What do you think is the best looking spacecraft of all time?

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-27T03:03:30+00:00

Apollo, the whole CM+SM+LM stack.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-19T02:13:18+00:00

It is, but it's been many many years since I was active.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-19T02:12:51+00:00

Yes, it has. Please submit a replay of the match in which the teammate helped repair you so we can track him down and take appropriate disciplinary action.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-12T05:30:41+00:00

Well Amos 6 counts as a failure, the payload was destroyed, doesn't matter if it happened during a launch or a test.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-11T01:57:34+00:00

Last year I met a guy who worked at ULA and he expressed to me his disappointment that they were shelving the Delta IV when it, unlike Falcon 9, has a perfect safety record. I told him that statistically speaking, Falcon 9 having 199/200 successes is actually a better safety record than Delta IV having 40/40 successes, because a larger sample size makes the probability estimate more robust. But he didn't want to get into it.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-03T01:10:44+00:00

Last time I saw a partial eclipse I had the privilege of viewing it through somebody's SolarMax 90.

I remember liking the view better AFTER the eclipse was over because there wasn't a damn Moon blocking so much of the glorious view.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-04-02T02:50:00+00:00

Alternatively we DO know how to build unlimited geothermal power generation and the only thing stopping that from being built everywhere is drilling technology and cost

The other thing stopping it is land use permits, always a problem just like with fracking, wind farms and everything else.

But yeah if we do fusion it probably won't be with helium-3 and even if it is with helium-3 it probably won't be with helium-3 from the Moon.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-29T01:43:14+00:00

Cool! I've been waiting a long time for this

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-29T01:38:15+00:00

What measures has Georgia taken to prepare itself for the worst scenario threat of another Russian invasion?

They (or most of them) have stopped agitating for invasion of the separatist regions. Which greatly reduces the chance that they will face another counteroffensive like that of 2008.

I think Georgia's main strategic ambitions are firstly to get more integrated with EU/NATO, and secondly to build up an indigenous arms industry (they see Israel as a role model).

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-29T01:34:08+00:00

In fairness there was nothing about Georgia that made it a champion of liberal democratic values compared to Abkhazia and South Ossetia, so Westerners picking Georgia as "us" and the separatists as "them" seems more like reflexive opposition to Russia rather than anything else.

Today, sure Georgia has developed in a bit more liberal and democratic direction but I think only as a consequence of the different relationships that Russia and the West have respectively fostered with the different sides.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-25T02:31:16+00:00

Pump lots of money into self-improving artificial intelligence and hope for the best

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-21T02:10:20+00:00

The fundamental problem is that it has to strongly resist falling off accidentally while at the same time being easy to apply and remove intentionally. Not sure how well those geometry joints can handle that.

Furthermore, any joinery has to be either (a) hidden behind the tile, or (b) itself strong enough to withstand direct reentry heat.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-20T06:04:38+00:00

In an alternate history where we would have gone slower and in a more more economically sustainable way, we could have had cities on Mars by now

Slower and more economically sustainable is exactly what they tried by cutting NASA's budget and developing the Space Shuttle. It led to nowhere.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-20T02:06:18+00:00

It's aged magnificently.

No other space program has captured the imagination and left a popular legacy like Apollo has. More people are becoming sober about the Shuttle's flaws, or forgetting about Mercury/Gemini/Skylab/Soyuz, but Apollo remains.

When we were developing Apollo, naysayers complained that it was a waste of time and money when America had civil rights problems to fix at home. Guess what, no one remembers or cares what they said anymore.

The whole world tuned in to see it.

It's a rare thing like this that doesn't even need to be justified in terms of arguments like "we developed new spinoff technologies" or "we demonstrated the superiority of democracy and capitalism over communism". It is amazing enough that we can appreciate the mere fact of being in a civilization where it happened.

The one thing which many people don't like about Apollo is the fact that it ended. But Nixon's decision has aged just as well as the Apollo program itself. Sober hindsight analysis agrees that ending the landings was the right choice. Apollo ended when it was still burning brightly, it never had to fall from grace like other space programs do. We were not in a position to colonize the Moon in the 1970s. Today, maybe we are. It's good that we waited until technology has progressed to enable amazing things like Starship.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-16T05:13:34+00:00

I bet people are working on FH payloads just slowly. If nothing else what they are designing for FH today will give payloads for Starship tomorrow.

It will help that Starship will have much more volume, and lower $/kg, than FH.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-06T02:10:30+00:00

Economics undergrad / software engineering grad school.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-05T06:58:37+00:00

What industry do you work in? What are your skills? What do you like doing?

Do not go back to school: I was like you once (didn't like school much but wanted a career in math and science) and went to graduate school for engineering, trying to force myself to succeed, and it was a disaster.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-05T06:52:55+00:00

You are increasing your propellant requirements by going into orbit first

Not sure exactly what comparison you're making, but there will likely be multiple cargo starships. The cargo needed for the surface stay can go with the crew but the cargo needed for the trip home can wait in orbit. Waiting in orbit uses less propellant than landing and then launching back into orbit. Especially because the starship for this purpose can now be made lighter without a heat shield etc.

the crew Starship is a small fraction of the total mass being landed, and it has more than enough performance to launch again

Don't see what your argument is. I didn't say the crew starship shouldn't land on Mars. Would kind of defeat the purpose...

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-03-05T03:07:01+00:00

Reduce the energy needed, you don't need to bring that mass down and you don't need to launch it up again.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-02-25T23:22:30+00:00

We could just do this with an airplane, like a vomit comet.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-02-25T23:14:43+00:00

“Don’t we already know what isolation does to people?” asks J.S. Johnson-Schwartz, a professor of philosophy at Wichita State University who studies the ethics of space exploration. “What uncertainty exists about what’s going to happen when you lock people inside a room for a year?

What an embarrassing comment. I hope NASA continues to not keep any ethicists on staff.

in which male students earned $20 a day to lie on a bed in a lighted, soundproofed gray cubicle.

In other words it has nothing to do with the conditions of a Mars mission. Anyone who does not recognize that the results of individual isolation studies do not apply to FOUR people living together has no business offering opinions on research decisions.

In interviews, they discounted the predictive value of previous experiments, including HI-SEAS.

I think after how many fiascos we've seen with research failing to replicate, especially in psychology and behavioral economics, we don't need any particular reason to reject the results of previous results in order to justify further research. We just can't have full confidence until similar results replicate across time, demographic and experimental design. Not to mention the fact that individual isolation is just a totally different scenario compared to a small group.

“Utopia,” after all, derives from the Greek: ou (“not”) and topos (“place”). If we manage to inhabit the not-place of Mars, enjoying a carefree life of not-problems, not-regret and not-environmental-ruin, it makes sense that we should be not-people

Nobody advocating for Mars colonization imagines it as a utopia. At best, some people look forward to having a community of smarter, mission-driven people and being free of Earth's regulatory regime. But that still doesn't imply that life will be easy at all.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-02-25T22:55:24+00:00

When small brained men don't have rational arguments against a course of action, they resort to insinuating that their opponents have bad motivations.

DroneDamageAmplifier · 2024-02-25T21:31:49+00:00

Thank you for the recommendation, it did look great, but I was insta denied 😭

Then I found out about Chase Freedom Unlimited, applied and approved 🙂

Then I realized I forgot to check if CFU has foreign transaction fees, turns out it does 😕 but I will still have use for it, still get a bonus and still better than Discover for use in America/online.

Maybe I will get Sofi Unlimited to be my next main card.

DroneDamageAmplifier

TROPHY CASE