You do remember that they signed a contract with NASA to have a lunar lander ready this year, right? A lander that requires more than a few launches and reuse of both the first stage and tanker Starships?

These launches are less about iteration than they are marketing. They are burning money and need to maintain interest in their magic Starship. They need just as many years as NASA and they need NASA’s money. The difference is, SpaceX have not demonstrated they can achieve their technical goals and they gloss over all the challenges while at the same time they waste money and Raptor engines on these publicity flights.

Remember, Falcon 9 was earning them money while they experimented with landing. And they hyped up its capabilities and cost before eventually under delivering. Starship will be different in that it may not even male them money.

What an absolute shit show. Why SpaceX isn’t getting raked over the coals for not being able to even maintain control on reentry is insane. That is like the least difficult challenge they face in getting Starship to work and they failed spectacularly. Not to even mention losing tiles that high up in the atmosphere.

My bet is that, just like with Falcon 9, Starship will become expendable with first stage reuse. They’ll continue to pump out Starlink for their primary customers, governments, and Musk will eventually talk himself into securities and espionage charges. At which point sober responsible adults will take over SpaceX and drop his pet project that is costing them billions. Raptor may or may not be repurposed.

/rant

Cool video though

Secession is illegal

“Ah boy, I’m just so tired of all these star wars.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWxiTPQv0ME

It’s easy and fun

As a geologist who works in the Appalachians… They’re cool af.

Nothing is more surreal than being a geologist. Just today I was standing on a dirt road in the middle of farmers field. Looking at the ground is an innocuous little outcrop of boring looking rocks. But those rocks erupted at the bottom of a back arc basin off the coast of Laurentia, was buried by ocean sediment for ages, had an entire ISLAND of rock thrust onto it, and then buried 10s of kilometers deep. The history one rock can tell is amazing.

I tried Mapquest recently for the first time in 18 years. It was astonishing just how terrible their app and directions were.

I would gladly pay a few dollars a month for an alternative to Google Maps or Waze, but it’s like no company even wants to try and compete with Google and Apple maps.

Isn’t having a job lined up a prerequisite for immigration in most countries?

100% agree with you OP.

I’ve been listening to a lot of music that is featured on the NPR shows Hearts of Space and Echos, which i highly recommend. The following artists/bands are of that type, instrumental, chill, “slow music for fast times”, and all are available on Bandcamp.

Hollan Holmes

Kiasmos

Lars Leonhard

Michael Stearns

Röyksopp

It’s the rising posts for /r/all. So all the posts from all the subs that, if they continue to get up votes and comments, are close to being on the front page.

Uh, no… these are the rising posts for /r/all. I have zero interest in crypto.

Lol

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

The dead Internet theory is an online conspiracy theory that asserts that the Internet now consists almost entirely of bot activity and automatically generated content that is manipulated by algorithmic curation, marginalizing organic human activity.[1][2][3][4] These intelligent bots are assumed to have been made, in part, to help manipulate algorithms and boost search results in order to ultimately manipulate consumers.[5] Further, proponents of the theory accuse government agencies of using bots to manipulate public perception.[1] The date given for this “death” is generally around 2016 or 2017.

Every day the Dead Internet theory looks more and more correct.

These are the rising posts on /r/all, not my feed. I’ve used /r/all/rising for years because it gives more frequent and diverse posts than the same couple dozen lowest common denominator posts that stay on the front page all day.

Up until recently it’s been a great way to see a lot of diverse and new content instead of the same dozen lowest common denominator shit posts that stay on the front page all day.

It’s been a hard habit to break after 15 years, but I’m getting there.

Waht… I haven’t used chrome in years. Unbelievable they’d remove that.