Cool science stuff

Unity 22 takes Richard Branson, two pilots and three other "mission specialists" perhaps as high as 50 miles above Earth. $250,000 for four minutes of Zero-G. Glad other people have that kind of money to burn.

 

Sounds on the surface like a bunch of billionaires with too much money, but what they're doing is important for future transportation. In about 20 years we will be seeing suborbital passenger flights from New York to Sydney in about 45 minutes. Glad that Branson and crew returned safely.

 

Been meaning to post this since I saw it about a month ago.

A group of astronomers discovered a structure that if confirmed could "overturn cosmology" and make the standard model of physics "kind of fall through."

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/galaxy-giant-arc-3-billion-light-years-long-cosmology-space

 

Our understanding of the universe breaks down at the very small and very big ends. That means two things: We'll eventually figure it out or we aren't meant to figure it out.

 

Any weather observer in the Southern Plains knows the phenomenon of "outflow boundaries" and how thunderstorms form along them. This certainly has the hallmarks of the same feature. I do not think this is necessarily groundbreaking stuff.

 

The Bezos launch was cool. Anderson Cooper has been good, but whoever the woman is working with him today she is unbearable. She's also not very intelligent, she doesn't know how to say the word 'sure.'

Among the things she has done today, she bought into the Bezos hype that they went to space because they met international standards but Branson maybe didn't because he only met US standards. If NASA says Branson went to space, Branson went to space. She also said no one ever thought that private companies would do this. Oh honey. Every single notable science fiction writer in the 1950s and '60s predicted that space travel would be owned by corporations and not governments.

 

Maybe I'm kind of easy to impress, but the coolest thing to me was that rocket returning to a pad and hitting just about dead center. That was some witchcraft.

 

It really was

 

The achievements of Bezos and Branson are extra impressive considering that folks are debating whether or not they touched space while Yuri Gagarin made a full orbit a mere 60 years ago.

 

Plus this was waiting for Bezos when he got back