the space race may be the funniest point in history period and i’ll stand by that. the US is like “yes whoever gets into space first will prove once and for all that our economic model is superior and that we are, in general, the superior country of superior and smarter people.” then the soviets just went and did it and the US freaked out and needed to cover their ass so were like “WE MEAN THE MOON, WE MEAN THE FIRST TO LAND ON THE MOON.”
yeah its cus walking on the moon was cool as hell and all this other boring shit sucked ass
When I was a freshman in a red-state college, I had a professor who taught Newtonian physics with a super thick Russian accent. The student body was unusually conservative for a state college, so there was a sort of general bemusement about learning physics from a Russian, but even back then the Cold War was far enough in the past that not even the red tribe was inclined to stir up trouble about it.
He was aware enough of this to get off on trolling the class, though. Whenever some force diagram in a homework assignment needed to be weightless, instead of being some generic spacecraft it would be “Mir” specifically. And he’d always use ‘cosmonaut’ instead of ‘astronaut’, that kind of thing.
One day about halfway through the semester, he’s doing this with in-class examples on the board, and one of the students finally gets up the guts to troll back a little. So this kid shouts from the back of the auditorium, “Hey professor, what’s the difference between a cosmonaut and an astronaut?”
And this beautiful man spins around on one heel to face the class, whiteboard marker triumphantly over his head, clearly having been waiting for this moment the entire semester:
It is never too early to start talking about outer space labor law
Like even NASA has been guilty of treating astronauts like organic robots in the past (see SkyLab Strike). You really think someone like Elon Musk will care about their employees working in microgravity beyond their ability to continue performing their job?
For example, NASA astronauts are currently required to work out two hours a day to keep up their bone and muscle mass. This helps prevent irreparable damage/loss and lets them eventually return to living their normal lives on Earth. But exercise equipment is heavy, and it costs $10000 per pound when you’re shooting something into orbit. That’s a lot! Can a company be trusted to send enough equipment into space for each of their employees to get that two hours in when the benefit is for the employees after they’ve served their time?
How long will these companies expect their employees to stay in microgravity when it’s cheaper for them to leave a single person up there for a long period of time than to bring them down and switch them out? If someone gets sick or wants to quit?
These are questions and concerns that will need to be addressed in the near future as the space industry becomes further and further commercialized and companies begin to break away from merely contracting for government space agencies.
Speaking as someone forever salty that we as leftists so often abdicate space stuff to the right-wing and the private sector, I am all for this.
Vantablack™ is no longer the blackest black. Congratulations to MIT.
Watch Stuart get the rights to this and ban anish kapoor from it
SHHDGSFSGHDSH
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