wumpus

How many of *any* (one) of those designs have China been able to develop and manufacture? Looks like a combination of propaganda and trying to sucker rivals into an R&D rabbit hole. Not that I don't think China would have all that much trouble doing one, but nobody is going to do all four at once. Especially not someone whose never done even one. China is great at going from crawl/walk/run at high speeds, but you still need to do them in order.

Generally, I wouldn't hold that much stock in renderings, then I remembered this: Akin's Laws of Spacecraft Design. 30. (von Tiesenhausen's Law of Engineering Design) If you want to have a maximum effect on the design of a new engineering system, learn to draw. Engineers always wind up designing the vehicle to look like the initial artist's concept.

Not sure what you are describing (in Hilbert space), but waves simply have a lot of the behavior attributed to "waveform collapse". This was the Blue Blue Brown video I was thinking of when I got "numberphile" wrong: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBnnXbOM5S4 While I can't vouch for the physics (beyond the basics of the uncertainty principle), I am familiar with the math he is talking about and it gets weirder the deeper you go down (it commonly comes up in "windowing functions" in Fourier transforms (and related transforms) in DSP work). Waves simply don't have both frequency and position arbitrarily defined, and it doesn't take any additional dimensions for them to [not] do so.

Falcon-9 flights 86 and 89 failed to return their boosters, along with all but one Falcon-Heavy centers. And I'm not even sure these make it to space, much less orbital velocity (the FH centers probably make it to space). So it will likely take far more than 100 landings, maybe more than 100 landings in a row... I'm all in favor of Starship, but that doesn't mean I'd like to be on that return path anytime soon. Space is hard. Returning from orbit might be the hardest part.

I highly recommend numberphile, but they tend to assume you've already taken calculus and would like a different look at it. On the other hand, the last 10? or so episodes were made at the high school level (for kids in quarantine). If this is new to you, you might want Khan academy supplemented by numberphile. I was thinking Blue Blue Brown. Not that numberphile isn't great, but my description is for Blue Blue Brown.

The landing sequence (with crew) looks far, far worse. I suspect they will be returning in dragons at least until 2030 (possibly modified for landing on land).

In a somewhat recent Matt Easton video, he mentions that while the fencing foil is based on the small sword (not the rapier, but a somewhat shorter weapon derived from the rapier), the épée is based on the épée (sometimes called épée du combat). He also mentions that the reason that épée fencing has that "if it touches, it counts" point system is that the swords were traditionally used for duels to first blood, thus making it reasonable that "going for the tie" was a sane strategy. Presumably the sword could still be used to deal with ruffians outside of a formal duel, as I suspect they are used that way a lot in the novels. Unfortunately, I'm having issues with audio and can't confirm that is the right video.

Did KSP 2.0 go from "almost certainly buy" (barring horrible reviews from trusted folks on this site) to "wait and see"? Yes, yes it did (no, I won't even pre-order KSP products. Never pre-order). Will KSP 2.0 (primarily due to non-existence) alter any purchasing decisions about DLC (or potentials gifts to others) for KSP 1.0? Not all all (barring changes in the mod scene). Is this whole thing likely to make me less likely to buy Take 2 products in the future? Yes, but not nearly as much as some stupid DRM I've encountered in non-KSP Take 2 products...

Waiting an extra year would certainly slow down the hype train (and make it much harder for KSP to catch up to KSP1.15+another year's worth of mods), but pulling the project from Star Theory stopped the hype train dead. Perhaps the hype train can get going again, but this doesn't look good at all for Take 2 and KSP 2.0.

I think the big problem is that "inertial confinement" largely uses magnetic fields to hold charged particles. I'm not seeing how this will hold neutrons back, nor kick them back into the nuclear material. Laser "ignition" confinement might at least hold the neutrons, but I'd be curious about kicking them back into the fission. I might be missing something, but I don't think the fuel rods of a reactor require excess confinement (bombs are another story).

True, but having a powerful senator consistently funneling money to rocket scientists is vastly superior to this late enemy of all things spaceflight (or even scientific): (considering it has been 30 years since he was a Senator I hope this isn't considered terribly political). If you've been wondering why old sci-fi mentions him so often, now you know.

My understanding is that the shuttle orbited the Earth with the windshield facing backward (they wouldn't need the main engines for the return, so it was safe to have them in the front). Did they not start doing this until after they cracked the windshield? It certainly didn't sound all that obvious when I first heard the shuttle orbited that way (probably long after it was grounded and I started playing KSP).

Reminds me how Sirius (and the competing brand at the time) suddenly added a lot of country stations after starting. Turns out that if there's one customer interested in radio stations that aren't geographically limited it is truckers. So along with the truckers came a lot of country stations (marketing didn't expect country listeners to be early adopters). Don't forget oceanic drilling platforms. I remember a player from my MMO-addicted time that one of the best players was a geologist living on an oil platform. Tons of downtime and an internet connection. But really, any place too far to run fiber (or even coax) is a candidate for starlink. And far more people live in the sticks than on the ocean.

I'm guessing they are facing bankruptcy with little else of value. Another theory is that the management of oneweb is already to buy oneweb's asset for pennies on the dollar and try all over again. Expect a second bankruptcy (at least) once a viable constellation is up and a third company forms out of the ashes. Presumably they have a duty to the shareholders. No idea if they have a duty to maximize the assets available to creditors during liquidation, because the chance of the shareholders getting anything is virtually nil.

SpaceX probably wasn't sure just how deeply buried the "SCE to AUX" switch is in Dragon's touchscreen menus.

I'd expect that they are especially careful as any dust wouldn't just stick to the lens, it would probably cause at least local breakage/damage/pitting. Dust at orbital velocity changes things a bit.

This sounds like something that would be dropped early in development. For geostationary satellites, you want your broadcast antenna to reach a continent or more, so the focus of the dish would almost certainly reflect enough signal to saturate the incoming antenna. For geosynchronous operation, the same is often true, especially when you want to send and receive from the same continent (acting as a deep-space relay wouldn't use the same dish) and would have all the same issues of saturating the incoming antenna. Sure, you can do things to subtract the outgoing signal, but said outgoing signal is going to be quite a few decibels (orders of magnitude) higher than the input and would likely be the limiting factor of the design. Exception: if for some reason you could use a much broader (or simply different) frequency or amplitude range on the uplink than the downlink (presumably for regulatory reasons), you might get away with it.

While "If you want to send a crew to somewhere else in LEO and have them stay there for while they replace some instruments in a satellite, the Shuttle was your best choice" seems cut and pasted from a shuttle mission, it also seems reasonably similar to Gemini missions. I suspect that even if the Shuttle was still available, NASA (or more likely Congress) would consider using commercial crew vehicles (although the Shuttle would still be vastly superior while in orbit). That and it would probably require heavy modification to allow an airlock to let an astronaut out while wearing a modern space suit designed for satellite work. Getting the cost of the modifications below a Shuttle launch may well be impossible (assuming one and only one mission. Which is how way too many government contracts work).

Oddly enough, this equation still leaves the question of "why do rockets have such a low dry mass" unanswered for the first stages ignited. The last stage has a dry weight of itself+the payload. The next stage has a dry mass of itself + the last stages wet weight + the playload (and so on). So the earlier you light the stages, the less important dry weight becomes (assuming you can still meet the overall delta-v requirements). Finally for extra boosters (whether a 2.5 stage configuration or those SRBs that ring some uncrewed rockets), TWR is nearly all that matters, and both Isp and dry mass mostly change delta-v linearly. - On the other hand, I think the delta rocket family (or a similar ULA rocket) switched from steel SRBs to carbon fiber. Presumably that tiny bit of delta-v was worth it (or they were gold-plating it, a real possibility). - this is one of those things KSP teaches you wrong. SRBs are not all that cheap nor reliable, and thus risking the payload (or worse, the crew) on an SRB not exploding is avoided when possible.

It certainly helps validate that NASA still loves to buy lifting bodies... This has to be one of the reasons SpaceX abandoned recovering boosters with parachutes (even coming down from much lower and slower, once the parachutes opened there was no telling where you would land). Mass (of the parachutes) had to be the other (and likely bigger) reason. Bringing the entire upper stage back might help re-entry (much larger surface area for more drag), but they certainly have their work cut out for them. Oddly enough, Scott Manley's latest video concerns a Soyuz that went off course and landed in a lake.

I have to wonder if Orbital/Northrup Grumman have any engines on display. I suspect they might not want to admit it. Maybe they can discretely send some over to the nearby Udvar-Hazy Smithsonian Air-Space extension...

I have to wonder if sometime in the future we will see designs more like Falcon Heavy (possibly with smaller side boosters, maybe even asparagus staging). Two stages seems to imply that each should have roughly equal delta-v. But then you have all the issues of needing much more thrust on the first stage. Side boosters would help, and would be the easiest to recover. Just don't expect such things to be common until fuel costs start to equal the costs to refurbish and relaunch reusable rockets (fairly far in the future, thus the idea that asparagus staging might no longer be such a problem. It doesn't add all that much in real life).

Sun Tzu writes that "all warfare is based on deception". I would claim logistics are most important, but deception is a close second. The catch is that it is quite likely you can determine how much energy a ship is emitting, how much it is accelerating, and thus its mass. Faking a high mass/high energy ship might not be worth it.

Heinlein wrote at least one to shake the rubes down, and another to become dictator of America. He said they were depressingly easy to write.

This is what Saturn V did. F1 engines can't throttle, and they wanted to fire them longer than the 3g the rocket (more likely astronauts) could handle. So they turned the center on off after acceleration exceeded 3g. TWR has diminishing returns after a couple minutes of flight. Most of the reason SSTO isn't feasible is how wasteful it is to get those high thrust engines into orbit, and it takes even more mass to bring them down safely.