dChan
Anonymous ID: ee216c Jan. 11, 2019, 11:14 a.m. No.4713429   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3456 >>3464 >>3489 >>3535 >>3596 >>3675 >>3742 >>3775 >>3827 >>3961 >>4004 >>4075 >>4093 >>4133

SpaceX Finishes Building 'Starship' Hopper Prototype (Photo)

 

SpaceX has built itself a shiny new rocket.

 

Assembly of the test-flight version of SpaceX's Mars-colonizing Starship vehicle is now complete, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk announced Thursday night (Jan. 10). The suborbital, hopping rocket is a sleek, shiny craft with three prominent fins that end in landing pads.

 

"Starship test-flight rocket just finished assembly at the @SpaceX Texas launch site. This is an actual picture, not a rendering," Musk said via Twitter. He also posted a photo of the vehicle, which included a spacesuit-clad person for scale.

 

The construction milestone seems to keep SpaceX on target to begin short "hopping" flights with the prototype vehicle soon. Musk said earlier this week that SpaceX aims to start such trial runs, which will take place at the Texas site near Brownsville, in the next four to eight weeks.

 

These flights will be similar to those that SpaceX performed in 2012 and 2013 with its Grasshopper test vehicle, Musk added in another tweet Thursday night. The Grasshopper runs, which helped SpaceX get ready to land and re-fly Falcon 9 rocket first stages, reached a maximum altitude of about 2,500 feet (700 meters).

 

The bona fide Starship will go very far afield, however. SpaceX envisions Starship — which will launch atop a giant rocket called the Super Heavy — taking 100 passengers at a time to and from the moon and Mars, and perhaps other deep-destinations as well. (These names are a recent development. SpaceX had called the reusable rocket-spaceship duo the BFR, short for "Big Falcon Rocket.")

 

Starship and the Super Heavy will do a variety of other work as well. SpaceX plans to have the duo take over all of the company's spaceflight duties eventually, from launching satellites to supplying and servicing orbiting space stations to ferrying people on superfast "point to point" trips around the globe. SpaceX has already booked the first passenger for Starship, billionaire Yusaku Maezawa, the founder of Japanese e-commerce giant Zozo, for a trip around the moon some time in the 2020s.

 

SpaceX's Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets are white, but Starship and the hopper will remain shiny, unpainted metallic silver, Musk has said. But the latter pair will be far from identical. The operational vehicle will have windows, and seven Raptor engines compared to three for the hopper.

 

And the two vehicles will be different in other ways as well.

 

"This is for suborbital VTOL [vertical takeoff and landing] tests. Orbital version is taller, has thicker skins (won’t wrinkle) & a smoothly curving nose section," Musk said in another tweet.

 

The first orbital Starship prototype should be finished "around June," he added in another tweet.

 

If the testing and development campaign goes well, Starship and Super Heavy could begin flying Mars missions as early as the mid-2020s, Musk has said.

 

https://www.space.com/42979-spacex-starship-test-vehicle-photo.html

Anonymous ID: ee216c Jan. 11, 2019, 11:17 a.m. No.4713453   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3487 >>3491 >>3500 >>3501 >>3511 >>3566 >>3669 >>3841

>>4713420

(repost for this bread)

Minneapolis: Muslim refugee brutally rapes 10-year-old girl, media hides facts

 

A 34-year-old Muslim immigrant has been arrested and charged with brutally raping a 10-year-old girl in Minnesota and the local media in Minneapolis has refused to identify the man as a refugee from Somalia.

 

KSTP 5, an ABC affiliate in Minneapolis, referred to the suspect, Ahmed Hersi Abdi as “A Minneapolis man.” CBS affiliate WCCO 4 used the same description, giving no mention of the man’s background or how he arrived in the U.S.

 

The attack occurred Sunday evening in an apartment complex in the city’s Cedar Riverside neighborhood, also known as “Little Mogadishu” for its high concentration of Somali refugees imported from United Nations refugee camps in Africa.

 

Abdi allegedly followed the girl out of an elevator. He asked for her name and offered his hand to her. She shook his hand and Abdi refused to let go. Police said he proceeded to rape the girl in the hallway of the apartment building.

 

https://www.scandallinfo.com/2019/01/07/minneapolis-muslim-refugee-brutally-rapes-10-year-old-girl-media-hides-facts/

Anonymous ID: ee216c Jan. 11, 2019, 11:30 a.m. No.4713632   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3665

The Brightest Quasar of the Early Universe Shines with the Light of 600 Trillion Suns

 

Scientists have discovered the energetic core of a distant galaxy that shatters the record for the brightest object in the early universe, blazing with the light equivalent to 600 trillion suns.

Researchers identified the object — a black-hole-powered object called a quasar, among the universe's brightest inhabitants — because of a chance alignment with a dim galaxy closer to Earth that magnified its light.

 

The quasar is 12.8 billion light-years away, and it shines at the heart of a forming galaxy during an early part of the universe's history called the epoch of reionization, when the first stars and galaxies began to burn away a haze of neutral hydrogen across the cosmos. Researchers announced its discovery on Jan. 9 at the American Astronomical Society's winter meeting in Seattle.

 

"That's something we have been looking for for a long time," Xiaohui Fan, a researcher at the University of Arizona and lead author on the new work, said in a statement from the Hubble Space Telescope team. "We don't expect to find many quasars brighter than that in the whole observable universe!"

 

Several powerful ground-based telescopes and the Hubble Space Telescope pooled their observations of the object, now designated J043947.08+163415.7, to learn more about it. The quasar gets its brightness from a supermassive black hole: material from a disk of gas surrounding the black hole falls in, leading to blasts of energy at many different wavelengths, according to the statement. The quasar likely blazed when the universe was less than a billion years old, but some of its light is only now reaching Earth. According to the new observations, the black hole powering this quasar is several hundred million times the mass of the sun.

 

Despite its intense brightness, the distance to the quasar is so great that it wouldn't have been visible, if not for a lucky trick of positioning. Through a process called gravitational lensing, light from the quasar has bent around a galaxy in between the object and Earth, magnifying our view: the quasar appears three times as large and 50 times as bright as it would have otherwise, researchers said in the statement. And it was only observed at all because the intervening galaxy was dim enough to not drown out the light from the ultra-distant quasar.

 

Learning more about this quasar, which also appears to be producing 10,000 stars per year, can teach researchers more about this distant but pivotal time in history, when the first stars and galaxies were kindling and shaping the universe to what we know today. Even more telescopes are joining the search to try and discern more about the system.

 

"This detection is a surprising and major discovery; for decades we thought that these lensed quasars in the early universe should be very common, but this is the first of its kind that we have found," Fabio Pacucci, a researcher at Yale University, a co-author on the work and lead author on a follow-up paper about the quasar, said in a statement from the Keck Observatory. "It gives us a clue on how to search for 'phantom quasars' — sources that are out there, but cannot be really detected yet.

 

"Our theoretical study predicts that we might be missing a substantial fraction of these 'phantom quasars,'" Paucci added. "If they are indeed numerous, it would revolutionize our idea of what happened right after the Big Bang, and even change our view of how these cosmic monsters grew up in mass."

 

The new work was detailed Jan. 9 in the Astrophysical Journal.

 

https://www.space.com/42962-brightest-quasar-early-universe-600-trillion-suns.html

(pic1 is real, pic2 is CGI)

 

—astrofagging end—

Anonymous ID: ee216c Jan. 11, 2019, 11:33 a.m. No.4713685   🗄️.is 🔗kun   >>3704

>>4713624

pretty much

but most of the asteroids are beyond mars, so it's plausible to have a nice trip

all depends how strong the ship is

for the interplanetary trip, SpaceX HAS not bulk it up as much as possible

>>4713638

clockfags gonna clockfag

>>4713665

o7, and agreed

we might be a very remote intelligent species though

until I see otherwise, we're the most intelligent species in the universe (ffs)

Anonymous ID: ee216c Jan. 11, 2019, noon No.4714061   🗄️.is 🔗kun

>>4714016

>then NO i wont be silent

I don't think I asked, nor do I care

anons are equal opportunity diggers

>>4714015

wrong about what exactly?

most anons and Q don't think she's dead, she's CLEARLY being kept alive