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I can't fathom a Martian economy, it makes no sense to me. It's not the western frontier. You can't just walk off into the prairie and grow corn. Or hunt for skins. Or dig a mine. Anything done on Mars will require a huge amount of resources, technology and capital. How do you manufacture anything without basic industry like mining and smelting? Then all the The equipment for that will be immensely expensive to bring to Mars. Any manufacturing has to be of high order technological products. Selling shovels and buckets on Mars is not exactly going to be a winning business. Even if you manage to make something, how will anyone else afford it if they can't also make something worthwhile. You can only have so many people growing hydroponic tomatoes! It'll be like a Sunday farmers market where everyone is selling squash because that's the only thing they can grow! :)


All I can say at the moment is: Don't underestimate human ingenuity.
 
[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31235009#p31235009:2cnzxy2n said:
MilleniX[/url]":2cnzxy2n]
[url=http://meincmagazine.com/civis/viewtopic.php?p=31234681#p31234681:2cnzxy2n said:
Tom the Melaniephile[/url]":2cnzxy2n]Omg, my non tourist KSC visit is Thursday, and the date has been holding. :D :eek:
Don't worry, they still have plenty of time to find a reason to scrub ;)
D: :scared:


Ya know, with all the inconvenience that stormy conditions cause, we might want to develop a low-level mechanism for pushing air in enough volume as to cause storm systems to move away from the launch area... I think we could call it... a Fan! (if we scaled up a huge wind turbine 10x and caused it to work like a room fan, would that do the trick? ;) )
 
https://www.space.com/38919-interstellar-asteroid-mission-spacex-mars-rocket.html

So the BFR could get to the 'Oumuamua interstellar asteroid? I love this idea! The article also mentions that the Breakthrough Starshot laser-powered craft could reach it as well, but I couldn't find my old thread on that one.

The ideas are obviously just being sounded out, but I like the idea of additional development momentum for these craft.
 
I was wanting to be sad about the center core having trouble, but on top of all the success from today, I'm looking at the upside of SpaceX looking more closely at Falcon Heavy in order to figure out the failure, and thus preventing much worse failures on future missions. The center core unintentionally failed in the best way possible in order to give more surety to future launches.
 
I just came across a new weird statement being repeated across 'boards' on the internet: "SpaceX is cancelling the landing of their rockets because the extra fuel has made the practice uneconomical.", or a variant.

I don't know what the motivation for that claim is, as it gets proven wrong on each Falcon 9 launch, but if you see it out there, smack someone with reality I guess? (Such as the last launch and landing?) :confused:
 
Speaking of SpaceX competition and underhanded tactics, I'd mentioned awhile back that someone with clout was pushing a narrative that SpaceX wasn't doing rocket landings anymore because of cost reasons. Whoever they were, they had enough clout and reach to get that drivel to a number of locations before it seemed to have died out.

Was there any news regarding that?
 
I realize this is bordering on link and run, but I really don't have any (worthwhile) commentary to add. Merely "wow".

A train of Starlink sats passing overhead caught with a low light camera:
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/0 ... x.html?m=1


Still very on topic, and yes, 'WOW' works for me.

It's been mentioned, but the Starlink system could become very disruptive of China's 'Great Firewall' intent and could really hinder Russia's attempt to make a similar system for their people.
 
I realize this is bordering on link and run, but I really don't have any (worthwhile) commentary to add. Merely "wow".

A train of Starlink sats passing overhead caught with a low light camera:
https://sattrackcam.blogspot.com/2019/0 ... x.html?m=1


Still very on topic, and yes, 'WOW' works for me.

It's been mentioned, but the Starlink system could become very disruptive of China's 'Great Firewall' intent and could really hinder Russia's attempt to make a similar system for their people.
Doubtful. It's pretty easy to track ground signals from the air, so they could catch people that way, and it's likely if SpaceX allowed their satellites to transmit while over China at all, they would threaten to shoot them down.
It wouldn't get to that point.

RF spectrum is mediated via international treaty as part of the ITU, an arm of the United Nations. Member States are free to regulate and allocate bandwidth in their territory, other than ITU requirement, as they see fit. If SpaceX breaches the United States' obligations under the ITU, it is guilty of criminal action under Federal law.

You don't need to shoot down satellites if you can just put Elon Musk in jail.


I thought places like Iran had quite a number of people regularly sneaking in programming and such from satellites in order to get around their government's restrictions?
 
It looks like the satellite deployments are going nicely, so I'll just have to read up on them tomorrow.

/tinfoil hat on

Concerning the center stage splashdown, I saw that landing, then saw the stage as it headed past OCISLY and into the water. It looked like it was coming in nicely. At the speed that the stage was coming in at, was it just too much input for the computer to correctly land the vehicle? OR... did the military need a demonstration of a Falcon stage's failsafe? SpaceX does have an amazing record of great landings now, so it's almost conceivable that they'd go 100 more launches with perfect/near perfect landings and not truly have a forced, 'we're gonna crash' need to demonstrate that failsafe.

/tinfoil hat off

Or does the stage need more software or hardware enhancements in order to cope with the increased pace of landing at the speed it was going?
 
and not truly have a forced, 'we're gonna crash' need to demonstrate that failsafe.

Every landing is fail safe. The computers intentionally aim for just a bit away from the boat and only at the last possible moment do they correct the movement for a landing, if everything checks out. That way if something goes wrong (internal or external) it just hits the water.

It's a bit difficult to say every landing is fail safe when the damn thing has hit the ship and exploded previously. It's a good risk mitigation, but fail safe seems overselling it.
It's never actually hit and exploded. It has landed then had a leg fail and fallen over. If the rocket actually hit the barge at speed, the barge would likely sink. In this case, it was probably too low on fuel to complete the lading burn so it aborted. The reason it always looks like it's wildly swinging around right at the end is because it only moves over the barge at the last second. You can see the difference on the pad landings, where they come in much smoother.


I wondered if it was possibly coming in too fast (which being low on fuel would cause).
 
Did they catch the fairings?
Nope. They got wet.


I don't know that Mr. Musk reads the Observatory forum, but I wondered if they could do two things with the fairing-catcher ships. One - extend the netting to double on each side of the current nets. Two - have the ships extending pontoons in order to balance the nets. Perhaps even keep the pontoons pointed a bit up out of the water so that the only time they make contact with water is when there's a fairing in the net weighing that side of the ship down.
 
Related, looks like SpaceX has one less competitor:
https://www.oneweb.world/media-center/o ... le-process

Pity, they actually had a pretty nice satellite. 8 Gbps for 150kg and 250W. So about 1/2 the capacity for 2/3 the mass and 1/4 to 1/8 the power of Starlink. Guess we'll see if Amazon buys the carcass for the spectrum priority.
I don't think you're interpreting this correctly. Chapter 11 does NOT mean that the company will shut down and assets will be sold off -- that's Chapter 7 (Liquidation). OneWeb could successfully emerge from Chapter 11 (under new ownership) and go on to complete their constellation. I'm not saying they will, mind you, just that they could.
OneWeb is using Chapter 11 to prevent its creditors from suing (for non-payment/tort) it while it finds a buyer for its assets. It's still self-liquidating. Airbus Defence and Space intends to continue the JV in Florida.

OneWeb used to work very closely with early SpaceX in its former guise as WorldVu. A falling out led to SpaceX "doing a Sony" and veering off to go into competition with OneWeb with Starlink. OneWeb is almost certainly where Elon Musk got the idea from for Starlink. This left OneWeb at the mercy of Russian launches, expensive and slow. That was OneWeb's first mis-step. The JV's satellite production facility is right outside the Kennedy Space Centre and designed for integration onto Falcon 9s, but OneWeb has never used a Falcon 9 and launches on Soyuz 2.1b rockets with a Fregat-M upper stage.

You can't build a massive satellite constellation on expendable rockets unless you have money to burn or are a government. Iridium was famous for bankrupting companies. Even SpaceX, which does have money to burn, hasn't ever contracted an external launch provider.


The fact that we can speak of alternatives to the mentioned situation is just incredible to me. SpaceX is quite the historic game-changer. And the attempts are STILL being made to derail them, rather than the competition stepping up to match them. The Starship SN3 collapse has brought the old naysayers out of the woodwork with new reasons why SpaceX is all bad and will surely die soon.
 
Aaaaaand scrubbed.
Awww; I wanted to see another earth-shattering kabooom a successful landing, finally.

Scrub doesn't appear to be weather-related, as forecasts are indicating the weather clearing up later this afternoon... no news on a backup date yet, either.


Since the scrub apparently wasn't weather-related, we'll probably see another date after they're reasonably certain that whatever fault came up is under control. The kabooms are interesting, but sometimes they have to resolve flight issues in the more boring way. :p
 
I like my crane parts bucket idea better.

Why two towers? Do they expect enough launch volume to keep two stacking towers busy? Or are they supposed to split the work? Maybe one lifts the booster on the launch platform and the other lifts starship on the booster?



With the testing pace, I actually wouldn't be surprised to see the volume quite in line with keeping this installation busy. They want to get orbital testing going SOON. But that SOON still requires a number of additional suborbital launches in order to get all the elements in reliable order. So a rapid pace of test, measure, test, etc could really be helped by the towers.

And wow... that is a big crane! What kind of training and certifications are needed to be a driver and operator for that thing?
 
And if you add in "ride along" launches, (assuming you haven't) that number goes up....and makes starlink launches that much cheaper.


Must be including that and averaging out?

Non starlink launches this year:
Turksat 5a
Transporter 1
Crew 2
CRS-22
SXM-8
GPS III-05
Transporter 2
CRS-23


So only 8 actual rocket launches with paying customers.


So far, if we're not counting future launches this year?

I'm checking Rocketlaunch.live and I'm seeing:

SWOT
GPS III SV-06
Crew 3
IXPE
DART
CRS-24
Turksat 5b

up and coming over the next several months. The Starlink launches typically don't show up until not too long before the actual launch on this and SpaceFlightNow.
 
So only 8 actual rocket launches with paying customers.
Inspiration4 has a paying customer

EDIT: Also USSF 44 on Falcon Heavy


Ooops, I was going to mention Inspiration4, but I wasn't sure who was paying for that one.

And USSF 44 was on Falcon Heavy, so I wasn't sure if we were only talking Falcon 9.

I still want to have a project that involves 3 Falcon Heavy launches at the same time. (I don't think I'm going to get my wish)
 
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