661–670 of 899 posts
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Standing next to the S-IC stage from the Saturn V at Kennedy really puts it into perspective. And the Starship full stack is larger and taller than the Saturn V!
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/51/Saturn_v... Saturn V slight larger than Statue of Liberty. I never realized that.
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> Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable And some would argue that nuking entire cities is completely unacceptable.
Allied options were: 1. Invade. Expected Allied casualties of 300k all the way to much more than a million. Expected Japanese casualties: tens of millions, perhaps up to literally all of them. Previous Japanese strongholds fought to the last man, earlier in the war the Allies invaded an island with 11000 Japanese soldiers, and I think 47 of those eventually surrendered. The rest died. The civilian populations on thes…
Probably the biggest share of the blockade at the end was done by naval mines. At the end, the US airdropped naval mines in Japanese harbors to prevent them from importing food, and this sunk more Japanese shipping than the submarines ever did. It was even called “Operation Starvation”.
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The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in per…
I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...
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Conditional surrender would have been completely unacceptable given that they were the aggressor and had a million troops in China, and wanted to hold on to their conquests after the war. Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. Your points about the Communists stand, but keep…
Literally the only condition was that the emperor was preserved.
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The V1 is the ancestor of all cruise missiles, pretty far from no military value.
It was an ancestor of things with military value, but it had little to none itself. You need a guidance system for a useful cruise missile, and the V1 had essentially none. No points for "military utility" as a "research program" when you're actively launching them at civilians; whatever it is, that's not a research usage anymore.
Additionally, reports of damage to the British capital city was very morale-raising for the Germans who saw mostly the destruction of their own cities. That also has military value.
Seeing the Starship's flap visibly burning in the reentry heat and still survive well enough to move around and get to a splashdown was just incredible. Amazing progress in just four test flights.
That flap is already a legend, kept at it even mangled by hot plasma, crazy accelerations and pressures, spitting molten steel at the camera. What a role model, the little flap that could.
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Here's where things get really counter-intuitive. If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, it's likely Falcon 9 will be completely retired, because Starship will cost less to launch! The entire point of the Starship is complete and instantaneous reuse. The idea is to have it launching something up, landing right back into its launch pad slot, and then going again. The ridiculous cost saving potential…
What are some example applications that could change life overnight, besides planet-wide connectivity?
But taking things in the abstract, single digit prices per kg to space would transform the Moon (or space in general) to just another place to build stuff and expand out into. Obviously there are technological hurdles but nothing particularly challenging, especially in contexts where we could have regular traffic flow to/from Earth. The possibilities of this rapidly enter into the sci-fi domain. But there seems no real reason for that "fi" suffix to really exist in these scenarios. So again, it's all just quite weird.
If things work out as they seem increasingly likely to, then are all living through what will be the most critical segue in humanity's history to date, and perhaps ever. So far as we know space really is the final frontier, and once we can start expanding outward into that, humanity's existence will be radically shifted, and our perpetuation as a species will also be all but completely guaranteed.
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Someone on the Everyday Astronaut live stream named it "Flap Norris".
I wonder what the odds are that some deep sea salvage group is moving to collect that this very instant (or being contracted for such). If Starship lives up to even a fraction of its potential, that [not so] little guy is going to have some serious historicity.
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Didn't they die by the droves?
In fact, they did. Being a sailor was about the most dangerous profession that you could choose, including the military. Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than being an (American, not Russian) soldier. People still do it. Which convinces me that people will risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of them. Some people are just built t…
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not missing anything, but it's just one of those things about how fast orbital speeds are. yes, i know orbital speeds are around 17,000 mph. this is just another example of just how fast that is. a lot of people might be familiar with falling objects speeding up to get to terminal velocity which is kind of a speed limit for normal things. for de-orbiting spacecraft, this is just another milestone of slow speeds to ac…
The boosters never achieve close to orbital velocity though, less than half if my memory is correct.