That’s fascinating! I have learned a thing today. Thank you, that makes today officially a good day!

You would think so, but that’s because we’re generally used to more everyday levels of force. Think about the Space Shuttle. Until launch, it was affixed to the launch pad by eight bolts. Seriously. Just eight bolts, held down with explosive frangible nuts, attached via the SRB aft skirts. The SLS uses the same system…

Or Temu.

That’s indeed one strategy for terminating a rocket. It’s not really germane, though, as that still isn’t what happened in this case. This rocket didn’t shut itself down. You can see in the video it took some time for the thrust to completely stop, and no matter how a range safety system functions, it always does so…

My grandpa had problems with general anesthesia, probably due to untreated PTSD from WWII. The worst one he had was during his knee replacement: he actually woke up on the table having a flashback. I mean, you always had to be careful waking him up from naps, because he’d come up swinging, but waking up in an…

Agreed. Definitely sounds like an emergency descent, which would admittedly be a very frightening experience for the passengers.

Yeah, that was one of the dumber things he’s said, which is fairly impressive.

The disposibility is going to be a problem eventually, of course, because it makes these things so expensive. They have to be built to exorbitant reliability standards, since there’s no hope of repair, and they’re just thrown away at the end of a relatively short mission. (That’s only part of what makes them…

*facepalm* Yeah, that’s a typo. Hundreds of millions. :P

Maybe; I’m not that good with orbital mechanics. ;-) I know the calculations get tricky because there are a lot of resonances with the major planets you have to deal with at that point, and also they’re light and brightly painted so they are sensitive to perturbation by solar pressure. Over large timescales, they’re…

Excellent description of the stresses that are placed on stuff. I mean, ships at sea generally are lucky to get a thirty year service life, thanks to saltwater corrosion, and airliners have a similar service life thanks to pressurization cycles. Stresses add up.

Wow, you’re touchy. No, obviously I hadn’t noticed that he’d responded to you directly.  Have a better day.  ;-)

I realize it was an attempt at humor, but it was a very bad one.

That would be pretty cool. Unfortunately, I understand it won’t be so easy to pull the modules apart. It would take a lot of labor to disconnect everything, repack the solar arrays and radiators, fold and restow them, and then there’s a problem where things in space vacuum-weld together so you’d have to cut a lot of…

A great deal of it will survive, but in pieces. It will be similar to the deorbit of Mir, although more mass will survive. This is why it’s so important to target the “satellite graveyard” in the South Pacific, for safety reasons. When Mir was deorbited, a lot of scientific resources were marshaled to observe the…

It came down prematurely; they didn’t destroy it on purpose. (That’s partially accurate — in fact they did somewhat control the reentry. It had no propulsion, so they tried to partially control the reentry by adjusting the angle of the solar arrays. It didn’t completely work, and they ended up hitting Australia…

And they used to actually be one of the better ones for science content.

The subtitle is even stupider:

Fun fact: being in a heliocentric orbit doesn’t mean they can’t still come back and hit us. In fact, there’s a pretty good chance they will, since unless a lot of effort is expended, they’re likely to be on an Earth-crossing orbit. For instance, the Apollo 14 S-IV B upper stage has already returned to Earth orbit at…

I’m afraid you will have to get used to more than one person answering the same question Try not to take it personally. It just means he didn’t see your answer before he posted his.