SpaceX Enters a New Stage of Reusability (mashable.com) 151
SpaceX will now be attempting to land and reuse all of the rockets it launches. Over the weekend, SpaceX launched and successfully landed its second Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket in Cape Canaveral, Florida. An anonymous reader writes: The landing of this vehicle, designed with reusability in mind, marks the beginning of a completely recyclable era of rockets for the company. The Block 5 can be used hundreds of times if recovered successfully. Now that the company has transitioned to this more reusable model, recovery will be an even more crucial part of the launch. In a two week period, it's planning five recoveries. Mashable: The landing marks one of the first landings and launches of the company's newest, upgraded Falcon 9 rockets, called Block 5. Before this launch, SpaceX got rid of a backlog of their Block 4 rockets by launching without landing them back on Earth. That type of launch without landing is the traditional way of getting things to orbit, but SpaceX managed to change that. The whole point in the company's rocket landings hinge on the fact that it could reduce the cost of flying to orbit. By reusing rocket stages for multiple launches, it could drive down the exorbitant cost of flying to space for companies and nations around the world. SpaceX has been killing it the past couple years. The company -- founded by Elon Musk -- launched 18 times in 2017.
Don't let the marketeers market (Score:3, Insightful)
Not sure you're old enough to remember deaths involved in space flight, but this may not be the smartest statement for the marketeers to put out.
More likely a quote, or fake. (Score:2)
Re:Don't let the marketeers market (Score:5, Interesting)
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
Unless we can get into space without explosive force, such as a space elevator, it is going to be dangerous, and people will die in the future from space travel.
Space elevators (Score:5, Informative)
Space elevators are infinitely more dangerous than current systems. If a rocket explodes, the occupants die. If the self-destruct fails, a few people may die wherever the remnants fall. If a space elevator breaks, everybody dies.
No. That idea comes from people who haven't actually thought it out, and the idea of catastrophic space-elevator destruction got popularized by the dramatic but unrealistic space-elevator destruction scenes in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red Mars.
A good way of visualizing what space elevator would be made out of is to picture spider silk, but lighter. A space elevator can't be massive: it has to carry its own weight 40,000 km. If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere; the parts that are lower down (and thus don't have much energy) sift down like dandelion fluff.
People have simulated this.
Of course, the material to make a space elevator does not yet exist. But if it did exist, we know it would have to be exceptionally light.
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The problem isn't the part that's in orbit, or the cables. It's the cargo that was being transported when some space trash cuts the wires near the top.
Unless you want to argue that a space elevator would only be used to transport very light objects individually.
Re:Space elevators (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem isn't the part that's in orbit, or the cables. It's the cargo that was being transported when some space trash cuts the wires near the top. Unless you want to argue that a space elevator would only be used to transport very light objects individually.
The statement was that it would be "infinitely more dangerous" than a rocket. No, it wouldn't. The space elevator itself is exceptionally light (or "impossibly light," in the words of anonymous coward above). The cargo would be like any other cargo dropping down from a high altitude, except unlike a rocket, not carrying a load of fuel.
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The space elevator itself is exceptionally light (or "impossibly light," in the words of anonymous coward above).
And impossible things are trivially safe of course. ;)
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. But if it did exist, we know it would have to be impossibly light.
Fixed that for you.
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Assuming that we on the ground don't rely upon those things up in orbit.....
Re: Space elevators (Score:2, Insightful)
If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere
It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material. Lighter than spider silk, but strong enough to lift massive load, yet conveniently fragile enough to burn up in the atmosphere. Now you just have to invoke for it the ability to provide free energy and we can call it unobtanoum!
Re: Space elevators (Score:5, Informative)
If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere
It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material.
I'm a physicist. That's what we do.
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I'm a physicist. That's what we do.
Physics is just applied mathematics! /snark
... ... I'll show myself the door.
https://www.xkcd.com/435/ [xkcd.com]
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ok, +1 funny.
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Drawn by a mathematician, or he would see the philosopher standing behind the mathematician, clearing his throat politely.
Re: Space elevators (Score:2)
Oh wonderful. Please, share with us the aspects of physics which led you to conclude that this magical material must necessarily burn up in the atmosphere during reentry.
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It's neat how you know absolutely everything about the physical properties of this not-yet-invented miracle material.
You totally misunderstood his argument.
To recap: if such a material could be used as a space-elevator tether, then it would necessarily have to have the properties he listed. Otherwise it could not be used as a space-elevator-tether in the first place.
Nowhere did he say that such a material actually exists, or even could exist.
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High strength per weight in no way implies low density. Even natural spider silks can be real structural. Feel like low test fishing line when you walk through it.
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He didn't claim to know all properties of this hypothetical material however those mentioned are known - as those are requirements for a space elevator to work at all.
Grow up.
Re: Space elevators (Score:2)
Burning up in the atmosphere is a requirement of a space elevator?
kek. Good one.
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Of course, the material to make a space elevator does not yet exist.
There are far more practical alternatives. A rotating skyhook can be made from existing materials, and drop down to pick up payloads from the ground, or from aircraft.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
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If a space elevator breaks, the parts that are high up (and thus have high energy) disintegrate in the atmosphere
No, they just get ripped off and become dangerous orbital projectiles.
the parts that are lower down (and thus don't have much energy) sift down like dandelion fluff.
Megatonnes of danelion fluff? OK then...
SpaceX is making it safe (Score:4, Interesting)
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
SpaceX is making it much more safe in two ways:
1) Coming up with a highly reliable design that has been tested so often failure modes are more rare than aircraft.
2) Designing a proper escape capsule to eject a crew module in the event there is a problem. Which commercial aircraft having nothing like for passengers in case something goes drastically wrong...
In the near future I would rather be on a rocket than a commercial aircraft,.
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I look forward to our future where rockets to space are as boring as a flight to LA. Hopefully the spaceport won't be as crappy as LAX.
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Rocket travel should enable much more lax (and therefore more pleasant) security in two ways:
1) No cockpit to hijack, computers are managing the flight.
2) Shorter flight duration means less time to try anything.
3) Any bombs added to luggage can simply be used as extra propulsive force if they detonate, saving money on fuel.
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They don't even fly them once before they're put to work.
Not yet.
Safety (Score:4, Interesting)
Space flight is very dangerous, and I don't see it becoming much more safe in my lifetime.
Maybe. It's gotten a lot safer during my lifetime but I was born near the start of the space age when we really didn't know what we were doing. We've learned a lot in the last 5 decades. (at the cost of some lives) That said it's still quite dangerous and likely to remain so for the near future. It's going to take quite a while to get the technology of chemical rockets to the point where they have a safety record even close to airlines at reasonable cost. They have a fairly good safety record today but at outrageous cost. The real question is whether we can keep or improve on the current safety record while reducing the cost to orbit. That is not going to be easy to do and won't happen overnight.
Unless we can get into space without explosive force, such as a space elevator, it is going to be dangerous, and people will die in the future from space travel.
You think a space elevator wouldn't be dangerous [wikipedia.org]? You might want to think about that a little deeper. Those things are enormously dangerous even if they prove to be possible to actually build. Not just to the users of the elevator but potentially to people on the ground or in space if they fail.
Anything dealing with space is going to be dangerous. But it's conceivable it could be made safe to a reasonable degree someday. Won't be easy but it could be made to be reasonably safe for most travelers. Take the airline industry for an example. It took decades but eventually it became quite safe with good regulation and technological advancement. Same with ocean travel. I'd expect the space industry to take longer (harder problem) but I also could someday see spaceflight being "routine" to a reasonable degree.
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The same thing that will reduce cost to orbit will be the biggest boon to safety: launching more frequently. It's very hard to work out all the bugs of a rocket that only launches a dozen times before it's replaced by a new model, compared to a rocket that launches thousands of times a year.
Launching frequently (Score:2)
The same thing that will reduce cost to orbit will be the biggest boon to safety: launching more frequently.
That's certainly going to be a big part of it. Kind of a chicken and egg problem though. To launch more frequently you need to reduce costs and to reduce costs you need to launch more frequently. This is a perfect example of where subsidies can make a ton of sense.
Although bear in mind that launching more frequently will come with a body count. Some of the lesson we are going to learn about how to do space travel safely are going to be learned at the cost of some lives and we're going to have to be ok w
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People die every day in more mundane vehicles, but that doesn't seem to deter them. Fear of a travel mode isn't often proportional to actual danger. Even Musk's proposed commercial suborbital BFR flights will look scary to many regardless of their safety record, and will likely attract only thrillseekers and those who really need the speed, unless his marketers are as good his engineers.
But the good news is that rockets are probably safer than many transport options already, at least in terms of deaths per
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>> SpaceX has been killing it Not sure you're old enough to remember deaths involved in space flight, but this may not be the smartest statement for the marketeers to put out.
They could say the growth in the rate of recovered stages has been explosive, or that the hopes of SpaceX detractors have been sent plummeting.
Re: Don't let the marketeers market (Score:2)
Not sure you're old enough to remember...
Definitely not old enough to know that slang like "killing it" is perfectly fine in casual speech but it's simply no substitute for genuine writing ability (which precludes such literary gems as "SpaceX is killing it... [dude]").
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Sadly, phrases like "killing it" and "throwing shade" have found widespread usage in news headlines in an attempt to sound edgy and cool.
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Even better is 'wrecking it', accompanied by pelvic thrusts. That's class.
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People in space is a silly stunt.
People in space is the point of the exercise. I don't expect that to be cheap or safe until launch technology evolves quite a bit. However, if all you need to do is get people up to LEO, where they'll transfer to the real space ship, there's room for craft heavy enough for airplane levels of safety.
Cheap cargo to orbit and safe humans to orbit are really different problems though.
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Often they are the same person. For example, when I worked the past for tech companies X, Y and Z, our marketeers worked hard to drop "news stories" about our company and products in tech magazines, and also worked to link to planted stories from Slashdot - and the "successful" stories often looked just like this.
Pro Russian Bots Saving Roscosmos (Score:5, Interesting)
A funny thing happened on the way to outer space... SpaceX developed a business model that is quickly obsoleting Russia's space launch supremacy. Now that it's an actual threat, expect to see frequent bot attacks on SpaceX, Elon Musk, Tesla, Hyperloops, et cetera. That's how the disinformation age works. Delegitimize anyone that is deemed a threat.
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expect to see frequent bot attacks on ...Tesla...
They'll have to queue up behind the massive hate campaign that's being fired at Tesla by the legacy automotive industry and big oil.
(Legacy; a good word for IT types as it has the correct connotation; probably lost on Joe Public.)
Re:Pro Russian Bots Saving Roscosmos (Score:5, Interesting)
No. But Soyuz is man rated. Soyuz is 81 million a seat. 243 million a flight.
Falcon 9 is 62 million/launch for commercial flight. NASA flight is more (NASA has lots of rules), and Man rated version will no doubt be even more.
This is, of course, a bit dishonest (Score:2, Informative)
The NASA claim (not YOUR claim - I am not calling YOU dishonest) that the Soyuz is "man-rated" is and always has been a fraud, just as it was for the Shuttle. Neither vehicle would pass the "man rated" standards being required for SpaceX's Falcon+Dragon or Boeing's Atlas+Starliner.
NASA Had no supervision over the design and construction of Soyuz and no ability to dictate ANYTHING about the system nor does NASA have any control over the system as it is in use. NASA has no supervision over production or test
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Soyuz uses a launch escape tower. It was developed so it could handle all the tasks necessary including going to the Moon if so required. The launch escape tower was even used in an incident on the launch pad and it worked as expected.
Re: Pro Russian Bots Saving Roscosmos (Score:5, Interesting)
By all accounts Soyuz is still cheaper than Falcon.
By which accounts? The Soyuz costs between $40 and $60 million per launch, while the Falcon 9 costs about $62 million. But the Falcon 9 can lift twice as much payload in reusable mode as a Soyuz can when being written off, so that $62 million get you a lot more stuff in orbit. It can lift even more in expendable mode, but that will cost you extra.
Of course the question isn't "which one is cheaper" to the customer; the question is which one is cheaper to actually operate. SpaceX doesn't need to underbid the competition by much since there really isn't that much competition, but you can bet that their profit margin per launch is significantly higher than that of their competitors.
Re: Pro Russian Bots Saving Roscosmos (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody cares what the Ruskys claim it costs them. They care what the Ruskys charge. Which is MUCH more than $60/million per flight. Rather $80 million per seat.
Re: Pro Russian Bots Saving Roscosmos (Score:3)
That's what they charge NASA. Because they can, and because it's embarrassing. Nobody else pays those rates.
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So what? America was big enough to pay for Russia's ENTIRE space program when their economy was 'passed out drunk, face down in a pool of puke in a gutter'. Because it was better than Russian rocket scientists selling their services to the 3rd world.
The FACT remains, nobody cares what they claim it costs, only what they charge.
Re: Pro Russian Bots Saving Roscosmos (Score:2)
I don't think you know what facts are. The fact is you're starting to sound like a drunk ass, presuming to speak for the entire world.
Regardless of what you personally care about, there are plenty of people who do care about which particular vehicle/program is more efficient and ergo cheaper. It helps us predict how things will move in the coming years, as well as helping us figure out which technologies to bet on.
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You do know there are commercial Soyuz rocket cargo flights right? Arianespace is one of the operators. The manned version is more expensive for several reasons.
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Aaaaaaaand....
The GGP post was right. It took only two posts.
The War on Tesla and the Fight for the Future (Score:4, Informative)
Daily Kos-- which you can hardly call a pro-billionaire publicity rag-- had an article discussing exactly these points:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2018/5/29/1767826/-The-War-on-Tesla-Musk-and-the-Fight-for-the-Future [dailykos.com]
Without landing? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Wouldn't that imply that they... sunk?
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*splooooooosh*
Re:Without landing? (Score:5, Funny)
"They said I was daft to land a rocket on a barge in the ocean. But I built it anyway. It sank in the ocean. So I built a second one. It sank in the ocean. So I built a third one. It landed on the barge, fell over, and sank in the ocean. But the fourth one stayed up!"
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Were they used in hi-lift missions that wouldn't allow for recovery?
Why would you ditch them in the water if you could save them? You'd think you could safely scrap those and recover quite a bit of cash.
Once you've proven you can land them safely, why would we want them just littering the ocean? They should have properly recycled them if at all possible.
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I assume it was some clients who required more payload then they could safely recover (i.e. a huge satellite) or insisted on no reuse.
Impressive (Score:2)
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Lower cost access to space helps us all.
It does, you know. Oh, it's a bit more long term than people generally think, but there's nothing wrong with thinking long-term.
Heck, the Earth will only be habitible for another 300 M years or so - not an immediate concern, but an inevitable one.
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The far future is far FAR away [Re:Impressive] (Score:5, Interesting)
Average lifetime for a mammalian species is 1 million years [pbs.org]. A few mammalian species last as long as 10 million years.
About 300 million years from now the brightening of the sun will indeed mean "we" will have to do something, but the term "we" in that phrase means "some different future species that is related to us about as closely as we are related to the very first reptiloids that would, in the future, evolve into dinosaurs."
Re:The far future is far FAR away [Re:Impressive] (Score:4, Insightful)
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Troll on, brother.
They only way out is by exploring the stars.
Interstellar travel is probably the hardest problem. I suspect we'll solve the problem of short human lifetimes long before we find a way to travel quickly between the stars.
It's also a problem of scale: unless there's some SciFi shortcuts handy, the smallest ship that would make sense would be billions of tons. When we're building in space at that scale, we'll be well on our way to not needing the Earth to survive.
In short, most of the great benefit to be found from moving industry into
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hope they saved some block 4's for display (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry, they're going to be used (Score:3)
IIRC, SpaceX is planning on launching all their Block 4s, especially when the mission requires "Maximum Performance" (which means they can't be recovered). In terms of what they have left, I think it's only one or two - certainly less than five.
They cost $30M or so to build, so if they're flyable, SpaceX wants to make money on them.
myke
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I think there are four block 3 or 4 boosters left in existence:
The first booster that SpaceX successfully landed is displayed outside their HQ.
There is the first booster that they ever reflew, which as I recall was recovered. Given that they've decided that nothing pre-block 5 flies more than twice, presumably this one still exists.
The side boosters from the Falcon Heavy test flight were both flying for the second time and both were recovered. By the same logic, they should also still exist.
Looking at https [wikipedia.org]
Re: hope they saved some block 4's for display (Score:3)
No, the one in front of HQ is the first of the Version 1.2 boosters, which would make it a Block 3.
The first block 4 didn't fly until a year and a half later. It then flew again this April in an expendable configuration, so it is currently at the bottom of the ocean. Maybe that means it's parked outside Elons mad-scientist lair?
They all landed (Score:3)
SpaceX got rid of a backlog of their Block 4 rockets by launching without landing them back on Earth.
Oh they "landed" them. The landings were a little more... exuberant than the Block 5 rockets will be though.
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Those launches ended in a RSD (as opposed to RUD).
Since they were intended to go into the sea, they were a rapid scheduled disassembly.
Launch our Garbage towards the sun (Score:1)
Re:Launch our Garbage towards the sun (Score:5, Informative)
No, and the rockets don't have anywhere near the performance required to do this. The Parker solar probe will take an enormous rocket to launch a small craft in order to be able to get relatively close to the sun, and to do that it will use multiple gravity assists from Venus to slow down.
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Why would we want to permanently get rid of the resources that we use the most?
Hitting the sun is hard (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Launch our Garbage towards the sun (Score:5, Interesting)
You can launch garbage toward the sun with a homemade water rocket. It's getting to the sun that's difficult. It takes more dV to get to the sun via a direct Hohmann transfer than it does to leave the solar system entirely.
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You start at the speed of the orbit of the Earth around the Sun. To fall towards the Sun, you need to reduce your speed so you can start falling towards the Sun. This requires an awful lot of fuel.
Re:Radio active waste (Score:1)
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No, but they are oil powered. RP-1 aka kerosene.
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We should get off oil and use nuclear [wikipedia.org]!
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We should get off oil and use nuclear [wikipedia.org]!
No, no, the only serious nuclear powered rocket is Project Orion [wikipedia.org].
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To be honest, my comment was made in jest.
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To be honest, my comment was made in jest.
To be honest, my comment was made in jest as an attempt to top your jest.
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It's jest all the way down.
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I would but I jest couldn't help myself.
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Venus would be a great destination for nuclear thermal, and an excuse to develop the tech to a point that people could be more comfortable with using it on Earth. You still have to launch nuclear fuel from Earth, of course, but just as a payload, not in the form of a operating, short-lived-isotope-generating reactor. People could rest easy knowing that the only time it would be turned on would be in the atmosphere / orbit of an entirely different planet. Of course, once you've had such a rocket working on
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You really make me wish that the energy put toward Mars was focused on Venus.
I demand floating cities on Venus. Not because of some Star Wars reference but to stick it to those mole-like Martians!
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Normal Earth air. Both nitrogen and oxygen are lifting gases on Venus.
That would be a prototyping step, yes. Just like Mars habitats are also first tested on Earth. On Earth, however, you'd have to use heliox as the lifting gas.
Actually 1) we don't know whether there's any sulfuric acid rains, snows or frosts in Venus's middle cloud layer, and B) it would actually be prefe
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They have done some work on their site since last I saw (probably the last time Venus was mentioned as a more suitable destination than Mars and the inevitable 'floating in a dense atmosphere is impossible!'). It's nice to see them still doing good work.
Cheers.
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We should get off oil and use nuclear [wikipedia.org]!
Once we’re out of the atmosphere. .
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If you first tell him to shove a rocket up his arse like the diver did? Maybe. Go try.