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Elon Musk Shows Off Near-Complete Falcon Heavy Rocket (newatlas.com)
Eloking quotes a report from New Atlas: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy rocket has been a long time coming. The successor to its Falcon 9 and the vehicle hoped to carry humans to Mars, this booster will be one of the most powerful ever. And we've just gotten our best look at it yet, with CEO Elon Musk tweeting out photos of an almost complete Falcon 9 Heavy in the hangar ahead of a planned maiden launch next month. The Falcon Heavy is essentially three Falcon 9 first stages rolled into one, with a second stage sat atop the middle one. The nine engine cores in each first stage work together to provide thrust equal to eighteen 747 aircraft, making it the most powerful rocket currently in operation and the most powerful since the Saturn V rocket last lifted off in 1973. In a series of tweets, Musk revealed that when the Falcon Heavy does lift off for the first time, it will do so from the same pad used by the Saturn V rocket at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. Musk has said recently that the Falcon Heavy will carry his own cherry-red Tesla Roadster as its first payload, but as an earlier tweet professing his love for floors has shown, it's not always easy to tell how serious he is about such matters.
If you are a live now, have been born from 1960 onwards, you are privileged. As am I.
We've seen the computer revolution, Internet revolution, and now a space revolution.
Jobs will be diminished, Musk will be remembered.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
If it were a public company, you'd be right. Which is why it's not.
So basically it's like a Beowulf cluster of Falcon 9s.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
Yep. Check it out! https://www.reddit.com/r/space...
Looks like it can take some serious payload... https://imgur.com/a/dtJIf
Going to Mars means taking lots of equipment with you. All that stuff doesn't magically appear in low Earth orbit.
A big rocket to launch stuff to LEO means that you can sling a larger amount of payload (+fuel + transfer vehicle) to Mars in one go. Otherwise you need more launches, and have to fiddle about with the costs of multiple Mars transfer vehicles and etc. It's cheaper to go bigger, basically.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
He plans to use his Amazon prime membership to get water shipped for free.
Bear in mind that the bigger/more powerful, the more problematic it is likely to become. Blindly scaling up things is business talk, not physics/engineering one. In imaginary land, the problems remain constant, and the bigger is usually the better; in the real world, the problems increase exponentially and what works for 5 rarely works for 50. In any case and as said, this is a completely secondary concern at this point anyway. They shouldn't worry about how to send "lots of equipment", but about what that equipment is supposed to be and all the associated problems (exposure to radiation, long periods between resupplies, extremely problematic conditions, etc.).
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
What a move! Not only get the water problem solved, but also force a competitor in the space race to handle the heavy expenses of delivery!
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Bigger also makes making launchers reusable much easier. Even with FH, the weight penalties for making the second falcon stage reusable were determined to be difficult to overcome.
Which is why Space-X has decided to develop and migrate all their launches from F9 to BFR much as they abandoned F1 once it had served it's purpose. BFR will be much larger than F9 but also 100% reusable.
Democracy is a sheep and two wolves deciding what to have for lunch. Freedom is a well armed sheep contesting the issue
If we look at the various different market sectors that Elon Musk has developed businesses for, then with the possible exception of Tesla, all of them, potentially even The Boring Company and Hyperlook [granted he isn't directly investing in this now] would seem to have the potential to be integrated at some future time.
For example, if mankind were to use "Boring Company" technology to cut an access tunnel up to a point near the 5,980-metre peak of the mountain, then use Hyperloop technology to provide a platform on which a rocket could be placed, put a stack of Solar City panels in the vicinity [to power the super-conducting magnets used by the maglev technology and perhaps also to synethsise the Methylox fuel, then essentially he has most of the components needed for a launch system that grabs another order of magnitude of cost savings/efficiency gains - because potentially the vehicle itself could do away with a potentially significant amount of fuel.
I took a quick look at the most recent launch, CRS-13, in which at 6km of altitude, the vehicle had achieved a speed of 938km/h, a little shy of MaxQ. I would have to concede that we are still a long way short, engineering-wise, of being able to achieve that even with a maglev track in an evacuated hyperloop tunnel. But Musk is all about continual, iterative improvement.
I would be the first to concede that all I've done here is borrow ideas postulated by science fiction writers for many years now: but if you go back to the 1950s and 1960s and look at the writing of Heinlein-era sci-fi writers, rockets that landed on their tails and took off again were a staple fare. It took real life 60-70 years to catch up, but SpaceX did it. With our rate of development increasing, what I outline here could be as little as 20-30 years away.
Which I guess leads to a question - which would be the most cost-effective solution: Falcon Heavy or a ballistic launcher? FH has massively lower development costs, but the operating expenses will be higher. A launcher will cost several metric f@ktons of money to develop, but, once done, should be significantly cheaper to operate.
br? Which would you go for?
Yes, but does in run Linux?
The intro in not correct in calling the Falcon Heavy the rocket that will take humans to Mars. This is just a heavy payload version of Falcon which still uses the Merlin engine. The BFR (Big Fucking Rocket) will have 31 Raptor engines (more powerful) and a completely redesigned booster and second stage. It's the BFR that will go to Mars. https://www.nasaspaceflight.co...
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
It is all frozen underground, waiting to be melted by an alien 3 fingered hand.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Funding is coming from successful launches.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
. And if he can't make a profit now that he controls the market, he's gonna get crushed when the other automakers seriously get into the market.
Considering that the greatest problem for an electric car is the battery, and considering that Tesla is currently making the greatest investments into making batteries efficiently, I'm wondering when those "other carmakers" are going to "seriously" get into the market - i.e., when they start to build similar battery-making facilities. So far they haven't.
Ezekiel 23:20
Look like the Tesla Roadster payload is almost ready for launch as well. Musk has said he is just hoping this thing gets high enough not to do pad damage when it explodes, but I'm hoping he is able to give his Roadster a Mars flyby.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
As the story goes, German-born rocket guru Werner Von Braun asked his ( mostly-german) rocket engineers whether the Saturn 5 was going to meet it's 99.999% reliability goal, and they said down the line "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
Actually, it did really well, with 13 successful or at least survivable launches.
Now with Elon's 9 engines, again it's time to ask, and even more so, the likely answer is "Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein! Nein!
The energy content of wood is ~16 MJ/kg and paper is fairly close to that. There are about 16 million books in the LoC and 120 million other 'things'. The average weight of a book is ~1.6kg and let's assume the other "things" amount to ~50% of the volume of books in form of combustible materials (wood, paper etc).
So you have 16 * 1.6 = 25.6M kg and another 12.8M kg of other materials. That's approximately 614 Terajoules or enough energy to lift ~5 Falcon Heavy's into LEO?
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