Cozy-airlessness - Cozy Airlessness

The Night Rolls In,  -    Greg Mort, 2011.

American,b.1952-

Watercolour, 14 × 20 in.   35.6 × 50.8 cm

Artist's concept of the missile-mounted Space Shuttle Orbiter during launch.

Date: November 23, 1981

NARA: 6364453

Posted by Numbers Station on Flickr: link, link, link, link, link

My girlfriend and I could not stop laughing about this motion blur, so I...

Earth gravity vs Martian gravity vs Lunar gravity

Antique map of the Moon by mapsandposters

Blue Moon really should go first. It's a more practical, less ambitious design, with better inherent safety. We shouldn't splash out on the towering ambitious megarocket just because we can. That stuff should come later, once we've gained confidence and experience. That should be obvious.

NASA does not need a lander with a dry mass of 100+ tonnes to put 2–8 astronauts on the Moon. The lander's excessive size and mass actually make several problems, such as the hatch being 30 m above the ground and there needing to be a crew elevator system with no current plan for a backup if it fails.

Big spaceship does not equal good spaceship. Don't be fooled by spectacle and awe. Starship HLS is ill-suited to taking humans to the surface of the Moon. The best case for it is as a heavy cargo vehicle, perhaps in service of a Moonbase. Again, that comes later. Skylab after Mercury-Redstone, not before.

It's genuinely possible that Starship HLS might not be ready before Blue Moon MK 2 is.

Space is one of the most hazardous environments for a human being to exist in. That's what makes it so damned enticing.

Space is so essentially deadly. It differs from any location on Earth in that way. You can't 'tame' space. You can't make a vacuum hospitable. Space is a desolate, dry, sterile, irradiated expanse, which is home to extreme temperatures and occasional overspeeding projectiles, and to which full-body exposure is almost instantly lethal. Space must command your respect.

I wish some people would realise that the obstacle to colonising Mars isn't just a lack of funding. It's crazy that there's people in the world who think that billionaires are just going to build extraterrestrial cities like it's so easy. ‘Oh, we'll just build thousands of giant rockets, and oh we'll just stuff 100 people inside each, and oh we'll just travel in an armada through deep-space, and oh we'll just land thousands of giant rockets on Mars, and oh we'll just build a city with millions of inhabitants on a freezing rocky desert with no breathable atmosphere, almost no running water, toxic soil, literally nothing to eat, and no economic incentive. Why hasn't anyone done this already? Total no-brainer!’

I say this because I used to be the kind of person who had actually thought that Mars colonisation were possible and could happen in my lifetime.

Some nice music that I think about a lot

Crescent Earth seen from the Moon