And cross your fingers and hope!
I’ve never understood why Iraq’s super gun was so scary, but we still can’t use such technology to launch satellites. It’s almost as if the government wasn’t entirely truthful about the threat.
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They’ve been visible for some weeks. Took this beginning of Nov. Just the phone but they’re all there in the twilight. Venus low to the right of the trees, the moon, Saturn is visible if you zoom in on one of the clouds between the moon and Jupiter.
I think the worry with big guns is that the initial investment is significant, but after that the shells are relatively cheap and easy to make. And the guidance is well-understood and reliable. So a rogue state might be able to build really quite an effective weapon without having to be too smart, and then to use it again and again without being bankrupted.
By contrast I’m aware that a UK supplier was once approached by Gaddafi’s Libya to supply copper vapour lasers. At the time their main use was AVLIS. The supplier confidently expected that they’d be able to refuse the order on the basis of certain denial of an export licence. But the denial didn’t happen. HMG probably reckoned that providing the laser to Libya would lead them to waste a huge amount of time and resource pursuing a near-impossible technology instead of investing it in something that might actually be troublesome.
The problem with guns for doing anything other than hurling near-solid projectiles is that all the acceleration has to happen in the length of the barrel, and most of it in the first small fraction of that length, before the hot gas pressure has dropped much. Not many complex things e.g. satellites can survive that degree of acceleration.
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This is the difference between accountants and engineers. Engineers understand that a delicate satellite is different to an artillery shell and actually needs to be usable after the launch process. 
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He is in good company though. This gun had a very long barrel, but would still have pulped the occupants.
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Was Jules Verne an accountant? 
I remember reading that book when I was a kid. From what I recall, the occupants didn’t enjoy the process…
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Nice timeline graphic to full deployment plus other stuff here.
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Loving this website.
L +3 Start of sunshield deployment
The mileage counter must have been borrowed from an Astra. Nothing else could cope with that speed
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This website is very well done, it just keeps giving
You Tube channel is good too
Noticed on Stellarium that the Andromeda galaxy was well-positioned tonight, so made a note of roughly where it is and grabbed the binoculars, since it’s beyond me to see it with the naked eye now. Through a pair of 35x bins it’s surprisingly obvious as a lenticular cloud of pale light.
Which was nice, 'cos that’s the first time I’ve knowingly seen another galaxy with my own eyes - and even at my advanced age, that’s pretty cool.
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It’s much bigger in the sky than you would think. Always find it quite eerie peering at other planted but another galaxy is a bit mind warping.
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220,000 light years across - impossible to grasp!
Webb’s First Deep Field of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723
Fucking brain melting time - every one of these is a galaxy not a star 
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The gravitational lensing is a total mind fuck
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It’s still a mind fuck that we can see light from 13 billion years ago. You would think that light would have passed us billions of years ago. Queue explanation around rate of expansion, space time and what expansion actually is. How that then defines how far back we can see is beyond me, but seem to remember someone saying we will never see first generation hydrogen only stars.
Pretty sure that single bright point with the rays pointing out of it is a supernova, so technically a single star. But they’re pretty exceptional.