Spaaaaace (Part 1)


ESA’s Cluster mission is heading into its third decade of operations. The Register spoke to some of the people behind the four spacecraft about how the team turned a five-year nominal lifetime into 20 years and beyond.

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I can only imagine how this is fuelling the conspiracy theories of the 5g burning, anti-vax batshit crazy loonies.

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somebody put together a site to track where and when you can ( try to ) see them.

https://findstarlink.com

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When it comes to rocket tech and space travel, I find that the nature of the people leading the charge on it and what they plan to do with space travel makes me wholly uninterested in that entire field. The endless “Say what you will about Elon Musk, but that guy dreams big and SpaceX is doing awesome work.” comments that ignore the plans that Musk is trying to set up irritate me to no end.

Trying to separate Elon Musk’s words and actions from what his company is trying to do is wrong. When Musk glibly commits SEC violations through Twitter posts, calls someone a “pedo guy” in a fit of manchild rage because somebody said “No” to his whack job publicity stunt, and reinvents indentured servitude for the 21st century, the motives of Musk and SpaceX as a whole should be thrown into question. With people like Musk, Bezos, and Richard Branson being the poster boys of modern spaceflight, why should I ever cheer on a future where space becomes a commoditized playground for the uber-rich, who are waited on by debtors?

I guess this just a long-winded and roundabout way for me to ask: What exactly gets y’all so excited about the current rocket and spaceflight landscape when the major players in the public eye are all horrible people? Have any governments, space agencies, or the UN discussed safeguards to prevent corporations from having free reign of space? And lastly, are there any alternative rocket organizations or companies in this sector that I can feel comfortable following and rooting for?

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Nineteen mysterious invaders from another Solar System spotted hanging around the outside edge of ours


These 19 space rocks have been right under our noses the entire time, almost since the Solar System formed some 4.5 billion years ago.
[…]
In short, these 19 asteroids have very odd orbits. When traced back in time they would have been circling the Sun at inclinations of nearly 90 degrees compared to the flat disk that the planets formed in.
The explanation for their existence is that they must have been captured from another nearby star when the Sun was forming […]

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Want to put a satellite into orbit for US comms? Whoa, says Uncle Sam: Where’s your space crash risk assessment?

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I read this the other day and have been thinking about it a bit. Honestly, it’s absolutely remarkable that such an arguably unnecessarily complicated machine achieved the success it did with as few casualties as it had. I’m not downplaying the tragedies of Challenger and Columbia at all, but they flew 135 missions, plus pre-mission trials with very few incidents. The work the fine folks at NASA have done through the ages can never be truly appreciated.

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You’ve got to build bypasses…

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That was no moon…

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The Kessler effect, live on TV!

A month, what kind of trope is that? It needs a countdown clock with 4 seconds remaining!

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Oh great, just what this timeline needs…

Where were you in drought season? Interstellar comet 2I/Borisov dumped 230 million litres of water as it whizzed through Solar System

The interstellar comet 2I/Borisov shed nearly 230 million litres of water as it whizzed through our Solar System during its visit last year, according to measurements gathered by NASA’s Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory.

About 200 Olympic sized swimming pools.

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Or 439,266,615.7372 Grapefruits.

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