CatastrophicFailure
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Posts posted by CatastrophicFailure
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11 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:
No, I have not been avoiding your point, I have addressed it repeatedly. All you have done is insist that I have missed your point without once addressing the points I have raised.
No, man, you haven’t. You’re still not getting what I’m saying. But whatever. This tangent is becoming toxic so I’m done. Time will tell.
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7 minutes ago, Bill Phil said:
The main market for BFR is spaceflight.
And the entire P2P concept is “extra capability.”
Someone sitting in a meeting probably threw the idea out randomly and it just stuck.
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23 minutes ago, tater said:
I can't see cargo as being particularly time critical in a way that makes cargo P2P worthwhile
Because you’re thinking NYC <—> Sydney.
I’m thinking LA <—> Shenzhen. SpaceX already has a footprint at the port of LA... and China is already cool with rockets falling out of the sky. 
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38 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:
I have never said otherwise. What I have pointed out is that niches (such as the CT machines CatastrophicFailure keeps harping on) don't drive industries and that they're a poor match for scheduled hub-to-hub transport
Bruh, I was pointing out an example, a very specific reference case to demonstrate my point that you keep avoiding. There are no doubt, like @mikegarrison pointed out, many other examples out there in this niche market, and that there is money to be made. Especially when one is trying to edge into a market dominated by other, much larger, players.
Like, for example, RocketLabs. They’re not competing with ULA or SpaceX, they’re going after the underserved market of smallsat launches. And by all accounts at this very early time in the game, it looks like it’s paying off.
SpaceX couldn’t compete in the cargo market shipping volume like UPS or FedEx, but targeting a niche like outsize and high-priority cargo and moving it faster than anyone else can even hope, yeah, that might just work. When they can send CT machines to China in a fraction of the time with demonstrated reliability and safety, then maybe they can consider a serious play for moving people.
Lots of today’s big players got their start by targeting niche markets. I will continue to remain... optimistic
until there is a concrete reason not to be.
2 hours ago, sevenperforce said:A market which can only be served by a fully-operational system/network.
I don’t disagree. I’m a lot more skeptical of this thing than SpaceX’s other schemes. But if they can make it work, along with all the obligatory minutia, customers will come.
First they have to get past the whole “only exists on paper” part, followed closely by that meddlesome “not exploding” part.
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6 minutes ago, Earthlinger said:
Snack reserves at 60%
Still not that sleepy, though it's only 1:18....
Code red! Code red! Launching emergency snack resupply...
oops... forgot to check staging...
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16 minutes ago, mikegarrison said:
A 747 can take a 10-ft x 10-ft x 10-ft package in through its side door, or a 8-ft x 8-ft x full length of the plane package through the nose door. Just how big are these medical imaging machines you guys are talking about?
She says the “small end” with CT imagers is 1x5m, 2000kg, without packaging.
Its basically a ginormous toroidal magnet that doesn’t really disassemble.
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14 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:
I never said there wasn't.
You seem to be arguing for the sake of arguing, then.
My comment stream has been directed at this:
7 hours ago, sevenperforce said:Suborbital cargo flights seems like a very small market...
To which I’ve provided several very concrete examples of how there is a market, it’s not unique to the one part of the industry I happen to be a little familiar with. It’s these unusual, high-priotory shipments that are going to be the driving force behind SpaceX’s early foray into P2P transport, long before people or volume cargo, because it is going to be more expensive than current shipping methods. If it works at all. But this is how I think it will likely begin.
24 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:Edge cases don't drive business cases.
RocketLab Electron.
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1 hour ago, adsii1970 said:
Hung a sign above my desk in my office. Was told I COULD NOT hang it up. My department chair told me it was inappropriate for someone who advises students. What do you folks think?
As I’m fond of telling a certain editor of mine, sometimes the greatest courtesy you can do a person is to tell them what they don’t want to hear.
49 minutes ago, adsii1970 said:College is to be endured only a short time and no where the length of the American Pie movie series spans...
Listening to the stories and experiences drifting around this thread, it never ceases to amaze me how happy I am to be done with that phase of life. Even tho I left it nearly 20 years ago, I’m still so happy to know I never have to deal with grades or classes or arbitrary academic rigamarole ever again.
I love learning but I always hated school.
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1 hour ago, HebaruSan said:
What are the circumstances that bring that about? I was surprised to read that, given:
- A department may take years to secure funding for one of these multi-million dollar machines
- Installing them is a miniature construction project
- If you're expanding your stable of devices, you have to hire and train staff to operate them
Are we talking about urgent replacements for sudden failure of heavily used equipment?
Well, one reason is dangerous goods that can’t be combined with other shipments, so probably not the best thing to have on a rocket, there.
But yes, the other would be time-specific transits that necessitate a dedicated truck instead of standard linehall.
Indeed, it does take years of funding and months of planning and a major construction project to install or replace a complete system. So you really don’t want your system to bog the whole mess down. In a very concrete example of this, a couple years ago the entire Port was shut down for weeks (because politics
), Nothing was getting in or out and freighters were just piling up in the Sound. This caused my wife all sorts of headaches because she simply had no other option. It’s not a simple matter to find space on another ship at a port hundreds of miles away.
Now, a rocket with a 30 minute flight time to China making dozens of trips a day... even if it’s expensive, that starts looking attractive when your thing is still sitting in line on a truck.
6 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:That's your wife as an originator of a shipment, we're talking about SpaceX as the transport mode. I cannot emphasize this enough - the two are not the same thing.
You miss my point. Which is, there is a market for fast-transit like that, even if it’s expensive.
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Relevant stuff first:
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1 hour ago, sevenperforce said:
There, again, it will take much longer to transport to the launch pad and from the landing pad to the final destination than the trip will take.
And this is the other side of the equation that will need to be worked out. Convenient, isn’t it, how the whole P2P concept just happens to synergize so well with Musk’s hyperloop idea, isn’t it?
Granted, there’s a lot of regulatory and logistical hurdles to be worked out, but it’s a chicken or egg sorta thing: there’s no impetus to reform regulations and logistical bottlenecks because there’s no transportation system that could take advantage of it because there’s too many regulatory and logistical problems.
55 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:And almost certainly very rarely has to be shipped now to some arbitrary distant destination.
It’s not uncommon, right now, for my wife to basically have to rent an entire truck for a single unit because it absolutely has to be there right now. It’s also not uncommon for a customer to have to wait weeks for a unit because it simply won’t fit on an airliner and has to go ocean freight. These are just two examples, from one small segment of the market. My dad, who works in aerospace and has been doing this longer than many people on this forum have been alive, could probably come up with pages and pages more.
And both shippers would be more than willing to pay.
The market is there, if the system can perform as SpaceX projects.
51 minutes ago, HebaruSan said:I agree about the G forces, though
This is a simple engineering issue, once again chicken-or-egg thing.
But the shipping crates my wife has told me about for some of these systems are pretty dang impressive in what they can do to mitigate full on “crap it fell off the forklift” moments.
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@sevenperforce My very specific example is an ultrasound machine. Too big to fit in a standard cargo plane, weeks to get anywhere by sea. Knowing a couple people in the shipping businesss, there is definitely a market for high-speed, high-priority and outsize cargo. Whether P2P BFR pans out or not remains to be seen, but if it does work even a fraction as well as they’re saying, the market is there.
1 hour ago, wumpus said:A lot depends on if you save anything on fuel thanks to the lack of air resistance in flight. Last I heard, you only saved fuel compared to mach 3 flight, pretty much killing the idea of suborbital cargo at least as long as we are limited to chemical rockets
It’s not about the money savings, it’s about time. And time is money. If they can make the entire system work as quickly as they’re saying, I think customers will line up, even at a premium price.
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57 minutes ago, sevenperforce said:
So I would anticipate an honest-to-goodness suborbital BFS commercial flight to have the same sort of arrangement. There would be no discounted economy tickets, no dizzying array of fare classes. Just one full-fare ticket price
And a load of high-priority, outsize cargo that absolutely, positively, has to be there today.
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On 4/9/2018 at 9:56 PM, qzgy said:
... Or more like giant earthshattering revelations of a kraken-y nature? ...
12 hours ago, TeslaPenguin1 said:Or maybe giant krakenshattering revelations of an earth-y nature!
10 hours ago, obney kerman said:Giant earthshattering krakens of a revelation-y nature?
10 hours ago, KSK said:You have to admit though, that broadcasting a wanted poster for Carlenna et al. is a rather good smokescreen to be hiding behind.
Possible...
or did @Just Jim perhaps take inspiration from...
Spoiler
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3 minutes ago, tater said:
Boo.
Putting it mildly.
Tho an interestin takeaway from the article, which doesn’t seem to be quite right, apparently TESS will be the last new Block 4. I would have thought they still had at least a couple in inventory still to go thru. Like, what about the next few Vandy launches & such?
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Delayed from the 24th.
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2 minutes ago, Ultimate Steve said:
As far as today for me goes, nothing much has happened yet, but ... if all goes well I'm getting my driver's license today!
*reads a few posts up*
And you did take the time to learn the rules, right?
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21 minutes ago, InterplanetJanet said:
My new game, first orbital mission, with Valentina (driving) and Jebediah (kvetching).
Yeah
Tell them if they see any weird talking green orbs, running and screaming is a perfectly rational response not that it would do them much good at that point.
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11 minutes ago, Wjolcz said:
ybe what's happening in BC is just a second Florida-like launch site but only for Falcons? Maybe they aren't planning to transport the BFR/BFSs to Boca Chica at all?
Shotwell has said they’re going to do initial BFGrasshopper testing out of Boca, but just that will probably require pretty minimal support hardware.
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33 minutes ago, Triop said:
Maybe I should think about sending plane/VTOL...
You’re far more persistent than I. By now I would have sent some ginormous, overbuilt rocket that cost 10x what the contract pays, given up, cancelled the darn thing and then crashed stuff into the VAB for an hour.
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21 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:
In other words, they're doing something never done before.
What they're doing is evolutionary, not revolutionary, like all their other advances. Standing on the shoulders of giants, to borrow the phrase.. They aren't groping around blindly with unknown materials in untested applications. Recognizing this is not "fanatical"
, it's looking at the big picture... with a dose of optimism. You can be a skeptic if you want, that's fine. Optimism is much more fun. 24 minutes ago, DerekL1963 said:SpaceX isn't in a habit of discussing their problems. Quite the opposite in fact, unless the problem occurs in the public eye they don't discuss it at all.
They also aren't exactly Gradatim Ferociter-ing, like with Falcon Heavy, are they? What with their big expensive tool in a makeshift tent at an unbuilt factory, no doubt with more in the pipe... this speaks to me that they have confidence in that they're doing and that the development is more-or-less proceeding as expected. ElonTime notwithstanding.
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3 minutes ago, JadeOfMaar said:
Come and get it.
[DOWNLOAD 0.8] GitHub only
1.4x version?
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14 minutes ago, tater said:
I have no doubt it can work for some time period. I think the question is one of cycling, particularly once the heat loads on it become more substantial. The principle concern with composites is delamination as I understand it. Holding together for a few hours is one thing, months and years is another.
If nothing happens but a BFingRocket flying---that's interesting, too!
True enough, and here I look to the 787 again as the archetype. You’ve got 650+ airframes in commercial service going through thousands of pressure cycles (its perhaps worth noting that the 787 operates at slightly higher cabin pressure than other airliners, the why escapes me ATM but it’s related to their use of composites), with some of them in the air for nine years now.
Granted, it’s not the same data points as a rocket, but’s it’s a lot of them, and a huge pool of information to extrapolate from even if SpaceX can only go off what’s publicly available.
Someone sitting in a meeting probably threw the idea out randomly and it just stuck.
I’m thinking LA <—> Shenzhen. SpaceX already has a footprint at the port of LA... and China is already cool with rockets falling out of the sky. 
Its basically a ginormous toroidal magnet that doesn’t really disassemble.
Delayed from the 24th.
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