Thank you for posting that! I couldnโt put my finger on why rich women screaming during 11 minutes of โspace flightโ was so irksome. Itโs not jealousy, itโs the stench of bullshit.
Make me want to vomit.
Bit of a fixer-upper, though. The roof collapsed and fell on the orbiter.
โStop complaining about the quality of coarse rye pain des valets. You canโt accuse the nobility of being out of touch. You arenโt allowed to accuse the nobility of being out of touch. My question is, have yโall eaten brioche au chocolat? Go eat the Kingโs brioche, or go look at the Royal Bakery and see what they do and then come back and say โThis is a terrible thingโ.โ
โYou never see a man, a male astronaut, whoโs going up in space and they say, โOh, he took a ride,'โ she said. โItโs always referred to as a flight or a journey, so I feel thatโs 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 Originโs goal really to โto figure out a way to harness the waste here and put it in space to make the Earth a better placeโ? Because I donโt see how this helps with that and I donโt see how that could possibly be a good idea.
Reports of this are coming in from all over today. Exciting! Probably just plankton-like life, if true, but exciting anyway.
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 gunโฆit 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 whatโs unusual.
Unfortunately this is looking a little hinky and probably false.
Texas Republicans Want to Move NASA HQ to Houston to Save It From โBureaucratic Micromanagementโ
Iโm gonna go with โMaybe something is broken at the Florida launch baseโ and also thatโs itโs 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 itโs broken and they find out it canโt 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 donโt 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. Letโs hope he doesnโt 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 logisticsโฆ Not much glamour there, but you really need them.
Or - itโs something China just canโt 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.)
โฆ by anyone other than us, of course.
The party of small-minded government.