/sci/ - Science & Math

Ice Ice Baby

https://www.nasa.gov/feature/goddard/2019/moon-mercury-ice

>inb4 Shelby shuts down this thread

On a serious note, if that anon who's going to see Sowers comes back with good evidence about Shelby holding back propellant depots, then I hope Shelby gets his inbox flooded with letters about propellant depots.

Elon inspecting them Starships with the boys

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/with_replies

Shelby deserves to be banned from all gas stations. Let him haul his own gas in canisters.

>>10865807
did they go back to 2017 style wings?
look at elon's profile picture

>>10865793

OwO what's this how does it work and why do I want to dock with it

>>10865825
To be honest, BFR design fluctuates so much that I wouldn't be surprised if Elon states that BFR goes back to the black and white paint, hydrolox is the fuel of the future, Starship will use tiles, Starship and Superheavy will be merged into one vehicle with an external tank, and additional thrust will be provided by solid propellant boosters.

And spaceflight fans across the world would be desperately checking their calendars to make sure that its the first of April.

I JUST WANT THEM TO GO BACK TO ITS, IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK?

>>10865897
wait for nuclear ITS launching from Mars 2064

Starship and Hopper livestreams:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kqZDeKHDwb4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIluyJ0lpj8

Too many clamped anti-space people in my town. Sad!

>>10865955
Why are they against spaceflight?

>>10865959
They were Clamped, for one. They are not aware of how interesting it is.

>>10865955
>>10865965
This retard again.

>>10865965
At least its not "but teh poor ppl". If you and these people that you are talking to are American, then tell them that China can claim parts of space and the United states has no way to challenge that. Wanna watch the newest episode of Game of Thrones on your sat tv? Say goodbye to that. Need weather tracking during hurricane season? Same. GPS on the way to your in-laws? Ditto. The reason why China isn't doing that right now is that they're waiting until theres a sufficient capability gap between China and the US with China in the lead. Neglecting American spaceflight will mean that China (or any other country for that matter) can do whatever they want right above us.

Why do people keep proposing surface habitats for Mars when most of it will be subterranean?

>>10865990
Because they're retards in universities

>>10865990
Probably because the majority of Earth habitats are superterranean so that's what most people imagine habitats in general. Also its really easy to set up a small above ground base by just dropping some ISS-like modules on the surface.

>>10865807
>ultra boom
should we be worried?

Could life exist in massive gas clouds? I was researching how dense nebula are, and started reading about molecular clouds. Apparently the eventualy collapse from their own gravity (I think?) and form stars. Am I missunderstanding, or are these massive gas clouds like an atmosphere? Would winged craft or prop engines work? Could life exist? The center of the cloud would be more dense I assume, creating a center of gravity.

I'm going to say the D-word! PROPELLANT DEPOTS!

>>10866036
SLS should have better boom.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vlY7o0qAdqQ
Remind me why we cannot build mass drivers.

>>10866071
because it's a panama canal-tier construction project with CERN tier power/precision requirements

>>10866080
Only if it were completely unassisted. A mass driver for an SSTO vehicle should be more feasible shouldn't it?

>>10866114
it really depends on your goals
assisted SSTO for smallsats: golden gate bridge tier project
assisted SSTO for useful payloads: panama canal
either way you need ICBM tier heat shielding, it's just not feasible for launch from the earth's surface

huh
https://www.spacex.com/smallsat

>>10866178
oh, are they putting the rideshare aggregator companies out of business with a dedicated company service? that's a good idea, they've had terrible issues with customer service from those guys that's impacting their ability to service that market

>>10866178
is this new?

>to SSO for ESPA class payloads for as low as $2.25M per mission, which includes up to 150 kg of payload mass.

>Unlike traditional rideshare opportunities, these missions will not be dependent on a primary. These missions will be pre-scheduled and will not be held up by delays with co-passengers.

Seems much better than the competition.

>>10866178
I love it, it's literally just a bus to space. Miss the bus? Catch the next bus. We aren't waiting.

>>10866197
they only need a dozen or two customers each launch to make even, too
what's their capacity on these things?

>>10866201
there's this on the site

>>10866208
thanks, I forgot to post the table I was looking at
nominal at-cost for SpaceX is around $40 million, right?

>>10866211
I believe that's correct, yes

>>10866211

Internal marginal cost to SpaceX might be less than that. Reusable booster and fairing. Expendable upper stage and per launch pricing.

>>10866225
yeah, but they're going to try to support their Vandy operations off of these
training mission just to keep the workforce competent

>>10866049
>The center of the cloud would be more dense I assume
No, these molecular clouds have very smooth densities, anywhere that the density starts to increase quickly collapses into a star.

>>10866080
>panama canal-tier
BIGGER

>>10866277
ah yes, and can't forget that your build locations are in a fucking jungle or a desert or the ocean

>>10866282
>desert
If we were so lucky.

https://hackaday.com/2019/08/05/spacex-clips-dragons-wings-after-investigation/
discuss

>>10866293
I'm reminded of that story of electric companies trying to set up power lines in some of the poor regions of Africa, but the lines keep getting torn down by some of the locals for the transformer oil. They use it to fry things apparently. A mass driver there probably wouldn't last for very long.

Not sure if it's true though.

>>10866304
They used it as fuel to cook with, or they used it to deep fry their chickums? honest question

>>10866300
nah we already talked about that
let's talk about LAUNCH LOOPS >>10866277 >>10866293

>>10866317
To fry food in according to the story.

>>10866293
if you were targeting KSC-inclination with your mass driver you'd put it up in Niger or Chad or the Sudan

anyway, Scott Manley sounds totally defeated and wiped out from his house moving experience, but he released a video on the draft environmental assessment for Starship/Super Heavy at KSC
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXKSH221uy4

>>10866329
when and where?

>>10866178
>Rocket Lab charges ~$5M for a 150kg payload to SSO, putting their per kg price at ~$33,333. At $2.25M for the same payload and orbit, SpaceX is only charging $15k per kilogram, which is undercutting RocketLab by more than half. -NSF

>>10866346
it's literally just clickbait, there's nothing new or interesting in that article
I know because I read it

>>10866355
this was to be expected.

consider that these all exist
>Relativity
>Gilmour
>RocketLab
>Zero 2 Infinity
>CloudIX
>Orbex
>Vector
>Firefly
>Astra

the smalllaunch market will wither away.

>>10866360
Of course the small sat launcher market will crash soon. The real question is, who will stay afloat?

>>10866363
on one hand I'm happy about access to space getting cheaper now, and on the other hand I'm sad that all this companies will probably go out of business.

>>10866363
no one. You don't see single-TEU boats going across the ocean for a reason.

>>10866293
Yes, deserts are much easier. Not only do you have to chop down trees (cue the reeee from the treehuggers), but you have to deal with all the fun tropical diseases including malaria and Ebola-chan.

>>10866369
Take the fact that there are more small sat launchers than needed as a good sign. A sign that getting into space has gotten so much cheaper lately.

>>10866370
There will always be the need for small sat launchers. Piggyback launches are hectic to plan around and have tight restrictions on what kinds of small sats could be piggybacked (if you wanted your satellite to have a propulsion system more powerful than cold gas farts then you are out of luck). Group launches are abit better but still have restrictions. And both of those have a massive issue in that you can't choose which orbit your satellite ends up in. If you wanted a polar orbit but there are no polar launches to piggyback on, then too bad. A small sat launcher can remove many of the insurance restrictions, allow you to pick the exact orbit you wand, and allow you to pick the launch date to your heart's content.

>>10865807
Question : Shouldn't there be a tarp or something over the wind brake? Or am I ignorant of something. I know it may not be finished, but if you are against salt air, shouldn't there be further cover?

>>10866417
the idea is to prevent the wind from blowing away your argon while you're trying to weld

>>10866363
Rocket Lab is probably safe for the foreseeable future. At least half of those companies will probably never reach orbit, with the rest likely getting acquired within the next few years. Big companies developing smallsat launch capabilities (namely Virgin Orbit) will last a few years and peter out when demand doesn't justify it.

>>10866384
In the future though there may simply not be any small satellites being made, because it'd be so much easier to just build a ten ton highly capable shitbox and pay to have it launched with a Starship.

>>10866417
It only has to slow down the air flow for reasons, not block it entirely.

>>10866456
That assumes that Starship turns out as well as SpaceX says it will. Let's hold back those high expectations until it starts seriously flying at least. And besides there's always going to be some budget satellite production simply because it is cheap to make a mirco sat that does one or two simple things.

>>10866468
ah yes, the "literally a cell-phone duct taped to a go-pro" satellite

Does Starship make asteroid mining not a meme?

>>10866468
I think that even if SpaceX fails with Starship for some reason they've proven that a vehicle with the launch economics of Starship is at least feasible. Maybe we aren't there yet technologically but I can't think of one insurmountable problem with the Starship architecture that leads to launch cadence per vehicle being measured in months rather than hours. I'm not even meming here, even if the Raptor engines only last for a couple dozen flights before they're done and it's only the air frames that can go for thousands of flights that'd still make each Starship launch cheap enough to piss on every small-sat launcher even on the drawing board. In that case you'd have a fleet of maybe half a dozen of each stage, with two being used at a time, the other ones having engines swapped out either for maintenance or for scrap recycle.

>2.25 million for 150kg to space
how game changing is this? are we going to see another explosion of startups?

>>10866482
The idea that an asteroid made of gold could be brought back to Earth and suddenly everyone is a millionaire will always be a meme. However, with the payload capacity of Starship (or any rocket of that size really), then space outposts can be made abit more self sufficient with asteroid mining and thus reducing the amount of material needed from Earth which reduces costs.

>>10866482
not yet, you need a resilient reusable water based nuclear thermal drive first

Within say, the next 20-30 years, could someone build a Project Orion style spaceship in orbit, assuming they overcame the political issues?

>>10866505
the best bet for that is the mars technocracy becoming a hotbed for nuclear research

>>10866509
that seems possible-the kilopower reactor is pretty ingenious in its simplicity. I imagine Mars has uranium deposits, and they have on access to fossil fuels and limited solar due to those dust storms, no nuclear seems like the ideal choice of power.

>>10866520
imagine: nuclear research without a million screaming nimbys and MIC vultures trying to shut you down, and no environment to contaminate

>>10866482
Asteroid mining will permanently remain a meme until there is a space economy in place. You can't support asteroid mining for the purposes of selling materials to Earth alone. The distances involved, the timelines required for any return, the technological leaps that need to be made, it's all too much.

What Starship can do is make Moon and Mars colonization reality, by putting in place a robust two-way transport network between these places and Earth. This puts human civilization into the advantageous scenario of having industrially capable settlements with effectively unlimited access to important resources located at the bottom of two very shallow gravity wells. The actual methods of home-grown transport we'd develop for the Moon and Mars are different, but accomplish the same goal, which is high capacity low complexity launch to orbit. This will allow us to construct large rotating orbital habitats, first as zero-atmosphere space factories then later as simple food producing hydroponic cans and finally as outright ecologies in a bottle, but most importantly as large manned space habitats that require very little in the way of resupply.

Once we can build those last things, we can use them as deep-space bases of operation for exploring and colonizing asteroids. Now, asteroids are different than planets; even if a certain element is rare on a planet, through sheer processed volume you can supply yourself with as much as you need. Asteroids don't have the gigantic amount of material to sift through, and thus some colonies trying to crack it on an asteroid are going to find they don't have nearly enough of this and that to sustain themselves. They're also going to have an immense surplus of materials that are useful but they aren't bottle-necked by, which will inevitably lead to the development of a transport network that would allow trade to occur between asteroid colonies. At that point selling materials to Earth (or Moon or Mars) is no longer a meme.

>>10866500
That tech would be extremely useful for colonizing and developing pretty much every system of moons around every gas giant, and every Kuiper belt object in the solar system. However, for asteroids, a solar furnace engine would probably be good enough, since you don't need high thrust and you won't be limited by availability of nuclear fuel.

>>10866533
yeah but the belt sucks for solar

>>10866520
>I imagine Mars has uranium deposits
Every chunk of basalt in the solar system contains Uranium and thorium.

If only we could get fusion working! You can make really high-performance rockets and never have to worry about fuel for a power station in several human lifetimes. Plasma is such a nasty bitch.

>>10866534
Really the mass to power ratio of an engine doesn't really matter if you're just transferring from asteroid to asteroid, and it matters even less the more mass you're pushing. When mass to power ratio matters most is during launch from a high gravity world, or rather launch from any object that has a gravitational strength stronger than a cm/s^2 or so. The biggest advantage of solar thermal propulsion is that it's simple and it's easy to build in situ, no complex super high power nuclear reactor to construct, meaning anyone actually living in the asteroid belt is not going to be looking at NTP as a practical option anyway.

The only places in the asteroid belt that you'd want something with a higher power to mass ratio than STP would be if you were trying to land on Ceres, Vesta, or any of the other dozen or so largest asteroids. Also, if you were actually trying to MOVE any asteroids, STP would be the absolute best option, because those burns are going to need to happen for multiple years and require a lot of thrust. A solar thermal propulsion system can be built to be very powerful given a proportionally large reflector, and since it's powered by the Sun it can just chug along constantly without having to worry about swapping out spent nuclear cores after outputting gigawatts of thermal power for dozens of months on end.

>>10866300
>hackaday
Fuck them. Five years ago they were pretty cool, but they started sucking arduino cock and posted retarded-but-popular technology articles for more traffic.

>>10866568
film cooling and remote heating would allow you to heat your propellant well beyond the limits for NTP for better ISP, maybe

>>10865990
Depends on your stage, I would argue.
I think you first build sort of split-level, dig up enough to bury the bottom half of your structures, cover the top half with the soil from the hole. But going super deep in a place you've not studied is asking for problems, I think.

>>10866071
because darpa knows that a massive structure like that can be derailed easily, and most of this tech is funded by them to pull double duty.
I'm with you though, the rail-gun is a great idea for stage one.

>>10866568
>complex super high power nuclear reactor

I dunno man, the kilopower project shows that with careful design nuclear reactors don't have to be that complex, especially if you get passive cooling and inherent safety right. The hardest thing to make is the uranium-235, but you need so little of it that it's fine to bring some from earth for a good long while. Eventually the belt will have its own centrifuges and uranium processing.

>>10866080
>CERN tier power/precision
no. we've built all kinds of things that can have shredded bearings and a few contact scratches on the base. Only the payload needs shock and impact safety.

>>10866588
the research for it has limited crossover with military application railguns, however
mass drivers want to move a lot of mass at a decent clip
military railguns want to tear holes in the atmosphere with a small amount of mass

>>10866332
So North Rhodesia, when?

>>10866590
thorium, not uranium
easier to clean

>>10866594
you're not good at selling things to jarheads, that's for sure.
>you're saying there are crossovers between mass-driver launch and rail tech? you're saying the program would give research and hands on that could translate?

>>10865965
>>10865955
wtf is a "clamped"?

>>10866574
You can get higher Isp if you use a transparent chamber (vaporization chamber?) like a quartz bottle to directly heat the water, and continue to heat the steam even as it expands out through the nozzle. One problem with STP using any transparent substance is that you usually need to heat something that's really good at absorbing visible and infrared light and good at conducting that heat into the water around it. You could potentially get around that issue by introducing carbon nano-particles into your water propellant, which would allow the suspended carbon to absorb the light and very efficiently and rapidly transfer that heat to the water around it. The propellant mixture would look like black tea or coffee rather than clear water. Alternatively you could go the simple route of having a transparent heating chamber with a graphite heating element, or even a thin but wide and very black panel than a thin film of water was pumped through extremely quickly. In that case you'd probably not use an annular (round) nozzle but a square one, with nearly flat sides, to work more effectively with the wide and thin boiler plate.

Proton launch in 40 minutes

>>10866603
oh, am I trying to sell this?
crossover applications:
>extremely high current electronics (consistent with the direction of the Navy's research directives)
>rail material science
>general railgun technology
>high-g tolerant guidance technology
it's a bigger project than the current limited railgun artillery project at uhh DARPA?
anyway I wonder if you could use the Navy's railgun prototypes to launch smallsats to orbit

>>10866583
I mean, they'd be studying it as they went. It's not hard to take relatively good seismic readings or even to use sonar to look down through the ground to try and find large monolithic plates of rock to tunnel into. They'd have literal years to do so in between shipments of new equipment and supplies, not to mention the pace of development is going to be slow at least for the first few launch windows. We will probably have had a permanently manned base on Mars for ten years before we do any larger scale tunneling projects simple as a result of having other more pressing problems to solve, like setting up robust and high capacity water mining, methane production, nitrogen capture and storage, iron smelting, and basalt-fiber production processes, not to mention the very large electrical production and supply grid that all needs.

>>10866619
Sure is a bigger project. But you also get material sciences, looking for lower weight higher strengths all around.
If you exit over water you get engineering advances (and/or experience) with submersed footings that take massive shock loads.

>>10866628
Get me seeds that continue to grow, and you've solved almost everything.

>>10866271
Interesting. Do you know anything about how dense they can be before collapse? For example, if you were inside one, would it apear like you were inside a gas cloud? I was trying to find this out but found no answers...

>>10866588
>the rail-gun is a great idea for stage one.
On the Moon yes, and on Mars a tentative maybe, but not on Earth. The additional structural reinforcement needed to keep a fully fueled rocket in one piece while being accelerated by the electromagnetic launcher, as well as surviving the impact with the air outside of the launcher and the shock heating it'd produce, would lead to a vast reduction in performance compared to that exact rocket simply being launched from the ground starting at zero velocity and a much better wet-dry mass fraction. If you REALLY want to add a low cost stage to your rocket, and you don't want to make it an impossible engineering feat, just build a big reusable booster and slap your rocket on top of it. After every launch the booster comes back to the launch complex and is refitted to launch again.

Earth's atmosphere is what makes electromagnetic launch untenable here. On Mars it's easier to consider because of the lower escape velocity due to lower gravity, and the fact that several volcanoes on Mars reach up beyond the vast majority of the atmosphere anyway, so in reality you'd pretty much be building a high speed rail system on the side of a hill. On the Moon, where there's completely negligible atmosphere and even less gravity, electromagnetic launch makes perfect sense, though you still need to wait for there to be enough industrial capacity on the Moon for it to make sense to start working on.

>>10866674
the best part about moonlaunch mass driver is that it's a big stick to wave at Earthgov and demand $1 BILLION

>>10866680
Until we send Bruce Willis up there to drill nukes into your moon, tough guy. It would be very painfull.

>>10866685
we've got six days to shoot your big man down, don't set your self up on the wrong side of this meme

>>10866590
>the kilopower project shows that with careful design nuclear reactors don't have to be that complex
Kilopower is not a nuclear thermal rocket's reactor. The reactor that NERVA used had a peak power output of over 2 gigawatts, about 2 million times more than Kilopower, and it still only had a thrust to weight ratio of about 5 in Earth gravity.

Regardless, the point about nuclear fuel is still relevant. Nuclear fuel is energy dense stuff but it doesn't last forever. If you have access to a power source that offers roughly the same Isp, for far less engineering and manufacturing effort, that doesn't require refueling at all and doesn't produce huge neutron flux that you need to worry about, it becomes very attractive. Deep space colonies are likely to want to use their nuclear fuel resources for other things, such as emergency power supply or even as bargaining chips to buy other materials more useful to them, through trading with other colonies too far from the Sun for solar power to be effective anymore.

On that note, anyone who colonizes Mercury is going to have little to no use for nuclear power due to the extreme intensity of solar flux there, but they're also going to be sitting on potentially the largest single stockpile of accessible nuclear materials in the solar system, so if we're also putting colonies in the outer solar system where volatiles are plentiful but sunlight and fissile and fertile elements are not, there may exist a large amount of trade between Mercury and the gas/ice giants, since either would have a massive demand for the other's surplus.

>>10866710
imagine trying to launch something from Mercury to the outer planets lol, you're basically obligated to do gravity assists, right
how often do those windows open up?

>>10866658
Molecular gas clouds typically have densities a few billion times lower than that of Earth's atmosphere. They really are incredibly low density, but they're also incredibly huge, which is why they can form entire star systems from nodules that collapse down. If our entire solar system were inside a molecular cloud right now you probably wouldn't be able to tell. You can only see them if you're a telescope gathering light for minutes or hours in a single exposure, from many light years away, in order to get the into frame.

>>10866680
It'd be a retarded thing to do so, because unlike the common scifi trope of 'it's easy to drop rock son you but you have to fight to get back up to us nyaa nyaa :)", the only way a Moon civilization with an electromagnetic launcher capable of firing actually relevant masses of material in one shot would exist would be if Earth itself had a very robust launch cadence and the ability to (relatively) cheaply and easily move lots of material around in space. At best, your Moon launcher would do some damage and cause some chaos, for about a week, until a Starship (or equivalent vehicle) could do a swing by and drop a hundred ton block of munitions onto the railgun itself to disable it, as which point your entire rebellious Moon colony is now a helpless sitting duck with an entire planet unified in the effort of kicking your shit in as quickly as possible.
It'd be the equivalent of a man handing a child a small knife, getting stabbed in the lower leg, and then immediately launching into an all-out brawl with this 40 pound kid.

>>10866741
what if you only blew up the people nobody liked and started WW3

>>10866694
You can't aim a mass driver, except through a very predictable and avoidable sweep by changing the muzzle velocity.

>>10866746
that's why it's aimed at EML1

>>10866741
beltalowda will find a way sabaka
You inyalowda all gone burn!

>>10865848
>I wouldn't be surprised if Elon states that BFR goes back to the black and white paint
NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO I JUST FINISHED MY MODEL IN SILVER CHROME

>>10866726
The launch window between Mercury and the outer planets occurs every 90 or so days, the sinode period is shorter the larger the distance between the two objects, and approaches the year length of the object closest to its star.

If you're launching towards the outer planets from Mercury you're probably doing so using a buried equatorial mass-driver that gets you up to around 8 km/s muzzle velocity, and once you exit and have effectively already escaped the planet's gravity well you can use solar sail propulsion to accelerate further, taking only a few years to reach Jupiter or Saturn, less than a decade to reach the ice giants, and slowing down at your destination using nuclear thermal propulsion. This is assuming we don't develop fusion propulsion by the way, in which case you still leave Mercury via railgun (or more probably coil gun) but use fusion engines to speed up and slow down at target.

Gravity assists are for chumps stuck with chemical propulsion that can't refuel anywhere.

I'm curious what our orbital defense capabilities are if we needed them today. How big an asteroid could we deflect if we knew it was likely to strike something like Washington DC?

Could we shoot down ayys?

>>10866765
>Washington, DC
nothing, that shithole deserves it
>shoot down ayys
basically nothing, we've deliberately limited ourselves from that sort of ability

>>10866749
for what purpose

>>10866755
>building models this early in the game
bro unless you're gonna build a model for every design update they release and have the entire evolutionary family tree lined up I'd suggest waiting until they launch one to orbit cuz that design is probably gonna stick

>>10866752
the belters were only able to glass earth with outside help from space hitler injecting himself with ayyjizz

>>10866768
space for the spacenoids

>>10866771
wel yeah, belters have always been a joke.

>>10866767
>basically nothing
We've got fairly robust anti-satellite systems if Earth ever needed to unite and use them. Any modern navy has destroyers that can shoot up to MEO. In theory submarines provide a nuclear deterrent against anything near Earth, but I don't know what launching an SLBM at an orbital target would entail.

However, we can't actually shoot at anything above geostationary orbit, and most of our weapons can't reach even that. LEO is well defended, anything above that is sketchy.

>>10866774
>i want to save earth
>by dropping space colonies on it.

Euh...

>>10866765
>How big an asteroid could we deflect
depends on the time to impact. At the moment we have nothing built and nothing really in development, so any rock of any size is going to hit unless it's like 30 years out and confirmed to hit to the point that it actually lights a fire under someone's ass to build the rendezvous and divert vehicle.

>ayys
depends on the ayy. If they're using propulsion systems we know can exist, and are in low Earth orbit, we could probably hit them with a missile. If they're literally anywhere else they're immune to human attacks; even if any of our missiles can reach up to mid-Earth orbit range the ayys would see it coming and be able to maneuver to dodge quite easily. If ayys have propulsion systems we currently think of as possible but very dodgy or the really weird fucks-with-physics-probably-impossible ones, allowing them to pull high Gs for years on end or simply scoot around by messing with the mass of their vehicles, again we can't do nothin pretty much no matter how close they get.

>>10866783
newtype brain problems

>>10866765
Hopefully it lands in Alabama and takes out Shelby's house

>>10866583
Split level is nice but not enough. You need to be below meters of compacted regolith.

>>10866783
a colony drop IRL would be crazy
you'd have this cylindrical bottle two kilometers wide and twenty long coming down at 11 km/s and striking the ground after hitting the top of the atmosphere ~9 seconds earlier, enough time for people on the ground to see the flash of light and look up before they're vaporized along with the entire city and about a hundred meters of dirt and bedrock underneath it (assuming the colony is of the low density variety)

>>10866783
I actually haven't watched anything past 0079 yet

>>10866071
for humans, the mass driver needs to be thousands of kilometers long so that the acceleration's reasonable. There isn't much benefit for launching satellites because you need to add a bunch of thermal protection and redesign your satellites to fit in a gun and survive high accelerations. There is a mas cost to making your satellite gun launchable and over all the cost benefits of doing so aren't that great
https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/d3eb/7789842e0600ffb8b12e385a59123bed0fd3.pdf
Although the above study might be worth looking into with improvements in battery, solar panel, and radio tech. Although you should look into spinlaunch which is investigating rotary sling launchers
https://spacenews.com/spinlaunch-joins-cadre-of-small-launch-companies-dod-wants-to-try-out/
There's also hypersciences which is investigating ram accelerators:
https://www.seedinvest.com/hypersciences.inc/series.a/product
Interestingly hypersciences is selling their mass driver to drill tunnels by repeatedly firing high velocity projectiles. Strangely enough this was actually found to be an effective way of drilling through rock to make bunkers during the cold war, although it was cost prohibitive because of the cost of gun powder. Hypersciences projectiles which use air and flammable gas would be much cheaper.
>>10866594
actually there is some crossover. In both cases you want something moving very fucking fast. In fact the army wants to build a cannon with 1000 mile range. They want said cannon to launch projectiles cheaper than missiles capable of hitting relatively small targets like missile launchers and radars.
https://breakingdefense.com/2018/10/army-builds-1000-mile-supergun/
This is interesting because they will need some guidance to do so. Railguns actually don't make very good mass drivers for satellites because they produce an enormous EMP. This would also tend to fry any guidance system you have too. Right now they're considering gun launched rockets. Big ones.

>>10866794
I think the idea is still to get the equivalent of meters of compacted dirt above your habitat, it's just that placing it in a hole first saves on the amount of dirt you have to actually dig up and use to bury your habitat.

>>10866785
>>10866780
>ayys, having evolved for millions of years to be the ultimate space combat species, not really ready to fight a terrestrial war but it's just some smelly apes lmao what could go wrong
>don't want to glass the planet because you really fucking love the lightbulbs humans make
>like holy fuck they're aesthetic 10/10 gonna take them by force
>not too much force or you might break these wonderful primitive light bobbles
>just gonna set the mothership down here on the open ocean, silly apes can't swim
>WARNING SIRENS
>the entire mothership starts to lose power and smoke is coming from the panels
>a fucking massive nuclear barrage just hit the underside of the mothership
>there's only water down there
>ayys came from a desert planet and literally do not understand submarines

>>10866803
>Railguns
in general people don't consider actual railguns for electromagnetic launch for a multitude of reasons. The usual suspect is coil gun launch, because it's much more gentle on electronics and on hardware, there being no rails to erode via high power arcing and so forth.

>>10866807
>all the subs are taken out by the shock waves from their own nuclear weapons detonating
oops lol

Mars is radioactive enough that going full Operation Plowshare won't actually make it worse
>plan for a colony to land in 2024
>ask the department of energy if you can borrow some nukes in 2021
>send a couple Falcon Heavies with nukes to Mars
>these are technically IPBMs
>blow a massive fucking hole in the surface
>give it a few years to cool off (both thermally and radioactively)
>line it with concrete
>just fucking plop all the habs in your new patented Mars Hole™

The ONLY problem with this plan is that lava tubes exist and would be infinitely cheaper and easier, but MY plan is cooler

>>10866813
Who cares? Trading an Ohio for an alien mothership would be the fucking coup of the century. Space Jutland.

>>10866817
do you think they'd let us take a look at their spooky space alien technology if we told them about submarines

>>10866820
maybe they'll want our lightbulbs and will trade basic bitch FTL for enough of them

I don't mean lightbulbs when I say lightbulbs I just mean maybe some weird and mundane aspect of our tech will be so foreign to them that they see it as art. Cars, phones, lightbulbs, toilets, there's probably something we can sell the ayys.

>>10866823
steel that doesn't turn into warm dust when exposed to dissociated supercritical gaseous oxygen

>>10866825
Our metallurgy is pretty fucking advanced when you phrase it like that but I'm pretty sure that's a prerequisite for FTL travel and spacefaring. Maybe they'll have skipped superalloys and gone straight for magnetic containment.

FTL is such a weird topic to approach because we're at a stage where "it's probably impossible, but we also know for sure that we don't know enough to say it's impossible". The likelihood of FTL ayys showing up at Earth is statistically zero but we can't actually rule it out.

>>10866482
Falcon 9 is sufficient to make asteroid mining not a meme:
https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/niac_sercel_phase_i_final_report_tagged.pdf
https://www.nasa.gov/feature/apis-asteroid-provided-in-situ-supplies-100mt-of-water-from-a-single-falcon-9/

NASA could save over $300 billion dollars by mining water from asteroids. A single Falcon 9 v 1.1 launch, which is normally capable of delivering 22 metric tons to LEO, could provide 100 metric tons of water to a cislunar orbit. You get almost 5 times the mass you could normally launch and further out. That's a pretty fucking big deal. It's such a big deal that NASA's working on a demo mission to test the tech necessary to mine the water out.
https://www.nasa.gov/directorates/spacetech/niac/2019_Phase_I_Phase_II/Mini_Bee_Prototype/
>>10866811
that's what I said.

>>10866838
I see a critical flaw in this plan, though. If a Falcon launched mission retrieves 100t of water ice and brings it to a cislunar orbit, you lay the groundwork for something terrible that must be avoided at all costs. You see, through simply applying electricity to this water ice, it will split into hydrogen and oxygen. Such chemicals are a precursor to the worst kind of proliferation – depots.

t. shelby

>>10866613
I think more likely is you would use an adapted version of the new generation of solar thermal power plants that can directly produce supercritical steam. They don't require complicating factors like a molten salt loop, and they should be relatively simple to construct and operate compared to the alternative.

You know it's pretty funny. NASA's has a very well funded effort to make a nuclear thermal rocket and flight test it by 2024. Why's it funny? It's funny because Marshall Space Flight Center is doing the work. Where's MSFC based? In Alabama, which Senator Shelby represents. It also needs a new test stand at Stennis in Mississippi, which is represented by Senator Wicker who I'm pretty sure is pretty pro SLS too. So oddly, Shelby's a driving force behind NASA investigating nuclear propulsion. Now if only we could convince these senators to fund this more than SLS...

>>10866870
nuclear SLS

>>10866741
Which is why a weaponized mass driver is probably going to be under control of a power on Earth, if one is ever used militarily in the near-term. So that boils down to either the US or China dropping rocks on someone they don't like.

>>10866877
Amazing idea! More excuses to delay the first launch!

>>10866879
imagine dropping rocks on dirt farmers in the sandbox

>>10866071
For the same reason we don't make a space mountain so we can hike into space.

>>10866300
It literally said nothing we didn't already know here. They aren't going to propulsively land Dragon2, but that's because all the effort is going into Starship, even before the earth-shattering kaboom. Engines belong on the bottom of the rocket, between the legs, not on the sides, with legs under a heat shield.
So sayeth The Elon, and so shall it be.

>>10866897
Terrible idea. It would poke a hole through the atmosphere and all the air would spill out into space.

Successfull Proton-M launch. Blagovest military communications satellite enroute to geosynchronous orbit.

https://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2019/08/proton-m-launches-fourth-blagovest-satellte/

>Russia has launched its fourth Blagovest communications satellite via a Proton rocket Tuesday. Having lifted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 02:56 local time (00:56 Moscow Time, 21:56 UTC on Monday), Proton’s Briz-M upper stage is now undertaking a nine-hour multiple-burn mission that will deploy its payload into geostationary orbit.

>>10866943
>Successful
>Proton launch
Well there's a novelty

>>10866939
those happen all the time, anon, it's not a big deal
the atmosphere is self healing
anyway, what do you think the bright lights are during reentry? it's the atmosphere being torn open and healing up again
we've been doing it consistently and controllably for sixty years now

>>10866950
GOTTEM

>>10866765
>ayys
Google "Casaba Howitzer"
Project Orion was only one of several project that was interested in using nuclear shaped charges. Until we figured out high altitude nuclear detonations caused EMPs, they were considered the perfect anti-ICBM weapon.
You can take a 100kg weapon with a 10kt yield, with 85% of the yield directed through a 10 degree aperture covered with a 32 kg tungsten plate. Upon detonation, the plate is vaporized as its atoms are accelerated to 1000km/s. Aimed at a target 16km away, the particles arrive 16 milliseconds after detonation in a circle about 2.8km wide and can penetrate 5mm of aluminum off of anything in that zone. So you can see why the US was interested in using this as an anti-missile weapon: you don't have to have perfect aim.
You can also design this as like traditional armor-piercing explosives, vaporizing and accelerating a lance of material (also about 32kg) moving at 3% of c (if you can sneak up and touch the ship, this can be used as a nuclear HEAT round).
And then if you're really clever, you can make a one-two punch weapon: a single nuclear detonation driving a shaped charge jet, followed by a forged penetrator.

tl;dr - if the ayys don't have a good way to handle multiple relativistic impacts from all directions, we can fuck them up with 1960s technology.

>>10866815
>lava tubes exist
so do craters

>>10866923
I chuckled

>>10866959
Except we don't actually have those and would have to develop them, which negates the question

How much say you need in terms of future capital / future launch costs to set up an industry operation on the moon?

>>10866887
anon, you don't use World War 3 weapons to fight Operation: Useless Dirt

>>10867039
but they've got nerve gas

>>10866823
wait I've seen this movie, we'll sell them our lumpenproletariat for them to serve in their high-end restaurants

>>10866988
???
Are you asking how expensive it'd be to set up a Moon base?
If Starship hits its launch cost goals then a Moon mission in which you soft land ~100 tons of payload on the surface would cost about as much as a falcon 9 flight, or about $60 million. If your base's equipment weighs more than that you need multiple missions, obviously. Say you can get set up and start producing whatever product you're making (iron ingots, sintered bricks, aluminum pipes, whatever) with a total mass of 1000 tons, then you're looking at ~$600 million to get an operational Lunar industrial park up and running. Let's be a bit more conservative and assume $1 billion total instead.

That doesn't include any development cost or fabrication cost for the actual hardware of course. Given the fact that this launch campaign would still only cost as much as launching a single SLS rocket, it's likely that the payload engineering and construction costs would end up being much more than the cost of transporting that payload to the surface of the Moon. This means that after the initial, expensive campaign to set up the first industrial production facility on the Moon, it'd actually cost much less to set up subsequent copies or to double it in size. You could also eventually take advantage of the fact that you only need to send the complicated bits and bobs from Earth once the Lunar industries expand to include more complex metal fabrication, at which point they can build their own vessels and drive shafts and beams and so forth and they just need the electronics.

>>10866815
This is stupid and you should kill yourself

Threadly reminder that Mars is going to be a forge world where Earth outsources all of its industrial processes.

>>10866815
>lava tubes
That would make a good movie plot. Ride the lava-tubes with your all terrain vehicle and plant the anti-matter device right next to the core of the planet before the containment field's battery runs out.

>>10867048

How likely is it to get the military involved in rapid industrialization. Say to dab on the chinese as they chase space. NASA would have the SLS killed, I hope that can be sent into RND on the moon, in theory that covers a lot of the developmetn costs. Not to mention starlink dollars. But it's also obvious that bezos wants to chase his own plans for the future.

>>10865990
Gotta live somewhere while boring the first tunnels

>>10867091
Yeah, the pre-made pressurised starships you arrived in.

>>10866178
I work on small sats so this is quite exciting to me

SpaceX must be saving so much fucking money with this stainless steel switch. No huge rolled carbon fibre segments, no custom made fuckhuge tanks specially imported from Japan. Just some bogan cunts with monster energy stickers on their welding masks slapping this shit together.

>>10866355
F

>momentus will ferry cubesats as far as mars thru the nanoracks iss module
>japan is expanding its military space capabilities, including hosting american military payloads on its satellites
there's so much good news in the space sector these days

>>10867133
the bigger saver in the long run is
>build by CHAD Texas ununionized manual laborers vs VIRGIN unionized San Pedro filthy contractors

>>10866987
Assuming we can see the ayys as they're coming, we did enough research into shaped nuclear charges that actual construction and testing would not take long.

>>10867182
fuck California

>>10867133
I really hope that the aerospace industry moves away from the idea that specialized parts are needed for everything, because of SpaceX. Sure, I understand why it became common back when rocketry wasn't very good and thus required extreme (at the time) measures just to get it into space. But spaceflight has evolved to the point where it doesn't need a propellant tank with an isogrid milled into it. Just made the tank plain, maybe with some strengtheners welded on, and just scale up the rocket to the necessary size. Insisting on "space-grade" parts specially crafted by special contractors is just driving up the costs without much benefit.

>>10867192
it really was necessary when the state of the art had only just moved beyond rivets

>>10867203
And when the state of the art fuel was high grade vodka.

39A's starship section will have a 180 meter mobile crane. Do those exist?

>>10867216
yes, easily
you buy them in parts and they ship them in, one track at a time
let me find it

I'm downloading this fucking liebherr video game now what the fuck
https://youtu.be/W_cWlBRyxgk
Crane Planner 2.0, for all your lift planning needs I guess

they require you interact with them as a business account before they let you use it

>>10866525
And even if Mars eventually hosts enough inhabitants for NIMBYism to begin to be a thing out there, there's a billion other places in the solar system to move research to, all of which by then are vastly more accessible.

Mars will be the springboard for humanity's dominance of the solar system.

is there anything more painful in life than watching your retarded roommate attempt to play Kerbal Space Program?
I sound like a know-it-all asshole while I try to 'help' him, but at the same time he has zero knowledge of orbital mechanics or basic design principles.
HELP

>>10867262
Just let him pay on his own, but be sure to let him know that you're here to help. My friend left over 10 kerbals in space before he successfully did a manned mission to the Mun and back.

>>10867262
internalize this picture and summon it whenever you're tempted to call him rude names and laugh at his misfortune
say something smug like "it's really quite enjoying watching you fumble"

>>10867262
Teach him how to build an all American rocket anon

>>10866791
The rock would then be made into a tourist attraction, Alabama's famous Depot Monument

What gas would be most suitable for giving the moon an atmosphere thick enough to move around and erode down all that problematic sharp regolith? How much would you need to pressurize the surface enough that only an oxygen mask would be needed on to walk on its surface?

>>10867216
How do you think the big reactors are put in the big ships?

>>10867307
CFCs. Instant greenhouse effect in a can. You'd need to constantly replenish it though. Maybe we can move CFC intensive industry to the Moon so it's actually a positive emission.

>>10867318
would lunar gravity be enough to hold onto those?

>>10867315
very carefully

>>10866727
See, that is exactly the what I read in my research. I just don't think I like the answer. I can see the Orion nebula with my eye. The gas in the nebula must have a high brightness? Even if reflected light on a lightyear scaled gas cloud... I might not be clear... But I guess I am wondering if anyone knows how concentated a gas cloud can be in "open space"? If earths atmosphere was placed in a vacum, is a good comparison to what I am trying to Imagine.

>>10867307
>Erode down sharp regolith

Congratulations now you have more tiny particles that are even smaller, just because they aren't sharp doesn't mean they won't fuck everything up including you. No one is ever going to be walking around unsuited on the moon unless all these particles are bound in some kind of liquid (unlikely given day side heat) or paved over the whole moon.

>>10867353
>>10867307
No. There is no gas with a high enough molecular weight to not escape the Moon's gravity at an extremely rapid rate. If you made the heaviest gasses you could at a rate fast enough that they actually built up, for all that effort you'd be far better off just building a gigantic space mirror death ray to scorch and melt the upper few meters of the Moon's surface and lock all the dust down that way.

>>10867307
>>10867318
Let's do it, I can't possibly conceive of anything going wrong with a plan to add an atmosphere and weather patterns to a place covered in sandpaper grit with a four-week-long day cycle. Surely, this will go over without any sort of horrific consequences.

>>10867369
>I just don't think I like the answer.
So you're just outright denying the science, okay.

The maximum density a cloud can sit at in space is the density at which the particle start to bounce off of one another and counterbalance the cloud's gravity. If you tried to make an Earth sized bubble of air at 1 bar of pressure (about equal to Earth's atmospheric density) the cloud would simply fly apart and disperse. If you tried to make a gas cloud massive enough that its own gravity could hold its density at that equal to Earth's atmosphere, the cloud would continue to collapse down and form a star, because it would have to be ridiculously massive to accomplish such a feat.

You can see the Orion nebula with your eye because it is lit from within by thousands of young, high mass blue stars. In fact the Orion nebula is one of the brightest nebula in absolute terms that we know of, the only one that has a higher absolute brightness is the Tarantula nebula if I remember right. Also, because nebula are not point sources of light like stars, they don't get any brighter to the eye the closer you get to them. That same extremely faint but barely visible cloud would still be barely visible even if you were on a planet orbiting a star right smack in the middle of the brightest area of the nebula.

>>10867262
This >>10867266
Half the fun of KSP is figuring that stuff out. Now granted, I've only ever lost like 1 kerbal on a risky EVA, but that's just part of the learning process.

>>10867394
That sounds metal as fuck I love it. Probably the simplest and most realistic way way to eliminate the moon dust problem too.

>>10867432
I learned through limitation. Been playing KSP ever since there were like 4 parts, no map view, and only Kerbin.
Sort of like a very slow tutorial.

>>10867432
One time I killed Jeb because I got the chute and drouge mixed up and his spacecraft was forced to do a lithobrake in which he did not survive.

>>10867413
Very interesting, I am not denying anything by the way, possible poor word choiceby me. What about ionized gas clouds. They would be glowing? If you were in a molecular cloud, "near" a source that could cause this? I guess in this train of thought, (we know gas can be dense, we are breathing it, we can see fog banks. Obviously solid matter exists, so in open space, must such things be? A massive oxygen, or hydrogen cloud?) why would gas scatter in a vacum? In theory if the gas is only relative to it's own mass it would group to a center point?

>>10867432
I've only ever lost kerbals to dumb shit like high-g low ceiling maneuvers that tore my wings off and not knowing the height of the terrain and crashing into it, although I've lost a few unpiloted probes due to running out of battery early in the tech tree
>>10867440
you realize that kerbals can survive falls from almost terminal velocity, right? jump and RCS is usually surviveable

>>10867443
>you realize that kerbals can survive falls from almost terminal velocity, right? jump and RCS is usually surviveable
I didn't know that at the time. Hell, at the time I didn't even know that drouge chutes were a thing. I learned that the hard way.

>>10867413
>>10867441
>If you tried to make a gas cloud massive enough that its own gravity could hold its density at that equal to Earth's atmosphere, the cloud would continue to collapse down and form a star, because it would have to be ridiculously massive to accomplish such a feat.
Oh! Also, another thing that was bothering me... When you say it would collapse under the massive density, wh kind of time frame? Is the collapse longer than the lifespan of the star it creates? Shorter? Does it collapse at relativistic speed? (please forgive spelling mistakes)

>>10867460
who the fuck knows, you're asking fundamental questions about the formation of stars

>>10867461
I see. So perhaps a gas cloud could exist, dense enough to allow physical propulsion, or even life, during it's collapse into a star? I am imagining solor powered droids powering their propelors with light from the ionized cloud surrounding it, perhaps the final colapse pushes the outer remnants out, in relativistic life seeding jets?

>>10867470
I'm not going to tell you to quit jacking it to hydrogen star-fart aliens but you should really stop

I had a desk lamp that looked just like that.

>>10867473
You are not struck by the thought of a galaxy sized gas cloud colapsing at near light speed?

>>10867460
That's not a spaceflight question, start a fucking thread for it.

>>10867491
But I am wondering if states exist that would allow physical "prop" style propulsion. Literal space flight..

>>10866317
The transformers can be oil cooled, the transformers Africa gets are old ones from north America. The old ones used PCB oil, which is extremely resistant to temperature etc. If you use it for frying you don't have to change the oil, like with vegetable oil. The only down side is it gives you cancer, and stays in the environment, like, forever. I'm just going to stay in a first world country I think.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qGOO7gZkBQM

>>10867500
Wait, so I never have to change fryer oil?

>>10867499
Stop trying to weasel out of starting a new thread. See that button at the bottom that says [Catalog], click it. lrn2topic

>>10867509
Fair enough friend. In regard to human spaceflight, any new news on New Hoeizon probe? It passed Ultima Thule 7 months and a few days ago... Is the science packadge downloaded from the DSN yet?

>>10867520
>has the DSN done [thing] yet
easy guess, no

>Soviets are gone
>no one to race
>...
>dude what if we raced ourselves lmao

vertical transport confirmed. They're going to have to relocate some overhead wires at KSC/Cocoa...

>>10867574
I'm not going to kremlinology that statement to death but in my opinion you're a retard
whenever Musk makes a statement like that the only assumption to make is that is what he currently thinks will happen

>>10867574
I mean they are both right by the sea, can they not transport it full height by barge?

>>10867578
it's easier to transport a tall thing with a small footprint than the opposite. Vertical transport makes sense to me. It's not like they'll have to tear down bridges.

Plus, the whole thing is built vertical, it'll be assembled vertical on the pad. The whole thing is vertically done.

>>10867585
the question was about the build tho
I would completely believe that Starship will only ever be sideways when it's not on the ground, but don't jump to conclusions

>>10867588
>>10867578
oh damn you're right, I'm blind. Misread the tweet
"build" is vertical, it says nothing about transport. my bad.

>>10867589
it's alright, you're very correct that vertical transport makes the most sense, even though it'll be a pain in the butt

>>10867591
hey if they could discretely move the CIA's A-12 through desert roads they can move a big tin can a couple blocks at the cape

fairing catch attempt tomorrow

>>10867597
What fairing? I wasn't aware of anything launching tomorrow, am I just out of the loop?

>>10867625
AMOS-17

>>10867625
F9 with the free ride for Spacecom. Amos-6 replacement.
I'll have the launch thread up before the launch. No landing for the 1st stage unfortunately

>>10867628
I hope the mission goes flawlessly and then the satellite explodes ten seconds after deployment

>>10867627
>>10867628
Oh neat, thanks for the update anons,

>Clearly, Autry said, the entry of SpaceX with a rocket that has flown reliably dozens of times will further squeeze oxygen from the market. "I don't think that's good for the industry, but I understand why they are doing that themselves," he said. "It does put pressure on an already crowded field. On the other hand, it answers the Chinese question and makes their pseudo-commercial players look less attractive for this market."

this kills the Chinaman

>>10867660
I love Autry, I follow him on Twitter and he has a massive hate boner for China.

Any updates from depot anon?

>>10867682
I was extra busy today sorry

>>10867684
No worries senpai keep us updated

>>10865842
what he said

>>10867412
>I can't possibly conceive of anything going wrong with a plan to add an atmosphere and weather patterns to a place covered in sandpaper grit
It is because of the lack of those that it is sandpaper grit in the first place.

>>10867631
Totally

We need to manufacture fuel in orbit from materials in space.

>>10867905
You mean solarsail?

https://spacenews.com/oneweb-founder-wyler-calls-for-responsible-smallsat-operations/
>“I’m really not a fan of just launching stuff in space to raise money, and launching stuff in space that’s not finished or not ready or vetted,” OneWeb founder Greg Wyler said, in an apparent reference to SpaceX.

seething

>>10867988
Absolute seethe

>>10866604
He means clamped too early right after birth, leading to a supposed drop in intelligence. Basically the new "smoothbrain", but with less scientific backing.

>>10866939
You sound like you could run for congress against the guy who thinks Guam will tip over

>>10867988
Oh so he's not a fan of space projects in general then? At some point after all the autistic puttering down on the ground you have to send an as-yet untried vehicle up into space and cross your fingers that it works the way you intend it to. You will have either done a good enough job that your system is sufficiently capable or it will suffer issues in space that can't be tested for on the ground and you'll have to gather as much information on those as possible and iterate on your design.

>Starship will literally be a water tower flying to space
Elon will finally have killed the destructive meme that everything besides the engines of your rocket has to be high-tech.

>>10867988
I can feel the seethe through my PC screen kek

>>10867876
An atmosphere would still take millions of years to smooth out the dust grains by blowing them around.

>>10867905
>from materials on the Moon and Mars
fixed that for you, we're not at a point yet where it makes sense to do any kind of asteroid mining.

>>10867988
Does OneWeb even have any chance? I mean, their biggest competitor also happens to own the world's most economical launch vehicle, which they can sell to themselves for marginal costs.

>>10866853
"FUH
D???"
cant read that

>>10866853
that's a tough one, you should use a bigger font when you make them, or different colors maybe

>>10868075
Shoulda taken the SLS route of develop forever, never launch

>>10868119
shelby go home

>>10868118
Not sure without knowing the details, but OneWeb can still compete with the quality of their service or they can offer other services with their network that Starlink won't or can't. Not sure if they can compete on price since SpaceX seems to focus on offering cheaper services overall. Hard to tell.

Seems like alot of SpaceX competitors are surprised by their development rate.

>>10868119
Must say fuel depot

>>10868125
>Seems like alot of SpaceX competitors are surprised by their development rate.
Seems like everyone in the entire space industry is being blindsided by SpaceX more and more every day

>>10868130
SpaceX needs to make some propellant depots then.

I expect there will be lots of megaconstellations that survive. Countries and businesses dont want to cede to spacex so they will prop up competitors. e.g. Telesat is DOA but because its from Canada, the government there has decided to provide it with enough funding to keep it afloat.

>>10868207
More competition is a good thing. SpaceX shouldn't have a monopoly, that runs into all sorts of problems.

>>10868212
Elon said they’d be happy to launch other constellation’s satellites

>>10868216
True, but that might not seem right to some constellations. Then again, OneWeb is launching their stuff on a rocket made by a country that has restricted internet and has expressed that constellations will not offer their services there.

>>10868084
I'm still a little disappoint that Elon didn't use a concrete mixer as a capsule.

>>10868118
>which they can sell to themselves for marginal costs.
...while at the same time testing improvements to the launch vehicle to make it even more economical.

>>10865848
Well actually raptor can only run on methalox.

>>10865793
what ever happened to this thing?

>>10868263
It got dropped when it failed to show results. Mainly because reactionless drives are impossible.

>>10868266

NEWS FLASH IMPORTANT L2 INFORMATION BELOW:

Starhopper will retire after the 200-meter hop. Will be cannibalized. The shell of the vehicle may be displayed like Grasshopper is at McGregor.

The initial plan is to hop to the LZ, leave Hopper there and prepare the launch pad area for Starship Mk1.

>>10868257
yuh, he knows he was just trollin

Honestly a methalox Shuttle would have made more sense anyway simply due to the reduced tank volume and mass, despite the corresponding reduction in Isp. The ideal Shuttle-style stack in my opinion would consist of a large high thrust methalox first stage (no boosters required) side-mounted to a smaller methalox-powered orbiter with a pair of vacuum optimized engines. In the 70's they were considering winged fly-back boosters but nowadays we'd just have the booster do a propulsive landing somewhere instead. Methalox is actually storable on-orbit without a sun shield, unlike hydrolox, so you wouldn't need a separate OMS propulsion system for maneuvers.

Assuming the orbiter had a dry, empty mass of 100 tons and a propellant mass of 600 tons, it would be able to get about 6 km/s of delta V when pushing a 50,000 kg payload, about double that of Shuttle. The first stage reusable booster would need to be able to supply the other 3.5 km/s of delta V needed to reach Earth orbit while also keeping at least a few hundred meters per second of delta V after separation in order to perform the reentry and landing burns. Assuming this booster alone had a dry mass of 250 tons, kept 200 tons of propellant in the tanks for burns after separation, and was pushing the entire fully-loaded orbiter with no assistance, the full stack on the pad would weigh 3500 tons and just before stage separation at 3460 m/s would weigh 1200 tons. The Booster would need 42,875 kN of thrust, or about 22 Raptors worth, to achieve TWR ~1.25. The booster would have 1900 m/s of delta V after stage separation, more than enough to do a down-range propulsive landing after a decent reentry burn. The Orbiter would be able to reach a final velocity of >8500 m/s with a 50 ton payload, and therefore 50 tons would not be the actual maximum payload this vehicle could launch (I can't be bothered to work backwards and find the actual maximum payload desu).

>>10868300
Makes sense, Starhopper doesn't really have a point beyond proving that Raptor can control a vehicle in flight, especially since they're gonna have the Starship prototypes ready quite soon.

>>10868300
Makes sense, since mk1 will be done soon. No reason to contribute testing legacy starship hardware

>>10868300
I guess the hopper was less to test the raptors and more as a proof of concept for the build process.

>>10868300
Remember back when some people were saying that starhopper was a fake rocket? I wonder how they feel now?

Today is a good day; a double launch. First up is an Ariane 5 launch and a couple of hours aftewards, a Falcon 9.

>>10868300
Not surprised. It's certainly done its job as something that could fall over or blow up and there would be no major loss other than maybe a good engine (failure would probably have been caused by the engine anyhow), while they get better at vehicle assembly.
I suppose the question now is where will the next test flight be, Boca or Cocoa?

>>10868301
>side-mounted
u wot m8? Side mount was a big problem with Shuttle. If you want to lift up humans, it's a Bad Idea™.
Anyhow SRB was a political requirement, gotta keep those ICBM guys employed.

>>10868357
>absolute thicc
>absolute shit a getting things to LEO

why

>>10868371
>look at this duude, he fell for the hydrogen meme
>ooh nono no no, uuh uuh uuh uh

>>10868369
It's pretty much the only thing about what I laid out that's even Shuttle anymore, if you put it on top then you've just got a smaller Starship SH. I agree that side-mounted orbiters are dumb.

Are the mk1 and mk2 the only orbital prototypes? I thought musk mentioned that there was a third location?

>>10868369
Oh also, since methalox is much warmer and easier to insulate than hydrolox, you'd probably not have to worry nearly as much about foam strikes. Honestly why did Shuttle's ET not have some kind of fabric outer layer anyway? Maybe because it'd add weight, but I'd add ten tons to the thing if it meant eliminating a failure mode. With a methalox booster instead of a hydrolox ET I'd bet the use of less foam plus an outer fabric jacket would actually still lead to a lighter dry mass than what Shuttle had anyway.

>>10868371
Probably because of the overall higher efficiency and lower thrust of Ariane v compared to similarly sized rockets. The higher efficiency and lower thrust requires Ariane to fly in a very steep trajectory. This is great for GSO payloads as the orbit is pretty far out and thus get more benefit from the efficiency. However, steep low thrust launches aren't good at going to LEO as more time is spent gaining tangential velocity which is less efficient than going to LEO on a shallower trajectory.

>>10868397
It's not just the foam, there is no good way to make a launch escape system for a side-mount shuttle.

>>10868397
>Honestly why did Shuttle's ET not have some kind of fabric outer layer anyway?
The tank was painted, but the paint was dropped to gain a "massive" 272 kg of payload.

>>10868406
To add to this, the dropped paint also probably saved on costs. Which for the Shuttle, cost cutting was needed. Sadly though, the actual expensive stuff on the Shuttle was never really fixed (probably because doing so would upset contractors and may convince Congress to cancel the Shuttle).

>>10868398
Bruh, Ariane V has a really high liftoff TWR, and by the time the boosters burn out and separate the vehicle is already high and fast enough that TWR doesn't really affect the launch profile whatsoever. The real reason Ariane V gets about 6 tons less into LEO compared to Falcon 9 is because despite being yuge, that core stage only holds ~158 tons of hydrogen and oxygen. At liftoff, the solid boosters comprise both the majority of the thrust contribution and the majority of the mass of the vehicle. Since solid boosters have garbage efficiency, this increased mass does not translate to increased payload mass fraction. While the core stage propulsion is certainly more efficient than that on Falcon 9, the sheer lack of propellant mass to work with means it can't make up the difference. The Ariane V only becomes competitive with F9 in terms of mass delivery when you consider very high delta V missions with reduced payload mass, which is owed to Ariane V's small but highly efficient hydrolox upper stage.

A very similar dichotomy exists between Falcon Heavy and Delta IV Heavy. The Delta is overall bigger (though a bit shorter) and uses much more efficient engines on all stages, however it gets less than half of the payload to orbit compared to Falcon Heavy, simply due to the fact that Falcon Heavy uses a much larger mass of a less efficient but denser propellant combo. Because of the difference in propellant mass, Delta IV Heavy doesn't out-perform expendable Falcon Heavy in terms of maximum payload to ANY given orbit even if you consider things like direct-to-Pluto launch.

Also, both Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy are less than half as expensive as their direct competitor launch vehicles, with expendable FH in particular being about a third as expensive as Delta IV Heavy for about twice the payload mass.

>>10868426
Sorry. I'm not too familiar with Ariane so I just guessed based on previous knowledge.

>>10868403
Then don't make one, yeet. In my methalox Shuttle design, there's no solid boosters, and the orbiter itself has a high power methalox propulsion system built in, so in the event that the launch booster fails the two vehicles separate and the orbiter fires up its engines to move away and to burn off excess mass until it's light enough to perform a landing. In the event of a total vehicle breakup destroying all propulsion capability, the crew cabin is designed to be robust enough to survive the breakup (like Challenger's did), and every seat is equipped with an ejection motor and a parachute, to be used once the cabin has fallen back down into the atmosphere. Each astronaut is strapped into their seat in full pressure suit plus umbilical connection to the life support system with the expectation that they may need to perform such an ejection abort, and the system will automatically trigger after a breakup once the outside atmospheric pressure reaches a certain value, whether the astronaut is conscious or not.

>>10868392
don't think so

>>10867988
So let me get this straight, the one party that can launch proof of concept hardware to prove their capabilities and attract investors *shouldn't* do so. No, instead the best way is to handwave your way into a pile of cash and THEN launch. Ok then.

>>10868517
>No, instead the best way is to handwave your way into a pile of cash and THEN launch.
It worked for SLS.

From SpaceX’s official NSF account on L2:

SN9 and SN10 almost ready to ship to McGregor. Production ramping up.

>>10868535
hol' up nigga, you're saying they have SN 7 and 8 in the pipeline already?

>>10868535
SpaceX has an official account on L2?

>>10868542
they could be in this very thread right now you know.
reading.
...posting.

>>10868535
shit's getting real

I can't be more fucking ready

>NuGen launches self-funded entrepreneurial effort to develop a 20 MWe mini reactor with an eye on its potential use to power landing sites on the Moon and Mars. It also has plans for terrestrial applications.

https://www.energycentral.com/c/ec/mini-reactors-are-going-places-and-pack-lot-power

>>10868551
20 MWe is enough to refuel 20 Starships during Mars synod.

>>10868431
For reference, to get the same amount of propellant mass, a hydrolox rocket needs to be about ten times the volume of an equivalent-mass kerolox rocket and about 6x more voluminous than a methalox rocket. Keep in mind that a hydrolox rocket would need less propellant mass to accelerate the same payload to the same velocity as a kerolox or methalox rocket, however it would still be carrying much larger tanks and thus would need more propellant mass than you may otherwise assume due to the extremely low density of liquid hydrogen (just 70 kg per 1000 liters). Also note that propellant mass is not expensive even for specialty chemical combinations, while hardware (the tanks the propellant needs to hold) is very expensive, so even though liquid hydrogen gives the best specific impulse it is often simultaneously the more expensive option as a result.

>>10868386
Starship Super Heavy is just bigger, vertical landing, Shuttle anyway

Falcon 9 is on pad

>>10868553
1 MWe supply for 1.5 years is ~13.15 GWh, is that enough to supply the Sabatier reactor with the hydrogen mass needed to make (20x240,000 kg) 4800 tons of methane? The LOx comes from the electrolyser and the Sabatier reaction (CO2 + 4H2 with nickel catalyst -> CH4 + 2H2O) powers itself once you get it hot and running. Unfortunately you have to split the water over and over in the process of stripping the oxygen off of the carbon dioxide and making your methane, but I guess it doesn't really change the numbers.

>>10868540
On the test stand

>>10868563
It's more advanced in every way
>they even solved the icing problem

>>10868542
Yes, it’s RocketManX

Cocoa Starship

>>10868438
designing the whole crew cabin able to shear off clean into an aerodynamically stable shape is important here, if it's got little bits attached and starts tumbling as it enters that's a black zone

>>10868574
Mueller has said that they need a megawatt, autists at NSF arrived at a similar number.

>4800 tons of methane

1100 tons of propellant according to wiki, most of which is oxygen.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starship_(spacecraft)

>>10868582
Did they wall in all four sides? What is the point of making it tall like that if you can't get a tall object in or out?

So what comes after Starship+Superheavy have seen 8-10 iterations and are old hat? Gigaship?

>>10868577
well, it doesn't have any solid rocket boosters so I don't know how you can say that
and whatever happened to aluminum, the metal of the future?
>>10868542
they have three or four posts in the non-paywalled sections of NSF as well
>>10868593
isn't the front a big door

>>10868593
It's worst than that, they trapped the crane inside.

D E P O T
E O
P P
O E
T O P E D

>>10868593
yeah, i am confusion

>>10868593
>>10868595
>>10868598

>YFW its not a building but the frame for Starship 2.0

>>10868608
nah, looks like water tower to me

>>10868594
well, I don't think they'll quite have the whole reusability thing nailed down after only 10 iterations
anyway, then space gets boring and becomes a vacation spot for rich people and we're properly in the space age now

>>10868603
You're on your last straw, Fourchan!

>>10868588
It just needs to be nose-heavy enough that the thing points nose-forward even if a significant chunk of the orbiter remains, or even the entire orbiter in the case that it simply lost propulsion entirely and they fail-safe vented the tanks (using a pair of pyrotechnic valves on each propellant tank that can be blown manually, remotely, or automatically under whatever circumstance).

>>10868593
Maybe it's not for putting Starship inside, maybe it's just for storing things that shouldn't get wet/exposed.

>>10868623
Starship has huge refueling pipes on the tail end for emergency prop dump, but the big danger is that the astros eject downwards

lunch thread up
>>10868624

>>10868591
Yes, I know that the total propellant load for a Starship is 1100 tons (though that's probably changed since 2017, along with everything else). I was specifically taking 240 tons of methane per Starship and multiplying by 20 Starships to get the total fuel mass; the oxygen is made effectively as a by product. The total propellant mass required for 20 Starships is of course 22,000 tons.

>>10868603

>>10868630
Remember I'm not talking about Starship here, I'm talking about a hypothetical methalox based Space Shuttle that was built in an alternate universe where NASA engineers realized that hydrogen was a meme propellant before it was too late.

>>10868645
you mean where the Air Force didn't fuck the project AND NASA realized that hydrogen was a meme propellant? They STILL haven't figured that out yet

>>10866807

Read the In The Balance series by Turtledove.

> impossibly old species of alien lizards lands automated probes on Earth circa 800 anno domini
> sees guys in iron armor riding horses, chuckles and sends the invasion fleet
> the fleet lands in 1942
> how did these monkeys develop tanks, radios and aircraft in a paltry 1100 years?!?!
> how did they manage to take out our landing craft with an artillery shell the size of a phone booth?!?!
> what do you mean they stole plutonium?!?!
> fucking shit! That missile came from under the water! How? Why?
> what do you mean "half our population is hooked on a native drug and the humans are selling it to them?!?!

It's slow, but hilarious.

>>10868648
I know, it's pie-in-the-sky type stuff. See >>10868301 for my breakdown of what a methalox Shuttle system could have been. TLDR, it's heavier but way more effective, can launch something like three to four times as much payload, doesn't expend any stages and has enough mass margin that you can do things like reinforce your foam insulation to prevent any possibility of debris strikes on the orbiter TPS.

>>10868655
Sort of reminds me of the Janissaries novel(s) by Pournelle & Co.

>>10868662
yes I already read the thing, it's fun stuff, I hope somebody does a flyback upper stage sometime soon
a Shuttle-Saturn for the modern age

>>10868655
Sounds like a HFY circlejerk honestly

>>10868667
I dunno if anyone ever will, now that propulsive landing is proven it seems hard to compete with using wings.

>>10868675
gentler landings for people, dreamchaser as a complete upper-stage
if you can make it cheap it'll find a market if space goes where we think it will

>>10868679
Hmm, maybe. I read 'flyback booster' for some reason, which I think you'll agree doesn't make sense anymore now that we can propulsively land them. Horizontal landing, fixed-wing orbiters would make sense as Earth-to-LEO passenger Shuttles, but only for that purpose IMO, where comfort is a factor as you suggest. On that note Elon was saying a little while ago that they could make point-to-point suborbital transport much more economical if they used Starship upper stages only instead of Starship+Booster, and I wonder if to increase user base they'd consider a fixed wing horizontal landing Starship specifically for E2E?

>>10868667
speak of the devil
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xFx5eJYv1E

And another one involving space plane mating nsfw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hCfGXEi91dI

>>10868670
Welcome to Turtledove books

>>10868714
no, P2P Starship needs to be VTVL for a few reasons, although I think it benefits greatly from an improved hypersonic L/D
reasons:
1. commonality with starship orbiter
2. you're essentially trying to make a recoverable SSTO, as range increases the speed required quickly approaches orbital, you need all the ratio you can grab onto

>>10868726
KSP is not spaceflight

>>10868726
>And another one involving space plane mating

HOP WHEN

>>10868730
It illustrates my thought experiment in engineering

>>10868582

Assembling a giant, groundbreaking rocket in full view of anyone with a camera must be like fucking your girlfriend with the hotel window open. You know everyone can see and you want them to.

tune in to watch ESA fail again:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQ8HecMG2qs
t-8 bings

>>10869022
The presenter sounds like he watches a lot of golf

>>10868641
kek

I don't even watch launches anymore, unless it's a new rocket. I watch for the landings.

>>10869131
what is this image so I can tag it properly in my meme database

>>10869145
filename

>>10869214
Robert Fripp (guitarist from some famous rock band I've only ever heard of because Araki named a stand after them) dressed as a robot on some game show?

>>10869219
how specific are your meme tags

>>10869235
as specific as I make them?

>>10868670
>>10868728
Turtledove balances it out a bit with his short story Vilcabamba, which is basically the opposite of a HFY story.

https://archive.fo/20130204143041/http://www.tor.com/stories/2010/02/vilcabamba

Personally, I think the alien invasion story that does best job of creating invaders that are both a serious threat, but still plausible to beat by humans, would be Footfall, by Niven & Pournelle. That has the aliens show up via fusion powered slow-boat from a nearby star; more advanced tech, but limited logistics and herd instinct that drives them to want humans to just submit rather than just orbital drop everything (though they do plenty of that as well.)

>>10868593
Faraday cage? Idk

>>10868582
you think that bullet is big? wait until you see the gun!

rocket lab reusability is happening

>>10869406
is that their big announcement at the smallsat conference?

>>10869423
yes

>>10868263
It got black helicoptered and "nothing to see here"ed

>>10869433
Hopefully they don't run into shock heating problems, their first stage goes pretty fast at stage sep

>>10869437
that was the entire contents of the video, is "the issue is shock heating, we're studying it to see if we can keep that plasma knife away from our fragile carbon fiber booty"

>>10869439
I've heard stainless steel is a pretty good protective material

>>10869439
I admit I didn't watch any of their shit lol

>>10869423
BIG ANNOUNCEMENT AT SMALL SAT CONFERENCE, MEDIUM CROWDS EXPECTED

>>10869447
nice meme

>>10869447
enormous if huge

>>10869543
>>10869447
With guest star Biggie Smalls

SpaceX stream is live

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZh82-WcCuo

>>10869543
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ydPNfN8PeI

new >>10869665