I saw Avatar in a cinema. I liked it at the time, but within a few hours of seeing it I started disliking it. The more I thought about it, the worse it got. “Racist and stupid” about sums it up. The “white man’s burden” plot was offensive.

My guess is that they’re concerned it might be involved in a terrible accident, and “Boaty McBoatface” would then not look so good in the news reports reporting the deaths, the obituaries and such like.

Room scale with one camera relies on the user always facing that camera. Your video reflects that. How well it will work with two cameras is still unknown (Rift uses different technology to the Vive so may not work as well). The delays in the Rift getting the controllers out suggests they may be having trouble getting…

Room-scale VR should not have that problem. The sickness is due to your eyes seeing the virtual world move while yours feel you are stationary. That disconnect doesn’t happen with the Vive’s room-scale VR, because you move through the virtual world by moving through the real world.

Nothing official, although CBS News has a “source” claiming nothing yet.

Don’t you get a chance to check whether the warrant is, in fact, valid? How can you do that if you aren’t allowed to see it, or even know that it exists?

So far, as far as I know, they’ve just been test flights. They hope to do tourism later, but they didn’t have any paying customers for those first three flights that I know of.

Blue Origin has launched the same rocket three times, which is impressive too, but it doesn’t do anything useful with those launches because it can’t achieve orbit. Also, it wasn’t landing on a barge in the ocean, just going straight up and down. Hopefully they can scale up their technology in time. I figure SpaceX…

They are saying 30% for reusing the first stage.

Room-scale VR is a fourth solution, and one that solves the nausea problem.

Maybe. The show has a kind of virtual reality called the “City of Light”, run by a probably evil artificial intelligence. To get to it, people take a pill that contains nanotechnology that rewires their nervous system in the real world so they no longer feel as much pain, and also uploads them to a computer. Details…

Because Nazgûl on winged mounts would defeat the eagles and take the rocket straight to Bezos.

I liked it at the time, but then I like PK Dick and am comfortable with his themes. I remember one bad review didn’t like it because it basically lied to the audience. I was OK with that because it fits the theme of not being able to trust the things you think you know, but I can see that not everyone would be.

Less than you might think, because by that time you’ve separated from the second stage and the payload, and you’ve burnt nearly all the fuel. Also, parachutes have weight too, and they add complexity.

It was going around 6,500 Km/hr when it separated. That’s about a quarter of a LEO speed, but I’d still class that as “close” for the purposes of my post. It’s the same order of magnitude.

Another reason is that Space X really wants to go to Mars, and for the first Mars landing there probably won’t be a mechanism already there to catch it. If they can nail the barge landing reliably, they can land anywhere there is a flat surface, including off-world.

Parachutes are not very precise. You’d land in the sea. The rocket would still be very hot. Hot salty water ruins rocket engines.

To land on a runway, you need wings and landing gear. The wings don’t work in space so you will be re-entering the atmosphere at close to orbital speed, so you will also need a heat shield. That’s three separate systems, each quite heavy and each quite complex (wings need control surfaces; the Shuttle’s heat shield…

How would that work for the first Mars landing?

The first stage isn’t really strong enough to be supported. When it’s empty, it’s just a very thin tin can. It also has a very low centre of gravity, with all the weight in the engines at the bottom, so it doesn’t really need support beyond its legs.