Anyone for an astronomy thread?

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

So while there was plenty of footage of the first two boosters coming in to land, there was literally no word anywhere about what happened to the third booster which was supposed to land on the boat. Well, Apparently it hit the water travelling at a couple of hundred miles an hour, after two of the three engines didn't light to slow it down, the second time they fire the engines on the way down. It will be interesting to find out why that happened, because that's the first landing they didn't manage in about 20 attempts.

The weird thing is that all of the extra stuff they had lined up for this rocket has all been thrown out the window. They were supposed to be building a much more powerful upper stage, based on the new raptor engine, and they were supposed to "man rate" it, or certify it to carry humans, so they could for instance send astronauts around the moon in a dragon 2 capsule. But all of that is gone, and instead in two years they're going to be launching their giant shuttle (without the big rocket) and flying it around the atmosphere and landing it, Two fucking years! Now inevitably that's going to slip a bit, but that's a vanishingly small amount of time, for something that they don't even have a factory for yet.

Still, if they can manage this, they can probably eventually manage anything.

[San Bernardhinault]

From 45:30 to about 46:30 is where the real gold is, with the synchronised landing of the two boosters.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

A bit after 38 minutes in this clip

No Saturn V, but still quite impressive.

Saturn V cheated by having Walter Cronkite sit so close he had a sort of religious experience.

[hobbes]

There's literally nothing less randian than a mars colony. the only way it will be able to survive is the sort of ultra high productivity communism that they have in star trek. People operating in the pursuit of individual freedom on mars will die very quickly.

Not to mention, chucking his entire fortune into driving the technology for solar tiles, house batteries, electric cars and big rockets is hardly a fuck you to his fellow man.

[ursus arctos]

A bit after 38 minutes in this clip

No Saturn V, but still quite impressive.

[Moonlight Shadow]

Fucking hell, this was perfection...

[Evariste Euler Gauss]

Wasn't it just!

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Holy Shit that was amazing.

[San Bernardhinault]

That was pretty awesome. Let's see if they can catch all three of the rockets, too.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

Five minutes.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

8.45. It's a bit windy up high apparently.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

And flamethrowers.

in fairness, that's a mel brooks reference.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

There's literally nothing less randian than a mars colony. the only way it will be able to survive is the sort of ultra high productivity communism that they have in star trek. People operating in the pursuit of individual freedom on mars will die very quickly.

[Gerontophile]

And flamethrowers.

[Lang Spoon]

Its a bit shit a junior Bond villain is our only long term hope of surviving this rock. You just know he’s big into his Friedman and Rand.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The launch is in an hour and a half. that stream is currently showing them fuelling up the rocket. It's not very exciting.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

The Launch window for the falcon heavy opens in five minutes. You can watch it here.

It's either going to be the most spectacular success you've ever seen, or one of the biggest explosions to take place on the East Coast of the US since the hindenberg.

if it works, It will look a lot like this. I am very excited about this.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

It's the sixth sense in space. Radio Astronomer looking for secret spy satellites (That missing zuma satellite) finds zombie Nasa probe.

Apparently this probe was monitoring the magentosphere, and something went a bit wrong with the power system, and it killed the satellite. Every now and again it would flicker into life, but NASA eventually gave up on it and forgot it. This guy has discovered that it has recovered completely and transmitting data to no-one in particular. Someone wake up bishop berkley

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

18 years after NASA sent up their first astronauts to the ISS, and after 143 previous opportunities, NASA was finally going to send Jeanette epps as their first African American astronaut to the ISS. Given that african americans make up 13.3% of the population, that number should be a lot closer to 19. Anyway, it turns out that she's not going for some unspecified reason. Now if this was 2 years ago, you'd just assume that she had picked up an illness, or was exposed to an illness (the most common cause for swapping out astronauts, which used to happen fairly regularly), particularly when the person to replace her was going to be the first hispanic woman to go to the space station.

however it Seems that there is a lot more to this story, and that it is going to be messy.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

This proposal for the next NASA new horizons missions is soooooo cool. Lets send a Nuclear powered quadcopter to Titan!!!

This is such a sexy idea.

the competing plan is to revisit that Comet that the Philae Lander went to, to build on what they learned. We literally only scratched the surface of that comet, and since it shows up very regularly, we should use this opportunity to learn a hell of a lot more about comets, while developing the next generation of comet lander, and to keep going back until we get really good at building these probes. Both of these are really good ideas and Ideally both would get funded. Instead we're going to get another couple of years of SLS development.

[Ginger Yellow]

Ooh, that would make a nice desktop. I've been meaning to replace my current one (v similar to this).

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

yeah, but it's a really super secret payload, and maybe it would have involved handing over too many technical details. This photo merging three long exposure shots is amazing. You can see the launch, the engine shut down, the booster coming back, and the fairings separating.

[Ginger Yellow]

I'd have thought if you're billing $100m or whatever it is for a satellite launch you can probably rustle up an adapter to their specifications.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

There are a lot of conspiracy theories out there. Sure why not try a new one.

It just strikes me that the only reason you'd build your own adapter is that your satellite just doesn't fit in the other one.

[Ginger Yellow]

My conspiracy theory is that they sabotaged the Northrop Grumman adapter to get more business for themselves. "See, you can't trust anyone but SpaceX. Our rocket worked fine."