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Raven Industries

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Posts posted by Raven Industries

  1. 1 hour ago, RCgothic said:

    Space colonisation is risky. If SpaceX straight up said "this will kill one in every hundred crews" there would still be volunteers.

    I don't know that the Gov would necessarily appreciate a company getting several dozen to a hundred people killed on a semi-regular basis. NASA would definitely protest the optics of it, at the very least. 

  2. 6 minutes ago, Flavio hc16 said:

    if the cost of space goes down to 100$/kg (  an order of magnitute worse than what Elon is aiming for) you will start a craptopn of stuff launched into orbit, universities, people who can burn money, science experiments of any kind. Yopu create a market that right now we don't know

    Spoiler

     

    $100/kg to LEO and we can send these things up in droves!

    File:safetysat.png

     

     

  3. Starship's capabilities may exist nowhere else except in pretty infographics and cute speeches at this point, but Musk already has one reusable cost-effective spacecraft, which is one more than everyone else. I daresay he's at least somewhat qualified to say that Starship is a viable idea. 

  4. 23 minutes ago, tater said:

    Yeah, any orbital destination for people doesn't need hundreds of seats a a go, something smaller would actually start to look really attractive.

    I'd love to see Skylon be a thing, for example.

    Not quite the same, but if there ends up being enough demand for such smaller flights, I could see SS being used in a sort of international/regional airport type setup. Haul large groups of people into orbit and drop them off at a hub of sorts, and then ferry individual groups to their destination with smaller craft that don't have to be built for travel to and from the Earth's surface. 

  5. I will have to agree that a manned mission would likely result in much more interesting information than any unmanned mission. One thing that was briefly mentioned but not elaborated on is maneuverability: Curiosity, in its 7 and a half or so years of service, has driven about 22 km. Apollo 17 covered over 30 km in about 4 and a half hours (over a few days on the lunar surface). Adding a generous amount of time for different circumstances and collection of samples, a few astronauts on Mars with a rover could do in a week what Curiosity has taken over 7 years to accomplish. 

    As far as whether a permanent presence on Mars goes, I hate to admit that there's little reason to stay with more than a small research team. However, there is one potential export a colony on Mars could provide which has been more or less overlooked: Good feelings for billionaires looking for a cause to support. Evidence suggests it's an industry worth hundreds of millions of dollars, growing every day. 

  6. 8 hours ago, ThatGuyWithALongUsername said:

    This is starting to get repetitive...

    I know, we all dream of the day when it works and Jim Bridenstine can finally go down to the SLS engineers and yell "Elon Musk was able to build this in a field! With a box of scrap metal!" 

  7. 4 hours ago, mikegarrison said:

    LOL. Kind of, yeah.

    It's like the airbags in a car. Or the styrofoam that is under the plastic covers of a car bumper. They are one-time use items, but if they aren't used then they last for quite a while.

    If you simplify the refurbishment and replacement process enough, I suppose manned missions could take spare crush cores with them and replace them in-situ if needed. I don't know what's involved in the refurbishment though, so maybe it can't be made as simple as opening a hatch,taking out the old core, and sticking in the new one. 

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