mikegarrison
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Posts posted by mikegarrison
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1 hour ago, darthgently said:
His respect for regulations that make sense is solid.
With Musk himself being the one who determines whether they make sense? That's not exactly "regulation".
1 hour ago, darthgently said:SpaceX's results are a testament to the value of its approach to problems
Or maybe just of survivor bias. There are other companies that have tried the "go fast and break stuff" idea that have ended up ... broken.
In the great dot-com boom of the late 90s there were a lot of companies that burned through all their cash trying to buy market share for their great internet business idea. Some of them became Amazon and Google. Some of them became Pets.com and Webvan and eToys.com.
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3 hours ago, KSK said:
Musk is insane because he's charging headlong towards a goal of dubious value without caring who gets chewed up and spat out in the process.
Not really a definition of "insane". I mean, I suppose it can be. We use the word quixotic to mean someone obsessed with a goal that is probably meaningless and may be impossible, and Don Quixote was, if possibly not "insane", clearly not thinking correctly.
I am not going to judge Musk's sanity, because a) I'm not qualified for that, and b) I don't know him. But certain aspects of his public behavior (and his fanbase) are extremely unappealing to me. I am reminded of Howard Hughes (who was before my time, FWIW). Or the fictional Citizen Kane. Sometimes giving people no limits (like fantastic personal wealth and power) has bad effects on them. Or possibly, if it is not a cause, it is at least an enabler.
I feel like I'm watching someone fall down a rabbit hole to a very specific kind of wonderland. And not a very nice wonderland either. The kind populated by Sad Puppies and Gamergate hashtaggers and Great Replacement believers.
But Musk != SpaceX, sort of. And yet, he has such a cult of personality (and so much ownership and control of the company) that Musk very certainly is entangled with the fortunes and future of SpaceX. Possibly, if it became necessary, SpaceX could end up independent from Elon Musk. But at the moment, it is hard to visualize a path to that.
1 hour ago, KSK said:Couldn't ask the dinosaurs but I did ask a little birdie - is that close enough?
They thought that getting off this rock and going anywhere else in the solar system sounded like a terrible idea compared to staying put in this nice warm environment with breathable air and food for the taking. They did reckon that detecting and deflecting any space rocks that threatened to mess things up, would be a good plan, and conceded that a big rocket could probably help with that.
Maybe I just spoke to a particularly short-sighted birdie but I'm inclined to agree.
Dinosaurs were on the Earth for over 150 million years (not even counting the birds). That is roughly 1000 times longer than hominids have been here. I think that if we last as long as they did, we will have done better than I expect.
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Just gonna drop in here that SpaceX using Tesla cars for transporters and X-exclusive broadcasts and the like is exactly the sort of behavior that led to anti-trust laws being written in the first place.
And since the ownership of those different companies is not identical, if one company gives something to another (such as SpaceX giving X valuable exclusive content), that potentially constitutes transferring value from one set of minority shareholders to a different set -- probably without their consent.
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One characteristic of laser drilling is that it has a tendency to make conical holes rather than cylindrical ones, and we used to use that to our advantage with combustors. We would drill the cooling holes from the inside of the combustor, thus making each hole slightly diffusing, which helped keep the cooling air at the wall of the combustor where it was needed.
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Folks, you know that laser drilling is a thing in real life, right? Used in industry all the time. No need to be guessing about this.
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6 hours ago, darthgently said:
Yeah, I've been reading it, and it inspired my disagreement with what I see as its basic assumptions in posts here. I see the book as playing devil's advocate at best, not being an end-all, be-all, definitive, settled, unassailably positioned, conversation ender that it seems to be presenting itself as at times
The book is written by a cartoonist and a worm biologist. They in no way claim to be providing a definitive "conversation ender". What they are doing is attempting to be a conversation STARTER -- about issues that are often handwaved over by space colony advocates.
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Oh, and also? You've got to love a book that is willing to discuss a hypothetical war on the surface of the moon between Muskow and Bezostralia.
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OK, just finished the book, and in the end ... they make a plea to all their fellow space fans to forgive them for coming to conclusion that this will be really hard to do and possibly should even never be done, but definitely should not be rushed into.
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10 hours ago, farmerben said:
It might be better to shoot for Earth dependent O-Neil cylinders first.
The book is titled A City On Mars, but they discuss the Moon, Mars, and space habitats.
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10 hours ago, 55delta said:
What's the rush? Well, a wide-scale disaster that renders Earth's surface uninhabitable doesn't just wait until 2100 to happen. I mean, there's many potential disaster we know can happen, like climate change or that nuclear war is as close as its ever been. But those are just examples, because I figure they could just as easily get to us before 2050.
And of course they discuss this, but their point is that it is nearly impossible to imagine any kind of wide-scale disaster on on Earth that would actually make it less habitable for humans than Mars is right now.
No air, no nitrogen, toxic dirt that sometimes blows in planet-wide dust storms, high levels of radiation, low gravity....
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2 hours ago, darthgently said:
That said, Musk has stated before that if it doesn't work they'll just put landing legs on it. The stacking is the main function of the sticks
And I have stated before that adding landing gear to an aerospace vehicle as an afterthought usually does not go well. They do have some idea how to do landing legs on the outside of a booster though, so it's probably not outside their ability.
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4 hours ago, darthgently said:
It just occurred to me, and I wonder if it would be an exaggeration, or accurate, to consider the OLM+chopsticks as making the entire horizontal vs vertical integration debate a bit obsolete.
I mean you get all the benefits of vertical because everything is vertical from day 1 and you mostly get the benefits of horizontal as each subsection can be built separately, and vertically, lower down in purpose built bays with great access, then stacked more fully later in a high bay or even on the OLM. With final integration at the OLM. No need to transport/erect horizontal to vertical (unimaginable with SS) or crawl a precious wedding cake for hours from the VAB to the launchpad.
Buildings and ships usually get assembled outdoors and more-or-less on-site. Aerospace vehicles usually don't.
Doing the stacking on the launch pad is pretty much a necessary pre-req for the SpaceX vision of turnaround within hours, so it's not too surprising that they decided to try doing it right from the start.
It only makes the other methods "obsolete" if it ends up working.
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3 hours ago, tater said:
Probability is ≈0, as one would expect.
When talking commercial airplanes, probabilities of 10^-6 are considered significant.
Of course, there are a lot more commercial airplane flights every day than space launches.
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As someone who has read a lot of science fiction, the issues about social governance seem to have been long-discussed. At least, well-discussed in a fictional context.
They mention that many space colony advocates seem to envision some sort of communal society, despite that the current leading proponents are both capitalist billionaires. However, there has been a *lot* of science fiction written about capitalist (or ruthlessly exploitive capitalist) space colonies. Enough so that I think even casual space fans can probably name multiple stories pointing to this being a potential problem.
On the other hand, I was quite amused by the authors' description of the annoyance felt by legal scholars of space law and space treaties when they hear that supposedly no one has ever considered such issues.
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2 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:
If you let the forum software censor the original word, then we can figure out what it was.
stand-up guys
It's a usually-considered-derogative word for a child born out of legal wedlock.
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I've started reading this book, by Kelly and Zach Weinersmith. Seems pretty good, so far.
They started out wanting to write a pop-sci book about all the engineering issues and solutions that would be needed for colonizing away from Earth, but ended up becoming what they call "space *******" (the forum won't let me quote their own self-description), because what they found was just a massive number of ignored or hidden problems. Issues with law, issues with biosphere stability, issues with human reproduction, issues with social stability, etc.
Looks pretty interesting.
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4 hours ago, StrandedonEarth said:
compared to the part of the flight that has already been tested?
Perhaps it is worth pointing out that Starship has:
1) never been tested landing from actual re-entry, and
2) only landed non-catastrophically one time.
But they probably have their reasons. Maybe they didn't include all the hardware or software it would take to attempt a soft landing.
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Also, any KSP player quickly learns that you can't do an orbital insertion with aerobraking. You can do a capture, yes, but you will inescapably (pun intended) end up with an unstable orbit that is going to quickly fail. You need another burn at the new apoapsis in order to avoid that.
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I do that all the time in KSP, and it works most of the time.
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13 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
I went through the list... Despite having an advanced degree, I'm probably only qualified for 'Barista'.
Better than "Barista -- temporary".
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Seven months ago it was reported that ULA was up for sale, but I've heard nothing about this for months. Is it still true?
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3 hours ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:
Not sure that is the case. Much of what I've read suggests that glaciers are bloody dangerous. Not something that should be used as a thoroughfare.
I used to do a lot of mountaineering. Glaciers are dangerous, but are also excellent ways to travel in the mountains if you are prepared for them.
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The big advantage to using rocket fuel instead of rocks is that rocket fuel contains its own potential energy. It is both reaction mass and energy source.
If you use rocks, that's fine for covering the "reaction mass" part, but you still need an energy source.
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16 hours ago, Meecrob said:
Haha, I don't blame MikeG for leaving the conversation.
I have other things to do. Like play Baldur's Gate 3.
Anyway, I said what I said, and don't see any point to coming back and saying it again just because some people disagreed with me.
SpaceX Discussion Thread
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
Got news for you, unfortunately. Eventually the whole universe will be dead.
The issue here is not whether humanity will survive infinitely far into the future, because it won't. The issue is whether leaving Earth might delay our species' inevitable extinction or whether it might, instead, hasten it. And if it does something like trigger wars, that might be a real issue.
If you can redirect an asteroid away from the Earth, that means you can redirect one toward the Earth, too....