Would get a little nervous being the guy riding up on one towards the end of it's life cycle.Hmm, I wonder if that's more nuanced than it sounds. From that it sounds like, "Yeah even the things that pratically blow up won't have to be replaced for 10 missions at least.", with the suggestion that much of the rocket can be used indefinitely.
I think the theory is that the launches really aren't that hard on them, it's the "landings" in the ocean/whatever and then being reconditioned for re-launch and all the potential errors that can happen there.Would get a little nervous being the guy riding up on one towards the end of it's life cycle.
That video is fucking awesome!I found this to be extremely awesome. The Spacex Cast is transposed over this visualization of the velocity and trajectory of the launch. It shows the altitude/velocity of the vehicle(s) - it shows when their engines are lit. The trajectory is exactly what you might expect, but its so hard to visualize the fact that our universe is quickly all about arcs. Our daily lives are on such short distances that the world might as well be flat. This also helps put into perspective why SpaceX is doing something that Blue Origin is light years from doing. There is very little truly vertical flight in this entire process. The falling portions of stage 1 I found fascinating with the graphs. I think the deceleration before the final burn must be when the maneuvering fins interfere with its acceleration from gravity.
Near the end of the video - both the full stage 2 and stage 1 trajectories are visualized together on the graphs.
Laser-illuminated solar sails.Dyson and Hawking and such talking about doing some teeny small probes with solar sails
I think most of it has to do with speed, (but clearly also trajectory), the higher the orbit, the tinier the recovery area possible because as that video shows - you really are just trying to go sideways really fucking fast to stay in orbit. That's 99% of the task almost, getting to altitude is easy, going 17,000+ mph is hard. For further orbits, especially geostationary, lagrange points etc I'm sure you have to go even faster. that video also made me realize exactly how much firepower they exert to return stage 1 to land in Florida. For the barge landing they kill almost all its horizontal speed and it re-accelerates through a much more vertical free fall, to get back to the cape they have to get that thing moving horizontally substantially to fall back on land. It definitely doesn't fly more as controlled fall - it has no lift surfaces besides those airbrake/landing fin combination. They said this mission could have returned to land, but they wanted to try the barge shot since their next 3 launches cannot possibly return to land. I think when you scale it all up to the falcon heavy - that there are very few launch trajectories where the F9 Stage 1's can get back to land.That's very cool and really shows why they want to be able to land at sea.
I wonder how much the sea-landing location varies based on payload?
100GW of ground based lasers required. As they say, "A number of hard engineering challenges remain to be solved before these missions can become a reality", and I'm sure the Chinese and Russians are going to love the idea of 100 GW of lasers that can hit small targets in orbit over a period of time to "accelerate" them.Laser-illuminated solar sails.
They probably wont' care, the current plan they have will only fire off about one per day. Lasers have two ways to increase their power, you either increase the power source and all the hardware to support it like cooling etc or you can do beam additions. Their plan is to do the beam additions where they keep adding in more and more laser pulses to the same beam until it reaches a power level they want over the specific time period. This limits how many they can fire a day with their current plan to 1, which is not exactly a weapons technology.100GW of ground based lasers required. As they say, "A number of hard engineering challenges remain to be solved before these missions can become a reality", and I'm sure the Chinese and Russians are going to love the idea of 100 GW of lasers that can hit small targets in orbit over a period of time to "accelerate" them.
Breakthrough Initiatives
If in inflatable habitat popped in a vacuum you'd just experience rapid decompression and outward explosion of pressure, right? Why would you be squeezed?The idea of being in an inflated habitat seems frightening. Now if there's a pressurization leak you won't only be suffocated but will be squeezed to death as well. Or something.
If in inflatable habitat popped in a vacuum you'd just experience rapid decompression and outward explosion of pressure, right? Why would you be squeezed?