/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10503687
No space flour, no SpaceX hops to make it grow bigger

Where to watch that electron rocket launch?

>>10503704
Wouldn't get your hopes up, it'll probably just get scrubbed again. For a company that wants to be able to launch every week they sure picked a garbage site and appear to be totally inept.

>>10503723
Yes, why would someone launch from damn new Zealand. Could pick Antarctica, would be the same.

Sea Falcon when? SpaceX is already part-way on that path, using steel instead of meme alloys or carbon composites.

>>10503775
I doubt SpaceX would use Sea Dragon without a significant redesign. For one thing, Sea Dragon uses hydrolox and SpaceX doesn't like hydrolox. So a change in propellant is needed which would change the size of the stages relative to each other. Also one problem with Sea Dragon is that it uses one big engine for the first and second stages, and the F-1 engine has shown that such big engines are very prone to combustion instabilities. With engines as big as the ones on Sea Dragon I'd guess that such instabilities are almost guaranteed to happen.

the hopper isn't going to hop until all 3 engines are in

>>10503775
Sea Dragon
how did I never hear about this? I used to read about rockets all the time but this never came up. Neat

>>10503966
source?

Starhopper this morning.

In other news, the road closures for Hopper tests have been pushed back two hours; they'll last from 12 to 8 PM central time.

https://twitter.com/SpacePadreIsle/status/1111285995889217536

>>10504036
Texas Weather

GET ON WITH IT

>>10503775
Sea Dragon has to be peak space autism

>>10503775
How would you cast such a gigantic engine nozzle?

>>10504272
weld it

>>10504272
Who casts rocket nozzles? lol
Sea Dragon was meant to be built in a shipyard by welding metal plates together as if it were a submarine. In a perfect world there's really nothing preventing the design from working but in reality there's no way they would be able to deal with combustion instability in a rocket engine nozzle that huge, it'd shred itself immediately.

>>10504272
level 39 magician

more tapered parts

serious question, what are the chances on a new space race once bfr is in play and willing to service any back logged defence programs centered around sending heavy shit to the moon and assembling it there

Designated shitting orbits

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/03/27/u-s-military-sensors-track-debris-from-indian-anti-satellite-test/

>>10504405
Probably low since I don't think there are loads of national defense programs which are centered on lunar bases, classified or not. I mean, the USA and USSR had a strong interest in "militarizing" space, but agreed not to because it would raise tensions leading to a war. Nowadays, there are no nations that both have the means to set up a military presence into space, and have a national threat big enough to motivate such things.

There may be a short race with America and China, but it won't be at the same scale as the old space race. At least in my opinion.

>>10504405
100%
but it will be a race between private companies industrializing space
asteroid mines rather than battleships
factories rather than fleetyards

Question why no raised platforms to build large steel constructs with an integrated elevator structure. If constructed around launching reliable rockets could you get an interesting increase in delta v or nah?

>>10504450
Anarcho-capitalist paradise on Mars sounds good

>>10504660
what?

>>10504660
Stop drinking, fren

>>10504660
no, launching from a mountain doesn't save you anything, really

>>10504711
Would be even funnier if you could see the display and see that he is reading that Elon Musk got sentenced to jail for stock manipulation.

When are are they going to try to test again?

>>10503775
Sea Dragon: one of the most gar designs ever. Literally built like a battleship.

Yes, those are the mighty Saturn V F-1 engines mounted on the sides... used as vernier engines!

>>10504751
no, those are the wrong size and there's no kerosene in Sea Dragon for the F-1
they might be one of the hydrogen engines from Saturn tho

>>10504753
The Sea Dragon first stage is kerolox, the second stage is hydrolox. But you're right, the vernier engines are mounted to the second stage.

>>10504753
>>10504751
You guys are both wrong in your own ways, Sea Dragon used hydrogen on the 2nd stage for better efficiency and kerosene on the first stage for better thrust, it used F-1 sized hydrogen fueled engines on the 2nd stage for steering, but these steering engines were simple pressure fed thrusters (just like the huge main engines) and didn't use complex turbopumps like the F-1.

>>10504272
Sea Dragon was designed to be shit-easy to build, it's pressurization system is close to as simple as it can get, the body and bell are all welded stainless steel because the enormous power of the engine outweighs the enormous weight of the rocket. This big black rocket would make a Saturn V look like a bottle rocket going off, the dB level of it's takeoff would be lethal several miles out. It would make some sense if they ever want to achieve an even larger launch system, the rocketry version of a supertanker to carry extra-massive payloads or enormous propellant supplies (for that period before extraplanetary bases can start manufacturing their own). Stuff like the raw construction components for building the skeletons of large rotohabs or supersized solar collectors, or radiators to reject heat from powerful nuclear reactors.
>>10504660
Getting the rocket to the top of your launch pad would add more work than it would be worth and there are only a few places so many miles up that they'd actually be useful.

>>10504002

>>10504309
>but in reality there's no way they would be able to deal with combustion instability in a rocket engine nozzle that huge, it'd shred itself immediately.

Do we know that? Have we actually built such a large engine and nozzle and assembled and test fired it? If not then thats just meaningless speculation

>>10504851
Plus you could always change it into three or four merely gargantuan engines as opposed to one titanic engine if it did turn out that engines of that size were inherently to unstable to operate safely. Still somebody should just throw a couple million into building one giant test engine just to see if it will work.

>>10504855
Yeah the main idea is to build a big dumb rocket at a shipyard, load it with tons of raw material and whatever you need to send up in large amounts and launch it at sea

I feel in love with it as soon as I read about it, makes perfect sense too, this is how we get construction material, propellant and all the necessary stuff to build stations into orbit cheaply and in massive quantities

The idea of building a rocket at a shipyard, in just a year or few months as opposed to the slow, laborious, clean-room way they are constructed now to lift just a couple dozen tons into orbit at a time, its a no-brainer, and the sea launch allows it to be really massive and carry a fuck ton more stuff into orbit at once, bringing costs way way down

Chinese startup OneSpace fails in first orbital launch attempt.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uTzsj0XRMxY

https://spaceflightnow.com/2019/03/27/chinese-startup-onespace-fails-in-first-orbital-launch-attempt/


Maybe next time, ant men. Good luck!

>>10504861
Yeah, launching rockets from sea generally seems so much better, don't know why it isn't the standard procedure for all rockets.

Mars 2020 rover helicopter drone, but wheres the camera?

>>10504861
the clean room bit was jewish trickery right from the start
rockets never needed that in the first place

>>10504893
Yeah man in reality building rockets is fucking easy as is demonstrated by north korea who are stunning the world with their functioning rockets.

>>10504851
>Do we know that? Have we actually built such a large engine and nozzle and assembled and test fired it? If not then thats just meaningless speculation
The F-1 engines on the Saturn V were famously hard to develop specifically because of combustion instability in their nozzles as they were so big. Solving combustion instabilities at F-1 nozzle sale was so hard that the Soviets never even bothered to try, and instead went with a cluster of smaller combustion chambers fed by a single large pump assembly for their own very powerful kerosene engine.
Sea Dragon's maneuvering thrusters alone would have been bigger in terms of physical size than the F-1. To say that we don't know if Sea Dragon's main engines would have suffered from combustion instability when we know how hard it gets to solve on an engine nozzle less than a tenth the size is like saying we don't know that a skyscraper ten kilometers tall would collapse under its own weight because we've never tried to make one that tall, when it's already difficult to build a skyscraper approaching a single kilometer in height.

>>10503704
right here
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaUSf0D95vs

stream goes live in 20 minutes (unless a sheep chews through another video cable)

>>10504910
To be fair, haven't they mostly been dealing with fueling errors likely caused by shitty pumping system and really vicious shitty old hypergolics and staging failures (from having shitty computer tech and poorly machined staging collars)?

>>10504881
more like NoneSpace

>>10504931
Maybe a larger nozzle (Sea Dragon sized) will lead to less instability above a certain size?

>>10504881
Rest in peace ChingChong-LongDong01.
In all seriousness though I hope they get better at it so we can have another competitor to spur on space race 2.

>>10504886
Corrosive salt water fucks with sensitive machinery and electronics, for Sea Dragon which would have been made of literal submarine hull steel and had only like ten moving parts it wouldn't matter but other rockets aren't build retard-simple like the Sea Dragon design.

>>10504886
To be fair, most of them aren't built for it, Sea Dragon could deal with the adverse conditions because it's an all-steel construct while most rockets are very delicate aerospace aluminum alloy and composite which will fold into pieces under anything other than exactly the intended stresses. On top of that the huge demand which SD was intended to fill never actually materialized, and the budget for it was cut resulting in it being a project which would have cost a huge amount to start up only to barely ever be used because nobody wanted to put 500 tons into orbit at the time.

>>10504944
please note that it's not 500 tons of whatever you want, because the vibration/acoustics would be extreme
it'd be 500 tons of propellant or dumb steel

>>10504937
The mechanism by which combustion instability occurs is that in a larger combustion chamber and nozzle the gasses are able to move more freely and end up starting to swirl and oscillate and even spin rapidly, this is something inherent to fluid flow dynamics and would only get more intense at larger engine sizes. I should note here that when Sea Dragon was designed in 1962 it was not common knowledge that the F-1 engines in development were suffering from combustion instability problems and it was certainly not something the guy who came up with Sea Dragon knew about.

>>10504939
I think it will be more like 20 competitors from China. It's been only 4 years since chinese govt allowed for private companies to try their skills in space race. They are starting small, and their dicks might be small, but the potential is enormous.

>>10504931
The engineer who made the concept believed you can also solve combustion instability by going way bigger, don't know enough about how exactly that was supposed to work.

>>10504946
This, absolutely
The vibration environment produced by those single huge engine nozzles (if they could even be fired without combustion instability destroying them) would damage any relatively complex payload and would kill any astronaut sitting on top.
Sea Dragon was designed for, and would be limited to, launching extremely dumb bulk payloads to LEO, specifically building materials and propellants in big steel bottles as you mentioned.

https://www.nasa.gov/specials/moon2mars/
>this site
>EM-1
>the return to Moon to stay plan
>Gateway
>Pence's declaration to return astronauts to the moon by 2024

I can't help but be excited but then I remember how Constellation was cancelled by Obama and NASA was forced to waste much time and money on the stupid asteroid redirect/asteroid landing mission. And now I'm worried the next president will do the same for the Moon2Mars initiative just to spite Trump and Pence.

But then I remember we're in a slowly heating up space race back to the Moon and with commercial partnerships locked in and there might just be enough pressure and pride on the line that no new elected President would dare to set back NASA's goals now at such a crucial starting point with so many things in motion (SLS, Orion, CLPS, new Lunar Lander, Gateway, etc)

Cautious optimism is the feeling.

>>10504892
Why wouldn't you just have some tethered balloons with cameras and sensor packs attached? Dipshit mars copter just seems like it's got too many fail points.

>>10504946
Right, but my point still stands, nobody was building any massive space constructs with 500-ton skeletons, or which needed 500 tons worth of hull plating, or was going to be burning 500 tons of propellant. They SHOULD have, but unfortunately were not, so now we're stuck in a position where we as a species have the space equivalent of the average Chinese penis.

>>10504949
Find me the source on that claim, because when Truax came up with the Sea Dragon design in 1962 it was not common knowledge that combustion instability was even an issue at large nozzle sizes. Bob Truax wouldn't have known at the time that his design was impossible, and any claim that going bigger would solve the issue would be retroactive and not based on any kind of actual data.

>>10504959
>balloons
well you see, Mars' atmosphere is so thin that a balloon would have to be ridiculously huge just to be able to lift itself even if it used warm hydrogen gas. This Mars drone has a relatively huge rotor that will be spinning at several thousand RPM just to allow it to fly a little. Besides that, drone autopilot programs have gotten very reliable in recent years, electric motors are obviously very reliable, and this drone is just a low priority experiment anyway.

Electron should be launching very soon, aye?

RocketLab stream is live

>>10504989
Link.

>>10504990

>>10504933

>>10504990
payload is a 150kg DARPA thingy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaUSf0D95vs

>>10504993
Very cool breakdown of the antenna, that kind of ultra-compact design seems like it could scale pretty big too, I can imagine much larger antennae copying that design if it works like it's meant to.

>>10504993
makes me want a fligth control simulatior games like Arma 3

T-3:30 now

>>10505006
they were right, you can hear a lot of cool birdsong over the mic

dubs for catastrophe

>>10505011
nice
where's launch cat

And lift off!

Cute liftoff!

>>10505011

A bit of wobble there

>>10505014
>>10505018
What did I miss?

>>10505024
somebody checking their digits

>>10505024
This
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OaUSf0D95vs

Surprised they don't have battery hotswap and eject in the timeline, since it is unique to this rocket.

>>10505028
what is that

Isn't Rutherford the entire rocket engine and not just the pump?

>>10505032
nevermind kek

Well, that went rather smoothly.

comfy short stream

>>10505037
smoothest ride to orbit available, in fact. Electric pumps have much lower vibration than turbo pumps.

>>10505042
How much does that contribute to the overall vibration experienced by the payload compared to, say, the actual combustion?

>>10505042
I miss the shakiness of SRB's

HOP WHEN

>>10505042
It's a shame that they need so much power and can't really scale to bigger rockets.

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-begins-testing-habitation-prototypes

Everything is accelerating it seems, very exciting

SpaceX gateway design concept

>>10505087
kek, but starship can't be used as a station

>>10505096
why not?

I wonder which is better, inflatables like Bigelow, or spent-repurposed fuel stages like Nanoracks and Skylab

I wonder how cheap they can make the Electron rocket if they mass produce it?. If they could get the launch price under $1M that would be a gamechanger.

>>10505042
Of course they don't, they don't need to deal with a mass flow rate of tons per second. Light rockets can afford electric turbopumps.

>>10505102
Probably to do with long term heat management, recycling systems, etc. Stations have permanence built in but the early starships will probably only carry a couple weeks worth of life support with later versions and the ITS carrying the months of it necessary for Mars shots.

>>10505104
Looking at Bigelow's test article at the ISS and how long it took to setup, Skylab style launch seems better

I miss Skylab. Skylab was a real space station unlike the tiny cramped ISS that we ended up with.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1sr6aVzW9M

>>10505122
What does length of setup time matter to a station intended to be permanently in orbit? It would be setup and inflated before any crew arrives

I don't think NASA should be set on inflatables but the Lunar Gateway affords a really nice opportunity for Bigelow to test their larger inflatable habitat and maybe even have that become a permanent addition to the station like BEAM is, only permanent livable now too

Bigelow has potential, but it would be foolish to rely on inflatables solely at the outset I think.

>>10505122
Does it specify what ate up the most setup time? Is it the expansion that takes time, the docking, or life support testing and excessive precaution taking? If it isn't the mechanical things slowing the process down then it can be sped up with experience and understanding what's safe to do and what isn't.

>>10505121
There is quite literally zero reason that a starship can't be fitted with the same equipment, a pressurised volume is a pressurised volume. It also has the advantage of being able to alter its orbit as well as tanking fuel for resupplying whatever docks with it and storing large amounts of liquid oxygen for the crew.

>>10505151
Yeah, I'm just saying it's not purpose built for being a space station so it probably won't be used as one. I'm not the other Anon saying it can't be used as a station, anything that you can slap life support and shielding to can technically become a space station so long as it has a docking clamp and airlock.

>>10505158
I guess my point is that it is a huge pressurised volume that can take itself to the orbit it needs to go for no doubt a fraction of what that LOP G piece of shit is going to cost. Could probably load all the radiators, solar panels, etc as cargo so it could well only need a single launch

>>10505176
Absolutely, shit if it were me I'd strap a bunch of expando-habs to the outside of the starship (obviously in a configuration that's balanced), and fill the actual cargo space with a hub to strap them all together, the tools and equipment to assemble the stuff, and send it all out in one glorious shot. Instant station with four huge modules and a docking ring, six launches, one to get each hab up, one for the main ship, one to fuel it back up so it can reach a nice stable LLO.

>>10505121
LOP-G will only be manned for a couple weeks at a time once per year or so anyway, so there's literally no reason why they can't just use a Starship instead of LOP-G and bring it back after every 2 week stay even if everything you said was accurate.

>>10505197
LOP-G a gay and I don't care much about it even though it will be an achievement for my country, I'm convinced that it will be beaten to the punch by a private station and end up being more like an orbiting monument to government inefficiency.

>>10505197
>and bring it back after every 2 week stay
Defeats the purpose of developing and designing a lunar lander that is intended to remain on the Gateway

>>10505202
Not if you send a reusable lander from Earth every time you send Starship, by sending Starship to act as LOP-G for a while then just landing it on the Moon.

Does /sg/ have a favorite space news site? Which ones are required reading?

>>10505209
they're all shit

>>10505211
How? What's wrong with them?

>>10505209
Chaos Manor except Jerry is dead now

>>10504956
We're reaching a tipping point with commercial launch vehicles. No matter who wins in 2020, by the end of that term (or very soon after) if an administration wants to send someone to the moon, it's just a matter of getting the trip chartered and paid for.

>>10505209
space news

>>10505209
boards.4channel.org/sci

I'm voting for Trump because of all of the good he has done for the space industry, whether it's on purpose or on accident.

>>10505287
Well having a country that isn't a collapsing socialistic hellhole gives space projects a better chance of continuing unimpeded. Rocket scientists work better when they aren't starving to death in bread lines.

>>10505318
Nah, Trump has given me confidence that’s the US is basically unkillable. We could have a president actively trying to fuck shit up and it wouldn’t be that bad.

>>10503775
Do you realize how inneficient is that bullshit?

>>10505344
It's actually quite efficient, stainless steel is one of the most plentiful structural metals available, propellants aren't an issue either, kerosine is enormously plentiful and hydrogen and oxygen are both exceedingly abundant even beyond Earth. The first stage of the Sea Dragon was even meant to be at least semi-reusable or refurbishable so it wouldn't go to waste in the same way Saturn stages or the SLS will.

>>10505369
Yeah, the mass fraction of Sea Dragon was actually pretty good considering it was meant to be build in conventional dry docks.

>>10505389
that's what happens when you go wide

Imagine a modified Sea Dragon blasting itself to orbit without staging and then entering orbit to function as a re-purposed space station, just imagine all that internal volume!

>>10505407

>>10505409
In awe at the size of this lad.

Now that Trump, NASA, SpaceX, etc. are dead set on returning to the Moon as soon as possible, do we think that China will respond by also rushing to the Moon asap?

>>10505422
I hope they do, I hope that both Russia and China pour as much money as their economies allow into their space programs and the US starts gearing back up as well. I hope we have a three way race to see who can get LEO stations, LLO stations, and boots on Mars first.

>>10505422
I think China is trying as hard as they can. The Long March 5 has had some significant difficulties, so unless they manage to vacuum up some tech that someone forgot to lock back up I think they're honest about the 2030 first-launch date for their Super Heavy rocket intended for Lunar Missions.

>>10505422
They better, otherwise the next President (highly doubt it will be Trump too) will have less pressure to redirect NASA's course again, cancel Gateway, etc..

We need a locked in race soon or NASA will become victim to politics again and the short ever changing presidential cycle

>>10505422
China is going Mars.

>>10505407
Sea Dragon Skylab, wherein the upper stage of Sea Dragon carries 500 tons of construction materials to a 600x600 km orbit, followed up by a manned launch of a much smaller crew vehicle with several tons of habitat supplies. The crew docks to the SDS, climbs inside the forward bulkhead, and starts using the supplies it carried to outfit the now empty hydrogen tank with all the fixings of a space station. Subsequent missions continue to construct the habitat within Sea Dragon's upper stage tanks, bring up more supplies, more solar panels, etc. You end up with a fuckhuge monolithic station in low Earth orbit with all kinds of internal room for activities.

Later you launch another SDS, remodel it into a completed station as well, then tether it off to the other SDS and start them spinning while connected with a 300 meter tether, now you have a gigantic artificial gravity space station in orbit that weighs probably in excess of 2000 tons, the vast majority of which was launched by just two rockets.

It's a shame that giant rocket engines like the ones Truax designed for Sea Dragon are impossible, oh well. We'll just have to build Sea Dragon scaled reusable rockets, sure they're more complex but since you can reuse them dozens of times and they can actually be manned you end up beating Sea Dragon economics anyway.

>>10505438
No, their plan is a lunar mission, then Mars. They themselves understand they need to do lunar missions before trying something that grand.

Now, I could see them doing a Venus flyby to just snag the "first to perform an interplanetary mission" title, but not a direct Mars trip.

>>10505407
>orbit without staging
SSTO? With that mass fraction? No way dude. The whole point of Sea Dragon is to go with the cheapest design, efficiency be damned, and then just scale up that shitty design until it's so big that you can actually get some use out of it.

>>10505446
Ah that sounds incredible. What could have been, potentially..

>>10505451
Fine then, just the 2nd stage then to orbit, empty of fuel, re-purposed for a station interior.

>>10505450
Doing a Venus flyby would definitely be an enormous flex on everyone, despite it being literally the easiest manned interplanetary mission possible unless you count a flyby mission to a near Earth asteroid (which is just cheating and technically not going to another planet anyway).

>>10505446
I thought the whole point of having a space station is so that you could do experiments under microgravity. And you can't dock with it while it's spinning, meaning you'll have to waste propellants to despin the massive thing and then start it up again every time.

>>10505461
That's why I think they would do it (as long as Russia or a private company doesn't do it first). It doesn't take nearly as much technical skill, just the ability to loft a capsule with a heat shield durable enough to take the interplanetary reentry, a decent habitation module, and a stage capable of performing the burn with the hab and capsule.

I fully expect unmanned SpaceX Starships will do a the trip just to test out navigation and reentry for interplanetary missions.

>>10505469
Unless you dock with a stationary hub requiring fancy rotating seals or you spin the docking craft to match.
>notimeforcaution.webm

>>10505446
>It's a shame that giant rocket engines like the ones Truax designed for Sea Dragon are impossible
Not so fast. My (very rough) calculations suggest that if Sea Dragon were scaled down so that it only needed nine F-1B engines in the first stage, then it could lift ~100t into LEO in a rocket that's only ~30m in diameter. That's still plenty of payload and size to play around with.

And that's using the original Sea Dragon's generous thrust-to-weight ratio at launch of 2. Using a thrust-to-weight ratio of 1.4 can potentially increase the payload to ~144t with a rocket that's ~43m in diameter.

Also, the Sea Dragon was already designed with reusability in mind. Refer to image.

>>10505481
>you need to do a sick 1g drift burn to dock with a rotating station at the outer edge
hardcore

>>10505483
Isn't 100t to LEO basically the same as the BFR?

I wish spacex would flex on nasa and the chinese with their hello moon mission but I fear they're gonna be stuck with a cargo version for a long time. Human rated rockets just seem like a pain in the ass. If even dragon (which is tiny and orders of magnitude more simple) took that long I doubt crewed starship development would go smoothly.

>>10505489
DEJA VU

but really the docking plan has almost always been to have a light structure that reaches to the center of rotation, so any arriving craft only needs to rotate at the same relative speed and then dock normally.

>>10505472
Venus need more love so I'm open for any mission there, right now its just Akatsuki

>>10505498
Yes. The problem with Sea Dragon is big engines like the one its first stage would use are very unstable. They're prone to rapid unplanned disassembly, even the F-1 engines on the Saturn V had a lot of issues due to their size.

>>10505501
They have to be a pain in the ass because any serious mistake (small emergencies happen all the time) but a really serious mistake will end in instantaneous death for the crew even moreso than with planes. If a plane has a serious engine blowout or fuel line problem or it catches on fire usually the passengers and crew can be saved, not so with single piece rockets or space ships like crew dragon is or like Starship will be. One fuckup there without a launch abort system means almost guaranteed death.

>>10505509
It will almost certainly see Space Tourists before Mars, if only because the mission duration is a lot more reasonable.

>>10505498
Yes.

>>10505510
My recalculations with F-1Bs was a vain attempt to make Sea Dragon more "realistically" sized.

>>10505513
Its like 2-4 months total right? Since Venus is closer than Mars

>>10505513
what is the mission duration for a Venus flyby?

I should do a writeup on that Indian ASAT test, especially since it looks like it might be the first in a series of tests. There's alot of interesting info out there, like a claim that it is a warning to China that India can now threaten Chinese launches from their Jiuquan launch site (pic related).

>>10505510
The upside to all SD's construction is that it's all mostly structural steel, including it's rocket bell. F1's or Raptors etc are complex fusions of aluminum, copper, inconel, and steel cooling pipes all held together by bunches of bolts and epoxies and so on. The Sea Dragon's rocket on the other hand is highly simplistic (as modern rockets go) and made of mostly nothing more than structural steel. Very heavy (comparatively), very sturdy (stainless is actually very good by mass for dealing with extreme heat shocking) and very cheap.

>>10505483
>if Sea Dragon were scaled down so that it only needed nine F-1B engines in the first stage
Then it would be completely pointless, because the only advantage of Sea Dragon is that it costs next to nothing to build relative to its payload. By scaling it down and replacing the extremely simply pressure fed megaengine with nine F-1B engines you'd be both reducing capability and adding massive costs. You'd also render splashdown recovery non-viable due to the salt water ruining the much more complex and delicate engines. Finally, if your idea is to use 9 F-1 sized pressure fed engines, then you need to consider that these pressure fed engines will get much worse performance than the F-1 in terms of thrust and efficiency and therefore the payload would further drop from 100 tons to something like 60.

Sea Dragon's design really only works because it's so huge. Even if you only scale it down a little bit the performance quickly drops and the relative cost increases until it doesn't make any sense to use anymore.

>>10505527
So its possible such a steel derived engine could withstand shit traditional engines made larger and designed in the complex and composite way wouldn't?

Possibly even reducing the combustion instability? I wish someone would just fund a test engine and build and test it to see if it handles differently and is more stable despite being so massive.

>>10505509
Venus doesn't need love, Venus needs to be mindbroke by a stinky fat bastard

>>10505517
The Apollo version took about a year, but I think extra dV can trim it significantly. Mars Cycler orbits take about 23-24 months without trying to cheat.

>Bezos or some other billionaire falls for the Sea Dragon meme
>pours fuck tons of money into designing and building a strong mega-engine made of stainless steel
>tests reveal the engine performs better than expected due to sturdy construction, very little instability, nozzle is stable
>Sea Dragon is built in full
>everything just fucking works
>Truax is vindicated

aaaaaaa

>>10505530
>Sea Dragon's design really only works because it's so huge.
I guess you have a point. The resizing was mostly for fun than anything else. However, a major problem (one of many) with the Sea Dragon is the size of the stage 1 engine. It's simply too big to get away without having combustion instabilities. Using instead multiple F-1 sized pressure fed engines may be a viable solution.

Vulcan is becoming reality. Shame it's a shit rocket

>>10505541
>combustion instabilities

Maybe a more sturdy stainless steel engine design and tooling eliminates or negates them, like that anon said.

Without actually building such an engine and testing it we just don't know.

>>10505517
No, it's like 4 months one way by Hohmann transfer and a full flyby and free return to Earth would take about a year and a half (the return leg is what gets you, you have to swing out beyond Earth's orbit and wait for it to catch up). That's still a year faster than a Mars free return mission, but definitely not something you do relatively on a whim like a Moon flyby. On a full blown Mars mission though you actually spend less time in deep space (about a year total) than you do on a Venus free return flyby, because on a Mars mission you spend most of your time on Mars itself, and can wait for the Hohmann transfer orbit window to open up again and take another short 6 month hop back to Earth.

>>10505545
True. Someone needs to call Elon or Jeff to try to convince them to give an engine that big a try or some other billionaire. Has Bill Gates done anything in aerospace?

>>10505518
About 1.5 years total from Earth departure to Earth reentry. 4 months to get to Venus, flyby within 100,000 km lasts about a day, then the free return loop back to Earth takes ~14 months.

>>10505540
>BFR's launch economics are superior and Sea Dragon fails anyway simply because it was too late to the party

>>10505548
on Venus you can just wait on the balloon outpost floating in the upper cloud layers

>>10505545
No, the combustion instabilities we're talking about cause harmonic interactions with the engine bell that make it flex violently and amplify the instabilities until the material strength of the nozzle wall is overcome and the engine explodes. When you're dealing with harmonic resonances of very hot, high pressure gasses, whatever material you are dealing with becomes pretty much irrelevant.

Also for the record, modern engines are mostly made from stainless steels and strong nickel alloys as it is. Sea Dragon's engines were meant to be cheaper by being extremely simple, not by using bulkier and cheaper materials. Complex engines like F-1, Raptor, etc have really powerful turbo-machinery that makes them expensive, pressure fed engines don't have any of that, they literally have four valves and a high pressure bottle of gas to push the propellants into the engine. This simplicity comes at the cost of pretty much every performance metric.

>>10505542
Is that a big ass milling machine for cutting those rectangular chunks out of tank wall panels?

>>10505573
we're humans, we'd probably find some way to correct these problems using some of that good old fashioned American ingenuity if things actually got off the ground

imagine if the NASA future projects branch didnt get its funding cut and they worked on Sea Dragon and all its faults till they perfected the engine design and actually built the fucking rocket, what could have been

>>10505576
My first guess based on the size is a press, but ULA doesn't launch enough rockets to need a press. On the other hand, they may have decided a press was the best way to go and billed the government for it even though their production rate is for tens to hundreds of parts instead of tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of parts.

>>10505572
>let's all rely on this thin balloon in an atmosphere dense with sulfuric acid fog to save us from a horrifying fate
Yeah, I know we have polymers that hold up to Venus' atmospheric contents but you have to take UV into account too, and if you're blown to the dark side of the planet you're just as fucked: you freeze and asphyxiate instead of being broiled and crushed.

>>10505576
>>10505584
bump forming

>>10505572
it'd be better to just aerocatpure into orbit instead of upper atmosphere and then sit in orbit until the time for a transfer back to earth came around

>>10505590
>bump forming
Ah, so it was milled flat and bumped into a curve, that makes sense.

>>10505572
That would make going to Venus at least an order of magnitude harder than going to Mars despite the shorter trip time, so it's a non starter.

Venus has too much gravity and (none) available surface to be viable as an early exploration target for manned missions, even ones that never leave orbit and make use of the retarded balloon ship idea. It simply takes too much delta V to brake into a Venus capture orbit and leave again to go back to Earth using modern technology. Mars is only possible because it has low enough gravity that we can actually launch off of it with a rocket small enough to send there from Earth, plus we can make use of Martian surface resources for things like radiation shielding, propellant manufacture, and so on.

If Venus were as far away as the Moon it'd still be a bad idea to attempt a manned landing simply because we lack the capability to get back from a planet as heavy as Venus. It took a Saturn V to get the Apollo vehicles to the Moon, it'd take 50 Saturn Vs to launch a Venus manned spacecraft and ascent vehicle to the planet, and we'd need that Saturn V sized ascent vehicle to get back to Earth.

>>10504956
democrat party is about to collapse into nothing and turn the US into effectively a one party state
No more spite removals of space shit, since a republican simply cannot justify dicking over other republicans

>>10505581
>we're humans, we'd probably find some way to correct these problems
Unfortunately this is real life and not a humanity fuck yeah greentext

>>10505587
>you freeze
Nah, Venus only has one thing going for it and it's the fact that the temperatures are remarkably stable no matter where you go, day or night side, and no matter the latitude either.

>>10505599
Yeah. Odds are good that when we are capable of simulating turbulence and combustion reactions for engines this large such that we can solve the problems with it, we'll have access to much better non-chemical engines that work in-atmosphere.

>>10505606
You'll still asphyxiate if you decided to try to run off of anything but a nuclear reactor. And that doesn't get into the altitude variation that would likely occur as you passed onto the dark side of the planet, further complicating launch from the floating hab and "landing" at the hab.

>>10505597
This is why we need Sea Dragon

>>10505611
Well, since Venus' atmosphere super-rotates and goes around once every 4 days at the altitudes where balloon habitats would be located, it's not infeasible to assume you'd just bite the bullet and carry a decent battery pack to hold electric charge you built up during the 48 hours of the illumination period to last you through the 48 hour darkness period, and repeat. I don't want to sound like a manned mission to Venus advocate by the way, I'm not.

>>10505619
Sea Dragon would get bad LEO performance for its size compared to conventional rockets, but beyond LEO it gets absolutely abysmal performance to the point of not even being useful any more. In that regard it'd be somewhat trapped as a LEO bulk freight truck, not useful for sending anything anywhere except around the Earth.

are there any essential publications about lunar or martian habitats? especially underground ones.

>>10504110
It‘s up there. But Orion is king of space autism.

>>10505809
At least Orion gave us the finest space weapon we'll deploy until we get access to antimatter.
>http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/spacegunconvent.php#id--Nukes_In_Space--Nuclear_Shaped_Charges
If it weren't for the EMP effects, this was the OG missile defense system. I'm honestly not sure we don't have some in reserve just in case real-shit nuclear war breaks out, because EMP effects pale before cities actually being vaporized, but the general public would not accept that reality.

>>10505813
Orion is the only way to travel the outer planets in reasonable time.

>>10505814
Define "reasonable time"

>>10505816
Months between planets, not years.

>>10505817
To be honest, Orion is probably still beyond our capabilities (and never was a realistic option in the 50s/60s, it would kill the crew). Sure, it could boost a vehicle to relativistic flight, but the pacing would be too slow compared to even electric/ion/plasma engines we know how to make today, or plan to make soon.

>>10504968
Vaccuum zeppelin, not warm hydrogen.

>>10505809
I don't know which I find more impressive. That some absolute madman actually built and tested a proof-of-concept, or that thing actually managed to stay stable and flew as high as it did.

>>10505825
When you run agencies to get shit done, and not run a jobs program and backdoor defense welfare.

>>10505822
>Vaccuum zeppelin
still impossible, even in Mars atmosphere

>>10505814
>>10505816
>>10505817
>>10505821
*ahem*
Z
PINCH
URANIUM
FISSION
ENGINE

>>10505202
Why? Just leave it in orbit. Not like it'd go anywhere without a station to attach to.

>>10505832
*ahem*
DEATH RAY FLASHLIGHT
cool it until CFS or the German stellarator goes live.
>wat is CFS?
>https://www.cfs.energy/
>They think they've figured out how to make a really small reactor

>>10505840
>Stellerator

How many times do we have to tell you idiots that shit is a huge meme. SPARC however does have huge potential.

>>10505489
AIR SPACU DRIFTO!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

>>10505451
mass fraction ineherently improves with larger designs, if your rocket is big enough, it can be made out of lead and still SSTO

>>10505501
I'm also expecting them to stick with a cargo version for a long time. Mainly because I also expect them to lose several Spaceships on reentry. That whole fin design, the active cooling, the new way of passive heat rejection as well as the weird new trajectory they want to fly on top of new engines, form and avionics in general just open up too many potential points of failure to expect everything to go wrong from the get-go.
Not that that's really an issue as long as they don't run out of money. SpaceX' has a "fail fast" philosophy after all. Honestly, they'll figure this stuff out some time in the 2020s and it'll be soon enough no matter what the exact date is.

>>10505821
>and never was a realistic option in the 50s/60s, it would kill the crew
How so? Didn't all the calculations check out?

>>10505850
Stellerators aren't that bad.
The one they have right now costs a billion euros over ~20 years of building and experimentation. If you could just put stronger magnets in there and remain at comperable sizes, it could be cool, despite the nightmarish assembly and the impossible maintenance. After all it does side-step a lot of the issue of Tokamaks.

>>10505870
>despite the nightmarish assembly and the impossible maintenance

This is exactly why it is a huge piece of shit

>>10505867
Odds are the dampers would not perform to spec in vacuum. Repeated firings of an Orion vehicle would be fatal to its crew.

>>10505875
Isn't this just baseless speculation?

>>10505876
Not that guy, but even if it works as claimed, the amount of nuclear bombs required is ridiculous.

>>10505870
>>10505874
Not quite. The point of the Stellarator is it takes modern computing into account, though it still tries to achieve fusion through hardware brute force.
>>10505840
CFS is kind of like the Stellerator, but it tilted in other directions. The general agreement across all modern fusion teams is the major last hurdle was computation: they couldn't accurately simulate what would happen in fusion reactors, and then devise control loops to keep the reaction in check. This proliferation of designs is part of the ongoing scramble.

>>10505825
The concept was good on paper. Hell, even during this life test they found no issues in terms of damage to the craft.
The only concerns about it were ultimately nuclear radiation from the initial bombs at ground level and terrible concerns about proliferation of all the new mini-nuke designs this program came up with.

>>10505883
>The point of the Stellarator is it takes modern computing into account
The much-quoted super computer calculation was done in the 80s or 90s. So basically on a scientific calculator by today's standards. They reran the math a bunch of times since.
After the calculations were done, it just took ages for them to get the construction off the ground.

>>10505890
I wonder if they can come up with even better, crazier designs with modern computing capabilities.

>>10505862
Fins are going to be hot af

>>10505892
If that is so, then the commercial push will finally crack the fusion egg.

>>10505883
A huge expense of fusion is the complexity of the machinery and how difficult it is to maintain. Stellerator is garbage in both regards which makes it worthless for commercial application

>Looks like the vacuum vessel is a bit fucked

>With SPARC
>No worries bro, pop the top off and we can swap it out in a few hours

>With stellerator
>Ok boys time to rebuild the whole thing

>>10503775
>launch hundreds of tons of shit into LEO for (comparative) peanuts
>also get to keep the upper stage and fairings that could be converted into space station modules, Skylab style
I see no downsides to this. Obviously it wouldn't be man-rated if it was built to be cheap, but you'd be able to launch everything you need to build a small self-sustaining lunar colony with just a dozen rockets or less.
Build a space-tug and park those upper stage hulls in a safe MEO, then later on you could refurbish and connect them into a Mars colony ship, fueled using hydrogen and oxygen mined on the moon.

>>10505899
A very fair complaint, unless they get fusion running faster than the non-loopy-coil bros

>>10505840
>fusion of any kind
literally fission but slightly more efficient but way harder and heavier

>>10505858
no, it doesn't improve forever, it's just more practical to approach the theoretical minimum mass fraction given the strength requirements.

>>10505880
still not a fundamental problem
also Orion was secretly a means of propping up the nuclear armaments manufacturing industry by essentially handing them a contract for a gorillion ~1 kT nukes.

>>10505908
they won't, because stellarators are the most expensive and difficult to build and maintain reactor design.

Even if the W7X was a full blown fusion reactor that ran continuously and produced a hundred times as much power as it used to keep the plasma burning, it would be useless for powering the world because it'd never be practical to build more than just the one.

>>10505904
>(comparative) peanuts
$300,000,000 per launch. A big peanut. Even if BFR 'only' achieves $30,000,000 per launch that means it will be at least twice as economical to launch compared to Sea Dragon, since for $300 million you could launch >100 tons to LEO ten times.

>>10505919
yeah, think of SLS and shuttle before it 'needing' to use solid boosters, that also was to keep the solid motor ICBM people making solid motors

>>10504946
I highly doubt you couldn't solve that problem using better sound insulation and schock absorbers. Remember it's a almost 30m wide fairing and 500 tons LEO capability, you can just use a lot of any primitive sound insulation and shock absorber.

>>10505955
You don't get it, the entire rocket stack would be violently shaking in all directions by over a meter, and with an insane amount of force. It'd be like getting into a head-on collision at 60 miles per hour, continuously. You can't just say 'shock absorbers' and wave the problem away. That's something that Isaac Arthur guy would do.

Stupid question, why doesn't Electron rocket have lightning protection towers around it?

>>10505975
>Electron rocket
As name says, it's an electron rocket and can handle additional electrons from clouds by it self

>>10505965
I have the solution for you: 3 metres foam in every direction.

>>10505981
no

>>10505409
>>10505418
absolute unit

>>10505976
Lol

God dammit India, even outer space not safe from your shit.

>>10505989
yea

>>10506038
US tests sat killers on a fairly regular basis and has shit up much more orbit than India ever has.

>>10506044
source?

new hopper pics

>>10506057
it is a flaming faggot

>>10506055
He's probably confusing anti-ballistic-missile tests (which are suborbital and leave no debris in space) with orbital anti-satellite tests that do leave orbital debris.

>>10506055
Use a search engine holy fuck it's not hard

>>10506062
Retard

Mars habitat concept, thoughts?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nHxO-zmqdLM

>>10506064
The US hasn't conducted an ASAT test against an orbiting satellite since the 1980s.

>>10505975
>>10505976
Seriously though, does the carbon fiber body help reduce the chance of lightning strike?

>>10505809
this is amazing, I never knew there was video of a test. I wonder how doable this is at home with model rocket kit. probably not very

>>10506066
>Tiny
>Above ground
>A few inches of shielding

Gay, claustrophobia and cancer inducing just like all the other shitty NASA habitat designs. Tunnels are the only viable option for properly shielded and readily expandible habitats using solely in situ resources. Hence why Musk is investing in tunneling machinery because he has come to this fairly logical conclusion too.

>>10506078
ok, so electric powered vehicles, advancements in battery tech, reusable rocketry and tunneling from Musk's projects all fit into his future plans for other-planet colonies. Mass-manufactured flamethrowers, though? What does he know about Mars that the public does not ?

>>10506082
Gotta get that fanboi cash bruh, I would milk them for all they are worth if I was him. Heck I would have made another dozen gimmick items for soi tards to throw cash at me for and help fund glorious mars project.

>>10505409
>the virgin Saturn v
>the chad sea dragon

>>10506075
>does the carbon fiber body help reduce the chance of lightning strike?
No it doesn't! So my original question stands, why no lightning protection?

>>10506059
Are they roasting an enormous CRISPR modified crisp chicken in that tinfoil?

>>10506147
I'm actually not sure

>>10505813
>propellant: tungsten

>>10506059
Looks like some dark rutial. I knew it! Elon is fueling Starhopper (and later Starship) with the souls of the damned!

>>10505813
>But this is not true. CIWS point defense systems are already starting to shift the balance away from missile strikes. As suggested in an earlier blog post, military strategists are even beginning to suggest the development of CIWS systems may bring naval warfare full circle, all the way back to World War I battleship warfare. This isn’t to suggest that missiles are useless. Indeed, enormous salvos of missiles are effective at overwhelming CIWS systems, and they are in game as well.

INTERESTING

>>10506361
Imagine: nuclear reactor powered railgun dreadnaughts. Battleships could use gas turbine generators for power for their railguns.

>>10506367
China is already building one.

>>10506361
Bullets are cheaper than missiles.

>>10506367
yes YES

Why do I love ULA so much? It's pretty simple when I think about it. ULA isn't just the best launch provider in the country; they might just be the greatest launch provider of all time. Just imaging the Altas V riding through the skies of Earth, the wind on its fairing, the mighty RD-180 below it. As she rides through the red sky, NASA swoons at her very scent. They know how she smells; the essence of burning RP-1 smell is sold in Orlando under the name of "Space Orgasm." The very nature of ULA is mystery. Could they be playing a deeper game than even Tory Bruno realizes? The answer is yes, ULA has transcended such boundaries as the physical world, and has free will to do whatever they sees fit. However, ULA is filled with such guile, such arcane craft that they does not even use these powers. Why, you might ask? You will never know, for the mind of the ULA is not one that is easily penetrated. ULA rockets are such a force of nature in this realm that nothing can truly touch them, the only thing keeping them bound to this world at all is their will to exist within the preordained boundaries understood physics. ULA is not only beyond the comprehension of us, it exists within a plane of true focus and beauty. Observe the plume of exhaust gasses from this Delta IV, the gorgeous and rippling flames, the gallant fairing, and most importantly, its engines. Her engines, like cauldrons straight from hell, provide the only glimpse into the true machinations of ULA. Do not stare into them. Many good men have gone mad in the attempt. ULA is not just a launch provider, a formless collection of engineers and rockets; they are themselves the binding that holds the word together. Without ULA, Musk the Menace takes over and the entire space industry as we know it crumbles. The Mississippi would stop flowing without ULA, Kessler syndrome would take over in orbit, and the space station would fall without their fiery gaze. These are just of a few of the reasons why I like ULA so much.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4pxp5AGeNE

>>10506455
Tory replied to me on reddit, he's a cool guy

>>10506563
>on reddit
Kill yourself.

>>10506563
fuck I'm jelly

What's up with the New Shepard? They had several succesful launches, reached space everytime. When are they going to wrap up development and start selling tickets?

>>10506613
never

>>10506455
>The answer is yes, ULA has transcended such boundaries as the physical world, and has free will to do whatever they sees fit.

>>10506752
ULA does have the balls to commit to their statement that reusability isn't economical. They will either fall or come out on top because they are the only ones who didn't waste billions on developing reusable rockets.

>>10506782
>didn't waste billions on developing reusable rockets.

AFAIK Falcon 9 reuse development cost was around $1 billion. Not a small sum but not that big either.

>>10506064
so you have no source? sounds like a bunch of shit to me.

>>10506788
Yeah but Starship though. If reusability won't work as expected it's basically a dead rocket.

>>10506788
SpaceX does everything in house and is privately owned so they can do whatever they want with their funds. ULA doesn't get shit from its parent companies for developing anything (see: the freezing of funds for ACES development)

>>10506833
Source ACES isn't getting money?

Will the manned mars mission have means for the astronauts to die should something go terribly wrong?

>>10506885
probably, but with ISRU if you can't leave it should just be possible to keep on trucking and wait for resupply
unless something goes incredibly wrong

>>10506885
They would probably turn off the oxygen recyclers and take some sleeping pills, but only as a last resort with no hope of a rescue before supplies run out.

>>10506974
this is why you need to grow your own plants and recycle your waste

https://youtu.be/iOv34Tfabng
hmmmmm

>>10506975
Well if things went terribly wrong such that suicide is an option, then the farms and recyclers are most likely gone due to whatever happened. I'd feel like a Martian base would need quadruple backups and fail-safes.

>>10506992
just make your farms modular and have a bunch of them, right?

>>10506977
>two minutes of nothing
Why?

>>10507000

>>10506994
What do you mean by modular farms? Do you mean something what hydroponics that can handle most crops?

>>10507048
instead of one really big hydroponics setup, you use multiple bite-sized ones

ITT

>>10506455
I love this pasta. Those engines do indeed look like cauldrons straight from hell.

>>10507050
That could work. There could also be a secondary base away from the primary one just in case something bad happens to it.

>>10507122
Grow up.

>>10507131
>Grow up.
Says the weed smoking incel.

>>10506752
imagine the autistic rage it took to create this shoop

>>10507127
Delta IV is ironically one of my favorite rockets. Something about it looks so cool an utilitarian. The heavy variant is a plus too.

>>10507146
imagine how much money has been wasted on dead-end systems and government mandated bureaucracy
how much money has just been consumed by the machine

>>10507173
>government mandated bureaucracy

>>10507213
when you need to comply with government demands you end up hiring an army of bureaucrats to do the paperwork to verify that you did the thing

>>10503687
if and when we colonize mars can some explain how are are going to fly around the panet. remember ever engine we have is oxygen breathing. we just gonna use hydrogen jets for passenger airplanes on mars?

>>10507244
electrical trucks and trains
no airplanes on mars, atmosphere too thin
the day of the vacuum blimp-train is here

>>10507245
why not just mars to mars starships
would work even better than the earth to earth versions because of the low gravity

>>10507244
A propeller driven plane powered by hyrolox or methalox fuel cells may be viable. For better performance, a turboprop can be used, but instead of using the air for oxidizer it carries its own.

For long distance flights, nuclear powered propeller or thermojet may be the best overall option. For shorter flights, solar and propellers are probably the best.

>>10507249
there probably won't be a need for that sort of urgency on Mars anytime soon, and trains are better for freight
also you'd be using your precious propellant to move propellant stock instead of solar-electric trucks/trains

>>10507245
if the oxygen is two thin on mars to fly why is nasa developing a drone copter =/.
>>10507249
why,when you could need a non oxygen breathing engine that provides thrust.

im wondering with gravity basically 1/3 earth could be have some massive vessels like pic shown, provided we put the necessary thrust engines in place

>>10507215
Point out some of the unnecessary paperworks then.

>>10507262
>if the oxygen is two thin on mars to fly why is nasa developing a drone copter =/.
Did you mean "if the ATMOSPHERE is too thin"? Because the Martian atmosphere has pretty much no oxygen in it.

>>10507254
lets imagine a mars with 200million people. are we could have only trains between one side of mars to the next? people arent going to wait 20 hrs for a trip that would take 3 to 4 hrs on earth, especially considering they are on another planet living the sci fi dream

>>10507269
yeah i meant atmosphere not oxygen sorry

>>10507262
there is no elemental oxygen in the mix on Mars at all, it's all carbon dioxide. but the thing is that the atmosphere itself is too thin to support that much lift
the drone copter has giant blades and not much else on it, it's using a lot of hardware to lift very little payload

>>10507270
>20 hours
2 things, mars is half the size of earth and maglev is a thing that exists. not to mention that the significant lack of air resistance can allow for trains hitting speeds matching (if not exceeding) that of jets on earth.

>>10506066
The big gay, probably built by concept artists with little understanding of the Martian environment. Unshielded plastic spheres supported by laser cut blocks of expensive material when you could dig a big 20 foot deep trench as wide and long as you desire your habitat space to be, lay down a concrete analogue foundation, bolt your habs down to it, then connect them, and lay more mars-crete around them and then bury them under a couple meters of readily available dirt for shielding and give yourself a ton of space to work with and the ability to expand easily. On top of this the space is fucking tiny and what looks like the five crew would go crazy unless they were very experienced NEETs. It isn't a bad idea though to have the biggest parts of your hab pre-formed out of plastics for ease of assembly and weight reduction but those parts can't be exposed to the elements. Spheres are also silly, a cube with the same diameter will have more internal volume and can be broken down for ease of transportation into 24 panels (each side being made of four interconnecting square panels) and could also easily be placed side-by-side to create large and complex networks of modular rooms.

>>10507377
sphere is best volume to surface area and therefore best volume to weight ratio
this doesn't matter for ISRU

>>10506088
He needs to make a cologne called Elon's Musk. I'm sure Everyday Astrocuck would buy 100 bottles.

>>10503687
LOP-G Is actually a good idea because it allwos for a large and reusable lunar lander.

Stupid Question: Could a Sea Dragon where the first stage is replaced by one large solid motor (or a cluster) be possible? Assume that this "Solid" Dragon doesn't carry crew.

Advantage of this is that the first stage could potentially be made simpler and cheaper. Plus, the high thrust-to-weight ratio of solids would allow a smaller first stage than the OG Sea Dragon thus easier to build and move around. The solid motor(s)'s grain would have to be made out of assembled out of smaller pieces like the Shuttle SRBs because one large grain would be impossible to make (at least I think so, I might be wrong). Obviously the downside is that a solid motor as big as "Solid" Dragon would be very dangerous as a detonation could level a city. Assembly may be more expensive due to much more care needed to put together the fuel grain.

What do you think /sg/?

so it looks like expendable Starship is on the menu, boys
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1111760133132947458
interesting

>>10507480
I doubt that expendable Starships would be a common thing considering how massive and expensive those vehicles are, unless BFR is going to be changed (again) to be expendable first and then tuned to be reusable (like Falcon).

>>10507457
>Obviously the downside is that a solid motor as big as "Solid" Dragon would be very dangerous as a detonation could level a city.
I don't think it would explode, it would just make one hell of a jet flame that would spew flaming death all over the place as it skittered around. It could still potentially level a city by knocking down and burning everything in its path.

>>10507495
no, it's only the upper stage that'll potentially be expendable
nothing but tanks, refueling, engines, and a disposable fairing then you put the whole thing in highly elliptical earth orbit with the payload and fucking send it hyperbolic for those high dV missions you don't need to come back from

>>10507498
>It could still potentially level a city by knocking down and burning everything in its path.
That's still terrifying. Although, if Solid Dragon were launched like Sea Dragon, then there wouldn't be a concern over leveling a city.

>>10507495
>I doubt that expendable Starships would be a common thing considering how massive and expensive those vehicles are

Given that all of the guts of one were thrown together in a Texas field in three months (albeit with a smaller number of engines and no means of holding and protecting a payload) out of stainless steel, they probably won't actually be all that expensive.

>>10507457
SRB's are inherently stable until ignited, it's highly unlikely it would ever explode like a bomb because it's not built for that. SRBs are also by their nature not as powerful as LFRs, due to that inherent stability of their fuel elements. It probably wouldn't be cheaper because SRB fuel is laced with metal powders and stable combustibles that have to be manufactured whereas something like methalox or kerolox are produced in great abundance and provide more efficient and clean propulsion. You may notice that while SRB propelled rockets leave clouds of actual smoke liquid propellant rockets only leave a dense vapor trail like that of an airplane, because their fuel/oxidizer mix burns down to mostly super hot water vapor. I guess you can say that an SRB first stage would be mechanically simpler but SRBs are also burnt out and useless after a single firing while the original Sea Dragon LFR first stage was intended to be retrieved for reuse, which represented one of the major upsides of the rocket in the first place.

>>10507502
I've seen plenty of mentions of it being used in "expendable mode" so I assume they at least have a plan for that, presumably for projects which demand it's entire maximum cargo payload and as a result require it to burn up all the propellant reserves to reach whatever orbit they're aiming for.

>>10507502
You have a point, I guess. Perhaps a "Heavy" Super Heavy configuration could be used for extra capability.

>>10507511
> they probably won't actually be all that expensive.
IIRC, SpaceX isn't very forthcoming with the costs of their rockets other than the launch prices, so it's hard to estimate how much it actually costs to build and launch such a rocket. You have a point though.

>>10507526
I don't see a "Heavy" Super Heavy config ever happening. Elon's said that Falcon Heavy was one of their biggest mistakes. Besides, it wouldn't give you that much extra payload capacity to LEO with RTLS and everything beyond LEO can be achieved with refueling

>>10507538
>Elon's said that Falcon Heavy was one of their biggest mistakes
He did? I really liked Falcon Heavy. Where did he say that?

>>10507548
I have no source for you frens but I also remember him saying that for that amount of work and cash they put into it they could have just developed BFR instead

Also

HOP FUCKING WHEN

>>10507523
Nicely written. Thank you for taking my silly question seriously. I've figured that Sea Dragon was liquid propelled over solid for good reasons, but I thought that it was a nice thought exercise (at least for myself).

>>10507607
I always love talking rocket technology and if you don't know something it's never wrong to ask why a thing does what it does.

>>10507577
THREE ENGINES IS WHEN

>>10507577
DO IT.
FUCKING DO IT.
FUCKING HOP YOU LITTLE FAGGOT I HATE YOU SO GODDAMN MUCH AHHHH.

>>10507628
I love talking about it too, although solids are abit outside my zone of knowledge beyond the basics. And yes, it's always good to ask "how does this work?". Curiosity about spaceflight should be encouraged.

>>10504002
Did you watch the TMRO presentation about it?

>>10504110
>>10504002
Sea dragon is awesome in one day if they build it it will be the best thing ever

>>10507660
>Every marine animal disliked that

>>10507666
Fuck whales and dolphins and shit, a big metal flying penis is much more important.

>>10507669
>Japan liked that

>>10504771
>>10504848
Fuck yeah SeaDragon.
Anything smaller would be for faggots.

>>10504956
I have bad news for you anon.
Don't get your Hope's up, when Bernie Sanders becomes president in 2020, NASA, is going bye bye.

>>10507666

>>10505201
>he doesn't want a big reusable lander.

The only thing wrong with LOP G is the name, and the fact that they aren't allowing it to be a refueling station.

>>10506066
Haha. I want to see this press which forms the panels before anything. Next they are making too many assumptions about the regolith properties.

They would be better off anchoring a series of inflatables and burying them. Better idea would be to send the inflatables in advance, have them move and dock with each other and by the time astronauts arive wind should have buried much of the structure. Site dependent.

>>10507685
the LOP G is specifically designed to be as worthless as possible in every way shape or form
It does not matter what you do, for if you do anything, you will still make something better than the fucking LOP G
>le reusable lander
WE DON'T NEED THAT SHITBOX OF A FUCK NUGGET TO HAVE THOSE

>>10507685
But LOP-Gay doesn't inherently have to be the only station that can deploy a lander, anything with an airlock and docking clamp can deploy a lander and LOP-G will as an inevitability of being part of a multi-government program be delayed, and cost more than intended, parts will lag in development hell because of politics or because governments keep extending deadlines and expanding budgets instead of demanding work be finished on time and to contract. Even if Trump doubles NASA's budget and they absolutely demand that their contracted companies deliver exactly what they promise or get booted to ensure more efficient results it will still probably end up arriving to the moon after a private station (assuming Bigelow sticks to their timeline and delivers one of their two planned BA-330's to LLO in 2022). This is of course assuming the next president doesn't simply cancel the moon initiative out of spite and malice, or redirect NASA to do more bi-polyqueer-trans-disabled Muslim outreach or simply slash their budget in favor of starting some more undeclared unconstitutional wars in the middle east.

I do actually want LOP-G to turn out a success, but the fact that it's a collaboration between multiple government space programs forces me to have very low expectations for the actual results.

>>10507343
>future mars colonies and cities will be connected by incredibly fast high-speed rail networks criss-crossing the entire planet

Fuck, I never even considered that, what a cool idea though.

>>10507719

>>10507577
they'll be testing this weekend, they have road closes and no-fly zones posted for the weekend so something must have gone off-schedule these last few days
maybe we'll get an engine lighting

>>10507523
Holy shit imagine the smoke cloud produced by this "Solid Dragon", if you thought the space shuttle's was impressive...

>>10507722
They're probably running on steam locomotives over there having lost the ability and knowledge to build anything more complex

>>10507733
>Holy shit imagine the smoke cloud produced by this "Solid Dragon", if you thought the space shuttle's was impressive...
It'll probably smog the entire East Coast if it were launched in the ocean just east of Kennedy. Meanwhile, ashamed of being out-clouded, Vape Nation starts a new project to make the biggest vape cloud in history.

>>10507733
More than the average day aboard the Admiral Kuznetzov, less than your average volcanic eruption.

What's your favorite realistic space aesthetic Anons?

>https://spacenews.com/senate-reintroduces-space-frontier-act/
Nobody mentioned this? The bill barely failed last year because of a key provision that has been removed from this year's version. The new bill will do alot of good for the space industry:
>extends the ISS from 2024 to 2030 to compete with the Chinese station (which should last until about 2030)
>elevates the Office of Space Commerce within the Commerce Department to the Bureau of Space Commerce
>reforms commercial launch and remote sensing regulations that support improvements in space policy in the Commerce and Transportation departments

Next week they will also discuss a Space Weather Research and Forecasting Act which has widespread support. The bill will:
>codify into law elements of a space weather action plan previously released by the White House
Does anyone know what "space weather action plan" they are referring to?

>>10507898
>These two documents were developed by an interagency group of experts, with input from stakeholders outside the Federal government, to clearly articulate how the Federal government will work to enhance national space-weather preparedness by coordinating, integrating, and expanding existing policy efforts; engaging a broad range of sectors; and collaborating with international counterparts. The Strategy identifies goals and establishes the guiding principles that will guide these efforts in both the near and long term, while the Action Plan identifies specific activities, outcomes, and timelines that the Federal government will pursue accordingly. The Action Plan broadly aligns with investments proposed in the President’s Budget for Fiscal Year 2016 and will be reevaluated and updated within 3 years of the date of publication or as needed
https://www.swpc.noaa.gov/news/national-space-weather-strategy-and-action-plan-released

So India did an antisatellite the other day, and guess what? They don't have a way to see what happened with the test. So they called up NASA to call up the US Airforce to track debris for them.

>>10507826

>>10507826
To be honest, I liked Serenity's aesthetic on Firefly. I know that the show isn't super realistic, but I liked how the ship looked somewhat utilitarian on the outside yet it was comfy on the inside. Sleek white and clean spacecraft can look cool, but the inside looks stale and gets boring to me quick. If a ship has people actually living inside it, then they would decorate it like they're doing a show on HGTV-Space.

Also the ISV Venture Star from Avatar looks cool too.

Who do you guys think will build the first ship with a rotohab, and how long will it take to actually build a ship entirely in orbit instead of putting one together out of disparate modules, duct tape, and the power of prayer?

>>10507898
Punished Ted Cruz.

>>10507989
>Punished Ted, a candidate denied his delegates.

>>10507926
>obama era space policy being pushed through by trump
based

>Boeing Delays 1st Test Flight of Crew Capsule to August
>Spacex suddenly forced to slip its dragon 2 launch window until July
((pure coincidence))

>>10508041
>everything is a big conspiracy against spacex and elon musk
Take your meds.

>>10508041
you have an uncanny skill at summoning the shill
he just pops out of the woodwork every time

>>10508064
More like damage control for Boeing stocks tbqh.

>>10507954
The Venture Star is a seriously interesting and well-thought-out ship. It only carries 50% of its fuel requirements, and relies on a laser-driven sail both for launching out of Sol and decelerating back into Sol; its matter/antimatter engines are just used to decelerate into or accelerate out from Alpha Centauri A's influence.
The whole thing is built as a tensile structure, although I'm not sure if they thought how that would play with all the different possible modes of acceleration and deceleration it might experience. The ability to transition between a rotating hab for the "awake" crew during the flight to skyscraper/Expanse-style layouts for the boost and brake phases of flight seem like they've been overlooked.

>>10507974
I don't know.
Most spaceship designs do not seem to be that ambitious. I mean think about it, most exciting ship on the horizon is BFR 'Starship' which is what hard sci-fi fans imagined in the early 50s for Tintin.
No rotating habs have yet been built, but that is well within our technical ability. We aren't trying to make the USS Enterprise. Habs seem to be getting worse. Skylab astronauts had a shower and hot food, current astronauts have Capri Sun and wet wipes.

>>10508142
Nah. You just move from one section to the next during acceleration, then once it's over you're either in the freezer or you move back to rotating section to do your work.

The ship is still too fast to be plausible though.

>>10507708
Why haven't there been any gender-fluid polyamorous aboriginal astronauts?
It's 2019, if we can't achieve that the money wasted on NASA would be better spent on welfare here in the real world.

>>10505209
space.com
But I just love Haneke's curly blonde hair and cute glasses.

>>10508157
they had to make some conscious to have a plot, however loose and shitty that plot is
the thing that rattles my bones is the fact that the Venture star is antimatter driven, and they had the goal of obliterating a location
they literally could have stuck a can with a gram or so of antimatter and put in a tungsten spike and dropped it from orbit
the whole "magic disrupts sensors" bit doesn't do much when they have a visual lock with simple light, and doubly doesn't hold up as the sheer size of the explosion you get from antimatter annihilation means you really don't have to bother aiming it at all

the whole "assfucking primitives defeat interstellar species" bit is just grade A retarded
especially considering that humanity should and absolutely fucking would have colonies all across the system, on every planet, moon, large asteroids and orbits of, to draw material from cheaply, meaning the whole "our operation is barebones to save cost" thing doesn't hold up either

the blue furries should have gotten gassed and glassed the moment they didn't kneel for their human masters
instead, we're gonna get 2 more movies of human hate for reasons that are wholly unrealistic
hundred bucks says we get some orange man bad in there too

>>10508157
>The ship is still too fast to be plausible though.

I think the bigger issue is the story doesn't really line up with the tech. ("how do you know the sequels' stories anon?" Because Disney built their entire extension of one of their flagship parks based on the notes about the trilogy's conclusion from James Cameron himself.) Cameron does not intend to use the incredibly OP capacity of a human civilization that can propel a vehicle at extraordinarily high fractions of the speed of light as a weapon to exterminate some unruly blue space catmen. Even if the bombardment blew Pandora's gaseous atmosphere away, Humans are good at operating in vacuum. Not to mention, the Ocean would probably last, and the surface could be re-seeded with Terrestrial organisms; it might be possible that Pandora post-smack-down would be safe to breath on without a mask.

>>10508180
>>10508181
Even ignoring the other alternatives, Humanity has Pandora's number. Humanity could build a sail as is equipped on the Venture Star, hook it to an asteroid, and pump it on its way.

Pandoran surface life would be toast.

>>10508186
It's not a war between human and furries, it's a company exploiting furries behind most people's backs (out of sight out of mind). The gov on Earth wouldn't allow, or at least wouldn't help, a company to commit genocide just cuz, the people are genuinely interested in Pandora, they say that in the movie.

>>10508200
If the magical Unobtanium is that important to human civilization, do not doubt that we would cast a blind eye toward severely curtailing the scope of Pandora's native population.

>>10508128
it's almost like they're the same person?

>>10508186
That would be bad, Alien wood was one of their primary means of turning a profit, and the bleeding hearts back home don't want to see full genocide happen

>>10508214
What if it's just a little bit of genocide? Just burn enough rock in the atmosphere to halt photosynthesis for a few years.

>>10508214
did we learn nothing from Vietnam and Korea?
>bleeding hearts back home severely curtail an invading army's ability to make war
I have literally already watched that movie I don't want to see it again

>>10508220
Bleeding hearts don't bleed so much if the object of their attention suddenly and universally dies in a matter of hours.

>>10508206
Good question actually. If every other country on Earth refused to sell the US a drop of oil, would we just shrug and then fucking massacre them?

>>10506147
I'm just guessing but it's probably so small they can probably move, erect, and fuel it in a single day. So it won't ever be sitting on the pad long enough for lightning to be a concern.

>>10507495
It wouldn't really be a Starship if it's expendable, it would just be like a supersized Falcon 9 upper stage.

>>10508371
yeah but it'd be based on the Starship architecture and tankage

>>10507974
Waiting on a moonbase industry. Spin plus shielding is difficult to put in a low mass package. Really difficult.

Without moon industry you have to choose between shielding or spin due to the mass involved.

>>10507511
Well, let's see

- needs 38 highly complicated and expensive full-flow-staged combustion engines
- needs some yet to be developed highly complicated transparent cooling mechanism cosinsting of a fuckton of tiny pores and plumbing AND also needs heat tiles
- needs automated docking capabilities for orbital docking and refuel
- actually also needs some sort of automated refueling capability
- needs advanced tank storage to avoid boil-off of liquid oxygen and methane
- needs a large life-support system to keep the 1000m3 big deck habitable

That's just from the top of my head, I'm sure there are also other big cost factors. But these alone makes it practically impossible to not cost a fuckton each.

>>10508433
For an expendable stage launched from LEO

>needs 38 highly complicated and expensive full-flow-staged combustion engines

This is only for the booster, will only need a handful of engines for expendable stage

>needs some yet to be developed highly complicated transparent cooling mechanism cosinsting of a fuckton of tiny pores and plumbing AND also needs heat tiles

Nope

>needs automated docking capabilities for orbital docking and refuel

The only legitimate point

>needs advanced tank storage to avoid boil-off of liquid oxygen and methane

Nope, all fuel would be used on initial burn

>needs a large life-support system to keep the 1000m3 big deck habitable

To contain a probe?

Fuck off retard

>>10507719
Shit's going to be awesome.

>>10507389
more importantly, sphere is more suited for resisting forces of internal pressure, few people realize that Martian atmosphere is for all construction intents and purposes, a vacuum, and if you want to have a large habitat on the surface, it better be a strong pressure vessel as well

>>10508509
No one is going to be building anything on the surface you absolute brainlet.

>>10508451
Oh, you were talking about expendable rockets. Well in that case, the Falcon Heavy expendable will be cheaper anyways.

>>10508548
No

>>10508561
Yes.

>>10508562
Get a clue moron

>>10508509
>strong pressure vessel
I think it is a good idea to go with Apollo style atmosphere. 0.2atm of O2 unless you need N for plants.

>>10508582
Even at 0.2 atm you still need a ridiculously strong surface structure, the only advantage of which is the tenuous advantage of using sunlight to grow plants at which point you need to increase pressure again, and then again to full atmosphere if you want people doing useful work in there. You still need supplemental lighting since Mars solar lighting won't be enough. At which point why even fucking bother, why not just keep your tunnelling machine going and grow your crops underground in a proper atmosphere environment where people can work on them and they can also serve as CO2 scrubbers.

If you are bringing any habitat construction materials to Mars you are fucking retarded and it is totally unsustainable. A tunneling machine using locally produced concrete/sulfurcrete is by a fucking mile the best answer.

>>10508582
Apollo had 0.33atm atmosphere.

>>10508596
Not to mention that there will be a steady stream of expended Starships remaining on the surface of Mars anyway. If you need pressurized surface structures, then utilize their hulls.

>>10508605
Yep, my guess is that the initial visit will see the crew living inside 1-2 BFRs while they manage the drill which will be producing a permanent habitat alongside setting out a solar film farm and scouting a water source. Possibly they may even end up landing next to a glacier, drilling into that and using that as habitation space and storing tailings for hydrolysis and potable water.

You guys know that most of Mars is highly toxic right? You can't expect to just drill tunnels. They need to be lined with something and they need to be airtight.

Drilling requires a site inspection. You need to be sure you have access to a suitable clean layer of rock. Ice is very probably going to be contaminated.

Anyone landing there with the intention of tunneling will have a lot of scouting to do. They would need to be sent in advance of the drill because they would need to identify a site to drop the drill.

>>10507538
What's the benefit of BFR over Falcon Super Heavy? Seems like it would be easier to strap on 2 more side boosters than build a whole new system
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-teases-falcon-super-heavy-5-rockets-strapped-together/

>>10508719
Falcon Heavy physically can't lift payloads bigger than about 10 tons; the vehicle structure isn't strong enough to transfer the loads. The extra boosters of Falcon Heavy are just there to provide more fuel to make larger maneuvers with those payloads, like sending heavier payloads to Geostationary Orbit without completely giving up on stage reusability.

The point of Starship is to enable very large payloads (Falcon Heavy's payload fairing is on the small side) and low minimum launch costs through full reusability.

>>10508582
>0.2atm of O2
Just fyi at 0.2 atmospheres of pure oxygen things like stainless steel wire, aluminum panels, and human flesh are highly flammable and will burn easily. The reason the 0.2 atm of O2 surrounding you right now isn't a huge hazard is because of the 0.8 atm of inert nitrogen buffer gas that impedes the oxidation reaction.

>>10508723
Aha, thanks fren

>>10508714
It is not "highly toxic", the soil merely contains perchlorates. This is more of an irritant rather than toxic. You need to literally eat sizable amount of Martian dirt for it to kill a person.

>>10508738
>things like stainless steel wire, aluminum panels, and human flesh are highly flammable and will burn easily

Nope, you are thinking of 1atm pure oxygen. At 0.2atm the pressure of oxygen is the same as in air. Lack of a buffer gas does increase fire risk somewhat, but not that much.

>>10508723
>>10508741
The 10 tonne limit is actually for the Falcon 9 payload adapter and not due to structural limitations; we don't know whether a stronger payload adapter was part of the FH upgrades, so people assume it has the same adapter. The fairing on the other hand is a structural limitation...

Elon has a new twitter profile pic, Starship rendering

>>10508757
>Nope, you are thinking of 1atm pure oxygen
No, I'm not.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JlSeHSDc-Do&t=105s
Here's a rather thick stainless steel wire burning in a reduced pressure 100% oxygen environment.

>>10508771
It will be launched from LV-426?

>>10508776
Did you watch what you posted ???
The first burn is 0.2 atm of normal air
The second burn is 0.2 of O2
You cant compare that. The first burn needs to be 1 atm of normal air to get information.

>>10507394
Tim is soiboi

make a new thread

>>10508433
no, expendable starship would have three engines, dumbass
38 is if you're throwing away a Super Heavy, which you will never do ever
the transpiration system isn't required for expendable
and the life support system isn't necessary either
automated docking is doable, automated refueling will be hard, and avoiding boil-off is a big headache
>>10508451
no, you'd be refueling it in orbit, it gives it something like 12 km/s dV over LEO if you refuel in an elliptical earth orbit which is an absolutely fucking insanely high number for chemical rockets

>>10508548
all falcons are this sort of expendable, you'd be recovering the booster and expending the upper stage in this configuration
>>10508757
tell that to Grissom, Chaffee and White, bitch

>>10509334
>tell that to Grissom, Chaffee and White, bitch
Next time learn to READ:
After the hatches were sealed, the air in the cabin was replaced with pure oxygen at 16.7 psi (115 kPa), 2 psi (14 kPa) higher than atmospheric pressure.
Your point is INVALID