wumpus

Don't mock foam core mockups. You can let the astronauts move around and make ECOs before things get too expensive. Ideally you want to make the cheap changes obvious to hide any really expensive changes they might want. Granted, foam core probably works better for people who work with sheet metal (In general the same CAD drawings will print both to "CNC machines"). But you really only want to have to design your carbonfiber molds once.

Unless the launch site is in the Sahara (which should be sufficiently close to the equator for similar benefits), there have to be less populated launch sites elsewhere. I'd claim that the Mohave is probably ideal (huge, unpopulated, East of a huge industrialized population), and China has something similar (or could simply populate the right area by fiat similar to "constructed cities"). I've mentioned in other threads that the Orion needs to be built in Antarctica: even George Dyson pointed out that discovery of how the magnetosphere works showed that the calculation of "minimal fallout" was wrong for Orion. But you can get back to those levels by launching in a polar orbit in Antarctica. This assumes you are trying to avoid killing people. I'd assume that evacuating all living people is impossible and the real way to evacuate Earth involves the four horsemen (War, Famine, Pestilence, and Death. Although in this case the new guy: Pollution might have a place) and lifting the survivors will be possible.

Randal Monroe's inspiration for this comic? [hint: if you expand it, it lists payloads of orbital rockets by horsepower. That is, how many horses can be delivered to LEO.] https://xkcd.com/1461/ [includes a much larger and readable image].

Takeovers typically happen because those personally involved with the takeover demand fees and get bonuses far beyond anything else you can do in corporateland. They rarely benefit either company, except when creating a monopoly or at least reducing competition to the point where the bonus to price fixing exceeds the cost of the transaction. Its one of those dirty open secrets of Wall Street. That's the goal, and good games work that way. But as you mentioned, it takes painstaking detail. Publishers like to cut costs to make a game, and "dumbing down" is the easiest and cheapest way to increase accessibility. They do it a lot. You really can't dumb down KSP without breaking the physics simulator. Sure, you could try something like the the beta (I loved the beta. And I miss a lot about it. But it really wasn't as good a game as KSP>=1.0), but even that was a game of rocket science: you got to ignore aeodynamic stability and the drag was calculated in a stupid manner. Flying pancake rockets for the win!

I remember when the Tesla S was new. Unlike the rest of the performance cars, they didn't publish a Nürburgring time. Probably because going flat out, they couldn't finish one lap (and they wildly underestimated the logistical challenge and expense of those quoted times [the S wasn't quite so new even then]). That's all in the past, and plaid power more than makes up for the massive battery. No matter how insane the price, don't short TSLA. Always remember that the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent. Unless you can somehow get a sufficiently long term put or other tricky deal that can't lose more than the wager.

To be honest, that's pretty much what the standard of journalism in the US has become. Formerly you would go out and get a quote from a source. And ideally, an opposing [edit: quote] from an opposing source. Because there aren't any facts, just quotes you can get from cherry picked sources to fit your piece. Tweets just help journalists do the work of themselves and their fired coworkers: they don't need to get the quote, they can choose from plenty available.

Musk claims that the factory design is driving Starship design, not the other way around. That's why he has all those Starship prototypes: he's testing manufacturing. Blowing them up and lighting them off is just a bonus. Granted that might be more PR that truth, but the idea of having a huge reusable rocket designed to be manufactured *in volume* is rather shocking. Bezos is more warehouses than factories. I suspect he simply doesn't want a tent after spending billions of dollars.

And if you check the orbit of Mercury you will notice that we are in a non-Euclidean universe. Of course if you are being literal about your Euclidean-ness, you might want to rename the term "geometry" (Earth measurement). It is trivial to project a triangle on a sphere (or oblate spheroid) with angles adding up to 270 degrees. The other issue is that pi is tied to radians and is deeply connected to math, especially anything involving waves or frequencies. Don't try doing a Fourier Transform with a pi defined any other way.

So if ei*pi=-1, logi(3)=-1/9 what would be i in this world? Certainly not root(-1).

https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2305 Superman maximizing his utility for mankind.

The whole patent issue is a rabbit hole you don't want to go down. In 2000 or so, the standard for "obvious" was "obvious to someone so green they couldn't get hired as an engineer" and even getting that proven in court was nearly impossible (there's almost no way it has gotten any better. I just haven't kept up with that side of the issue since). The real key is something never published. And this also makes 'anti-reverse engineering patents' so useful (also DRM lockout chips to lockin your supply chain for game consoles, printer ink, car tools, combine harvester oil, you name it) they will demand a unique action that makes so little sense that nobody has published it and the patent gets auto-granted. And a good patent lawyer can make finding this patent as likely as a needle in the haystack (assuming that is the goal, I'd assume that they would publicly claim a patent or two to stop people from trying to reverse engineer. The extra "licensed from this shell company we wholly own" patent comes up in discovery.

DRM has two means to enforce "digital rights". First is the legal aspect. If the DRM contains any encryption, decrypting that code is illegal in the USA under the DMCP act. I'd assume that you could easily cover all the laws of any major port with enough widely applied legal patches. It is entirely possible that major shipping companies and the biggest importers and exporters have tied up negotiation to only use their ships to transfer goods. Then using "un-DRMed" ships would be a contract violation and lead to lawsuits. But I have a hard time believing that maritime law includes all the craziness of DRM (with the exception of potential contracted monopolies as listed above). This leads to the question of whether or not you could simply break the DRM. Quick googling puts the cost of a new container ship in the hundreds of millions of US dollars. There isn't any DRM that ever existed that you can't break for a tiny fraction of that budget. I'm pretty sure that 1980s ship technology (back when my dad was raving about his "sea container" stock) would be reasonably effective today. You might need quite a bit of automation to keep the amount of crew to a minimum (even on an Indonesian payscale), but nothing that can't be duplicated reasonably easily. If the engines are using that godawful mixture of diesel and paraffin, I can't imagine that engines have changed much since 1900, and certainly not since 1960. One potential counterexample would be a presumably fixed 737MAX, although you could easily break the DRM and copy the software significantly cheaper than whatever Boeing is paying to fix the issue. Similarly, while Kerbaloid's image of the Buran appears to have main engines connected to the orbiter, as far as I know the Buran made it to orbital velocity with the Energia boosters. Those nozzles on the orbiter would be the equivalent of the Shuttles OMS.

[I seem to be ninja'ed. but I'll post my meandering post anyway in hopes that it will provide other perspectives on the issue]. As people have noted, electrons aren't infinite. You typically have equally many protons as electrons, and when you accelerate a positive ion with equal energy, you get far more momentum. Momentum is what you need for the rocket equation. On the other hand, there is no theoretical limit to the amount of momentum you can add to your positive ion through additional energy. The LHC provides roughly 55 million times the momentum than you would get if you plugged the speed of light into your (non-relativistic) the exhaust velocity of the rocket equation (the one that uses Ve instead of Isp). I suspect that this might be even less efficient than LED propulsion (especially since the LHC wasn't designed with this as a goal, but even if you designed a cyclotron this way...), but you really aren't limited to your reaction mass if you have arbitrary amounts of energy. On a small scale, ion engines work this way, and yes they do get the Isp they get in KSP. Unfortunately, they don't get the thrust they get in KSP, as KSP won't accelerate time for "continuous burn between planets", so you'll have to ignore that. But the Dawn spacecraft had a delta-v of 10km/s *after* being launched into escape velocity and an Isp of 3100s (the kerbal equivalent is ~4000s). At the point there is little use optimizing for higher Isp unless you are trying to replace xenon (unbelievably rare) with argon (there's more argon than CO2 in our atmosphere. At least I hope that's still true:), so nobody seems interested in accelerating ions even further. More important issues are mN/W (thrust efficiency) and increasing thrust overall (despite Dawn's champion acceleration status, she could only do a 0-60mph run in 4 days).

I remember (20th century) reading about "is the surface of an inhabited planet the right place for an expanding industrial economy". While I have as much trouble as anyone else coming up with justifications of space economy as anyone else familiar with the rocket equation, some of the bits about the modern economy is that you can always push the dirty parts "somewhere else". Right now, China is that "somewhere else", but China* has historically been either the dominant civilization on Earth or close enough (and the rival civilizations only seem to last a few centuries, China has been around 40 (ignoring the odd barbarian conquest)), so don't expect to be getting rare earth elements from there much longer. I think Brazil is enough source, but the inclusion of the "BRIC" nations imply that sooner or later they will reject this type of thing. I can only see the worst of heavy industries getting moved off planet, especially mining, ore extraction/smelting, and possibly energy production (although Earthbound solar and wind are making huge strides, and there is always the chance that fission may rise again). Moving the goods to other space-based areas makes tons of sense, but has the chicken&egg issue of why you would want the goods in space in the first place. Electricity could be beamed to Earth, metal pigs could simply be dumped into the desert, possibly with parachutes (more like drogue 'chutes, hit hard, but don't leave a crater. You only have to leave a steel/Al/Ni pig intact). I'd assume that the rare earths and "need to be made in 0g" materials could either come down in regular transport craft or possibly tiny capsules (I'd expect that re-entry scales better smaller, but doing the math would be silly assuming that there would have to be regular flights to/from space anyway). * Any Civilization [n] player would be impressed by the function of China's "civ-score" over time, especially compared to the "competition" (which really isn't worth the term). Musk sometimes mentions that he's competing with China, and I suspect that some of it is that China simply is the dominant civilization on Earth and that if the US wants to compete, it will have to expand into space.

Good luck showing that life emerged on Venus: it isn't a place I'd expect to find any fossils. Similarly, I'm not aware of any era in time that fossilization was possible that doesn't contain evidence of life. Earth life could have easily been seeded by Venus (or any other planet), especially if both planets were under asteroid bombardment (I'm unclear about when this happened vs. when life appeared, but it really only requires one meteror with the exact right exit velocity of debris). Panspermia across solar systems would be different from panspermia across planets. Unless you want to posit that the missing dark matter is extra globs of life being flung through the universe where we assume there is only hydrogen gas. I can't imagine how much mass it would take to typically seed a galaxy with life (especially if it has to get to a solar system with the first few hundred million years).

Issac Asimov was able to give robots unexpected emergent behavior with only three laws. I wonder if future robot/AI software will have similar issues with traditional, layer-based software development. Especially if multiple middleware vendors each include routines to further their own interests.

Since Blue Origin appears only to be getting relatively small contracts from NASA and slightly larger subcontracting jobs from others (which means the prime helps themselves to 25%+ of whatever Blue Origin would get), I'm guessing they need around that much money. It is mainly what keeps Blue Origin in discussions on a level with ULA, Spacex, and Roscosmos, even if they've so far only done unmanned suborbital launches. This cartoon is wrong: planes don't fly thanks to aerodynamics. Planes fly on money (something that was in a coworker's pilot and/or A&R mechanic training). Rockets fly thanks to much more money. There's also no indication that lack of money is a problem at Blue Origin, or that adding even more money would help. It may be their slow progress is intentional, either to learn from the mistakes of others, or merely guessing that others are moving to fast and will hit big problems. Spacex (and Tesla) seem to consume Elon Musk's entire life. Blue Origin appears to be a hobby that Bezos pays CEO Bob Smith to run. Bezos is probably limited by how much attention he can give to Blue Origin, especially with Microsoft trying to eat Amazon's AWS lunch. Lack of money seemed to be what killed Armadillo Aerospace: as rich as John Carmac may seem, he couldn't afford to run a space company as a hobby.

Not from this evidence. You'd need to know the likelyhood of life being randomly produced from organic molecules. You'd have to intentionally select the exact extremephiles you wanted to contaminate Venus with and splash them all over the parachutes. While plenty of the conditions that probe was built/transported/launched might be considered extreme, I'd expect any of the "right" microbe would simply be eaten by ordinary microbes evolved to Russian conditions. This really calls for a "Wolftrap". Put a glider in Venus' atmosphere and load it with various organic chemicals including phosphorus and see if any phosphine is produced.

The shuttle had a 1:1 glide ratio. How much lower do you plan on going? How fast do you have to land?

Dawn used 25kW per Newton, and holds the record for the most delta-V of any spacecraft ~10km/s. It is quite possible that a deepspace probe would burn through a first stage of Argon, then a much smaller second stage of Xenon, and finally use photons until the nuclear power ran out. To be honest, when using photonic drives, make sure your heatsinks are design with the black sides facing in the direction you want to thrust. They will be a significant part of your thrust (i.e. you aren't going to have much at all).

The problem with HL is that those wings are heavy. The Shuttle had 3 kg of orbiter mass for every 1kg of cargo. While I don't think the Starship/payload ratio is a key driver is Starship design, I still think they will do significantly better. HL does have a huge safety advantage (which is odd, because the shuttle had the glide ratio of a brick), so we still might see it again. Poul Anderson published "Orion shall Rise" two years earlier. It was a post-apocalyptic work, so his Orion was more as minimalist as possible and still reach anywhere in the Solar System. Slapping shuttles on Orion makes a good image, but has anybody figured out what it takes to get a RS-25 to restart, or was it a strictly one-way flight (the Footfall Orion was a warship during an alien invasion of Earth).

SSTOs based on hydrolox while physically possible have a lousy mass fraction and a huge problem getting enough thrust out of the hydrolox engines. Reusable SSTOs would have to use something other than hydrolox (air breathers, ground-based power, who knows) because the mass fraction of a chemical based rocket simply doesn't have enough mass for the hardware needed to survive de-orbiting and landing. Sure, it is better than a device that ignores the conservation of momentum, but that doesn't mean you can build a snowball that can survive being tossed in the Sun or a reusable SSTO that relies on hydrolox. I'm mostly irked that X-43 lost further funding. That at least got off paper and up to mach 9.6. Granted, that tech won't be particularly useful for decades (it will be a long time before fuel consumption has an effect on the cost of a rocket), but getting an air-breather to take you above even to 2000m/s would significantly change the floor of the cost to get things into orbit. So include the X-43D and beyond on this list (I think the X-43A through X-43C were all launched). I also like "beamed power" for SSTOs, but that really belongs on powerpoint for even longer than hypersonic airbreathers. Of course it is quite possible that military lasers might be beaten into ploughshears (presumably after becoming an open secret) to make this happen (who else would develop the lasers/masers? Starship isn't going to be an SSTO. There will be Starship (that goes to orbit), and the Super Heavy Booster that gets them the first 3km/s-9km/s of the way there. Granted, *both* will look like the Delta Clipper, and I suspect even moreso when combined on the pad, but by not being SSTO the difficulty is quite plausible (there are few doubts that the booster will require significant technological development other than the already designed raptor engines and Falcon 9's proven landing capabilities). Getting Starship to survive orbital descent and having humans on board a vertical landing** are one of the reasons they are building so many prototypes. And no, neither one will be a reusable SSTO on its own. Starship will only have the sea-level thrust to land when empty*. Super Heavy Booster won't be able to survive de-orbiting (even it if can SSTO on its own). If de-orbiting was that easy, I'd have expected Starship to have orbited already. * main engines are for vacuum. Although I might be wrong if they use them as a launch abort system. I'd still expect it to get out of there and simply burn up the fuel before an aborted landing ** I'm pretty sure even Elon knows that NASA won't let him to this until 2030 at least.

American schoolchildren are taught that Abraham Lincoln did his homework on slate tablets (no idea of the truth), so presumably they were in use in the western USA around 1800 or so. Probably a lot easier digging up rock locally than shipping from the East. Film/tape is used interchangeably to record video with tape for audio. And those terms don't appear to be changing, "to NAND flash" just doesn't specify what you are saving nor does "to SDHC" roll off the tongue any better (and the memory format is unlikely to last as long as film/tape did).

There's a shocking amount of funding that NASA gives to SSTOs (anything non-zero should be shocking, but this was a pretty significant project). One thing to note: like "NASA doesn't build rockets, contractors do". NASA doesn't hire employees (there are exceptions), they hire contractors. I also have wonder just who NASA employees are, and what their backgrounds are. I'd have to assume that anybody connected to the Apollo hiring wave has long since retired (and probably dead). I'd guess that anybody around when they were designing/building the first shuttles is retired/retiring. It won't be too long until they run out of employees who joined up with NASA and are down to pure apparachniks (the contractors do all the real work). My guess is that this is why SSTO projects still get funding. Rumor has it that DC-X was cheap to launch, but that might just have been thanks to size. I've often said that once Space-x gets rocket building costs under control (they've done an amazing job at that), that cutting launch costs will be the next big thing and that Blue Origin (which started out with a lot of DC-X alumni) would have a leg up.

A smart phone connected to google (presumably really just the starships' servers, but in Star Trek they *could* access datacenters half a galaxy away). The whole point is to get the plot going as fast as possible and to deliver said information quickly to the crew and audience. See also "as you know, Bob".