Because everything about crypto is negative.

Taking an engine off a Falcon 9 would require a lot of engineering work to result in a working rocket at the end - in particular, that changes the landing dynamics significantly, which was the hardest part to master and took dozens of attempts to get reliable at, and going from eg 9 engines to 7 may as well be…

Sub-orbital would only be cheaper if they were able to cut out the second stage. While doable, that would severely limit the payload and/or the range, unless the lower stage is expended, which itself would raise costs by more than you’d save by eliminating the upper. And without an upper, the payload is going to come…

On top of that, it can bypass airspace restrictions. Space is considered beyond territorial claims - you can fly a satellite or station over any country, they can’t complain about it, it’s fully legal. So if you wanted to invade, say, Switzerland, but every country surrounding them denies the Air Force the use of…

Bitcoin mining is already being done with ASICs. Sure, you can mine Bitcoin with a GPU, but the days when that would earn you more than the electricity cost, were nearly a decade ago.

As I said to another user, yes, I would absolutely love to do so, but it’s a question of time. Every marathon is what, 200 hours to watch through? And I do actually pay attention, not just have it on a third screen while working on something else. If I’m spouting opinions on others’ work, the least I can do it give it…

I wouldn’t call them “plans” so much as “aspirations”, but yes, my ideal would be to have every event going back to Classic Games Done Quick.

I have a habit of using the full width of a scale - no 7/10 syndrome for me. It’s just how I do - I have a similar spread when rating songs in my music library.

I figure this is a good place to post this:

I’m thinking more international than domestic. There was a MANPAD attack on a DHL plane in Baghdad, in 2003. There was also MH-17, shot down by Russians over Ukraine in 2014, and UIA752, shot down by Iran in 2020, although both of those were vehicle-based, radar-guided missiles, not infrared.

Speedrun leaderboards often track a lot of information that doesn’t disqualify a run. Many will ask what system you’re playing on, for multiplatform games, or which language and/or version, even if all of them are allowed on the same leaderboard. Or they’ll ask for both wall-clock time and in-game time, even if only…

Flywheels and reaction wheels are not inherently unreliable. There was a specific model used on spacecraft, for a time, that had some very interesting failure modes involving solar flares causing electrical arcing across a ball bearing. Current reaction wheels use ceramic bearings that should prevent the issue, as…

I wasn’t aware 2022 was even still a target for New Glenn. That’s rather ambitious if they’re following the sim-heavy work-the-first-time model they seem to have been. But Wikipedia does still say “target date for first test no earlier than Q4 2022"... I suspect they just haven’t admitted publicly that it’s not…

Explain to me, if you would, one application of NFTs that:

There are enough companies trying to follow in SpaceX’s footsteps that, were they to collapse, their accomplishments would shortly be eclipsed.

Solar panels actually do seem well-suited for the post-apocalypse.

Except... as currently constructed, Starlink would not work in India without numerous ground stations.

The maximum expected change in the asteroid’s trajectory is nowhere near enough to bring it into an Earth-crossing orbit. They’re expecting to measure a change on the order of millimeters per second; the nearest approach of the pair will be about six million kilometers. The purpose behind targeting a dual asteroid is…

The header is a stock image of a smallpox vaccine, not a picture of the actual discovered vials. As you would know if you had read all the words in the caption.

I’ve seen a lot of proposals for rapid charging stations involve some sort of local storage. Flywheels actually seem to be the popular suggestion - get a ton of metal spinning at a few thousand RPM in a vacuum chamber, that’s a lot of energy being stored, that can be quickly channeled into an alternator. Not the best…