Codraroll

Did I completely miss something, post in the wrong place, or watch the wrong video, or is Crew-2 in progress right as we speak with no activity in this thread whatsoever? EDIT: Looks like somebody else shares my delusion, if nothing else. EDIT2: Booster landed safely, second stage still flying nominally. Yay. EDIT3: Dragon separated. I guess it's smooth sailing to the ISS from here on.

Can it do oxygen extraction if the atmosphere is too rich in oxygen as well? That function is crucial in case you accidentally fill your habitat module with a hydrogen-oxygen mix during an attempt to make water from hydrazine.

I wonder how powered that landing was. It appears to have fallen slower than freefall, but ... one of the screwy things about Mars is that freefall isn't anywhere close to what we're used to, so all our perceptions of gravity in videos like that are widely off.

One of the very first paragraphs of China's constitution practically clarifies that "the public" in China is defined as "the Communist Party", so I guess they're in line with the plan at any rate.

An investment far beyond any budget they've committed to since Mir or so, a task similar to (but much more complex than) the one they've already failed to perform since the 1990s (that unused ISS module they've talked about launching since forever), requiring a launch vehicle they don't have, a business case that's dodgy at best, and a ridiculously short time frame. I think we've hit Rogozin bingo.

Pair up two portals. Mount one at the back of your ship (which preferably should be in orbit already and, this is important, quite a bit distant from any local police force). Then throw the other portal into the sea.

Well, that certainly seems like a suitably remote place for Earth monitoring. Nothing to do every morning apart from drawing back the bedroom curtains and determine whether the Earth is still there.

It's starting to look less and less like somebody getting things hilariously wrong, and more and more like a serious lapse of mental health ... with good access to 3D modelling software.

That's a red flag the size of a tennis court right there. Phrases that are variations of "I know this better than the professionals" can be directly translated into "I know so little I can't even understand what I don't know". Dunning and Kruger would probably consider him an interesting study object.

Of course you should. It's a conditional premise that is not evident from the phrasing of the question. To reiterate the XKCD above, communicating poorly and acting smug when you're not misunderstood is not cleverness. It's not "a gambit". It's being an annoying prickwad.

Wouldn't you get a few ablative effects as well, or is the time frame too short for that? I.e. your outer skin cells cooking to a crisp, but the heat not penetrating particularly deeply anywhere before you're safe and sound back on Earth.

There's always an XKCD for every occasion: https://xkcd.com/169/

Doesn't this assumption suggest you will only be exposed to an area of the sun the size of a human, rather than the area of the sun that would actually be within light-millisecond-range of a person standing on it? The area of the sun that would radiate upon you would be larger than the area of yourself, wouldn't it?

One thing I've been wondering: If you were, somehow, sitting on one of the satellites headed for near-collision, would you even notice the other one as it flew past? At 14 km/s it would whizz past you in a fraction of a blink of an eye, and in a vacuum it wouldn't even make a whooshing sound. Even if you knew which direction it was coming from and you were actively looking for it, I don't think you would be able to perceive it unless it happened to reflect a lot of sunlight in your direction. It could pass within ten centimeters of you and you'd be none the wiser.

In Zimbabwe, cirka 2008. Half a billion dollars would buy you a loaf of bread at government-regulated prices, but given how almost nobody sold bread at this price, you'd have to shell out around ten billion at black-market rates to get your bread. Getting a single-stage solid rocket booster for a mere half-billion would have been an absolute bargain. You never specified that it had to be American dollars, did you?

Landing a Starship on the Moon or fueling it in orbit would take months or years to test and try, sure ... but that's also true of the SLS. It doesn't currently have a lander to send anywhere, and the spacecraft it is built to lift, it can't even send to the Moon. Orbital refueling isn't even on the table. Arguably Starship lacks those capabilities at the moment, but they are not even within the design specs of the SLS, so I'd say that puts them on even footing. Overall, I can agree that the SLS doesn't necessarily "suck" per se, but it definitely lacks a sensible purpose, and it's so incredibly expensive. That's why people ridicule it. It can't do anything useful, but it still costs oceans of money doing nothing useful. I mean, I've only done back-of-the-envelope math here, but I found you could build a to-scale model of the SLS out of chicken wire, stuff it with dollar bills, and light the whole thing on fire, and you'd have spent less money than the marginal cost of a launch - depending slightly on how tightly the dollar bills are packed, of course.

Surely that must be many separate tests of many separate engines, rather than keeping one engine going for 3-5 hours.

I don't think Mssr. Verne knew that. Of course, in modern days central Florida sports several peaks such as Mt. Splash, Mt. Space, and Mt. Big Thunder.

I guess most of it is underground, like in Verne's story. You know, dug out of the mountains in central Florida.

Great presentation of Perseverance by Mark Rober:

Doors? Nah, I'm expecting they open the roof hatches and launch.

I'm no ornitologist, but would this realistically be an issue? Birds have evolved to fear predators coming from above, after all. At bird-flight altitudes, a falling Starship or Falcon would go engine-first only when at (or near) terminal velocity, while travelling nearly vertically. And they are big. It would be easier for a bird to spot and dodge a falling rocket than a diving bird of prey, and they generally do that successfully most of the time. A bird allowing a falling rocket to get close enough to strike one of the engines would have to be very inexperienced, very absent-minded, or possibly suicidal.

I like how the official stream showed the rocket from underneath until the last couple of seconds, then switched to a faraway camera right before the impact. As if the producer followed the feed until he saw only one Raptor was running, decided "Well, that's not nominal, this camera will be toast in three seconds" and cut away in time to have another camera capture the fireworks.

"if >BMW ahead then >Expect no turn signals" Or something to that effect?

I still don't get it. Solar panels tend to react to shading the same way a water pipe network reacts to a pipe being pinched: even if it happens in just one location, it reduces the flow throughout the entire system. Also, if the old arrays have deteriorated, why not replace them entirely instead of laying new arrays on top of them?