I'm good with it.

I thought the Russians were NASA's partners and it's been obvious for a few years now that they've been dropping the ball (interesting that the uncommanded docked thruster firings that caused the ISS to lose attitude control wasn't mentioned).

So where's NASA's Inspector General on this and what is their plan to mitigate missed commitments by the Russians?

I would think NASA should be having daily calls to Gwen Shotwell about increasing ISS support capacity - SpaceX seems to be NASA's only reliable partner.

For me and probably most people here who remember it when it first was broadcast, it was something to watch in the early '90s when you got home from work (as we all worked crazy hours), have a few chuckles and go to bed.

Maybe the next day you'd talk about different parts around the water cooler or maybe not. It was like pizza - never as good the next day so after one or two so I never recorded it (although, to be fair, I did buy a few DVDs when they came out of what I remembered as the best episodes - "Mitchell" being a big one).

What made it special was Joel, Mike and Dr. Forester and it went down hill at the end (Pearl, I'm talking to you). The reboots were terrible as they didn't have the same cast and the fact you could stream them any time rather than only having one coming out a week at a specific time ruined the fun.

MST3K was a product of it's time and the broadcast technology available - it doesn't work the same way now.

Another flawless launch - very impressive.

I think that this is the first time the Falcon 9 (not Falcon Heavy) has launched a spacecraft out of Earth's orbit. That's quite an accomplishment, especially considering they also recovered the first stage.

You're right but there's a huge caveat that currently bio-fuel requires quite a bit of energy to process the biomass into SAF (Synthetic Alternative Fuel) and that energy is often produced by burning something.

So the carbon in the SAF is being taken out of the atmosphere, but often additional carbon is used to make the fuel so it's really not carbon neutral.

Hopefully in a few years there will be sufficient renewable energy available and more efficient processes to make SAF truly carbon neutral.

I guess you don't realize that this has been an area of study since the 1950s.

The search for an appropriate biomass feedstock (ie plankton, bacteria as well as plants) has been going on for literally decades and for about the last fifteen years the effort has included trying to genetically engineer different species to make the process more cost efficient. The ideal is a lifeform that produces raw fuel as a byproduct, minimizing the need for processing.

Bio fuels are currently about 4x the price of fossil fuels so there's still a lot of room for improvement.

Right now there are three major contenders for zero emission flight:
- Electric
- Fuel Cell/Hydrogen
- Synthetic Fuels

Each one has its advantages and disadvantages and are at least a couple of major innovations away from being commercially viable. The first two need very high output motors with very high efficiency (which is the primary reason why Rolls Royce is doing this; they're looking to sell motors in the future). Regardless, it's much to early to tell which of these technologies will be the most successful and be the market leader.

Personally, I'm much more excited about what Harbour Air along with magiX and H55 are doing to actually implement commercially viable solutions but this is another important step towards a cleaner future.

For some reason, TFA reminds me of Larry Niven's "Ringworld" which was built by Pak Protectors who were able to transmute the mass of a gas giant like Jupiter into scrith and created the structure around the star.

So if you're middle aged and see something that looks like a tree root that smells wonderful, don't eat it.

I have to wonder if this is actually a joke - I can think of three issues right off the bat which seems to me that would make this concept impractical:
1. Where does the horizontal velocity for orbit come from? Rockets only go straight up for a few seconds and then they tip over and start accelerating parallel to the ground to get orbital velocity. Check out Newton's diagram of a cannon on a mountain.
2. The G-forces on the payload are going to be enormous. In a normal SpaceX launch they're experiencing around 5g, I would imagine that in the centrifuge they'll be experiencing hundreds at least. Along with that, once they leave the vacuum of the centrifuge, they're going to be slamming into the atmosphere which is going to subjecting the payloads to heavy G-forces in another dimension.
3. They're going to need significant heat shielding for launch. Again, slamming into the atmosphere from the launcher at a minimum 25,000 kph (orbital velocity) is gonna generate a lot of heat.

If they do manage to secure $110M in funding, I'd love to see the presentations that they give to investors - they could probably double it by doing seminars to entrepreneurs in how to get fleece investors.

But I don't see anybody asking the question how does the screen work with face ID?

I think there is the perception that it just lights up (with infrared light) for the camera to sense the face but I suspect that it's a lot more more sophisticated than that. I'm guessing that different sections/rows/columns of the display lights up at different times to create a 3D rendering of the person's face with the light source moving and the camera acting as a fixed point.

If that's the case, then it seems wholly appropriate that the display is coupled with a proprietary microcontroller to maintain the security of the face recognition algorithm.

Probably the right question (and solution to this problem) is that the OLED displays are manufactured with the microcontroller on the glass and make the display only available from Apple - I would think that Apple's volumes would make it cost efficient. Third parties will scream that Apple is yet engaging in anti-competitive practices and not letting them buy "compatible" displays from where ever but this is a user security issue.

I always thought it would be more awesome.

More seriously, I'm guessing that the concept is to have a common platform for communicating but when you look at the great unwashed PowerPoint would be great for memes but I'm not sure about basic communications.

Of course the Microsoft Meta also as Excel, but that goes back to the previous point that it's not something for everybody or for everything.