Today may be the day we start to become an interplanetary species!
Today may be the day we start to become an interplanetary species!
"No harmonic knowledge, no sense of time, a ghastly tone, unskilled vibrato, and so on. Chuck is one of the worst guitar players I know" -Gravity Jim
Is that the name of a new band you put together or did I miss something NASA just did?
There's a mixture of extraterrestrial events occurring in the news today. Elon Musk's/SpaceX missile launch exploded shortly after takeoff. A test run, so no one was injured. Learn and fix, and prepare for the manned mission to come. There are also several objects observed in the skies that scientists are taking note of, currently as "unidentified objects." Note, NOT "UFOs," as these appear further out and are not technically flying.
I imagine the SETI folks are excited.
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I was so busy with work and recording my songs that I wasn’t even aware of that.
At first I thought Chuck was forming a Jefferson Airplane/Starship band tribute band
Anyway, a link please? Though I guess these objects speak Chinese or Russian, not Martian or Klingon
From space.com: https://www.space.com/spacex-starship-first-space-launch
Is someone/something spying on us? https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/alien-mothership-spying-harvard-scientist/
UFO spotted by drone in the Middle East: https://www.jpost.com/international/article-739724
Don't forget: Today is 420.
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There's a lot of spin going on about this. I heard one of the mission control managers claim that the goal was to lift the 42-story rocket ship past the tower. Everything past that was "icing on the cake."
"The goal was to find out what works and what doesn't," was another opinion I heard. That could explain why the team cheered when the rocket exploded.
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That's not "Spin", it's the truth, and for months before the flight SpaceX was saying there was at best a 50/50 chance it would complete the flight. SpaceX's methodology has always been "build, test, itterate" and it's worked pretty well for them.
This is not "the same old thing" only bigger. Starship is something completey new. The Raptor engines are something totally new - I won't get into Full Flow Staged Combustion Cyle engines - since I realize not everyone is a rocket scientist by training, but trust me, this is pushing the envelope. I also won't get into how hard it is to actually start a rocket engine, much less 33 at once.
It appears that Stage Zero was the issue, not the rocket. Nobody had ever launched a rocket that big and it appears that the carnage under and around the orbital launch mount was the issue.
Starship represents a huge leap forward in launch systems and space vehicles. It's the Holy Grail of spaceflight: Fully reusable, rapid turnaround access to earth orbit and in-orbit refueling for interplanetary travel.
Unlike NASA's SLS which while technically larger than a Saturn V - but ultimately less capable and basically made from re-purposed Space Shuttle equipment, Starship is a quantum leap forward in capability, and it's completely re-usable.
For an example of how SpaceX does rapid development by its methodology you may want to look at some of the videos of the first Starship suborbital hops (When Hop? ) while they were working out belly-flop, relight and landing on its tail. It's pretty amazing to see.
In fact, watch this video:
(133) The evolution of SpaceX's Starship (with explosions!) - YouTube
Chuck
"No harmonic knowledge, no sense of time, a ghastly tone, unskilled vibrato, and so on. Chuck is one of the worst guitar players I know" -Gravity Jim
Perhaps my use of the word "spin" was taken more negatively than I'd intended. The news media has been focusing on the explosion of the rocket ship rather than on its purpose. Elon Musk, once the darling of the greenie world, has been painted with a large bullseye on his back since his acquisition of Twitter and the exposure of massive corruption and collusion between the government and the media. So, they turned a positive story into a negative one, costing Musk in some reports to lose over $12 billion in net worth in a single day.
I'm not a fan of electric vehicles, per se (even though I own one), and less so of Teslas. In many ways, I consider Musk to be one of the single worst polluters of the planet, given the rapacious nature of gathering, refining and disposal(?) of the components that comprise an EV. There are also reports of the debris and detritus raining down on the Texas and destroying at least one car and sand and soil from the launch and explosion covered the area around Port Isabel for miles.
Interesting that this topic, and my post, should occur on Earth Day, 2023.![]()
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So, what do you guys think of Avi Loeb’s alien technology statements?
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence." Prof. Loeb's speculation is just that. Science fiction writers are often referred to as writers of "speculative fiction." Anyone who dismisses his statements outright is simply being extreme to the opposite degree.
Wait and see. That's what I plan on doing.
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