My high school physics teacher said she attended a lecture about the life-cycle of stars. The lecturer pointed out how in about 8 billion years, our own star will have consumed enough of its fuel that it will expand into a red giant and absorb Earth.
After the lecture, a gentleman asked the lecturer:
G: “Excuse me, did you say that Earth may get swallowed up by the sun in 8 million years, or 8 billion?”
L: “8 billion.”
G: “Oh, good.”
edit: tyop
Well, yes. You need precise data for planning.
And it’s no good feeling rushed to finish tasks.
Not as gruesome as I feared.
“The company says that, while the rocket was destroyed, the Celestis payload “was unharmed and will be able to be relaunched.”
Of course Russia’s ex-space boss doesn’t believe US set foot on the Moon
[…]
It’s not clear to The Register how the boss of Roscosmos could seemingly be unaware of the retroflectors Apollo 11 left on the Moon, and the many successful attempts to shine an Earth-based laser off the devices. It’s not like the reflective devices walked to the Moon. Not to mention massive Soviet intelligence systems that would have called out such a fraud at the height of the Cold War.
[…]
Dmitry should play it safe and give Buzz Aldrin a wide berth for the foreseeable future.
Celestial tour:
Look at the sky, an aurora is coming:
https://www.spaceweather.com/archive.php?view=1&day=08&month=05&year=2023
This upstart is selling tickets for a SpaceX trip to the world’s first private space station
Price as yet unspecified, but hey - if you have to ask the price you can’t afford it anyway, right?
The link in the post goes to a press release which, despite using the phrase “full efficiency,” seems to indicate such a mission might only involve a relay to re-establish communications. That could allow the Spitzer Warm Mission to continue. The observatory ran out of coolant in 2009, but one of its instruments kept operating in a limited capacity until Spitzer was put into safe mode when the Sun was getting too much in the way.
It’d make a great movie, but they’d have to send some old white farts on the mission.
