/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.5966335]

Will it work?

[Anonymous No.5966347]

yes

[Anonymous No.5966352]

>>5966350

i'm a girl btw

[Anonymous No.5966353]

>>5966350
maybey

[Anonymous No.5966350]

>>5966347
I mean no

[Anonymous No.5966357]

Maybe. I want it to.

[Anonymous No.5966371]

Also, how is spay sex avoiding the refurbishing costs that made STS so expensive?

[Anonymous No.5966386]

>>5966371
>spay sex
I love you

[Anonymous No.5966400]

>>5966335
prob. could, but it's going to cost more that what they state their per unit cost to be, and i doubt the'd ever get the price per kilo of cargo down to what they state. It's not really crazy tech or anything.

[Anonymous No.5966406]

>>5966371
They have yet to detail that. We won't know if it's economically feasible for some time. We don't even know if spaceX prices can be maintained without bankruptcy.

[Anonymous No.5966408]

>>5966371
this is a total shot in the dark, but isn't SpaceXe using capsulse and reusable rockets, not shuttles? I have a feeling the answer lies in there somewhere.

[Anonymous No.5966412]

>>5966408
Yeah, the rocket doesn't need to be so reliable if the escape system works.

[Anonymous No.5966433]

>>5966412
SpaceX will likely get the majority of their business from satellite launches, not people. That requires reliability. Escape systems are not 100% they will fail, failures are taken very seriously even if the crew survived.

[Anonymous No.5966432]

>>5966371
Biggest maintenance costs on shutte:

Thermal Protection System

Shuttle: thousands of delicate custom silica airgel tiles which had to be individually inspected and replaced by hand

SpaceX: cheap, rugged ablative thermal protection designed to be replaced entirely in a few big panels once every few flights


Main Engine

Shuttle: complex, expensive, tricked out for top performance, bleeding-edge hydrogen-oxygen staged combustion design, needed an overhaul after every flight and wasn't designed to be removed without basically disassembling the whole back half of the orbiter

SpaceX: cheap, rugged, simple kerosene-oxygen gas-generator design optimized for reliability, should be capable of multiple flights without maintenance, mounted on exterior of vehicle for easy removal for maintenance or replacement


Booster

Shuttle: parachute-based ocean crash landing, big recovery operation, explosion-prone solid fuel, refuelling requires complete disassembly and is essentially a manufacturing operation

SpaceX: flies itself back to land itself delicately near launchpad, refuelling requires hooking up some hoses

[Anonymous No.5966435]

>>5966353
can you repeat the question?

[Anonymous No.5966436]

>>5966335
Will it matter? If everything goes perfectly, it's going to take at least a decade.

Meanwhile, much cheaper and simpler VTVL launch systems will have had that time to get fully operational.

The biggest problem with Skylon is that it's basically this one guy's life work, and no matter how things play out, he's going to be at retirement age before it could possibly fly. So it's hard to take him seriously.

[Anonymous No.5966438]

>>5966433
Nothing stopping them from doing an escape system for expensive payloads.

[Anonymous No.5966444]

>>5966432
when i first saw the spacex grasshopper video i was like "fuuuck me." it was like magic.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NoxiK7K28PU

[Anonymous No.5966460]

>>5966436
>cheaper and simpler VTVL launch systems will have had that time to get fully operational.
Very unlikely. SpaceX time estimates are like monopoly money, worthless. 10 years is very unlikely.

Alan Bond is by no means the only person behind skylon.

>>5966438
Escape systems aren't gentle and they don't land softly. They would ruin a payload even if you retrieved it. The very high accelerations and shocks far beyond a normal launch will destroy sensitive equipment. The then splash down or crash down will break the clean environment. A more reliable launcher is better. Reliable launchers exist today and will in the future. A lot of what spaceX do does not suit the high end GEO market so they will stay with Ariane 5 for some time.

[Anonymous No.5966482]

>>5966444
I can't wait to see the full-scale, 9 engine test, later this year.

[Anonymous No.5966478]

>>5966460
If you think that SKYLON, of all fucking things, is more likely to work than a VTVL system, you're completely delusional.

SpaceX isn't the only one working on VTVL rockets. There's also Blue Origin, and many smaller companies.

>Escape systems aren't gentle and they don't land softly.
SpaceX is working on propulsive landings. It would land softly.

[Anonymous No.5966497]

>>5966482

[Anonymous No.5966496]

May or may not work, either way it's gonna take years to actually make one.
I always lel when I see people talking about SpaceX as if literally nothing they ever do will go wrong, one day something will blow up.
What is it with the cult of Musk?

[Anonymous No.5966500]

>>5966460
>A lot of what spaceX do does not suit the high end GEO market
Falcon Heavy covers what every other GEO launch service does at a lower price.

[Anonymous No.5966501]

>>5966353
sometimes

[Anonymous No.5966506]

>>5966496
He's so dashing.

[Anonymous No.5966508]

>>5966496
Where do you get this bizarre fantasy about a cult?

SpaceX stuff has already blown up, and everybody knows it. That's inevitable in the rocket business. And everyone expects some craters from the Grasshopper program.

[Anonymous No.5966512]

>>5966433
It's actually exactly opposite. The man-rated systems are the ones with extraordinary reliability requirements. Which is why manned space flight is so utterly pointless. It just costs ten times as much as unmanned space flight with little to no extra benefit.

[Anonymous No.5966516]

>>5966460

SpaceX time estimates are delayed. Skylon time estimates are completely baseless fiction.

Skylon coming to fruition is far-fetched, yet Skylon dupes treat it like it'll enter service a few years from now. Skylon has received far more credibility than it deserves as topic of discussion.

[Anonymous No.5966517]

>>5966508
I don't know, something about how no one can mention his name without 10 people popping up to lap at the balls of the new technology messiah seems a bit weird to me.

[Anonymous No.5966524]

>>5966512

Non-manned payloads cost hundreds of millions, so the rockets that launch them have to be pretty reliable, and built to be reliable. That makes them reliable enough to launch people.

"man-rating" is an overblown concept these days. It made more sense when we were putting people on unreliable ICBMs. Nowadays it is just a canard to justify bloated corporate welfare among NASA contractors.

[Anonymous No.5966530]

>>5966517
They're signing contracts at the lowest launch prices ever. The $/kg figures they're openly advertising and signing contracts on are lower than anyone thought were possible with an expendable launch vehicle, and they've got plans to make the same world's-cheapest-launch-vehicle into something highly reusable for *another* order-of-magnitude launch cost improvement.

[Anonymous No.5966533]

>>5966517

Skylon is a cult.

[Anonymous No.5966534]

>>5966524
>That makes them reliable enough to launch people.
Sure, if you regard people as expendable.

Nobody's going to take human spaceflight seriously until the safety approaches commercial air standards.

[Anonymous No.5966536]

>>5966534

"man rated" rockets don't approach those standards either.

[Anonymous No.5966539]

>>5966530
what seems so absurd about all of this, the Tesla car included though maybe less so becuase of battery tech- is that Musk isn't inventing brand new tech. He's simply corralling resources and implimenting smart design. We could have been doing this for decades by now. More or less....

[Anonymous No.5966543]

>>5966432
>SpaceX: cheap, rugged ablative thermal protection

Source for that? To my knowledge the Falcon 9 v1.1 does not make use of any ablative material.

[Anonymous No.5966546]

>>5966524
>Non-manned payloads cost hundreds of millions, so the rockets that launch them have to be pretty reliable, and built to be reliable.
Nonsense. Regular satellite launch systems are designed with a reliability of about 98%. The rest is covered by insurance. That's the beauty of unmanned space flight. If things go wrong just try again. You can't do that with human lives. Which is why man-rated systems are designed with ten times the reliability (about 99,8%) and consequently cost ten times as much.

[Anonymous No.5966548]

>>5966543
>ablative material
"Thermal Protection System: Primary heat shield is made of tiled Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (PICA) fabricated in-house. The backshell is made of SpaceX Proprietary Ablative Material (SPAM)."

SPAM lol.

http://spaceflightnow.com/falcon9/004/dragon.html

[Anonymous No.5966551]

>>5966533
As a total SpaceX fanboy, even I can say that there isn't nearly as much of a cult behind Skylon as there is behind SpaceX.

[Anonymous No.5966554]

>>5966546

Complete bullshit. "Man-rated" rockets like the space shuttle or soyuz also have roughly the same 98% reliability.

Some unmanned expendables like Atlas 5 or Delta 4 have had no errors so far that would have been fatal for crews riding atop them.

Again, "man rating" is a sort of fiction in this day and age.

[Anonymous No.5966560]

>>5966536
So? Man rated rockets are still a lot more surviveable than the ones we're launching unmanned payloads on, even ones worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

You see, the launch also costs hundreds of millions of dollars. So if you accept a few percent chance of the rocket just blowing the fuck up and destroying the payload, at a savings of a hundred million dollars per launch or thereabouts, that's a bargain. You just buy insurance.

[Anonymous No.5966566]

>>5966543
That's for the planned reusable upper stage.

Doesn't exist yet.

[Anonymous No.5966564]

>>5966551

There is substance behind SpaceX where there is nothing comparable behind Skylon.

[Anonymous No.5966567]

>>5966548
Oh, you were talking about Dragon. I was under the impression that you were referring to Falcon 9's first stage and saying something like the engines are coated in an ablative material to protect them during atmospheric reentry.

[Anonymous No.5966575]

>>5966548
ah no, sorry i wasn't that anon. i was just linking to something about their ablative materials. srry. not sure about the falcon 9.

[Anonymous No.5966596]

>>5966512

That's derp tetrated to herp. If manned flight is pointless, then so is all spaceflight. If you won't send people, then why are we doing it? People need to go into space to live, work and play there. Exploration is for only one singular reason: TO COLONIZE.

[Anonymous No.5966595]

>>5966554
Just shut the fuck up. What they achieved in real life and what it was designed like and hence what it cost are two different things.

[Anonymous No.5966607]

>>5966539
That's what makes SpaceX so efficient.

They may not create new technology, but they have the balls an the leadership to actually do shit that others are afraid to try.

[Anonymous No.5966612]

>>5966595

>just shut the fuck up

Your arguments are wrong. You thought something was so and it wasn't. Now you cry like a baby.

Grow a thicker skin.

non-manned expendable rockets are designed to work. if they dont its a big fuckup. there is no difference between "man-rated" and "not man-rated" in this regard.

You fell for NASA marketing bullshit.

[Anonymous No.5966616]

>>5966596
That's like saying that we shouldn't build telescopes to look outside our solar system.

Space exploration is science. It teaches us things that are useful back on Earth.

[Anonymous No.5966621]

>>5966612
>non-manned expendable rockets are designed to work. if they dont its a big fuckup.
No, there's an acceptable rate of failure and payload loss. If they spend more than they need to achieve it, THAT is a big fuckup.

[Anonymous No.5966623]

>>5966596
We need to bring back the mindset of Manifest Destiny.

[Anonymous No.5966631]

>>5966478
I meant the decade figure. I don't believe skylon will ever be funded.

SpaceX's current system would need a parachute on abort as the landing motors are the escape motors. In any case the violent escape is enough.

[Anonymous No.5966642]

>>5966500
Lower cost is debatable until we know if they do dual launch but it's more than size. Horizontal integration is an issue, current big buses are not built for it. Secondly spaceX provide no integration services as yet which eternally get the spacecraft ready for flight.

[Anonymous No.5966649]

>>5966596
>If manned flight is pointless, then so is all spaceflight.
Bollocks. There are countless subjects where you can do valuable science and don't need a cowboy up there. Same happened with oceanic exploration. ROVs took over because the scientist simply doesn't need to sit in a steel sphere and look through a tiny window when he can sit in a comfy ship's cabin and look at a HD screen.

The only scientific gain of manned space flight is the medicinal knowledge of how man copes with the conditions in space in general and weightlessness in particular. Which you wouldn't need if you didn't put people there in the first place. Now go and colonize the ocean floor, because "people need to go there to live, work and play".

[Anonymous No.5966650]

>>5966512
I didn't say they didn't.

[Anonymous No.5966653]

>>5966516
>SpaceX time estimates are delayed. Skylon time estimates are completely baseless fiction.
Baseless no, fiction yes. I was referring to the decade figure not the idea Skylon would be first or built at all.

[Anonymous No.5966658]

>>5966631
The landing motors being the escape motors doesn't mean they can't carry enough fuel to do both, especially if they're also orbital maneuvering thrusters. It takes a fair amount of delta-V to circularize a GEO after launch to GTO. In this way, the abort system could serve a useful purpose on successful launches.

Anyway, you can have an escape system with much lower acceleration. It's a liquid-fuelled rocket, so you can shut the engines down. Getting away from it in most cases of launch failure should not require high acceleration, just separation and controlled descent. It's a trade-off between the kinds of launch failures you can survive and the stresses on the payload you're saving.

[Anonymous No.5966661]

>>5966649

You're forgetting the species survivability issue. Disasters that ruin the Earth ruin the Ocean also. Being able to reliably put people into space offers a chance for the species to survive a planet killing event.

[Anonymous No.5966660]

>>5966621

>No, there's an acceptable rate of failure and payload loss.

No there isn't. The standard of excellence is 100% in both cases. Nothing is perfect, and failures are considered inevitable in both circumstances, manned and unmanned. It is just in the case of unmanned payloads that there can be a financial security payment to an insurance company. The recourse doesn't have the special meaning you ascribe to it, it just exists as an option because the insurance company can make money on the spread between payments and the rare possibility of failure.

Oh, and another thing, the government doesn't buy insurance on its launches, so the standards are the same for governments that launch manned payloads and unmanned payloads.

Man-rated rockets fail too. They are not especially safer than their counterparts in modern times. Man-rated rockets can have counter-measures like escape systems too, so the existance of those do not indicate something specially unsafe about the rocket. "man rating" is something that is overblown.

[Anonymous No.5966668]

>>5966612
No you just talk bullshit. When I talk about designed reliability requirements and implied costs you come with achieved reliability in real life. That's the kind of eristic you indulge in. Then you cut that argument in the quote to try to make it look like I had nothing to say when in fact I showed that you completely missed the subject of my statement. Go back to >>>/b/

[Anonymous No.5966671]

>>5966661

>Being able to reliably put people into space offers a chance for the species to survive a planet killing event.

Not really, unless you have a very advanced level of space activity that is completely unlike what we have now or will have in the near future. That rational is removed from relevancy.

[Anonymous No.5966690]

>>5966660
>the government doesn't buy insurance on its launches, so the standards are the same for governments that launch manned payloads and unmanned payloads.
That doesn't follow at all. You buy insurance when you can't afford to absorb the losses yourself. Being able to afford the losses yourself makes it more cost-effective to bear the risk of loss yourself, while still tolerating the same risks in return for lower costs.

There's always a trade-off between cost and failure rate. A certain probability of failure is accepted to control costs. Once this trade-off is accepted, then the occurence of failure, within the accepted rate, doesn't mean somebody screwed up.

The screw-up would be to spend so much unnecessary funds reducing the failure rate below an acceptable level that it costs more than simply bearing the costs of occasional failure.

[Anonymous No.5966709]

>>5966661
Go back to the movie theater to watch the latest Emmerich disaster flick.

You obviously don't know how differently land animals and oceanic animals were affected by various sorts of catastrophies in Earth's history.
You obviously don't know that putting people in space for the purpose of "surviving a planet killing event" is pointless if you can't maintain a stable, isolated and independant ecosystem, which, btw, we are simply unable to do even on Earth as experiments like Biosphere 2 have shown.
Just spare /sci/ your Hollywood fanatasies and nightmares.

[Anonymous No.5966723]

>>5966650
>I didn't say they didn't.
I don't know how you read this:
>SpaceX will likely get the majority of their business from satellite launches, not people. That requires reliability.
but to me this reads like a contrasting juxtaposition with satellite launches assuming the reliability spot.

[Anonymous No.5966728]

>>5966709
Biosphere 2 was just plain comical.

They poured a fresh cement foundation, didn't seal it off from the facility's air supply, and totally failed to account for it continuing to set (reacting with the air).

It's a bit like painting the inside of a space capsule in the last hour before launch. "Hey, why's it all full of paint fumes?!"

[Anonymous No.5966745]

I would like to see Skylon become an actual thing, but my hopes are low. The UK does seem to be making a push towards promoting engineering, with Crossrail, HS2 and Bloodhound SSC, but I suspect that all this will peter out after a few years and any funding with be cut due to austerity.

It's kind of a shame, as the only other thing SABREs can really be used for is a supersonic jet, and nobody cares for those things since Concorde.

[Anonymous No.5966746]

>>5966497
Every time I read news about spaceX or elon musk I get stuck with a massive space boner for days.

[Anonymous No.5966755]

>>5966658
Would hurt the payload though. They could not be used for maneuvering as they are very high thrust.

You need the acceleration to escape not just the launcher but the explosion. It's never assumed with these things that the main engine will be off. An escape system makes a snap decision, there may not be time.

In any case these things aren't planned.

[Anonymous No.5966761]

>>5966728
>Biosphere 2 was just plain comical.
And yet it was the most sophisticated, elaborated and financially ambitious attempt at achieving the desired goals so far. We don't see NASA or ESA trying to work this out for the colonization of other planets which, according to some uneducated fags on /sci/, is just a matter of a few years or very few decades in every other space thread.

[Anonymous No.5966785]

>>5966755
>They could not be used for maneuvering as they are very high thrust.
The fuel certainly could be, and extremely deep throttling is possible in vacuum. Not to mention the possibility of splitting up the thrust between several motors.

Anyway, I've already pointed out that you could have a useful escape system with much lower thrust than is typical for manned abort systems.

>It's never assumed with these things that the main engine will be off.
It can be, if it needs to be.

With a lower thrust system, there are just certain kinds of failures you can't survive. However, on a modern liquid-fuelled rocket, those kinds of failures are the rarest sort.

[Anonymous No.5966805]

>>5966761
>it was the most sophisticated, elaborated and financially ambitious attempt at achieving the desired goals so far.
That doesn't mean it wasn't a goofy project done by goofy people for goofy reasons.

You can't really judge the difficulty of a problem by one ridiculous attempt at solving it.

Most serious plans for self-sufficient colonies are not based on some delicately balanced set of gardens, but on a robust power source and set of chemical plants.

[Anonymous No.5966833]

>>5966444
after clicking the link to that video, i have for the last 2 hours been watching fucking youtube videos of planes, rockets, helicopters, i dont even

fucking youtube man

[Anonymous No.5966845]

>>5966833
I should link you to the article on tvtropes about that phenomenon...

[Anonymous No.5966888]

>>5966805
>That doesn't mean it wasn't a goofy project done by goofy people for goofy reasons.
I agree. Like all the colonization talk it's just goofy nonsense.

>Most serious plans for self-sufficient colonies are not based on some delicately balanced set of gardens, but on a robust power source and set of chemical plants.
Humanity never experienced a shortage of plans. How plans work out in real life and even what's getting realized in the end is a whole nother story.

[Anonymous No.5966965]

>>5966888
Colonization is only goofy nonsense until we get launch costs down within a couple orders of magnitude of the necessary energy costs, which is pretty much an inevitability.

Then it becomes rational behavior to boldly go where no man has gone before, to seek new real estate and new mineral resources.

[Anonymous No.5966975]

>>5966845
sure go ahead, as long as its not a youtube link (i nee some sleep tonight)

[Anonymous No.5967000]

>>5966965
Elon Musk is quite explicit about the goals of SpaceX: to colonize Mars. I just looked at a job at spacex designing space suits, and it's stated that that's what the whole company is for. I admire the man's chutzpah.

[Anonymous No.5967040]

>>5967000
Terraforming Mars will be difficult when there's not much gas to work not much gravity to hold onto it, and not enough of a magnetic field to charge an ionosphere so solar shit doesn't keep knocking everything away. This system sucks.

[Anonymous No.5967064]

>>5967040
To quote wiki:

>There is presently enough carbon dioxide (CO2) as ice in the Martian south pole and absorbed by regolith (soil) around the planet that, if sublimated to gas by a climate warming of only a few degrees, would increase the atmospheric pressure to 30 kilopascals (0.30 atm),[10] comparable to the altitude of the peak of Mount Everest, where the atmospheric pressure is 33.7 kilopascals (0.333 atm). Although this would not be breathable by humans, it is above the Armstrong limit and would eliminate the present need for pressure suits. Phytoplankton can also convert dissolved CO2 into oxygen, which is important because Mars's low temperature will, by Henry's law, lead to a high ratio of dissolved CO2 to atmospheric CO2 in the flooded northern basin.

[Anonymous No.5967070]

>>5967040
i agree, terrafroming is kinda retarded. I'm sure that image is pure PR. But a small reasearch colony a la the arctic is certain possible.

[Anonymous No.5967074]

>>5967040
>>5967064
Meaningful terraforming of Mars is going to have to wait for epic scale space tech, to transport an atmosphere's worth of nitrogen from the outer solar system.

[Anonymous No.5967199]

>>5967074
Titan has an enormous amount of N2. I don't know exact numbers, but I'm sure it has enough.

[Anonymous No.5967286]

>>5967199
Titan is in the outer solar system. There's all kinds of nitrogen, hydrogen, and noble gases out there.

[Anonymous No.5967316]

>>5967286
I know, it just came to mind as a source that could provide a sufficient amount of pretty pure (98.4%) N2.

[Anonymous No.5967501]

>>5966335
Mechanical engineer here, yes it should work.

[Anonymous No.5967506]

>>5967074
How much compressed nitrogen are we talking about?

[Anonymous No.5967848]

>>5966965
>Colonization is only goofy nonsense until we get launch costs down within a couple orders of magnitude of the necessary energy costs, which is pretty much an inevitability.
>which is pretty much an inevitability
>inevitability
And why is that? Because the validity of the rocket equation will expire in the future? Because the gravity well that is Earth will shrink? Because you're a Trekkie dreamer?
Oh it'll be a rough ride, but our fine crew will overcome any obstacle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-hdIwGcOL9o

>Then it becomes rational behavior to boldly go where no man has gone before, to seek new real estate and new mineral resources.
LOL. We're not talking about a second Earth with an abundance of food, forests and mineral resources like the New World was to Europeans. Not to mention more important things like an atmosphere that suits our respiratory system, a magnetic field and an ozone layer to protect us from lethal radiation, temperatures suitable to our warm blooded nature and gravity that is neither so strong that breathing becomes impossible nor so weak that muscle atrophy and osteopenia follow.

Go and try it out on the ocean floor. You have real estate there and mineral resources like manganese nodules and methane. Getting there is "within a couple orders of magnitude" easier than getting into space. You just have to slide down the gravity well and don't need to spend energy at all. Just set up you independant ecosystem there. Live, work and play there. Sell your resources and establish trade with the surface folk. If you're not fit to live on the ocean floor then you're definitely not fit to live on something like Moon or Mars.

[Anonymous No.5967963]

>>5967506
I tried to do the math last night and determined that there exists no simple formula to figure this out, but Titan's atmosphere has 1.19 times the mass of ours so there's plenty nitrogen there and Mars will require less nitrogen than Earth for 2 reasons. Mars only has 28% of the surface area of Earth and since it's further from the Sun it's colder therefore any comparable atmosphere would be denser, necessitating less N2 to maintain atmospheric pressure.

[Anonymous No.5967970]

More Grasshopper

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=2t15vP1PyoA

[Anonymous No.5967977]

>>5966335
Fuck yes.

[Anonymous No.5967978]

>>5966533

Skylon is a technical marvel.

[Anonymous No.5967979]

>>5966534
>Nobody's going to take human spaceflight seriously until the safety approaches commercial air standards.
The only way this can happen is by making more manned spaceflights to get the numbers up. When Skylon is operational it will be responsible for setting the new standard in terms of making spaceflight as common as air travel.

[Anonymous No.5967983]

>>5966745
>I would like to see Skylon become an actual thing, but my hopes are low. The UK does seem to be making a push towards promoting engineering,

The UK is trying to throw money at it. Alan Bond has stated that they were more interested in private funding rather than government because then they are less likely to get caught up by their work being classified. UK government has provided £60m to further develop the SABRE engine and once the next tests are successful you can bet your ass they will be drowned in more funding.

The UK is very proud of its aerospace heritage and to have the chance to start another Rolls-Royce tier company is too good to ignore.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/government-to-spend-60m-on-revolutionary-sabre-rocket-engine-that-will-be-used-on-spaceplane-skylon-8710542.html

[Anonymous No.5968064]

>>5967040
It's like you haven't read Terra Formars at all

[Violent Simians Guy No.5968082]

>>5966616
> That's like saying that we shouldn't build telescopes to look outside our solar system.

We shouldn't. There's no point in studying the universe when you have ZERO intentions of going out there. And Humanity's intentions are ZERO.

There's only reason to study anything: TO MAKE USE OF IT. You basement-dwelling virgin-nerds never understand this, since it's ECONOMICS and it drives 99.9% of Humanity, including yourselves.

This space exploration FETISH will end soon enough. It's too expensive, relies on high-energy industries (which due to Petroleum Depletion will come to an end), and really only pleases the Cheetos eaters like YOU.

[Anonymous No.5968087]

>>5968082
Nice opinions you got there pal

[Violent Simians Guy No.5968124]

>>5966649

I never said to make use of the ocean floor for living purposes. And there's a good reason for that: It's economically impossible. The pressures and concomitant dangers of doing so make it cost prohibitive.

And there's no shortage of land. And by the time there's a shortage of land, killing off billions of people will be the much cheaper, politically preferred option.

Space is different. Hanging around on Earth will produce a resource shortage, particularly that of energy supplies. Wat do? Solar-collector satellites. There's only one way to go for an expanding technological civilization, and that's to form a Dyson Structure around Sol.

Of course, what's likely to happen is that we devolve and make use of purely vicious economics to solve resource depletion: Killing billions of Humans as being "useless eaters".

[Violent Simians Guy No.5968128]

>>5968087

That economics drives 99.9% of Human affairs isn't an opinion. It's established fact. Time to grow up. And stuff your stupid little pictures right up your fuckass. You're wrong and even more alarmingly you know you're wrong. But bluffing your way through this conversation isn't going to produce results for you. Petroleum is still depleting. And still, nothing replaces it. You'll have to do less, much less, and have less. The future for most people (who survive the Resource Wars) will involve LESS.

[Anonymous No.5968135]

>>5968082
All of our precious metals came from space. A single near earth asteroid contains more metal in it's few square miles than the entirety of the erath's crust. Billions of tons of iron, nickle, and millions of tons of platinum, more than would ever be possible to mine on earth, and we don't even have to dig for it. Just start carving off chunks and building what we want up there. Soon we'd only be launching people into waiting made infrastructure up there.

Economics should drive space travel. Short sighted laziness being called economics is what's keeping us grounded.

[Anonymous No.5968138]

>>5968128
>99.9%
99% of the people who use statistics make them up

>It's established fact.
>Time to grow up.
>And stuff your stupid little pictures right up your fuckass.
>You're wrong
mfw all this mad

>nothing replaces it.
I'm sorry if you live in the US of A but here in Italy we are actually trying to give renewable resources a chance

tl;dr stay mad

[Anonymous No.5968139]

>>5968124
NO
RISE UP
FOLLOW ME
MY VOICE IS SOON
Stop believing your fellow humans are the scum you've convinced yourself they are. You sit there with a knife ready for their backs because you believe they do the same. And they do the same, because they are the same as you with the same fears and insecurities. Laugh at your fear, drop your knife, and tell them to not be afraid either. It's no use hiding from each other any longer.

We have to work together. And we have to leave.

[Anonymous No.5968140]

>>5968128
We have several alternatives, and we discovered more to mine recently. While the increase in reserves is being kept quiet, the alternatives are constantly being squawked about so there is no fucking way you're ignorant of them.

[Anonymous No.5968143]

>>5968128
Whoah brahh! That's some pretty deep insight you have there!

Have you ever really sat down about all the technologies pioneered by organizations and businesses such as NASA, Boeing, Northrup Grumman etc in the name of space travel that were once thought impossible but are now being investigated into cost efficient mass reproduction for commercial use. I mean nothing major just huge advances in aerodynamics for the auto industry, thermal dynamics, radar and long range communication, "laser shields" (look it up, they have them, just with limited applicability), food preservation, water filtration, human health and nutrition I mean, nothing important that could EVER be of economic use right?

[Anonymous No.5968147]

>>5968140
>>5968143
Why are you people replying seriously? He's just mad

[Anonymous No.5968158]

>>5968128

references:

Vaclav Smil, 2011, Scientific American, .pdf, widely available. "Global Energy: the Latest Infatuations"

On sequestration:

> Let us assume that we commit initially to
sequestering just 20 percent of all CO2
emitted from fossil fuel combustion in
2010, or about a third of all releases from
large stationary sources. After compressing the gas to a density similar to
that of crude oil (800 kilograms per cubic meter) it would occupy about 8 billion cubic meters—meanwhile, global
crude oil extraction in 2010 amounted
to about 4 billion tonnes or (with average density of 850 kilograms per cubic
meter) roughly 4.7 billion cubic meters."

tl;dr: Switching to alternatives to fossil fuels won't be able to scale in time, and current installed technology won't be "turned off" to save any hypothetical future populations the problem of out-of-control global warming.

[Anonymous No.5968210]

>>5968124
>I never said to make use of the ocean floor for living purposes. And there's a good reason for that: It's economically impossible.
No, you never said that. I said that to provide you with an analogy to clear up your mind on why space colonization is completely out of the question in the near or medium future. And the oceans aren't the only suitable analogy. There are other uncolonized regions on this planet, like deserts and arctic regions. All three types are far easier to colonize than anything in space, provide far easier access to resources, provide far more human suitable habitation conditions and, of course, just getting there is far easier, too.

>The pressures and concomitant dangers of doing so make it cost prohibitive.
These dangers are negligible in comparison to the conditions of Moon or Mars. Which makes colonizing them even more cost prohibitive. In the oceans you have unlimited supplies of hydrogen and oxygen all around you. You don't have that in space. In the oceans you have super protection from cosmic radiation. You don't have that in space. In the oceans you have exactly the gravity that your body is accustomed to. You don't have that in space. You get all those things for free which in space would require expensive technical solutions that just add to the cost. If you're realizing that colonization of the ocean floor is just too expensive then why do you fail to see that this is even more true for space colonization?

>form a Dyson Structure around Sol
Spare me your SciFi fantasies. And your dystopias, too.

[Violent Simians Guy No.5968217]

>>5968139

We are working together, broski. We buy and sell. We attack the Third World yearly and remove at least US$500 billion from it yearly just to support our Westernized lifestyles.

Our lifestyles are based on consumption. We're all part of the problem. I admit it. When will you?

[Violent Simians Guy No.5968234]

>>5968210
> There are other uncolonized regions on this planet, like deserts and arctic regions. All three types are far easier to colonize than anything in space, provide far easier access to resources, provide far more human suitable habitation conditions and, of course, just getting there is far easier, too.

Totally true. But there's more to do than just colonize. Space is necessary for an EXPANDING technological civilization due to the Energy Wall. You run out, bro. So you either downsize or go outward for more.

Ultimately we'll choose to murder each other than to undertake the impossibly expensive means of getting off-world. Elysium won't be built; why bother when you can just live on Earth once you kill off a few billion useless eaters? You can pay a few million poor soldiers to kill off the billions, then pay other soldiers to kill off most of the soldiers who can't conform to the New World Order. Humans are heirarchical. That's always been our consuming weakness.

[Anonymous No.5968241]

>>5966612

He's right and you're wrong. A design for manned flight will always be different to an unmanned version.

[Anonymous No.5968262]

>>5968234
>So you either downsize or go outward for more.
You don't just go outward for more. Just like every financial investment can be measured by the return on investment, energy sources can be measured by energy returned on energy invested. With our current and foreseeable technology there's no reason to go outward for more simply because the energy return is negative.

As to your repeated dystopic depictions: go see a shrink.

[Violent Simians Guy No.5968561]

>>5968262

You just admitted we're not going to expand. And yet you claim I'm dystopian. We have worldwide economic models that only function on EXPANSION. Without inflation, they simply collapse. The manufacturers and bankers just go home, and left to fend for themselves, the common man cannot find emplolyment, therefore cannot earn money, therefore his own socio-economic system collapses. Then you end up with absurdities like legions of homeless people while residences sit empty.

Remember, there will always be GOVERNMENT. That will ensure that people can't adapt to less economic inputs. The people will be forced to compete for rarer resources. This leads to WAR. This is the core rule of being Human, aka a Violent Simian. We're just too competitive, and we just love to kill, particularly killing each other. All of history proves this.

Therefore it's expand or kill each other. Welcome to reality.

[Anonymous No.5968669]

>>5967983

60 million is chump change for a project like this. enough to pay the salaries for another few years, which is all skylon really was, a personal momentum project for a bunch of aerospace guys in a dead end career path.

>once the next tests are successful you can bet your ass they will be drowned in more funding.

spurious faith, like the faith the private sector would drown them in money when the last series of tests were successful. but that never happened.

[Anonymous No.5968797]

>>5968669

They have all the funding they need for the next stage of development.

Right now everything is on track and going as planned. I don't see why the negativity

[Anonymous No.5968803]

>>5968128
>And still, nothing replaces it.

Shale gas.

Advanced drilling techniques for shale gas are also helpful in making other oil viable.

[Anonymous No.5968806]

>>5967040
The question is, will it be more practical to change the planet or to change the people who live on the planet?

[Anonymous No.5968830]

>>5967963
>since it's further from the Sun it's colder therefore any comparable atmosphere would be denser, necessitating less N2 to maintain atmospheric pressure.

But Mars has less gravity and pressure is defined as Density * Gravity * Height. It would need to be considerably denser.

[Anonymous No.5968834]

>>5968082
>We shouldn't. There's no point in studying the universe when you have ZERO intentions of going out there. And Humanity's intentions are ZERO.

Retard

[Anonymous No.5968859]

>>5968797
>They have all the funding they need for the next stage of development.
Sure, on a development path that leads to retirement before building an actual vehicle.

This isn't how they wanted to do it at all. They have way less money than they said they needed to build Skylon, because people don't believe in it.

[Anonymous No.5968961]

>>5968561
>Welcome to reality.
I don't share your dystopian economic beliefs or your beliefs on supposed causal relationships that you call "reality". And I just think it's weird how you seem to make a cult out of them.

[Anonymous No.5969076]

>>5966335
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-08/12/skylon-alan-bond

Very relevant. Article published 2 days ago.

[Anonymous No.5969121]

Still not talking about how they solved the frosting problem, expecting investors to just have faith that it works when it can't be openly discussed. How ridiculous.

Anyway, it seems like a simple enough thing: divide the cooling coils into segments, cycle them rapidly between hot and cold, so at any given moment one segment is defrosting (and not contributing to cooling the intake air) while the rest are cooling. So you get the required overall amount of cooling, and enough frost doesn't build up over time to keep it from working.

Needs lots of little valves, though, so reliability and maintenance are likely to be issues.

[Anonymous No.5969227]

>>5969121
>Still not talking about how they solved the frosting problem, expecting investors to just have faith that it works when it can't be openly discussed. How ridiculous.

Experiments and tests show proof of concept. They don't need to tell anyone 'how' it has been solved.

>Anyway, it seems like a simple enough thing: divide the cooling coils into segments, cycle them rapidly between hot and cold, so at any given moment one segment is defrosting (and not contributing to cooling the intake air) while the rest are cooling. So you get the required overall amount of cooling, and enough frost doesn't build up over time to keep it from working.

Do you know anything at all? That's a ridiculous solution. Extreme thermal cycling? Valves!? What on earth are you talking about?

[Anonymous No.5969252]

>>5969227
>Experiments and tests show proof of concept. They don't need to tell anyone 'how' it has been solved.
Sure, just like Rossi and his magic energy machine.

>That's a ridiculous solution.
How do you think they keep it from frosting up without defrosting it?

It's the obvious solution.

[Anonymous No.5969532]

More importantly, will it blend?

[Anonymous No.5969613]

>>5969252

2/10

Confirmed for troll and/or highly uneducated.

[Anonymous No.5969627]

yes, of course

[Anonymous No.5969632]

>>5969613
Look, a demonstrator of a few parts of a new kind of engine, supported by ground-based machinery and chilling only stationary room-temperature air, with the actual workings of the key part a secret, is no evidence at all for the viability of any flyable hypersonic engine, let alone for one that will work reliably through hundreds of flights with limited maintenance.

[Anonymous No.5969669]

>>5969632
You expect him to share his lifelong work at the behest of a few naysayers? You may act skeptical now, but in the coming decade we will receive our answer.

[Anonymous No.5969691]

>>5969669
>You expect him to share his lifelong work at the behest of a few naysayers?
He's asking for a fortune in public and private funds, and he won't share the details that he'd have to publish in order to patent?

That's not "guarding your lifelong work", that's the way scammers operate.

[Anonymous No.5969705]

>>5969691
>He was careful in noting that the pre-cooler design had been both appraised by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the UK Space Agency, adding: "What we are seeing is the emergence of potentially a very successful British technology."

They don't just pour money into some smoke and mirrors. The ESA are serious people that set serious targets and Reaction Engines are complying.

[Anonymous No.5969711]

>>5969705
>They don't just pour money into some smoke and mirrors.
Big government organizations "pour money into some smoke and mirrors" all the time.

You'll notice that they haven't been given him anything close to the full amount he wanted, and that they're making him use to money to take steps he didn't want to take.

He never wanted to build any subscale demonstrator or proof-of-concept chiller, he was pushing hard to just be given the money to go straight to a spaceplane prototype, before any part of the engine had ever been tested.

It's a really crazy project.

[Anonymous No.5969715]

>>5969632
> let alone for one that will work reliably through hundreds of flights with limited maintenance.
It doesn't need to work through hundreds of flights with limited maintenance. Even if it was single-use (like the majority of the existing launch options), there are applications where the increased cost could be justified. E.g. SLBMs, due to the size premium.

[Anonymous No.5969730]

>>5969715
>Even if it was single-use (like the majority of the existing launch options), there are applications where the increased cost could be justified. E.g. SLBMs, due to the size premium.
What do you mean "due to the size premium"? This thing will be huge, much bigger than most launch vehicles.

"The currently proposed Skylon model C2 will be a physically large vehicle, with a length of 82 metres (269 ft) and a diameter of 6.3 metres (21 ft)."
By comparison, SpaceX's Falcon 9 1.1 (the new, longer version) is 69.2 m long, with a diameter of 3.6 m. It carries a roughly equivalent payload.

The takeoff masses are similar, too. Skylon: 350 tons, Falcon 9: 500 tons. However, most of the Falcon 9 mass is cheap liquid oxygen, whereas most of the Skylon mass is costly subcooled liquid hydrogen. The Skylon actually uses much more energy to carry the same load to space.

SLBMs are much, much smaller.

Bond has insisted that it simply can not be scaled down. The SABRE engines won't work at a smaller size, due to the need for an efficient turbine heat exchanger between the liquid hydrogen fuel and the air chiller.

[Anonymous No.5970077]

>>5969076
The way he thinks reusability will make things cheaper automatically because of the labor cost associated with building a new expendable vehicle for each launch shows he never heard of the Space Shuttle or maintenance costs.