Viewing profile — snrplfth

Cool, it's like a nature preserve for hookworm.

No worries! I guess I get people's reactions a little - they've heard so many vague plans about "maybe a Mars mission" that never pan out, so when the real thing arrives they're no…

Which is amusing, because @Pinboard absolutely cannot stand SpaceX and mocks them constantly.

That's not a criticism. The Mars cult is a very good thing. For forty years, most space programs have been motivated by the burning urge to...uh...send some more people to Low Eart…

> Like everything behind their breakthroughs, which they had a few - including landing and turnaround times - is meant to enable the Mars mission. They've been explicit about this …

When you're cooking with motorbikes, it tends to accumulate at the bottom of the fryer or pan as a hot liquid which can be put down the drain, but re-solidifies once it hits the co…

You have a kitchen so tiny it cannot find room for a single old tomato sauce jar? My condolences.

The ISS is in a great position, because it's in an altitude with such high drag that small objects and uncontrolled fragments deorbit very quickly. Even the ISS loses 50 - 90 m of …

"Spaceballs: The Flamethrower! The kids love this one."

I've read this blog for years. This is exactly the kind of joke he makes all the time; in describing or referring to something, he folds in a fact which, while not literally true, …

It was a test payload on an experimental vehicle.

I can almost guarantee you that Scott Alexander is aware of who the Jacobites and the Jacobins were and what the difference is. The blog is constantly bringing up all manner of his…

The impression I'm getting from this and other comments is that San Francisco is basically a bunch of small mountains where people get mugged. I live in a pretty flat city, but the…

The fact that certain industries have a lot of foreign ownership doesn't mean that they're not part of the actual economy. They produce in NZ, they employ in NZ, they buy inputs in…

Also this is a cryogenic rocket which has to be kept cold and launched soon after fueling. Not terribly good for nuclear launches.

I'm pretty sure that toomanybeersies means new country as in, "a country from which an orbital rocket has never been launched before", rather than "a country which is new". Edit: A…

A lot of stovepipes leak fumes, an in any case most people in the Roman empire had no such thing as a stovepipe. It's absolutely a myth that most premodern people had "clean air". …

Haha. They breathed tons of fumes, most of their households' cooking and heating was fueled with either wood, charcoal or dung, in open or not-well-sealed hearths. (Woodsmoke is st…

Indeed, a Falcon 9 takes only the amount of fuel used by 2 long-distance 747 flights. BFR might be, say, five to seven times that, though it's a different fuel (natural gas instead…

For sure - but it's been good enough for a while. Consider the McDonnell Douglas DC-X in 1993: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McDonnell_Douglas_DC-X

Correct - they just went down the wrong optimization road, so the incremental development program for Falcon 9 landing is nothing they could have replicated.

They're pressurized with nitrogen generally, just to keep them clean and dry inside. They're quite capable of standing or lying down while unpressurized though.

I believe that the $1 billion figure is for the entire development cost of the Falcon 9 vehicle (stages 1 and 2.)

One big obstacle to established players was the fact that a lot of existing booster stages had been optimized in such a way that they simply could not survive atmospheric reentry, …

Also the space industry has real utility for poor Indians. Weather forecasting and crop monitoring are really important for farmers in India, and have gotten a lot better since Ind…