The (new) Space Thread 🌌📡🔭🗿🛸🤖
 

Looks like we crashed out in the last space thread.

Cool rocket launch today! Space is cool get me out of here!

The approaching comets include:

C/2025 A6 (Lemmon), closest to Earth on October 21, 2025
C/2025 K1 (Atlas), closest to Earth on November 24-25, 2025
3I/Atlas, the 3rd interstellar object discovered, closest to Earth on December 18-19, 2025
24P/Schanmasse, closest to Earth on January 4, 2026
C/2024 E1 (Wierzchos), closest to Earth on February 17, 2026
https://earthsky.org/space/5-bright-...rts-2025-2026/

Billionaires only wanna go to space because guillotines require (local) gravity to function.

starship is a sad boondoggle. That guy from SpaceX is lucky he never lost control of the narrative with respect to him being unable to deliver us to the Moon on time as promised. I admittedly don't know a huge amount about the program's progress, and I have heard the Artemis timeline was bungled in more than 1 way, but fact is the rocket does not exist after 10 years and it was supposed to be fully ready for NASA use when, 2 years ago? That's what the taxpayer paid the guy for, anyhow. Where's the beef?

Btw, that guy's been going 'round lately saying we should skip the Moon return and Artemis (for which purpose he was already paid to deliver a rocket.) because it's too easy. We should just aim for Mars instead and cut him even bigger checks into his personal bank account for even more ephemeral deliverables 3-5 years off. Seems legit as always.

Oh, a future where NASA is rebloated and renationalized. I work with old scientific equipment and it's all so hardy & wonderful thanks to those monster contracts up through the Space Shuttle era. Requirements for repairability, statistical analysis by the customer on failure rates of bulk purchases, etc. It was nice. It's funny how this little market & industry mirror the beauty of the space program and provide me material benefits thanks to it.

This had a fair amount to do with Bell / AT&T as a monster negotiator and consumer too. I understand Bell-AT&T was like 50% of all revenues at Hewlett Packard during the peak of their test equipment era. HP in that era is my Apple. The stuff is SO GOOD.

Anyway, a good 20% of surplus gear I see in some domains has NASA tags. And it ALL works 30, 40, 50 years hence. Then it falls off fast in the mid-2000s. Now they don't even make the damn stuff anymore! Do it all with an oscilloscope. Call it petulant, I know manufacturing changed, everything's in the box etc, but for the sake of this post's rhetoric I choose to blame it all on NASA privatization. It's emblematic, at least.

Oops, I went on a little long. OP is right: space is cool. I got inspired. Here's wishing my kids can witness American flags painted on rockets completing fantastic feats some year soon. Pretty rockets with white paint, dignified colorful paint jobs, and so forth. Rockets that are 100% disconnected from any individual's ego and bring light to the world from every American. You know what I mean.

IDk there would still be zero rocket ship production whatsoever without that guy.

This is what ego-less space travel looks like.

https://i.imgur.com/0lVDtV2.png

The purpose of hiring the guy who's hopped up on goofballs was to find ways to make space lift less expensive per ton, not reach the moon, which is not only pointless but also has already been done. That's the deliverable.

Has he done so?

Private sector is usually pretty good at making products more efficiently so they can squeeze a maximum profit out of each unit.

"wow so that was a cool space program for the last 60 years, can we do anything with all this innovation?"

"We made velcro."

"But like, can we explore, mine, or make life better with all this incredible technology?"

"We made velcro."

"..."

"Oh we also made tang!"

His real business is launching satellites. Satellites that some of which provide internet to remote regions. Remote regions that are now able to purchase velcro products on the e-web. :D