Codraroll

At least it highlights the need for other telescopes to complement Webb. It's a good telescope, but not suitable for every use case, so preferably somebody should start work on another telescope for a slightly different use case pretty soon. If Starship works as advertised, it might not even be prohibitively expensive either. I have often wondered how expensive it would be to build a reasonably capable telescope if mass wasn't (as much of) an issue and launches were really cheap.

Interesting. So they could potentially ask it to just photograph whatever it happens to be pointing at, and hope for it to be interesting. Chances are it will, given how Hubble took the Ultra-Deep Field photo by intentionally pointing into the darkest portion of the sky, and it still found lots of interesting stuff. Granted, they chose the darkest patch of sky not because it had nothing to look at but because it had the fewest obstructions, but chances still are that JWST would be able to find something science-worthy in every random direction if necessary. Decades in the future, I hope we have enough relays to bounce the signal off of if it doesn't go straight towards Earth.

I guess it's nice to have aspirations, but I severely doubt any of this will ever leave the drawing board.

On the other hand, from what I've seen, I'm pretty sure that's not the weakest point of the film from a scientific perspective.

If you mean "Properly" in the sense of "Ensuring that the authoritarian regime is kept in place, or at least replaced with someone even more aligned with the interest of other dictators in the area", then yes. The last thing they want is for people to ask whether having a self-appointed dictator for life is actually in the best interests of the nation. I guess there are plenty of neighbouring countries ready to help "maintaining stability", though, so it will probably blow over.

If we're being properly optimistic, we could hope that by the time JWST reaches the end of its lifespan, it will be a matter of a routine Starship flight to go out there and refurbish it. Popping in a new tank of hydrazine, inserting some new sensors, improving comms, all that jazz. Or maybe just installing a new telescope entirely and taking JWST down to be exhibited in a museum.

I think it's not so much the delay, as disappointment over the fact that there are so many problems to be fixed after this many delays and inspections.

I sometimes get the impression from these threads that it's possible to take both those options, though ...

But even Verne made some simplifications and mistakes on the scientific front, without it getting in the way of the storytelling. In Five Weeks in a Balloon, the whole endeavour is based on a battery strong enough to provide continuous production of hydrogen from catalyzing water - for five weeks. And in From the Earth to the Moon, he somehow got the idea that landing in water dampens any acceleration to survivable levels - even that of being shot out of a cannon from a standstill to near Earth escape velocity in the span of a couple hundred meters. Just sit in a bathtub during launch and you'll be fine ... Sure, it reads a bit anachronistically if you know the science, but the story is well told so it really doesn't matter. That's what the whole point of fiction is.

Not in the slightest. A bomb sends energy in every spherical direction, and the ship only gets to take advantage of the "ray" that hits its pusher plate. The rest dissipates uselessly to the sides and behind and diagonally and every other direction you can think of. A rocket engine directs all the energy in the desired direction, since the nozzle surrounds the combustion process and ensures the energy only has one way to travel - very roughly speaking. I believe you have been told this many, many times already.

Long story short: If you want a ship to do what ordinary technology cannot do, don't try to do it with ordinary technology. Invent something vague and fancy-sounding that works without explaining how, or just handwave it. Or both: Introducing the Palm-and-Five-Fingers Cyclical Motion Engine. The P5F-CME is a super-efficient technology that allows practical SSTO capabilities and continuous acceleration for a very long time, without using a lot of reaction mass. That's the entire explanation of how it works.

I guess they don't need to. The right people can just send a press release that says "the people loves CNSA now", and suddenly its official approval rating is one hundred percent. No need to buy as much as a poster. It must be very economical.

It's more that I don't have that much knowledge - or prejudice, perhaps - about those. But to make up for it, here's a bonus one: the Virgin Galactic approach: "Our clamps are sideways!"

So many ways to take this from here: NASA approach: "A clamp opened unexpectedly, so we delay the whole thing for twenty months or so to re-evaluate the design of the telescope, question the life choices of all our junior engineers, and allow Congress to re-consider whether it should be a telescope at all, and not, perhaps, a lunar test bed for rover wheels." SpaceX approach: "Well, the clamp thing did end up destroying the spacecraft, but we have nine more like it ready to launch by next Tuesday, and the wicked cool footage of the explosion is giving us a lot of subscribers on YouTube." Roscosmos approach: "Clamp is same as on Sputnik. In fact, whole rocket is same as on Sputnik. Telescope is slightly altered Sputnik, with camera tied on using string. Two years from now, we will make nuclear telescope and send to Saturn." BlueOrigin approach: "One day, we too will have clamps. And SpaceX's clamps are bad." CNSA approach: "There was no clamp failure. Everything worked perfectly. But just in case, the search terms 'clamp', 'rocket', 'telescope', and 'crash' are now censored on all search engines." ESA approach: "Clamps? We should form a committee to consider whether to use clamps in our next design. Pinces ? Nous devrions former un comité pour examiner s'il faut utiliser des pinces dans notre prochaine conception. Abrazaderas? Deberíamos formar un comité para considerar si usamos abrazaderas en nuestro próximo diseño. Expect results in 10 to 15 years. Attendez-vous à des résultats dans 10 à 15 ans. Espere resultados en 10 a 15 años. " ULA approach: "Unforeseen circumstances have led to unexpected delays in the spacecraft integration process. An extra cash injection of $5.5 billion is necessary to uphold the schedule of the project and retain America's capability to integrate mission critical components." ISRO approach: "These clamps didn't work, so we went to the hardware store and picked up new ones. It pushed up the cost of the mission slightly, but it's still cheaper than the Clamps movie Hollywood is going to make about this situation. By that we don't mean cheaper than the film production, but cheaper than the collector's edition DVD set."

Never mind that, I wonder what they would even name the successor to New Armstrong. Hopefully, some (presumably required to be American) astronaut will do something heroic before the New Armstrong is retired, so there is an even more prominent name to attach to the even bigger and better rocket. At the moment, it's hard to top the first guy to walk on the Moon.

Fans of a certain KSP mod will know. Emu for sea level engines, Penguin for vacuum engines.

The whole premise for that question rests on flawed assumptions and (deliberate?) misunderstandings. You bring to mind creationists asking why there are still monkeys if humans evolved from monkeys, then answering "that's not what I asked for, you cannot answer the question" when people try to point out the errors inherent in the question asked.

Using the Caspian Sea as an argument against sea level rise is like using indoor temperatures in an airconditioned building as an argument against global warming. The Caspian Sea is an inland sea primarily fed by the Volga, which the Soviets diverted quite a lot of water from in the 1930s for the purposes of agriculture and hydroelectric power. No wonder the sea level in that particular sea fell a bit back then. If there had been more substance to your argument, you might have had a less regulated sea to use as an example. The main issue with sea level rise is the destruction of infrastructure on the coasts. As @SunlitZelkova said above, it's primarily a real estate problem ... but over the past couple of centuries we've built a lot of real estate on the ocean front. It's mostly a human issue, with potential millions of people who will be displaced by increasingly frequent flooding. Natural habitats will be destroyed too, of course, but that's not the part that makes things so hideously expensive. 1) The human efforts happen alongside the natural effects. That's what makes things so drastic, because the equilibrium moves. 2) That "Maybe" is pulled out of your own backside and then you run with your assumption as an argument, which is troll logic. Half your arguments are variations of "All available data points to one conclusion, but maybe all the available data is wrong, and this conclusion for which there is no data whatsoever is true instead?" Give us the fricking data you're basing yourself on instead of saying "maybe, maybe", or face the idea that your uninformed opinion might be wrong.

Ignore? Where the heck do you get that from? Look at the temperature graphs, it's right there. XKCD has a great chart to illustrate that the current situation is a tad more serious than the gradual warming over thousands of years that ended the last Ice Age. A temperature change of one degree per thousand years is about as drastic as it gets under natural conditions. We've seen a degree of warming in less than a century now, and it's still accelerating. In biological terms, the industrialization of human society is a mass extinction event, but sure. Absolutely happy. There's no way this can come back to bite us in the ass later. No, it's right there in the statistics, and all accounted for. Greenland was never very green. Viking settlers managed to eke out a few meagre grain fields during its short summers, but it's not like the ice caps weren't there back then either. The settlements were always at a sustenance minimum and it didn't take much of a change in the climate for them to be abandoned. The "Little Ice Age" was a mostly regional phenomenon. Besides, again, the speed at which things are happening. I trust you haven't come to this discussion without at least looking at a temperature graph, but I suspect it didn't sink in. Same with point #3. You seem to pretend that climate scientists have failed to notice events you can find on Wikipedia, then claim them as evidence that you are right and they are wrong. Chances are that the people whose job it is to study the development of the global climate over time are taking into account historical events when the reports are written. Any examples of this? Any decent scientific measurement should include error bars. And if nobody reports the error bars, how do you know how wide they are? Now you're making a mishmash mix-up of overpopulation, land use, pollution, and climate change. They are related, yes, but the presentation here is too tangled up for the argument to have any sort of understandable meaning. You seem to be implying that people blame plastic straws for climate change, which absolutely nobody has done ever, and use that as an argument against the idea of climate change in general? Hahahahahha no. So everybody finds the theory "totally idiotic", but it just so happens nobody says it out loud, and they do so despite the fact there are no good alternative explanations for the very well-observed warming. They have no arguments, just like you have no arguments, yet believe anyway despite themselves having put forward arguments for the opposite. How utterly convenient. I see only one totally idiotic thing here, to put it that way, and that is your reasoning. Look at the body of evidence from every relevant field. It should not be hard to find if you care to look. But you can look very long for an alternate explanation, and many people do, and they haven't found anything yet. There would be a lot of fame and fortune awaiting anyone who could debunk the idea of anthropogenic climate change, and since such a find would massively benefit the fossil fuel industry too, there's no lack of scientific funding for anyone wanting to pursue "alternative conclusions". Yet everything these well-funded detractors have managed to come up with includes massive methodological errors or outright fraud. If there had been a truth out there for them to find, so obvious that even a random guy on the Internet knows that it's correct, wouldn't they have managed to document it better and not have to cheat to arrive at their desired conclusion? It's actually so close to 100% the difference is barely a rounding error, but the argument itself is still absurd. What reason do you have to believe that they don't believe it? You're taking this assumption out of your rear and running with it. An argument built on a baseless assumption does not lend credibility to the person making it. You might as well say the same about the shape of the earth: "All those knowledgeable people have put forward plausible and solid arguments for it being round, but deep inside they may all think it's flat". You're basically taking the available evidence, saying "but what if it's all wrong and this alternate fact for which there is no evidence is correct?", and going with that assumption. That is not compatible with any known system of logic except that of certain creatures in Scandinavian folklore. And your point with this is what? That the scientists don't really bother with accuracy, so the whole scientific framework around climate change is flawed? Or are you just ranting randomly about scientists now? English isn't my first language either. And it's not necessarily his language I have a problem with, it's the utterly baffling logical jumps and groundless assumptions. I suspect the post would have been just as much of a word salad if he had written it in Russian.

I wanted to respond to Kerbiloid's post, but it's a borderline incomprehensible word salad mixed with copious doses of sheer ignorance. Can we just tell the troll to read a Wikipedia article or two and then never come back? The last portion responding to the three quotes is sort-of possible to understand, at least. The argument for all of them boils down to "Scientists believed something different in these fields before anybody knew how to make actual measurements, so we shouldn't trust them now either even though actual methodology has been developed and tested over many decades". This level of ignorance itself is a blemish on a forum that's otherwise quite science-oriented.

It stems from the competition between the US and Soviet space programs. The US used the term "astronauts", the Soviets used "cosmonauts". Cue the media thinking that every different country/political bloc's space program ought to have their own "-nauts", and making up a term to use for the Chinese astronauts. I bet that somewhere on the Internet, somebody has painstakingly created a list of "-nauts" for a hypothetical space program for every country out there.

It's, uh, politics.

Obligatory:

Radon should work great. It's chemically inert (it's a noble gas) and much heavier than air. Too bad it's radioactive ...

Rendezvous with Rama featured this as a minor plot point, if I recall correctly. Having a defined up and down makes it easier to orient yourself, and set a mental system of reference to prevent vertigo in zero G. Imagine floating at one end of a corridor, maybe doing some work along the short wall, grabbing a handhold, and looking over your shoulder. The comfortable perspective is that you're standing at the end of a horizontal corridor, like on Earth. Slightly more unsettling is imagining that you lie at the bottom of a deep, narrow well. But if your brain somehow tricks you into believing you've grabbed a hold to the ceiling of a tall and narrow tower shaft, you'd have to take several deep breaths to let go of that handhold, and it would be hard to focus on the work you're doing. Having some surroundings telling you what is up would be a real comfort in that situation.