Does the Washington Post realize how badly its credibility has been damaged since the Bezos takeover? Everything they publish is now seen in the context of Bezos's other interests - Discord runs on Google Cloud, not AWS, so the attack on Discord is understandable. Resentment over the failures of Blue Origin inform this article, don't they?
Kind of like Buzzfeed, if you ask me. The WaPo has sold its soul for a mess of pottage.
> Leading up to Thursday’s launch, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said success would be measured by a simple metric: “Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”
I don’t understand why these chemical rockets and another flight to the moon are needed. Isn’t it a dead end? And pointless carbon emissions on the way?
Nuclear fusion gives a path to clean energy and allows star-flight. Chemical rockets don’t.
Please inform the rest of us, the unwashed plebs, exactly what technology exists to get us off this rock to the moom that isnt chemistry based and can be used in the next 20 years
What happened to ground based laser propulsion? Where you heat up the propellant with a ground based laser during takeoff and then use the same laser source to power your ship is space?
I remember a few videos of launching small rockets with a ground based laser from some twenty years ago. Haven’t laser technology improved since?
All the recent work on compact reactors has been on modular ones that don’t care about weight. I think there have been studies about nuclear rockets but no active development programs.
Fission rockets are useless for launching to space because the thrust is too low, or the weight is too high. They could be useful in space because their higher exhaust velocity. But high exhaust velocity means low thrust.
Do we have any approaches to fusion that would be usable for launches? I mean, ones that we could possibly prototype within a decade, not just Project Rho links, much as I enjoy Project Rho.
PFRC2? I think the whole fusion thing is like A.I. or electric vehicles.
You simply need someone to really push it, and you can get there. Instead of having the status quo keepers running the things on fossil fuels and collecting guaranteed income to build even larger yachts.
Estimated performance is 10 Newtons per megawatt. Useful to replace ion engines for interstellar spacecraft, but not useful to escape Earth's gravity well. cf Starship with about 75 million Newtons of thrust.
If you have a good, compact inexhaustible source of clean energy that gives you megawatts of it, you should be able to turn it into delta-V.
You can use atmosphere as the propellant. And accelerate as much as you need at the upper levels of atmosphere. Potentially you can use aerodynamics (basically fly inverted) to get to even higher velocity than the orbital velocity. Then, you can stay there at the upper levels, as long as you need to, and charge your tanks (you can initially take off with an empty tank of propellant). Once this is done, you can adjust the angle of attack and ease of into the higher orbit, switching to space flight.
It involves hypersonic flight, but there is nothing impossible here.
At this point there is project risk from them not wanting to redesign and rebuild the launch mount. If an add-on flame diverter is not enough, they will have just delayed a painful decision that imposes long lead-times.
It might even be a blessing if the launch mount can't be repaired in a cost-effective way and they have to start over. But an iterative, Agile-like approach looks great when perfecting welded joints. But doing too many more iterations to get to orbit, in which boosters and Starhips are expended, could break the project. Agile is appropriate for a lot of software projects (n.b. not Scrum), but maybe not for the biggest rocket ever made.
That is possible. But, so far, the decision-making has been faulty: the decision to go ahead without, at least, the flame diverter, was a poor decision. Elon will be loathe to make any decision other than "Patch it up and add a flame diverter that fits between the legs of the launch mount."
Secondly, no decision at this point will save them two months. They are in for many months of reconstruction, apart from all the other design changes needed. They are also in for FAA scrutiny that will take at least several months. There is a large incentive to be unrealistic about this: A realistic view of delays makes an already very optimistic schedule for supplying a Starship-based lunar lander to the Artemis project look very risky.
What we are seeing is the limits to scaling an iterative project. It is transitioning from learning how to weld stainless steel, which can evolve quickly, to learning how to fix multiple large problems when every iteration costs 39 rocket engines, 200 tankers of fuel/oxidizer, etc.
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[ 0.28 ms ] story [ 71.6 ms ] threadThis is the most "concrete" view of the damage below the OLM so far: https://twitter.com/OCDDESIGNS/status/1649430284843069443/ph...
Damage & puncturing to the tank farm: https://www.youtube.com/live/omouxjzI17U?feature=share&t=234...
You can see how the housing for the cable spool is shreded here: https://www.youtube.com/live/omouxjzI17U?feature=share&t=211...
RGV has posted a few photos from their flyover: https://twitter.com/RGVaerialphotos/media
Kind of like Buzzfeed, if you ask me. The WaPo has sold its soul for a mess of pottage.
If you're aware of that, and read it in that context, I think that's fine.
Certainly it goes without saying that they didn't want to blow it up? This reads like an online blog and not a premier newspaper.
> Leading up to Thursday’s launch, SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk said success would be measured by a simple metric: “Just don’t blow up the launchpad.”
Nuclear fusion gives a path to clean energy and allows star-flight. Chemical rockets don’t.
I remember a few videos of launching small rockets with a ground based laser from some twenty years ago. Haven’t laser technology improved since?
Fission reactors have the same problem. It is possible to use them in space but not to get into space.
Fission rockets are useless for launching to space because the thrust is too low, or the weight is too high. They could be useful in space because their higher exhaust velocity. But high exhaust velocity means low thrust.
You simply need someone to really push it, and you can get there. Instead of having the status quo keepers running the things on fossil fuels and collecting guaranteed income to build even larger yachts.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direct_Fusion_Drive
You can use atmosphere as the propellant. And accelerate as much as you need at the upper levels of atmosphere. Potentially you can use aerodynamics (basically fly inverted) to get to even higher velocity than the orbital velocity. Then, you can stay there at the upper levels, as long as you need to, and charge your tanks (you can initially take off with an empty tank of propellant). Once this is done, you can adjust the angle of attack and ease of into the higher orbit, switching to space flight.
It involves hypersonic flight, but there is nothing impossible here.
It might even be a blessing if the launch mount can't be repaired in a cost-effective way and they have to start over. But an iterative, Agile-like approach looks great when perfecting welded joints. But doing too many more iterations to get to orbit, in which boosters and Starhips are expended, could break the project. Agile is appropriate for a lot of software projects (n.b. not Scrum), but maybe not for the biggest rocket ever made.
Secondly, no decision at this point will save them two months. They are in for many months of reconstruction, apart from all the other design changes needed. They are also in for FAA scrutiny that will take at least several months. There is a large incentive to be unrealistic about this: A realistic view of delays makes an already very optimistic schedule for supplying a Starship-based lunar lander to the Artemis project look very risky.
What we are seeing is the limits to scaling an iterative project. It is transitioning from learning how to weld stainless steel, which can evolve quickly, to learning how to fix multiple large problems when every iteration costs 39 rocket engines, 200 tankers of fuel/oxidizer, etc.