Though named after Hamburg, it was an American invention.

What I wonder is what other industries might prompt the same level of hatred.

Private prisons companies? Hedge funds? Drug companies? Cryptocurrency exchanges? Payday loan companies? Dollar stores?

It would be a shame if it were only health insurance companies that were scared.

Hit the gym, delete the lawyer, face the book.

For one thing, the Apollo shield started in the very thin upper atmosphere, and they came in at an angle that meant they bled off as much speed/energy as possible in that thin upper atmosphere before going into the thicker atmosphere.

I don’t know that that makes a huge difference to the physics involved, though it certainly may have.

Of course it will make a difference. The whole challenge is about managing the heat build-up, which is the energy per second (i.e. power). If you hit the thin upper atmosphere you’re encountering less material, so less friction / pressure, so less heating. It means you can keep the heat on the heat shield in a manageable range, rather than putting it at a temperature where it would melt or explode.

the air cushion begins heating itself up instead of the object, reducing the amount of heat the object receives.

No, both heat up. The air cushion transfers its heat to the object next to it. At the kinds of pressures we’re talking about, you might even be getting nitrogen plasma rather than just nitrogen gas.

But it would also tail off as the bore cap heated, reducing stresses on it as it went higher.

If it went high enough for that to matter. If it disintegrated in the lower atmosphere it wouldn’t matter that the air got thinner in the upper atmosphere.

chunks of meteorites bigger than a meter have made it through the atmosphere, for instance

Is a metre the original size, or the final size? Also, reverse meteors (something starting with its maximum speed in the lower atmosphere) are doing things the hard way. Rather than getting slowed down initially by the thin upper atmosphere and then only hitting the thick atmosphere once they’re slower, they start out in the thickest atmosphere. OTOH, a meteor is a random collection of rock and metal formed by gravity in space. A pure metal plug cast on Earth is probably going to be a lot less prone to breaking apart.

the bore cap starting at the bottom of the atmosphere means that it’s likely it experienced less fracture stress, since the air would’ve accelerated with it rather than being static.

That doesn’t make sense to me. Something in a thicker medium is going to experience more stress. Try pushing a cracker through the air vs. through water vs. through gelatin. Which medium will cause the cracker to crack first? Obviously it’s the thicker medium.

Exactly. It’s the minimum speed required to get into orbit assuming you get the direction correct. If you launch vertically, you’ll almost certainly come back down, no matter how far out into space you go. The only consideration is that if you go far enough out you might be influenced by the gravity of something else like the moon which could change your trajectory.

It would spread outward a bit, but the entire kinetic energy and momentum in the system would remain the same. But, the more it broke apart, the more surface area it would have. The more surface area, the more surface exposed to heating. The more heating, the more it would break apart. I’m guessing that it was a silicon, iron and oxygen plasma without individual grains by the time it hit the upper atmosphere.

I don’t think you can compare the Apollo heat shields to a bore cap being launched into space. For one thing, the Apollo shield started in the very thin upper atmosphere, and they came in at an angle that meant they bled off as much speed/energy as possible in that thin upper atmosphere before going into the thicker atmosphere. In fact, one of the engineers said that if they came in too steep they’d generate too much heat and probably not survive the re-entry.

The layer of air you’re talking about at the front of the spacecraft was what heated up the heat shield. Instead of causing heating via friction, the heat was the result of compressing the air. The amount of compression you’re talking about would be orders of magnitude higher for something starting at 40 km/s in the thick lower atmosphere.

Also, the Apollo heat shield did heat up to 5000F or 2800C but was designed to be ablative, so that the hot layers burned off and flew off to the sides leaving new material to be heated up and burned off. This concrete and metal plug wouldn’t have been designed the same way. Concrete apparently melts at 1200C, and steel is approximately the same, so it’s very likely some of it melted or vaporized, the question is how much.

I don’t know where you’re getting the maximum of 22MJ of energy. The whole point of Apollo not going directly into the atmosphere was to take as long as possible to slow down, going through the thinnest part of the atmosphere for as long as possible. The whole point would be to reduce their energy-per-second as low as possible by taking as many seconds as possible. One reasonable first approximation of the energy would be to integrate the entire energy per second / power for Apollo’s re-entry over the entire 7 minutes (or however long it took until parachutes deployed) and then divide that energy by 2 for the 2 seconds the plug was in the atmosphere.

My guess is that that would have been temperatures well in excess of 1200C which would have made the outer surface start to melt, and most likely a temperature where it just turns to plasma. Would it all have melted / vaporized / plasmafied away? I don’t know, it’s a huge plug. Since it was launched vertically, anything remaining would probably have come right back down. But, that’s assuming it stayed in one piece. I’m guessing it broke apart due to the stresses on it, and breaking apart would have meant more surface area, which would have meant more areas exposed to massive heating, which would have meant more breaking apart.

TL;DR: I doubt it made it out of the atmosphere.

It isn’t speed.

Throw it into water or gelatin. At thousands of metres per second the air is going to seem much more dense.

That’s 11.2 km/s and 42.1 km/s.

Also, even if the manhole cover was going at above 12 km/s the trajectory has to be right for that to result in orbit. Most paths it would take would result in it going up and then coming back down again. Similarly, if somehow it did manage more than 50 km/s and wasn’t destroyed in the atmosphere, it might have the velocity to escape the sun’s gravity, but probably wouldn’t be on the right path to do it. Most likely it would fall into the sun.

So, assuming the 125,000 mph (55 km/s) velocity is correct, the most likely outcome is that it was a reverse-meteor, something that burned up going up through the atmosphere, not down. And even if it did have enough speed to get out of the atmosphere, and there was enough of it left, it most likely fell right back down through the atmosphere somewhere else, either burning up on re-entry or hitting the ground (or the water) somewhere else.

It’s interesting how there’s a hint of science here, but so much non-science.

Like, trying to categorize things is a bit scientific. Trying to distinguish between similar but different things is a bit scientific. At the same time, so many of these causes of death are symptoms not causes. And, there are too many cases where they didn’t bother to try to find a cause, like the “Planet” cases or “Suddenly”. Also, almost all of the deaths are in children / infants, but in those cases they don’t try to figure out the cause of death, they just note the age.

Nobody thinks Joe Rogan sounds smart. Dumb people just like him because he asks the same dumb questions they’d ask if they could talk to the same celebrities.

He was a good interviewer then because he’d ask good questions, shut up, and let them talk.

And there was no time pressure on his podcast. The episodes took as long as they took, so no need for people who aren’t good at sound bites to figure out how to explain something complicated in a fast and simple way.

But, even back pre-COVID, pre-Spotify, he was a dangerous idiot. Like, he’d have Alex Jones on, and the guy would spew vast quantities of dangerous misinformation, and Rogan would fact check him on one little thing and that moment would go viral. Meanwhile, Alex Jones gets platformed and most of his BS goes unchallenged.

He had maybe 3-4 good years when his podcast changed from having the same MMA fighters / comedians on again and again every year, to having new people every week, to when it went full-on right wing. In 2012/13 it was still an MMA / comedy podcast featuring mostly the same people every week. Then he had Neil Degrasse Tyson, Dana White, Dan Carlin, David Lee Roth, Douglas Rushkoff. In 2017 he had Alex Jones for the first time. But, by then he was already platforming woowoo people pushing “supplements”, and right-wing assholes like Stephen Crowder and Gavin McInnes.

He still is incredibly popular, that’s why many people think his hosting Trump on his podcast helped swing the election.

He’s always been libertarian right wing. But, since he became generationally rich, he’s now full on Republican.

That’s a weird take, that podcasts are the issue and not monopolies, big tech, lack of privacy regulation, etc.

Podcasts are one of the few interoperable, democratic things left out there. Anybody can put one up, they use an open technology, RSS, for distribution, they’re not monetized by default, etc.

The real issue is that the Internet has an advertising duopoly made from two companies that harvest vast amounts of personal data. They promote controversial stuff like Joe Rogan because it keeps people engaged (read “angry”) and engaged people spend more time on their various sites which means more ad dollars flow in.

Spotify, which has a cozy relationship with the music industry cartel, signed Rogan to an enormous deal. So, again, not really podcasting that’s the issue here, it’s the music/entertainment cartel using him as a means of driving engagement with their platform.

David Searchengineoptimizer, Mary Marykaycosmeticssales, Oleg Disinformationandpropagandabotprogrammer.

My premise is that people are sometimes corrupt and that power corrupts. There are democrats in power.

Are you really so much in a cult that you can’t believe that your side could possibly be anything less than pure?

It’s a laptop, do you really need 7 USB C / Thunderbolt ports on a laptop? You can always plug in a dock and get multiple other ports when you’re set up at a desk.

When I’m not at a desk I rarely have anything at all plugged in. Maybe power if I’m going for a long time, but the Pro has its own power adapter. Maybe a USB stick for a minute or two.I can’t imagine having 3 things, in addition to power and headphones, plugged in while I’m not at a desk. At a desk it’s probably more convenient to have a dock so you can have a bunch of things permanently plugged into the dock (keyboard, mouse, screens) that require just 1 plug to the laptop before they’re ready to go.

Cool stuff, I live in a city. Not a huge city, but big enough that I only see the major stars at night. It would probably take me at least 45 minutes of driving to get somewhere dark enough to take a picture like yours (assuming I had all the equipment and skill to take that kind of picture at all).