3209

Makes me wish I was younger. But then, most everything does.

3210

Except the fact that unless you live in Canada or Siberia you’ll have to have a self-contained air conditioning system and oxygen tank to survive outdoors when you get older.

3211

So I told my son (six) this story and he came up with “snuffelwiel”. Snuffel is what a dog does, searching and sniffing out curious smells. It literally means the sound a dog makes with his nose whe n sniffing out a smell.

Wiel means wheel, because its a wheeled vehicle.

If the successor to Curiosity is named Snuffelwiel, that’d be hilarious :D

3212
3213

On topic:

3214

This group looks interesting.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-09-05/the-silicon-valley-heavyweights-who-want-to-settle-the-moon

3215

There’s not much overlap between people currently in political power and people who are members of this group. How are you going to make the former listen to the latter, when the former are already distrustful of any kind of cooperation that does not fall strictly along racial/ethnic/nationalistic lines?

3216

Maybe getting that Starlink satellite service sooner than we thought?

3217
3218

Scott is amazing. I don’t know how he has time to do his day job.

3219

I assumed his day job was YouTube these days.

3220

Another possible interstellar visitor is checking out our solar system. Like ‘Oumuamua, it would be fun to think of it as an alien probe, but it’s probably just a dumb ol’ comet.

Still, it’s interesting to think that we’ve never seen evidence of interstellar comets until two years ago, and now we’ve possibly seen two.

3221

Wow, it’s coming in pretty fast. For comparison, one way they measure if it’s interstellar is by looking at the eccentricity of its orbit. Anything over 1.0 is hyperbolic and should escape the Sun’s gravity, though some comets from the solar system may be kicked out by a planet and so could be higher than 1.0 without being interstellar.

ʻOumuamua was a borderline eccentricity of about 1.2 and was consistent enough with not being slingshot by a planet – and also looked weird enough – that they called it interstellar.

The new one has an eccentricity of 3 or so based on the observations so far.

3222

I love that there are people who can say, with a straight face, that they’re going to have a full-blown space hotel that can sleep 400+ operational by 2027. I mean that takes some balls.

The aim is to get the hotel off the ground by 2025 and make it fully operational for travel by 2027.

3223

This is my ‘yeah right’ face.

3224

Well, Musk is claiming he’ll be able to get people into orbit profitably at $200,000 per person in 2022; it’s probably no more outlandish than that.

3225

Naming your hotel after a Nazi is an
 interesting choice.

3226

Cue Tom Leher:

3227

He’s one of the good nazis, he only wanted to build rocket engines on the backs of slave labor to beat the commies.
I’m happy to know he’s at least controversial these days.

3228

Will be cool, if they can get it to work: