todofwar
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Posts posted by todofwar
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32 minutes ago, tater said:
They do great with robots, no question. SLS/Orion is a train wreck, however (or a dumpster fire, take your pick).
I suppose it becomes a philosophical question, but did NASA land on the moon before or did Boeing? And is the SLS train wreck on Boeing or NASA? I think the latter is more on how the contract bid process and need to provide jobs in districts overrode other concerns, which is what always happens with federal projects. And of course NASA is capped at what it is allowed to pay civil servants. But the CLPS program I think shows NASA might actually be learning from the lessons of SpaceX, namely that the best use of tax payer dollars is to create a competition among commercial providers with NASA as the main but not necessarily only customer. The big question becomes, in regards to this thread, if we have a SpaceX launch for a Moon Express manned lander and China buys the first trip, who got credit?
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2 minutes ago, Ol’ Musky Boi said:
I think its not so much the rovers that impress people but rather the amount of progress the CNSA has made in such a short amount of time. For sure their achievements don't hold a candle to NASA, but they've certainly got a lot more direction than NASA at the moment - particularly in manned spaceflight.
I think NASA has a bit of "trying to do everything" syndrome, but it's worth remembering right now NASA is focused on developing technology to enable Science. And we have compelling science cases to go just about everywhere, and one astronaut on the Moon probably equals ten or more Curiosity class rovers on the Moon. This gets into the whole manned vs unmanned argument but I think NASA is doing better than people think.
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I believe SpaceX timelines about as far as I can throw an F9. Besides that, end of the day, what does Musk want with the Moon? He wants to colonize Mars and his pie in the sky architecture for that does not involve the Moon. SpaceX has not even tried to enter into the commercial lander provider race which now has several serious players and a commitment from NASA to buy. They will probably be involved as a launch provider, but they have made 0 moves towards becoming a lander provider even though the new program is set to mimic a contest SpaceX already won once. My money is still on NASA. People are going nuts over China landing a couple small landers and a rover, talk to me when they land a rover the size of a mini cooper on Mars. Only threat to NASA being first is if the next president decides to once again shift focus to humans on Mars which is entirely possible, but to be honest when it comes to outer space there is NASA and then everyone else. It's like they are an NFL team and everyone else is still playing at the college level.
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11 hours ago, peadar1987 said:
Power of a wind turbine is Eta*0.5*A*Rho*v3 where eta is the efficiency (maximum of 57%), A is the swept are, rho is the density, and v is the windspeed.
Density at the surface of Venus is 67 kg/m3, but wind speeds are quite slow, apparently around 3 m/s. A 1MW turbine would have to have a minimum area of 970m2. This corresponds to a rotor diameter of ~36 metres (compared to a 60m diameter for a similarly rated turbine on earth). A corresponding 1MW (~1500HP) gas turbine would be a lot more compact, if not a huge amount lighter.
It's not just about size and weight though, wind is a nice steady source of free energy. And if you use a kite, you can access much faster speeds not too high off the ground.
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5 hours ago, Hannu2 said:
Certainly and that is why high gap semiconductors have been investigated. Higher operating temperature and ability to handle high voltages means smaller, cheaper, faster, more efficient and more reliable components in power electronics in industry and electricity networks. Venus probes will be extremely marginal application for high temperature electronics.
Experimental stuff seems to have nice specifications. I made a short search for commercial components and they had much lower temperature limits. However, surface temperature is about 500C. There should be some room for heating. Energy production is also very hard. Atmosphere absorbs all short wavelength radiation from Sun which could be able to produce electricity in high gap solar cell. Any heat engine with low temperature at 500 C would be quite imaginative. I think that electronics would not be the hardest challenge in long period operation on Venus.
Don't forget wind power. It's slow, but steady and reliable and with higher mass than our own atmosphere.
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5 hours ago, Hannu2 said:
Semiconductors must have certain carrier densities. Electrons and holes. They are controlled by doping, strain, electric fields etc. However, they are strongly temperature dependent. At too high temperature too much electrons is excited from valence band to conduction band. These carriers cause conduction and transistors can not be shut down anymore which leads to fault action, more heating and destructive thermal runaway. On the other hand, if temperature is too low, doping atoms can not donate or accept electrons and semiconductor stays in insulating state.
There are some high temperature materials which have larger bandgap. For example silicon carbide which has been already mentioned. However, they are typically difficult to dope and process to components. Components need also insulators, package materials, metal bonds etc. They have different thermal properties and may lead to problems when temperature changes. As far as I know there are no stock electronics which can operate even nearly at the temperature of Venus surface.
All sounds like one of those things that may feedback into earth applicable systems. I'm sure there are places we'd like higher temp circuits, if the tech was available.
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5 hours ago, kerbiloid said:
I like the idea of monstrous coal-dark zeppelines silently barraging in a blurry sky of the Venus.
But fluorine plastics are still in order. Snow-white silently barraging zeppelins are nice, too.Also I'm fond of steel-only electronics, with no solder, plastic, chips and so on. Good old dieselpunk automatons with honest gear-wheels ilogic nstead of pathetic microchips.
When the whole drilling machine is several dozen tons (?), its heat capacity would be overflown in several hours.
Any cooling system must evacuate the waste heat into outer world.Not absolutely at all. The greater is wind speed - the greater are its local turbulences. So, the crew would still have green faces (not Kerbal) with popped out eyeballs (still not Kerbal, though looks similar) , just without expressed flow direction.
-270° cryogenic LH2 inside .500° atmosphere, with its extremely low density would mean ~800 K temperature difference between fiery hell and superfrosty hell, separated only with several centimeters of insulation.
The hydrogen would finish very quickly..To float up it should be either a rocket, or a balloon.
The first would return 1 kg of payload per 1 t jf the lander's mass. The second would melt before inflate.
Perhaps, combining the said lander and earthquaker into a big nuke solves all these problems. The cargo delivers itself, as a cloud.This Russel's teapot should reach the near-Sun orbit in several minutes after its landing.
The hydrogen won't get stored at the surface, it's for rocket fuel.
You can use copper for your electronics as well, but I'm imagining you won't have allot of circuitry. Just some hydrolic pumps to work the arms of the scooper. The smart section would be very small, and the first thing cooled by the flowing water.
The water reserve would be kept isolated as much as possible, some low pressure helium insulation should work pretty well. Once the reservoir of water starts getting too hot it can be vented at a higher rate to finish filling the piston and allow liftoff. But the system is designed to have the water reach boiling point, just in a controlled fashion.
Also, pretty sure pure graphene is colorless but I might be wrong about that.
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13 minutes ago, kunok said:
I understand that the idea is that the band gap is bigger than the amplitude of the noise made by that effect, no? Some electronic engineer or solid state physic here?
Not sure what the necessary threshold is, but I know that band gaps only refer to gaps in energy states. Distributions within those two states is governed by boltzman equations, which are temperature dependent. As you ramp up temperature, you begin to populate the higher energy state more. In order to make use of that gap, you need a difference in population that can be exploited. If you populate the higher state too much, you end up with a negligible difference in populations, that means you have one state, and no band gap in the most extreme case. I believe it also plays into tunneling, which can be an issue for sophisticated circuits.
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I wonder if there will come a time when we don't do EVAs anymore. Seems there should be a way for a drone operated from the relative safety of the inside of the iss to accomplish all those tasks.
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People freak out too much about the Venusian surface. Pressure: absolutely a non issue. We handle many times that pressure every day. Ever heard of submarines?
Acid: again, non issue either on the surface or even if you were hanging out in the clouds. Sulfuric acid is the most produced chemical on earth. Yeah, iron doesn't like it, but we have plenty of ways to deal with acid. High temperature acid resistant coatings are a budget away from reality. We can already rust proof things with graphene coatings, it's just expensive.
Temperature: this is the real problem, but not as bad as people think. Lead is really low melting, so the whole "melting lead" thing sounds cool but it means nothing for most alloys. Steel will handle it just fine, though it may warp a bit over time so you'll need occasional replacements. What this does mean is you'll need some kind of way to keep your smart sections cool, but you can have those in a well insolated and actively cooled section.
Wind speed: also non issue, though storms may be a problem at certain latitudes. You will be floating along with the wind at high altitude, from your frame of reference you won't be moving at all. It will be possible to air launch to orbit, that's not much of a problem. Real issue there is fuel, Venus has very little hydrogen which is a key ingredient in all our chemical fuels (kerosene is, in terms of molar ratios, mostly hydrogen). So you'll have to bring in the hydrogen from elsewhere, already started a thread on that one and the conclusion was near Venus asteroids as the best source. And at the surface the wind is a slow breeze. The mass of the atmosphere may require some anchoring to avoid drift, but the wind is actually slow enough to cause issues with wind power (hence the need for a kite system, already being developed by Google for earth applications).
My suggested system: airship with good sensors aimed at the surface looks for concentrations of unobtanium. Lander deployed that is little more than a back hoe that scrapes the surface. May come with its own drill, or you could drop some earthquake bombs like we used in WWII to loosen up material. It dumps material into a bucket that floats up to the atmosphere where it is refined, and launched to orbit.
Other idea for the lander: it has a tank of liquid water. The liquid is used as a coolant, in a system designed so that once the liquid boils it exhausts into a piston. The piston generates energy for the lander, which is anchored to the ground. Once the piston is full, it has enough buoyancy it lift itself to the upper atmosphere. Water will condense, so the lander will need to be caught by another airship that never lands. It takes the ore to the refinery, the piston has reset itself and goes back down to the surface e for more material. Only the bucket of ore need float up, so the piston will reattach itself to the lander base and continue mining.
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20 hours ago, wumpus said:
Considering mankinds' treatment of other species "conquer and rule" would effectively mean domestication (although whether we would get the cow or the dog treatment remains to be seen). If you were planning to colonize Proxmia Centauri (and even more so further away), wouldn't you want an initial probe that terraformed the planet a bit (especially removing any dangerous species and converting the ecology to something more suitable).
We wouldn't live to see the "invasion force" (unless already fully domesticated). The first thing that would hit us would be a biological payload that would basically wipe out Earth's biosphere and replace it with something more friendly to aliens. Expect to be wiped out (probably via disease) once the probe detected us interfering with the process.
I think we're basically going to be depending on space peta and space green peace to protect our biosphere from total annihilation.
Unrelated but they'll merge anyway, but one of my biggest pet peeves was definitely in one of the iron man or avengers movies where Tony stark is giving a presentation at MIT and at the end he says all the students projects have been fully funded. Afterwards, someone walks up and asks if maybe some of that money could go to faculty, and it's played off like that faculty is unimaginative and greedy unlike the students with genuine good ideas. Who do people think do all the research at universities? Undergrads do what grad students tell them to do and grad students follow the lead of their faculty adviser. If those students projects are funded than that money will go to faculty one way or another.
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4 minutes ago, 5thHorseman said:
This reminds me of a pet peeve specific to video games (and sometimes long running TV shows), but close enough to add here. The bad-guys-du-jour attack your good guy forces in such a way that we always have a way to defeat them, and each time they attack it's a little stronger even though there's no logical reason why they couldn't attack on day 1 with the force they use in the big final battle and totally obliterate the Human race in the prologue.
Examples: Mass Effect and XCOM. For TV, the show that comes to mind is Stargate SG1.
Related to the final final final form trope in rpg games. Normally, armies get more desperate and throw more and more rash things out as you get close to defeating them. They throw everything into round one and hope there is no round two. See: Germany in wwii. Now, individual battles can have this sort of escalation if it was say a sneak attack that didn't immediately succeed so you start sinking more and more resources into it to try and force the other side. See: also Germany wwii.
On Saturday, December 31, 2016 at 5:42 PM, Codraroll said:But I've posted most of my peeves already!
Oh well, there's always more (always). How about this?
So... your average alien invasion. Or invasion from some other dimension, whatever works. A genocidal race of hyper-advanced or even magical beings is coming to Earth to destroy us all. Their chosen method of widespread destruction? Flying around downtown and zapping small objects. Maybe blowing up cars (one at a time), or single rooms in some unfortunate buildings. Zip-boom, zip-boom, panicked crowds running around, individual people being hunted down by death rays. All in all, less firepower going off than your typical New Year's Eve celebration.
Wouldn't it take an awful lot of time to destroy humanity this way? I mean, depopulating the Earth using the explosive equivalent of hand grenades is an awfully tedious and inefficient process. Even in Independence Day, the aliens took out one city per ship per day or so, which seems rather modest too, considering the size of the Earth. But those aliens deserve credit for using a somewhat effective method, I mean, the guys in Avengers and Battle: Los Angeles and even TRON: Legacy decided to do the job with foot soldiers. The aliens in War of the Worlds had vechicles (or whatever the three-legged equivalent is called), as did the Galactic Empire in Star Wars Episode V (four legs), but they still packed a comparatively modest amount of firepower for their operations.
Savvy aliens would realize they had the technology to accelerate tons of mass up to a significant fraction of light speed (that's what their ships are doing, after all), and instead play the orbital mechanics game with a big rock and a pair of engines. Instant extinction-level-event without the hassle of getting guys on flying scooters to fly around skyscrapers. Even Starship Troopers got this somewhat right.
Then again, if the alien invaders knew what they were doing, most alien invasion movies would have been rather short and depressing, though...
You may enjoy planetary annihilation. The only game I've played where smashing your own planets moon into the enemy planet is an available and encouraged way to end a conflict.
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1 hour ago, shynung said:
You can work it out, at least in theory. Look at the propellants used, determine the reaction products and energy liberated, and assume this energy goes wholly to accelerating the reaction products. Then, knowing the reaction product's mass and kinetic energy, you can work out the 'short-hand' theoretical exhaust velocity, which becomes specific impulse after divided by standard gravity. I read somewhere that if you do this with the hydrogen-oxygen mix, you'd get a specific impulse well above 500 s.
I say short-hand, because even with a perfect engine design that's 100% efficient at converting chemical energy to kinetic, the exact chemical composition of the exhaust need not necessarily be the same as what a chemical textbook would tell you; burning 2 molecules of hydrogen with 1 of oxygen does not produce 100% water, even at stoichiometric ratios. Some of the exhaust could be stuff like HO, H, O, or other rarer combinations. These reduce the chemical efficiency, as some of the reaction products have not fully liberated their chemical energy by the time they leave the nozzle.
Then there are the physical issues. Exhaust particles impart momentum directly opposite of their direction of travel onto the engine. Excluding ion thrusters, rocket engine exhaust doesn't always travel towards the same direction as the nozzle points. These tangentially-leaving exhaust particles impart less forward momentum, reducing effective specific impulse.
All this, before considering the mechanical efficiency of the engine design itself. Older engines use what's called a gas generator cycle, where part of the propellant is used to run the propellant pump, then thrown away. Newer designs attempt to improve specific impulse by routing this propellant back into the main chamber, at the cost of reduced thrust, and needing to run the turbine at uncomfortably high temperatures, requiring either heat-resistant materials, extensive cooling systems, or both.
Does it matter where the reactions take place? Thinking about what you would make in hydrolox aside from water, none of them will be stable and your number two product will probably be peroxide, which will then act as a monopropellant but it would probably persist long enough to not go off in the main reaction chamber.
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1 hour ago, LN400 said:
Bottom line is, it is all too common to assume we are the end product of evolution, that evolution strives to produce humanoids everywhere it can. We tend to create imaginations in our own well, image.
Only thing I will point out is the visible light spectrum is optimal for vision because many electronic transitions happen in that region, sometimes down to the UV or up to IR, but most spectrometers in chemistry labs operate between 200 and 800 nm because that's where you get the bulk of useful information. IR sensing eyes could also be useful, and some organisms can detect them, but usually in addition to visible light organs. Anything above UV is likely to be too damaging, and you don't gain much in the ultra ultra violet region anyway.
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27 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
Right. That's the issue. Your revolutionary technology has to have an advantage over the alternative by the time it is ready to go into service. Too often in history people have thrown a lot of money into technologies because they were better than what existed at the time the new technology was kicked off. But by the time it was ready, their revolutionary technology was now a dud.
Of course, the question becomes which tech would have advanced faster. Let's say I build a graphene hard drive in a lab. It stores 10x more than the current market leader, and has a superior read out rate (I really don't know computer hard drive terms so bear with me). By the time I get it into a product, conventional hard drives have outpaced mine or made it so the benefit is no longer worth the added cost of scaling production to be able to match what can be made on existing machinery. But my graphene drive will improve in certain metrics at 1.05x the rate of conventional, and match improvement rates for the rest. Long term, it will be the better solution. So, is the market driving us to a local minimum in the end? It is (edit: potentially) a big issue with many technologies out there.
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4 hours ago, Jonfliesgoats said:
Dry erase boards are in briefing rooms and are pretty common these days. Chalkboards are disappearing. They make me feel more academic. Seriously. Holding chalk makes me feel more intelligent. As soon as I realize this newfound sense of self satisfaction comes from holding chalk in my hand I immediately feel stupid. And I should. I am still embarrassed that those thoughts even cross my mind.
I will agree a marker just doesn't have the feel of chalk, but it's not enough to outweigh the other benefits for me. Of course, chalk is much more eco friendly too.
5 hours ago, magnemoe said:Knew an mathematician, he did doctorate after engineering on university, he was doing modeling, as in trying to make simulations work.
Kind of edge with programming as you have to know how the computers do math. Think that is the main employment, same as most software developers end up making custom modules for firms.
Theoretical chemistry has become big because of simulations, you try loads of stuff in an simulation and you find something interesting, then the next part is to make it real.
You also need people to set the strategy for the search.
And yes they have found multiple materials harder than diamond, don't know if any is commercial, know that stuff who is a bit weaker and way cheaper is.
And the real big ones is in biochemestry.No, you're describing computational chemistry which is different from theoretical. Computational chemists apply the theory others come up with, not to say theoretical chemists don't apply their own theories.
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20 minutes ago, Tullius said:
Not necessarily, it can also mean that the mathematics behind this new theory are so overwhelmingly complicated that noone has yet solved them for more complicated systems.
I always wonder about this. What do mathematicians do all day? I asked some theoretical chemists, apparently they do just write on chalk boards allot (I must be the only scientist I know who prefers dry erase boards) and then put the equations into mathematica. Still can't wrap my head around that, the thought process that goes into just staring at an equation until some new way forward pops up.
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1 hour ago, wumpus said:
I've heard reports that Skylab astronauts hated exersize, but not the same from ISS. Some of this might be cultural change, but I suspect the newer exersizes make more effort to get the sweat from pooling on your body. There's a pretty good mockup* of Skylab in the Smithsonian (downtown): it doesn't look big enough to run in.
* don't know how real the command module body is: I suspect one of the last two was part of Skylab and the other is in the intact Saturn V in Florida. Most things in that museum are the real deal or (for things that didn't come back to Earth) backup copies.
Interesting. I would think running in the hamster wheel would get sweat to actually flow down off of you like it would naturally, since you are in effect running in 0.3g. Maybe getting in one of these:
Instead might work better. You can get going up to a faster speed, getting closer to 1g, and with the added benefit of having less tidal force. And, you can bolt it onto a track, so you can start from stationary allot easier. Downside is, your legs won't get the same level of force as they would from walking around in a 1g environment so who knows what that will do for bone loss.
Whole point of this is to accomplish something close to 1g for health reasons, without the need for a complex rotating hab which needs to be much wider due to the RPMs necessary at smaller radii. But if it's only an hour or so at a time, I think a small 5m diameter wheel might work nicely.
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6 hours ago, Shpaget said:
Wouldn't they keep on falling on their noses? It is far to small wheel. Coriolis would have them barf in no time.
They apparently did it in space lab, not sure how big that was. I'm thinking a harness would be needed to train on it at first, but over time humans are capable of pretty impressive things.
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17 minutes ago, Camacha said:
It almost sounds like people think interplanetary radiation is at Chernobyl reactor hall levels. It seems to be much less, even less than we thought not long ago. Wikipedia has some great information. Do note that the scale of the chart is logarithmic. Even so, the problem seems within reasonable engineering reach.
One solution that comes to mind is that water seems to be a very decent shield. We will need to take quite a lot of that with us anyway. Also note that most of the theoretical health effects would manifest themselves many years later. For most intents and purposes, those will not hamper even a long term mission. Wikipedia mentions that, even without shielding, the dosage of a full Mars mission should be less than an astronaut is advised to endure in its career.
Is interplanetary radiation a hassle? Sure. Is it an insurmountable problem? It seems not.
Log scales have a habit of diminishing differences. It's not insurmountable, but it is a big problem that needs to be adressed. And the type of radiation is different too, it's very high energy radiation that penetrates allot of conventional shielding.
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So, what I guess the take away is we should just be ok with half the astronauts we send somewhere dying from radiation related illnesses until we figure out better treatments and shielding? Being serious now, back then it seems the value of human life was lower in general, we don't accept anyone dying on the way to Mars.
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46 minutes ago, Thor Wotansen said:
The other problem is if the wheel is spinning and the astronaut is the motor then the astronaut feels no Gs because he/she remains stationary. sure, the spinning bit feels Gs but the astronaut isn't spinning.
No, the wheel is stationary the whole time, the astronaut runs around generating their own g force. Think of it like a car going along the side of a track, the faster it goes the harder its pressed against the track wall. From an observer outside, what is happening is the astronaut is propelling themselves forward to collide into a wall, but instead of colliding they redirect themselves along the wheel. Faster they propel themselves forward, harder they "hit" the wall. Much the same way a runner is doing little more than falling forward and catching themselves over and over again.
Now that I think of it, some kind of rigid bar for the astronaut to push against as they get themselves going will probably be better overall than a tether. That way, while running slower, they can push themselves into the wall for some added traction. As they really get going they won't need to push themselves down anymore. So some kind of trapeze type bar hanging down on a rigid rod from the center of the wheel.
4 hours ago, James Kerman said:It sounds like a great idea however wouldn't you have issues with the opposing forces created during the run?
Also could it be improved by adding a generator as a resistive force?
Yeah, that's one of the issues. The section of the ship would need to weigh enough to make the astronaut's mass almost negligible. Don't know just how massive off the top of my head though.
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Was thinking about the whole artificial gravity thing, and about the usefulness of inflatable modules thing, and realized the two might work well together. The general problem with inflatables is you need to fill them with stuff, so really what good does the inflatable part do for you except require multiple launches? So I thought maybe just having some big empty space for astronauts to feel a little less claustrophobic would be nice. And maybe put some excercise equipment in there too. And that's when I thought, hamster wheel. If you make a wheel 5 meters across, and tether someone to the middle of it, and they start running, then if they hit 8 miles an hour (that's not bad at all really), their feet will experience 0.5g of centripedal force. Now, they will feel some tidal forces. Their head will experience about .1g in this scenario. Running at 12 miles an hour (5 minute mile pace) gets their head up to .23 and their feet to 1.2. Basic idea is, launch an inflatable with a five meter diameter internal environment. Have a pole run through the center, and a tether attached. It might need to be able to swing the person a bit to get them started, but once they're moving they should be able to propel themselves forward. Nice, lightweight 0 energy solution for artificial gravity for long term habitation. So, for anyone with more knowledge about medicine, the question is, would simulating gravity by running in a circle have any benefit? I'm thinking thirty minutes to an hour a day (probably not all at once) should help somewhat. They already have those bungee chord treadmill things after all.
Optional design: Make it a bike attached to a rail, easier to get to speed and keep the body more prone to avoid tidal issues.
Possible issue: The mass of a grown human running around will throw off the center of mass, and will introduce some angular momentum to the station. Might need to be compensated with something. Maybe the bike solves this a little bit, just add a counter weight to at least preserve a center of mass. If gravity is an issue on the Moon or Mars though, at least those won't be problems.
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6 hours ago, Nibb31 said:
Ants don't have much relevance to human life support systems.
Most life support experiments have been done on animals already. Most ISS experiments on animals don't get much public coverage because of extremists who would scream out about it, but they exist. There is also Russia's Bion program (The Bion spacecraft are derived from Yantar military observation sats, which are derived from good old Vostok!). The last one flew in 2013 and carried gerbils, mice, geckos, fish, snails, and other microbes and critters, with various rates of survival.
As for measuring radiation exposure levels, there are more reliable ways of getting raw data than sending animals.
Yeah but again, those didn't stray into the belts or deep space, so not much better than the prolonged exposure of humans on the ISS. We can get radiation levels easy enough, but actually seeing their effects on biological systems is more challenging. Ants aren't the best analogue organism, but even sending up some nematodes will give lots of useful information on the effects of space radiation on multicellular organisms.
Who will be next to land people on the Moon?
in Science & Spaceflight
Posted
Congress is what I meant by the jobs in districts thing. Also, there is the other concern around the culture at NASA today. Plenty of Mars Sample Return people are probably getting nervous and trying to find ways to make sure they don't lose money to manned missions to the moon (I happen to think sample return is also pointless from a science perspective but that is going way off topic). And there is no way we put a human on the moon in the 2020s and get back a sample from Mars in 2030 unless we double NASA's budget, probably more. Still, I think NASA, with all its many faults, remains the best space agency out there and can get an astronaut to the moon. I have pretty low faith in Starship, but I also had low faith in the Falcon 9 and was convinced a VTHL was the way to go so I could be wrong. I do worry about landing Starship on the moon because the moon is all regolith, might not be able to handle something that heavy without a dedicated platform first.