CatastrophicFailure

Curiouser and curiouser...

Interesting... Like the guy said, should Cuban cows be nervous?

*raises hand*

Time to invest in a gennie before the price gouging starts. ETA: oh dang, I just heard about this on the news, he wern’t kiddin! Not that I thought he was... What an incredible dangerous and short-sighted response.

I have a ceiling fan that does this. Creepy as hell. Ah, I am very uncultured when it comes to horror movies Whatever you do, don’t go staring at your bathroom mirror. @adsii1970 will get this.

The year is 2137. Due to insufficient allocation of resources towards... anything at all prior to the incident of 2037, one thing led to another and today the surviving members of the Global Congress voted unanimously to accept the surrender terms of the Martian Cockroach Ascendency.

Oh come on guys, get real. A united Mars would never destroy the earth. The Martians would be too busy destroying each other over which end of a Martian egg to open...

Dagnabbut, ninja’d and played by the stupid cache bug.

Sounds more like convergent evolution to me. Every fall: Also quite tasty, I’m told. I wouldn’t know, they’re too high. But I’ll still be sure to keep my noggin clear of leaf clusters when doing yard work.

I sense a disturbance... Hoooo, ho ho ho ho ho, haaah hah hah hah hah hah...

Buildup of the new Starship pad over the last couple weeks:

Wait a sec, so... is THIS a proto-Kerm? Pacific Madrona tree, native to the mild Pacific Northwest. Glossy, evergreen leaves in a cluster, sort of fuzzy underneath: Doesn't smell of cinnamon but the bark kinda-sorta looks like it: I'm told it makes a wonderful tea. And the clincher: they're nearly impossible to transplant, doing so is all but guaranteed to kill the tree. No one's sure why, it's like there's some extra component in the immediate soil... You almost never see them in groups of any size, either... I should probably go read the chapter now...

Excuse the random, just-jolted-awake-in-the-middle-of-the-night thought, but what happens to Kerm in winter? Are they evergreen or do they drop their leaves and go domant? Frozen ground can’t be good for sensitive Kerm fibers...

Even so, I’d be pretty darned surprised if they go directly for orbit even after a fully successful 20km flight. They’ve got two ships right now, after all, and are prepping to build two more before they even start the first one that would go to orbit, according to Musk. Tho I’m sure they’re expecting to lose some along the way. Sadly, I don’t think Mk 1 that we saw the other night in all its shiny glory will make it to the Smithsonian or anything. Quick reference: titanium has a melting point just below 1700c, 301 stainless is “only” around 1400.

And just like that, thousands of likes were expended within mere moments, overloading the system and breaking it once again...

Explain yourself...

Massive, crushing debt is a thing. No, seriously. Get that number down from “hundredS” to just around one hundred thousand, and you start nibbling that upper-middle class demographic. Extremely dedicate space fanatics who, say, have a nice chunk of equity in their home they don’t mind mortgaging out. Maybe cash in an investment. Arguably radical financial decisions, certainly, but that’s for an arguably radical experience. The Tesla S and X are in a similar price range, and a chunk of those owners aren’t “hyper-rich,” just very dedicated to the cause and willing to make personal sacrifices for it. Besides, if private spaceflight ever is going to hit the realm of the true middle class, it’s got to start somewhere. And here we have not one but two companies on the verge of starting commercial flights, that competition will be good.

I swear, I was no where near the place, I was never even in the same time zone! It was the one-armed man with the candlestick on the grassy knoll... I want my phone call.

Well, I mean, it does need to weigh just so... ooh, and there’s those wireframe not-engines, too, real artist’s work there, youbetcha...

Ahh. Ahhh. AHHHHH... BULLCHOOO! Dust... dusty in here... <sniff>

Still no likes so...

We’ve been building offshore airports to mitigate noise (among other concerns) for a while now. And helicopters? Not at all, you just need an undersea tunnel and high-speed electric trams running in it to move passengers. Oddly enough, Musk has some interest in companies that do both.

Clearly, you underestimate the ability of NASA contractors to siphon money. I’m not entirely sold on the whole P2P thing myself, but one way or another, “a whole ‘nother level of reliability” is a thing that needs to happen if Starship is ever going to be fully successful, whether it flies P2P or not. Thing is, until Starship gets going it’s been impossible to even measure that level of reliability in rockets because they all (or nearly all) just get thrown away. So there’s also no incentive to build that level in the first place, since it'd just be a waste. The Atlas V is the pinnacle of reliability, but we’ll probably never know exactly how much so, since it’s likely to be retired without a single major failure. Which, if you stretch the words a bit, is a level of reliability even airliners can’t match. Starship may be the first rocket to approach airworthiness-levels of reliability if only because it can, since it’s been made to. After all, there was a point in history when a wing falling off your airplane was a perfectly valid concern...

This. Woke up with it stuck in my head. Hadn't even heard it in years. Apparently I dreamt I was walking downtown and heard some epic, jazzy, drum-Heavy arrangement of the same belting from a bar. Yes, I acknowledge how oxymoronic the concept is, but like... dreams, yo. Now you all must share in my misery. Been listening to GWAR all day and it’s just. Not. Helping.. @Triop Thought that was Beetlejuice for a second. Would totally listen to a Beetlejuice band. Especially right now.

It’s a conspiracy..