Actually, humanity originally lived on Venus. It was a paradise. And then they invented corporations.
Those rich enough piled in spaceships and escaped to Earth.
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65 posts were split to a new topic: Boeing Starliner Flight
The only thing I remember from an old Nova episode about Venus was that the tests they did on drying out rock to match the conditions on Venus caused the rock to get super hard. That explained why there are very tall mountains on Venus with walls more steep than could exist on Earth. So they didn’t have to come up with a new type of rock, it was normal rock made much stronger due to how dried out the planet is.
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I hear scientists are beginning to question the accuracy of that account.
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Are you suggesting that East Germany might have made media that was less than accurate?
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IMO, the first four books are subpar and not indicative of the quality of the series.
I feel fortunate that I didn’t start there (my first one was The Truth)
So don’t judge Pratchett by The Colour of Magic, please.
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I liked Color of Magic but a lot of people agree (and sure it’s not the strongest entry) – even Terry Prachett suggested that people skip the first two and start with Sourcery.
A guy on bluesky (@rincewind.run) made this reading order chart:
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That’s the same chart I linked to above.
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Links? what’s a link? 
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Interesting opinion piece by Robert Zubrin, the man who came up with the “Mars Direct” plan years ago. He argues that Mars Sample Return could be accomplished with reuse of the current sky crane lander design and a simpler, higher power Mars Ascent Vehicle. For less money — a lot less.
Do not Pass Go, do not resort to docking with a separate Mars-orbiting Earth return vehicle, go directly to Earth.
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When I sat down with Jane Rigby last month, in an upper-floor conference room at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis — a quiet reprieve from the throngs of families perusing cosmic exhibits and dinosaur bones below — her eyes were warm and measured. She was also wearing a menagerie of gravitationally lensed galaxies.
Her T-shirt was decorated with illuminated realms warped by massive structures in their vicinity, stretched and squashed like taffy thanks to gravitational tides that twist the very fabric of spacetime as though it were a bendable sea of four-dimensional rubber. This image was actually among the first stills captured by the James Webb Space Telescope, a gold-plated, multibillion-dollar instrument located a million miles from Earth — a machine for which Rigby serves as the chief scientist, and for which she just earned the White House’s 2024 Presidential Medal of Freedom.
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Which is why it took so long to design, build, and test; the impossible always takes a little longer.
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Boeing is the first with a third-party proposal for Mars Sample Return. To absolutely no one’s surprise, it wants to launch a single massive lander onboard an SLS (which costs a bare minimum of $2 billion a launch all by itself). For some idea of the size of the lander, here’s an artist’s conception with Perseverance at lower right for scale.
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Well… since it isn’t crewed, at least we don’t have to worry about a door falling off…
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You’re forgetting about the door for the samples to be loaded into the MAV and then sealed to keep them safe and secure during the trip to Earth and reentry. True, the odds are extraordinarily low that anyone would be hit by a wayward sample or piece of the reentry capsule, but the time and the money wasted!
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Capsule?
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No parachute, BTW, since it’ll hopefully be carrying rock samples sealed inside individual titanium tubes that can survive a ~200MPH impact thanks to a crushable metal layer cake inside. That’s a significant amount of weight that doesn’t have to be schlepped to Mars and back.
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Oh, hey— Anyone with the Criterion Channel— They have the excellent 1989 Apollo Program documentary “For All Mankind”. Brian Eno composed music for the soundtrack, really my favorite album by him.
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