The Astronomy Thread

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Kiroy

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Tuco said:

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Who's going to be making jokes when bezos lobbying bucks and lawyers come through and convince xyz gov admin/agency to shut spacex down for reasons. May not happen today or next week or next year, but it's definitely a possibility over the next decade. I expect bezos and his minions will strike when spacex has their first loss of life accident.
 
Tuco

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Kiroy said:
It's a cool photo, but this is a stupid article.

What those guys are doing is no different than what a thousand crane operators/handlers do every day around this country in terms of the deadlyness of a failure

The first photo of the construction workers is completely different and harkens back to an age where regulation and safety was an after thought behind speed and quality.
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That article reads like a bunch of geeks who have never been around construction before and are impressed by huge cherry pickers.
 
Cybsled

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Kiroy said:
1b on spacesuit dev

what a fucking joke
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Yes, that is somewhat of a head scratcher. I do understand they want to make them more comfortable and with a better range of motion, but that price tag just smacks of markup.
 
Tuco

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Kiroy said:
Who's going to be making jokes when bezos lobbying bucks and lawyers come through and convince xyz gov admin/agency to shut spacex down for reasons. May not happen today or next week or next year, but it's definitely a possibility over the next decade. I expect bezos and his minions will strike when spacex has their first loss of life accident.
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Not really plausible. Musk could crash a starship in Manhattan and take down the freedom tower and we'd still keep spacex rolling.
 
Kiroy

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Cybsled said:
Yes, that is somewhat of a head scratcher. I do understand they want to make them more comfortable and with a better range of motion, but that price tag just smacks of markup.
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pretty simplistic to just say "markup"

there's a whole complex mess of bureaucratic nonsense that gets us this kind of price tag
 
Kiroy

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Tuco said:
Not really plausible. Musk could crash a starship in Manhattan and take down the freedom tower and we'd still keep spacex rolling.
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lol you serious?

Musk has been curating a nice little enemy list out of groups of very powerful people. I think there will be a lot of worried plebs like you and me after his first loss of life accident (which is inevitable) as we watch the government investigations, committees and hearings rip into his shit.

obviously I hope you're in the right on this topic
 
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Oldbased

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Except with Boozo steping down from Amazon he is ripe for some weight bars to the back of the head. He has served his purpose. Now go with God and a bag full of nuns.
 
Tuco

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lunar-starship-complexity-infographic.jpg
 
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Tuco

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Kiroy said:
lol you serious?

Musk has been curating a nice little enemy list out of groups of very powerful people. I think there will be a lot of worried plebs like you and me after his first loss of life accident (which is inevitable) as we watch the government investigations, committees and hearings rip into his shit.

obviously I hope you're in the right on this topic
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3 key differences:
1. SpaceX could be funded without the US Gov, so the worst they could do is tell them no.
2. If all those bureaucrats assailed SpaceX, once the dust settled they'd still #1 in terms of cost/safety for launches.
3. A lot of this is congressional-backed, in that different US congressmen are cutting pork to their districts. The popularity of that politics works when nobody understands the pork being moved and they're just mad at the entire pit of swines, but it's different when one group (SpaceX) is trouncing everyone and is a household name that's clearly separate from the rest.
 
Aaron

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Regarding how we can't build shit we could 50 years ago, I remember reading about how we couldn't just go to the NASA archives, dust off the schematics to the Apollo 5 rocket and build a couple more if we wanted to go back to the moon. It's not the big stuff that's the problem, but the small things. I remember they specifically mentioned screws and how many screws they used to build the rocket and it's systems simply aren't made any more. Sure, you could use modern screws, but first you'd have to test them out. A fraction of a mm difference could mean the difference between something rattling loose and causing problems during launch or sitting snugly. Same with the electronics.

It really shows just how fragile high tech civilisation really can be.
 
Tuco

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Aaron said:
Regarding how we can't build shit we could 50 years ago, I remember reading about how we couldn't just go to the NASA archives, dust off the schematics to the Apollo 5 rocket and build a couple more if we wanted to go back to the moon. It's not the big stuff that's the problem, but the small things. I remember they specifically mentioned screws and how many screws they used to build the rocket and it's systems simply aren't made any more. Sure, you could use modern screws, but first you'd have to test them out. A fraction of a mm difference could mean the difference between something rattling loose and causing problems during launch or sitting snugly. Same with the electronics.

It really shows just how fragile high tech civilisation really can be.
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Yep. I think most of the time we don't care because anything we've been is technologically eclipsed before the techniques are lost. Apollo is a huge exception because of how artificially motivated it was. All other huge progressions of tech like atomic weapons, the internet, the automobile, planes etc were followed up with usage and improvement.
 
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Jozu

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By its very nature, space is extremely difficult. In terms of surviving in it, getting to it, and most importantly coming back from it.

Human spaceflight in general--at this point in the history of mankind--is more of a commercial flex and boost to our historical narrative, than it is an important scientific achievement or advancement. Sending probes or spending money on observation is a better pursuit, for NASA anyway, in 2021 and beyond. Human missions to Mars appear fruitful in terms of achievement, not only from a spaceflight standpoint but an engineering one, as successfully putting astronauts on Mars and bringing them home would be a mission for the ages and our greatest accomplishment as a species.

But honestly outside of a mission to Mars, or a close by asteroid, manned missions arent something NASA should be putting their energy into. The James Webb Space Telescope is launching in November and is going to be an incredible science instrument, one that hopefully like the Hubble, provides generations worth of data and inspiration, as well as cutting edge scientific discovery and observation. The JWST is theoretically worth tens of manned missions in terms of scientific advancement and important measurements that lead to further understanding of our universe as a whole.
 
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Captain Suave

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My brother-in-law at JPL is legit worried that SpaceX is going to to return a physical sample from Mars before NASA can do it in 2032, just as a flex.
 
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Tuco

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Captain Suave said:
My brother-in-law at JPL is legit worried that SpaceX is going to to return a physical sample from Mars before NASA can do it in 2032, just as a flex.
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It's more likely that NASA will put out a request for proposal to enable a mars mission that just so happens to align with what is feasible from spacex. This isnt as incestuous as it sounds and is very common and practical.

This is doubly true if spacex carries the entire Artemis program and it goes as well as everything else spacex has done.
 
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Captain Suave

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Tuco said:
It's more likely that NASA will put out a request for proposal to enable a mars mission that just so happens to align with what is feasible from spacex.
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That's possible, but it'd be a different animal from what is already in motion with the Mars Sample Return mission, on which multiple teams are already committed.
 
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