DAL59

What do the rockets look like?

This movie is basically the story of the Tsien from the book version of 2010, which was dropped from the movie. ... relay this information to Earth. Tsien destroyed three hours ago. I'm only survivor. Using my suit radio - no idea if it has enough range, but it's the only chance. Please listen carefully. THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA. I repeat: THERE IS LIFE ON EUROPA...The signal faded again.'... soon after local midnight. We were pumping steadily and the tanks were almost half full. Dr Lee and I went out to check the pipe insulation. Tsien stands - stood - about thirty metres from the edge of the Grand Canal. Pipes go directly from it and down through the ice. Very thin - not safe to walk on. The warm upwelling...'Again a long silence.'... no problem - five kilowatts of lighting strung up on the ship. Like a Christmas tree - beautiful, shining right through the ice. Glorious colours. Lee saw it first - a huge dark mass rising up from the depths. At first we thought it was a school of fish - too large for a single organism - then it started to break through the ice.'... like huge strands of wet seaweed, crawling along the ground. Lee ran back to the ship to get a camera - I stayed to watch, reporting over the radio. The thing moved so slowly I could easily outrun it. I was much more excited than alarmed. Thought I knew what kind of creature it was - I've seen pictures of the kelp forests off California - but I was quite wrong...I could tell it was in trouble. It couldn't possibly survive at a temperature a hundred and fifty below its normal environment. It was freezing solid as it moved forward - bits were breaking off like glass - but it was still advancing towards the ship - a black tidal wave, slowing down all the time.'I was still so surprised that I couldn't think straight and I couldn't imagine what it was trying to do.'... climbing up the ship, building a kind of ice tunnel as it advanced. Perhaps this was insulating it from the cold - the way termites protect themselves from Sunlight with their little corridors of mud.'... tons of ice on the ship. The radio antennas broke off first. Then I could see the landing legs beginning to buckle - all in slow motion, like a dream.'Not until the ship started to topple did I realize what the thing was trying to do - and then it was too late. We could have saved ourselves - if we'd only switched off those lights.'Perhaps it's a phototrope, its biological cycle triggered by the Sunlight that filters through the ice. Or it could have been attracted like a moth to a candle. Our floodlights must have been more brilliant than anything that Europa has ever known.'Then the ship crashed. I saw the hull split, a cloud of snowflakes form as moisture condensed. All the lights went out, except for one, swinging back and forth on a cable a couple of metres above the ground.'I don't know what happened immediately after that. The next thing I remember, I was standing under the light, beside the wreck of the ship, with a fine powdering of fresh snow all around me. I could see my footsteps in it very clearly... I must have run there; perhaps only a minute or two had elapsed...'The plant - I still thought of it as a plant - was motionless. I wondered if it had been damaged by the impact; large sections - as thick as a man's arm -had splintered off, like broken twigs.'Then the main trunk started to move again. It pulled away from the hull, and began to crawl towards me. That was when I knew for certain that the thing was light-sensitive: I was standing immediately under the thousand-watt lamp, which had stopped swinging now.'Imagine an oak tree - better still, a banyan with its multiple trunks and roots - flattened out by gravity and trying to creep along the ground. It got to within five metres of the light, then started to spread out until it had made a perfect circle around me. Presumably that was the limit of its tolerance -the point at which photo-attraction turned to repulsion. After that, nothing happened for several minutes. I wondered if it was dead - frozen solid at last.'Then I saw that large buds were forming on many of the branches. It was like watching a time-lapse film of flowers opening. In fact I thought they were flowers - each about as big as a man's head.'Delicate, beautifully coloured membranes started to unfold. Even then, it occurred to me that no-one - no thing - could ever have seen these colours before; they had no existence until we brought our lights - our fatal lights - to this world.'Tendrils, stamens, waving feebly... I walked over to the living wall that surrounded me, so that I would see exactly what was happening. Neither then, or at any other time, had I felt the slightest fear of the creature. I was certain that it was not malevolent - if indeed it was conscious at all.'There were scores of the big flowers, in various stages of unfolding. Now, they reminded me of butterflies, just emerging from the chrysalis... wings crumpled, still feeble... I was getting closer and closer to the truth.'But they were freezing - dying as quickly as they formed. Then, one after another, they dropped off from the parent buds. For a few moments they flopped around like fish stranded on dry land - and at last I realized exactly what they were. Those membranes weren't petals - they were fins, or their equivalent. This was the free-swimming, larval stage of the creature. Probably it spends much of its life rooted on the seabed, then sends these mobile offspring in search of new territory. Just like the corals of Earth's oceans.'I knelt down to get a closer look at one of the little creatures. The beautiful colours were fading now, to a drab brown. Some of the petal-fins had snapped off, becoming brittle shards as they froze. But it was still moving feebly, and as I approached it tried to avoid me. I wondered how it sensed my presence.'Then I noticed that the stamens - as I'd called them - all carried bright blue dots at their tips. They looked like tiny star sapphires - or the blue eyes along the mantle of a scallop - aware of light, but unable to form true images. As I watched, the vivid blue faded, the sapphires became dull, ordinary stones...'Dr Floyd - or anyone else who is listening - I haven't much more time - Jupiter will soon block my signal. But I've almost finished.'I knew then what I had to do. The cable to that thousand-watt lamp was hanging almost to the ground. I gave it a few tugs, and the light went out in a shower of sparks.'I wondered if it was too late. For a few minutes, nothing happened. So I walked over to the wall of tangled branches around me, and kicked it.'Slowly, the creature started to unweave itself, and to retreat back to the Canal. There was plenty of light - I could see everything perfectly. Ganymede and Callisto were in the sky - Jupiter was a huge, thin crescent - and there was a big auroral display on the nightside, at the Jovian end of the Io flux tube. There was no need to use my helmet light.'I followed the creature all the way back to the water, encouraging it with more kicks when it slowed down, feeling the fragments of ice crunching all the time beneath my boots... As it neared the Canal, it seemed to gain strength and energy, as if it knew that it was approaching its natural home. I wondered if it would survive, to bud again.'It disappeared through the surface, leaving a few last dead larvae on the alien land. The exposed free water bubbled for a few minutes until a scab of protective ice sealed it from the vacuum above. Then I walked back to the ship to see if there was anything to salvage - I don't want to talk about that...'I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it after me.'And - when the next ship comes home - ask them to take our bones back to China..'Jupiter will be cutting us off in a few minutes. I wish I knew whether anyone was receiving me. Anyway, I'll repeat this message when we're in line of sight again - if my suit's life-support system lasts that long.'This is Professor Chang on Europa, reporting the destruction of spaceship Tsien. We landed beside the Grand Canal and set up our pumps at the edge of the ice...'

Its easy- just download a picture. Or use @Aperture Science Employee's profile pic.

Course to Jool plotted! Trans Jool Injection: This far from the sun, the solar panels are useless, and so we jettison them. One solar panel got stuck and will be removed via eva. "Why am I going out alone?" "Psych eval" "Okay, removing now. Just like plucking the wings from a butterfly." "Test results: your a terrible person. Thats not even what we were testing for." https://youtu.be/Yy3dIicSI_0 JOOL ARRIVAL Jool. Closer Reactors shut down, radiators retracted, heatshield inflated. 8-10-13 gees! Welcome to Laythe! The Kegasus is in an elliptical orbit of Laythe. It will lower its periapsis, release its probe, and then get back into orbit. The probe is practically uncontrollable. The wings make no effect on its nosedive towards the ground at 100 m/s. Splash. Refueling in Laythe orbit: We should go back there someday. Next stop: Vall! The manned Vall lander will be reused at Eeloo. However, there is the risk of docking failure, like what happened at Duna. So, should I land at Vall or save the lander for Eeloo only in case I can't redock? I also have a tylo lander.

Patchwork P3 I awoke in a hard metal chair, next to Ix and Kumbukani. Directly in front of us was a silver table, with nothing no it but a small cylinder. The room was small, brightly lit, with a single door behind me. It was locked. The cylinder emitted a variety of tones, ranging from squeaks to rapid low pitched honks to some vague mumbling. Finally, it began to speak Dictionary, in a monotone voice: "I am a translation unit. Do you speak dictionary? If so, please say yes." "Yes. I demand to know who you are and what you want with us, and I demand we be-" Ix quickly shushed her. "I am captain Ix of the Uniter. We were conducting a faster than light jump when-" "You are aboard ship 211899 of the Empire. Why did you destroy that planet?" "That's our planet! A faulty field made our ship easily detectable, as you know. We warped back to find our planet was destroyed by an unknown party." "Very well. My condolences. Your planet would have been a great addition to the Empire of a million worlds." A million worlds! Then I remembered, there are 100 billion stars in our galaxy. They control only 1 percent of 1 percent of it. "We will share our scant data on the ones who razed our world with you. May I request we be returned to our ship? We will stay out of imperial space." After a pause, the translator spoke again, "You may return to your ship." Then I felt a dart hit the back of my neck, and everything went black. I awoke strapped into a seat on the Uniter. Ix and Kumbukani were already awake. "Finally," said Ix, "You're awake. Oh, and we're stranded." I squinted as bright yellow light filtered through the front window. I then noticed the planet, far below, covered in city lights. "This is so much brighter than Dawn." "The fact that we can see the sun is a good thing. It means they don't have dyson spheres: you know, solar panels that enclose a star to get all its energy. Even though they control a million systems, they don't control the energy of one million, or probably even one, star. That doesn't mean they are not formidable though." which is why they want the nicoll dyson beam Ix clicked a few buttons and some images appeared on the overhead screen. There was the blurry picture of a space station, which consisted of a hemisphere, with a large cube behind it. The cube had 4 dagger shaped structures stretching out from it, glowing bright red. "Those red things are radiators for a huge nuclear reactor. The reactor is feeding a giant laser. The laser lens is 2 miles in diameter. It can vaporize anything within half a million miles instantly, and burn through anything in a few seconds from 10 times that distance. There are 100 of those. In addition, there are 2,400 ships identical to the one's that brought us here." "And?" I asked. "We, and the rebellion, are doomed."

Why did they not catch the fairings though?

And my favorite:

I vote Orbiter 2010.

http://www.scp-wiki.net/scp-173 Anyway, what happened to the fairing recovery boats? Was that not for this mission? Didn't we see gas thrusters when the fairing separated?

@CatastrophicFailure, you should post that to https://www.reddit.com/r/catsvstechnology/

Evil plan fails.

Wait... could a random guy just boat over to it and claim it as salvage?

I TOTALLY CALLED THAT!

What was it?

@Alpha 360, after booster landing, hit return to main mission. Then from there go to tracking station and recover booster.

IF you want a completely accurate, current tech(in fact the story is set now) interstellar mission, read Rocheworld. He actually published a paper describing his method. A paper I had on my computer and now cannot find except the expanse Decelaration!

Since XKCD did not do one this year, I'll do "2018 guide to making people feel old" 1. Blade runner is set next year 2. We are closer to the first warp flight(2063) than to 1970. 3. Many of asimov's robot stories are now set in the past. 4.

And pretends to have holograms! You can make an identical flamethrower for much less.

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