Recent content by theNerdonot

The wrong score for an inspirational video with many slo-mos. That would have worked out for a commercial about bike deliveries in San Francisco though. Discloser: Not a big fan of Metallica.

It was their initial assessment of how to tackle stage separation on Starship. One attempt was apparently enough to convince them to go a different way. It speaks volumes in terms of how bad the data must have been to give up so quickly on this technique.

That would be the case for a Falcon. rocket. For Starship, the idea was to initiate a rotation before separation, so that a collision between the 2 stages would be unlikely. Scott Manley has a good video about the maneuver: View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1651031623859843073

I wonder why the "flip maneuver stage separation" acrobatics was considered a good idea by the SpaceX team in the first place. Sometimes, they confuse innovation and whimsiness.

The article talks about expansion rates without mentioning time. Shouldn't 45 miles/megaparsec give an amplitude, not a rate? I am assuming it implicitly means 45 miles/second/megaparsec.

There is a good chance that we will destroy the planet before one of these big boys hit us. All it takes is one crazy lunatic at the head of a nuclear-weapons state. So we'll see what the coming months have in store for us.

When it comes to Near Earth Object, the 2022 JO1 asteroid is a good illustration of smaller bodies that can't be detected until really close to earth but could nonetheless create serious destruction. View: https://twitter.com/i/status/1524144215747227648

Hello! This is Chuck Mathieu aka theNerdonot. I've always been passionate about all things space and have dipped my toes in the complexity of our physical world by developing my own solar system simulator. One interesting feature is its ability to animate Near-Earth Objects encounters on a daily...