SunlitZelkova

I don't find the term "manifest destiny" to have particularly negative connotation, 60s Apollo presentation materials sometimes compared it to Columbus' voyage, with the LM to the rowboats and the CSM to the Santa Maria and my first reaction on seeing these was not "the poor Lunites!" As much as the original use of word caused a lot of harm, a lot of progress resulted from it too; it's neutral through and through IMO. I think there is a lot of thinking about how a society is structured that would need to happen before a successful Mars colony is built but parsing language is not going to contribute to that. Back to Isaacman himself... If the second Polaris mission happens while Isaacman is administrator, that'd be pretty wild. No active NASA administrator has ever flown in space. Alternatively I'm sure he has trusted acquaintances who he could appoint to replace him as commander for that mission. Although, it kinda seems like the point of Polaris is for Isaacman to be commander on every flight?

Space isn't a country, it's... space. Like the ocean more or less, as AckSed pointed out. Future economists, IMO, won't classify iron mined from an asteroid as "space iron" it will just be American iron or Chinese iron or whatever country's iron. Cool detail is that it comes from space, but that doesn't have much consequence in how a buyer would look at it. Lots of caveats involved of course. Asteroid mining would somehow need to become cost effective enough to be both a worthwhile investment and competitive with Earth mining in the market.

If the Soviet Union had produced its own answer to Lego during the 1970s, would the identities of the designers of the different pieces and sets be hidden to prevent their assassination at the hands of Danish intelligence agents?

@Anth Install worked just fine for both DLCs, and the main game did not have the build number error.

I’d argue all science can never be apolitical because it relies on organizations for funding. Science is just too advanced for a single person alone to do on their own with no strings attached to a wider group of people, and thus a wider group of ideas.

Is there any reason to differentiate between the “space economy” and the Earth economy? When actually discussing economics? Even if we did some small scale mining on the Moon in the near future, 99% of the people using those materials will be on Earth. It’s like saying that we need to differentiate between the wheeled mining vehicle economy and the tracked mining vehicle economy. What matters is the good, not the means by which it is produced. EDIT- Unless maybe iron or whatever can be expected to be of higher quality from space than Earth? But I’ve never heard anything about that; the advantage of space resources is quantity.

I’ve seen one or two coyotes in my neighborhood on and off for at least five years, but on account of it literally being on the border between suburbia and farmland, with a large forest to the north, rather than construction. In most of my sightings they cross the street late at night, once I encountered one on the other side of a pond while out on a walk. We observed each other in stillness before I turned around and went back the way I came. I like going close to animals on the assumption there’s no harm in it but at that time I had no idea what the ROE with coyotes was. I’m quite lucky it didn’t get bad because the coyote was in a position where he/she would have had nowhere to escape had I approached. They aren’t really a bother from what I can tell, but I do feel bad for the people who have outdoor cats (my sister’s friend being one of them).

I’ll try to within the next 24 hours.

I actually am online. If I hadn’t forgotten to check the forum while I was eating lunch I would not be on at this time, I would have logged-in in the afternoon and then not revisited until the next day. How about @magnemoe?

Disagree. FYI, your statement about N1 engine testing is wrong, the engines were tested individually. N1 and Starship are not comparable. N1 was a very, very, dangerous design because it was being uprated to do a single launch LOR lunar landing, whereas it was originally designed to do a multiple launch EOR lunar landing. Because of the personal issues of the various engineers, the organization that built the N1 could not procure large high thrust engines and had to use groupings of smaller ones. This taxed the N1’s payload to the limit and resulted in the elimination of numerous redundancies in the various equipment. The N1’s engine configuration was not the cause of its repeated flight failures, but rather the design philosophy it was built around, which was to cut as many unneeded systems as possible (including redundancies). In contrast, Starship has been built from the outset with a single mission in mind: crewed Mars landings. Because the vehicle is being designed for its mission from the outset, instead of being modified for a mission it wasn’t designed for, it does not have the massive safety issues caused by a lack of redundancies as N1 does. It should be noted that full scale ground testing of an entire first stage does not provide any benefit over in-flight testing, or at the very least is equally dangerous. If a 30+ engine first stage explodes on a ground test stand, the test stand will be destroyed and need to be rebuilt, but if it explodes in the air a sufficient distance from the launch pad, no harm will come to infrastructure or personnel. Also notably, the Proton rocket was (to my understanding) ground tested and still had a number of failures during its early service years on par with N1 that resulted in the loss of numerous spacecraft. Yet it became a reliable rocket by the mid 1980s. I think the lesson of the N1 program is not “don’t build a rocket with 30 or more engines” or “always do full scale ground testing,” it is don’t give up no matter what your dream is and don’t abandon a system once it is sufficiently developed. The N1’s last test flight was not a spectacular failure, in fact if the computer control system for shutting down engines had functioned properly instead of shutting down the entire booster, the vehicle would have made it to orbit! The Soviet government and TsKBEM’s industry rivals used the same types of arguments you often post here to lambast the N1, and cancelled it despite being on the brink of success. I think Starship is sufficiently along in development it should not be cancelled no matter what. Engineering takes time, you can’t adjust it to political or fiscal schedules. It will fly well in time. The engineers of TsKBEM spent the better years of their lives developing the N1, and many were devastated when the project was cancelled. I hope the engineers of SpaceX never go through that same disappointment.

Quite a few countries do even if they don’t have any launch apparatus. Their purpose is mainly operating communications satellites, and they sometimes contribute small experiments to the ISS or Tiangong.

I second this. During 6th grade camp I sat at the teacher’s table due to my allergies, and overheard my science teacher (who happened to be sitting next to me) talking to another teacher about how one hypothesis at the time (2014) of why allergies develop revolved around the parents being too clean. Notably my biological grandmother has numerous allergies but my mother does not, and my mother and father were not clean-obsessed. Not sure how grandma was raised. I think it is a given that if life becomes self-sustaining on Mars and doesn’t have much contact with Earth, it will diverge and become completely different from what is found on Earth. Same goes for humans. Think humans in Europe vs. humans in Africa. And for other animals, the difference between African big cats vs. mountain lions in North America.

They are saying your conception of what constitutes evidence is wrong. Right now the vehicle itself is in development. Although reuse is obviously still an aspect, the main focus is getting it to perform as well as possible and lift things to orbit. Reuse is taking the back seat right now. Just as the first aspect of Falcon 9’s development was to get it flying in the first place, and bonafide reusability came much later, it may be a relatively long time before the evidence you are looking for starts to show. What is more important to search for at this time is: Is this rocket reliable? Are the clustered engines doing fine? etc. etc., I’m sure folks here can think of better grades for how the rocket is doing. After SpaceX checks all those boxes: then we get into reusability. This is not an all in one test program like SLS, where it is expected to do everything it can on the first flight. It is staged, perhaps vaguely similar to military aircraft development in the 1930s. You fly the clean airframe first usually and then work out all the equipment needed to fire weapons or communicate.

I had this same issue. Glad it got reported, hoping it is fixed soon!

What about the ISP of a stomp rocket?

@Ultimate Steve Considering SpaceX is the only organization with an intention to build a colony on Mars that is more substantial than anything before (albeit with few details at the time given focus on Starship itself), you might continue discussion in this thread. There’s also one called A City on Mars, but that was more about habitation and economic factors in a Mars colony. Also, you might find this article interesting: http://spaceflighthistory.blogspot.com/2016/12/energy-from-space-department-of.html?m=1 Summarized DOE/NASA study of SBSP from the late 70s. They envisioned 60x 10x5 kilometer satellites and 60x receiver antenna spaced approximately 50 kilometers apart stretching across the US at the 35th parallel. 60x such satellite would have been capable of providing 300 gigawatts of power. That’s one quarter of what the entire present day US energy grid can produce, and thus far more than what a Mars colony probably needs, so fewer satellites would be needed at Mars. Dust storms might have deleterious effects on the transmission of the power if microwaves are used though; didn’t Opportunity lose communications because of one? I’m not sure how its communications system’s transmissions would compare with an SBSP satellite’s though.

Dumb theory, but maybe Bezos wants to see the launch and has other things going on during the day.

I’ve dreamed of that world and tried hard to make it happen, but I am still of the belief that that world was never a real possibility. It was just a fantasy. I’ve been going through Asif Siddiqi’s Challenge to Apollo trying to find a point of divergence where a counterfactual/alt history could reasonably start and make the Soviet space program of the 60s healthier, but there’s just none. Here’s some of the events that stood out to me: 1. Between 1962 and 1964, OKB-1 deputy chief designer Leonid Voskresensky argues with Korolyov over building a test stand for the N1’s first stage. He also tells him that the rocket cannot be built without annual funding ten times more than actually allotted (500 million rubles in 1964). Voskresensky eventually refuses to sign any document related to the N1 unless Korolyov concedes on the test stand issue but resigns in 1964. 2. 1964: Despite the N1 not being designed for a single launch LOR profile, instead having been conceived for EOR and direct ascent, someone (it wasn’t known at the time the book was written in the 2000s) proposes to change it to LOR. Korolyov received letters from many of his best (and most-well liked within the design bureau) engineers imploring him not to change the design but he ended up ramming it through government skepticism and criticism from other chief designers for approval. Consequently, many of these people were either dismissed, transferred to minor positions, or resign. 3. January 1965: Minister of Defense Rodion Malinovsky openly tells Air Force officials “We cannot afford to and will not build super powerful carriers to make flights to the Moon.” 4. In the rest of 1965, an ungodly amount of infighting over both the lunar landing and lunar flyby programs occurs. Korolyov finds himself writing his own “letters of imploring” begging various government, party, and military officials not to sign off on Chelomei’s UR-700 lest it divert funding from the N1, but meanwhile does his own jockeying and becomes responsible for the lunar flyby spacecraft, increasing his organization’s workload to the detriment of the N1. 5. Despite the objections of many of its members, including Mystislav Keldysh himself, who said “What kind of nerve must we have to disembark one man on the Moon? Imagine for a moment being alone on the Moon… that’s a straight path to the psychiatric ward,” a special commission headed by Keldysh signs off on N1 development in December 1965, giving it the complete go-ahead. A loosely similar series of unfortunate events occurred in 1974 that led to the N1 being cancelled despite being close to working. I wouldn’t say any of this was inevitable. If you look at what made the N1 and other big Soviet space projects fail in the 60s and 70s, there’s arguably so many contributing factors it’s a miracle they didn’t succeed in the first place. The failure of the programs are contingent on so many factors that if I was writing an alternate history where the Soviets did not land on the Moon first I would probably be mocked for writing a story akin to what happened in real life. But on the other hand, it’s contingent on so many things that to think of a world where they succeeded one would basically be writing complete fiction. In the 80s it’s actually a lot easier to get the dream vehicles going, because Energia was the main dream vehicle. With Energia literally complete by 1988, all that would remain would be to build lunar or Mars spacecraft. To get that to happen though, the USSR needs to survive, and that is equally contingent on so many factors such a counterfactual is pure fiction (there is no one point of divergence that can make that happen). Considering Energia was complete, it may not be too hard to imagine a 90s or 00s Soviet government funding the building of a lunar lander and capsule, but on the other side of the isle it’s about as difficult as imagining N1 getting proper funding as it is to imagine SEI getting the funding to do anything at all.

Not entirely true. Zenit, based on the boosters of Energia, worked just fine. It was supposed to replace Soyuz the booster, but… ya know.

I’m honestly surprised, my money was on something Soviet.

Well of course, why make designs of camels when you can make art about cats. https://egypt-museum.com/cat-eating-fish-under-a-chair/

Unmanned in some cases and manned in some cases, IMO. Equally important but not often mentioned is how well one side’s electronic warfare forces happened to be performing against another’s drones. That affects the other guy’s too (or so I understand) so they wind up needing to send in guys to do the gritty stuff. There’s also probably a reason we see both sides using manned fighter aircraft to launch glide bombs and cruise missiles and not the Bayraktars or equivalents that were oh so ubiquitous two years ago. A little like how missiles could not fully replace guns on fighter aircraft, I would bet that both manned and unmanned systems will always complement each other.

I was once very lucky to see a satellite transit across the Moon while observing it through my own telescope. The night I saw the ISS, I was also using my telescope. I desperately tried to track it but it was just a little too much, the thing moves fast and my telescope doesn’t seem designed to rotate smoothly like that.

So there’s this Japanese fusion band called Casiopea, and I was listening to it while walking back from the store during sunset. Lo and behold, it gets dark enough and clear enough for the constellation Cassiopeia to appear in the sky above me. So I pull out my phone to take a picture. My vision is good and the trail runs right on the edge of farmland and forest, so it’s really easy to see satellites. There is a satellite passing across Cassiopeia as I take the picture. I thought “that’s cool, too bad it will just look like a star on camera.” But I didn’t realize the iPhone takes a long exposure photo on night mode! So when I look at the picture hours later, not only was the satellite captured as a streak across the sky, but there was another satellite above it that I myself didn’t even notice! I even saw what was probably two members of the NOAA constellation. It was two sats following each other along the same azimuth, some NOAA sats are deployed like that. The behavior resembled when I managed to catch a Cargo Dragon trailing behind the ISS three years ago, but the brightness of today’s objects was much too low to have been either the ISS or Tiangong.

I haven’t seen it mentioned here. China has begun launches for not one, but two mega constellations. https://spacenews.com/china-kicks-off-guowang-megaconstellation-with-long-march-5b-launch/ I saw a post on X the other day where the poster thought China was overdeveloping launch capability, a little similar to its overcapacity in renewable energy production. While certainly a few of the new commercial space upstarts can be expected to fail, just as some have in the US, this is what all of that capacity is for. Some have speculated the second constellation, Guowang, may end up having military applications. Not much info is available about it compared to the other one (Qianfan, which actually has already signed agreements to provide service in Brazil), and satellites with “guo” (nation, national) in the name tend to have military purposes. According to government regulations on satellite services, Guowang must have 6,500 of its 13,000 sats in orbit by 2032. Obviously the Long March series isn’t going to cut it for such a task. Especially if this is a government-backed project, it may provide the commercial space developers incentive to speed development of their reusable rockets. At the moment most of these superficially resemble F9, but use different fuels and engine configurations.