Tag: mars

Falcon Heavy’s central core booster did not survive reentry.

That’s a shame, but this is how you learn:

Elon Musk said on a conference call with reporters that the launch “seems to have gone as well as one could have hoped with the exception of center core. The center core obviously didn’t land on the drone ship” and he said that “we’re looking at the issue.” Musk says that the core ran out of propellant, which kept the core from being able to slow down as much as it needed for landing. Because of that, the core apparently hit the water at 300MPH, and it was about 100 meters from the ship. “It was enough to take out two thrusters and shower the deck with shrapnel,” Musk said. That should be worth seeing on video: “We have the video,” Musk confirmed, “it sounds like some pretty fun footage… if the cameras didn’t get blown up as well.”

Continue reading Falcon Heavy’s central core booster did not survive reentry.

SpaceX Falcon Heavy test flight today.

Via Geeks Are Sexy, here’s the live feed:

3:10 Eastern Time, which means… not at 3:10 Eastern Time, sorry.  Expect a delay on this launch, because there’s always going to be a delay.  Heck, it might not even launch today.  But if it does, Elon Musk is going try to send a Tesla to Mars.

OK. I’m not particularly enamored of our current self-appointed tech barons.  But I have to give him style points for using a car with ‘Space Oddity’ playing as ballast payload.

NASA announces spiders. From Mars.

I simply can’t imagine why they’d come up with that particular name.

No, wait, I can: Continue reading NASA announces spiders. From Mars.

The newest Mars… anomaly… pic.

Coming soon to a government conspiracy thread near you:

It’s supposedly on Mars… well, I think that it’s just pixel noise in Google Earth: Mars, or whatever the technical term is. I just use the Magic Thinky Box; I don’t pretend to be a toolmaker.  On the other hand, Google Earth looks interesting, so there’s that.  Anyway, I figure that it’s not real, and that NASA can either release high-resolution photos of the area that won’t show it (thus proving that there’s a cover-up going on), or not have any high-resolution photos of the area (thus proving that there’s a cover-up going on).   Note that there’s no actual way for NASA to prove that there’s not a cover-up going on; there never is.

Moe Lane

PS: If it was real NASA would have broadcast this to every corner of the world, coupled with an unsubtle request for some money, please*.  Because we didn’t put it there – people are aware that getting payloads to orbit is not exactly a subtle exercise at our current level of technology, yes? – and even a government bureaucracy can recognize a hand-wrapped PR gift from God when it sees one.
*’Some’ being defined as ‘quite a lot of money, really.’