PakledHostage

The only way that makes sense to me is to use gravitational interactions from a 3rd celestial body. I've seen "future tech" proposals to use oort cloud objects carefully sent earthward to slingshot past the Earth and increase its orbital distance from the Sun. Over the course of millions of years, we may be able to move the Earth enough to save it from being baked by the Sun. But presumably orbital perturbations could also happen naturally due to the passing of something large. The star Gliese 710, for example, will pass through our outer oort cloud in about 1.3 million years. If it carries its own oort cloud, it stands to reason that some of the bodies in that oort cloud will pass through our inner solar system. A close encounter with a large object like that could bump an orbit slightly, as could the passing star itself if it is massive enough (Gliese710 is not). That being said, I find it hard to believe that these types of orbital changes would really be that noticeable. Our own orbital distance from the Sun varies by millions of kilometers over the year, with our closest approach happening in early January (i.e. northern hemisphere winter), and yet it's still winter on a good deal of the planet when that happens each year.

I went looking for the re-entry path and found these on space.com: I was trying to figure out what those snow covered mountains were early in the clip. I thought maybe the South Island of New Zealand, but it doesn't fit. Maybe Antarctica? But that seems too far away from the entry interface? Maybe they weren't mountains? Edit: I just watched it again on the livingroom TV with my 5 year old son, and we agree that those aren't mountains at the start. And I'm proud to say that my little guy was just as enthralled by the video as I was... But then he's also the kid that, in his kindergarten class, drew a closeup of a rocket nozel with orange exhaust coming out and surrounded by clouds. The teacher didn't have enough technical understanding to realize what he was drawing, but I suspect most here do.

Speaking of Orion and Artemis, this popped up in my YouTube feed today. And no matter what one may think about the program, it is cool footage. Edit: Apologies @Minmus Taster. I thought your link was just an image, but it's actually the source footage for the YouTube clip.

How fast is this pump spinning? For comparison, the core compressor/turbine stage in a big turbofan like the CF6-80 spins at about 9600 rpm and that core is bigger than me (6'2" male) and made out of heavy alloys like inconel. To my knowledge, there aren't any limitations on maneuvering a 747 where "ripping the engine off the pylon due to gyroscopic forces" are the governing factor. Why are the gyroscopic forces so large for this pump?

All the talk on here of Mars colonies begs pointing out that Venus is in a lot of ways more habitable than Mars... The 60 km altitude level in Venus' atmosphere has comparable pressure and temperature to Earth and an oxygen-nitrogen mix of gas would work as a lifting gas in a balloon there. It also has very Earth like gravity and much better protection from cosmic radiation than Mars. Access to resources like metals would be a challenge, but every off-world colony faces serious challenges of one form or another. Maybe SpaceX's propulsive landing technology could be put to eventual use flying to/from cloud cities on Bespin Venus? Living in floating bubbles there would almost certainly be preferable to moisture farming on Tatooine Mars.

A little bit off topic, but I thought I would share that I am writing this post from 36000 feet above the North Atlantic, well out of range of terrestrial internet. I suppose I have SpaceX's Starlink to thank for the opportunity?

There's the Barking Sands missile test range on Kauai that's near where they seem (from the animation above) to be planning to bring Starship down. Maybe the eventual plan is to try and test soft landings from that facility?

SloMo Guys posted this video of a Firefly test fire about 10 hours ago, as of this writing:

Sounds to me like SpaceX has some homework to do... Let's hope that they're A-students and were already on it like a fly on poo last Tuesday.

What does smoking have to do with sea levels, again? I'm confused.

What's "short term death"? A good sleep? Also w.r.t. extraction of data below the normal sensitivity and noise level of sensors: Image stacking in astrophotography is a common example. It's like when a dice is loaded. Roll it once or twice and you won't know. Roll it enough times and you'll see the pattern.

Sixty Symbols have done a video on this topic now too:

I'd love to know what that "quick thinking and collaboration" was? Maybe they bounced a message off some mission that's in a more favorable position?

Well there was the MOOSE concept during the early space program.

Fun story. Thanks! I will have a look at that website.

Practical Engineering did a video about the Boca Chica launch pad. Possibly nothing new to many here, but might still be interesting to some:

So I created a MathCAD spreadsheet to compute the water rocket's performance and it reveals a few interesting things: 1. The density of the propellant does not significantly affect performance. Sugar brine has a density of about 1300 kg per cubic metre and using that density in the model only yeilds about 1-2% more altitude. The reason being that the Ve is that much lower because the same internal rocket pressure can't accelerate the heavier fluid as much as it does the lighter fluid. 2. The boost phase of the flight is over in about 1/3 of a second, and the rocket accelerates to about 95 kph in that time. It then flies ballisticly. 3. Performance isn't that sensitive to the size of the nozzle. At least not with variation of only a couple millimetres around the existing nozzle radius. 4. The biggest determinant of performance (perhaps not surprisingly) is internal rocket pressure and the amount of water in the chamber. In my son's rocket, launching slightly less than 1/2 full with water seems to yeild the best performance, but that would change depending on the rocket geometry. My model accurately predicts the flight duration and I am working on figuring out how to verify other parameters. I haven't taken into account head losses through the nozzle or back pressure in the propellant due to acceleration, but that later effect seems to be relatively small compared to the other sources of error in the model.

The one I got him means business. I might not have bought it if I knew to what extent it does (he's only 5). But with adult supervision, I guess it is OK. He thinks it is pretty awesome and it gives me an interesting new project. I think I will do some simulations in MathCAD to find the theoretical optimal starting water to air ratio vs. launch air pressure. It might be fun to then build a test stand to try to refine the model and optimize the launches a bit more.

I bought my son a water rocket for his birthday, then I found this site: Water rocket equations I think I am going to have to build a test stand...

One of my friends (a software developer) admitted that he uses ChatGPT to help him write code. I'm like "...okay?." How bad is his code that ChatGPT is better? (But then he's management, so he doesn't do a lot of coding anymore.)

I am a bit late to this party, but I read this thread and have been talking about it a bit with colleagues today. One of them told me about a test where GPT-4 successfully asked someone on TaskRabbit to solve a Captcha for it to get it past the "I am not a robot" roadblock for bots on a website (ref. GPT-4 solves Captcha). To be fair, the GPT-4 instance was told to lie about why it needed help with the Captcha and to lie about it actually being a robot, so it didn't come up with that idea on its own... But this is still an example that's indicative of AI safety concerns to come. (The movie "Ex Machina" springs to mind...)

And we have a new leader!

You win the internet. Congratulations.

Excellent. I will update the leader board.

Ok. You're right. I'm wrong. Moving on.