A genuinely thick fog is consuming San Francisco -- quite a rare event in these times. I'm standing outside accumulating moisture in my clothes and hair. #sanfrancisco
I've been listening to Planetary Radio, but it was a bit tiring with all the super upbeat hype atmosphere, I liked Orbital Mechanics and plan to get back to listen to it, and I now I will be trying out Off Nominal.
@stfn Main Engine Cutoff is my primary one, a little more sober than Off Nominal. AvWeek's Check 6 is real aerospace journalism, sometimes about spaceflight. Sometimes the Space Capital podcast.
@arstechnica While I like their catalog and a lot of their original programming ("Normal People" was a standout love story), I just cancelled because of the astronomical increase in price. I can live with two streaming services (Netflix and Apple TV+), plus purchasing the odd show on iTunes.
My cat and my dog are obsessed with eating each other’s food, I’m tempted to just switch bowls and keep up a charade of letting them believe they are getting it (but it’s actually their own food, switched)
What a great illustration of the perversion of #capitalism: someone who owns two restaurants in downtown Minneapolis is asking Target to force thousands of employees to spend literal pieces of their lifespan every day (and polluting and adding to traffic and wearing down/depreciating their cars in the process) to #commute#returnToOffice#RTO so that their restaurant business model continues to be profitable.
The #remoteWork#flexibleWork revolution is likely unstoppable: thanks to three years of lockdowns, workers now know that rote commuting is a waste of time. Flexible and remote work allows more work-life balance and costs everyone less to produce the same output.
The forces against remote work are almost entirely #reactionary: a desire to return to the Old Ways, to Manage By Walking Around, to go back to the Old Business Models, to save Commercial Real Estate; in other words, to save old capital.
(Article title is clickbait, so I wont’t repeat it)
@drahardja Meanwhile, many of San Francisco's neighborhoods are recovering nicely. Many of those work at home folks still live in the city, and many of them go to neighborhood restaurants and shops. City downtowns need to adapt to house more residents - more like European cities. To quote a famous author, "specialization is for insects".
@spaceflight Well, maybe companies and governments should have competed with @STARLINK and Falcon-9 instead of laughing at their ideas. Instead of copying Starlink and Falcon-9 now, they should look beyond and beat spacex at own game with better rockets and comsats. Easier said than done, but probably only way forward.
Picture : #Soyuz at the Vostochny Launch Centre https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soyuz-2.1a_launch_vehicle_carrying_spacecraft_Mikhail_Lomonosov_at_the_launch_pad_at_Vostochny_Launch_Centre_2.jpg
Happy Monday, Thunderbird family! Join Jason, Ryan, and Alex as they take a deep dive into the features of Thunderbird 115, and share insights into WHY some of the features and improvements were developed.
@spaceflight I'd like to see how the question was phrased. Was it some variation galavanting around on Earth 's moon? Or, was it geological research to better understand planets, and thus Earth? Or, was it prospecting to find resources useful in orbit or on Earth?
"the #mainstream media doesn’t cover #SpaceExploration and #SpaceScience with the same questioning 🔍 rigor that they reserve for politics. People writing about #SpaceExploration are mostly cheerleaders 🥳 for the cause, rather than independent observers keeping a watchful eye 👀 on how our national monies are spent."
@spaceflight Excellent analysis. I am among those beyond disgusted with where Mr Musk has gone, and with the whole Twitter fiasco. But, I am also able to separate SpaceX from the immature child Mr Musk has become. He made that easy early on by hiring a capable and respected adult to run the operational company, while Mr Musk can sidle off to destroy Twitter and play with giant rockets without too badly disrupting the Falcon and Starlink businesses that pay the bills - so far
@kentborg@spaceflight Actually, this is demonstrably false. Relative dating throughout the Solar System largely depends on absolute dates collected on Earth's moon during Apollo. Apollo-17 explored an entire alpine valley in three days. None of the lunar robotic mission, which were hardly cheap, to this date have accomplished anything remotely comparable. The cost per unit science achieved was probably less during Apollo than comparable robotic exploration.
@spaceflight But the current rovers together cost ~$10 Billion, or more, once all is said and done. A rationally planned human Mars mission might cost ten or twenty times that, but would achieve a LOT more than 10-20 times the science.
(BTW, I argued in the past that Mars science would have been served better by building 20 additional MERs, and landing at 22 different sites, rather than building 2 science labs that expensively tried to automate science better done by humans.)
