Rakaydos

I maintain my contention that the Falcon 9 costs SIGNIFICANTY less to build and lanuch than SpaceX is charging for it. Whatever the falcon 9 costs, they have no reason to price it too much lower than their competition- it's a matter of finding a price where demand meets their production speed, any lower wastes demand they cant fill

Wunderland Named for famus science fiction worlds around the same stars.

The Raptor wasnt subsidized as an upperstage engine until recently, and it's already being sent to a test stand. Either SpaceX is willing to make leaps of faith and assume applications will open up once they have hardware, or they built that raptor REALLY fast. Either way, a multi decade timeline may well be pessimistic.

Out of curiosity, is your data detailed enough to rule out an earth-moon pairing over a single super-earth? A quick look at Wolfram Alpha suggests that adding Luna cross section to Earth's would make Earth's light dip ~6% stronger, creating the false impression that Earth would be bigger than it is.

I guess it got boring.

Interesting, but I'd worry about the launch acceleration pulling out the landing engine igniter. Also, make sure your "Grid fins" have a higher drag than your "landing legs", or you may be coming down the wrong way and accordian.

Hubble will not be taken down until it is irreviviably dead. A micrometeor strike on the mirror, say. However, as this topic is a hypothetical, lets say that happened, sometime after 2025. The smithsonian wouldnt care what condition it was left in if they could retrieve enough pieces to say they have the actual Hubble Telescope. The only super-heavy payload lander currently in the works right now is being designed for SpaceXs mars ambitions... but if Elon's tweets are to be taken as gospel it should be in the right payload range to recover hubble and land it in... well, as many pieces as they found it in. It's totally not what the BFS is designed for, but SpaceX is all about multipurpose hardware. Falcon 1 Merlin being used as both lift and vacume engin for the falcon 9, Crew Dragon being designed with Red Dragon Conversion in mind- even interview responces to the tune of "well, the hardware s designed for mars, but if someone paid us we could totally land on tthe moon with it, because mars is harder." There may be other options by then, depending on how long we can keep patching hubble back together before something happens we cant patch. There could be a 1-use custom designed reentry shield lofted by ULA, or Blue Origin may be in the orbital market by then- or russia could dust off their own shuttles. But spaceX already has plans to build hardware capale of managing the task... and plan to keep building the hardware, in pursuit of their founder's personal dream. Therefre I find it likely that BFS or a successor design will still be in operation when lady luck catches up with hubble.

The MCT's BFS is designed to land 100 tons on mars, and bring 25 tons back to earth. I doubt hubble is bigger that 25 tons of assorted cargo. If the situation called for it, in however many years it takes hubble to completely die, Elon can charge the smithsonian a finders fee to recover it.

Its going to come down to some basic math. (Cost increase of port fees) x (number of flights landed before SpaceX's private spaceport comes online) vs (Cost of lawsuit to be grandfathered through the port fees)

Interesting theory, but does it make any testable hypothoses?

Fortunatly Bo Chika wont have this problem.

Well, you know how much SpaceX loves their vertical integration...

Or quickly change to a 5 engine burn just long enough to sort out which engines are underperforming.

RISE FROM YOUR GRAVE! It's now mid 2016, and MCT is back in the rumormill after Elon's statement of intent for humans going to mars early next decade. there's a contract that has someone (I think DoD) helping pay to devlop Raptor-based upperstages for the falcon 9- the same tactic SpaceX used for the Falcon 1 to develope the Merlin engine for Falcon 9. Bo Chika is breaking ground, Falcon heavy is behind schedual but should be launching in the next year, and the first Red Dragon will be sent up in 2 years, if all goes to plan. And the final MCT reveal is supposed to be in 3 months. All insider information emphasizes it's ambitious scope. Secrecy consists of "If I told you you'd think we're crazy." What a time to be alive.

AI will have Emotions... they will, however, not all be human emotions. Emotions being shortcuts, bypassing the gordian knot of logic and decision paralisis. Rage/Fear? Kill or flee. Happyness? reward cycle. An AI wont have a human concept of love, because that's related to human pairbonding, human reprodution, and thus continued human life. An AI would have something similar to a worker ant's need to be useful, because it makes the AI more likely to be the basis for furthur AIs- computer reproduction.

Arbitrarally large numbers are not, by themselves, evidence against simulation. It is impossible to prove the negative that we arnt in a simulation- it is only possible to find evidence that may suggest simulation shortcuts, like the observer effect.

Truman Show made truman the center of the universe... how much control of his life did he have?

NASA gave SpaceX a science wishlist, but SpaceX hasnt finalized a cargo yet. the mission itsolf is an engineering proving mission- even if it crashes, as long as they get good pictures of what goes wrong it's a complete success.

If the life support fails completey that early that they're on 20 times their body mass of canned supplies and run low before they get back to earth, that failing life support system needs a serious redesign.

They've already started on most of that, and only the actual construction and testing is dependant on the competion of the other events. The Raptor has been designed and tested in isolation, the bo chika pad is under construction, and Elon has stated he's going to reveal the MCT program this year, which impies at least completed paper studies for the BFR and BFS.

I dont think the 2024 date will be an actual landing. Sending BFS on a shakedown cruse PAST mars makes more sence to me.

IF it's just a long range test of the BFS's life support systems (enough to keep 100 people alive, but only actually flying a skeleton crew of 5 or so, with the other 95 person masses filled with canned air and extra scrubbers in case the test fails) with no actual mars landing... why NOT send it past mars, if you're confident it will survive the journy even if systems do fail.

"People to mars in 2024" "Life support" So lets say the rumors for the MCT BFS are true, that is designed to carry 100 people to mars. Lets furthur say that for this first mission, he only sens say, 5. That's a lot of life support mass (and payload mass) they can repurpose for canned air and CO2 scrubbers.

Olmpic runner Ue Boll could get into a stable low orbit.

SOP is Standard Operationg Procedure. The default option, one that doesnt need mentioning because it's right there in the manual.