I'm a bit too young for Apollo, so it feels incredibly fortunate to be able to watch the next great step forward for humanity. Starship is both the first true economics focused rocket to production and after F9 the end of the beginning of a shift in mindset for space. The ripple effects of the disruption will be fascinating and exciting as well. And we'll get to watch if live, in beautiful detail.
I mean if SpaceX is a rocket factory company, isn’t Ford a car factory company? We just don’t include factory because it’s redundant.
With the upcoming starship test, it feels like even if it ends up being a 100 meter firework, the engine is still purring.
It's mind boggling how much stuff a Starship will be able to chuck into space and come down and then do it again and again.
Consider this, the military is starting to explore the idea of moving heavy military equipment anywhere in the world within 90 minutes using this kind of capability. International Space Station sized habitats are a handful of launches over months, not dozens over decades. A single Starship launch could place multiple hubble-sized space observatories up in a single launch.
Even if they just stacked a modified Starship designed to stay in orbit (just enough fuel to get into orbit, ability to jettison engine section, some solar panels bolted on) and shot that up, that'd get you as much or more internal pressurized volume than the ISS in a single launch.
How reliable would this really be in practice? I'm thinking of all the times a projected launch has to get scrubbed and rescheduled days later. Not exactly the type of delivery uncertainty you'd want for critical equipment.
The killer app for the military is missile defense. Currently the US has about 4 dozen ground based midcourse interceptors. Each costs more than $100 million and carries one single exo-atmospheric kill vehicle capable of destroying one single incoming threat. The kill vehicle weights 64 kg.
A single starship could carry more than 1000 kill vehicles. A dozen or two starships on standby could carry enough kill vehicles to defend not only against all current intercontinental ballistic missiles, but against all that Russia, China and North Korea could conceivably build in a decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exoatmospheric_Kill_Vehicle
The only time I was ever tested for drugs was when I started an internship at Toyota back in 2006 or so. I had to do a whole physical. At the time it seemed pretty silly. Later in my career I started a new job, and the new company's background check flagged me for being unable to verify my employment at Toyota. That also seemed pretty silly, considering the company's CTO used to be in the same department at Toyota back in the day!
Maybe politicians don't like that reality, but they are not the ones putting people into orbit.
Maybe they just want to commemorate the birthday of the visionary leader who recognized and funded the genius inventor that ultimately ended up being instrumental in getting the American space program of the ground?
/s
I’m sure he won’t be smoking weed on podcasts any more.
https://www.pomona.edu/news/2000/10/01-mystery-47
https://magazine.pomona.edu/pomoniana/2015/02/13/the-mystery...
Given that it's a reference to a specific California prop, I don't think this is a problem in any way.
Hitler's birthday?
[1] https://twitter.com/Rainmaker1973/status/1602270207287902209
- Half the size of the statue of liberty is it's base. Not that tall as a statue.
- Seadragon, of which I'd never heard. 1)
I mean I don't find the farting and 4/20 references funny, but I don't see a reason to be bothered. I'm happy for the people whom it makes smile.
And I think S3XY is clever. I like that it gives the models sort of a canonical order and always feel good when I see them ordered that way by someone other than Tesla.
There's nothing new in using supercomputers to compute aerodynamics. It's been done for decades with ever further precision. SpaceX has even done talks that can be found on youtube on it themselves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vYA0f6R5KAI
The heat protection technology is literally the exact same material as used on Apollo, except re-formed into tiles, something SpaceX has been doing with their own heat shielding technology for decades.
The landing/pacifying procedures are variants of Shuttle procedures as the same propellants are used (which are also very old). They're even the same engines and fuel used on Apollo and the Shuttle.
(Also, I do not describe "happened to die during period of employment" as people "giving their lives for the program". That's just extreme propaganda.)
So what experience was gained that was not in the form of "re-learning things that were forgotten"?
Sorry, it was absolutely wasted. We could have predictably achieved those benefits for less and quicker, with tens of billions to spare.
What’s the FAA considering in approving or denying a request like this?
In this case this is specially hard because the core booster flies back towards the coast.
I have been curious about this and not seen much disclosure on the topic. Would ship 24 also be the largest re-entry vehicle, and largest re-entry vehicle to make ocean landing?
Edit: I was able to find some more information on the splashdown:
>During this time, the spacecraft will hurtle sideways, generating tremendous heat before adjusting to an upright position for a "soft " rocket-powered ocean landing 62 miles north of Kauai. It will sink in the Navy's Pacific Missile Range Facility, according to plans for the historic flight, and join dozens of warships that have gone down over past decades during Navy "sink exercises " in waters 15, 000 feet deep.
https://weatherboy.com/spacex-plans-to-launch-starship-rocke...
https://www.govtech.com/products/orbital-spacex-starship-to-...
official spacex launch plans with estimated timelines
Its incredibly costly and complex to build things like the james webb telescope and that would be a great problem to have, but are there any measures of the demand for rocket capacity at given price points?
