CatastrophicFailure

Every man must wrestle with his own Krakens. Sometimes it’s not as easy as just punching them in the face.

*Magic Carpet Ride intensifies*

You’re missing the fourth (fifth?) possibility: Emiko’s tacos are just that good.

@tater I’ll see your booster and raise you one more rising.

Well, it helps if you have absolutely silly amounts of delta-V and no pesky atmosphere in the way and... Wait, is that bioluminescence?

That would be Music Television. Legend tells that in the Before Time, in the Long Long Ago, MTV once broadcast... music videos....

According to some estimates, it may already be there... I guess the question I should be asking myself is, do I feel lucky? ...and something about my lawn I think...

Courtesy of @InterplanetJanet ...gonna be humming this the rest of the night, now.

Aaaaaaand now that’s stuck in my head, thanx.

“Like” is perhaps not the best emotion for that post, but still. You take care of yourself and do what you need to, I empathize where you’re coming from, and you’ve got no shortage of ears ‘round here should you need to fill them and let off some steam. Come back soon.

The shuttle could manage only 3g because it’s a lifting body, just like BFS will be. That allows for a much gentler re-entry, since the vehicle can use aerodynamic lift to decelerate more in the thin upper atmosphere. The BFS will likely do a similar earth entry to what we see in the video, using lift vectored down to “pull” itself down into the atmosphere where it would otherwise skip off. That lets it fly right in a sweet spot for both G loading and heating.

Year 8, Day 147...More housekeeping and minutia in this update. ION-1, our plucky little foray into electric propulsion, has spent the last few months in an eccentric holding orbit high over Gael after thoroughly SAR mapping the surface. And at Ceti. And Iota. And Rald. This thing just keeps on going and going like some bizarre pink rabbit. To that end, it needs a refuel. ION-1, of course, remains in good health in a high orbit over the small moon. The fuel in its tanks barely touched, we have a new mission for it. A window to Thalia is once more approaching, and after the disappointment and then failure of Thalia EXPRESS, this time we're sending... an armada.

So speaking of this... the concept of "man-rating" gets thrown around a lot, here. Obviously NASA has some very specific standards SpaceX has to live up to due to the contract, but if SX did want to man-rate the FH, independently of NASA, what would that involve? As far as I know, there's no FAA or other "legal" standard for man-rating a rocket for entirely private use.

Maybe they plan to kickoff space tourism by bolting seats inside the fairing.

Whoah. Looks like they’re serious this time. I... I want to jump into it from a great height...

This is presumably what they’re doing. The last expendable only had legs for testing purposes.

Ahah. Perhaps this is the debut of the promised "Fairing 2" then?

Embrace the Elsa... in 270 different languages!

SpaceX: The Flame Thrower! (The kids love it), moichandising!

That’s the point you keep missing, bruh. Thats not. Always. An option. If the telco/cable company doesn’t see economic value in upgrading its equipment, its not going to. To have that economic value there needs to be a certain density of customers in a given area. Many of us live where we do specifically because there isn’t that kind of density, we don’t want it. Satellite internet is already a successful thing in such places, but existing systems have a lot of drawbacks: low bandwidth, per-MB charges, one way High-speed, etc. Also, they’re freaking expensive. Starlink has the potential to offer the same kind of coverage, but at prices and performance that will even allow it to compete with telco/cable, perfect for those of us who would be happy with “good enough.”

And yet you’ve had two or three people just right here on this one thread tell you, “hey, this sounds like a good idea, it might just work for me.” Starlink doesn’t need to be the end-all be-all to be competitive, in many places simply offering an alternative to the local telco monopoly will get them a few customers, and if it really is “super high speed” even with some latency, that’ll draw a few more. A niche market here, a niche market there... the nice thing about satellites is that they can reach ALL the niche markets at once.

Like the other guys said, laying a cable isn't always an option. Or maybe there's ONE option for a cable, and nobody wants it, cuz the provider sucks, and can continue to suck as long as they have their little monopoly. Not everyone lives in a city, bruh. That too. Bet there's a lot of demand on those cruise ships with thousands of people on board... As I understand, they're looking to build it out here in Kent, WA near their lab facility. My wife keeps checking the job postings there, and I keep reminding her what the commute would be like. Landline-speed internet in the vanpool, now there's a good use of it...

Musk has only said "ultra-high-speed," whatever that means remains to be seen. But I think you're missing the point, this isn't meant for everyone, it's meant for users in areas not well served by traditional services, and to give some competition where it is (and where there is often none). Might not be the best thing for gamers if the lag is what's been discussed, but for the average user who just facebooks and streams movies? Yeah, it's possibly an option. And any competition would be in improvement at this point.

Awesome. Throwing this out there in case its helpful, been mulling it over the last couple days. It might be a slightly more, er, elegant solution if IR is giving you conniptions, all do-able with stock bits. Start with a rig like this that you can drive over your shuttle. This one's from SSTU massing around 40 tonnes, not sure how your much-better-looking one compares. Not pictured: the 6 large landing gear on the rig. Which are unpowered here, but you get the idea. Park the shuttle, drive this over it, then retract the gear so it settles onto the shuttle's docking port. Then retract the shuttle gear, extend the FRONT most rig gear, and start transferring ore from the front tanks to the ones up high. This will transfer the center of mass rearward... That didn't work. Made some tweaks, tried again. MOAR boosters ore! Mordor? Flipped the middle gear out, still not quite enough, so I popped the rear gear... This gave it an uncontrolled jolt, but... it's working! It's working! TIIIIIMBEEEEEEEEEEER! uM... well I guess the landing gear on the counterweight ore tanks weren't quite enough to catch things. Kinda blew up the runway... But, as a proof-of-concept, it worked pretty well, thrown together in about an hour, and without any IR shenanigans. But WITH KJR and copious autostrutting. YMMV.

Because they're not much more than cubesats and they can launch dozens at once. Also, the initial bunch is "only" around 4000. And with "24 hours" turn-around time on Block 5, all they have to do is crank out upper stages... I may be an early adopter. I'm lucky to even get one bar of 1G where I am, and the only internet choices are the local phone company, which sucks, and the big nationwide cable company, which sucks but has decent speed. IF I can get equal/better speed, at a competitive price, AND give money to SpaceX (via its subsidiary), sign me up! Oh, also, StarLink isn't the only player in the game. There's one or two others also looking to loft internet satellite constellations numbering in the thousands.