The Astronomy Thread
- Thread starter Araxen
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Guest, it's time once again for the massively important and exciting FoH Asshat Tournament!
Go here and give us your nominations!Who's been the biggest Asshat in the last year? Give us your worst ones!
pharmakos
soʞɐɯɹɐɥd
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Ask Astro: Does our Oort Cloud overlap with Alpha Centauri’s?
The Oort Cloud begins about 2,000 to 5,000 AU from the Sun and stretches to about 10,000 to 100,000 AU (0.16 to 1.6 light-years), according to NASA. But keep in mind this outer boundary is pretty nebulous, so there is no hard line where the Oort Cloud ends.
astronomy.com
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Sanrith Descartes
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Sanrith Descartes
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BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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Sanrith Descartes
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As my cousin who works on flight simulation has put it, landing these boosters "Is like trying to balance a burning pencil on the tip of your finger... in a hurricane." Fucking amazing that it works at all.
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Sanrith Descartes
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Watching that shit really shows you that hiring people because their IQ is above 150 is more important than their skin color or orientation.
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Big Phoenix
Pronouns: zie/zhem/zer
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Want a real dose of clown world? NASA had working prototypes of this tech back in the mid 90s;NASA engineers watching those videos be like...
McDonnell Douglas DC-X - Wikipedia
Of course the illumined galaxy brains that run NASA canceled it in favor of a retarded design that would never fly in any form.
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Sanrith Descartes
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Want a real dose of clown world? NASA had working prototypes of this tech back in the mid 90s;
McDonnell Douglas DC-X - Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org
Its like the current NASA brain trust has regressed intellectually about 50 years.
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Want a real dose of clown world? NASA had working prototypes of this tech back in the mid 90s;
McDonnell Douglas DC-X - Wikipedia
Of course the illumined galaxy brains that run NASA canceled it in favor of a retarded design that would never fly in any form.
It was a single stage to orbit craft. It is barely possible (in theory) to build such a thing, but the payload is miniscule. Cancelling it was a good idea. The prototype was one third scale and completely unable to reach orbit. It did verify that you could build it and it would lift off and not explode.
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Lambourne
Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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Because the way physics works, rockets actually get more efficient the larger they get. There was a serious proposal for a reusable SSTO craft in the 70s that was basically a giant cone 96 feet across that could lift 50 tons to orbit and return to land vertically using aerodynamic drag and jet engines for touchdown. It would be unmanned or optionally have a detachable, shuttle-like crew module on top. It'd be similar in total mass to the Saturn V.
It'd have been huge but SpaceX Starship is going to be almost twice as heavy.
It'd have been huge but SpaceX Starship is going to be almost twice as heavy.
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Big Phoenix
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Good thing they canceled it and dumped a billion dollars into the X-32 which never even produced a prototype at all.
Where would we be today if that had gotten a billion dollars of funding in the mid 90s instead?
Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Maybe we'd have a pitifully low payload to LEO SSTO spacecraft. I kinda doubt it, though. Probably we'd have another 20billion boondoggle like the SLS.
Might have caused SpaceX not to exist which certainly would not be a plus.
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
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Big Phoenix
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Yeah dumping resources into a concept thats proven to be the future of spaceflight 30 years ago would have been a totally bad choice over the concept that never made it to the prototype stage.