It is illegal* to ask if candidates are married.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates have children.

It is illegal* to ask if candidates live with their parents.

* In America.

There are many aspects of a flight profile. Some are based on where you put the payload when it is in orbit. Others are the weight of the payload. As an example, 9's Payload for a GTO orbit is 5.5t when recovered on barge, and 8.3t for an expended mission. LEO orbit, 17.5 t if recovered, 22.8t expendable.

Just because some flight profiles can land at a pad or on a barge, does not mean that this happens in all cases.

References from paper :

A Survey of Launch Vehicle Recovery Techniques

Shraddha C.

Pankaj Priyadarshia

and Devendra Prakash Ghate

Institutes:

Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre, Thiruvananthapuram, 695022, Kerala, India

Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology, Thiruvananthapuram, 695547, Kerala, India

A pretty good read if you have the academic credentials to access it. Clear, at a reasonably high level so not too deep in the weeds, with all manner of different flight profiles for many rockets - including StarShip. And a lot more. Otherwise, I think it is a little premature to claim the success of Starship. The Falcon's are good reliable Rockets. Starship might end up a tad problematic.

I've been wondering for many years before the first traffic camera appeared, why the toll-roads aren't enforcing the speed limits automatically. The time you enter and exit the highway is recorded down to a second. The distance between these two points is known — your average speed could be computed on the spot even with the early 90-ies technology...

The polite police officers would be standing right behind the toll-booths issuing tickets without the drama of hiding in the bushes, then chasing you at highway speeds...

And, yeah, you could lower it by stopping at a rest area — but it'd still be a tremendous disincentive to speed.

I was and continue to hope, that such universal enforcement, affecting all voters, would cause the limits to go up to reasonable figures — or even be abolished completely...

I've run into these people, they're the worst

When have you last checked your compiler's output?

30km/h implies urban/residential areas, not wide open highways.

But you can't implement average-speed based on an urban/residential area where there are lots of possible paths, you can only implement it on straight line highways with very few exits.

I think much more safety would be to enforce traffic laws much more strictly around kids/schools and the like.

https://www.teslarati.com/spac... Forgive the link, it is a real rah-rah piece.

CEO Elon Musk says SpaceX has successfully expanded the envelope of orbital-class rocket recovery with its 50th booster landing, meaning that all Falcon boosters will have a better chance of safely returning to Earth from now on.

https://space-offshore.com/boo... "Falcon 9 missions may need to land on a droneship instead of RTLS due to the weight of the payload or the overall mission profile." I think you have academic access. Here is a good technical report on a lot of rockets that land after use. https://www.sciencedirect.com/.... You'll need academic credentials to download it. But it has a lot more info - and as part of the launch envelopes, there is constraint based on payload as well as direction. If you are going to land, there is a significant reduction in payload.

All of this is why I find it a little amusing that many among us find the most important aspect of launching these candles is the recovery.

tl,dr - where the rocket is going, what it is carrying has a big effect on recoverability. You can force things, reducing payload, or only sending the profiles to places where the first stage can make it back to the launch site, otherwise small extensions to allow it to make it back to a barge.

Because Orbital mechanics is pretty difficult for most to grok. She does have bona fides, Doctorate in Environmental Science and Masters in Physics.

So I'm pretty certain that she well knows that Orion is still in orbit around the earth.

But just think about it. We have people in here who think that not re-using a rocket is some sort of crime, not thinking how that first stage can only return if it is close enough to the launch site. That if you want to go to the moon or a planet, you just point your Rocket at it and it's balls to the wall time. Among other misguided notions.

All said, She is an administrator, and I believe her excitement when she said that, so I'm not quite so willing to call her a political appointee. I'd call it an audio typo.

If it was me, I might say it was the first time humans have left Low Earth Orbit since 1972. And since it is a matter of providing soundbites, I would save the Perigee and Apogee part for later. Perigee and apogee are the more interesting parts from my perspective.

This gets brought up fairly often. And yes, we did it before. Why do it all again?

The learning curve is why. I can't imagine there is anyone from the Apollo project left at NASA. So a whole new group of people have to learn how to make things work. All those people sitting at their consoles are learning, re-learning after a fashion, what the Engineers learned in the 1960's.

It's all good!

A lot of people have a lot of trouble understanding that returning a first stage to the launch site puts a huge constraint on where in orbit you can place that rocket's payload.

You can add a bit of flexibility if you return a rocket to a barge in the ocean - but not much. And when you use a barge, you are eating hard into whatever savings there are in capture and refurb.

The first stage has to have enough fuel to make it back to the landing pad or barge. If the launch envelope takes it out of that range, it's just another disposable rocket. As an indicator, people will notice I only mentioned the first stage. Because there's no good way to recover the second. The rocket is way too far downrange, the earth is rotating. There aren't many landing sites at that point.

Your assignment: Find out why reusable rockets are only useable for very specific launch envelopes. If you use them out of that launch envelope, there are just as disposable as the rockets you think are some sort of complete waste. You are a really smart guy seems like you could teach us all about this stuff.

Either you lose $200 billion now, or you lose your lives in a few years.
The IR has been actively building missiles, developing better ones and funding various terrorist groups around the world while making money selling oil.
They are stronger now than they were 20 years ago. They openly call for the complete destruction of Israel, and they call the US "The great satan". If they had the capability to destroy Israel and the US right now then they absolutely would, if they ever got that capability in the future they wouldn't hesitate to use it.

The majority of the Iranian population HATE this regime. They also know that this regime is ruthless and will not hesitate to kill, and yet thousands of them stood up against it in january and lost their lives.

The sooner the IR is taken out the better for everyone, $200 billion this year, $400 billion next year, $1 trillion in 2 years time, or in 3 years it's too late and they take you out instead. And unlike western governments, the IR will not hesitate if they have the capability.

I understand completely. Many who are orgasming about a Woman and a "Black man because it checks off a box do not like White males, and want less of them doing things. Racism is in no way restricted to the dreaded white male. The people who would call themselves inclusive aer every bit as racist and sexist.

After all, when people say we need more women and people of color in a profession, they are exactly saying they want less White men.

P.S. Race is exactly the biggest social construct ever invented. I'll believe that human races exist when speciation happens, when a human from one group cannot mate and produce offspring.

Thank the Trump-Lord that coal and natural gas plants are free, eh?

Now just between you me, and the fencepost, If we're talking about all that, we could skip a lot of the hassle, and use a hybrid approach. Break Martian ice into Hydrogen and Oxygen components, then utilize Alumina to produce solid Rocket Boosters, using the perchlorates that constitute around 1 percent of the surface area of Martian "soil". Some experiments have been performed using the 60/40 mix of Calcium and Magnesium Perchlorate. looks pretty promising. https://engineering.purdue.edu... Even makes these cool red, white, and blue flames.

Solid boosters and H-O main engines.

All of this is of course hypothetical. There needs to be a reason to establish a permanent human presence on Mars, where people are born, reproduce and die there.

I support sending people to Mars to do research, but that's a whole different setup than the almost inconceivable amount of work needed for the Muskovian pipe dream. In this more practical vision, the return trip materials would be transported separately and in place before the astronauts ever landed. Assembled onsite then come home. It is still an incredible effort, but perhaps a thousandth of the Brave New World plans that still require that reason for all the effort and expense.

What is the reason for a permanent human presence on Mars? Almost certainly living in a cave, and the major industry will be making the fuel and infrastructure to leave Mars. After that, creating the pressurized environment, the air to breathe the water to drink, and the food to sustain life. Oh, the irony.