Spaceception

SpaceX's big reason is that they're gunning for Mars. And Methane rockets is one of the best ways to go for ISRU production there. Whether or not you think they will achieve that goal doesn't matter. But they're planning ahead, which is important. And then Scott Manley's video summarizes everything else. I just realized you were mostly talking about Blue Origin. Sorry, I just focused on the quote and not the title earlier.

That title was from this paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1809.08632 https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/43844m/researchers-mind-melded-three-people-to-collaboratively-play-tetris Tl;dr, Three people had their brains "connected" through a Brain-to-Brain interface and they played a Tetris-like game with each other using the technology. Early attempts were pretty successful. Abstract; We present BrainNet which, to our knowledge, is the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving. The interface combines electroencephalography (EEG) to record brain signals and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) to deliver information noninvasively to the brain. The interface allows three human subjects to collaborate and solve a task using direct brain-to-brain communication. Two of the three subjects are "Senders" whose brain signals are decoded using real-time EEG data analysis to extract decisions about whether to rotate a block in a Tetris-like game before it is dropped to fill a line. The Senders' decisions are transmitted via the Internet to the brain of a third subject, the "Receiver," who cannot see the game screen. The decisions are delivered to the Receiver's brain via magnetic stimulation of the occipital cortex. The Receiver integrates the information received and makes a decision using an EEG interface about either turning the block or keeping it in the same position. A second round of the game gives the Senders one more chance to validate and provide feedback to the Receiver's action. We evaluated the performance of BrainNet in terms of (1) Group-level performance during the game; (2) True/False positive rates of subjects' decisions; (3) Mutual information between subjects. Five groups of three subjects successfully used BrainNet to perform the Tetris task, with an average accuracy of 0.813. Furthermore, by varying the information reliability of the Senders by artificially injecting noise into one Sender's signal, we found that Receivers are able to learn which Sender is more reliable based solely on the information transmitted to their brains. Our results raise the possibility of future brain-to-brain interfaces that enable cooperative problem solving by humans using a "social network" of connected brains. All in all, pretty awesome

"Man, landing those rockets must be a piece of cake." "No you fool! It's like a piece of pie." "That doesn't make any sense."

Does it really make sense for wormholes to be automatically "connected" (is the area between wormholes a different kind of "space"?), and could there instances where you end up in a totally different system than where you intended to go? I know this can't really be 'known' so what are your thoughts/opinions?

And look how much has changed. I wonder what the original SpaceX team would think if they could see what their little company will become. Heck, I wonder what they think now

Looks great I'll probably get VR for this, even when they can support non-VR.

Yeah... I wonder what the outcome will be. Unfortunately, people will start bashing Tesla/SpaceX/etc more now Even though their internal work is still really good, and impressive.

I suppose SpaceX would be in pretty good hands with Gwynne Shotwell. But what about Musk's other companies? Boring, Telsa, etc? I wonder if there's people who could faithfully take the reigns. Either for now, or permanently.. albeit with less controversy.

Oh, Steve Job's voice One more thing, it sounds like you were just doing your sleeping in those barracks. Not a lot of common area for meals, recreation, etc that's all done in the ship, and only the ship. Even optimistically, that's ~3-6 months in that condition. Probably a few times more than that (at least) to have the time to build a habitat in order to spread out in the first decade. So let's say that's roughly <10 of years of staying on a ship with around 100 people and less than 1000 m^3 of space. (Are there any other good Earth analogies to this? Maybe aside from a bad prison)

True. I guess it'd weed out the people who don't want cramped living conditions in exchange for going to another planet. But, here's another thing. Could onboard life-support take care of it? All the smells, water, air, waste, food, etc. Could it keep up? But (I don't know if this a deal-breaker), at least you could go outside. For the trip to Mars, you're inside for the long haul. Most people probably won't be trekking across the surface for safety reasons, and will only go out for necessary operations, like cleaning the panels, building the hab, etc. Maybe sometimes you'd go out to stretch your legs, but not for more than a few hours or so.

Came out recently. Looks cool

Is it reasonable to have 100 people on one of those ships? Most of the crew would likely be regular civilians. Maybe a few vets, or Astronaut trainee's that didn't make the cut, but mostly civilians. And while they would get training, and would likely have to meet some requirements, it probably won't be nearly as rigorous as NASA's Astronaut program. But as time goes on, and the population grows, this could change. Allowing the average joe to get in without as many pre-reqs (Aside from medical/physical, which I think will be hard caps). The psychological stresses of living with 99 other people (Or even more) in tight conditions, even with all the room of microgravity will probably be hard to get accustomed to, even if you're mentally fit (Emotions could, and probably will run high). Especially for the first few cycles of ships - as they will have to stay on the ship while habs are being built. Which means even less space to move around/live in. I think they've even mentioned you'd be in "Shifts"? Some people would sleep, and others would work or something like that. Which means you don't even really get your own room. Are 50 people better? Or even less? I think they said there's like 40 cabins (Correct me if I'm wrong), so 40 people may be good, to allow everyone to have a private space and all. If they scale up to something more similar to the 2016 ITS, maybe they could fit in more people. But not hundreds. I don't know though.

Thanks a ton! Screenshotting this so I can look at it in the future for other stuff

I need my math checked So, I'm trying to find the geostationary height for a planet 0.37x the mass, 0.66x the radii or Earth (~0.85 g), and I got the value of around 21,308 km. Which seems right. BUT, I calculated my finished value as follows: 295948.832 km x 0.072, why did I multiply it by 0.072? FIrst, I tried out the equation with Earth values (Several times), and multiplying it by 0.072 was the only way I could figure out how to get Earth's geostationary height. So when I did the equation for my planet, I did the same thing after converting the initial value from m to km (If you haven't figured it out by now, this was the first time I've ever used the equation ) I used a solid 24 hr day in seconds (86400 s), multiplied by 0.798 for the planet (19.152 hr day), Earth's mass in kg (expanded out to get rid of scientific notation), then times 0.37 for the planet, and Earth's radius in meters, multiplied by 0.66 for the planet. I used parentheses on all values with an exponent. And I used the calculation on the KSP wiki, which used cube root instead of square root on another website I found, which gave me even worse answers. (a = cube-root(G x M1 x t^2/4pi^2) - R) was the one of the KSP wiki. So uh, yeah, where did I go wrong? And what's the correct answer, if I didn't get it?

Just recently came out

So, a couple of questions. Either I didn't use the right keywords, overlooked something, or there simply isn't an answer, but could something like the Intrinsic field subtractor (Like the one in Watchmen that gave Dr. Manhattan his powers) be theoretically possible? And could something like that manipulate an object from a distance without the need for sophisticated machinery around the object?

Now, I'm preeeeety sure this article has already been shared https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/09/inside-the-eight-desperate-weeks-that-saved-spacex-from-ruin/, but I really like this quote "Outside of the USSR, from 1957 through 1967, and NASA from 1961 to 1971, it is difficult to find a country or company that has had a more dynamic decade in space than this." And this is why I think we'll see the BFR launch. Pretty much all of the comments were interesting to read as well (Surprisingly), and despite what SpaceX has ahead of itself, I'm excited for the day when we cheer on the first BFR test launch. Now I just want more updates of the BFR progression. How many times have the Raptors been tested, and for how long in total? How hard was it to build the first carbon fiber cylinder? Do they see building the first fuel tank as faster and/or easier since they already built a larger one a couple years ago? What's the progress on the refueling procedures? Ugh... I wish there were more people like Tim in the audience asking questions. Or even publically submitted ones entered by SpaceX employees or something.

From the video in the presentation (41:17 onward roughly), it has a high angle of attack, and comes in right side up, heatshield forward. Once it's lower in the atmosphere, it looks like it levels off on its belly (roughly) to bleed off more velocity, rights itself again, and uses the engines to land.

I thought that would pull too many resources from actually developing the BFR? And that will be handled in the mock-up version next year.

Oh, no, I meant more like basic equipment, habs, something like the start of a base. I wasn't talking about the picture's version. I agree that'll take awhile.

It's almost the same pic from a couple years ago, but I can't help feeling the same. There's just something so awesome about that pic, and it looks so tantalizingly close as well.

So, 2028... Does that mean the date for a crewed Mars landing has slipped 4 years? Because I imagine a base can be built in the first crewed mission. Gives them more time to test everything though, which is good. And a date I was honestly expecting.

I wonder if that'll be part of the grasshopper tests with the BFS and BFB, go really high, drop, and land on a very narrow target. Later tests could make it approach at an angle.

Oh, sorry. it was one of the first questions I could think of.