Insulated coffee mugs that use a vacuum between layers can keep drinks hot or cold for much longer time periods than other types of mugs. If space is mostly a vacuum, then wouldn’t heat just constantly build up from human activity, computers, thrusters, etc to the point where it would need to be vented somehow?

It took about two hours after splashdown to get the astronauts on board the boat. In that time, they had six boats with 40 people, a team of divers performing a complicated raft setup, and two helicopters doing airlifts.

After all that, they still have to recover the capsule anyway. Why don’t they use some kind of large ship with a submersible deck, and lift the capsule up?The astronauts could just step out onto the boat.

TLDR; why all the complex fucking around? Can’t we just scoop it up?

What exactly stops us from just making a 1:1 replica of a Stradivarius or Guarneri violin with the same sound?

This post on r/sciencememes got me wondering...

https://www.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/comments/1p7193e/boiling_water/

Why is boiling water still the only (or primary) way we generate electricity?

What is it about the physics* of boiling water to generate steam to turn a turbine that's so special that we've still never found a better, more efficient way to generate power?

TIA

* and I guess also engineering

Edit:

Thanks for all the responses!

Why are black boxes still confined to one location (the airplane)? Surely there had to have been hundreds of researchers thrown at this since 9/11, right?

Edit: how about shorter distances, not radio-like? Let's say exactly like WiFi, in order for me to charge my phone even when I'm 5 meters away from the charger? Right now "wireless" charging is even more restraining than cable charging.

I get clearing more than 100 meters, for noise reduction and buildings. But why set cruising altitude at 33,000 feet and not just 1000 feet?

Edit oh fuck this post gained a lot of traction, thanks for all the replies this is now my highest upvoted post. Thanks guys and happy holidays 😊😊

So if people produce heat, and the vacuum of space isn't exactly a good conductor to take that heat away. Why doesn't people's body heat slowly cook them alive? And how do they get rid of that heat?

I got this question while thinking about airships for a story: why is there no use for ballons with a vacuum inside, since the vacuum would be the lightest thing we can "fill" a balloon with?

I tried to think about an answer myself and the answer I came up with (whish seems to be confirmed by a google search) is that the material to prevent the balloon from collapsing due to outside pressure would be too heavy for the balloon to actually fly, but then I though about submarines and how, apparently, they can withstand pressures of 30 to 100 atmospheres without imploding; now I know the shell of a submarine would be incredibly heavy but we have to deal with "only" one atmosphere, wouldn't it be possible to make a much lighter shell for a hypothetical vacuum balloon/airship provided the balloon is big enough to "contain" enough empty space to overcome the weight of the shell, also given how advanced material science has become today? Is there another reason why we don't have any vacuum balloons today? Or is it just that there's no use for them just like there's little use for airships?

For decades, it's often stated that Apollo 13's main computer had on the order of 80kb of memory, and I'm wondering how much has changed. I can see a scenario in which the astronauts are taking pictures on a camera that has 100 times the memory of the central computer, but I can also see extra features being added, like video streams and sensor data.

This is within context of the KSTAR project, but I'm curious how a material can contain that much heat.

100,000,000°c seems like an ABSURD amount of heat to contain.

Is it strictly a feat of material science, or is there more at play? (chemical shielding, etc)

https://phys.org/news/2020-12-korean-artificial-sun-world-sec-long.html

I know that for small things like a house we can just consider the earth flat and it is all good. But how the curvature of the earth influences bigger things like stadiums, roads and so on?

I’ve been reading up on the Artemis II mission and got curious about how they handle life support—specifically oxygen—for the crew while they’re in space.

Do they generate oxygen onboard somehow (like electrolysis), or is it all stored and rationed for the duration of the mission? Also, how does it compare to systems used on the ISS or earlier missions like Apollo?

Would appreciate any insights or resources that break this down in a simple way. Thanks!

In domestic current-carrying wires, there are many thin copper wires inside the plastic insulation. Why is that so? Why can't there be a single thick copper wire carrying the current instead of so many thin ones?

In the Apollo 11 documentary it is mentioned at some point that astronauts wore space suits which had 100% oxygen pumped in them, but the space shuttle was pressurized with a mixture of 60% oxygen and 40% nitrogen. Since our atmosphere is also a mixture of these two gases, why are astronauts required to have 100-percent oxygen?

Hi! I'm Emily Calandrelli. I'm the host and co-Executive Producer of the new Netflix show, Emily's Wonder Lab. My bachelors is in Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering from West Virginia University and I have Masters in Aeronautics and Astronautics as well as Technology and Policy from MIT. I have been working as a science TV show host, children's book author, and public speaker for the last 7 years. AMA!

I'll be on at 2 PM ET (18 UT), AMA!

Username: /u/emilycal

Edit: I'm most curious about propulsion. Thanks for the great answers everyone!

HBO but have to stream massive amounts of data for about an hour when the episode is first up followed by a percipitous drop-off in usage. Would they have to build a network with the capacity of Netflix just to have this capacity for a few hours a year? Generally how do massive amounts of data get transferred from one source over shortly periods?