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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4937 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I really enjoyed the latest Starship test flight.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=lFkqZF-Ss7o&t=6250s

It's fairly widely accepted that the most difficult and most experimental parts of what SpaceX is hoping to accomplish are the re-entry and landing of the orbital vehicle, so actually demonstrating the ability to complete those tasks (albeit imperfectly) is a big step forward. Also high up on the difficulty scale is a precision landing of the booster, and while we don't know if it landed with the necessary precision, demonstrating the capability to do the soft landing on the booster is also a big step forward.

ETA: Given this is the second flight to put Starship into a suborbital trajectory with orbital velocity, I would recommend @ArjinFerman get his checkbook ready.

I did notice they're making progress between launches a while ago, so the checkbook has long been ready. I doubt I'm wrong about my broader point about SpaceX collapsing, and the revolutionary impact of reusability being a house of cards.

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how much maintenance was required between those flights, and how much did that maintenance cost?

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The nuclear salt-water rocket propulsion that would give them range to Pluto and back one tank fairly fast are doable

"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."

are doable

Well, maybe? For obvious reasons we'll never get the EPA to approve a ground test, and I'd be a bit leery about LEO too, which leaves us just hoping that Zubrin's paper was solid.

Of course, the 66 km/s exhaust version was his conservative design; the really speculative version upgrades the uranium enrichment level from "20%" to "weapons grade" and bumps up the yield, to get the delta-V to a few percent of the speed of light. YOLO, right?

Either way, while I'm generally a big fan of the SpaceX "get hardware flying so if it breaks you learn more faster" strategy, I think I'd be cool with taking things more slowly before assembling a 200,000 megaton hopefully-not-a-bomb in orbit.

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