The Astronomy Thread
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pharmakos
soʞɐɯɹɐɥd
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This was great.
I had never heard of the idea of child universes and how intelligent life could play the part of the reproduction system for them. Pretty neat concept.
Qhue
Trump's Staff
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The Battle Over a Telescope on Hawaii's Sacred Mountain Is Just Beginning
Native Hawaiians are protesting the construction of the Thirty Meter Telescope on Mauna Kea. Where do we go from here?
www.vice.com
This is the world we live in now. A process was followed, there was a court charge that the process was not inclusive enough and subsequent redress was followed. Compromises were made and in the end we still have a bunch of people who are all butt hurt that 5 out of 11000 acres in a completely inhospitable desert landscape is going to be used for science instead of nothing.
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spronk
FPS noob
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Crab Nebula blasts Earth with highest-energy photons ever recorded
The super energetic gamma rays originated thousands of light-years away in the Crab Nebula, and scientists still aren't exactly sure what generated them.
www.astronomy.com
Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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In more somewhat related news, Nasa and SpaceX are going to be working together on developing the capability for in-orrbit refueling. This may be the first sign of any overt interest Nasa has in the Starhopper.
NASA agrees to work with SpaceX on orbital refueling technology
"The civil servants at Marshall and at Glenn are very talented in this area."
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Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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The first space mission of the starhopper should be hop as many people in congress, NASA and the ULA who have been slowing down space progress for the last two decades into space.In more somewhat related news, Nasa and SpaceX are going to be working together on developing the capability for in-orrbit refueling. This may be the first sign of any overt interest Nasa has in the Starhopper.
NASA agrees to work with SpaceX on orbital refueling technology
"The civil servants at Marshall and at Glenn are very talented in this area."arstechnica.com
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Throw Blue Origin in there too. They get a lot of support that might otherwise go to SpaceX, and one of those two companies actually has 50ish launches to orbit, and the other has zero.
Someone posted a good video comparing rocket engines recently, and SpaceX's raptor is *amazing*. Unlike other 'coming soon' engines in that video, the Raptor has actually lifted something big off the ground. Just 60 meters, but still. Good things are coming.
Blue Origin might indeed build something groundbreaking in a few years, but until they do, I rate them as 'not helping'.
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Gotta keep Blue Origin in the mix because this is going to be a long journey, and long term that company has better odds of staying afloat due to Bezos' money bin size. Great to have competition for SpaceX.
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Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Not much, around 29 million from what I could find on Wikipedia. I could have sworn that the airforce paid them some money for or toward their engine they've been developing but i didn't see it there. I do keep seeing them listed as one of the companies competing for funding from the air force and/or NASA, though they haven't actually launched an orbital rocket or (I think) actually built a proven orbital class rocket engine. They were also causing trouble for SpaceX when SpaceX wanted to lease one of the rocket launch sites in Florida.
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Cybsled
Avatar of War Slayer
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Not just any launch site. It was the Apollo program launch pad and an extremely long term lease of the platform. Bezos is heavy duty into the Apollo program (a number of years back, he salvaged a saturn engine from the Atlantic) and really wanted that pad.
Mudcrush Durtfeet
Hungry Ogre
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Maybe this will have some results.
If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams at Us, We Now Have a Way to Detect Them
Breakthrough Listen, the most extensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program in history, announced that its team will begin looking for new signs of alien technology using the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona.
If Aliens Are Flashing Laser Beams at Us, We Now Have a Way to Detect Them
Breakthrough Listen, the most extensive Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) program in history, announced that its team will begin looking for new signs of alien technology using the Very Energetic Radiation Imaging Telescope Array System (VERITAS) at the Fred Lawrence Whipple Observatory in Amado, Arizona.
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BrutulTM
Good, bad, I'm the guy with the gun.
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I agree. If we're going to put the future of space travel in the hands of somewhat mentally unstable genius zillionaires, I'd rather not put all the eggs in one basket.
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Tuco
I got Tuco'd!
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This is an interesting tweet. I don't know what the situation with SpaceX was at the time, but SpaceX is definitely a stand-out corporation that has advanced the state of space exploration beyond the typical coattail riding of world-wide technological improvement. If any number of problems happened and we take Musk at his word, mankind's exploration of space could have been set back decades
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