RCgothic

This morning one of my acquaintances went straight from "Coronavirus is an engineered cull" to "No Jews were killed in 9/11". Conspiracy theories are poison.

The linked thread is also linked in the Mission and Launch Index thread pinned at the top of the forum under "Individual Missions > ISS"

Alternatively instead of expending 4 cores, Falcon 9 reusable can put a 16t dragon 2 that could do the TEI into LEO, and Falcon Heavy (centre core expended) can put S2 into LEO with enough propellant to do both TLI and LLO requiring only mods to increase endurance to 3 days.

Ok. Dragon 2 is 9500kg dry. Throw out the normal payload to ISS and give over to propellant. Stretch the trunk, give it some superdracos at 235 SL ISP. Call it +2000kg lunar dry weight, some of which is consumable but we'll ignore that, and 11000kg of propellant. Starting mass: 22500kg, Dry 11500kg. Superdraco can push that through 1550m/s and do both the lunar insertion and return (~1400m/s) with margin. Falcon 9 can launch 22.8t expendable. Falcon 9 is man-rated. Falcon Heavy can put S2 (~4000kg) plus a notional 1000kg docking module into LEO expendable, with 58000kg of residual propellant. MVac has 348s. Starting Mass: 85500kg, Dry 27500. MVac can push that through 3870m/s, which is again easily enough for a lunar intercept (3260m/s). The only new engineering here is a stretched trunk with superdracos on, plus a docking target on S2. And it goes to LLO, which is better than NLHO. Tell Musk: Get crew to LLO by the end of 2021 for half the price of an SLS or the world ends and I'd back him to succeed.

Herd immunity means if a virus normally spreads to 5 other people, but 90% are immune, then each infectee only infects half another person and the infection dies or over time. Which means the 10% who aren't immune mostly never encounter it. For Covid19 nobody is immune. In order to reach herd immunity first a massive number of people need to get infected. Which is a disaster for a disease with 1-2% mortality.

Give SpaceX half the cost of a single all up Orion SLS to develop a means to send a crew to NRHO as soon as possible and actually do so and I'd bet £100 they beat SLS Orion by an embarrassingly large margin.

Herd Immunity is absolute rubbish when it comes to Covid19. In the absolute most charitable interpretation, it's basically "vulnerable people need to hide until Coronavirus has run it's course through the healthier and more resilient segment of population". UK govt policy is to stand back and watch people die. "Oh dear, so sad, never mind."

No evidence of UK govt making significant emergency preps. We're headed for Italy.

Does SLS Block 1 even have a cargo version? Block 1B is so far over the horizon it might as well be a paper rocket. Block 2 even more so.

Yup, a barely useful mission has been designed for SLS because it can't do anything more useful with the throw weight and capsule it has. It will require multiple launches of other rockets to complete that mission, so why not just go the whole way and just use other rockets? SLS can't do anything that a falcon 9 and a falcon heavy can't do much cheaper and much more often just by working together. Falcon 9 is man rated. Astronauts will literally be on the next dragon flight.

Once again, the threat here isn't that the virus is particularly deadly. In the grand scheme of things it's not. But it is very infectious, nobody has immunity, and enough people are going to get it at once to overwhelm healthcare systems. When that happens it's going to get very bad indeed, so any effort put into flattening the curve or expanding healthcare capacity is not wasted.

Grim.

So SN2 is officially just a test tank. SN3 the first real deal.

Just like like air blowing over a supercooled surface to me.

There could be more recommendations than issues with the spacecraft. The recommendations will include things like changes to the way testing is done and corporate culture at Boeing.

That's such an obvious thing to have it's a wonder the idea wasn't developed. I guess at the moment it's only relevant to the ISS which has its own lifeboats. And if Starship has an issue on orbit they'll probably just send another starship. Maybe the utility of that idea had a window that's gone.

Read an article about the potential for a rescue mission to Columbia on Ars, assuming the critical damage had been noticed soon enough. Only Atlantis or Arianne V-159 had any hope of reaching Columbia before its consumables expired. But the Arianne had already mounted Intelsat 907 a ressupply probe couldn't have been thrown together and mounted inside a month. If similar happened today I bet SpaceX could do it though. They have enough hardware and the right "get it done" attitude.

They've got a long way to go to match SpaceX in that department, but any news and insight into what they're getting up to is welcome.

This article actually made me tear up. Finally feels like we're reaching higher and farther than Apollo.

Alien bacteria are going to be exceptionally lethal to any foreign organism. Interstellar civilisations like The Federation would be pretty much impossible. Attempting to colonize a planet that already has life on it sounds like a very bad idea. It'd be easier to take a nearly life-bearing planet and terraform it the rest of the way. If I absolutely had to live on a planet that had something else on it first? Complete nuclear sterilisation of the surface.

https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-ambitions-save-space-station-delays/?fbclid=IwAR1vjmLLtEghs-JfFq5ySf3sy4giprmKCovOHXeSiHezhrsidYVfif3fYjY I know we already know about the second stage swap, but it pretty much couldn't have happened without SpaceX's ambitious internal market for Starlink launches that can take a back seat if necessary. Starlink is directly improving SpaceX's service to customers. That's pretty impressive!

I don't think these thrusters are used for self-propulsion. The ASDS barges are towed? Better station-keeping seems to fit.

Wow, that's a major public rebuke.