721–730 of 899 posts
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It looked like the booster exploded when it submerged after soft splashdown. There was some fire and the stream cut off. Maybe that's what happened to the ship too.
IIRC the intent was to sink it using explosives (Flight Termination System) in case it stays afloat after landing.
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V2 was of questionable legitimate military utility too. Sure you can hit a target the size of a city, but unlike carpet bombing, the payload isn't enough to guarantee that something specific is destroyed. So you can only use it to randomly harm civilians and maybe every once in a while hit a military target. Compare this with the Western Allies' approach where they also killed and maimed tons of civilians but at leas…
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.
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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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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...
Here's the full-sized pic: https://rare-gallery.com/mocahbig/1305111-SpaceX-Starship-Bl...
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What is even more impressive to me is that they were able to quite reliably stream all this through Starlink. This shows how mature and usable Starlink is. The fact that you can have live internet connection on re-entering space ship - truly the future is here.
Well, yeah it was reliable but with a lot of artifacts I honestly couldn't make out much of what was being shown at those last moments. And I'm curious why SpaceX didn't have a ship there at the expected landing site to assess the landing (maybe they thought it wouldn't make it)? It was a great event, surely, but it would have been nice to have a 3rd person view of the landing (you have the diagram at the bottom but…
The issue at the end wasn’t as much artifacts as it was the camera housing getting blasted during the descent. It visibly cracked as the fin caught fire.
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You hit on two really different topics at the same time. So let's hit on the fuel topic first. People tend to draw intuitive parallels of rocket fuel with gas. A short trip doesn't need much, while a long trip needs a lot. But it turns out that's not really how it works in space. In space the way you travel is you point at something, accelerate a bunch, and then coast there. So the typical measurement for something a…
Why does this matter? The delta V requirements are so steep Starship can't return from the martian surface. It is a completely different game to go to Mars than to the moon unless you are planning on building a mars gateway in orbit and never landing anywhere.
Mars has essentially infinite CO2 and hydrogen. So this means we can produce essentially infinite methane and water. In fact you can carry out electrolysis on some of the produced hydrogen and feed it back into the system. This leaves you with a final excess product of methane, oxygen, and water. The Starship's engines, uncoincidentally, run on oxygen + methane. So we can locally produce basically limitless amounts of water, oxygen, and rocket fuel on Mars.
Of course this begs the question of what we do initially. And like all long distance colonization efforts, you're not sending just a single ship, but rather a small group. Those other ships are carrying additional critical supplies, including fuel. Upon landing those ships can also be used as shelters until something more permanent can be constructed. And the extra fuel provides a means of getting back to Earth if necessary while giving you a big window of time to start establishing basic local infrastructure including energy and methane production.
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There’s a much simpler theory of the war, which is that it was Germany that was worried about a foreign rival catching up to them—Russia—which is why Germany pushed for the war to start. It’s interesting to see this theory projected onto the British, but there’s a fatal flaw with this projection. The first declaration of war was by Austria-Hungary against Serbia. Britain was not in a position to manipulate the situat…
> The 99 years between the Napoleonic and First World Wars were the most peaceful 99 years of European history since at least the Roman Empire; You make a good point about the "Long Peace" between the Napoleonic Wars and World War I. While there were indeed several conflicts during this period, they were generally shorter and more localized. The Revolutions of 1848, which affected many European countries. The Russo-T…
The answer to this is incredibly obvious. It's the same reason people have always made voluntary alliances - for security. See also: NATO.
As for the "Thucydides Trap", there's plenty of criticism on Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thucydides_Trap#Criticism
Personally I file it alongside Marxism, Asimov's Psychohistory, and all the other Grand Theories Of History that try to pretend human behavior is simple and predictable.
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No, that's the point: It's a significant technological advancement for some unreliability/imprecision to not mean critical failure.
So how can that work for air seals? Have a big robust air storage that can replenish losses from your half-broken door? How many other systems like that do we need? And all that extra weight somehow doesn't get you stranded in space when your badly maintained, low efficiency engine can't move it and your payload with the fuel that fits in the tanks? I get the principle, it just seems literally impossible to achieve (…
The ISS leaks air on a daily basis.
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In fact, they did. Being a sailor was about the most dangerous profession that you could choose, including the military. Until today, some jobs at sea are pretty dangerous. Being a fisherman in Alaskan waters is much more risky than being an (American, not Russian) soldier. People still do it. Which convinces me that people will risk their lives going to Mars, and more than a few of them. Some people are just built t…
People risk their lives for high-risk, high-reward jobs. They don't risk their lives for high-risk, no-Reward explorations.
Sure they do. There’s a queue at the top of Mount Everest despite regular deaths; a couple rich folk got squished to pulp in the Titanic submarine last year. The free solo guy climbs Yosemite for the fun of it.
Plenty of people still have that itch.
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What is even more impressive to me is that they were able to quite reliably stream all this through Starlink. This shows how mature and usable Starlink is. The fact that you can have live internet connection on re-entering space ship - truly the future is here.
To me,the bandwidth of the live telemetry data was the most impressive part of the whole thing. I think that's a bigger success than the whole launch.