Here we are, administrators in, massive points deduction, an estimated £50m or whatever in debt, unable to pay wages. And then we read in the Teesside Gazette that Steve Gibson is suing Derby County. https://www.gazettelive.co.uk/sport/football/football-news/middlesbrough-Derby-rooney-mel-morris-21660410
His gripe is that Mel sold the stadium to another of Mel's companies (accepted as OK by the League because not every club owns their stadium and you can't force a club to) and that Derby loaned Matt Clarke when Gibson wanted him to go to Middlesbrough.
Of course claims such as these are manifestly absurd and would normally be laughed out of court. But the problem is it's inconceivable that the Derby Administrators can also afford to pay lawyers to fight the Middlesboro Chairman. Equally, it's inconceivable that Derby could afford any additional fines the courts might impose.
The sole purpose of this can only be to ensure the end of Derby County as a football club. Nothing less. The entire football world including honest Middlesbrough fans should be outraged by this behaviour and condemn it in the strongest possible terms. The club can't afford to fight this, so it's up to us fans to shame Gibson into stopping this despicable course of action.
It was the one before (Ostigard on 77 minutes)!
Derby to win, both teams to score, 2+ bookings each team, 4+ corners each team, 50/1!
Confess I took the cash out and settled for £550 on 80 minutes. Wonderful we won and I'll forego the extra £200 for that. Watched us throw away a lead too many times. Brilliant win and I'm very happy. And contacting the administrators first thing Monday morning!
I could understand if they were jumping ship for another Champ academy but they are joining Man City, Liverpool & Man Utd - the biggest clubs in the country
I love that there seem plenty of space geeks on here. Something that's going to come increasingly into the public consciousness over the next few years will be the work from Elon Musk's SpaceX to transport many tens of thousands of Humans to Mars to build the first sustainable settlement on another world. It sounds like fantasy, but the amazing thing is they're doing this in public view in Boca Chica, on the coast of Texas, and we can all watch. There are lots of livestreams and over the last couple of years a barren field has started to be transformed into a shipyard. But not for ordinary ships, for spaceships. The goal is ultimately to have completed ones roll off the production line once a week. And each will be able to take a hundred people at a time.
The optimal time for going to Mars in terms of minimizing fuel (the launch window) comes round every 26 months and the plan is to have a fleet of Starships gather in Earth orbit that will then travel to Mars together, before returning to bring more settlers for the next launch window. Tickets will cost you about $250k but there'll be high baggage charges on top I should think. The secret to the low price comes from reusability and scale. SpaceX has pioneered rocket reusability and landed 65 or so "first stages" (the main rocket booster) after orbital insertion. No other company has done any - they're at least a decade ahead of the competition, but the competition should worry because their pace of innovation is extraordinary.
The new rocket being built in Texas will be the first fully resusable craft where all of it flies again and again with minimal refurbishment, just the same as an airplane. The top section where the passengers and cargo will go is called Starship and the lower section to help boost it into orbit is called Super Heavy. In a dramatic innovation, instead of being built from an advanced carbon fiber skin these are both made from stainless steel. Making them a fraction of the normal rocket price. The Super Heavy booster is needed to escape Earth's gravity well. Once there it will return to Earth and launch half a dozen tankers to refuel Starship in orbit so it can fly much more quickly than normal to Mars (normally a spaceprobe just has enough fuel to reach escape velocity and then coasts all the way to Mars). Refuelling in orbit hasn't been attempted in the past, but is a technology we need to master to become a spacefaring species.
Because Mars is smaller, with lower gravity (one-third of ours) the Starships can be what we call "single stage to orbit" when they take off from the red planet for the return journey. We'll build factories on Mars to manufacture fuel through a process called in situ resource utilization (ISRU), which is another technology we need to master to become spacefaring. And because they can carry so many passengers at a time, the price of the trip becomes a lot cheaper as it's divided between many more people.
The Super Heavy booster will be quite similar to the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, just a lot bigger. So in principle SpaceX already knows how to design, build, fly and land that. They have started on the harder problem first, by developing Starship, the first ever fully resuable second stage. This week there's been a lot of work on the eighth prototype (called SN8 standing for serial number 8 ) which will probably be the first to attempt a high-altitude (15km up) test flight as the key trial of the novel landing system (the "belly flop"). Before now three different partial Starships have flown 150m on one engine only. It's been amazing to watch. Here's the Starship SN5 "hop test":
While SN8 is the focus at the moment, also partly built are SN9 through to SN14, each better than the last, and also the very first Super Heavy booster (SH1) is being constructed. There's a good chance that the first Starships (without people) will go into orbit and return next year. There'll be hundreds of test flights before they start taking crew, but I'd expect the first uncrewed Starships to leave for Mars carrying cargo and experiments either late 2022 or early 2025.
The reason SpaceX was founded was to safeguard Humanity's future by building a self-sustaining community on Mars, the aim to reach a population of a million by the end of this century. This is why the company is privately held and you can't buy shares, because shareholders might look at the amazing technology and say Mars colonization is a waste of money when we can do a lot of profitable stuff closer to home. However, NASA wants to return to the Moon by late 2024 (though after the US election this date will slip) and are contributing funds to create an adapted Starship to land on the Moon (the normal engines are too powerful for this because the rocket is so big, so SpaceX are going to add smaller thrusters higher up to do the job). However, Elon Musk has said it's easier to just go and land on the Moon than jump through all NASA's certification to say they'll allow someone to launch astronauts safely to the Moon.
I hope we'll be able to keep this thread going over the next decade while we watch developments until the first Humans get to land on Mars, and it can be a wonderful record of the progress that took us to that point.
Spacehorse reacted to Carl Sagan in Steve Gibson trying to liquidate Derby
Spacehorse got a reaction from hydraulic ram in Stoke at home
Spacehorse got a reaction from Carl Sagan in Stoke at home
