https://opennebula.io/

Their website speaks corporatese. Not immediately clear what their business model is.

My understanding is that the payload bay had to be accessible while stacking, so tank on the other side wouldn’t work.

Because no one does any actual engineering in space. At best you’re a technician running other people’s projects; at worst, you have to MacGyver something. But every ISS crew needs a medical specialist on it, and a backup specialist in case they need to work on their medical specialist. So it gives you the highest odds.

Now if you wanted to work at JPL designing probes, that’s a different story. But you’re not going to space.

The great red spot is so fascinating. It’s a vortex that has been spinning for hundreds of years. Like someone pushed a giant canoe paddle through Jupiter and the whorls, larger than the earth, just keep turning. You look at this and go: holy fuck there’s a lot of energy in this system.

Spain is part of the ESA. If you have citizenship there, there’s a nearly-zero (but not actually zero) possibility of getting into their astronaut selection class. But more likely SpaceX starts taking passengers and the whole question is moot.

I decided that my own path was also unlikely, but I chose a field of study that would take me to some pretty fun places on Earth. Can’t explore Mars, so might as well do the high arctic, the Atacama desert, etc. :)

Not true, really, presuming we’re talking about “working for a space agency” versus “becoming an astronaut”. There are at least 100x more opportunities if you’re willing to sit in a desk and review regulations for a living – but at a space agency.

Really, the minimum barrier is being good enough to get into a STEM focused undergrad program, and qualifying for student loans. Assuming you make it through and are smart enough, grad school is typically wholly funded by the universities (or their funding agencies). Which means the barrier of requiring wealth was already passed.

Source: I made it to grad school and I am from a farming family that went bankrupt when I was a teenager.

I don’t think melting is the issue here. I think it literally disintegrates at those speeds. Like, this is Mass Effect mass driver level of impact with the atmosphere.

For reference, RICK ROBINSON’S FIRST LAW OF SPACE COMBAT: “An object impacting at 3 km/sec delivers kinetic energy equal to its mass in TNT.”

Assuming the lid is travelling 55km/s, it’s well beyond that point. The atmosphere it’s travelling through is basically a solid at that speed. Even if it isn’t heating due to the friction (and waiting for heat flow), it is heating due to the compressive force of being slammed into the atmosphere. It’s very likely the whole thing vaporized.

But I could be wrong, and some alien SOB is going to have a bad day when the manhole cover slams into their ship in interstellar space.

This is like some sort of black mirror ad

Yeah, but like, the shuttle was cool man.

In retrospect, it wasn’t the best idea, but it’s probably the most complicated flying brick anyone has ever conceived and it somehow worked, most of the time.

But imagine you could go back and redesign it. Payload bay doesn’t have to fit keyhole satellites. Don’t have to use SRBs as a jobs program for ICBM contractors. They use a fuel that isn’t as nasty to handle as hydrogen. It gets stacked vertically. Oh wait – I just designed Starship, minus the reusable booster.

You can’t tell me what to — oh, a pretty cat!

Nature is lit

Hijacking.

I actually went through the Canadian Space Agency’s astronaut application a few years ago. Made it through the initial screening and into medical certifications. Got downselected where there were about 300 candidates remaining for two positions. But I got to see a little of the process. Here are some specifics items to add to the list, some of which will be relevant if you’re trying to support your child in their dreams (and have the resources to do it).

(1) 20/20 vision. They were allowing people who had laser surgery to correct to 20/20, or people who could be corrected. (2) Be a pilot of any kind whatsoever – even a crop duster – but ideally military. Kids can do air cadets, or take gliding lessons or similar.
(3) Have SCUBA certifications.
(4) Have radio certifications (even HAM radio works, but more advanced is better).
(5) Speak at least one other language that is used in one of the world’s space agencies – two are better. Russian and Japanese/French would be a good choice. Russian may fall down the list of relevance soon.
(6) Have experience in an “operational environment” – basically, are you going to go crazy cooped up in the space station with only a few people for months? For kids this might mean backcountry camping trips. For adults, this often means being deployed somewhere, in a military or similar context.
(7) Have a medical degree, preferentially, but any STEM Ph.D. will probably work. This means making sure you select courses in school that lead that direction.

I went to grad school for planetary science – naively thinking that I could outcompete all the people dreaming of the same thing. Make sure you have a fallback plan – something you can pivot to – when it doesn’t pan out :)

That said, all of this may become entirely irrelevant very quickly if Starship starts ferrying a hundred people to space every day.

Damn, too early of a release eh?

Alright. I’m a huge supporter of Ukraine here. But the west has been collectively providing Ukraine with a metric fucktonne of weapons. Russia is clearly the aggressor, at fault, and fucking evil. But if we can send weapons to Ukraine, Russia acquiring weapons elsewhere is probably fair game. That doesn’t mean we can’t apply economic or political pressure.

In many ways, this war dragging on for a long time is actually in Chinese interests, as far as I can tell. It makes the west war-weary making it less likely we can sustain another conflict should China decide to engage over Taiwan or similar. And it increases Russian reliance on China in the longer term. The only thing China is likely unhappy about here is NK’s increasingly large role (moving into Russian sphere of influence).

But unless we’re willing to actually sanction China, the west will just complain and do nothing.

If the device was a nuclear clock in the same reference frame, maybe.

It is price fixing with an intermediary (who produces the AI model).

https://65daysofstatic.bandcamp.com/ – their catalogue is quite impressive though :)

“read as” is doing a lot of heavy lifting. Most scholars say they were written well after the fact (decades to generations after), after a bunch of oral tradition related changes crept in. Plus, they were sort of down selected from a much larger corpus.

So this is just a narrative technique rather than an actual eyewitness account.

It’s basically a zombie death cult. This powerful necromancer has to die to become a lich, releasing his soul into a phylactery which happens to be the souls of his believers (and making it really hard to destroy his phylactery). Then his believers are promised that they will come back as undead, as a reward for carrying a part of this “holy ghost” phylactery. What a racket.

Much wiring, great advice 👍