Rakaydos
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Posts posted by Rakaydos
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9 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
This fixation on billionaires looks rather descriptive.
Which one builds SLS and Orion?
Noone. (insert dig at their progress)
Or if you prefer, Senator Shelby.
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4 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
Or some RU based Billionaire could decide to imitate the commercial success of the impulsive kid from South Africa.
They enjoyed being the only show in town much like the contractors for SLS...
Then things changed.
We have yet to even see the dust from what SX hopes to do, much less have an idea of what the global space economy will look like once it settles.
The RU based billionare would either get appointed to head Rocosmos, or be shut down. Depends on if he's part of the "in" crowd or not.
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11 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
And it will just illustrate the importance of proper minimalism.
Of course, if the word "Enterprise" will stay legal in the United Socialist States (USS is for that, yes?).
What could Russia do, if somebody has to rent a 1950s ship for flying for 10 years due to the lack of his own.
United States' Ship, actually.
And they,ve found out what happens when they DONT rent one to a dot com millionare with dreams of mars- they lose the entire commercial launch market in 15 years.
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5 hours ago, Spacescifi said:
Concrete. Source could regolith, from the moon or any other celestial body without an atmosphere.
I think concrete may be easier to manufacture offworld than metals.
Both will likely be helped with centrifuges, but bulk metal manufacturing requires more overall than bulk concrete manufacturing.
Concrete spacecraft would make OK orbiters and moon landers. Earth reentry is not for them though.
Kind of funny to think the first offworld built spacecraft could be a whole fleet of ships made from lunar clay.
Truly lunar craft.
What do you think?
One more relatively reachable use of space resources.
Concrete usually has problems with vibrations, and rocket engines usually have a lot of rattle. Have you run the numbers for how much vibration your concrete spaceships can take?
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5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
I will better believe in a shark's bounty than in a self-made billionaire's naive romantism.
When a money attractor feeds the stove with money, this usually just means that it isn't his money.
And when the real money owner doesn't stop him from doing that, that usually means the same.
(All I read about Tesla production just ensures me.)
While generally a good habit, the specifics here is off. Elon made millions selling his share of paypal, then later he gambled with his paycheck at TESLA, that if he could short squeeze the tslaQ crowd, he'd become one of the richest people in the world, but if he didnt, he'd get nothing. And he did. Seriously, check out that compensation package, people thought he was crazy.
This is speedrun strats, not general "money attractor" behavure. Luck had everything to do with it, money grubbing capitalist behavure had nothing to do with it.
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17 hours ago, fourfa said:
For me, a death in NCD is a reset. There's enough grind as it is without having to recover rep and cash from a fatality, and with enough practice you get through the marginally-safe reentry phase of play pretty quick. After that there's little risk
My problem is, I am stalled at expendable to low kerbin orbit. I need enough science to either go further, to mun flyby, or to get another science expiriment and probe cores. This run, I've got .8 science that I cannot expect to get in another run.
Which is why I grinded out 10 double VIP missions today. 40 rep got me above -890 rep, so about 3 more days of that to get into Orange rep, and presumably a crew price drop. Then we see how much more I need to grind to afford them.
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15 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
Two letters. L/D
For planes = 4 .. 60
For conical capsules = 0.3 .. 0.5
For non-rotating spheres and cylinders along the flow ~0.***
Heat concentration.
Flat bottom (incl. lifting bodies) = distributed across total cross-section.
Spheres and cylinders = concentrated at the convex spot.
This is literally why Starship has a heat shield at all- before they ran the numbers, they thought they might be able to get away with bare steel.
The heat shield they have now is at the "might work" level- not because they CANT build a "guaranteed to work" heat shield, but because they'll never know how little they can get away with unless they try... And because they dont want to recover this obsolete ship anyway, because it would just take up museum space.
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Just now, kerbiloid said:
Exactly. Before they started testing the reentry of 2nd stage and the N1 of the 1st stage.
If actions fall, the money will be lost.
This is why spaceX isnt publicly traded. Only mars believers are allowed to give them money. This gives them the flexibility to be public about failures on the road to mars without their funding suffering.
So, it doesnt matter if one or two or nine boosters and/or ships "fail", they are literally mass producing improved versions, and didnt want to find a place to park the obsolete ones anyway.
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57 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:
To the moment, both Starship and SLS are same good.
Together with Sea Dragon and Convair Nexus.
Starship isnt a product yet. Neither is SLS. It's Falcon 9 block 5 and Falcon heavy against the oldspace stable, and SpaceX is winning handilly.
Starship on the horizon is a future threat that, if it works, seals SpaceX's dominance for 2 decades at least.
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6 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
I mean, clearly it cant be the ONLY reason, because SpaceX's products are better AND cheaper AND more responsive to demand.
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Lost both Jeb and Val to exploration failures.
I dont want to reset because of the Flying at KSC scans, but I'm going to need a few hundred manually-flown tourist flights to have enough money and reputation to hire a new pilot.
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restarted the NCD run. up to 24 science with Island runway, mountains, highlands, desert, space high, and space above science theoretically available. I need the 45 point matsci/probe core node before I make a serious bid for orbit, or I'll run out of money again.
I was extremely fortunate during my rollers, though- I got crew reports for Flying at Flagpole and Flying at VAB, for almost an extra science point.
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9 minutes ago, Meecrob said:
I mean, for teenagers, it might be cool, "yo 420, MOFO's!!!", but aerospace doesn't work that way. Like yes, Elon smoked on Joe Rogan, we all know, but let me stand up for the integrity of the industry and say that the only way it works is that people in it are sober. Its not like this cabal of pot smoking idiots who cobbled together a rocket...In fact, its kind of insulting, to be honest.
It's less that it's a pothead joke, and more that it's a meme number. Elon is considered quite the "memelord" on twitter, which is one reason some people find it difficult to take him seriously.
...and if you didnt know the context, "drone ship of course I still love you" would sound quite random too. But Elon has been know to push for pop culture numerology. So ship 20/booster 4 probably isn't a complete coincidence.
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7 minutes ago, Minmus Taster said:
when he says "Protection for booster engines" Is he talking about B4 or the RapVacs on S20?
Because I thought that B4 wouldn't need protection.
"As simple as possible... and no simpler."
Guess they need a cowl over the plumbing after all.
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1 minute ago, Beccab said:
In 2016, SpaceX was presenting its Interplanetary Transportation System to the world. Five years later, Starship has become the biggest rocket assembled in history
*whine* but it's not 12m diamiter carbon fiber! Elon LIED to us!
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14 minutes ago, Spaceception said:
Already? Are they going to finish tiling at the orbital site?
After final preflight weld inspections, probably.
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8 minutes ago, Beccab said:
They definitely will, it doesn't impact anything and will provide a whole lot more of essential data this way. We already know the basic flight plan, which ends with the soft landing of starship if it is able to surviveSplashdown, anyway. It's explicitly going to be a water landing.
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1 hour ago, Brotoro said:
That staging sequence sounds dubious to me.
It works if you put the decoupler on upside down.
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12 minutes ago, DDE said:
Anyway, to the shock of many (except probably the French government
) it's made it into the EU Taxonomy of green projects.
Nuclear is in an awkward place, classification wise. Technically, mined uranum is not a renewable resource, but because it isnt formed from compressed carbon products, it isnt a "fossil fuel". If green is defined as "not contributing to climate change", then nuclear absolutely IS a GREEN technology. But it still is NOT a RENEWABLE energy source, only a long-lasting one.
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15 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
I am pretty damn sure those nozzles are hot. Yes, yes, I know they are cooled. I already said that several times. But I've worked around engines my whole career, and my guess is that they will cool the nozzles to just a little bit under the point where they start running into problems.
You've seen the videos from inside the engine bay, right? Has there been a flight where you didn't see flames in there? That's a hot environment, and that's just with three engines. With 30 engines, it's going to be a very hot environment.
If one of you can find some data on what the temperatures are like in there, I would be interested to see it. But I'm pretty sure it's very hot.
Hot for a flesh and blood individual, sure. But at no point are the bells going to be hotter than the melting point of copper, which is what they build those channels out of. The outside of the bell, made out of sterner stuff, is going to be cooler than that, and the outside of the next bell over, if it doesnt have a flame running, will be cooler still.
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58 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
Um, no. The more engines, the more heat. This should be pretty obvious.
The radiation is proportional to the surface area, but only the parts of the nozzles that can be seen from outside will be able to radiate. All the other nozzle surfaces will only see nozzles just as hot as they are, so there will be no net radiation. Because the number of engines (and therefore the total heat) is proportional to the area of the circle, but the radiating surface is only proportional to the circumference of the circle, the bigger the circle of engines, the less you can rely on heat being radiated away.
We know it gets pretty hot in there with just three engines. With 30 (or whatever) it's going to be really, really hot in there.
So, like I said, I assume they are relying on ejecting the heat with the exhaust. The mechanism for that is that it goes into the super-cold fuel, which then ultimately gets thrown out the back end. That's potentially going to be an issue for them with soakback, however. When they shut the engines off, does it also shut off the cooling? Or do they keep pumping fuel through them to control the soakback?
"Um, no." These arnt radiatively cooled nozzles, so radiative cooling, by definition, isnt their way to stay cool.
As the person you replied to said, the nozzles have tiny pipes milled into them, with subcooled liquid methane going in one side, and hot methane gas coming out the other, with the nozzles not getting much hotter than the coolant fluid. This used coolant gas is then pumped into the preburners to run the pumps to push more subcooled liquid methane into the nozzle and combustion chamber liner. THEN the exaust enters the main combustion chamber in typical staged combustion fashion.
This is basic stuff. But admittedly not stuff Kerbal teaches us.
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7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:
This is a well-known old-school interview technique, and it's generally considered to be ineffective nonsense. You should hire people for their skills, knowledge, potential, and personality -- not because they were able to solve some kind of 10-minute test problem. A lot of old "theory X" managers loved to pull this sort of stunt. It establishes dominance right there in the interview.
Who said it was a test problem? given SpaceX's agile approach, it could well have been an actual problem they encountered that needed to be solved on a short deadline. In this case, "hiring for their skills" includes the ability to work under that kind of time crunch, because SpaceX actually tries to move fast enough that it matters.
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4 minutes ago, MKI said:
I get it that "rockets" are needed to get the propellant back into orbit to use elsewhere, but what about the actual "refinery".
I can image something like some giant floating city in the clouds doing "refining" of the gases all around when "in the atmosphere". Except is that even physically possible, or would such a setup only be in Star Wars via "anti-gravity magic"?
Or would it be something like giant blimps that can carry a whole refinery + launch/landing platforms for rockets?
Or something totally different, like a high eccentricity setup where the refinery/ship enters the atmosphere only temporary to get some gasses and then flies back into a higher orbit?
There's a concept involving an "air" breathing ion drive, at the upper edges of the exopshere, that can compensate for the drag of flying that low, while scooping atmospheric gasses and storing them to be delivered elsewhere once the tanks are full. The earth based version of this concept would orbit at around 150-200 km- I do not know what the equivilant would be for gas giants.
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1 minute ago, Jacke said:
What @wumpus and @tater said. I've read a lot on what I lived through: the Space Race in the 1960's. What you only get by reading enough is that was built on a lot of budgets and a lot of effort from the staff that broke lives and marriages.
Just because that level of effort now is demanded by many businesses doesn't make it right.
Which is why SpaceX preferentially hires those with no lives to break, no marriages to ruin. Let them give the best years of their life to an inspirational cause, and let them sort out their social situation when they're ready to slow down.
) it's made it into the EU Taxonomy of green projects.
NASA Human Landing System
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted · Edited by Rakaydos
We've been saying that about the Senate Launch System for years.
Fortunately there's another player in town now.