SunlitZelkova Posted December 8, 2022 Share Posted December 8, 2022 7 hours ago, Minmus Taster said: North Dakota having nothing in it as usual. They already get the Sentinel ICBM program. Despite the controversy around whether ICBMs are even necessary anymore (from both a disarmament and nuclear modernization view), it’s most ardent supporters in Congress just happen to be in the states with ICBM builders and where ICBMs are stationed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
StrandedonEarth Posted December 8, 2022 Share Posted December 8, 2022 10 hours ago, sevenperforce said: Let the pork flow! The Pork is strong with this one... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted December 25, 2022 Share Posted December 25, 2022 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scotius Posted December 25, 2022 Share Posted December 25, 2022 Oooohhh! Pretty! But... Where is the rest of the rocket? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Meecrob Posted December 25, 2022 Share Posted December 25, 2022 (edited) 12 hours ago, Scotius said: Oooohhh! Pretty! But... Where is the rest of the rocket? You and me both! I remember back like 2014-ish thinking " SpaceX is gonna have some serious competition soon!" Edit: I mean that as in we all wanna see awesome rockets...I'm not trying to crap on Blue Origin...I just wanna see what they come up with. Edited December 25, 2022 by Meecrob Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JoeSchmuckatelli Posted December 26, 2022 Share Posted December 26, 2022 On 12/24/2022 at 9:12 PM, tater said: Wen Hop? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scotius Posted January 20, 2023 Share Posted January 20, 2023 Wow! A fairing! ... Five years from now BO will test the other half of it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted January 28, 2023 Share Posted January 28, 2023 ? For what, exactly? BO is not much of a business, they've flown a few suborbital payloads for customers, and have delivered 2 engines to ULA. The latter is the larger contribution to developing commercial access to space, assuming they, you know, work. I want BO to succeed. I want to see more reusable launch vehicles so we have a downwards cost driver. I want to see "millions of people living and working in space" (unlikely, but I want to see it!). This award is absurd, however, the same conference has Gwynne Shotwell as a keynote—she's done far more in this area than Bezos. Heck, Peter beck has accomplished far more than Bezos in this arena. LOL, tweet was so ratioed they closed comments. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve9728 Posted January 28, 2023 Share Posted January 28, 2023 "When one of your sponsors who gave a lot of benefit to you and he want a medal, but you can't find any better excuse" Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Beccab Posted January 28, 2023 Share Posted January 28, 2023 50 minutes ago, tater said: ? For what, exactly? BO is not much of a business, they've flown a few suborbital payloads for customers, and have delivered 2 engines to ULA. The latter is the larger contribution to developing commercial access to space, assuming they, you know, work. I want BO to succeed. I want to see more reusable launch vehicles so we have a downwards cost driver. I want to see "millions of people living and working in space" (unlikely, but I want to see it!). This award is absurd, however, the same conference has Gwynne Shotwell as a keynote—she's done far more in this area than Bezos. Heck, Peter beck has accomplished far more than Bezos in this arena. LOL, tweet was so ratioed they closed comments. Just to recap, in 2022: - SLS finally launched, completing a highly successful mission - F9 made 60 orbital launches, achieving an incredible flight rate higher than even the initial hopeful Shuttle promises - China completed Tiangong's assembly, the third continously inhabited station ever - ULA and Rocketlab, both commercial entities, completed respectively 8 and 9 successful orbital flights ...all while the winner completed 3 suborbital launches, their third worst year, and the fourth launch ended with the capsule activating its abort system and the booster crashing on the ground with a big explosion - and this was over 4 months ago, since then there was zero more information released to the public about this high profile failure of a crew rated system Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
steve9728 Posted January 28, 2023 Share Posted January 28, 2023 Which part of Starlink doesn't looks like this award? Ah I see, is the angry astronomy enthusiasts who can only take photos about bright white line in the sky to consider this award. Bezos somehow didn't cause any pollution. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted January 28, 2023 Share Posted January 28, 2023 1 hour ago, steve9728 said: Bezos somehow didn't cause any pollution. Yet. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted February 14, 2023 Share Posted February 14, 2023 From Berger's article: Quote But now, we may have an answer to the question. On Friday, in a blog post not even promoted by the company's Twitter account or a news release, Blue Origin quietly said its "Blue Alchemist" program has been working on this very topic for the last two years. The company, founded by Jeff Bezos, has made both solar cells and electricity transmission wires from simulated lunar soil—a material that is chemically and mineralogically equivalent to lunar regolith. The engineering work is based on a process known as "molten regolith electrolysis," and Blue Origin has advanced the state of the art for solar cell manufacturing. In this process, a direct electric current is applied to the simulated regolith at a high temperature, above 1,600° Celsius. Through this electrolysis process, iron, silicon, and aluminum can be extracted from the lunar regolith. Blue Origin says it has produced silicon to more than 99.999 percent purity through molten regolith electrolysis. https://www.blueorigin.com/news/blue-alchemist-powers-our-lunar-future/ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AckSed Posted February 14, 2023 Share Posted February 14, 2023 If BO is setting itself up for supplying the equipment to live on the moon, and in space, I'm all for it. It's kind of needed. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Scotius Posted February 14, 2023 Share Posted February 14, 2023 Huh. Did BO decided to stop trying to become launch provider (which didn't go well for them)? Instead they are switching to much less competitive and saturated field of actually making off-world bases? Now that would be commendable decision. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted February 14, 2023 Share Posted February 14, 2023 1 minute ago, Scotius said: Huh. Did BO decided to stop trying to become launch provider (which didn't go well for them)? Instead they are switching to much less competitive and saturated field of actually making off-world bases? Now that would be commendable decision. They have not stopped with launch vehicles, but this is certainly a smart move. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 1, 2023 Share Posted March 1, 2023 https://www.space.com/nasa-blue-origin-mars-spacecraft-mission-contract NASA is paying $20M for this launch. Interesting. Will be nice to see BO actually flying, as then SpaceX will finally have a reason to lower prices. Right now they can secure any contract by bidding ULA price -$1 (realistically lower, since they don;t actually know the ULA bid, lol). But at $20M/launch, F9 prices will have to drop as well. $20M to Mars. That's a dedicated launch, not some sort of LEO rideshare price. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
sevenperforce Posted March 1, 2023 Share Posted March 1, 2023 1 hour ago, tater said: https://www.space.com/nasa-blue-origin-mars-spacecraft-mission-contract NASA is paying $20M for this launch. Interesting. Will be nice to see BO actually flying, as then SpaceX will finally have a reason to lower prices. Right now they can secure any contract by bidding ULA price -$1 (realistically lower, since they don;t actually know the ULA bid, lol). But at $20M/launch, F9 prices will have to drop as well. $20M to Mars. That's a dedicated launch, not some sort of LEO rideshare price. Very interesting. EscaPADE has a total launch mass of under 200 kg. The BE-3U is an expander bleed so I'm expecting specific impulse on the order of 445 seconds or so. Maybe a little more with that wickedly long nozzle. BO advertises 13 tonnes to GTO and 45 tonnes to LEO. More specifics in their users guide. I wonder if we can deduce anything about dry mass and propellant load from this. The BE-3Us only downthrottle to 88% of max thrust. For an LEO payload the second stage has a single 600-second burn, while in a GTO mission the second stage starts with a single 623-second burn and then performs a 99-second GTO injection burn. I was surprised, because I would expect the LEO insertion burn on a GTO mission to be shorter, not longer. The difference has to be throttling, then, but I'm not sure why they would do it quite like that. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tater Posted March 1, 2023 Share Posted March 1, 2023 2 hours ago, sevenperforce said: Very interesting. EscaPADE has a total launch mass of under 200 kg. The BE-3U is an expander bleed so I'm expecting specific impulse on the order of 445 seconds or so. Maybe a little more with that wickedly long nozzle. BO advertises 13 tonnes to GTO and 45 tonnes to LEO. More specifics in their users guide. I wonder if we can deduce anything about dry mass and propellant load from this. The BE-3Us only downthrottle to 88% of max thrust. For an LEO payload the second stage has a single 600-second burn, while in a GTO mission the second stage starts with a single 623-second burn and then performs a 99-second GTO injection burn. I was surprised, because I would expect the LEO insertion burn on a GTO mission to be shorter, not longer. The difference has to be throttling, then, but I'm not sure why they would do it quite like that. I mean they could deploy some rideshare to GTO ot LEO, then restart S2 with the Mars stuff I guess, right? It's not like there are other unknown payloads to Mars. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shpaget Posted March 2, 2023 Share Posted March 2, 2023 On 2/14/2023 at 5:53 AM, tater said: Blue Origin says it has produced silicon to more than 99.999 percent purity through molten regolith electrolysis. While that is a noteworthy achievement, isn't it still quite a few 9s away from purity needed for decent solar panels? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AtomicTech Posted March 2, 2023 Share Posted March 2, 2023 3 minutes ago, Shpaget said: While that is a noteworthy achievement, isn't it still quite a few 9s away from purity needed for decent solar panels? Couldn't you just continue to refine it? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shpaget Posted March 2, 2023 Share Posted March 2, 2023 Well, I certainly can't and BO apparently didn't, so I dunno, maybe, probably yes in the long run, but the specific tech they used may be not capable of it. There certainly are processes that can do it from regular Earthling ore. Lunar one may pose different challenges. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Piscator Posted March 3, 2023 Share Posted March 3, 2023 According to my very quick search, further purification involves repeated fractional distillation of volatile silicon compounds. So if you need a second step anyway, it probably doesn't matter very much where your raw silicon is coming from. Especially since this process typically uses feedstock of much lower purity. According to my somewhat more involved search, solar-grade silicon may be as impure as 99.9999%, so the cited "more than 99.999%" might actually be pretty close to being usable without further refining. Apparently, there is also some potential for getting away with even less pure silicon. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mikegarrison Posted March 4, 2023 Share Posted March 4, 2023 Can't they just drill for "ore" and turn it into anything they want? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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