871–880 of 899 posts
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Seems like a very small-minded way to see things... But if it makes you feel any better, Musk is only one of many people working at SpaceX. You could see him as just a figurehead and you wouldn't too far from reality.
I could call you small minded for thinking only of advances in rocket technology, and ignoring the negative aspects of advancing Musk's power and influence. Should I?
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Getting it human rated is likely much harder than reusing the upper stage a couple of times. The difficulty is that Starship has 1) no launch abort system, and 2) the belly flop landing is much more dangerous than conventional and proven capsule based landing. To get the system human rated, they may have to fly tens or even hundreds of flawless cargo missions first.
The Shuttle was human rated (though in retrospect, perhaps wrongly) despite having basically both of those exact same flaws.
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My desktop. My login screen is two Falcon heavy side boosters landing.
Do you have a link?
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/52/Falcon_H...
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I still think: Starship Moon Base Orion Pulse Nuclear ships launched from the Moon Mars Base Is the winning formula, because the Orion payloads are so huge and the transit time so greatly reduced.
I strongly suspect the chances of Orion-style propulsion happening are close to zero. I think we're much more likely to see fission engines (where the heat from a conventional fission reactor is used to superheat water, which then goes through a conventional nozzle), or something a little more exotic like pulsed fusion (where little capsules of lithium containing deuterium go through a magnetic pinch and fuse, again…
One starship trip could probably transport enough "fuel" for a midsize orion trip to mars and back (I haven't run the numbers, but 150 tons of fissile nuclear fuel is pretty effing compact.
The "Super Orion" 8 million ton ship uses 3,000ton bombs.... but most of the bomb is the inert propellant that can probably be obtain from regolith.
And the Moon could probably have a nuclear launch cannon pretty easily to reduce the payload or initial acceleration.
Politically it sounds dangerous putting nuke bombs on the moon, but frankly it is safer having them there than on Earth. You know, as long as a mass driver catapult doesn't send them back ....
Oh, but to your point, one of my ideas for Starship is to design an antimatter catcher from the solar wind:
https://www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/1107Jac...
So you could probably do the antimatter catalyzed drives a lot more feasibly in space, but its still a lot more complicated than dumb bombs on pusher plates.
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Firebombing whole cities in Europe and Japan is still a black mark in US history. It’s really hard for me to get “holier than thou” on other terror campaigns when I remember that.
It's easy to say that now. Have you lived through unrestricted, total warfare, where one side intends to conquer a continent or the world, invades without provocation, and won't stop until brought to submission through extreme force? The Allies did not initiate war and did not want war. How many of your country's people should you sacrifice to end a war of aggression started by the enemy? Should you not use the means…
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No, that’s when WW2 became a pan-European war. It became a world war when Japan attacked the British and Americans, thus combining the Anglo-German and Sino-Japanese wars into a single conflict.
It's arguable, WW2 is typically dated from the German invasion of Poland. By then, the war in Asia was already underway with the Japanese fighting in Asia. So with the British Empire, Germans and French and the Soviet Union also starting hostilities, much of the world was at war.
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How about "don't invade your neighbors" to "half of Poland" itself being an absurd goalpost move? The default is to _not_ invade.
The topic of discussion isn’t whether to invade! It’s whether there was a realistic threat of Germany invading either all of Europe or the entire world, and separately whether the allies were in fact practicing what they preached. That is what I was replying to in the GP, which I explicitly quoted! The goalpost move was the topic being changed from world invasion to Poland invasion.
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> Re image quality, beyond the resolution it looks like someone spent a while getting things lined up nicely? I don't know. There are really good drone photographers. They have remote controls for all the settings, and remote viewing is also possible. They could have lined it up with the drone. Or made the photo with even higher resolution and cropped it to perfection. Or made hundreds of photos and selected the best…
Ok. I now think it was a drone. There is footage here that looks like it might be from that https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zi5DXe_65J8&t=52s
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The topic of discussion isn’t whether to invade! It’s whether there was a realistic threat of Germany invading either all of Europe or the entire world, and separately whether the allies were in fact practicing what they preached. That is what I was replying to in the GP, which I explicitly quoted! The goalpost move was the topic being changed from world invasion to Poland invasion.
Seemed like it was a realistic threat considering Germany did exactly that; invade all of Europe.
The France and Britain invasions were pretty straightforwardly defensive actions by Germany. They both allied with Poland and when Poland was invaded (an aggressive act by Germany) they declared war on Germany. What evidence is there to suggest that Germany would still have invaded France if France and Britain had simply abandoned Poland? Note that I’m not asserting that they “should have” abandoned Poland, just that the “we’ve got to stop them before they conquer the whole world” is almost always a bogeyman.
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Are you actually familiar with how reentry causes deposition from a melting fin onto the lens of a camera. I'm genuinely shocked by how you are wording your comments, but that may just be your writing style. Anything of the form of "could be solved..." it kind of ridiculous because the circumstances just happened for the first time yesterday. This isn't like the motorsports cameras that spin the lens or transparent p…
> but that may just be your writing style No, that's more like an unfortunate choice of wording :( . Sorry.
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