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SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

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Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#351
post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretending politics is the only reason people turned on Elon is kinda hilarious. The dude has been behaving utterly unhinged. All that aside, buying a social media platform for the express purpose of influencing elections is most likely not going to win you any favours.

> buying a social media platform for the express purpose of influencing elections is most likely not going to win you any favours. The irony is that was going on before he bought Twitter. Stopping it may have been the reason he bought it. We know Twitter at the behest of the US gov't censored the Hunter Biden laptop story but allowed speech that wrongly claimed it was "Russian disinformation". That could be considere…

Twitter probably over censored the story. Considering all of the crazy demonstrably fake news surrounding this, I can see how handling this was probably difficult to get right.

If the right wing wants to stop getting over censored, maybe they should hold themselves a little more accountable to the mass amounts of fake news they share.

But again. Hunter Biden was not running for president. The right is still pushing fake news (Ohio) as part of their campaigns.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#353
post #261

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Following the analogy... you're on an island. A ferry has showed up at the island every six months or so for the last 40 years. The last ferry that showed up broke before it could leave the harbor. No need to worry, though. Another ferry's coming in six months and there are plenty of supplies on the island. Is it rescue? Maybe in the sense that you can't leave when you wanted to and now you have to wait. But not in t…

On an island you can call for a boat or a helicopter. You can relax and eat all your food knowing those options exist. On a space station your options are considerably more limited.

>On an island you can call for a boat or a helicopter.

Boat, yes; helicopter, no, unless the island is pretty close to civilization. Helicopters have very limited range. No helicopter is going to rescue you from some remote island in the south Pacific, unless it was launched from a rescue ship (in which case it was really the ship that rescued you; the helicopter was merely more convenient for transportation between the ship and the island than a tender boat).

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#354
post #277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"the second stage safely landed in the ocean, but outside of the targeted area. We will resume launching after we better understand root cause" reality: "It crashed somewhere in the ocean, we don't know why but we pretend it was safe, though we just got lucky"

Uncontrolled reentry has been the norm for most of the space age (and is still standard practice for the Chinese, and their boosters). The far more important issue is that this a human-rated booster, and an unidentified defect impacts the safety of crew launches. This issue showed up on a de-orbit burn, but it's unlikely to be limited in scope to de-orbits only. edit: Turns out this isn't accurate; it's still actuall…

China also often launches from far-inland locations which puts large terrestrial populated regions beneath the booster (and booster landing) track. Perhaps less so for nominal launches, but not all launches are nominal:

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=ys0DOsZmr7g>

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=peJ6gErODic>

https://yewtu.be/watch?v=-SFRNImP7p8>

China operates four launch facilities, three of which, Jiuquan, Taiyuan, and Xichang are inland. The fourth, Wenchang, is on the island of Hainan, in the South China Sea between China, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Space_Administr...>

Russia's Baikonur Cosmodrome, located in the independent country of Kazakhstan, is similarly an inland location and has seen launch debris fall over populated areas.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#355

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes and we also say you rescued me if I am bang out of cash and you lend me a fiver at checkout... If you see a news headline "man rescues child" you expect a direct threat like something like from a burning house. > if somebody finds a child wandering in the park alone, we say that the man rescued the child. Exactly as SpaceX is doing in this situation. Plus, saying astronauts, professionals who signed up for the jo…

Humans in space are less than children in the park. We've barely ventured out of our own atmosphere. Less than a 1000 people have been to orbit, and only 24 have gone to the moon. Out of those, only a dozen have landed on the moon. And the moon is still the Earth system - we've never really left our own yard.

unlike the moon ISS is shielded by magnetic field and receives less radiation. It is actually our yard more than a park

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#356

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When the ground state is emergency the definition of emergency changes because emergency cannot be the same as ground state... If we go by technical definition of "emergency" then anything not by the plan is an emergency, but it's not used that way normally and it's not a technical publication. If you are stuck in space with no lifeboat back then I agree it is an emergency, but they apparently have Starliner and it w…

> they apparently have Starliner and it works One, had. Starliner went home. Two, they didn’t. Starliner was broken. Its manoeuvring thrusters, a critical reëntry system, were misbehaving. If you’re on a plane and the oxygen system fails, that’s an emergency. You don’t have to wait for cabin pressure to fail for it to qualify, and oxygen systems aren’t even a critical system; this is closer to the flaps or landing ge…

But the oxygen system is fine, right? Let me check the article again

If it fails then that's an emergency, but that regardless of the presence of the boat.

Noted the absence of Starliner, but not 100% convinced personally

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#357
post #344
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you for explaining that! Seems a tough call doing that versus flagging the root comment of the acrimony, but maybe that alternate approach would have a bigger (too big) cost in disruption once there is such a small continent of comments built out under the top comment.

We can do that too, or at least mark the low-quality subthreads offtopic (which downranks them). But if we don't take the provocation out of the title, it'll only generate more of the same.

There's also your brilliant practice of collecting off-topic threads under a "sweep" comment, which strikes me as astoundingly effective at re-railing derailed discussions.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#358
post #270

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In literally every thread about SpaceX people who don't like Musk (and sometimes others), people bring up Shotwell. Of course her name doesn't come up as often as Musk, Musk is literally one of the most famous people on earth, a highly controversial public figure and one of the richest people on the plant, who also owns and leads the company. For most other tech companies people done even know the Nr.2 person in the…

The numbers 2-4 at Apple come up quite often, but “how annoying it is to work with Tim Cook” isn’t a recurring thread, despite his also being one of the most famous, wealthy, and powerful people on Earth as well. Joel Spoksky’s meeting with Bill Gates about Excel is famous lore in our circles as well, although I doubt Spolsky was ever even top 10 at Microsoft. Werner Vogels comes up fairly often, too.

I don't know who 2-4 at Apple are, and I think most non Apple fans don't know them, and neither to most Apple fans.

And there is a big difference between people generally known and being a character in on famous 'lore' story.

I challenge you to compare all threads about SpaceX and Amazon and and see who gets more mentions, Shotwell or Vogels. I have never hared about Vogels despite reading many theads on Amazon, that said, I don't read many about AWS details.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#359

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Humans in space are less than children in the park. We've barely ventured out of our own atmosphere. Less than a 1000 people have been to orbit, and only 24 have gone to the moon. Out of those, only a dozen have landed on the moon. And the moon is still the Earth system - we've never really left our own yard.

unlike the moon ISS is shielded by magnetic field and receives less radiation. It is actually our yard more than a park

You are invited to stretch the analogy as far as you would like in order to win an internet argument. Have a nice day.

Re: SpaceX launches mission for 2 NASA astronauts who are stuck on the ISS

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If my car breaks down while I'm at my fully-loaded villa on day 2 of my 30 day vacation, my friend coming to pick me up isn't a rescue mission. If you chose to say it was, nobody would be doing the "Well ACKSHULLY..." routine with you because that is in fact totally in line with common use of the word rescue and not worth making a stink about even if you think it sounds a little melodramatic. The ISS situation is m…

>but you're pulling the ackshully bullshit because you don't like the company that has done it. I wonder if you, like me, have taken a vacation to travel half-way across the United States to watch a SpaceX launch, or had discussions with former heads of NASA as far back as 2011 about what the company meant/means for manned spaceflight. I wonder if you grew up around astronauts or knew people who died on Columbia. Thi…

I will repeat myself, you wouldn't be doing this pedantic nitpicking bullshit with the word 'rescue' in any other context.
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