141–150 of 221 posts
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What is the point? Are we comparing coconuts and apples?
Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
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Well, Mars is so much farther away and much more massive so you need a lot of fuel if you want to come back. This is much more difficult than the extra fuel needed for the moon landing due to lack of atmosphere. Speaking of which, Mars having an atmosphere means you need complex heat shields for the landing. Furthermore it's so far that unlike the case of the moon you can't make real time adjustments from earth, ther…
Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing. This is made even true on the Moon because its…
Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.
Anyone know if they flew over the site of the Apollo 11 lunar module landing? Surely they'd do it just for the publicity and ability to shut up Joe Rogan and the other nutjobs that consider that landing fake.
Rogan hasn't believed that for nearly a decade because he learned more about the physics of the Moon and the engineering of the time. Since you have an interest in truth and honesty, I'm sure now that you've been informed you won't spread this misinformation anymore and will do some reflection on how you ended up holding this view for so long past when it no longer was true. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmlmxamw_…
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It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
> 1960s technology Still photography has gotten more convenient since then, but in the agreeable lighting and atmospheric conditions one would encounter while taking a vacation snap outside at noon Cynthian time, image quality now isn't better than then* *Unless you're willing to spend $10,000+
Here are the pictures it has taken so far: https://www.flickr.com/photos/fireflyspace/albums/7217772031... There's also a cool lunar flyover video taken during final deorbit.
It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
It's like many of the current LED car and street lights.
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How do you expect to get to the Moon before SpaceX? The Space Shuttle ended up costing $2+ billion per launch, and given it's a government program - getting anything on it from an untested company who didn't already have major connections would be near to a nonstarter, and that's even if they could casually foot the billions of dollars it would have cost. FireFly launched as a private company on a Falcon 9 so their c…
The space shuttle isn't relevant to this conversation. Private industry has been putting things in space for decades, long before SpaceX existed. The reason no private company put a thing on the moon isn't because they couldn't, it was because nobody was paying them to, and because there is not otherwise any economic benefit to them for doing so. If your expected income is zero, it doesn't matter how low your costs a…
Now that we've clearly nailed all 4 of those points, we're starting to see lots more interesting things in space from tourists visiting the ISS, people sending their ashes to space, to doing private space walks and going further into space than any human has since the 70s [1], and now even things like this with a private company landing a payload on the Moon. Many of these things are done with no return beyond doing them.
More specifically though, this is also literally why SpaceX was created. Elon was researching NASA's plans for getting men to Mars. They literally did not exist. He wanted to get society more interested in space and so his idea was to launch a greenhouse to Mars and live-stream it. The capability for that simply did not exist in America, and in Russia the costs were far too high. So SpaceX was born.
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It's fascinating how the pictures have that "Apollo moon landing" look. I'd always assumed that a huge part of this was just 1960s technology (film not digital etc), but apparently it's actually coming from the literally unearthly lighting conditions of being on the Moon.
that's a great point about the lighting... it really does contribute to that distinctive look. i've also read that the lack of atmosphere on the moon sharpens the shadows and increases the contrast, which probably adds to that effect.
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When Mallory climbed on Everest (and possibly summited) it was a big deal because it had never been done. When Hilary and Tenzing did it, it pushed human achievement forward. Today people still do it, but it means nothing to anyone other than those people. Going to the moon in the 60s was an impressive feat. It pushed the boundary forward. But that's all it did. There's literally nothing of value there. Sure most of…
> There's literally nothing of value there. ISRU water to hydrolox to reduce amount of uplift from earth's gravity well?
The moon lacks too much to be self sustainable. Mars is a stretch: it is likely someone will reply that mars isn't possible and they will have good points, so while I have concluded it is just possible I can see the points of those who think it is not.
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Atmospheres make landing easier and require less fuel! A big problem with landing is losing your speed which is going to be extremely high to begin with. On the Moon you can only do this by basically turning around in the opposite direction of your velocity and thrusting an equal but opposite amount. It's not only quite complex but also substantially complicates landing. This is made even true on the Moon because its…
I think the big piece that is being overlooked here is the distance. The distance itself poses significant challenges. The obvious things like resupply and communication are much harder. But also the journey to mars is much harder on the human body. Rescue and abort options are also much harder. The moon is close enough to easily resupply or rescue people on the surface, mars is much harder.
But if somehow both of these bodies were orbiting around Earth, Mars would be just orders of magnitude more straight forward than Mars, and I think it's relatively likely we'd already have permanent outposts, if not colonies, there. So the mental model of it being viewed as a stepping stone is somewhat misleading. The Moon is hard!
And also I don't think the distance will be that bad. We've already had 374 day ISS stays which is far longer than any possible transit to Mars (though nowhere near as long as a late-stage mission abort would entail) and the overall effects of such a stay were not markedly different than significantly shorter stays on the ISS. So it seems very unlikely that even a late stage emergency abort would be fatal.
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Well, you were the one telling me "space tech evolves slowly", when Apollo was taking their pictures with a film coconut, Firefly is using a digital apple, and yet the output still looks eerily similar.
you are talking about stills. still don't know what the actual tech difference is.
Here's what Firefly uses: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_photography
Hopefully you can see that from a raw tech level, there's practically no overlap between those things at all. The technology has moved on _completely_.