stemmisc

While waiting around for the upcoming Starship launch, I was going back and browsing through the long list of Falcon 9 launches to see what sorts of interesting non-Starlink missions had been launched in the past.

This reminded me that there were quite a few rideshare launches over the years, where a single Falcon 9 launched a whole bunch of small payloads and missions together in a single launch.

Back when these rideshares missions were launched, I never paid too much attention to what the actual payloads and missions were, at the time, and figured I'd look into it later on.

Anyway, just wondering, if maybe any of you actually paid attention to any of these, or know a lot about any of th

I noticed that there are a couple threads made recently from people who saw Elon's recent podcast episode on JRE where he hinted at the next roadster being able to "fly".

Presumably people assume this must be fake or some nonsense as they are imagining some literal "flying car" from the Jetsons or something with wings or propellers or something like that.

But, this is not what he is actually hinting at. He's hinting at something he has mentioned on numerous occasions (in more detail) in the past few years, of making use of the cold-gas control thruster systems used on SpaceX rockets/spacecraft, by putting a version of those into the next roadster, likely using compressed air in auto-refil

Let's say for the sake of the argument we end up feeling nearly certain that the stuff they just found on Mars really did come from life on Mars and not some non-biological explanation:

The next most important question after that seems like it should be about what the rough odds are that it got there from something hitting earth (a big impact or something) and then hitting Mars and transferring it to Mars (or, the other way around, of life originating there and getting transferred in that way to Earth), or life starting on some 3rd planetary body elsewhere in the universe and then getting transferred by asteroid/fragments/impacts of some kind to both Earth and Mars from the same common star

I know people were already starting to wonder about this sort of thing a bit even before the U.S. strikes on Fordow happened, and then we ended up hitting it ourselves, and now the topic seems to have fallen mostly into the rear-view mirror in the aftermath, but, I'm still curious about it, in regards to years to come.

With the Iran situation, Israel seemed to quickly get full control over the skies of most of Iran, or at least the western half of it, from what I understand. But in spite of that, it seemed they couldn't take full advantage of it, because they didn't have any planes that could drop the really heavy duty MOP (like the GBU 57) bunker busters that are supposed to be able to h

Seems like the severity of the vibrations endured by Starship during the ascent burns have been the underlying cause of the problems that occurred downstream of that. I.e. leaks causing ship to have a fire/explosion; spin out of control, etc, but the leaks being caused by the severity of the vibrations that ripped things loose, etc.

Given unlimited time, eventually SpaceX can probably solve pretty much anything, and not just bandaid style, but in a more pure, genuine underlying type of way.

But, the schedule is tight and the clock is ticking and there are some things they obviously want to be able to get to working and testing ASAP, without necessarily wanting to have to wait however many

So, the basic idea would be, for high speed inter-city travel in boring tunnels (as opposed to lower speed intra-city usage) maybe you have a high speed train that is just a series of flat platforms that cars drive onto and sit their cars upon, with the one at the front having a cone shaped windbreaker pointing forwards at its front end, and a long train of flat platforms behind it. And you have it where people aren't able to manually drive onto the platforms, rather, to get on it, you go to the "staging" area and you have to put your car in "train usage mode", this way humans can't drive incorrectly onto the platforms, or park halfway up and leave half the car-platforms unavailable in fron

I've seen the movie lists on wikipedia of films that were shot on VistaVision as well as the various 65/70mm formats (Todd; Ultra-Panavision; Super-Panavision)

That said, the number of other non-standard formats, techniques, and types of actual physical film (regardless of size of the frame) could vary significantly, and there are presumably a bunch of other movies besides just the VistaVision and Ultra/Super-Panavision ones that either use larger than normal frame surface area, or used a combination of unusually fine-grain film with really sharp lenses, good post processing, etc, to attain unusually good image quality.

That said, when watching these at home now, I guess a major factor is

Usually the first thing everyone brings up is blowing a nuke up in front of the asteroid, and hitting the asteroid with just the photon pressure and plasma of the nuclear explosion, the soft "cushion" of which presses "gently" enough against it to slow it enough to push it off course without breaking the asteroid up.

But, I wonder if there might be any other interesting methods.

For example, could you fill the payload bay of a rocket with a bunch of big, compressed pieces of foam, and hit it with a barrage of foam balls, without breaking it up (maybe a small amount of tiny rocks would get rubbed off the foam-facing surface, but nothing too big?)

Also, what about spraying certain types of

I was looking around at topographical maps and 3d renderings of the Baltoro Glacier and Concordia, that runs down the middle/next to some of the tallest peaks of the Karakorams, i.e. K2, Broad Peak, and the Gasherbrums, which are clustered pretty near each other.

I got curious and started looking to see what some shorter peaks were that would give a great, unobstructed views of these taller, more famous 8-thousanders or high-7-thousanders that are near them.

One peak in particular that stood out in this way was a "small" little 6,010 meter peak called "Mitre Peak", situated just perfectly, on the inner edge of the opposing side of the Baltoro Glacier (which should give it an even better vi

Denali is really high north, and is far enough inland that it gets crazy cold in the winter, despite "only" being 20,000 feet tall. I would assume it had gotten below -100 without windchill on numerous occasions, although I don't think it's ever been formally measured as such. One of the books written about climbing it was titled "Minus 148 Degrees" (Fahrenheit) in reference to the windchill-converted temps the climbers faced on it.

K2 and Nanga Parbat are also famous for getting insanely cold in the winter.

I sometimes check the weather-station temperatures on these mountains during January, and it's pretty common to see bot of them reporting temperatures in the -80s (that's without win

I wonder if the hot-staging method might be a significant part of what is causing problems for the upperstage. Originally there was more concern about what it would do to the top of the 1st stage. But that seems more robust and easier to deal with, and seems like the bottom of the upperstage is probably the more vulnerable and tricky part to deal with, during hot-staging. Even with the hotstage ring providing a tiny bit of gap, and vents for the exhaust to shoot diagonally out sideways, presumably there is still quite a bit of pressure spiking, turbulent forces, vibrations, etc, doing stuff to the bottom of the upperstage, during hot-staging. I guess maybe Elon's thinking with it is that

There is a huge, seemingly totally uncontrolled fire in the area near JPL, from what I can tell, that has been sweeping down with the strong winds from the foothills down into the northern part of the cities below the foothills (JPL is in that general area).

Have there been any planes dropping water or that orange fire-retardant stuff on JPL or the area around it?

Jet Propulsion Laboratory is one of the most important centers in the country for NASA's science missions in space (some of the most famous flagship missions you are all probably familiar with the names of were worked on in large part at JPL)

(also, condolences to anyone who lost their homes in the area) :(

Seems like the earliest mammals may have already existed before even Pangaea broke up, or around roughly the same time period. And way before North America broke off from Europe or South America broke off from Africa.

Now, unfortunately all of these continental splits happened before the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs hit, so, presumably a lot of mammal species also went extinct during that (obviously some survived, thus us existing), but maybe that asteroid wiped out what otherwise would've been some notable examples of it (or not. Not sure).

Anyway, yea just curious if there are any interesting known cases in biology of animals that still exist, where the species got split apart f