Natural logs weird me out. Base 10 makes so much more intuitive sense to me. Probably because I don’t have an irrational number of fingers. Though I am currently missing a wee bit of my OEM equipment thanks to a landscaping accident in high school.

I both love and hate that we both didn’t do ALL our homework and read the source material. The metaphorical equivalent of saying “as described previously” in your M&M section.

I will level with you, I was going to do basically the same thing when I get home. But I do still want to see how close I could get/how much of my physics I still remember. I think I’ve got a slow day tomorrow, so I’ll busy myself doing weird math and see if my numbers pass muster. And to see exactly how trying to…

I wish I could get back to a mental state where my first thought actually was "low earth orbit."

The costs are why it’s going to deorbit, not the technical difficulties of moving the thing. The latter is easier than making sure it will crash where you want it to. The cost to move it will be immense, and the costs to continue maintaining it will continue to be non-trivial. The people who will be paying those costs…

Some scientists like cars too. I’m one of them. 

I majored in Chemistry, minored in Physics, PhD was a weird mix of Immunology, Biochem, and Stats, so this type of math isn’t quite my bag. But I could probably work it out for you, at least in terms of how much energy you’d need to accelerate the mass of the station into the new orbit in a vacuum. Then it’s mostly a…

I bet Disney’s HOA could!

Exactly. The execution is the easy part. Funding the endeavor is the impossible part.

Executing such a plan isn’t technically difficult, but selling it to the people who would fund such an undertaking would be herculean. They’re going to ask you why they should spend billions to move an uninhabited, obsolete station (plus the attendant maintenance it would require to keep it mothballed).

I know they do. And so do I. And, like them, I have spent many years working for governmental and military science agencies. Doing this would be massively expensive, and for what? It’s the space-faring equivalent of renting a *very expensive* storage locker for the clothes you swear you’ll fit into again one of these…

I got my PhD from Duke. I think we probably understand it about equally. The difference is that I’m grounded enough in reality to know that the “it’d be really nice if we could do THIS” will pretty much always lose to “it’d be a lot cheaper to do THAT” when push comes to shove.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsiolkovsky_rocket_equation

Yeah, they are. Modern autos... I hate to say that they’re “good” because they will forever be missing a pedal, but they are absolutely better than a CVT.

Do you think this will be less expensive to maintain than an equivalent Mustang?

I’ve driven past that abomination numerous times and have always had this exact idea.

It’s hot and swampy

False. It can absolutely be corrected. But the longer we wait, the more cumulative carbon we need to capture, the harder it gets.

This. It’s gonna get real bad. Hell, where I live, it’s so hot that my pepper plants can’t actually set any fruit (except the habaneros, they’re unstoppable). Mexico doesn’t have cilantro for tacos. Food shortages and price hikes are going to become the norm soon.

Exactly. PV=NRT.