totm nov 2023 SpaceX Discussion Thread

[mikegarrison]

I have been a reporter and and editor and an engineer. It's got nothing to do with reporters or editors being stupid.

Ever play the party game called "telephone", where one person whispers something to the next person, who whispers it to the next person, etc., and by the time it gets around the room it is nearly unrecognizable?

In this case you probably have a flow from the engineers to the managers to the public relations people to the reporters to the editors to the readers. There are many steps along the way for somebody to make a mistake in communication.

And then you have to realize that a news article is not a technical journal. In an effort to translate the information to a more general audience, it often gets a little jumbled.

1 minute ago, tater said:

(Biofuel) Doesn't work on Mars.

Are you sure? Have you tried?

If you can build some sort of chemical CO2 extractor reactor on Mars, why can't you just build an algae farm there?

Edited December 14, 2021 by mikegarrison

[tater]

10 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Are you sure? Have you tried?

If you can build some sort of chemical CO2 extractor reactor on Mars, why can't you just build an algae farm there?

Their plan for early vehicles is ISRU on Mars for a return, presumably automated. I find it hard to believe a farm would be more efficient.

How many acres would they need to cover? Then how much water?

What other gear? It certainly doesn't work without first building an environment in which to put the algae that is "not Mars" even if it's not fit for humans.

24 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

And then you have to realize that a news article is not a technical journal. In an effort to translate the information to a more general audience, it often gets a little jumbled.

I know people who have had their work in, say, astronomy, covered in the local paper. The game of telephone is prof at the U to reporter. Editor has some say. That's it. That's the Gell-Mann story, certainly. Often they miss a critical point. It's partially the fault of the person interviewed not realizing they need to say things in an accessible way, but it's also that sometimes in trying to make an analogy for non-technical people it might not be clear when things can be cut. Regardless, in this case "Falcon Super Heavy" is simply not a thing. Starship/Super Heavy has a web page at SpaceX they could check.

[Beccab]

1 hour ago, mikegarrison said:

There is already a way to take CO2 out of the atmosphere and turn it into fuel. It's called "biofuel".

1: good luck producing various thousand tons of nearly pure methane on mars, starting from an atmosphere 1% as dense as ours, as biofuel.

2: someone starts a 100 millon dollars x prize for carbon removal from the atmosphere and a 100 billion dollar company focuses on the same and your response is "meh, we already have biofuel", seriously?

Edited December 14, 2021 by Beccab

[tater]

 

[mikegarrison]

16 minutes ago, Beccab said:

1: good luck producing various thousand tons of nearly pure methane on mars, starting from an atmosphere 1% as dense as ours, as biofuel.

2: someone starts a 100 millon dollars x prize for carbon removal from the atmosphere and a 100 billion dollar company focuses on the same and your response is "meh, we already have biofuel", seriously?

Yes, seriously.

I work in this field. 100 million is a drop in the bucket compared to what is being spent by industry to develop commercially viable sustainable alternative fuel.

In a way, though, Mars actually does have an advantage in terms of CO2->fuel processing. Instead of 400 parts per million, CO2 is 950000 ppm on Mars. So it's a lot easier to pull out of the atmosphere. But of course, you still have to spend a lot of energy breaking it down to CO and O2, and then you still need water (or at least some source of hydrogen) to turn that CO into a hydrocarbon fuel.

Edited December 14, 2021 by mikegarrison

[Beccab]

2 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

develop commercially viable sustainable alternative fuel

...that's not even what the 100 millions are about? It's for large scale carbon capture and storage

[magnemoe]

1 hour ago, tater said:

Doesn't work on Mars.

 

And the process used on Mars can not be used on Earth and the other way around as the atmosphere is very different.  On mars you pressurize the air, then cool it down until most of it as in the co2 liquefy of freeze, the rest is mostly nitrogen and noble gasses. You can replicate this in an test chamber pretty easy. 

Now its probably they extract co2 from the air then they make oxygen and nitrogen, its the first thing coming out then you liquefy air after all, at 400 ppm you will not get much however. just 400 liter of co2 for 1 million liter oxygen and nitrogen. 

[AVaughan]

3 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Maybe, but somehow it's never the rich white resort communities that end up with a chemical plant or a spaceship factory right in the middle of them.

Which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. These sorts of facilities get built in the poorer neighborhoods.

If you want to build a large manufacturing facility, then one of your major expenses is probably buying or leasing land.  Acquiring large areas of land will almost certainly be significantly cheaper in a poor neighbourhood than a rich neighbourhood.

 

13 hours ago, tater said:

Checking (online as well) requires knowing what questions to actually ask.

It also requires time.   Factor in the fact that controversial subject matter probably attracts more page views (and hence ad revenue) and there just isn't an incentive for most online media to bother fact checking most articles.  More profitable for the reporter to spend the same time writing another article instead.

 

[RCgothic]

Boca Chica was just the southernmost East coast property they could get hold of. That's what a rocket launch site needs.

That's it.

[mikegarrison]

1 hour ago, AVaughan said:

If you want to build a large manufacturing facility, then one of your major expenses is probably buying or leasing land.  Acquiring large areas of land will almost certainly be significantly cheaper in a poor neighbourhood than a rich neighbourhood.

That doesn't change whether it is fair that wealthy people can say "not in my back yard" and push unpleasant things into poorer or less politically connected areas. That's the whole basis of the idea of environmental racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism

38 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

Boca Chica was just the southernmost East coast property they could get hold of. That's what a rocket launch site needs.

That's it.

Maybe. But it was also a place that had no political protection. The main residents in the area were birds and retired people on fixed income.

Want to bet that if there had been a Disney resort there instead, they would have found a way to deal with a little bit of latitude shift  and moved north up the coast a ways?

[Beccab]

14 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

That doesn't change whether it is fair that wealthy people can say "not in my back yard" and push unpleasant things into poorer or less politically connected areas. That's the whole basis of the idea of environmental racism.

"Unpleasant things"? Is Cape Canaveral or the JSC an unpleasant thing now? Even ignoring how much the economy of the whole area has grown since spacex moved there from what was one of the poorest areas of the US, I want you to find someone at the cape who thinks the rocket launches are an annoying nuisance instead of what defines 90% of the economy of the area

19 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

Want to bet that if there had been a Disney resort there instead, they would have found a way to deal with a little bit of latitude shift  and moved north up the coast a ways?

That is purely based on your own opinion on the company though, there is zero evidence either way. It's the very definition of biased

[magnemoe]

18 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:

That doesn't change whether it is fair that wealthy people can say "not in my back yard" and push unpleasant things into poorer or less politically connected areas. That's the whole basis of the idea of environmental racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism

Maybe. But it was also a place that had no political protection. The main residents in the area were birds and retired people on fixed income.

Want to bet that if there had been a Disney resort there instead, they would have found a way to deal with a little bit of latitude shift  and moved north up the coast a ways?

Main thing you want with an launch site is an lack of people at the east coast and as far south as possible. Now they could go north a bit but you would either build it in an wildlife preserve or displace people anyway because most of the coast are populated. 

[SunlitZelkova]

6 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

Maybe, but somehow it's never the rich white resort communities that end up with a chemical plant or a spaceship factory right in the middle of them.

Which is another way of saying exactly the same thing. These sorts of facilities get built in the poorer neighborhoods.

Yes. I was not trying to deny the existence of environmental racism as a whole, but in this case, I don't think race is actually involved in the issue. Whether it was a poor white community or a poor black community, SpaceX would be doing what they are doing.

On the other hand, deliberate ignorance or intentional neglect of the plight of a low income community may be present in the situation.

20 minutes ago, Beccab said:

"Unpleasant things"? Is Cape Canaveral or the JSC an unpleasant thing now? Even ignoring how much the economy of the whole area has grown since spacex moved there from what was one of the poorest areas of the US, I want you to find someone at the cape who thinks the rocket launches are an annoying nuisance instead of what defines 90% of the economy of the area

The complaints at Boca Chica are pretty serious. Floodlights forcing people to board up their windows to sleep, windows being broken, and of course the damage to the surrounding wildlife habitat as well.

"The economy has grown" is a poor indicator of the actual situation on the ground. There are plenty of communities and countries where the economy "grows" and yet a majority of people still lack quality services or basic necessities.

That is not to say these complaints warrant a complete expulsion of SpaceX from the area. But they should be listened to, and measures should be taken to address them if they are found to be justified. SpaceX hasn't really done any of this.

KSC is a poor comparison. People don't live at the same distances from KSC as they do Boca Chica, and KSC actually takes steps to reduce its environmental impact. Of course, JSC is too, because it doesn't have any launch sites.

[Beccab]

 

[wumpus]

7 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

That doesn't change whether it is fair that wealthy people can say "not in my back yard" and push unpleasant things into poorer or less politically connected areas. That's the whole basis of the idea of environmental racism.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_racism

Maybe. But it was also a place that had no political protection. The main residents in the area were birds and retired people on fixed income.

Want to bet that if there had been a Disney resort there instead, they would have found a way to deal with a little bit of latitude shift  and moved north up the coast a ways?

They certainly  would have trouble  building in Miami.  Anything not highly developed near Miami is protected Everglades, and I'm fairly sure they can't build in Key West (and launching over the Keys is probably a no go as well).  I'm guessing they also don't want to pay Hawaiian salaries (although if you advertise in Chicago during the winter, you might get bites from people who are used to expensive living).

[Beccab]

Great pics to show the mechanism of the QD disconnect here. It should be connected to the booster in the next few days, then the B4 test campaign can begin if I'm not missing anything

 

Edit: forgot to add, confirmation from another insider of B4 being for ground testing only and additional information on Booster development:

"As per comment a month ago that B4 may be swapped out. I can verify Val's post.  Static fires and testing will go ahead for B4, with an extensive validation program.  B7 canned. B8 will have 13 R2's (arrangement to be confirmed) and S23 will be fitted with SL R2's also."

Edited December 14, 2021 by Beccab

[tater]

Apparently static fire might be today.

Another F9 from FL on the 18th.

[RCgothic]

So, um, look at those raptor bells. Wonder what happened?

 

 

 

[RCgothic]

They do look pretty in situ though. We don't get this view at 39A!

 

 

 

[tater]

22 minutes ago, RCgothic said:

So, um, look at those raptor bells. Wonder what happened?

What am I supposed to see? They've all been test fired at McGregor, right? I'd expect they'd be oxidized.

 

[JoeSchmuckatelli]

1 hour ago, tater said:

What am I supposed to see? They've all been test fired at McGregor, right? I'd expect they'd be oxidized.

 

18 looks like a dent and 17 a crease - likely optical illusion, but first glance? 

[Minmus Taster]

idk why exactly it's still playing the DART launch over and over, but it's (probably) here!  

Edit: Bruh I'm so dumb XD

Edited December 14, 2021 by Minmus Taster

[RCgothic]

4 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

18 looks like a dent and 17 a crease - likely optical illusion, but first glance? 

Yeah, there was a photo highlighting various dents. I thought I was sharing that one, but they're not as obvious as I thought. Now I can't find the original tweet I saw 

[Minmus Taster]

Are you kidding? Their literally just playing the old presentation AG-

wait.

I FELL FOR THAT? I ACTUALLY FELL FOR THAT?

[tater]

They do this a lot. I click the ... and report it.