A one-way trip with refueling for landing is absolutely within current
engineering state-of-the-art… actually, 50 years ago’s state-of-the-art.
It’s always been a framing problem and so that last 1,500-2,000 fps of
delta-v for deorbit and recovery that’s doomed every other effort.
On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 1:33 AM roxanna Mason <rocketmaster.ken@xxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
The earth's gravity well is pretty deep but perhaps when carbon nanotubes
and/or other exotic high strength structures make it out of the laboratory
to the field, SSTO may become practical.
Ken
On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 8:23 PM Matthew JL <prmattjl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
I am eternally an SSTO hopeful.
On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 11:16 PM Alexander Mikhailov <
alexander.mikhailov@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Musk suddenly gets his hands tied and makes easier the path for some
companies to try to reproduce SpaceX achievements. Not sure it will be
Rocket Lab, though... A good investment and a good technical team with
explicit goal to make a truly competitive launcher would be
interesting to watch, to say the least.
On 12/19/22, Matthew JL <prmattjl@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Musk is busy digging his own hole in the court of public opinion… noneed
to wait for some outside force to do him in.frankly
He’s not the saving grace most of the community thought he was and
I wish he’d let someone more competent, i.e., Shotwell, helm SpaceX.rocketmaster.ken@xxxxxxxxx>
On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 8:05 PM roxanna Mason <
wrote:plentiful
Henry, If you can believe NASA, the raday reflections are very bright
indicative of gold and PGM's. Cobalt is needed too and is not
hirehere being an anode material for Lion batts and is mined in Africa by
children.
No, I don't look up to Musk only across to him as talented at what he
does
which is far more than NASA will ever do or be.
The NASA of Apollo doesn't exist anymore. Musk has the authority to
Notthe best without much regard for PC.
I'm afraid though that the current US gov is hostile to him and may
escalate the road blocks being thrown at him. The 2024 election is the
make
or break that will tell if Musk is left alone to do what he does
best,invent and create.
Ken
On Sun, Dec 18, 2022 at 2:23 PM Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
wrote:
On Sun, 18 Dec 2022, roxanna Mason wrote:
SpaceX will get us wherever we need to go...
At the moment, that's religious faith rather than a known fact. :-)
assumeseveryone thinks Saint Elon will save us... (For one thing, it
needhe
will eventually manage to pry himself away from Twitter!)
and 16 Psyche and other asteroids will have all the metals we could
possibly need...
Not necessarily so. The nickel-iron asteroids are strong on iron and
nickel and cobalt, which we're not actually short of (although we
lithiumto
do a better job of recycling them, and they're unevenly distributed),
and
okay on platinum-group metals, but markedly short of things like
onlyand uranium. The metal asteroids are planetary-core fragments, and
thingssome metals go into planetary cores. And metals are not the only
picocosm..we might need, as witness the discussion originally being about
helium-3.
But first, let's get along right here. If there are ET's they won't
let
us contaminate the universe like we have in our tiny little
than
Again, I'm afraid, more faith rather than verifiable fact. There's a
widespread assumption that ETs would *have* to be much nicer people
onwe are -- kind, wise, peaceful, etc. etc. -- but this is based more
hatred of our current society than on careful rational reasoning.
Compare
this conception of ETs to the classical conception of angels!
Henry