This is huge This isn’t just a SpaceX achievement. This isn’t just “oh wow the most powerful rocket ever survived” This is history in the making Starship was burning up in the atmosphere, no other rocket has ever survived that And Starship, despite literally disintegrating, managed to make a successful landing This is not only the most powerful rocket ever, it is the strongest it quite literally became a meteor and survived no other rocket has ever done that this was the problem that killed the space shuttle Columbia, and Starship lived While this happened, multiple engines were failing and it STILL SURVIVED remember where you were on June 6th, because this is more than just a rocket this type of history you tell your children that you lived through this is the rocket that will build a moon base and send people to mars and it’s now operational
should also mention that as starship was burning up there was ONE wing flap that steered the ENTIRE ship, flipped it upright, and allowed for a successful landing the flap’s connection to the ship was GONE, it was hanging on by a thread and it not only operated, but operated well enough to land the whole damn ship spacex have built a goddamn monster
IF YOU HAVE ECLIPSE GLASSES, GO OUTSIDE AND LOOK AT THE SUN RIGHT NOW
There is currently a dark spot on the surface of the Sun visible as a black dot, it’s called AR3664 These sunspots happen very often but ones this big are very rare, and this one is visible without a telescope
this sunspot is also releasing massive solar flares that will cause auroras to be visible in northern US states and all of canada
this is extremely rare, STARE DIRECTLY AT THE SUN RIGHT NOW (if you still have eclipse glasses)
so here’s two fun facts i learned about saturn today that just prove that this planet is the physical embodiment of chaos
1. saturn’s biggest moon, titan, is currently moving away from saturn. As it does, saturn’s obliquity (it’s axial tilt, which is just how tilted the planet is toward the sun) will increase. This increase then destabilizes titan’s orbit, which causes it to move away further, which causes the obliquity to increase more, in a feedback loop that will eventually -eject titan from the system entirely, flinging it off into space -cause saturn to flip on its side, like uranus is today we don’t know when this will happen but we know it will (it will probably be between 1-100 billion years from now)
and 2. Saturn’s moon Hyperion has a chaotic rotation. Earth takes 24 hours to complete one rotation, and it’s very stable. Hyperion is not
Hyperion’s day length and axial tilt constantly changes chaotically and unpredictably due to interactions with saturn and the other moons. This is so chaotic that it becomes physically impossible to predict where hyperion will be more than a month in advance Even with things like supercomputers, we genuinely have no idea how long a day on hyperion will be or how tilted it will be more than 1 month from today
fun fact: there is an area on the Moon called the Sea of Moscow that was discovered by (who would’ve guessed) Russia in the 1960s
however, the rules for naming places on the Moon said that you couldn’t name them after anything political, and the city of Moscow fell under that category
but the soviet union was determined so they argued that the city of Moscow was “a state of mind” and so not political
your daily reminder that the United States Space Force has a classified “fleet” of space planes very similar to the Space Shuttle but with no crew and they only do military stuff
they’re called X-37s and every once and a while one will launch, stay in orbit for a few months, and come back down what they do up there is classified we have no idea what is on board
(it’s probably just spy satellites and stuff but i like to tell people this because as much as people like to joke about the Space Force, it’s a serious organization that actually does stuff)
so i’m sure you guys know boeing at this point the airplane company that keeps having doors fall off their planes and other wacky events
well a lot of people don’t know that Boeing is also a space company and has launched things into space
and now they’re working on the first crewed flight test of Boeing Starliner, which is a new vehicle meant to take people to the International Space Station
let’s go over a brief history of Boeing Starliner because it is the worst crewed spacecraft since Apollo 13
the first flight test of Starliner occurred in 2019, it didn’t have people on it and was just trying to get to the ISS It was almost ready to approach the ISS and then MISSED
the second test, also with nobody on it, went fine a few years later keep in mind that Boeing wanted people on Starliner in 2018. It’s now 2024 and a crewed flight test is just now about to happen
istg if Boeing kills a bunch of astronauts I think that’ll just be the end of the company the first company to kill someone in space let’s hope that doesn’t happen
time to perform ritualistic sacrifices to Artemis, Selene, Chang’e, Chandra, and whatever other moon gods i can think of for the successful landing of the VIPER rover sometime this year dear god this thing needs to succeed we aren’t sending humans back to the moon without it
the tin can (starship, the most powerful rocket ever built that will eventually send humans back to the Moon and to Mars) hopped (launched successfully, reached orbit for the first time, we are so back, humans will be back on the moon before the end of the deacde)
here's something interesting I found https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PtdcdxvNI1o an interview with Neil Armstrong about what being on the Moon was actually like (what the sky was like, could they see stars, what did the surface look like, etc) interesting stuff
ofc the saddest part was when he said that he expected to have lunar bases in the near future 50 years later and here we are not even the most pessimistic people about space wouldve guessed that we wouldnt have had a base on the Moon by now
luckily we have the Artemis Program now at least and China doing shenanigans on the Moon
Eystreem_YT
•3/7/22 11:36
NatsMinecraft
•3/11/23 3:49
PMC
TheAxolotlLord
