Space

I just finished watching the season five finale of For All Mankind. No spoilers, but the whole show is filled with people in spacecraft stuck, slowly running out of resources of one variety or another. And, shortly after, I happened to catch this video on the World War II buoys anchored out in the English Channel to rescue downed pilots. My brain just decided to staple the two things together and do some napkin math to see if the idea would actually hold up. ...

The other half of the title. None of this is work. It is what happens when an idea is interesting enough to spend an afternoon and some order-of-magnitude math on, whether or not it goes anywhere. Orbital Lifeboats Site: lifeboats.mickdarling.com | GitHub: mickdarling/orbital-lifeboats | Write-up: Napkin math for space rescue During the war, both sides anchored rescue buoys out in the English Channel so a downed pilot only had to make it to the nearest float. Could you do the same thing as we start populating the solar system? Turns out orbital mechanics flips the whole idea: the lifeboat has to come to you, and what is worth caching is time, not fuel. ...