tater

Didn't see this here yesterday (sorry if I missed someone else posting it):

They specifically say that FAA lacks the resources to deal with the current environment. "Resources" for a gov agency is money, and people. It's a smart political play—just as BO putting their engine factory in AL was—as they are in effect asking for the current FAA Administrator to have more power (larger agency = more power).

FAA regulations exist to protect public safety. I think SpaceX has no issues with protecting public safety. Their current issues seem to overwhelmingly related to an agency where the spaceflight component is scaled to a national launch cadence that is now much higher. The first commercial spaceflight in the US was in 1989, but most launches were still government (a few Shuttle flights/year til 2011, plus defense launches). The spike in the late 90s was a bunch of Iridium launches added into the mix. The most launched in 1 month in 1997 was 6 (4 were government). These were planned well in advance, so they could deal with it. We're now pushing 3X the total launches of the odd mid-90s spike, with no sign of a decreasing cadence. new companies joining the fray not only means more launches, but more novel vehicles with the associated risks during test flight campaigns. Heck, even ground testing requires FAA input. I don't think it would work that way—I'm in effect talking about a tax, and it's not like people who pay more tax get lower scrutiny...

These problems will only get worse if Blue Origin not only starts flying, but tries for the cadence that Bezos desperately needs if Kuiper is to be a thing. BO 100% needs to fly at F9 cadence ASAP if they are to have any hope of getting half the constellation on orbit by their deadline, and the FAA simply cannot cope with the launch cadence they have now, much less any increase. Perhaps there needs to be a fee structure for launch providers designed to scale the number of FAA compliance people with launch cadence? No fee for up to X launches per year, then above that X cutoff fees to fund however many new employees are required?

later today

Success

Yeah, do the tour stuff, I got there too late to do any of that. The visitor center is great, Atlantis is spectacular. There's a nonzero chance you can time trip to KSC to catch a launch (I know this has to mesh with however many days in a row of handing your wallet over to Disney you shelled out for—that place is a wallet-ectomy). https://maps.app.goo.gl/C3mTZoGHudqam3p57 This is actually a decent place to watch a Cape Canaveral launch should it happen after visitor center closes. That's the gate to the Space Force base, but when there's a launch, they show you where to park, and have bleachers, etc, right next to the water with SLC-40 right across (though fairly far). There's some places to eat at Port Canaveral with F9 boosters (and someday soon NG booster?) right across the water, close—I went there and had a beer and burger to kill time before 8:30 launch after KSC closed.

Any suit we're talking about does this. The point was that it might as well be paper in the grand scheme of things. Isotropic GCRs are always there, and GCRs (mostly protons and alphas) with the same energy as solar protons usually are not even considered, as the ave energy of a GCR is more like 1000 MeV, not 20-30. Which is what NASA was talking about above, you avoid radiation problems operationally by not doing EVAs during solar particle events since suits don't do much. Adding some H to the suit (water or polyethylene) to mitigate those accidental event exposures while they move inside is mostly for that contingency. If you go outside, your dose is going to be higher than inside by a lot, regardless of suit—lower by 2-3X just being inside the pressure vessel, and lower by 20X if you're in an "equipment room" in the paper (meaning areas with eqp covering the walls (most of ISS is like this)). An actual shelter 2 orders of mag or more better than a suit. Any new suit design will include similar, mild radiation protection as every other suit made because there's only so much you can do with a suit, which is nearly nothing—and they need to be cheaper. If we want to mitigate overall rad exposure, we need better shielding in spacecraft/habs. Perhaps dedicated, shielded sleep areas would be the best starting point on spacecraft, and piles of regolith (or bags of same) on the surface of the Moon or Mars.

Suits aren't several cm thick. US suits are <0.5cm even with a cover. Bottom line is that if you want to avoid radiation exposure, get under a couple meters of regolith. On orbit? Slightly better inside the vehicle than out, and don't be outside during a solar event—get in the shelter areas of ISS.

Thicker than what? Another suit? https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20060046504/downloads/20060046504.pdf "Meeting radiation protection requirements during EVA is predominantly an operational issue with some potential considerations for temporary shelter. The issue of spacesuit shielding is mainly guided by the potential of accidental exposure when operational and temporary shelter considerations fail to maintain exposures within operational limits." Ie: the suit doesn't do much, get to shelter during an unexpected rad event. Later talks about water jackets, polyethylene fibers added, etc... some marginal improvements. Bottom line is that any new designs will incorporate this, and not need to cost a billion bucks a suit. or $100M, or even $10M. We need cheaper space suits.

So does a sheet of paper. There is no meaningful rad protection from any space suit for the most concerning radiation, galactic cosmic rays. The point is that there's nothing special; about any of the current space suits, and no need for them to be absurdly expensive.

Mechanical counterpressure suits. Space suits don't deal with ionizing radiation at all. Micrometeorites? Not sure current suits do much of that at all, honestly, just check for leaks before EVA and patch? That's a launch cost issue, they are literally weightless in space—inertia is a different matter, obviously, they're not massless. Regardless, at current cost, a few thousand bucks a kg is not a big deal for a suit that is ~$1M, and costs will certainly continue to drop—they have to anyway, if there is to be a need for cheaper suits (chicken and egg). If protection is an issue, look up the thread a ways to my posts about personal spacecraft for orbital EVA (vs "suits"). Throw Whipple shields on them, etc.

Polaris Dawn got me thinking about this thread since they have an EVA suit (sans PLSS) of a sort. I was also thinking about cost. Atmospheric Diving Suits (a sort of worn submarine) apparently cost close to a million bucks each. I don't see much reason for any space suit to cost much more than that, 1 atm is an easier problem than 1000 atm, after all (yes, temperature extremes are worse in space). Wonder what the cost is for the current SpaceX suits, and if they worked well enough (thinking mobility here, for microgravity EVAs, tool use, etc) to get a PLSS added in future and have legit suits, vs tethered.

Starlink is not a monopoly, nothing even remotely near it. Every single person on this forum has broadband, I assume, what % have Starlink? <1% I'd wager, hardly a monopoly. What % in places with Amazon have used Amazon? ~100% I reckon. I buy online from "not Amazon" decently often, but a majority of purchases online have got to be Amazon for my family (and most people, I'd bet).

Gillis went out after he did and did more suit testing as well.

Oh, I thought there were 4, my bad. https://whoisinspace.com 19 in space right now.

This will put 12 people on ISS, there are also 4 at Tiangong, and 4 on Polaris Dawn. So we already have 20 humans on orbit at once.

The plan from "go" has always been landing at Starbase, and the ecological studies already included this reality. Little here is new at all... the hot staging ring? The deluge systems—plural, as the new pad has a flame trench and deluge.

Moving launch to some island is not going to happen. A US island has an identical regulatory culture, plus they'd need cheap housing for 1000s, schools, propellant depots (and a deep port), etc. A non-US island has all that, plus ITAR concerns. Oh, and all beach real estate near the US is insanely expensive. Not gonna happen.

No one else moves fast enough to notice the rules, and this dropped out of nowhere—nothing in that update was new information, all of it was known at the time of the last flight, and/or when SpaceX submitted their accounting of what happened with IFT-4. By all accounts, they thought they would be getting this license around now, not thrown a 60 day delay. I think their issue is the unpredictability, not a demand for special treatment. The staging ring thing, for example, it's 100% less impactful than every single expended booster dumped randomly into the ocean (or interstages from expendables, etc, ad nauseum). Is the spacewalk tonight?

https://twitter.com/PolarisProgram/status/1833648070011109784