Live rocket launch in 10mins here

 

http://www.spacex.com/webcast/

Absolutely incredible these massive telescopes.

 

https://www.unilad.com/technology/nasa/mind-blowing-animation-shows-speed-of-international-space-station-248852-20231022

 

Love a straight talker I do. Bint commentating for Spacex on the catastrophic explosion of their Starship, blowing it to smithereens.

"A rapid, unscheduled disassembly". FFS 

🙁

 

On 25/01/2024 at 20:32, Cheese said:

🙁

 

Shot down by a Houthi missile. Bastards! 

In all seriousness though - this is very sad. As a species we're capable of some amazing things when we're not trying to blow each other up! 

In a quirk, wasn't the space race started by the two superpowers almost as a tit-for-tat battle in the cold war?

If times were completely peaceful, would space exploration have happened as quickly?

2 hours ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

In a quirk, wasn't the space race started by the two superpowers almost as a tit-for-tat battle in the cold war?

If times were completely peaceful, would space exploration have happened as quickly?

No, the very fact rocket technology developed from missile inventions shows that. 
f we didn’t have the need to blow each other to bits we would never have realised that they could also be used to escape earth’s gravity. 

Think a few German scientists working on weapons in ww2 were recruited by America for the space program 

Which is pretty much what I said!

2 minutes ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

Which is pretty much what I said!

Well to be fair , you asked a question and it was a subject I did a project on in 4th year so thought I’d enlighten you with my knowledge on the subject 😄

3 hours ago, Tonge moor green jacket said:

In a quirk, wasn't the space race started by the two superpowers almost as a tit-for-tat battle in the cold war?

If times were completely peaceful, would space exploration have happened as quickly?

Read something in the past where it was Germany and the Nazi's who initially led the space race

Then once it was clear they were losing the war the US and Russis had a race to capture as many German rocket experts as they could and make the ones they caught work for them

And once the war ended the race was on to get into space and land on the moon

17 hours ago, Zico said:

Read something in the past where it was Germany and the Nazi's who initially led the space race

Then once it was clear they were losing the war the US and Russis had a race to capture as many German rocket experts as they could and make the ones they caught work for them

And once the war ended the race was on to get into space and land on the moon

Absolutely correct. 

The point being, as stated previously, that the space race was started on the back of military action and development. Doesn't matter who those protagonists were, just that it happened.

Once in space, there was a feeling of military advantage too

The same question: without the conflict and later cold war, would it have proliferated so quickly?

Edited January 28, 20242 yr by Tonge moor green jacket

 

 

 

Talking to the bloke who works for me in Scotland the other day

His BiL was part of the team that designed the Mid-Infrared Instrument (MIRI) part of The James Webb Telescope. Once that was done and the telescope was launched he became part of the team that analyses the images that are coming back. It's absolutely amazing what they can now see. Have to admit that he lost me when trying to explain how so many previous theories about the other galaxies that are out there have been blown apart as the James Webb can show how much light "bends" and galaxies are bigger/smaller, nearer/further apart, newer/older, etc

One of his BiL's "Bolt-On" jobs is to monitor the temperature of the MIRI. They have to keep it at something like -260degC with only a small degree of variation

Just blows my mind that he does that from a room in a building in Baltimore that is a million miles away from the telescope. A million miles away!! 

Mind boggling stuff this.

 

It all makes my head fall off, the numbers/sizes are so big, it's just too difficult to comprehend

6 minutes ago, Sweep said:

It all makes my head fall off, the numbers/sizes are so big, it's just too difficult to comprehend

We are little more than specks of dust.

This is extraordinary footage. A re-entry plasma field caught on camera for the first time ever.

 

https://news.sky.com/story/amp/giant-spacex-rocket-goes-further-than-ever-before-after-successful-launch-13094488

Another bit of footage from launch.

Bastard big machines.

On 21/02/2024 at 11:56, bolty58 said:

We are little more than specks of dust.

We are little more than specks of dust on a speck of dust then.

On 14/03/2024 at 16:26, Cheese said:

This is extraordinary footage. A re-entry plasma field caught on camera for the first time ever.

 

Was it reversing in at first ?

Interesting thread which kind of brings home just how close they came to other disasters on the space shuttle. Basically rode their luck from the first flight to the last.

Frozen piss!

That's an Icepop for Little Whitney 

2 hours ago, gonzo said:

That's an Icepop for Little Whitney 

Not even you have videos of an astro golden shower 

Voyager 1. Astounding to me that they were able to send a fix for a dodgy chip over 15.1 billion miles (way beyond the extent our solar system), taking 22.5 hours to get there, which fixed it from sending back messages of garbled gibberish to understandable ones.

Headed off in 1977 and still expected to be transmitting for at least another year. No solar panels, just a 'long term' battery. There are/were some properly clever people about.

Keep your eyes out for Prof Nikku Madhusudhan in the news. 

He and his team at Cambridge have discovered an expo planet (K2-18b) that is within it's stars habitable zone and is potentially giving off bio-signals. 

He's estimating the odds of this proving to be due to life at about 50/50. They're just starting to analyse the data which they expect to have completed in about 6 months. 

Aliens in October would make winter a lot more interesting next year...... 😁