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Sure, but when there's controversy about whether or not "it" really happened, it's perfectly cromulent to consider the odds. The odds of it (the runs had no cheating) happening in this case are a pretty convincing argument that it didn't really happen. Where the creationists tend to go astray...

This was discussed a little bit earlier in the thread. Any large science installation is designed with specifications intended to answer specific questions. Like, the LHC was designed to verify whether the HIggs boson exists or not. That dictated things like it's energy and beam current. A small...

There's a sort of chicken-and-egg problem that comes into it. If you only get to build one of these things every decade or two, it has to aim for a major jump in capability. But major jumps in capability are really difficult and expensive, so you can only do it once a decade or two.

It should hardly be surprising that the Earth wins sometimes. After all it's about 1000 trillion trillion times bigger and heavier than the magnet. What's surprising when you think about it is that the magnet can ever win, given that 10^27 ratio. That definitely says something about the relative...

"It would be great if it were safe to do this, but it's not and we're doing it anyway."

That was an 80 person event and dozens got covid despite daily testing. MWC will be 50,000 people and will apparently rely on the same faulty logic that testing can create a virus free bubble. As I recall, these events got cancelled last year when the big companies started declaring that they...

Using any electron beam emitter we could fit on a space probe in the Jovian system would be like standing under Niagra Falls with a squirt gun.

Yeah, if you look at about 33:00 in the launch video, you can see that the blue and gray paths both begin at the launch point and diverge. That can't be the next orbit, can it?

What is the significance of the blue and gray orbits shown on the launch animations? Google is utterly failing me at finding this info. Blue appears to be the projected orbit of the spacecraft, but I can't see an obvious interpretation of the gray.

I have morbidly wondered what would happen if one of these late season storms did major damage. You can't retire the name "Zeta" and replace it with a different sixth Greek letter.

I realize they didn't actually exist until 1920, but it would seem more appropriate to charge 1918 prices. Which would be about $0.11. Wartime and pandemic inflation was a bitch.

Aegis has much bigger boats with much, much smaller rockets and much, much, much more expensive antennas. Plus it was a fundamental design criterion that the radar array work continuously through launches. A cruiser probably feels it when a 30' missile launches, but not like a drone ship taking...

When we first started using the format back in the late eighties, everyone I knew used hard g. It was at least five years (and probably more) before I ever even heard anyone use a soft g. It sounded weird to me then and probably always will.

Whoosh.

If we're being really pedantic, it was Madison's job to repeat for Taggert first, then later it was DeMarco's job to repeat for Nesmith. And she was going to do it. Dammit.

Unscheduled Lithobraking Maneuver

In addition to all the other shortcomings that have been pointed out, the usage pattern makes a big difference. Am I parking at an office building during business hours, where very few spots will open up during the day, so the chances of finding a "close" spot are minimal? Or at a grocery store...

There's a difference between filling a gap in the hominin family tree, which requires a new species, and filling a gap in the fossil record, which requires finding a substantial new fossil. Thanks to this find we know a lot more about A. Anamensis than we did.

Yes, the longitude of the spacecraft will vary during flight, but since the longitude of the launch point and the target orbit are fixed relative to each other it doesn't matter when you launch. (Except, as pointed out, for sunlight, thermal, or range availability reasons.)

Yeah, stopping to consider our single-payer military system might induce some cognitive dissonance. :)