SeaDog

Well, I wouldn't trust anyone either way on this. There's a good reason why spaceX is private, and one thing is that these things can be kept very secret. And depending on how your internal accounting is done, you can look at it in many ways. For example, it may be that the launch is profitable... But that the difference in launch capacity due to reusability attempt is bought by the development section of the company, which of course spaceX itself pays for, in the end it turns out to be a net loss. But launching the rocket was profitable. So in the end no one knows for sure. I think spaceX needs to make reusability work. I think the rockets at best pay for themselves, but there's substantial infrastructure and development that's still at a loss. For that reason I think any price drop in launch costs will be moderate even when they start doing reusable first stages. SpaceX will put that money into more development. Further, I think space X will need more investors, and they need to really see space x doing revolutionary stuff.

Well, it's much larger than earth. In terms of size, there have been better candidates. Arent they just detecting that there are atmospheres, rather than actually seeing what the atmospheres are made of?

Well, the cool think about chutes is that you can set an airpressure and activate them well before you reach the planet. No further input required. But other than that, yes, what you say makes sense.

It seems to me that the planets already known are already pretty good candidates for earth similarity, judging only by orbits, but they make it sound like this something much better... Is kepler capable of detecting atmosphere content or something like that? Otherwise I guess it's just another planet similar to earth in terms of size and habitable zone.

Actually, I think you're a bit ridiculous. I agree that we can't know for sure that the capsule separated safely from the rocket, but your claim seems to be that it couldn't possibly have done that, the evidence for that is also pretty weak. I think it's at least an interesting speculation, and I don't understand why it's so important to you to prove it wrong, even though you can't at the moment.

Maybe I'm going off topic here, but the only time ingredients are measured in mass here in Sweden is when it is actually more practical. That pretty much only happens when the recipe is aimed at large producers who get their flour in large bags that might compress the flour so that weight is the only accurate measure. Butter is one of the few things you see in terms of mass in regular recipes here, and thats because the packaging shows how much 50 grams etc is.

Why? That's pretty much what it takes to bounce a signal on a LEO satellite, assuming a few ms for the computer to react. In reality, it would usually be more because you go through a few nodes on the ground as well, but still, from the ground to the satellite and back again should be something like 30 ms.

No, the wikipedia link you gave talks about geo stationary. For LEO is actually says latency is no issue. The ship link you're talking about also uses geo stationary satellite. In fact, I think there are good reasons to believe satellites will in the long term offer lower latency than what is usually seen for todays broadband connections.

Thats a strawman i often see when people are disappointed that nuclear power isn't the end all solution to various problems. Nuclear power for everything is a 50's scifi trope and in the case of space travel, there's actually not much indicating that it would be better than solar. Solar has several strong points: While taking up much space, it can probably be made extremely light. It is extremely reliable since you can run parts of it if it gets damaged. It has already been used extensively in space. Simple forms of it could probably be constructed in situ. So yea, the idea that we're not using nuclear reactors for stuff like this because of the opinion you quoted, that is the real education failure. It only shows you do not understand how difficult nuclear power is, especially in space.

On a global scale it doesn't matter, but on local scales, it might. One should also have the entire life cycle in mind, and remember that many common types of power generation do have an impact on water supplies. Yet another example of how efficient transports may be more important than alternative fuels.

Not in the forseeable future. If you ever get a job where you're supposed to make robots do advanced tasks, you'll realize just how bad robots suck. I mean, even extremely good robots really suck at some very simple things. Great, so you have a robot that sweeps the floors perfectly, better than any human could. Want that same robot to also dust the book shelves? Extremely difficult. Not impossible, sure, but somewhere in the development you'll be like "Well the cleaning lady was a bit lazy, but honestly, if you told her to dust the books, she'd do it once in a while..." So i know that some people will reply to this with "Well, we will eventually design robots that are adaptive and learn", but I actually don't think so. That's exactly what humans are good at. Why would you need machines that mimic humans? No, I think robots will keep on being quite specialized and genereally do boring, uncreative stuff, because that is where humans are weak and actually need help.

Sure, but water and fuel alone could be a big market. I'm not going to stick my head out too far here, but it seems to me that 1 billion turnover should be possible on that basis alone, even if launch costs drop somewhat and even if lower costs do not lead to more space exploration. For example I think the SLS Block 2 will have an upper stage with room for 100 tons of fuel. If you had a system that could completely refuel that once a year, it would be incredibly valuable, possibly on the scale of a billion dollars, even though it's hard to put a figure on it. And then there are smaller, commercial satellites that might be launched to LEO, refuelled and then pushed on to GEO with fuel left to spare for deorbiting. So yeah, you don't even have to look at rare earth metals to see there's a business here... Even if that's what you talk about when investors are around, if you're planning to go there. As for making it profitable - I think you can only figure that out by trying it on a small scale. First step is controlling a small asteroid though. How is that done? No one knows for sure right now.

Well, the horizontal velocity is on purpose. In case of engine failure, they don't want to crash hard into the barge. I don't think it's necessary to get rid of that feature anyway, even if it probably would be slightly easier if they did.

It's funny how technology that does not yet exist always seems so simple. Get back to me when we actually have closed eco systems that can support a number of astronauts for many years. Then we can discuss how to fit that on a space ship that's too far from the sun to use direct solar energy.

That is one possibility, but that will be for the BFR/MCT. Another speculation for that vehicle I've seen is that the upper stage will be refueled in orbit, brought to mars, perhaps even landed and refuelled again and then used to bring back the MCT. Something along those lines. If anything remotely like that will happen is uncertain, but i guess it could count as reusability.