The Astronomy Thread

Cad I think energy is the next hurdle, I completely agree with your desire for better propulsion but it seems without overcoming power generation and storage the best engines won't fix what you want out of them.

Maybe I'm wrong and miniaturized fission plants are super great already?

Luxembourg's space mining FAQ.

Did you know ? - Space resources / Luxembourg

Space X stuck another landing on the barge ship.
Some interesting stuff on getting the sat into the correct orbit.
THAICOM 8 | SpaceX

So here is a spend up PoV of the stage doing its tumble and descent into landing, pretty incredible. I found it to be a cool exercise to watch this a few times trying to find the location of the drone ship against the cloud pattern as the stage descends. There is enough cloud cover to identify which clouds the drone ship is between at a reasonably far distance. 27:44 of the second link is the real time webcast of the descent.

Fucking cool man.

I'm fairly certain that flat earth society was formed to troll before the widespread internet became a thing.

It's like the /r/shittyaskscience of the 70's and 80's.

Tuco_sl said:

Flat Earth Society is the best combination of conspiracy theorists, morons and educated trolls anywhere. It's the best example of Poe's law I've ever seen.

Click to expand...

Best part is "where is the amateur footage of this".

Iannis_sl said:

I'm fairly certain that flat earth society was formed to troll before the widespread internet became a thing.

It's like the /r/shittyaskscience of the 70's and 80's.

Click to expand...

It was founded for that, but it fell foul of whatever the active application of Poe's Law is called - it got taken over by true believers (like /pol/ started out asironicracism and is now just an offsite subforum of Stormfront, for example)

Or DID it?

The joke isn't funny if it's obviously a joke.

Tuco, this is a pretty interesting piece about a possible asteroid mining option.

How We Want to Turn Asteroids Into Spacecraft - Made In Space - Medium

So this is one of the best videos I've ever seen discussing time, human interaction with it, and scaling it up to intergalactic motion. Anyways, this is worth a watch, the finale that visualizes and discusses (not to scale) our movement is the most well done presentation I've seen to date. This is a hard topic to present to someone without them having a decent knowledge base to work from, which makes this video standout.

I too watched that today and thought it was great. Considered posting it to facebook but knew no one would dedicate the 20 minutes.