Space and Science BS Thread

Slick 6

 

Wow, a fresh one. So clean you could eat off it. Thanks for posting

 

Mining initially would be for substances that don’t form on earth or in higher gravity or for resources consumed on site such as water ice. We will learn things in the process that will make other things possible.

 

Uh...wut?

 

https://www.boringcompany.com/prufrock

The Boring Company is also owned by Elon.

 

Ok, because my Googlefu was coming up with a poem.

 

Looks like a Falcon Heavy side booster, when is that going to launch?

 

Kinda?

There may be multiple lunar landing starships as SpaceX is also an entrant in CLPS (in the 100t class) and obviously SpaceX doesn't want to throw away hardware, but then again, crew quarters are mass that can be used for .. actual landing hardware.

Still, at that point there's a transshipment issue (will CLPS-starship be reusable, and if so, how do you get more cargo on), etc.

 

CLPS?

 

Yet another constellation of internet satellites…

https://twitter.com/thesheetztweetz/status/1455968521557577737?s=21

 

https://www.nasa.gov/content/commercial-lunar-payload-services

 

Great story if you haven’t heard it yet:
https://twitter.com/airandspace/status/1455967733775048716?s=21

 

Kuiper, OneWeb…

 

Easy access to Launch Forecast info direct from the horses mouth.
https://www.patrick.spaceforce.mil/...st FAQ final.pdf?ver=7zXbiEWbRc-gRMpWBGbzog==

 

If they all stay in orbit and never burn up in the atmosphere, and launches continue to increase at this cadence, about 4,500 years. Satellites aren't really the problem, the gaps between them are MASSIVE. We have satellites orbiting at 60 miles up, the iss at 250 miles up, and some are tens of thousands of miles up. The real problem is when they die and crash and create debris fields. Their solution for that is to make constellations orbit low so they burn up in the atmosphere at the end of life cycle. Starlink satellites for example have a 5 year life, after which they sink too low, burn up in the atmosphere, and are no longer a problem. This means Spacex could seriously screw up, crash a bunch of satellites into each other, go out of business, and in 5 years there'd be no evidence they were ever there. In other words, the sky would be clear in a shorter amount of time than the James Webb Telescope and MOST Nasa projects get delayed.

we can do this another way though for scale. Imagine the Earth was solid with no oceans. Now plant a Giant Redwood Tree on the Surface of Earth for every single Satellite in orbit. There are currently 6,500 satellites functioning and non-functioning in orbit. How many giant redwood trees would you have to plant before you couldn't take off in an airplane? We can work Space debris into this conversion too. There are an estimated 24,000 pieces of debris in orbit larger than a baseball. With about 2 dozen debris producing events we can estimate there are about 2 dozen large fields each containing about 1,000 large pieces. We'll convert those fields into forest and plant a tree for every piece. So how long now until we couldn't launch an airplane? Well for comparison the Amazon rainforest is estimated to have 390,000,000,000 individual trees.

It's an issue, but not as big as portrayed. It's really that humanity is just in this "we have to save existence from humanity" phase. With the current status of reusable rockets, in the next 100 years we should see 10-20 new space stations in orbit. With the current state of drone technology we'll most likely see a government agency develop a space drone capable of securing and retrieving defunct satellites before they're an issue. between that and regulatory forces already requiring satellite manufacturers to address the issue, it will probably never be a real issue.

 

Ugg…

https://twitter.com/sciguyspace/status/1456038853689626627?s=21

https://twitter.com/spacex360/status/1456041878823096327?s=21

 

The TLDR version is Space junk isnt really an issue, and probably never will be.

 

I found this interesting. This is Blue Origin and Spacex showcasing their progress on their next gen rockets. I find it amusing that everything in the blue origin video is wrapped in plastic, and they even have special covers made for rocket parts to prevent dust, and employees wiping down rocket parts!!! They may not be going any where, but they'll be clean when they get there!!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ukGXfH-eyg

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeVbYCIFVa8

 

But even at those speeds it still takes time and gives windows. The ISS is going 17k mph but takes 90-95 minutes for an orbit. And with both Spacex and Blue Origin looking into sea launches, it opens up more windows. Not saying it's not an issue, just that they're actively working to prevent new satellites from becoming a future issue and we're along ways away from it being a big one even if they weren't. I seem to recall someone is even working on a satellite that would house little kamikaze drones to nudge defunkt satellites into more rapidly descending orbits.

 

How many Starlinks were going up with each launch?

So far, 120 have already deorbited if ‘lost’ used here is synonymous:
https://twitter.com/starlink_map/status/1455939268749103112?s=21