AckSed

I get the feeling The Line is them wanting to unroll a torus-shaped space station onto the ground.

Huh. Anecdotally, I did hear of a lab that used leftover LN2 for a party trick: slosh it over the floor and sweep up the residue left by the wave.

On a related question, how many humans could you cram into a generational ship of 10,000 tons? Because I heard that figure quoted for a sun-grazing solar-sail ship with a 1000+ km-wide inflatable "pillow" sail. By having an incredibly light sail, and diving to a perhelion of 0.05AU, it would reach 0.00264c in a day.

I think I actually saw the tip of the fairings glowing dull red during F9's ascent.

I just want to tell people that not only is M2 being prepped, ispace's Lead Assembly, Testing, and Integration engineer is called Scott Moon.

And the never-flown RD-701 (294 bar).

Damn, that's a relief. So will the dish unfold automatically now?

Is that a record for chamber pressure?

The 1st stage of Sea Dragon, the classic Big Dumb Booster, was projected to have a thrust-to-weight ratio of 2. That's 36,000 tons of thrust from one pressure-fed engine.

Arstechnica article on the Vast station. My key takeaway here is that it's going to draw on the Dragon capsule for life-support: A big, airtight can with solar panels, a window and docking port would indeed be simpler. Unless they design for it, it would essentially freeze like Salyut 7 once Dragon disconnects, though.

I use YT transcription services for getting a quick summary of most videos. "Our theories need updating" is about right. If I read the transcript correctly, they haven't learned as much as was hoped about Cold Dark Matter affecting expansion but will have to tweak the software that assumes the initial mass function of the Universe.

If you had a hyper-efficient fusion drive like in BattleTech, how viable would it be to mine Sol's asteroid belt for rare elements like germanium? It's part of the canon that fusion is calling upon dimensional quirks to extract more energy than put in: mere tons of fuel can lift multi-kiloton dropships into orbit, and push them to Lagrange points on even less. It's also canon that their FTL needs vast quantities of germanium to build the cores.

Scrubbity scrub.

It doesn't want to leave.

"Everyone else got to come home..."

Picking up spent fuel rods with shovels. What the actual, factual hell?

"Hold due to probability of landing failure." #JustSpaceXProblems Edit: Scrub. I get it; it probably wouldn't look too good right now if their workhorse rocket crashed on re-entry.

Man that drone-ship pad is actually rusty.

Oh dear, it's a tad foggy.

I see. Now it's a rocket-powered, robotic returning spear-thrower. The spear is also an orbital rocket. Man what.

I... Excuse me? The flip was planned? They were going to do a supersonic hammer-throw with a building-sized rocket to avoid fitting a normal separation mechanism. The HELL? This is Philip Bono levels of far-out. SpaceX, you have flabbered my gast most thoroughly, and I salute you.

Super Heavy too stronk for mere mortal concrete!

Just to get an idea of the sheer volume of the sound of liftoff, go back to the normal NSF 24/7 livestream and rewind to the point just before liftoff. It's exactly like a bomb going off: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mhJRzQsLZGg Do not use headphones.

Nope, Everyday Astronaut's stream shows it lifting off at about a 10 degree angle. And it still made it through Max-Q! With 5 engines out!

Clearly, what is needed is a little cybernetic implant to activate prehensile toes on the exterior of the feet of the suit. We were fully prehensile species once, let's use it.