You mean the Estates General, right? That's the assembly that hadn't happened for a century and a half and squabbled about procedures and then split apart so the Third Estate could found the National Assembly. The Revolt of the Parliaments was a year or two earlier, and the problem there wasn't that the parliaments' judges couldn't agree with each other, it was that they could agree that even impending bankruptcy wasn't a reason to approve new taxes.
(This is confusing as hell because as far as I can tell neither the "parliaments" nor the "Estates General" assembly were actually what modern English would refer to as a "parliament", a legislative body; they were just there to give either a judicial or "popular" stamp of approval to laws that the King made?)
roystgnr
6mo ago
Thanks for the detailed response!
You're welcome, but it's not entirely to my credit. I reserve the right to keep giving you shit about "three years AFTER" from now until the end of time, and I figure if I don't at least try to be as helpful as I am annoying then that's probably not good for my soul.
I actually forgot to mention what I think is a very important detail in the "worrying" category: the fact that they have a shot at reaching their target payload isn't actually because their initial estimates were good, it's because their underestimates of engine performance are making up for their overestimates of structural performance.
On the one hand, the Raptor looks like it'll end up with a thrust-to-weight ratio similar to what they eventually hit with Merlin, despite much higher specific impulse, and it's already better than the best non-SpaceX engines in history, more than twice the next best engine with equal or better specific impulse. The Raptor 3 is incredible, not just in the metaphorical "higher thrust than Blue Origin engines twice its size" sense, but in a literal "the United Launch Alliance CEO thought it must just be an unfinished model until Gwynne Shotwell posted video of it firing" sense.
On the other hand, the mass growth on both Superheavy and Starship has been heinously bad. They need the extra power, because they're something like 50% over their estimates on dry mass. On Superheavy that's not such a big deal so far (every extra 10 tons of dry mass on the booster only means losing around 1 ton of payload), and not likely to be a bigger deal in the future (they're already landing and reflying them), but on the ship that's a huge deal (every extra 10 tons of dry mass on a ship that's doing a powered landing is a tad over 10 tons less payload) and it's still in danger of further growth (soft-landing a ship is 80% of the way to reflying it again, but there's no telling how much extra bloat that last 20% will require).
Mars feels like a distant dream.
I'd put maybe 33% odds on them sending an unmanned (save for Optimus androids) one-way ship or two in the 2029 launch window, albeit probably to crash on arrival. 66% in the 2031 window, with slightly-better-than-even odds of survival by that point. Just a baby step compared to a colony, but still, it's been super exciting when we landed a couple 1-ton robots on Mars and I can't wait to see what scientific "rideshares" in a 100-ton payload will look like.
What pushes us to "distant" is that those launch windows only come every couple years. On Earth, when SpaceX flubbed a test super-badly then it took them 7 months to launch the next, and when a test goes well it takes them 1 or 2 months to launch the next, and they're gradually speeding up the cadence overall. For Mars entry, no matter how well or how poorly a test launch is prepared, it's 6 or 7 months before they reach Mars and find out, and it's another 19 or 20 months after that before they can launch a redesign. If they want to test Earth return too, with a conjunction class mission to give refueling time, it's 29 months before the Earth reentry and then another 23 months after that before they can launch a redesign. That's a horrible rate at which to iterate, for a company that's always depended so heavily on iterative testing.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Didn't Jeb recuse himself from being involved in the recount? And I don't actually understand how the Iraq War would benefit Jeb or the Supreme Court; the conspiracies there were all about Cheney and Halliburton.
The election conspiracy theories I remember all revolved around either "recounting punch cards sucks" (which makes a little sense: you have votes that can be changed by a fingernail, and you're going to get as many grubby hands on them as possible?) or "recounting electronic voting machine records is pointless, and also they suck" (which makes a lot of sense).
roystgnr
6mo ago
What's your take on it's performance so far, in that regard?
Very disappointing out of context, then reasonable with a little context, then worrying with a lot of context.
With their current "v1 booster, v2 ship" stack, they claim max payload to Low Earth Orbit of ~35 tons, basically twice what they can get from a Falcon 9 with a drone ship landing. A new stack and test flight of Starship is something like 4 times the cost of a Falcon 9 flight, so we're looking at twice the price per kg, when they were shooting for 20 times less, so they're off by a factor of 40. Demonstrating booster reuse this early means that ongoing costs would be less than new stack costs, but until they can reuse the ship too or increase the payload they're still at maybe half of the price per kg of Falcon 9, roughly what Blue Origin is trying to hit with New Glenn. They'd be way ahead of Falcon in price per m^3, which for older Starlink designs might have been more important (they were limited by the size of the Falcon 9/H fairing much more than by the payload capacity), but these days they're launching "Starlink 2 mini" and "Starlink 2 mini optimized" satellites that squeeze down more densely and actually use the Falcon 9's mass capability. Regardless, billions of dollars of R&D to save a few hundred million a year on launch costs would be very disappointing in LEO.
Past LEO the current design would be a total failure. Their goal of using at most a dozen refueling launches at full-reuse prices to get a hundred tons out of Earth orbit would be awesome. They'd be able to put dozens of people on the moon more cheaply than they currently send four people to the ISS. But with their current performance, requiring three dozen launches at partial-reuse prices to get 35 tons out would mean they'd eat a loss just fulfilling the HLS contract.
So, TL;DR: very disappointing.
It seems to have taken quite a bit of time for it to pick up speed during launch
When I watched, it looked like it cleared the pad pretty quickly as soon as it started moving at all, but for some reason it wasn't released from the pad for like 5 seconds. Makes me wonder if some sensor reading almost triggered aborting the launch. They did shut down one booster engine about 2/3 of the way through its flight, and didn't relight it for the boostback burn, but just one problem engine wouldn't have been enough problem to possibly cancel a liftoff.
just with 16 tonnes of the dummy payload. It's hard to imagine it taking off with double that, let alone the 100 tonnes they're targeting.
That's because imagination is an inadequate substitute for math. ;-)
The v1+v2 stack is around 5200 tons. By far most of what any rocket does with its fuel is accelerating the rest of its fuel. If they were to add another 16 tons of payload to that stack, it would not have half as much acceleration at takeoff, it would have 99% as much acceleration at takeoff (about .36 instead of .365 g's). Another 68 tons after that gets you down to around 94%. The rocket equation is a harsh mistress, and one of the consequences of it is that, for any rocket with enough delta-V to get to Earth orbit, the payload mass at liftoff is practically a rounding error.
The extra 200 tons of propellant in the v2 ship does make a bit of a difference to their initial acceleration, though. What their current descriptions call a "v2" Starship would have been in between v1 and v2 in their earlier talks; it's basically "v1.5". It's got the stretched ship from what they previously called a "v2" stack, but not the stretched booster with higher-thrust Raptors. From a performance point of view they've upgraded half the ship so far, and in an imbalanced way. They still think they can get 100 tons to LEO out of what they're now calling "v3" (what was "v2" on their prior timelines) with both ship and booster upgraded. Flying newer ships on older boosters isn't a performance thing, it's a "need to test after major changes" thing, and in hindsight they really needed to test after major changes. The higher-thrust Raptors on the next booster version should give it around .41 g's at liftoff even with both stretches. That also means higher acceleration through most of the trajectory (rockets start accelerating faster and faster as each stage's fuel burns away and the same thrust is lifting less weight; it's common to start at around .25 or .3 g's but throttle down before the end to cap the acceleration at 6 g's to go easy on the payload), which means less nasty gravity losses (imagine a rocket "taking off" at 0 g's acceleration - it's still producing 1 g but only fighting gravity with that and getting no velocity) and more efficiency, which means much more payload makes it to orbit. The payload at liftoff is practically a rounding error compared to the weight of fuel and oxidizer, but when Starship hits orbit with only as much propellant left as is necessary to get back down, the payload should be more than a third of the total mass.
We saw this same sort of growth with Falcon 9. The first "v1.0" stack was around 320 tons at takeoff and could put 8 or 9 tons into orbit, but they kept making the engines more powerful and that let them stretch the fuel tanks and densify the fuel, and today the final "v1.2 Full Thrust Block 5 Why-Cant-SpaceX-Name-Versions-Sanely" stack is around 550 tons at takeoff and can put at least 22 tons into orbit. They typically spend some of that growth on things like earlier staging and landing legs and landing fuel, and now they can put 17 tons into orbit while landing the booster again afterwards. For booster landings, Starship doesn't have to spend anything more than it already has. Earlier staging and landing fuel are already in the current accounting, and they replaced "landing legs" with "giant robot arms on the launch tower" and somehow that's repeatedly worked because I guess we live in some kind of sci-fi anime now.
They could finish up their immediately planned upgrades, and if everything works on upper stage reuse too, hit their original goals. With an additional booster upgrade (and an extra 3 engines on the upper stage), they still think they can double their original (2017, after they scaled down from the 2016 trial balloon) payload goals, and that would be amazing but not a priori impossible.
So, TL;DR: reasonable with a little context.
The trouble, in the long term, is that "if everything works on upper stage reuse too". They could give up on upper stage reuse completely, get to spend a few tens of tons on more payload instead of on heat shielding and flaps and landing propellant, and even with the design they're testing next year they'd be good enough for HLS and for Starlink launches and for continuing to price under their competitors' next generation. But, unless they can do upper stage reuse, that still doesn't put a colony on Mars. Their existing "can reenter and then do a soft touchdown afterwards despite some damage" ships would actually be fine for getting to Mars, since that atmospheric entry isn't inherently as bad as Earth's (less free oxygen in the shock plasma, plus significantly lower speed entry) ... but then to bring people home they need the same upper stage to get back to Earth afterward, with no more refurbishment than they can accomplish in situ, with the reentry at Earth now at a significantly higher speed. With their dream architecture, getting to Mars is (relatively!) cheap and getting back afterward is practically free, but if they can't make upper stage reuse bulletproof then getting to Mars is too expensive to do regularly and getting back is impossible (without some other gimmick like carrying a separate reentry capsule). Part of why their flights 7 through 9 were so awful was that such major regressions on the v2 ship were really embarrassing, part of it was that the flight 7 and 8 failures were at the worst possible part of the trajectory, but part of it was just that they've been trying to do more heat shield robustness tests (removing tiles here, experimental tiles there) since January and they didn't actually get a v2 ship to reenter properly and run a test until August.
So, TLDR; worrying.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Nah. If UB always fired explosives it wouldn't be nearly as bad. What's diabolical is that UB is allowed to be a squirt gun on your test system and then switch to rapid-fire explosives as soon as one of your users installs a minor OS patch.
roystgnr
6mo ago
then 13 would probably be around December.
I just ran across an Eric Berger article from this morning which agrees that 13 would be "probably the first orbital flight" but predicts a much longer delay before the first v3, putting flight 12 "in early 2026", which would push 13 to something like March. He says to take this "very notional" "informed guesswork and reporting" "with a pinch of salt" but his guess is probably far more accurate than mine.
Oh, no, they're definitely trying to go to orbit. Basically every use case they have requires it. Starlink satellites use low-acceleration argon ion thrusters to change their orbit after a launch, but they have to start from a low parking orbit that won't decay for weeks or months. (One time a series of solar storms reduced that to "days" and actually brought down a batch of satellites.) Starting from an orbit that reenters within 45 minutes is out of the question. Artemis missions and Mars missions have to refuel in Low Earth Orbit, and that again requires weeks or months of orbital stability, at a minimum, for the propellant depot Starship. These barely-suborbital flights are the best way to test everything, but even barely-suborbital is not suitable for an operational launch.
Their problem is that they're trying to get to orbit with a ridiculously huge payload (which is requiring redesign after redesign to make things more powerful and/or lighter) and then get back from orbit in good enough shape to reuse (which will require redesigns to make things more robust and thus potentially heavier), and so even when they have successful tests (the last version-1 flights, 4 through 6, were awesome) that doesn't guarantee that a major redesign will still be successful (the first version-2 flights, 7 through 9, were awful, and they had one v2 that didn't even make it to flight).
[Edit, to sum up the problem in one sentence: They can't safely go to orbit until they can safely go to orbit, and it's hard to both achieve and verify "safely" with a design that's still a rapidly moving target.]
My guess is that they'll go for a full orbit in the same flight that they attempt their first ship catch, which Musk claims will be 13 if everything goes right with 12 (the first v3 launch). They've got one last v2 launch for flight 11, and if they had a NASA milestone for orbit then I think they'd try to check that box then, but they don't (the next milestone is for ship-to-ship docking and propellant transfer, requiring two launches to orbit) so 11 will probably be another "fix stuff that broke or wore too badly on the previous flight and pick new spots to weaken to see what else they can push to the breaking point" suborbital like 10 was.
If everything goes right with flights 11 and 12 then 13 would probably be around December. I wouldn't bet on that, since even Elon is suggesting that they might end up waiting until 14 or 15 for a catch. And if the first v3 flights are as much of a regression as the first v2 flights were then the catch+orbit attempt would be flight 16 and wouldn't be until next summer. Even that would still win you your bet with months to spare, but the implications for the already-implausible Artemis 3 timeline would be awful.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Caffeine has evolved independently like 5 times. It may attract bees (and enhance their memory of where they found it!?!) and deter herbivores (including insects) and inhibit growth of nearby plants of other species.
There's a bunch of other examples where humans find chemicals evolved to be toxic or unpleasant and consume them for fun, too. Nicotine and menthol and sulphur+allinase (in onions and garlic) were supposed to defend against herbivores, capsacin against mammals, morphine against microbes and insects, cinnamaldehyde against fungi... And there's others (like persin in avocados, an antifungal that can sicken pets and kill birds) where we just don't even notice the toxin is there.
I want to see a "planet of hats" sci-fi show where the humans' hat is "the race that eats poison for fun". "My guacamole is extra spicy, but there's some mint chocolate chip ice cream for after." "That's five different toxins in one meal!?" "... how about a margarita?" "Is this just a mix of ethanol and acid???"
roystgnr
6mo ago
I wonder if it's a closer-to-home example of the old "Saudi men holding hands" paradox. If you're in a culture where homosexuality is nearly unthinkable, you simply don't need to worry about innocuous behavior being misinterpreted as homosexual. If you're a heterosexual in mainstream modern culture, where bisexuality and homosexuality are officially approved of and celebrated but unofficially bisexuality would be brutal on your dating life, then you greatly want to avoid anything that might give misleading signals, and the fact that all the other hetero guys are doing the same just increases how misleading the signal would be if you slip up.
roystgnr
6mo ago
To me Life is Strange felt like a very progressive game, but it was in a "we're all progressives here"/"fish don't know what water is" way: they didn't make a big deal about any artistic choices that stemmed from that, but so many artistic choices felt like they stemmed from that. It's hard to go into details without spoilers though.
Life is Strange 2 often went the "petulant and preachy towards various conservative residents" route by contrast, but didn't seem nearly as self-aware or unreliable-narrator about it as what you're describing. It felt almost like the converse of an Ayn Rand novel; instead of Rand's fascinating but disturbingly realistic villains mixed with corny one-dimensional heroes, LiS2 (or at least the majority of it; I quit about 2/3rds of the way in) mixed fascinating troubled heroes with cartoonish one-dimensional villains.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Do you have any idea why we still have this system where our officers (mostly, with commissioning-program exceptions) don't start as soldiers? It feels like an outdated relic of "aristocrats get to be officers, commoners just get to be enlisted" days that are now centuries past. I could imagine a system of "try to pick out your smartest recruits, and put them in charge of the others when they've had enough study and experience", but the attitude "put them in charge when they've had enough study; what good is experience?" is baffling to me. It seems like the system depends in part on at least some of the smartest recruits getting missed by or rejecting it. That happens (one of the smartest kids I knew went enlisted Air Force, and I had a friend decide "Chemical engineering has been so stultifying, I'd rather be marching on Baghdad"), but it seems dangerous to rely on.
It's not like the system has just been unaware of the importance of its NCOs, either. Supposedly one of the Army OCS test questions from ~1950 was "You are in charge of a detail of 11 men and a sergeant. There is a 25-foot flagpole lying on the sandy, brush-covered ground. You are to erect the pole. What is your first order?", to which the answer was of course "Sergeant, erect that flagpole."
roystgnr
6mo ago
I'll second Andor and Arcane. For Andor I'd say season 2 is as good as 1, for Arcane season 2 is great but in different ways than 1 so YMMV.
For gaming I'd nominate Life Is Strange, and to a lesser extent its prequel, but Life Is Strange 2 fell into the "ideological and terrible" category and I never bothered with the others.
Caveats: Life Is Strange is a "choose-your-own-adventure"/"puzzle" style adventure game; not quite "walking simulator" but adjacent enough that it's not recommended for anyone who wants a higher percentage of game in their games. It's also not quite the best of its genre if you consider less-ideological games too; my pick for that would be the first season of Telltale's Walking Dead.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Maybe she had ready access to weapons in the land of loicenses
I followed all the rest of your logic, but: even in the UK, is it really so hard to get your hands on a chef's knife and a hatchet? My ten-year-old carries equally deadly knives (much more carefully) whenever she unloads the dishwasher, and in a pinch I bet she could find our camping equipment bag if she wanted variety.
roystgnr
6mo ago
This link blurs the distinction between "tertiary source" and "game of telephone", but while https://digpodcast.org/2020/09/13/male-witches/ agrees that, for witchcraft accusations in total, 20-25% were men, it claims there was a huge variation from period to period (as in @Corvos' reply's suggestion) and especially from place to place, going up as far as 75-80% men in Russia and 90% men in Iceland.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Thanks for letting me sperg out on the added detail! I suspected you might know it already, but it's surprising how counter-intuitive it is.
As a kid 30-something years ago I wrote an orbital dynamics simulator (in QBasic, with Explicit Euler time stepping, with nothing but circle sizes to indicate z-dimension position and nothing but animation to indicate velocity; I won a science contest award but I cringe to think back on it), and one of the features I added was user-controllable rockets. Keys to control orientation, another for acceleration, others for speeding/slowing/pausing time. I'd ask people to get from a lower circular orbit to a higher one, and basically everybody I asked would try the same strategy: turn the rocket vertical (perpendicular to its current direction of motion), thrust, then turn horizontal again on the theory that that's what they'd need to do after they'd accomplished "up".
To be fair, at the same time I was struggling to understand why porkchop plots all have those gaps in the middle, and I didn't finally get that until long long afterward, when I first had to make an interplanetary plane change in KSP.
roystgnr
6mo ago
accelerate until they reach their desired altitude, which should be well outside the atmosphere, then accelerate again to stabilize their orbit
Ooh, we just talked about this, kinda!
It would be correct to say "hefting its payload, the rocket accelerated to orbit", because the "gain altitude" part and the "gain horizontal speed" part of a launch trajectory aren't two separate parts. A launch vehicle generally starts angling a little bit away from vertical almost immediately as it leaves the pad, and a launch to low orbit usually doesn't reach its final altitude until at or after the point it turns off its engines. There's a slight break earlier, in between the acceleration phases from different rocket stages, but not much of a break and not much change in direction before vs after.
It's mostly just geosynchronous satellites that have a distinct separate "now we're high enough and we start accelerating again horizontally" phase, but even geosynchronous transfer orbits are stable (and faster than low earth orbits, all horizontally, at perigee) so the final phase is called "circularizing" the orbit, not stabilizing it.
roystgnr
6mo ago
In practice there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit - we spend like 3 tons a year of propelllant reboosting the International Space Station, and if we ever stopped its orbit would just keep decaying, faster and faster, until it reentered the atmosphere a year and a half or so later.
But you want to release satellites either into their final orbit (which you want to be stable for years or decades) or into an initial "parking" orbit they can gradually raise themselves (so you want it to even initially be stable for weeks or months). So the upper stage of a spacecraft will enter this mostly-stable orbit to release its satellites. From there, ideally you do a deorbit burn to control where you reenter, but either way you tend to have a small light aluminum upper stage that just burns up on reentry.
All the Starship tests have targeted "suborbital, but just barely" orbits like the one in test 10, aimed to reenter the atmosphere over the Indian Ocean without any further maneuvering. From a performance perspective there's not much difference between this and a full orbit, but from a safety perspective the difference is huge, because the Starship is huge.
If they're on a suborbital trajectory that's going to hit atmosphere over the middle of nowhere, then at that point even if the vehicle isn't controllable (which happened on the 3rd and 9th tests) or the engines can't relight in space (which hasn't happened, but they've only tested that twice now) it's still not a danger - even if it can't reenter safely, it'll still break up where nobody can be hurt. If they're on an orbital trajectory, they're not an immediate danger to anybody, but there's no such thing as a completely stable orbit, and the instability of an orbit depends on "space weather" that expands and contracts the upper atmosphere somewhat unpredictably, and so basically anywhere with a latitude as close to the equator as Boca Chica or closer would become a possible target.
China has at least one large rocket stage that basically plays Russian Roulette this way, but an untargeted Starship reentry would be even worse - the Long March 5B stage has at least been designed to use lighter materials that won't survive reentry very well, but Starship is steel and heat shield tiles designed for just the opposite, and it's 100 tons of them instead of 20. So they're not going to even try to get into orbit until they're very confident they can get out of it again.
roystgnr
6mo ago
with 10-20% of human genes estimated to be pleiotropic.
Citation needed?
This 2011 study finds 16.9% of studied genes show pleiotropic effects, but that's not an estimate, that's where "Only SNP-trait associations reporting genome-wide significance (p < 5 × 10⁻⁸) were considered". By 2017 we have "44% of genes reported in the GWAS catalog associating with more than one phenotype. The proportion of genes shown to be pleiotropic has continued to increase as more studies are added to the catalog." Then by 2019 we're at "11,544 (65.9%) genes were associated with at least one trait (Supplementary Table 7). Of these, 81.2% were associated with more than one trait and 67.2% with traits from multiple domains".
I am more optimistic, their currently tested designs are innately better than Falcon 9
Citation needed? I would say "currently in testing", but "tested" suggests they've made it to orbit, and AFAIK there are no non-expendable Chinese designs that have reached orbit so far. And even if you consider hop tests and engine tests to be "tested", everything seriously in the works there is basically working off the Falcon 9 playbook.
"Gravity-2 aims to operate at a similar price per kilogram as the SpaceX Falcon 9", which is about what you'd expect from a lineup that looks like someone was frantically cribbing from SpaceX. (which is mostly the right thing for them to do, to be clear; it beats the hell out of Europe's response to SpaceX)
The Hyperbola-3 hasn't had any prices announced yet but it also looks more like "cribbing from Falcon" than "innately better", except for the choice of a methalox rather than kerolox engine.
Deep Blue Aerospace is at the advanced cribbing stage, surpassing its competitors' infographics of not-Falcon-9 and not-Falcon-Heavy rockets by putting a not-Starship rocket at the end.
Pallas-1 gets us back to not-Falcon-9 and not-Falcon-Heavy territory.
The obsession with Falcon Heavy clones is IMHO a bad sign for some of these companies. Even SpaceX admits that Falcon Heavy wasn't worth the trouble in hindsight, and there was a point where if they hadn't already accepted Air Force contracts for it (or if Gwynne Shotwell hadn't talked Musk into staying on the feds' good side) they'd have probably canceled it entirely. The original rationale behind it was that they didn't think Falcon 9 would be nearly as powerful as it was, but after some engine improvements and tank stretching and propellant subcooling the F9 got pushed into the FH weight class, and FH got pushed out into a weight class where (with its small fairing) it will never have enough payloads to pay back the investment.
I don't know much about Tianlong-3. I'd give the company points for being the first Chinese startup to put a liquid-fueled rocket in orbit, but then take away a quarter of those points for being the first to launch a rocket stage unintentionally, to fly for miles out of control before impact, when a test fire stand broke.
Maybe LandSpace is the best bet here? 4 successful Zhuque-2 launches with 2 failures, VTVL and relight tests with Zhuque-3, using methalox now and working on full-flow methalox upgrades. There's no hint of Starship-scale plans in their future, but they're at least setting up to have Starship-quality institutional experience.
But I think what's impressive about the Chinese effort isn't any single rocket design, it's the sheer volume of these efforts. All but one of those companies has already reached orbit, albeit with smaller and less-ambitious designs than what they're working on now. Two of them have reached orbit with liquid-fueled stages. Even if most of them fail or come up with something mediocre, they're actually trying and achieving impressive things quicky. In the US, after SpaceX, our best efforts are probably Blue Origin (made it to orbit after only 25 years!), RocketLab (the Electron would have been impressive if they'd got reusability working, and I'm hopeful for Neutron), Stoke (still just doing hop tests, but actually trying out a potentially better-than-Falcon-9 idea), and maybe Firefly (with no impressive launch vehicle plans, but they made orbit).
and may allow rapid scaling beyond Starships, though this might take 5+ years
Even in the "I made a PowerPoint!" dreams of (the 4th redesign of) the Long March 9, a rocket scaling to Starship is supposed to be not flying before the 2040s.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Oh, no, I'm mixing up the premises of 1 and 4! I'd like to say that it's the scriptwriters fault for going to the "mysterious alien menace threatens Earth and the twist is that it's actually connected to 20th century humanity" well more than once, but I'm just trying to rationalize away my own shame.
Tolkien has always had a loyal following among college-educated conservative Christians, and my mom was recommended The Hobbit at a Christian college.
I think he had a lot of loyal followings. My first introduction to Tolkien by name was in writing by Isaac Asimov (Jewish atheist), and of course modern medieval-fantasy from D&D onward is like 80% Tolkien with the serial numbers filed off.
She does love the Peter Jackson films, but insists that everyone should watch the extended editions.
Of course! Especially the Two Towers extended edition - the theatrical version didn't include Saruman's death, and without knowing that Jackson had made that change to the plot it was unnecessarily disappointing to see The Return of the King end with no scouring of the shire.
Also, you have to watch the Hobbit films either first or not-at-all. My kids got to enjoy them for what they were, not having seen the Lord of the Rings first, but then looking back after the LotR trilogy they understood how disappointed I must have been.
roystgnr
6mo ago
I thought thr idea is absurd, and would have walked right into taking the "not gonna happen" side
I thought Musk was making a joke. If I fight the Absurdity Heuristic hard enough I can see how much sense it makes, but until they started mounting the tower arms I still thought maybe it was a joke.
They're not even doing it for the Falcon 9, Starship is probably exponentoally more difficult.
Counterintuitively, no. You'd think that "bigger is harder" in engineering as a general rule, but there are exceptions. The control problem that lets Falcon 9 land within meters and Starship get caught within centimeters is one. Surviving atmospheric entry is another - it helps to be as big and "fluffy" (high surface area to mass ratio) as possible, so you start decelerating sooner and slow down higher and peak at a lower heat flux. Size also lets Starship get away with using steel - previous steel rocket stages needed to be "balloon tanks", pressure-stabilized because of their thinness, but Starship is so huge that even "thin" relative to that is thick enough to worry less about buckling, and they get far more thermal resilience "for free".
But that aside, it's the recovery of the second stage that is more likely to do them in.
Reuse is; recovery they could definitely do. They've already managed to bring three ships to a soft powered splashdown (albeit just barely, that first time) after atmospheric entry, despite one of the three being a "let's try stripping the heat shield way down and see what breaks first" test. I can't imagine any of those were in shape to launch again (or would have been even if they were caught rather than splashed down), but being able to do even a brief short main engine relight right on cue for the splashdown is a pretty good step in the right direction.
The biggest catch is that, even if they technically manage upper stage reuse, they need cheap reuse, with at least a few flights per ship, to make this worth all the effort. Space-Shuttle-style "if we go over everything with a microscope then we can launch this again next year" won't cut it.
In terms of Artemis, though, what's most likely to do them in is the schedule. They're not going to make 2027 for Artemis 3, and if they don't even get an unmanned lunar landing test by then, Congress is fickle enough to put HLS Starship (or the whole Artemis program) in the waste bin next to Constellation.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Some people would say you should go out and watch all of SG-1 now, but don't listen to them; it's fine to stop after season 8.
BSG, on the other hand ... "The humans haven't figured out what the Cylons are doing" is a compelling premise, right up until you add "the BSG writers are humans" and complete the syllogism.
I'd think LotR was the least nerdy thing you've mentioned, though. Pre-Peter-Jackson, sure, knowing the name "Frodo" marked you as an ubergeek, but today they're still top-100-lifetime-gross movies; when The Return of the King came out it was like top 10.
I remember liking Star Trek 1 and I was surprised when I got older and found out everyone hates it. But I also was obsessed with the Voyager probes as a child, so I guess it hit the spot for me.
You're not mixing up 1 and 4, are you? Everybody thought 1 was dull but loved 4.
I don't know what the Xer and Millennial parents of my cohort raised their kids on.
I tried to suggest to them at least a little of everything I knew was decent as soon as it was mostly age-appropriate; sometimes sooner if the writing was clever enough to slip by ("Under a blacklight this place looks like a Jackson Pollock painting!" - Guardians of the Galaxy) or pointless enough to edit out ("What if we reuse the same joke but don't understand subtext?" - Taika Waititi). I try to tell them which yet-unwatched options are better or worse or scarier or slower or whatever than others.
And they take turns getting to pick what we watch together, which is sometimes the hard part (Gravity Falls was good, Owl House less so, and was Amphibia really worth three seasons?) but is still the important part, because their preferences often surprise me. They've all soured on the MCU and Star Wars (except that we're planning to watch Andor). My oldest loved TNG and likes DS9 but dislikes Kirk too much to watch more TOS. My younger two just tolerated Trek (and won't watch any more scary Borg episodes) but they really like Babylon 5. Everybody loved The Martian, though not as much as the book.
roystgnr
6mo ago
The LEM descent engine was aimed straight down and was only around ten feet above the soil its exhaust kicked up when the contact probe cut it off. The HLS Starship's current solution (though Musk still wants to try direct Raptor landings eventually) is to do its final descent with mid-body RCS-sized engines, a hundred feet up and angled outward. There's still the possibility of plume recirculation from those kicking a chunk of regolith in a bad direction, but even if something hits a main engine they only need one out of three still working at that point.
It's still crazy to only do a single unmanned landing+ascent test before putting people on it, though. We're not racing the Soviets this time, we can afford to "lose" the race to China, and the combination of "SpaceX has pretty great software for precision vertical landings of rockets without a human pilot" with "SpaceX will be landing on unprepared soil for the first time and often takes a few tries to get a new solution right" really suggests we wait a little longer before adding humans.
Technically we're not single-sourcing the lander anymore; Blue Moon is supposed to be ready in time for Artemis V circa 2030. In theory they're launching an unmanned test of the smaller Mk1 version of it next year. I wouldn't be surprised if the schedules slip further, though, whether or not the slippage is "Elon time" bad.
roystgnr
6mo ago
once it's established that the symbolism of magic = family love is all that matters, the backstory revelations undermine it: Was it grandpa's death that brought about family love?
... Yes?
He's leading refugees away from their burning village, he sees soldiers catching up to them on horseback, and he kisses his wife and babies goodbye to turn back and (checks video) wave down the soldiers. Rather than using the opportunity to run or hide, his wife stops in her tracks to watch him die. The natural interpretation here is "he loved them so much that he would run to his own death just to buy them another minute to run and hide, and she loved him so much that even in those circumstances she couldn't bear to leave him, and The Magic rewarded such powerful love." (The other interpretation, "neither of them had the common sense or tactical acumen of a mouse, and The Magic took pity on such powerful stupidity", doesn't really fit the movie's tone.)
Ah, but the catch is that most of the other sides of your bets (myself included) are probably likewise using motivated reasoning, not deliberate reasoning. "Elon Time" has been a thing since at least Falcon Heavy (announced Apr 2011, first launch planned by end 2013, first launch accomplished Feb 2018, 82/32 months = 156% schedule slip). BFR announcement was Sep 2017 with first unmanned Mars launch planned by Nov 2022, so that'd just make the 2031 launch window after the same magnitude slip, and it's a much harder challenge so expecting the same level of slip should probably be a best-case scenario not a median-case.
Would you take $33 of mine to a charity of your choice vs $100 of yours to a charity of mine? (Probably just Givewell or a top pick of theirs) Official judgement based on whether there's a Starship-derived upper stage en route to Mars by July 2029 (if they're running late SpaceX might try some kind of Hail Mary pass after the best of the launch window has passed) but more likely February 2029 if they launch something on time, or I'll call it at the end of 2028 if they clearly have zero plans to launch anything. Yeah, I just figured out that "33%" was motivated reasoning on my part, but if we keep the bet small enough to just rub my face in a loss then I'd be in anyway.
IMHO part of why SpaceX has been a success and e.g. Blue Origin (with more investment and a head-start) hasn't yet is that Musk's employees implicitly asked him to go to Mars. At some point I guess people were willing to work crazy hours at SpaceX for barely-competitive wages because the stock options made up for it, but at least in the beginning the only thing SpaceX offered employees was the promise of being able to just get important things done, not to just eventually co-chair a committee to review the recommendation to change the color of the book of regulations against doing things. The list of "first privately-funded X" (liquid rocket to orbit, spacecraft recovery, ISS, GEO, humans to orbit) and then "first X" (booster landing, ocean booster landing, rocket with a 120-launch success streak) and "most powerful X" (operational rocket, rocket), while Constellation and SLS were turning into dead ends, keeps the dream alive. If SpaceX ever pulls a bait-and-switch on that, and just focus on e.g. Starlink as a cash cow while ignoring Mars, eventually their best people will go elsewhere and they'll rot Boeing-style from the inside out.
At this point SpaceX is the investor, buying back $500M of their own shares last year, and at the rate Starlink is growing (7 million subscribers now, up from 6 million in June and 5 million in Feb) they're not likely to change that soon. They're still letting employees sell their shares to outside investors too, but AFAIK the last time they issued new shares for investment was Jan 2023.
The existing investors could turn on Musk, and I'd expect a shareholder lawsuit if he gets Spruce Goose "the next Starship will be made out of wood!" crazy, but right now he's still reportedly got the majority of voting shares, and "we're mad because the company that's been talking about going to Mars for decades is going to Mars" probably wouldn't even make it past a Delaware court.
I'm hoping the competition can provide a tolerable alternative, but so far the best out there is Kuiper, 100 satellites launched (out of a planned 3236), half via the cancelled Atlas V rocket and the other half via Falcon 9. Even with Falcon launches, Kuiper has an upcoming July 2026 deadline to launch the first half of their constellation, and I don't think they're going to make it. Hopefully Trump is still pissy enough at Musk that his FCC will waive the "may result in Kuiper’s authorization being reduced to the number of satellites in use on the milestone date" consequences.
Plus, the competition isn't even yet proposing an alternative for Starshield. SpaceX had put up several hundred commercial satellites and begun paid service before they even started putting up the military sats.
I guess there's still a lot of time between now and the next administration. New Glenn isn't even planning to launch its first KuiperSat load until "mid-2026", but by 2029 they could really be in business. There's not a lot of time between the next inauguration and the subsequent launch window, though. If SpaceX actually is prepping for a Mars launch in February 2029, I'd be astonished if the Dem's "First 100 Days" list in January 2029 was topped by "1. From Hell's Heart, We Stab At Him."
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