• 8 Posts
  • 323 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 16th, 2023

help-circle








  • Good essay. I don’t know if you remember after Obama won in 2008 a bunch of democratic party apparatchiks came up with this idea of “the coalition of the ascendant” and that they pretty much had the government locked in for a generation, due to support that would never waver for them amongst immigrants, yuppies, tech bros, etc. They didn’t need the working class anymore and the Republicans would be the minority party for many years.

    Two years later the democrats were wiped out in the midterms.




  • The space station’s orbit has been adjusted continuously over its lifetime initially by attaching a shuttle to it and doing a burn of the shuttle’s engines and later doing the same with progress modules.

    My bet is the original expectation of the designers was to deorbit by attaching centaurs (or whatever) to the existing docking ports and rotate the beast to the right attitude for a deorbit burn.

    NASA has more recently said they want the reentry to be as steep as possible to minimize the size of the debris field, and is using that to justify the development of a new specialized deorbit vehicle. No doubt SpaceX will declare that Starship is the proper vehicle for this, and then will plow the $800 million into the Starship program. The money they got for Artemus is already long gone and Starship has failed to demonstrate key components of the Artemus plan. Dear Moon has been cancelled so NASA and Artemus are the only customers they have left. NASA knows that without a cash injection Artemus is at risk.









  • The problem with this is that if billionaires just sat on their fortunes like a dragon sitting on treasure it would be much better than the way it is now, where they pump their billions into “nonprofits” that try to manipulate society to make it even better for them and worse for normal people.