261–270 of 305 posts
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They paid more, something like $150M I think "no one pays that" has more to do with "every mission is actually a negotiated contract" than "the price is inflated". https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2022/10/falcon-heavy-ussf-44...
Fair enough, I'd naïvely thought of it as a ceiling.
3,700 kg to geosynchronous orbit... man that is a hefty satellite. Would love to know what they packed in there.
Is that a high number? An upcoming Viasat- 3 communication satellite is expected to weigh 6400 kg and one of them is planned to launch on an Atlas-V.
Even Falcon 9 can put a 6.4t satellite onto GTO in expendable mode and Falcon Heavy can while recovering all 3 boosters, but direct insertion into GEO of 6.4t would probably be stretching the limits of Falcon Heavy if even doable at all.
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Just a minor nitpick but I think the part you're referring to (actually at 11:50 in the video) is showing Chinese soldiers specifically, not just random Chinese civilians. I'd bet that there are few people in either the US or Chinese military who would disagree that the other side is an adversary right now, even if they're not at war.
Disagreeing with that and overtly saying it in a widely publicised video I think are very different things. One is pragmatic, the other aims to sow specific narratives in the mind of the viewers. The video is aimed at us, not at the Chinese
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Good. Call China what it is.
A country with a impressive history of not declaring war on another state and who has drawn the ire of USA simply because they see it as credible economic competition?
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> SLS vs Falcon Heavy is simply a battle between two different government contractors. One is not more government-based than the other. This is completely false. SLS was established by Congress with various mandates on the technology and process to design and build it. Falcon Heavy was not. Many of the issues with SLS can be traced to Congress's requirements that they put on the project, like forcing it to reuse 50-y…
If congress asked Intel to build a computer meeting specifications from 50 years ago, regardless of how stupid that request is, and they somehow failed to do that in a resonable amount of time or budget... it would be an astounding display of incompetence. And failing to even try to create a new showcase technology of something better is just additional incompetence.
SpaceX over the last two decades has been a superb illustration of the value of private enterprise.
When does/do the research/space programs enabled by these more frequent launches start to benefit us all? It must have already contributed to something somehow. Agriculture? Defense? Oil exploration? Seems like the sort of information that's hard to find.
If you mean the rockets, there's the perk of making it easier for smallsats to get rides, enabling all sorts of smaller research/Earth observation and making it easier to train the next generation of talent in the field.
If you mean things like Starlink, one thing coming in the next few years that should play a decent role in the world is the idea of cellular connectivity anywhere by direct satellite uplink. It would be extremely low bandwidth, basically text-only, but likely to still be a fairly big deal for monitoring remote environments and for search and rescue purposes.
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You can blame Boeing for that, it's not like NASA is directly creating the rocket in-house. SpaceX is just disrupting the current MIC contracts.
You can absolutely blame NASA for that. They are calling the shots and making the design decisions. Its not like NASA puts out a check and simply waits for the rocket to arrive. With the NASA process, they own the design, they are in meetings on specifications, they requests tests, ect. They micromanage and direct work down to the nuts and bolts, literally and figuratively. By analogy, they are the head Chef in the k…
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There's no definitional difference between "outer space" and just space. They're synonymous, and most commonly defined to begin at 100 km altitude. If there's any difference, it's that outer space refers to the physical region, as opposed to "space" that might refer to the mathematical and relativistic concept. "Deep space" is another definition, which commonly means beyond lunar altitude. Other regions of space typi…
> defined to begin at 100 km altitude I guess this is probably on Earth, which makes me wonder how far up from Earth's moon do you have to go to be "in space"?
For an airless body, there's no real meaning to the definition, the surface is pretty much equivalent to space.
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If you watched the liftoff, after the vehicle was above the fog, the plume from the core looked much weaker than from the boosters. I think they throttle that stage down so it's using less fuel, leaving fuel to be burned after the boosters are done. This will also reduce the velocity at which the boosters are staged so they have an easier time getting back. After the boosters stage the core will be throttled back up…
Correct, and that throttle-fiddling is required to get a good performance boost from using side boosters.
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Correct, and that throttle-fiddling is required to get a good performance boost from using side boosters.
Additionally, the center core is throttled to make sure the vehicle safely gets through the dangerous "max-Q" part of the launch where stress from the atmospheric drag is highest.