Recent content by sciencecompliance

This seems like a silly thing to do for a probe that's staying inside the solar system, to be honest. It would seem more befitting to etch the names of the engineers and technicians who built the thing, so future humans can see that.

Let's hope the hatch doesn't fly off.

I'm very cautiously optimistic at the prospect of finding life on (in?) any of the icy moons. For all we know, sunlight and/or lightning could be key components for abiogenesis, as well as other factors not present on these bodies. It's also possible that life was seeded from space in the...

Not that I'm not inclined to agree, but this is unfortunately more complicated than just strapping some solid rocket motors to the payload. You need a way to ensure that it can maintain a retrograde thrust vector for the duration of the deorbit burn, otherwise you could still have space debris...

Yeah, when they said it was made out of Inconel I shook my head. You mean the Inconel that's famous for its heat resistance? Jesus Christ, NASA. Get your **** together. I hope they pay for the damages to this guy's house, but, ultimately, this could have been a lot worse. There needs to be...

I'm going to look for another source of space news if I see too many more articles like this one. If you're going to look into how people's religious beliefs grapple with an event like an eclipse, I want to see a much broader picture than that of one Native American tribe. The Navajo aren't...

Not possible. Ice hitting the moon would not create liquid water. The lack of atmospheric pressure means it would either remain frozen as ice or vaporize.

I'm going to go on the record to say that Blue Origin's naming convention for their rockets is stupid.

33 million dollars? That doesn't sound like that much money to be honest.

Due to how the orbits of Earth and Mars work out, astronauts will be on Mars for a long time before a return window opens. I think it's around two years if I remember correctly. In any case, it's quite a while. Unless the water is recycled almost entirely, that means you're going to have to...

I'm not sure how this addresses what I said. My point is that they shouldn't be depicting a complete work of fiction and calling it representative of the Space Force's mission. There's no reason to be sending up manned spaceplanes simply to take out enemy satellites.

Why is the Space Force commissioning paintings featuring fictional spaceplanes? This is so stupid and a waste of US taxpayer money.

I could care less about Musk and would just as soon see him fail, but SpaceX is too important to US geopolitical goals at the moment--and employs too many decent people--to want to see it do anything but succeed, despite Musk.

Lol. I see what you did there.

This doesn't really seem like fundamental law of nature material to be honest, but rather an emergent property of certain chemical environments. As a side note, regardless of what Darwin said, unless you invoke supernatural forces, if you believe that the universe started without life present...