NFUN

cut SpaceX some slack; after all, we're making the same mistake over and over again right now

what about at -40°F?

This thread has approximately eight hours before it becomes solely a discussion on the Chinese Room problem Good luck

7.5 hours total That's a solid angle of .065 steradians, pretty big, comparable to your outstretched fist Assuming everything is in the same plane (which is not true at all but I don't want to do the real math), the angular diameter of Mars is 9% of the arc of the sky, so you'd be in some kind of eclipse 9% of the time. The Sun only has an angular diameter of .006 rads, so basically all of the time would be in a total clipse

whoa they're launching boats now??

yeah. point stands

"outdated" implies it was ever good to begin with

The US and USSR would race to be the first to land on a moon, and unless in this reality the Soviets were just behind America and could go for a landing on the second as a consolation price, the lower would give up while the winner went on to visit the other Moon just to run up the score

I can just barely read it without needing to out my phone in my face

can somebody please hit the jukebox it's acting up

At the risk of getting modded, can you please stop talking about the Raptor and its reliability all of the time?

bro you can read his posts they speak for themselves regardless, I don't think his other businesses will affect SpaceX. as far as I knew they're completely isolated

Oh my god

Amazon was getting sued for violating fiduciary responsibilities for not buying SpaceX launches for Kuiper, so Bezos wouldn't've'd much of a say either way

for falcon 9, going off wiki numbers and assuming they all use max thrust (order of magnitude estimate), takes 1.6 GJ to get 22 tons. Some random site says ISS's solar panels deliver 2/3 of a kW/kg, so that's potentially 14 MW per launch. Only like a day to make up the expenditure

then by definition it wouldn't be "waste heat" would it

An industry that famously produces a ton of waste heat that needs to be removed is about the worst possible choice for one to be moved to space

what's "rotating" compared to a symmetrical gaussian beam? the only difference a rotation makes is polarization and you are already free to set up the polarization to whatever is convenient (and it probably either doesn't matter or if it does, just make it circularly polarized )

no

God, some things never change

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1107.2939.pdf

okay maybe mike has a point

give us a bit more time to work on quantum networking and remote entanglement so we can build IR/optical interferometer telescopes before we really commit

none of those problems have anything to do with the coherence he's talking about

in a million years it will either be as easy to get there as it will be to Sirius or Alpha Centauri or lots of further places or it will be equally impossible