We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.
You could just re-use the studio where they faked the Apollo 11 landing except it was in 7 WTC which was destroyed in a controlled demolition to hide the evidence.
> She called the top of the ET (well, it's no longer an ET, but it's the stage that was the STS ET) the "upper stage". She said that the propellents are stored at thousands of degrees below zero. And so on. This is a NASA presenter?
To be fair to her, she seemed to explicitly refer to what sits on top of the core stage, it just wasn't in the diagram she was gesturing to the top of at the time.
To be fair to you, I think the cryogenic comment was worse and she actually said "thousands of degrees below Fahrenheit".
The problem is they're trying to run hours of programming leading up to this launch for some reason, but aren't willing to force the experts to come in to do the commentary. They should have given her a script.
Jesus! Why is there a presenter? Why isn't it just a livestream of the mission control radio chatter? That sort of shit belongs on some 24/7 news broadcast.
Same reason the livestream mentioned jobs about a dozen times in the 10 minutes I watched, NASA is in a fraught position and this is their way of fighting for some continued funding. A 'mass media' event captures more attention than a minimalist stream of chatter. (And a less cynical interpretation is also that getting the public interested in and engaged with space missions is part of their mandate.)
> So much advanced equipment is just sitting there in labs, waiting for humans to finally go and make experiments. Which they eventually get round to, sort of, when they can secure funding and when the grad student isn't ill or making mistakes or framing the problem the wrong way.
That's not really what the article is about though. Short of staffing it with humanoid robots, existing labs and their equipment will continue to be unused.
There are groups that are actively working on automating conventional labs like this. Most of the efforts I know about use non-humanoid mobile robots or even just a six-axis arm on a rail and some lab space reconfiguration
I don't know if this is an irony thing I'm not getting, but we know they had untracked access to data they shouldn't have (violating data access rules and orders from a judge), and there is a whistleblower accusation that the data was retained and some DOGE staffers were at least talking with other groups who could use the data.
Meanwhile how would Hunter Biden, not a government employee nor having access to government systems, get that data in the first place?
This is blogspam based on a tweet of the company's promo video[1] in November and some speculation by a guy on Chinese state TV[2]. As far as I can find there's no evidence since then that these have entered production, mass or otherwise. It was doubted at the time they could hit these costs in production, and there hasn't been any news since.
Yes. I have no idea if this is technologically plausible at this point but it doesn’t make sense strategically. Why would China allow something this dangerous and IP-intensive to be commercialized? We don’t sell our nuclear weapons tech, for example. (I assume.) And the thought that they would want this in the hands of unstable actors, however they are currently aligned, is a little silly. This feels more like a mistake, possibly even a scam.
You underestimate both China's production capability and their desire to destabilize the south Asian region, so they can step in to take control. They have been arming Pakistan to the teeth against India. They even sold them the nuclear weapons tech. They don't care.
Both the US and China sold nuclear power technology to Pakistan, as I recall France also agreed to sell nuclear power tech to Pakistan .. in a deal that fell through because of something (haven't checked history) in France's domestic politics scene(?).
All three countries have denied providing nuclear weapons tech to Pakistan - there is credible history to account for both Pakistan and India to have independantly developed enrichment programs and weapons on their own*.
All things are possible, a plausible explanation for the flurry of accusations against China from 2000 onwards from both the US State Dept. and India was the bald fact that the US, the premier global atomic watchdog, was caught absolutely pants down and blindsided by the events of 1998** ... India detonated a series of nuclear weapons tests and Pakistan responded within 30 days with a slightly longer series ( 5 blasts Vs six in response .. IIRC )
It sounds like marketing hype. The term "hypersonic" is so vague as to be almost meaningless, for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile. Can it usefully maneuver at hypersonic speeds? Can it track a target at hypersonic speeds? Without further evidence I'm going to assume the answer is "no".
Also, as the Iranians have recently demonstrated, the way to get get past someone's defences is to deploy multiple warheads (and a pile of random debris) from a cheap missile, not to bet on exotic hypersonic weapons.
> for example the V2 was technically a hypersonic missile.
The V2 was not a hypersonic missile, it was a ballistic missile that had a predetermined flight path that was easy to predict. The distinguishing factor of hypersonic missiles is that they do not require a ballistic trajectory to achieve their speeds (and are hence, much harder to detect) and they maintain maneuverability throughout their entire flight path.
> The ancestor of ballistic missiles, Germany’s [...] V-2 was first launched in the 1940s. During ascent, it could reach a speed greater than Mach 5 and could do so again momentarily on its way back down. But, no one would claim that the V-2 was a hypersonic missile. In a similar vein, should one apply this label to modern intercontinental ballistic missiles that reach speeds beyond Mach 20 at ascent and re-entry?
> Certainly not, and there are other characteristics commonly cited when defining ‘hypersonic missiles’. However, while a combination of defining characteristics is increasingly adopted among experts, hypersonic missiles are often not well understood within public discussions in politics and the media [...]. The US-based Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance states that ‘hypersonic weapons refer to weapons that travel faster than Mach 5 (~3800mph) and have the capability to maneuver during the entire flight.’
How about don't call stuff that travels faster than sound a "fasterthansoundic missile" if you don't want people to confuse it with all other old stuff that also travels faster than sound!
Yes, that's exactly what I said, it was technically a hypersonic missile because it could travel at more than Mach 5. In the same way that the Kinzhal is technically a hypersonic missile and please ignore that fact that you can shoot it down with a 1980s-vintage Patriot, which at Mach 3-ish is definitely not hypersonic no matter how you fiddle the figures.
> He seems to provide ample detailed western sources to back up his claims in every video
Does he? The only sources seem to be a CNSpaceflight tweet from last november of a promo animation from the missile company, and a South China Morning Post article that is just quoting commentators on Chinese state TV talking about the the possible capabilities of the missiles.
The other sources (someone else's substack that's sourced from a December article[1] from The Independent, and two articles on "interestingengineering") all just quote the same animation and commentators.
Eh, it also feels like a classic "maybe we somehow have enough perspective on this watershed moment while it's happening to explain it with a simplistic dichotomy". Even this piece interrogates the feeling of "loss" and teases out multiple aspects to it, but settles on a tl;dr of "yep, dichotomy". There's more axes here too, where that feeling can depend on what you're building, who you're building it with, time and position in your career, etc etc.
(I'll admit, though, that this also smells to me a bit too much like introvert/extrovert, or INTP/INTJ/etc so maybe I'm being reflexively rejective)
I've known people working in federal government where firing them would be a serious problem, as in they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Many of these people could get paid more in private industry. You're seriously underestimating niche knowledge of things and/or overestimating how well things are documented.
> they're the only person who knows something quite important well enough.
Then either the organization needs to abandon that 'something' or create a structure that prevents such a situation arising.
If that 'something' is important then the organization has to provide some sort of guarantee of continuity or it is permanently just one road traffic accident from disaster. If it won't do that then it is tacitly admitting that the 'something' is not important.
They actually often are in the short term (see the "significant loss of productivity from which it took the agencies years to recover" quote in the article about the similar relocation from Trump's first term), and a gutted department of agriculture can remain incompetent longer than you can avoid supply chain disruptions and food poisoning.
What you do is open small distributed offices led by a driven person eager to live in that area, and let the small offices grow over the years as the DC offices shrink. Careers aren't that long on the timescales governments work on, you just have to be patient and be ok with slow, incremental progress in your own career instead of big splashy doge headlines followed by desperately trying to rehire and hire new expertise when you realize what you've actually done.
I'm skeptical though that 100% (or even more than 60%) of the workers in the DC offices are true specialists in agriculture vs. office workers who happen to do agricultural work. Certainly there's a set of institutional knowledge to be maintained. But the most committed specialists are going to be the ones who are willing to move to e.g. Ogden Utah, as the previous commenter mentioned. The slightly specialized office workers, being able to swap into some other role for ${BUREAUCRACY} are less likely to move and less likely to need to. There are people in Ogden and ${RURAL_CITY_[1-5]} who are able to do the support work needed.
However, as you say, the time scale is important and I did not really take that into account.
Why do you think specialist knowledge about crop and livestock management is that fungible? Particularly as it interfaces with the federal bureaucracy?
> Are you of the opinion that DC is a hotspot for specialized crop and livestock management knowledge?
I don't have a strong opinion on this. But I think a farm and food specialist in D.C. probably has more sway than tens of distributed experts in Iowa and Kansas. Part of the purpose of these agencies is to inform policy. That's hard to do if you're not near the room.
lol yes what we really need right now is unregulated interstate sales of raw milk. Luckily that was introduced in 2024 (last congress) and went nowhere.
We're commenting on NASA's live stream that exists to get us pumped up about the tens of billions of dollars we overpaid for this launch.
I'm probably much more happy than the next guy about getting to see a flyby of the moon this week even if I really wish we'd gotten here another way, but the accusation is a bit funny in this thread in particular.
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