Lukaszenko

Profit from Starlink? Even if not, it's not THAT much money. Isn't it around what Falcon Heavy cost to develop?

Man of many talents!

Hell, for $1.5M/ flight, I wouldn't be surprised if some of us chipped in and bought one or two.

Are they really sending him to the ISS? Seems unlikely, because wouldn't he need a camera crew and all the works? Besdies, they have a mockup of the ISS on the ground and CG and parabolic flights to more or less make it convincing.

It's not for publicity in the advertising sense, where you're trying to win over customers. It's for publicity in the "hearts and minds" sense, where you're trying to win over support and inspire people to pursue space-related careers. It's more of an indirect and long-term benefit for the space industry. In a sense though, since the taxpayer IS the customer of NASA, it's also directly beneficial.

Exactly, it LOOKS like a step back. It makes the statsics looks worse, and it adds a bit of weight to the notion that Elon is trying to accomplish the impossible. Cheap and reliable space access and rocket reusability is still a dream. That being the case, every time there's a failure you can't help but feel a little of that dream slipping away.

True, but the whole satellite-launching stuff they (as well as others) seem to have down. The interesting point, and the one I presume keeps us glued to the webcasts and this thread, is the progress towards making space accessible. Every recovery is a step forward. It's hard to not see a loss as a step backwards (at least temporarily).

That kind of thinking will keep you stuck in the cave (or low-earth orbit, in this case )

I don't think it would make sense to report it in absolute. Imagine for example, if it failed at 1 bar, absolute

Not sure I follow the logic here

Could Super Heavy make orbit with no usable payload? If so, launch it anyway and you end up with something even better. Subtract the fins and legs, and maybe replace a couple engines with vac variants to optimise. You can then take the whole RTLS concept to the next level, where the launch site is low-Earth orbit. I wonder how fast that could get you to Mars?

Yes, what you said.

It did cross my mind, but it can't be that hard to shield 3 cm^3. Besides, since the first sentence of this discussion is "about how humans would survive on long-term space voyage", we'll be using dna storage in one way or another whether we like it or not.

Why not? All sources I checked say that "215 petabytes of data in a single gram of DNA" is 85% of the theoretical limit. Where did you find 455 exabytes ?

"DNA Fountain" method can store 215 petabytes of data in a single gram of DNA. So, looking at the density of DNA, you could easily fit an exabyte into < 3 cm^3.

That has a bit of an ominous quality to it

If that's the case, then maybe there IS a good reason for it after all. They'll probably need all the energy they can get.

I don't think it's fair to count destructive tests during the R&D phase as "failures". Even after the first successes there's a grey zone. Perhaps when they stopped referring to it as "experimental landing" and simply "landing" would be a good starting point to count failures/ successes.

Hmmmm....is that a falcon?

Right. It's not exactly rocket science

Yeah, they didn't even bother to do the countdown this time.

Given how much effort they put into their PR, I'm guessing that they DO care. Maybe those people aren't directly their customers, but they have an influence on the people who are.

Probably, I didn't realize that they made ropes out of the stuff. Makes sense though.

Based on this link, I estimate a kevlar cable would weigh about 5 kg/m for a 450 ton BFS at 1g. I don't know how much you want, maybe 100 m? So that's 500 kg, and that's probably waaaay over-engineered.

Yeah, maybe, but it's tall and ladders aren't the safest things. But indeed, it will be on Mars anyway. Perhaps I overanalyzed. Still, if there is a big open common area, having space in 3d would be, well, more space.