It’s not Earth-focused, but Eve Online had a minor subplot about how the coordination of time between multiple competing human civilizations became a major political problem because no one wanted to accept the system promoted by a rival empire.

That’s not exactly how it is right now, but it’s not far. Hell, the last time a F9 booster went splat, they grounded them for only a couple weeks before it was shown it wasn’t a safety-critical issue.

It just stands out because there’s only two flying reusable boosters right now (and only one that can go to orbit). Meanwhile, grounding one model of aircraft doesn’t usually have that much of an impact because they are so many active. What’ll be really cool is when there are so many reusable boosters out there that one can be grounded and spaceflights will just continue on another.

Back around 2010 or so, I discovered that if you had a physical PC game that was also in Steam’s store, you could type in the serial number on the game box and it would register and add it to your Steam library.

WAIT WHAT.

Does this happen even if the game wasn’t on Steam at time of purchase so long as it has a Steam version now? Because that would be amazing.

I’m wondering if the remaining fuel in the lower segments of the ship gave those sections more momentum, causing the whole hull to pivot around those heavier sections (especially with the loss of thruster capability being discussed).

With the Space Shuttle, this tendency was largely offset by the delta wings also causing greatly increased drag at the rear of the hull, but with fins folded the Starship doesn’t really have this. That plus the seeming loss of control due to thruster malfunction…

This is the cool stuff I come here to read. Very interesting!

Really glad I’m not the first to come here and say this. We’re “firing” programs now? Come on.

This is a big thing killing my interaction with Lemmy as well. I want to like it, but I drop into a discussion thread and the top-engaged/boosted comments are spicy and almost designed to promote maximum anger. And I feel like, “Do I really, really want to spend significant time writing out a deeper comment to engage with this community…?”

Especially the politics on here. I’ve seen some wild takes going completely unquestioned.

Here’s a picture of a to-scale model to emphasize what the other comment is saying - Ingenuity isn’t that small, and also remember that Mars’ surface gravity is only about 40% of Earth’s.

So by all means correct me if I’m wrong, but is this really that bad?

Like, people always freak out about “turning one falling object into many” because they would still share the same collective kinetic energy, but smaller objects are far more likely to burn up high in the atmosphere rather than penetrate for a destructive impact.

The article describes 37 boulders, each with a ~15kT kinetic energy. We have record of meteor events in this magnitude, and they aren’t terribly destructive. Nor is it more than a footnote in terms of Earth’s daily total energy budget; the Earth isn’t going to be cooked by a meteor-swarm of this scale.

It’d seem to me that the biggest risk would actually be peppering Earth’s orbital region with far smaller objects that could still damage satellites, no?

c/worldbuilding

Thanks for the shoutout! It’s going to be a slow climb up, but I’m looking forwards to growing this place as well.