StrandedonEarth

Well crap.

Breaking news: Kobe Bryant! https://www.abc15.com/sports/small-stars/tmz-kobe-bryant-dead-in-helicopter-crash Doesn't seem to be a lot of confirmation out there. I'll wait for more info before updating the thread title... Confirmed...

The goal is a 1.4 to one safety ratio. Maybe they ended the test at 1.5 or more?

Well, that depends on your TWR and how much dv is needed. In theory the lower your pe the less dv is needed, but I don’t know if it’s a linear Relationship or what. In practice, I’ve had a several minute long Moho capture burn lower my already low pe into the regolith So surface skimming can be dangerous when starting a burn well before pe. Extra-Careful planning is required

Could Orion’s pusher plate also be used for laser-riding? Granted, the huge mass of Orion (the bigger the better) works against using light (the lighter the better), but ablatives would increase the thrust. Are there any current technological limits on just how big a laser (gigs/tera/petawatt-class?) can get, given a sufficient power supply?

In honour of Terry Jones? And may elderberries' grow profusely on his grave

They shouldn’t have invited Jeb...

Well, Pluto was a moon of Neptune until it got hit by an alien spacecraft moving at 0.8c, which knocked it out of Neptunian orbit...

NASA helped SpaceX get off the ground. Now that SpaceX is up and running it’s poised to do great things. But NASA is the one with human spaceflight experience and life support technologies. And NASA is the one building deep space probes. SpaceX would not be around without NASA’s help. And it still needs NASA’s help to continue doing great things. SpaceX is just a launch provider and rocket developer. The significant payloads come from elsewhere (other than Starlink)

Anything involving extra-terrestrial resource extraction, not necessarily for terrestrial use. Because that is absolutely necessary for any truly grand space projects

Nnnnnnnni!

There once was a kerbal names Wehrner Who was really a very fast learner When the Wheesley was smoking He gave it a stoking And created the first afterburner! Bonus limerick: working on one set of rhymes begets another! Bill didn’t think that Jeb was jokin’ When he said that the rocket was smokin’ So he said “Let’s abort” But Jeb gave a snort Saying “I meant that it’s fast, not broken!”

Nah, he likes playing hardcore w/ permadeath

150 hours into Factorio since Dec 26th. Today as I was going through checkout at a major retailer, I didn't have any bags, so I was just putting stuff back in the cart. As the clerk scanned the items and put them down, I picked it up, transferred into the other hand and into the cart. For those few moments I was feeling like an inserter machine from the game....

"Han Solo: Great, kid. Don't get cocky!" Which I kept repeating myself while driving to work on an icy highway in whiteout conditions, every time it cleared a little and I was tempted to speed up

Or, what about a "crasher" stage that can take the lander down to the last few hundred m/s, before separating and heading for a separate landing site. The idea is to maximize the possible salvage potential, ideally repurposing the entire structure and (hopefully) eventually having the capability to refill them. Henry Ford's genius didn't just include the assembly line. Suppliers thought he was nuts for specifying where to put the bolt holes in the shipping crates, but he took apart the crates and used them for floorboards in his Model T's*. The same sort of planning for re-use and re-purposing needs to be applied as much as possible to everything headed towards any infra-structure building project BLEO. Even if it is just recycling the materials, since building materials will be in short supply aside from dirt and bricks. It's not like there are trees to cut down.... A large, Skylab-class transfer/descent stage designed to be landed separately, moved, tipped over, buried, and converted into habs, labs, airlocks, storage, or hydroponic units. Waste not, want not. *- I wanted to find a link to back this up, but I found this instead. Still, reusing as much as possible is the sensible thing to do when the nearest hardware store is a quarter-million miles away..

Calling 911 because my boss is making me drive in to work during snowmageddon

Day three of commuting in treacherous winter conditions. The highway was either a sheet of ice or in whiteout. I just keep my Yaris rolling-slow and steady past cars in the ditch, a lot of them were people who had passed me earlier.

“You’re dethpicable!” - Daffy Duck

Not to mention the 737MAX fiasco, showing problematic software and pushing things past regulators. That and SLS issues do not Instill confidence

Drove my son to his hockey game down the valley. The last half of the return journey was in semi-whiteout conditions. After getting home, I introduced him to Canada's other national winter pastime: shoveling snow!

So long, and thanks for all the fishing (for ideas, that is)!

Doing score keeping (digital and paper copies) and timekeeping for a bantam ice hockey tournament, 5 games in a row. One more game to go. At least I’m getting paid if I was working tomorrow, I’d be going through the bedtime routine about now...

I was fortunate enough to catch the "Roll the Bones" tour

Thanks for that. I hadn't seen that particular one before. Awesome as usual.