SunlitZelkova

Refueling is necessary to reuse the lander, lowering cost. Having a singular Moon rocket would mean building a new spacecraft each time and throwing it away, something unviable in the long term. Artemis is trying to build a lunar base, and to do that within a realistic budget, you need to reuse stuff. Is it a little dangerous? Yes, but I don’t think it is any more dangerous than a singular Moon rocket. It’s just a matter of deciding what is dangerous. With reuse, you leave the lander up there for a long time. You can’t inspect every component after each flight in the same way you can with a Space Shuttle returning to Earth, so something could fail due to prolonged use. But with a singular Moon rocket, you are building a brand new spacecraft each time. There are bound to be defects eventually, as happened with Apollo 13. Note that most spacecraft have been lost to production defects, like Soyuz 1, Soyuz 11, Apollo 1, and Apollo 13. Challenger and Columbia were not lost due to a problem with the vehicle itself, but rather external damage. Perhaps someday a lunar dockyard could be built for looking over Starship HLS’ in detail.

I forgot to put a “know”. As in “you know people are trying to stop sea level rise, right?” I had only three hours of sleep. Apologies! If that’s the case that’s fine, but no one should expect regulators to go along with SpaceX’s “break things and move fast” philosophy. They will take the time they need to approve things. They work from their own schedule, not SpaceX’s. ”Please start the regulatory process now even if you don’t feel like you will have all the data necessary to properly assess the conditions,” or “just start now because we need you to do it now or have it done by this date” is basically asking them to rush it. Obviously you don’t want them taking years to approve things, but I don’t think waiting a couple months is outrageous and it is totally understandable on the part of the regulators. It’s not the end of the world and is not going to significantly impact anything. I mean let’s be real, the only real reason to do it now instead of two months later is for the popcorn and X views. Especially as testing picks up the pace later on, SpaceX will certainly be able to meet all the goals. But before that, we need to let the regulators do their jobs. If they said it was going to take another year to finish it I would be sympathetic to the outrage, but a few months is not that bad. Upsetting the environment excessively anywhere is bad. Just because it’s happening in Florida doesn’t make it ok in Texas. But as I said above, if those conditions exist that make Florida unviable, that’s fine, but don’t expect regulators to bend over backwards for them. They need to hold a Q&A session to explain it. But lack of explanation does not indicate malicious intent. They need to gather data now because letting things go on and potentially harming the environment is not only bad, it’s illegal. I think the “please provide Starlink for free” thing is over. This is about whether Musk has the right to restrict the users of his product. I think he should get a pass. As Pavel Podvig, an expert on Russian nuclear forces said, “never try to stop someone who thinks he is preventing a nuclear war”.

The point isn’t to say they should move there now, it’s that they could have chosen an existing rocket launch site where regulations might be easier to overcome. It is a fallacy to think that building an entirely new launch site should be as easy now as it was in the 1960s. They were always going to have a big regulatory slog, whether they built it in Boca Chica or the Bronx. As I said, these things take time. If you don’t let the regulators do their job, and push for “do it according to my needs and my timeline”, instead of what the regulators need to do to get the job done, you will end up with another Challenger disaster. Just because you disagree or it seems outrageous does not make it cheap. People make emotional statements sometimes, and sometimes that emotion comes in the form of a strong exclamatory or seemingly hyperbolic nature. I have done this myself in the past and ended up walking it back when people corrected me. Perhaps that was your intention too (to correct/advise and not shun), but it just came off to me as a put down. Apologies if there was a misunderstanding.

If three doctors told you you had a risk of dying from liver cancer in your 50s, would you start drinking a wine bottle everyday, or try to live a healthier lifestyle to prevent yourself from getting cancer. You people are trying to stop the sea levels from rising, right? Not just throw their hands up in the air and say we’re doomed. That’s like… the whole point of climate action. If it wasn’t for nuclear weapons being controlled by bureaucracy they probably would have been used in every major Cold War proxy war. How about KSC? Don’t they literally have a second launch site there, currently being converted for Starship ops? The processes take time. Unless you can prove that they are being done for superfluous reasons, criticism of their pace of work as being a sign of incompetence is conspiratorial. This is also conspiratorial. Unless you have evidence of some kind to support this accusation. It’s his opinion. There is no “bad form”. Correct him and move on, never discourage someone from sharing their views just because they might make a mistake.

https://nonproliferation.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/web_peoples_liberation_army_rocket_force_order_of_battle_07102023.pdf Even if DF-21 stocks remain in reserve, the fact remains that DF-26 numbers are rising.

I changed mine again, likely for the last time for awhile. It’s a KSP1 replica of VALIS, the satellite from Philip K. Dick’s novels VALIS and Radio Free Albemuth.

The DF-21 is/was China’s premier ballistic missile for targeting stuff in Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia. It was easy to intercept for the Patriot. The nuclear and conventional versions were also clearly defined, and it was known there were fewer nuclear ones than conventional. In contrast, the DF-26 is an IRBM. Patriot can’t do jack poop against it, making it easier for it to get through ballistic missile defences. It’s also dual capable, meaning every DF-26 could possibly have a nuclear warhead. To me, this reminds me of when the less capable, borderline stationary, liquid fueled SS-4 Sandal MRBM was replaced by the MIRVed, mobile, solid fueled SS-20 Saber, resulting in a scare in Europe.

Rather than a “decisive battle”, I think the problem for Japan was that the battle ended up being a campaign. The Solomons operations in late ‘42 to 43 drained the IJN of a lot of strength and experienced pilots as much as, if not more than Midway did, and Japan just had no chance of keeping up with the US ability to replace losses. Lack of surface search radar didn’t help either, and gave the US an edge despite excellent Japanese night-fighting capabilities. That wasn’t a declaration of war, just a notification they were abandoning diplomacy. So the US would be enraged even if the 14 part document arrived on time. IIRC the US actually decoded the whole message ahead of the Japanese embassy.

TIL China is replacing some of the DF-21 MRBM with the DF-26 IRBM. This loosely parallels the replacement of the R-12 MRBM with the Pioner.

Just a hour and half from where I live. So when the AI activate the nuclear weapons, I should be shielded from the bombs, because Oregon will become the base of the AI army. I, for one, look forward to serving as the human advisor to the new apex predator of Earth. Long live the People’s Republic of Cascadia!

Congrats to my American comrades on our nation becoming the second country to successfully return a sample from an asteroid Next stop: Mars!

The Dr. Strangelove in me wishes the Cold War continued so we could get cool pieces of engineering the the Ulyanovsk class carriers, Yak-41, LOSAT sabot ATGM tank destroyer, and SIDAM 25 SPAAG with Mistral missiles.

Doe! So would be possible to damage the neutron protection with an HE shell or near miss from gun or rocket artillery and thus “poke a hole” for a nuclear weapon’s radiation to hurt the crew?

The First Team: Pacific Naval Air Combat from Pearl Harbor to Midway by John Lundstrom covers this nicely. Having read this book, I think there were two the key things that made USN flyers ultimately prevail over the IJNAS, rather than aircraft themselves- 1. The USN practiced deflection shooting. This is when you shoot at a target while it is turning. It seems like an obvious thing if you’re like me and play combat games like War Thunder a lot, but very few air forces did this at the time. The IJN was stuck trying to get on the tails of fighters before they could fire a shot. 2. Radar ground control intercepts. The IJN had nothing like this, and it gave the USN a huge edge in intercepting incoming strikes. Both sides were a really interesting bunch though. The First Team details the profiles of each pilot, and gives a fair bit of detail on the Japanese side too. If the late war was characterized by masses of Hellcats and Corsairs flying against inexperienced kamikazes, the early war had some of the finest airmen to ever face off against each other. At the same time, I think superior tactics and intelligence on the part of the Americans leveled the playing field more than the average history accepts.

Earth and Moon taken by SLIM’s landing camera. https://x.com/slim_jaxa/status/1705042659075854484?s=46&t=Jd73T2beq0JLNtwTy1uR5A

From what I’ve read the goal was to prevent the enemy from finding the target in the first place. No consideration was given to helping down the attacker if it actually found the target. In the case of the modern day, you might want to keep the lights off. I’m not sure about the launch parameters of EO weapons like the KAB-500Kr, but if the opponent did happen to attack with such weapons, you wouldn’t want to illuminate the target for them. I wonder just how vital the targets the DShKs are defending. If the really important stuff is protected by Gepards, it seems like it wouldn’t be worth it to risk an TV guided weapon attack (as unlikely as it is).

My mom calls it Taco Hell.

Actually most Soviet tanks since the T-55A mod. 1970 have had a liner built within the armor to stop neutron radiation. It can be. One of the crewmen of the Fukuryu Maru succumbed to radiation sickness after being exposed to fallout from the Castle Bravo test. I’m just saying it can be. The other 15 crewmen recovered.

It’s so weird to think a super heavy lift launch vehicle will be launching so often, considering how little the Saturn V flew. It’s a shame the Soviets couldn’t launch N1s at the same rate they did R-7s. SpaceX will have to avenge them and the 30+ engine design!

Thank you for these words of wisdom.

There are at least some similar activities in Thailand too. I recall an NHK report last year on a scam calling center that got busted, and a lot of the people were Chinese immigrants who were forced to work there. They were targeting Japan.

I don’t think every single case can be reduced to a simpleton misidentifying Venus. There is some phenomena out there causing (some of, that is, the most bizarre and unexplained of) these reports. But the claims are so fantastical that even when there is some shred of evidence- like depressions in the ground where a UFO purportedly landed- it’s impossible to take seriously from a scientific POV. I disagree with Jacques Vallee’s 1975 call for open minds and better data gathering methods. This phenomena will always evade scientific understanding. If we want answers to the UFO mystery- why these things keep happening- we need to study the history of the phenomena, the details of the cases past and present, and the emotions they generate. We must turn to the humanities. The curiosities and desires generated by the UFO phenomena should not be brushed aside as silliness or reduced to a biological mechanism. It must be understood and treated from a philosophical (and maybe psychological) POV. If we never do this, the conspiracies and pseudoscience are never going to end. The NASA investigation is just on track to produce more conspiracy theorists once it fails to produce any new findings as previous physical research attempts have.

Ok I just had the weirdest dream. I was watching For All Mankind Season 4, and Ewan McGregor and Hayden Christensen were part of the cast. Hayden gets drugged by a NASA official and forced to fly to a moon of Jupiter. So Ed (Baldwin) goes after him and they apprehend the drugger. But a fight breaks out on the base between the North Korean cosmonauts and the Americans, so a Japanese Soyuz rocket is launched to bring the veteran NK cosmonaut from Season 3 there to calm things down. Then everyone returns to Earth and the shows ends. I decide to take a giant N1 rocket model back home because I want to keep it, but it is rusted and covered in UDMH (!!!). I try to figure out how to clean it but it catches fire so I rewind the dream (!) and put it on a boat. I’m walking around this floating restaurant thing trying to figure out how to store it and restore it, and it was creepy because of my submechanophobia. But as the TV set is closing down, I and some other people get in EVA suits to go play on the fake Moon, one of whom was @steve9728. He and another dude drop like 50 meters down a ravine but survive. Meanwhile I walk along the ridge to the base. Some lady finds some odd biological specimen, and I hurry back off the set (which was located on the grounds of my elementary school!) and find a needle floating around. Even though it’s all fake, I try my best not to get punctured by it so I don’t die. The lady decides to do some tests on the biological specimen by putting it in a puddle and it begins to grow rapidly, and I freak out and run away knowing it could be a monster. As I leave the school grounds I see soldiers fighting zombies in the neighborhood nearby, and assume they are from the biological specimen. I head back to the school to find these Utapaun, Squidward like creatures trying to eat everybody. I head along the school hallways and see everyone evacuating, and me, a black detective dude, and the lady run away from the monsters for awhile before finally escaping in a truck. We make it back to a military blockade, and the monsters who were chasing us were destroyed by lasers on Portland class LSDs… which were somehow in the river near the neighborhood. Then I woke up!

I once had an email correspondence with one of the authors of Shattered Sword. I was only 13 at the time and my question was kind of dumb (“what would have happened if Yamamoto survived his shoot down?”) but he kindly provided a response. I later joined their online forum called Tully’s Port. Lots of nice discussions there about the book and other topics related to the Pacific War.

I stole this link from @kerbiloid https://www.interfax.ru/russia/921100 “Russia is ready to learn and launch a cosmonaut from DPRK, but the details were not yet discussed, said the Roscosmos director Yuri Borisov.” Called it!