darthgently

I’m just relieved that the reuse of 14 is not an April Fool’s joke after all

Yes, auto incorrect bites again The greater the agenda, the less the science

Throw Lysenkoism into the mix and the state had a big deficit in credibility

I thought sun synchronous would put them in sunshine all the time, but you are saying that it can be phased differently. Obvious now that you point it out, but it wouldn’t be polar really. Could make a great tourist destination orbit for sure

Canadarm 2 comes to mind. I think if they couldn’t dock and had no control with reboots no longer working that as a last ditch they’d have tested those emergency IVA suits to the max and attempted to drift the gap. I wonder if ISS crew were pre-breathed and suited up for an EVA with an EMU just in case. So many questions. Frankly, I am a bit amazed that Boeing was wanting them to come back on Starliner given what we’ve learned

Imagine having to decide between aborting the dock and trying to bring Starliner and crew back with a then poorly understood serious issue requiring hard resets or further violating ISS safety protocols and proceeding with the docking attempt with DoF failures bouncing between zero and a single safety net. It is very hard to imagine there not having been a meeting including all crew affected by the decision to be made, including those on the ISS, and getting a unanimous, or at least a plurality of, go signals for the docking attempt. I can’t imagine NASA and other leadership unilaterally telling the ISS crew, some from other nations, to just suck it up. What seems likely to me is the ISS crew took a “leave no one behind” attitude and gave a go to the docking attempt knowing it could be them in Butch’s and Suni’s situation someday. This story, whatever the details, begs to be told completely

There is no reason a commercial station to dock to couldn’t be in polar orbit, though it could get a bit warm twice a year when orbit normal aligned with the sun and it is in constant daylight for a period

Wow

Yeah, I think it is fair to say at this point that all who guessed that Butch and Suni probably didn’t want to return on Starliner guessed correctly. Ahem

Good article about Suni’s and Butch’s ride up https://arstechnica.com/space/2025/04/the-harrowing-story-of-what-flying-starliner-was-like-when-its-thrusters-failed/

Here is a working version of the grok link for Metzger’s Mars post: https://grok.com/share/bGVnYWN5_59abf054-1175-41a2-ab66-99dc027bc149 I continued the grok conversation Metzger started but with the failures being stochastic and the result is the same, effectively zero

Dr. Metzger has cred so if he posted the grok calculations, he vetted them. Grok3 gets the highest analytical math scores of all the AI engines currently. As far as promoting it, I’m not so certain that is as required as one might think. There has always been a slice of humanity that will push into a frontier. And it isn’t simply a human thing. It is what living organisms do and have always done. It might be hard to prevent if one even wanted to at this point. (The grok link isn’t working; error message says it wasn’t shared correctly. I bumped Metzger to see if he can retry that share)

Fastest social media post from astronaut after launch. Chun at T+9m or so via Starlink

Perhaps the confusion is that it is my understanding that a flight termination system merely terminates the flight; which could be via explosives or merely shutting off the engines. Both are FTS

True, but my understanding is that it didn’t even have explosives installed and this is common in smaller rockets. Could be wrong of course

From what I’ve gathered the FTS shutdown the engines in lieu of using explosives which is common for smaller rockets and outfits

Could flight software be tested on a 1/100th scale rocket? The hardware wouldn’t have to be exact scale replicas if the point was focused on testing sequencing and sensors. And of course PIDs and such would be parametrized for the difference in scale

I was thinking in regards to fantastical notions of an intelligent native species prior to humans, but yes, humans are riverine and coastal critters generally and our deeper history is mostly under water now

Aside from common sense anyway. The national motivations for redundancy don’t change simply because the destination is leased

Stuck in traffic? Is saving time worth the money of calling a carry-all? Just use the app! The carry-all from the novel Dune comes to mind, but smaller, for a “flying car” solution for when you need your car at the end of the journey. An automated flying hauler could be hailed that would carry your car to its destination. Why rage on the road when you can sigh through the sky? For a nominal fee.

With plate tectonics recycling any civ prior to some time point would be invisible to our archeology at this point. But I read something recently that seemed to rule out the possibility of a previous civ but can’t remember the specifics

Agreed. The reason we don’t see flapping wings on aircraft is more related to the infancy of our materials science combined with the fact that you won’t likely ever see a flapper flying as fast as a prop plane much less supersonic. There is a speed threshold where rotary jet or rocket engines would completely outpace. Then there is surface to weight ratio and ambient air pressure. Flappers would be limited in size to probably about the same neighborhood as the most massive flying organisms. Consider that when pterodons were a thing, iirc, ambient air pressure is thought to have been a bit higher

Grok3 search and analysis of the MATECH claims and related info about the material. Will be interesting to see what pans out: (I verified all the key citation links. The second to last citation link is the only one that 404s and this looks like a news feed that likely purges old news and grok referred to an old cache perhaps. Or hallucinated)