AckSed

We all know about Venera, the Soviet Union's Venus probes. What surprised me was that the US managed to land a probe on Venus' surface too: Pioneer Venus Not only that, its orbiter was still operating up to 1992.

It looks a bit like the Mockingbird 'brick-lifter' SSTO. Chances are good. A quick MT of the post says they're proposing propulsive landing on non-atmospheric sites, and looking in to decelerating and even augmenting propulsion with the atmosphere.

Science fight! Science fight! Edit: Say we have a thrust-augmented nozzle that injects extra oxygen to increase thrust. Not looking for anything special, just a bit more mass-flow at the start for a O/F ratio of say 13:1 for 30 seconds. Does that do anything for the lift-off mass?

Thank you for choosing SpaceX Space Delivery. We get you to orbit. Something I didn't expect was the ESA is sending up astronauts with Axiom. It's using the exact same hardware, but I wonder what the organisation is RE: monitoring/mission control?

Always a fan of big engine tests.

How long could you live in a 3D-printed structure on Mars? Let's test this test!

Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't, maybe they should concentrate on finishing something... but they're trying it. I think that's laudable.

I think of it as two similar instruments given similar but not identical roles. Kind of like two delivery lorries that are sent out to most of the same places, but one is available for the inner city routes, while the other is almost exclusively long-haul.

Question: How viable would it be to launch a reduced Starlink constellation around the moon? Assume 10 V2 Mini and an additional custom laser-link hub that can connect with the Starlinks around Earth. How much bandwidth could it enable and could other satellites and landers connect to them?

Better late than never!

The normal, slow way would be to use gravity assists. One fun way is a proposal that uses a very light solar sail to catch the light pressure at very short range: The beryllium hollow-body solar sail: exploration of the Sun's gravitational focus and the inner Oort Cloud. We would probably build it in orbit around Earth, as the sail is a disc-shaped 'air mattress' of sub-micron-thick beryllium foil. (It's hollow because it's inflated with a tiny amount of hydrogen to stiffen it.) We don't quite have the manufacturing capability to make that on Earth and bring it up the gravity well. It would be sent into a 0.1 AU perhelion before the sail is deployed. Because of the extreme ratio of mass to sail area (the disc would be 1.874 km wide, yet only mass 150 kg, leaving space for a 150 kg payload), combined with the light pressure so close to the Sun, it would gain impressive amounts of acceleration. Note this was a modification of an earlier proposal to make a probe (or 10,000 ton generation ship, which is a bit of a jump) that flew even closer (0.05AU) and went even faster: I.e. one day of constant acceleration later, it would be going 2,851,200 km/h. In comparison, New Horizons has, with the gravity assist off Jupiter, managed to clock 84,000 km/h as it flew past Pluto. The Parker Solar Probe, the fastest human-made object, gleaned enough speed from Venus flybys to skim the Sun at 586,800 km/h. This isn't the only proposal: NASA has funded a Stage II (i.e. 'seems interesting, here's money to investigate further') study of sun-grazing solar sails: https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2021_Phase_I/Extreme_Solar_Sailing_for_Breakthrough_Space_Exploration/

Frigging hell that is a sine-wave of launches and landings. How much upmass is that now?

Vulcan says: he sees a shadow.

I get the feeling The Line is them wanting to unroll a torus-shaped space station onto the ground.

Huh. Anecdotally, I did hear of a lab that used leftover LN2 for a party trick: slosh it over the floor and sweep up the residue left by the wave.

On a related question, how many humans could you cram into a generational ship of 10,000 tons? Because I heard that figure quoted for a sun-grazing solar-sail ship with a 1000+ km-wide inflatable "pillow" sail. By having an incredibly light sail, and diving to a perhelion of 0.05AU, it would reach 0.00264c in a day.

I think I actually saw the tip of the fairings glowing dull red during F9's ascent.

I just want to tell people that not only is M2 being prepped, ispace's Lead Assembly, Testing, and Integration engineer is called Scott Moon.

And the never-flown RD-701 (294 bar).

Damn, that's a relief. So will the dish unfold automatically now?

Is that a record for chamber pressure?

The 1st stage of Sea Dragon, the classic Big Dumb Booster, was projected to have a thrust-to-weight ratio of 2. That's 36,000 tons of thrust from one pressure-fed engine.

Arstechnica article on the Vast station. My key takeaway here is that it's going to draw on the Dragon capsule for life-support: A big, airtight can with solar panels, a window and docking port would indeed be simpler. Unless they design for it, it would essentially freeze like Salyut 7 once Dragon disconnects, though.

I use YT transcription services for getting a quick summary of most videos. "Our theories need updating" is about right. If I read the transcript correctly, they haven't learned as much as was hoped about Cold Dark Matter affecting expansion but will have to tweak the software that assumes the initial mass function of the Universe.

If you had a hyper-efficient fusion drive like in BattleTech, how viable would it be to mine Sol's asteroid belt for rare elements like germanium? It's part of the canon that fusion is calling upon dimensional quirks to extract more energy than put in: mere tons of fuel can lift multi-kiloton dropships into orbit, and push them to Lagrange points on even less. It's also canon that their FTL needs vast quantities of germanium to build the cores.