CatastrophicFailure

Your island is smaller than my one state, with less than 8 million people living here. When you have that kind of population density it greatly changes how you can do things. Burying cables is expensive, and brings other issues, to only serve a very small market. The legislature can’t just wave a magic wand and make that less so, at least not without introducing... other problems. There’s a scant 50k people on my island, most of them clumped on one end. The rest of us literally can’t even get a pizza delivered, to say nothing of reliable internet.

Unlikely. I once caught a lineman at a gas station during a really bad power outage, don’t worry, I let him go again, Had a very interesting conversation about why, in a place like this that’s known for its trees just as much as its wind, are utility lines still run exposed on poles that are so vulnerable to said wind and trees? Long story short, it’s actually better here. Burying power (internet) lines is expensive, and while problems are much less likely to occur then, when they do occur, they are much much harder just to find, let alone dig up and repair. Where I am, we’re never going to see a mass burial of utility lines, not without a massive suburbanization effort, which would meet a resistance bourn upon the fury of hell itself and would see any such proponents literally tarred and feathered, then maybe set alight. As such, we will always have power outages during windstorms, which will always bring internet outages with them. The local phone company has buried fiber, if you’re lucky, but I rate them below even Comcast, and if you’ve any familiarity with the latter that should tell you something. Even if completion could acquire the land rights to bury more fiber, it’s an inherently limited thing in an inherently limited market, so we’ll never see any real competition unless it comes from above. There are millions out there in a similar situation, and we like our rural living, we don’t want suburban subdivisions. We are the target market of these megaconstellations, not the cities and suburbs, at least not yet. One way or another, these constellations are coming, we’d all better figure out how to coexist now, while such things are much easier to do. Yes, there are problems with megaconstellations but they are solvable problems. Pix or it didn’t happen.

On the contrary.... and this is just the very beginning.

Yes, seriously. Turns out the stuff does exist, and Musk has mentioned using it in the past. It’s already found uses in optics that need to be tough, like military FLIR sensors. The trouble with these neato technologies is that they’re always just out of reach, just a few more years out. And anything with “nuclear” in the name automatically gets a metric crapton of pushback from the “nUcYAluR bAaAaaAd!!1!1” crowd, regardless of how safe and viable it is. Musk doesn’t want to wait anymore, he wants to move now with the things he can make work, even if it’s not a perfectly optimized system. The perfect is the enemy of the good enough. With orbital refueling and tethers they could still make a shorter-duration transfer with some simulated gravity. I think eventually we’ll see specialized mission modules that can be fitted as needed. Don’t need an expensive arm, or even solar panels, if you’re just launching a batch of Starlinks and recovering on the next window. Adding a module to the Axiom station? Now there it might be helpful. Preach.

I’d heard they’d been mostly invisible up til now. The white thermal paint on the upper surface while they’re orbit raising must be the culprit, gonna have to start looking again.

A couple hundred years ago no one would have thought we’d be sending raw materials to China and receiving the finished products, all for dirt cheap, either. Bezos’ vision makes more sense when you consider such raw materials would ideally be coming from asteroids, too. All the messy stuff stays up there, mostly run by machines, and we get finished products down here.

Indeed. Those lower tiles seemed to be more “test” tiles (they’re all test tiles, but...), with different sizes, etc, vs the more “production”-look of the fully-belted section. Someone with better math skills than me could extrapolate that one tile and give us a guesstimate of what the total loss would have been had the whole thing been covered...

This is promising...

Well, now we know... sort of...

There was some discussion about this on the NSF livestream. While getting more flip/landing data would certainly be desirable, every time they fly they have to shut down assembly on the orbital launchpad, put away tools, hide the donuts, etc. The big milestone has been accomplished now, concept demonstrated, now orbital reentry is the next long pole, be interesting to see what they do with 15... and 18 and 19...

It worked! Now the big question is, do they pick it up and put it right back on the launch structure again?

There are other ways to cross the Atlantic. The only way to see space is... to go to space.

Literally no one said that. We said this is how it needs to start if anyone else is ever going to get a chance. Like cell phones circa 1980?

Nah, they just blur your face out or digitally remove you, but... ... @kerbiloid’s dirty laundry is on display for the entire world to view.

So, in essence, the forum has been vaccinated against this virus site? save for silly folks intent on licking doorknobs n such...

Revenge of the Fifth it is, then.

Not the MAX.

Interesting, just heard on the livestream they actually do do a “propellant waste” burn to get rid of unneeded fuel. Their track record isn’t exactly the best right now...

It’s not about saving money with the fairings, it’s about saving time. SpaceX’s launch cadence is incredible, and those fairing are a major choke point in that. Every set they can reuse, even at zero cost savings, is quicker than building new ones. Solvable. Engineering. Problems.

Ahem: Until such designs, there was no need to. You said it yourself: It’s not a difficult design feat to make a tank that can survive the same impact a crew could. The tank need not be stronger than the crew. This is old tech.

Well, I can see they already fixed the stuck window. I would assume hope anyone actually considering buying a 17-year-old Ford 6-liter diesel instead of running away screaming knows what they’re getting into.

And these are all very solvable engineering problems. It’s not that difficult to design tanks that are stronger than the crew. If the impact kills the crew, what happens to the tanks doesn’t really matter. If the crew can survive a hard landing, so can the tanks. Kerbals have a thing for squirrels...

Aww man, the old prop-driven one? That would be a thing to see. And hear.

They’ve done upwards of 10+ ground landing tests of varying fidelity. I trust they have the data they need to design things to needed specification.