Recent comments in /f/space

jrichard717 t1_jeau57d wrote

Reply to comment by banduraj in Investing in Space: Boeing’s got to get going by cnbc_official

Me too. I know there is a lot of "Boeing bad" in all of Reddit, but it would have been very beneficial to have them actually be a solid competitor to SpaceX which currently holds a near monopoly in space. Having a competitor in this case is a good thing because it would force both companies to be on their toes and find new ways to incentivize.

4

cnbc_official OP t1_jeaols7 wrote

Reply to Investing in Space: Boeing’s got to get going by cnbc_official

From reporter Michael Sheetz:

“Boeing pushed back the flight schedule of its Starliner capsule by several months, the company said on a conference call with reporters Wednesday."

That sentence holds true this week – but the problem is, I wrote it five years ago.

At the time, Boeing and SpaceX were seen as neck-and-neck in a race to finish development of their respective crewed spacecraft and be the first to fly NASA astronauts. Even then, each company had faced its share of delays, but NASA estimated flight tests were months apart. Until they weren’t.

Fast forward to the present. Boeing and SpaceX each won contracts to fly six operational missions with astronauts. The latter is poised to finish nearly all of its six before the former even flies a crewed demo mission.

Read more: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/03/30/investing-in-space-boeings-got-to-get-going.html

16

jcampbelly t1_jeam8b2 wrote

Reply to comment by Andromeda321 in Gaia discovers a new family of black holes: astronomers studied the orbits of stars and noticed that some of them wobbled on the sky, as if they were gravitationally influenced by massive objects. No light could be found using telescopes, leaving only one possibility: black holes. by Andromeda321

Congrats and thanks! A very interesting read. And the Gaia mission is so damn cool. A compass and map to inform and recommend potential other missions. The Sagan Summer Workshop on Gaia was very accessible: https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLIbTYGsIVYti7z5CHoiS5BJlT11gHUtgt

Perhaps it's just a small black hole in a small solar system that eventually devoured up everything in its neighborhood, leaving nothing to accelerate from its polar jets. You'd expect a black hole formation to be violent and leave remnants, but if it happened so long ago that the remnants were all eventually devoured or flung off, it might just be alone in dark. Is the companion very old?

Does the Gaia data show it having a trajectory moving with the galaxy or "through" it? Perhaps it happened elsewhere and the remnants were left behind in some ejection event that stripped the system of its lighter elements and sent the more massive objects tumbling through the galaxy.

I love how the Gaia data just keeps building on itself. And the next release is expected to dump something like 10,000 exoplanet candidates. That's huge...

2