Codraroll

A Falcon equivalent operational within five years, without having any hardware and no budget at the present? I'd call that unlikely at best. Remember that it took five years from the debut of Falcon 9 until they actually landed a first stage. Sure, it might be possible given infinite funding and competent management, but ... what's the saying again? "If a fish had wheels, it would be a bicycle"? Those missing factors are, well, quite far removed from what is actually available in the present situation. And frankly, quite a bit more than Russia can be expected to make available with things being the way they are at the moment.

Of course. Impressive announcements and PowerPoint slides are cheaper than impressive hardware. As the capabilities of the Russian space program dwindle into nothing, expect their announcements to become ever more grandiose. Ars Technica had a recent article on Borisov announcing a rocket able to throw infinite payload to space by running on reusable unicorn farts, starting next week. Or, well, that's not quite what he said, but he might as well, because what he promised will be equally impossible to deliver in the time frame: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/04/russian-space-chief-says-new-rocket-will-put-falcon-9-reuse-to-shame/ Expect instead Soyuz to fly for a few more years until the budget or political situation will put a stop to manned Russian spaceflight forever.

Raptor is assumed to have reliability issues. It is assumed that there exists evidence to support this. It is also assumed that the previously debunked evidence/arguments still hold true despite aforesaid debunking. The conclusion is assumed to stand firm regardless of the amount of evidence presented against it, the weakness of evidence/arguments presented in favour, and the lack of any solid evidence. The basic assumption may be questioned, but no answer will be provided. Such is the way.

Looks slightly smaller than the type of lens paparazzi use to take pictures of various royal families on vacation from mountaintops ten kilometers away.

Depends on the coinage. If I were in a boat and a pallet with $60M in pennies was falling towards me, I'd try to get the heck out of there.

Artillery shells and tank shells are kind of different beasts, though. For an artillery shell, you'd use measures like this to extend the range of the shell, since its job is to hit targets as far away as possible. A tank shell, meanwhile, fires in a near-straight line at relatively close ranges, and needs to pack as much kinetic energy as possible when it impacts the target, preferably as quickly as possible after firing. Although the reasons why it doesn't work tends to be the same for either: fitting a ramjet into the relatively tiny package of the shell takes away space for explosives and fragmentation material, so the ramjet shell will have a rather puny effect wherever it's hitting compared to a conventional shell. It might have its use against time-sensitive high-value targets, though, for instance, a high-ranking officer who visists the troops to deliver a rousing speech to motivate his men to drive golf carts into the minefields for the glory of the mad czar, or a helicopter that lands to drop off troops or restock ammunition. Those are usually key targets that present themselves for a very short duration, and need to be hit right after they are spotted before they are gone to have another drink again. However, I don't think it'd be ideal to make such ammunition for the 155 mm guns. Guided rocket artillery already have the range, higher effect on target, and the mission profile fits better into its part of the organization chart: you don't need to give the long-range "surgical strike" missions to the battalion-level artillery with the 155mm guns, whose job it is to spew out shells at the enemy forces in the battalion's rather limited operation area. Better give the job to the more specialized brigade artillery, with heavier rocket artillery and a purpose that's more along the lines of "strike where needed in a very large area". They also say ATACMS, a rather heavier missile system, is great for "assassinations" like this. They have a short flight time, a long range, and need little time to prepare a fire mission (unlike, say, cruise missiles, which need a whole trajectory to be plotted). And they come in at very high speed, making it hard for the target to prepare for their arrival. They're ideally suited to fire at stuff like, say, a train loaded with fuel or ammunition just as it passes a key bridge.

I suppose it could also have its use for naval guns, where you have a bigger calibre to work with and longer ranges to be covered by the projectile. Then again, at those ranges, you would probably want a rocket booster to get the hypersonic penetrator up to speed anyway, and just launch it as a missile instead of bothering with those huge and cumbersome guns.

I must say I preferred Artemis, but I can see how it would be much harder to adapt. And Project Hail Mary wasn't a bad book either. I really hope they will be as rigorous with the physics as the book was, though.

Same old bunk as always. What does it come from, this obsession to defend a bogus conclusion using whatever bogus straws you can grasp, often submitted multiple times even after thorough debunkings as if repeating them would make them any truer? Put simply: your conclusion is wrong and the arguments don't hold up. They never have. You've been told many times. Yet you still harp on the same indefensible story and refuse to accept it as bunk. Why is that? This behaviour comes across as borderline obsessive and highly irrational.

Of all the bad ideas ... Never have I seen someone so enthusiastic about discussing space, science, and fiction, while also being so extremely disinclined to actually learn anything about either topic. That being said, lying down on a gimballed couch, like in The Expanse, is something that vaguely resembles what you're looking for. That way, the pilot always gets the G forces front-to-back. It probably is no good arrangement for a fighter craft, though, as it requires a lot of space.

Ah, yes, I was wondering whether this pathological fixation on concluding against all evidence that Starship doesn't have any lift capacity was separate from or a part of the already-demonstrated pathological fixation on concluding against all evidence that the Raptor engine is unreliable. Thanks for providing the missing link.

On the other hand, we are talking about Starlink satellites, which are approximately as expendable as non-expendable payloads get. They've launched almost six thousand of the little fellas by now, about a thousand per year. They reported building six Starlink satellites per day back in 2020. It would not be a bank-breaking gamble to put a few on the next Starship flight, if only to test how well Starship can carry and dispense them. If it works, hey, bonus Starlinks in orbit! And if not, well, they can probably afford to lose a few.

I was watching the liftoff in awe, and re-entry quite slack-jawed. That footage of the hypersonic air stream and re-entry plasma in real time was gorgeous. Quite mind-boggling that they were able to broadcast the footage even as the spacecraft was tumbling through the atmosphere in a stream of plasma so bright that the Earth itself wasn't visible next to it. That struck me as well. Quite aside from the whole re-entry thing, what Starship just did was to bring more mass to orbit than SLS ever could, at a vastly lower cost than even the side boosters of SLS, and there's a mass production line of these already up and running. It wouldn't take much adaptation of the already proven concepts of Starship to far outperform everything SLS dreams of doing. Even when treated as an expendable two-stage rocket, with all the waste it implies, Starship still does more than SLS does, for less. I will definitely keep this excellently consise summation of Exoscientist's whole posting history for future use.

Doing a half-decent job of imitating a Beatles cover while they are at it.

Is this pathetic attempt at whataboutism in any way relevant to the topic at hand, which is the state of the Russian space agency?

Well, at this point it's them and the North Koreans. Syria, Eritrea, and Nicaragua presumably don't have the funds for a space program.

All right, time for a short one. Every high school student knows the measure of pH for the acidity of aqueous solutions. The H is always upper-case because it stands for "Hydrogen ion exponent". It's essentially a measure of how much free Hydrogen ions there are going around in the solution. Interestingly, whatever the p stands for has long been lost to history, or was never clear to begin with. The Danish chemist who introduced the term never gave any explanation why he chose the letter p in particular, why it was lower-case, or whether he meant it to stand for any word. It has even been suggested he picked the letter arbitrarily because he liked to use the letters "p" and "q" the same way mathematicians use "a" and "b". Modern chemistry has scrambled to ret-con the p into meaning something like "power" or "potentiality", or the like, but neither has gained any definite dominance. We've just accepted that there is a little p there, without fully understanding why. And now it's too ubiquitous to replace with something more sensible.

Wasn't the annual target usually around 50 before they stopped announcing them? But yeah, good luck finding extra money for manned spaceflight in the current budget situation. Not to mention the one in a couple of years. If there even is a budget by then, things will already have gone more favourably than many are expecting.

Your first challenge would be to get it anywhere. Even if it ran on pure annihilation, it would still weigh billions of tons. Although it probably wouldn't matter much where on the planet you set it off. By the way, why 3 yottatons in the first place? Why not 1 or 2 or 5 or a more round number?

Starship didn't explode in the PowerPoints either.

In a way, that is exactly what it's built for, after all. For some value of "truck", anyway.

Never mind dirigibles. A nano-porous material with closed pores that contain no gas is the holy grail for insulation scientists everywhere. Since most insulation materials are based on stationary gas in pores, the total thermal resistance of the material is limited to that of the gas. So-called vacuum insulation panels overcome that limit by encapsulating the material in a diffusion tight envelope and pumping the gas out. They are extremely effective in theory, but using them in practice is like covering a building in balloons - which they effectively are, only with the pressure on the outside instead of the inside. That means nothing can be cut or punctured, and you can simply forget on-site adjustments. But a material that could sustain its own vacuum ... that would be a revolution worth trillions. Take the length of all the exterior walls in a building, multiply by 20 cm or so. That's the cost savings in building area alone.

You get that in more densely populated countries too. And besides, not everyone will always want to live out in squirrel-land where you have to drive for ten minutes to get to a grocery store and an hour on the six-lane freeway to get to work.

Let's hope it's a game about being nice to each other. A game in the vein of Stardew Valley, perhaps, about moving to a new town and being nice to everybody else? I'd call it "Harvester Moon".

No, it is evidence that the new flight termination system works. The explosions had absolutely nothing to do with the engines, as has been pointed out repeatedly.