StrandedonEarth

Hmmm, will that require an inflight restart? With those troublesome TP spin-start valves, that will also be a lot of pucker...

Well, there's always a transfer window, depending on how long you want the trip to be and how much dV you can spend. But for a Hohmann transfer window, I rather doubt it. 's possible to always have that window open. Unless it's 1800 around the sun...

Yeah, news report also listed a fireworks factory in the area. 240 tons yield puts it an order of magnitude below the 1917 Halifax explosion, estimated at 2.9 kilotons yield. Still devastating, of course, no hi-rise buildings in Halifax back then...

Congrats SpaceX! Another one for the museum / Flying Water Tower (FWT?) garden? I guess the 20km dive will be up next? That'll be some serious pucker factor! But poor ol' Marvin was disappointed...

Nice looking bird; hope it pans out. So with current aerospace development timeframes, it'll likely be 5 years Elon Time aspirationally and 10 years realistically until we see taxi tests, if ever?

Congrats to SpaceX and NASA for establishing another Crew Transportation System! Did you grab all the available science first?

"Mississippi Moon won't you keep on shining on me..."

The hatch on Apollo 1 opened by swinging inside the capsule. In space, the internal pressure pushed the hatch against the shell, helping to seal the hatch. But such a hatch is impossible to open if the capsule pressure exceeds the outside pressure, which it did during the test (20 psi pure oxygen absolute pressure compared to ~14.7psi outside). The fire caused the pressure to rise even more. It’s a similar effect to trying To open a car door underwater before the interior is flooded. Having the hatch swing outwards (as it was redesigned to after the accident) makes it more challenging to seal, as the internal pressure tries to blow the hatch open. I suppose if it sank they could just crank up the internal pressure.

Inefficient, yes, but also propellant-less

Although Tory Bruno has done a great job of raising ULA's profile with his twitter feed

Cat People...

There's also a Larry Niven story dealing with a solo traveller (a revived corpsicle) riding a Bussard ramscoop to the Core and back, returning 50k years later IIRC

This effect also leads to the postulation that if relativistic, non-FTL aliens have been visiting Earth throughout history, the same individuals could be returning to visit Earth 10,000 years later. After all, it could only be a few years or decades of ship time to return to Earth after 10,000 years surface time. Perhaps to see how their genetic engineering experiment is doing...

Geez, apparently it's trifecta day. Did Freddy get him?

Regis Philbin, who holds the record for most hours logged on American TV, died yesterday at age 88 https://people.com/tv/regis-philbin-dead/ Also, Fleetwood Mac co-founder Peter Green died at age 73

Exercise is overrated

Sute about that?

The (un)official NHL team of the Kerbal Space Program (2)?