Fair point. In that light, the first "real" methalox attempts to orbit are the upcoming Terran 1 and Starship flights.

I can only speculate. Possibilities that come to mind (which might not be popular):

• Inefficient/interfering management

• Insufficient expertise among employees

• Customer "moving the goalposts"

• A design quirk making realization difficult

I'm sure there are other possibilities.

Yes. The first and most recent attempt (of which I'm aware) failed. I think Relativity's Terran 1 will be the next attempt. Of course, the big one - Starship - is also looking to March.

> ... Bruno said[,] the oxygen pump on one of these engines has consistently produced about 5 percent more oxygen into the engine than expected. This fell outside the bounds of nominal performance but had only been observed in this engine.

> "We've arrived at the conclusion that this is simply likely unit-to-unit variation, ..."

> "Before the end of 2025 we expect to be really at a tempo, which is flying a couple of times a month, every two weeks."

Between the quoted variance and BO's yet-to-be-proved ability to produce motors at the required rate, I remain skeptical they'll be able to reach such a cadence by 2026.

To the naked eye it'll appear as a faint smudge, best seen with averted vision. If there's any sky illumination by city lights visible, you'll have a very difficult time seeing it with just the eye, even if your locality is dark.

Seeing this query often enough, I now keep a standard response :-) :

• Moon Machines (great detailed breakdown of the Apollo program vehicles)

• Apollo 11 (50^(th) anniversary documentary, some very high resolution film, no added commentary)

• Mars Inside SpaceX (covers recent exploratory intention and activity, albeit not Starship)

• Fly Rocket Fly (documentary on the sad story of OTRAG)

• Cosmos series (with Carl Sagan). Also deeply philosophical, and despite its four decade age is little dated. Sagan had a way with words unmatched, per this little example (narration over video by Erik Wernquist).

IMO, most Arthur C. Clarke books fit the bill. A few novels off the top of my head, in my order of preference:

• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• Rendezvous with Rama
• Childhood's End
• The Songs of Distant Earth
• The City and the Stars
• The Fountains of Paradise
• The Hammer of God
• Imperial Earth

2001 and Rama have sequels, but I'd recommend against reading them until after reading the above. IMO, the Rama sequels are inferior, not so much Clarke and more his collaborator.

Yes, hours after it launched!

And it was around 9:40 am EST when you posted.

Unless there's yet another launch today (none that I see on assorted schedules), that flight has already occurred.

Referring to the earlier comments, I think it is what we're discussing - the pure "unburned" form being relatively safe.

He's more or less right. In its pure form it's as much dangerous from its heavy metal qualities as it is from radiation, hence the person holding this 90% pure plutonium puck wearing gloves.

I'm unaware of any such accident with NERVA NTRs, but very much open to correction. Might you provide a reference?

While the teleportation is instantaneous, I don't think there's any way to bypass the need for ancilla to be transported "classically," which are required for the Bell measurements at the receiver.

And there's still the causality problem (manifest here as "information causality" - PDF). Of course, one should never say never, but it seems there's always a fundamental roadblock when it comes to FTL, regardless of the path taken.

My understanding here is that the ancilla are themselves limited by the speed of light, thus limiting communication speed to the same, and this experiment's goal was to (dis)prove the apparent instant simultaneous collapse. But I'm very open to correction here.

I had a look at your link, but didn't see anything indicating useful FTL communication.[*] Further, by all understanding, any such communication between points in our universe - even if attempting to bypass actual traversal through this space - results in time travel, raising the specter of causality violation. Regarding the paper's reference to "many worlds," that might be the only way around said violation. But again it would not be useful, as no information within the same timeline would be transferred.

[*]: If I missed it, could you highlight or quote the text?

By all current understanding it doesn't appear possible. Beyond the immediate problem of biasing wave function collapse, it seems that any attempt at communication or travel faster than light invokes the potential for causality violation.

Yes. Ben Krasnow has a good little video on making the fluid.

Don Mitchell's web page has perhaps the highest quality images taken by the Venera probes. He gained access to the raw data from the probes and used his expertise with modern image processing tools to extract much better quality images.

This and this are great examples of his work. Quite something to see these, taken at the bottom of a ~460 °C, ~90 bar supercritical CO₂ ocean.

Edit: Oops, just saw /u/UmbralRaptor's comment, already referencing Mitchell's page. But I'll leave this one as I think it adds detail.

Yeah, that would have delayed the telescope.

;-)

> A green comet will appear in the night sky for the first time in 50,000 years.

This green comet will appear in the night sky for the first time in 50,000 years. Green comets are otherwise not unusual. As I mentioned under another similarly worded post, I took this image of comet Hyakutake in 1996.

I did what again? Disagree with you? I gave some rationale. You gave just an assertion without explanation. My point stands. I'll leave it there.

Within the definition of "comprehension" as "the capacity for understanding fully," I do indeed assert that distances in space fall beyond anyone's full grasp. At an intellectual level, certainly one can discuss such measurements and manipulate devices accordingly, but they fall beyond human intuition and evolutionary experience.

While not bothered by downvotes (hover over my username to see my comment karma), I am puzzled why anyone would downvote the comment above. What could possibly be displeasing or wrong about it? Maybe they're just having a bad day. :-)

The vastness of space is beyond comprehension, even within our own solar system. So many seem not to understand that. A NASA image which can give an inkling is this one, taken by Voyager 1 of our immediate neighborhood after its Neptune encounter. The Earth and Moon are together smaller than a pixel (the blue one, barely standing out from the noise), so even here our planet's size is exaggerated.