Recent content by Pogo

Not to mention the thermal stresses every 90 minutes from a couple hundred degrees to minus a couple hundred degrees. Although there is insulation, much of the pressure envelope has been heated and cooled millions of times. Aluminum doesn’t like that so much. I wonder if stainless steel or...

The fly has no idea it is inside the taxi. At that point, the taxi is its world and the physical environment is the air moving along with the taxi, the fly’s wings interacting with that air. If the fly exits the taxi, it very quickly slows down to the speed of the air it is now in, it doesn’t...

Seems to me that if it worked, they would be using the concept today.

It would be like the Earth’s year, but, twice as long, but, sunlight is about half what it is here because of the distance from the Sun. The day is about a half hour longer.

About the only place that ain’t got rocks is stars. To find ones that look like other stuff is no surprise at all.

It would take a huge amount of carbon in a certain form to clean the whole atmosphere, but, the process to make that carbon in the correct form would probably produce more CO2 than it would remove.

I think Matt was speaking of taking pictures at any location during nighttime. But, it would still require a long exposure to get stars to show up decently.

There have been a number of Starlink launches where many satellites are orbited in one launch. You are probably seeing them for some period of time after launch. They will look just that, a bunch of ducks in a row. Eventually, the orbits will disburse.

Ah, I realized that the inclination is not in reference to the star’s equator, but, to the Earth’s line of site. Naturally, a lower inclination would not allow for occultation, it would pass above or below. I imagine that eccentricity would be limited, at very high eccentricities, allowing for a...

Problem is, that if the Earth were to spin fast enough to throw off a moon-size blob because that area reached escape velocity, as the blob ascends, the escape velocity decreases with altitude, the blob continues to ascend to never return. There is nothing to slow it down to orbital speed from...

I understand that Blue Origin’s New Glenn will also burn methane.

For future, any Star Trek, or Star Wars, Star Trek being my favorite. For current or near current, Apollo 13 the best, The Martian right up there.

Wikipedia.org: Lagrange point

Besides the fact that he was pretty busy with station keeping chores, the hand held Hasselblad camera with an 80 mm lens pointing through the thick windows of the command module would not have produced anything spectacular shooting stars. They were designed more for lunar shots and shots of the...

Static charges will always be a problem on the moon. It dissipates on the Earth because of conductivity of the atmosphere, especially with higher humidity. No air on the moon, the dust has no way to dissipate quickly because there is no contact with anything. The dust motes seem to be at the...