๐ŸŒŸ๐Ÿš€โœจ Space Exploration ๐ŸŒโญ๐ŸŒœ

9 Likes

Indeed.

13 Likes

Thank you for posting that! I couldnโ€™t put my finger on why rich women screaming during 11 minutes of โ€œspace flightโ€ was so irksome. Itโ€™s not jealousy, itโ€™s the stench of bullshit.

Make me want to vomit.

12 Likes

https://phys.org/news/2025-04-slowly-universe-hubble-tension.amp

8 Likes

20 years on, DART still a masterclass in how not to rendezvous in orbit

7 Likes

They can always ask Mr. Putin to give them an alterntive versionโ€ฆ

8 Likes

Bit of a fixer-upper, though. The roof collapsed and fell on the orbiter.

9 Likes
9 Likes

โ€œStop complaining about the quality of coarse rye pain des valets. You canโ€™t accuse the nobility of being out of touch. You arenโ€™t allowed to accuse the nobility of being out of touch. My question is, have yโ€™all eaten brioche au chocolat? Go eat the Kingโ€™s brioche, or go look at the Royal Bakery and see what they do and then come back and say โ€˜This is a terrible thingโ€™.โ€

9 Likes

โ€œYou never see a man, a male astronaut, whoโ€™s going up in space and they say, โ€˜Oh, he took a ride,'โ€ she said. โ€œItโ€™s always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel thatโ€™s a little disrespectful to what the mission was and the work that Blue Origin does.โ€

Except I absolutely do say that for these tourists flights. Also, is Blue Originโ€™s goal really to โ€œto figure out a way to harness the waste here and put it in space to make the Earth a better placeโ€? Because I donโ€™t see how this helps with that and I donโ€™t see how that could possibly be a good idea.

9 Likes
12 Likes

Reports of this are coming in from all over today. Exciting! Probably just plankton-like life, if true, but exciting anyway.

9 Likes

From a distance plankton are always going to be the life with enough impact to be noticed. Our atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen is the work of cyanobacteria, plus plants that have turned them into chloroplasts, and it would be hard to notice all the rest.

That said, I do have to wonder about dimethyl sulfide as a smoking gunโ€ฆit seems like the sort of simple organic molecule there could be lots of ways to generate on a hycean world full of reduced compounds, even if it happens to be associated with life in our strongly oxidizing atmosphere. More knowledge of exoplanetary chemistry is always a good thing before we decide whatโ€™s unusual.

8 Likes

Unfortunately this is looking a little hinky and probably false.

:thread:

10 Likes

No rest for the rocketry as NASAโ€™s Easter weekend heats up

8 Likes

Texas Republicans Want to Move NASA HQ to Houston to Save It From โ€˜Bureaucratic Micromanagementโ€™

8 Likes
9 Likes

Iโ€™m gonna go with โ€œMaybe something is broken at the Florida launch baseโ€ and also thatโ€™s itโ€™s not so much secret as somewhat embarrassing.

Some little part that nobody has given a second thought about because it had always been there and seemed to be something trivial. And now itโ€™s broken and they find out it canโ€™t be easily replaced because it was made a couple of decades ago by a company that ceased to be or has been bought and sold again a couple of times. Anyway, no documentation whatsoever. So not only do they not know who made it, they also donโ€™t know how it was made. Or to which specifications. Or from which materials, exactly. So now they have to find someone who is willing and able to reverse engineer it and adapt currently available materials and manufacturing methods to make another batch.
Possibly their only hope is some old geezer, long since retired, who (against company policy) kept a stack of old technical files and notes in his garage. Letโ€™s hope he doesnโ€™t still hold some grudge or other about, say being made redundant in a company merger. Or being told to shove off because all of his knowledge and everything he ever designed was hopefully obsolete now.
Infrastructure and logisticsโ€ฆ Not much glamour there, but you really need them.

Or - itโ€™s something China just canโ€™t deliver right now and is terribly sorry for the inconvenience.

(If anybody thinks scenario #1 is unrealistic - at one point NASA regularly sourced old electronic and computer components second hand from eBay to keep the Shuttle going.)

7 Likes

โ€ฆ by anyone other than us, of course.

7 Likes

The party of small-minded government.

7 Likes