Recent Comments

... engineer, looking at his feet, blushing ...

Nope, pretty damn good!
Although I knew two people who got 1600's when I was in HS. Neither one went on to significant college careers. They were all memorization and algorithmic tricks. One went from physics, to astrophysics, to foreign languages.
She was the one who said, when I grabbed two red wires to set up a motor experiment for her: "But negative electricity won't flow through a red wire, right?"

A remarkable capability to ignore reality, both economic and physical, imo.

Combustible carbon-compounds in the rat and oxygen

Trying to wrap my 80+ year old brain around what contributed to initiate the explosion. Please Illuminate me before I wear it out.

BTW, my grandson scored 1540. Not too shabby.

Excellent! My hubby was a National Merit Scholar runner up. My main romantic interest in High School was also a National Merit Scholar. Unfortunately, he lost his senses and became a liberal. What a waste! Other than that, though: i only hae one thing to say about the topic: brains are sexy!

In the early 60's I worked at the Santa Susan Mountain test facility for Rocketdyne.  At lunch one day someone caught a rat and dipped it in liquid nitrogen, freezing it almost instantly.  They then threw the rat against a wall, and it just completely shattered like it was made of crystal.  The practice continued for a while, until someone at Rocketdyne's facility at Edwards AF Base in the desert did the same thing.  The problem was that they dipped their rat into liquid oxygen.  When thrown against the wall of a building, it blew a hole in the wall "big enough to drive a Mac Truck through".  The practice ceased right then and there.  Experience is still the best teacher (except of course, in politics).

As much as I WISH these things actually "ended his career," wel all know liberals have the memory capability of a drunken flea, PLUS they simply Do. Not. Care. If it's not Trump, they're voting for it, whoever "it" is.

IMO, a so-called "lib" these days is not free at all.
To be an enslaved conformist would be much more like it.

But never lose his/hers/its nasty cackle.
Always riding a broom wouldn't hurt either.

Yah, it makes the vehicle lighter. (that's was intenend to be a joke). But in actuallity it is also true.

In reality, I've found that most of the liberals (leftists) I know are really conservatives, seems like they just won't admit it.. They deep down beleive in most of the same things conservatives beleive in, but they are just too (something) to be able to express or admit it. They want everyone to "just get along", but yet just won't even listen to reason.

As I wrote above, weight shouldn't be the only consideration.

Weight

As someone who trains the rocket engineers, I have to understand, and for me to provide value for value exchange to them, I need to get them to understand. As to the decisions regarding fuel technology, just because a fuel is lighter doesn't mean that it is the best decision.

Because it has a lower boiling point than nitrogen, doesn't freeze near absolute zero degrees.

Not sure what this says about me, but this old white guy has a happy hankerin' for some fried chicken and watermelon.
Gavin is just getting started -- My God, he is not trying to impress you, but his Hair sure is.
960 SAT. Good Lord. Was that Live or was that Memorex? This guy is literally a dullard.
98% on the GRE for me and still writing software / running the financials for side-hustles.
Why, oh why, to these Newsom mediocrities continue to float to the top? Surely they must be getting a push along the way.
We need a long, cold, hard winter to blow away a lot of the chaff.

Newsom's most recent concept really makes a lot of sense. Tell the people just how dumb, stupid, and ignorant they are. Then tell them you are just like them.  Then smile and ask them to vote for you.  Why would anyone do that, unless the rhetoric he is implying is really true?  This is what I ask my liberal friends, usually after which I'm usually no longer a friend.  To me it just proves it makes a lot of sense.

I especially liked Hillarie's comment on hot sauce, ‘‘I got hot sauce in my bag, swag’’.  That's pretty cool dude, maybe she should run for president again.  It was quite obvious she was playing "the deep-rooted cultural affinity for carrying and using hot sauce in the Black community" to show "them" that she understands them.  (It brings to mind that many of us, black and white,used a lot of hot sauce in Vietnam.  It was actually requested in our care packages from home. It's great on rations and on those terrific powdered eggs.

This also brings to mind when I was growing up in southern CA in the 50's.  I remember going into a predominately Black grocery store a few times near where we went fishing.  Every time It made me understand the Black's affinity for hot sauce.  The meat department actually stunk, and much of the produce and other "fresh" items were so much inferior to outside the area grocery stores. (I also wondered who owned and operated these stores, but that's a whole new topic).

Well, I was a 1470 SAT guy, and national merit scholar, and proud of it. What a douche.

It's rocket surgery. We're not supposed to understand. I did poke around on the NASA website to see if there were any tech details; found nothing. Do we know what trail of decisions led to the choice of fuel technology?

This issue was considered, long ago.
Ayn Rand was trying to describe people who think in a (by the old definition) liberal manner, while distancing themselves from he anti-Conservative control freaks that had already come into power 80 years ago. Her buddy Rose Wilder Lane (Laura Ingalls Wilder's daughter, in real life!) coined the word "Libertarian" to denote the difference.

Why use valuable Helium to pressurize the fuel and oxidants, vs something easy like Nitrogen?

While simultaneously accusing the other side (us) of just such a sin.

Cryogenic embrittlement is a surprisingly big problem. A part of my job is to make sure the engineers know what all the potential rocketry issues could be ... and to troubleshoot proactively.

Liquid helium and liquid hydrogen are much colder than liquefied methane that SpaceX uses. Is it any wonder that SpaceX is more reliable?