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Codraroll

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Posts posted by Codraroll

  1. 2 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

    That's hard to find reasonable... Starship hasn't reached orbit yet, and it seemingly hasn't maintained attitude control in zero-g, either. Who would put a non-expendable payload on it before it's been proven more capable? (Maybe some Star Trek red shirted crew want to go for a ride?)

    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.

  2. 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.

    5 hours ago, tater said:

    “we are watching the end of SLS”

    quote from someone at MCC relayed to me

    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.

    5 hours ago, sevenperforce said:

    It appears that literally anything that does or does not happen during any test will be interpreted by you to support your pet theory about Raptor reliability.

    I will definitely keep this excellently consise summation of Exoscientist's whole posting history for future use.

  3. 7 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

    Another US probe decided to join Luna-27 club, together with that one with human remains, lost a month ago.

    https://www-interfax-ru.translate.goog/world/948591?_x_tr_sl=ru&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=ru&_x_tr_pto=wapp

    Happily, we understand, that it's just a chain of accidents, not a system problem.

    But technically yes, while Luna-27 was lost in midair (midvacuum), Nova has dived deeper and kissed the surface.

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

  4. 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.

  5. 13 minutes ago, DDE said:

    Borisov: Roscosmos to perform "more than 40" launches in 2024

    https://ria.ru/20240219/roskosmos-1928185605.html

    2023 - 19

    2023 - 21

    2022 - 24

    You smell that? Do you smell that?... Budgeting pitch, fellas. Nothing else in the world smells like that.

    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.

  6. 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?

  7. 1 hour ago, AckSed said:

    Funny you should say that. A vacuum can be sustained inside an aerogel pressure vessel, and with a bit of engineering of the materials, scaling up to a dirigible should be theoretically possible: "Approaching air buoyancy in aero/cryogel vacuum vessels" Journal of Materials Science 57, 2022

    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.

  8. 47 minutes ago, Nuke said:

    not really big on urbanization of all the things, i like seeing squirrels on the power lines, up to the point where they unwittingly become shunt resistors. 

    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.

  9. 4 hours ago, Exoscientist said:

     The fact the SH/SS keeps exploding in flight is evidence the SpaceX little 5 second burns are insufficient to qualify the Raptor for flight.

    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.

  10. 5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

    Dragon, Starliner, Dreamliner, and all that crowd of American companies. who are competing to each other in visiting the depleted (almost derelict) ISS, and the planned Axiom. They are, who you are laughing at. They are NYX competitors.

    The Ariane rockets also face stiff competition from Falcon 9 and other US rockets, but Europe will still pay for its production, to maintain its own launch capacity. For the same reason, NYX will probably be funded despite competition from the US capsules. Earlier, there was a certain willingness to fall back on Soyuz for that task (as Russia was seen as a relatively European country), but that option is now off the table, making NYX more urgent than its cancelled predecessors.

  11. 3 hours ago, tater said:

    They've signed an agreement with Axiom as well. They say delivery to Axiom/ISS by NET late 2027 (which we all know means 2028, lol). So aiming for a test flight to station in 4 years?

    Let's see ... late 2027, that's four years away. Any space-related promise relating to delivery more than two years in the future, has a roughly 50% chance of not happening at all. But for the remaining 50%, we can apply the rule for the next time window (delivery between six months and two years from now): add 50% to the time elapsed from the present day to the promised delivery.

    So overall, I'd say a 50% chance of delivery by late 2029. Still better odds than Oryol.

  12. 1 hour ago, Exoscientist said:

    We are incredibly proud to be the 1st private company in #Europe () to hot fire a staged-combustion upper stage for its full duration.

    Doesn't sound like "Standard industry practice" to me, if you find 1 (one) example of somebody doing it, and they are the first to do so.

  13. 1 hour ago, Scotius said:

    Oh, there IS some real hardware?

    Wow.

    Maybe wonders will never cease? Maybe this thing will actually fly one day?

    I think the "System requirement review" is long before any hardware production. They have basically just finalized a list of specifications the design needs to meet, and now they are ready to start designing it.

    It will probably fly before the Orel, though.

  14. 9 hours ago, Exoscientist said:

     I’m making a serious charge here. I’m suggesting SpaceX knows the Raptor is unreliable and is obscuring that fact both from the NASA and the American public.

    No, you're making that conclusion first, and then trying to find whichever flimsy pieces of evidence or erroneous methodologies you can come up with to defend it. Those pieces of "evidence" have been unmasked as bogus, and the methodologies you try to apply are extremely lacking. This has been shown every single time, by people with way more patience than I have. It includes repeatedly comparing the Raptor to engines, components, or rockets that do not even exist.

    I suggest to take a step back and review what you're doing here. If neither the data, the background theory, nor the methodology hold any water, why should you try to defend the conclusion time and time again, usually from scratch after the last attempt was torn to pieces?

  15. The excuse for dumping boosters on houses like this was usually "the civilians are evacuated in advance". But if they are close enough to the crash site to film the stage impacting the ground, would that even count as evacuation? I mean, the booster might just as well have come down where the person with the camera was standing. One would think that the booster could potentially come down anywhere within an area several kilometers across, and it'd be just as likely to be on top of the evacuees' heads as on their houses.

    Fortunately, it seems they were at least aware it would be coming and had plenty of time to spot it as it fell - potentially enough to make like a tree and get out of there if it was headed for them.

  16. On 12/22/2023 at 5:28 PM, kerbiloid said:

    To the great surprise of ... let's see ... no raised hands at all.

    The one good thing about Hyperloop is that it raised awareness of "gadgetbahns"; those spectacular infrastructure works that promise to revolutionise transport but end up inventing a poorer version of the bus/tram/train/taxi.

    In the case of Hyperloop, it was a system with the space requirements of a railway system, but the capacity of a bus ... while having to tolerate an environment comparable to a high-altitude air liner. That makes it heckishly expensive, and unable to capitalize on its speed, which would be its biggest advantage if built as intended. Not to mention the risks of some technical failure or other.

    All that came together to make the decisionmakers say "ain't no way we're paying to build that stuff", which would make it quite clear that the company was doomed to end like it did. But I guess the key people got to claim quite hefty consultancy fees to hang on at the company for a while, so it might have worked out just fine for all involved parties. I wonder what happened to that demonstration capsule they built out of an old aircraft, though.

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