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tater

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Everything posted by tater

  1. Atlas V has flown 87 times. This was the 86th successful recovery. Equaling Atlas V launches will have to wait until... Sunday. LOL.
  2. The SLS people have a powerful incentive to fly the thing before Starship I think. Starship completely obviates SLS regardless of when SS flies, but the egg on the face of the SLS people should SS fly first is something I assume they would like to avoid.
  3. I imagine it has to do with cadence, because they have to send an ASDS to LA to support VAFB launches.
  4. NASA has set a NET date of November on their site as well. https://www.nasa.gov/launchschedule/
  5. Literally complaining to my buddy at MCC in another window (he agrees).
  6. Watch his lecture, I think his constellation concept has multiple groups such that they pass off, and 1 is always in LOS. GEO is another possibility, but his concern there is launch costs. Launch costs that are orders of magnitude higher than what might be possible soon.
  7. Sun sync orbit, always lit. About an hour and a half:
  8. This is lounge level nonsense, and would require demonstration, I haven't met any of them, much less all of them to compare. Bezos doesn't seem like a terribly swell dude, and Gates, lol... you might want to read up on what predicated his recent divorce before calling him nice.
  9. Yeah, it's not a huge use case for Earth I think, but it is possible now in a way I had thought was not a thing. It has utility for lunar infrastructure, however. Put solar in a SSO, beam to surface during the 14 day night.
  10. A Bishop's Ring is not around the Earth (which is not possible, anyway, we have no materials that can do that circumference without breaking). It's a free-floater with the rotational axis tilted so that half is illuminated.
  11. His lecture is worth a watch. If they can get it at ~$1.77 /kWh at $17k/kg launch cost, and SS could deliver it for $177/kg that's $0.018/kWh, add a zero if SS could deliver it for $18/kg.
  12. It's a good lecture. Space based solar (beamed) was very much a dead idea, just not worth it. This looks far more plausible.
  13. There are places where solar is not terribly effective due to low insolation. The lecture about is interesting since he gets the cost per kWh at $2.55 using what he has in his lab now, and they think $1.77 was easily done (this is based on mass reduction per unit area since the cost driver here is actually the launch cost in the ~$15k/kg range). If the launch cost is 100X less... That's pretty competitive on price.
  14. No, that seems extremely unlikely. Unlikely even with SS, actually. I mean it's possible to bring up mass from Earth, but crazy. Any space construction on that level needs asteroid mining IMO. There was a talk on youtube that was posted here a few years ago (guy at Caltech) regarding double-sided photovoltaics that also had built-in microwave transmitters. They've done experiments and they think they can get the beamed power to Earth for a price that might interest the military for remote stations (like the arctic). It was still like 10X more expensive than regular power production, mind you, but it had some specific use case—the costs were predicated on launching the things with Atlas V, however. So regular prices close if launch costs are just 10X lower than Atlas V (much less 100-1000X less. That's from memory, so I might have the numbers wrong.
  15. This seems likely. Cast them around a retaining part (metal with undercut), posts are a little wider at top and snap into undercut cast into tile.
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