Octopus Overlords

Holman wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:30 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:23 pm If you cant do it safely you shouldn't be allowed in space.

In 1979 we dropped Skylab all over Australia.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 4:18 pm

Holman wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:30 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:23 pm If you cant do it safely you shouldn't be allowed in space.

In 1979 we dropped Skylab all over Australia.

Is that the royal "we"? I don't recall doing it myself.

Holman wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 4:24 pm

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 4:18 pm

Holman wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:30 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:23 pm If you cant do it safely you shouldn't be allowed in space.

In 1979 we dropped Skylab all over Australia.

Is that the royal "we"? I don't recall doing it myself.

Fine. *You're* allowed in space.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 4:29 pm Nope, my wife vetoed my astronaut application back right after we were married. Something about me being the breadwinner or her being in love with me or she just liked me home at night . Actually too many over-achievers in the program for me to have gotten in anyway, I'm pretty much a lazy bastard

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:23 pm If you cant do it safely you shouldn't be allowed in space.

jztemple2 wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 5:03 pm

Daehawk wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 2:23 pm If you cant do it safely you shouldn't be allowed in space.

I guess this means we're going to ban SpaceX for the debris they dropped in Washington state and Oregon back in March?

Actually space flight cannot be done safely, it is all about managed risk. But then you're probably more likely to be killed by lightening than be hit by space debris.

Holman wrote: ↑Sun May 09, 2021 5:13 pm Hypothetically, what would have happened if this rocket had come down in Manhattan? Would it have wrecked a building? A block? Half the borough?

Of course wrecking "just a building" can be catastrophic if the building is a skyscraper.

Presumably the rocket wouldn't have exploded on impact (as on 9/11) because it wouldn't have been full of fuel. Or would it?

Here on Earth, the air, land, and sea are zones of conflict, clashes and combat. There is a growing perception that next up is the ocean of space, transformed into an arena for warfare.

There is ongoing chatter regarding military use of space by various nations. The freshly established U.S. Space Force, for instance, is busily shaping how best to protect U.S. and allied interests in the increasingly contested and congested space domain.

What conditions could lead to clashes in space? Is such a situation a given, or can conflicts be short-circuited ahead of time? Could nations "slip into" off-planet muscle-flexing, quarreling and actual warfighting in space that might spark confrontation here on terra firma?

Space.com contacted several leading military space and security experts, asking for their opinions on the current status of the militarization of space.

Virgin Galactic's rocket-powered plane, carrying two pilots, soared into the upper atmosphere on its third mission to reach space Saturday morning.

The success cues up Virgin Galactic to begin launching paying customers within the next year as the company works to finish its testing campaign at its new headquarters in New Mexico.

Spaceplane VSS Unity reached an altitude of 55.45 miles, according to the company. The US government recognizes the 50-mile mark as the edge of space. The company tweeted Saturday morning that the spaceflight carried technology experiments for NASA's Flight Opportunities Program.
...
Recently, the company installed a new CEO, former Disney executive Michael Colglazier, and has been pledging to slowly ramp up to commercial operations over the next year or so. It's also focused on constructing a new line of planes, called SpaceShipIII, and is angling to one day fly about 400 flights each year from its New Mexico spaceport.

The United States' next moonshot is shaping up to be a contentious affair.

In mid-April, NASA awarded SpaceX a $2.9 billion contract to finish development of its Starship vehicle and fly two missions with it to the lunar surface for the agency's Artemis program. If all goes according to plan, the second of those missions will put two astronauts down near the lunar south pole in the mid-2020s — the first crewed moon landing since Apollo 17 in 1972.

SpaceX, founded by billionaire Elon Musk, beat out two commercial competitors for the lunar lander deal — Dynetics and the "National Team," which is led by Blue Origin, a spaceflight company owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. But those two groups didn't accept the decision and move on. They both filed protests with the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) in late April, citing perceived flaws in the award process. NASA has held up the $2.9 billion until the GAO finishes an investigation into the matter, which will wrap up by early August.

A chief complaint of both protests was the fact that NASA selected just one company, after the space agency had said it aimed to pick at least two at this stage to maintain competition and redundancy. And the passage of a month doesn't seem to have softened this objection, for Blue Origin aired it again, in a very public fashion, on Thursday (May 27).

The Meal wrote: ↑Thu May 27, 2021 7:33 am I'd like to see the (simple) justification for not putting the Earth's value at the middle of the range of habitability index scores. (I.e., have we fouled things up so badly that planets untouched by humans are actually scoring better than our own Mother Earth?)

Daehawk wrote: ↑Mon May 31, 2021 2:03 pm Space Debris Has Hit And Damaged The International Space Station

Kraken wrote: ↑Mon Jun 07, 2021 11:40 pm Good primer on why NASA will send a couple of new robots to Venus around the end of this decade, and why other countries are also looking to the morning star.

Using its green filter, the spacecraft’s JunoCam visible-light imager captured almost an entire side of the water-ice-encrusted moon. Later, when versions of the same image come down incorporating the camera’s red and blue filters, imaging experts will be able to provide a color portrait of Ganymede. Image resolution is about 0.6 miles (1 kilometer) per pixel.

raydude wrote: ↑Fri Jun 11, 2021 3:03 pm NASA Selects New Science Investigations for Future Moon Deliveries.

So as Artemis becomes more of a real thing NASA is looking at commercial deliveries of scientific payloads. One of my colleagues at APL had his proposal selected - a joint lander and rover payload suite slated for delivery to Reiner Gamma.

After a month of thermal protection system foam repairs and other preparations, workers with NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems (EGS) and prime test operations and support contractor Jacobs at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida started lift operations on the Space Launch System (SLS) Core Stage for Artemis 1 in the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) on June 10. Early on June 11, two of the overhead cranes in the VAB rotated the Core Stage from horizontal to vertical in the Transfer Aisle.

Work will continue over the weekend of June 12-13 to lift the stage up into High Bay 3, position it in between the two SLS Boosters already stacked on Mobile Launcher-1, and bolt them together.

Daehawk wrote: ↑Thu Jun 10, 2021 7:51 am Just watched the ring of fire live on CNN as the moon passed in front of the sun. Its neat to think a long time ago with the moon closer that it would have covered the entire sun and for longer. One day it wont block it out .