back to article Choose your own thrill ride: A Florida slidewire or catching a rocket by helicopter

Catching rockets by helicopter, three more 'nauts arriving at the ISS and COVID-19 causing schedule shuffles - it's been busy in the realm of rockets during this past week. ISS crew jumps to six as Soyuz trio turn up After a successful launch on 9 April, 0805 UTC, the Soyuz of cosmonauts Anatoli Ivanishin and Ivan Vagner and …

  1. stiine Silver badge

    re: catching rockets

    The US military did that with drones during the late 60's/early 70's, and the first satellite spy images were ejected from the satellite and captured mid-air during their descent (usually)

    1. Chris G

      Re: re: catching rockets

      Is there anywhere I can see a helicopter catching a rocket stage?

      That ought to be interesting.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: re: catching rockets

      There was a more recent (but failed) attempt with a solar particle capture satellite that was supposed to parachute the samples back: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genesis_(spacecraft)

      But I always thought that catching stuff with helicopters was incredibly dangerous especially as the mass of the thing increased. So it's one thing to catch film canisters and sample return canisters but quite another to catch rocket engines...

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    You missed the mail-in lawsuit

    You're weekly roundup misses the most important of the weekly events. My prediction that Republicans will block elections took a couple of steps closer.

    -------

    Dallas court ruled that people **can** vote by mail in Texas if they fear Covid 19, i.e. this lawsuit, which is good:

    https://www.texastribune.org/2020/04/07/democrats-sue-texas-officials-vote-mail-during-coronavirus-pandemic/

    Republicans are claiming that Covid19 asymptomatic people cannot vote by mail because they have no symptoms and thus are healthy and thus cannot use the mail-in ballots intended for unhealthy people. Republicans have appealed, they want to block mail-in votes in Texas.

    That will inevitably make its way to the Supreme Court where Brett Kavanaugh and his fellow Republicans will block another mail-in ballot measure. Like they did in Wisconsin.

    Republicans don't actually want to kill a lot of old and fat people, they want to make it impossible to hold an election they know they'd lose. A few hundred thousand deaths would be enough for that. Even if they're Republican deaths, (as old fat people tend to be), it won't matter if there's no election. The whole point of voter suppression and Gerrymandering is to get power *without* needing the votes.

    USA: 28,529 deaths, lowest death rate has been 2.9% in Korea, i.e. the *minimum* real number of infections is in the USA ~1 million, and the likely true number is 4-5 million since a many many more deaths would be in the un-recovered set. So that '644k' USA cases number is not real, they've unaccounted for minimum quarter of a million infected people minimum. 20 people would be enough to infect the whole of the USA, quarter of a million ensures it will happen.

    Have you seen the video of the man spitting on oranges while his friend films it and the grocery store owner slaps him silly ? He risking people's lives for his power rush. That's Brett Kavanaugh and Fox News right there. Spitting on the constitution to kill people to hold power, while Fox and Friends fake smile people offer 'thoughts and prayers' to the families of people Fox News propaganda helped kill.

    -----

    And Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis declared WWE an essential business, fake TV wrestling joins 'Religious Services' as being essential and permitting to allow mass gatherings. You can see how he's trying to look like he's got a stay-in-place order while actually overruling the Florida Counties more strict 'stay-in-place' orders.

    https://www.espn.com/wwe/story/_/id/29031903/wwe-deemed-essential-business-florida-mayor-says

    You see how he's pretending to close stuff down, while actually exempting a lot of things? Similar things are happening in South Dakota (Republican governor), Ohio (Republican), Kentucky (Republican) and so on in every Republican state.

    So, I'm still expecting Florida to be the seed state, I'm expecting them to block elections, "for safety" DeSantis having caused massive numbers of deaths in Florida, and Texas having already undermined mail-in votes.

    I'm still expecting other dodgy Republican states to follow suit. I'm expecting the Supreme Court to wade it and Republicans on the court hiding behind Kavanaugh, to block elections.

    I'm also now expecting the Supreme Court to force states to open their borders to infected states like Florida. As California and the rest pass the infection and want to open up, the Supreme Court will take measures to ensure they get cross infection from Republican seed states.

    ------

    South Korea had infections at the same time as USA (Feb 15th), indeed it had more initial cases.

    South Korea had (past tense) 229 deaths and is passed it, USA has (present tense) 28529 deaths so far and ongoing, Republicans and Fox News death clock 28300+ deaths so far. That is how many people this power grab has so far killed. 28300 Americans.

    1. 96percentchimp

      Re: You missed the mail-in lawsuit

      Downvote because WTF has that got to do with spaaaaace?

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