PB666

I saw nothing but a successful flight with a bit of an annoying/confusing telemetry display. I saw nothing that would indicate the flight had failed. EDIT: This will be my last response on the topic, I was correcting an entirely incorrect statement that was off-topic in this thread to begin with, the moderators are cracking down on off-topic so if you want to respond take it to the Ariannespace thread.

Somehow briefly go translated into images showing the satellite barreling back to Earth. There is reality and hype, given the modern overexposure to hype, they should be easily distinguished.

ArianeSpace had a great day, three payloads separated.

Here we go again, the little chimpmunks are once again running around in their treadmills.

This is not travel on the high seas where the air is pressurized, autorecycled. . . . . .humas are very expensive in such space craft, the would spend more time tying to keep themselves alive. Voyager probes (both) are still running after more than 40 years without human intervention.

Actually your probably could undo extinction the new DNA techniques nwo allow you to basically tranform certain genes without removing from their native cells from knowledge about extinct species to reconsitute the traits, but you would have to know what all the SNP variance means, as well as the occasional insertion and deletion. You could, with enough DNA same create a few woolly mammoths. In my work we found that some SNPs in gene deserts 100,000s of nucleotides from any know genes had meta-analysis confirmation, its not clear how they are meaningful. But in the case of extinct species you cannot do risk analysis on something dead for 10,000 years so you cannot apriori know if a mutation is just random drift or an SNP that has undergone selection. Whether you call it a species or something else is a matter of debate, there is a definition of what animal species are, and the phraseology is extensive abused and used inappropriately. We call a dog a dog, and its species was, up tom about 20 years ago Canis domesticus, its a wolf, a coyotes is either a species of wolf or a subspecies or a gradient species depending on who you talk to. If you converted an Asiatic elephant embryo into a woolly mammoth it would still be an Asiatic elephant until you produced enough to create a breeding population, Again the DNA technologies (CrispR) to allow the sensing and recombinant replacement of nucleotide sequence you could get back to a woolly mammoths and it would no longer be an Asiatic elephant even at the level of random drift. If you did this sampling enough ancient DNA you cold create a viable population of individuals and you could continue to use CrispR to add variation (e.g. add elephant variation to MHC genes). The woolly mammoths would not have innate immunity to diseases over the last 10,000 years so you would have to create vaccines and immunize them for every thing they might contact. But over time if you gave them a minimal herd immunity they could evolve their own defensive traits. Could you put them anywhere, Antarctica if it substantially warmed, There are also the krugerland Islands. Without predators they would lose their tusks, they would lose their fear of predators, it would just be a zoo. I would like to see what would happen if someone tried to recreate them, its an incredibly expensive undertaking and the pygmy mammoths might be a good place to start. I don't think they are trying to evolve new species (certainly dinosaurs would not be possible, the best you could do is go back to the last common ancestor of all birds), certainly there sauropod dinosaurs can never be built. They are talking about gene substitution on a massive scale in some living relative to recreate an extinct species. I agree with you about the Videos, many of them I start watch and just quit, too too much speculation and repetition of common knowledge. I wish DAL would stop spamming them and at least use a paragraph to describe the contents.

Oh well, you were doing fine until this. But then again I think most sci-fantasy and sci-fi is really bad with physics and economics (economics really being the post neolithic ecology of humans), except HHGTG because it makes good sport of all the rest of them. Noone, of course, pays attention to me. I think Stargate Universe was the most realistic (far from being realistic on a physical scope, but does show the cost being done to do instellar things) and it was quickly cancelled, too dark. And phrasing it this way we can argue one of several things. FTL may be possible, I seriously doubt that it is, K2 thinks it might be possible. But if it is possible the forces involved are incredibly risky and probably incompatible with living. So from that point of view if you wanted to blow up a ship one good way of [handwaving] is warping to about 100 meters from that ship and stopping. Of course you would also be dead, and all that matter that was being carried that the gravity, light, muons, nutrinos, . . . . .carried in its well in front of your craft would suddenly expand into space with the force that particles experience during a supernova. There is no mechanism other than exiting our Universe, whereby you travel FTL and then somehow come out and you are alive. You would have to warp into something (Some call it hyperspace< but hyperspace is just space time). And when they enter hyperspace there is something already in it, which defeats the reason for using it. You want a parallel universe that has no matter or light that only you cross into and exit from that is curling the spot that you want to be to the position where you enter . . .a hyperspace manifold. So again this is if and if and if then so basically it just bunky . Sci-Fi. Jumpgates, Stargates, . . . . . all rely on point energy densities that are incompatible with human existence. But lets say that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcubierre_drive is possible first of you need alot of energy, not a little, most of your ship is going to comprise of contained antimatter, you are essentially creating a matter-less black hole in front of you ship and an antigravitational black hole behind it. Your ship is not a warship so much as its a bomb. You would not eject the antimatter container because that container would comprise much of your ship. Not only that the bigger the warp bubble, the more energy you would need, so that you want a really spherical compact ship with energy concentators at the front and antigravity generator at the back. The third thing is that once you get people into space, unless you are trashing the rif-raff in your society (and it almost always better to recycle their nutrients in space) you don't what to be throwing that at your enemies. So as a matter of fact the better the drive and warship, the less people you want to have on it, and the more automated the systems would have to be. AI is also part of star trek, if you see the new series one of the commanders is transported away from the battle when it was found that the risk of death was too great. The food synthesizer are a form of AI, the transporters are reconstructing the pattern buffers, etc. All this stuff is done by the computer and the users are throttle throwers or button pushers. Its almost better that if you are space fairing, and you know someone is going to attack you just to leave and mine your space with hard to detect weapons, attacking them at their home planet is pretty dumb unless they are some sort of galactic superthreat. So without AI I don't see a valid sci-fi that also supports a decent crew.

If I could give this five likes I would.

And plit-down man was considered to be an intermediate between apes and humans that lived once in Europe. The number of debunk-able theories out there far exceeds theories with substantial enough support, whenever you lead an argument with 'this theorist said' in the context of soft science, unless the argument begins with here we had these competing lines of thought, its basket fodder. See Langford JHE 33 as an example of bunk trying to debunk with bunk. You could ask the same question, how likely was it that T. rex was only a scavenger. In either case you are asking what it the likely hood of an extreme behavior when the plurality of relevant living examples are not extreme. That's the point. The question that is being ask what evidence, if any might support the extreme. The null hypothesis basically states that you stick with a foundation until something with data comes along that makes you abandon that hypothesis. So that anyone who proposes an extreme hypothesis without also providing the evidence of that extreme hypothesis is by default, debunked. You really don't want to get me started on paleontology, i can shred the science of 40 ago into pieces without breaking a sweat. Only arguments that scientifically holistic in the approach have meaning. For example human paleoanthropology before genetics and serious climate modeling and a whole bunch of physics (essentially before 1980) was bunk, and people made alot of money selling bunk. Many popular theories are now in the garbage bin.

I plotted these, F9 comes off the launch pad at 1.25 m/s or so, there is a bit of a bounch after they release the clamps but it settles down and then runs up to about 1.25 within a couple of seconds. So that when the engines reach a thrust required to lift that launch clamps come up it rises at minimal lift for about 3 seconds and then goes to full throttle. As a general statement about what it is and what it does. Consider that if you launch with a TWR at 2, you could rise up to M0.8 but then you would end up throttling down to 0.6 power until past Max Q and then back up to 80% power at some later point. There is a logic in doing that, but if there is lag between thrust requirement and actual application it might not be a good choice. Clarification: They could use full thrust on FH liftoff but I doubt they will, they probably will lift of similarly, sparing the forces on the launch clamps and boost power a few meters over the pad. I have to repeat this, they don not know how bad Q-side forces will be, So I don't believe they will hit at full velocity quickly and instead use a more constant acceleration to max Q, sparing power on the core in order to avoid placing to much stress on the boosters. And if I was in there shoes I would have a ton of sensors on the nosecones of the boosters to measure those forces. I know that most of you know this but just a little reminder, the slower the climb, the more wasteful in fuel, but the higher the altitude in which you encounter max Q and the lower the pressure is at max Q.

In response to Brotoro . . . . .Plutos mass has not been estimated to that level of precision.

I think the question is being asked is a correct question but one that can be replaced by a better question . . .how likely is it that T. rex is only a predator. From predators to herbivores . . . the entire spectrum. How common is it when looking at all animals that we find animals that only eat what they kill. If you do this you find that the only examples pertain to certain lineages, for example snakes generally won't eat something they did not kill. If you put a rat and a rattlesnake in a cage, and the rat bites the snake, the snake may envenom the rat, but if he does not eat it soon after, he just leaves it and waits for the next rat to be thrown in. As you move into the warm-blooded animals that are social, they tend to have higher learned behaviors, these behaviors allow them to learn for example to create a learned behavior that when something is this level of dead, you can eat it, and beyond that level of decay you leave it. Most mammalian carnivores practice this and most birds also practice this to some degrees (I've seen bald eagles chomping down on dead cows). Crocodiles, Birds, Mammals, Turtles for the peak predators all practice this. So the question based on the dinosaur lineages and based on the their dentate, etc how likely is it that the were strict carnivores in the sense that they never scavenged. The answer is that it is not very likely, but still possible. Here are some scenarios, T rex might have had a community of other animals that followed it, potentially indicators species (like the honey-catcher, humans and lions of Gujarat) where the indicator informs the hunter this is the prey, he kills, eats the choice bits, his entourage eats the rest, he moves on. This is just an example where the waste works, in the case of farmers its to their benefit the lions kill as many competitors as possible, even if they don't eat them. Another situation is that he kills, the offspring eat the remains, and he/she moves to the next prey, and since the offspring could be endangered by claim-jumping other kills, then the hunter then just quickly moves from kill to kill and leaves a trail of partially dead bodies. So there are potential examples were T.rex only killed or at a certain stage of life only kills (but at another stage of life only eats what other T.rex have killed). So there are complex reasons why they might or might not have killed. We have to look at pre-KT as a sort of 'other-earth' in that the smaller organisms were more accessory, this system evolved over 100Ms of years and so trend in the inter-species interactions between apex predators and the system may have been evolved, complex and advanced but with an Achilles heal, the ability both to survive the social advances in mammals and the effects of a catastrophe. The dinosaurs did survive in a genetic context, but the apex predators did not, that component was completely eliminated and replaced. We really cannot, today look backwards with any reasonable certainty and estimate the complexities of these interactions. So that its best to generalize, for example T. rex was a meat eater that commonly killed.

Also they often generate one last pulse of data gathering as the plummet.

Even at 70'N it can be useful. There is no doubt that cutting edge technology can be useful, but for most people the technology they are familiar with was often invented decades ago. The durable glass on the smartphone was invented about 2 decades before it was used for some completely different application (something like durable windows for space craft) and was never seriously used in that application. When I was getting out of college people were talking about bucky-balls and this kind of thing. Diffraction gratings for spectral analysis was invented (I don't even know 1920s) but were never seriously used for bulk photospectronomy until 1980s. Just because something is the latest tech does not mean it has been reworked for a highly specified usage. For example, I would not take any current computer into space (having just built one), the basic problem is that for instance, the demands on power supplies are much more finicky than past computers. There are several computers I owned I never replaced a power supply, never even thought of replacing a power supply, I have 40 year old pieces of equipment that I threw away that still had the original power supplies working in them. I have computers that are 6 months old and are on their 3rd power supply. This is amazing because I tend to chose processors and video on the performance inflection point (generally means 4 or 5 years old relative to peak performance). The panels on the ISS are massive, each Bus is something like 14,000 kg. We don't even consider the power per unit weight I once calculated it to 20kg per sq. meter or something like that. But of course none of them have failed, the ISS, of course is over built, but its not overbuild by a magnitude. This means that in order to get the power/weight issue down some very huge near future change needs to occur. Yes we can use carbon fiber (weight is 1/3rd) yes we can use superconducting materials, sure its possible to get more efficient. But there also tradeoffs. If you are at a high elevation and at 70'C you are pretty much above any scattering layer, you have very little atmospheric scattering (except in the UV spectrum) so that you can horizontally look through the atmosphere with less scattering than on Earth. The problem is that as you get further north during part of the year you have great sun, but during part of the year you have no sun or only a few hours per day. In terms of panel disposal, this is going to be a thing on Mars were absolutely you have to recycle the panels. There is no situation on Mars were hunting for rare-earth minerals will be profitable or feasible. But on the other hand, since bulk panels are flat, reasonable density, they can be shipped and while they are being shipped they don't loose performance, and given that they are flat they can be made into basically a giant aero-foil and landed on mars with little waste. So if we had a ION powered space tug, we could not to expensively ship lots of panels to Mars. BFR however is not a space tug. BFR is to tugging what Fed-Ex is to bulk-materials shipping. Remember that the most popular electric cars also have chemical engines, they are still using basically 1930s battery technology. A hybrid is much more about the drive system (engine off time) than it is about the battery. The materials they are discovering today, for example graphene based materials, 20 or 30 years, much less if the gov't says we want you to apply these things into space technologies now.

It is th best but its not suitable for everywhere on Mars. The less suitable the spot, the more infrastructure that will need to be added. Lets give a example, Suppose NASA spots a great place to put a space base next to a crater with Frozen water at the bottom. Say 65'N, IOW it can get sunshine all year round, just barely in the winter months. The facility would be close to the bottom of the crater, were are the panels going to be. They will be at the top, and during the winter those panels will be facing the horizon, which means panels on the surface are not suitable, on the bright side dust will not be a problem, on the bad side any solar wind that hits the panels that come through the thinnest part of the atmosphere will basically exert their full electric force on the panel. Again such a panel would need to be electrically transformed and a long two-wire conductor will have to go from that site to the water extraction site. So we abandon all sites that are above say 45 degrees N that are close to water. Since the energy flow is slow in the time of the year you need the most heat then you need NTGs or RTGs to generate power during the off period (or move the denizens to a more suitable spot). So if you go to the equator, how far down do you dig before you need to hit water, again that has a different weight cost. If water is not close to the surface it needs to be elevated (mah) and then it needs to be purified (kCal/mole cost). Finding water in space is alot easier than dealing with the water limits on Mars. I mean you could dig a very deep pit on Mars equator and hurl directed blobs of Ice into the pit. That is a solution.

You pat yourself on the back too soon, Juno's panels weight 340 kg and they are 3 x 2.7 x 8.9 or 72.09. Therefore they weigh 4.7 kg per meter. Again I am being very generous about power per unit weight for Mars.

You are blowing off all the other mass you need, essentially. Even I am being too too generous, the power production per kilogram in any panel, today, ready to ship and be stationed on Mars has a far lower KW/mass.

The thin films are not electronically robust enough to survive a solar storm. You could not really tilt them, without adding alot of mass. Solar storms that hit mars are not an issue of mass flow, they are an issue of charge flow. If you can imagine a wave of charged particles hitting mars at an oblique angle the charge that accumulate on one side of the panel could be in the 10s of 1000s of volts relative to the other side. Since Mars has no van Allen belts there is no way for the electric charges to interact (force particles around) to neutralize or to dissipate the magnetic field. Then the problem is what in the atmosphere will slow down these charged particles. The electrons will avoid the electric dipoles of CO2 and the delta positive is shielded by the dipole, the positively charged proton is very small. If we recall the de Broglie hypothesis that every particle has a wavelength according to its inverse momentum. Then the wavelength of a proton as it travels is much smaller than an electron, its less likely to collide. Its going to continue traveling thorough the atmosphere of Mars until it has something magnetic or negatively charged to interact with. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geiger–Marsden_experiment shows that interaction, even with alpha particles for a plane of gold molecules is very small. Again don't think of Mars atmosphere in total of behaving like Earths. Earths atmosphere is 3000 times denser, it protected by a magnetic field and van allen belts.

Supply and demand curves shift with economic forces, as the willingness of providers to provide at lower cost, the basis shifts and the demand increases, I don't think their market is yet saturated.

That would not be very KSPish, I know every one wanted to see a booster go spiraling off at an angle followed by a large explosion and the "F3" screen suddenly appearing.

Well let's just see, I calculated the power output of 137 watts per meter at 22.8% OK so lets see what power efficiency is for space ready solar materials. (Reference: National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) - National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), Golden, CO − United States Department of Energy website image explanatory notes) And we select the highest of space stable of 33%, so that we can get 200 watts. Again this is only going to be, for a panel lying on the ground, 1/3rd of a Martian day. So that average power production per day per meter is going to be 66.6 W. But I have to state that no solar panel in space (or Mars) will ever get this even, because the panels are drawn out over an area that contains diodes, joints wiring ect. On the ISS solar arrays the panels form less that 1/3rd of the area, so you're not going to be able to hand wave those wastes away. I repeat that thin film solar arrays are only feasible if you have already in place a regime of power conduction end stochastic event protection (dust and storm abatement) if you don't have the weight for these in the system, you are essentially digging a hole on Mars and throwing solar panels into them.

You've made an error, I will figure it out. Its 32.8 kW per solar array of 34x12 at maximum power, (80 kw/meter) I think that one solar array is nearly always in the Normal position (not relevant). 16,400 solar cells in 8x8cm = .08 x .08 = 0.0064 m2 so total area exactly is 104.96 m2 These are then spread into 35x12 meters by sets of folds and joins. If we look just at power production per solar cell area its 320 watt per meter, if we were to convert this to mars its (149/227)2 * 320 = 137.87. So that if we were using the ISS's solar cells, perfectly compacted to form a continuous place, its 137.87 watts per sq.meter.

I am considering the average location, IOW where ever the water is, not where the sunlight is. . . . . . . The average I take at 150 w/meter2. If I am not mistaken the panels on the ISS are 2?? watt per square meter, and again Mars is 3/2 the distance so its basicaly 4/9th that on Earth, so 150w/sq.meter is being generous with what is being placed in space. We have to remember one thing, if you are hauling solar panels all the way from Earth to Mars, you could bring the most efficient which is 42% (@622 W/meter) then you are basically going to have 261 watts per meter _But_ that efficiency declines quickly because of the instability and hole problems. If you take the most stable panel they will last longer 25 to 50 years, potentially 75 is you use very expensive contacts for electrical conduction but their efficiency is going to be low. The highest efficiency panels lose 15% of their efficiency within 100 solar days and decline slowly after that. They are not going to haul the solar panels back or abandon them, that would be dumb. Panels that last a long time are desired. The second thing is that you do want panels that tilt, tilting is very useful, although there is not much dust suspended in the martian atmosphere, when there is dust there tends to be alot of it (winds sometimes blow in the 2 and 3 magnitude range), and thus you want to to tilt those panels to an inverted angle. So that the weight estimate is actually an under estimate for any long term use of panels. There is a third problem with panels on Mars that is far less of a problem on Earth. CO2 the major gas on mars is not really a magnetic dipole and it lacks polarity, while there is a two minipoles in CO2 they offset each other. Thus the magnetosphere does very little work on CO2 and thus CO2 provides little shield, and although it can pass current it generally could be considered an insulator again, putting electrons on either oxygen is not going to be a thing since the Oxygens are electron withdrawing, you might get an electron to bind the carbon or a proton to delta+ on the oxygen but again not a great charge carrier in the martial atmosphere, ionizing CO2 therefore would not either be easy and little work it expected. Although, I must point out that scientist believe that Mars has lost CO2 as a result of ionization and magnetic forces, this is slow relative to water. From this consideration the magnetic and electric fields that give rise to the power within solar storms is not going to be sufficiently deprecated in the Martian atmosphere to protect sensitive electronics, and the voltage potential across any sufficiently long object is expected to be, at times (very very brief periods of time) to be extreme, extreme enough to damage electronics (which typically have sensing voltages of 5 or less). As a consequences during any intense ION storm we expect electrical pressure along traverses on Mars. For long term panel stability this is a problem, on the Hayabusa spacecraft two of the panels were rendered inoperable because of the dark-spot activity. The ISS is largely immune because its orbit is close to Earth, but any true polar spacecraft can expect this (an maybe a reason that there are almost no true polar spacecraft). So having 1 meter wide panels is not very wise, smaller panels that have scavenger wires of alternating positive and negative wires would protect the panels by attracting current to the wires and into some kind of current buffer. There's another problem also, because if you are using large panels you want to use huge step voltages, and this compounds the problem, versus smaller panels the voltage is lower but carry more amps and has some excess capacity. Imagine that we have a step voltage of say 1400 V, which will be the case at the edge of some (the last) p-type semiconductor, then this would be extremely attractive to any negatively charged IONs coming in from space, if the n-type connector is harder to access, then the corresponding positive charge will have an extreme attraction to any part of the system that is less insulated. If you are running alot of isolated parallel panels then they are easier to shield and if one is damaged the damage will be less damaging to the entire system. I consider 150 W/panel at a kg per meter for a large protective system to be very generous. This idea that we can have a roll out of a panel of say 0.00001 to 0.001 meter thickness is not feasible on mars unless you already have some protective enclosure for the panel, not realistic This is why I say, don't tell me anything you are going to do on Mars without first telling me how you are going to power it. Power = f(mass) and acceleration = thrust / mass and also dV=f(acceleration)*burn time. If someone handwaves in alot of power, I have to handwave behind Their back -dV.

Quite the opposite, I am disappointed that they with-drew the prize. Its this circumstance, suppose I have a 100 meter tall building and I say to 5 competitors (Say its an alien race whose exoskeleton is made of rubber) the first one to hit the street wins, but then I say but if no-one hits the street in 4 seconds then I will withdraw the prize. So the competition is a bit unfair. If we look at electron, they have a nice little rocket, but it takes effort to make nice-little rockets, and effort occurs over time. If you put an artificial time on getting to the moon, then the price competitors lets get artificial help, so for instance lets get NASA to help . . and then its no longer private anymore. The point of the prize was to get private entrepreneurs to venture beyond the box. By withdrawing the prize the ventures will now focus on a lessor box (say throwing small payloads into LEO), which is redundant and not really ground breaking. Anyway I have no trust of google, so this is not unexpected.

Gee, I leave the discussion for 12 hours and my the little logic sprites come bounding out of the wood work. First, since the Methanogenesis reaction cannot occur at low temperature is a vacuum or just sitting there it all assumes you brought along a reactor vessel, one that can be turned (rolled around it axis), and that you can both purify and store the reaction product. Since it assumes that you will liquify the methane you need an LNG plant. Also the water needs to be separated. The electrolysis reaction requires 2e- per mole/n of water. The book value is 2.37 x 105 J per mole 55.5556 = 1.327 x 107 J/kg. The maximum theoretical efficiency is 90%. So . . . . ~15 MJ per Kg 4H2 + CO2 ------> CH4 + 2H20 It takes 8kg of hydrogen to make 16kg of Methane If we look at a BFR and the amount of methane require. 240,000 kg x 8/16 x 15 MJ per Kg = 1.8 TJ of energy required to fuel a BFR. And BTW If we divide this by the number of seconds in a typical daylite day then its roughly thats 62.5 Megawatts of power (416 thousand 1 meter solar panels). IF we consider the minimal weight of a solar panel is 1 kg (A very generous reduction in current mass), then that is a landing on Mars weight of 416 kT, but the other problem is that not all that energy goes into the formation of Methane, about half the energy goes into heat during methanogenesis So lets say that we only could afford 1 ton of solar panels (31 x 32 m of solar panels), then it would take 416 martian days. If the plan is to land in a polar region and extract water from Ice, then increasee the time. Mar's tilt is higher than Earths and there are many areas that go dark in its winter. And remember that those 1 kg per square meter panels just lie flat on the ground, there is no provision for tracking, stands or brackets, these require added mass. The maximum power output of NTGs is typical 10 kW, so even if you decided to do this in 100 days, you still need 625 kW/day which means you would need 62 of them, and the nuclear thermal generators are not cheap in terms of weight either, you wont find a 10kW generator for 10kg. So lets consider all of the costs 1. Finding water piping and the cost of pressurizing atmosphere to remove CO2 2. The weight cost of the equipment for #1 3. The weight cost of solar panels and weight cost of the electrolysis equipment (not discussed) 4. The cost of storing hydrogen and oxygen (presumably at some point liquified and oxygen scaveging equipment to keep it liquified) 5. The weight cost of a methanogensis reactor, the weight cost of cooling the reactor. 6. The weight cost of storing methane and at some point liquifying it. 7. The energy cost for cryogenesis. 8. The weight cost of systems for deploying solar panels and cooling equipment, carbon capture, and water drilling. (to have a well you have to have a drill). Assuming that many operations will be Roboticized. So in the Musk Video is shows a Martian City and growing . . . . . . The problem is that Cities require water, and so do space craft, you can recycle the water in a city but not in a spacecraft. So that if you plan to have a city, you best get your spacecraft water elsewhere. 9. The cost of reaching out from the base site (as shown in the video) to find water and transport the water back to the base.