Radiation dissipates with distance squared :-) Throw in any medium (dust, gas) and it dissipates even more

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I don’t know the answer, but it reminds me of when I found out that Orion’s Belt is not actually a straight line. The planets stars are really far away from each other. If your looking at it top down it would look more like a scatter plot but looking at it from the horizontal line they look straight and side by side.

Edit: I meant stars.

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Those aren’t things that would suddenly happen. NASA could probably afford to keep SpaceX afloat with contracts for the rockets it wants. It isn’t helpless to SpaceX’s whims.

Not in human history as we only recently learned how to detect them

I mean spacex could go bankrupt one day out of nasas control, or they could abandon the F9 based on a business decision. And then nasa would be screwed. Not saying it would happen but crazier things have

*Human history, since we've been ~accurately recording (so, not that long).

Pretty fukin amazing that a few thousands light years is considered to be a dangerous area within GRB range.

Meanwhile on Earth and large explosions, meh go 10 km away and you’re perfectly safe from any man made non-nuclear explosions.

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All the awe in astrophysics also applies to nano physics. As above, so below. 🤯

With all these new planets being found surely it's a matter of time we find a planet that can support life just like here on Earth.

I do, and I know that without funding and a powerful entity with an interest to see something happen you won't achieve much when there's no direct economic gain.

You yourself mentioned SpaceX and their rockets as the "greatest hope for space travel", and yet back in the 90s you had things like the Delta Clipper that, with proper funding and time, could have delivered decades ago what Starship has yet to achieve.

Or what about the VentureStar, an SSTO spaceplane that was, according to Lockheed's engineers, 95% complete, and it was a spacecraft that would have achieved what Falcon 9 does but even cheaper and only needed a few years more of research to solve it's final issues, and yet it got cancelled because the government has no idea of what they are doing.

Or what about nuclear rockets, something that NASA is working on and says will have one ready to test in 2027, even though NASA had been doing some very promising work on this back in the 70s, and got cancelled because the government told them to focus on the Space Shuttles instead.

Absolutely nothing of what we use right now for space travel is cutting edge technology, we just have what the government is willing to afford, which isn't much, and when it is willing to spend money they completely waste it anyway.

Just look at the SLS, 10 years of development and dozens of billions spent to end up with a rocket no more powerful than the more than half a century old Saturn V and powered by 40 year old engines, which launches the Orion spacecraft, yet another capsule that isn't much more advanced than the Apollo CSM.

If we don't have the tech to achieve all of this is because the government doesn't have a legitimate interest, and because they are just too damn incompetent to fund the right people and let them work. And that's how you end up with a company owned by a mentally unstable conman leading the charge in space travel, because everyone else is too busy feasting on their own snot.

The space shuttle had failure throughout its program. If something goes wrong with Falcon 9, we’ll be flying again relatively quickly since we know it is a reliable rocket. The AMOS-6 explosion happened on September 1 and SpaceX flew again in December, just 3 months later.

Reagan proposed this in 1984.

I thought about why there is a universe at all.

It is good to be concerned about Falcon 9 but it has proven to be highly reliable. The current version has flown 158 missions with complete success. Dragon 2 has 16 successful flights under its belt. Backups are good but Boeing has a long way to go to show that it can be a reliable partner in the program.

Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:

|Fewer Letters|More Letters| |-------|---------|---| |H2|Molecular hydrogen| | |Second half of the year/month| |LEO|Low Earth Orbit (180-2000km)| | |Law Enforcement Officer (most often mentioned during transport operations)| |SLS|Space Launch System heavy-lift| |SSME|Space Shuttle Main Engine| |SSTO|Single Stage to Orbit| | |Supersynchronous Transfer Orbit|

|Jargon|Definition| |-------|---------|---| |hydrolox|Portmanteau: liquid hydrogen fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer|

^(6 acronyms in this thread; )^(the most compressed thread commented on today)^( has 18 acronyms.)
^([Thread #8738 for this sub, first seen 30th Mar 2023, 10:20]) ^[FAQ] ^([Full list]) ^[Contact] ^([Source code])

Sure. And holodeck with replicators are right around the corner. Do you know how science works? Do you think it's just throwing money at people in lab coats until they give you what you want?

Having a plan is very different from being able to even test its viability, let alone execute it. Right now delivering relatively small inanimate objects to Mars intact is a gamble. And it's telling that the often cited greatest hope of human endeavor in space is a company owned by a mentally unstable conman.

How do we know there wasn't a brighter gamma ray in 469 BC?

Kind of: I think about my inability to grasp the vastness of the universe every day.

Huh. I always thought Gamma Rays were the most deadly thing in the universe and would basically sterilize exactly half of the planet if one were to hit earth. Seems I was very wrong

>Do they only sell gravity generators at the fancy store?

No, but we can research and develop it, the only thing preventing tech from existing is lack of political will and money.

When there's both, you can do things like landing on the Moon when only 20 years before your most advanced aircraft still used propellers.

If the government wanted it we could have even landed on Mars back in the 70s, NASA in fact had a plan for it completely laid out by the late 60s, and even other things like a crewed Venus flyby, all before the Moon landing, but achieving this would have required not slashing their budget into a fraction of what it was during the Apollo program.