/sfg/ Spaceflight General

[Anonymous No.10707975]

Mars (of which the Moon is a part) edition

pic related, concept for a commercial lunar lander from SNC

old thread:
>>10699524

[Anonymous No.10707979]

>>10707975
https://www.sncorp.com/press-releases/snc-to-aid-in-us-return-to-moon/

[Anonymous No.10707982]

>>10707979
and their Gateway habitat module WIP

https://twitter.com/SierraNevCorp/status/1137061679869677569

[Anonymous No.10707992]

Trump is a Zionist controlled piece of shit but the context of the tweet is blindingly obvious, that the moon mission is a part of going to Mars.

[Anonymous No.10707998]

>>10707982

Is it inflatable like Bigelow modules?

[Anonymous No.10708000]

[Anonymous No.10708061]

>>10708000
Trips when?

[Anonymous No.10708213]

>>10707975
>>10707977
>new thread
>4 hours ago
>page 8
Moron.

[Anonymous No.10708252]

>>10707975
Ok that picture is quite clearly fake... Are they even trying now a days?

[Anonymous No.10708293]

>>10708213
>WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

[Anonymous No.10708321]

>>10707975
that's a dumb fucking concept. That astronaut would get SANDBLASTED by the rocket exhaust. The exhaust is fast enough to reach escape velocity.

[Anonymous No.10708325]

>>10708252
its just bad lighting anon. nothing wrong with that totally legitimate live action photograph

[Anonymous No.10708345]

>>10708293

[Anonymous No.10708355]

>>10708345
>WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHH

[Anonymous No.10708358]

10708345
10708355
No (you) for fags

[Anonymous No.10708431]

>>10708000
DEUCE BIGELOW GALACTIC GIGOLO!

[Anonymous No.10708488]

>>10707975
That guy would die to the dust flying at mach 10

[Anonymous No.10708591]

>>10708488

Tudle!

[Anonymous No.10708643]

Fuck, this was unexpectedly good

turns out KSP is a documentary based on real life events

[Anonymous No.10708653]

>>10708643
I seriously need to get a copy of this book. I cant afford it right now though.

[Anonymous No.10708744]

>>10708643
top kek
>>10708653
i do too

[Anonymous No.10708799]

>>10708653
Quite ironic that they go over and test everything flammable and the kitchen sink, but there is only few short sentences about methalox, which seems to be the current favorite..

[Anonymous No.10708809]

https://twitter.com/SpaceX/status/1137383580529618946

Static fire test of Falcon 9 complete—targeting June 12 launch of RADARSAT Constellation Mission from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California

[Anonymous No.10708877]

>>10708653
It isn't a physical book, but here you go
https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pdf

[Anonymous No.10708888]

>>10708877
You sir are awesome.

[Anonymous No.10709033]

>>10708643
>on amazon
>new, 74 bucks
>used, 100 bucks
wtf

[Anonymous No.10709057]

>>10707975
Why does it have so many damn rocket engines?

[Anonymous No.10709157]

>>10708799
Methalox is only cool for ISRU and reusability. Otherwise it's so average, you're better off using something else.

[Anonymous No.10709189]

>>10709057
redundancy?

[Anonymous No.10709206]

>>10709157
Hydrolox can also work for ISRU. I don't know how useful it can be for reusability due to hydrogen embrittlement, though.

[Anonymous No.10709243]

>>10707979
>"OZMENS’ SNC CONTINUES TO AID IN AMERICA’S RETURN TO THE MOON"
>press release calls out company owners, who are husband and wife, in title and several times thoughout
>check wikipedia pages
>"This article may have been created or edited in return for undisclosed payments"
>both have short but unusually positive articles
Can someone redpill me on the Ozmens?

[Anonymous No.10709362]

>>10709157

Like what?

[Anonymous No.10709366]

>>10707975
so was the block 1B of the SLS completely cancelled or was it just held off until they can get the base rocket working first? im getting a lot of conflicting signals.

[Anonymous No.10709369]

>>10708643
the N-1 rocket program is something straight out of a KSP play through. its hilarious how fucking bad that program went.

[Anonymous No.10709375]

>>10709366
they decided to not fund it for now, when if they don't fund it now they'll never get it ready

[Anonymous No.10709383]

>>10709375
well i kind of support the idea of getting the block 1 ready first. NASA was a bit too ambitious it seems, and at least this way even if the 1B doesnt get finished we would at least get something out of it rather than the whole thing being canned entirely.

[Anonymous No.10709387]

>>10709383
the thing we'd get out of it is objectively inferior to Falcon Heavy tho

[Anonymous No.10709394]

>>10709387
its still better than it getting completely canned and wasting everyone's time. hopefully they get things sorted and the upper stage does come to fruition.

[Anonymous No.10709398]

>>10709394
>sunk cost fallacy

[Anonymous No.10709403]

>>10709398
for NASA's purposes its pretty much true though. if they cant get something to show the boomers in congress they'll never get funding again.

[Anonymous No.10709407]

>>10709403
that's a good thing tho, they don't need to be developing launch vehicles

[Anonymous No.10709409]

>>10709407
so what, do you want to have to go through the air force for all your launches? or do you just want the chinese to do all the space missions instead?

[Anonymous No.10709410]

>>10709409
>do you just want the chinese to do all the space missions instead?
thats a good thing though. the first people to get to another planet should not be the mutts, theyll just fuck it up before anyone can get there.

[Anonymous No.10709411]

>>10709409
>SpaceX
>Blue Origin
>Orbital ATK
>ULA I guess
you don't need NASA to design launch vehicles, dumb ass

[Anonymous No.10709419]

>>10709411
so were relying on non american companies to get our missions (that wont be funded either if congress doesnt have something to show)?

[Anonymous No.10709421]

>>10709419
space has never been the americans thing. they should just leave that to the europeans and russians.

[Anonymous No.10709428]

>>10709419
commercial space will be enough
ESA and Roscosmos will still do science missions, and Congress will get over their hissy fit sooner or later

[Anonymous No.10709434]

>>10709428
>commercial space will be enough
not if you can never get funding to do missions. congress will cancel the mars landing if

[Anonymous No.10709439]

>>10709434
didnt finish
congress will cancel the mars landing if NASA doesnt have anything to show, and theyll cut funding for decades. another pause in spaceflight would be disastrous.

[Anonymous No.10709445]

>>10709439
lel you don't need NASA in order to do space, anon

[Anonymous No.10709446]

>>10709445
you do if you want america to be involved.

[Anonymous No.10709449]

>>10709446
no :^)

[Anonymous No.10709456]

>>10709449
do you think space-X is going to plant an american flag on mars? fuck no. if NASA cant pay for a mission theyll look for other customers. I.E. china.

[Anonymous No.10709462]

>>10709369
Nah, N-1 is not KSP tier, it was well thought out. They've had several tech problems (increased drag due to the wide aft, the hyperboloid supporting structure turned out to be worse than initially thought, etc), so the rocket was worse than Saturn V. But the idea of many engines was solid, and even somewhat more reliable because of the redundancy. It failed because they failed to secure the funding for the required ground infrastructure (the industry was too busy with ICBMs at the time), so they've had to test it in actual flight instead of doing static fire tests.

[Anonymous No.10709464]

>>10709456
Of course they will, you dummy. They operate under the authority of their home nation (the USA), and actually like the United States of America, particularly over nightmare states like China who are chased for the money, not out of any love.

[Anonymous No.10709467]

>>10709462
>the Soviets didn't go to the moon because the Soviets didn't care about space

[Anonymous No.10709475]

>>10707975
I think what he meant was that establishing a foothold on Luna was a part of sending astronauts to Mars.

[Anonymous No.10709478]

>>10709464
no they will not. if NASA isnt giving them any money, then they have no reason to go to mars at all.

[Anonymous No.10709480]

>>10709375
so wait, is it getting built or not? not that other guy btw

[Anonymous No.10709485]

>>10709480
no, Block 1B and Block 2 will probably never happen and the design/production work that could make them ever happen isn't being funded right now

[Anonymous No.10709486]

>>10709478
Reason's got nothing to do with it.

[Anonymous No.10709493]

>>10709485
i know this whole thing is pretty likely to fail, but has nasa officially said anything on it?

[Anonymous No.10709500]

>>10709493
"we're going to the moon and also SLS will be there yes thank you Congress"

[Anonymous No.10709507]

>>10709500
fair enough.

[Anonymous No.10709515]

>>10709456
Erm no, there are some limitations.
For example the companies that design and build fighter jets are technically private, but they can't also make and sell them to countries that the DoD doesn't first approve--China for example.

Accepting all of the gov contracts that SpaceX did probably happened under the requirement that they not also try to sell rockets to Iran for example.

This is not Domino's pizza we are talking about, it's a company that builds spaceships, which are basically still just weapons on a fundamental level.

Hell you couldn't even open a Domino's in North Korea because a portion of those sweet pizza profits would go towards a regime the UN has agreed is evil.

Anon this is not Vietnam, there are rules.

[Anonymous No.10709517]

>>10709467
They've been too busy closing the reverse rocket gap. The US made several hundred Titans to close the rocket gap previously, but the gap itself was imaginary, the soviets only had several R-7s at the time. So the soviets were stuck with a pressing need to reach the parity in ICBMs and SLBMs at the time of Apollo, it was a top defense priority. Moon program wasn't given the national status in USSR until 4 years into the "race". Kennedy's analysts and advisors were worth their salt, they choose the right time to start all this.

[Anonymous No.10709525]

>>10709515
International Trafficking in Arms Regulation forbids SpaceX from dealing with China and Iran even without any kind of contract work with the Federal Government, because rocket technology is a fundamentally restricted commodity.

[Anonymous No.10709532]

>>10709515
like I'm gonna listen to some retard that reddit spaces his posts.

[Anonymous No.10709534]

>>10709532
this.

[Anonymous No.10709536]

fuck the SLS and Scam-X

we should have never abandoned the saturn.

[Anonymous No.10709542]

>>10709532
>>10709534
>call me a plebbitor will you
I was posting on 4chan before that site existed, and probably back when you were in preschool. STFU and read

[Anonymous No.10709543]

>>10709536
embrace the future, and it is all shiny and chrome trashcan

[Anonymous No.10709556]

>>10709525
>implying "international law" is real

[Anonymous No.10709561]

>>10709556
ITAR is a US law

[Anonymous No.10709566]

>>10709561
and its a farce.
china will be the new owners of space, deal with it.

[Anonymous No.10709572]

>>10709561
>ITAR is a US law
ITAR is an international treaty encoded with domestic laws for each of the signatory states.

[Anonymous No.10709575]

>>10709572
in this case the US law enforcing the ITAR treaty (known as ITAR) would be applied

[Anonymous No.10709587]

>>10709575
Generally in the form of sanctions against the state and its economy. Its a multinational effort, not just a US one.

[Anonymous No.10709589]

>>10709587
no, its not. the company would be banned from taking business from another nation, its as simple as that.

[Anonymous No.10709592]

>>10709587
it actually applies in a very real sense to ANY attempt to export or share on the internet knowledge about guns and rockets
it's a pain in the ass and they take it super seriously, you need to do a bunch of paperwork to even share images of protected bits of rockets with somebody from, say, Great Britain, our ally

[Anonymous No.10709597]

>>10709589
You seem to be confused about the nature of the consequences and their scope.

>>10709592
They do indeed take it seriously; I'm only speaking towards the consequences of non-compliance.

[Anonymous No.10709642]

HOP WHEN

[Anonymous No.10709644]

>>10709642
SOON
you can check the county website for the latest news on the road closures surrounding any testing

[Anonymous No.10709657]

Which is a better ISRU propellant? Methalox? Hydrolox? or something else? And why?

[Anonymous No.10709662]

>>10709657
hydrolox is easier on the moon, and doesn't require importing giant blocks of graphite
it also has some performance benefits, but you end up shackled to storing liquid hydrogen, which is a pain in the ass, both on the ground and in orbit
methalox has a bunch of benefits re:storage and transport and only slightly worse performance
if you're on the moon you could always make solids out of moon aluminum

[Anonymous No.10709671]

>>10709662
>but you end up shackled to storing liquid hydrogen, which is a pain in the ass, both on the ground and in orbit
A way around this is to only convert water into hydrolox when needed. Trips from the lunar surface to lunar orbit or lunar orbit to LEO are typically very short (in the order of days) so maybe the headaches of LH2 storage won't be so bad.

>methalox has a bunch of benefits re:storage and transport and only slightly worse performance
Mathalox is noticeably worse ISP-wise, but it has better thrust for the same size of engine compared to hydrolox. This may be desirable if one were looking to use the same engine for both to-orbit rockets and space transportation vehicles (like SpaceX).

>if you're on the moon you could always make solids out of moon aluminum
I remember a debate on this on a previous /sfg/, one anon argued that the process of grinding down aluminum on the moon would be so energy intensive that it would simply be easier and better to use hydrolox.

[Anonymous No.10709672]

>>10709657
Methalox in general, hydrogen is a pain in the ass to store for extended periods and it damages everything it contacts (hydrogen embrittlement). Not to mention it requires a fuckhuge amount of tank volume to hold. Hydrolox would be suitable as a single-burst return engine from any of the outer system moons though, either launching to intercept a mothership, or coming straight home, as many of the moons orbiting the gas giants are iceballs. Methalox would be ideal for ops around Saturn simply because of the existence of Titan; methane and other simple hydrocarbons are extremely abundant there, with Methane simply requiring distillation straight from the atmosphere or sucked straight from the lakes. LOX would require drilling on Titan or extraction from Enceladeus.

>>10709662
>if you're on the moon you could always make solids out of moon aluminum
powdered solid propellant would be a grade A pain in the ass to get into the combustion chamber, and do you really want to deal with a solid or hybrid rocket motor in space?

[Anonymous No.10709675]

>>10709672
>do you really want to deal with a solid or hybrid rocket motor in space
cheap and indigenous storable propellants for that lunar MIC baby

[Anonymous No.10709680]

>>10709672
>Methalox in general...
Would it be feasible on the moon though? Methane ISRU there would have to bring it's own carbon. I'm not sure how much carbon would be needed, but I'm sure that it's not a trivial amount.

[Anonymous No.10709682]

>>10709671
>the process of grinding down aluminum on the moon would be so energy intensive that it would simply be easier and better to use hydrolox
the thing is that you're grinding that regolith down anyway to cook the water out
there's no reason not to do both

[Anonymous No.10709723]

>>10709680
Hence why I said in general. There's a few places in the solar system where carbon sources are scarce. For spamming the Moon with megatons of carbon its probably going to require a shitload of starship flights or just spamming solid rockets at it and crashing the payload capsules into the surface.

You also have to keep in mind, we still havent done any proper prospecting and resource surveys of the moon so we have no idea what's really up there other than what's on the surface in a few small areas and the ice in the polar craters.

[Anonymous No.10709727]

>>10709723
this, I'm sure we'll be able to find SOME carbon on the moon

[Anonymous No.10709729]

>>10709723
>You also have to keep in mind, we still havent done any proper prospecting and resource surveys of the moon so we have no idea what's really up there other than what's on the surface in a few small areas and the ice in the polar craters.
Hopefully that will change soon, and wouldn't get put off indefinitely like low gravity research.

[Anonymous No.10709741]

[Anonymous No.10709742]

>>10709727
I mean if the running theory is that the moon is basically a big chunk of Earth that got btfo by a fuckhuge asteroid, if that's the case it would be ludicrous for there NOT to be many forms of Carbon.

[Anonymous No.10709743]

[Anonymous No.10709757]

>>10709741
>>10709743
What's up with the instagram filter?

[Anonymous No.10709761]

>>10709757
shit if I know dude, some twitter dude posted these
he's got his watermark on them

[Anonymous No.10709763]

>>10709743
Good luck tin can looking piece of shit Chan!

[Anonymous No.10709768]

There's also the fact that, depending on how far down the hot layers are, we could go REALLY FUCKING DEEP into the moon for resources, like, into the entire upper lunar mantle deep if not into the middle mantle.

>>10709742
It'd be buried then, because orbital observations haven't seen much if any, and sample returns from Apollo were all carbon-free. The rocks we've seen were all various metal-oxide and silicate mixes with no carbon.


I also realized, since there's so much metal on the moon, building observatories up there would be fairly easy to do. The hard part would be creating carbon-free or low-carbon alloys to substitute what we'd need for various forms of carbon steel.

[Anonymous No.10709774]

>>10709768
low-carbon and carbon-free steel is going to be the biggest hurdle for the lunar shipyards, yes
lunar titanium and aluminum are also both extremely attractive, although harder to extract

[Anonymous No.10709783]

>>10709768
Maybe the carbon issue can be used as an advantage? A lunar-base using mathalox ISRU would need regular (or semi-regular) shipments of carbon from Earth, thus providing a reason to continue support of a lunar-base (beyond it's original purpose of course). The need to ship carbon can be spun as a positive because the needed mass of carbon would always be smaller than the needed mass of propellants made on Earth (with no ISRU on the moon). Plus the need of regular launches to the moon could drive down launch costs.

[Anonymous No.10709786]

>>10709783
NEO or Belt carbon, bruh

[Anonymous No.10709799]

>>10709774
Hey, at least melting the shit down is going to be easily doable during the day cycle: the sun is a huge source of energy and it'd be possible to use a shitload of mirrors and/or lenses to focus the sunlight from a huge area onto a small one.

>>10709783
Point. Earth has a fuckton of carbon and regular flights to the moon when they happen would likely end up just stuffing all of the extra available mass outside of the primary payloads with chunks of carbon material for use. Like, here, you're going to the moon, here's your luggage and a 100kg container of anthracite coal to stuff in the specified spot in your cabin.

[Anonymous No.10709814]

>>10709799
That sounds awesome. I really hope that spaceflight and a space-born industry takes off within my lifetime.

[Anonymous No.10709905]

>>10709786
It'll be decades before we're out in the belt harvesting it for resources, and you know the scientists are going to want their first real look at the rocks out there before processing begins.

Besides, harvesting the Jupiter Trojans is probably going to be more likely as they're all nicely grouped up into 2 clouds.

[Anonymous No.10709913]

>>10709905
>Jupiter Trojans
you need nukes to go out that far, solar and chemical won't take you there
and that's never happening unless Mars develops nuclear tech, or Luna has enough independence to do the same without the fun police shitting on them (unlikely)

[Anonymous No.10709944]

>>10709913
We're gonna need nukes to go out beyond Ceres anyways. The only real spot past the belt where chemical ISRU is cheaply feasible is Saturn due to the presence of Titan and Enceladeus, not to mention the rings themselves.
Uranus would be possible as several of the larger moons have carbon sources, but the extreme tilt of the entire system would make entry and exiting it a pain in the ass.
Neptune has Triton, but that motherfucker is going retrograde.

[Anonymous No.10709951]

>>10709944
>going fucking retrograde
is Triton the most remote place in the entire solar system?
luckily swapping orbital direction is basically free if you're coming in from escape anyway

[Anonymous No.10709955]

>>10709743
that shits gonna burn up immediately.

[Anonymous No.10709957]

>>10709955
doing what? it's only designed to test low altitude low speed engine performance and control

[Anonymous No.10709961]

>>10709957
the production version is made up of the same stuff. spaceX is a scam.

[Anonymous No.10709964]

>>10709961
oh okay, thanks

[Anonymous No.10709970]

>>10709961
>spaceX is a scam.
Let me guess, you think SpaceX fakes the Falcon 9 booster landings?

[Anonymous No.10709972]

>>10709951
Pluto and the Kuiper Belt objects are further out. Sedna with its fucking ridiculous eccentricity of 0.85491 and a perihelion of ~76.1AU and an Aphelion of 936AU puts it WAAAAAAAY the fuck out in the boonies.

If the proposed Planet 9 is ever actually found it and its moons if it has any would definitely hold the record for the furthest actual planet at 400-800AU.

[Anonymous No.10709974]

>>10709972
I meant in dV, but it's probably not that hard to get to actually, coming in from outside a system lets you pick literally any inclination with ease

[Anonymous No.10709989]

>>10709974
True at least for going to Triton. Going to the Uranus system would still be difficult due to the tilt once it has shifted far enough out of phase with the rest of the system. There's like only 2 arcs of Uranus' orbit where its possible to easily enter and exit the system without having to do much plane changing to sync up with the moons (when the plane is tangental to Uranus' orbit, essentially during a Polar summer). Outside those arcs might as well not bother. Not even sure if playing gravity pinball off the moons to sync up would be an option either.

[Anonymous No.10709995]

>>10709970
a majority of the first ones were obviously faked.

[Anonymous No.10709998]

>>10709995
you mean the ones where they consistently crashed?

[Anonymous No.10710001]

>>10709995
And your evidence for this is?...

[Anonymous No.10710003]

>>10709998
Exactly. Elon Musk wouldn't fuck up like that. He'd get it on the first try.

[Anonymous No.10710015]

>>10709989
>>10709972
I went digging and found another iceball that goes out to almost 1600AU at aphelion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%28308933%29_2006_SQ372
>Orbital period of 23,336 years

[Anonymous No.10710016]

>>10710001
are you just in denial? did you not see how many cuts and skips there were on their landings? faked as fuck.

[Anonymous No.10710022]

Dont feed the fucking troll jesus christ.

[Anonymous No.10710065]

>all these people saying the block 1B is cancelled
i thought it was delayed until the Artemis missions? that sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

[Anonymous No.10710066]

Anyways, back to the original point: ISRU would be possible at Uranus and Neptune as they both have icy moons containing carbon sources. The problem is getting out there. Neptune is super fucking far out and Triton being retrograde makes capture and escape from Neptune a little more interesting. Uranus's tilt limits arrivals and departures to polar summers.

Really though, why the fuck would anyone want to physically go out to Uranus or Neptune anyways? Saturn and its moons are at least interesting to explore/colonize. Only real reason I see to go that far out would be to set up radio and infrared observatories away from the energy of the inner system. On top of that, whoever we sent out would likely have to spend the rest of their lives out there. Even gravity assisting off Jupiter with a nuclear rocket would still take decades for a round trip.

[Anonymous No.10710083]

>>10710015
Beautiful

[Anonymous No.10710086]

>>10710065
If it's not funded now it won't be ready for Artemis
It isn't being funded

[Anonymous No.10710091]

>>10710086
im not sure about that. they seem pretty sure that the SLS is the way forward.

[Anonymous No.10710095]

>>10707975

Reminder that the next person to set foot on the Moon (if any) will thereby become the 13th person to do so-using untried craft, at that. Would any NASA personnel dare tempt fate in this way? Will it even be a NASA astronaut?

[Anonymous No.10710109]

>>10709742
Thing is, the carbonate bearing rocks on earth originated from ocean sediments, and I'm pretty sure the moon never had any oceans.

[Anonymous No.10710111]

>>10709768
>>10709774
Carbon free alloys exist; they're called maraging steel.

[Anonymous No.10710115]

>>10710109
Where the fuck do you think carbon comes from

[Anonymous No.10710127]

>>10710109
Hence why I (the anon who's been talking about beyond-saturn exploration) said we're probably going to have to mine carbon-bearing minerals from deep inside the moon if it even has them. Volcanic activity on earth has ejected parts of the planet's internal carbon store onto the surface where it ultimately got used over the planet's lifespan.
On the moon though, there's no more volcanic activity and there hasnt been for billions of years. All of its carbon is currently locked deep inside, and mining that shit out is going to be a pain in the ass. If it's too deep, we wont be able to extract it and the Moon will require regular carbon shipments from Earth.

[Anonymous No.10710222]

Any astronomical philatelists got an eye for this craft? Looks like the mission involves magnetism.

[Anonymous No.10710225]

>>10710091
Yes, and they can put Orion into the gay-ass NRLHO with only block 1

[Anonymous No.10710234]

>>10710225
thats true, but they also need the block 1 later on. so it makes sense not to get too ambitions and work out the block one first and work on the 1B when theyre closer to actually needing it.

[Anonymous No.10710426]

should the flags on the moon be removed? the moon belongs to no nation after all. hopefully the ESA can accomplish this task and fix that mistake.

[Anonymous No.10710446]

>>10709961
Just because they're made of the same material doesn't mean they are built the same. The hopper is a quick and dirty test bed.

[Anonymous No.10710509]

>>10709362
Simple Kerolox for example.

[Anonymous No.10710510]

>>10710222
Nice trips!
Examination of Van Allen Zone, magnetosphere

[Anonymous No.10710512]

>>10709723
>There's a few places in the solar system where carbon sources are scarce
Why is carbon scarce on the moon anyway? Shouldn't it have just as much carbon in it as earth does?

[Anonymous No.10710562]

>>10709439

Nah, that's just alarmist bullshit a SLS fanboy says

[Anonymous No.10710570]

>>10710509
>Simple Kerolox for example.
It becomes better than kerosene when you start utilizing propellant densification.

[Anonymous No.10710601]

>>10709478
Musk wants to go to Mars, that is reason enough. Besides, NASA will likely give them funding if they demonstrate Starship orbital flights. To not take advantage of such opportunity would be criminally negligent.

[Anonymous No.10710609]

>>10710066
what about Callisto? an entire moon worth of resources, including volatiles, and radiation environment is much milder than inner Jupiter moons

[Anonymous No.10710672]

>>10709157
>Methalox is only cool for ISRU and reusability

Yeah, only the two biggest factors in the future of spaceflight, no big deal.

[Anonymous No.10710679]

>>10710672
Yes. The future. I was explaining why a book concerning the past of rocket propellants didn't cover it much.

[Anonymous No.10710691]

>>10709995
i can never tell if this is satire or genuine any more

[Anonymous No.10710693]

>>10710022
sorry

[Anonymous No.10710717]

>can't even put a human into orbit
>discussing ISRU and colonies independence
I thought I was in /sci/ not /scifi/

[Anonymous No.10710741]

10710717

[Anonymous No.10710755]

When are we going to create a worm hole?

[Anonymous No.10710765]

>>10710755
The belt has to riot first. The Earth-Mars coalition won't allow anyone to have the tech, they are using it on their interstellar cruisers.

[Anonymous No.10710771]

>>10710741
Don't give him any attention, that's all he wants. Fucking earth shills think they can stop the expansion of humanity into the space, amirite guys?

[Anonymous No.10710807]

>>10710765
fuck the belt

[Anonymous No.10710850]

>>10710807
WE GON RISE RISE UP

FUCK THE INNAS

[Anonymous No.10710863]

>>10710679
Reusability was big in the past, too. See Shuttle, DC-X, and many other projects that never left the drawing board. Yet methane was never considered. I dont think this is only due to technical arguments, there was a cultural blind spot here. Conventional wisdom at the time was compared to hydrogen and RP-1, methane ISP and density sits in between and thus offers the worst of both worlds. When in fact it looks like it is in fact the sweet spot.

[Anonymous No.10710867]

>>10710755
create two artificial black holes and feed them with entangled particles

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ER%3DEPR

[Anonymous No.10710901]

So which is the best method of skipping all this expensive-as-fuck rocket launching bullshit? Space colonization will never happen without a permanent cost efficient link

[Anonymous No.10710909]

>>10710901
just make the rocket launching bullshit not be expensive, non-rocket launch is mostly sci-fi bullshit

[Anonymous No.10710913]

>>10710901
>So which is the best method of skipping all this expensive-as-fuck rocket launching bullshit?

Nuclear engines. Other than that, there are no better options; Earth's gravity well is deep.

[Anonymous No.10710919]

>>10710863
It's not cultural, it's just gradual tech improvement. Before 90s (approximately), you've had to worry about the best mass ratio you could ever get, regardless of the cost. In 90s, the computation capabilities and advancements in materials rendered this obsolete, so today you have a bit of a margin to care about other factors such as cost effectiveness, modularity, transportability etc. Methalox started to appear on the radars again in late 90s to early 2000s, when nobody took VTVL and reusability seriously.

Regarding DC-X in particular, it was a prototype for an SSTO rocket, and SSTO still needs every bit of effectiveness to barely reach the orbit, so it's a poor example; Shuttle is a better one.

>>10710901
Momentum exchange tethers look the least scifi of all other non-rocket options. (but still sci-fi)

[Anonymous No.10710920]

>>10710901
>>10710913
Orbital rings are a possibility if the kinks are worked out
Space elevators if we can get a material strong and plentiful enough for it
and launch loops if the designer stops being a meme tier mong with his head up his own ass

for now though, Nuclear rockets

[Anonymous No.10710927]

So what happened to aerospikes? In 90's there was lots of talk, but no walk. Did nozzle extensions replaced them completely?

[Anonymous No.10710935]

>>10710927
They were found to be heavier than classic layouts while offering little improvement over nozzle extenders. Some light rockets are currently trying to make use of aerospikes, there's not much point in using them in larger ones. Although central engines in multiengine rockets like Falcon 9 work in modes similar to aerospikes (caused by the outer engine exhaust dynamics).

[Anonymous No.10710979]

>>10710919
Yea ok and now musk is building a steel rocket

[Anonymous No.10710982]

>>10710901
Just remove Earth. Then everyone will be in space.

[Anonymous No.10710983]

>>10710850
Get back to your hollowed put rock, slinkytwink rock hopper

[Anonymous No.10710997]

>>10710901

Launch Loop. Its will be expensive as fuck, but at least remotely feasible with current tech, contrary to fantasies about space elevators/orbital rings. And if completed, the price reduction in cost to LEO would be massive.

[Anonymous No.10711016]

>>10710997
looks like it would collapse at the drop of a hat, but whatever

[Anonymous No.10711059]

>>10710901
The Bifrost.
http://www.luf.org/bifrost.php

[Anonymous No.10711090]

>>10711059
mmmm g forces

[Anonymous No.10711097]

>>10711090
Use it to carry bulk materials into space. Food, graphite, and equipment don't care about 10+g's.

[Anonymous No.10711100]

>>10710512
No major geological activity after it was formed other than the flooding of the various basins on the earth side. Without tectonic or volcanic activity (which earth has and mars had) to dredge the carbon up from deep within in, the surface depleted of carbon.

>>10710609
Well that too, but the proximity of Jupiter's radiation belt makes exploration of the inner moons difficult.

[Anonymous No.10711104]

>>10711059

Beamed propulsion in general is pretty promising:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beam-powered_propulsion

>"Laser propulsion as an idea that may produce a revolution in space technology. A single laser facility on the ground can in theory launch single-stage vehicles into low or high earth orbit. The payload can be 20% or 30% of the vehicle take-off weight. It is far more economical in the use of mass and energy than chemical propulsion, and it is far more flexible in putting identical vehicles into a variety of orbits."

[Anonymous No.10711186]

>>10710901
Orbital Ring. Go big or go home.

[Anonymous No.10711193]

>>10711097
Food very much so cares about g forces you mong, as does everything else that isn't inert and solid

[Anonymous No.10711195]

>>10711193
>Food very much so cares about g forces

[Anonymous No.10711201]

>>10710997
0 to full retard in one post. That thing is just a grant chasing project.

[Anonymous No.10711209]

>>10711193
Inanimate objects don't have feefees, anon. Stop drinking your bathwater.

[Anonymous No.10711211]

>>10711186
WEW

[Anonymous No.10711213]

>>10711193
Oh no! The potatoes Earth has sent has undergone too much gee forces and has turned into mashed potatoes! Baked Potato Wednesday on the moon is ruined!!!

[Anonymous No.10711216]

>>10711201

Nah, its pretty feasible. No new materials needed, just engineering and building a pretty long tube. Long, but but still much shorter structure than a fucking orbital ring would require.

[Anonymous No.10711270]

>>10711211
that's a bunch of nonsense though
>wave propagation
yeah waves propagate no shit, what's the point though
>tidal forces (Roche limit)
roche's limit is just several thousand miles above surface for earth
>tidal forces (extraplanetary)
earth gravity is a dominating force at these altitudes
>tidal forces (planetary gravitational map inconsistencies)
what a complex way to pronounce uneven gravity, it's not like earth has mascons like the moon, the effect is negligible unless you are retarded enough to let it resonate
>solar phase declination particle flux cumulative charging
an electron gun to neutralize the charge is literally 1910's tech
>metal fatigue to temperature fluctiations
the structure won't be rigid due to its size anyway, it has to be in hydrostatic equilibrium, metal fatigue has nothing to do with it
>basal shear stress
the same as above
>secular & periodic gravitational perturbation
the same as above, the structure has to be in equilibrium just like Saturn's rings but above Roche's limit, the sum of perturbative forces is zero
>constant orbital degradation & related forces
see above

[Anonymous No.10711279]

>>10711270
the person that made it is a brainlet trying to sound smart
similar retards now parrot it everywhere, while staunchly ignoring any arguments

[Anonymous No.10711544]

>>10711279
Do you really believe that orbital rings will be stable enough to be useable? Honest question here

[Anonymous No.10711553]

>>10711544
Yes, but only after extensive research and development, as we have nether built anything even remotely like it, nor have we built anything on such a grand scale
we outright need new logistical doctrine if we want to build megastructures like this, let alone all the other shit

[Anonymous No.10711558]

>>10710997
>realistic
>2000 km long
>80 km high

[Anonymous No.10711559]

>>10711558
big doesn't mean impossible
big means difficult
there is a difference

[Anonymous No.10711581]

>>10711559
There's an equally like chance of space elevator happening than there is for launchloop today. But chances Space Elevators would become much more likely than launchloop as we advance in material science.

[Anonymous No.10711659]

>>10711581
do recall that a space elevator would need to be 36000 kilometers long, in addition to requiring materials far stronger than what we possess today
The launch loop is a meme, but in it's current state, it's less of a meme than a space elevator, since at the very least, the physical capabilities of existent, and most importantly mass producible materials are sufficient for the launch loop, despite it's size

[Anonymous No.10711732]

>>10711558
At this rate wouldn't it be more efficient to just build a regular tower and combine with space elevator for the last part?

[Anonymous No.10711775]

>>10711553
>Yes
And, this is why >>10711211 has a higher IQ than you.

[Anonymous No.10711781]

>>10711270
Seems you have no idea what any of that means, kid. Don't quite your day job. lol

[Anonymous No.10711862]

Did she died?

[Anonymous No.10712351]

>>10711781
What the fuck did you just fucking say about me, you little bitch? I'll have you know I graduated top of my class in the Navy Seals, and I've been involved in numerous secret raids on Al-Quaeda, and I have over 300 confirmed kills. I am trained in gorilla warfare and I'm the top sniper in the entire US armed forces. You are nothing to me but just another target. I will wipe you the fuck out with precision the likes of which has never been seen before on this Earth, mark my fucking words. You think you can get away with saying that shit to me over the Internet? Think again, fucker. As we speak I am contacting my secret network of spies across the USA and your IP is being traced right now so you better prepare for the storm, maggot. The storm that wipes out the pathetic little thing you call your life. You're fucking dead, kid. I can be anywhere, anytime, and I can kill you in over seven hundred ways, and that's just with my bare hands. Not only am I extensively trained in unarmed combat, but I have access to the entire arsenal of the United States Marine Corps and I will use it to its full extent to wipe your miserable ass off the face of the continent, you little shit. If only you could have known what unholy retribution your little "clever" comment was about to bring down upon you, maybe you would have held your fucking tongue. But you couldn't, you didn't, and now you're paying the price, you goddamn idiot. I will shit fury all over you and you will drown in it. You're fucking dead, kiddo.

[Anonymous No.10712450]

>>10710717
humans have never been to space and lived. the radiation makes it impossible.

[Anonymous No.10712528]

>>10711862
In glorious fire, yes

[Anonymous No.10712666]

>>10711659
Uh no launch loop cannot exist, that’s not how physics works

[Anonymous No.10712794]

>>10712666
Post numbers, Mr. Brainlet

[Anonymous No.10712848]

>>10710935
>Although central engines in multiengine rockets like Falcon 9 work in modes similar to aerospikes (caused by the outer engine exhaust dynamics).
Confirmed to not be the case, Falcon 9 has no aerospike effect due to its engine layout. If it gets any extra bit of thrust at all it's coming from the gas generator exhaust, which is dumped just aft of the rocket and collects into a sightly-higher-than-ambient pressure region at the base of the rocket.

[Anonymous No.10712850]

>>10710997
Someone draw in the large hardon collider for scale please

[Anonymous No.10712853]

>>10711104
>It is far more economical in the use of mass and energy than chemical propulsion
But is it more economical in terms of cost? That's all that matters.

[Anonymous No.10712980]

>>10712853
Don't forget to factor in design cost
We're going to be stuck as technobarbarians soon enough, were it isn't cost effective to develop anything so understanding dies

[Anonymous No.10713455]

>>10708488
might be closer to mach 12, actually.

[Anonymous No.10713507]

>>10712848

...

niggers?

[Anonymous No.10713546]

>>10713455
It's in a vacuum, it doesn't have a mach number, dumbass

[Anonymous No.10714286]

>>10713546
mine does, shut up

[Anonymous No.10714315]

>>10712666
damn nice digits. Launch loop can exist. The problem is that the launch loop is unstable. Lofstrom's proposed solution is LOL COMPUTERS. This has not been tested or analyzed.
>>10711659
Colossal carbon tubes have the required MACROSCALE strenth to weight ratio to build a practical space elevator.

[Anonymous No.10714322]

Anyone work for Blue Origin? If so, what is the culture like? How is the pay compared to market averages?
I just had a head hunter contact me about an open position there and am wondering if I should even waste my time calling back.

[Anonymous No.10714332]

>>10714322
From Glassdoor reviews: culture seems troubled, mainly due to recent rapid expansion and poor management. But salaries on average are about $20,000 more than SpaceX, whilst less than ULA.

[Anonymous No.10714340]

>>10710927
Aerospike engineers work at BlueOrigin now.

>>10710935
Only brainlets claim Falcon9 is using Aerospikes engine design, when the reality of it was far from it.

[Anonymous No.10714681]

>/sci/ is getting raided again
for fucks sake

[Anonymous No.10714721]

>>10714681
Yeah but they're getting banned so whatever

[Anonymous No.10715059]

>>10714340
>>10710935
>>10712848
>Falcon 9 Aerospike-like
This is the first time I'm hearing of this. Where did that come from?

[Anonymous No.10715162]

>>10715059
Its an idea that's been floating around with some members of r/spacex and NasaSpaceFlight for a while based on aerodynamics speculation, but I don't think its born out in actual flight data.

[Anonymous No.10715169]

>>10715162
I mean, it makes sense. Some artillery shells have a small gas generator on their rear ends to generate turbulence behind them. This turbulence acts like an extension of the shell body rearwards, allowing the air to flow more smoothly around it. Supposedly this increases accuracy at cost of more drag (or maybe it's the other way around, less drag for less accuracy idk). The central engine on the F9 could act like that, in theory at least.

[Anonymous No.10715411]

>>10712850
LHC diameter is 8.5 km

[Anonymous No.10715492]

New image of the Mark 2

[Anonymous No.10715861]

>>10715169
No, the central engine couldn't, because its exhaust is hypersonic just like the rest of the engines. However, the gas generators which dump their very subsonic exhaust directly through the rear shield could act exactly like you suggest and probably do.
>>10715059
The idea is dumb but it comes from the fact that the center engine on Falcon 9 is mounted slightly lower (like a few centimeters lower) than the rest. Some peopel suggested that the exhaust from the outer 8 engines could somehow interact with the middle engine and increase its chamber pressure, which is not how De Laval nozzle engine bells work. In reality the reason for the lower mount is that it gives the engine a slightly wider gimbal range, and is also a consequence of weight saving design on the thrust plate (it is cup shaped rather than a flat disk because it makes the plate much stronger, which means the middle of the plate is slightly below the edges).

[Anonymous No.10715877]

>>10710997
>>10712850
>>10715411
>some people actually think this thing is even remotely plausible
Megastructures are mega memes and will never be built for the same reason we don't build terawatt scale power generators

[Anonymous No.10715913]

>>10715877
>BIG THING BAD

[Anonymous No.10715915]

>>10715913
In not so many words. Being big makes everything more complicated and more expensive.

[Anonymous No.10715924]

>>10715915
absolutely
but it's viability as a feat of engineering is based on other factors, which if some good research on the thing was done past that one faggy paper, we could confirm for sure and be done with it

[Anonymous No.10715971]

>>10715877
Do me a favor and compare it at scale with equatorial South America

[Anonymous No.10715972]

>>10715877
Did you really need to draw the LHC at scale to convince yourself that a 2,000x80 km rollercoaster is implausibly big?

[Anonymous No.10715982]

>>10715913
>BIG THING EXPENSIVE AND DIFFICULT TO JUSTIFY WITHOUT LARGE SCALE PREEXISTING SPACE ECONOMY
Unless we're already putting millions of tons into orbit per year this thing is a bridge to nowhere. You can't justify spending trillions on a megaproject like a launch loop unless we're already spending about that much on more expensive launch options.

[Anonymous No.10715987]

>>10715972
No, but it helps convince some people. I've encountered people who seem to think LHC is build underneath the entirety of Europe, for example.

[Anonymous No.10715995]

>>10715971
>here's your launch loop, bro

[Anonymous No.10716005]

>>10715971
>>10715995
option 2

Other than these two places you are required to put some or all of your loop over open ocean, so good luck.

[Anonymous No.10716046]

>>10716005

[Anonymous No.10716048]

>>10716005
ocean would be ideal, as it would be (effectively) flat and open, not requiring any significant excavation
it would also be easier to secure, since not every asshole has a boat

[Anonymous No.10716054]

>>10716048
Somali pirates?

[Anonymous No.10716058]

>>10716054
only raid cargo ships, oil tankers, and other things that they can make money from
this thing would store no large volumes of easily sold goodies, so it would be a straight up waste of time
also because docking a small warship at the ends would be simple and absolutely shut down all piracy, as modern pirates are just giggling assholes in a speedboat, not a military equivalent ship of the line

[Anonymous No.10716065]

>>10716048
How are you gonna secure the stabilization tethers? Build pylons into the sea bed 4 km down? That requires just as much excavation except you're doing it in a high pressure salt water environment, remotely, because you can't even use human divers at that depth. The advantage of the sea being effectively flat on large scales pretty well evaporates in the fact of the hugely increased construction difficulty.

[Anonymous No.10716186]

>>10714681
by who?

[Anonymous No.10716201]

>>10710913
>>10710920
What reading material would you recommend for nuclear engines

[Anonymous No.10716207]

more hopper delays, oof

[Anonymous No.10716221]

>>10716201
Wikipedia and that youtube video documentary from the 50's about NERVA.

Here's the basic concept; you design a very power dense nuclear reactor that uses open cycle cooling. You run this reactor as hot as possible. You route the hot coolant escaping form the reactor through a nozzle to generate thrust. Configure the plumbing to weigh as little as possible, and you now have a nuclear thermal rocket engine.

NTRs have two overall advantages, and several disadvantages. First, the disadvantages. NTR engines cost a lot, because not only do they require all the same engineering as a rocket engine, they are also ultra-high-power nuclear reactors, and have all the difficulties associated with that. For any propellant except for hydrogen and helium, chemical engines get better Isp. This is because a chemical engine can get its propellant far hotter than a nuclear thermal rocket engine can, so if your NTR is running on water and you compare it to a hydrogen-oxygen rocket engine which produces water exhaust, the NTR will look like shit by comparison. Nuclear thermal rocket engines also weigh much more than chemical engines, take much longer to start up, require decay heat management after the engine is done firing, release large amounts of neutron and gamma radiation while operating, and if any erosion is occurring inside the engine the exhaust itself will be contaminated by radiation.

Now for the advantages. Nuclear thermal rockets do not rely on the chemical reactivity of their propellants to generate the heat that drives the system. This means that they aren't limited to water being their lightest exhaust product, and can use molecular hydrogen, which is 9 times lighter than water (helium weighs twice as much as hydrogen and costs thousands of times more per kilogram so it is disregarded as a useful propellant). This low molecular mass means that at a given temperature the hydrogen molecules move much faster on average than heavier molecules like water . . .

[Anonymous No.10716246]

>>10716221

. . . which means that every kilogram of hydrogen ends up leaving the rocket at a much higher velocity, therefore imparting more momentum per kilogram of propellant, and thus giving a higher specific impulse. In fact, the specific impulse of a hydrogen propelled NTR using a solid core (the coldest kind of NTR) is in the range of 800 to 1000 Isp, depending on overall operating cycle. While this does come at a cost in thrust, since the lighter propellant is used up less rapidly in terms of mass flow, it does mean that any vehicle with a mass fraction of 80% propellant will have at least 12 km/s and up to 15 km/s. This is for a single stage and blows chemical rockets out of the water, making hydrogen NTR transfer stages extremely high performing and can allow for large vehicles to visit Jupiter and Saturn at the least.

The second big advantage to NTR engines is less obvious. If your plan is to go all the way out to Jupiter or Saturn, then you obviously want to maximize your mission effectiveness once you are out there. The most powerful way to do this is with ISRU. One way to do ISRU would be to crack water into hydrogen and oxygen, and store those as liquid propellants to use to transfer between the different moons of the planetary system you're visiting. However, generating any significant amount of chemical propellant will take months even with a large power supply, so at best you'd be able to do a few hops using this method. If however, you replaced your chemical processing plant and power supply with a single nuclear thermal rocket engine built to run on water, everything would change. Now your vehicle can be refilled with thousands of tons of propellant using a modest power supply in just days, allowing you to make hundreds of flights to dozens of different regions across the surfaces of multiple moons. Water will only afford your engine somewhere around 350 Isp as opposed to hydrolox chemical rockets that achieve >450 Isp, however . . .

[Anonymous No.10716252]

>>10716221
>>10716246
Thank you anon

[Anonymous No.10716262]

>>10716221
Nuclear salt rockets are the only nuclear rockets worth seriously considering. Fuck that nuclear thermal shit, controlled continuous criticality is our best path to widespread exploration of the solar system.

[Anonymous No.10716268]

>>10716246

. . . if your vehicle has a mass fraction of 90% water (easy to do since water is so dense) you will still have 7.9 km/s to work with, easily enough to achieve round-trip SSTO around any of Jupiter's moons with payload, meaning as long as you had a separate tank in orbit to store water in you could shuttle propellant up to refill it and use the extra capacity to transfer to other moons later. Again, this is all still possible using chemical engines only, but NTR allows you to do it all orders of magnitude faster, which is the most relevant factor other than actually having the delta V to get out there in the first place. The special case is Saturn's moon Titan, where the argument for NTR becomes even stronger than for anywhere else because titan has natural liquid methane reserves which can be used for propellant, and methane offers superior Isp performance compared to any chemical engine at around 600 seconds (I didn't list it earlier because I forgot, I'm writing this all stream of consciousness so sue me). It still gets less thrust than a chemical engine but Titan has very low gravity so that wouldn't be an issue, and furthermore on Titan there is an argument to be made for an air breathing nuclear thermal rocket, since Titan's atmosphere is even more dense than Earth's and extends roughly ten times as high. A nuclear shuttle designed to work on Titan would only need to use on-board methane to accelerate up to a high enough speed that the intakes are bringing in enough atmosphere to produce useful thrust in the ramjet, which would be powered probably by a heat exchanger warmed by a thermal loop passing through the same reactor that powers the rocket, rather than a second reactor. The Titan nuclear shuttle would have a ridiculously low propellant mass fraction and a ridiculously high payload mass fraction; if it exchanged some of that payload mass for propellant it could easily have the delta v to visit any of Saturn's moons and return to Titan.

[Anonymous No.10716276]

>>10716262
>controlled continuous criticality
>widespread
Yeah it would be widespread in an instant

[Anonymous No.10716289]

>>10716262
It's certainly our best path to widespread explosion of the solar system, lol.

In all seriousness, the delta V leverage you get from using nuclear thermal rockets with common propellants to shuttle between objects in the solar system is far more attractive than using NSWRs to brachistochrone our way around simply because all that fissile material is going to be both expensive and impossible to convince any government to let anyone have. NTRs are already bad enough in that they need highly enriched fuels, the salt water that powers the NSWR design would be worse, as it would be highly mobile and is effectively either one step away from being made into a nuclear weapon or zero steps away, as a tank full of the stuff could be made to explode simply by rattling some shielding pins loose inside the tank.

The only application in which a NSWR really fits is as the main propulsion system on a first generation interstellar probe or vehicle, since you can reach decent fractions of light speed if you idealize the performance a bit, and more importantly you can reach top speed pretty fast, faster than even an Orion or Medusa nuclear pulse rocket can. It all depends on what the real life Isp of the NSWR actually turns out to be, because if we can get better Isp using Medusa then it by far makes the most sense. If that's the case then NSWR would work better as a secondary propulsion system on large interstellar vehicles once they've reached their destination and need to maneuver around the much more busy environment, since you don't want to be faffing around with a gigantic kevlar-membrane parachute style shock absorber when you don't have weeks or months to do an about-face.

[Anonymous No.10716299]

>>10716262

This. Direct nuclear > nuclear thermal

Nuclear thermal is not worth it. All that complexity and weight for merely doubling or tripling the ISP over chemical rockets. With direct nuclear you could have a dozen times higher ISP.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_salt-water_rocket

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fission-fragment_rocket

[Anonymous No.10716320]

>>10716262
>controlled continuous criticality
That's what is inside a nuclear reactor, you want controlled continuous PROMPT criticality, the type of criticality you get when you collapse a pit of plutonium inside a nuclear bomb, except instead of the reaction happening for a few millionths of a second it happens continuously for minutes/hours at a time, depending on how much propellant your ship has aboard and on how high your top speed is planned to be.

[Anonymous No.10716336]

>>10716299
It's not about Isp. It's about being able to refuel your vehicle on any icy body in the solar system in hours or days rather than months. Rapid launch rate/transport turnaround is far more relevant to quickly expanding into space than just going fast is. If your vehicle is ten times as fast but takes a hundred times as long to refuel then you end up developing your destination at 1/10th the rate.

[Anonymous No.10716349]

>>10716336
That refuel rate problem requires that it'll be a star trek style ship living off the land
If it were going to an already established location, the refuel problem would be gone, as the place would have plenty to sell

Thermals could be better for initial colonization, while direct is better for everything past it

[Anonymous No.10716354]

>>10716246
>>thousands of tons
is that a typo?
>>modest power supply
melting 1000 tons of ice takes 92MWh
>>10716221
>>10716268
Does NTR have sufficient TWR to take of on these moons? Since you seem to know lots about NTRs, could we increase the TWR by putting lots of tiny channels into the fuel so we can get rid of heat more efficiently? Since we can get rid of more heat we can turn more prop into hot gas faster and run at a higher power mean more thrust right? Basically do the proposals to 3d print NTRs have any merit?

Lastly any advice on understanding neutronics?

[Anonymous No.10716361]

>>10716343

space launch thread up

[Anonymous No.10716400]

aerospace-grade sun blocking device

[Anonymous No.10716416]

>>10716349

This. Any established location will have fuel depots and dedicated fuel production facilities.

[Anonymous No.10716593]

Shit, an Animal Crossing game called "New Horizons" is coming out. Search results for the Pluto probe are gonna be tainted forever

[Anonymous No.10716605]

>>10716400
Kek, that guy is polishing meme space ship

[Anonymous No.10716681]

>>10716349
>>10716416
Uh huh, and fuel production will always be limited by the amount of energy needed to crack chemical fuels/enrich nuclear fuel. Unless of course you are using a relatively small amount of nuclear fuel to power nuclear thermal engines, which use common and very easy to obtain volatile chemicals as propellants.

Sure you can always just fantasize about us eventually having hundreds of gigawatt scale reactors all over every decently sized object in the solar system, but in real life it is always ALWAYS going to be vastly more feasible and cheaper to just top up nuclear thermal vehicles with water than it will be to manufacture chemical fuels or produce thousands of tons of highly enriched nuclear fuels.

Of course earlier when I said you'd only need a few hours/days to refill your vehicle with water if you landed on any of the Jovian/Saturnine moons, that's for a vehicle landing somewhere totally new that has never had any infrastructure set up beforehand. Once you consider the fact that a ground station can produce and store hundreds of thousands of tons of liquid water easily on such worlds, refilling times for NTR vehicles can be down to as little as a few minutes, which means they become limited in flight frequency by cargo and passenger egress and ingress instead.

[Anonymous No.10716708]

>>10716354
>>>thousands of tons
>is that a typo?
no, you can conceive of a nuclear thermal propelled vehicle that has room for thousands of tons of water. It'd be about the same size as Starship.

>melting 1000 tons of ice takes 92MWh
A single NTR reactor core outputs multiple gigawatts of thermal power (or at least NERVA's did). There are also designs for new NTR engines that have closed cycle electricity generation via a hot working fluid pumped through the reactor at a low power setting. That thermal working fluid could instead be used directly to melt water ice, at a rate limited only by how fast you are using the heat from the thermal loop. A notional propellant production routine could look like a small thermal melt drill powered by heat from the reactor being used to penetrate the upper few dozen meters of ice, sealing of the drop shaft with frozen water, then increasing the thermal power of the melt drill to create a melt cavern, a large bubble of liquid water suspended in ice, commonly used today in antarctic bases to supply fresh water to the human occupants. The water would then be pumped from the melt cavern as it is produced. This is one of the simplest methods although probably not the fastest.

A more permanent liquid water production system would involve a large nuclear reactor that produced hot steam, and that hot steam would be used to melt ice either inside large vessels at batches or in large melt caverns deep under the surface. Any water tanks on the surface would not be for longer term storage, rather they would be for staging the propellant nearby the landing craft to refill them more readily, and these staging tanks would be topped up from the much larger storage ponds/caverns underground.

[Anonymous No.10716720]

>>10716681
Time is money friend
Nobody is going to be willing to sit around on a ship for months doing fuck all when another kind of engine could do the same thing in a fraction of the time

your thermal rockets are efficient, but efficiency is worthless when it comes to shuttling humans, people need speed

[Anonymous No.10716736]

>>10709375
wrong.

>>10709366
there's a lot of confusion. they have put it off from when it was originally going to fly (and they're currently debating whether Artemis 3/EM-3 should fly with it), but they used that time to rescope it and make some design decisions to optimize it for lunar TLI at the expense of some of its generic "deep space" performance.

[Anonymous No.10716752]

>>10716354
>Does NTR have sufficient TWR to take of on these moons?

Yes, even old NERVA itself had a >1 TWR in Earth gravity, but only in vacuum, as it had terrible sea level Isp. Notably, all of the big moons have roughly 1/6th G at most.

Project TIMBERWIND aimed to design and eventually develop NTR engines that had thrust to weight ratios useful for launch vehicles in a booster-sustainer configuration, where the boosters would be chemical and the center sustainer stage used hydrogen NTR. The three designs that were fleshed out all achieved ~30 TWR, low for a chemical engine but certainly useful, and completely reasonable as standalone propulsion on vehicles meant for low gravity worlds like the Moon and the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. Of course these TWR figures were for engines that ran on hydrogen propellant, if you instead consider water propellant at the same volumetric flow rate then the mass flow rate becomes 9x higher and the TWR goes up significantly (though not by 9x as the Isp also drops by about 2/3rds). Using water propellant, any of the TIMBERWIND engines could achieve TWR of around 80 or 90, which is actually significantly higher than the thrust to weight ratio of the RD-180 engine, which water-based TIMBERWIND NTR would resemble in terms of Isp. Obviously you can't just run an NTR meant for hydrogen using water, but even if the changes require to make it happen doubled the weight, the TWR of these engines would still be respectable, somewhere around 60. The TIMBERWIND engines came in three sizes, a 440 kN engine, a 735 kN engine, and a 2,400 kN engine (all thrust figures given for vacuum), all using H2. Switch to water, then the thrust figures become ~1300 kN, ~2200 kN, and ~7200 kN respectively. That last one is interesting because it approaches the thrust output of the F-1 engine that powered the Saturn V, yet is a nuclear thermal engine.

The reason most paper NTRs have very low thrust to weight ratio is because they're optimizing for Isp.

[Anonymous No.10716754]

basically, an SLS block primer:

SLS Block 1 is happening. they're currently putting together the first one. core stage should ship off to stennis for the green run pretty soon - before the end of the year if boeing can manage to not fuck up for once

SLS Block 1b is in a good spot. Trump (probably actually Pence tbb) went totally back on his "let's defund the EUS" position when they decided to ask for a moon landing, and there was never really any question that congress would fund it either way. it has been intentionally held back so it could be optimized for lunar TLI, and NASA isn't sure whether they want to fly it on Artemis 3 or Artemis 4 first. either way, they have a backup ICPS if Boeing shits the bed again. expect to see EUS on Artemis 3 as long as the project seems to be going smoothly. if there's any delays, expect it to get pushed back to Artemis 4.

SLS Block 2 is not a "paper rocket-y" as some say, but it's also not a guarantee. NGIS wants to get a contract with NASA for some improved SRBs that are OmegA-derived (and the OmegA SRBs themselves are derived from the "Dark Knights" proposed for the SLS way back in the day when Block 1A was a thing), but if Block 2 happens, it'll be a long time from now. If the SLS is flying continuously though, Block 2 HAS to happen eventually - they've only got 8 mission's worth of old shuttle SRB casings. So if the SLS is still flying a decade from now, it WILL be Block 2.

[Anonymous No.10716756]

>dragon 2 tickets cost $52 million per seat for commercial astronauts
what the FUCK

[Anonymous No.10716765]

>>10715877
the only two choices are a place with no infrastructure
>>10715995
or a place with only disease and sadness
>>10716005

[Anonymous No.10716790]

>>10716354
>Lastly any advice on understanding neutronics?
Neutrons are either fast or slow, which we call 'thermal'. Neutrons that have been spit out of fissioning atoms are fast, neutrons that have been bounced around inside a moderator have been 'thermalized' and are slow. Being slower means they are more likely to be captured by an atomic nucleus; they have less momentum so the ultra-short-distance strong nuclear force has a slightly better chance to interact enough with the passing neutron that it gets drawn in. Nuclei usually don't fission because they are stuck by a neutron, they fission because after the neutron is absorbed the nucleus becomes unstable and develops lobes that quickly cause it to tear itself apart, as the electromagnetic force repels two lobes outside of the range of the strong nuclear force.

Fission nuclei have a neutron cross section, a handy way to define how likely they are to absorb a neutron. In the fat spectrum all cross sections are very small, but every fission is much more likely to produce extra neutrons. In the thermal spectrum cross sections are much larger but you need much tighter control of neutron economy, as every fission is only producing slightly more than 2 neutrons on average.

Some nuclei that aren't fissile have huge neutron cross sections. Some of these nuclei are formed commonly as fission products. Namely, Xenon-135 is the strongest nuclear poison known, and managing xenon formation is one of the most difficult parts of designing any reactor. Boron is a strong nuclear poison that is also non radioactive and is used in reactors to control the rate of fission.

[Anonymous No.10716824]

>>10716756
>I understand it as the seats they are reserving aren't for tourists, but would be for Bigelow employees who come to outfit a B330 on the ISS.
>This is assuming that they either A. get the go-ahead from NASA for the XBASE, B. have an agreement with NASA to check out / outfit a private B330 at the ISS before separating it for their private space station, or C. win the Gateway habitat competition and put it together at the ISS before shifting it to the Gateway. Or possibly even some combination of the above.
oh if that's the case then bigelow is shelling out hundreds of millions or billions of dollars to get their space station up and running. i hope it can work out for them because that's an expensive gamble.

[Anonymous No.10716836]

>>10716720
Your fission fragment rockets are going nowhere fast, unless you're going interstellar. Your NSWR costs so much to fire even for a short time that noone can afford a ticket.

Nuclear thermal rockets hit that sweet spot where they can actually take you somewhere in less than multiple years of acceleration-deceleration time, yet they also don't have ridiculous fuel costs. The NSWR belongs to a special class of rocket engine, including Orion pulse and He3 fusion bulb, where simply filling the tanks with fuel one time is an international effort.

The nuclear fuel in an NTR is expensive, but only if you don't consider the total impulse you get from that engine's reactor over its lifetime. Meanwhile in an NSWR your kilogram of U-235/Pu-239 has a very short lifetime and only offers a few dozen km/s of impulse if you're lucky. The heat given off from every kilogram of fuel inside an NTR can supply hundreds of km/s of impulse, by repeatedly refilling the propellant tanks.

If your only concern is maximum top speed, one acceleration burn one deceleration burn, then yeah NSWR and fission fragment make sense, because the only times you're actually doing those maneuvers is if you're going interstellar and every ten km/s you add to your coasting speed is decades of travel time you don't have to sit through.

Inter-system propulsion needs to be as fast as possible because you're going incredible distances and don't want to have evolved into something else before you get where you're headed. Intra-system propulsion needs to be economical and quick/low effort to refill. A lot of people are going to be moving from place to place, back and forth, and you need to be able to gas and go without also requiring gigantic industrial effort to support that gas and go capability, because no one is going to set up huge propellant manufacturing industry on a small moon or a comet or backwater Kuiper belt object. What will be set up is what's easy to set up.

[Anonymous No.10716963]

>>10716593
RIP

[Anonymous No.10716997]

>>10716756
You're not paying for the launch, you're paying for the NASA bureaucracy and logistics to feed you and get you air, as well as for shuttle lol
That was a shitpost btw
>>10716836
Have you considered nuclear salt reactors, like the thorium breeder everybody's screaming for? Potentially less resistance from states that want to restrict access to enriched uranium/plutonium

[Anonymous No.10717201]

>>10716708
>>gigawatts
that is not a modest power supply. A notional with hydrolox ISRU sample return mission to icy moons needs only 478 W. The entire lander, which can return a 1 kg sample, masses like 30 kg. Sure it takes 148 days to generate propellant, which is probably too long for current rad resistant electronics to handle on Europa, but it can be done with tech that isn't wildly far off and reasonable amounts of funding. I mean yeah manned nuclear power space battleships complete with a crew of transparent orange chainsaw toting ice miners are cool, but far off. We still need to launch a damn NTR.
>>10716790
I mean doing the math on modelling reactors. DARPA wants to 3d print an NTR and I'd like to design it. There are books on this right?

Also does better heat transfer from the fuel translate to an increase in thrust while Isp stays the same? This is particularly important because unlike NERVA DARPA wants to use high assay low enriched uranium. Highly enriched uranium is getting phased out. Although, UN space guidelines do specify that highly enriched uranium is the only acceptable fuel because the politician writing them didn't know what enrichment is. These are just recommendations unfortunately, not actual rules.

[Anonymous No.10717219]

oh nononono

[Anonymous No.10717233]

>>10715492
looks 100 times better than the first two pieces of trash

[Anonymous No.10717276]

>>10717233
>the first one flies
>the other one blows up midair

[Anonymous No.10717292]

>>10717219
>don't get complacent, you wankers aren't going to get to dance on the moon for a week and then do nothing for another 50 years, the ball will keep rolling
.t trump

[Anonymous No.10717329]

>>10717292
>tfw becoming space empire

[Anonymous No.10717453]

Elon says starlink will be able to serve 3-5% of the world's population

[Anonymous No.10717465]

>>10717453
~375M people then. $50 a month subscription (used as a boilerplate figure) would net 18.75B USD a month if I did my math right. 225B a year.

Starlink's gonna make fucking bank.

[Anonymous No.10717483]

>MORE
>CONTAINERS

[Anonymous No.10717559]

>>10717465
They could charge 10 fucking dollars a month and still make a killing, if they put more sats up with better bandwidth they could holocaust almost every existing isp if they can serve enough people.

I'm pretty confident this is going to get him suicided with two gunshots to the back of the head. These Telcos are filthy rich and incredibly corrupt and are not going to roll over and take this.

[Anonymous No.10717576]

>>10717559
>They could charge 10 fucking dollars a month and still make a killing
Assuming that many people buy it. Not saying that Starlink is doomed or bad, but there is a chance that it can fail. Google fiber was going to be the how new internet delivery and that got bogged down. There were also previous attempts of orbital internet and those countries went bankrupt.

>I'm pretty confident this is going to get him suicided with two gunshots to the back of the head.
Probably not, but I bet that if the existing isp's see Starlink as a threat, then they'll try to fight it through bureaucracy. They'll probably bank on the "Starlink hurts science!" panic to get it shot down. Either that or try to put it in their contracts for their customers that they'll face a serious fee if they drop their current isp for a satellite provider.

[Anonymous No.10717605]

>>10717576
>Google fiber was going to be the how new internet delivery and that got bogged down.

Not really comparable since they had to deal with over 9000 city ordinances fucking them and was never going to serve rural areas. Starlink has all the permissions they need to launch their network, it's just a matter of people sticking a pizza box on their roof and acquiring permissions for service from countries, most of which will be fine assuming the isps don't nuke it with bribed politicians but you can definitely take a billion people out of the equation because no way in hell is China going to allow this.

>There were also previous attempts of orbital internet and those countries went bankrupt

Yeah but they didn't have their own reusable rocket company, built expensive as hell satellites and were not fully funded like starlink.

[Anonymous No.10717665]

>>10717453
yeah, and tesla will sell millions of cars this year

[Anonymous No.10717674]

>>10717665
They sell literally every car they make

[Anonymous No.10717686]

What's the theoretical maximum chamber pressure or chamber temperature a combustion tap-off cycle rocket engine could have? The highest pressure I could find was the J-2S, but it had the same chamber pressure of the J-2 so I'm not sure of the pressure was the max or it was used because the J-2 had it. Thanks in advance.

[Anonymous No.10717689]

I heard that Space Adventures is going to use Starliner instead of Dragon 2 as their mode of transport to the ISS. Do we think that they will see much success? They used to be the big name back in the early days of the ISS when they were sending tourists via Soyuz.

[Anonymous No.10717690]

>>10717665
Tesla is production limited, not buyer limited

[Anonymous No.10717691]

>>10717689
nah, people will be going up with their friends most likely. Only one seat at a time will be available with space Adventures and Starliner. With Bigelow you can bring along your three favorite hookers at the same time

[Anonymous No.10717727]

>>10716997
>nuclear salt reactors
They'd be difficult to make into a useful NTR reactor though not impossible. In a reactor meant to power a nuclear thermal rocket you really are constrained to using fast neutrons only, as any thermal neutron design will require you to use moderator and moderator takes up way too much volume. Due to this you are steered very strongly towards either U-235 or Pu-239 fuels, as these give off lots of neutrons when fissioned in the fast spectrum which makes up for their smaller absorption cross sections when bombarded with those un-moderated fast neutrons.

Off the top of my head the advantages of molten salt fuel reactors in a nuclear thermal engine would be improvement of the reactor characteristics assuming the fuel can be flowed into and out of the reactor, decreased likelihood of containment breach leaking radioisotopes into the exhaust stream caused by solid fuel cracking and pitting as the fission products build up, and the ability to potentially increase the lifetime of the reactor core by a very large amount, by no longer being constrained by the amount of fuel initially loaded into the reactor during fabrication. A reactor that has the ability to flow fuel into and out of the reactor continuously can remove nuclear reaction poisons like xenon as they are produced, meaning the reactor itself is always running with clean fuel and therefore doesn't need to be as big to get the same total power output. A reactor with a liquid fuel doesn't have to worry about the fuel developing voids due to noble gas buildup or fractures from fission product formation, for obvious reasons. Finally, the ability to continuously refuel the reactor means that an NTR powered ship could on paper extend the total firing time capacity of its engine by orders of magnitude by carrying a supply of nuclear fuel along with it, not to mention the much greater burn-up fraction implied by continuous fission product removal.

[Anonymous No.10717734]

>The company noted in its statement that it still is able to fly people to the station on Soyuz spacecraft, although none have flown since Laliberté, and also has an agreement with Boeing to fly people on CST-100 Starliner missions.
Wait so if the Soyuz continues to launch people to the ISS, could we see the return of tourists via the Soyuz? I know they don't launch tourists anymore because the Americans took up the remaining seats since the Shuttle got canned. Maybe this will create an opportunity for people to fly out of Russia again?

https://spacenews.com/companies-express-varying-interest-in-nasas-iss-commercialization-plan/

[Anonymous No.10717737]

>>10717734
If it's unclear, I meant that with Dragon 2 and Starliner now able to carry American astronauts to the ISS, the seats on the Soyuz might be freed up for tourists.

[Anonymous No.10717741]

>>10717665
Scam-x

[Anonymous No.10717751]

>>10717727
The disadvantages I can think of are increased complexity due to having to have a very high surface area containment structure that holds the liquid nuclear fuel and separates it from the propellant, increased weight associated with all of the equipment that allows you to truly take advantage of the potential for reprocessing that you get from liquid fuel, and the fact that while a solid fuel reactor may experience pitting due to erosion, if a liquid fuel reactor has a leak it can and probably will lose a far higher percentage of fuel load, enough to negatively impact reactor performance. Also, since the core of a nuclear reactor tends to significantly degrade pretty much all materials via neutron bombardment and other forms of radiation, it's likely that the amount of firing time you gain by using a refuelable core NTR design are not significant, and engine lifetime is guaranteed to be limited by physical degradation before fuel burn-up anyway.

The most likely molten salt reactor NTR design I can think of would use totally enclosed, hollow pins of zirconium or another neutron-transparent material that were loaded with nuclear fuel salts and had a very small interior void or air gap. During operation the fuel in these pins would liquefy and allow xenon and other gaseous fission products to escape into the air bubble, preventing poisoning of the reaction, while the other fission products simply built up in the salt without causing physical degradation of anything. During shutdown the fuel would solidify in the pins. Since this design effectively treats the liquid fuel as if it were a solid rod anyway, there is very little that changes between it and a classic solid fuel NTR. The main differences would be improved reactor control and power density, as the most relevant nuclear poison would float away from the direction of thrust and leave solution to enter the bubble of each fuel pin.

[Anonymous No.10717753]

rank the best spaceflight companies

go

[Anonymous No.10717763]

>>10717737
Isn't the soyuz in danger of getting canned? Or am I wrong?

[Anonymous No.10717766]

>>10717753
Rocosmos>everything else
They're the ones who've led the way since day one

[Anonymous No.10717767]

Bit old, but according to NASA ASAP, cause of the SpaceX Dragon anomaly (read: explosion) has still yet to be identified.

https://twitter.com/EmreKelly/status/1136628679054888960

Looking more and more like Boeing's gonna beat 'em.

[Anonymous No.10717768]

>>10717763
>soyuz
>getting canned
it's literally the only good thing going for the russian space program currently. yeah sure, they're TRYING to build a replacement, but I bet you that'll fail for the same reason all the other Soyuz replacements failed: money.

[Anonymous No.10717774]

>>10717201
>that is not a modest power supply
If you're using an NTR it is, the power supply you need is the rocket you're trying to refill, so you aren't bringing anything extra. As I've been saying, the reason NTRs are so perfectly suited for icy moon exploration/colonization is because they have such low energy propellant production needs and that producing that propellant even from scratch is very fast. 148 days is waaaay too long to be relevant to any group of people trying to colonize Callisto and Ganymede, and want to be able to shuttle easily between them. Using chemical fuels they end up devoting gigawatt-hours of electrical power over the course of months in order to afford a single trip; using the same power supply but a nuclear thermal shuttle, they can perform the same trip the equivalent of once a day (in reality it'd be a fleet of vehicles once every few weeks as the moons approach transfer window), and in fact they would be using the *thermal* power of said power supply and not the electricity, meaning they have more than twice as much energy working in their favor by comparison.

If you're talking about tiny unmanned probes to the outer solar system, then sure, hydrolox is fine, because you aren't developing anything on those moons and your mission isn't time sensitive. I'm not talking about our first steps though. I'm talking about where the technology of NTR can reach its peak, and the answer is as our primary means of low gravity point-to-point and object-to-object transportation. For two way transport between Earth and Mars, chemical is better suited because it offers the best TWR and TWR is highly relevant to achieving single-stage-to-Earth form Mars' surface. For going from moon to moon around any large object with moons or between small objects like Pluto and their moons? NTR all the way, no question. NTR even lets you do quite robust comet deflection by using the water and other volatiles present.

[Anonymous No.10717781]

>>10717201
>Also does better heat transfer from the fuel translate to an increase in thrust while Isp stays the same?
Yes, maximum fuel temperature stays the same, so maximum propellant exhaust temperature and Isp stays the same, but since thermal transfer rate is higher you can run your reactor 'faster' and send a higher mass flow of propellant through the core, increasing thrust.

[Anonymous No.10717782]

>>10717768
Oh, that's good.
I dont know why, but I was under the impression that they were in danger of not being able to keep up production due to cost. Although I think I was confusing it for another Russian aerospace project.

[Anonymous No.10717786]

>>10715492
>built indoors
fuck that, I want my space shitbox

[Anonymous No.10717795]

>>10717576
google fiber died due to telcom interference and corrupt regulatory hurdles

[Anonymous No.10717800]

>>10717686
I dunno if there is a maximum. As far as I know the only engines that are thermodynamically limited to having a maximum thrust are expander cycle engines, and I've never heard of anything having a thermodynamically limited chamber pressure.

[Anonymous No.10717820]

>>10717800
I'm sure that the limitation of tap-off would be how much heat the turbines can be put through since they'll be feeling a large part of the combustion from the chamber. However, since most tap-off designs use ways to cool down the gas before it reaches the turbines, the chamber pressure and temperature can't be used directly.

[Anonymous No.10717844]

>>10717751
and of course when you fill up at a station you rinse your fuel out

[Anonymous No.10717909]

>>10716400
shouldn't it be yellow?

[Anonymous No.10717925]

>>10716756
Sure, in a jump seat on a crew Dragon flight to ISS. If Bigelow ever gets something dockable up there, the price per seat would be lower if it was all tourists, and on "flight-proven" Dragon 2 capsules.

[Anonymous No.10717932]

>>10717844
Correct, IF the fuel pins are also all connected via a network of plumbing. If the pins are unconnected and permanently set in place, as is likely for a first generation molten salt NTR, then refueling isn't really an option.

[Anonymous No.10717939]

>>10717932
you don't even need to refuel, you just need to clean the fuel up so it's fresh

[Anonymous No.10718059]

>>10717939
To do that is the same thing as removing the fuel and adding different fuel, because you still need a manifold to drain the used fuel with and insert cleaned fuel. The concept I laid out earlier would have fuel salt put inside of sealed metal tubes with no access in or out, to make the transition from solid to liquid fuel as simple and minor as possible while still having some advantage. You wouldn't be able to refuel or clean the fuel of a reactor built like that, but it'd be way easier to develop and build in the first place.

[Anonymous No.10718079]

>>10709462
Well, a lot of KSP tier designs are well thought out, it's just that they didnt really think out everything. And given how bad the KORD system was, I'd say that's a pretty big overlook in thinking things out.

[Anonymous No.10718156]

>>10707975
Can someone explain why if gravity is real, and the force is relative to mass.
Why does the moon not crash into the earth, should it not have been accelerating for billions of years toward us and by now have crashed into us at great speed?
gravity is a spook.

[Anonymous No.10718158]

>>10718156
NASA doesn't exist. It's a spoof so they can convince us that the ice puddle earth truth isn't real.

[Anonymous No.10718160]

>>10718156
>why is the moon not accelerating towards us for billions of years???
it is, dumbass, it just keeps missing

[Anonymous No.10718268]

>>10718079
The KORD was actually quite advanced and fit for the purpose it was designed for (but also heavy). It was the time when soviets didn't embrace System/360 as a standard yet, effectively killing their own computing. Any system was too slow for this at that time; it was designed to shut the engine down BEFORE the explosion, due to the early signs of failure. What made N-1 fail is the lack of integrated testing - the KORD was originally meant to be used with stacks tested on a specific stand, for which they didn't get the funding. Hence the new control system.

[Anonymous No.10718273]

>>10718268
Based.
N-1 better than Saturn V confirmed. Mutts BTFO.

[Anonymous No.10718303]

>>10718273
It wasn't better either. It was pretty overweight in most parts

[Anonymous No.10718402]

>>10718273
>>10718303
The N1 was really unoptimised for lunar missions (being originally designed for manned Venus flybys) with only 95 tons to LEO and 23 to TLI; meaning it could only launch a stripped down Soyuz with a skeletal one-person lander to the moon with little room for error, trying to land on the moon with an N1 was roughly equivalent to attempting to do so with an SLS Block 1A nowadays. In comparison, the Saturn 5 could send 50 tons to TLI despite having a weaker first-stage, meaning it was slightly overpowered for the trip which in turn gave Apollo much friendlier margins than the N1.

[Anonymous No.10718715]

So, June 24 FH launch will only have two interesting missions:
- Green Propellant Infusion Mission, a test for the non-toxic replacement for hydrazine. ALICE in space when?
- LightSail 2 by Planetary Society. Seriously, how can a spaceflight general exist without mentioning Planetary Society at all? (oh I forgot, unmanned exploration is too boring for this general, anons here are only interested in huge dildos that go vroom, and waving flags)

[Anonymous No.10718718]

>>10718156
What is angular velocity alex

[Anonymous No.10718782]

>>10707975

[Anonymous No.10718855]

>>10718782
white women fuck rockets

[Anonymous No.10718857]

https://spacenews.com/poll-what-are-the-must-see-movies-for-anyone-serious-about-space/

Should we ‘help’ Fousty’s poll?

[Anonymous No.10718878]

>>10718857
are there any flat earth movies we could recommend
as a joke, haha

[Anonymous No.10718889]

>>10718156
It's moving sideways at about 1 km/s, and Earth's gravity at that distance is only strong enough to bend the Moon's trajectory into a circle, it can't draw it down to hit the Earth. If you watch for the moon a few nights in a row you'll notice it shifts position relative to the distant stars.

[Anonymous No.10718892]

>>10718889
And spoiler alert... it's slowly getting farther away. After a few hundred thousand years or so there will be no more total solar eclipses.

[Anonymous No.10718895]

>>10718273
>>10718402
What if N1 had Saturn V's hydrolox upper stages instead of its own kerolox ones

[Anonymous No.10718899]

>>10718402
>The N1 was really unoptimised for lunar missions (being originally designed for manned Venus flybys)
That makes no sense, you still want a high Isp upper stage/high C3 capability to do anything interplanetary, Saturn V was better optimized to do Venus flyby than N1 was.

[Anonymous No.10718909]

>>10718895
What if Saturn had a NTR upper stage

[Anonymous No.10718912]

>>10718715
>Planetary Society
Literally Who? They haven't done anything important or interesting ever. Their most notable project is the light sail and oops it turns out that unfurling and controlling an extremely high surface area to mass ratio object in space is harder than they expected! Wow! It's almost like relying on 'It Just Works' design doesn't actually work!!

Seriously, FUCK light sails and FUCK launch loops and FUCK EVERY OTHER FUCKING TECHNOLOGICAL DISTRACTION WASTE OF TIME DIARRHEA BRAIN CONCEPT FOR SPACE ACCESS/TRAVEL. We don't need any of that BULL SHIT

[Anonymous No.10718914]

>>10718889
It'll shift position over the course of a single night too
>>10718909
Aaaaaaaaah fuck yes nuclear daddy meme me harder

[Anonymous No.10718923]

>>10718892
More than a few hundred thousand, after that amount of time the Moon wouldn't have even moved a tenth of a percent further away. It's only being boosted onto a higher orbit by earth's rotation at rate of about 4 cm per year, in 100,000 years that's 400,000 cm, or 4000 m, or 4 km. Earth will still be getting total solar eclipses for at least a few million years longer. Also consider that as the Moon gets further away the tidal forces that push it away get weaker, so its rate of recession slows down.

[Anonymous No.10718925]

>>10718909
it would be extremely painful

[Anonymous No.10718927]

>>10718402
What the fuck went wrong with that rocket? Who looked at that and said it was okay? Did they get gulag'd?

[Anonymous No.10718947]

>>10718927
no he died of complications from heart surgery

[Anonymous No.10718948]

>>10718923
Hundred thousands vs millions, it's still a drop in the bucket in geologic time of billions.

>>10718925
S-IV-U

[Anonymous No.10718950]

>>10718914
Well yeah, but checking a few nights in a row should make it extremely obvious.

[Anonymous No.10719044]

>>10718912
>Literally Who? They haven't done anything important or interesting ever.
There some top grade spaceflight journalists here you fucking autist. That's enough. You only know about chinese probes in detail because of them. Oh wait you don't, you aren't interested in unmanned spaceflight, otherwise you would have knew them. You don't meet a journalist who can process raws from a space mission by themselves every day. They have some top notch coverage of actual space missions happening now and in the last 10 years you turbo fucking retard.

[Anonymous No.10719078]

>>10718927
>Who looked at that and said it was okay?
Korolyov. A literal nobody - just a person who launched a first human into space, and a man behind the Sputnik moment.

He had actual things to do with it even before he launched a human into space. He was one of the few people in spaceflight who've had an Vision, capitalized. (we have another one - Elon Musk - just today, after decades of things designed by committees). But some retards in CPSU central committee looked at kennedy's lunar program and decided they want to have a dick measuring contest instead of actually explore the solar system and earn massive propaganda points in the process.

[Anonymous No.10719081]

>>10718927
>Did they get gulag'd?
And yeah, they did. Before that, even

[Anonymous No.10719107]

>>10719078
>But some retards in CPSU central committee looked at kennedy's lunar program and decided they want to have a dick measuring contest instead of actually explore the solar system and earn massive propaganda points in the process.
This was a recurring pattern. They've had the Spiral, a spaceplane that made actual sense, but cancelled it because of the Shuttle, started to copy that flying contraption, and got an even more pointless contraption as a result. They pathologically resisted any native innovation, of which there was plenty. I'm sure they would've cancelled the modular stations if they had a Shuttle copy at the time.

[Anonymous No.10719126]

>>10718715
>Seriously, how can a spaceflight general exist without mentioning Planetary Society at all?
I'll be honest, I'm pretty shit at keeping up with space news. I didn't know that SpaceX could land their Falcons until I saw the first Falcon Heavy launch...

[Anonymous No.10719153]

>>10719044
>a bunch of useless bullshit
as expected

[Anonymous No.10719482]

>>10719044
>REEEEE WHY DOESNT ANYONE CARE ABOUT MUH BEEPING METAL SPHERES?
cry more Zhu wang

[Anonymous No.10719491]

I grow stronger...

[Anonymous No.10719519]

>>10719491
color me impressed - this one doesn't look like a rusty pile of scrap metal. guess thats what happens when you put things together INSIDE buildings instead of doing it in the middle of a field for some godforesaken reason.

[Anonymous No.10719556]

>>10719519
They're different iterations of a prototype. The 1st exists solely to be blown up when testing the waters. The second is for multi system integration.

[Anonymous No.10719738]

>>10718909
What if the Saturn V first stage had 30 engines.

[Anonymous No.10720047]

>>10719491
uWu shiny

[Anonymous No.10720075]

>>10719738
Kaboom

[Anonymous No.10720101]

Stop tweeting about your fucking cars holy shit tweet about starship already fuuccck

[Anonymous No.10720105]

>>10720101
give him a week or two

[Anonymous No.10720310]

Reminder that Russia will always be better at space. NASA and scamX will always be seething.

[Anonymous No.10720757]

next thread
>>10720754