tater

Constrains IFT-4 to NET April 25 (no later than Oct 25)

Apparently there was just a launch.

I would assume so, clearly they're not going home in a capsule. Course anything in orbit has to get their at least in part propulsively. I'm a little unclear on moving the hab things around, or why the habs are so tiny vs just using a SS deck or two.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20230013972/downloads/CrewLogistics Lander for Common Hab Architecture.pdf

Feed dropped. NSF captured a screen shot of the landed booster

5 min 4 min

If bone wants stimulation down the long axis (walking), or from muscle use, bedridden patients are a poor model. Would be worth experimenting at 0.38g with mammal studies. I'd say it's not definitive—but the experimental path is clear. Another reason I'm not a Mars colony guy, this needs to be demonstrated as long term safe or it's a nonstarter.

Possibly. There might be a value at which bone health is preserved that is <1g. The experiment needs to actually be done.

Zero g does—but we don't have data on reduced gravity I think... all there years, and we've yet to do that experiment.

Space combat in babylon 5 was good til it jumped the shark near the end. You'd see a Narn ship fire a particle beam. Cut scene. Centauri ships coming around the limb of a planet in orbit—that get cut in half by beam. Ships implied very far apart.

The guys at LANL were playing with a tunneling device. Unlike the offering from the Boring Company, the LANL one was nuclear powered... it was designed to MELT regolith as it drove forward. The resultant glass then seeps into the surrounding regolith forming a glass tube. https://patents.google.com/patent/US3693731A/en https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/4687637 Their civil engineering guys did a paper on this for the Moon and Mars I saw presented in the 90s.

Might need a print of this. https://cosmicbackground.io/pages/total-eclipse Got a framed one for my son to commemorate our road trip.

Indeed. A station would be fine spun up to 1g, obviously (with appropriate radiation shielding, as the O'Neill concepts had). Mars is a big "?". Seems like people pushing for Mars colonization would at some point make a centrifugal station and test out mammalian embryology, etc, in 0.38g. You'd think.

Robots are better for all the science, but it's not the same as people. I was at a conference at Caltech years ago (Voyager Neptune encounter, actually) and in a discussion someone asked what humans could do that probes couldn't, and a guy yelled, "Have children!" I want to see humans actually living in space... I'm just not seeing a great reason. I think @PakledHostage is probably on the right track. We have a couple guys who really want this—Bezos is one of "Gerry's Kids" (Gerry O'Neill), and Musk is the Mars bro. I still think for LEO and even cislunar space, tourism is in fact the "killer app." O'Neill thought space based solar power beamed to Earth was the answer—but even if that math is made to close, it will NOT require the 10s of thousands of construction workers O'Neill imagined. As a result, no colonies to house them are needed. Tourism could actually scale—but the travel piece needs to be airline safe, and at least as affordable as business class and up (or same economic class of passengers, anyway). That's an incredibly high bar, airline travel is amazingly safe. For Mars? tourism to mars would be another class of people—the sort who 100+ years ago took The Grand Tour around Europe (as seen in period films/shows). The sort that might have servants. Actually rich people, not just the affluent professionals who are the business class customers for LEO/cislunar. Mars, like everywhere else humans might go in the solar system, is only a destination once someone BUILDS the destination. It's all 100% built, humans die quickly off Earth otherwise. So the super rich need to build the destinations, "because," then they can maybe get people to visit. Mars is really hard for tourism, though, it requires 1.8 to 2.5+ YEARS of time allocated (opposition vs conjunction trips). I don't see tourism as much of a driver for Mars. I would argue that since the place has to be built, and the workers need to be there (even service workers), it can still be a colony. To me the definition of colony is that humans live there as their home, and have kids.

This is a pretty precise statement of the problem, and why historical comparisons are not useful.

20th flight booster landed, nominal orbit.

2 min

35 min

The issue is planning an international trip around it. My wife and daughter could not go this week, so it's likely a family vacation—so 4 people with jacked prices. Tangier would be cool—do a riad with roof patio, no traffic, just sit there and grok it.