Grey wrote: ↑Sat Nov 06, 2021 2:28 am
jamesbond, have you heard the "space news"?
The crew of the Crew Dragon ship will not be able to use the toilet on the way to Earth. Due to the disconnection of the hose in the toilet, liquid got into the ventilation system, which raised concerns about the possibility of corrosion of the ship
Yes, I heard that. I didn't read the article, I thought it was a joke. With Soyuz at least, it's only 3 hours up, as opposed to 23 hours for Dragon ... I'm not sure of the de-orbit times for both, though.
But what's the problem, just open the airlock, and do your business right there, right? Nobody will be looking anyway
What happened to the hermetic plastic bag, did they ban that on Dragon too? (No offense to women, but men obviously have the benefit in this particular situation, gravity or no gravity).
This is a low orbit. Can you imagine a flight to Mars? Human physiology is not designed for such feats.
As people like to say, it's only "boring and thoroughly unimportant implementation details", and we can always "modulate" and "compensate"
Until we perfect some sort of stasis (aka "human hibernation"), I don't think anybody will get anywhere beyond the moon __alive__. How much food you think we'll need for a 6-month journey for a crew of three? Even with freeze-dried rations? How do you like to eat freeze-dried food for the next 6 months? Yeah me neither.
That's why we enjoy SF so much, eh? Because in reality, don't even bother to talk about lightspeed when even the nearest planet is not (practically) reachable. Space is indeed the final frontier.
On November 12, a fragment of a Chinese meteorological satellite, shot down during China's tests of anti-satellite weapons in 2007, may fly up to the ISS.
There will be more of this coming, the way we've been treating our low Earth orbits. Imagine a rocket is hit by a debris on its way up. That's would make spectacular news.
The Kessler effect is real, although nobody can pin out when that's gonna happen, and thus, let's just conveniently assume it will never do and bury it under wood. Let's talk about electric self-driving cars instead (which requires us to put more of those debris ... I mean disposable satellites) to LEO.
With every Starship test launch, they launched at least five other rockets in between, and each time I read the payload being "Starlink". I heard our nerd hero Musk has managed to put over 1,000 Starlink sats there; and I'm sure his baldy companion would not like to be outdone.
But the (serious) question is: Does he have the de-orbit plan?
If not, who will be responsible to clean the stuff up?
Does anybody who ever puts things up have a de-orbit plan?
Do we have regulations that says you can't put stuff up unless you plan to bring it down (something like collecting your dog poo when you're walking the dog?)
Even if we do, Is it actually enforced, anyway?
Watching all these things feel like watching Wile E Coyote sawing the branch he's sitting on ...
Perhaps not too bad, while waiting for the sky clears up by itself, we can replenish our fossil fuel. And we can re-attempt to conquer space again in the next million years or so ... hopefully before the Sun starts to roast us. And make sure we do it right next time.