mikegarrison

With Musk himself being the one who determines whether they make sense? That's not exactly "regulation". Or maybe just of survivor bias. There are other companies that have tried the "go fast and break stuff" idea that have ended up ... broken. In the great dot-com boom of the late 90s there were a lot of companies that burned through all their cash trying to buy market share for their great internet business idea. Some of them became Amazon and Google. Some of them became Pets.com and Webvan and eToys.com.

Not really a definition of "insane". I mean, I suppose it can be. We use the word quixotic to mean someone obsessed with a goal that is probably meaningless and may be impossible, and Don Quixote was, if possibly not "insane", clearly not thinking correctly. I am not going to judge Musk's sanity, because a) I'm not qualified for that, and b) I don't know him. But certain aspects of his public behavior (and his fanbase) are extremely unappealing to me. I am reminded of Howard Hughes (who was before my time, FWIW). Or the fictional Citizen Kane. Sometimes giving people no limits (like fantastic personal wealth and power) has bad effects on them. Or possibly, if it is not a cause, it is at least an enabler. I feel like I'm watching someone fall down a rabbit hole to a very specific kind of wonderland. And not a very nice wonderland either. The kind populated by Sad Puppies and Gamergate hashtaggers and Great Replacement believers. But Musk != SpaceX, sort of. And yet, he has such a cult of personality (and so much ownership and control of the company) that Musk very certainly is entangled with the fortunes and future of SpaceX. Possibly, if it became necessary, SpaceX could end up independent from Elon Musk. But at the moment, it is hard to visualize a path to that. Dinosaurs were on the Earth for over 150 million years (not even counting the birds). That is roughly 1000 times longer than hominids have been here. I think that if we last as long as they did, we will have done better than I expect.

Just gonna drop in here that SpaceX using Tesla cars for transporters and X-exclusive broadcasts and the like is exactly the sort of behavior that led to anti-trust laws being written in the first place. And since the ownership of those different companies is not identical, if one company gives something to another (such as SpaceX giving X valuable exclusive content), that potentially constitutes transferring value from one set of minority shareholders to a different set -- probably without their consent.

One characteristic of laser drilling is that it has a tendency to make conical holes rather than cylindrical ones, and we used to use that to our advantage with combustors. We would drill the cooling holes from the inside of the combustor, thus making each hole slightly diffusing, which helped keep the cooling air at the wall of the combustor where it was needed.

Folks, you know that laser drilling is a thing in real life, right? Used in industry all the time. No need to be guessing about this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_drilling

The book is written by a cartoonist and a worm biologist. They in no way claim to be providing a definitive "conversation ender". What they are doing is attempting to be a conversation STARTER -- about issues that are often handwaved over by space colony advocates.

Oh, and also? You've got to love a book that is willing to discuss a hypothetical war on the surface of the moon between Muskow and Bezostralia.

OK, just finished the book, and in the end ... they make a plea to all their fellow space fans to forgive them for coming to conclusion that this will be really hard to do and possibly should even never be done, but definitely should not be rushed into.

The book is titled A City On Mars, but they discuss the Moon, Mars, and space habitats.

And of course they discuss this, but their point is that it is nearly impossible to imagine any kind of wide-scale disaster on on Earth that would actually make it less habitable for humans than Mars is right now. No air, no nitrogen, toxic dirt that sometimes blows in planet-wide dust storms, high levels of radiation, low gravity....

And I have stated before that adding landing gear to an aerospace vehicle as an afterthought usually does not go well. They do have some idea how to do landing legs on the outside of a booster though, so it's probably not outside their ability.

Buildings and ships usually get assembled outdoors and more-or-less on-site. Aerospace vehicles usually don't. Doing the stacking on the launch pad is pretty much a necessary pre-req for the SpaceX vision of turnaround within hours, so it's not too surprising that they decided to try doing it right from the start. It only makes the other methods "obsolete" if it ends up working.

When talking commercial airplanes, probabilities of 10^-6 are considered significant. Of course, there are a lot more commercial airplane flights every day than space launches.

As someone who has read a lot of science fiction, the issues about social governance seem to have been long-discussed. At least, well-discussed in a fictional context. They mention that many space colony advocates seem to envision some sort of communal society, despite that the current leading proponents are both capitalist billionaires. However, there has been a *lot* of science fiction written about capitalist (or ruthlessly exploitive capitalist) space colonies. Enough so that I think even casual space fans can probably name multiple stories pointing to this being a potential problem. On the other hand, I was quite amused by the authors' description of the annoyance felt by legal scholars of space law and space treaties when they hear that supposedly no one has ever considered such issues.

stand-up guys It's a usually-considered-derogative word for a child born out of legal wedlock.

I've started reading this book, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Seems pretty good, so far. They started out wanting to write a pop-sci book about all the engineering issues and solutions that would be needed for colonizing away from Earth, but ended up becoming what they call "space *******" (the forum won't let me quote their own self-description), because what they found was just a massive number of ignored or hidden problems. Issues with law, issues with biosphere stability, issues with human reproduction, issues with social stability, etc. Looks pretty interesting. https://www.acityonmars.com

Perhaps it is worth pointing out that Starship has: 1) never been tested landing from actual re-entry, and 2) only landed non-catastrophically one time. But they probably have their reasons. Maybe they didn't include all the hardware or software it would take to attempt a soft landing.

Also, any KSP player quickly learns that you can't do an orbital insertion with aerobraking. You can do a capture, yes, but you will inescapably (pun intended) end up with an unstable orbit that is going to quickly fail. You need another burn at the new apoapsis in order to avoid that.

I do that all the time in KSP, and it works most of the time.

Better than "Barista -- temporary".

Seven months ago it was reported that ULA was up for sale, but I've heard nothing about this for months. Is it still true?

I used to do a lot of mountaineering. Glaciers are dangerous, but are also excellent ways to travel in the mountains if you are prepared for them.

The big advantage to using rocket fuel instead of rocks is that rocket fuel contains its own potential energy. It is both reaction mass and energy source. If you use rocks, that's fine for covering the "reaction mass" part, but you still need an energy source.

I have other things to do. Like play Baldur's Gate 3. Anyway, I said what I said, and don't see any point to coming back and saying it again just because some people disagreed with me.

I guarantee you there is more than water and CO2 involved. It's an industrial site.