What insanity compelled OP to place a comma after the word deeply?

Hiding the emergency release behind a panel should be illegal. These things are death traps.

With all this law-breaking, surely someone is going to jail? …Right?

Look at all those beautiful pixels and crisp text. 10/10.

No, there isn’t anything like that. Big heavy objects fall. Falling objects are moving fast when they hit the ground. Further details are irrelevant.

Are you absolutely sure that you’ve seen a coin in those vortex demos just stop? Coins falling over doesn’t count, there’s nothing like that in space. Otherwise, they are moving at quite a clip when they reach the bottom of the funnel.

The one possible exception is when you detach part of the mass. If your vehicle removes some mass and launches it, you can use the reaction force to slow down. This is what a rocket engine does, for example. (Note the propellant will still impact at very high speed, as evident from the plume of any rocket landing.) The higher the relative velocity of the reaction mass, the less you’ll need to come to a complete stop. But at this point we are talking about a manmade vehicle, not a naturally occurring rock.

Needs more JPEG

For anything that’s captured in an Earth-centric orbit, it’s never going to end up falling “straight down”. Closed Earth orbits barely decay at all, except from atmospheric drag. For anything that started from a closed orbit, the last few years are almost always a circle or ellipse that barely brushes against the upper edges of the atmosphere.

For such orbits, drag is mostly applied near the lowest point on the orbit (perigee), and drag forces applied there will mostly reduce the height at the other end of the ellipse (apogee). Even if you start from a highly elliptical orbit, this means the decaying orbit becomes more and more circular. Eventually, all parts of the orbit are inside the atmosphere and the loss in altitude starts getting faster and faster, but the velocity is still mostly horizontal.

The good news is that the concept of specific orbital energy applies to any initial orbit. For objects coming from outside Earth’s sphere of influence, terminal velocity remains a good lower bound.

No, it’s not possible to soft-land a large falling object, even with extraordinary luck.

Our intuition serves us well in everyday situations. I think you’ll agree that, if you have a big rock 100 meters in the air, it’s going to hit the ground hard no matter how you drop or throw it. The bigger the rock, the more we can ignore things like air friction.

The same situation applies to objects in space. If it hits the Earth, it’s been falling the whole way from space. The minimum impact velocity is equal to the “height” of Earth’s gravity well, about 11.2 km/s.

No, it’s based in New York.

This is basically “Weekend at Bernie’s”, using the likeness of a dead man as a puppet.

Relevant sketch from SNL

The Bagger 288 is there to safeguard all mankind.

The Bagger 288 wreaks total utter devastation.

The Bagger 288 contains an artificial mind.

This mind is full of hatred, violence is its sole vocation.

IRS doesn’t care when you buy gold, only when you sell it. At that point, it’s treated like capital gains on any other investment.

There’s an easy way to settle this. Just bring him back to the United States and take some photos of his hands.

apt | cowsay

No more delays. Start throwing people in jail for contempt of court.

Is that Frieren?

Make America Great Depression Again

If only there was a way to build that function directly into the phone.

Zelenskyy in a suit just looks wrong.