Pictures of Blue Ghost from Lunar Recon Orbiter (easier once it alternates between before and after)
Brian
AFAIK, Musk never planned for his Mars colonization dream to depend on NASA at all. At most, a diversion to the Moon via the Artemis program was a way to get some development funds.
Musk is a very odd egg. A few years ago some of us hoped that he would be a space tech pioneer, doing what NASA couldn’t or wouldn’t to get a real space program working.
But it seems he has developed weird obsessions in many kinds of political, mostly right wing issues.
Of course Howard Hughes did good work for a while and then went off the rails.
And Heinlein’s D D Harriman was also a questionable ‘robber baron’…
You misspelled egominiacal narcissist sociopath.
Developed, or has just become more open at letting his asshole flag fly now? Hard to tell.
Based on internal engine bay & attic video of the Starship IFT-8 flight, which has not been publicly released, resonance was indeed the cause of the ship destruction. It grew in amplitude as the propellant tanks emptied out and modal characteristics of the vehicle changed.
The resonance caused leaks which in turn altered the thermodynamic state of the propellants reaching the engines. This caused the engines to either shut down or destruct. That in turn caused a fire in the released attic propellants.
The alterations SpaceX made from IFT-7 were not sufficient to dampen the resonances, so the mode of failure was essentially the same. SpaceX had attempted to mitigate the issue and did an expanded hot-fire test of Starship to take data under similar circumstances, but the resonance persisted in the actual flight.
Here is the manifold piping in the Starship attic. You can see that they attempted to even out the propellant flow between engines. But you can also see how resonance modes could arise in the piping.
So is that a Martian tripod now?
All helicopters want to crash, and all rockets want to blow up. Getting either to fly means fighting their fundamental nature.
ETA: okay, it’s somewhat comforting to know it wasn’t a brand-new problem that magically came out of hiding when no one was looking.
If that is really an accurate quote, it does seem to suggest a psychopathic personality…
Unfortunate. Of course some genuine geniuses like Newton were also total assholes… 
Not that I’m suggesting Musk is in that league!
I love it…brings Apollo vibes!
The company did not immediately announce a new launch date, but noted the next try could be as early as Thursday night.
Scrub due to hydraulic issues on the ground systems. Didn’t yet get to fueling. Good to see the lack of go fever.
I love this sort of speculation as it gets my mind racing.
I’ve heard this sort of argument before and that we cannot rule out that the universe is inside a black hole. It’s total speculation of course, but endlessly fascinating.
Given the afaik random orientation of galaxies, I don’t know how they would count which way all the edge-on cases were rotating. And of course you would have to consider any angular momentum from galactic clusters as a whole.
Hmm, so maybe the universe has net angular momentum. It does put a wrinkle on the nature of the original singularity, though. That singularity already had exceptionally low entropy. Putting another constraint on it like having net angular momentum makes it even more improbable. Going just based on entropic concerns, one would expect non-rotating singularities to vastly outnumber rotating ones.
Then again, that singularity is already so improbable that it demands another explanation (like not being a singularity at all, and the big bang arising from a cyclic universe or a “big bounce” or something), in which case maybe angular momentum isn’t all that surprising.
How so? Of all possible values for rotation, isn’t “zero” rather narrow?
Well, I should say small rather than precisely zero. If you flip 10100 coins, you’d expect the final result to be very close to 50/50. Getting a result of 66/33 is exceptionally unlikely!
You may remember that Godel came up with a solution to the Einstein field equations in which time travel is possible in a rotating universe?
[time travel is possible in a rotating universe?]
[time travel is possible]
[time travel]
And now I have tested it, said Wen*…
- (I assume everyone here has read Pratchett… Thief of Time?)…
I hate clickbait-y titles: our universe wouldn’t be “trapped” within a black hole, it would have been born as the inside of a black hole. Black holes in our universe would also NOT be “gateways” to these other baby universes, as a whole host of bad things would happen to oneself if one tried to dive into one (i.e. nobody can survive such, either hitting the hypothesized firewall at the event horizon or getting spaghettified afterwards, or something equally deadly).
Closed time-like curves are fun. Though I did see a “proof” recently that they can’t result in a paradox, basically because the nature of entropy reverses when you get about halfway around the loop. So when the loop closes back on itself, the state of the passengers is back to where it started, and nothing very interesting happens.
ETA: The paper:
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1361-6382/ad98df