this is great! i think you could make it as pleasant as a typical rush-hour trip on the city bus: louder and more dangerous, but with less people, and perhaps roughly as comfortable, at least if you have the kind of rush hour where you are frequently in danger of fainting from the heat
I wasn't able to respond to any other comment in your history, because pretty much everything you post is dead. You don't seem to respond to the obvious feedback from that, but somebody needs to recommend that you stop making flippant, dismissive, and generally worthless comments, because I've never seen an account as deeply downvoted on HN as yours.
Only a handful of minutes from a position in space where you can see the whole earth to a small spot in the desert of Utah. Where you see the feet of a human walking towards you.
Amazing what is achievable with the tech of today. Space is not that far away after all. Still very odd to see the two scenes described above in a short video on YouTube.
Having the human walk towards the camera has a tremendous effect. It's something everyone can relate to and it puts a great context to all the scenes that are shown in the video before that.
Yea, that's something we have to explain to folks quite a bit working at/on Varda; space feels further away than it really is because of how inaccessible it has historically been; really due to cost, but also cadence of launch in near equal measures. Now that both of those barriers have fallen with the Falcon 9, and will continue to do so with Starship, that perception of inaccessibility will slowly change...or I hope it does/I'm working really hard (with some decent progress) to make that true.
You can't see the whole earth (most of one hemisphere) from LEO, only a circle about 1000 km in diameter, which is about the size of Texas or twice the width of Utah. That doesn't stop it being amazing though!
There's also a cut before the person appears, so it could have sat waiting much longer than a few minutes.
> This marks the first time a commercial company has landed a spacecraft on United States soil.
I'm assuming SpaceX doesn't count somehow? Boosters have landed on soil for sure (well, technically on landing pads), but maybe they didn't become spacecraft.
Then what about Starliner? Here's a video of the landing from OFT-2 [1] two years ago, on the way back from the ISS. It was in orbit and landed on land in New Mexico. And while they are doing this as part of a NASA contract, the spacecraft and mission control were both from Boeing. I don't see how they don't qualify
Falcon 9 is an orbital booster that's landed dozens of times on US soil. Suggesting this spacecraft has achieved some kind of world first is totally ridiculous and diminishes the actual achievement.
The boosters aren't themselves orbital, and while the Dragon capsules have re-entered several dozen times now, they splashdown in water. I think technically Starliner would better fit the case of a commercial company landing a spacecraft on US soil.
Out of curiosity, what's the benefit of pharmaceuticals manufacturing in space?
Is there a benefit to manufacturing drugs in low gravity environments, or is it more of an experiment to see if it's feasible, in a future where more people might be living in space?
Perfect crystals. Also, the proof-of-concept drug was ritonavir, and it's nearly impossible to consistently grow large crystals of it on Earth. All of the labs that work with ritonavir are contaminated by a more stable form ("polymorph") that rapidly converts any ritonavir crystals into a less-useful form.
I believe last I read about it, some drugs are formed as crystals, and being in 0g (or free fall if your pedantic) meant the formed crystals were much bigger or easier to actually form, can't remember which, the specific drug is related to HIV medications
The implication is that the heating is like when one compresses air in a bicycle pump, the increase in temperature that comes from adiabatic (reversible, isentropic) compression of a gas. And some compression does occur, so there is some necessary heating from that source (as required by the second law).
But entry heating is not reversible. It's fundamentally irreversible, in fact. The gas is going through a shock. Shocks fundamentally cause an increase in entropy as fast gas slams into slow gas over a region whose thickness is on the order of a mean free path of molecules in the gas. And, in fact, the increase in density of gas going through a shock approaches a limit (around 4, IIRC, for air) regardless of the Mach number. So at sufficiently high speed most of the heating is coming from dissipation at the shock (a process akin to friction), over and above the heating implied by adiabatic compression.
Seems like the gases are getting compressed either way and it's just different ways of wording the same effect. As for it being reversible or not, is it not just a matter of whether the energy was actually transferred somewhere? Like you could technically undo the shock the same as you could depressurise air in a pump no? I don't really know what I'm talking about though, fyi.
I prefer to say it's the molecules screaming in agony as they are violently compressed and forced to hit each other at speeds they are mostly uncomfortable with.
Readit News
For the true space nerds, here is the 27min uncut version. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BWxl921rMgM
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/MOOSE
Deleted Comment
also, congratulations. space is hard, and what you've done is harder than reentry
Deleted Comment
Amazing what is achievable with the tech of today. Space is not that far away after all. Still very odd to see the two scenes described above in a short video on YouTube.
Having the human walk towards the camera has a tremendous effect. It's something everyone can relate to and it puts a great context to all the scenes that are shown in the video before that.
What you said is still valid though, since the full video is not much longer.
Probably also helps that 17,000 mph is really freaking fast.
There's also a cut before the person appears, so it could have sat waiting much longer than a few minutes.
I'm assuming SpaceX doesn't count somehow? Boosters have landed on soil for sure (well, technically on landing pads), but maybe they didn't become spacecraft.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPFS8Bp643o
Falcon 9 is an orbital booster that's landed dozens of times on US soil. Suggesting this spacecraft has achieved some kind of world first is totally ridiculous and diminishes the actual achievement.
But what about Dragon?
https://www.healio.com/news/infectious-disease/20240222/hiv-...
Is there a benefit to manufacturing drugs in low gravity environments, or is it more of an experiment to see if it's feasible, in a future where more people might be living in space?
The heat is not from the friction, but from the compression of the gasses.
The implication is that the heating is like when one compresses air in a bicycle pump, the increase in temperature that comes from adiabatic (reversible, isentropic) compression of a gas. And some compression does occur, so there is some necessary heating from that source (as required by the second law).
But entry heating is not reversible. It's fundamentally irreversible, in fact. The gas is going through a shock. Shocks fundamentally cause an increase in entropy as fast gas slams into slow gas over a region whose thickness is on the order of a mean free path of molecules in the gas. And, in fact, the increase in density of gas going through a shock approaches a limit (around 4, IIRC, for air) regardless of the Mach number. So at sufficiently high speed most of the heating is coming from dissipation at the shock (a process akin to friction), over and above the heating implied by adiabatic compression.
I predict new reentry shaders being made for Kerbal Space Program by modders in short order.