What I was getting at is that parking/graveyard orbits aren't realyl practical, and people tend to react as if that makes any sort of preservation impossible, and that can obscure the fact that it doesn't need to be permanent, it just needs to be sustainable.

Anyone that knows that lifting it to a permanent orbit isn't practical, should also know what the alternatives are, but that doesn't seem to stop it... Tell you what, you book the Dragon, I'll get some jerrycans of rocket fuel

Putting into a parking or graveyard orbit would be a ton of effort. But pruning it a bit to reduce drag once it's unmanned, and lifting it somewhat higher would be pretty easy. At this point, literally just a matter of cost.

Lunar gateway is, well, a gateway, not a permanently manned station

Safety isn't that much of a concern, it's a simplification but all of the places we're likely to put an orbiting station for the forseeable future are in the same ballbark of risk in terms of ease of access and return, obstacles, etc.

You can't separate physics and dollar cost since dollar cost is directly related to payload, quite simply delta v costs money.

Launches play a big part... Like, the ISS is low enough that it suffers a lot from atmospheric drag and its orbit needs frequent boosts (and that'll get worse as the atmosphere warms). But obviously higher up = harder to get to. So that's just a plain old compromise, but it's ultimately one that can be handled within a really wide range- raising it occasionally is just a question of fuel, so that's meant that the low-ish orbit has worked well and that's probably still true.

The other being the orbital path of course, since you have to have the launches intersect with the orbit. And that's simple phyics really but not simple human-stuff. Where will we be launching from in 2040, and how will we be launching? Will we have equatorial stations, or more mobile floating launchers? Will be still be using chemical rockets for everything with no other options in sight, or will we be kettling stuff up, or have a big railgun up an equatorial mountain, or be launching payloads from the moon, or getting close to any of those? It all gets insanely complicated, right down to "which US politicians want to keep launching from their state" or "which countries will be friendly and stable enough to invest this stuff in"

An ISS replacement in the short to medium term, I bet 20 scottish pence would end up at a similar orbital height, but with a different track to suit current US launch sites and less or no thought to Russian cosmodromes. In the longer term I'd expect payload delivery to get easier and therefore a higher altitude to become more desirable, especially with a warming atmosphere, but for now it's almost certainly still better to be lower and to get mass there easier

It still seems to me that even though the useful life of the ISS is limited, and its value as a building site for a new station has diminished, that 420 tons of pretty much <anything> in LEO is a useful resource. Reconfiguring the thing for less cross-section then firing up something like a dragon with nothing but fuel, seems like a fairly small investment even if you have no specific plans for it in the future.

Yeah, it really doesn't take a lot. TBH it does seem a little oversimple to me, just because the drag on the station isn't a constant- bringing it down is easy, bringing it down exactly where and when you want it to is not so simple, being able to brute force that could be very useful.

For quite a while it was assumed that using the old ISS as the building site for a new one was the best way to do it- without the shuttle, assembling was going to be harder. But the chinese station pretty much shows that time's past, especially considering that you don't necessarily want the new station in the same orbit

It is a great picture but surely not a real firefight. That said I love the idea that the gendarme are just watching, trying to decide if this is a crime or a war. "You murdered that man!" "I did not, I killed him in a totally legitimate war" "What is le difference?" "Complicated..."

It seems like in practice it's going to be more of an expansion of the traditional first aid place/chillout room, or maybe better to say it's expanding the perception of those.

And that's great! People tend to expect those to be for drugs and injuries, and pretty much a place of last resort, but not always for mental health issues. If people feel that it's appropriate and encouraged to seek out a safe space then that's important.

Crowds, mostly. Getting squished or feeling you can't escape, touching people you don't know, lots of noise, overload. Emotional overload too, that goes all the way back to Elvis and probably further, my mum could have done with a mental health safe space when she saw the Beatles...

Physical plays a part too, dehydration or exhaustion can be pretty heavy triggers especially for those unused to it. Plus, sometimes too much drink, or drugs. AND there was this whole pandemic thing, even old hands like me are still not really match fit (it's really only this year that I've really got my gig reflexes back, and that's a skill I'd been working on for about 25 years) lots of people are less comfortable and there's this whole surge of new gig-goers that missed out on 2 years.

Last bad one I helped with was at a my chemical romance show- panic attack, the person had some history of that but it was triggered simply by the excitement and the anticipation kicking them into a state of emotional overload, and then that getting magnified by feeling surrounded and not able to get out so it got really bad. It was the person's first big show post-pandemic too.

(and exactly like Yungblud, there you've got a rock show that'll be attended by a lot of people that are not normally at rock shows, so inexperience and other people's experience is a multiplier. Only reason I was involved- most of the kids around them were inexperienced, I'm an old hand.)

Last one I had, was at a Sepultura show, I was having a great time but I just plain ran out of oxygen in the pit and couldn't get myself out, and then in that state being helped did not feel like being helped. I've gone to hundreds of gigs and been in hundreds of pits but that was like flipping a switch in my head. Never happened to me any other time at a show, even at properly dangerous ones when people have been leaving in ambulances, I'm usually the person that hauls other people out. That's the nature of a mental health crisis really, it's not predictable, it doesn't follow rules.

Me too, before the show I'd pretty much decided that it was going to suck, very cynical about the image and some of the music choices/influences but it was nonstop entertaining and yep genuine. Sometimes you just naturally are something that other people choose to fake.

Watching the interaction with the guitarist was fun too, they're best mates, they work together, they've lived together and you can still tell that sometimes, that guy is really, really annoyed :)

>30,000 people die in cars every year, but no crash helmets for drivers?

That is really not a good argument- cars are built from the ground up for safety, you are wearing the helmet and also about 10 other helmets.

Agree with everything else though, pretty much.

Some of the evidence is glorious- Dr Ian Walker, serious scientist and researcher, wearing a wig and riding along while intentionally wobbling.

The fun part is when you throw in the impact of NOT cycling- ie, people being deterred from exercising, because they think it's dangerous, or the helmet is too expensive, or because it looks stupid. Australia's helmet mandate laws almost certainly caused more negative health impacts than positive, partly because people exercise less and partly because the reduced number of cyclists make it more dangerous for the remaining cyclists.

I totally believe there are net safety benefits to wearing a helmet, personally. But I also totally believe that they're pretty trivial statistically. Serious head injuries are relatively uncommon and, as a complicating factor in road accidents, often come along with other injuries. Minor head injuries are also worth protecting against though!

I came in here expecting to be the first person to make a benchy joke, ah well

The bizarre thing about the japanese whaling is, it loses money and there's no demand for it. Without subsidies, the industry would disappear pretty much overnight. So they use the false cultural argument and the laughable research argument in order to prop up an industry that makes no sense

Especially when it's Andy Murray

It's a modular station, it's basically as expandable as the ISS.

Yup, it's pretty small by comparison, but then the ISS has grown- it's pretty comparable to the original Unity/Zarya/Zvezda ISS. Kibo alone is massive

It's a big deal tbh. And it's also, importantly, a big deal that doesn't require a huge change in infrastruture and that can be retrofitted to existing ships. This is <exactly> the sort of technical improvement that we need to be chasing tbh.

It's a non trivial thing, it turns out. Most of the earlier schemes planned to use skysails (ie kites, basically), or something very like traditional sails, but they kept running into practicality issues. This solid sail approach is more complicated to implement but is supposed to be easier to operate and to not need much change in operator practices, training etc, and it's also supposed to be useful in more conditions.

Which means it's powered by the sails. If you read "fully powered" then that's on you.

Because it's a static, homogenous cargo probably, almost as good as a non-cargo ballast. Better for data collection on the effect of hte sails

It does, but it's not

I cannot believe how few headlines are saying "sex position"