Angels Fall First lets you participate in sci-fi battles on every level, you can take control of capital ships and their weapons, or run and gun during boarding actions. It's just entered early access after years of part time coding as a pretty complete title, albeit with a lot of rough edges in its current form. http://store.steampowered.com/app/367270/ ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dqkqysFrjCk

Part 3 in my series on communications satellites - The first communications satellites could only maintain connections for a short time before their orbits took them below the horizon, to make a stable connection needed a satellite that orbited with the earth - a geosynchronous satellite. And that's what Syncom was - they used bigger boosters and smarter navigation to get the spacecraft into higher orbits to create the first stable satellite connections. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/pdfs/ADA267914.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19660012402/downloads/19660012402.pdf https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19670015715/downloads/19670015715.pdf Follow me on Twitter for more updates: https://twitter.com/DJSnM I have a discord server where I regularly turn up: https://discord.gg/zStmKbM If you really like what I do you can support me directly through Patreon https://www.patreon.com/scottmanley ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Wiz_t7ImQc

Last night Elon Musk posted a pair of low resolution images showing the new Raptor engine getting ready for testing at the Mcgregor, Texas facility. Raptor is a next generation design using full flow staged combustion cycle, a design which has never been successfully flown, but offers superior performance and reusability. ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sdwy9fzQzl4

Approaching the question of proximity to space in both directions - hiking up to the highest point I could find (http://www.norcalhiker.com/sierra-buttes-fire-lookout/) then discussing Jonathan McDowell's paper on why the edge of space might be better set at 80km rather than the current 100km. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0094576518308221?via%3Dihub ... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A9bwTFGbDa0