BillHicksScream t1_jdd2qtc wrote on March 23, 2023 at 3:10 PM

Reply to comment by Emble12 in 10 months after its launch by SpaceX, a $10,000 satellite made by students with off-the-shelf materials and powered by 48 Energizer AA batteries, is not only working, it's demonstrating a way to reduce space junk by lughnasadh

LOL. "a literal order of magnitude" makes no sense. It doesnt work as English and the current state of development is so primitive there's nothing to compare.

Emble12 t1_jdec2ks wrote on March 23, 2023 at 7:56 PM

When you decrease something logarithmically by 10, that’s reducing by an order of magnitude. “Literal” is used because the phrase is often used in a hyperbolic sense. I was specifically referring to the difference between the Shuttle/SLS and Falcon 9.