I was wondering how the scientists went from proposing a planet that was 1.5 to 2 times the size of earth, to proposing it being 5-10 times the size of earth.

You Should Really Considering Explaining Acronyms Before Posting, obviously.

A remote command from some random phone to reboot does sound like the a wonderful vector for malware, though

YSRCEABP

I remember doing the bear grills one, and one of the choices was to jump over a ravine, or walk over it using a fallen tree as a bridge.

Being the hiker I am, the obvious choice of walk around it being missing kind of annoyed me, but I chose the tree option.

Bear died.

So I got to go back and pick the jump over option, which was apparently the right one.

Who the fuck does running jumps over a 15 foot deep ravine.

I never bothered with the choose your own adventure things again. When the correct choice is just not available and the next logical choice just means an instant loss, you don’t have a very fun game

If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.

The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.

But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.

One of those fancy plasma lighters, sure. But butane lighters have been around for decades

Squadron was the original kickstarter promise.

Star citizen was a stretch goal and side project. Supposedly they’ve been meticulously crafting every detail of Squadron 42 for the past 12 years, and 7 years ago they pinky promised it would be out by 2018.

The ships better have higher fidelity than my fucking house, or I’ll know they spent the past decade fucking off, and are only now pushing this out like a freshman term paper because they realized the due date is tomorrow.

There was a big idea a couple decades ago that corporations were going to copyright natural genes and sell them for massive profits to other biotech companies that could use them to make cure for diseases and other things.

Michael Crichton wrote a few books about it, pretty good reads.

They did do the gene copyright thing in the real world, but it turns out that doing anything with a random gene is pretty hard and the genome isn’t just something you can copy paste a gene into and have it cure aids or cancer, so no one wanted to buy genetic sequences that they would then need to do a whole bunch of work on anyway to make it useful.

Pretty much all 23andMe did was increase the size of the Law Enforcement dna database by letting cops send in samples of suspects and get back their family members info. Of course the company said that was very naughty, but no one got into real trouble for it. And now 23andMe owns a lot of other people’s genetic code, and it’s not worth the hard drives it’s stored on.

I could actually see this being useful for dangerous working environments like steelworks or inside nuclear facilities. As long as the control system is on a separate intranet that’s properly air gapped.

You should still pay the operator their full wage though. The human still needs all of the technical knowledge to do the job, you’re just removing most of the physical risk.

That’s kind of like saying that ford can’t make a model t anymore.

I’m sure they could, there’s just no reason to.

I’m also sure the contractors that built the Saturn V, those that are still in business, could build equivalent parts today if the government asked.

The Saturn five was an absurdly large rocket designed specifically to get 3 people from earth to the moon. It was insanely expensive per launch, and the only reason it ever flew was because the government was writing nasa blank checks in order to beat the soviets.

Today the government wants a reasonable dollar figure for a launch, and the days of spending a billion dollars per launch are long past.

That’s an extremely bold assumption.

The space shuttle was designed originally to be rapidly reusable, but its shortest turn around time was still measured in weeks, not days.

And its main engines only produced water as a by product, no soot or carbon deposits to worry about.

If you follow that arrow around to the next with your hand, which direction is your hand moving?

That is indicating clockwise rotation, or a rotation to the right. We’re talking about circles here

The whole thing is rotating to the right, that’s what clockwise means. Clocks rotate to the right. One arrow is not pointing left, it’s pointing in the direction of rotation, which is to the right.

What the fuck are you talking about.

You’re either rotating the fastener to the right or the left.

It doesn’t matter what side you’re talking about, because you’re not moving one side of the fastener, you’re rotating the whole thing one direction or the other.

Clockwise just means something is rotating to the right.

If I ask you to turn around to the right, are you going to ask me what side of you I’m referencing?

• we invented the modern car, y’all are driving on the wrong side of the road
• a switch is a switch, if you don’t like the direction it goes, just flip it over and put the cover back on, half the switches in my house go one way, and the other go the opposite way, some of them are even sideways.
• y’all sank the ship that had the US copy of the metric standard on it, and also invented the imperial system in the first place.
• if you look at the entomology, the US largely uses the original English pronunciation of things, it’s the British who have slowly changed their pronunciation over the centuries. We did have a guy who intentionally changed a bunch of the spelling, you are right about that.

Semi drivers require a commercial license, and special training. They’re monitored way more closely than your average American driver.

And side mirrors only let you see what’s behind the car to the sides and at a distance, not what’s immediately behind the car. I don’t want some idiot in his $80K battering ram to roll over me because I happened to walk behind his death trap and he couldn’t be bothered to wait for the rear view camera to come up.

Not being able to see what’s immediately behind the vehicle is a safety hazard, especially in suburban areas or parking lots where most people are reversing out of a space with other people walking around.

The Cybertruck has no rear view mirror when the back cover is down.

So any reversing requires the use of the backup camera.

The car also accelerates really fast, and weighs 7,000 pounds.

It’s also an $80,000+ car that was preordered by a lot of people without test driving it. So it’s primary driver is someone who makes risky and impulsive decisions.

So a really fast, heavy car that can’t see behind it without a reverse camera, driven by impulsive people makes me think the reverse camera should definitely come up really fast.

Nope, they were awarded 3 billion dollars to develop the Human Landing System, which is the Starship they’re supposed to use for the moon landing.

Why 3 billion dollars?

Because Kathy Lueders, the interim director at NASA at the time, called SpaceX and told them if they could get their proposal down to 3 billion, it would be approved. No other contractor was given this call. When SpaceX submitted the revised proposal, Lueders unilaterally approved SpaceX for the contract.

Kathy Lueders is now the manager of Starbase Texas, SpaceX’s private launch facility. She was hired six months after she approved the contract.

Oh, and recently the Government Accountability Office released a report that the Raptor engine, which powers starship, does not have the performance required to do the mission anyway. But this has largely gone unmentioned, because the GAO is largely a toothless organization.

You’re right in that the contract is Fixed-cost, so if SpaceX blows up too many rockets and burns through that 3 billion, they are left holding the bag. But SpaceX did receive that money and are spending it to develop Starship.

I love Space, it’s been a passion of mine since I was a kid. I love learning about space, and learning how all these launch vehicles work. Rockets are really fucking cool. I want the Starship to be everything they say it is, it would be a powerful tool for making Spaceflight cheaper and easier. But the more I’ve learned about the history of spacecraft development, and the more I’ve learned about Starship in particular, the more concerned I’ve been. Starship is ludicrously complicated, even compared to a similar vehicle like the Space Shuttle. And the fact that it looks like SpaceX was awarded the contract to make Starship not on merit but though a corrupt deal where the director of nasa called and told them the price tag, and then took a job from SpaceX less than a year later, just makes me incredibly jaded with the whole project. The develop approach is concerning given they are spending US tax dollars, the design of the craft is concerning given the complexity it adds to an already complex mission. Everything comes together to make me think that because of this, we may not have humans back on the moon anytime soon. We need someone at the GAO or NASA to take a serious look at what SpaceX is doing to develop this lander, why it’s failing to test all of the hardware needed for the Artemis mission, and why they are now several years behind schedule on a multi-billion dollar contract.

It’s not about converting the car.

I have a 2009 Chevy with an automatic transmission. I’m order to convert it to electric, the ECU would have to be replaced so the car knows when to shift to a higher gear without a combustion engine.

Because of environmental reasons, ECUs are pretty tightly controlled by the government. I don’t know if any company even exists that can sell an aftermarket ECU. There’s plenty that can hack or reprogram ECUs, but even that is becoming increasingly regulated and legally questionable.