Codraroll

Please tell me your post is just missing a significant apostrophe, and not just telling about JWST in past tense ...

Yes, but what if they want to launch more often than once per decade?

Why shouldn't it be? It's based on friction. I don't think atmospheric pressure is necessary for it to work.

The backstory in Andy Weir's novel Artemis struck me as a little weird the first time I read it, but over time I've starting to feel it makes more and more sense. In that book, Kenya has emerged as a dominant space power, because they essentially told the private spaceflights of the world "we have no red tape, come to us and launch from the equator" and decided to tolerate whatever consequences came out of it.

Supersonic in multiple directions at the same time. A really dangerous missile for those on the giving (and, as it turns out, receiving) end.

Alternate title: China is actively developing new rockets, Russia isn't.

At least they're catching the issue before they're flying this time, which is a step up.

Not necessarily, it depends. Just yell slogans against the central government or invasion force, and they might give you a rifle and take you up to fight for the Cause after a talk with their leader.

Evidently, sit idly by while that customer builds their own, better rockets due to the constant price hikes for the service, become reliant on that revenue stream to balance its budget, do nothing to remain competitive versus the new and better rocket, then watch the revenue stream disappear so they're back at square one but a worse financial situation, and then still fly rockets from the 1950s, only now all the other potential customers will rather hire seats on the new rocket instead. And then try to build another version of the 1950s design, because why start innovating after 70 years when it couldn't be done after 30? The only way for that situation to be salvageable would be if the new rockets all failed so the 1950s rocket was still the best show on the road. And when that situation doesn't manifest, one apparently pretends that it does anyway, because that's presumably more comfortable than facing reality.

In my experience, subtle humour in academia is more common than one might expect. Ask the author of "Fantastic Yeasts and Where to Find Them."

Let's cut to what I suspect is the core of the issue here: Just because Russia has consistently failed to create a man-rated rocket better than the one they first designed in the 1950s, doesn't mean it's impossible for everyone.

I personally would be quite excited for handball. In zero G, there's potential for some real Magnus effect shenanigans.

And in 2016, SLS was ... ... well, that's not really on topic or strictly needed for this discussion, but finishing that sentence in your head is a fun little exercise.

At this point, I hope SpaceX will respond something like "Listen, if you are so bothered by your lander not going to the moon, I'm sure we can bring it with us in the cargo hold. We have room for it."

Nowhere did I say that anybody else is doing it better or compared it to any other spacecraft. I'm just saying that huge blunders have been made with Nauka specifically, and we can't be sure if these are the ends of it. Hopefully, whoever is in charge manages to sit down and review their procedures instead of launching a big rant of whataboutism.

No, it's a bad QC problem, which may become the mother of several other problems. The flaw is not so much that the defects happened, so much that it was that the defects were allowed to happen. There's a big difference. If a faulty wire in your house starts creating sparks, your problem is not that a wire in your house is sparking. That's just a symptom. Your problem is that you used a shoddy electrician, and you better have somebody take a long, hard look at the rest of the work performed by that guy. The wire you see sparking is a problem you can manage, but you have reason to worry that there's a similar wire spitting sparks inside a wall. Likewise, the undetected defects in Nauka's propulsion and docking systems are bad in themselves, but they are symptomatic of a management problem among the people who built it and declared it fit to fly. That's the real reason to worry. The dangers of failure with propulsion and docking are over, but there can be all sorts of other nasty surprises that haven't revealed themselves yet, because they didn't look hard enough to find them.

Still a problem on a conceptual level. Even though the issues with propulsion and docking are now over, they still launched a module without knowing what was wrong with it. If they missed the defects in the propulsion and docking systems, they could also have missed other critical defects in other systems.

If you have the tech to build tractor beams, what the heck do you need Orion drives for? Especially with antimatter again? You seem strangely hung up with using antimatter-based Orion drives despite being told repeatedly how ludicrously impractical it is and that pretty much every other wishlisty science tech makes it obsolete. Also, if you can shape the tractor beams anyway you want, you obviously must shape it like a tractor. Preferably the old type with an open-air seat and a tall exhaust pipe that goes puff-puff-puff.

And that's kinda the problem, isn't it? There are people whose job it is to know the exact condition of the module, and they didn't catch the major problems with propulsion and docking. What else did they not catch? Seeing how this thing behaved after it actually docked, I can't help but wonder when it will start frying the station's electronics, interfering with communications, or just venting air. Obviously the quality assurance team did a terribly poor job and it may still house many lethal dangers.

It might be the cynical part of my brain talking, but I can't help but wonder: if something as basic, yet critical, as a main engine failure passed unseen by QC, is it really wise to hook this thing up to the ISS? What else can be deadly wrong with it that the quality control didn't catch?

Let me just nab a few applicable responses out of the previous couple of threads: That should cover the gist of it. You tend to ask the same type of question over and over, so giving the same type of answer over and over seems only appropriate.

One of my favourites is the quarter, which may be a unit of length, volume, or weight, depending on context. Of course, the quantities described by each definition of a quarter has no relation to each other either. It's either 22.9 centimeters, 12.7 kg, or 242 liters. In other words, I would rather not order spaghetti by the quarters.

Fortunately, the ones that do survive tend to be the ones most compatible with the SI units, though. I mean, the liter is not a SI unit, but it's so easy to convert back and forth it might as well be because it's a multiple of 10 SI units. The same with the examples you mention, they work mostly as a shorthand for common multiples of 10 of other SI units. The whole reason why Imperial is such a royal pain to work with is that it's not linear like that. You've got fifty-seven Godfreys to a Worthington, which itself is two-fifths of a Lengthwise Flagpole and defined using the time it takes an unladen swallow to cross the shadow of a priest at noon on St. Longfellow's Day. Okay, maybe not quite, but there are Imperial units like a fathom (2.02666... yards), a perch (272 1/4 square feet, or 30 1/4 square yards), a fluid ounce (1.73339 cubic inches), or a hundredweight (112 pounds). These units do not scale nicely at all with each other. They are little used for precisely this reason, though, which I believe to be the case with most near-metric units that don't scale well either. But the easy ones have a certain right to life, when they fit so nicely in with the rest.

I think the idea also includes a slowdown of aging so a person can stay in ship-shape for an additional couple dozen decades or so before becoming "a senior citizen". If the body deteriorated after 60 at the current rate, and then just did not stop until the person was 300 years old or something, that would be very bad indeed. But if you could be as healthy at 260 as you currently are at 60 (and consequently, stay as spry as a twenty-something for half a century or more), it would be a lot more appealing. Then you'd still only spend a few decades in retirement, after a working life of two centuries.

Ooh ... since there is "magic" in the question, there's so much fun stuff to wish for. In no particular order and with little regards for the laws of physics or other practicalities: Delay-free communications with unlimited range and bandwidth Safe anti-gravity An universally acceptable algorithm to determine truth Objective morals A harmless cure for stupidity, greed, and malice A universally acceptable system of politics and ethics that people will have no issues adhering to A harmless and comfortable way to restore bodies to perfect health and sanity (preferably with a module about accepting mortality and dying peacefully at an appropriate age, with the appropriate number of living descendants) An infinite resource multiplicator (and a universally acceptable way to use it responsibly) An infallible means of resource distribution that everybody will be fine with Infinite reassurance that it'll be fine in the end A way to come to terms with the overwhelmingness of the universe and the limited means a person has to experience it A toaster that keeps the toast just warm enough not to burn, for long enough that it's still warm when you take the last bite The contact info to magic space Amazon and a limitless gift card I mean, sure, many of those fall within the category of "Haha, that's impossible", but remember, magic.