Nye is not a scientist, but an engineer; Saying that something is impossible is classic Scotty thing on Star Trek (and then they will rig the impossible anyway, but it'll never hold and eventually explodes at the right dramatic moment).
Indeed, I don't see much new information: everything is still at concept stage. I collected some links on all I could find on the topic on my blog last spring: https://unfinishedwisdom.wordp...
One reason of putting people in a gondola under the balloon is because people and their equipment are much denser than air. In a passive scenario or the slow thrust of a dirigible, the righting torque of a buoyant body comes from the distance between the center of buoyancy and the center of gravity. Dirigible balloons are "flattened" vertically, which brings the center of buoyancy even closer. This is why in many early dirigible designs had the gondola suspended by rope a few meters below the balloon, increasing the distance and thus passive trimming.
I think it is. But such a floating habitat on Venus might also be called a Zhitomirsky habitat, after Sergei Zhitomirsky. http://archivsf.narod.ru/1929/...
The suit needed for Venus surface would of course need to be different from day and night suits for walking on the Moon, but I don't think a Venus surface suit is against the laws of physics as such. Existing atmospheric diving suits are almost rated to the pressure on top of Skadi Mons. Active cooling is of course needed.
Actually, it is healthier to live a little bit *below* the surface on Mars and Moon, due to things like radiation, meteors, and temperature variation. You can visit the surface for short periods with appropriate preparation and equipment, but that applies to Venus as well.
The original word planet means a wandering start, a distant light in the sky. Now that we know more about those distant lights, we could have better words to describe them, based on mass instead.
For example, "Piccolo" for meteors, "Magnum" for rocky planets, "Jeroboam" for giant planets, "Rehoboam" for small stars etc.
This is really just a continuation of the "software crisis", the discovery of human error when programming machines. Human error occurs on all levels of the software process, there is no "silver bullet" for fixing conflicting requirements.
We should not "incentivizing" big tech to pass the risks on to the public. QA is the boring stuff that involves regulation, redundancy and statistical modeling, of course the fancy Internet companies want to pass the responsibility for QA to end users with eternal Beta versions and EULAs filled with legalese.
In LEO you have about an hour max of Earth shade at a time. You could of course bring a big parasol with you. The point I tried to make is that while NASA/SpaceX have some hard-won experience in fueling rockets on the ground, nobody has ever transferred supercooled rocket fuel from one ship to another in orbit. What kind of setup is needed to make the first trials safe?
SpaceX also plans to fuel its ship in parking orbit in the future, topping off many times, with presumably crew and payload aboard. What does NASA think about that? The fuel will not be supercold I think, but explosions in orbit could anyway cause a debris cascade making space travel unsafe for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
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Nye is not a scientist, but an engineer; Saying that something is impossible is classic Scotty thing on Star Trek (and then they will rig the impossible anyway, but it'll never hold and eventually explodes at the right dramatic moment).
Indeed, I don't see much new information: everything is still at concept stage. I collected some links on all I could find on the topic on my blog last spring: https://unfinishedwisdom.wordp...
One reason of putting people in a gondola under the balloon is because people and their equipment are much denser than air. In a passive scenario or the slow thrust of a dirigible, the righting torque of a buoyant body comes from the distance between the center of buoyancy and the center of gravity. Dirigible balloons are "flattened" vertically, which brings the center of buoyancy even closer. This is why in many early dirigible designs had the gondola suspended by rope a few meters below the balloon, increasing the distance and thus passive trimming.
I think it is. But such a floating habitat on Venus might also be called a Zhitomirsky habitat, after Sergei Zhitomirsky. http://archivsf.narod.ru/1929/...
The suit needed for Venus surface would of course need to be different from day and night suits for walking on the Moon, but I don't think a Venus surface suit is against the laws of physics as such. Existing atmospheric diving suits are almost rated to the pressure on top of Skadi Mons. Active cooling is of course needed.
Actually, it is healthier to live a little bit *below* the surface on Mars and Moon, due to things like radiation, meteors, and temperature variation. You can visit the surface for short periods with appropriate preparation and equipment, but that applies to Venus as well.
I read it once years ago, but I am rereading it now. I was sort of reminded to it from watching the anime Planetes.
The original word planet means a wandering start, a distant light in the sky. Now that we know more about those distant lights, we could have better words to describe them, based on mass instead.
For example, "Piccolo" for meteors, "Magnum" for rocky planets, "Jeroboam" for giant planets, "Rehoboam" for small stars etc.
This is really just a continuation of the "software crisis", the discovery of human error when programming machines. Human error occurs on all levels of the software process, there is no "silver bullet" for fixing conflicting requirements.
We should not "incentivizing" big tech to pass the risks on to the public. QA is the boring stuff that involves regulation, redundancy and statistical modeling, of course the fancy Internet companies want to pass the responsibility for QA to end users with eternal Beta versions and EULAs filled with legalese.
Wikipedia article on the Lunar Orbital Platform: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [Do check out #Critisisms section]
In LEO you have about an hour max of Earth shade at a time. You could of course bring a big parasol with you. The point I tried to make is that while NASA/SpaceX have some hard-won experience in fueling rockets on the ground, nobody has ever transferred supercooled rocket fuel from one ship to another in orbit. What kind of setup is needed to make the first trials safe?
Can we use bleach to prevent the semantic apocalypse?
SpaceX also plans to fuel its ship in parking orbit in the future, topping off many times, with presumably crew and payload aboard. What does NASA think about that? The fuel will not be supercold I think, but explosions in orbit could anyway cause a debris cascade making space travel unsafe for years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...