This Movie Sequence Of Images Is From The Last Dedicated Observation Of The Enceladus Plume By NASA’s

Dragon has achieved zero-g!

Altiplano (Malena Szlam, 2018)

Jared Harris as Anderson Dawes in The Expanse s01e06

Signalis is such a good game. It's so melancholy and dreamlike. It's like one of those really sad dreams that makes you cry when you wake up 😭

Space looks very different to how film and television might show. Lots of sci-fi shows or movies portray the stars and galaxy behind a planet, and while it can look pretty, it also is very unrealistic. Stars are very dim. The galaxy is even dimmer. Anybody that lives in a light-pollluted area knows these things. Sunlight, and the light from it that shines onto the planets, is very very bright. This is why you can’t see stars during the day time. You can turn the exposure of your camera up to see both the planet and the stars, but then the planet becomes blindingly bright, and you get lots of camera glare.

Images taken using Space Engine 0.990.37.1720

Unrelated spiritual stuff below

This post probably sounds like nitpicking, and I guess it is. I’m not sure if I like the spirit of space being tampered with just to make things look better in a blockbuster movie. I believe the darkness and quietness is what contains the energy of space, and that feature of it is sacred. Space to me is an ocean, and filling space with clouds/nebulae and planets in a fictional setting feels a lot like completely filling the oceans with seaweed and sand. Planets are extremely far apart, and that is a blessing, as otherwise they would collide with each other. I don’t really have any personal grudges on people that exaggerate space for visual or story related reasons, I think it’s more of a cultural issue, and one that will be resolved over enough time as life on Earth begins to wander into space.

Well actually it wasn't just about funding. Kathy Lueders basically made the decision to contract SpaceX by herself in 2021. The fact that there was a governmental leadership-change ongoing at the time might have enabled her to sneak this through: https://www.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2019/04/option-a-source-selection-statement-final.pdf

In 2023, she quit NASA and went to work for SpaceX as a general manager of the Starship Programme in Texas.

Bare in mind that SpaceX had not yet provided a capsule mockup and their lander design was inherently less safe and more ambitious than the alternatives. It also depends upon a highly experimental super heavy-lift launch-system using several wholly new technologies and flight profiles.

But now that it's crucial for NASA's Artemis Programme, NASA is basically required to be involved in Starship development and to continue providing funds. Musk's companies are already quite well known for tricking the government and the customer out of their money.

It's genuinely possible that Starship HLS might not be ready before Blue Moon MK 2 is.

Buzz Aldrin’s space selfie from the Gemini 12 mission and Andy Saunders’s remastered version of the same image.

It's genuinely possible that Starship HLS might not be ready before Blue Moon MK 2 is.