rigorousintuition.ca

Posted: **Thu May 03, 2018 7:52 pm**

240-ish miles above Earth

Expand the frame for best view...

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/image ... spacewalk/

While on a spacewalk outside the International Space Station over Mexico, NASA astronaut Randy Bresnik captured this spectacular, vertiginous video with a GoPro camera.

I spotted it in a NASA Tweet yesterday, and when I watched it, I really did have the sensation that this would be as close as I’ll ever come to experiencing free-falling around the Earth. (Short of a virtual reality video, that is.)

Bresnik shot the video awhile ago — on Oct. 20, 2017, while on one of three spacewalks during his mission totaling more than 20 hours. So this isn’t exactly breaking news. But I figured that there would be others who had’t seen it until now. I also got to thinking that it offered an opportunity to talk about the phenomenon of free-falling around the Earth — in other words, orbiting.

Posted: **Thu May 03, 2018 8:14 pm**

Privatization of space - good or bad?

Posted: **Thu May 03, 2018 10:46 pm**

Privatization - bad. Private enterprise - "good" / gonna happen anyway.

I don't think there should be any kind of property rights in space (at least not until there's a city on the moon and you want to buy a vacation home there), but some international framework for staking a claim will probably be necessary if we ever get to mining and resource extraction in space, something that is getting more likely as launch prices go down (Senate Launch System: approximately 1 billion per launch if it ever gets off the ground. Falcon Heavy: 90 million).

Space is big, there should be room for everybody, but since humans are involved we'll probably find a way to fight over it anyway.

Posted: **Fri May 04, 2018 12:24 am**

Space is so big that sometimes a demonstration is in order to show just how big it is. Most here have probably seen this, but it's worth visiting now and again just to experience the long bouts of boredom you will experience just by letting this site do its thing. I think I have more to say later about this awesome OP, but I wound up going grocery shopping and cooking and lost what it was I planned to say on this thread but wanted to toss this out there.

IF THE MOON WERE ONLY ONE PIXEL:
A tediously accurate scale model of the Solar System

http://www.joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace ... ystem.html

Posted: **Fri May 04, 2018 3:10 pm**

^^And that's just the solar system revolving around Sol, one of about 100-400 billion stars in our galaxy, which is one of anywhere from 200 billion to 2 trillion galaxies in the observable universe. In a scale model of the universe our entire solar system wouldn't even be close to covering a pixel.

The observable universe is about 91 billion light years across, the solar system is about 1 light year across (if you include the Oort cloud). :shock:

rigorousintuition.ca

This may be as close as you can come to going on a Spacewalk

This may be as close as you can come to going on a Spacewalk

Re: This may be as close as you can come to going on a Space

Re: This may be as close as you can come to going on a Space

Re: This may be as close as you can come to going on a Space

Re: This may be as close as you can come to going on a Space