Nikolai

And also, considering how much there is for free that you can examine beyond pictures and videos, that person would bear some blame for his own incuriosity. One might take this into account when considering how well he evaluated the situation when he "chose to believe" his conclusion.

Developing, building, and testing the specific instruments and the support systems are only part of developing technological know-how. If those three things are where most of the money was spent, then by definition, most of the money was spent developing technological know-how. Yes, the goal of this mission is a successful mission -- but the goal of a space program is (in the long run) to have a high rate of successful missions, and the path to that goal may not mean that every individual mission is successful. That's why we occasionally try things that haven't been done before in an incremental way. Sometimes we learn a great deal from failure. If exploration is the goal, we will pick ourselves up and attempt to learn what we hoped to learn before the failure -- this time, hopefully, wiser.

I liked that a lot of the math they showed were genuine orbital mechanics. And I liked that this highlighted a lot of technical expertise that generally goes ignored in relating how the United States got people into space. As pointed out, it's not a documentary. I don't think Al Harrison, for example, was a real person, even though he takes up a lot of screen time. And I don't think the decision to keep Glenn's retro-pack attached was made exactly as it was shown in the film. But it's still inspiring.

What are they teaching kids these days? Even if the mission fails, it's not as if it was a waste of money. The money was spent increasing our technological know-how, and that will continue to be the case even if the mission fails. It's not the gee-whiz payoff of a successful mission, I'll grant you that -- but we explore space for a lot more things than successful missions.

Even so -- even with decades and Epstein Drives and people saying "Gee whiz" -- if physics ruins a show for you, don't calculate how much energy this would take.

ISTR from the books that Ceres is spun up so that people can walk around the interior under Earth-normal gravity. Other asteroids aren't. Most Belters spend their lives in considerably less than a full g. EDIT: If physics ruins a show for you, don't calculate how much energy it would take to spin Ceres up to that speed. It will annoy you.

I have four rovers on two moons with this problem. Generally speaking, any question on the Internet that begins with "Am I the only one who...?" can be truthfully answered, "No."

From the article linked to in the OP: Proxima is about 0.13 light-year closer to us than A and B are, and revolves around A and B with a period of about 550,000 years.

I approached an asteroid with some stuff clamped onto it and a few stages floating around in the vicinity. The Kraken grabbed my asteroid facility and started spinning it faster... and faster. Regrettably, I didn't react at all; I just watched in horrified fascination as docking clamps let go one by one and stuff was flung all over high Kerbin orbit. When I finally had the presence of mind to act, I turned timewarp on and turned it right back off, and the rotating stopped. But I had spent long enough building that asteroid facility that I ragequit. I was ready to return to it a few days later (as in a couple of weeks ago), but the promised 1.2.2 has made me hesitate. (I also haven't managed to get my "Kuiper Belt" by parking a Sentinel inside the orbit of Eeloo, for some reason. Maybe I just haven't waited enough time.)

Except that all that stuff is small, and orbits of small things decay rather quickly. (The more surface area you have in proportion to your mass, the faster your orbit will decay... and small things have a higher proportion.)

As long as we're picking nits: Harry Mudd. (Harcourt Fenton.) I seem to remember hearing that they wanted Harry Mudd for the job, but the writer of "The Trouble with Tribbles" didn't want to take any of the glory away from the other writer who invented the character of Mudd.

Or -- speaking as a parent with respect to Chuck E. Cheese -- new targets.

I can't recommend Steins;Gate highly enough. Sure, it might be my predilection for time travel talking, but I really thought it was exceptional, even if it doesn't fit your criterion for "hard" science fiction.

What if we "upgrade" this mod? I mean, if we're talking about increasing the potential number of asteroid locations one can have in stock, why not go all out? From the cheat menu (or some kind of option in the tracking station, or some other place that makes sense), the user can press a button that launches an asteroid "spawner". This spawner, once it starts running, will generate random asteroids -- with the randomness weighted according to options the user selects. Those options should include things like semi-major axis range, eccentricity range, inclination range, size ("class") range, resource contents, and the asteroid spawning rate. (It would be nice if we could have colored markers for the results from different spawners, so that we can see which asteroids we see in the tracking station were generated by which spawner.) Several spawners can run simultaneously. If a user opts to delete a spawner, the user is given the option of deleting all asteroids generated by that spawner or to allow them to "fade away" when they are not selected for tracking after a time (as asteroids normally do in the game). It would be nice to tie the ability to detect asteroids to the player's capability somehow, and the Sentinel telescope did that -- at the cost of making options available to the player like those I outline above. Perhaps someone more clever than I can come up with a way to include a capability-based asteroid discovery mechanic while preserving maximum player choice. And as long as I'm dreaming, more and different textures for different asteroids would be nice. Of course, I know that this represents a substantial amount of effort, and that I have no way to influence SQUAD's decision to include spawners like these other than to beg. (My financial resources are rather limited.) Still, I dream.

I know this probably doesn't help, but 1.2 has been slicker than snot on a doorknob for me. No crashes at all. I've had to restart some missions, but that's because I tend to forget things before launch.

The commander of Apollo 8, the first flight to orbit the Moon, was Frank Borman. (Armstrong commanded Apollo 11, the first flight to land.)

I'd be happy as a clam if they did update it for 1.2. I like having asteroids generating in places besides Kerbin's and Dres' immediate neighborhoods. (In prior versions where this mod has worked, I've really enjoyed parking a telescope in the outer regions of the planetary system and generating my own "Kuiper Belt" to explore. If I had any artistic and modding skills at all, I'd do it myself with some properly icy-looking bodies.) I saw someone try to use it in one of the prerelease versions, and according to the in-game debugger, it didn't work right.

<double-checks> You're right. Good catch. Thanks for the correction.

Cornu is Latin for "horn"; the word unicorn comes into English from the Old French. (Horn comes into English from Germanic roots, not Latin ones.) See also cornucopia, corner, Capricorn, and corn in English.

Yeah, sure. I just mentioned what I did because of the "Slow your drop with EVA" advice. He had no propellant left in his pack to slow his drop with. He'd have to jump it. Or send a rescue, like he ended up doing. Either way.

Note the remaining propellant in his pack. He's going to need to time a good jump, and won't be able to slow himself.

Verne was much more interested in the plausibility of what he was talking about than Wells. Wells was happy to handwave away inconveniences to make them sound plausible -- a man could become invisible by making himself have the same refractive index as the air; ships could be propelled from Mars to Earth with a green mist; and a time machine could be accomplished by moving at right angles to the three dimensions of space. After that, on with the story! Likewise, Space: 1889 was made for swashbuckling adventure more than scientific treatise. In much the same way as I'm happy to go along with Wells' tales with something that sounds vaguely plausible (with the understanding of Victorian science), I'm happy to play or host a good adventure after the rules by which something works are outlined and everything else follows logically enough.

It was based on a book that was pretty autobiographical with that title -- Rocket Boys, by Homer Hickam (the main character in the movie). Yes, it is. Holy monkey. I never noticed that. Good catch.

Here in the States, it's called October Sky. And yes, it is a great movie.

Leroy. Gordon. Cooper. His Faith 7 spacecraft was meant for an endurance test and ended up falling apart around him -- falsely indicating premature re-entry, losing altitude readings, elevating carbon dioxide levels, losing power to attitude control... he resorted to using marks on the window and his wristwatch to perform a manual re-entry and ended up making the most accurate splashdown in the entirety of the Mercury program. (This accomplishment is even more impressive in light of the fact that Mercury capsules were not lifting bodies like Gemini and Apollo capsules that could be "steered" to a landing site as they fell.) He completed all of his mission objectives in spite of a failing ship.