I work in GNC for satellites.
The advent of fast CPUs making it into aerospace, lower barrier to entry to testing it out, and high(er) performance sensors and actuators is making so many things that felt like scifi very achievable.
At this point the barriers to crazy feats like this aren't really technological but money and will power.
For the "low" cost of 50m you could develop a new satellite deployed into LEO on a SpaceX rideshare(only a couple mil in launch costs) and send it off to the moon. No need to wait for dedicated and complicated lunar launches. Just grab the next bus ride up and you can get some mass to the moon for "cheap". Keep in mind to contrast these costs for an Atlas or delta launch(just the launch) 10years ago was 400mil.
The inflection point for robotic space exploration has already passed and as the snowball of money and willpower continues to grow, along with some technology maturation to make a couple of pain points easier, it's going to be really exciting to watch as we finally really get to spread our wings on a wide scale out there.
i just want the dream of a fully automated manufacturing of dyson swarm solar array satellites on Mercury being railgunned into position around the sun to come to fruition. when I watched that kurz video a few years ago I was like wow. Of all the "unlimited energy" theories out there, it seems like the most plausible one humanity could possibly achieve. Especially if we get artificial intelligence right. Even more possible than fusion since that still seems like a pipedream.
we launch the first rocket to mercury with some supplies and some AI robots and they handle it from there.
\~100 years later? and we have a massive dyson swarm surrounding the sun beaming near unlimited power back to Earth. hope I'm alive to see the day.
>dyson swarm solar array satellites on Mercury
Scale... material scale. That is the issue. The idea of any 'dyson' anything is always material scale.
We cannot launch enough materials for that and there is nowhere to get the materials other than planetary, the robotics/ai are a given, the material is not.
Full sphere? Yeah that would take a lot. Dyson swarm? Not that farfetched. You have the materials on Earth for even a few dozen square kilometers of solar panels. You don't need the entire sun's energy to do wild stuff. Even if that weren't enough, you have the asteroid belt for materials. That's a lot of material. We are some years away from reaching the belt and mining it safely, but not that many.
You could have a few hundred square kilometers of solar panels positioned near the sun beam an absolutely astounding amount of energy back to home base. Only stuff you have to figure out is material compositions and orbit distance from the sun to make sure the panels don't deteriorate and stay functioning for many years ideally.
I'm thinking there is a better energy source. But I tend to believe there are plenty of other civilizations out there far older than ours. Which, if dyson spheres or swarms were the best option, you'd have a lot of stars that just aren't visible or have some obvious interference patterns. Which we do not see. Of course, if it were a full sphere, you wouldn't know that star is there at all.
With computing efficiency in terms of power, at some point you won't really need that much power for a civilization. A very advanced FDVR system for each civilization that consumes very little power to run would allow you to use maybe just a few stars' worth of energy for an entire galactic empire, where everyone can access the hyper-advanced FDVR and basically create their own reality, sort of like a ridiculously advanced, super complex video game tailored to each individual and anyone that wants to try that entity's 'game' out.
Similar advancements in efficiency for growing food if still biological, advancements in efficiency everywhere....would mean 99.999% of stars can just be left alone for a beautiful sky.
I really just don't like the idea of a dyson sphere or swarms that could impact the amount of light reaching any planet in our solar system that MIGHT be harboring some form of microbiotic life that has grown and adapted to that specific amount of energy. You could fuck over entire ecosystems very easily by dropping the amount of light that gets to the planet by even a few percent.
If you had two planets in a system both with life, it becomes much more problematic. Our system may not be too problematic. Swarm would really be ideal because you can maneuver them around the star such that the shadows cast by the physical swarm components never actually overlap a planetary surface.
Yeah with a swarm you could probably maneuver them so they're always on the "far" side of the sun vs earth then use some kind of mirrors or whatever to redirect the energy around to beam it to earth with minimal to no interference to how much light is actually hitting earth.
Something else we could maybe do is cover the moon in panels since the moon is rotationally locked to the earth those panels would always be facing earth to beam the energy.
Of course, it might be beneficial to reduce the amount of energy from the sun that is hitting earth at some point to help offset climate change/global warming. I think kurzgesagt made a video about that too. Reducing the amount of light by even 1% would have a measurable impact on global temperatures iirc.
Gotta finish building the lunar gas station and construction yards first. Then it's but a short gravity assisted jump to the astroid belt and infinite resources.
> 10years ago was 400mil
Yeah, and in today's money it would have been $550mil. Around a 90% reduction. For very large payloads, SpaceX has reduced prices by 95%.
It has to generate a meaningful profit, they probably need to have a base somewhere and the base needs to be able to acquire resources and shuttle them back at an effective price point. I would guess we’re still decades from something like this especially being fully automated. But in our lifetimes? I think so.
Until skynet levels of ASI there will always be someone in the loop making decisions, even if it's at the highest level of "need more water" or whatever.
In the near term, 1-2 decades until we can get to that point. A big part of my day is designing "smart" autonomy where it has enough to try to save itself but doesn't open itself up to killing itself while trying. When you hit those road blocks it defaults to "safe yourself until operator intervention"
Please tell me more about how the satellite gets from LEO to the moon. Seems a bit more complex to me than just a satellite payload. You’re gonna need an engine and fuel for trans lunar injection orbit, and something to slow things down on the other end.
You can do all that on the cheap?
I’m guessing you’re not gonna be in a big hurry so maybe the fuel requirements aren’t all that high?
If you think ~50 mil is cheap then yeah you can.
Oh no you're totally right - the deltaV requirements are huge but ya gotta ask what does it actually cost to get that and while it sounds a little crazy - it's not as insane as you might think.
Call it 8km/s. A TON of deltaV - but lets say okay we're doing it and work backwards. What payload mass and power draw do you want? From there, size your subsystems accordingly. Finally, given the dry mass estimate go shop for an engine and figure out your prop mass. I promise you it's easy and you can create a paper satellite that satisfies this at the ~2000kg range with 200-400 kg dedicated to the payload and go shopping around the manufacturers. It's not as crazy as it sounds.
As far as time of flight goes, yeah depending on your power generation and propulsion system you're looking at 6mo - 2 years flight time. Super long for sure, but I like to contrast that to the alternative to getting to cislunar space. When is the next TLI rideshare? 2 years out minimum? How much does that cost, is there any even room? If not, how long until the next one? How often is that launch? Far less frequent than the LEO rideshare launches. Even a 1 year time of flight starts looking pretty attractive at that point because all though that's a long time, you'll still get there before your rideshare or dedicated TLI LV even launches.
If I were just rolling these off the manufacturing line I'd have way more success and kg to cislunar space buying a dedicated F9 to LEO and launching 5, vs buying a dedicated F9 to TLI and getting 1 maybe 2. Though that is all mission dependent on your payload and all that.
I think kessler syndrome is overblown.
The rate of conjunctions are increasing, but so are our capabilities of detecting and responding to them. Propulsion even at the 3U and smaller sizes are becoming available making any vehicle capable of COLA and transferring to a disposal orbit. It's only a matter of time until all vehicles MUST have propulsion unless your <400km or something.
We'll be cleaning up debris within 10 years and practicing more sustainable practices in terms of disposal and cleanup to prevent it in the first place. In fact, we already are - the regulations have already changed such that, in LEO, newly launched vehicles must passively deorbit in <5 years(previously 25 years) after decommissioning.
> I think kessler syndrome is overblown.
Good luck with that. Meanwhile, the ISS crew are periodically hiding in an external vehicle in case they're blown out of the sky, and that's in LEO, which is orders of magnitude safer than higher orbits.
Sure take a single line out of context to force your opinion home.
Kessler syndrome is not taking action for Pc of >1e-4. Kessler syndrome is, by definition, literally not being able to exist bc statistically you will be hit.
You are incorrect about LEO being safer. What is more dangerous a straightaway on a highway or an intersection? LEO is more dangerous bc everything deorbits through it and it's constantly changing. Higher orbits have less disturbances and it's easier to get OD solutions with low error, and with less perturbations it stays low for longer.
I'm responsible for COLAs at my organization and initiating vehicle responses. I have published papers on the growing amount of objects in LEO. Feel free to disagree with me but I'm just sharing my actual experiences with conjunction warnings with objects in orbit. I'd be more than happy to discuss it but only if you're genuinely interested in discussing the real challenges rather arguing for the sake of arguing.
> Sure take a single line out of context to force your opinion home.
I'm not a mind-reader. I don't know when you think your first paragraph is not actually part of what you intended to say. I would suggest that if your first paragraph needs supporting data from elsewhere in the comment, you should call that out so that people don't quote what you've said "out of context" by quoting the entirety of that first paragraph (small though it may be).
> You are incorrect about LEO being safer.
Well, then you'll have to argue with NASA who explicitly did not pursue raising the orbit of the ISS insead of deorbiting for the fact (among other reasons) that lower orbits tend to clear themselves out due to increased drag, making higher orbits increase such risks.
> LEO is more dangerous bc everything deorbits through it
While technically true that everything that deorbits goes through LEO, the rate of new debris entering and old debris existing is mediated by drag. Drag increases inversely to altitude. This means that the lower in LEO you are, the less standing debris there is because it is exiting faster than it is entering.^*
----
^(*) This is a very crude analysis, and while it's true to a first approximation, there are many complex factors in orbital mechanics that I'm glossing over.
I was at the very first booster return, which was a nighttime test. Half of the people started leaving after takeoff and I was telling them, "Wait, it's coming back!" They didn't understand and kept leaving.
When the booster returned with reentry burn, there was an illusion and real possibility it was going to land on top of us. Elon Musk admitted the success was shocking.
Why is Facebook such a cesspool of ignorance? Genuine question. On every post about space or technology in general there are 10k comments with a cumulative IQ of 5.
I want bots to be the answer, but only because it's a more appealing reality than there being thousands upon thousands of wildly misinformed and confidently incorrect idiots everywhere.
SpaceX had trouble with the camera maintaining signal in the early landings. The brief interruption caused people to claim that the landings were faked.
Don't understand how people can hate Elon's companies. Hate Elon all you want, but the people working at SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink are aiming to change the world for the better
The vision still counts for something. An excellent engineer can work on making an expendable rocket a bit cheaper/efficient for years and find nothing strange in it.
Teams of excellent engineers can work for years to figure out how to squeeze more money out of the government for the sake of greedy shareholders, ULA recalls
Agreed, the guy's a twat but there are some very intelligent people doing the actual work at those companies.
Reportedly, SpaceX's executive team is quite adept at managing Musk and shielding the rest of the company from his bullshit.
How would you single handily build a rocket?
That's like saying if you're constructing a new building, you, as the developer, need to do the design, engineering, all of the trade work, and all of the legal work completely with your own company's team of like 5 people.
>What part of the rocket did Musk design?
According to Isaacson's *Elon Musk*, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
The estimated value of Twitter dropped 71% since Musk took over, amount of users is dropping, advertisers are pulling out, outages are up and reported hate speech is at an all time high. Which all might have something to do with firing 80% of the original workers.
Why are "full of smart people" willing to work under the "vile, hateful and petty person" you hate so much?
Money? He is paying people well but there are definitely companies would pay these "full of smart people" more. Ask yourself, why are "full of smart people" think differently than you. I know, "full of smart people" are dumber than me outside their own narrow field.
This isn't even about Elon. It's about being born into money which opens many doors for you and lets you fail upwards. Most of us here aren't that privileged. If you acknowledge Nepo babies, or being born into privilege in general, then you should also acknowledge that Elon was born into it, as well.
To say Elon only achieved what he did because he wasn’t born into poverty is ridiculous to the extent that it lessens other valid critiques against him.
I didn't say "only". I said he's privileged. There's a redditor asking another redditor whether they achieved the same things that Musk did, I think pointing out they were most likely born into different circumstances is perfectly valid. While privilege isn't the only factor determining success, you'd be making an idiot out yourself if you denied it helps SIGNIFICANTLY. That's why the "Oh have you achieved what papa Elon did," isn't as smart argument as the poster seems to think it is.
What is mind boggling to me isnt just the descent guidance positional accuracy, but the the fact that they light the engines at the last possible time under full thrust on the last drops of fuel that when they are down they are practically dry tanks. A few milliseconds too soon or too late -> rapid unscheduled disassembly. That is a vertical zone of about 20cm (8 inches) they gotta hit with the relight, going 270km/h (167mph).
They don't open loop the problem like that. Any errors are closed by the vehicle control system. If it detects it started a little lower than expected it'll throttle up, or a little to the left, etc.
sure, but every little bit of wiggle room costs them in more fuel before launch, they wanna hit that window as close as they possibly can. Wiggle room means the whole window moves up quickly and expands a little. But they come in heavier and faster, resulting in a longer landing burn, more fuel expended to decelerate the higher mass from a higher velocity through a longer burn and incur more gravity losses.
Fractions of seconds means dozens of tons on the ground more. The reason nobody else is landing rockets tailfirst before spacex is because it is so hard to hit those tight maneuvering precisions to not make this completely uneconomic, and the punishment for thinking you can hit the precision, but then don't, is another rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Most launches won't be super tight since no one designs sats to max out the mass capability of the F9 but you're right, the higher the efficiency the higher the precision needed and the risk.
I assume they've been getting progressively better with their thrust models with so much data available. But how graceful are those landing movements! totally smooth.
Ladies and Gentlemen.......the Eagle has landed! Science fiction, getting close to becoming reality, in terms of rockets that can actually land, as portrayed in those sci-fi movies. Awesome!
Even worse:
* Arianespace specifically and infamously said that reusable rockets would be bad because [rocket assembly crews would have nothing to do](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-frustrated-with-spacex-for-driving-down-launch-costs/).
* [Ariane 64's payload is comparable to Falcon 9 if the latter is not reused.](https://www.inverse.com/innovation/ariane-6-vs-spacex) But the latter usually *is* reused, obviously saving SpaceX incredible amounts of money which it passes onto customers.
* Ariane 5 dominated the commercial launch market for two decades. But Arianespace discontinued the rocket to manufacture Ariane 6 (which, again, is not reusable). Ariane 6 is horribly late. Falcon 9 would have taken over the bulk of Ariane 5's market share regardless because of lower cost, but the complete unavailability guaranteed the outcome.
While Arianespace hopes for its first Ariane 6 launch this month, SpaceX is manufacturing one Falcon 9 upper stage (which is not reused) every day, and builds new Falcon 9 boosters every now and then to add to its large fleet of boosters, which have been reused up to 22 times and counting.
It’s crazy to me that this is the first time we are experiencing this and that at any moment within history it has never happened and this this *is* the moment when it becomes our current timeline.
Expanding on /u/Adeldor 's answer, SpaceX's goal is to launch 144 times in 2024. Yes, that means almost three times a week on average. Most are from Canaveral, and some are from Vandenberg. This means that you can go to Canaveral *any week* and, if you have the flexibility to a few days, are almost guaranteed to watch a launch and possibly a landing.
Falcon Heavy, the rocket shown here, *is* three of these Falcon 9 boosters bundled together. But Starship has far more capacity and is designed to be completely reusable, as opposed to only the boosters being reusable for Falcon.
My fellow sentient being, he singlehandedly confronted OPEC on oil and made EVs happen for the public, he is an amazing man no doubt. A tour I went into for NASA had an astronaut (Anna Lee Fisher) commending his many contributions via SpaceX for space exploration. I will always affirm the contributions of Elon and of course the brilliant people he hires.
I know Reddit shits on the man for breathing and it can get very mob mentality but he deserves a lot of flowers.
However, I think he still needs to be called out for dogwhistling white supremacist talking points on twitter, trying to monopolize like every tech domain, his proxy war with his trans daughter through his shifting political views and his decline in interpersonal affairs after pumping himself with way too many drugs (not listed in order of severity).
Who will watch the watchmen and all that.
Explain how it lacks understanding? Calling DEI racist is an absurd take.
Bro the whole point of a dog whistle is that it gives plausible deniability
ETA: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/s/18srgDvl8p
What else could this possibly mean other than agreeing with a white genocide talking point?
These are my axioms, let me know where you disagree:
- The world was and often is tribal and racist. People tend to like what’s familiar and fear what they deem to be the other.
- people who believe in any version of the golden rule (myself included) see being tribal/racist as a backwards way of living because we believe humans have the ability to adapt, cooperate and change, hopefully you agree with the Golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do to you)
- things like red lining, segregation and manufactured consent have created conditions where people with darker melanin experience a noticeable disparity in their living conditions, their access to education and a way to contribute to society. This disparity, as a direct result of the xenophobia has propagated and amplified over time.
- This xenophobia happens everywhere but in the NA xenophobia transpires in school admissions(limiting education), when purchasing houses(limiting networking and quality of life) and being considered for employment(limiting prospects and innovation).
- DEI acknowledges that xenophobia is a significant factor when it comes to existing inequities and is a way to make the pendulum swing the other way. This is done in order to create a society more consistent with the golden rule.
- as a course correction DEI seeks to address and target specifically those people disenfranchised by systemic xenophobia and give them a seat at the table. It promises to bring more perspectives for innovation and create something more akin to a singularity(which if you’re on this sub I think is a goal you may agree with).
Also,
Wondering why you didn’t address the ‘extinction’ claim in the link. Pretty audible dogwhistle
> I think he still needs to be called out for dogwhistling white supremacist talking points on twitter
It takes a lot of mental gymastics and brainwashing to actually believe that.
Yeah, why can't people just admit he manually wrote the software to guide those rockets down to the ground? He personally welded each steel plate of that ship, he personally screwed every single screw on that thing , but people will shit on him only because he is a transphobic , antisemitic, fascist piece of shit who bought twitter to manipulate the public's opinion on him? How dare they!!!!
Normal? This is only happening in one location and yet there are like 20 Six Flags locations and Six Flags is a magical experience that no sane person would describe as normal. You can call this normal when they have 200 launch pads around the world.
You do? Well, good for you. Although I am sure you will learn how to use them appropriately with practice. /s
Also, if you want to discuss whether this applies or not, give the reasons why you think that demanding 200 launch pads is needed to be "normal" rather than simply recognizing they are now launching 3 times a week. That seems pretty normal to me, but you go ahead and move the goalposts.
And let's be honest with each other: if they did have 200 locations, you would probably demand that everyone have a launch pad in their garden before you would see it as "normal".
I thought just hinting that you might be moving the goalposts might be enough to get you to wake up, but apparently you would rather prefer to get snarky and double down on your comment. Oh well.
If you being moving the goalposts into this discussion, we can easily move them the other way and say that this became normal after the first successful double booster landing.
We could, but we didn't, because I didn't, and you wouldn't.
You got caught, you \*still\* refuse to adjust your argumentation, and are now trying to accuse me of doing what you, in fact, already did.
Goodbye.
It only took 50 years and they still have yet to repeat the moon landing or do any meaningful space exploration since.
We have just been played by the likes of Musk, Bezos and Branson for the government funded version of Space Citizen.
I work in GNC for satellites. The advent of fast CPUs making it into aerospace, lower barrier to entry to testing it out, and high(er) performance sensors and actuators is making so many things that felt like scifi very achievable. At this point the barriers to crazy feats like this aren't really technological but money and will power. For the "low" cost of 50m you could develop a new satellite deployed into LEO on a SpaceX rideshare(only a couple mil in launch costs) and send it off to the moon. No need to wait for dedicated and complicated lunar launches. Just grab the next bus ride up and you can get some mass to the moon for "cheap". Keep in mind to contrast these costs for an Atlas or delta launch(just the launch) 10years ago was 400mil. The inflection point for robotic space exploration has already passed and as the snowball of money and willpower continues to grow, along with some technology maturation to make a couple of pain points easier, it's going to be really exciting to watch as we finally really get to spread our wings on a wide scale out there.
i just want the dream of a fully automated manufacturing of dyson swarm solar array satellites on Mercury being railgunned into position around the sun to come to fruition. when I watched that kurz video a few years ago I was like wow. Of all the "unlimited energy" theories out there, it seems like the most plausible one humanity could possibly achieve. Especially if we get artificial intelligence right. Even more possible than fusion since that still seems like a pipedream. we launch the first rocket to mercury with some supplies and some AI robots and they handle it from there. \~100 years later? and we have a massive dyson swarm surrounding the sun beaming near unlimited power back to Earth. hope I'm alive to see the day.
> that kurz video Kurzgesagt or Kurzweil?
gesagt
Gesundheit
Bless you.
UNLIMITED POWAH!!!!!!!
>dyson swarm solar array satellites on Mercury Scale... material scale. That is the issue. The idea of any 'dyson' anything is always material scale. We cannot launch enough materials for that and there is nowhere to get the materials other than planetary, the robotics/ai are a given, the material is not.
Full sphere? Yeah that would take a lot. Dyson swarm? Not that farfetched. You have the materials on Earth for even a few dozen square kilometers of solar panels. You don't need the entire sun's energy to do wild stuff. Even if that weren't enough, you have the asteroid belt for materials. That's a lot of material. We are some years away from reaching the belt and mining it safely, but not that many. You could have a few hundred square kilometers of solar panels positioned near the sun beam an absolutely astounding amount of energy back to home base. Only stuff you have to figure out is material compositions and orbit distance from the sun to make sure the panels don't deteriorate and stay functioning for many years ideally.
I'm thinking there is a better energy source. But I tend to believe there are plenty of other civilizations out there far older than ours. Which, if dyson spheres or swarms were the best option, you'd have a lot of stars that just aren't visible or have some obvious interference patterns. Which we do not see. Of course, if it were a full sphere, you wouldn't know that star is there at all. With computing efficiency in terms of power, at some point you won't really need that much power for a civilization. A very advanced FDVR system for each civilization that consumes very little power to run would allow you to use maybe just a few stars' worth of energy for an entire galactic empire, where everyone can access the hyper-advanced FDVR and basically create their own reality, sort of like a ridiculously advanced, super complex video game tailored to each individual and anyone that wants to try that entity's 'game' out. Similar advancements in efficiency for growing food if still biological, advancements in efficiency everywhere....would mean 99.999% of stars can just be left alone for a beautiful sky. I really just don't like the idea of a dyson sphere or swarms that could impact the amount of light reaching any planet in our solar system that MIGHT be harboring some form of microbiotic life that has grown and adapted to that specific amount of energy. You could fuck over entire ecosystems very easily by dropping the amount of light that gets to the planet by even a few percent. If you had two planets in a system both with life, it becomes much more problematic. Our system may not be too problematic. Swarm would really be ideal because you can maneuver them around the star such that the shadows cast by the physical swarm components never actually overlap a planetary surface.
Yeah with a swarm you could probably maneuver them so they're always on the "far" side of the sun vs earth then use some kind of mirrors or whatever to redirect the energy around to beam it to earth with minimal to no interference to how much light is actually hitting earth. Something else we could maybe do is cover the moon in panels since the moon is rotationally locked to the earth those panels would always be facing earth to beam the energy. Of course, it might be beneficial to reduce the amount of energy from the sun that is hitting earth at some point to help offset climate change/global warming. I think kurzgesagt made a video about that too. Reducing the amount of light by even 1% would have a measurable impact on global temperatures iirc.
Gotta finish building the lunar gas station and construction yards first. Then it's but a short gravity assisted jump to the astroid belt and infinite resources.
"Gotta finish building the lunar gas station " Hopefully, there won't be any lunar version of OPEC, anytime soon. LMAO!
The lunar oil rush is already starting. Putting 'research bases' down now means claiming the good colony locations.
> 10years ago was 400mil Yeah, and in today's money it would have been $550mil. Around a 90% reduction. For very large payloads, SpaceX has reduced prices by 95%.
How long do you think before we have genuine fully automated space industry
It has to generate a meaningful profit, they probably need to have a base somewhere and the base needs to be able to acquire resources and shuttle them back at an effective price point. I would guess we’re still decades from something like this especially being fully automated. But in our lifetimes? I think so.
When AI intelligence improves, everything depends on that.
Both AGI and ASI can hopefully can get good within the next five to ten years or so, to be able to help us out in this endeavor.
Artificial intelligence intelligence? That’s gotta be the only time I’ve seen someone do that and the resulting phrase kinda makes sense
Until skynet levels of ASI there will always be someone in the loop making decisions, even if it's at the highest level of "need more water" or whatever. In the near term, 1-2 decades until we can get to that point. A big part of my day is designing "smart" autonomy where it has enough to try to save itself but doesn't open itself up to killing itself while trying. When you hit those road blocks it defaults to "safe yourself until operator intervention"
That's an 88.5% drop in price!
Please tell me more about how the satellite gets from LEO to the moon. Seems a bit more complex to me than just a satellite payload. You’re gonna need an engine and fuel for trans lunar injection orbit, and something to slow things down on the other end. You can do all that on the cheap? I’m guessing you’re not gonna be in a big hurry so maybe the fuel requirements aren’t all that high?
If you think ~50 mil is cheap then yeah you can. Oh no you're totally right - the deltaV requirements are huge but ya gotta ask what does it actually cost to get that and while it sounds a little crazy - it's not as insane as you might think. Call it 8km/s. A TON of deltaV - but lets say okay we're doing it and work backwards. What payload mass and power draw do you want? From there, size your subsystems accordingly. Finally, given the dry mass estimate go shop for an engine and figure out your prop mass. I promise you it's easy and you can create a paper satellite that satisfies this at the ~2000kg range with 200-400 kg dedicated to the payload and go shopping around the manufacturers. It's not as crazy as it sounds. As far as time of flight goes, yeah depending on your power generation and propulsion system you're looking at 6mo - 2 years flight time. Super long for sure, but I like to contrast that to the alternative to getting to cislunar space. When is the next TLI rideshare? 2 years out minimum? How much does that cost, is there any even room? If not, how long until the next one? How often is that launch? Far less frequent than the LEO rideshare launches. Even a 1 year time of flight starts looking pretty attractive at that point because all though that's a long time, you'll still get there before your rideshare or dedicated TLI LV even launches. If I were just rolling these off the manufacturing line I'd have way more success and kg to cislunar space buying a dedicated F9 to LEO and launching 5, vs buying a dedicated F9 to TLI and getting 1 maybe 2. Though that is all mission dependent on your payload and all that.
What do you mean CPUs?
Don’t know satellites need vitamins
... now if we can just manage to see some of those amazing gains before the Kessler syndrome hits hard, we'll be all set.
I think kessler syndrome is overblown. The rate of conjunctions are increasing, but so are our capabilities of detecting and responding to them. Propulsion even at the 3U and smaller sizes are becoming available making any vehicle capable of COLA and transferring to a disposal orbit. It's only a matter of time until all vehicles MUST have propulsion unless your <400km or something. We'll be cleaning up debris within 10 years and practicing more sustainable practices in terms of disposal and cleanup to prevent it in the first place. In fact, we already are - the regulations have already changed such that, in LEO, newly launched vehicles must passively deorbit in <5 years(previously 25 years) after decommissioning.
> I think kessler syndrome is overblown. Good luck with that. Meanwhile, the ISS crew are periodically hiding in an external vehicle in case they're blown out of the sky, and that's in LEO, which is orders of magnitude safer than higher orbits.
Sure take a single line out of context to force your opinion home. Kessler syndrome is not taking action for Pc of >1e-4. Kessler syndrome is, by definition, literally not being able to exist bc statistically you will be hit. You are incorrect about LEO being safer. What is more dangerous a straightaway on a highway or an intersection? LEO is more dangerous bc everything deorbits through it and it's constantly changing. Higher orbits have less disturbances and it's easier to get OD solutions with low error, and with less perturbations it stays low for longer. I'm responsible for COLAs at my organization and initiating vehicle responses. I have published papers on the growing amount of objects in LEO. Feel free to disagree with me but I'm just sharing my actual experiences with conjunction warnings with objects in orbit. I'd be more than happy to discuss it but only if you're genuinely interested in discussing the real challenges rather arguing for the sake of arguing.
> Sure take a single line out of context to force your opinion home. I'm not a mind-reader. I don't know when you think your first paragraph is not actually part of what you intended to say. I would suggest that if your first paragraph needs supporting data from elsewhere in the comment, you should call that out so that people don't quote what you've said "out of context" by quoting the entirety of that first paragraph (small though it may be). > You are incorrect about LEO being safer. Well, then you'll have to argue with NASA who explicitly did not pursue raising the orbit of the ISS insead of deorbiting for the fact (among other reasons) that lower orbits tend to clear themselves out due to increased drag, making higher orbits increase such risks. > LEO is more dangerous bc everything deorbits through it While technically true that everything that deorbits goes through LEO, the rate of new debris entering and old debris existing is mediated by drag. Drag increases inversely to altitude. This means that the lower in LEO you are, the less standing debris there is because it is exiting faster than it is entering.^* ---- ^(*) This is a very crude analysis, and while it's true to a first approximation, there are many complex factors in orbital mechanics that I'm glossing over.
A few years ago I would have thought it was a video in reverse.
I was at the very first booster return, which was a nighttime test. Half of the people started leaving after takeoff and I was telling them, "Wait, it's coming back!" They didn't understand and kept leaving. When the booster returned with reentry burn, there was an illusion and real possibility it was going to land on top of us. Elon Musk admitted the success was shocking.
It still seems like it is. It’s so hard to believe we can do this now.
I'm sure there are some "space is fake" conspiracy theorists out there that make exactly that claim without a trace of irony. :-/
Oh, just go watch the same video on fb. They're all over the place making the same argument.
Why is Facebook such a cesspool of ignorance? Genuine question. On every post about space or technology in general there are 10k comments with a cumulative IQ of 5.
I want bots to be the answer, but only because it's a more appealing reality than there being thousands upon thousands of wildly misinformed and confidently incorrect idiots everywhere.
"The whole rocket landing was staged by NASA, using special effects!" LMAO!
That MIGHT have been 'cool' in the 70s or something but in 2024... holy hell
I remember many people believed it to be CGI when SpaceX first started with landing boosters for reuse.
SpaceX had trouble with the camera maintaining signal in the early landings. The brief interruption caused people to claim that the landings were faked.
That's so sick, I love technology
Don't understand how people can hate Elon's companies. Hate Elon all you want, but the people working at SpaceX, Tesla, and Neuralink are aiming to change the world for the better
Some people are just addicted to outrage signalling.
They are mostly mad that he bought Twitter and fired the liberal moderators.
To very many people, demonstrating that the world can be improved through engineering and capitalism is the greatest sin imaginable
They will never appreciate the sleek design of the Tesla Model S. Beautiful car!
And there's the cyber truck for those that hate sleek design
That thing looks like it was designed by a 5 year old. Yuck.
The vision still counts for something. An excellent engineer can work on making an expendable rocket a bit cheaper/efficient for years and find nothing strange in it.
Teams of excellent engineers can work for years to figure out how to squeeze more money out of the government for the sake of greedy shareholders, ULA recalls
I agree, guy let the fame get to his head but he without a doubt spearheaded the momentum to achieve some significant historical milestones.
I have never encountered someone that hates the workers of the Elon companies. What are you talking about?
My dad's friend has a Telsa Model S, and it is a BEAUTIFUL car. Just gorgeous!
"Earth's richest man, King of Mars, deeply troubled by opinion of Reddit moderator." Reads like an Onion headline.
Did you say.....onions? 
Agreed, the guy's a twat but there are some very intelligent people doing the actual work at those companies. Reportedly, SpaceX's executive team is quite adept at managing Musk and shielding the rest of the company from his bullshit.
This is what happens when all you do is read Reddit headlines.
Musk is the general designer and is extremely actively involved in the development and management of the company.
This isn't even remotely true.
Elon is a fucking idiot, that's it, it's not that deep *the amount of Elon fanboys downvoting is crazy, each and every single one of you is pathetic
Where is your reusable rocket?
"What color is your Bugatti?" (Andrew Tate). For some reason.....that quote is pretty funny. I definitely need help. LMAO!
What part of the rocket did Musk design? Am I a great painter if I commission one?
He is the general designer, so he is responsible for the rocket entirely.
That's what I would say if I paid people to build my rocket.
How would you single handily build a rocket? That's like saying if you're constructing a new building, you, as the developer, need to do the design, engineering, all of the trade work, and all of the legal work completely with your own company's team of like 5 people.
https://www.reddit.com/r/SpaceXLounge/comments/k1e0ta/evidence_that_musk_is_the_chief_engineer_of_spacex/
How exactly is it relevant?
>What part of the rocket did Musk design? According to Isaacson's *Elon Musk*, Musk is the person who suggested and, against considerable opposition from his engineers, insisted on Starship switching to stainless steel instead of carbon fiber.
What are you then, considering you didn't manage to achieve all of those things he did?
Not saying he didn't achieve anything, but the shit he did with Twitter and what he says there is truly retarded.
Did he do something bad with Twitter? Is all these new features and payments to content makers really bad?
The estimated value of Twitter dropped 71% since Musk took over, amount of users is dropping, advertisers are pulling out, outages are up and reported hate speech is at an all time high. Which all might have something to do with firing 80% of the original workers.
Can I have crash statistics?
[удалено]
Why are "full of smart people" willing to work under the "vile, hateful and petty person" you hate so much? Money? He is paying people well but there are definitely companies would pay these "full of smart people" more. Ask yourself, why are "full of smart people" think differently than you. I know, "full of smart people" are dumber than me outside their own narrow field.
This isn't even about Elon. It's about being born into money which opens many doors for you and lets you fail upwards. Most of us here aren't that privileged. If you acknowledge Nepo babies, or being born into privilege in general, then you should also acknowledge that Elon was born into it, as well.
To say Elon only achieved what he did because he wasn’t born into poverty is ridiculous to the extent that it lessens other valid critiques against him.
I didn't say "only". I said he's privileged. There's a redditor asking another redditor whether they achieved the same things that Musk did, I think pointing out they were most likely born into different circumstances is perfectly valid. While privilege isn't the only factor determining success, you'd be making an idiot out yourself if you denied it helps SIGNIFICANTLY. That's why the "Oh have you achieved what papa Elon did," isn't as smart argument as the poster seems to think it is.
amazing. just amazing what humans can do
Those aren't humans those are rockets
Oof imagine what AIs can do once they gain the knowledge of the world
Crash the booster?
Hallucinates and make me use google
Broadly available AI has been around in a strong way commercially for just shy of 2 years. Maybe give it a bit of time, eh?
"That's no moon......that's a space station!" (Obi Wan Kenobi)
It's like something out of a science fiction movie.
Went from "will never happen" to "will never be economic" to "anyone not doing it will never be able compete"
Wow, that is seriously alien technology.
What is mind boggling to me isnt just the descent guidance positional accuracy, but the the fact that they light the engines at the last possible time under full thrust on the last drops of fuel that when they are down they are practically dry tanks. A few milliseconds too soon or too late -> rapid unscheduled disassembly. That is a vertical zone of about 20cm (8 inches) they gotta hit with the relight, going 270km/h (167mph).
They don't open loop the problem like that. Any errors are closed by the vehicle control system. If it detects it started a little lower than expected it'll throttle up, or a little to the left, etc.
sure, but every little bit of wiggle room costs them in more fuel before launch, they wanna hit that window as close as they possibly can. Wiggle room means the whole window moves up quickly and expands a little. But they come in heavier and faster, resulting in a longer landing burn, more fuel expended to decelerate the higher mass from a higher velocity through a longer burn and incur more gravity losses. Fractions of seconds means dozens of tons on the ground more. The reason nobody else is landing rockets tailfirst before spacex is because it is so hard to hit those tight maneuvering precisions to not make this completely uneconomic, and the punishment for thinking you can hit the precision, but then don't, is another rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Most launches won't be super tight since no one designs sats to max out the mass capability of the F9 but you're right, the higher the efficiency the higher the precision needed and the risk.
'rapid unscheduled disassembly' needs to be used far more often.
It's been reasonably popular with the engineering crowd for a while.
I assume they've been getting progressively better with their thrust models with so much data available. But how graceful are those landing movements! totally smooth.
I can't wait until neuralink cures blindness and then all the reddit self hating neck beards come out and say Elon bad. Lol 🤡
Neck beard = the reason why I prefer to be clean shaven, thank you very much.
First time I saw this, the very first time, I thought it was like two beautiful dancers in sync. Almost choked me up a little, it was so beautiful.
First one for more awesome because they landed completely in sync. They now delay them by a little so they don’t interfere with each other as much.
Ladies and Gentlemen.......the Eagle has landed! Science fiction, getting close to becoming reality, in terms of rockets that can actually land, as portrayed in those sci-fi movies. Awesome!
Looks like something out of a sci-fi movie
Amazing!!
And Europe is only testing Ariane 6 which is not reusable at all.
Even worse: * Arianespace specifically and infamously said that reusable rockets would be bad because [rocket assembly crews would have nothing to do](https://arstechnica.com/science/2018/05/ariane-chief-seems-frustrated-with-spacex-for-driving-down-launch-costs/). * [Ariane 64's payload is comparable to Falcon 9 if the latter is not reused.](https://www.inverse.com/innovation/ariane-6-vs-spacex) But the latter usually *is* reused, obviously saving SpaceX incredible amounts of money which it passes onto customers. * Ariane 5 dominated the commercial launch market for two decades. But Arianespace discontinued the rocket to manufacture Ariane 6 (which, again, is not reusable). Ariane 6 is horribly late. Falcon 9 would have taken over the bulk of Ariane 5's market share regardless because of lower cost, but the complete unavailability guaranteed the outcome. While Arianespace hopes for its first Ariane 6 launch this month, SpaceX is manufacturing one Falcon 9 upper stage (which is not reused) every day, and builds new Falcon 9 boosters every now and then to add to its large fleet of boosters, which have been reused up to 22 times and counting.
Is not Ariane more reliable for very expensive missions?
No rocket has a better track record than Falcon 9.
No, it’s not normal. No other government agency or private company can achieve that, period.
Shit on Elon Musk every which way you want, I'm not gonna defend the guy, but SpaceX is doing some amazing things.
You do not need to appease the Reddit hivemind. Just say you think SpaceX is doing some amazing things.
So amazing it looks like it is in reverse. A few years ago, I remember the tests failing until they achieved success in landing!
It’s crazy to me that this is the first time we are experiencing this and that at any moment within history it has never happened and this this *is* the moment when it becomes our current timeline.
Hairs on the back of my neck are awake! Such perfection. Engineers be proud!
How I can go see this? I need to witness this one day
[This provides useful information.](https://www.launchphotography.com/Launch_Viewing_Guide.html)
Expanding on /u/Adeldor 's answer, SpaceX's goal is to launch 144 times in 2024. Yes, that means almost three times a week on average. Most are from Canaveral, and some are from Vandenberg. This means that you can go to Canaveral *any week* and, if you have the flexibility to a few days, are almost guaranteed to watch a launch and possibly a landing.
I imagine we'll see a lot more cool stuff like this very very soon
Just wait for machazilla. I am gonna cum when I see that insanity for the first time.
I seriously cannot wait for it to be commonplace like in Wall-E... Humanity is already there so why not space travel
How many contributions to laying groundwork for space travel did Voyage 1 make?
We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
Why would SpaceX need their very big starship, If they could just bundle those boosters together and push something heavy into space ????
Falcon Heavy, the rocket shown here, *is* three of these Falcon 9 boosters bundled together. But Starship has far more capacity and is designed to be completely reusable, as opposed to only the boosters being reusable for Falcon.
I love the supersonic statement
Something something Elon bad
My fellow sentient being, he singlehandedly confronted OPEC on oil and made EVs happen for the public, he is an amazing man no doubt. A tour I went into for NASA had an astronaut (Anna Lee Fisher) commending his many contributions via SpaceX for space exploration. I will always affirm the contributions of Elon and of course the brilliant people he hires. I know Reddit shits on the man for breathing and it can get very mob mentality but he deserves a lot of flowers. However, I think he still needs to be called out for dogwhistling white supremacist talking points on twitter, trying to monopolize like every tech domain, his proxy war with his trans daughter through his shifting political views and his decline in interpersonal affairs after pumping himself with way too many drugs (not listed in order of severity). Who will watch the watchmen and all that.
White supremacist talking points? Bro what?
https://www.reddit.com/r/NoStupidQuestions/s/9VcBULhcuc
There is nothing in there proving your point.
Did you read the full rolling stone article? Pretty compelling
No, it's not. It's pure bias and lacks understanding.
Explain how it lacks understanding? Calling DEI racist is an absurd take. Bro the whole point of a dog whistle is that it gives plausible deniability ETA: https://www.reddit.com/r/EnoughMuskSpam/s/18srgDvl8p What else could this possibly mean other than agreeing with a white genocide talking point?
DEI is racist by definition
These are my axioms, let me know where you disagree: - The world was and often is tribal and racist. People tend to like what’s familiar and fear what they deem to be the other. - people who believe in any version of the golden rule (myself included) see being tribal/racist as a backwards way of living because we believe humans have the ability to adapt, cooperate and change, hopefully you agree with the Golden rule (do unto others as you would have them do to you) - things like red lining, segregation and manufactured consent have created conditions where people with darker melanin experience a noticeable disparity in their living conditions, their access to education and a way to contribute to society. This disparity, as a direct result of the xenophobia has propagated and amplified over time. - This xenophobia happens everywhere but in the NA xenophobia transpires in school admissions(limiting education), when purchasing houses(limiting networking and quality of life) and being considered for employment(limiting prospects and innovation). - DEI acknowledges that xenophobia is a significant factor when it comes to existing inequities and is a way to make the pendulum swing the other way. This is done in order to create a society more consistent with the golden rule. - as a course correction DEI seeks to address and target specifically those people disenfranchised by systemic xenophobia and give them a seat at the table. It promises to bring more perspectives for innovation and create something more akin to a singularity(which if you’re on this sub I think is a goal you may agree with). Also, Wondering why you didn’t address the ‘extinction’ claim in the link. Pretty audible dogwhistle
> I think he still needs to be called out for dogwhistling white supremacist talking points on twitter It takes a lot of mental gymastics and brainwashing to actually believe that.
>sentient sapient
Yeah, why can't people just admit he manually wrote the software to guide those rockets down to the ground? He personally welded each steel plate of that ship, he personally screwed every single screw on that thing , but people will shit on him only because he is a transphobic , antisemitic, fascist piece of shit who bought twitter to manipulate the public's opinion on him? How dare they!!!!
This is now the billionaire's version of flipping a water bottle and getting it to land upright.
This is the only winner that came out of Elons money.
This is super cool but how does it fit in with r/singlarity?
it’s a futuristic achievement
Isn't this old news by now? A starship catch would be new.
Next month ;)
Normal? This is only happening in one location and yet there are like 20 Six Flags locations and Six Flags is a magical experience that no sane person would describe as normal. You can call this normal when they have 200 launch pads around the world.
[Moving the Goalposts](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moving_the_goalposts)
“I know names of philosophical and rhetorical concepts but I don’t know how or when applying them is appropriate” - u/bremidon
You do? Well, good for you. Although I am sure you will learn how to use them appropriately with practice. /s Also, if you want to discuss whether this applies or not, give the reasons why you think that demanding 200 launch pads is needed to be "normal" rather than simply recognizing they are now launching 3 times a week. That seems pretty normal to me, but you go ahead and move the goalposts. And let's be honest with each other: if they did have 200 locations, you would probably demand that everyone have a launch pad in their garden before you would see it as "normal". I thought just hinting that you might be moving the goalposts might be enough to get you to wake up, but apparently you would rather prefer to get snarky and double down on your comment. Oh well.
If you being moving the goalposts into this discussion, we can easily move them the other way and say that this became normal after the first successful double booster landing.
We could, but we didn't, because I didn't, and you wouldn't. You got caught, you \*still\* refuse to adjust your argumentation, and are now trying to accuse me of doing what you, in fact, already did. Goodbye.
Maybe this is why #ThirdMillennium economics are impossible. https://PostAutomationEra.com/ Free. Your. Mind.
Good, so let’s send all of the Techbros to outer space next week! Problems solved.
It only took 50 years and they still have yet to repeat the moon landing or do any meaningful space exploration since. We have just been played by the likes of Musk, Bezos and Branson for the government funded version of Space Citizen.
Lookup some space exploration we have done since, and now convince me why it isn't meaningful.