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Post by aquaduct on May 30, 2020 13:51:39 GMT -5
Watching the launch.
The astronauts are named Bob and Doug.
Take off, eh. Hosers.
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Post by aquaduct on May 30, 2020 14:45:59 GMT -5
One of the recovery ships is named Of Course I Still Love You.
I shit you not.
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Post by RickW on May 30, 2020 15:03:12 GMT -5
Watching the launch. The astronauts are named Bob and Doug. Take off, eh. Hosers. ‘Cause, like, SpaceX is really a Canajun company, eh?
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Post by Hobson on May 30, 2020 15:24:21 GMT -5
Watched it. Very cool. I almost forgot all the crap that's going on back here on Earth until I saw the people in Mission Control wearing face masks. Set up to record the docking tomorrow morning.
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Post by aquaduct on May 30, 2020 15:33:42 GMT -5
Watching the launch. The astronauts are named Bob and Doug. Take off, eh. Hosers. ‘Cause, like, SpaceX is really a Canajun company, eh? That's that southern suburb of Detroit, right?
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Post by coachdoc on May 30, 2020 19:23:44 GMT -5
Cool. We got 2 astronauts into orbit today. With a private company. This is sci fi coming true.
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Post by Village Idiot on May 30, 2020 20:10:31 GMT -5
Cool. Didn't the company somehow develop reusable rockets? That's a big deal.
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Post by aquaduct on May 30, 2020 20:22:50 GMT -5
Cool. Didn't the company somehow develop reusable rockets? That's a big deal. Yeah. The first stage guided itself down to a perfect landing on the deck of the Of Course I Still Love You.
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Post by Village Idiot on May 30, 2020 20:31:02 GMT -5
Saving, like millions, right?
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Post by aquaduct on May 30, 2020 20:36:15 GMT -5
Saving, like millions, right? Something like that. And something was mentioned that since we stopped launching our own stuff 10 years ago, it costs $85 million a seat to have the Russians take us up.
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Post by coachdoc on May 30, 2020 21:14:40 GMT -5
Hey. This is real life sci fi. Money is not a topic of interest.
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Post by sidheguitarmichael on May 30, 2020 22:36:15 GMT -5
Hey. This is real life sci fi. Money is not a topic of interest. Unless it’s in the form of a holographic paypal chip in your pupil. That would be some dope sci-fi, right there.
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Post by brucemacneill on May 31, 2020 5:56:00 GMT -5
Does anyone know how long Bob and Doug are staying at the space station and when the SpaceX capsule is supposed to return to Earth? I see the capsule is supposed to dock at 10:30 this morning but I haven't heard the plan beyond that.
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Post by billhammond on May 31, 2020 8:12:39 GMT -5
Does anyone know how long Bob and Doug are staying at the space station and when the SpaceX capsule is supposed to return to Earth? I see the capsule is supposed to dock at 10:30 this morning but I haven't heard the plan beyond that. Unclear at this point, could be weeks, even months, they were saying yesterday.
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Post by billhammond on May 31, 2020 8:58:36 GMT -5
Cool. Didn't the company somehow develop reusable rockets? That's a big deal. Yeah. The first stage guided itself down to a perfect landing on the deck of the Of Course I Still Love You. This just astonishes me:
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Post by coachdoc on May 31, 2020 9:11:13 GMT -5
Elon Musk is a long view visionary. Eschewing short term gains for the long view. Most of our capitalist entrepeneurs go for financial wins right now. Musk is different. Patience way beyond which most investors have.
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Post by TKennedy on May 31, 2020 9:36:31 GMT -5
Wow! A step up from the Estes rockets my kids used to launch with an occasional frog on board.
Dub do you and Russ remember the homemade rocket epidemic that started after Sputnik? I bet you had some attempts. Ours was a flashlight casing filled with kitchen table solid fuel (potassium nitrate and sugar). The result was predictable.
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Dub
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I'm gettin' so the past is the only thing I can remember.
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Post by Dub on May 31, 2020 15:00:06 GMT -5
Wow! A step up from the Estes rockets my kids used to launch with an occasional frog on board. Dub do you and Russ remember the homemade rocket epidemic that started after Sputnik? I bet you had some attempts. Ours was a flashlight casing filled with kitchen table solid fuel (potassium nitrate and sugar). The result was predictable. Boy do I remember. I'd had Gilbert chemistry sets for years and had done all the experiments and read up on all the science behind them by the time I was fourteen or so (1956). I'd learned to make black powder by buying saltpeter (potassium nitrate) and powdered charcoal (sold to aid digestion?) at the corner drug store. At some point I realized that saltpeter and granulated sugar would work just fine too. In those days, we were still most concerned with blowing stuff up, not propulsion. As an aside, I did discover that my father's suede bound, gilt-edged, 1911 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica contained a lengthy and very detailed set of instructions for making nitroglycerin. I really wanted to try that but I never did. (And so I remain extant.) Model rockets had begun to appear in our hobby store before Sputnik. Science mags and some popular press had been covering such things as multi-stage rockets and the possibility of space flight for a while. I learned that solid fuel model rockets were powered by saltpeter and sugar melted together. This of course is a "killer" combination since nearly every carbon atom winds up right next to an oxygen atom. What could be faster or more efficient for combustion? I had some copper tubing from the hobby shop and decided it would make a fine fuselage for a model rocket. I could melt my sugar-saltpeter mixture over my alcohol lamp and just pour it into the copper tube. What could go wrong? But the melted fuel was far too viscous to be poured into the narrow copper tube. After some thought (but not nearly enough thought), I figured I could grind the powdered mixture very fine using my mortar and pestle, load the "rocket" with the powder, and just heat the rocket over the alcohol lamp until the fuel melted together. Then I could just let it cool and wait for a launch window.(Heh) It turned out there were at least two flaws in my plan. The first was that I didn't actually know the kindling point of my fuel. I’d seen it catch fire on occasion while being melted in a spoon over the lamp so I'd become careful about letting it get too hot. Still, I didn't know how hot the flash point was. The other miscalculation was that the fuel in the copper tube rocket might not heat evenly along its length when held over the alcohol lamp. So, seated at my desk in my bedroom, I watched closely and carefully as I held the rocket over the lamp and before you know it... BLAM! The thing blew up in my face embedding shrapnel in the ceiling but somehow, Lord knows how, missing my eyes. My ears rang for a long time afterword. That concluded my association with rocketry. This was all before Sputnik had yet flown. But, yes, I remember the model rocket fad.
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Post by Village Idiot on May 31, 2020 15:10:42 GMT -5
Wow! A step up from the Estes rockets my kids used to launch with an occasional frog on board. For us, it was a mouse. I think we all have become a little more humane since then.
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Post by TKennedy on May 31, 2020 15:29:12 GMT -5
That is funny Dub. Well could have been not so funny I guess.
We packed a smaller finned flashlight casing with the powder, made a hole in the cap for an exhaust nozzle, and put a fuse up the hole.
Lit it and ran. The explosion on the pad was impressive. That was it for the program.
Saltpeter and sugar was not retired though and came in handy for a lot of boyhood shenanigans like blowing up model planes and ships.
What you could buy in a drugstore was amazing back then. Pretty loose times, actually till not that long ago. In medical school we did experiments where we would take a capsule of Methylene Blue powder and see how long it took for it to be absorbed and appear in the urine which became quite blue.
When my sister in law got married in the early 80’s I asked the local pharmacist in a small town in Nebraska if he’d make me up some Methylene Blue capsules and label them as cold pills as she had a cold. He knew the family very well and thought it was a great joke and did it. We gave them to her as she left on the honeymoon.
Her husband said the first morning in the hotel he heard this scream from the bathroom - “I’m peein’ blue!”.
You’d wind up in jail for that today or for trying to buy potassium nitrate in a drugstore. As I recall saltpeter was also supposed to decrease a young male’s sex drive and rumor had it the nuns put in the food at school.
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