They're not producing fuel to continue the same reactions, which would be a violation of conservation of energy. They're producing fuel to run a different reaction. Less "perpetual motion machine," more "spinning a turbine to charge a battery to run an EV."

Edit: A better analogy is cracking water to capture the hydrogen, to later burn it in a fuel cell.

A Deuterium-Deuterium reaction produces Helium-3 and a neutron, or Tritium and a proton. Roughly even odds on which products you'll get. And a ton of energy. A Deuterium-Tritium reaction produces Helium-4, a neutron and a shitton more energy.

Basically, the DD reaction is used to create fuel for a more predictable and energetic reaction. From the article, seems they're also bombarding Lithium with neutrons from the DD reaction to create more Tritium. Problem with Tritium is that while it does occur naturally, it's extremely rare and volatile. Tritium has a half-life of about 12 years, so if we want to use it in a fusion reactor, we need a feasible way to produce more of it at scale.

It's all stepping stones to a greater goal though. DD and DT reactions produce neutrons, which will make your entire reactor highly radioactive thanks to neutron activation. D-³He and ³He-³He reactions produce ⁴He and protons, which are actually able to be controlled by magnetic fields and won't irradiate your whole shit. But then sourcing ³He becomes your new biggest problem.

Counterpoint: Blender was the first 3d modeling tool I tried and I bounced off that UX so hard that I haven't touched it in nearly 20 years. Sometimes a bad UX is just bad UX.

Because if you launch something from Earth, you inherit the Earth's orbital speed around the Sun. At that point, whatever you launched will just continue to orbit the Sun. It takes less energy to accelerate to a solar system exit trajectory than it does to scrub off all of the excess velocity and end up on a trajectory that intersects the Sun.

Even the Stream version doesn't require Steam. You can just run the executable. A few folks over on Reddit claim they've given the game to their friends just by copying the files from an external drive.

Right now, the Earth is losing mass at about 55 000 tons per year. Yes, losing. About 100 000 tons of hydrogen and helium escapes the upper atmosphere, partially offset by roughly 45 000 tons of dust and meteorites getting scooped up along our orbit.

Considering this has been happening for millions of years, I think we're quite safe from affecting the Earth's mass and orbit within the span of even centuries.

But it's much more likely that the majority of material mined and processed in space will not be coming down to Earth. It's much better put to use in orbital construction, or shallower gravity wells like the Moon and Mars.

You're entirely right that getting to the rocks, and getting the mined stuff to where it's actually useful, are gonna be a problem. Maybe we'll finally get some nuclear thermal engines, cause the shite ISP of chemical rockets is really insufficient for these trips and ain't no one wanna wait on the gravity assists.

NASA has the measurements of all their astronauts and Dragon flight suits for Butch and Suni are already made.

Crew Dragon has been solely responsible for the US side of ISS rotations for four years, without incident. 8 successful missions, not counting the privately funded trips. Cargo Dragon has been doing resupply missions since 2012.

I mean if you want to invalidate my lived experience, sure. Played on release on a 5600X, RTX3070 and 32GB of RAM, 1080p, almost everything maxed out. Open areas on Koboh saw a drop to mid-40 fps, but other than that, I had one hard crash and no bugs I noticed.

If Starship Troopers had the player numbers of Helldivers, these articles would be about that game instead.

This is what happens when Zura isn't around to contain her!

Showing my age here, but the OGs of Doom, Mortal Kombat and GTA turned all the millennial gamers into murderous sociopaths who can't tell the difference between video games and reality. That's after Dungeons & Dragons turned us into murderous sociopaths who can't tell the difference between board games and reality. If I recall correctly, the hoopla around all of that made national news in the States.