781–790 of 899 posts
Seeing the Starship's flap visibly burning in the reentry heat and still survive well enough to move around and get to a splashdown was just incredible. Amazing progress in just four test flights.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 'worst' thing about watching space launches on streams is that you simply cannot grasp how ridiculously huge these things are. Even if, like in the stream today, you see a water tower for some scale, the size discrepancies just make it so hard to intuit. Starship is 121 meters high. That's something taller than a football field, jetting off into space! I've only gotten to see a decommissioned Space Shuttle in per…
I've got the black and white arty photo as my lockscreen which gives you an idea https://cdn.mos.cms.futurecdn.net/E46BxzjjUkpthVBNE6k8mn-192...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’ve said for a while that we won’t be ready for the real space age until you can have a rusty pickup in space. What I mean by that is that we have it down well enough that the tech exceeds tolerances and can degrade gracefully. You see this in some sci-fi where there are rust bucket old ships that work.
I would compare it to Airplanes, and there are not a lot of rust-bucket airplanes, because just like in space, failures can lead to unavoidable death very quickly. That’s not comparable to a reliable pickup
Earlier quoted context omitted.
They still would've been in position to put down a marker, since they had to be prepared for that before they knew they'd be able to maintain telemetry down to the water, and if they're already in position, it doesn't hurt to place the marker anyway.
And the coordinates of where it "landed" are less important when it's drifting in the middle of the ocean.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bet he will
He doesn't give many Star Trek vibes though. Space Socialism isn't really his thing. What he could do (and Blue Danube yesterday gave me the idea) is to buy the PanAm brand and do a rebrand of the crew services at least to the ISS.
Like Star Trek, most of the action occurs where this civilization comes in contact with its barbaric neighbors. Unlike Star Trek, The Culture is very keen on interventionism and many of its characters volunteer for these dangerous foreign assignments because of their ennui/restlessness with their utopian society.
Musk's private wealth management firm, Excession LLC, is also based on the series.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Getting human rated for launching seems feasible. Getting it human rated for landing on Earth seems infeasible.
> Getting it human rated for landing on Earth seems infeasible. Why? For NASA, human-rating - for either Earth launch or Earth re-entry - requires a very detailed engineering analysis of probability of loss-of-crew (LOC), and then NASA has some maximum LOC probability they allow (for NASA Commercial Crew, both launch and landing it is 1-in-500, which is 0.2%-for whole of mission it is 1-in-270). That analysis is base…
Elon had that idea of using rockets for passenger transport so I’m sure it’s in the plan, but for astronauts I don’t see why you’d rush.
Just curious who pays for cleaning up the debris after one if these landings.
Watching pieces of the ship melt off, but then seeing it make a relatively controlled landing, is perversely confidence building. If it can survive that kind of damage on a control surface maybe it's a quite robust craft.