I've seen a lot of cool videos. This might take the cake though. Footage of the falcon heavy launch, uninterrupted from takeoff to landing, following the boosters: I don't know why that isn't all over the MSM yet.
I had not seen this in the news. Pretty cool use of the monument. https://www.npr.org/sections/pictur...sary-the-washington-monument-becomes-a-rocket
That's pretty badass. I saw a headline somewhere saying they plan to do a moon mission in 2024? I think with our technology that will make for some awesome tv viewing.
I think it’s cool to have space missions like this, for nothing more than good morale for the country. But what do we need from the moon?
You already mentioned it, it'd be good for the morale of the country. Anymore, we only rally around each other when there's a national tragedy. Why not something good? Plus, there's a whole generation that's never had that experience of seeing men ( or women ) walking on the surface of the moon. To many, it's just something that happened in history, but at the time it inspired a generation to reach for the stars. A 10 year old watching them on the moon in full color today could be the one that gets us to Mars.
Why do we need to go to mars? The people that go there aren’t coming back. I hate to sound like a former board member, even though I am in favor of a robust space program(he wasn’t). We are not evolved as a species to live on that planet.
From what I Last hear I think they are returning now, after what seems to be a dubious amount of time. They have to have the ability to either set up a pad or re-launch first. As far as living on Mars, it will take 500- 1000 years to make it truly livable. It requires building massive factories on the planet that will pump out greenhouse gasses to create a more stable atmosphere. Over centuries. In the meantime you can enjoy hitting 1500 yard golf drives and slam-dunking on 25 foot basketball rims.
And as soon as you land from that 25 foot dunk you can enjoy about a dozen broken bones since the zero gravity trip over there will leach calcium from your bones, leaving them barely able to support the reduced weight of your body upon entering Martian atmosphere. And since all that calcium has to go somewhere, your body will be passing kidney stones often enough you’ll consider pulling an Epstein before you even land.
Shitty... https://www.space.com/india-loses-contact-with-vikram-moon-lander-chandrayaan-2.html In case you didn't know, India was landing on the moon tonight... well, they were trying to, anyway. Nothing definitive yet (they're still "analyzing the data") but it's not looking good.
FYI this happened a few hours ago: This was an intentional destruction of a launch vehicle to prove the safety systems of the Crew Dragon module. Pretty interesting shit.
(FYI, I also renamed the title of this thread to include "Space Stuff" so that it's easier to search for... I keep forgetting New Horizons...)
Elon Musk: So we're testing the Dragon crew module by blowing up the rocket and seeing how the module survives. Onlooker: So you're firing off a rocket, and then deliberately blowing it up after it flies a specified distance? Elon Musk: Exactly. Onlooker: That's a missile Elon, you built a missile.
Actually, I'm not sure if they intended to blow up the rocket or not... it seemed like they were kind of surprised when it exploded. I think they were probably expecting to just throttle back to simulate a failure, then release the Dragon, which they did. I mean, it makes sense to recovery the Falcon and re-use it, as that's a huge aspect of the program. It wasn't until well after the module separation that the Falcon blew up, and you heard a report of "lost telemetry". I wonder if something didn't like the throttling back phase and failed unexpectedly, and spectacularly. Still, the Crew Dragon stuff seemed to work great. It was really interesting watching the 4 main chutes too... not your normal rigging, and the way they were bouncing off each other on the descent... interesting design. It's always great to hear the staff watching from the sidelines go nuts when stuff is about to happen... they count it down, then cheer like mad when it works. I know I've done some product launches, but yeah, they take the prize.
I dug into it a bit. They were expecting Falcon to breakup on entry, but I wasn’t expecting such a violent explosion so soon after Dragon detached. I think the explosion was unexpected that fast, but they were not expecting to recover. The delay for weather was for recovery of Dragon which was always part of the plan. The capsule splashes down in the ocean under parachutes.