People down voting you for bringing up Kessler syndrome were correct to do so. It’s a complete non-issue for starlink-sized objects at that altitude.

Light pollution is a more reasonable objection, and the effects on the upper atmosphere of all those satellites burning up would be as well, but not Kessler syndrome

I have at least a little sympathy for SpaceX’s position that the regulations are unfit for purpose if they need a modification to their licence to use a different fuel tank, that seems totally immaterial to the flight

For an emergency ascent, they’d probably have dropped more than two. They also probably wouldn’t have taken the time to type a message to the surface if it were going wrong that quickly.

It seems more likely to me that they were controlling their rare of descent. I’d expect them to lose a little buoyancy as the vessel compresses, so it seems reasonable that they’d drop the occasional weight as they descend.

Actually, I suspect he’s implying that nobody’s trying to assassinate Harris because all the democracy-hating assassins are on her side, or she’s the one setting them up, or something to that effect.

It’s still the sort of slander which in a reasonable world he’d be called on, but that seems unlikely

It’s unlikely to cause anything to outright fail, but it will certainly be creating bottlenecks and inefficiencies

Third party, sure, but Starlink is absolutely a US corporation. They have joint projects with the US military, even

That’s going to be a problem whatever solution you come up with, because of the federated nature of the lemmy system.

There’s no central authority to hand out usernames, so if two people sign up to different instances with the same username, any design which didn’t attach instance name to each username would fail. The only way around it would be for each instance to contact every other instance which exists, including the ones which haven’t federated yet, and negotiate ownership of the new username, and that’s just not possible

Cuboids are prisms. Specially, they’re rectangular prisms

The assesment that he’s the wealthiest person on earth is pretty dubious, actually. The analyses which list the worlds wealthiest people always are, because they have to decide what counts as wealth and how to count it.

Normally that’s fairly easy, but for very powerful people (who, as you point out, the people at the top of those lists are) it gets murky because of things like stocks and options which they could liquidate in theory, but which would crash in value if they tried to actually do so. Does it still count as wealth if it only exists so long as you don’t spend it?

There are also people who’s wealth isn’t held in any currency, or gold, or stocks. How do you measure the wealth or power of a sovereign king, or any other kind of dictator? You certainly can’t neatly put it in a scale alongside people who just have a dragon’s horde of cash somewhere, that wouldn’t be comparing like for like

In their defense, a judge probably would try and answer basic legal questions to support a defendant who for some reason didn’t have a lawyer to ask, unless that defendant had already gone out of their way to antagonise the judge.

Sadly, I suspect there’s a lot of overlap between people who are representing themselves and people who have annoyed the judge

I would describe it as being in free-fall whenever it’s not in being held up by any interaction with a solid surface, even indirectly. I’m not sure everyone would agree with my definition, but it’s not a term you’ll see used much in serious engineering precisely because it is a bit vague.

For example, an aircraft in flight isn’t in free-fall because it’s being held up by the air, which is in turn held up by the ground. An aircraft (or spacecraft) which has no wings is being slowed down by air resistance, but not actually held up and is therefore in free-fall.

An ascending rocket is generating forces which hold it up, rather than transferring forces to something which won’t move (like the ground), so I would consider it to be in free-fall

No, even when the engines are firing it’s in free-fall. The only forces on the booster or fuel (aside from internal ones like gyroscopic or centrifugal dynamics) are thrust, control thrusters, and depending on the phase of flight drag & aerodynamic control.

Thrust always points roughly along the length of the booster, and drag always acts against the direction of travel, so the external forces acting on the fuel are almost 100% up or down during all phases of flight. The only exceptions are manoeuvres when the attitude control systems is rotating the vehicle, either by grid-fin or thrusters, so any redistribution of the fuel or snow will be entirely driven by those movements, and their own inertia

Excellent video & analysis, as always.

I was highly irritated by the erroneous claim that things would settle to the earth-facing side of the tank though. The damn thing’s in free-fall, the direction of the gravity vector is entirely irrelevant! The conclusions mostly still work, but it has more to do with jostling and slosh causing the snow to move, not gravity

Exactly, that seems like the reasonable reading of the statement to me

While we can all agree Trump is an ass, I think you’ve misunderstood this statement.

He’s not saying “it’s important that republicans don’t vote if we fail to solve the election fraud”, he’s saying “it’s important to solve the fraud, because otherwise next time republicans won’t be allowed to vote”.

He’s claiming that republican votes won’t be counted, or that they won’t be allowed to place a vote at all, because the democrats will have rigged the system and/or deprived them of the right to vote

That’s apparently less risky than riding back on Starliner

Not necessarily. The dangers involved in coming home packed like unsuited sardines in the back of a Dragon only come into play if they need to evacuated the ISS to begin with, so they’re saying the odds of abandoning the ISS and the Dragon capsule loosing it’s atmosphere are better than the odds of a catastrophic failure of the Starliner

The crew of Apollo 13 weren’t really stranded, as such. They were far from home and not sure if they had the means to get home before the supplies ran out, which is a different problem

HARM is a category of weapon which seeks things like radar or jammers. They weren’t suggesting that the jammers are literally harmless.

In unrelated news: the jammers are, in fact, harmless unless you’re making a habit of riding on top of the tank. The radio energy isn’t going to penetrate a significant thickness of conductive material, such as armour plating. Or unless you’re the person being jammed, in which case they’re a different category of harmful