How did this entire article not answer the most important question? Did this man have homeowners insurance or does he have to repair his house out of pocket?

I think there’s a good chance that smoldering interstage is mostly just fuel dumping.

In every form of flight you want to ensure a certain margin for error, ideally they would have had more fuel than they needed to make sure they got their rocket into position. Conversely though, every drop of extra fuel they’re carrying is extra weight, which puts extra strain on their landing system and their airframe, so as they approach the landing barge, they may be frantically dumping excess fuel. A fuel rich mixture tends to burn dark, especially with kerosene, as the smoke carries a lot of soot.

Personally, I think their high tension arresting cables are a brilliant solution for catching boosters, relatively simple and likely more reliable when compared to the chopsticks.

That said, chopsticks aren’t just a catching system, they do catching and stacking. The chopsticks are designed to support a higher launch cadence, by not needing any additional infrastructure to handle stacking. For instance, with the chopsticks they can catch a booster, move it to the side, place it down, and be ready to catch a second stage within the hour. When they roll a new starship up to the launch pad, they don’t need one of the largest cranes in the world to winch the second stage up, they can just use the tower.

Edit: Well Scott Manley released a video about this flight on YouTube and he doesn’t think it’s fuel dumping. Some Chinese reports have said that it was all part of the plan, dumping excess rcs fuel. But Manley says that’s pretty unlikely, a more plausible explanation for that kind of thick black smoke would be burning hydraulic fluid (which makes some sense, because the hydraulic fluid for the grid-fin articulation would be housed up there). In general I’d trust his instincts over my own.

Well that’s certainly a valid theory to explain where everyone is. In examination though, it’s not a terribly robust theory, because it assumes that the “galactic community” is a monolithic body with no bad actors. I mean even if whatever galactic council in charge decided not to interact with us, you don’t think that some third party wouldn’t just do it anyway? There’s always some jerk breaking the rules, always. And if there’s a whole galaxy full of individuals, there are a whole lot of chances for someone to be a bad actor. How do you control the actions of a whole galaxy of individuals?

The more evidence is found, the more panspermia checks out. Honestly, I don’t love it. If life arrived on earth, or in fact if it arrived in the sol system via panspermia, that introduces so many more questions…

Well the thought of complex life all over the place is in fact really cool. But that also comes with some scary implications. If it turns out that complex life is extremely common, that’s actually very bad news for the outlook of our civilization. It would mean that life starts up all the time and for some reason it never survives long enough to develop advanced technology.

For that reason I hope that we find bacterial life, but nothing larger than single cells. I hope that eukaryotic life is extremely rare.

That sounds right. I recall that one of the probes had a camera that was able to take a series of images like a video. But the video visually degraded with every shot it took after opening the lens cap. The effect was like watching a movie as the projector film starts to melt.

The Russian space program worked incredibly hard to get those images. They focused on Venus when nobody else was sending missions there. I mean, still nobody else has really sent anything there!

But the Venera Program was incredibly successful, despite Venus being an extraordinarily harsh environment to operate in.

It’s such an amazingly awesome mission, I love every part of it.

Seems legit to me.

Only the smallest ones.

I believe there’s an exponential relationship between size and rate of decay. So tiny black holes evaporate almost instantly, whereas anything as massive as a planet (still small for a black hole) would outlast all stars.

I heard it, it was pretty crazy. It was raining lightly and we were like… “That was… not… thunder”.

Unlike thunder it was a short boom (not rolling), it had a concussive aspect to it, it shook the house. I assumed it was local, perhaps a transformer blowing or something. But then someone told me there was a news alert about it saying it was heard across Eastern Mass. At that point I was like oh wow… then it had to be a meteor!

In retrospect, it could have been the sonic boom we heard (my initial assumption was that it must have been the airburst that we heard).

Hmm… Yeah that probably applies to formula 1 as well. We’d have to do the math to know for sure, but a quick Google search says that about 3% of astronauts/cosmonauts have died during a mission. I’d be surprised if the fatality rate for race car drivers is higher than that.

Yikes, it doesn’t matter how spinlaunch sends you there. 200+ Gs are not friendly to the human body…

I’ve never really thought about what the optimal survival party would be, but I think you nailed it. They’d be a great choice as fellow shipwreck survivors or zombie apocalypse crew.

I’ve been watching the development, they’ve been very open about it. The developers still have a lot to do, but I’ll hold on to hope.

Yeah, it’s not there yet. But soon.

I mean, I wouldn’t doubt that it will achieve its goals, it’s very close already. If all they wanted was a single use rocket with a reusable booster and greater payload to orbit than the Saturn V at a fraction of the cost, then that has already been achieved, and that is not nothing.

I think that’s probably right. But personally, I want more and I think it’s worth caring about, worth encouraging people to think about.

I have models of both Hubble and Chandra telescopes hanging in my room. 😃

It’s a great telescope, it made a whole slew of discoveries possible. But yeah, digital imaging has improved a lot over the last 27 years, do you remember what digital cameras were like in 1998?

What we have is great, and what we’ve managed to do with it is astonishing. But… I believe we are doing ourselves a disservice by not updating these space observatories more frequently and by not building enough of them for all of the observations we want to make. Because we could, but we aren’t.

Oh absolutely! But why not more?

Why are scientists around the globe competing for small chunks of time on the jwst when we could have several more telescopes like it? Or perhaps even a few slightly less advanced telescopes. I know designing it was a huge challenge, but even with the design complete, just constructing it presented a number of serious challenges. Given that the jwst was such a complex project, I wonder if a series of telescopes with optics and instruments still significantly more modern than Hubble would still be useful to astronomers as well as much easier to produce than the jwst.

Honestly, Hubble is old, very old. It was based on a spy satellite that the US developed in the 70s, we built 5 of them. There were essentially 5 hubbles looking down at the earth and only 1 looking up.

But those spy satellites were retired years ago, they’re 4 generations old now. Since then, we’ve gradually launched 14 other spy sats to replace them.

All that is to say, why are we still content with our 1 ancient Hubble telescope? Clearly there is a budget for more. If the military can point 19 satellites down at the earth, surely we should be able to point 5 upward, right?

Yeah, the Hubble is struggling up there in LEO, but this isn’t a hubble problem, it’s a US prioritization problem. You get what you pay for, and apparently we’re only willing to pay for war.