201–210 of 287 posts
So what's the carbon footprint of one of these launches? Did I understand correctly that we can make the fuel by taking CO2 from the atmosphere? That would make the footprint negative, would it? That seems to good to be true.
Not negative, since you are creating just as much CO2 burning the CH4 as you removed in the first place. Carbon neutral though.
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Well yes, but using the tool he made you could argue that very few would deny it since the truth became so obvious. Even if it was known a long time before that, a lot of people still believed that the earth was flat. With increased technology it was easily disproven.
Do you have a source for the claim that a lot of people believed the Earth was flat in Galileo's time? (Galileo was born decades after the Magellan-Elcano circumnavigation of the world.)
My bad and thanks for correcting and enlightning me :)
Honestly, Elon's presentations are some of the most impressive, inspiring I've ever seen. And the way he just stumbles out words and sentences that are completely revolutionary... casually dropping these absurd, incredible statements. I find it incredible. If anyone else was saying this, was showing these graphics, you'd think it was just wish fulfillment; a fantasy. And I'm sure their timeline is a bit aggressive. B…
I would be really excited about a future where everyone had access to clean water. Going to space is fun and exciting. The future of space travel is going to be interesting, but it essential that when we imagine the future that we do so while recognizing the glaring problems of today.
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He said the heat shield ablates for Mars trips but not Earth trips (not sure why). If so then propellant should be the only important consumable. Of course this level of reusability and reliability has never been achieved before, but the whole thing depends on it.
> He said the heat shield ablates for Mars trips but not Earth trips (not sure why) Falcon 9 presently lands completely without any heat shield, because it just uses it's engines to reduce velocity until they are not needed. In principle, you can always replace heat shields with fuel like this. Mars trips need to bleed velocity aerodynamically because the craft cannot bring enough fuel. Presumably a sub-orbital hop o…
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If you think putting it a little out to sea would kill NIMBY objections .... still, we can but dream. I'm not entirely sure how serious SpaceX are about their E2E idea anyway, I took it as more of a "hey, isn't this neat? totally physically possible and practical too." I imagine it would take a long time to scale up to that point though, probably decades(?) after the Moon/Mars.
Objections, sure, but any enforcement ability? That’s international waters.
[1] https://www.un.org/Depts/los/convention_agreements/texts/unc...
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The Shuttle just made the mistake to not be a fully two stage system, it was a strange hybrid. SpaceX also figured out that vertical landing had many advantages compared to a plane.
Totally. Because NASA, ESA, and others use public money there was less (or little to no) incentive to strive for reusability.
Making life multiplanetary seems like one of the least important issues of our times to me: either we figure out how to make life on earth sustainable in the medium term (next 50-100 years) or we do not have enough time to become multiplanetary anyway (since that will take centuries, and we will likely never leave the solar system anyway). So it seems a bit premature to concern yourself with interplanetary ambitions…
We may always face existential risks. We now know of some concerning the next 50-100 years, but in 100 years we may know of different ones. Planetary redundancy conceivably aids our chances with those risks as well, so is a project best begun now, whatever the lead time. I don't want us always just solving the present crisis. We should think about the distant future too.
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Thats why they show the spaceport out at sea, as it kills the standard NIMBY objections. Also the cities they want to fly out of don’t have enough room to easily build a spaceport.
Boats already stop rockets from taking off somewhat regularly. I think a lot of people would be pissed off if they couldn't sail off the coasts of many major cities on a daily (or even more frequent?) basis.
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he told a few jokes that bombed. tough crowd.
"So we decided to call it BFR"... crickets Clearly no gamers in the audience, I died.
The earth-to-earth idea is nice, and whilst it would be an improvement, I expect the travelling time to be the biggest obstacle. You have to gather the people, check them in and clear them during internation flights. Then you have to load everybody on a boat, ship them to the platform X miles into sea, unload them, take them up the big tower, letting them board and settle and depending on how predicatable this is, wa…
- Get everybody on a boat in NYC harbor with ferry level security (i.e. not much)
- As the boat is travelling to the platform, perform the more thorough check in, any security scans, etc. Everyone simultaneously straps down in their seats, last minute toilet runs etc.
- Slot the passenger capsule into the rocket like a cartridge and take-off immediately at arrival. Plot twist: the capsule was on the boat. Passengers might not even get to see the rocket.