If it doesn’t come with the 3d printer, a pair of flush cutters is insanely useful. Just be careful with them, especially if you have a cheap pair. Probably wear eye protection.

If you think you would find them useful, there are also filaments at different levels of softness, bounciness, and foaming variants of those. Particularly useful for the soft ones as you can get different levels of softness by changing printing temperature. For any it helps to decrease weight.

For 3D modeling software, Fusion is good but annoying to obtain, Onshape is good but has a non-commercial license for the free version (and makes all of your files public), Freecad is FOSS, decent but not quite as good, Blender is good for detailed or sculpted things that are more art-y (although it’s often very difficult to achieve certain shapes that are easy in actual CAD software)

My modelling advice is to keep in mind where supports will go, what places can be bridged, what details the printer can achieve, what axis the vertical should go on (for strength)

Did a teeny bit of googling and it I’ve seen a few people saying PVP washes a little bit easier but it sounds like pretty much any composition is fine, for PLA at least

blame the Normans

mostly the part 4, its just very… inspirational? maybe not the right word but idk how to describe

wow that’s a lot more than i would have thought

Isn’t that like half of cars nowadays?

https://xkcd.com/264/

It’s clear that several people in charge of the youtube livestream have no idea about how to do that correctly. I think the difference is just effort. Viewership was tiny compared to Apollo 11, as was the hype leading up to it. It’s clear that NASA could provide a whole lot better footage if even some random youtuber (Everyday Astronaut) can beat them. So that aspect is, as you said, because as a society we don’t really care about the Artemis launch. SpaceX does put a fair amount of effort into their livestreams, and you can easily tell by watching them.

For the recorded footage, film often has a lot higher dynamic range than digital cameras and usually looks a whole lot better when recording a launch up close.

Far shots are limited by atmospheric distortion and physical limits from diffraction for a given aperture size. None of that can change.

IDK anything about the quality of the original live broadcast of Apollo 11, so i don’t have anything to compare in that regard

Originally, the president did have basically no power. The whole federal government wasn’t supposed to do that much, and the executive branch by itself was supposed to do almost nothing compared to today. They didn’t even think there would be a standing army. States not being willing to put in strong reforms by themselves led to more executive agencies and executive branch influence over the country. (Which is all controlled by the President, since that made sense for the things that they thought in the 1790s the executive branch would be doing.)

The whole system was made around an idea of who would do what, which has turned out to be completely different after 250 years. It’s not really surprising that it isn’t working very well.

I don’t really know where I’m going with this. To even get a sane and effective Congress, we need voters to be aware of the real world, which seems like the largest hurdle right now. In the past, large and effective reforms have mostly been lead and advertised by the President, although it’s possible that with better voting systems and less presidential power parties would be able to cohere behind consistent and strong visions. Conservative think tanks seem to be able to do that currently, but they’re very quiet about it and I don’t know of a progressive equivalent.

Compared to most other countries at the time, it was very democratic.

Yeah, I rewatched the launch from Everyday Astronaut’s livestream and he actually had better footage, he had a tracking camera showing the booster separation

Outside of the launch part, I think it’s mostly because SpaceX has set the standard so high, with tons of high resolution cameras streaming over Starlink even during reentry

Yeah, just the 2 identical failures on Starship V2 I think destroyed a lot of trust

and afaik they still haven’t had a reentry that hasn’t seemed at least somewhat like a miraculous survival… I know they were testing out different types of heatshield tiles on the last launch though which was where a lot of the weirdness was from

What I was referring to though was the very… optimistic timelines they’ve had in the past. HLS was supposed to be ready last year.

Interestingly apparently water vapor from rocket launches can be similarly harmful to CO2. Water vapor doesn’t usually get into the upper atmosphere, and has a hard time exiting, but still acts as a greenhouse gas.

Falcon Heavy is quite a capable rocket, with about 60% of the SLS’s payload capacity to LEO when the side boosters are reused (although it’s almost never used for LEO, since no one actually needs that large of a payload there…).

New Glenn can reuse it’s whole first stage, but currently has only 47% of the SLS’s payload capacity to LEO. (with plans for a larger variant)

Starship… has been kind of a mess. At least with how their timeline has compared to their goals. They have demonstrated several successful launches, but with the reliability of their past few, I doubt anyone will trust them anytime soon.

China seems extremely close to having a partially reusable heavy lift rocket, they have said that they’ll test it in the first half of this year (LEO payload a little bit higher than Falcon Heavy, but they plan to go to the moon with something very similar). India has some looser long-term plans.

As a spaceflight nerd, I was thinking today about why I (and everyone else) don’t care that much about the Artemis launch. I think it’s largely because it’s not demonstrating anything new; they already did basically the same mission but without the people in it, and even more advanced missions with people in them were done in the 1960s. The rocket itself though isn’t helping, the only things it has going for it compared to other modern rockets are that it’s large and probably reliable. The technology is basically just re-used space shuttle parts, there’s nothing that seems particularly innovative, and reusing old technology hasn’t prevented it from being extremely expensive compared to basically everything else (~20x the cost of New Glenn, Falcon Heavy, or Starship per launch…). It’s also worse for the environment in basically every way (expendable, and has solid fuel boosters).

I kind of agree with what some other people have been saying about NASA for a while now. They should probably just stick to the satellites, rovers, and technology tests, making their own launch vehicle is not really helping anyone. The usefulness of being a government funded thing is that they can do the type of science to help humanity that doesn’t turn a profit. They don’t really need their own launch vehicle to do their science, and the vehicle itself is so conservative that I’m sure they aren’t really learning anything from it. If they were actually capable of producing something economical and better than the corporations then it wouldn’t be a problem, but that will never happen with Congress pushing rocket designs that “seem like they would be cheaper” and forcing NASA to route all work through insanely inefficient military contractors.

Having re-usable parts is the obvious bit. But actually the worst part for the environment from a lot of rockets is the solid fuel boosters, those leave a ton of weird stuff in the atmosphere that a liquid fueled thing wouldn’t (like the Falcon Heavy, Starship, Delta 4 Heavy, New Glenn, Long March 9 and 10…)

it’s a reference to this xkcd

edit: as an april fools thing probably

Still very fond of WBOR from when I was following the Internet Roadtrip

No one’s stopping you

I learned the other day that something can be dubitable but you can’t dubit something. Very sad

The US could arm them, but the US government probably fears that they’d turn on the US later