Juice is getting back to Earth before the Starliner astronauts.
That was nuts! I can't believe they caught the booster like that, amazing!!
Amazing!
Short but very good documentary on the soon-to-be-launched Europa Clipper, explaining how each of its instruments work and what they might discover.
Watching the Super Heavy catch felt genuinely like life is catching up to sci-fi.
As groundbreakingly realistic as Gargantua appeared in Interstellar, apparently we had a decent idea of what a black hole would look like much earlier than I realized.
Mao didn't mention the date - it's from 1979, and you can find the whole paper here.
That's really interesting because in the extra features for the movie, some hay is made over how Kip Thorne came up with the equations to model the black hole which were used by the VFX people to create the image. Somebody wasn't being entirely honest 
This is an interesting read about that.
https://www.wired.com/2014/10/astrop...
Kip Thorne did the maths, and they rewrote the software to deal with curved light, and generated hundreds of terabytes of data. But the twisted disk happened when a CG supervisor put a flat accretion disk in the renderer and that was the result.
So they could have skipped all that work and just made something based on the 1979 paper. 
If only their simulation of orbital mechanics had been that carefully researched.
Yeah, but then how would Dr. Thorne have afforded that new bedroom on his house? (He's a great guy, I wish him every success.)
Honestly, we need to pay scientists more.
I assumed it was a marketing thing or the producers of the extra features wanted to make things sound cooler than a VFX guru tweaking a mathematically accurate render for a more visible effect. Thorne was genuinely surprised at the result, but of course he saw at once that it made sense physics-wise.
Ah, so Thorne was brought in as a consultant, however, he was intimately involved in the movie's production from the very idea - his idea - to produce a movie that would show black holes and wormholes in a scientifically accurate way. So he got huge amounts of rendering time with a bespoke physics model that showed a black hole in all its glory, complete with unexpected effects, and the movie got, well, a more beautiful centerpiece in Gargantua.
He got Executive Producer credit so I hope he got a piece of the movie too.
Only to be undone by that "love can transcend spacetime" nonsense they put in the script.
Oh yeah, the story is nonsense.
Only to be undone by that "love can transcend spacetime" nonsense they put in the script.
Oh yeah, the story is nonsense.
Technocrats, I loved the loving in my movie about spaceholes, some people, geez
MURRRRPH!
Only to be undone by that "love can transcend spacetime" nonsense they put in the script.
This is also the plot of the Hyperion series by Dan Simmons.
Interstellar's story is as soapy as could be and I loved every minute of it.
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