Bill Phil

Once they get the experience with BFR it's just a matter of tooling and putting enough resources behind development. I think that BFR is really serving more as a technology demonstrator for ITS that can still earn them revenue, and that ITS is still being planned, if not for the near future. It likely will undergo redesigns, but we may see something like a 12 meter BFR flying in 30 years, provided everything goes swimmingly (there's a good likelihood that it won't). They may yet use a cluster of BFR boosters to push a scaled up BFR into a trajectory that it can get to orbit from. Provided they design the boosters for that in the first place. It would probably have more to do with downmass than upmass. Landing more mass is always a plus.

Juno is using solar at Jupiter. It doesn't take much mass to inflate large mirrors or lenses and point them at some small solar panels (I actually met someone at MSFC with some demonstration models in his office - if I recall correctly, they burned through a soda can with one). Definitely more complex, but at that distance, I'd worry about signal strength more than anything else. Also, it would be pretty awesome to have a swarm of cubesats orbiting some other planets and doing science, as well as a number of larger probes, maybe also acting as relays.

Spiderbot.

They did. It used to be worse.

Also, if it flies, it'll be the first dropship, according to Battletech's definition... It sounds a lot like the Shuttle's promises. But if it can deliver...

Congratulations!

It's fun. Sometimes. It can get tedious really fast though.

Being single is a stable relationship.

I'm referring to using BFS as an F9 replacement.

They want to replace the Falcon 9 family entirely, and if they also want to reuse the BFS with that much payload they'll need an upper stage.

Maybe it won't SSTO, but could use a small kick stage or even an F9 second stage in a reusable configuration?

Hovering takes a lot more delta-v and would reduce reusable mode performance drastically.

Hmm... I guess BFR would technically count as one of these: http://www.sarna.net/wiki/DropShip With propellant it's definitely above 200 tonnes and even without if we count payload. Just a shower thought, but I think it's cool. More about SpaceX, does anyone know the BFS SSTO payload?

SLS was practically strangled in the crib.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_drag You can find your average angle of attack over a rocket launch and multiply gt by the sine of that angle and you get a decent approximation.

Specific impulse. Impulse per unit propellant. Impulse is change in momentum. So change in momentum per unit of propellant. A rocket is effectively a continuous collision, where the propellant and the rocket exert a force on each other. Specific impulse tells us how much the momentum changes per unit of propellant, and in general is dimensionally equivalent to speed. Dividing by the acceleration of gravity gives us the impulse per unit weight, which is in seconds. With a clever abuse of mathematical principles, it turns out that Delta-V is a function of specific impulse and the natural logarithm of the rocket's mass ratio.

You do realize you're easier to kill on Mars than on Earth, right? Just increase CO2 content, or depressurize the habitat, or do any simple thing, and you're gone. This is part of why a Mars Revolutionary War makes no sense. Heck, you could die by accident before any rogue AI gets to you.

Let's hope it stays one blip on the radar.

I've only ever had a rocket noodle once in years. And it was made of the smallest tanks of that size and so had a lot of joints. If you build em right they don't noodle.

2001 strikes again. Also, von Braun's old ideas. Rotating space station, lunar ferries, the whole nine yards.

Still pretty cool how our biggest threat is ourselves. Not a good situation to be in, but it does show that we've come very far.

On Titan.

@tater is just being truthful. Manned spaceflight is a waste of money. Now, if wasted in the right way, it can provide large economic benefits (Apollo Program). Also:

Try 75 billion plus. It was half the total cost of Apollo.

If it was a pile of cash they could spend at will, sure. But it's not. That 20 billion is the total. It's divided into small chunks that make up various different programs, spent as dictated by Congress.