My brother in Amerigo Vespucci, there are maps from 500 years ago that show sea serpents on them. Are those real, too?

That’s true. Honestly I remember being a kid, learning about the Soyuz recovery system and being shocked. A 20mph collision with the ground (without the braking SRs, 5mph with them) doesn’t sound like much, but it can still ring your bell pretty good.

“Touchdown” on land.

In fairness, if you can throw a person at a person, one or both of those people are probably going to think twice about crossing you.

Or if they encounter space-bears before reentry

Also

We did land on land

For like forty years we did that exclusively

It’s called the Space Shuttle and it’s pretty cool

That’s…what this article is saying…?

I’m a Christian and even I have no idea what you’re trying to say.

The Karman Line’s lowest theoretical point is still substantially higher up than commercial airplanes and its highest is substantially lower than the ISS. Most nations agree on it as the boundary for the purposes of law and regulation. Commercial airplanes fly about half as high as the line, while spacecraft orbit at four times its altitude or more.

It may be scientifically arbitrary, but it’s got a lot going for it as a rough approximation.

Amazing. I’d love to be able to see inside his brain.

Around the time of the SimCity games, Maxis released a game called SimAnt. It’s pretty much this.

Partially, yeah. Crewed spacecraft by necessity weigh significantly more than uncrewed, because life support is very heavy. But they also want to take that very heavy spacecraft further away from Earth than any crewed spacecraft has ever been before, which means they need to take a lot of fuel; yes, it’s a gravity-assisted free-return trajectory, but it still needs fuel for course corrections and other orbital dynamics. Plus, it’s a two-stage spacecraft, while the Saturn V was three-stage, so it’s got to carry a lot more dead weight a lot further than before.

All of that together means they needed the most powerful rocket ever. The lander mission will almost certainly be even more powerful than that, because while it won’t need to go as far, it’ll be carrying another spacecraft.

EDIT: Actually, to correct my last statement, potentially not! Turns out the current plan for Artemis IV is to send the lander on ahead and have it waiting in lunar orbit for the astronauts to get there. So potentially all of the Artemis missions could be launched on this same configuration of rocket.

Yeah, honestly, this is kind of a banger.

Another thread I read said that photovoltaics have an efficiency of around 45%, while turbines are somewhere in the 40% range. Source: I dunno.

I mean, that’s like pointing out that a coal plant isn’t very efficient because it doesn’t burn all the coal on Earth at once.

Nah, that’s just a strip of raw bacon.

The whole fruit/vegetable controversy only comes because we’re trying to use two different domains of terms interchangeably: botanical terms and culinary terms.

Tomatoes (and squash, and pumpkins (which, side note, are a type of squash), and cucumbers) are botanically fruits, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as vegetables because they tend to be less sweet, particularly when raw. Mushrooms are botanically…well, I guess they’re botanically “n/a”, as they’re not a part of the plantae kingdom, but whatever–they’re typically considered botanical, so they’re “botanically” fungi, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as vegetables (or, interestingly, as meat replacements).

We get into the same linguistic confusion when we start throwing around “peanuts aren’t nuts, they’re legumes!”–botanically, yes, peanuts are legumes, but culinarily they’re most commonly used as nuts. See also: “green beans” are botanically pods, not beans, but we use them culinarily as vegetables; and many “berries” are botanically something else but we use them culinarily as berries; meaning they’re often left whole, mixed with other berries in the same dish, and go well with cream in cold summer desserts.

The whole thing is a misguided exercise in pedantry; “technically burritos aren’t sandwiches, they’re meat-sacks!” They’re both, and we instinctively understand that trying to compare the two terms is silly because “sandwich” is a culinary term and “sack” is not.

Another funny part of this is that pedants are trying to say that tomatoes are (botanically) fruits and not vegetables, but the closest thing to a definition we have for “vegetable” botanically is “literally all plant life and maybe also some fungi,” so tomatoes are clearly both fruit and vegetable botanically. Plus, they’re culinarily used as vegetables, but can also be used as fruits in some cakes, pies, sorbets, and so forth (and isn’t ketchup just a tomato smoothie?), so tomatoes are clearly both fruit and vegetable in culinary terms as well.

edit: Someone who actually knows what they’re talking about (an ecologist) has corrected my botanical definition of “vegetable.” Actually, they’re “edible parts of a plant which are not fruit.” Which means that tomatoes are explicitly excluded as vegetables, being botanically a fruit. I don’t think that ruins my overall point in any way, though.

Every single one of them look like their eyes are about to roll right out of their heads.