/sci/ - Science & Math

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KKq9sVqL0Xc

Run through the recent OIG audit, I didn't bother to read it and didn't see it discussed much.
From the video: each new core stage is costing more than the previous, NASA is also not monitoring the costs.

>>15738694

FireFly Alpha Rocket.

>>15738695
>Artemis IX and beyond

>>15738694
That's just inflation bro

>>15738695
I hate this piece of shit like you wouldn't believe

We went all the way from dedicated launch threads to no one giving a shit about Starlink launches because they're on X. This is progress.

>>15738727
>Acceleration far in excess of Saturn V and Starship
>Most powerful upper stage known to man
>Most advanced spacecraft known to man
After Block 2 we will assemble spacecrafts in orbit for deep space missions. If America is smart this could be the last big rocket they ever need.

>>15738731
Kill all Shelbies

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/09/books/review/elon-musk-walter-isaacson.html

Book review
anybody found the pdf yet? it should be out now

>>15738760
man, the media has been desperate to get in front of this book

>>15738760
> Yet even as Musk struggles to relate to the actual humans around him, his plans for humanity are grand. “A fully reusable rocket is the difference between being a single-planet civilization and being a multiplanet one”: Musk would “maniacally” repeat this message to his staff at SpaceX, his spacecraft and satellite company, where every decision is motivated by his determination to get earthlings to Mars. He pushes employees at his companies — he now runs six, including X, the platform formerly known as Twitter — to slash costs and meet brutal deadlines because he needs to pour resources into the moonshot of colonizing space “before civilization crumbles.” Disaster could come from climate change, from declining birthrates, from artificial intelligence. Isaacson describes Musk stalking the factory floor of Tesla, his electric car company, issuing orders on the fly. “If I don’t make decisions,” Musk explained, “we die.”

https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1701514228467978274

> Elon Musk arrived in North America with $4,000

>>15738785
equivalent to about 10k today
nice I guess, but not like he got millions from his dad to start off that is often implied by Musk haters

It's all his pain. It's not an issue.

>>15738785
saved for convenient reposting when the EDS stans go on about the emerald mine myth

>>15738717

I wanna go to the Mun in KSP, but I don't want to do another Apollo all-up. Give me other mission architectures

>>15738812
use smaller launches to launch pieces of a vehicle in LEO that gets sent to moon

>>15738812
Just do direct landing & return, no mun orbit rendezvous

>>15738812
long-term orbital spacetug which brings landers to the mun

>>15738804
Boeing saw the collapse of the USSR dooming Russia to 50 years of Soyuz launches and thought "That's what we want, but twice as bad"

>>15738785
there is more

https://twitter.com/WholeMarsBlog/status/1701477912925683764

>>15738846

>>15738847

>>15738717
>>15738731
>>15738804
I just hope we can make the 2033 launch window!

>>15738804
captcha KHSHT

>>15738847
>>15738848
Owning a twin engine aircraft is definitely not middle class shit.

>>15738879
small business owner shit

>>15738879
Lefties love to point out that you can’t go from middle class directly to 100 billionaire as though taking two generations to go middle class -> multi millionaire -> billionaire is some kind of massive failure of capitalism or the american dream.

>>15738729
We havent had dedicated launches for most of the Starlinks for years not because of X but because its routine.

>>15738812

Not long ago sfg was so active that we were taking multiple threads to image limit per day, what happened

>>15738923
/pol/ advertising
Jannie banning people he doesn't agree with
Starship is doing nothing and elon is focused on X

>>15738922
Zubrin has two decent crew mission architectures to his name and that's one of them. It's too bad it relies heavily on developing a super mass efficient hydrolox lander to work (impractical).

>>15738927
Not enough autistic arguments

>>15738906
yes you can?
billionaire parents just tend to be wealthy due to simple genetics

>>15738923
just wait for the Starship launch, /sfg/ is going to be near unusable for weeks

>still no orbiter mission
>basically unstudied
>what we do know only raises more questions (why is it colder than Neptune, why are its moons so dense and dark, why the fuck is its magnetosphere centered on a point in the fucking mantle of the planet)
>decadal survey makes a Uranus mission top priority
>NASA decides MSR is more important actually :^)
> . . .
>still no orbiter mission
what's it gonna take faggots

>>15738937
They tend to be able to instill financial discipline in their kids and show them how to actually make decent amounts of money

>>15738943
>what's it gonna take faggots?
To do it ourselves

>>15738943
It’s seriously so tiresome. Both NASA and CNSA have it on the drawing board. Honestly I get they we will likely never, ever woke with Chyna—but it wouldn’t hurt to do some sort of semi-parallel mission that doesn’t require direct interaction. We should just meet with China, discuss the top 10 instruments worth sending on a Cassini-style mission, and each just launch a cheaper/lighter weight variant of Cassini. We can take five instruments, China can send the other five. That way we are both splitting the cost of what would otherwise be two very similar missions

>>15738953
having two independent missions to the same place to corroborate the data is good too

>>15738922
>everything on the moon will be upside-down
lel

>>15738947
that might help, but its mostly genetics

Long Lehao is going to be on his death bed by the time ILRS actually starts doing anything interesting with LM10 and LM9 and manned landings. He’s already 85 years old right now. Hopefully there’s some autist in the orient right now with the vonBraunnian spirit who is ready to take control when he is needed

>>15738760
>playing a new war and empire building game, elden ring
Didn't do his research in games. What else did he fib.

>>15738995
I thought Elden Ring was some big stupid-hard RPG like a Skyrim, more than an AOE-type RTS

>>15739003
Elden fag

>>15739003
its a souls like rpg
about exploration and fighting monsters with emphasis on the monsterfighting and making that difficult

>>15739009
I've probably took something. It's probably there's a way for even you to prosper.

>>15738953
I think international involvement does actually directly hurt space mission performance.

>>15739012
>>15739008
Whoever set this bot loose, please come collect it so it stops randomly posting at anons in this general

>>15738857

>>15739028
>gyno

>>15738937
>billionaire parents just tend to be wealthy due to simple genetics
What are you trying to say? If there is a genetic component to wealth, it can hardly be "simple". Do you imagine a billionaire gene?

>>15739038
Come on man

>>15739039
its due to the heritability of IQ mostly
but talking about that extensively is off topic

>>15739038
more mass to cut off

>>15739028
JPL's astronaut program is coming along nicely

>>15738857
>cost of Orion launch: $4.5B
>estimated cost range of SEP module: $1B to $3B
>estimated cost range of Habitat module: $1B to $3B
>Cost of launching Hab and SEP modules: $6B
So between $12B and $16B cost estimate for a Mars flyby with crew who will, presumably, take some selfies with Mars in the window and otherwise do a bunch of pointless zero G health effects and muh radiation dose research which will never be useful because Starship will do quick direct transfers of ~5 months then arrive on a world with gravity and infinite rad shielding mass to work with. Wow such value for investment.

>>15739039
By "simple" he likely meant "basic", that is to say, "It is simply due to genetics". Native english speakers do this thing all the time because native english speakers are good at parsing this language, and they're good at it because almost any english sentence can be parsed in multiple ways, so everyone is constantly trying to figure out what someone meant anyway. Getting hung up on technicalities of sentence structure in english is a waste of time.

>>15739042
lol, would you have preferred I make fun of his low tech tier cyborg body? Or perhaps how he's the world's first successful nigger lip transplant recipient?

>>15738937
While billionaires are generally high IQ and competitive due to genetics, genetics barely determine if anyone becomes a billionaire. There's probably tens of millions people with the genetic makeup that makes them high IQ, innovative and competitive enough to be billionaires, yet there's only few thousand billionaires. Fair portion of these billionaires are probably retarded and/or have inherited their status.

You need luck and good inherited social status more than good genes.

https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/09/a-year-after-new-shepards-accident-blue-origin-may-return-to-flight-next-month/

> Half a year after this failure, Blue Origin provided an update on the accident investigation it had conducted with assistance from the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board. According to this update, the mishap team noted "hot streaks" on the rocket engine's nozzle and determined that it was operating at higher temperatures than it was designed for.

> New Shepard's long-awaited return to flight comes as its primary competitor, Virgin Galactic, has begun to demonstrate an impressive cadence of human spaceflights. With its VSS Unity spacecraft, Virgin Galactic can carry four passengers and two pilots to an altitude of about 55 miles, and this vehicle has made four spaceflights in four months this summer. Virgin Galactic's president, Mike Moses, told Ars that the company plans to continue flying humans on VSS Unity on more or less a monthly cadence from now on.

>>15739089
>New Shepard's long-awaited return to flight…
Long-awaited from who?
>…comes as its primary competitor, Virgin Galactic, has begun to demonstrate an impressive cadence of human spaceflights
Oh please, is the bar really this low??

>>15739049
All astronauts should have all non essential components removed (reproductive organs, redundant kidney, auricles, legs and pelvis, hair, subcutaneous and visceral fat cells, gall bladder, appendix, 2/3rds of the liver, teeth, esophagus, most of the length of both intestines, most of the skeletal calcium, etc) prior to launch, we can't keep wasting money on launching all that mass budget.

>>15739087
I didn't say billionaires are billionaires due to genetics, I said the parents of billionaires tend to be wealthy due to genetics
High IQ people are more likely to get wealthy and high IQ people get high IQ children, other factors that affect income and wealth are also affected by genetics to an extent, such as conscientiousness (pretty high heritability as well)
it doesn't matter that a fair portion are retarded, that is entirely expected

News: Arianespace launching GEO satellite, Banker concerned about SpaceX near monopoly, Puting praising Musk an ‘outstanding person’ and ‘talented businessman’

----

https://spacenews.com/arianespace-to-launch-intelsat-small-geo-satellite/
> Arianespace to launch Intelsat small GEO satellite
> PARIS — Arianespace will launch a small geostationary communication satellite for Intelsat on an Ariane 6 in 2026, a sign of a stable, but diminished, role for such satellites in the commercial launch market.
> Launch companies say that the commercial GEO market remains important to them despite a decline in orders. “We see that market pretty stable at about 10 launches per year,” said Tory Bruno, chief executive of United Launch Alliance. Those satellites, he said, will increasingly be part of multi-orbit systems working with LEO constellations. “I think that market stays pretty stable.”

----

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/spacex-near-rocket-market-monopoly-is-huge-concern-lazard-banker.html
> SpaceX’s near monopoly on rocket launches is a ‘huge concern,’ Lazard banker warns
> A Lazard investment banker sounded the alarm about the dominance of Elon Musk’s SpaceX in the rocket launch market.
> Several other U.S. companies are working to launch competitors to SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon rockets, but delays mean American rivals are struggling to field next-generation operational rockets.

-----

https://www.cnbc.com/2023/09/12/russias-vladimir-putin-praises-elon-musk-as-an-outstanding-person.html
> Russia’s Putin praises Elon Musk as an ‘outstanding person’ and ‘talented businessman’

2024 will be the year of the musk dream VTOL

>>15739093
>your brain on oldspace

>>15739093
Christians should be sending zygotes on manned flyby missions. The heathens can send third trimester fetuses.

>>15739106
Why are most people who post here Elaines?

>>15738812
I do a dumber Apollo. Launch the whole thing to orbit, use the upper stage to get to Munar orbit, decouple and use the lander for both descent and ascent, dock with the upper stage and return to LKO (aerobraking optional; the lander weighs almost nothing with its tanks empty).

>>15738812
Constellation-style, with an orbiting station to act as staging ground for multiple landings with a reusable lander. Deploy science experiment packages across all biomes before returning to Kerbin.

https://archive (dot) ph/20230912000241/https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-09-11/elizabeth-warren-demands-probes-of-elon-musk-spacex-after-ukraine-revelations

> “The Congress needs to investigate what’s happened here and whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government and not by one billionaire,” the Massachusetts Democrat said Monday at the Capitol.

> Armed Services Chairman Jack Reed, a Rhode Island Democrat, also said he was concerned about the issue, given that governments traditionally have controlled satellites and presidents decided what to do with them.

> He said there have been very positive developments with SpaceX reducing the cost of access to space, including for national security launches, “but he can’t be the last word when it comes to national security,” he said of Musk.

>>15739149
She is meeting with tech chiefs? Of what tribe?

>>15739149
It'll always be hilarious to me that cyberpunk reality is so much more boring than fantasy

>>15739149
Elon will show when warren agrees to stop inside trading and forfeiting her I'll earned profits

>>15739149
maybe democrats shouldn't have been playing political games and gave a contract for Starlink right off the bat?

>>15739149
She's such a piece of shit, my god I hate American politicians so fucking much.

https://twitter.com/stoke_space/status/1701620154176782697

>>15739163

>>15739149
Not a traitor

>>15739162
In matters of foreign policy the State Department absolutely brooks no criticism or interpretation.
If you disagree, from their point of view as private citizens you should not have the power to do anything to affect that policy. It is unclear if satellite communications infrastructure is governed by this doctrine. Clearly someone at State overlooked an important stakeholder in the defense of Ukraine and they were expensively reminded of that fact.

>>15739163
I seriously can’t tell it stoke is based or cringe. I’m blackpilled from a saturated market of memelaunch goons so I just take everything with a grain of salt now. Do they seem competent?

STOKERS RISE UP

>>15739168
What he did was firmly in line with existing foreign policy and if it were up to the pentagon they'd have done the same exact thing. They're just mad that he was able to make the decision to begin with.

>>15738847
>he also dabbed in politics, defeating an Afrikaner member of the pro apartheid national party
I wonder if he regrets that?

>>15739175
Everyday astronaut has a interview with them which I haven't watched
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY8nbSwjtEY

the idea is unique if nothing else
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=812xKz9pcnU

>>15739187
idk much about them but their website is very cringe
https://www.stokespace.com/

>>15739172
>no criticism
I criticize whomever I please

>>15739188
https://www.stokespace.com/team/

seems like a pretty run of the mill coroprate website to me

>>15738943
>>15738949
>>15738953

Because no one actually wants to do deep space missions like this anymore because it doesn't improve spaceflight technology that can be used militarily or 'dual-use technologies'. A lot of what NASA used to do was for the military (testing concepts, airframes etc for the air force). CNSA is in a similar position. The military (who run their space program) are pretty against the idea of doing deep space missions because it means more engineers aren't working on the 'real projects'.

>>15739149

These arent fucking REVELATIONS. We knew about all this AS IT HAPPENED. Dumb bitch

>>15738943
>what's it gonna take faggots
Chyna or India since there are unclaimed firsts there.

>>15739175
>Do they seem competent?
As competent as Firefly or Relativity

>>15739189
If you're happy with never getting a security clearance. They check this stuff.

>>15739184
Pentagon shoulda had a contract sooner. Buncha fags

>musk is a traitor!!!
>doing things literally causing america's enemies to shit their pants

???

>>15739235
>Dont do as ukraine asks = Musk conducts own foreign policy
>Do as ukraine asks = Musk conducts own foreign policy (and starts WW3)

>>15739243
I wouldn't rule out them eventually starting to threaten very nuclear very directly depending on the course of the war, but this narrative that a couple of drone ships hitting Sevastopol instantly leads to a massive nuclear exchange is pure Kreml propaganda.

>>15738760
Fukcing kek at normie comments.

>>15738995
Fucking clueless normies.

Is dearmoon still happening?
https://files.catbox.moe/gxippa.mp4

>>15739258
I don't see why not

>>15739254
Bottom line is Elon can directly attack Russia if he wants, he has that right

Do you think current Musk hate is about as superficial as his 2016-2019 adoration? Will mainstream sentiment swing the other way? And what happens after the first crewed Mars mission gets there on a Starship? Assuming the mission goes well, will people regard him as a modern day Werner Von Braun thats morally flawed but a genius visionary? I also get a bit giddy thinking that there will be new Neil Armstrong/Michael Collins/Buzz Aldrins for this generation in the form of the first mars crew.

What resources is Mars rich in? What would a Mars colony trade with Earth or other space settlements or colonies compared with other planets?

>>15739274
Freedom

>>15739274
it's psyops
no one is going to mars and terraforming it
the real prize is one of jupiter/saturn's moons

>>15739168
>file name
Kys now

Fuck ukraine, they ruined the good name of Starlink, also fuck russia even more for starting this shit

>Starlink is Brilliant Pebbles
>SpaceX got their start as a part of DARPA's FALCON (ring any bells?) Global Strike program.
They're military through and through, no one should be surprised. Having said that, it's getting a bit tiresome now. I suspect the military will put in a word for Musk and shut down this whole media debacle. The Starship program and Brilliant Pebbles (Starlink) must continue.

>>15739168
the donkey has a soft spot for hard liner stronk ape dictators. Not only with everybodies favorite ziggers but also with being completely cooperative with xiggers. If burgers want epic space man to start respecting its new home they will have to do some demonstrations on what happens to professional fence sitters

>Starlink is Brilliant Pebbles
stopped reading right there

>>15739056
>one JWST to send people to Mars flyby
not nearly as much as i would have expected

>muh land immediately
>muh radiation doesn't exist until you land
>muh don't bother testing the transit first
apparently what you get if you combine Soviet "if it crashes, it crashes - we literally cannot afford orbital test trips" landing obsession with early Space Shuttle "if they die, they die - got to meet those quarterly targets" management incompetence is the ideal launch strategy for Musk personality cultists.

for fuck's sake i don't think Musk himself is a fraction as ready to kill astronauts as his [dairy alternative bean]-faced twitter congregation.

>>15739103
Add Hemispherectomy to the list

ViaSatbros…I think the Air Force is mocking us (SpaceX isn’t a monopoly)

>>15739291
>>15739296
substantial evidence point to the fact that Elon was planning major DoD support including global missile defense as early as 2001
>SpaceX first contract was DARPA Falcon Project
>SpaceX founding contracts with NASA were awarded by Elon's friend Michael D. Griffin, who architected global missile defense and designed space-space interceptors for SDI and his NASA COTS program was an unprecedented award and given to SpaceX before they had even flown a rocket.
>Griffin was so important to Elon that it is rumored he named his first son after him (Griffin Musk).
>Griffin went on in 2019 to start the Space Development Agency where he advocated for global satellite constellations of sensors and space weapons (First contracts were given to SpaceX)
>Starshield...
And that's just the SDI side of things
Starship is the gamechanger here. May as well get rid of the entire military to support this program in my view. Total balance of power shift.

>>15739254
Escalating a conflict into a larger one which is already getting more nuclear nations indirectly involved such as China and NK is probably a stupid idea if Musk wants to establish a self sustaining colony on Mars. He would have a hard time doing that if the earth is a smoking ruin before the colony is even established let alone self sustaining so kneeling for boomers and their retarded foreign policies should be avoided.

>>15738943
It will never be properly studied because of retarded normies only caring about the name

>>15739087
>>15739098
the evolutionary pressures on wealthy families are entirely disgenic - from the earliest age they are insulated at an unparalleled level from the consequences of incompetence, and so the only real incentive there is to develop delusions that it is not present if it is (which they can trivially afford).

>>15739274
Nothing will be economical to import from Mars for at least the first 100 years after the first colony is established. Over the years, it will become cheaper to assemble and launch satellites and spaceships from Mars due to it's lower gravity.

But for the first century at least, Mars will be settled and will thrive by rebuilding Earth's supply chains on the planet to improve self-sufficiency. Tbh, I still don't see who is going to pay the massive up-front bill to support colonization until self-sufficiency, as no country has the ressources or political will to do it. The only rich guy who could even try is Elon, but he seems too busy with Twitter as of late.

https://twitter.com/theallinpod/status/1701636472384938396

>>15739151
kek

>>15739307
evolution happens over many generations, not one generation

>>15739291
stop retardposting

>>15739308
Twitter is part of the Mars colonization efforts

>>15739308
>Over the years, it will become cheaper to assemble and launch satellites and spaceships from Mars due to it's lower gravity
only if the moon never develops industry in that entire time, which it will be able to do more quickly and with even less gravity (since the ultimate destination of its products AND source of emergency support is days and not months away)

>>15738943
It's even worse when you consider Neptune is equally unexplored and also won't be getting an orbiter this decade or the next

They need, in order:
>More money (MSR needs to finish)
>More DSN (Artemis needs that moon mission DSN expansion)
>More RTGs (Oak Ridge, where the hell is my plutonium?)
>More launch options (Falcon Heavy launching Psyche is a good start)
>A competent NASA mission planner (JPL is in the middle of a competence crisis)

>>15739315
wealth is inherited over many generations, not one generation.

>>15739308
>Nothing will be economical to import from Mars for at least the first 100 years after the first colony is established
You can sell both data and remote services, including labor, even over a high latency network.

The books is more than 600 pages

FUCK rockets
i am a fpv drone chad now

>>15739323
>NASA missions
I think if you're counting on the 2023 NASA to do this you're out of luck. Sure they have way more money than Russia but does money matter when you're completely disorganized and Congress moves the goalpost every 4 years?
Prediction time: Russia will give (or China will steal) this and send a Jupiter probe in the next 15 years.

>>15739199
That's is why I think NASA really needs a housecleaning sweep to remove bureaucracy and re-establish themselves with a real mission statement. In fact it may make sense to split NASA into two entities, one that handles all things human exploration and another that handles all things robotic exploration, given that the two are very very different.

>>15739330
Does anyone here have an .epub of it or know a site hosting it?

>>15739322
Of course, I was making the case for a Mars colony, but I think the way to go is to colonize the Moon and only once they are close to self-sufficient look at other planets.

>>15739329
You won't be able to compete with Earther programmers, they will be closer, will not have any communication lag and will be cheaper to feed/house/keep alive.

>>15739209
Maybe so, but I also feel that if any nation was like "Yeah we're gonna put an orbiter around Uranus first bois" it's likely congress in the USA would have a conniption and grant funding for a competitor. Idk it's hard to say, they could just as easily think there's not much point since technically they got a probe there first, even though it was only a basic flyby in '86 with 70's tech hardware.

>>15739337
would like to know too

>>15739337
libgen.is should get it at some point, I currently have it laying in front of me so I can't share it

>>15739254
It's a small risk and everyone knows it's a small risk but when nukes are the unlikely outcome it makes sense to avoid that risk anyway. How low do the odds of ending the current course of civilization need to be for you to not give a shit about rolling the dice? It's probably much slimmer odds than 1 in a million.

>>15738995
>Elden Ring is a 2022 action role-playing game
The first sentence of the wiki article. It makes me think Isaacson had too many tabs open and cribbed the description of some other game Musk mentioned at some point, then nobody noticed through the entire editing and publishing process.

>>15739258
Ya, likely delayed though but whatever
>>15739273
Normies will probably harbor a general dislike of Musk forever, even if SpaceX gets 10,000 people to Mars by 2050 the average person on the street would probably argue that NASA made that happen and SpaceX just builds the hardware (which is stupid but normie's gonna normie). Real ones will know Musk was the genuine article tho, respecting instead of worshiping.

>>15739337
its here
https://forum.mobilism.me/viewtopic.php?f=1285&t=5377698&hilit=Walter+Isaacson

>>15739297
NASA murdered an entire crew of astronauts and an elementary teacher for a pointless propaganda mission because they were too lazy to check a couple O-rings lmao. Now they can’t even launch astronauts into orbit. There is a zero percent chance NASA will ever send people to another planet. Your ideal exploration of space is watching $10 billion dollars get hurled, unmanned with no cargo, into LEO every 5 years.
I am a supporter of space travel, I live to see man explore the stars.
You are a political fanatic, willing to doom this species to this rock if it means your side wins.
We are not the same.

Crew swap is based

>>15739365
>Filesize: 82.3 Mb
Uhhhhhhhhhh

>>15739309
Musk seems absolutely sleep deprived

> Q: when are you going to put the next one up, what are the chances it will reach orbit
>A: we have the second one stacked at starbase, so its ready to go. we finished that up last week. we believe we have completed the remaining items requested by the FAA, we should get our license hopefully soon. But really the only thing holding back is approval

> Q: What is your expectation or hope it gets to orbit
> A: We are doing a new staging technique called hot staging, where you light the upper stage engines while the boost stage is still firing. This is the most efficient way to do rocket staging, but we didn't try that at the last mission but we are trying it for this mission. Probably well over 50% chance to get to stage separation, maybe close to 50% chance to get into orbit if the hot staging works. Maybe its like 50% to get to orbit, previously less than 50%

> Q: In terms of complexity, how complex is this of a problem compared to the other problems you have worked on your career?
> A: Making a rocket that is more than twice the size of Saturn V, in fact, the next *intelligible* of the rocket will have roughly 3 times the thrust of a Saturn V moon rocket. Moreover its designed to be fully and rapidly reusable, Saturn V was completely expendable. F9 land at sea so it takes a while to bring them back. The scale and the fact that Starship is designed for full and rapid reusability that get caught by giant Mechazilla arms.

>>15739389
bite the bullet

>>15738731
>acceleration greater than starship
Are you retarded or just a bot? Acceleration differences effectively don’t matter outside of the atmosphere, while having larger amounts being worse in the lower atmosphere.
>most powerful upper stage ever
Literally no lmao, such a meaningless brag
>most advanced space craft ever
The one made of bolted together decommissioned boosters designed in the 70s? The one that uses inferior engines to its predecessor because they literally couldn’t figure out how to recreate them? The one that 90% of its mass is made unrecoverable, by being dropped into the ocean or left in orbit? While it’s competitor returns all but fuel and cargo home? Surely you must be trolling, no serious person could be such a clown

>>15739389
>>15739395
It's clean

>>15738767
still in his delusion that humans can be a multi-planetary species. Space flight is just a minute detail into the whole planet colonization scheme. Space is fucking brutal.

>>15739274
Relative to the Moon and Asteroids inside of 2AU:
Mars is abundant in nitrogen, water, deuterium, phosphorus, iron, sulfur, and nickel. It has an earthlike geologic history (concentrates elements in certain minerals making them easier to economically extract).
It has reduced but likely still comfortable gravity compared to Earth (fucking study this already NASA, you verified cable tether spin gravity works and is stable IRL during the Gemini program) which makes launch back to orbit relatively easy.
It has a thin atmosphere for nearly free returns from orbit/aerobraking, solar radiation shielding, and omnipresent supply of carbon and oxygen for habitats and factories to draw from (important for easily producing methane, carbon monoxide, oxygen, ammonia, argon, and all the chemicals that can be build from these precursors, plus whatever trace gasses are available).
Mars has two asteroid-like moons in almost perfect circular orbits which mass in the quadrillion-tonne range and could act as raw materials for enormous construction project, including spinhab stations and ships ranging from ~10^3 to ~10^12 tonnes of dry mass, or even greater.

What this all means: Mars is THE most resource rich object in the solar system apart from Earth. This makes the task of bootstrapping industrialization and colonization of this place the easiest in the solar system, after Earth of course. The Moon will enjoy a huge leg up in the early game due to its proximity to Earth, but in the long game Mars should leapfrog it as the most developed extraterrestrial world for a loooong time.

Mars is also the most likely place our colonization efforts will actually work, because even if all the doomsayers are right and human populations can't live and grow in reduced gravity, the moons of Mars offer so much potential habitable space in the form of spin habs that we could easily sustain billions of people in orbit around Mars under comfortable, perfectly Earthlike conditions.

>>15739413
>Space is fucking brutal.
Is it as brutal as women, though? If he can conquer women and you can't, maybe he can conquer space when you can't.

>>15738731
Nice bait lmao

>>15739391
Musk says it would have basically been illegal for them to turn it on over Crimea due to Russia being sanctioned
The request came during the middle of the night without any forewarning and no authorization came from the US military, president or whatever
Musk says they would have turned it on if a request like that would have come from the US government, it didn't at the time

>>15739415
bit naive are we?

>>15739412
hmm

>>15739187
God the animation on that landing is so jank

>>15738767
>climate change
this is bait too
>>15739413
quiter

>>15739287
I wish more people had this exact take, because it's correct

>>15739347
Trade only requires comparative advantage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparative_advantage

>>15739168
>filename size
the left can't meme for shit

>>15739297
Please note that my cost estimate was a very generous low ball, real costs would easily balloon to over double that. Think more along the lines of half an ISS, except we don't even get a flag and footprints on Mars. I cannot think of a bigger waste of time and resources, even the Opposition class Mars missions or a Venus flyby would be better (at least at Venus you can't land anyway, so a crewed flyby isn't as much a kick in the balls).

https://www.livemint.com/companies/news/elon-musks-starlink-likely-to-get-approval-from-telecom-ministry-for-starting-services-in-india-report-11694493347392.html


Starlink possible approval from India

THIS IS XBOX HUEG

India is very poor as a country but also has HUEG population so even 1% is HUEG.

If they sell the service at $50/m that should be affordable for the affluent in the India who still dont have proper internet in their rural areas.

1% of 1.4 billion is 14 million. X $50/m = $700M per month or $8.4B per year.

>>15739297
>muh land immediately
Yes, do uncrewed shakedown missions to verify your architecture works and can be trusted to carry passengers, then go land on Mars. There's zero reason to send people to Mars unless you can land safely, and there's zero reason you need to send humans to Mars to prove you can land safely.
>muh radiation
Five months of deep space radiation doesn't matter. No astronaut has ever experienced any measurable negative health effects due to their stays in space, and while the dose rate in LEO is roughly half of what it is in deep space, 2x nothing is still nothing. We also have data from tens of thousands of nuclear energy workers absorbing dose on Earth too, and from nuclear accidents with high dose exceedance to work from, and everything we know points to the dose from a total of a year in deep space being a nothingburger, less risk than several cigarettes a day.
>muh don't bother testing
Nigger what made you think I held this positon, you should probably assess your critical thinking skills and catch yourself when you start arguing against points the person your speaking with didn't make, you dumb fucking nigger

>>15739300
>I don't give a shit, launching our stuff costs less now and still happens on time and with high accuracy, plus they're never lost one of our payloads
lol based air force guy

>>15739422
Is space more brutal than women?

>>15739439
Quite unironically big if true. I pray for the starlink IPO.

>>15739428
What is the comparative advantage of coding from Mars vs Earth?

>>15739415
Yes anon, several sieverts of ionizing radiation, severe bone loss, sight degradation, extremely limited privacy and resources, limited communication, risk of death due to small mishaps and at least 12 months in a metal can with 1000m^3 of space are in fact more brutal than women

>>15739243
>(and starts WW3)
The rest is correct but this part is utter bullshit. Russians didn't do shit for much worse. They aren't going to launch muh nooks because the comms on some drone boat that rekt some of their ships may or may not be using Starlink. Something which can be easily put into vague plausible deniability territory too.
He just wanted DoD to contract and be involved with the military shit instead of potentially getting into major legal shit. Reasonable enough.

>>15739306
I fucking hate NASA nerds, they hold this superposition of both extreme reverence for their org, space, and spacecraft, while simultaneously making extremely dumb and cringe in-jokes and references to pop culture.

If I were project team lead on a Uranus probe I would filter applicants by whether they make fun of the name or not. I would be extremely draconian about this, to the point that I would demand that the team pronounce the name as "Oo-ran-os" (greek pronunciation) both in all public communication and all dialogue internal to the team. I would also personally correct all journalists that pronounce the name wrong and I would quit any interview immediately if the reporter made an anus joke.

Yes there would be memes about NASA picking a tightass guy to run a project to send a probe to Uranus. I wouldn't care, I'd be out there beating the correct pronunciation into anyone I could get my hands on.

>>15739315
Evolution happens constantly, and depending on the severity of the selection pressure it takes many or few generations to show significant results. African elephants for example are evolving smaller or absent tusks in an extremely short number of generational cycles due to tusking pretty much removing all the individuals with the "grow big tusks" genomic features.

>>15739455
These things all sound more appealing than dealing with women

>>15739399
>Acceleration differences effectively don’t matter
go back. gravity loss is extremely important. so much that sacrificing isp for thrust is worth it on a booster

>>15739149
>whether we have adequate tools to make sure foreign policy is conducted by the government
Clearly not, since without Elon Ukraine never would have received Starlink in any capacity.

>>15739415
Elon uses IVF to procreate while retaining wizard powers.

>>15739465
>tightass
lol

>>15739322
The Moon is very poor in some vital resources though, so if you imagine scaling up industry overall you run into problems like global water scarcity and so forth which halt further exponential growth and can only be solved by importing those materials.
Mars on the other hand has lots of basically everything, so although it's much harder and slower to get a basic industrial complex operating in the first place, that complex as a MUCH higher ceiling to expand towards before it runs into hard resource limits that require imports.

>>15739465
more like tightanus amirite?

>>15739452
I think you misunderstand the term. It just has to be easier for Martians to code than for Martians to do something else, for example producing crude oil.

>>15739455
t. never married

>>15739306
>>15739465
Just return to the name Georgium Sidus

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1701647524459659356

I found you

>>15738923
they upped the image limit like 2 years ago anon

>>15739087
so you're saying if we made a clone of Elon the clone wouldn't be successful?

>>15739498
I'm not Finnish

>>15739455
>several sieverts of ionizing radiation, severe bone loss, sight degradation, extremely limited privacy and resources, limited communication, risk of death due to small mishaps and at least 12 months in a metal can
Sounds like the average relationship to me.

>>15739508
I know, be he is >>15739423

>>15739465
Kek based

>>15739497
Off topic faggot kys

>>15739323
I agree on your points assuming we stick to the same technological trajectory that oldspace has been on since the 70's, but Starship throws a wrench in that. Once Starship is operating, it removes pretty much all the mass limits on all future probe missions.
>more money
Save it by building dumber and heavier, because the mass doesn't matter anymore. Also cancel MSR immediately, it's a waste of time given that we'll likely have people on Mars before 2035 and they'll come back with up to double digit tonnes of material from a massively larger array of sample locations potentially from as much as ten meters underground.
>More DSN
SpaceX will do this on their own if it becomes problem for their own ambitions. It'll probably be a lot cheaper and higher capacity than the existing DSN too.
>more RTGs
Many solutions for this that aren't Pu238, but they're heavier per watt of power, but that doesn't matter because Starship 100x'd the mass budget. Americium comes to mind, it's a common radioisotope made in all nuclear reactors and it has a nice long half life. It's even fissile, so if you have a neutron gun aboard you can drive some fission reactions to increase the thermal output for moments when you need higher thermal + electrical output.
>More launch options
Starship :)
>a competent NASA mission planner
Impossible

>>15739187
https://youtu.be/EY8nbSwjtEY?si=LmR6psFol3PeA_F5&t=320
You can really tell he knows the ins and outs of his rockets, too bad they selected hydrogen though

>>15739412
seems to be the book at least

>>15739334
"That" doesn't exist and it's not required to do anything anyway. Chemical rockets with orbital refilling allow for faster probes to the outer planets sooner and cheaper. A nuclear powered tug would be great for really ambitious outer planet probes, but really anything up to ten tonnes dry should be better off launching to LEO with Starship then waiting for Starship and the probe's kick stage to be loaded with methalox prior to a final departure kick burn and payload release.

>>15739510
Anon, are you in a relationship with an unshielded submarine nuclear reactor that feeds on 15mg of calcium extracted from gumans every month?

>>15739331
>9334
what kind of drone

>>15739347
I think what will happen is Starship will enable both Moon and Mars colonization, so both will start at once, and the Moon will follow a steeper but shorter sigmoid curve in terms of development as it gets limited by availability of water and other volatiles, whereas Mars will take much longer to achieve industrialization and so forth but will reach higher heights of development, assisted after the first few decades by Lunar industry (because the Moon is likely to remain under total Earth control, so why wouldn't they use the Moon to supply all the relatively dumb hardware Mars would need?).

Basically both efforts can start at the same time, and the Moon can assist Mars' growth dramatically, while much later Mars can assist the Moon when it comes time to set up a large transportation logistics system for moving ices from the outer asteroid belt to the Moon. It's a win-win for everyone.

>>15739367
>because they were too lazy to check a couple O-rings
Worse, they actively ignored Thiokol engineers who told them the rings were too cold to function correctly, and essentially told them to go pound sand before launching anyway and killing those people, then calling it a tragedy.

>>15739528
>muh bone loss
It was solved an actual decade ago. Quit bitching about the bone loss.

>>15739439
The USA glowies move fast
https://republicworld.com/business-news/india-business/how-googles-taara-can-help-provide-faster-internet-connectivity-to-rural-india-articleshow.html

>>15739528
don't be so judgmental. she's a good ship deep down, i can fix her

>>15739391
>> Q: In terms of complexity, how complex is this of a problem compared to the other problems you have worked on your career?
I actually kinda like his answer to this question. Normally a person would respond with something like "It's extremely complex" or "It's easily the most complicated thing I've ever worked on" but Musk is so reality oriented that he doesn't care about relaying his experience of the complexity, he just jumps immediately to describing what Starship does.

>>15739323
RTG is always discussed like it’s a problem but they always ramp up production when needed. DSN is already hogged and is only going to get worse.
Probably THE worst problem is mars sample return. Shit is taking up so much money, time, and resources. It’s unreal

>>15739464
Elon should launch missiles directly at Putler's ballsack

>>15739365
Holy fuck death to shitty hosting sites. Please have a torrent.
magnet:?xt=urn:btmh:12203aa7499133d1287ae85fe6103b83081ae9a8ac90cca8877b37a95199740491d2&dn=Elon%20Musk%20by%20Walter%20Isaacson%202023.epub

>>15739451
I hope they don't
they don't need to and not subjecting SpaceX to public markets will make reaching the Mars ambitions much easeir

>>15738672
Seeing this flying skyscraper just makes me smile and dream about the future. If someone calls Musk dumb or lucky I assume they're a jelly narcissist, granted there was some luck involved as with all business but this is simply incredible.

>>15739538
>sigmoid
tightass Uranus mission planner from upthread strikes again

>>15739455
>several sieverts of ionizing radiation
Again, all studies on health effects of radiation dose say that a dose of that size over that period is too low to have any deterministic health effects, ie health effects that are significant enough to be directly attributed to the dose. As Zubrin once said, the ethical dilemma surrounding a Mars round trip total absorbed dose is something that can be solved by a waiver that states "The dose I will receive carries an equivalent health risk compared to smoking between 3 and 5 cigarettes a day for the duration of the mission".
>severe bone loss
Bone loss is a solved problem, remember? The nerds at NASA discovered that stressing bones more (lifting heavier) prevents bone loss. Who fuckin knew, $50 gorillion well spent.
>sight degradation
Happens with age anyway and no astronaut has ever lost enough visual acuity to affect their performance or quality of life.
>limited privacy and resources
A submarine is more cramped and has less personal space than any spacecraft designed after 1970. Starship will likely have over 20 cubic meters per crew member, even with 40 people on board. That's an enormous space when every surface can be a floor, wall, or ceiling simultaneously.
>limited communication
Again, submarines, or actually any military vessel.
>risk of death
lol
>at least 12 months in a metal can
submariiiines

>>15739538
Mars will outpace the moon immediately because the US, China and India are trying to build moon bases but Elon wants to colonize Mars. It won't even be a close contest.

>>15739538
you think there will be other significant industry besides propellant manufacturing on the moon?

>>15739470
Starship has a higher liftoff TWR than SLS.

>>15739538
Moon isn't getting a colony. Its just gonna be an outpost for Earth. Earth's gravity means they'll just be a puppet for Earth's political powers.

>>15739553
so basically 5G towers?
just plop a starlink receiver on top and then beam it around with this thing, seems pretty easily scalable
you just need reliable power

>>15739399
>>15739470
>>15739593
>>15739417
Happy to answer questions on the SLS vs Starship debate now, just trained my ChatGPT instance on it.

>>15739501
We were still hitting it even after the increased limit for a time, nonetheless

>>15739603
Ask it who needs to die.

>>15739558
he didn't really answer the question though and I don't think there was any new information

>>15739517
Thanks for gigachad posting, it always reignites my drive to stay fit and get fitter

>>15739611
Starship.

When are we building lunar tractors? I’m want to build a factory on the moon. It’s a free high vacuum chamber

https://twitter.com/torybruno/status/1701655035745042479

>>15739287
Fuck this guy for starting all of it.

>>15739563
hmm maybe my old torrent client sucks
>Error : Invalid magnet URI - no urn:sha1 or urn:btih argument supplied.

>>15739632
https://twitter.com/KenKirtland17/status/1701667403682250930?s=20

HOP

>>15739632
Amazing cope on Tory's part.

>>15739641
https://twitter.com/Alexphysics13/status/1701670787898372590

>>15739646
basically lying if I'm understanding these replies correctly, bundling in dev costs for special fairings for instance
well, they have to pay for them and if they had only launched those few missions, Tory would be basically correct, but didn't the government have to pay for similar stuff to ULA previously? they just did so a long time ago

>>15739603
why is SLS inferior to starship?

>>15739603
which rocket should i have sex with, SLS or new glenn?

>>15739522
In this case hydrolox may actually make sense.
For all its flaws hydrogen does have roughly 3.5x the specific heat capacity of water, making it an excellent coolant compared to other liquid fuels, and since it rapidly boils while it's doing its cooling it provides a "free" source of high pressure gas which can be vented in the middle of the plate to act as an additional buffer layer of cool gas. Stick a turbopump between the plate cooling loop and the vent and you now have a self governing actively cooled heat shield.
I think this may also possibly work with methane or ethane, but the heat shield is gonna run hotter and more importantly the total mass of fuel used as coolant during entry would probably be much higher, harming payload performance.
It'd be really interesting to test an actively cooled heat shield like this that ran on a heavy hydrocarbon like kerosene, hear me out. The heat of reentry enters the vehicle in two main ways, radiatively and conductively. The conduction is simple enough, hot gasses touch the vehicle so the vehicle heats up. The radiative mechanism is similar to the heat you feel standing next to a big fire, it comes in the form of visible and infrared light and bakes whatever it hits under intense heat. The thing about Stoke's heat shield is, hydrogen vapor is transparent, so the buffer gas layer cannot prevent the radiative heat from reaching the shield. If the buffer gas layer was instead produced by a very fuel rich kerolox gas generator though, the gas would contain a lot of soot, and would very strongly absorb the radiative heat from the entry plasma, preventing it from reaching the shield at all. If the gas generator powered its own fuel and oxidizer pump, it would act as both the main thermal shield via its exhaust, and as a coolant pump, using the heat shield to preheat its own kerosene prior to use in the gas generator. This could allow very hot entry with no refurb needed.

>>15739525
"That" being Russia's nuclear space tug thing that they've been teasing for many years now & will never build.

>>15739477
you'd be surprised how much water you can get out of solid rock - by weight most of it tends to be oxygen; hydrides are more stable without oxygen to oxidize them and are likely to be more abundant on the moon. in their total absence, solar wind protons can be captured and neutralized into hydrogen.

water is stupidly easy to get in space - i suspect the real limiter will actually be halogens. fluorine in particular can cleave the silicon/oxygen bond yielding oxygen + SiF4 from silica. using more gentle (...relatively) solvents, HF will also cleave that bond directly into a solution of water and hexafluorosilicic acid (H2SiF6, from which HF can be recovered by heating, again leaving SiF4) - but fluorine is very rare.

perhaps most importantly, the moon's siderophiles (the iron-associated elements that are so rare in Earth's crust because they're dragged into the core along with iron) are much more accessible than either Mars' or Earth's - and even barring Lunar ISRU volatile sourcing, that alone could economically justify sending up volatiles as needed, something that is feasible for the moon but completely infeasible for Mars

>>15739560
Big agree, RTG isn't even a problem because we don't need to use Pu238, the only reason mission planners at NASA refuse to consider other radioisotopes is because "muh mass", and that's unironically the only reason. Americium RTGs would be just as reliable, operate with useful power output for 5x longer, and use a radioisotope that's cheap as dirt and made in all reactors, but it would weigh 5x as much for the same output.

>>15739579
It's gonna keep happening too, I've been here off and on since december 2018

>>15739678
Nice. If mass is the only downside then it’s literally a non-problem. It’s not like the entire probe increases by 5x, it’s just the RTG. Plus deep space probes don’t need to rely on the autistic mass constraints of Atlas V anymore

>>15739602
>fails on a foggy day
nothing personnel kiddo

>>15739691
Suck my left testicle

>>15739589
There's lots of space on the Moon and if SpaceX has a fleet of thousands of Starships and can only go to Mars once every 2.5 years AND the USA is racing China and India to maximize Lunar real estate territory, the USA is gonna pour funding into buying as many Starship launches as they can to maximize what they can throw at the Moon. Hence the Moon with be developed at an explosively accelerating pace for several decades, and its rate of self-growth will increase to become a majority of the driving force of development of the Moon in short order despite the thousands of annual Starship landings, but it'll hit a wall of resource availability too. Meanwhile SpaceX will do everything they can to throw as much at Mars as they can possibly afford (which will be less than what the USA can afford to throw at the Moon), and Mars will undergo its own process of industrialization and development until it too is growing very fast through its own efforts, and it will proceed to blaze past the Moon and take the crown for biggest off-Earth industrial base and population.

>>15738695
>maximum theoretical estimate at 130 metric tons after two entire design revisions
Lmao, you can’t even give them credit for being overly ambitious. The Saturn V had an operational cargo capacity greater than that. With its theoretical designed capacity being twice as much.

>>15739632
Anyone got the infographic with the huge Vulcan and tiny Starship?

>>15739619
My god, it's full of söy

https://www.axiomspace.com/news/ax3-astronaut-crew

https://twitter.com/Dexerto/status/1701608175819166068

>>15739592
Yes. The Moon industry will include all kinds of metals extraction, fabrication of raw metals into structural materials and more complex products like machined parts and so forth. Making solar panels from scratch on the Moon is actually pretty simple and easy, due to the omnipresent hard vacuum. I actually expect propellant manufacturing to be a relatively tiny fraction of lunar industry overall by then, because one of the first things we'll do on the Moon is build non-rocket-based launch infrastructure, with a focus on minimizing propellant requirements.
Besides, I doubt lunar propellants will be able to beat the economics of simply launching propellants from Earth for a long time. Remember that during this whole process of colonizing the Moon, Starship and probably other fully reusable competitor vehicles will be in an arms race to reduce cost/kg to orbit as much as possible, AND there will be a large and cemented logistics system for Mars transport based on low Earth orbit propellant refilling. It will make more sense for Lunar propellants to be used for Lunar orbital operations only, and instead use non-rocket based propulsion systems to do any long distance throwing, while Earth uses Earth-launched propellants to throw stuff at the Moon.
Oh, oxygen may be an exception to this rule, because lunar industry is gonna produce an enormous surplus of oxygen which will be pretty much useless for any purpose other than exporting it to markets that want pure LOx. Every raw material on the Moon produces oxygen gas when you refine it, humans only breathe so much of it (and need even less supply once you consider life support loops) and you can't really get away with using it to fill habitats unless all your habitats are at low pressure to avoid extreme fire hazard).

>>15739638
It's v2 torrent. I guess I can make a v1 if you really want it.

>>15739712
How the fuck does this company generate money

>>15739729
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-selects-axiom-space-for-another-private-space-mission-in-2024
https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-partners-clear-axiom-space-s-third-private-astronaut-crew

>>15739729
Aren't they just a middleman between customers and spacex/NASA?

>>15739723
based, he understands sexo is the only thing overwatch is good for.

>>15739661
You think this thing is going to work?

>>15739734
Essentially yes, they're a space travel agency. There are additional regulatory differences (and they're also bidders on private space station construction) but for now they just arrange the flights. People underestimate the value of a person with connections

While the Mars-belt delta vees and transit times are better, the synodic periods are much worse

>>15739596
Any outpost will reach colony status if it is allowed to grow at any rate, given enough time.

Since the Moon is primarily made of silicates and metal oxides, and since buildings are heavy, it makes sense for even a small outpost to have the capacity to refine local materials into resources to build their own structures. The ability to manufacture things like solar panels very easily and launch them into orbit very cheaply means the lunar outpost would have a means of both bootstrapping its own power supply and potentially generating its own income by selling things like large propellant tanks, trusses, solar panel arrays, etc to Earth markets that want those products and can't get them as cheaply from Earth (if only because the products are very large and would require zero G manufacturing in low Earth orbit if not launches from the Moon).
Etc etc. Any Lunar outpost at all will be capable of growing into a huge colony supporting billions of people if it starts off with even a tiny, basic level of industrial capacity. To be fair I personally think the investment of material and tech from Earth will be much larger but in any case my point is that the Moon being highly industrialized will directly benefit the people who wanted to build a Moon base, so they'll do it, and that way leads to giant colony (even if you would rather consider that colony to be an extension of Earth rather than independent, which every colony starts out as anyway).

>>15739671
> The siderophile elements include the highly siderophilic ruthenium, rhodium, palladium, rhenium, osmium, iridium, platinum, and gold, the moderately siderophilic cobalt and nickel, in addition to the "disputed" elements mentioned earlier – some sources[2] even include tungsten and silver.[4]

I was under the impression that even if you had this stuff in readily packaged pallets, it would still very uneconomical to get them to earth
but I guess it might make sense for the purposes of sending them to Mars or towards other manufacturing in space

>>15739621
Not soon enough, also you're based

>>15739671
>solar wind protons can be captured and neutralized into hydrogen
Solar wind is not dense. (~ 2e12 protons per square meter per second ?) You need like 11 more orders of magnitude to make 1 mole, ie 1 gram, of hydrogen.

>>15739653
The government used to give ULA a billion dollars a year for "launch readiness" or something, basically an annual life support injection of funds

>>15739754
Wasn’t tory crying about how SeX is only successful because of muh government subsidies? Lol

>>15739725
Interesting

>>15739728
nah I just got gud and found a current torrent client for my linux machine

>>15739700
>Meanwhile SpaceX will do everything they can to throw as much at Mars as they can possibly afford (which will be less than what the USA can afford to throw at the Moon)
lol, by that logic the US can also outspend Space X on satellite launches
You have to multiply budget by efficiency.

>>15739757
In the sense that they wouldn't exist without them, sure
In the sense that their present operation is government-subsidized, we'll never know unless SpaceX makes it's numbers known

>>15739671
Capturing solar wind protons still represents a resource constraint that prevents further exponential growth, like I said. I didn't say the Moon has no water or no way of getting it, I said that industry on the Moon will experience a period of very rapid exponential growth that will hit a wall and slow down forever after. Also, my argument is not specific to water, that's just a basic resource everyone knows we need and is easy to talk about. The same logic applies to any 100% necessary element or molecule which exists only in limited quantities on the Moon or any other object; once that resource peaks, your exponential growth period ends and you transition to a much slower relative growth rate.
My point is that civilization on Mars will achieve a much larger scale before bumping into that limit than civilization on the Moon, because the Martian crust contains much more of every element than the Moon's crust, especially more volatile elements.

>>15739729
Sell services now that you promise to deliver in the future. It's that simple!

>>15739781
The Blue Origin model

>>15739689
Mass is literally the only downside. You need 5x the radioisotope and a tad more shielding due to the increased gamma and neutron emission flux from Americium 241 vs plutonium 238. You're also correct about the RTG being the only thing that gets any heavier, and mass constraints being effectively a non-issue.
What does Falcon 9 throw at Mars, like 4 tonnes? That's so much mass budget that there's zero reason we couldn't be using Am-241 powered rovers on Mars right now. Falcon Heavy can throw 16 tonnes to Mars, and at least 2 tonnes to Jupiter according to C3 plots. I defy anyone to tell me we couldn't build an Am-241 powered orbiter that weighed 1500 kg and had the delta V to capture at Uranus, following a fairly direct Earth-Jupiter-Uranus trajectory (one gravity assist, no silly half decade of Earth-Mars-Earth or Earth-Venus-Venus-Earth windup.

>>15739646
It's not cope, he's just a slimy fuck businessman.

>>15739725
I could imagine lunar propellant supply economically winning over Earth-launched supply if this idea >>15739671 >>15739778 of capturing hydrogen from solar wind actually works.
In this scenario the Moon wants more water for itself, so it builds a very large array of either orbiting or surface mounted machines which deploy some kind of giant electromagnetic ion trap, collect and cool the resulting ions into gas, then condenses them into separate cryogenic liquids, like a condenser-only version of vacuum distillation. The hydrogen gets combined with Lunar oxygen, and they're now producing water.
Scale up this array large enough and eventually the surplus hydrogen supply will be so large that skimming off a few percent for sale as a propellant could equal a million tonnes a year of hydrogen production. At that point it's really a question of how much does it cost to move a kilogram of material to LEO from the Moon, and whether that cost is competitive with Earth launch costs.

>>15739738
I dunno lol.
I'm talking about possible performance of a modified version if the real thing actually does work.
The only question I have about the viability of the actively cooled heat shield Stoke is trying is how much mass in hydrogen they need to carry to orbit to be able to handle reentry and then propulsively land. If the mass of those propellants is a large fraction of the burnout mass once the vehicle reaches orbit, then the economics will suck, because Stoke's rocket will have a tiny payload mass fraction. Which sucks. If it only eats up 10% of the burnout mass in LEO though, that's not too bad, and they could actually compete against other fully reusable rockets (though Starship will have a major payload mass limit and volume envelope advantage either way).

>>15739309
https://twitter.com/DavidSacks/status/1701628430016716957

Maybe somewhat off topic, but the tweet (which is longer than the pic) expounds upon the section that is between 5min and 19min here >>15739419

TL:DR, SpaceX didn't turn anything off, they refused to turn something on, which might have been illegal in the first place, and would have turned it on if the White House had actually requested it

>>15739100

>>15739741
The synode is not that big of a deal, it sucks that Mars has the least frequent launch window of any planet when starting from Earth, but it's whatever. The reason is because Earth and Mars are right next to one another. Worlds very far from the Sun move so slowly that they effectively stand still compared to us, so the synode for an outer planet approaches 1 Earth year the farther out it is, while planets closer to the Sun lap us faster than we can go around, so the synode approaches the year length of the target planet the closer in it is. An asteroid in a one month orbit of the Sun would have a sinode with Earth of a bit over a month, for example.

Even if the whole surface of the moon was directly exposed to solar wind it would receive less than a kg of solar protons per second.

>>15739809
Could you do a direct injection to somewhere past the asteroid belt if you did two FH launches: one for the probe just to MEO, and another for a giant ass cryogenic hydrogen or methane kick stage?
Two FHs within a short time period isn’t unreasonable. And NASA could just lob up a centaur or EUS or something

>>15739273
He's currently speedrunning to be the most retarded guy on the planet so it's well deserved.
Also Von Braun actually designed rockets, not merely take credit for his engineers achievements

>>15739746
>I was under the impression that even if you had this stuff in readily packaged pallets, it would still very uneconomical to get them to earth
All old and most current estimates like that assume modern, or near-past launch costs. Many estimates simply divide the cost of a mission to Mars by the mass of the payload and use that number. With extreme near future improvements in launch costs, plus the expected ease of launch from worlds even as heavy as Mars, the actual economics of selling precious metals to Earth may actually break even much sooner than we think. I don't expect that time to arrive soon though, definitely beyond the 2050s if I had to bet a dollar on it.

>>15739870
seethe. reminder that twitter is still running

>>15739762
I agree

>>15739851
SpaceX management and Elon Musk shouldn't be anywhere near this level of power. He fucked himself over sending the dishes to Ukraine so now deal with the consequences.

>>15739772
>US can also outspend Space X on satellite launches
It probably does, but that was likely your point.
Keep in mind that I'm essentially handwaving that oldspace will be dead by 2040 and space colonization efforts will be organized by a regulator split out from NASA which is built to perform that task, kinda like how the space force was split out of the air force.
By that time the old "every gram at any cost" mentality will be extinct due to competition from companies following the rule that things should be built robust, as simple as they can get away with, reliable, and cheap, and damn the mass (consider Starlink satellites as an early example which still needs to consider mass much moreso than payloads built to launch on Starship).

>>15739876
>yes I will slurp the shitty quality SpaceX launches on twitter so daddy Musk can justify his money burning pit of a website

>>15739887
you seriously think he should not have helped?
being too competent and too helpful is bad now because it makes the government look incompetent, and you think its fine if competence in this way is punished?

its not even about musk having power, its more about the White House refusing to make a contract or deal with the situation, basically blaming their fuckups on Musk/SpaceX
its a fucking farce, in a long list of farces

>>15739868
Simply set up a collection area the size of the entire cross sectional area of Earth's sphere of influence

>>15739887
It was a 2000 IQ move to show the earth cabal just how important the service is. Ultimately, good will come of it (money, for Starship and Mars no less)
Just because the optics are bad and reddit is mad doesn’t mean it was a dumb idea.
Twitter may or may not have been a good idea. I think it was important to get it out of the pockets of retards but it appears to be distracting to the vonBraunnian cause. I could be wrong on this though, for all I know it could just be another simple thing he likes to juggle. Tesla is for sure taking up most of his time; he has self-admitted this. Tesla is gay and no amount or mental gymnastics about >muh solar tech for space will change my mind

>>15739898
>>yes I will slurp the shitty quality SpaceX launches on twitter so daddy Musk can justify his money burning pit of a website
what did he mean by this?

>>15739901
Optimus Robot nigga

>>15739900
It's that simple!

>>15739901
>t was a 2000 IQ move
Love this cope. It has as impulsive as many other things he's done including buying twitter

>>15739869
Rather than distributing the launch that way, I'd imagine you'd achieve that goal if you instead used all of FH's upmass capacity to launch a ~60 tonne probe-and-propulsion-module stack to LEO, which would have the delta V to do the direct-to-wherever departure burn. Something like the Bridenstack maybe, basically stick a Centaur V into FH's extended faring, under the probe payload.

Thoughts on Soviet MAKS (lost out to Energia)?

>>15739912
no, nothing impulsive about not turning something on
turning it on would have been impulsive, not doing anything is the opposite of impulsive
I'm pretty sure Ukraine did a drone strike a bit later, so clearly a request/OK came from the government later
so it is in fact completely opposite of being impulsive
it was waiting for more info, then talking to the US government and then turning it on at some point (or maybe some other capability was used for the drone strike, kind of doubt it)

>>15739870
Amazing how the most retarded guy on the planet is also the richest, what does that make us?

>>15739919
/sfg/ has a soft spot for it which I respect but I think it’s kind of gay and energia-buran is WAY cooler (if we ignore launch costs lol)

>>15739887
That's a failure of the DoD, not a failure of Elon. The DoD failed to recognize the level of involvement they were obligated to have with Starlink the moment Ukies started begging Elon for Starlink terminals. They should have contacted Elon/SpaceX/Whoever immediately and gave them a list of "don't's" to follow (ie, do not enable Starlink within 10km of the front lines). Simply ignoring the issue until they inevitably used Starlink to try to steer an attack into Russia was gross negligence on the part of the DoD.

>>15739900
Maybe you could make a more efficient hydrogen collector by focusing on the higher hydrogen density areas near the center of Earth's sphere of influence.

>>15739910
It really is

>>15739922
unlucky geniuses, every one!

>>15739912
All of my impulses have turned out to be 2000iQ moves though. Impulses are actually just products of a genius subconscious mind.

>>15739937
Pleased to meet you, Isaac!

>>15739921
>no, nothing impulsive about not turning something on
I'm talking about sending the dishes to Ukraine in the first place. They put themselves in this situation. As I said SpaceX or Musk shouldn't have this kind of involvement over active conflict.

>>15739919
It was a dead end like all air-launch rockets and all spaceplanes, but it had a cool engine. They should have retained the RD-701 and built a big Proton-style launcher with it or something like that. Hell, an RD-701 powered TSTO would have the dry mass margins to allow for glideback recovery and full reuse of both stages.
We could have had Big 1980's Soviet Starship, instead we got two launches of Energia and a big plane.

>>15739949
well, it seems to me its pretty easy to argue it was a good idea even taking this latest character assassination attempt into account
they showed the superiority of Starlink compared to traditional GEO satellites, they helped people (not the first time Starlinks have been sent to disaster areas)
this is just incompetents in DoD trying to throw Musk under the bus

>>15739887
True. Musk shouldn't try saving Ukraine from anything. It was his fault for giving into the Ukraine politics.

No good deed goes unpunished.

>>15739934
Earth launched propellants? If yes, subtle, I like it.
And yes that's probably what will happen, at least until we have fusion propulsion good enough to make comet wrangling feasible, or some other method of ice mining beyond the snow line for transport back to the Moon (outer asteroid belt, Jovian moons, maybe Saturnine moons but that's pretty far out there and Jovian moons have more water in total anyway, no we will never mine Saturn's rings for ice that's retarded and the expanse worldbuilding sucks)

>>15739947
Nah I don't engage in coprophilia

>>15739910
Eventually we're gonna build something to shield cislunar space from CMEs anyway, it may as well stay turned on and sip up some hydrogen and helium for us while it's waiting to actually protect us.

lmao
>insult startup founder
>get hired as vice president

>>15739887
>American civilian companies should not be able to refuse foreign governments asking them to participate in acts of war against nations the United States is not at war with

The Ukraine flag in bio types really don't want you thinking about what actually happened.

>>15739980
I wonder who that loser is, and where he is now

>>15739980
Elon seems to respect and value people who can speak frankly and care about succeeding, and adds them to his teams when he finds them.

>>15739657
SLS has a lower payload, lower launch cadence, and an order of magnitude higher launch costs.

>>15739992
Accurate assessment of the situation.
>you want to just let innocent women and children die???
Yeah actually, for the same reasons I don't want the USA launching a campaign to take over 90% of the continent of Africa in order to kill every warlord and end every civil war and train the population into a high trust society for long enough that the culture becomes ingrained and stable long term: It's not our fuckin problem and it's not the reason the government exists. The government exists to use a portion of the resources of a population to maintain a safe, stable, clean, and civil state for the people living in it. Reaching outside of that bubble, beyond dealing with foreign governments in order to avoid wars and illicit trade, is overstepping. Yes the USA oversteps all over the place, but that's bad.

Space Force reorganizing some operations, Maxwell demonstrates radio-frequency thruster in space, Intelsat considering a Medium Earth Orbit constellation
----
https://spacenews.com/space-force-to-create-integrated-units-responsible-for-acquisition-maintenance-and-operations/
> Space Force to create “integrated” units responsible for acquisition, maintenance and operations
> Chief of Space Operations Saltzman announced a pilot program to establish two integrated units for space electronic warfare and PNT
> Two integrated units will be established, each run by a Space Force colonel — one for space electronic warfare; and the other for positioning, navigation, and timing (PNT) satellites.
> Space electronic warfare includes the operation of satellite jammers and equipment used to detect adversary jamming. The PNT delta will be in charge of maintaining and operating Global Positioning System satellites in support of U.S. military and allies organizations.
-----
https://spacenews.com/phase-four-demonstrates-maxwell-block-2-thruster-in-orbit/
> Phase Four demonstrates Maxwell Block 2 thruster in orbit
> PARIS — Phase Four’s Maxwell Block 2 radio-frequency thruster has been demonstrated on a commercial satellite.
> Maxwell Block 3 “has achieved the performance with krypton that’s equivalent thrust ISP [specific impulse] to a Hall-effect thruster,” Siddiqui said. “It’s the first time any cathodeless thruster has been able to achieve that.”
-----
https://spacenews.com/intelsat-plotting-a-meo-constellation-in-2027-with-c-band-windfall/
> Intelsat plotting a MEO constellation in 2027 with C-band windfall
> TAMPA, Fla. — Intelsat expects to decide whether to proceed with plans for a medium Earth orbit (MEO) constellation early next year after requesting proposals from nine satellite makers, an executive for the geostationary fleet operator said Sept. 12.

>>15740013
Suborbital spaceflight is becoming more routine
-----
https://www.thespacereview.com/article/4649/1
> Putting the private into private spaceflight
> What was different about Galactic 03, though, was the publicity surrounding it—or, rather, lack thereof. Virgin Galactic did not provide a live webcast of the flight, instead providing play-by-play updates on social media. Moreover, it did not disclose the identity of the three customers—Ken Baxter, Timothy Nash, and Adrian Reynard—until after the mission was over and the company issued a press release confirming a successful flight.
> The industry is shifting, and that customers of private human spaceflight can and will have more control over how their journeys into space are publicized as flights eventually do become more routine

>>15740005
It's also shorter, narrower, requires much larger transport equipment because solid boosters heavy, has ugly orange foam, shakes more than Starship, is more environmentally damaging than Starship, and was designed without a specific purpose in mind, beyond reusing shuttle tech and keeping those contracts alive for a bit longer.

>>15739980
based

>>15740013
>Maxwell Block 3 “has achieved the performance with krypton that’s equivalent thrust ISP [specific impulse] to a Hall-effect thruster,” Siddiqui said. “It’s the first time any cathodeless thruster has been able to achieve that.”
The Isp figure is 800s, by the way. Can't stand it when announcements about engines bury the efficiency in the text somewhere. Reading the paragraph in your post led me to think they were getting something like 2000 Isp, since that's roughly what I think when I hear electric propulsion. Still, for stationkeeping purposes, 800s beats the hell out of chemical monopropellants.

>>15740023
>designed without a specific purpose in mind

>>15740031
do these have any benefits compared to hall effect thrusters?

>>15740035
indeed

Europe can into ISS missions.

https://x.com/andrewparsonson/status/1701479691087905224
https://www.linkedin.com/posts/exploration-company_exploration-company-and-axiom-sign-cargo-activity-7107235160529453057-FBXn

>>15740035
Correct

>>15740046
No cathode = no cathode erosion issues
Erosion of components is a serious problem with all currently operating electric thrusters, as it limits the operational lifetime. Erosionless thruster concepts are being explored and developed, like the one we're talking about here. The advantage is that they have effectively infinite operational lifetimes, meaning any amount of propellant you give your spacecraft can eventually be used up, without requiring spare thrusters to switch to if the first one fails.

>>15740057
Eurospace once again aims low, and I have full confidence they'll land short.

>>15740078
Shoot for the stars and if you fail you'll be a Euro

>>15740083
Fate worse than death

fully reusable rockets

>>15740118
I'm just happy it's made of steel. It IS made of steel, right?

>>15740125
Yup stainless

/sfg/ really went off today

I wanted to be an aerospace engineer, more specifically I wanted to design aircrafts like this, but my parents made me choose something else entirely. Is being in aerospace engineer really that fucking cool - you get government funding to design, construct and test these machines? Or am I romanticizing something I don't know?

>>15740171
most of it is slow, tedious and bureaucratic
i guess there is some (glowing) contractors that are more spacex pilled

>>15740171
You'll do 1% cool shit and 99% drudgery, if you want to have fun at work go operate heavy earthmoving equipment

>>15740171
You get to autistically test a new bolt to failure

>>15740171
In school you are surrounded by people who are wicked smart, but impressively retarded at the exact same time (if that makes sense)
Also half of them are, unironically, libtards who spend five years preaching about how much they hate the MIC—only to end up at lockmart or northrop grumman because they scored a manager position with unimaginably high pay for doing soul-crushing busywork all day

>>15740171
It's tedious office work.
It's also a lot of math and I'm a retard.

Very few people get the cool job of heading up a team.
Get a high paying job -> learn aerospace engineering on your free time -> and just build kit aircraft.

The engine guys get to test designs by slingshotting frozen chickens into the inlets.

>>15740047
>>15740065
Employing contractors to secure votes is still a specific purpose.

>>15740236
I mentioned that, dude. I specifically said "apart from keeping shuttle era contractors alive" or whatever

>>15740238
Your mistake was assuming I could read.

>>15740249
my b

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viktor_Schauberger

Can somebody who is actually smart explain who this guy is and how legitimate his shit was?

>>15740263
Yeah it's real. They bailed on this shithole planet.

Go Clear!
Our girl is going to(possibly participate in a contest for the opportunity to collaborate and) send a small payload to space.
https://atsushi-uchuchallenge.com/
https://twitter.com/clearusui/status/1701600184512532593

Status report?

Starship will launch on October 12.

Exactly 10 years after this test.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZDkItO-0a4

>>15740283
Nobel soon, possibly a Fields medal too

>>15740283
situation normal: no results

I like to think some ayy decoded this and is thinking 'What a shit video game'

>>15740283
Worst oceanographer in the UK

>>15740293
They did think that. They hated it so much they destroyed Arecibo

>>15740299

https://x.com/cosmic_penguin/status/1701645675279311007
Luna-25 -ACK speculation from cosmic penguin. Not saying it’s right (I don’t think he is either) but it’s peculiar nonetheless

>>15739168

>>15740322
that boy always was downright peculiar

>>15740281
That's neat.

>>15740281
Nice. It's really hard to get involved in spaceflight if you're not an academic or a student.

>>15740333
That boy needs therapy

>>15740371
Purely psychosomatic

>>15739151
My sides have been lifted by sky spirits.

>>15739723
Incredibly based, I would do the same

>>15740478
What if they neck up the depot

>>15740478
>depot

>>15740478
This fag is so gay Im tired of his stupid quippy infographics designed for redditors

>>15740478
Stupid to include regular and "extend" variants as if they were different, there'll be no reason to build/fly the regular ones once everything is configured for the extended ones.

>>15740496
some cheapo mexican starliners will only buy the short ones

>>15738812
refuel an SSTO spaceplane in LKO and then single stage it to the Mun's surface and back

>>15740500
There won't be short ones to buy

I read half of it but now it's 4 am
Good book

>>15739919
>>15739928
very cool
It might have survived the fall

>>15740283
Transporter 9

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1701772977061392643

> She did dress up as Mercy. It was awesome.

>>15740500
99% of payloads are going to hit volume constraints before mass constraints. Any payloads that are neither mass nor volume constrained are going to give enough leeway that SpaceX can probably underfill the tanks a bit to save on cost. The added dry mass of a few extra meters of unneeded tank will easily be overcome by the cost savings of only having to maintain one fleet of ship lengths rather than short and long variants (barring the depot that will probably be even longer).

>>15740484

>>15740478
Retard

>>15740536
He's just like me fr fr

>>15739074

>>15740522
*may have

>The Mars Telecommunications Orbiter (MTO) was a cancelled Mars mission that was originally intended to launch in 2009 and would have established an Interplanetary Internet between Earth and Mars.

>The spacecraft would have arrived in a high orbit above Mars in 2010 and relayed data packets to Earth from a variety of Mars landers, rovers and orbiters for as long as ten years, at an extremely high data rate. Such a dedicated communications satellite was thought to be necessary due to the vast quantity of scientific information to be sent to Earth by landers such as the Mars Science Laboratory.

>On July 21, 2005, it was announced that MTO had been canceled due to the need to support other short-term goals, including a Hubble servicing mission, Mars Exploration Rover extended mission operations, launch Mars Science Laboratory in 2009, and to prevent Earth science mission Glory from being cancelled.

>>15740603
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glory_(satellite)#NASA_Investigation
lol

>>15739602
>you just need reliable power
Kinda made me stop and think, how are they powered? I would assume batteries as running a power cable to these devices is pointless.
For the specs they are promoting, these transceivers will need a fairly decent power supply. But if you look at the photo, the devices aren't very large, and what appears to be at least half of it is the optical communication portion. If the rest of the shell is filled with batteries, I would guess you would get maybe an hour or two out of it.
I just don't see the use for that, aside from anything that starlink couldn't do for a much lower cost.

>>15740603
Behead all bureaucrats

H3 better be ready to launch JAXA's MMX mission next September or there will be a third bombing

I haven't been keeping track of Falcon 9 records for a while, whats the consecutive successful launch at? 200+?

>>15740616
If it makes you feel better, apparently between Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Express there is more than enough uplink right now, even for further missions. And NASA is planning on sending Next Mars Orbiter (NMO) at some point soon that will feature a dedicated laser coms system originally tested on the LADEE lunar mission

>>15740603
don't most missions come with their own orbiters that do this for their own and later missions?

>>15738943
Uranus needs to be renamed ASAP.
Firstly, it’s not a Roman deity like every other planet.
In fact it’s not even a “real” deity it’s some vague Greek skyfather god, who gets castrated in mythology and immediately falls into irrelevance. No cults, barely even shows up in greek pottery.
Even switching to Caelus, the Roman version, doesn’t really help with how shallow the deity is.

But most importantly for the sake of space flight and the future settlers of Uranus, it should be renamed.
The reputation of spaceflight should not be hampered by such goofy names.

>>15740603
>it was announced that MTO had been canceled...to prevent Earth science mission Glory from being cancelled
Glory blew the fuck up on a Minotaur launch topkek

>>15740621
Rename ALL planets after Tolkien characters

>>15740620
It's become very common, but not every mission does it. For example, Dragonfly is going to just communicated directly with Earth. Which, I don't really understand. I guess the orbits are going to work out well enough or something idk

>>15740619
At least it's something

>>15740606
they were scamming people and falsifying documents for nineteen years?? Holy shit
How did they think they could get away with it. Especially for NASA missions

>>15738943
>why the fuck is its magnetosphere centered on a point in the fucking mantle of the planet
Something spooky has got to be going on with it. An offset/imbalance of that degree in a planet that large with that composition simply doesn't make sense.
All the gas giants creep me out though. Jupiter and Saturn's cores are sentient.

>>15740536
kek based

>>15740536
He probably didn't even need to ask Grimes to dress up as D.Va, I'm willing to bet she already had a closet full of professional-quality cosplay with strategically-placed zippers.

>>15740606
Glorious American aluminium

>>15740621
Not a problem outside the English language

>>15738879
https://www.controller.com/listings/for-sale/cessna/421/aircraft
buy it on credit cause you think its a deal or because you can add value by working on it yourself, make the monthly payments until you can find a buyer and turn a profit. its no different than flipping houses, which was a common middle class hobby until interest rates spiked due to the onset of hyperinflation

>>15740667

>>15740678
>buy it on credit

That's half a mil bro. That's not a credit, that's a mortgage. Not middle class stuff, not even close...

>>15740618
236

>>15739413
A rapidly reusable launch device takes colonization from
>literally impossible, would cost more than the entire earths GDP over decades
to
>Extremely expensive and difficult, but feasible.

>>15740684
kek

>>15740685
For boomers it was

So I haven't read either of Elon's biographies. Should I read the new one or start with Ashlee Vance's one?

>>15740685
>Not middle class stuff, not even close...
It is if you're not committed to life as a wagie. Millions of middle class people leverage their credit ratings in the hopes of turning a small percentage profit on large amounts of borrowed money by investing their time and skill into airplanes, houses, boats, etc. Its an extremely common side hustle, just about every airframe & powerplant guy I know has a plane they bought cheap or credit and are fixing up for sale.

>>15740720
Walter's easily. Ashlee vance, based on recent behavior, is a total retard compared to walter isaacson, and isaacson's is far more relevant to today

>>15740667
Good luck trying to reset the status quo of languages.

>>15740740
>>15740720
>t.
Dont read either you retards