I watched the video of the flight today and man, it sure seemed kinda boring and pointless to me. The passengers just unbuckled their belts and floated up to stare out their windows until a minute later when it was time to return to their seats. No fun zero-g flipping around or anything for those guys.
As the flight was descending the Virgin Galactic guys were interviewing the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, who was saying what an important, historic day this was for his country now that two of their citizens were astronauts. Seemed a little hyperbolic but I’m glad they’re happy about it.
Great throughput, but terrible latency.
… I tried to look it up but the Google results were all people asking questions like “How Far Is Mars From The Earth In Light Years?” so I have to go cry
ETA: but the answer is around 3.82E-5 light years, today.
Boffins reckon Mars colony could survive with fewer than two dozen people
That’s some interesting modelling.
I hope they’re not trying to found a population off of 20 people!
Seems weird and arbitrary to me. If they’re being constantly resupplied then why is there any kind of magic number at all? The ISS has a crew of 7 people. There are arctic research stations and other isolated outposts that go for many months with fewer people than that. Some hermits live alone for many years.
I think the wrong part of that quote is highlighted-the whole “the results depend on the completely arbitrary parameters” part is way more revealing.
“We only need 12 people to make mars a paradise, if we have thousands of sentient machines doing all of the hard work!”
Abstracts for project proposals need to be in by September 6, with the program officially kicking off in November.
BBC News - Russia’s Luna-25 spacecraft crashes into Moon
