My theory is that they are shooting with the spoons and then some team of poor schmucks gets the lucky assignment of burning 12+ hour days 7 days a week to make the spoons look less spoon.
“lucky” assignment.
It kinda makes sense? Spiderman and Deadpool both they spent a lot of time fixing the mask to make the body language work.
There really aren’t any simple counterfactual historical arguments to be made.
I have a fairly strong feeling that, of the various shuttle variants studied, the majority of them would have at least been vulnerable to a Columbia level disaster.
Plus, the shuttle was very much overweight and there were a lot of nasty compromises there, so I kinda wonder that if they’d gone for broke with the two stage reusable designs that they’d have ended up just getting cancelled because the more reusable things are, the colder the equations. So you can’t even really treat the earlier proposals as something that might have worked out better. There are things that no amount of money can make work. Like faster-than-light travel without a fundamental reassessment of physics.
And then a lot of the things in the late-70s-early-80s vision wouldn’t have worked out. There was a giant Microwave Radiometer Satellite project that they were cooking on with a giant antenna with a radius of 1150m. Eventually that survey was completed with a much smaller synthetic aperture radio that sat in the shuttle’s cargo bay and today there are lots of tiny SAR survey satellites.
There was another giant geosynchronous dish antenna that was supposed to be a single cell phone satellite for all of the continental US. That was overall a bad idea, Iridium did a better version with less lag in lower orbits, and now we’ve got Starlink and some new competitors coming online and, overall, cell coverage is actually pretty great with conventional towers.
Then again, here’s this paper from 1973. See, the shuttle ended up with a reusable second stage the conventional wisdom was that the second stage is always the expensive one so therefore make that reusable and the first stage can basically be a steel pipe with propellant poured into it and everything’s fine and the bulk doesn’t matter. Thus, only a madman would reuse the first stage. Which is why they were proposing putting parachutes on the Redstone rockets that Mercury used for reuse but never bothered. But, see, they were going to build this two-stage reusable rocket but wanted to preserve the option of launching large bulky cargo… yeah.
The more I think about it, it’d ruin the magic of the story if “Max” got outed. If “Max” goes public and takes credit and maybe talks through how it worked (especially understanding that you could not pull off the same trick today) that would be cool but … even ignoring any sort of potential harm it just ruins the spirit of the thing.
I don’t know what you are talking about. I can’t find it on IMDB.
The last time the fires hit my area I was watching the fire progress via Purple Air sensors. If this one sensor was still sending, then my friend’s place up in the mountains was probably OK. Seems … kinda obvious almost?
This can get very expensive very fast. Okay, so 20 years ago concert photographers shot on 800 film pushed to 1600 or 3200 and shot on f/2.8 constant lenses, sometimes f/1.8 primes and then walked naked through the snow to milk the developer rodent for the C-41 chemicals. And now 6400 looks pretty darn good on a small sensor even. But it just means that concert photographers want more more more more!
200mm at f/5.6 is going to be really really hard to work with. Or whatever the Sony is at the same zoom setting.
I shoot a lot of smaller dance and circus shows and I use the Olympus 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro, which is about 24-80 in full-frame terms. If I wanted to do larger arenas where I’d be farther away … I’d probably get the longer brother of my 12-40mm f/2.8 Pro and put it on a second body or just swap lenses regularly. If you are going to be fairly far from the stage in an arena, I’d probably suggest you get something that’s got a shorter zoom range but is faster and then use even just the kit lens for the wide shots because the longer the lens, the more problems you will have both with your hands shaking the lens and the subject moving.