international partners. Whoops - I forgot launch costs - anyone know what Superheavy's cost per flight is projected? Oh... How thick do you think it needs to be before we can start lowering the cable?