5456

Aren’t they all rockets? I ain’t seeing no space elevators out there.

5457

Correct. It was also massively expensive and the re-use concept was good on paper but weak in execution. Traditional staged rockets have been proven superior. NASA went down a well-intentioned dead end with STS.

Also correct, but sad. The only reason that SLS is using STS parts is because Congress mandated it to preserve jobs and keep the money spigot open to their big donors^H^H^H^H^H^H . . . .I mean key aerospace companies. This shouldn’t in any way be touted as an advantage of SLS.

Correct again, but that just means we had the budget and will to build such a thing while nobody else (at the time) did. The shuttle has less launch capacity to low earth orbit (in kg) than the newer Falcon Heavy, and the Falcon Heavy is dramatically cheaper per launch. If we had to rebuild the ISS tomorrow for some reason, we could do it a heck of a lot cheaper this time around with commercially available launch services.

5458

Sorry I was being imprecise, obviously the STS is still rocketry. I was referring to stacked rockets specifically, e.g. the continuation of the Saturn program and similar heavy lift boosters for manned flight.

That is with the momentum from the Apollo program, what is now Artemis could have been achieved in the 80s.

Edit: What Tortilla said

5459

Well, technically both the X15 and SpaceShipOne reached space (barely) without vertical launch (though they did use rocket engines), so they sort of count as not being rockets, even though they came nowhere near orbit.

I mean, Saturn V was as capable as Artemis will ever be. Even fully mature, Artemis will have about the same TLI payload capacity that Saturn V did. I’m totally on board with SLS being a total boondoggle giveaway to constituents of congresshumans. It is already 4x as expensive per launch as the Saturn program (assuming we get 10 launches out of it) and isn’t, as far as I can tell, any more capable than rockets built 60 years ago. I’m not sure what the point of it is. And totally agree that Space X blows everyone out of the water by like an order of magnitude. But the Apollo program was more expensive than the STS program and had 13 launches compared to STS’s 135. I’m not sure continuing Saturn launches into the 80’s was feasible or desirable. The shuttle program was a logical step, even if it proved to be far more expensive and dangerous than expected.

And while I agree that it will be cool to see boots on the moon again (if that happens and we don’t end up killing astronauts trying to do it), I don’t know why we’re doing it. I’m a pretty firm robotic exploration proponent vs human spaceflight. Sure Curiosity cost a couple of billion bucks, but it will probably cost 100x that to send crew to Mars. We could sent 100 Curiosities instead and do much more science.

5460

Yes, space is so hostile to life you have to dedicate so much payload just to keeping the meatbags alive. All of which is fragile (just look at all the maintenance problems with space toilets for example). Let alone all the potential psychological issues of long duration space missions. I mean the Voyager program alone vastly increased our understanding of the solar system for a fraction of the cost of the simplest manned missions. There is not much merit in, say, a manned Jupiter mission that couldn’t be accomplished by probes. Mars “colonization” sounds ludicrous for most of it’s stated benefits. If we haven’t colonized central Antarctica, the middle of the Gobi desert, or the bottom on the Marianas trench, why would we colonize Mars? Any of those would be hundreds of times simpler.

I highly doubt there will ever be such a thing as a manned interstellar mission, ever.

That said, I think there will always be some place for manned missions, but primarily in cislunar space and potentially asteroid missions. Also you cannot discount the political factor of “our guys” saluting a flag somewhere, even if just for funding.

5461

The shuttle was worse than all of this. It was designed very poorly because they couldn’t get enough budget after post-Apollo cuts and therefore asked many departments of the US government to buy into the project for a larger budget base, and places like the Air Force and NRO got to add their own grab bags of features to the shuttle. This bloated the size of the shuttle from its original design and messed up the safety and maneuverability in addition to impacting the cost and reusability.

Then, due to how much of the US government would be in on it and how expensive it seemed it would be (though only a fraction of the eventual cost), it was decided that everything needed to use it. Nobody would be allowed to fly anything else, at least with a government contract, no matter how inappropriate the shuttle was for their mission. Basic satellite deployment was required to use a crewed mission just to standardize on the more and more inappropriate STS.

To justify all of this, officials involved began to deceive everyone as to the cost of flying the shuttle. The country and the world was told that it was so cheap to fly the shuttle that other rockets were too inefficient to compete. The US government then subsidized the flights without most people, even those involved in parts of the shuttle program, being aware of it. As I understand it, much of this was due to bureaucratic mismanagement and “hoping for the best” as opposed to intentional deception, but the hidden subsidies rise to a level of deception beyond that.

All of this very much helped to kill off a lot of other rocket development in the US and also in Europe until the Challenger accident. Many rocket designs were only dusted off after Challenger showed how dangerous it was and US administrations outlawed any shuttle flight that didn’t require a crew in some way.

You can see some of this already in thses article from before Challenger:

https://www.science.org/doi/pdf/10.1126/science.216.4543.278

And one right in the wake of Challenger:

There’s more about the problems with commercial competition here:

5462
5463

Now that’s what I’m talking about.

aliens.jpg

5464

That’s only 4.1 quadrillion miles away!

5465

Invite them over for lunch.

5466

We’ll only have to wait 1,400 years for their RSVP!

5467

Anyone see the SpaceX announcement with T-Mobile and care to translate it? My phone will be able to talk to the Enterprise directly at last?

5468

That seems to be Berger’s take.

https://twitter.com/SciGuySpace/status/1562961991362158593.

I wonder if it will also be used to provide cellular coverage to Tesla in remote areas?

5469

5470

Yeah, Musk said Teslas will be able to connect directly to the satellites. Not sure exactly how useful this all is, but people seem excited :)

If you’re somewhere with no coverage and a bear has you trapped up a tree or wherever, seems like it would be useful though.

5471

In a Tesla in a tree?

5472

Don’t blame the car, the human was supposed to override it when it tried to drive up the tree.

5473

Remember last week’s claims of JWST disproving the Big Bang? So apparently that wasn’t just normal fringe science, poor science journalism or typical cherrypicking, it was negligent to malicious misrepresentation of people’s research and statements.

One of the big claims in “The Big Bang didn’t happen” article by Eric J. Lerner was that scientists were panicking over the data coming down because it upended all their best-loved theories. It turns out this is based on one of the papers being titled “Panic! At the Disks: First Rest-frame Optical Observations of Galaxy Structure at z > 3 with JWST in the SMACS 0723 Field.” To push his own ideas, he misrepresented this as panic among traditional scientists instead of just a joke title about the band name “Panic! at the Disco”.

He then quoted a scientist named Alison Kirkpatrick as saying “Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning and wondering if everything I’ve done is wrong” out of context. He left out that she said it about the new galaxy formation data not the Big Bang and left out that she followed up with “We’re going to have to figure that out” not expressions of panic or upending of mainstream cosmology in general. She’s a bit unhappy about the quote:

Edit: Hmm, I see that @Tim_N did mention this earlier in brief but I didn’t realize then how bad it was, that it wasn’t just run of the mill exaggeration. I found this additional context just today and thought it might be helpful.

Anyway, here’s a good rundown of what’s actually being learned from these JWST observations:

5474

Serious question. How can you disprove the big bang? My understanding is that there’s a point that we just can’t view beyond.

5475

Plenty of ways. Right now our theories, which are based on laughably few observations of other galaxies compared to the size of the universe, are based on the idea that that everything started with a bang at one point in space. Everything is thus expanding away from that point. This is consistent with our observations and understanding of physics to date, but further inconsistent observations or new theories in astrophysics could call that into question. Maybe there were multiple bangs, at the same or different times, in the history of our universe. We don’t know. And we won’t know in our lifetimes because we are peering out the proverbial keyhole at the universe.

I tend to take the stance that we don’t know and that’s okay. We have some theories and that’s good and healthy and shows we have smart and curious people pondering the issue, but it won’t be settled for centuries. Or maybe millenia.