Giant SpaceX Spiral Appears Amid the Aurora Lights in Alaska's Night Sky
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You can buy those, they're just expensive to buy, to run, to insure, and to learn how to operate.
But you can buy them.
The material resources do not exist on Earth to switch to EV cars. The idea we’re going to live on Mars is hallucination.
Transfer of consciousness to other substrates is far more interesting than literally living out pop culture from the last half of the 1900s.
Might be due to the fact that man made energy was quite a new thing and it's getting cheaper quite fast and seemingly boundless.
Like Moores law. It ends eventually.
The price of energy recently resumed its exponential cost reduction, but only for those who have access to solar energy. Hopefully those cost reductions result in price reductions for the rest of us soon.
The problem is that politicians and governments saw shows like Idiocracy and Space Balls, and thought - hey, we can do that.
Plus the powerful elite tapped into the discontent that they'd created in order to further their own power, then crushed the useful idiots who rebelled against the oppression and doubled down with more oppression.
Fuck yeah!
I think that styling trend was due to making them look like jet aircraft. The taillights mimicked jet exhaust pipes closely. Even the front grille was often fashioned to look like a turbine intake.
Jet engines were some of the coolest, most visible, and most advanced tech in the 50s.
Maybe they were right but a little off on the timeline. For example there was a lot of crazy tech that people thought would take off in the 90s and flopped, but are now a reality (Online shopping, smartphones, electric vehicles).
There's the risk that we will develop stronger weapons to match our increasing resilience, but on the other hand in the last 100 years we've made good progress on either outlawing many weapons of mass destruction or at least making their development much harder, so there's hope.
(OT: I do not understand the U.S. policy in this, but surely they are doing everything in their power to prevent that, since this will affect, like, everything. Right?!)
And, the tension between the U.S. / NATO vs. Russia / China / Iran / (Brazil ?) has lessened, but it certainly it isn't gone. How optimistic are you?
We've also mostly stopped with firebombing, and have seriously dialed back the chemical and biological weapons that were much more popular in the WWI/WWII era.
This past week had a test in both N. Korea and Iran, so I don't think that is accurate.
> I'd say that's a massive improvement.
Oh, yes sure it's an improvement. But if we only have two countries intent on starting a nuclear war, thats already enough to hose the whole planet. And I am far from confident that we can safely say we aren't there.
Neither of these happened.
North Korea tested a missile which could be used to deliver a nuke, they haven't tested any nukes since 2017. I don't know what Iran tested, but it certainly wasn't a nuke. The only news of a missile test from Iran this week that I can find is them testing an anti-tank missile, which obviously isn't even meant to deliver nukes.
Which would hopefully be detected in time to "solve" the problem, but still... ;)
Orbitals at predictable orbits and surfaceinstallations on airless bodies might be more in danger though. There even a well targeted fast crowbar might do quite some damage.
Faster then: the kinetic energy of such a mass moving at 12 km/s, faster than escape velocity, would be 'only' 137 tons of TNT, approximately 1/15th of the 2020 Beirut explosion. Even if you throw the rods into the ground at a blistering 50 km/s, that only gives you the equivalent kinetic energy of 2.4 kilotons of TNT, or 1/6th of the Little Boy nuclear bomb.
Then there are the terminal effects; such a tungsten rod is basically an oversized armor piercing dart like tanks shoot at each other. It will drive itself straight into the ground and most of the rod's kinetic energy will be spent pulverizing bedrock and itself. Such a weapon would be great for taking out bunkers, but I think very wasteful for any other purpose.
Wonder if it could be precision enough for non-military applications? eg possibly faster for deep geothermal drilling than using the existing surface based borehole drilling approach.
For military applications though, it'd wonder if such a rod (or small sequence of them) could be effective when striking geological fault lines. eg the San Andreas Fault line
Aka the old "use the terrain" approach.
Not much more substantiated than what people believe will be the return of Christ, it's all sci-fi
Not much fundamentally changed in the last 100 years, even a nuclear reactor is just a fancy steam engine. We're closer to horse carriages than a solar system wide civilization
But I agree, it's a process, not a state machine.
1. The right star system (including organics and potentially habitable planets) 2. Reproductive molecules (e.g. RNA) 3. Simple (prokaryotic) single-cell life 4. Complex (eukaryotic) single-cell life 5. Sexual reproduction 6. Multi-cell life 7. Tool-using animals with intelligence 8. A civilization advancing toward the potential for a colonization explosion (where we are now) 9. Colonization explosion
We have made it through 7 of the 9 steps and are currently in number 8. I would call that the end stages of the Great Filter.
For everyone else, the current climate trajectory doesn't bode well.
And our newest toy is a machine mimicking human written texts.
AR and VR like in books in movies are also not reach, self driving cars aren"t really a thing just like flying taxis.
It's more self-deception than future.
Climate change and it's consequences like new diseases will be problems we be the real yardstick of human capabilities.
Despite so much technology we still have so much precarity and poverty with new massive destabilizations happening every day. What a nightmare
Like... How many people complaining about the effects of Starlink satellites have ever actually seen a Starlink chain drift by, like beads on an invisible string?
It's mesmerizing.
The thought that would be necessary just to see the night sky depresses me beyond belief.
"We in the city can no longer see the night sky, so it's now an unimportant issue."
SpaceX sky-litter is the first time that i've had my night-sky obstructed far-far off-coast on the ocean; that feels significant somehow.
Quick post on Facebook gave us the answer but yeah at the time it really was a "wow" moment
People who care about the night sky won't be impressed by that sight more than by actual beads on a string. Certainly not for long, especially when they realize what it means for that night sky.
If anything, this is adding something to the existing dance of the stars and planets.
Define "harm". I think astronomers would disagree with your assertion.
(... and that's before we consider that cheap launch infrastructure means we can also address the problem by launching telescopes, which would put high-quality imagery completely unobstructed by atmosphere in the hands of far more astronomers than can touch that tech today).
As I understand it, it's not quite as simple as that when the number of satellites gets large.
> that's before we consider that cheap launch infrastructure means we can also address the problem by launching telescopes
The cost of the launch is not the largest part of the cost of having space telescopes.
I'm not sure "simple" is the term I'd use, but given the satellite ephemera and timestamps, the algorithm for knowing where the satellite is and therefore ignoring that chunk of sky when the satellite passes through is well-understood (and we can certainly mandate that every launching organization maintain correct and up-to-date ephemera).
Telescopes observe a tiny, tiny sliver of the night sky. The density of satellites necessary to interrupt them continuously would be something well past the expected launch capacity of this century alone (and would create its own navigational problems were we to achieve it).
> The cost of the launch is not the largest part of the cost of having space telescopes.
Not as they've been done, because the cost of launch was so high that it could only be justified by putting a perfect-mirrored device that could see all the way back through spacetime to the first microseconds of the cosmos in orbit. Now imagine the economics when you're putting a hundred up at that price, not one (and you can use algorithms to combine signal from them to account for lower resolution).
... imagine having, with the right math, an aperture the size of the orbital diameter of the Earth itself...
For part b) you are completely incorrect in your assumptions here. The majority of the cost and effort of telescopes is really in the instrumentation (the 'cameras' that are strapped to the back of the telescope). To get the most out of an observing facility, we need access to these to change them, fix them, and improve them. This is not possible with a space-based mission.
Long-duration observations can't be disrupted badly by a quick satellite jaunt across the sky. That's just a noise blip. Less than 0.00001% of the data collected. Isolate it and scrub it.
Similarly, wide-field observations have a lot of data to work with to figure out what the field is supposed to look like vs. what it looks like with a satellite-pass event. Isolate them and scrub them.
Satellites and deep stellar phenomena are different scales of event at different ranges and speeds. A Fourier transform should make them show up as obviously separable.
(... and again, all of this is assuming you have to scrub this data without a-priori knowledge, when the disrupting event is a well-documented passover with clear ephemera. If it is mandated that satellite companies publish the ephemera, which I think is a perfectly reasonable burden upon them, it should be even easier to separate signal and noise).
I do see your point regarding (b) though; space telescope science may require a wholly new approach relative to terrestrial science.
That's news
I've observed a Starlink chain (the second full chain launched) after sunset, it was absolutely amazing _and inspiring_. I've also tried to observe a chain that I knew was overhead about midnight - and even as an experienced satellite watcher actually looking for them and knowing where they were, I could see nothing.
If astronomers are truly bent about satellites fouling their earth bound observations, they should demand SpaceX put more telescopes in orbit. Those would be better any way, right?
We plan to some day colonize the moon itself. How much should we be concerned about how it will effect isolated Amazonian and Papuan tribes when the moon is lit up with a hundred points of light on the dark-crescent side as the phases shift, and one can make out the twinkle of ion drives or torch ships crisscrossing from lunar to Earth orbits? Enough to never colonize the moon?
Honestly, do you just want to learn, or do you want to go?
Make sure to watch the video too, taken by an all-sky camera run by the University of Alaska. The video shows the spiral as it starts forming at ~1:30. The spiral expands to cover much of the sky, and then dissipates -- all in just a few seconds.
What a fantastic alliteration to describe his state of mind :-)
But during re-entry there's no reason to keep that with you and if by some chance your stage arrives intactish at the ground it might cause a fire. Hence the venting before re-entry.
Why do we want some fuel in the exhaust? Burning an oxydizer-rich mix is not a good idea, especially with a reusable rocket. You'll have a very hot gas that is going to burn-corrode your engine. Metals can burn in an oxygen-rich air. Now imagine that mix at 3,600 K and 300 atm pressure. You'll have what is called in the industry an 'engine-rich' burn. You don't want that.
Also, I don't know about this rocket but sometimes you want to cool down your nozzle and you can do that with unburnt fuel that you inject from the side.
Running a stochiometric mix puts you also at risk of damaging your engine (some parts of your mix might be oxygen-rich), on top of combustion temperature being higher.
Now, burning a fuel-rich mix make these problems go away. And does not decrease much your thrust: heated at very high temperatures, this residual fuel will expand and contribute to some part in the force generated.
Last, a fun fact: you can detect when then rocket leaves the upper atmosphere with the flame color! That's when the flame goes from being orange (high temp residual fuel meets oxygen from the atmosphere and burns) to being grey (flame meets the atmosphere but not enough oxygen to relight it, and soot is grey). You can clearly see it happen around 40km altitude here:
one earthquake did that about three years ago, had it not been for the subsequent hardening , i would have lost my preserves to a rocket.
i live in a place between two major installations, and see uncommon things often. [such as X-45 variants https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-45]
this happened a little before 2:00 hours saturday morning, and was the loudest thing ive ever heard and felt in my life, and was definately not an earthquake, or a hurricane, i saw the spiral.
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/18/northern-lig...
perhaps you could enlighten me with a trajectory during launch, and during stage recovery. im not the only one that saw the spiral, and i had nieghbours on the next ridge that were disturbed by it as well, they thought the noise was my fuel exploding.
I'm not telling you that you didn't see the spiral, I'm telling you that there's no physical way that it could have knocked anything off your shelf from the upper atmosphere.
im looking at the idea this was re-entry shock from an jettisoned booster stage, either that or there was someonelse , using the spaceX as cover for thier own launch, but i havnt heard about anything from Kodiak.
Given that the spiral had a northward azimuth from Delta Junction (as per the article) the draining happened after it had already passed overhead, and it was likely very far away when it actually re-entered. At an inclination in line with Vandenburg, it likely landed in the Pacific.
I am an astrodynamicist but my work in launch dynamics is a bit rusty, so bear with me if my off-the-cuff estimates are off.
https://earthquake.alaska.edu/event/0234u01ap5
Would it have been around this time? I'd be interested to know if their seismographs can be used to detect non-earthquake recordings.
When I was little I lived less than an hour from Cape Canaveral and damn, when those shuttle missions launched, you'd feel it in your bones. I'm not sure how it would feel if it were just in the air crossing my path though.
it was not a snowquake either, and it wasnt from Clear, or Elmo.
Whatever happened at your place, it was nothing to do with this launch.
so...we are marveling at how awesome it looks to dump rocket fuel into the atmosphere? cool, cool
Seems like the latter is correct (if it was going to 'burn up' why would you need to dump fuel?) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9#Recovery_of_second_st...
I guess they figure it's better to let the fuel diffuse in the atmosphere than poison the ocean, or less weight to be recovered/sink
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2018/01/fuel-dump-of-zumas-...
> Rocket stages always carry excess fuel, as you don't want the engine to cut out prematurely by running out of fuel. So it always has a sufficient fuel margin. Once its work is done, this excess fuel is often vented, also known as "depressurization".
> Depressurization and fuel venting avoids the risk of the rocket stage blowing up, for example as a result of static electricity building up in the rocket stage. You do not want your rocket stage to blow up, as it creates an uncontrolable swarm of debris and includes the risk that particles are ejected into orbits where they do not decay quickly, adding to the space debris risk.
As for burning up, it's a bit of both. Some material burns up, some larger chunks splash into the ocean. Same thing happened a while back when the US dropped bits of Skylab on Australia. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-05-31/nasa-skylab-fell-to-e...
They also dump it much, much, lower in the atmosphere. Where people and other things are more likely to breathe it.
The reason it is visually spectacular is not because it is burning but because the fume is reflecting sunlight. Rockets that only emit water vapor have caused similar spirals.
Humans marvel at all kinds of cool-looking things.