StrandedonEarth

Another flight in the books, six in six months.! After leading NASA’s mission to Pluto, Alan Stern flies to space himself | Ars Technica

The major difference in costs between NASA and private is that NASA is researching and building new technology, from scratch. SpaceX got where it is by standing on the shoulders of NASA, hiring the engineers with the knowledge of how to build rockets (Tom Mueller honed his trade at TRW). Much of NASA's hardware (probes) are handmade, one-off creations, and their rockets are built by bloated govt contractors in the military-industrial complex who are used to charging inflated prices to fund black programs, funneling money around to keep congresscritters happy. NASA learned the hard lessons, and as the original NACA was chartered to do, is spinning off their lessons to the private sector to do what they do best, which is find inexpensive ways to mass-produce equipment. The trick is having a market for the equipment. Rockets were typically optimized for max performance and minimal mass, with little thought about cost. Private industry generally optimizes for low cost. I imagine there's also an extra layer of possibly redundant quality control documentation at NASA to ensure mission success. But the main thing is that private industry reaps large benefits from heavy spending on R&D at NASA Sorry. /ramble

Are those engine ports near the top of the cylinder section? Hopefully they didn’t go back to bottom landing engines…

Putting a fake manual transmission and clutch in a battery-electric car? Sounds Kerbal to me... Toyota has built an EV with a fake transmission, and we’ve driven it | Ars Technica

Whoa, had me worried for a sec when your quote showed up while the tweet took forever to load. I thought there was a launch anomaly

Wow. Matthew Perry, aka Chandler Bing on Friends, is dead at 54 after an apparent jacuzzi drowning.. Also, on Oct 26, actor Richard Moll, better known as Bull on Night Court.

Like ford and their plastic water pump impeller, breaks, overheats, and warps the heads. Or the plastic oil pump piece that toasts the engine when it breaks…

Off on a tangent here, but the Canucks hockey team have a history of playing games on Christmas and New Years, and those games end up being turkeys. I don’t think they have ever won one, but I’m probably wrong on that..

I enjoyed Talent series as well as her Pern series. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, which is generally only produced with validated scientific evidence. Reproducible scientific results are essential to prove the existence of phenomena previously thought impossible, fantasy , or scams.

This is awesome news! Just in time for Xmas, it might be time to finally buy it! And it's even more awesome to hear that @Just Jim has been scorching his keyboard writing scireports. My biggest hope for KSP2, is that when kerbonaut skill progression is added * that it isn't a passive linear progression. A proper multi-dimensional skill tree like in Star Wars: Galaxies would be fantastic. * (or has it already? I haven't been following that close...)

In case anyone didn't already know, stay the frack away from fructose! Layman's article: Major Study Claims to Identify The Root Cause of Obesity: Fructose : ScienceAlert Actual study linked in above article: The fructose survival hypothesis as a mechanism for unifying the various obesity hypotheses (wiley.com)

Speaking of suicide: Weird how just earlier today I read another suicide story (on imgur? Quora? One of those), and the main takeaway I got was that if someone you know is contemplating suicide, one of the more effective things is to have them promise you they won’t. Apparently, that promise tends to stick. As for my own story, an old friend’s brother committed suicide around ten years ago, maybe more. However, he had stage four (non-?) Hodgkin’s lymphoma (multiple treatments had failed), and was terminal. He was only in his twenties. He didn’t want his family to watch him suffer more than he didn’t want to suffer himself, and given the lack of availability of MAID (medical assistance in dying), he figured that was his best choice. So he hung out with his big brother one night, smoking, playing games, watching stuff, having fun, then when everyone went to sleep he left his wallet on his bed and hung himself in the backyard, in a way that it would not be family that found him. In this case it was a means to cut short incurable suffering. It was still a huge shock though.

I posted a pic of one of these over 15 years ago to be ID’d on the SDC forums, that I spotted (probably) doing pilot training exercises near the municipal airport I lived near at the time. Definitely an odd looking bird

Perhaps a few specks of neutronium?

Hmm, my thread, and I was excited for Ahsoka, but I haven't chimed in lately... I enjoyed it, aside from the near-death interlude. I mean, I watched Rebels (only because I heard Thrawn was in it), but didn't really watch TCW, so I found that sequence pointless. Oh, and Ahsoks's ship had some incredibly strong plot armor, to be chased around by fighters all episode with no real damage. What I enjoyed most about the series was that it had plenty of the action that made Star Wars great. Baylan has his own agenda and his blonde apprentice seems to have her own internal conflicts, and that ending was positively screaming for season 2. I learned long ago not to think to hard about the finer plot points in Star Wars, as that usually opens holes big enough to fly an SSD through. I'll just enjoy the spectacle, and that was delivered, thanks.

Suzanne Somers, aka ditzy blonde Chrissy Snow on Three's Company, died today at age 76, after battling breast cancer for 23 years... That was one of my favorite shows...

I was at work, and it was cloudy, so nothing to see here. but I did find this neat clip on imgur, using a colander to cast shadows... https://i.imgur.com/ARx4uYS.mp4 I wish their video clips would embed...

What follows two days of rain? Anyways….

Oh cool, there's going to be a partial eclipse this morning! *wakes up, looks outside* ... rain... Yeah, we need rain, but did it have to pick this morning?

Today I found this: Fire in the hole! https://i.imgur.com/TUA1n2p.mp4

Finally, a coffee break so I can see it was a successful launch! Woohoo!

I’m thinking the pike choked and died, floated to the surface, and froze

That’s been my view towards asteroid prospecting: relatively inexpensive, mass produced probes launched at every convenient target

A sunrise timelapse, too bad I didn't think to start it earlier... https://i.imgur.com/TJ3bAaU.mp4

Today I bought a sublimation printer and mugified my avatar… well yeah, cuz he tried to pass it, then he caught it, but ground made him lose it, so incomplete pass! /s