Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

801–810 of 899 posts

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#801

Post by nextaccountic »

larrydag wrote: post #752
somenameforme wrote: post #344

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…

For comparison the Statue of Liberty is 93m. Big Ben is 96m.

So this means we can strap some rockets to it and send the Statue of Liberty to space?

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#802

Post by lupusreal »

scotty79 wrote: post #748
FredPret wrote: post #611

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And let them continue to fuck up China and the whole Pacific region, only to come back swinging a couple of decades later

And now US fears China instead. You can't come out on top. Why not commit less atrocities on the way wherever you are going?

"Commit less atrocities" in this case is just code for permitting others to commit whatever atrocities they want. American "atrocities" against Japan pale I comparison to what the Japanese were inflicting on the rest of Asia.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#804

Post by macintux »

ActorNightly wrote: post #514
magicalhippo wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried what you said in the most realistic simulator we have, Kerbal Space Program, assuming like you that a gentler approach would be better. And I learned that no, that most certainly is not better. What you need to protect is on the inside of the heat shield. Heat conduction is based on temperature difference and time[1] and the conduction of the material[2]. Since the heat shield tiles have a very low thermal co…

What happens if you do a geostationary deorbit? I.e straight down.

https://what-if.xkcd.com/58/

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#805

Post by simiones »

rvnx wrote: post #696
simiones wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Columbus was just wrong, he was not motivated by some higher goal. And no, it's not a good plan against a nuclear war, Mars is far far far less hospitable than the Earth would be if we launched all of the nuclear weapons we have today. It's far more radioactive, dusty, cold, toxic, and everything.

The tech we developed for Mars can become useful for the Earth of tomorrow, once World War III finishes.

Let's first build a self-sustaining mega-city in the Sahara desert, or in the Antarctic, and then we can use what we learn doing this to start thinking about a colony on Mars. Building new self-sustaining mega-cities on Earth has obvious direct advantages, and it is a reasonable first step and case study for doing so on another planet.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#806

Post by simiones »

throwthrowuknow wrote: post #312
simiones wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then what is this hardware that you'd want to run in space, that needs more power than it can generate on its own?

Anything that will fit in a 30ft diameter faring weighing less than 150 metric tonnes. I’d love to see commercial space stations that can house large numbers of people in comfortable cabins so it’s more like a cruise ship than a submarine. Gotta power all those amenities somehow without diesel generators. But you could also put things like datacenters in orbit if the cost savings on power production made it worth whi…

Is there any realistic way to dissipate the heat from a datacenter in space, even ignoring the transport costs?

Also, the limitations of being in an extreme hostile environment make it completely impossible to get cruise ship levels of comfort in outer space, at least with currently known technologies. The huge amounts of radiation and the bone density loss from being in low-g for any weight of time, coupled with the extreme acceleration on the way up and the way down, will also severely limit space tourism regardless of transport costs.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#807

Post by SergeAx »

cletus wrote: post #299
jwells89 wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For one, Starship+Superheavy will enable launching of large objects like space telescopes without forcing object in question to be engineered with expensive, delicate, failure-prone folding mechanisms (like the James Webb Space Telescope was). Just build the thing as big as it needs to be and launch it in its final form (aside from minor folding bits like solar panels). It could have similar impact on other scientifi…

So JWST has (IIRC) a 6.5 meter mirror once deployed and yes, it was a challenge to develop that tech. Plus it added risk of failure. The Starship Super-heavy seems to have a max payload dimension of 9 meters. I imagine some buffer is required (ie it won't just allow a static 9 meter mirror) but I could be wrong. So that's larger but not that much larger. Remember the JWST was a huge step up from Hubble's 2.4 meter mi…

> There are only so many JWST 2.0s that you can and will build, launch and deploy.

I remember reading about building a virtual mirror out of hundreds telescopes, scattered around Solar system. It will allow getting kilometer-resolution images of Alfa Centaur system planets.

Building and launching that with Superheavy can become viable in the next 30-50 years.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#808

Post by tim333 »

krisoft wrote: post #715
tim333 wrote: post #706

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was pondering but given the guys in the picture are on cherry picker type cranes, I'm guessing the photographer was on another of those. The quality looks a bit high for a drone.

> The quality looks a bit high for a drone. There are drones which carry full DSLR cameras or even cinematography film cameras. I don't think you will be able to tell if the camera was hoisted by a crane or a drone based on image quality. > given the guys in the picture are on cherry picker type cranes, I'm guessing the photographer was on another of those I don't think so! That picture appears to be the fitment chec…

Dunno.

I found a youtube of drone footage of flying around starship and I think the camera is pointing south west like this (time set to 6 seconds in)

https://youtu.be/0sA9rGc80Y4?t=6

whereas from the tower it would be looking north east.

Even if you can get the resolution from a drone camera, the shot looks like someone spent quite a while lining everything up to look nice and like the historic NY pic.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#809

Post by fpoling »

FredPret wrote: post #568
pdonis wrote: post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it. All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki…

This is an excellent point. This is why it was necessary to beat the Germans first - so the Russians could invade or at least threaten Japan. Even so, a land conquest of Japan would have cost vast numbers of lives - far more than the nukes. When people die one by one in war, the emotional impact is blunted. But when a million die in one bomb, it seems much worse, even if the overall body count is lower.

Soviet Union were preparing to invade Hokkaido. My grandfather was staged near Vladivostok and everybody in Soviet military there in summer 1945 expected there would be invasion of Japan.

Japanese knew that Soviet rulers did not care if another million of soldiers died and Soviet occupation was considered much worse outcome. That contributed to their surrender to US.

Re: Super Heavy has splashed down in The Gulf of Mexico

#810

Post by thehappypm »

Denvercoder9 wrote: post #505
thehappypm wrote: post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No atmosphere would be much easier. There's enough energy in a Tesla battery to for the Tesla to reach escape velocity. If you could simply drive at max acceleration (and the car didn't fall apart, and the tires continued to have grip, and a million other reasons why this is impossible) eventually you'd reach escape velocity and still have some percentage left. In a more realistic sense, a long railgun type system wo…

> There's enough energy in a Tesla battery to for the Tesla to reach escape velocity. No, it's not even remotely close. A Model S weighs around 2000kg and has a battery of 100 kWh. That's √((100 kWh)/(1/2*2000kg)) = 600m/s of delta-v. Escape velocity for Earth is 11.2km/s, almost a factor 20 more.

My math was off!

This nerd sniped me a LOT, I’m wondering if it’s possible for a chemical battery to reach orbital velocity (not escape).

An idealized Tesla would just be its battery (500kg) perfectly dumping energy to mechanical forward speed. Cutting 3/4 of the weight gets you closer to the delta-v you need, but youre still off by a factor of 5. Though orbital velocity, and leaving from the equator and gaining that speed, means you only need to get up to ~7.2 km/s. Still only a third of the way there.

Maybe you could split your battery into chunks, and expel them once they’re expended?

Post reply on HN