The Space Stuff thread

Hemimax said:

Elon Musk Wants To Drop Nuclear Bombs on Mars - Industry Tap

Well...There goes the neighborhood, I hope they're low yield.

Plans are for a Moon outpost to be in place by 2024. Starting in 2020 the space launch system and Orion are to be tested to the Moon and back to work out the bugs then the launch system is to be built in '24 for a Mars liftoff between 2030 - 2033 but this says otherwise: Independent report concludes 2033 human Mars mission is not feasible

160 years ago today:

At 11:18 AM on the cloudless morning of Thursday, September 1, 1859, 33-year-old Richard Carrington—widely acknowledged to be one of England's foremost solar astronomers—was in his well-appointed private observatory. Just as usual on every sunny day, his telescope was projecting an 11-inch-wide image of the sun on a screen, and Carrington skillfully drew the sunspots he saw.

On that morning, he was capturing the likeness of an enormous group of sunspots. Suddenly, before his eyes, two brilliant beads of blinding white light appeared over the sunspots, intensified rapidly, and became kidney-shaped. Realizing that he was witnessing something unprecedented and "being somewhat flurried by the surprise," Carrington later wrote, "I hastily ran to call someone to witness the exhibition with me. On returning within 60 seconds, I was mortified to find that it was already much changed and enfeebled." He and his witness watched the white spots contract to mere pinpoints and disappear.

It was 11:23 AM. Only five minutes had passed.

Just before dawn the next day, skies all over planet Earth erupted in red, green, and purple auroras so brilliant that newspapers could be read as easily as in daylight. Indeed, stunning auroras pulsated even at near tropical latitudes over Cuba, the Bahamas, Jamaica, El Salvador, and Hawaii.

Even more disconcerting, telegraph systems worldwide went haywire. Spark discharges shocked telegraph operators and set the telegraph paper on fire. Even when telegraphers disconnected the batteries powering the lines, aurora-induced electric currents in the wires still allowed messages to be transmitted.

"What Carrington saw was a white-light solar flare—a magnetic explosion on the sun," explains David Hathaway, solar physics team lead at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

Source

Just imagine how the world would react with the electronics in use today.
You'd be taking a selfie and possibly the phone would start smoking in your hand. Communications, traffic grids, cars, planes, credit card pos, (point of sale), GPS, anything electronic and that would include the Internet and TenFourms would be down.

For how long? How long would it take to replace and rebuild the electronics to run those systems, your guess is as good as mine.