Codraroll

And they've caught a lot of flak for letting two retirees publish a contrarian working document (calling it an "article" would be too generous - it never went through quality control, never mind peer review) through their official channels, abusing the name and reputation of the institution to give credence to their bogus work.

Current events are very tragic, but they made me look at the map and realize something interesting. So, there once was this Jesus fellow, who allegedly was born in the town of Betlehem, did a bunch of stuff, travelled the land for years, before one day, fatefully, he rode into the city of Jerusalem whereupon he was arrested and crucified by the Romans. All famous events chronicled in this big book. With my cursory knowledge of the stories, I had assumed that these places were, well, not a lifetime of travel apart, but certainly in different corners of Judea or Samaria or whatever the land was called as a Roman province back then. A hundred kilometers, at least, like the distance from Nazareth to Jerusalem. Certainly a few days' travel. Then I had a look at the map and realized that Betlehem is more-or-less a suburb of Jerusalem (politics notwithstanding, and there's a lot of politics going on). Along the shortest road and in fair weather, it'd take you less than two hours to walk the nine-or-so kilometers between the places of Jesus' birth and death. If Jesus was of a sporty persuation, he could feasibly have nipped out for a short jogging trip to visit the ol' manger in the hours between The Last Lunch and The Last Supper. Given the significance of the events to the story of the book in which he was the main character, one would think these monumental places would be further apart. It'd be like learning that Hogwarts was located two streets east of Privet Drive.

The big question is, was it the same subcontractor that supplied the radiator?

Quite on the contrary, the glacier was definitely there, and used as the quickest and easiest way to get over the mountain (being "ice rivers", glaciers flow along the parth of least resistance down the mountainside, after all). Occasionally, items were lost on the ice, which is why we find them when the ice melts away. Had there not been a glacier there, you'd have expected to find all sorts of bits of vegetation as the ice retreated as well. But alas, even the remains of old horse dung stand out. The reason why 1850 is used as a baseline is because that's roughly when things started to change rapidly. In the preceding 2000 years, the global average temperature changed by about 0.5 °C. In the 170 years since, we've seen three time that. There's a famous XKCD that illustrates the point quite clearly.

A slightly less ultra-positive interpretation is that they're finally getting stuff finished at Vostochny, leaving less need for construction money and more room for rockets in the budget, despite the total sums of money being the same. Still, two billion dollars is hardly a fortune considering how expensive space stuff is. I would presume it is also subject to further budget cuts or inflation due to currency devaluation. It could buy some nice yachts, apartments in Dubai, and convenient foreign citizenship for the upper management, though.

Ars Technica relays some news from the Russian space program: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/10/russia-talks-a-big-future-in-space-while-its-overall-budget-is-quietly-cut/ Politics aside, some key figures of its funding in the years to come: They also present a shiny new PowerPoint presentation with a few new missions, some new rockets, and other assorted stuff that might generously be called "aspirational" at this stage in time.

I saw that movie. It didn't end that well for the tall blue guys.

Even you should have learned by now that there's a world of difference between what impoverished authoritarian regimes claim to be capable of, and what they actually are capable of.

Having "Development" as part of the name was presumably too much of a baldfaced lie, even for North Korea. At least the name "National Aerospace Technology General Bureau" doesn't include any allusions to progress being made. Now, if only they'd do something about the D, P, and R ...

That would really put a damper on the wedding, too.

I doubt the North Korean government would permit that potential PR blunder. "Look, TV viewers back home! From up here, I can see the cities of the world at night! See, here comes East Asia into view. That big web of lights is Bangkok. And there we see Hanoi, and Hong Kong, and Shanghai ... see how they shine! And now, the motherland! Behold the glory of ... er, oh. Never mind. Pay no attention to that big blotch of lights to the south, please."

(image source) This is mighty K2, the second tallest mountain in the world at 8,609 meters. An awe-striking, massive cone of a mountain, rising some four thousand meters from its 4600-meter base in the Karakoram mountain range, right on the border between Pakistan and China. It is noticeably taller than its surrounding mountains, a king of the local landscape. Its Western name is of course K2, but in local mythology it is revered as ... ... uh, hold on ... *checks notes* Oh. Until it was noticed by British surveyors, who spotted it from afar and labelled it "K2", shorthand for "The second peak from the left up in Karakoram, as seen from our vantage point right here", during a surveying expedition in 1856, nobody even knew this mountain existed. K2 is in the middle of nowhere, even as far as the locals of the area are concerned. Getting even close to it requires a weeks-long trek along a glacier. The view of K2 is blocked by nearby mountains from every inhabited location (the nearest of which is 65 km away), although it might occasionally be visible from the lower parts of the Baltoro Glacier - which itself was considered too remote and desolate for the locals of nearby villages to bother with. "Up that valley is a glacier, probably nothing interesting is beyond that." And apparently you'd have to hang around on the Baltoro Glacier for quite a while before getting a glimpse of K2, due to the frequently cloudy weather conditions in the area. For the same reason, hanging around on the Baltoro Glacier for a while is not a very good idea. So K2's original and local name is, well, K2. That surveying expedition had a policy of using local names for the mountains they surveyed wherever possible, but came up short for K2. The peaks denoted K1, K3, K4, and K5 were eventually identified and their names found out, but K2 wasn't known to anybody and so didn't have a local name. K2 stuck. In later years, the mountain has sometimes been called "Chogori", but that's just a direct translation of "big mountain" in the local language, and apparently it wasn't even the locals who coined it. The Chinese government apparently sinified that word into "Qogir", which is their official name for the mountain, but it's not a local name. It appears that in the local languages, the widely used name for K2 nowadays is ... Ketu. No need to guess where that word came from. So yeah, the second highest mountain in the word had no name and wasn't known to anybody before 1856. As a bonus fun fact, the same applies to the neighbouring mountain Broad Peak, which is the 12th highest mountain in the world at 8,051 meters.

Not by itself, but it's a brick in the wall, as it were. Once more commercial suppliers get up and running, it will probably become more politically viable to acknowledge that SLS is way too expensive for what it offers, and there will be few remaining reasons to continue its support, even as a jobs program. Some congresspeople will continue to fight for it, but they will get outvoted eventually, and this report of the costs will probably be a key argument in the process.

They made an announcement after Fukushima, but the decision was made after Chernobyl. Germany last opened a nuclear plant in 1989, one among a few that were already under construction when the Chernobyl disaster occurred. All other plans were cancelled. Meanwhile, it was clear even back then that the life span of those plants would be 30-something years - Germany hasn't ever operated a nuclear plant for more than that. It was already in the cards that the plants would close at some point in the 2020's, and that would be the end of nuclear power in Germany unless the decision not to build more plants was reversed. So when Merkel announced the end of nuclear power production after Fukushima, she really just reaffirmed that the current practice would continue and that the plants would be retired upon reaching their already-expected life span. A few plants might have closed a few years before they otherwise would have, but it's unlikely that they would have carried on for much longer anyway. And by 2011, it was arguably to late to save the existing expertise in nuclear power building. Those who planned and built the plants that opened in the late 1980's were presumably not junior engineers straight out of university, but experienced seniors who retired before the 2010's. The right time to save the nuclear power sector would have been around the turn of the millennium.

Fool you into parroting bogus claims 10664 times, shame on whom? My username is next to my post, it should be unneccessary to repeat it.

For North Korea, the outcome is usually the same. They have a history of stuff coming down after going up, usually not where and when it was intended to.

Aha, that complicates matters. Still, it can easily be un-complicated. Just remove that preference from the mission parameters for Luna-27. Make it an optional goal instead.

I would think they have planned the program in advance, and that each mission is not dependent on the success of the previous one. Even before they launched Luna-25, they must have known there was a certain chance it would not succeed, and take that into account when planning the way forward. If Luna-26 has any concrete plans at all, there's probably a whole chapter about what happens if Luna-25 does not deliver as intended.

Oh, confirmation: https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/russias-moon-mission-falters-after-problem-entering-pre-landing-orbit-2023-08-20/

It would be a tremendous PR hit if the mission were to fail, at a time where the Russian government really doesn't need more PR hits. So that might compel them to do the quality assurance process properly to maximize the odds of success. Then again, it could also be that the desperation for a PR win compels them to launch it now, odds of success be damned. Bad news can always be buried.

Not sure, but I think spacescifi has made a thread or two about it.

I suspect that when we finally find the aliens, by tapping into the network of communication they use instead of moving about in physical space like common cavemen, we'll be like a kid who logs into a chat room for the first time. "Hi, we're the humans of Earth ..." "Dude, there's some new kids in the Main channel. Mods, can you direct them to the Introductions section?" "This is the president of the UN speaking on behalf of humanity ..." "Whatever. Can you please stop interrupting our discussion on the latest trade policies of the Federation?" "We live on a small, blue planet in the outer spiral arm of ..." MOD EDIT: Personal home address removed. Five minutes later, another civilization makes the same breakthrough and is likewise ignored.

Fair point. The rest of the world aren't going to restrict their station's orbit to the rather limited set of parameters that can be reached by that 1960's piece of junk either.

Sounds to me like an admission that external funding would be required for this prestige project to get off the ground. The problem is that most of the G20 countries would rather throw their money in with the ISS than with Russia. Or in the case of China, do their own thing instead.

I wouldn't say the paper has any major flaws, but I would be very careful with when to consider its conclusions applicable. As far as I can tell, it exclusively cites biomedical research for examples, where most studies follow a rather set and rigid pattern of the type "Does A correlate with B? Given the number of interactions between A and B, a correlation would be C percent likely to be observed. We did D and E to A and B, and observed a correlation that is F percent likely to be a coincidental product of random chance, with a margin of error of G ...". Then it sets up a mathematical model (which has been critizized for exaggerating the reduction of the "credibility" of the research results) to show that the study result is H percent likely to be wrong if C, E, and F are so-and-so large, and due to the methodology H is almost always a pretty big number. It also leaps to some strange conclusions elaborated in the criticism paper. It doesn't say outright that "most science is wrong". Nor does it give any basis for overthrowing conclusions in any scientific fields. There is also a rather large leap from "statistically speaking, most science results are likely to be wrong" to "any study presented is likely to be wrong", and yet a larger one to sweeping conclusions about the state of science in general.