darthgently

I’ve been subject to intrusive imaginings of a duel Superheavy launch and landing utilizing both towers at once. I can’t think of a valid use case but it would be so dang spectacular

Would be interesting if the trash is compacted into a small subchamber that can be periodically exposed to vacuum to kill anything growing in it. Though the heating during compaction probably does a good job of that. And yes, I’m aware that there are some very tiny things that survive vacuum reliably well

I beg to differ, profitability is the biggest factor in valuation, followed by viable evidence of pending profitability. How else would valuation rationally work?

If it isn’t obvious this vid is a comparison between the simulation (left) and the reality (right). What I want to know is whether that is a pre-flight predictive sim, or after the deed. If the former, even more impressive

The title of that vid may end up being prescient

I gather Tesla and maybe BYD are the only EV companies making a profit on EVs.

Nice endorsement if accurate

Future Miyake grade super solar flares could dwarf the Carrington event by 2 orders of magnitude given the strongest inferred in tree ring records. Miyake grade solar flares appear to occur every 400 to 2400 years or so. Throw in the risk of large earth crossing asteroids, glaciation, and human idiocy and I am more and more appreciating Musk’s insistence of not having all of our eggs in one basket. If SpaceX continues to apply its profits to interplanetary diaspora then they will create the space market in their wake making it far easier and less risky financially than we can now imagine for those who follow. But clearly the more players willing to run point on the risk the better. Blue Origin seems willing in principle I’d like to see SpaceX‘s competition at the tip of the spear be represented by more than the PRC, personally

Noice pic!

What I’m reading here and there says that Starliner would need a heat shield upgrade and perhaps other upgrades to aero brake from lunar return (That was supposed to merge with previous, but didn’t)

Good point and point taken. I think even Starliner may be salvageable in lieu of Orion if it got to that ludicrous point. That heat shield issue just doesn’t click, or the fact that it is taking so long to move on from doesn’t click. Was Starliner designed to reenter from the moon? Idk

Yes, Firefly needs to stay flexible

Waking the dead thread, to put it to bed for the Big Sleep. Synopsis: ABL pivots to missiles leaving Firefly as the survivor of this wave of 1-ton payload launchers (Relativity went to larger payload market) https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/11/citing-decreasing-launch-opportunities-abl-space-will-pivot-to-missile-defense/

What do you think of this analysis? I like the start at the McMaster lifting eye ID for sure. Very low calc’d chamber pressure

If we were in a post-scarcity scenario then continuing a publicly funded Artemis would be a simple thing to do. But as it stands, continuing it means something/someone else sacrifices for it to continue. And it isn’t like those sacrificing are volunteering. At some point one might consider that rather than deeming it a tough call whether to continue, to instead deem it unethical to continue based on anyone’s opinion other than those making the sacrifice

It’s bananas all the way down

I gather that is the entire point. That and it is the prime feedstock in the diet of spherical cows bred for research purposes. Grass confounds the results and bananas don’t for complicated reasons. I know, it surprised me too. iirc, the banana for scale thing started in an off color way with the advent of selfies

Exciting times! I’m no genius but the artist made that payload too big for the taper on those payload bay doors if my MK1 calibrated eyeballs don’t deceive me. Never leave the engineers out of the artistic rendering loop. It’s as important as spellchecking in PR.

Nope, thought you meant the big one. Y’all must have smaller bananas or something!

Who knows? Could be either. Another quandary, it could be in radians or degrees if going for arc length. Well done, and I’m betting highly predictive Zoom in, banana is holding a more realistically scaled banana, ha

IFT-6 NET Nov 18th?