AckSed

I admire the gumption, and I think they have a shot if they're launching a single, longer Haven module to start. I also wonder if they're still going for the spinning-stick station on top of it.

Alternate view where you can see this massive thing just fly in:

I may be wrong about it being reentry heating, or only reentry heating: rewatching the ED stream, at 2 hours 30 minutes, when it's 38-32km up and moving 4330km/h, the glow of a fire spreads through the internal engine bay. This may just be trapped methane from engine chilldown.

(Thank Scott Manley for pointing this out.) Reentry capsules are not new (e.g. pre-digital spy satellites that dropped film capsules), but doing the Varda Space thing and making it a cheaper way to bring experiments back from orbit? That's more novel. https://spacenews.com/shijian-19-reusable-satellite-lands-after-2-weeks-in-space/

Zoom in on the flamey end of the booster: That is not a happy engine bay; that is glowing red-hot, with several fires outside the engines and distorted nozzles on the boost engines. Maybe the retropropulsive burn needs reinstated.

"Off the nose"? What's that, a stage on top of the Starship?

Booster 12 is being slowly lowered down, and its carriage (transport stand) awaits. Can I just say that of all the things that happened, the rocket nozzles glowing red-hot from reentry underlined how violent it was.

The shot of Starhopper in the same frame as the caught Superheavy in NSF's normal Starbase stream is very, "Son, I am proud."

Landed! Then the buoy camera caught it blowing up. Still incredible.

Uh, Starship doesn't seem to be flying 'straight'- oh never mind, it is.

It wasn't entirely smooth: one of the chines looked ripped open at the bottom and there was that internal fire next to the trapezoid holding the flight propellant-loading hardware (that's now out thanks to the CO2 fire-suppression), but they caught it! AAAH THEY CAUGHT IT Best of all, now they get to examine it and discover what needs to be fixed.

AckSed's Second Law of Entropic Cleaning: every rag, scourer or sponge used for cleaning will inevitably be loaded with so much hair and dirt that it has to be thrown away.

AckSed's Law of Entropic Cleaning: every labour-saving cleaning device has a filter that needs to eventually be cleaned itself, or disposed of.

The paper cited knows this. It also said that: So on one hand it's slightly less flexible as you're moving bricks of ballast of a set weight, on the other you can distribute them more flexibly than a tank of fuel or a massive engine and driveshaft. You also lose mass as you burn fuel. In contrast, while the mass of batteries is 'dead' weight, it also doesn't change over time, making it more predictable. This will take time to learn, but it's not insurmountable to learn to live with. You have to either change the order of operations (unload cargo then unload drained batteries) or have more powerful chargers that can charge over the 30-60 hours it's in port. The dockworkers have to figure out the distribution of cargo anyway so they know how much ballast to take on and in which tank. Water tanks can still be used for trim. Note: This isn't a one-size-fits-all, more 'this size currently fits up to 5000km range small ships that load 7650TEU, with a corresponding 1m increase in draught'. Bigger ships with longer range may still have to burn fuel or be hybrids. In the future, though, with better batteries or cheaper ones... the case for longer-range full-electric ships closes.

It's a definite possibility. I read an old sci.space.tech post on space-launch guns, and one paper said you could launch several thousand kilometres straight up (like strapping all the boosters to a rocket and blasting through the atmosphere before you blow up), burn a bit at apoapsis to circularise the periapsis to 50-70km, then aerobrake down until your apoapsis is where you want it, then burn again to circularise it up to desired periapsis.

Going to say it: it's very IKEA. That's no bad thing, mind. Part of me is a grump and wonders how much grime those fabric handholds will pick up over the course of a mission. The ISS has to clean daily, and they have the equivalent of hard floors with lots of clutter. (Or maybe that part's projecting from my own inability to keep my room clean.)

China is trying out this battery thing on a container ship: https://electrek.co/2024/05/02/fully-electric-10000-ton-container-ship-begun-service50000-kwh-batteries/ COSCO Shipping Green Water 01 is a small river-to-sea container ship that plys the Yangtze from Shanghai to Nanjing with 700 Twenty-foot Equivalent Units, but its most interesting feature is swappable batteries. The batteries are in containers themselves, each holding 1.6MWh, and while it typically carries 24 of them (38.4 MWh), it can carry up to 36 (57.6 MWh) if it needs the range and/or power. With containerised batteries, it doesn't need to hang around to recharge and it can use the same port infrastructure: unload cargo, unload depleted batteries, reload fresh batteries, reload cargo, go. The second one is on order. We could go further. I found an article in Nature: Rapid battery cost declines accelerate the prospects of all-electric interregional container shipping (2022) To skip to the end, it reckons that, with lithium-iron-phosphate batteries at $100 per kWh: They also note: Like SSTO rockets, being big is good. The percentage cargo lost to batteries increases more slowly as the ships grow bigger, even though the gross mass given over to batteries has increased. With an 18,000TEU container behemoth that could sail to New York from Shanghai (20,000km), that's just under 20%. It's a horrific amount of course, but it could be done. If there is an improvement in the future in battery energy density to 1,200Wh per litre, then the case improves substantially. Even the smallest 1000TEU 'feeder' ships only lose 30% of their capacity going the longest 20,000km routes, while the behemoth loses 5%, and it improves to positive amounts over short trips of 2000-5000km depending on the class. As of Feburary 2024, the lowest average price CATL is supplying to car manufacturers is $69.53 per kWh. And there is overcapacity leaking out of the Chinese companies' ears.

Circle is over, square is my new friend now. But seriously, how does that work?

To drag the topic back in line, here's a Scottish lake fisherman who converted his little boat to run on solar and batteries: tl;dw The conversion was not that difficult, it has about the same capacity as a middle-of-the-road Nissan Leaf, and he doesn't go many miles, so many days in the summer he doesn't need to charge. It was the paperwork and regulation he had to deal with that was really challenging. If you think about it, coastal fishing boats like this are good candidates for electrification.

Today I learned "wake thieving" with specialised hydrofoil boards was a thing.

Huh, I didn't think you'd need it for landing, but F9 has steadily blowtorched the logo off the drone ship landing pad. Raptor, even a single engine, would be hotter. Also, things might become explodey.

It's vindication of a sort, as they have set themselves up to be a kickstage-providing, satellite-making business and it's slowly materialising.

"Thank you for your service" indeed, B1061. *salutes* Side note: it's always a treat to have John Insprucker commentating.

I did read a 1950s SF story (years ago now) about workers using liquid sodium to paint parabolic mirrors on a solar-thermal power plant on a space station, and it's also abundant in regolith. Solar PV was barely a dream back then, which is why von Braun's lunar lander used such for power. Calcium may have use as a reducing agent for smelting iron, kind like using aluminium in a thermite reaction.

Relief as they have telemetry of Hera.