The Astronomy Thread

My brother-in-law just got laid off from JPL because Congress is so deadlocked that they haven't made appropriations for NASA's 2024 budget yet. Lack of guidance is basically shitcanning the entire Mars sample return mission.

So I've been looking into Wolfram physics, and one of the core concepts is that space and time are discreet, so tiny chunks of both. Update order is semi random and there's a finite number of threads of the universe.

Relativity still works though, so near a rotating event horizon you get space very stretched out and time slowed from an outside observer. This immediately made me think of the variable deltatime problem in videogame physics.

When the update step time of games change, the curvature of game accelerations can vary quite a lot from a pure non discreet curve. As an example, you could stand on the docks in Qeynos in everquest 2 facing the sea, spin your camera towards town and jump, and because of all the texture and normal map loading as it loads up the town, you'd get a huge deltatime causing your jump impulse to be huge. You could jump about 20 or 30 feet this way.

This same problem would affect gravity in wolfram physics near a rapidly spinning event horizon. This might stretch out the curve that is normally distance squared for gravitation if the initial gravitational impulse determines the curvature of the spacetime drag.

Doesn't explain wide binaries though.

Aaron said:

What was the key design feature that was never used? The ability to be used rapidly to launch commercial and military satellites?

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I assume he's talking about the rapid recovery of a satellite from orbit - reference mission 3b.

Really good video on it:


I wish i could find it, someone had an excellent long-form critique of NASA and everything post-Apollo. Their biggest complaint was the space stations because the constant servicing missions meant essentially nothing else could be really worked on.

Big Phoenix said:

You really cant put into words how utterly retarded the people in charge of NASA and the politicians associated with it have been. Imagine how America/Humanity would look today if we simply kept usign Saturn Vs for 5 decades.

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In this case it's the politicians. They just can't get off their assess enough to tell NASA how much money they do or don't have to work with.

Captain Suave said:

In this case it's the politicians. They just can't get off their assess enough to tell NASA how much money they do or don't have to work with.

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It's always the politicians, it's not that they can't, it's that they want this to happen to stir up people. The agencies that are generally liked such as NASA or the National Parks always are cut first. You never see massive layoffs at the IRS or Homeland Security announced.

I would consider the administration level in NASA to be a politician as well. I'd say there's a very good chance they could have gotten creative with their budget, but the goal was to get a headline that gets people upset, who cares about the people it impacts or how it actually sets things back.

Turned out a good use of the shuttle was going and fixing shit in orbit that had been launched.

Furry said:

The big bang theory is the result of a century of mathematicians sniffing their own farts. A whole shitload of stuff makes no sense if you accept the universal truth that red shift = moving away. It's far more logical and simpler to say that light redshifts as it travels immense distances in the universe. It gets rid of the need for dark matter and all sorts of other mumbo jumbo like space expanding, and explains a lot of stuff that the big bang theory just can't account for, like the abundance of lithium.

Sure, it opens up lots of new questions of its own, like how does new hydrogen get created in a now infinite universe, or why would light naturally lose energy as it travels, but I'm okay with not knowing to answers to things like this, rather than not knowing the answer to lots of space magic necessitated by overly complex mathematical calculations that don't even match observable reality.

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I watched a vid awhile back that goes over the dozen or so predictions the big bang makes. Over the years I believe it said all of them but one have been falsified. The only thing it gets right is the observed amount of lithium I think.

You guys don't understand academia at all if you think physicists wouldn't literally murder each other for an opportunity to prove the Standard Model and big bang theory wrong. They'd win all the Nobel prizes for the next century and be immortally famous.

The problem is, warts and all that shit really is the best explanation we have for the data we have. I don't know what you watched, but I can guarantee none of that is "falsified" and whoever produced it either is misrepresenting nuance or just wrong.

Deuterium? Haha I know it got one right! Out of a dozen or so

meStevo said:

Finally got around to working on my LEGO Saturn V... it's wild how much goes into this stuff. This is the top of the second stage.

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My father in law found some newspapers from the Apollo 11 landing, so going to mount it w/ the stages apart on the wall along w/ those newspapers framed.

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The Saturn V was a pretty cool build for the most part, but I found it to be a little repetitive at times (I guess that makes sense based on the structure).

Breaking it apart into stages is pretty cool, I think I'm going to do that with mine. I'm going to use command strips though.

That etsy kit looks a little superior, but if you have a 3d printer available, it appears you can maybe get something similar:


One word of warning: I've had mine sitting in my office windowsill temporarily since I've moved and the parts have already started to discolor from the UV exposure. If you'll be putting it in a room that get some natural light, you might want to install some protective film: