AckSed

Side question: how many strings to their bow do Blue Origin have now? We've got the engines, New Shepard sub-orbital tourism, New Glenn reusable heavy-lift booster, Jarvis reusable upper stage, Blue Alchemist lunar ISRU, and now the Blue Moon lunar lander. I want to say Kuiper, but I think Amazon is building those in-house. The former Orbital Reef was also another ambition. I ask because if each one is a separate facility with its own staff and sub-management, I think BO has recreated the same problem as NASA of rival facilities: Ames, JPL, Goddard, Langley etc. have all gotten into each other's ways over the years as they championed things in relatively genteel science-fights (reusable spaceplanes! With Maglev! No, ramps up a mountain! No, composite tanks and SSTO!), all with an under-current of, "I don't want this to die when the funding is cut." Which is a shame, as this soup-to-nuts approach is bearing fruit. I'm an especial fan of Blue Alchemist, because that's a great way to make acres of solar-power, even on Earth.

Pilot power plant utilising supercritical CO2 turbine completed. This is very cool stuff. Supercritical CO2 not only makes the turbines 10% more efficient, it allows them to be smaller. Much smaller. Like, ten times smaller. If a normal 10MW steam turbine is the size of two tyres off one of those giant mining trucks stuck together, this is able to fit into its passenger seat. The US is very interested in these for making concentrating solar power more efficient. It also makes the whole plant much smaller and uses less water, whatever you use for heat.

Here's something that might be facilitated by cheap in-orbit manufacturing: waterless, high-efficiency recycling of lead-refining waste via vacuum distillation of metals. It also works to recover bismuth, tantalum from tantalum capacitors and germanium from coal fly ash. So those second stages could be loaded with (s)crap, unloaded into the factory, vented to low pressure and then heated. Zone-refining metal and semiconductor ingots of all types would also work, and might even work better in freefall. One thing that really should be worked out, though, is bulk material handling. The lack of gravity would be a boon in some ways (only moderately powerful cranes needed to transport large items), a curse in others (how do you get powders out of a hopper when even a small static/magnetic charge makes it stick to the sides? What about conveyor belts?)

I had a little brainworm of a notion that asked, "What would it take for manufacturing in orbit to have the same impact of the export of heavy industry to modern-day China coupled with the global shipping network?" Because when launch and downmass are really, stupidly cheap, with air-freight-like reusability... you might start to get the same absurdities that make buying, say, a pack of blue plastic beads off eBay, or a mobile phone battery from Aliexpress, and waiting for it to be shipped from almost halfway across the globe, an actually viable proposition. I'm not talking about asteroid mining, I'm talking about something stranger: sending raw materials from Earth, into an orbiting factory, converted into the things you want built, and returned back to Earth. The asteroids could come later, but we'll stick to Earth-mined for now. We'll also abstract the launcher and return vessel. *ahem* "...our patented SuperCheap booster and SuperLift reusable second stage can lift and return 50 metric tons to SpaceMade's orbiting tele-operated factory complex in LEO for $50 per kilogram return. Lower rates available for 'bundling'. Our engineers assure us that we can bring the costs down even lower, perhaps by a factor of five. We deliver to most spaceports. Import fees listed on request." The question I have to then ask: at this cost, what would make sense for this hypothetical factory to make? What about lower costs of launch? $25/kilogram? $10/kilogram? I'll assume its manufacturing has cost parity with a normal factory, but it has the advantages of cheap high-vacuum, abundant solar power and micro-gravity to make... whatever unique product that's an advantage for. It also has the disadvantages of radiation and needing to shed heat, but we'll assume the plant designer thought of that. I think the scale looks like this: $10,000,000/kg - This is where we are now. Commercial spaceflight has already dipped their toe in this, with Varda Space manufacturing rare pharmaceuticals such as ritonavir. (But they've run afoul of the FAA and gone to ask if Australia would be amenable. Something else that has to be worked out before the taps are opened.) $100,000/kg - Aerospace parts, exotic semiconductors; this is *waggles hand* national defence-level money. Could also produce therapeutic radio-nuclides without worrying about the neighbours; I think I saw a proposal for producing radioactive Rhenium from proton bombardment of a tungsten oxide target... and one of the Van Allen belts just happens to be full of energetic protons. $1000/kg - University projects, printing human organs in zero-G, specialised electronics, in-orbit production of satellites and probes. $100/kg - Starting to edge into luxury novelty goods: metallic glass for golf clubs, perhaps space-grown crops - Space-Cacao, anyone? $50/kg - Drawing a blank. At this price you have a good shot at going sub-orbital and delivering to anywhere in the world in less than an hour, and damn the manufacturing. What do people think?

They cared, but not enough to spend the staggering amounts of money needed. Elon Musk was weird enough and committed enough to plough money and time into a private rocket company when it was seen as a sure-fire way to lose your shirt. Given the previous track record of the 7 or 8 companies that went bankrupt, they were not wrong, and Musk did almost lose his shirt. My most likely (but still not that likely) bet for a brighter aerospace 2000s: Kistler Aerospace finding an angel investor to pull their behind out of the fire when Iridium went under, and hitching their wagon to NASA, enough to make the K-1 as promised. There would be trouble ahead with the use of the NK-33, but given they planned for full reuse it might have worked.

Oh, the poor dears.

When your booster is so powerful the water deluge sounds like a rocket itself.

As long as we're throwing out ideas for a liquid-fuelled booster, how about we go really Kerbal and slap two Super Heavy boosters to the side of SLS? I think I read somewhere that its performance was approaching SRB. As a bonus, you now have partial reusability.

So I believe the intent here is to have the inner hull plate protected, so the outer hull plate and ballistic pillow can be replaced. I approve. Though how I loathe the word 'proprietary'.

Frooday. Sunn.

Thanks for posting these updates, and that GIF is seriously cinematic. Question: If you didn't have to keep mass down (say you had ~15t to LEO), but had the same budget, and used commercial off-the-shelf hardware, what could a successor to OSIRIS-REx be like? Where would you send it? I know hardware costs are only a fraction of the program's costs, but it's a significant one all the same.

I like it, it's like a round cooler. I see holes on the bottom. Is that where the escape system rockets fire? If so, it must have to eject the heatshield.

Suddenly that one scene of the observation room in Red Dwarf became reality. Cool.

Pretty high. Note that SpinLaunch didn't invent the rotary mass driver; I saw a 1977 NASA paper on space settlements that, among other things, described a Rotary Pellet Launcher to launch ~200 10g regolith pellets a second. Granted, it had to have a TiNi wear liner that needed replacing regularly, but at an impressive 4 kilometres/sec with a thrust of 8.9 kN, there's no reason a counterrotating pair couldn't be used on an asteroid to provide thrust. Shame about the 16 megawatts of power it needed. Here's the paper. A linear mass driver is also described: https://archive.org/details/SpaceSettlementsADesignStudy1977

Oh now this i like. Granted, with heavy-lift and big fairings from you-know-what, it's less important, but it's still a way to cram a lot of living area into a small space.

insert image of spinning turd flying up and becoming a space station

I mean I sort of expected the flaring about the base. that's where the hydrogen vents from the expander cycle, but the flares from the side were a surprise.

That was far more chaotic than I anticipated.

That's a lot of data.

If the SS test was a flying water tower, this is a flying lightbulb.

How much more speed could you get if your fusion Orion left the solar system at 0.0024c? My post and the paper about the sun-riding beryllium 'pillow' sail: https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=58581.msg2485032#msg2485032

Hell yes. This is proof that, if nothing else, they're good at carbon fibre construction. Do they give a mass for the tank (and an estimate for the mass of the Neutron)? https://investors.rocketlabusa.com/events-and-presentations/events/event-details/2023/Second-Quarter-2023-Financial-Results-Update-and-Conference-Call/default.aspx ...It doesn't. But they are 3D-printing the first Archimedes combustion chambers and testing injectors.

The researchers know. The MIT link has more explanation: The thing historically holding supercapacitors/ultracapacitors back is their low availability and difficult construction. To have a scaleable, self-assembling, literally dirt-cheap version of them (cement, water, carbon black, potassium chloride), that, if you so wished, could be a structural element... I'm sure the energy storage and transmission industry is interested.

You say that, but have you heard of High Frontier? https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/281655/high-frontier-4-all

"Behold, mine field of rockets. Look upon it, and know that it is bountiful."