Timex
3249
But, in the real world of history that actually happened, he played a key role in one of, if not the most impressive achievements in all of human history.
He put human beings into rockets, sent them to the Moon, had them get out and drive around, and then flew back to Earth, landing safely.
That’s an achievement worthy of my respect.
Djscman
3250
I don’t know what all this means, but I like the idea of long filaments extending from black holes.
What’s interesting in space (specifically, the space that is my backyard) is that my son and I got the telescope out and looked at Jupiter and Saturn. It’s not a fancy or powerful telescope, but we could see the Galilean moons of Jupiter (which floored me a couple years ago when I first saw them) and, dimly and fuzzily, the rings of Saturn (which I hadn’t seen before and didn’t believe my son was seeing at first).
How do you keep objects in view long enough to actually take in what you’re looking at? My brother-in-law set up his telescope for us to view the moon, and while the magnification was very nice, everything was moving way too fast not to be frustrating IMO.
Pod
3253
The further away stuff moves more slowly :)
Matt_W
3254
Everything not in LEO (i.e. some satellites, meteors, and the ISS) moves at approximately the speed of the Earth’s rotation. They’re all effectively infinitely far away and the Earth’s rotational speed swamps all local motion of the objects.
At high power, you need some help to track the stars’ motion. An equatorial mount keeps one of the scope’s axes aligned to the north pole (or south pole if you’re in the southern hemisphere) so you can track the apparent motion of celestial objects using only one of the positioning knobs. (Turning the knob moves the scope in east-west arcs parallel to lines of latitude.) There are also many amateur telescopes available with motorized mounts with celestial tracking and computerized star finders built in.
jpinard
3255
So the Russians know how a hole ended up in the Soyuz docked craft but won’t tell anyone. WTF is wrong with them?
and there goes NASA’s budget :(
Cost-plus & Lockheed = gutting other NASA programs to cover Lockheed’s “guaranteed” cost overruns.
Just insane. That cost doesn’t include the service module. So if you add the SLS in then it will be between 1.5 to 2 billion dollars PER launch.
Romalar
3258
SpaceX is finally ready to show off the Starship prototype.
Their future plans update is tonight at 7 pm CDT.
Menzo
3259
It may not look like much, but it’s got it where it counts, kid.
ShivaX
3261
You could say this for literally everyone.
Washington owned slaves, but we still named our capital, a state and countless schools after him.
Actually, that looks more like a 1950s version of what a rocket ship of the future was supposed to look like than anything that’s actually been built to date.
Romalar
3264
Well, the presentation was interesting but awkward. Generously, Elon must have had a really hard time with the wind. He had a bit of trouble answering questions even about things already known publicly.
Still, key info is that the one shown above that they’ve built there in Texas and the one in progress in Florida probably won’t fly to orbit but just within the atmosphere or maybe to space suborbitally, with at least their 20km test flight with this one aiming for 1-2 months out. Then each of the Texas and Florida teams will build another Starship upper stage followed by their big first stage boosters so that both sites can ideally move right to orbital testing.
He thinks they could optimistically try for orbit in 6 months and attempt human flights in 12 months. I doubt that timeline will hold, but who knows. The key thing he emphasized is ramping up the time to build Raptor engines since each team needs 33-40 of them to get to orbit. The key thing he de-emphasized is how hard it will be to get regulators to approve the flights, who knows how hard that will be.
Edit: https://arstechnica.com/features/2019/09/after-starship-unveiling-mars-seems-a-little-closer/
Sounds like the after-interview here clarified some things. In particular, he talked about how their life support systems for Dragon (for NASA-funded trips to the ISS) are not renewable enough for long-term space flight and how it needs more work.
antlers
3265
The hard technological leap for Starship is managing the heat of re-entry; it’s a hard problem. The Dragon capsules use ablative heat shields which won’t work on vehicles that are supposed to be turned around for re-use quickly. SpaceX has gone through several strategies on this; carbon fiber; stainless steel with active cooling from evaporating unused fuel; and now ceramic tiles, somewhat like the Space Shuttle. I hope the tile technology has advanced beyond the Shuttles notoriously fragile and finicky tiles.
fire
3266
Finally, a use for all those pesky cockroaches!
We need to work on finding out the most efficient way of making better flavoured meat out of insects using nutrients on Mars.
Well we know you can grow potatoes so they got their vegetable.
Could we feed one million people living on Mars?
More importantly, why would we want to?
