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CatastrophicFailure

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Everything posted by CatastrophicFailure

  1. CatastrophicFailure
    On the contrary.... and this is just the very beginning.
  2. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  3. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  4. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  5. CatastrophicFailure
    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...
  6. CatastrophicFailure
    This is promising...
  7. CatastrophicFailure
    Well, now we know... sort of...
  8. CatastrophicFailure
  9. CatastrophicFailure
    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...
  10. CatastrophicFailure
    It worked! Now the big question is, do they pick it up and put it right back on the launch structure again?
  11. CatastrophicFailure
    There are other ways to cross the Atlantic. The only way to see space is... to go to space.
  12. CatastrophicFailure
    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?
  13. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  14. CatastrophicFailure
    So, in essence, the forum has been vaccinated against this virus site? save for silly folks intent on licking doorknobs n such...
  15. CatastrophicFailure
    Revenge of the Fifth it is, then.
  16. CatastrophicFailure
    Not the MAX.
  17. CatastrophicFailure
    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...
  18. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  19. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  20. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  21. CatastrophicFailure
    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...
  22. CatastrophicFailure
    Aww man, the old prop-driven one? That would be a thing to see. And hear.
  23. CatastrophicFailure
    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.
  24. CatastrophicFailure
    I work right near Paine Field where the Boeing plant is, sometimes when I’m out on lunch one of those monsters will come lumbering in so low it feels like you could just reach out and touch it. It is surreal.
  25. CatastrophicFailure
    Building tanks strong enough to survive a given impact is a known and relatively solvable engineering problem. My intuition is that any impact strong enough to rupture Dragon’s fuel tanks will rupture the crew as well, rendering any post-crash fire irrelevant from their perspective. (See: Vladimir Komorov) It’s a very relevant fact here that even risk-averse NASA has signed off on the safety of Crew Dragon, with LOCV chances far lower than the shuttle ever was. We armchair rocket scientists like to sit here flinging theories back and forth but the fact of the matter is, the people actually making the important decisions have access to much better data than we do and are generally much smarter than the lot of us to boot. being, y’know, actual rocket surgeons & all...
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