/sci/ - Science & Math

>>10846136
Up- and subsequent downwards motion at which exact moment in time?

>>10846202
>Up- and subsequent downwards motion at which exact moment in time?

>>10846136
man Tory Bruno sure loves his cowboy hats !!!

Gross mass more than 10x larger
Maximum thrust nearly 3x higher, actual propulsive capability in orbit ~262 times higher
Total delta V with 100 tons of payload is 6.9 km/s, compared to 0.3km/s with 29.5 tons payload
At least ten times cheaper per launch, potentially 100x cheaper
Did not fall for the hydrogen meme
Not a solid fuel grain to be found
Infinitely easier to construct air frame using much cheaper and superior materials

Has there been a more mogged launch vehicle than Shuttle? Even Buran/Energia was better.

>>10846368
Shuttle was such a waste of money. We could have done a human mars mission wish all the money sunk into the shuttle program. Fuck.

>>10846368
Fact, if you took a shuttle orbiter, loaded it up with its maximum payload mass, then crushed it into a compacted block of scrap, you could launch that entire block of scrap into orbit using Starship. and still have about 20 tons of additional cargo mass capacity.

>>10846368
>Has there been a more mogged launch vehicle than Shuttle?
Black Arrow maybe? Got dropped because other launchers were promised to be cheaper, and then it turned out that Black Arrow could've been cheaper actually.

>>10846368
I just hope Starship won't end up as another Shuttle. The reentry tech seems to be crucial here.

>>10846388
I hear the perspiration cooling idea is in trouble. Does anyone have any new info?

>>10846368
what an absolute unit
>>10846388
the difference is if it somehow doesn't work well enough, Elon won't force the meme for 20 more years like NASA did with Shuttle

>>10846375
I haven’t done the napkin math but that probably still works out wolume-wise.

>>10846388
>>10846401
They've replaced it with Dragon-style tiles. CRS-18 is flying with four Starship tiles on board.

Basically Dragon's shield can survive 10 re entires safely, so naturally once can use similar tiles on the Starship, and end up with little to no refurbishment. Pretty cool.

>>10846388
The biggest thing that messed with the Shuttle was that it was stuck in the prototype phase and it wasn't allowed to be developed upon. Not even the new metallic heat tiles from the X-33 were incorporated into the Shuttle even though the original tiles were the biggest slow down to the Shuttles reusability (and having to replace them every flight was costly too which the metallic tiles didn't have an issue). Sure there were some iterations on the Shuttle, but compared to other launchers such as Soyuz, Atlas, Delta, and Ariane the Shuttle changed very little during its life. This was most likely due to budget issues and fears of "rocking the boat" in Congress (something like "oh? You don't like the Shuttle? Then we'll just cancel the only way Americans can get into space.")

People make fun of SpaceX for constantly changing the design of the BFR, but it shows that they're not going to be locked down by an inefficient design simply because of momentum.

>>10846422
The move from Carbon fiber to stainless steel was very ballsy, but after the Starship fire last week, it shows it was the right choice.

If they had stuck to CF, it would've come apart on the pad.

>>10846401
Apparently the lighter solution is thin ceramic tiles. Thin as in a centimeter or so, allowed by the steel structure's ability to withstand higher peak temperatures. Shuttle for example needed tiles as much as 6 inches thick in places in order to protect the sensitive aluminum alloys underneath, which could not even be allowed to reach 150 celsius. The steel of Starship should be able to handle as much as 500 degrees with no issues. Also, only the belly needs any tiles, the back of the vehicle will remain bare steel in order to limit absorption of infrared light from the hot plasma wake.

Transpiration cooling was only considered because it was seen as a lighter option than ceramics earlier. If something in the design changed, or better ceramics were developed, or lower peak temperatures are expected, or whatever, and as a result transpiration cooling isn't the lightest option any more, then it makes sense to drop it and go for the simpler, passive solution so long as it performs better.

The only bummer thing about this change is that it will restrict the conditions under which Starship can actually use aerobraking. With transpiration cooling, it has been demonstrated that cooling rates can be as much as ten times higher than what is necessary inside the combustion chamber of a high pressure rocket engine, which effectively translates to meaning you can aerobrake as hard and as fast as you want, so long as you have enough coolant on board. Starship with transpiration cooling could aerobrake directly to landing at Titan, which means it could scrub off a massive relative velocity in a single pass of a small body with low gravity, which requires a very intense braking pass. It could also have aerobraked at Earth coming back from pretty much anywhere in the solar system, even if it meant striking the atmosphere at over 16 km/s. There's also the gas giants; only Jupiter would probably remain beyond Starship's ability.

>>10846403
>Elon won't force the meme for 20 more years
Exactly, SpaceX is flexible and they aren't locked into anything by any government or bureaucratic shit. If Starship turns into a lemon they can just takes the technology that definitely works (Raptors, stainless steel construction) and use them to build something else, taking the lessons they've learned into account. A Raptor-based Falcon 9 style rocket, 9 Raptors on stage 1 and a single Raptor on a reusable upper stage, all made of steel to achieve better reuse characteristics due to the fatigue limit the material enjoys, would still shit on everything else currently flying and likely to fly in the near future, it'd be able to totally replace the Falcon family and would still probably out-compete New Glenn both in terms of payload to LEO and cost per launch. It wouldn't be the massive frame-shift that Starship represents, but it'd still be an incremental improvement, and should be well within their capability.

>>10846404
Almost certainly, since Shuttle was made mostly our of materials much more dense than water, and Starship has the cargo volume to fit about 1000 tons of water. 130 tons of aluminum and fiberglass and assorted alloys would definitely fit once crushed.

>>10846416
Starship ain't Dragon. Coming back from Mars is different than reentry from LEO.

>>10846416
>Dragon-style tiles
Not exactly. dragon uses PICA-X, an ablator. These new tiles are ceramics, much thinner, and don't ablate. It's really a completely different technology, operates differently, but achieves the same goal of reducing the amount of heat the air frame is subjected to. That being said, Starship's air frame can handle much higher temperatures than Dragon's or Shuttle's could, meaning the ceramic tiles on Starship can be much thinner and lighter while letting more heat through without causing a problem.

>>10846429
>The only bummer thing about this change is that it will restrict the conditions under which Starship can actually use aerobraking
In my opinion, being unable to aggressively aerobreak is probably a good thing. Having to be less aggressive is alot safer than trying to aerobreak to Earth reentry staight from a transearth interplanetary orbit. Kinda like limiting the speed a car can go to reduce potential crashes.

>>10846453
My mistake man I forgot they're using the ceramic tiles.

Funny enough about two or so months ago I got to tour SpaceX HQ (My nephew works there) and oh boy, it was a helluva experience.

>>10846422
Would the metallic tiles of Venture Star even work on Shuttle? My understanding is that VS had a very low density compared to the Shuttle orbiter because of the fact that it was an SSTO and was mostly empty hydrogen tank by volume on reentry, meaning it could stay high up for much longer and experience far less heat loading by comparison. I think Skylon is designed with the same thing in mind.

Maybe the metallic tiles would have worked across the entire back of Shuttle and in a few areas on the belly that experienced less heating, but they had already replaced the back tiles with much simpler and cheaper thermal blankets, so i'm not sure if switching them out for metallic tiles would be any cheaper or better.

I think Shuttle was simply a shitty design that was trapped by too many opposing design considerations and had nowhere to go to improve, at least not incrementally. Shuttle couldn't switch to liquid boosters no matter how much better the performance would get simply because muh national security missile contractors, it couldn't switch main engine fuel types because it needed the Isp to make up for the lousy boosters, it couldn't use cheaper TPS because it was too dense on reentry and had too heat-sensitive an internal structure yet also couldn't use ablatives, it couldn't be reconfigured to be more like Buran/Energia because the whole point of Shuttle was to try to be as reusable as possible and the engines were very expensive, and so on.

>>10846403
SpaceX runs by the whims of one madlad, the Shuttle had to contend with dozens of senators, congressmen, air force fucks and competing factions within NASA, as well having design and construction scattered all over the lower 50.

People consider SpaceX to be the work of organisational genius, but it only appears so because it is not crippled with boomer infighting. More aerospace dictatorships please.

>>10846450
Dragon is actually designed with interplanetary reentry in mind (actually reentry from a Lunar free return but that's only a few hundred m/s shy of interplanetary anyway). The reasoning was that it would give the team experience trying to design for interplanetary atmospheric entry speeds, and as an additional benefit their capsule would be overbuilt for entry from LEO, giving it lots of margin and additional safety/reliability.

>>10846456
Is it as dystopian as they say or is it just a beehive all the time? Or is it some other third thing
>>10846455
It's true that if you're relying on an active TPS and it shits out on you mid-entry, you're fucked. However, as time goes on and we really start getting out into the solar system, our two options are going to be either extremely capable propulsion systems in excess of what near future tech will allow, OR more reliance on active TPS in order to cut the delta V requirements of any transfer into a system with an atmosphere roughly in half. Doing a manned flight to Saturn using propulsion only is very marginal, even if you assume we have shit like advanced nuclear thermal engines and significantly better electric propulsion than we have nowadays. However, a mission to the Saturnine system becomes well inside the scope of modern chemical propulsion if you assume you're gonna use aerobraking at Titan or Saturn itself to slow down into the system. For a one-off or once-a-decade style mission, a big ablative heat shield may suffice, but for more regular transport to-and-from Saturn, active TPS is the best option, being lighter and fully reusable.

>>10846472
SpaceX isn't the work of an organizational genius, it's really just the work of a functioning organization, with clear goals and a clear understanding of what needs to be done to be successful.

>>10846494
yeah it just looks like genius because none of the old aerospace companies have any of their shit together, and haven't since the 70s

>>10846504
yeah. Closest any other organizations came were the contractors working for NASA during Apollo, and the Russian space program during the very early space race, when they developed the R7 and subsequent Vostok rockets (they went from captured German v2 rockets to a five main engine, four boosters around one core stage design, that with minor modifications is still used to this day and probably still has a while to go yet. Soyuz rockets probably won't die until several years after Starship has completely nukes the current market).

>Starliner will most likely fly with crew before crew dragon

IT'S NOT FAIR THEY DONT DESERVE IT WITH HOW THEY FUCKED UP SLS AAAAAAAAA

>>10846544
I still think Boioioing is gonna fuck something up, SpaceX already fixed the problem with their hypergolics pressurization system (burst disks instead of check valves or whatever). Really they're just waiting for a new capsule to be ready to do the in-flight abort, then they should be g2g

Boing still has to do another abort test, right? What could possibly go wrong?

>>10846563
ULA sniper

OK, shower thought here.
Hopper is really cool and shit, but how are they gonna test the Starship prototypes.
Those are supposed to be suborbital vehicles, so they can just go around Erf and land back where they launched, can they?
I mean, if they could into orbit, there wouldn't be a need for Super Heavy.
Are they gonna land on droneships like F9?

>>10846569
>it hurt itself in its confusion

>>10846544
Well, SpaceX only has themselves to blame for this one.

>>10846563
>Boeing blocks SpaceX from using Dragon 2 through NASA, Boeing felt that SpaceX has violated Boeing patents for liquid propellant escape systems

>>10846575
"Nobody knew NTO could do that to titanium" isn't quite blame-able.

>>10846572
Possibly droneships, although they may not want to risk losing a prototype right away.
I think it's more likely that they'll use the delta V capability of the vehicles (probably somewhere around 9 km/s fully fueled) to boost into the upper atmosphere at high speed, then flip, brake, and come back to land at the same pad they launched from. They won't go as high or as fast as they otherwise would, but they'd be able to effectively work their way up to quite fast velocities in order to test different things, until the Booster is ready and they can just straight up go to orbit. The Booster prototype won't take very long, it's effectively gonna be a taller hopper with more engines, and it won't take much performance from the Booster to allow a Starship prototype to get itself into orbit. Once in that testing program the booster will always be landing back at the same pad it launched from (probably a simple raised concrete platform for the legs with a flame trench under the engine cluster) and the Starship will always be going orbital and therefore will be able to come back to the launch site.

>>10846575
for what? testing their vehicles in extreme situations to get new results that can be used to improve the design.
Also a reminder that this kind of situation is unprecedented until now because in the past there never were situations where tests were done on crafts that went to space because they never were retrieved after for reusability.

>>10846579
Scott Manley did a video about this, and it's literally what happened to some lost spacecraft.
>>10846582
What I was thinking too, but doing a backflip won't ever get you anywhere near Mars re-entry speed.

>>10846575
>>10846579 is right, nobody knew you could set titanium on fire with NTO and they didn't expect to be able to do so. The conditions of the system prior to the failure led to higher pressures and faster fluid velocities than had ever been tested for. To add to this, it's not like titanium valves and such aren't used on spacecraft to handle NTO all the time, in fact titanium components have been used in NTO systems for decades.

So what is the date for Starliner to launch anyhow? All I can find is stuff from 4 months ago saying "August". Well here we are at the end of July. I tried to find an exact date, and couldn't.

>>10846589
Yeah, and it was the likely culprit for the loss of a spacecraft.

>>10846587
>doing a backflip won't ever get you anywhere near Mars re-entry speed
You're right, but they don't need to get close to Mars entry conditions at that point, they need to figure out how the vehicle is gonna control at hypersonic velocities and how the TPS holds up to real world conditions, preferably BEFORE they send a prototype to orbit.

Once they have both a proto-Starship they're confident can survive reentry and a proto-Booster that can lob it high and fast enough to let it achieve Earth orbit, then they can start slamming it into the atmosphere harder and harder to test how Mars entry is gonna go.

>>10846595
And we still didn't know NTO could do that to titanium until Dragon blew up on the pad. Just because it happened before doesn't matter if we didn't know that's what happened.

>>10846595
Sure, but until now nobody knew, or really had any idea. A titanium fire leading to the destruction of a pressurized fluid system can look a lot like a faulty pressure vessel rupturing, as demonstrated by the fact that that's exactly what it looked like when Dragon 2 went kaboom. Now we know that several satellites that failed mysteriously in the past that were attributed to being victims of faulty pressure vessels may in fact have been killed by titanium-NTO fires instead.

>>10846596
Yeah, the whole brick fall control mechanism is what needs to go right first.
People think of F9 and think it will be fine, but that's a totally new approach to EDL.

>>10846599
>>10846602
Fair, I guess. SpaceX just went with what old-space was doing.
But for a company that prouds itself for testing everything, that doesn't bode well for the Mars plan.

>>10846592
I don't even know at this point, the ULA website itself is still claiming that '[Starliner's] first orbital flight is slated for March 2019', and it definitely didn't launch as of yet. Suffice it to say that Starliner won't be launching astronauts in August, like it also says on ULA's website that clearly hasn't been updated since early to mid 2018.

And to think I was mad that red dragon was cancelled...
When it would have just blown up a few kilometers above the surface.
Now this still looks bad, but they dodged a PR bullet.

>>10846610
Why not?

>>10846605
Correct.
The Booster is in effect the same thing as a Falcon 9, but bigger and with more engines; it controls the same, though it has much better/more fine control due to having a lower stage TWR with more engines shut down. Starship is in a completely different ballpark, effectively a long blunt-body entry vehicle, since it doesn't even angle itself to provide significant lift under most entry profiles. The lateral flap-steering is also totally new.
I'm confident that SpaceX is going to figure out controlling Starship in the air. I'm also confident that it's going to take at least several incrementally faster and higher flights before they gain confidence, and they're probably going to abort the aerodynamically controlled portion of a test flight more than once (by lighting a few engines and using gimbal control to reorient it ass-first while slowing down, then falling and relighting the engines again for landing).
Unlike with the Falcon 9 booster recovery program, each test flight of the Starship prototypes is not going to pay for itself and the hardware used. They certainly aren't going to be throwing these things away frivolously, while 8 months is an impressively short time to go from nothing to a functioning vehicle that's still 8 months of wasted time and effort if the thing crashes on its first test.

>>10846610
Don't worry. Starship doesn't use any hypergolics and won't include a super-high-pressure helium system either. The whole titanium-NTO fire issue is only really possible in scenarios where the helium system pressurizes suddenly and slams a slug of NTO into the titanium at speeds literally faster than a rifle bullet.

>>10846456
>Funny enough about two or so months ago I got to tour SpaceX HQ (My nephew works there) and oh boy, it was a helluva experience.

Do tell.

>>10846624
I'll spare you the wall of text of things that need to work right for a Mars mission to work. And how most of them can't be really tested until the mission really happens.
Now if even things that can be tested are blowing up your vehicle, then you might as well play russian roulette every evening.

>>10846610
>SpaceX tests something
>Something goes wrong and it disassembles itself into a million peices
>Somehow this is a bad thing
Problems happen during testing, that's why tests are done. The F-1 project went through dozens of engines before a design was made that didn't blow itself up in seconds. The final result was one of the best rocket engines in the world (at least at the time), and a legend in spaceflight. Problems in testing does not reflect how the final project will be.

>>10846610
You shouldn't have to test that accepted principles of physics are wrong. Usually errors are in operation, manufacturing, or design, but this time it was a very rare case of humanity's knowledge of science being wrong.
And fortunately it happened on the ground with nobody around, not when a capsule had to escape from a fuck-up during launch. Just imagine a rocket going boom on the pad, followed immediately by the crew capsule going boom.

>>10846634
I'm sorry but no.
Grid fins are totally different.

>>10846429
>striking the the atmosphere at 16 km/s

so all the people on board will leave humanity behind

>>10846621
Who's to say Red Dragon would suffer the same issue? Here on Earth they tested Dragon 2's abort system multiple times, they even performed multiple hover tests. I'm pretty sure the failure recently was a freak accident that only had a small chance of happening, which actually makes it a gigantic sigh of relief that it did actually happen and they fixed the problem before a Dragon 2 carrying astronauts detonated on top of a Falcon 9 on the pad.

>>10846642
OK, that's one way to look at it.
But this shit went to space.
Imagine they launch it with crew afterward.
Need to abort.
???

>>10846641
fuck off with the FUD please

>>10846650
But it wouldn't have had crew in it until at least that particular test happened.

>>10846654
You understand thi test happened because it was the first one, right?

>>10846645
I mean the method of recovery. Descend ass-first, use aerodynamic fins to steer on descent, light engine when close to the ground, gimbal with engine to steer towards landing zone, manipulate throttle to achieve zero velocity at zero altitude, cut thrust, safe vehicle. The finer details (like how much TWR to deal with, how many fins and where they are, how many burns on descent (F9 uses two, SH will probably only need 1), etc) are different of course.

Anyways, all I'm saying is, I'd be willing to pay to not go on the first Starship, if I was obliged to.

>>10846659
But that's not what SS is doing.
It's going belly first.

>https://spacenews.com/launch-industry-divided-on-proposed-regulatory-reforms/

What? You want innovation in space? FUCK YOU. You can't have any. The regulation. Boeing/ULA/Lockheed are pushing this regulation hard on new innovation in space launch industry. Blue Origin/SpaceX are fighting against it.

Oldspace corruption strikes again.

>>10846656
>>10846650
The abort engines wouldn't be used if they had to use that capsule to leave the ISS. The only situation in which the Superdracos fire is if the capsule is aborting off of the launch stack.

SpaceX has already implemented a solution onto all future and existing capsules, which is the addition of bust-disc valves to the pressurant and hypergolic systems. The failure occurred (simply put) because NTO leaked backwards into the helium lines before the helium system pressurized. The addition of the burst-disc means that leaking NTO backwards is now impossible. We will never see this failure mode on Dragon 2 again.

>>10846669
I know, and it's a good thing it happened.
But it should have happened before.

>>10846663
I know. Read my comment chain, dude. I'm talking about the BOOSTER being effectively the same as the Falcon 9 booster, in terms of recovery profile, and thus easy to develop due to the familiarity SpaceX has with the technology.

STARSHIP on the other hand will require a much more extensive development program to work out how the thing actually flies and controls IRL. That's what we were discussing earlier; the fact that Starship can power itself up to suborbital hops to test flight dynamics, but it needs the Booster to go orbital and be able to test entry under Mars-analog conditions, and that luckily developing the booster or at least a prototype capable of being reused won't be very hard.

>>10846671
see >>10846648
We're probably very lucky to have seen this failure mode now, at the beginning of the program, instead of 15 flights into the program.

>>10846136
NASA to partner with SpaceX if they deliver on getting starship to the moon within 2 years
>> DeWit, who's in charge of helping the agency make the most cost-effective decisions, said he thought that the odds of SpaceX pulling off a private lunar landing with Starship before NASA can return there "are slim," but he did not rule out the possibility of a NASA-SpaceX partnership on a moon mission. In fact, he underscored the possibility.
>>"More power to him. I hope he does it," DeWit said of Musk. "If he can do it, we'll partner with them, and we'll get there faster."

>>10846666
>The Coalition, best known for its advocacy of NASA’s human spaceflight programs, includes as members launch companies Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance, as well as ULA’s parent companies, Boeing and Lockheed Martin

> The Commercial Spaceflight Federation, on the other hand, includes as members Blue Origin and SpaceX, as well as Relativity, Rocket Lab, Vector and Virgin Orbit and a number of spaceports seeking commercial launch business. Those companies have, in many cases, called for major changes to the NPRM and how it is being developed.

Basically oldspace vs newspace. Lets see how much influence oldspace still has in the government.

>>10846685
>nasa to spacex: land on the moon then we'll talk
vs
>nasa to SLS: here's 60 billion dollars for uhh nothing

>>10846678
Yeah, sorry, diagonal reading failing me, I guess.
The thing is, given how they seem to develop things, 'on the fly', we're never gonna see a real starship until super-heavy kicks in.

>>10846683
How many of these gismos do you thing could happen on a Mars mission without creaw safety being compromised?

>>10846666
satanic quads confirm, this legislation must die

>>10846671
Okay, so then how would SpaceX figure out this problem? Maybe a way SpaceX could figure out such problems and iron them out is to do test runs both under controlled conditions and full run mock missions...

...oh wait that's exactly what they did. Testing exists for a reason.

>>10846693
They just went with what other did, and landed in the freak spot where it blows up.
Except nobody ever did it with crew, so testing was limited.

>>10846688
>>nasa to SLS: here's 60 billion dollars for uhh nothing
More like

>Here's billions of dollars for being late, but pinky swear that you'll be ready next time, okay? No, we won't punish you for being tardy, ever, but please don't be.

Anyways, we can focus on how unlucky spaceX was with its capsule blowing up, but that's not really my point.
My point is, a Mission to Mars on their watch is doomed to fail.
Name a 2 year period where SpaceX didn't have an issue, to begin with.

>>10846703
Fail or not, I'll happily watch anyone try and get there, be it a company or a space agency. I don't know why anyone would want anyone to fail at this, makes no sense to root AGAINST success.
Hell, let the Indians and Chinese try even, more the merrier.

>>10846688
>nasa to spacex: get to the moon and back and in return we will bloat your organisation with boomers, career military retard "analysts" and political appointments who will cripple you completely and you might get a few hundred million bucks for the privilege

and

>nasa to old mates in lockmart, boeing: here are your tax dollars, keep us a seat at the table when our old boys retire, would ya?

If you crushed SLS down to an infinitely small size, it would become a black hole, but wouldn't get any better or worse at being a bottomless moneypit

>>10846715
I don't want it to fail.
But I'm all about doing at least one automated mission first.
Doesn't look like what spaceX's going for.

>>10846717
>nasa to spacex: get to the moon and back and in return we will bloat your organisation with boomers, career military retard "analysts" and political appointments who will cripple you completely and you might get a few hundred million bucks for the privilege
Huh?

>>10846703
spacex is not a traditional company, its a growing company coming up with new innovation after another where the rest of the industry is stagnant and maybe 1 new innovation ever 30 years or so.

>>10846701
>>10846717

All of this could change if starlink pans out.
They could tell the US goverment and all its coruption to fuck off.

>>10846733
Must be why they keep crashing boosters.
Most telling one was when grid fins failed.
They literally never failed before.

>>10846490
No it was actually not that bad. The employees are generally pretty young and all of them were enthusiastic. I mean my nephew said the hours were pretty bad (he also has a new wife and a baby on the way so it's pretty hard) but he told me that even with his family, he doesn't feel as alive when he's watching a launch.

>>10846639

Oh boy where to begin. I saw B1019 sitting out in the courtyard looking like a majestic creature. Inside the facility there was the COTS Demo 2 Dragon hanging like a chandelier.

The best part was seeing all of the falcon 9 cores in the hangar like it was some sort of spacedock. Back when my father worked on the shuttle he told me how beautiful the shuttle looked inside of her processing facility and I grew up with stories of Endeavor and Discovery.

I couldn't really believe the fact that the cores in the hangar had flown to space (And I think at least one had gone twice already).

Of course the embryonic falcon 9's were pretty cool too. My nephew talked about how nearly everything about the Falcon family was done to lower cost. He told me the commonality between the engines, and ESPECIALLY the same tooling for stage one and two lowered the cost a lot.

Lastly I asked about Starship development. He told me there's already "A lot we're doing", but he couldn't tell me. He did, however, say that the company is pretty confident of a 2020 to 2021 debut of the stack, and a landing in the mid 2020s.

Great experience Touring SpaceX. I'm willing to answer questions about it.

>>10846742
They failed on CRS-5.

>>10846368
I presume the thrust of Starship alone isn't enough to lift Shuttle to orbit, even if you chopped those hydrogen engines off?

>2027
>Elon Musk on twitter
SS failed to land because lack of hidrolic pressure in control actuators. Regards to families, but we'll do a quick fix on that.
>>10846750
Fuck you, that was supposed to be fixed and it still failed.

>>10846756
>2027
>NASA to congress: SLS is almost ready to launch human missions to moon, just give us another 20 years and 50 trillion dollars

>>10846756
t. ULA shill

>>10846756
>SS failed to land because lack of hidrolic pressure in control actuators. Regards to families, but we'll do a quick fix on that.
I mean, that's pretty much how airline companies react if one of their planes fail. Shit happens.

>>10846767
What could this be?
Did you get amnesia?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyaIKYspAdU

>>10846769
Except shit's gonna happen right away.
We're not ready.

Why are you guys like this to one another?

>>10846690
Probably a lot fewer than in the NASA baseline mission architecture, which has a metric fuck-ton of different specialized vehicles working in tandem and has very little to zero tolerance for failure.

>>10846770
>cherry picking this hard
Falcon 9 literally has a 97% of success rate

>>10846775
You're not ready. Everyone else is.

>>10846686
>people who are currently getting shit done
vs
>people who are used to things never getting done and getting paid anyway who are suddenly having their breadbasket stolen

>>10846783
It's all in the details.
When they started landing their stuff, success was zero.
>>10846784
Be my guest and buy a ticket to Mars on the first flight.
I know I won't.

>>10846790
I will. I'd literally die for just ten seconds in space. I'm currently saving money for a Blue origin hop. Gonna have enough by 2022 so I'm excited.

>>10846703
Finding, diagnosing, and fixing design problems while developing a new vehicle or technology is not a bad thing. It's the opposite of what went down during the Shittle program, for one thing

>>10846428
Honestly, I don't even care if it impacts payload mass after all. Looking at them building this rocket like a fucking water tower, out in the air with regular joe schmo welders - seeing it set on fire with zero issues, it just really fucking shows me that steel is worth doing just for that, no matter if they lose a few tons of payload.
This rocket needs to go to mars, stay there for a year or something and get all the way back taking off in some random piece of alien desert.

>>10846790
It won't be first flight but 30th or 50th flight when humans land on Mars. You think SpaceX will sleep for 2 years after the initial launch to mars without any changes?

>>10846792
>>10846793
So why do they insist on sending people on the first flight there?
Just fucking test it before, as you always do.???
I heard that's what they're doing with Dragon 2.
People are gonna die for nothing.

>>10846723
What do you mean? Starship is going to do dozens of unmanned launches around Earth before it ever launches humans, and it will do dozens of manned flights before it even sends any people to the Moon (yes I'm saying that before Dear Moon even happens they will have launched humans into space on Starship multiple times, because rapid reusability). They'll have probably even landed Starship on the Moon many times before they ever attempt a manned Mars mission, and before the manned mission they plan on sending multiple unmanned Starships to Mars anyway. Starship will be a very well tested, tried and true vehicle before it sends anyone anywhere.

>>10846801
nobody's gonna die

>>10846798
That's not how transfer windows work.

>>10846721
Doesn't need to be infinitely small, just Schwarzchild radius

>>10846742
>Must be why they keep crashing boosters.
Who, SpaceX or everyone else? Because everyone else has a much worse track record when it comes to crashing boosters.

>>10846802
Which will prove nothing of it's capability to
-fly to Mars
-land on it
-be refueled (!Warning, critical point here!)
-Ignite engines 18 month later
And fucking dive into Earth's atmosphere.

We need a demo automated mission before risking any lives.

>>10846746
>when I have sex with my wife I DON'T FEEL ANYTHING
>when I'm holding my newborn child I DON'T FEEEL ANYTHING
>when I'm watching a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch . . . I feel

>>10846803
Yeah, right.
Even fucking Musk told otherwise.

>>10846754
Thrust is irrelevant for the most part, the issue is delta V. Ultra-low-thrust ion propelled space probes can have huge delta V budgets. Most chemical rocket stages don't have more than 8 km/s in the budget, but for an SSTO you really need more like 10 km/s of delta V to combat gravity losses, drag, and overall ascent profile inefficiencies. Starship itself with zero payload has a delta V somewhere around 9 km/s, but with 100 tons of payload that drops to just 6.9 km/s. The Shuttle Cube weighs ~130 tons, so Starship probably doesn't have more than 6 km/s budget at that point. Therefore it can get into orbit if launched atop the Booster, but not on its own, not even close. In fact Starship can only very marginally get into orbit as an SSTO, and only if it reserves nothing in terms of landing propellant, making it effectively useless as an SSTO.

Oh, and the whole 'engines are heavy' thing is pretty much a meme, the engines on Shuttle only made up ~10.6% of the mass of the orbiter.

>>10846803
>Elon Musk said that no one will die
>get on board a Starship to Mars
>Neuralink implants required
>bit of a pain to get but okay
>exicted af on way to Mars
>Starship accidentally aerobrakes on Mars too steeply
>totallynotgood.jpeg
>crash on the red surface
>body dies but mind gets uploaded to the Deep Space Network
>bummer, sucks not to have a body
>Elon offers me a job
>with no purpose left in life, accept his offer
>wake up all shiny and chrome
>mind is now integrated to a Starship's computer system
>have dank adventures transporting mankind across the Solar system
>worth it

>>10846790
You'll never go to space at all, ever, regardless of whether or not you want to, poorfag.

>>10846805
He means that while the first unmanned Starships are on their way to Mars, they're going to be launching and upgrading their Starship fleet back on Earth for the entire two years until the next launch window. For a vehicle that can launch as often as Starship, even if the first unmanned ones left for Mars before Starship ever launched a human, they could have racked up hundreds of thousands of hours of on-orbit-life-support time for crewed missions in the interim between launch windows.

>>10846827
Neither will you, no matter how wealthy.
SpaceX is a scam.
They're building the rocket to go to Mars, but they aren't building the infrastructure needed.
And nobody is.

>>10846801
They aren't doing that. They already plan on sending unmanned Starship first. See >>10846835 and stop spreading FUD. They will have launched humans into Earth orbit on Starship dozens of times before the first unmanned Starships head to Mars, and hundreds of manned flights before they send the first manned Starship interplanetary.

>>10846841
Yeah, unmanned SS to Mars next year, alright. Or did we slip to 2026 already?

>>10846840
>SpaceX is a scam
No.

>>10846812
>fly to Mars
Fly it to the Moon and rack up those in-space hours to get real world experience. Send up a Starship with life support running and a dummy 'crew' that consumes those life support resources and let it sit in the Van Allen belts for a year to simulate being cooked in interplanetary space for a decade.
>land on it
Perform entries into Earth's atmosphere at altitudes and speeds relevant tot hose experienced entering from interplanetary space at Mars. Do this a dozen times to gather data. Do a dry run with several unmanned Starships a launch window or two before you want to send people.
>be refueled
They will be doing this on Earth all the time, or do you mean producing fuel? The Sabatier process is very well understood and very simple/safe, the biggest problems will be supplying the power necessary and gathering the water necessary. If they can land near a glacier or on top of permafrost that solves issue #2.
>Ignite engines 18 months later
They can test this by landing a Starship in the desert on Earth, waiting 18 months with it out in the elements, and then launching it. Earth's highly variable, humid, more chaotic environment will be far more punishing than anything on Mars. For added realism put the Starship in Antarctica, for the temperature.
>And fucking dive into Earth's atmosphere
They will have done this hundreds or even thousands of times, they will have massive experience with Starship atmospheric entry.

>We need a demo automated mission before risking any lives
That is quite literally their plan, already. Who are you arguing against?

>>10846840
>They're building the rocket to go to Mars, but they aren't building the infrastructure needed
??? What more infrastructure do you need to get to Mars than the Mars vehicle?

>>10846846
>I'm wrong, so I'm going to bring up schedule slips as if that's relevant
bruh

>>10846746
>pretty confident of a 2020 to 2021 debut of the stack
Booster + starship? Or just Starship.

>>10846849
Ok, I'll rephrase.
SpaceX has no Mars plan beyond making a rocket that can go there with some payload.
They don't have a payload.

>>10846857
I'm starting to think that this guy is from r/enoughmuskspam, or something like that, fishing for "lol look at these musk fanboys being okay with Elon murdering people."posts.

>>10846864
>the stack
That's Starship and the booster. You can't stack a single stage.

>>10846777
war is hell

>>10846871
>You can't stack a single stage.
I mean, one can stack copies of the same stage on top of each other. I worked on a rocket that looked into doing something like that. The idea was that it would speed up development time and reduce costs overall. Turns out that the performance loss compared to using specialized stages was too great. Neat idea though.

>>10846866
>they don't have a payload
The payload will be the hardware required to set up a power plant and fuel production plant necessary to refuel multiple Starships per Earth-Mars sinode.
SpaceX is operating their Mars plans on the premise of 'if we built it, they will come', that is to say, once two-way Earth-Mars transport is established, and it's at a significantly low price point, people who want to spend money to do things on Mars will do so. SpaceX is trying to blow the door to Mars wide open so that entities can afford to build on and develop Mars without having the resources of a large country to throw around.
They're kind of doing the same thing with the Moon at the same time, building Starship so that it can perform Moon missions as well as Mars missions, and just throwing the fact that they'll be able to put >100 tons of payload onto the Moon's surface for <$60 million out there for countries and the population at large to look at. How many small countries with little recognition currently would pay $200 million to build themselves a substantial Moon base, even if they didn't even have a space program of their own? How many large countries are going to get locked into a perpetual dick-waving contest about who has the bigger or more advanced Moon colony?

Once Moon colonies are a thing and (hopefully) are viewed as status symbols, then the market for Mars colonization becomes apparent. When all anyone has to do is sign a modestly sized cheque and they can have themselves a shiny new Mars facility built with their name carved into it, and there's already a convention of that being the case for Moon bases, then you can bet there will be plenty of activity on Mars' surface.

>>10846777
Some anons are dreamers, some anons are memers, and some anons are paid by ULA to be here.

>>10846730
nasa's support for spacex will be conditional on them installing sinecured assholes, when spacex start to humiliate them in achievements

>>10846764
this is sad and funny because it is so believable. when will nasa cease to be a meme organisation?

>>10846889
ULA will probably have better chances at spreading FUD on reddit or YouTube rather than on a Vietnamese tapdancing forum.

>>10846894
>when spacex start to humiliate them in achievements
I mean, they'd better get on that, because we're only like two years off from SpaceX usurping every NASA achievement ever other than the unmanned probes.

>>10846900
probably, but do the boomers at ULA know that?

>>10846902
right, so expect every conceivable legislative and lobbyist-planted challenge from boomerspace to swing into action imminently.

Would World War 3 help or hurt space prospects?

>>10846401
there's multiple competing heat shield techs, and they all look like they might be needed for different reentry regimes

>>10846905
Boomers dont even know who Forchan is.

>>10846909
Hurt. The societies capable of producing spacecraft probably would not survive, or at the very least, would not retain its pre-war capabilities after the dust settled.

if all of starships Mars downmass is dedicated to fuel, will it have enough deltaV to escape Mars and inject LEO without any ISRU methalox?

>>10846494
this was all that american tech needed to get anywhere. the space programme has somehow managed to be the biggest argument both for and against government involvement.

>>10846909
It depends on how far along we are.

WW3 right now? Expect most space development to stall out, except for missile tech, especially hypersonic jet engine tech. There simply won't be any interest in colonizing or even exploring space if everyone's focusing on not being taken over/killed.

WW3 in a few decades, when we've hopefully established at least a few decent scientific outposts on the Moon? Expect mostly evacuations back to Earth, as supply shipments are necessarily cut off by instabilities due to war, but potentially a few people staying behind to act as skeleton crews. Same goes for manned space stations.

WW3 in a century, when we've hopefully got at least some industry going on on the Moon and Mars? I'd still say Earth probably gets cut off from space for the most part, however in this case the people on the Moon and Mars do their best to bootstrap their own situation using the technology and industry they have to produce and stockpile resources, develop more products, and in general try to grow their industries enough that they can fully self sustain or at least last for a long time until they can eventually develop the tech they need to extract the remaining resources they require.

Basically it depends on how close to being resource-independent these space colonies are. Anything existing in orbit will have to choose to either go back to Earth or go to the surfaces of the Moon or Mars, because in space they're effectively trapped if they don't have access to resupply. For groups marooned on planets, their smartest course of action would probably be to try to take advantage of their shitty situation by getting fully onto their own feet and to stop relying on outside shipments altogether.

>>10846821
Thanks for actually going through that. It was just a dumb thought that occurred to me with Shuttle shown in front of Starship like it was attached and ready to launch.

>>10846917
no

>>10846666
>>10846686
This, old space still seems to have a grip over politicians, but let's see how much of it. I wonder if new space will try to use a jobs argument to try to win Congress over

Say a company is looking to hire people for their Mars construction crews. What kind of construction experience should you get if you want to help build a Mars colony?

>>10846967
I would focus more on mining than construction skills.

>>10846736
This, the only thing i'm scared of is that Starlink doesn't pay off, i really hope the demand for it to be profitable is there

>>10846967
>construction experience
welding
>>10846971
smart

>>10846582
just copying the F9 booster trajectory, up and out with a boostback, will tell you quite a lot about your control at supersonic speeds
maybe they can optimize that sort of trajectory to be faster? less loft?

>>10846971
To expand a bit more. The easiest way for a standard individual to get into space in the future will probably be to have mining skills and experience. Corporations will want to exploit the vast untapped wealth Mars and other celestial object can offer.

It is also an easy profession to get into for people living in places like the USA since most miners are approaching retirement age now so their should be a decent demand in employment along with the future desires of outer space mining along with providing an decent wage while waiting.

>>10846998
Possibly. Serious reentry studies for Starship will have to wait for the Booster prototype to be ready. It simply needs the extra performance.

>>10846645
Booster will probably use grid-fins too

>>10846723
lol, what makes you think they're going to try to shove humans on board anything so soon?
it's too much risk, they're going to test the shit out of Starship with unmanned missions first before they put anybody on it
aside from Dragon 2, which of course NASA is climbing up their ass about, as is sensible with trying to fly humans on something that's only flown once before you put a man on it
>>10846917
I don't remember the number of starships full of fuel it would take to bring a Starship back but it's not a huge number but not a small number
>>10847021
Agreed, unless you're willing to land in the water
does it have the performance to reach Africa? any islands in the Atlantic?

>>10846548
Pretty sure they said SpaceX was actually mostly bogged down by paperwork at this point when they had the press conference about the malfunction.

>>10846859
A billion dollar leaning launch tower.

>>10846912
Forchang is just russian hackers mate.

>>10846932
WW3 in a century would probably see earth get kesselered.

>>10846666
>The proposed rule, he said, would add regulatory burdens and costs to companies, and doesn’t meet the goal of replacing specific, prescriptive requirements for license applicants with performance-based alternatives. The proposed regulations, he said, are “anti-competitive” since they favor existing operators over new entrants, and makes changes to other regulations that aren’t needed.

Leave it to the FAA to leave their job to Boeing.

>>10846972
There is demand

FUCK COMCAST

>>10846648
They said there was some human error involved in getting the hypergolic into the pressure line, didn't they?
Obviously, that was a really random thing then.

>>10846859
A huge skyscraper full of people carrying papers from one room to the other.
It'll make it so the rocket can't explode.

>>10847251
But what about the workers in the South? They need jobs too. And don't forget about the Senate too? They need to be able to afford a third home and 8 cars. Do you seriously want their kids to be made fun of in school because their parents could ONLY afford 2 mildly big homes and MERELY 5 luxury cars?

>>10847153
Seconded. Waiting for a better ISP.

>>10847001
Not sure if I can into mining but I already have a construction job (hence my question). Of course building stuff on Mars will be completely different than on Earth...

>>10847260
I would 100% support launching the entire senate into space

>>10847269
Third. Although, it's not because my ISP is bad, but because the infrastructure here is so old that it would require digging up miles upon miles of underground cable in the middle of nowhere to upgrade and apparently the company can't afford it. Just to give you an idea of how old our stuff is, we don't even have internet cable, older phone cables are being reused for internet.

>>10847277
>I am the Senate!

>>10847277
with no survivors

>>10847251
they need to spread out their manufacturing base to as many states as possible so that the engineers can't talk to the people on the floor at all

>>10846136

>>10847297
GUYS IM NOT JOKING THERE MAY BE SOMETHING GOING ON!!! ONIELL MAY BE ON THE MOON!!!!

>>10846721
You're wrong.
At that size, black holes evaporate basically in an instant. The process of turning the mass of an unfueled SLS rocket directly and completely into energy in this way, releases about 36,500 tsar bombs of energy, which is luckily still 4-5 orders of magnitude below the dinosaur meteor.
A bunch of America would probably be gone still. However, given how this is not a completely planet killing event, rebuilding efforts could be undertaken. From that point forth, Americans would save real money that previously the SLS would have absorbed in its entirety.

>>10847332
imagine if we had spent the SLS money on infrastructure improvements

>>10847340
If it were spent on improving internet infrastructure in the US, then there might not be the need of Starlink for some. That might have thrown a wrench into SpaceXs plans.

I faintly hear the sounds of palms hitting faces from Boeing.

>>10847340
I mean you’ve just listed an even better way to get that money embezzled...I love when people in America talk about just throwing money at infrastructure without knowing how big infrastructure projects usually work in the US, California found out the hard way...

>>10847354
oh, no, I have family in the business

Dec 17, DM-2 going back to ISS.

>>10847359
oh shit, gonna get that flag
it begins

>>10847348
Considering starlink is more for rural folks, perhaps not
Laying all that fiber would probably cost more than even SLS, given the size of the US, and the fact that corruption and embezzlement in government contracts is a universal thing, not just NASA

>>10847372
Small towns/rural areas. Maybe city too with limited capacity.

>>10847375
there will be zero starlink pizza boxes in large cities until the inter-sat laser link grid backbone is up and then it'll be one or two ultra-high priority million dollar connections for high speed trading

>>10847372
Has the internet service companies tried to stop Starlink or do they think it's not a serious threat?

>>10847359
>the FUCKING RUSSIANS say it's going to be December
https://ria.ru/20190729/1556956788.html

>>10847390
it's mostly governments who are opposed to Starlink and they're mostly opposed to the inter-sat laser link backbone because they can't thought police it

>>10847396
Image how balistic China would get once Starlink is up and black market pizza boxes start showing up.

>>10847393
Those soviet spies must have really cushy desk jobs at Nasa these days. You'd think they would've gotten found out after they outsourced American space flight to Russia for a decade, but apparently not.

>>10847390
The argument i've seen the most thrown out there is that internet companies don't see it as a viable option, they think the demand isn't enough for a profitable service

>>10847390
ISPs like Comcast/Timewarner own their media/news channels. They've been attacking Elon's companies relentlessly for the last few years. So expect that to continue on until Elon sets up his own new channel and ISP(Starlink) and shits on them.

>>10846825
I read a book that had a ship mind that used to be human. I think it was one of Greg Bear's Halo books, maybe 70% sure. I don't know who else it would be.

>>10847359
Is there a source better than some random russkies? Wikipedo still has it as NET Nov 15, and Starliner Nov 30, and you know how autistic wiki people are about updating shit once they find a good source.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Dragon_Demo-2

>>10847431
>random ruskies
Ria.ru is state run international news site. Its sorta like those chinese state news Xinhua news.

Its most likely written with state support.

>>10847441
Great, but how do we know they aren't just making shit up? Where is THEIR source? How come they are the first to report this? I'd trust L2 leaks more than an un-credited story on a .ru site, """official""" or not.

>>10847448
it's probably from an internal NASA doc being shared with the "international partners" about the tentative ISS schedule, which needs to be made well in advance

>>10847419
I'd kill for a Elon-run tv channel. Pravduh

>>10847448
The December date is actually on L2 lol, it’s a ‘work-to’ date for SpaceX but due to the ISS schedule etc it likely won’t be the launch date even if DM-2 is not delayed further.

>>10847484
So do dates for Boeing's launch still remain elusive?

>>10847306
thanks for the chuckle anon

>>10847466
>We'll tune into Starship 12's Martian landing after this episode of Nekopara no Uchū.

>>10847527
>Nekopara no Uchū
BTW that's supposed to be "Nekopara in Space", but my moonspeak is pretty weak.

The last two days of July are in sight and each day a Soyuz (2.1a) will be launched:

-30th of July: A Russian military com satellite for the (Russian) VKS (Aerospace forces). Launched from Plesetsk.

-31st of July: A Progress (MS-12/73P) cargo capsule for the ISS. Launched from Baikonur.

Here is a vid of the rollout and installation of the Progress on the launchpad: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Du1mll8wZH0

>>10847455
yeah, you have an American astronaut scheduled to be aboard and no such astronaut on a baseduz launch, that's that

>>10847571
I really hate how the filter hits Soyuz
I think it might skip it if you capitalize it properly?

>>10847571
>>10847573

You should capitalize it anyway since its a name.

>>10847573
Americans: Soyuz
Russians: Coюз
Me (an intellectual): SOYuz

https://techxplore.com/news/2019-07-drones-days-photovoltaic.html

"For the past 15 years, the efficiency of converting heat into electricity with thermovoltaics has been stalled at 23 percent. But a groundbreaking physical insight has allowed researchers to raise this efficiency to 29 percent. Using a novel design, the researchers are now aiming to reach 50 percent efficiency in the near future by applying well-established scientific concepts."

Relevant for Mars colonies/spaceflight?

>>10846375
>you could launch that entire block of scrap into orbit using Starship

At the moment, you can't launch 2 ounces to t feet off the ground in "Starship."

Comparing future rockets rockets that were built and flown is not really a worthwhile exercise. Remember that the Shuttle was also hyped about how much cheaper it would be -- and then they built and flew it.

Maybe "Starship" will live up to the hype. I'll be very happy if it does. But let the chickens hatch first, then we can count them.

>>10847620
onions uz

>>10847639
wow, what a worthless comment, impressive

>>10847571
I can't wait to see Russian cosmonauts riding in a Dragon 2 to the ISS.

>>10847668
>"Blin! This is much roomier than Soyuz. Does not smell like stale vodka either. Let Cosmonaut Borris fix that."
>Pulls out bottle of ethanol stolen from propellant plant

>>10847639
it appears you could move many tons to about twenty meters with Starship right now

>>10847639
Except we have hindsight and engineering data from the Shuttle, an existing succesful reuse program instead of learning on the go, and 40 plus years of technological development. It would be a shock if "a shuttle, but for real this time" failed as a concept.

>>10847673
>rocket flies self, so is okay to drink and ride, like bus

>>10847531
Catgirls would dominate and destroy us in two generations. It's like fluffier Skynet.

>>10847682
Elon Musk @Twitter 2020
"The Russians loved the Dragon 2, SpaceX puts crew comfort and ergonomics at the forefront. However, some modifications were required."

We're going to see fuel cells as sources of power generation on Mars, right? They were used on the Shuttle and Japan is making big progress in the industry.

>>10847781
methane fuel cells aren't particularly efficient, and burning your escape fuel doesn't seem particularly wise to me, especially when you spent so much energy to make it in the first place
if you're using nuclear, it will never be used, unless you break your nuke somehow and all backups fail
if you're using solar, it will only ever be used in the darkest hours of the hugest dust storms that blanket the surface
emergencies only, pretty much
anyway, if you're burning your escape fuels it's a better idea to go with either a genset or a full-up combined cycle gas-turbine plant, depending on your emergency power requirements

>>10847809
Yeah a gas turbine or maybe a few as an emergency backup combined with solar would be my guess. While it would be nice, a nuclear plant would be much, much too heavy to ship as a backup option compared to a handful of turbines plus there is all the political and regulatory bs.

>>10847828
not nuke as backup, nuke as primary
it greatly simplifies all your power generation requirements due to being compact and steady

>>10847738
blin/blin, would bylat again

>>10847838
The weight problem for nuclear vs solar is even worse though and then you have to add fields of radiators since you don't have a convenient waste heat dump thick atmosphere like on earth nor do you have liquid oceans, lakes and aquifers for easy cooling. I agree it's a superior option to solar, it would just be much too expensive and need too much shipping and that's if you can even convince the government to let you do it since solar comes without all the bullshit political baggage.

>>10847886
it's almost like weight is much less of a limiting factor with cheap starships, which this whole conversation hinges on
the biggest obstacles to nuclear are regulatory and political

>>10847809
I was referring to hydrogen fuel cells. Does the same apply to them as methane fuel cells?

>>10847889
this, no one gives a fuck that nuclear is slightly heavier because it's not about hyper-optimizing for low mass anymore, the trade off of 100% reliable non-fluctuating power supply is more than enough to justify the added weight.

>>10847904
Yes, you have to make the hydrogen, which means that they're effectively just a battery, and normal batteries are better in that they're very simple and reliable across a wide range of temperatures and pressures, plus you don't have to worry about your hydrogen leaking away.

>>10847904
yeah, they're basically only useful as extremely high volume replacements for batteries, except hydrogen is even harder to store

>>10847727
can I become a catboi?

If NASA goes to Mars with SpaceX then they will probably bring nuclear with them. Congress won't risk losing a bunch of astronauts because they neglected to provide them with a little nuclear energy.

>>10847908
>it's not about hyper-optimizing for low mass anymore
Spaceflight can't get off that idea fast enough. I'm tired of hearing stuff like...
>This rocket can't carry the payload needed (or this rocket doesn't have enough DeltaV)
>Making it bigger would be too expensive
>But making it from this experimental material that no one else has ever used is perfectly fine

>>10847889
It's not necessarily that weight is a problem if transport is cheap, it's just that you can pack much more productive power per ship with solar than nuclear so why would you choose a less productive option? Also if something goes wrong with nuclear then you are pretty much fucked since your heavy and complex spare parts are two years away whereas if some solar panels fail it doesn't really matter and you can pack many spare inverters/transformers which are the most complicated parts without much trouble.

>>10847908
It's not slightly heavier, it's hugely heavier and power fluctuations don't matter when you have much more energy on average with solar which is being used to produce fuel which can be used as a backup.

>>10847911
what about a RTG? They generate hundreds of watts for a years

>>10847911
>>10847912
Also when you factor in inefficiencies of converting power to hydrogen back to power and into actual work, you get much better efficiency by just using your electrical generation to recharge batteries instead. It's not like any vehicles on Mars are going to be driving hundreds of km in one go, even shitty lead-acid based batteries are good enough on Earth to power 40,000 pound forklifts for 12 hours straight on a single charge.

>>10847919
Elon has been discussing nuclear power for mars, but until official tweets/announcements, its probably going no where due to legal/regulation issues.

>>10847916
Cayboys deserve more recognition.

>>10847926
>Hundreds of watts

Wow it's literally nothing, call us back when you can produce giggawatts

>>10847926
the heat generated could also be captured with a closed water circuit to warm up the colony

>nasa and esa plan mars sample returns for 2031
>https://spacenews.com/mars-sample-return-mission-plans-begin-to-take-shape/
what the fuck is the point? even conservative estimates would put spacex on mars by then.

>>10847933
>2031
Oh boy! Does that mean that a 5th launch of the SLS is guaranteed now?

>>10847932
You will have excess heat you need to dump from your colony, not the other way around.

>>10847931
you don't need gigawatts fron the start. With a few kilowatts you're ready

>>10847941
>A few kilowatts

Are you serious? That's what a fucking suburban house uses.

>>10847924
the ground equipment for transporting solar over the distances required and tracking the sun make it more competitive, but they're extremely similar already
solar is ISRU compatible easier than nuclear
nuclear greatly simplifies load-balancing requirements
both are good, just pick one and bring it
>>10847926
to generate useful power for a life support system RTG would not be sufficient

>>10847929
I mean a NASA base would get Congressional approval for a NASA base on Mars. NASA would just be flying on a SpaceX rocket to get there. They would probably end up sharing the nuclear power in exchange for free SpaceX flights to Mars or something.

>>10847933
>2031
>Thousands of people living on Mars
>ESA payload shows up
>Colonist go out and steal the rover for the lulz and mount it like a moose head in their favourite bar

>>10847946
In the event NASA partnership goes nowhere, SpaceX needs to properly support a base themselves. Since SpaceX is aggressively pushing Mars 2022ish and NASA has not said anything about Starship/Starhopper, it can be assumed that there are no plans from NASA to collaborate with SpaceX.

>>10847952
rude

>>10847952
you've got to shoot it first

>>10847958
>you've got to shoot it first
>this is the last thing the ESA rover sees

>>10847943
>>10847941
ISS generates up to 120 kilowatts

>>10847941
if you're not generating Gigawatts how are you supposed to return the starships?

>>10847945
You will be bringing heavy ground equipment regardless and tracking is unlikely to be used, all those mounts and electrical tracking shit is not worth the trade off of simply packing more solar film. You stake out two poles at each end of a row of panels and string up tensile wire between them then mount your solar film to that.

>>10847955
I agree. I'm just saiyan tho.

>>10847972
tracking reduces the amount of over-night battery storage you need

>>10847955
If Starlink works out, and given that it is already fully funded I don't see why not, then SpaceX will have a bigger budget than NASA lmao.

>>10847924
Nuclear is not massively heavier than solar per kWh.

All that mass you describe in radiators etc for nuclear goes along with the 100% up-time of the generator and at decent power production levels at that.

Meanwhile people tend to cherrypick the thin-film solar option, which seems nice except on Mars you have the option of cutting your production literally in half, minimum, by taking no tracking elements to point the panels at the Sun all day, OR bringing along tracking element hardware, in which case cut your power to weight ratio by about 2/3rds. That's before factoring the need for large battery storage banks, a larger-than-minimum panel array due to having to charge enough to supply the colony at night, while also powering the colony during the day, the effects of dust storms, the effects of surrounding topography, the effects of temperature (including panel degradation from thermal cycling) and so on. You can't use fuel production as a battery btw because fuel production doesn't happen fast enough. Also by shutting down your chemical reactor process every night you can say hello to incredibly fast thermal cycling and all the hardware failures that come with it.

Also people who try to paint nuclear as ultra heavy tend to ignore the fact that very light power-to-weight-ratio reactors can be built and in fact have been built. A molten sodium cooled reactor doesn't need an 18 inch thick forged steel pressure vessel to contain the core. By extension it's actually much safer as well, because there's no high pressure environment in the entire reactor. The single heaviest bit of any reactor, the shielding, can easily be sourced locally on Mars by, for example, making blocks by freezing water mixed with sand and stacking these blocks around the core in a wall several meters thick. You could also use straight up sand or just ice, or tanks of water, or dig a hole underground to lower the core into, whatever.

>>10847980
>I don't see why not
ULA/Lockheed/Boeing. AKA SLS.

>>10847977
It's pretty negligible anyway since only a single digit percentage of power will be used for life support.

>>10847926
Curiosity is the size of a car, is powered by batteries trickle charged by RTG, and has a top speed of a few cm per second. It runs off of as much power as two light bulbs. Not really useful if you plan on mining up water ice in any significant amount.

>>10847983
domestic research and production of molten salt thorium reactors would be a good goal for a martian economy away from the earth-sphere

>>10847986
>SLS
AMERICA'S ROCKET*

*ignoring that the Falcon 9 is American made too, but it's made efficiently and not spread across as many states as possible so it doesn't count

>>10847995
Does thorium even exist on Mars?

>>10847983
a nuclear reactor also needs transformers, tons of electrical equipment and human operators

>>10847940
With a nuclear power plant you could actually siphon off waste heat from the thermal fluid transporting heat to the radiators and use it to vaporize water ice you've mined up and placed inside vessels. The latent heat of vaporization of the water would be a very effective means of cooling the thermal fluid, plus by extension it'd be a very effective zero-extra-electricity-required option for separating your water product from your sand and rock tailings, a feature that solar based power does not offer. Once the water was all vaporized the thermal fluid valves would simply switch back over to the radiator field.

>>10848002
maybe. But one starship filled with it could last for years

>>10848008
>Starship #13 on it's way to Mars full of thorium
>The copilot constantly shifting his seating
>The pilot asks what's wrong
>"I don't know, but for some reason I feel very itchy." the copilot replies

>>10848013
no pilots on cargo starships, that was the first mistake of Shuttle, it tried to carry both cargo and crew at the same time

>>10847941
Starship requires something like 3 MW of power continuously for 1.5 years in order to produce the methane and oxygen needed to refuel the vehicle. That means you need a three-point-something MW nuclear reactor or a 15 megawatt solar field with a minimum of a 40 MWh battery storage bank to refuel a single Starship fast enough that it's ready to go when the launch window reopens. Several kilowatts won't cut it, this isn't Mars Direct (which by the way had the advantage of somehow packing away about ten tons of liquid hydrogen that it reacted with CO2 very quickly to produce most of the methane it'd need right away, because the Sabatier process is actually exothermic, and from then on only had to electrolyse the water produced in the initial reaction and slowly redo the Sabatier reaction until the tanks were filled with methane and O2).

>>10848017
>implying that thousands won't sign up for a chance to be a space trucker

>>10848023
sorry, no pilots on cargo starships

>>10848023
Pilots in sci fi is the stupidest shit, especially for a ballistic transfer.

>>10847971
Gigawatts per hour will be necessary to get dozens of Starships refilled in time for each launch window back to Earth, to begin with they'll need production rated in megawatts.

>>10848002
Yes, we have maps of it, just like we've mapped the thorium deposits on the Moon.

>>10848026
Fine, just use Neuralink to upload the minds of the truckers to the Starships' computers for cheap A.I.

It's time to start thinking of DearMoon in more complex terms than just so many tonnes of payload on a particular trajectory.

The whole point is to get a load of influential people, who are not necessarily hardcore space geeks, and show them spaceflight as it really exists. The plan is to let the entire world get some vicarious experience of spaceflight through the works of the artists who actually fly.

If the experience they have is a week spent inside a stinking rusty dented steel can, with vomit and stray urine floating around because freefall toilets are difficult, and a squeaky ventilation fan driving everybody mad, well... then that's what they're going to communicate to the world.

It's all about public communication via the passengers, and so the trip has to be a pleasant one. DearMoon is going to need more than just bare bones effort to keep the passengers alive. It has to be comfortable and preferably when seen from the inside, shouldn't look like it was welded out of scrap iron in a field.

>>10848038
the inside is going to look like the inside of Dragon 2, future minimal, but much larger
absolutely enormous

>>10848038
Fuck off FUD shill go short your TSLA elsewhere

>>10848044
He does have a point (kinda). Has SpaceX released any solid details on what the inside of Starship is going to look like? Any signs that SpaceX has worked out anything for micro-gravity interiors?

>>10848048
>worked out anything for micro-gravity interiors
did you miss the part where they launched a human-rated vehicle to the ISS

>>10848032
hmm

>>10848005
A nuclear plant needs transformers, a solar plant needs a large battery bank. The battery bank will be significantly heavier (remember, it needs to supply fuel production even at night, or at least provide the heat necessary to prevent the fuel production plant equipment from cooling down, because if you constantly thermal cycle that equipment it will rapidly break down and then you're fucked).
The fact that electrical equipment is required is totally meaningless, obviously we're going to need to send electricians to Mars, you can't get away from the need for electricity in such a scenario.
A nuclear reactor does NOT require operators. Maybe a 4 gigawatt monster that uses pressurized water needs operators, but the reactors we send to Mars will not use pressurized water, they will either use molten alkaline metals or molten salts as their core thermal fluids (both will probably use supercritical CO2 as their working thermal fluid, analogous to what we use water for in steam turbines, since the supercritical CO2 won't have the same problems with freezing in the lines that water would on Mars, plus it's easy to get). Anyway there's no reason why a non-pressurized reactor on Mars would need human operators. The biggest focus of nuclear engineering is to make it so that the design requires zero human intervention to prevent a disaster, and in fact often times nowadays reactors are designed that will not cause a melt down or disaster even if their operators do the exact wrong thing and TRY to make it blow up/melt down. A computer watching for grid load fluctuations that talks to the computer that controls the propellant plant is all they'll really need, with maybe a guy watching each process just in case. The biggest power draw is going to be the water electrolyser that feeds hydrogen to the sabatier reactor, followed up by the fractional distillation plant that separates and liquefies methane and oxygen from their respective streams to be stored.

>>10848048
It's obviously not going to be anything remotely like what he has described.

Elon has said each passenger will have a separate room on Starship

>>10848054
I guess I should've been more specific. Oops. I meant stuff like beds, toilets, living space, etc. Yes, they did make a spacecraft that (at least in it's current form) travels from Earth to LEO and back again in a trip that lasts days. However, that's different from a mission around the moon and back due to the longer duration which requires additional design considerations that necessarily don't show up in a LEO taxi ride.

>>10848069
there's a toilet on Dragon 2
the seats are also beds on Dragon 2

>>10848048
No

>>10848013
It wouldn't be the thorium, since it's an alpha emitter like uranium and pretty much completely harmless unless you eat its salts, and even then its toxicity simply from being a heavy metal will get you before the rads.

>>10848026
Manned Starships will also carry cargo, they just won't be carrying really bulky cargo like earthmovers or reactor vessels, they'll have shit like flat packed construction materials and food.

>>10848073
>there's a toilet on Dragon 2
There is? I didn't know that. I just figured that the trips were so short that it wasn't needed.

>>10848038
Isn't this plagiarized from a recent Leddit thread? Not that I'd know of course.

>>10848077
Dragon 2 is designed as a minimal moon capsule, if you stapled a service module to it you could take it around the moon easily

>>10848069
Good thing there is this manned space station in orbit that has been keeping people alive for decades to draw designs and components from then huh?

>>10848080
nah fuck that, Skylab is a much better place to draw inspiration from, it's nearly as big as Starship

>>10848078
Smells like a rebbit post for sure.

>>10848082
Sure, either way the is a wealth of knowledge and practical experience to draw from. Ultimately the majority of starship is just going to be plain cabins with beds/hammocks in, hardly a difficult proposal.

>>10848080
I guess so. I can imagine NASA opening up their modules for study by private companies. I don't know about the other agencies, Roscosmos might not allow it for their own stuff.

>>10848077
Yup, meanwhile astronauts on Orion will be shitting themselves for weeks at a time because they didn't bother to install one.

>>10848075
>implying that the truckers would know about that and wouldn't feel phantoms due to misconceptions about nuclear material

>>10848098
Lmao there is no toilet on Orion? What a fucking joke.

Chinese private launch firm iSpace has achieved orbit for the first time, placing a red model car into space

>>10848100
>meanwhile they're being assblasted by Bremsstrahlung radiation and cosmic rays

>>10847886
My imaginary bro math napkin tells me that solar would lose out to nuclear once you scale it up large enough but I'm too lazy to bother checking out so
source: me

>>10848103
what did they mean by this

>>10848101
Lockmart hired Indians to design the Orion.

>>10848103
Kek is this for real?

>>10848110
>source: deep inside my ass
I feel you, anon
I also think that nuclear doesn't make sense for small applications

>>10848112
POO

IN

SUIT

>>10848110
Solar loses to nuclear once you have the ability to both produce steel on Mars and fabricate steel into things slightly more complicated than tubes and I beams on Mars. At that point the only things you're importing from Earth for a 5 gigawatt reactor are the fuel and the electronics, plus a few smaller more complicated bits and bobs.

Mars is also gonna have the ability to make useful steel WAAAAY earlier than they'll be able to produce advanced photovoltaics.

>>10848103
ChinkeX

>>10848103
Cute.

>>10848078
>>10848084
n-no anon, w-why would you think that

>>10848115
Nuclear makes sense for anything in any place where the sun shines >95% of the time or less. If you're in orbit solar makes the most sense even at Jupiter nowadays, but if you're landing on anything anywhere and planning to stay for a while nuclear is the correct option.

>>10847413
>they think the demand isn't enough for a profitable service
Half the US is stuck with ~3mbps download with no signs of upgrades. The only thing that would keep me from switching is how well they handle clouds and security

>>10848038
Just think beehive. Along the outer walls a layer of 'cells', each one roughly the size of a smallish closet, serve as personal living space and sleeping areas for passengers. The doors of the cells also make up the inner 'walls' of the main cohabitation space, which for the most part is open, with handholds on every surface (think Skylab interior). Towards the nose there are some partitions/bulkhead walls separating the main cabin room from the amphitheater room with the big window. In the other direction towards the engines there's another bulkhead wall that forms the ceiling of a utilities area, including showers, toilets, etc. Beyond this area there's a sort of mess hall, where supplies brought from the pressurized cargo section are pulled forward and made accessible. Finally there's the pressurized cargo area, packed mostly with dehydrated foodstuff. Within the pressurized cargo area there's an access door to an airlock that leads out to the un-pressurized cargo deck, where the cargo useful on Mars but not in space is stored, along with some large containers of extra food as a backup. Beyond the un-pressurized cargo section is of course the propellant tanks and finally the engine cluster.

>>10848125
you slut

>>10848122
that's true, but simple photovoltaics are really simple, and silicon is everywhere on Mars

>>10848112
On related news, OrbitBeyond has pulled out of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services because their Indian partner wanted it to be built in India instead of in USA.

>>10847552
I think the Soyuz is the best looking space craft

>>10848134
There's going to be a waitlist to get onto Starlink. When does OneWeb start service? They might be good to use for a year or two while waiting for Starlink.

>>10848142
was that really the reason? Their proposed landing timeframe was bullshit anyway. Actually, the other two are probably full of shit too.

>>10848142
>their Indian partner wanted it to be built in India instead of in USA.
Can US space/rocket companies even manufacture stuff outside of the US? It's the kind of thing that US would put a hard lockdown on it due to security reasons

>>10848142
well i hope the other two participants get the indian's money split between them

>>10848140
no you

>>10848144
I don't think there will be much if a waiting list like there is with Tesla. The only end user equipment you need a pizza box which can be mass produced very easily, it really depends on how fast they get the network up. Oneweb is scheduled for 2021 and I can starlink having basic services earlier than that but who knows.

>>10848147
Read it from here. http://nasawatch.com/archives/2019/07/what-ever-happe.html
At the very least this was inferred from the contradicting quotes.

>>10848061
https://www.teslarati.com/tesla-megapack-targets-utilities-with-massive-3mwh-plug-n-play-battery/

Maybe the Indians already had the lander built or mostly built and were just hoping to ship it to the US but found out that they couldn't do that so they said fuck it and quit.

>>10848166
pajeets are dumb but not that dumb

>>10848141
Unfortunately silicon's scarcity is not a factor in making panels, it's taking silicon-bearing minerals and producing ultrapure silicon crystals from them. This is a very complex and expensive process involving dozens of uncommon chemicals. Making photovoltaics on Mars is going to be extremely expensive for a long time, after they manage to develop the capability at all.

>>10848143
Soyuz is neat because they have that orbital habitation element/module. It's sort of like a mini version of the Apollo-LEM combined spacecraft, two little rooms joined by a docking port. If you're not gonna reuse any part of your vehicle anyway, having an expendable orbital habitat element to expand your living space without making it harder to reenter because bigger capsule makes a lot of sense.

>>10848157
Wouldn't NASA select another to do it? There are 6 other companies in CLPS that has not been awarded anything.

>>10848079
In free-fall you can go for ~5 days without pooping. One of the Apollo astronauts actually went the entire ride without pooping, and he really had to go bad by the time he was on the recovery ship. For the ride to ISS and back it's probably not as important for #2, but it should get a lot of use for #1.
>>10848082
Yeah, just think... if Skylab had engines and fuel for orbital insertion AND landing. At least it wouldn't have fallen on Australia.

>>10848176
Also you don't just snap your fingers and presto you've got a clean room. Even on Earth, with full access to construction equipment and labor and such it takes a lot of work and materials and time.
Thin stuff in rolls at least won't be too hard to roll out... once you've got people up there, but the first ships are surely going to be unmanned robotic ISRU fuel production.

If SpaceX wants to eventually reuse their Falcon 9s/other rockets, why don't they stress test one 10 times with a dummy load right now?

>>10848241
I think that's part of the reason why there are so many Starlink launches, but launching isn't free
the range fees and personnel and the second stage suck up dosh
also they probably want to pull it apart every time they go up a number

>>10848103
Cheeky, and so classically Chinese

>>10848241
>eventually reuse

Multiple F9 cores have flown three missions at this point, quite a few have done two

>>10848253
Yes, with paying customers on board. Although I won't say it was reckless at that stage because I have fate in SpaceX, the 7th or 8th reuse mission I would definitely call it reckless.

>>10848241
because you don't do shit for free if a customer will pay you for it, duh

don't worry, when the satellite launch market dries up they'll stress test them with Starlink launches. it's like a dummy load except it's a billion dollar satellite constellation.

>>10848101
they have plastic bags, like Apollo did

Isn't most of Starlink going to be launched on Starship? Only the first few launches are on Falcon 9 right?

>>10848276
Possibly, there are an enormous number of starlink satellites needed to create the constellation, it's going to take a helluva long time if they're only launched with F9's.

>>10848279
launching with starship introduces some orbital plane change issues

>>10848276
I mean that depends on when Starship is ready, really

they launch batches of 60 on Falcon right now, and need, what, a thousand or so to get full coverage for the initial subscribers? that's only 16 launches, not impossible even if Starship slips

>>10848276
The majority of the constellation by satellite number may end up getting launched on Starship, but it'll be at least a few years before that rocket flies payloads and I think Spacex wants to do something like 10-15 Starlink F9 launches a year until then.

So most of Starlink may go up on Starship, but the "first few launches" on F9 may end up being several dozen.

>>10848122
>iSpace

Question:

Would Mar's Steel be pre Trinity Test Quality?

>>10848048
they haven't said anything publicly, no

clearly this means that they haven't even thought about this problem at all, despite working on that manned Mars architecture for a decade. also, Yusaku totally dropped nine figures on that moon trip without even seeing the prototype starship cabin that definitely isn't in a back room in a warehouse in Hawthorne. you're a fucking genius; how could so many people have overlooked this?!

>>10846136

Can someone explain to me the reason SpaceX is taking so long to make another Crew Dragon?

>>10848299
they're making several; they have the in flight abort test coming up soon and demo 2 later this year, there's some minor hardware changes because of the thing, and a bunch of software work to do. this is about how long stuff takes to do

>>10848282
Falcon could put the whole constellation of 12,000 up in 200 launches, which would be a hell of a lot of launches but if Boca Chica had Falcon manufacturing and launch/landing capabilities they could streamline things dramatically. Assuming a 2% attrition rate per year that would only require quarterly fleet maintenance launches once the whole thing was up.

I really do think that with a recoverable second stage, Falcon could be a fantastic LEO workhorse, but Elon seems dead set on "Starship for everything"

>>10848290
yes

>>10848308
I think the payload to orbit would be too low with a recoverable second stage after factoring in the mass penalties of reuse. Lithium-aluminum is the wrong structural metal to use for that anyway, making the TPS way heavier than it needs to be, then you're building a steel mini-starship and at that point why not go whole hog
the 9m version is big enough to be able to absorb a lot of mass penalty from reuse and small enough to launch from existing infrastructure so while it seems ridiculous it might work if they can get this whole reentry thing sorted out.

>>10848179
adding a heavy extra airlock and failure point is a tradeoff

>>10847929
>>10847919
why the fuck would spacex want to work with nasa timelines?

>>10846368
>Buran-Energia was better
>One flight
>Unmanned because boiler plate model with no life support system
>Buran orbiter built off of publicly available shuttle orbiter blueprints
>Program cancelled

>>10847635
Ok, walk me through this are thermophotovoltaics just as universally applicable as normal photovoltaics? Is the efficiency also the amount of energy that can be extracted from the light? If so, what the fuck. I mean, I guess price per kilowatthour could still prevent it from saving the world. But as you said it might be fantastic for space craft. Unless these guys are full of shit of course...

>>10847269
>Waiting for a better ISP.
nuclear thermal doubles the isp over chemical

>>10848103
Lol wtf

>>10848863
China man... Everything is FACE there !!!!
It doesnt matter how good you are as long as you look great...

>>10848406
There are many reasons
>For the prestige of working with the agency that got people to the moon and back
>For more funding (if SpaceX can get on the good side with Congress, then it's essentially a blank check)
>To gain access to technologies necessary for Martian colonization developed by NASA which SpaceX couldn't have developed on their own
>To make NASA friendlier towards SpaceX as it becomes more of a regulatory agency

>>10847282
Yep I'm still on ADSL via copper telephone lines.

The demand for Starlink is definitely there as long as the price is affordable.

>>10848929
Where I grew up, the phone/internet lines were close enough to the ground that someone's electric fence can send it's pulses down the lines when it rains. You can hear it in the phone and I'm pretty sure it's messing with the internet too. I hope Starlink or Oneweb works so that issue can be worked around.

>>10847983
>You can't use fuel production as a battery btw because fuel production doesn't happen fast enough.

Fuel production dominates the power usage of any Mars colony. There will be plenty of fuel to run the colony for months soon after setting up the fule plant.

>>10847306
>2 Ls

>>10847526
Accurate.

>here's your bulkhead bro

>>10849300
Meanwhile in Michoud

>>10849300
>>10849314
So why doesnt SpaceX rent a circus tent ?

>>10849426
It would leave them wide open to "Elon is a clown" jokes.

>>10849426
We are not yet that far down the clown world timeline. Also SpaceX enjoys the hype open-air assembly generates.

>>10849300
there's absolutely no way they can get shit like this to mars. there's a reason decades of quality control development in spaceflight has led to the ridiculous clean room assemblies you see everywhere else.

>>10848299
Everything takes a long time to build. Building a Falcon 9 takes over a year, but they build many at once assembly-line style so that they can keep up with launch demand (even now with stage reuse becoming the norm that's still the case).

>>10849426
Both Cocoa and Boca Chica have large enclosures about to be covered with panels or something. They'll be for welding, polishing... But lowering parts in will likely still happen outdoors.

new thread pls

>>10848440
And it was still better. The best thing about Buran/Energia was the fact that they could launch the launch vehicle without the Buran whatsoever. That meant they could take up a 100 ton 'something' and drop it into orbit rather than be stuck like the Americans with launching a huge, heavy, MANNED vehicle every time, limiting payload and adding costs.

>>10849480
clean rooms are simply for a higher level of reliability, no?
Alright, so...
Assume clean room construction decreases failure probability by X percent.
Assume clean room construction increases cost by Y percent.
I GUARANTEE that the overall cost of tonnage to mars is LOWER without clean rooms. The actual failure modes encountered by having a gram of dirt lodged between two pieces of metal or whatever are limited

>>10849480
You think the hopper will fly to Mars?

>>10848730
bruh
what's the $/second cost-to-Isp ratio for nuclear thermal vs chemical
how does that translate to $/kg on a practical vehicle
Is it worth chasing a higher Isp if a bigger chemical rocket is still cheaper? It's certainly not the case for hydrolox VS methalox.

>>10849495
you have a point. honestly at this point the problem isn't the lack of clean rooms, it's the lack of quality control in general. not that they need it for the prototypes right now.

>>10849498
at some point they're going to have to get more serious about their spaceship construction. they aren't building falcon 9's outside even though this vehicle is supposedly going to be way more complicated

>>10849173
And then no fuel to send the Starship home with once the launch window reopens.

>>10849506
They have state of the art facilities and they ain't gonna leave them unused, I wouldn't worry about it.

>>10849480
>there's a reason
And the reason is to increase costs to milk as much money out of NASA's pockets as possible

>>10849508
Again, you can run the base on fuel and barely decrease the reserves. Fuel production for the Starship dominates the energy needs of the base. The base is not going to drain the tanks at all.

>>10849513
To be fair, NASA enables that kind of behavior from it's contractors.

>>10849506
>complicated
it's just plumbing

>>10848061
>solar plant needs a large battery bank

Starship runs on methalox. Just use a good old natural gas generator.

>>10849547
it would not be an exaggeration to suggest that NASA encourages that kind of behavior
>>10849550
if you go with batteries instead it makes sense to keep the water electrolysis machine running all night, even in a reduced power mode, so as to keep the Sabatier reaction running, which will help to preserve your catalyst. Unless you're going to be mining nickel ore during the first synods.

>>10849550
burning your spaceship fuel isn't a very good idea

It’s funny how if we just... leave the colonists on Mars it simplifies things greatly.

KISS principle anyone?

>>10849573
You have a point, but omitting the return capacity means that there's no easy way to return a large amount of Martian samples back to Earth to make people realize that tiny probes every 5 or so years isn't how one should explore space.

>>10849573
yes, but starships have a lot of value when they're returned to Earth

>>10849536
Dude, stopping fuel production at night is going to ruin your fuel production equipment and it's going to mean you need to make twice as much during the sunlit hours in order to make the 1.5 year deadline.

>>10849573
That business model effectively expends a Starship per manned and unmanned flight to Mars, making it very expensive. You need to establish two-way transport, preferably at high capacity, in order for it to be viable.

>>10849579
Would a Martian mass-driver help with sending shit back to Earth?

>>10849597
At that point it would be simpler, cheaper, and faster to make Starship be able to return to Earth from Mars.

>>10849597
No, the atmosphere is still too thick for mass-drivers to be efficient

>>10849573
That's what I learned from KSP. Long-range missions just become new "outposts" with disposable personnel

>>10849628
>not routinely swapping crews on Duna and Laythe

cruel.

can somebody give me a rundown on Thunderf00t or whatever his name is? seems to have a hard-on for Elon for some reason

>>10849640
he's a fag ignore him

>>10849628
Just refuel on Pol if you're at Jool, why would you not?

>>10849640
From the few videos I've seen of him, he just seems to have an issue with Elon making promises and then failing at some of them as if somehow that makes Elon a con man.

I wouldn't take this guy seriously. In his video about the Space Force, he kept rambling on about how hard it is to get to space (and sort of implying that it's not worth going to) while ignoring some of the fundamental and legitimate reasons for the creation of the USSF.

>>10849656
>>10849643
Looks like he really hates MemeLoop as well

>>10849640
every youtuber should be sent to a camp

>>10849661

>>10849668
Not all, but most.

>>10849680
nice

>>10849597
Not for a long time. A mass driver is a megaproject even on the Moon, unless you're launching ~1 kg at a time, and even then it'd be difficult. Mars has more than twice the escape velocity, and an atmosphere in the way.

Given enough resources and demand for higher mass throughput launch systems, it could make sense to build a mass driver on the slope of one of the giant Tharsis shield volcanoes, probably Olympus Mons or Ascraeus Mons (the latter being shorter, but much gentler in terms of slope profile and closer to the Mars equator). At the summit of Olympus the Martian air is only about 1/1500th the density of Earth's sea level atmosphere, to any vehicles being accelerated by the mass driver will need to be aerodynamic but won't need to worry much about huge deceleration once they leave the gun barrel. Also, assuming the exit speed of the mass driver is ~5 km/s, vehicles won't even need much in the way of thermal protection systems, due to the low speed compared to, say, Earth reentry, and the low air density. Vehicles being blasted out of this electromagnetic cannon would probably be able to get away with a stainless steel exterior, and possibly some ceramic shielding on any leading edges.

Until such time as the people living on Mars have any use for a system capable of launching hundreds of thousands or even millions of tons of material per year, they will be able to get by quite handily with single-stage-to-orbit chemical rockets, and potentially SSTO nuclear thermal rockets as well, using cheap and readily available water as propellant at ~340-360 Isp.

>>10849649
It's boring to sit and wait for 10,000 days while your drills mine piddly amounts of ores and your converters turn it into liquid fuel. I wish they added asteroid spawning at Jool like they did to Dres, though it'd take away the one thing Dres actually has going for it. Base building in the Jool system is the end game anyway, so I don't see why they wouldn't.

>>10849707
put an engineer on your drills, they really crank it out if you do

>>10849707
base building on laythe is so challenging I haven't gone farther and mapping for resources. I can't figure how to accurately land a habitat. Last 3 I dropped in the drink.

>>10849714
aerobrake into orbit first, circularize as low as possible, then F5

>>10849714
Trajetories mod, it gives a predicted landing site and you can tweak how your descent profile to change where the landing prediction is.

>>10849640
He's a chemist who dabbles in astronomy and thinks he has a deep understanding of rocket engines and economics as a result. He usually makes 'busted' videos about what are effectively scams making easily refutable claims. His limited understanding of engineering especially when it comes to rockets though makes him think he's spotting obvious scam shit from SpaceX when in reality everything they're doing is legit, because SpaceX doesn't do things like old aerospace companies. He also uses information very disingenuously in order to support his claims; he once used a picture of the Falcon Heavy center core that had tipped and dented the engines (as well as destroying the stage itself) as proof of his claim that launch and reentry of the engines was gonna fuck them up. Basically he's a fag that has made exactly one contribution to science, which was when he and a team of other guys filmed drops of NaK falling into water at high speed and proved that alkaline metals explode in water because of a coulombic explosion and not because of hydrogen gas buildup.

>>10849707
I like to have multiple missions going at once so there's no downtime like that, refueler starts doing its thing and I switch over to some other task like roving 100+km then check back on the refueling later. Bases are kind of boring to me too so I make all my missions purely exploration and not colonization.
>>10849714
My best solution was using the inflatable mod to make a rover-blimp-base-plane, enter the atmosphere and inflate to slow down, fire up the electric propellers and start flying around to pick your landing spot. If you build it right you can use a SSTO plane nearby and attach with the winch mod, letting you hop from island to island gathering science while the crew lives comfortably inside their flying base, able to detach the plane and return to orbit wherever they end up.

>>10849719
this
>>10849722
mods are gay, reminder that if you use mods to help you dock you're a baby that can't into space

>>10849739
>mods are gay
Mechpleb, sure, but what's wrong with adding more useful parts unless they're obviously cheat-y like warp drives or whatever?

>>10849495
>g a steel mini-starship and at that point why not go whole hog
>the 9m version is big enough to be able to absorb a lot of mass penalty from reuse and small enough to launch from existing infrastructure so
that would make sense if you could send 1 probe every year.

the thing is, even wwithout a clean room theres only budget for one probe every 10-20 years.

so if it fails youre fucked.

>>10849739
>this
aerobraking to surface from interplanetary trajectories is a dick-waving feat and feels so fucking good but totally isn't worth it

>>10849739
>mods are gay
I generally don't like mods in KSP either, but that mod that allows one to preprogram spacecraft so one doesn't need to be in control of it to do burns seems really helpful especially for a reusable mission profile.

>>10849656
>space force video
are there any good youtube channels for space warfare?

new thread please

>>10849777
I honestly don't know any space military channels out there, but I have a suspicion that each one would make slighly different assumptions about space warfare such that their theories are invalid for the others. Take "there is no stealth in space" or "missiles will dominate everything" as examples. I'd suggest that you'd just keep looking until you find one that you like.

>>10849680
I was gonna make an exception for AvE but then I realized he'd break out in like ten minutes

>>10849746
IMO part packs aren't mods, not in the same way as adding entire new mechanics or making old mechanics way easier.

>>10849835
What about mechanics that make everything harder?

>>10849750
We're not talking about probes here dingus
also if making a probe in a 10x dirtier room means it costs 100x less but only makes it 10x less reliable then you're better off in every way by building 5 of them in the dirtier room for half price

>>10849835
part packs can be even cheatier than mods, anon

>>10849751
it's easy tho, besides I was more 'this'-ing the f5 part, if at first you don't succeed, that was just a simulation.

>>10849849
>it's easy tho
with a capsule, a plane, or something bigger?

>>10849774
That's not really making it easier, that's in effect adding immersion because IRL you do really preprogram burns and shit. The problem is when you use mods that iterally just put you in orbit with the press of a button, and more along those lines.

The most patrician mod that actually changes gameplay has got to be kerbal alarm clock, since it encourages you to do more than one thing at a time, preventing multi-year spans of game time where you do nothing but watch one vehicle transfer to Jool.

>>10849864
there's a fucking mod for that? I've been writing the maneuver node times down on a piece of paper

>>10849839
based af