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0 pointsjvanderbot2y ago0 comments

I'm quite aware of the difficulties of it. As much as anyone around here, I think. I've spent time studying it from the inside as well as as an outsider.

That's part of the sadness. But it is possible to spread throughout the solar system, and so it's a matter of scale after that.

At one time, nobody could leave the shoreline or they'd be lost forever. We have invented our way out of most of it.

Now, I enjoy thinking about how _different_ it would be from any journey we've taken. Something more like frozen embryos and robotic caregivers than a ship full of brave men. I mean, what would they eat? But it is not at all impossible, just unfathomable to us.

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Animats2y ago· 2 in thread

> That's part of the sadness. But it is possible to spread throughout the solar system, and so it's a matter of scale after that.

Not really. In this solar system, the off-Earth real estate is pretty bad. Worse than almost anywhere on Earth. Most of Canada and Alaska are vacant, after all, and those areas have air and water. Now that it looks like human population is peaking, there's not much pressure to inhabit low-value real estate.

Space travel belongs to machines. Small ones. Read Ashlee Vance's new book, "When the Heavens Went on Sale". All the action now is in small satellites and small to medium sized rockets. If and when Space-X gets its Starship working, it may turn out to be a white elephant, like the Space Shuttle. There just aren't that many big payloads worth launching. About once a year, somebody buys a Falcon Heavy launch, and once or twice a year. China launches a Long March 5.

m4rtink2y ago

SpaceX is about to launch about 1600 tons to space this year, massively more than has been the global combined tonnage in the years before. And their launch slots are selling like hotcakes (which is also due to others turning out to be pretty incompetent in producing any rocket comparable to Falcon 9 in a decade, but thats a different story).

So I think the demand is there & finally the costs are low enough to enable many missions that we just can't afford before (like all those lunar landers showing up recently) and I don't think this trend will slow down any time soon, thankfully.

rbanffy2y ago

I find it odd we haven’t embraced the modular spaceship and EOR approach.

Think of a Falcon 9 second stage but instead of payload, it had more tank, more fuel, a docking ring and a set of RCS thrusters. It gets to orbit, finds its ”passenger”, docks to it and pushes it into whatever trajectory it wants to go.

Add a truss with multiple docking rings to your payload and you can add multiple tugs to give a larger payload a bigger kick.

Even packing a few kick stages on top of F9s or F9 heavies would enable some interesting missions - as both trajectory can be higher energy and payload doesn’t need to be trimmed to the minimum viable mass.

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