311–320 of 899 posts
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Gulf of Mexico
This branch of the thread is about Starship, which landed intact in the Indian Ocean afaik.
https://bsky.app/profile/planet4589.bsky.social/post/3kub775...
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It means you can have abundant power in space to run all kinds of hardware.
Then what is this hardware that you'd want to run in space, that needs more power than it can generate on its own?
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It’s feasible - but nobody did, and nobody has. I get the dislike - his politics are pretty reprehensible - but it’s hard to argue with the results his businesses generally achieve. What he brings to the table apart from money is an absolutely bull-headed madcap drive to make the infeasible into reality in the face of a chorus of naysayers, and that, I respect.
I'm not arguing against the results his businesses achieve, I'm arguing against the incessant drive for hero worship which ascribes those successes to him and him alone. >What he brings to the table apart from money is an absolutely bull-headed madcap drive to make the infeasible into reality in the face of a chorus of naysayers, and that, I respect. This is exactly my point. Elon didn't make the infeasible into real…
It can't be merely "other people" who are responsible for the success of SpaceX, because Blue Origin (and other rocket companies like ULA) also have "other people", but are not anywhere near as successful.
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There’s lots of things that are just too big and heavy and need launch vehicles like that. It might be overkill for satellites, but space stations and habitats need the payload capacity of something like this to become anything resembling economical.
how many of those things are there?
Apollo program flew once in 6 months.
If we're to build a Moon base, we're going to have at least this frequency of flights - really, I'd prefer to have a great margin on top of that, because Moon is much harder than LEO, and we might need more resiliency to safely explore.
Each flight to the Moon will likely need to involve 10-20 Starship flights (rough number) to LEO. So even if we're flying twice a year - and 6 month stay on the Moon right now looks like a pretty serious expedition - we need to have a Starship flight every ~10-15 days.
So even for a robust Moon exploration program we need as many Starships per year as the whole world was launching rockets per year just some ~20 years ago.
What the hell, half melted starship actually did the landing flip and hit the ocean slow!!! That was amazing!
That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and…
The difference in presentation between the launch of Starliner yesterday vs Starship today was stark. For most of the Starliner launch, all we got to see was a Windows desktop showing some basic animations that look like they're from the late 90s and unexplained telemetry with about a 1Hz update rate. Perhaps interesting to hardcore space nerds but not very exciting for John and Jane Public. Also, the "timeline" at t…
> SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis moon program So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?
The eventual plan is to build an orbiting space station, the Lunar Gateway. Astronauts will then launch on SLS/Orion, which will perform a Trans Lunar Injection. However, before that, a Starship will be launched into LEO. There will then be something like 17 (the actual number is not clear, but it is a lot) Starship tankers that will launch to re-fuel the original Starship. The Starship then does a Trans Lunar Inject…
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I'm not sure why people are misunderstanding my question as "Why not bring more fuel and burn the rockets in reverse". I am simply asking: why not reenter the atmosphere at a shallower angle, spreading the atmospheric braking friction over a longer period of time, which I'd expect would allow more time for the accumulated heat to radiate away before it becomes catastrophic.
I'm no expert but I think reentering at a shallower angle results in "bouncing off" the atmosphere. So, even if you did it multiple times like a rock skipping on water, you'd have to have extra fuel to counter the bounce "up" and go back down for each skip. Thus, back to the same "bring more fuel/weight to orbit" problem.
> SpaceX won a multibillion-dollar contract from the agency to use Starship as a crewed lunar lander as part of NASA's Artemis moon program So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface?
> So four people would arrive at Lunar orbit in an Orion, board a huge prepositioned Starship, and fly that down to the surface? That's the idea, yes. [1] 1. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/1/13/20...
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That was seriously some of the most dramatic television I've ever watched. Video of Starship being melted/torn apart by supersonic plasma, the broadcast stream dying multiple times maybe due to ship destruction, then finally back online, peeking through the cracked camera to see the nearly destroyed grid fin STILL ACTUATING. The announcers laughing about the ship being "maybe held together by some nuts and bolts" and…
Really wish the camera housing had held up to get a complete video of the fin being eaten away. I wonder if any of the other cameras got good footage too because they stayed on the camera with the obliterated lens for a long time which makes me think the others also fair pretty poorly. There wasn't much to see on the fin cam after the housing broke until right at touch down.