Space stuff
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i’ve had ties to JSC/NASA my whole life. as indicated by my forum name.
“you mean not every kid grew up playing on Guppies & re-entry pods?”. -BarHoot
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A wonderful gift for the space nerd in your life. An old National Geographic book called Our Universe is probably what ignited my lifelong obsession with space. This new book about JWST could provide similar inspiration for a younger generation.
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Just gonna put this right here. Many long days and nights to make this happen; tired but really stoked.
https://x.com/JeffBezos/status/1872824935732916265
Edit to add a link with more context but no video
https://x.com/davill/status/1872826008774041719 -
@pechelman this is awesome. Thanks for sharing with us
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Thanks for those words @Giles. I just watched the replay before posting this and also got a little teary. I was so focused on my systems and capturing data I didn't even really get to watch much.
That's a different support room from where I sat, but it looks very similar. Ours was off of the video feed circuit so we didn't get uniforms to wear.
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Incredible. Much congratulations. There are few more meaningful endeavors for humanity than space exploration.
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And sorry to bring a negative to this thread. But for fucks sake, this use of lack of clarity is pitiful, or is it unwoke to say what actually happened....
"Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today's flight test to better understand root cause," SpaceX posted on X."
"OK face up to it - you're useless but generally pretty honest and straightforward . . . it's a rare combination of qualities that I have come to admire in you" - Geo 2011
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@Giles "One of our more resource intensive performance vectors..." Quote from the Simpsons parody of the military, wish I knew which episode...
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@Giles space is really hard. They may not know exactly what happened yet, but I agree with you and I despise the dumbing down or obfuscation of information with things like "rapid unscheduled disassembly" phrasing. Just be up front; we don't know yet and will get back when we know.
But today's SpaceX launch was incredible. Even more incredible was this footage of the second stage breaking up over t&c
https://x.com/deankolson87/status/1880026759133032662 -
Beautiful @pechelman !
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Apologies in advance for any existential dread this creates, but here is a to-scale rendering of the solar system if the Moon were 1 pixel: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
If we consider the solar system to include the sun’s gravitational influence all the way out to the farthest suspected reaches of the Oort Cloud, I think the diameter would be something like 6 light years. This is probably the most generous estimate as to the size of the solar system, as you could define the boundary to end at the heliosphere instead. The diameter of the Milky Way galaxy is something like 100,000 light years. So the most generous sizing of our solar system relative to (divided by) a fairly conservative sizing of the galaxy is 0.00006 or 0.006% of the galaxy’s width if I’ve done my math correctly.
Then the closest major galaxy, Andromeda, is 2.5 million light years away, and the observable universe has a diameter of 93 billion light years. To me the preponderance of evidence suggests that the universe continues infinitely beyond the boundary of this observable universe.
So that’s space. We are less than a speck in it.
What about time?
The universe is thought to be 13.8 billion years old. Most cosmologists believe that the universe will expand infinitely and ultimately reach maximum entropy and conditions where star formation is no longer possible, stars will burn out, and even black holes will evaporate. It will become impossible for life to exist. This will play out over 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years, and the dead universe will as far as we can tell continue in this state infinitely. The conditions where life is possible will asymptotically approach non existence over this time scale.
All this to say, we occupy a place in time in space that is beyond infinitesimal and we should embrace this with gratitude.
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Here is a counterintuitive fact. The coldest known place in the solar system is very close to home, on our moon, at 26 kelvins: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hermite_(crater)
When you consider how close that is to the sun relative to the size of the solar system that is very surprising. At least to me.
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