/sci/ - Science & Math

god bless america and SpaceX (but not ULA or Boeing)

https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-to-host-preview-briefings-interviews-for-first-crew-launch-with-spacex

Welcome to the future, boys and girls.

36 days to go for launch. With every passing day, the hype increases!

>>11586719
Thank god. It’s ridiculous that US astronauts have been going to orbit in craft that belong in a museum

>>11587025
Our military aviation is the same way because feeding useless fat baboons is apparently "mandatory spending" but national defense is "discretionary spending."

>>11586783
fpbp

>NOOOOO YOU CAN'T JUST NUKE YOUR WAY TO THE STARS WE SPENT 75 YEARS TELLING YOU HOW BAD NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY IS
>ha ha torch drive go boom

>>11586719
How many solo human flights have there been, all time?

Mercury (6)
Vostok (6)
X-15 (2, or 13 counting the ones above 50 miles by Burger standards)
Shenzhou 5 (1, Liwei)
Soyuz 1 (1, Komarov, RIP)
Soyuz 3 (1)
SpaceShipOne (3)

Any others?

>>11587096
I think that's about it. Once you have the spare thrust for redundant wetware it makes sense.

>>11587105
Get surgery for those estrogen tits elon

>>11587083
Nuke cuckoldry is the biggest shame of the last 50 years

>>11587003
where are the hose connections for these suits?

>>11587105
Who’s that

>>11587166
thigh

>>11587105
who

i would be ecstatic to see more pictures of titan's surface. i wanna see a methane lake so bad you have no idea
how will we send and recieve information without a relay like cassini was to huygens?
hang in there, titanchads. we'll get our day. we may be older, but we'll get our day.

>>11587224
Titan is not real

>>11587228
how?

https://tass.ru/kosmos/8282283
So how likely will this reusable Soyuz-LNG(Methalox) with wings actually get made?

>>11587169
>>11587205
>2020
>Don't know how to reverse image search
kys

>>11587224
>how will we send and recieve information without a relay like cassini was to huygens?
ring bounce and a lot of error correction

>>11587105
Stay away from him, horny girl.
We need him to stay focused.

>>11587260
Given the abysmal state of Russian aerospace R&D these days I'm going with 5% chance.

>>11587260
>https://tass.ru/kosmos/8282283
You maybe suprised by how few people here can read russian.
It's sad, I know.

>>11587260
Unlikely. Rogozin has promised many things over the last decade but most of them never came to fruition.

>>11587299
tl;dr - it's in the very early R&D stage (they just started assembling an engineering team) and they plan to do a sub scale proof-of-concept first to assess the merits of reusability and shuttle-style landing.

Why are spaceplanes such a mess? It should be possible to create a spaceplane that has its own engine and can maneuver itself around in orbit without needing a service module at all, right?

>>11587315
You may be interested in this.
https://www.space-walker.co.jp/service

>>11587321
That’s cool. I wonder why the tailfins are like that.

>https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/g5avrp/dragon_xl_space_tug_concept/
This guy has it backwards. The dragon 2 would be docked with the dragon xl the other way around, so that astronauts could move freely between dragon 2 and dragon xl. The dragon 2's heat shield side would have a lunar lander on it for missions like that.

>>11587337
you have to go back

>>11587312
So reusability may be a ways to go, but any idea on the engine?

>>11587366
There's little info in the article tech-wise. Just the fact that the engine is methane-based and payload to LEO will be 10 tons.

>>11587383
Yeah, apparently it's sourced from an interview with Rogozin. No idea how to get that though. Just waiting for twiter now.

>>11587383
Way too low

>>11587260
Based Elon stirring up even the Russian bog of the space industry

>>11587503
21m in height? That's pretty short. Cool wings though.

>>11587503
>>11587542
>Tfw wing blocker loose during ascent due to vibrations

MAX Q GANG

>>11587542
Well it's "light" class whatever that might mean. Pic might be some sort of small scale demonstrator as well.
Apparently it has a dedicated jet engine to return to landing site under its own power while not being limited by rocket engine throttling shenanigans and with much lower fuel consumption.

>>11587563
Got to wonder what's the payload hit though. Wings + jet engine weight compared to say Rocket Lab's Electron helicopter grab with a 10% payload hit.

>>11587062
Should be flat. FH is the busty version.

>>11587224
>NASA keeps feeding us dreams of Titan balloons and boats and shit that will never happen
Hopefully Starship makes some of this shit real. I want to see Mars and the Moon colonized but I just want to see more of Titan period.

>>11587583
The dude made F9 the elder sister.

>>11587062
>>11587598
I prefer this one.

>>11587598
Should have two loli as side boosters.

>>11587605
Loli's are for small launchers.

>>11587612
Wonder if he'll make an electron gothloli.

>>11587621
He's focusing on making it a VN for now. Electron will have to wait for Vol. 2 for sure.

>>11587627
>spicy redhead long march
>burns your house down if you fuck with her

>>11587627
I took the liberty of fixing Long March.

>>11587627
where is rocket lab rocket lab ?

>>11587288
I swear to god if a wahmen fucks over Mars I will be absolutely apocalyptic.

>>11587503
>>11587563
>>11587575
The wing definitely doesn't inspire much confidence, i can see it getting redesigned since it's still early stages, maybe having the wings hugging the rocket gridfin style and then opening and turning 90 degrees to function like a wing for horizontal landing
Though i wonder why try horizontal landing when every company out there is going for vertical landing

>>11587681
No decent software base? It reminds me of the weirdo contraptions everyone was considering in the 90s before SpaceX said "just control the rocket real good, dummy"

>>11587627
>New Shepard
I giggled

>>11587686

>>11587681
Vertical landing got its own drawbacks, mostly due to fuel reserve requirements and having a downrange landing pad if you're not doing a boostback burn. Maybe this will allow it to fly back to launch site without having to boostback and having a downrange landing pad.

>>11587503
i have definitely built this in ksp

>>11587105
his a big guy

this is now a Soyuz thread

>>11587824
sorry forgot to post pic

>>11587681
>Though i wonder why try horizontal landing when every company out there is going for vertical landing
Probably to pull experience from Baikal.

>>11587824
>blocks ur path

>>11587503
>>11587260

>Given our geographical specificity, the step should sit on an airplane, rather than a" vertical candle.

It's going to be a rocket-shaped space-plane, piggybacking an Antonov.

Hey, if it works it works, hopefully they've realized it's not viable to just keep shitting out R7s.

>>11587838
>only has one pressurized compartment to house the crew

BLOCKS YOUR PATH

>>11587838
Elon really should put a decal with a trampoline sporting a Roskosmos logo on the first proper Crew Dragon mission.

>>11587846
Elon's enough of a madlad to do it, but NASA would be apoplectic lol

>>11587105
what an absolute alpha chad, tall as shit, only person who beat baldness, looks more or less ok even while doing evidently 0 excersise and smart as shit, no wonder all girls are desperate to get their wombs filled to the brim with his alpha seed, i mean thats a guaranteed genetic superiority.

Also is nice and original of him to go more for brunete goth style girls rather than blonde dumb bimbos.

you can clearly tell he will impregnate her and his gf wont even have a problem because she knows she cant stop the absolute alpha chad

>>11587845
would it be possible to redesign the orbital module, so it can be used for space station expansion?

>>11587627
the big ones should be disproportionaly busty. like, saturn V, N1 and Starship should be exxageratedly buxomy and catty, making the smaller boosters uncomfortable, and for the love of god just make porn of it already

>>11587852
Hey, Roskosmos started it.

>>11587627
also make electron as a tanned guro loli

>>11587627
>VN
>not a dating sim

Disappointed.

>>11587863
>a dating sim in which you play as a time travelling werner von braun trying to fuck those rockets

>>11587856
dont see why not
but also the proton is already good at that

>>11587869
*blows up*

>>11587868
>Saturn9 calls you daddy

>>11587873
i think you got the wrong rocket

>>11587863
I actually got it wrong. I checked the older tweets and it's classified as a Gal Game.

>>11587874
yeah taht would be the incest route.
>>11587877
imagine and anime mascot of the shuttle, it would be a short stacky girl of the "artsy" type thats unpredictable and very susceptible to weather

>>11587884
and what would the N1 be?

>>11587877
>90% success rate
the shuttle being a hunk of junk doesn't change the fact that proton was a trashfire

>>11587897
a coffin

>>11587901
proton had a success rate of 88% its still usable
also it dosent detract from its sexyness

>>11587897
A series of spectacular launchpad explosions.

>>11587915
>>11587905
noooooooooo i mean in aqnime form

>>11587911
> its still usable
It literally isn't.

>>11587917
Yes.
Something that blows up off screen. A running gag.

>>11587917
There's a really pretty corpse in it this time

>>11587922
this makes me sad

>>11587931
>Soyuz: Vlyat! N2-senpai sure is running late this morning!
>*muffled explosion in the distance*
>Soyuz: Ah well, nevermind.

>Definitely header tanks & nosecone on SN5, hopefully flaps too. Definitely flaps on SN6
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1252556301412052993


>implying SN4 isnt going to blow up during cryotesting

>>11587937
Sorry, N1.

>>11587761
Fuel reserve is irrelevant if your rocket capacity is overkill for payload.

>>11587845
Not sure but I believe dragon 2 has more internal volume than both the soyuz orbital module and descent module combined.

>>11587937
would the proton be soyuz's younger sister?

>>11587957
>be Soyuz
>be the only stable person surrounded by BOOM
Appropriately depressing

>>11587957
Technically, I'd call them all cousins since Soyuz, N1 and Proton were all made by different manufacturers.

>>11587983
so then it would be like vostok and voskhod are the parents and then the soyuz and the malnia and zond are the children

>>11587897
a clumsy landwhale

>>11588004
this, an insecure ugly girl promising to get it right the next time

>>11588013
she dosent need to be ugly anons why are you so mean

>>11588024
make her " anime ugly" like, just shy book nerd kind, flat chested and with glasses with nice small hips, ultra shy and insecure, very easy to manipulate calling her a failure.

"nooo im not a failureeeee, im not"
if youre not a failure then suck my dick
"waaah senpai dont be innapropiate.. oh.. well, you think? ok then maybe i should"

>>11588024
thicc babushka elf

>>11588004

>>11588030
i like this version the best :^)

>>11588032
Babushka means granny anon...

>>11588077
i think he knows

>>11588077
thats how grannys look in anime fantasy land

>>11588077

>>11588079
>>11588082
>>11588104

Shit right. My bad

>>11587083
Heinlein style propulsion would be literally god-tier. Those torch drives aren't even using antimatter, they're straight up direct energy conversion from normal matter to kinetic energy, with exhaust velocity 99.999999999999% the speed of light. If we could do that we could do single stage to 0.2 c and back easily.

>>11587337
fuck off
>>11588160
>this literal magic propulsion technology would allow us to do the impossible!
yes, anon
yes

>>11587333
Probably to keep them out of the air stream on reentry and later to make the thing more stable during horizontal gliding (an angled tail fin offers both yaw and pitch stability).

>>11587083
>>11588160

I get why pulse propulsion didn't get more attention given the geopolitical history and the resulting laws around nuke detonations, but it seems like the thing that sounds good on paper and eventually proves to be an engineering nightmare. Wouldn't the spaceship wear with the kind of strain sustained by the explosions? What about the radiation? How do you get that much weight in space with chemical rockets knowing nobody will let you use nukes to propel things in our atmosphere? How do you protect the nukes from spilling in case the rocket transporting them in orbit explodes in a suborbital trajectory?

>>11588223
>wouldn't the spaceship wear with the kind of strain sustained by the explosions
pusher plate takes the hit, it's very heavy
>radiation
enormous
pusher
plate
>how do you get that much weight in space with chemical rockets?
Orion can launch from the ground. Fuck the police, nuclear battleship. Don't like it? Get Nuked.
>how do you protect the nukes from spilling?
make sure they detonate if that happens

>>11588223
The latter two are the real issues of this design, as the wear and radiation are accounted for in the design.

>>11587710
>slow is smooth and smooth is fast
Hes says unironically as SpaceX continues to blast past them in terms of capability and development of new technology

>>11587838
Gosh darn that's pretty

>>11587897
Woman with big bobs and vagene but clumsy, constantly falling over. Comedic relief character.

>>11587921
They used it

>>11588254
Incontinent. Problem with her plumbing. Only for people with specific fetishes.
You sick fucks. etc.

>>11588030
She needs to be as tall and busty and beautiful as Saturn V, but extremely clumsy

>>11588223
>How do you get that much weight in space with chemical rockets knowing nobody will let you use nukes to propel things in our atmosphere?
Starship 18m variant
Processing of bulk materials on Mars and/or the Moon, sourcing only critical components from Earth

>>11588165
Yes, it doesn't real, but it's okay to dream

>>11588262
And they stopped without even having a replacement lined up. It just isn't feasible to feed 1+/10 of your payloads to the hypergolic chaos lords.

>>11587224
Titan is crazy. I love the idea of Dragonfly and I really want to see a Balloon mission sent there with the capacity to circumnavigate the whole body. We could see the dunes at the equator and the geomorphology of the polar lakes.

>>11588278
>NASA
>design is a Soviet Venera lander hung from a metal blimp
lmao

Upcoming Launches
>22 April - Starlink
>25 April - ISS resupply
>16 May - X-37B
>27 May - Dragon 2 crew

>>11588281
Yeah lmao I made this for a planetary science presentation. We had to do a mock mission proposal and I just used an airship with venera 3 thrown on the bottom

>>11587869
at the moment the orbital module doesn't have a inner hatch or what else that is called. meaning that once it's jettisoned you have a huge hole in it. complete reconstruction of the orbital module would be needed.

>>11588264
oh no she gonna BRAAAPPPP

would boobs stay firm longer in lower gravity?

>>11588327
Imagine the kerosmell

>>11588363
That's what bras are for.
So yes.

>>11588363
In general supposedly skin looks younger in microgee since there's less gravity pulling on it, so stuff that would sag normally like tits or a gut or bags under the eyes won't do so as much in zero gravity. The actual texture of skin though has to do with a combination of youth and health.

>>11588223
>How do you get that much weight in space with chemical rockets knowing nobody will let you use nukes to propel things in our atmosphere?
Lots and lots of Starships.

>>11588284
Pity the X-37B is on an Atlas this time. Wasn't the last launch on a Falcon 9?

>>11588400
I thought bras reduced the longevity of firm breasts

Can a nuclear thermal rocket based on fusion instead of fission SSTO and be better than a multistage rocket with the same technology?

>>11588439
no, there's probably no better fuel source than chemical rockets for escaping Earth's gravity well

>>11588443
Methane fueled reusable chemical rockets are almost infinitely renewable given Earth's ecosystem and a bit of electricity. Starship will be the gold standard for quite some time assuming it works.

>>11588439
nuclear thermal ISP and such is limited by materials technology
there's just an upper limit to how hot you can make the fuel before your engine burns up

>>11588451
you could probably do better with subcooled propane but yeah it's slim gains

>>11587827
>>11587824

It.
Just.
Works.

>>11587877
>trying to defend the proton by deflecting to an LV with a better success rate

>>11588223
behold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DSK_mymJvkM

>>11588467
people died on it tho

Starlink train

https://twitter.com/astritspanca776/status/1251844011058397184

>>11588471
>people died on a crew transport vehicle but not on a cargo transport vehicle
>this is somehow a profound statement

>>11587612
Pedophile, typical anime viewer

>>11588439
Just so I understand your question- are you asking if a SSTO could be better than multistage, if both were using nuclear thermal propulsion? If so, the answer is no. Multistage will always be better for payload and basically every other metric.

SSTO has the potential advantage of operational simplicity, given that you don't need to juggle stages. Hybrid space planes could possibly have quicker turnaround times than even a process-optimized Starship, meaning there could be a logistical niche for them to fill. The future of such space planes would probably be exclusively for ferrying passengers to LEO stations.

>>11588412
Yes, and it went perfectly.

>>11588438
myth, and it makes no sense that it would do that.

>>11588363
Fuck off coomer

>>11588551
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/259073#1
>“Medically, physiologically, anatomically – breasts gain no benefit from being denied gravity. On the contrary, they get saggier with a bra.”

Talk about space and space travel not bags of fat on chests you coomer incels

>>11588439
No, the basic problem of nuclear thermal rockets in general is that you're using a hot element to transfer heat into a propellant. Chemical engines can get away with retarded levels of exhaust heat flux because the thing that generates the heat IS the propellant, meaning all you need to do is cool the chamber walls and you're good.

In a nuclear thermal rocket, or any other thermal rocket, you're heating up a solid object in contact with a fluid. If you heat up the object to a greater temperature than its melting point, your engine shits itself out the nozzle and dies. The thing is, no material has a melting point as high as the temperature achieved in the chemical reactions we use for chemical engines. This means that all thermal engines must use a very light propellant, lighter than any chemical exhaust product, otherwise they are actually LESS efficient than chemical engines. Hence why most nuclear thermal rockets have been envisioned as using pure hydrogen.

As for fission vs fusion, fission definitely beats fusion. Fusion requires FAR more mass per unit heat energy generated, full stop. Even ignoring the issues of trying to rapidly exchange heat with a propellant, a fusion NTR engine would weigh far more than a fission NTR, and would not be more efficient. Remember that the NERVA engine built by the US in the 60's weighed a few tons and had a thermal power of over three gigawatts, and ITER (the worlds biggest fusion reactor, still under construction) will only produce five hundred megawatts of thermal power, and will weigh over 5000 tons.

>>11588579
how the human body reacts to low gravity is an important part of space travel. I'm sure there'd be a lot of people more willing to give going into space a chance if they knew it would keep their body young and limber for longer.

>>11588587
>As for fission vs fusion, fission definitely beats fusion.
So you're saying that NSWR is actually the best torch ship short of direct matter/antimatter conversion to photons?

https://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw56.html

>>11588606
Surgically remove breasts. Problem solved.

>>11588613
Fuck off tranny.
>>>/lgbt/

>>11588616
Fuck off coomer.

>>11588457
In terms of total density, maybe, but not Isp.
Regardless, actual per-launch performance (assuming each launch gets you meaningful payload to orbit) becomes less important than ease of reusability once you have a reusable rocket. If switching from one propellant to another increased payload by 10% but also increased launch costs by 10% or more, then you're effectively moving backwards. The best strategy is to target cost, not performance.
Take Falcon Heavy vs Delta IV Heavy. Delta IV has the better engines by a long shot. Delta IV Heavy gets more payload to orbit per kg of propellant than FH. However, Falcon Heavy gets more than twice as much payload to LEO, and more payload to ANY orbit, than Delta IV Heavy. FH also costs about a third as much as Delta IV Heavy.
Why? It's because despite having much less mass, Delta IV Heavy is a significantly bigger vehicle, using a propellant that is much more difficult to handle and use in an engine, and due to that propellant's low density needs to shave every fraction of a gram off of its structure in order to make any gains whatsoever over less efficient but more dense options.
The only time you target performance is if you NEED performance to accomplish the mission the vehicle is designed for, which in Starship's case is Mars missions. If SpaceX were not looking to send things to Mars they'd probably have just developed a new Merlin engine that used a torch igniter and methalox propellant, and clustered a shitload of them onto both parts of a large two stage to orbit vehicle.

>>11588626
in terms of ISP it's very close and it's better on density

>>11588613
no, gravity IS the problem. Although I can imagine all kinds of funky ways a child might get messed up going through puberty in low G. But as an already developed adult, going to low G should keep your limbs and stuff healthier. micro gravity is different

>>11588631
Flesh is the problem.

>>11588633
this is true

H

>>11588469
>that chungus stage
B A S E D

>>11588587
At least when comparing NERVA to ITER you're creating a bit of a false dichotomy. NERVA was a poorly optimized NTPR to begin with. Yes they did manage to get it to work but it's TWR was abysmal and far lower than the technological limitations would have allowed. Timberwind rockets for example had TWRs of 30, and the DUMBO rockets would have had TWRs similar to chemical bipropellant rockets. ITER is also not a good example to use, it seems essentially to be a glorified demonstrator. It's like saying that Chicago Pile no1 would make a bad NTPR that would compare terribly to a hypergolic rocket.

>>11588469
>has a drive that says "fuck you" to optimal transfer windows and mass fractions
>still uses expendable landers

>>11588469
>225 meganewtons of liftoff thrust
oh god, oh god I'm gonna UH, I'M GONNA LAAAAUUNCH
AAAAAAAAAGHH

>>11588538
Nah, he was asking if fusion NTR would be better than fission NTR, for any purpose including SSTO. The answer is a resounding 'nah'

>>11588569
fake news, even if your boobs get saggy in zero G they ain't gonna hang anywhere and they ain't gonna stretch because there's noooo gravityyyy

>>11588579
Hey, breasts are more than just bags of fat, there's also modified sweat glands that secrete nutritious fluids for infants

this thread made me wanna play ksp

>>11588611
"Best" in terms of high Isp and high thrust, probably. "Best" in terms of day-to-day travel between planets? Noooo. That shit is dirty enough that even in deep space you're going to reserve it for doing interstellar missions.

>>11588629
Sure, but then again in terms of theoretical Isp kerosene is actually better than methalox. The difference is practically achievable combustion efficiency. It won't be as difficult with propane as with kerosene, but it will certainly be more difficult than methane. There are other questions that will impact achievable Isp vs theoretical, such as how difficult is it to avoid coking in a FFSC engine using propalox?

Finally, if you manage to get your vehicle highly reusable, how much more reusable does a propalox vehicle need to be compared to a methalox vehicle in order to offset the increased propellant cost of propane compared to liquid methane? This is pretty far down the list but of course when you start talking about sub-100 dollars per kilogram price points the fuel cost actually starts to matter.

>>11588671
You're basically proving my point for me, dude. NERVA was built, so I talked about it and not the TIMBERWIND designs, which may not have actually been practical (maybe we'll find out someday). ITER meanwhile is basically a tech demonstrator and will achieve a maximum Q factor (basically energy produced divided by energy used to run the reactor) of 10, and a normal running factor of 5. You liken it to the Chicago Pile, but in reality it's more like EBR-1, a reactor that was designed to research fuel cycles and reactor control instead of generating electricity. The simple fact is, any fusion reactor that can produce more power than ITER (and we're really only interested in thermal power for NTR) would need to be either significantly bigger and thus heavier, or use more advanced magnet technology among other things.

In short, we had working NTR engines that were pretty much ready to be used in space and well studied designs for high thrust-to-weight ratio NTRs that would have been able to lift about 30x their own weight at sea level, which right there could have made SSTO feasible and maybe even practical. On the other hand, not a single design for a fusion powered NTR exists, because the technology simply doesn't lend itself to that purpose, and even if fusion reactors could be built with just as much power to mass ratio as fission reactors, they wouldn't offer any real advantage in efficiency because of the limits of materials.

Weren‘t they supposed to test SN4 yesterday and today?

Are liquid-core NTRs achievable with current technology? NERVA was solid core

>>11588772
The closures were only for an hour, so those are (or were) scheduled moves, rather than tests. Since the moves haven't happened yet, its safe to assume the schedule has slipped.

NASA making major changes to it's commercial LEO programs because they weren't good enough
https://spacenews.com/nasa-adjusting-its-strategy-for-leo-commercialization/

This new guy seems to like commercialization alot.

>>11588783
Relying on congress is a fucking joke and a bad one at that. Gotta have commercial interests involved or we're never getting anywhere. Like it or not.
Or you could you be like Norway and play with stacking literal fucking bottle rockets.

>>11588774
Liquid core doesn't help much, because you still need to contain the liquid in a solid, which means you're still limited by structural material melting points.

If you want to say 'fuck it' and not bother to contain the fuel in a solid structure, then you just skip liquid core anyway and go straight to open-cycle gas core, because it gets you up to around 50,000 Isp at high thrust to weight ratio and spews just as much radioactive shit as an open cycle liquid core. If you don't want to spew radioactive shit but want higher Isp than solid core, then what you want to do is have a gas-core contained inside a transparent 'lamp' that your propellant flows around and keeps quenched. This is a closed cycle gas core engine, aka a nuclear lightbulb. Efficiency around 1500 Isp would be achievable, decent TWR, you could probably do single stage to Moon orbit with these things, and if your SSTO had an on-board chemical propulsion system to boost off the pad you definitely could. Issues with nuclear lightbulb include be bulb being brittle and really wanting to melt unless you quench it really really fast, which means prompt shutdown capability is needed if the propellant stops flowing. Not an easy technology but maybe worth the effort. Would certainly make colonizing the Jovian moons much easier.

>>11588783
>“Within my office, CASIS was managed separately from our commercial crew program, which was managed separately from our commercial cargo program, which was managed separately, in many cases, from our commercial LEO development program,” he said. “We’re putting those all together so we can make sure they are synergistic.”
>"Maybe all of these inter-reliant teams should actually operate together so our communication isn't an absolute clusterfuck?"

Jesus Christ it's like Boing! programmers all over again, I thought this is why they made kids do those group research projects in high-school, so they'd learn that it's retarded to try and divvy up a project among separate teams that don't communicate.

>>11588783
I feel bad for him having to pretend the whims of congress are based on a rational assessment of their failings and not an abject dismissal of everything that isn't a jobs program. Sounds like he's doing good with what he has to work with, but it isn't much.

>>11588808
At least NASA is admitting that there is a problem and taking steps to resolve it rather than ignoring it like Boing.

>>11588828
Boeing is only the way it is because of the government being so easy on them

>>11588740
>This is pretty far down the list but of course when you start talking about sub-100 dollars per kilogram price points the fuel cost actually starts to matter.
For perspective, orbital lift costs for Starship are now within two orders of magnitude of the fucking postal service.

>>11588805
>Launching from Earth with nuclear powered anything, closed cycle or not
Just use a ferry instead of dealing with the headache.

Also doesn't all of this go out of the window when you stop worrying about containing the reaction? Orion and its derivatives, pellet-based magnetic confinement drives, laser sails, etc.

>>11588844
Orion pusher plate drives still need the plate to not fucking slag itself when nuked hundreds of times.

>>11588833
That's because they're the only major commercial aircraft manufacturer in the country.

>>11588844
>Just use a ferry instead
Yes, but people talk about using NTR for SSTO anyway, as if doing launch SSTO solves anything.
>Also doesn't all of this go out of the window when you stop worrying about containing the reaction?
To a degree, yes. Anything nuclear pulse however can't be used too close to Earth because it will burn the retinas of people on the ground. You also don't want to use really dirty shit like NSWR or open-cycle gas core NTR near any solid surface you like, and by 'near' I mean 'within several hundred thousand kilometers, minimum'.

>>11588853
That's easy though. When you're in vacuum the destructive potential of nukes drops off to almost nothing. All you do is time the charges to detonate at a distance from the plate such that the surface of the plate does not get hot enough to melt and you're golden. There are nuclear pulse thruster designs that use giant aluminized kevlar parachutes as thruster plates and get away with it because the nuke goes off about a kilometer away from the surface of the chute. The chute catches most of the shock-wave and jumps forward, dragging the vehicle behind it through elastic rigging. These designs are called 'Medusa' nuclear pulse thrusters and get much higher efficiency than Orion with higher TWR (so you can pack more payload and nukes) at the cost of reduced steering capability.

>>11588863
From what I’ve heard, there’s no real benefit to doing SSTO because you’ll have a worse payload fraction than a TSTO and both stages can be recovered. I can’t see it ever happening except on other worlds with weaker gravity wells or in some ludicrous extremely distant Star Wars future

NASA is going to announce a downselect or winner of the human lunar lander this week. My guess is that Dynetics either won or is downselected. Not sure about SpaceX.

>>11588879
which one is Dynetics? Who's on their team

>>11588855
Elon Musk starting an aircraft company when?

>>11588887
never

>>11588886
SNC

>>11588904
I would believe it
I would also believe Blue Origin's national team

>>11588873
Medusa also lacks the inherent safety factor of the giant solid collector between you and the string of nuclear explosions. You're just sailing into them.

>>11588874
You are correct. That's not going to stop people from thinking SSTO is the best and cheapest thing, even though they're wrong. Besides, even if we had magic 3000 Isp nuclear engines with no radiation hazard concerns to speak of, we still wouldn't use them for SSTO vehicles, we'd use them on the upper stages of big TSTO vehicles for the exact reasons you mentioned.

Where SSTO makes sense is on any world with Mars gravity or less.

>>11588893
he should do electric aircraft

>>11588887
At least a few battery breakthroughs from now.
Or, and this one is a much longer shot, when they start doing Sabatier on Earth to keep Starship running renewably, they'll have such a glut of methane that they will start finding weird things to do with it like methane fuel cells in everything.

>>11588879
As someone who doesn't know a hell of a lot about any of the bids, right now I feel like BO's team stands the best shot of winning the contract. They've got two defense giants, a newspace company, and a solid tech supplier. My main concern is that the lander has three components built by three different companies, so more room to go wrong.
Boeing has been shaky with NASA lately, Dynetics (and probably unannounced bidders, if any) is relatively small, and if SpaceX is in it without partners I feel like they wouldn't be invested enough to design a winning Artemis-tailored lander.

>>11588936
SpaceX also don't have any engines suitable for a lunar lander
no, super dracos don't count

>new lunar lander will be 1 x blue origin, 1x spacex, 1x lockheed, boeing disqualified due to cost/architecture/management issues

whats coming soon in terms of landing on other solar bodies?

we got shit boutta land on the Moon or Mars or somewehre else soon? I want to see some more space content

>>11588943
Raptor for main engine
SuperDracos when main engine shuts off

>>11588961
Curb your enthusiasm. We may yet get it all ripped away or postponed indefinitely due to MUH ECONOMY MUH PROGRAMS.

>>11588969
Ok doomer.

It’s a shame how few bodies we have images from the surface of

>>11588961
there's a few Luna missions in the pipeline but none are launching this year
there's a NASA Mars mission launching in the summer
Parker Solar Probe is still doing the thing
BepeColumbo did their Earth gravity assist and are on their way to Venus gravity assists or whatever it is that they do to get to Mercury
uhhhhhhhhhhh
>>11588962
they will not be bidding Starship

>>11588961
Mars 2020/Perseverance and a Chinese Mars rover are scheduled to launch this year. China also has a moon sample return coming up.

>>11588974
Starship also doesn't have superdracos, he's obviously talking about a hypothetical vehicle.

>>11588943
The 'muh dust' meme has gone so far people think SpaceX engines are going to blow up the moon if they're ever used anywhere near it now. All rockets do the same shit dude.

>>11588971
The economy isn't exactly looking good, man. We're in a recession, oil is looking grim as fuck. There will be lots of competition for every single fucking dollar on the budgets going forward.
This is not "doomer" or any bullshit like that, this is cold, hard logic because I know politics. I grew up in a household with a parent balls deep in politics from a very early age.

I also grew up in a recession. 25% fucking interest rates and the state had to buy up the banks because they had toppled over due to a credit bubble burst. There wasn't much money being spent on jack shit back then.

>>11588984
Vacuum Merlin is too powerful for a lunar lander sized to be launched on Falcon Heavy, anon, it has nothing to do with the dust meme

>>11588972
>>11588989
>I know politics.
translation: im one of the hundreds of million who read some shitty conspiracies online and think they are special, but i did not read any books or serious source about it.

>I grew up in a household with a parent balls deep in politics from a very early age.
Translation: my father is a loser and everyone knows it so he spent a lot of time talking to the only person he could impress, his idiot son.

>>11589009
Ok, don't be fucking surprised when funding shrivels up because of stimulus checks or all the fucking money printer tricks they pulled at the start.
Or all the never ending programs they're going to demand be funded in the wake of this shit.

Hard times are ahead and a moon landing is unfortunately way fucking down on the list of shit normies are willing to spend money on.

why is nasa budget like 20bil but us defense is 600bil for useless memes

>>11588989
>I know politics, I grew up watchin the news and I saw the bailouts!
lmao wow that's real special dude.
>oil is crashing, we're entering a recession, government budgets are tight
All of these things are true and should not surprise or terrify anyone. Oil is on a long slow decline that anyone could predict if they aren't a fucking retard. Recessions are a natural cycle. Government is no longer the sole arbiter of spaceflight.

>11589017
>Baby Chang-Poster's first time attempt to bait Americans into thinking they aren't getting anything worthwhile from the military, with intent to erode the nation's strategic advantage

>>11589018
>Government is no longer the sole arbiter of spaceflight.
Ok here we go again, "Commercial companies are magically going to take over NASA and get us to the moon and beyond".
Nice bait, fucking forget it.

>>11589029
>NASA is going to ever do anything relevant in rocketry again
This is the meme.

>>11589017
The worth of the dollar is directly tied to US defense. The more confident other countries are that the united states is going to be around to pay back their loans, the more likely they are to do business. That's it.

>>11589036
having nukes is enough of a deterrent, theres litearlly no need to even have a standing military anymore desu

just threaten nukes again and other countries will do whatever the US says

>>11589031
>Implying governments are ever going to give up their monopoly on prestige projects.
Our great great grandchildren can have this discussion if we ever get off this fucking rock.

>>11589029
I don't know if you haven't noticed this, but commercial space flight has dropped the cost of access to space significantly, something that NASA failed to do for decades. Pretty much every major currently relevant problem of space flight right now is that it is so expensive to send stuff to space even to LEO.

>>11589042
That threat doesn't pay off unless you actually nuke the first person who doesn't listen to you, it assures that 100% of everybody else on the planet hates you, and limits your ability to act to whatever you're willing to kill everyone in a several dozen mile radius to address.

>>11589048
we've already nuked another soverign country lmao

>>11589042
>having nukes is enough of a deterrent, theres litearlly no need to even have a standing military anymore desu
>Vietnam and Korea don't real

>>11589042
>don't have conventional military
>Iran cuts off Straits of Hormuz
>China, Western Europe, and India begin to collapse economically because no oil
>because of economic contagion, this leads to downturns in the US

or

>don't have conventional military
>PRC dabs on JMSDF in the South China Sea
>Japan concludes that they can't depend on the US any more and begins developing nuclear weapons
>because Japan and China hate each other and are autistic bugmen, they nuke each other

or

>don't have conventional military
>little green men take over Latvia and start adding parts of it to Russia
>Europoors can't do shit
>NATO splits apart
>US completely alone

etc.

>>11589050
And? This is a proposed doctrine shift. Nuking someone 70 years ago means absolutely nothing. It doesn't matter until you make the change to "listen to us or we nuke you," and someone else calls the bluff and gets nuked for it.

>>11589046
I don't know if you've noticed it but we haven't set foot on another stellar body since nineteen fucking seventy two.
Who gives a shit about satellite payloads when we're talking about prestige projects.

>>11587627
New Shepard a qt and for headpats

>>11589044
NASA will put astronauts and equipment on Starships and clap like everyone else.

>>11589066
Yes, and?
Doesn't mean SpaceX gets to use them for their own little projects other than shooting loads of starlink satellites into LEO.

That is of course, assuming they'll get it to work.

>>11589062
>complete inability to follow the trend line of progress, just whines
Smoothy.

>>11588943
They easily could actually, each "pack" of two develops 71kN of thrust at 100% throttle. Split the packs up into four individual engines in a quad cluster mount, add vacuum bells to them and you could land a vehicle more than twice as heavy as the original Apollo DS. A single "Vacuum Draco" could easily hoist an ascent stage back to the command vehicle. Another quad pack with vacuum bells would match or exceed the SPS for thrust and depending on how high the superdraco can be uprated in terms of pressure, they might even exceed it for ISP too, I can't for my fucking life easily find the vac-ISP of the SPS. They can also throttle extremely deep, down to only 20%, so you could use them on multiple sizes of lander as well due to the great flexibility in potential thrust.

>>11589074
Are you seeing a fleet of FH's sending payloads to Mars? How's that for a trend?
I mean, the rocket is quite capable of doing so, isn't it?

But they're not allowed.

>>11587853
>doing evidently 0 excersise
He bears the future of space travel on his shoulders, what other excersize could he possibly need

I just saw like 30+ sattelites in a straight line fly over my house in Germany, any idea what that was?

>>11589080
Starlink train. Choo choo.

>>11587503
oooh, swing wing. Where have I seen that before?

>>11589072
>Doesn't mean SpaceX gets to use them for their own little projects
NASA has neither the intention nor authority to stop them, in fact they will be right there with them because they basically don't have a choice.

>>11589076
>pressure fed hypergolic engine
not suitable for the artemis program

>>11589062
>I don't know if you've noticed it but we haven't set foot on another stellar body since nineteen fucking seventy two.
Yeah, because NASA has failed, and the commercial sector wasn't developed enough to do the heavy lifting.

>Who gives a shit about satellite payloads when we're talking about prestige projects.
Prestige projects would move to cheaper options if they're motivated enough by budget constraints. Just like what's happening now with Europa Clipper and GLS. There's also the case that if access to space is cheaper, then one doesn't need prestige projects to send landers to other bodies. An example is Beresheet, or the lunar customers that Rocket Lab is catering to.

>>11587083
full size image
>>11587163
it really is

>>11589080
it's the future

any other movies similar to The Martian where somebody has to survive on a non-earth planet, where it isnt just 'shoot da aliens'

Rockets are stupid
Rail gun launched vessels are superior

>>11588919
You're ten kilometers away from the point of detonation, which automatically means your ship has to deal with less gamma and neutron radiation than a classical pusher plate design even after taking the shielding effect of a ten inch thick plate of steel into account.

>>11587612
which are themselves based on the boosters for the H-IIA and B.
>>11587627

>>11589072
>SpaceX gets made
>constantly talk about sending people to Mars
>is a selling point for their popularity
>their drive to improve is centered on getting to Mars
>they'll even send their own people there if they have to
>by the way, did they mention that they're going to Mars?
>"Doesn't mean SpaceX gets to use [Starship] for their own little projects other than shooting loads of starlink satellites into LEO."

>>11589084
>NASA has neither the intention nor authority to stop them
Who the fuck said NASA would stop them. NASA is not the government.

>>11589101
Hype sells, doesn't mean they deliver.

>>11589082
Quick rundown on what they do?
Forgive my ignorance.

>>11589085
Oh, I wan't talking about Artemis, just a moon shot in general, considering how much better power systems and computers have gotten in terms of mass savings, and all the practice with orbital docking that Apollo and all the ISS trips have delivered it should be almost trivial even with vehicles like Atlas or Falcon 9, or now just Falcon Heavy to assemble a three piece vehicle for a moon shot. SPS, CM, LM.

>>11589112
Right now, not much. Satellite internet.

>>11589085
Because it would work lmaooo

>>11589055
Nuke Vietnam and nuke Korea lol

>>11589077
>Are you seeing a fleet of FH's sending payloads to Mars? How's that for a trend?
Why the fuck would they be spending gorillions of dollars to make shitty current gen landers, when they're actively developing a vehicle that will blow all of those efforts out of the water by orders of magnitude? And jesus christ you're a fucking retard. Launches increasing YoY, launch prices falling, development pace increasing, these are trends, not you making up random shit.

>>11589094
Please point to a real rail-gun launched vessel that can place payload into orbit for less money than a rocket, anon.

>>11589117
honestly I don't think pressure fed hypergolics have the performance to work for the Artemis program with how mass-constrained and how much extra dv they need

>>11589111
>Delivers Falcon 1
>Delivers Falcon 9
>Delivers drastic reduction in launch costs
>Delivers Dragon
>Delivers Falcon 9 Reusable
>Delivers even more cuts to launch costs
>Delivers Falcon 9 Heavy
>Will soon deliver Dragon 2, the cheapest human ride to orbit
Yeah, SpaceX has a long history of not delivering. They're totally not the dominant launch provider for LEO payloads.

Either way, I'm fucking out because it's late. Keep thinking that the government is going to let private companies steal their glory.

>>11589119
Actively developing a tincan that may or may not ever fucking fly? They need shitloads of stuff for a colony. Comsats, various junk for infrastructure etc.

To build a fucking colony on Mars, they're going to be launching shit years in ADVANCE of sending people. If you think they can pack everything in a fleet of starships and off you go, guess again.

>>11589072
>Doesn't mean SpaceX gets to use them for their own little projects

Yes it does. NASA has zero authority over private spaceflight doing their own missions independent of NASA. All they have to do is file the launch and orbit with the FAA and they’re green.

>>11589119
based

>>11589016
lol i hit the nail in the fucking center with full force hahahahahah

>>11589111
>Who the fuck said NASA would stop them. NASA is not the government.
The rest of the government doesn't give a shit. "Hey, we want to go to Mars, lol"
"Okay put a flag on it"

>>11589132
>NASA has zero authority over private spaceflight
Correct, but like I've stated since the start. THE GOVERNMENT will not let prestige projects go to private companies.
NASA is not THE GOVERNMENT. NASA is just a little department receiving government funding.

>>11589131
>Keep thinking that the government is going to let private companies steal their glory.
Have you missed that the US government wants more commercial involvement and use of resources in space even if it technically violates international treaties? The US government doesn't care if private boots touch the moon again before government ones do, because by the end of the day those boots are still American.

>>11589112
Starlink is basically SpaceX's funding mechanism for Starship + SuperHeavy.
>launch 60,000 satellites in LEO (no, that number was not a typo)
>sell 1Gbps internet with tolerable latency to anyone between the polar ice caps down on Earth
>transfer money to Starship division at market rates to cover launch costs

>>11589145
Last fucking post before bed.
Yeah, I'll fucking believe that when I see it. "Commercial involvement" so far is sending robot rovers to the moon.

>>11589149
Meanwhile SpaceX has a paying private customer waiting to be sent around the moon, and the government hasn't stepped in. Again, the government isn't going to stop private space flight.

>>11589153
I strongly suspect the poster you're replying to is not American and doesn't understand how our government works.

>>11589131
>Comsats
Literally Starlink, already part of the plan.
> they're going to be launching shit years in ADVANCE of sending people.
Also already in the plan, unmanned Starships carrying supplies for a manned mission. Trying to do this job with FHs would be a joke.
> If you think they can pack everything in a fleet of starships and off you go, guess again.
>I don't know why but you can't just DO that! I mean, space is HARD

>>11589153
they also have a dragon flight for NET next year for the company that is making that private space station on the ISS

>>11589155
What kind of terrible country do you have to live in where the government is expected to stop a private company because they're doing something better than what the government can do?

The transcript from the Rogozin interview. Here's him hating on Elon.

>>11589130
inb4
>but muh Red Dragon! and Raptor was supposed to be 8 MN thrust! and what about Merlin 2! and what about Grey Dragon? and what about carbon fiber
All abandoned because they found something better or just as good.

>>11589111
>NASA is not the government

Stupidest trips I've ever seen.

Uninstall your life.

>>11589140
Why not? At worst they'd try to steal some of the credit in a state of the union address or something.

>>11589174
And their own reusable.

>>11589148
Basedx

>>11589140
>THE GOVERNMENT will not let prestige projects go to private companies.

Prove it. America prides itself on its private enterprise.

>>11589174
>enough is as good as a feast
Holy shit how mediocre

>>11589164
Any communist/socialist country

Imagine a company in China trying to land on the Moon that wasn't directly backed by the CCP

>>11589174
>him quoting ULA's old calculation
LMAO

>>11589145
>Have you missed that the US government wants more commercial involvement and use of resources in space even if it technically violates international treaties?

It doesn’t. No one signed the Moon Treaty

>>11589192
And without designations

>>11589174
>About Elon Musk's words about 80% reusability of SpaceX rockets. Russian and American experts calculated the efficiency of the reusable stages and came to the conclusion that the profit can be reached only when the stages are used 10 times.
I'm suspicious of this claim. My understanding is if the cost of refurbishing a booster and reusing it is less than the cost of making them, even just once, then it's a profitable endeavor.

>>11589198
Oh, third world shitholes that fail at the basic premise of a government.

>>11589174
>>11589188

>>11589174
seething so hard
>strongly implying SpaceX is being fed funding by the government to artificially deflate launch prices
hahahahahahahaha

>>11589174
>50% fuel reserve
This dude lmao.
The salt must flow.

>>11589174
>>11589188
>SpaceX's reusable rockets are a scam because reasons
>But OUR reusable rockets are legitimate, please ignore previously stated reasons

>>11589206
Exactly, also, if you're a paid shill from one of those fake as shitholes riding on the real world's coat tails, it becomes difficult to comprehend not having the government constantly shutting down public endeavors.

>>11589204
It's from Tory Bruno's old analysis and he's still standing by it.

>>11589216
Might just be a mistranslated or a bad simplification of rocket mechanics. A boostback rocket like the Falcon 9 would have to hold 50% of it's DeltaV in reserve for a RTLS landing which can be interpreted as 50% fuel reserve if talking to people who aren't dedicated space flight fans.

>>11589192
Saw those at the end of March. They're actually like 30 seconds apart so they don't look like that much of a train anymore in the sky.

>>11589223
Even then the number would actually be around 30%.

>>11588934
>methane fuel cells in everything
yes

>>11589223
Wouldn't even be 50% deltaV reserve though because the boostback and entry burns is done without 2nd stage and payload mass in the equation.

>>11589222
Tory B is working off of ULA facts and figures, and SpaceX is working with SpaceX facts and figures. SpaceX is already making money using reusable rockets, so the fact that it takes ten reuses for every ULA rocket to become profitable clearly is only indicative of wasted expense at ULA compared to at SpaceX, where the first launch is already profitable and every subsequent launch is very much more profitable.

>>11588934
>when they start doing Sabatier on Earth to keep Starship running renewably, they'll have such a glut of methane that they will start finding weird things to do with it like methane fuel cells in everything.
>non fossil hydrocarbons everyhwere with almost 100% burn efficiency
>leftoid heads exploding everywhere
>ha ha methane bike go vrrrrrr

>>11588934
There's already a massive glut of LNG (methane) in the US due to fracking having much more gas vs. oil compared to regular oil wells.

>>11589243
Stop it you’re making Peruvian purple tortoises go extinct if they go extinct then the global ecosystem could implode STOP

>>11589118

>>11589247
I'm aware but the Earth sabatier thing is something Elon has actually proposed. I think the dude loves vertical integration more than he cares about the cost.

>>11589257
North Korean nukes could be shot down before they’ve even reached open water. Just park some submarines around the peninsula and wait.

>>11589263
What’s vertical integration?

>>11589145
>>Keep thinking that the government is going to let private companies steal their glory.

so? you think they would prevent a company willing to go to space? that would be extremely stupid, what they'll do is just let them go but force them to make it look like it was a joint private-public effort.

like most things in existence which exists in spite of the evil thieving goverment (tax=objectilevy theft and you know this automatically when not a retard)

yet most people here are not aware that nothing ever good came from any goverment ,

thasts prestige propaganda brainwash my friendy friend

>>11589222
Regarding the document;
>extensive inspections
AFAWK SpaceX has a small group of techies look over the thing, and they focus on the known high-wear areas. If those areas are not damaged or mildly damaged, the rest of the rocket is fine. You don't have to x-ray inspect every square millimeter of everything.
>replacement of parts that cannot be economically salvaged
Such as what? SpaceX doesn't have explosive bolts or anything.
>Replacement of parts affected by reentry
SpaceX used the early recovered boosters to find the areas where things were being damaged, and added TPS in those areas so nothing is getting burned up anymore. This includes both solid state insulation and liquid water cooling in the hottest areas.
>blahblah to achieve 6 week turnaround
Okay? Why can't reusing a booster be profitable after 6 weeks?
>this list is going to be many times the initial cost of the expendable version of this reusable booster design
Then don't use such expensive refurbishment processes and fix your booster design so it doesn't get degraded so much. Oh it adds weight? Make a bigger booster so it gets the same payload, then. When you make it cheaper to reuse than the smaller expendable rocket you're being more profitable despite having a bigger vehicle, shocking I know.
Tell me again how these problems are set in stone and unfixable such that ten flight minimum is necessary no matter what?

>>11589263
>I think the dude loves vertical integration
Duh.
S T A C C

>>11589271
How you build Starships.

But seriously it's an economic term about a company owning most or all of its supply chain from raw materials to final shipped products. Elon-chan making his own fuel from atmospheric CO2 would be classic vertical integration.

>>11589223
>A boostback rocket like the Falcon 9 would have to hold 50% of it's DeltaV in reserve for a RTLS landing
No, not really. The stage uses >80% of its delta V to shove the 2nd stage, and when it decouples and suddenly loses all that mass its delta V bumps up again. Delta V is the wrong number to use in this instance. The stage burns >90% of its propellant on the way up. The Soviet man is just categorically wrong and attempting to self-justify and save face, "haha make fun of the dumb american design and get angry at their evil capitalism schemes to destroy our pure and righteous people's space program" etc.

>>11589271
You are the source of what you use.
It's a big part of SpaceX and Tesla's growth as they shell out far less than everyone else on third party suppliers and have to make fewer compromises in design.

I remember Elon stating he wants to get into the mining business for battery supplies. It might not entirely be a joke. I mean, the Boring Company is right there.

>>11589280
>But seriously it's an economic term about a company owning most or all of its supply chain from raw materials to final shipped products.

That sounds beneficial for profits, because you don’t have third parties taking their own cut lower down the pyramid.

>>11589282
>I remember Elon stating he wants to get into the mining business for battery supplies.

Lots of environmental bullshit to wrangle with in the mining business, and I dunno how many economically viable lithium deposits that aren’t being exploited already exist and can actually be accessed. Muh Peruvian purple turtles

>>11589283
It is, but you need to be big in the first place to have the spare capital to do it. Steel and oil are common industries for vertical integration since they need a bunch of raw materials from different locations and transportation.

>>11589286
Unironically Afghanistan has a shitload of it in dry lake beds.
>no turtles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mining_in_Afghanistan#Lithium

>>11589286
Just extract it from sea water

>>11589290
>Desert Boogaloo 2; Renewable edition

>>11589290
>Afghanistan

Sounds perfectly safe.

>>11589303
>lithium
>renewable
laughingbelters.jpg

>>11589283
Yes, the downside is that you'll have to put resources in areas where your company might not be very good at or that aren't the focus of your business, vertical integration has it's pros and cons

>>11589283
Another downside is that highly vertically integrated companies tend to be very inflexible to new markets because they're super specialized in one thing. IIRC, Ford had an issue like that a long time ago.

>>11589321
The opposing perspective to vertical integration is typically known as "core competencies." The logic is to focus your business on what it's good at and rely on others for the bits that you don't care about as much. This of course assumes a frictionless spherical cow global economy. Vertical integration is probably going to make a comeback in the world after globalization burns down.

>>11589223
Don't forget to consider atmospheric drag

>>11589275
It's Tory Bruno's comment on Reddit then tweeted by that CNBC reporter and got everybody riled up last week. The first part is here. Anyway, ULA needs to justify why it's not aggresively going the path of reusability yet. Those are as good as excuse as any.

1st stage reusability relies on early staging. that's about it.

>>11589341
>So, and individual booster that has been built for reuse costs more if it were configured to be expendable
No shit Sherlock, but no launch provider is only working with one rocket. They all have multiple launches and rockets to deal with. Having lots of reusable rockets to deal with lots of launches is cheaper than if using lots of expendable rockets, because the long term operating costs will be cheaper. Boeing isn't making expendable commercial planes even though they would be cheaper than reusable ones, because there's so many flights needed that expendable planes would be too expensive to run.

>>11589359
I don't think that part is even as obviously true as it seems.
F9 was developed for cheaper than some single rocket launches. It's still more than competitive to fly expendable.

>>11589376
Even the Falcon Heavy gets expendable contracts and turns a profit on them.

>>11589242
>Tory B is working off of ULA theories and assumptions
>SpaceX is working with SpaceX facts and figures
Everyone told Elon private commercial rocket was impossible 20 years ago
Everyone told Elon reusable rockets were impossible 10 years ago.
Everyone told Elon Starship is impossible, today. Here we are now.

>>11589290
Afghanistan has no infrastructure and will never have any due to various American foreign policy disasters leading to the local population producing a neverending stream of terrorists who violently want to keep the country a shithole.
Asteroid mining is more realistic than resource extraction in Afghanistan.

>>11589433
>Afghanistan has no infrastructure and will never have any due to the locals being violent inbred savages
Yes.

>>11589056
Alright now how is the second one a bad thing?

>>11589455
Our supply chains get all fucked up and we go into a depression

>>11589433
Destroy local food supplies with high altitude fire bombing and collapse tunnels with bunker busters. Once the local population is eradicated, it can be resettled with glorious Americans.

>>11589359
To be fair to ULA, they're strictly launch provider and don't have any payloads on their own. Even if they double their launch capacity and lower prices, there's not a big enough market to justify it. That said, SpaceX can easily do what ULA can't because they can be their own customer and can use excess capacity now instead of waiting for the market to catch up. Tory Bruno serves the market while Elon Musk makes the market.

>>11589475
It all wraps around on itself. The launch cadence and ability to eat the cost of their own launches comes straight out of reusability.

>>11589436
You seem to have forgotten the part concerning american meddling

>>11589487
They were like that before the US ever set foot there, all the way back to Alexander.

>>11589278
Is that SN4 already? Haven't been keeping up with progress over the last few days.

>>11589501
IIRC it's SN3. It's an older pic.

>>11588887
He said on that third row tesla interview that he had to set priorities. Building an airplane would be an entirely new thing altogether for him and even he has to prioritize at some point.
Also for these really disruptive technologies he‘s reliant on finding enough top-of-the-line engineers to work it out and apparently, that supply is limited.

>>11589489
For a long while but not always. Invasions and foreign nations backing extremist militias isn't really helping either. Not that the USA is the only one that did that, just the most recent.

>>11589487
They were just as backwards from at least as far back as the colonial era, with the same shit repeating itself. Afganistan is a turd and you're mad because America is the latest bootprint on it.

>>11589504
>Also for these really disruptive technologies he‘s reliant on finding enough top-of-the-line engineers to work it out and apparently, that supply is limited.
Boeing is probably keeping most of those top-of-the-line aircraft engineers stuffed in a closet somewhere.

>>11589508
>you're mad because America is the latest bootprint on it.
Or maybe because founding extremist militias and invading a sovereign nation when they go rogue is morally wrong?

>>11589501
this is SN4

>>11589516
The only moral failing there is not taking the Saudis down with them.

>>11589516
Not obliterating inferior cultures is morally wrong.

>>11589321
It’s only a con if a supplier can be easily found and is willing to change their product to fit your needs
Otherwise doing it yourself becomes essential

>>11589529
those tiles look kinda flimsy ngl, but then again, this is one of the first times they are mounting tiles

>>11589566
Supposedly they’re welded on.

>>11589566
Carbon-based insulator, apparently pretty tough stuff very much unlike the silica tiles from the shuttle. Attached to welded studs with caps. Should be alright.

>>11589341
Just a whole buncha cope and “well nasa never paid us to try to save money”

>>11589566

>>11589583
How big are these shits anyway? I just realized I've never seen them with decent perspective. They seem pretty big on Starship which is massive itself.

>>11589602 self replying
Actually just noticed the pepsi can, that gives some context.

>>11589605
imho bigger is better, fewer tiles which makes replacing them quicker and easier

>>11589583
>>11589577
>>11589576
How many times are they predicted to be reusable anyways?

>>11587105
Woof woof. That's like the fit birds from 20 years ago.
Bit concerned with Elon's robustness though lads. Hope his heart's in good shape

>>11589614
I can't find a number, desu there might not be one though. They're not ablative, might be intended to be last the life of the craft outside of impacts.

>>11589056
You say that those are problems NATO is obsolete.

>>11589614
Prolly good forever
Doesn’t make sense to do it any other way

When will we get a starship prototype that looks like the starship on this page? https://www.spacex.com/starship

>>11588489
I'm down near the south coast in the UK and we had a pretty good view around dusk earlier. Not like that pic but probably about 20 or 30 visible over about 15 minutes and spaced out. Could see about 3 in a line at once. It's crazy the speed they move at.

>>11589516
all sand niggers must die

>>11589654
>incremental design process + rapid prototyping
Who knows lol might look like a shoe

>>11589241
And without most of the fuel mass.

>>11589654
Never. The design has already changed from that time.

>>11589654
SN5 at the earliest, though SN6 is more likely. So a month or so from now.

>>11589583
God I hate that game.

>>11589352
Which is totally fine

>>11589424
wholly fucking based

>>11589654
in a month it'll probably start to take shape
the Starship after the next Starship

>>11589690
>>11589706
I mean when will we reach the orbital prototype.

>>11589614
They aren't ablative for normal reentry. They apparently will ablate a little during Mars EDL and entry at Earth from interplanetary speeds, but not so much that they need replacement. Given that those high speed reentries are probably going to happen no more than a dozen or so times for any single Starship, the tiles are basically infinitely reusable because the vehicles themselves will be retired before the tiles need to be replaced.

>>11589732
the Starship after the next Starship, or maybe the one after that
they need to build a Super Heavy before they can get to orbit or do real heatshield testing, but the one with the flaps should be within the next couple of months

>>11589732
Orbital prototype probably won't look much prettier than the current prototypes. In fact Starship won't lose its signature in-a-field construction appearance (dents and wrinkles and rust) until they're building it in a factory with robots doing basically everything. Look forward to Starshit Bucket performing orbital sorties and dabbing on SLS fags.

>>11589732
Hopefully this summer, if not this year. But almost certainly next year.

>>11589741
>>11589732
They can churn 1 Starship a month right now, so they got ~9 more tries this year.

>>11589732
SN6 and maybe 5 are getting full battle dress of wings/flaps again. Guessing they intend to at least hop SN6. If that goes well, I could see them putting SN7 or 8 in orbit. That put the most optimistic timeline at, what, a few months?

>>11589735
Why would they ever be retired

>>11589468
How's that different from what's going on now?

>>11589757
Obsolescence - incremental updates means you just stop wanting to deal with the bullshit of your old designs after a period of time.
Airframe fatigue - these things are subjected to pretty tough stresses, mostly the upper stage. Even with robust design, enough time spent in orbit + enough re-entry cycles adds up.

>>11589766
You could refurbish them, though, and sell them off. Imagine buying a used Starship in fifty years for a couple million.

>>11589746
a little bit more than one a month, I think
that might slow down a bit when they start putting the nose and aerosurfaces on

>>11589762
We have a supply chain right now. 1/3 of all global trade or 50% of all sea trade goes through South China Sea. If this trade route ever stops, US is fucked.

>>11589769
absolutely would, and live in it

>>11589769
They could decomission them and give them up for display, but they can't sell live ones, at least not simply
>ITAR

>>11589800
>Classification of Defense Articles
>IV: Launch Vehicles, Guided Missiles, Ballistic Missiles, Rockets, Torpedoes, Bombs and Mines
>XV: Spacecraft Systems and Associated Equipment

>>11589800
Why not? Private entities like corporations can construct them and launch them all they like as long as they tell the FAA, and the same is true of, say, a private plane, so why couldn’t an individual US citizen buy one and lob it up there? Especially if it’s old tech

>>11589824
desu for FAA clearance to launch something like a starship you'd probably need a company behind you anyway just to process everything. but practically speaking it's unlikely they'd sell an operational one anyway. if it blows up or is mishandled, the press isn't "this guy did something really dumb with his investment" it's "SpaceX Starship Blows Up!"

>>11589800
ITAR will only exist for boot licking, well dwelling, atmosphere havin', government fellatin', welfare takin', feddie SCUM.

>>11589824
Corporations that produce ITAR-regulated things like rockets and rocket engines have to put up with certain levels of oversight regarding who they can hire, who they can sell hardware to, and what information they can make public. If you have a Starship, you also have an ICBM. If Spacex sold a Starship to a random person, that person could resell it, and so on, until Somalia has a weapon that they can threaten any target on earth with.
Extreme example, but you get the point.

>>11589860
Looking forward to rogue shipbuilding operations on the moon.

>>11589845
>desu for FAA clearance to launch something like a starship you'd probably need a company behind you anyway just to process everything

I wouldn’t know. All I’ve ever flown is a lil’ plane.
I figure you’d have to rent a launchpad, purchase fuel, pay for transport and storage of a bigass rocket, file a launch window and an orbit, and launch. Together that could easily run into the millions, probably over ten million, but I think it could eventually become something achievable for upper class people or groups of lower income people who pool their resources, like, say, a religious organization or aspirant colonists. I think it’s more likely people would simply purchase seats and payload space on rockets owned by big corporations because it’s cheaper and more practical for most purposes, and I think a personal orbital vehicle that can ferry a few people to various earth-orbit destinations is much more likely and achievable. Maybe the Johnsons could buy a four-seater space minivan in 2080 after saving up for a few years.
Sleezy orbital gas stations manned by Indian guys when?

>>11589878
>If Spacex sold a Starship to a random person, that person could resell it, and so on, until Somalia has a weapon that they can threaten any target on earth with.

ITAR actually covers this, and it’s applied to prevent *other countries* from selling US-manufactured equipment to other countries; for example ITAR was used to block Venezuela selling jets to Iran. A US citizen selling it to someone who isn’t one is the point where the boot is put down

>>11589882
based

>>11589882
I always envisioned the first true separatists being on Mars. More complete resource profile, far enough from Earth that people will tend to develop a divergent identity due to the lag in communications and travel.

>>11589892
These wouldn't necessarily be separatists though. Just small illegal operations.

>>11589895
Astronaut shootouts between Earth-Gov security forces and scrappers. Can’t wait.

>>11589898
soon

>>11589899
Wouldn't laser weapons be much more effective on the moon and mars due to low atmospheric density, unless there is a dust storm.

>>11589899
They’d be most visible by their heat waste, and could be spotted by orbiting satellites, so perhaps they’d be deep underground, even in the old lunar lava tubes, which would also provide access to ore resources.

>>11589899
Hopefully they'd have at least mechanical pressure suits, if not powersuits or small mechs. Trying to fight in a suit like that would be farcical

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bh03GxRndeI
Soon.

>>11589907
They’d have to be internally compartmentalized, too, unless you’d like to be killed on the spot by a shot anywhere on your body. The head would probably be enclosed separately from the rest of the body, which can actually survive vacuum exposure without much issue, and thick body armor would be facilitated by being in a lower gravity environment

>>11589769
structural issues cannot be refurbished, the structure is just going to start cracking eventually

>>11589924
Yes, unfortunately. There’s not much you can do with a car if the frame is fucked except strip it

>>11589905
nah, kinetic weapons are still king
they're even more effective due to the low atmospheric density

>>11589949
>magdump AK
>it stays hot forever because vacuum

I think the real chad move is flechettes powered by compressed CO2

>>11589949

>>11589954
No, gyrojet/bolter ammo is for microgravity
it has nothing to do with atmosphere or no

>>11589895
Small illegal operations with the corporate backing to mine and refine fissile material into warheads, which they will then use as leverage to revolt from both government and their former corporate patrons.

>>11589951
Heat pipes and radiators, maybe exchangeable heatsinks as well for the times your radiators can't keep up due to sustained fire.