Wjolcz

A MAKS-like shuttle being carried and launched by that plane would be pretty neat.

There was something like that launched a couple of years back. Not as big though, but if it didn't fail to deploy it would've been the brightest artificial satellite. Don't think it was as big as JWST's sunshield. I also don't remember the name of the satellite. Something Russian IIRC.

I remember watching one of Issac Arthur's videos dealing with the dilemma of giving a less developed species the ability to space travel and defend itself from major catastrphes like asteroid impacts. Unless the 'aliens' are some some sort of robotic hive mind the psychology of dealing with the problem of a crashed spacecraft on a foreign planet is pretty interesting.

I dunno about the whole naming thing. The E2E ships will probably not have any names. Eventually (I hope) there will be so many of them that naming each one something special will make as much sense as giving names to all the airliners. I'd like to live long enough to witness that.

Pretty sure @Cheif Operations Director is either trolling or just not willing to accept that humans as eukaryotic life aren't that special. It's obviously not that simple. The evolution doesn't work in steps like chemistry->microbes->animals->humans. There's still the case of how life got started on Earth but if you include time and natural selection anything can happen. If you give chemistry enough time and the right conditions some of it will start assembling itself and replicating. If you are willing to educate yourself check out viroids. They are as simple as it gets. Just a piece of RNA that doesn't even have a membrane. They need a host to reproduce so not technically "alive" but if you really want to get into defining "alive" you might want to switch your interests from science to philosophy. It doesn't. But if the environment changes and the microbe doesn't reproduce fast enough then there's a low chance of the species surviving. With each copy there are errors in DNA/RNA that make for better and worse adaptations. If the organism has an offspring with error that lets it thrive in the new environment then it will not die. If the error isn't beneficial then the offspring will die before reproducing. Reproduce and hope that your offspring makes it or die as a species. It's pretty simple. Anyway, my point is that if you don't understand something then it doesn't mean it can't happen. You don't have to fully understand how and why the electronic devices work to use your phone.

Where do you guys get all these videos from? I can't even find the past stream on thr official SpaceX channel.

Well, while I agree that Earth is not the worst place in the universe for life to arise there's also a reason to think that it isn't the best either. There are stars more stable and there probably are worlds that have better odds of life arising and surviving on them. Now, I feel like in order to get something more complex than bacteria and archaea the planet needs to get whacked (just not hard enough to be destroyed) by some major disaster from time to time. It's not uncommon in nature that sudden environmental changes drive biological changes (pretty much what happened to our ancestors in Africa). So perhaps unstable-ish worlds with stars that aren't always that friendly are best for intelligent life to eventually arise. I think I've mentioned this already but anyone who's ran an evolution simulation in Cell Lab will understand that population bottlenecks and constant changes to environment force the organisms to mutate and adapt until they become that hard to kill and quickly spreading Alien parasite that can hijack other organisms in order to spread or live on its own just fine.

I'll just leave these here for anyone interested: Also, sorry for posting like crazy. It's just one of these topics I really enjoy discussing and sharing what I know.

That is very unlikely IMO. I always thought these missions were more of a joke. This kind of behaviour wouldn't make much sense. Seeding intelligent life all around the galaxy is kind of dangerous for you. Eventually these seeded civilizations would rise to your level and there's a very high chance they would want to take your place. The more of them there are the higher the likelihood of this happening. This is why I hope Mars is dead (with the recent findings it's probably not). If it is then it's free real estate and we can move in without hurting anybody. Try Cell Lab. It's free and it shows that with a couple of simple rules complex organisms can emerge and thrive and all they need is time and random mutations. We won't because of two things: evolution and the inability to maintain integrity on the larger scales. You would have to send cultural and technological updates all the time. It might not be a problem if we're talking about star systems relatively close (Proxima Cen) but maintaining culture and tech and minimizing differences of a colony on the other side of the galaxy is impossible. -the post bugged out here and i cant delete this quote please ignore- Check out Isaac Arthur's series and PBS Spacetime host's (his name is Matt something) presentation on galactic civilizations.

It's silly to assume we're alone. Especially since we haven't searched hard enough for any evidence of extraterrestrial life. Life is crazy good at surviving harsh conditions. And there's evidence that it doesn't have much problems emerging. I bet there are at least 2 more worlds with life in the Solar system alone. Now, whether that life is eukaryotic and multicellular is another question, but since endosymbiosis happened on Earth a couple of times then why not on other worlds too? We need more and better telescopes that can detect unusual elements in atmospheres of exoplanets. Once JWST and ELT is online I bet we will see a lot of planets with their atmospheres out of equilibrium. Besides, the Fermi paradox isn't really a paradox and Drake's equation is pretty useless (for now). The equation's purpose was to make people think of the odds of life out there, not to calculate actual odds.

I'm also surprised. Compared to previous Falcon versions Block 5 seems like a real beast.

Pretty interesting how all this stuff is visible. Perhaps TESS could be used to study trajectories of potentially hazardous comets and asteroids?

I kinda wish there was an app for searching exoplanets and exomoons like the thing that's in Eve Online.

The middle one has legs? Btw, once the reusable Chinese rockets fly and land I hope we get pretty pictures and videos.

Ooooh, okay. I thought it wasa already standing there waiting for launch.

I googled Iridium-7 launch date and now I'm confused because it says it's already happened. So when is that RTLS in Vandenberg happening? Edit: August 7 no, it's not. That one is from Florida. Edit2: I'm guessing it's delayed for now?

Hm. But then these two BFS's could simply be tied together for artificial gravity.

Wasn't the BFS tanker supposed to be the SSTO? There's no point in making it SSTO since the rocket is supposed to be 100% recoverable anyway. Could Nautilus-X be assembled with FH/F9 only?

So they took the legs off to transport it? Or is it that first B5 that they wanted to inspect?

*Slaps capsule* *Gets delayed*

That's honestly not that bad. Even though it looks slow they are saving a lot of time doing it this way. And it's pretty amazing how the rocket retracts on its own. I reckon it takes 2-5 hours to retract them. Then the stage is ready for transport and integration of S2 (given that there's no need to inspect it). Yeah, now I'm confident they can make it fly twice a day. Seems very much possible. BTW wasn't that RoombaX holding it on the barge?

Are you guys excited? I didn't like some of the plot elements (also a bit slow) of the first one but it was a good documentary IMO. This one looks pretty interesting and much more dynamic than the previous season. Hopefully it will be better.

Are we talking BFR (AKA booster) or BFS? I don't think the booster will have any kind of legs, unless they will be somehow hidden in the fins by the base of the rocket. But then what's the point of carrying that on the rocket since it will have to land back on the pad anyway. I really don't see a reason to fly the booster from one place to another. BFS will most likely have some kind of shock absorbing leg structures. If they want to land it on Mars or the Moon there's simply no other way to do it. And if the Mars/Moon version has them then the Earth-to-Earth version will have them too because that extra mass won't affect it that much +they will be needed in case of emergency landing (not on the pad).

Just. I don't even want to know what kind of stresses this would induce on the boosters. We've talked about this some time ago. It won't have launch clamps like the ones you see in KSP. AFAIK it will just stand on them. The rocket needs to withstand more than one gee of acceleration so I don't think it will have any problems supporting its own weight while standing on the pad. Besides, it's been done already with a comparable rocket and that's Saturn V. Why?

Not exactly sure how the assembly line of F9 looks like but I'd assume that since they have experience with that then BFR's production process will share a lot of similarities.