Here’s a shorter video, cropped for your booster-landing pleasure:
And because why not, here’s some recent test flight footage of the Bell V-280 Valor tilt-rotor, complete with some curious blurring of the nacelles for some mysterious reason:
And lest y’all think I’m unfairly focusing too much attention on American achievements today… here’s a map of Europe.
SpaceX is currently livestreaming a series of videos being beamed back from the roadster, heading off into space. It’s already a good distance from Earth, with the result being some damn fine images. I do wonder how long this will last. It’s already far further away than I would have thought possible with a meager GoPro transmitter that they usually use on space launches. Is it battery powered? Does it have solar panels? it would be really interesting to check back in on the roadster every few months to see what the rigors of spaceflight do the the paint and bodywork. Eventually you’d probably see the windshield get pitted, maybe even blown out in meteoroid impacts; the paint trashed by UV and thermal cycling, plastic, fiberglass, rubber, carbon fiber bits turning to mush and fluff.
Following on the badassery of the Falcon 9 Heavy, here’s some art. See the guy’s full gallery on Deviant Art.
The Falcon 9 Heavy flight went off seemingly without a hitch (as I write this it’s not yet clear if the core booster landed right on the barge EDIT: Whoopsie, the core smacked into the water near the barge at a stately 300 miles per hour due to a failure to ignite two of the three braking rockets). But the two boosters landing simultaneously, side by side… that is hands down no BS the coolest, awesomest, most hopeful thing I’ve ever seen. I’m beyond jealous of the people who work at SpaceX.
How awesome is this? It’s all the awesome. Give it up, Star Wars. There’s no awesome left for you.
Now would be the time for trump to get on live TV and say, in effect, “USA! USA! USA! This is what free men in a free market can do. It’s hyuuuge. It’s beyootiful. And I’m’a gonna take all the moneys the US current sends overseas and instead will pay SpaceX to launch a Trump Casino And Resort to Velles Marinaris.”
Negative mass/negative matter is a theoretical substance that appears in sci-fi and scientific speculation. It would be a difficult substance to deal with, if it actually exists… negative mass means negative inertia. Which means if you push on it, it pushes back, just as hard. This is why it’s considered probably necessary for stable wormholes: somehow, you line the “walls” of the wormhole with negative matter, and if the wormhole tries to collapse, the negative matter resists the collapse.
The video below explains some of the head-scratching consequences of the existence of negative matter. Not explained in the video is the idea that negative and regular matter would mutually annihilate if they came into contact. But unlike a matter/antimatter annihilation, a matter/negative matter reaction would release… nothing. Literally, nothing. One gram meets negative one gram, the end result is zero. The two substances would disappear like nothing was ever there. Of course, it’s not quite that simple. You’d probably get atoms partially torn apart… the electrons disappear but the nuclear scoots away, or the nucleus is partially eliminated, releasing a flood of suddenly liberated protons and neutrons and elementary particles. It would be nowhere near as energetic an event as a M/AM reaction, but there would seem to be a distinct sort of signature to a M/NM reaction.
Just a few hours from the launch window for the first test launch of the Falcon 9 Heavy, the highest payload capacity launcher since Energia. All goes well, at 1:30 3:15 3:45 PM eastern (11:30 AM 1:15 1:45 PM Mountain), the F9H will lift off from the same pad that launched Apollo 11. Giggity! The live stream of the launch will be carried in the YouTube window below.
Meh.
Pretty sure I’ve posted these, or something like these, before. But in light of the Boring Company’s “flamethrower,” here’s a flamethrower that anyone can actually buy, and that will project *real* fire a good long ways. The “Dragons Breath” shotgun rounds, which fire pellets of burning zirconium or magnesium, are not particularly wise for home defense.
And then this so very, very 80s:
This is what happens when the Democrat party machine in Chicago is so dominant that the Republican party doesn’t even bother to try: a whackjob Holocaust denier is able to be the only guy running for a Congressional seat as a Republican. Odd, that, given that he seems to be a big government guy terribly interested in anti-semitism and racial issues, stereotypically leftist positions.
John D. Clark’s “Ignition!” is basically *the* book to read if you want a readable history of modern rocket propellants. The problem has been that it has been *long* out of print and the only ways you could read it were:
Fortunately, Rutgers University is going to re-release printed (and electronic) versions in May. And it’s available on Amazon for pre-order, which is awesome because if you buy it through a link in this blog post, I’ll get a small fraction of a pittance and thus “Ignition!” will help feed some cats. It’ll be available in paperback, hardback and Kindle. I’m’a get me the paperback.
