831–839 of 839 posts
Before aiming to Mars, I would consider crowfunding two free tickets for a trip on the Falcon to a couple high profile flat earthers.
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Asteroid mining is pointless for Earth-based industry. There's more of everything on Earth and it's orders of magnitude closer to processing and manufacturing infrastructure. The ISS in Earth orbit cost billions of dollars and was only possible because the Space Shuttle was an awesome utility vehicle that could act as an orbital work platform. Putting even trivial ore processing and refining infrastructure in a place…
I would like to take issue with your claim that it's closer to processing and manufacturing infrastructure. If expressed in km that is correct. It gets really interesting once you express it in Delta V. It gets more interesting yet when you take into account things like linear accelerators which can launch things for pennies. They're not practical on earth, but somewhat practical on the moon. They might also be usabl…
I mean, it does depend on how much time you're willing to spend. Yeah, the dV required to move from one asteroid to another is pretty tiny, but typical orbit phasing maneuvers like that typically take a long time to execute, especially in the scale of the asteroid belt (you gotta orbit all the way around the Sun).
That said, I feel like (but haven't validated mathematically or in e.g. KSP, or found real-life examples) it should be possible to do small phase shifts with radial burns (e.g. inward then outward to "catch up", or outward then inward to let the target do so) without requiring much of a time expenditure, though this would probably entail more fuel.
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Because the tax payer has paid for nearly all of this and the goal was certainly not for some billionaire couple to get into the hundred mile high club.
Yes, the goal was for everybody to get into the club. Billionaires wold just get there faster, for a fee. Similarly like it happened with aviation. Sergey Korolev was pretty comfortable with the idea.
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Yup. In fact, there are various stories of people in late 1930s who tried to get the word out to the wider world about what's starting to happen in Germany, and they were generally ignored. The world truly didn't learn about the camps until Nazi Germany was conquered.
Possibly, but the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder has been readily available once they declared war on the rest of the Europe and went through with it. You didn't have to wait until discovering some camps to change your notions of them.
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> perhaps helped by a guy in a VR suit back on earth or in a nearby spaceship. Definitely not "back on earth". Lag is an issue with VR as-is with mere milliseconds of it, and you'd be calling for minutes of latency there. And "in a nearby spaceship" would, definitionally, involve getting humans most of the way there; might as well get them all the way there at that point.
I think it's interesting to explore whether remote-control VR lag can be combated with simulations. If you can simulate the other side well enough, you should be able to manipulate the simulation until you've got a recording that you're satisfied with and then send it. This is kind of how Mars rovers are steered today. Obviously doing this for robots on Earth is tricky and largely pointless, given it's probably easie…
True, but that has limitations, right? Meteorite impacts, electromechanical failures, and such still do happen. Plus on Mars there's still dust flurries and such, and then you've got Titan with its "dummy thicc" atmosphere blowing stuff around even harder, though obviously asteroids wouldn't have those issues.
With the Mars rovers we're basically in a position of "well we'll run them as long as we can, but if they get stuck in a rut they're hosed". Spirit and Opportunity would probably still be running and collecting science if we had human crews nearby able to hop over and fix them up.
> The point about the spaceship is not distance related but that building life support structures into everything is quite expensive, whereas building them once in a spaceship and then extending the human presence to all surrounding structures would be a lot cheaper.
Right, but my point there is that "surrounding structures" implies you're basically pretty much there anyway. You don't necessarily need life support structures in the mining equipment itself; you just need some spot for the ship to dock for a sec while the maintenance crews don their spacesuits and do their repairs.
Even if we did build human-habitable areas in those "surrounding structures" (e.g. break rooms, workshops, bunks), as long as there's a supply chain to provide air/water/food (and the first two could likely be extracted from the asteroid itself) I suspect it wouldn't be that much of an additional cost in the grand scheme of things, especially when weighed against the increase in productivity.
Plus, you gotta think on the flip-side, too: would it make sense to haul all those life support structures around on a moving ship? If you're sending crews someplace often enough it seems reasonable to have those on-site and thus not have to haul all that mass with you (then again, depending on the length of the trip such facilities might be necessary anyway).
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How much of that material needs to come from Earth, though? If we can get that from the Moon, for example, then you wouldn't need nearly as much fuel to get the raw materials into orbit for manufacturing. Then all you need to do is get the finished product to wherever it needs to go (e.g. in an atmospheric entry vehicle, or to some other orbital factory, or to some far out colony, or what have you).
Long term - definitely! But to get space manufacturing started in the short term, lowering the launch costs is the best bet.
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Don't limit cadence. Just tax transactions, and cadence will limit itself.
I waffle on this one too. Institutions that do HFT have a huge capital cost and pay large fees before they even make their first trade. They also employ programmers, traders, etc. Basically, these taxes are going to need to sum to something really big to dissuade them. Too small, they ignore it. Medium, the market will just consolidate. Large, you'll stop HFT, but at what consequence? The probability of unintended co…
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This is definitely a hindsight is 20/20 moment. In an age where radio was new, where televisions were even newer, where transcontinental news took hours, days or even weeks to travel, the knowledge that the Nazis were engaging in mass murder was not readily available. When allied troops liberated the concentration camps they filmed everything that they saw because they were concerned that without footage no one would…
Reports about what's happening in concentration camps had been coming to Allied intelligence agencies since 1941 ([1]) but obviously they did not include any video footage, so they were hard to believe. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pilecki%27s_Report
In hindsight being 20/20 it's hard to comprehend the blurred optics of the past era.
Moreover, the blood libel of WW1 was still a fresh memory, and so many who did hear about Nazi atrocities were skeptical.
The world would be different today if not for the photographic and video evidence.
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So is spacex. It's a dictatorship.
All the people forced to buy contracts with them. All the people forced to work with them. Pure. Tyranny.
It's a private corporation: it's a mini-dictatorship. Basically everything functional in the world is built by one. Could you imagine the department of transportation making a car?