Rakaydos
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Posts posted by Rakaydos
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4 hours ago, Kasyan said:
Tungsten is not my choice, it’s from an old article on PopMech (can’t find the source right now). I suppose tungsten is tougher and more likely to survive reentry, but I’m not particularly sure.
The idea is maximum mass behind a minimum of atmospheric drag, so you lose as little kinetic energy to aero drag as possible. Higher density is good, but at least the cap needs to be able to handle the usual problems of the bow shock, particularly at the velocities it will experience shortly befor impact.
guidance is relatively easy, a thruster in the back that turns the rod slightly side on, steering with body lift the same way the Falcon 9 returns.
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11 minutes ago, CatastrophicFailure said:
Don’t forget now, Starship’s primary purpose actually is downmass… on Mars.
How well that translates to Earth, well, we’ll see. But I still keep slim hope that Starship will one day bring back the Hubble for the Smithsonian.
More than that, the plan has always been to refuel them on mars and bring them back, with all the life support and amenities still installed. (and possibly with people who decide mars is not for them aboard.) That's going to require earth dowmass.
Point to point is also earth downmass, even though it's not going to be "up" for very long.
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13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
Yes, if it uses cheat codes to spawn them for free.
Those "cheat codes" are the entire reason this thread exists. A properly paranoid person wouldnt just take Elon's "5 mil to build, 2 mil to launch" numbers on faith, but actually assume it will be CHEAPER, that Elon is making it sound more expensive to milk more money out of the goverment.
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3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
What color?
Looks pinkish, so probably red when lit/not in daylight.
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10 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
I forgot, that still nothing has ever landed on the Moon because there was no Starship, sorry.
Again you deflect and avoid the question.
Your cold war rockets, that put probes on the moon before the americans... how much do they cost to fly?
Can starship literally flood the skies with landers for less than it would cost to put enough defensive weapons to stop them? Can your nation sustain that kind of economc drag?
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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:
By rocket.
And how much does that rocket cost to fly?
Can SpaceX throw cheap stainless rockets at the moon for less than cold war era rockets can send anti-starship weapons? Can america force you to drain your economy stopping them?
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4 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
It's many times lighter than a crewed lunar lander.
But that doesnt answer the question... how does it get on the moon?
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All of that is just First Mover advantage- the first one to put that sort of thing on the moon can shoot down what anyone else brings to the moon.
Right now, it's looking like Starship is gong to be that first mover. Denying the moon and mars (and wherever else they want) to other nations forever. Unless your nation does a crash program to get there first.
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57 minutes ago, zolotiyeruki said:
Looking at the tiles on the aerocovers, it sure seems like SpaceX is having to do the same thing at STS did--while not every tile is unique, there sure are a lot of custom tile shapes over there!
"Everything should be as simple as possible- and NO MORE SIMPLE THAN THAT." -Albert Einstein
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It will be nice when the EIS is finished and Starship finally does what the N1 failed to do.
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2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
The obvious purpose of Starship is to make others start making their own Starships and spend money on bird instead of useful purposes.
1 hour ago, Rakaydos said:But SURELY Russia wouldnt fall for that AGAIN, after Buran...
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13 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
At the very least, its purpose was to teach SpaceX how a proper reusable spacecraft should look like.
N1 was for their first stage.
Sounds like a waste of rubles to me...
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2 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
Buran had its purposes, and it was actually good for them, unlike the hypothetical Starship.
It has nothing common with forced money spending.
Really? If it had actual purpose, what was it used for? and when?
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34 minutes ago, magnemoe said:
My guess is that the crane is rented and that spaceX is buying an crane for themselves seeing they need it for lifting stuff up on test stands and perhaps helping getting an booster down from the clawzila.
Its not the tank treads on top of the arms its way to overbuild for that, the rotate and move treads don't need to be thick for one....Overbuild for possibly a 200 ton booster to misjudge landing velocity?
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1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:
The obvious purpose of Starship is to make others start making their own Starships and spend money on bird instead of useful purposes.
But SURELY Russia wouldnt fall for that AGAIN, after Buran...
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16 hours ago, Ultimate Steve said:
And I usually do worse! I time it so on ascent I'll get a super close suborbital approach, and the relative velocity sometimes gets over 500m/s.
I suck at orbital timing, and often play without the tracking station enabled. Phasing orbit to get within 10 KM, 100m/s closing, walking in the intercept with angled retro thrust, zero out within 100m, then lock a docking port, get a good angle, approach at 5m/s and walk in in with thrust limited main engines, tapping the throttle during the bounce to ensure a connection.
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7 hours ago, K^2 said:
You know, usually, things are never as simple as just using a magnet, but in this case, the solution is literally just using a magnet. Lorentz force on a charge is proportional to velocity, so a magnetic deflection shield that works at 1c will work at 10c and 100c and 1000c. The magnetic field doesn't even have to be that strong, because that just determines the turning radius, and that can be hundreds of meters or even entire kilometers for an interstellar craft. And if you do happen across some neutral atoms, at high enough speeds, magnetic field will rip electrons clean off and your ship will just experience a tiny amount more drag than normal.
All of this works in relativistic case as well. The math is a bit more complex, but principle's the same. The higher your Lorentz boost, the more Lorentz force is applied, and the incoming particles are deflected safely around the ship. Problem of interstellar travel at light speed is trivially reduced to having enough propulsion and propellant to keep accelerating. That problem itself is the exact opposite of trivial, but if you have means of getting to near-light speeds, keeping the craft protected is actually the easy part. At hyper-relativistic speeds even small asteroids you might be risking running into will be turned into a cloud of plasma safely deflected around your craft.
Interesting- I've read early scifi involving "magnetic scoops" for Ramscoop fusion drives- it sounds like that's the same principle, in reverse?
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[citation needed]
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3 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
Then they can rent enough Angara launches in advance.
And I'm sure Rocosmos would be just as willing to take the money as Blue Origin was. But that says nothing about their ability to provide the service.
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4 minutes ago, Spaceception said:
Wait... what is that? My first thought is a heat-shell, but I don't know if that would be too complex. Or is it a tool of some sort?
Also, those Tesla bots might be useful for the first Mars missions
In the EDA tour part 2, elon explains that it's a prototype of a new approach to nose cone construction. Something about stretching sections over a mould? Then welding these staves into a nose cone barrel.
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22 minutes ago, wumpus said:
Starship has a capacity of 100 tons (at least that's the plan). Dragon 2 is 10 tons. So you need 11 launches instead of 10, and you can bring along 70 people. Somehow I can't imagine riding with 70 people to Mars inside a Starship. Perhaps the Starship will take them to a large cycler (and park with it for decscent/return duty).
Alternatively, you have a separate 11th launch with 10 dragon capsules in abort-racks. No need to mess around with the tankers.
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11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
Now it's the SpaceX turn to have negative part masses.
A puzzle:
DC-X + BO = SpX LL
Negative mass was Dynetics, not BO... assuming that's what you were going for.
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28 minutes ago, RyanRising said:
That’s plenty of iteration, which is great for optimising and improving the design, but it doesn’t help with proving reliability through flight rate. We can’t just make one that works to do that, we have to make one that works and then fly its design a couple hundred times successfully with only one or two failures to be able to responsibly claim it’s safe enough for crew without an escape system. The first flight of Starship design iteration 58 has exactly as much proven reliability as the first flight of Starship design iteration 3.
Ah yes- it's one thing to actually improve the design, another to PROVE it's been improved.
Still, that's where cheap rapid reuse WILL come into play. If by iteration 60 they've nailed "3 flights a day per pad" reuse, that's 90 flights per month before the next iteration comes out of starbase. 3 months to get 270 flights, the commercial crew calculated LoC number.
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12 minutes ago, Elthy said:
Thats the current rate. 2 Years ago it was 0, in two years it could as well be 1/week. Its impossible to say how fast this will progress, even SpaceX will change their plans several times in the next months.
I'm taking the pessimistic, plateau'ed number for now. Remember that I'm not including booster production. Also, there has to actually be some testing between revisions, and then they have to incorporate the changes into the next model. But you're right, this is not a maximum number of revisions, or a minimum, merely an expected number.
NASA suggests Mars Sample Return to cost $4 billion and 10 years. Not really.
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
...Yes, they do that a lot. Rarely does anything come of it.
They still have issues actually DOING anything that doesn't involve hardware handed down by the Soviets.