NASA needed the Russians and now SpaceX to keep costs down, but they don’t need them because they’re incapable of doing it themselves. They just wouldn’t have the bandwidth to do anything else which is not sustainable or ideal for scientific research.

However, SpaceX needs NASA to exist, which is a much more desperate need. SpaceX has no other cash flows besides NASA contracts that can sustain them, except maybe starlink, but that is still operating at a loss from analysis that I’ve seen. How would SpaceX survive without NASA? I would love to see you explain this.

Venus is getting a face lift. Always looking young.

I hope he witnisses the ladning of the people. So he couod feel the joy our forefathers felt when he landed on the moon and we saw it on the TV

I cant agree with this considering the internet was a pretty big change and happened within our lifetime. Automation, combined with robotics will allow us to refine the manual world we're still transitioning from. This would be near the same level of shift as electricity had on the world. instead of people using electricity to power things and create a lot of QoL improvements (also the destruction of certain industries) so will AI automation as it becomes more refined. Despite that, I do understand your POV. I just think what constitutes as "trash" really depends on the focus of society.

People collaborate in large constitutions today all thanks to the interconnected world we now live in for the last 25-30 years. People collaborated in the past, but it's not like they could submit findings and results, etc in a digital archive and discuss them remotely and have world wide information in the palm of their hands

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Spacex doesn’t need nasa to fly astronauts to space.

Nasa needs spacex (or Russia) to fly astronauts to space. (More than once every couple years at least and for less than a billion dollars per person)

Spacex NEEDED nasa for sure at one point but that point has come and gone. Nasa is a great partner but is no longer required.

"Talk on the street"? That's cute, but it's just something someone made up.

Yes there is, the business reason to create startship is to win even more lucrative NASA contracts. SpaceX is not a business, it’s a quasi government agency. SpaceX literally can not exist without NASA, they don’t release financials because it’s not public, but I’d be shocked if they didn’t get over 90% of their profits through NASA contracts.

SpaceX needs NASA far more than NASA needs them. The problem is that NASA is constrained through bureaucracy which makes going to space very expensive for them, so for them to do what SpaceX does would eat most of their budget. So they delegate that to SpaceX so they can allocate that budget to something more productive.

The best thing for NASA and the Space Force is to use SpaceX for the missions that need to be done that only they can do for now, while funding their competitors to help them grow, so they can also have the capabilities to do the same missions in the future. This will put massive downward pressure on SpaceX’s ability to use their position for leverage in the future and keep these corporate parasites in check.

20-30 years ago people couldn't listen to music wirelessly unless they had a portable cassette player, tape, and headphones. Today, you can have access to seemingly limitless music from around the world and wirelessly beam the audio to a pair of wireless earbuds that are about the size of a dime. 5 years ago, people couldn't ask an AI to code something for them and fix the errors, now it do all that, at the level of a flawed intermediate level programmer, nor has it reached its potential yet, minimalizing a job that normally takes time to do.

Although technology focuses more on refining, people mistake that and think the evolution of tech is minimal when it literally means technology quickly evolves.

I'm s firm believer in Murphy, since engineering was my thing. We now control enough energy to affect climate the slow way. We also control enough energy to really" affect the environment a lot more significantly and faster. We are an armed, aggressive, warlike species. Shrugs. I've been thinking about EMP and fobs and l5 since the early 70s. I'll lay any money someone has tungsten rods in orbit right now.

No humanity won't decide. Not educated enough, kept artificially divided, kept artificially poor. Nope. Not without significant and probably violent change. So as to the very original question....

Edit: Not gonna be a lot of space travel except military, science and industrial concerns.

> Kamen invented booster landing

Balancing ain't even half the problem.

Sun-impact trajectories take a lot of propellant. Burn 'em up on re-entry instead!

Again, to repeat what I said simply. Humanity will not decide to be ready for space colonization. Nothing I'm saying to you is in opposition except to say that we will never collectively decide to change society, society will change around what we do, don't do, or achieve, therefore there's equal potential of everything. instead of trying to label me things you could just accept it as an opinion, there's no need to get agitated. I'm not arguing with you over whether or not we will overcome anything we're dealing with, optimism has nothing to do with it. I'm saying we wont be in that mindset unless the wheels of general progress hit the ground rolling, which they're already doing.

Also, you're looking at the world in black and white if you think the question boils down to who bakes or drowns first. Climate change isn't about that, It's about a changing climate that threatens how we've become accustomed to the water and environments around us that we base our society on, and the animals/humans that will suffer for it. humanity can manage the changing climate and heat, but the strife this will bring is the danger. nevertheless, that doesn't stifle human progress until a nuke, asteroid, or EMP is dropped on our heads, until that happens, an impeding moon base or a breakthrough in technology is all that's keeping us from utilizing extraterrestrial space and what with this seemingly renewed space race and activity, we could be in the beginnings of that change. Humanity doesn't need to collectively change and do better no more than the early settlers and colonizers didn't need to work together to travel the sea or explore otherwise uncharted territory.

Just walked home under it. Wow it’s beautiful with that moon too

I was lucky enough to see them on my walk to the gym yesterday!

How is it looking out each day and seeing the build and launch site?

That is my hope as well.

Radius of a main sequence star is proportional to the mass of the star. If you know the radius, you can pretty accurately get the mass. (It depends some on age and metallicity too, but not that much, as long as it hasn't evolved to a red giant yet.)

Planets, on the other hand, don't follow the rule nearly as well, especially for gas giants. Jupiter and a brown dwarf 80x the mass of Jupiter both have the same radius.

It was a combination of the expense, a percieved victory over the Soviets, and Nixon wanting to end Kenney's legacy.

The discovery is very cool. I just dislike using "size" because it's unclear and dislike using "forbidden" because it sacrifices accuracy for sounding even cooler. An accurate headline that still sounds cool(ish) would be "Massive planet orbiting small red dwarf, an extreme mass ratio that challenges planet formation". I'm sure a professional could clean that up a bit without using the word "forbidden".

But it's still a very cool discovery.

By r^3 , sure, but if a star is 4x the radius, it's 64x the volume, so whether you meant "4x the size" meaning radius or "4x the size" meaning volume, the two are very different.

And the visual of the protomolecule leaving Venus is also hauntingly beautiful. God I love that show

And Astra… (looks at my stocks in ASTR and RKLB) please buy some launches from Rocket Lab and Astra.

So true 👍 There is so much out there, that is a mystery.

Was lucky to see them on 22 and 23 February. The only two cloudless days this month. No more clear weather expected soon. Now i just sadly look on the app at what the skies would look like if i could see them lol.