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SpaceX's Next Starship Prototype Launch Will Be a 12-Mile-High Test Flight, Elon Musk Says

"Aiming for 20km flight in Oct & orbit attempt shortly thereafter," Musk said on Twitter before making another promise to his followers. "Starship update will be on Sept. 28th, anniversary of SpaceX reaching orbit. Starship Mk 1 will be fully assembled by that time."

[...] SpaceX's current plans for Starship call for a 100-passenger spacecraft powered by six of the company's Raptor rocket engines. Starhopper, for comparison, used a single Raptor engine, while the Mark 1 Starship will apparently use three Raptors for early tests. When Starship and the Super Heavy are on the launchpad, they'll stand 387 feet (118 meters) tall, Musk has said.

Those details may change on Sept. 28, when Musk rolls out his Starship and Super Heavy update. He has said the presentation will he held at SpaceX's Boca Chica test site in South Texas, home of the Starhopper and the first Starship prototype, the Mark 1. (A second, the Mark 2, is being built at SpaceX's facility in near Cape Canaveral, Florida.)

Starship construction in Florida is halted due to the incoming Hurricane Dorian.

AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3000 CPUs To Feature Support on TRX40, TRX80 & WRX80 Series Motherboards – ASUS TRX40 Motherboards Leak Out

1 channel per chiplet?

AI Learns To Animate Your Face in VR (4m2s)

VR Facial Animation via Multiview Image Translation

THE ONLINE SILENCER MARKET IS BOOMING — JUST DON’T CALL IT A SILENCER

SD Tactical Arms calls them barrel shrouds. Hawk Innovative Tech says they’re solvent filters. Prepper’s Discount sells flashlight tubes. But with a few hours and a little elbow grease, all of these products become the same thing: gun silencers.

Silencers, otherwise known as suppressors, are among the most highly regulated gun accessories in the US. Under federal law, consumers must apply for a license to purchase them. The process involves paying a fee to the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and submitting to extensive screening. It can take more than a year to get an answer. Americans eager to skip the wait, though, have a shortcut: tap one of the dozens of online retailers selling de facto suppressor parts and build their own.

Even a search for “solvent traps” on Amazon returns a page of unrelated items useful in silencer construction, such as automobile fuel filters. A spokesperson from Amazon refused to comment for this story, but emphasized that all the products sold on the site were legal.

[...] Bob Folkestad, the founder of a leading solvent trap retailer called Quiet Bore, told The Trace the ATF forced manufacturers like him into business. “It’s 450 dollars and a yearlong wait [to purchase a suppressor],” he said. “Buy a solvent trap, and you can be approved in two to four weeks.” Solvent traps are designed to collect cleaning fluid from the barrel of a gun, and amateur gunsmiths can easily convert them into suppressors.

Mod Virge Informatif. Much moreso than their PC builds.

30 Years Ago: Voyager 2's Historic Neptune Flyby

Thirty years ago, on August 25, 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft made a close flyby of Neptune, giving humanity its first close-up of our solar system’s eighth planet. Marking the end of the Voyager mission’s Grand Tour of the solar system’s four giant planets – Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune – that first was also a last: No other spacecraft has visited Neptune since.

The Solar System’s Loneliest Planets, Revisited

NASA’s nuclear rejuvenation could not arrive at a better time. To begin, there is no question that such a mission would revolutionize our understanding of the outer solar system, simply by virtue of voyaging there after three decades of further technological development and scientific discovery. What is more, in the late 2020s, the planets will be positioned so that a Neptune-bound spacecraft can get a gravity assist from Jupiter, picking up tremendous speed from swinging by the giant planet and shaving years off the travel time. Finally, a mission to Uranus needs to reach the world before 2050 in order to see its northern hemisphere for the first time. (When Voyager 2 flew past Uranus, only the planet’s southern hemisphere was illuminated.) “I’m hopeful because that puts a little bit more pressure on NASA,” says Mark Hofstadter, a planetary scientist at JPL. “But in the back of my mind, there’s a fear that if we miss it, I’m going to miss the boat.” Hofstadter is 56 years old and would therefore be in his mid-70s when—if—a mission reaches the ice giants in the late 2030s. To him and many other planetary scientists on the verge of retirement, an accepted mission would be bittersweet. “I like to joke that they’ll have to reserve a rocking chair and a drooling rag for me by the time we get there,” Hansen says.

The historically racist origins of gun control are hardly a topic for debate. As noted by Cato Institute’s David Kopel, the matter of arming blacks in America was the subject of the infamous 1857 Dred Scott decision; with one Supreme Court justice warning about the rights of free blacks “to keep and carry arms wherever they went.” Kopel also notes that as a part of the Black Codes passed in the South during the early post-Civil War Reconstruction, free blacks were required to secure permission from police in order to carry firearms.

From Harriet Tubman, who carried a pistol with her during the heroic rescues of slaves, to abolitionist Frederick Douglass, who quipped “a man’s rights rest in three boxes: the ballot box, the jury box, and the cartridge box” -- there is perhaps no other group in American history whose members understand intimately the “right to self-preservation” embodied in the Second Amendment than black Americans.

It is therefore more than a little curious as to why Democrats continue to push gun control measures that are inherently, historically, and intentionally designed to disenfranchise minority groups from their Second Amendment rights.

In spite of a downward trend of gun violence in America, even as gun ownership soars, Democrats contend there is both an “epidemic” of gun violence sweeping the country, and that access to firearms is the culprit. This mindset guides virtually every part of the Democrats’ gun control agenda; with no apparent regard to who actually is or will be impacted the most by their plans.

Carried to its natural end, the philosophy of gun control virtually ensures the only people left with firearms in a Democrat-controlled America are cops, affluent whites, and criminals.

Perhaps street crime and police response times are not concerns for rich liberals hiding behind privacy fences in gated communities with private, armed security guards (can you say, “Silicon Valley?”); but for millions of Americans in urban areas ravaged by gangs and crime, firearm ownership is literally a matter of life and death.

One underpinning gun control strategy favored most by Democrats centers around price control; wherein regulatory measures squeeze both supply and the cost of production of firearms, making them cost-prohibitive to acquire and possess.

Schemes such as removing the legal shield that protects firearm manufactures and retailers from lawsuits resulting from criminal acts by end users, and resurrecting the Obama-era tactic of employing the FDIC to bully banks into not doing business with firearms retailers and manufacturers, are measures intended to dry up the lawful gun industry.

However, the actual and ultimate victims of such measures are not big businesses, but individual, law-abiding men and women whose ability to protect themselves, their families, their homes, and their small businesses will be made increasingly difficult.

We see this strategy already playing out in municipalities controlled by liberal officials. Even where technically lawful to carry a firearm, such officials delight in making firearm licensing exorbitantly expensive and time-consuming. Overly complicated testing mandates are coupled with multiple in-person filing requirements available only during regular business hours. Such measures require significant time and effort to pursue -- luxuries largely unavailable to the working poor and middle-class workers.

One of the latest proposals gaining popularity among the Democratic presidential field is to mandate that gun owners carry firearms liability insurance; another side-door tax on a constitutionally-guaranteed right.

This “death by a thousand cuts” has now become gun confiscation by a thousand regulations; with its earliest and most numerous victims being the poor and “marginalized” citizenry these very Democrat bleeding hearts claim to champion.

Democrats long have vigorously opposed every effort by Republicans to require voter identification as a prerequisite to exercising one’s right to vote. Liberals assert such mandates intentionally “suppress” the minority vote. Yet, those very same civil rights champions have no hesitancy in pressing for measures that would seriously suppress the ability of minority and poorer citizens to exercise another precious right; one that is expressly guaranteed against such suppression in the Bill of Rights. Their hypocrisy is disgraceful.

https://townhall.com/columnists/bobbarr/2019/08/21/the-notsosubtle-racism-of-gun-control-n2551961