I was most of the way through the thumbnail of the story when I realised IPA wasn’t IsoPropyl Alcohol. It’s still early. I’ll be awake soon …
My first reaction to the Artemis photo of the Earth with the small white dot below presumably being the moon was “Oh Fuck, We have gone the wrong way”
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The small white dot is Jupiter
Thanks for the heads-up, appreciated.
Sounds like your drinks cabinet has different contents to mine.
We had rules at work about putting comestibles into the chemicals/biohazards stores (which were quite often fridges). The habit’s stuck with me, albeit in reverse 
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Watching by flightradar and line of sight an aer lingus flight attempting a landing at John Lennon Airport. Very blowy out there, now on its third attempt to land.
Not a flight I’d relish being on - the whole house is shuddering in the gusts here.
Third attempt aborted, now attempting a landing at Manchester Airport.Thank goodness, down safe and sound, twitchy bum time.
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Learnt today, the grandson of the founder of Jamesons whisky in 1890 purchased a slave child who was thought to be 10 years old and then fed her to a tribe of cannibals for his entertainment as he watched. He later sketched it and wrote about it in his diary.
Maddening.
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Seems he was the grandson of the founder.
There isn’t a thread about the Artemis 2 mission but I have to admit to getting a great deal of pleasure reading the unhinged comments of barking, armchair flatearthers proclaiming it as being more faked than the Apollo missions & why!
As a secondary issue, I didn’t realise that after the translunar injection burn (which took it out of earth’s orbit) at some 24000 mph, the speed of the capsule drops off quite rapidly down to a few thousand mph. There’s no ‘drag’ up there so presumably it’s still earth’s gravitational pull that slows it while diminishing with distance. Also, don’t really understand the whole weightlessness phenomena once no longer ‘falling’ ie out of orbit.
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Ah my mistake, either way thoroughly horrible chap
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Also, on this day in 2063, is when we have first contact with the Vulcans
On the weightlessness issue
A good way to understand this is to think of all motion under the influence of gravity alone as “falling.” Whether you’re in low earth orbit like the ISS, coasting to the moon like an Apollo astronaut, or drifting through interstellar space, you’re in free fall whenever you’re moving only under the influence of gravity. In free fall, gravity affects you and the ship in the same way—if you accelerate, the ship accelerates too—so you won’t be pulled down to the floor no matter how close you are to a planet. If you move through space on any trajectory without firing your spaceship’s engines, you’ll feel weightless because your ship won’t exert any force on you.
If you wanted to travel away from the earth in a straight line at constant velocity, you couldn’t do it in free fall. You’d have to fire your engines constantly to keep the pull of the earth’s gravity from slowing you down. With the engines on, the ship would exert a force on you and you’d feel pulled to the “floor.” As you got farther away, the force of gravity from the earth would decrease, and you’d need less force from the engines to keep moving at a constant speed. The ship would exert less force on you and your apparent weight would decrease. At about 9,000 km from Earth, you’d feel about half your weight on the earth’s surface.
If you cut off the engines at any time, you’d feel weightless again. As long as the engines were off, you could pass by other planets without noticing anything (unless you entered an atmosphere and the ship started to decelerate, or you passed so close to a black hole that you started to experience general relativistic effects).
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How dy’a mean? 
We actually experience general relativistic effects all the time.
The fact is that masses have an effect. Newton described that effect in terms of the forces exerted by a mass on other masses. He formulated gravity as an inverse-square law of attraction between masses. Einstein viewed the effect of masses differently. He said (general relativity) that what a mass actually does is to curve spacetime and that the ‘force’ we ascribe to gravity can be substituted by that curvature. When you do the sums the curvature causes things to move in just the same way as if they were being acted on by Newton’s forces. But Einstein’s theory also explains things that Newton’s theory can’t e.g. why masses can bend light, even though light (photons) has no (rest) mass.
The weird things that happen when we get near black holes tend mostly (I think) to be caused not so much by the intense gravity there but by the extreme way the gravity changes (i.e. the gravitational gradient) over quite short distances.
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It will never not be annoying that the moment I get past Newtonian stuff, physics change into a rare C4th West African dialect that was mostly chirps and squeaks and knowing waggling of eyebrows to native-speakers, and which was never written-down, much-less translated…
(…and please don’t waste your valuable time trying to bridge the Chasm of Dumb: that horse has bolted, met a charming dappled mare, settled-down, sired generation-upon-generation of foals, lived-out a long and satisfying life in verdant pastures, and finally been boltgunned into dogfood and glue… aeons ago 
)
tl;dr - don’t even read this gibberish: it’s like chronic sleep-deprivation & white noise had a baby
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A quarter of a million miles from earth!
Or, as we call it here, three trips to Tesco and back 
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