Since 1. They already know how to land on a barge, 2. SeaLaunch proved you can launch from a floating platform (based in Long Beach, btw), 3. you want miles of emptiness around you when launching, especially during development, 4. there was a floating rocket port in the BFR presentation, I expect SpaceX to eventually build a launch barge that will set out from LA, go south and/or west, and launch; first to another barge, later to their facilities in FL and TX.
I believe I read somewhere that they were going to use more aerodynamic braking in the future (Block 5's only?), to use less fuel for landing. So this may have been an envelope-expansion test, basically flying sideways as much as they dared to see if it would stay controllable and hold together. They may have left the legs off and the barge in port because they thought the chances of success were low.
(Spin recovery training and research has always been dangerous for planes, and in a rocket you have big tanks with liquids sloshing around.)
However I would have thought that the legs would change the aerodynamics enough in that regime that the test would be more valid with them.
Or, more excitingly, they could be fine-tuning their reentry models as part of BFR design work.
Methane/LOX is the propellant of choice if you want to be able to:
1. store it until later. (LH2 is a pain.)
2. produce it on Mars for a return trip. (H2O (water) + C02 atmosphere = O2 and CH4.)
One way to think about elevators and high-rises is to start from the top. The uppermost part is a little building that only needs one elevator. As you add floors on the bottom they need more shafts so that you can fill and empty the building in a reasonable time.
With conventional elevators, there is only one per shaft. (Although it can be more than one floor high.) At some point the next bottom floor you add will be all elevator shafts and unless you think you can make money from a more scenic view from the top, you stop.
With this tech the elevators become cars on a vertical railway and can take on passengers without blocking shafts. Big gain.
Why not use the 8 inch hard sectored floppy disks? Of course there's nowhere you could either read or write them... but they were a bit thinner, and I think they stored all of 100KB.
Because I am willing to bet there were more 3.5" floppies made than all other types of removable media put together.
I have a DEC RX-02 somewhere, but haven't had to use it since 1998... ISTR they held about 500kB.
Let's assume 3.5" form factor. Using HD floppies, you need 20 million.
The one on my desk is 3.25 mm thick, so they'd make a stack 65 km tall.
In the spirit of Randall Munroe's What If, it would of course collapse and kill you long before it got that high.
Grabbing it would almost certainly crumple the tank. It is not designed to take much in the way of sideways loads.You would have to add a flange or some hooks to the top of the first stage, and thicken the skin, which would add significant weight (although getting rid of the legs would help). The elegant thing about a pad landing is that it is just like a launch in reverse - all the loads are in the same direction. It's just that the mass is way less and the CG is much farther down.
I did the same, got a used Relay from the US. I hate how touch screens (and web designers) are destroying the standardized UI that you could actually become good at driving. Now no two on-screen keyboards have the same keys. No two buttons, menus or even scroll bars look the same, making each new UI a game to be deciphered.
Yes, #5 is the center engine. And yes, the Falcon 9 is supposed to be able to lose an engine at any point and still complete the mission. (Assuming the engine shuts down in a relatively orderly manner, the feed valves close, so you still have the fuel and can throttle up the other engines to compensate.)
Rough approximation, everything leaning towards higher visibility:
Say L1 is halfway to the moon, and that the asteroid is all ice.
A sphere weighing 1000 tons is 20 m in diameter, so would obscure half a football field's worth of the moon's surface.
At 10 000 tons, 40-something m in diameter, it still obscures less than a whole football field.
AT 1 M tons, 200m in diameter, it hides a dragstrip on the moon. (Which is probably just as well; low gravity - low friction - low acceleration, and the spectators can't hear the engines anyway...)
So you would need a serious telescope.
This close to the bleeding edge, definitely. We have better models and more teraflops to run them than ever before, but real breakthroughs come from unexpected, unintuitive results. Remember how hard it was for most engineers to believe that mere foam could bash in a shuttle wing - until they fired an actual piece of foam at an actual leading-edge panel?
Flying real hardware is still the only way to conclusively
1. Learn Something (if it has problems) or
2. Silence the critics (if it works fine).
IMHO, while a good number of aerospace contracts can be criticized for either being pork or thinly veiled airliner-maker subsidies, that should be focused on those never producing an instrumented flight.
The SS2/WK2 differences might be simply due to volume. AFAIK, there are 7 SS2s on order, and only 2 WK2s. So it would make sense to invest in more infrastructure for SS2 assembly.
Unrelated, it seems one of the booms will be windowless. I wonder if it will get painted-on windows like on the models.
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Since
1. They already know how to land on a barge,
2. SeaLaunch proved you can launch from a floating platform (based in Long Beach, btw),
3. you want miles of emptiness around you when launching, especially during development,
4. there was a floating rocket port in the BFR presentation,
I expect SpaceX to eventually build a launch barge that will set out from LA, go south and/or west, and launch; first to another barge, later to their facilities in FL and TX.
I believe I read somewhere that they were going to use more aerodynamic braking in the future (Block 5's only?), to use less fuel for landing. So this may have been an envelope-expansion test, basically flying sideways as much as they dared to see if it would stay controllable and hold together. They may have left the legs off and the barge in port because they thought the chances of success were low. (Spin recovery training and research has always been dangerous for planes, and in a rocket you have big tanks with liquids sloshing around.) However I would have thought that the legs would change the aerodynamics enough in that regime that the test would be more valid with them. Or, more excitingly, they could be fine-tuning their reentry models as part of BFR design work.
Methane/LOX is the propellant of choice if you want to be able to: 1. store it until later. (LH2 is a pain.) 2. produce it on Mars for a return trip. (H2O (water) + C02 atmosphere = O2 and CH4.)
One way to think about elevators and high-rises is to start from the top. The uppermost part is a little building that only needs one elevator. As you add floors on the bottom they need more shafts so that you can fill and empty the building in a reasonable time. With conventional elevators, there is only one per shaft. (Although it can be more than one floor high.) At some point the next bottom floor you add will be all elevator shafts and unless you think you can make money from a more scenic view from the top, you stop. With this tech the elevators become cars on a vertical railway and can take on passengers without blocking shafts. Big gain.
this advanced facial recognition will literally rat on you?
Why not use the 8 inch hard sectored floppy disks? Of course there's nowhere you could either read or write them... but they were a bit thinner, and I think they stored all of 100KB.
Because I am willing to bet there were more 3.5" floppies made than all other types of removable media put together. I have a DEC RX-02 somewhere, but haven't had to use it since 1998... ISTR they held about 500kB.
Let's assume 3.5" form factor. Using HD floppies, you need 20 million. The one on my desk is 3.25 mm thick, so they'd make a stack 65 km tall. In the spirit of Randall Munroe's What If, it would of course collapse and kill you long before it got that high.
Before this, the largest collection of collision data was the Russian dash-cam footage on YouTube
The original Green Hornet had a spy drone that launched out of the trunk.
Sounds like a cage fight to me...
Actually, some mountains (notably Everest) and the deep sea trenches are there because of plate tectonics, not despite it.
Grabbing it would almost certainly crumple the tank. It is not designed to take much in the way of sideways loads.You would have to add a flange or some hooks to the top of the first stage, and thicken the skin, which would add significant weight (although getting rid of the legs would help). The elegant thing about a pad landing is that it is just like a launch in reverse - all the loads are in the same direction. It's just that the mass is way less and the CG is much farther down.
I did the same, got a used Relay from the US. I hate how touch screens (and web designers) are destroying the standardized UI that you could actually become good at driving. Now no two on-screen keyboards have the same keys. No two buttons, menus or even scroll bars look the same, making each new UI a game to be deciphered.
Is that what invades the stores on Black Friday?
He might still get there. First sequel to Emergence, Tracking, was serialized in Analog in 2008...
Yes, #5 is the center engine. And yes, the Falcon 9 is supposed to be able to lose an engine at any point and still complete the mission. (Assuming the engine shuts down in a relatively orderly manner, the feed valves close, so you still have the fuel and can throttle up the other engines to compensate.)
Rough approximation, everything leaning towards higher visibility: Say L1 is halfway to the moon, and that the asteroid is all ice. A sphere weighing 1000 tons is 20 m in diameter, so would obscure half a football field's worth of the moon's surface. At 10 000 tons, 40-something m in diameter, it still obscures less than a whole football field. AT 1 M tons, 200m in diameter, it hides a dragstrip on the moon. (Which is probably just as well; low gravity - low friction - low acceleration, and the spectators can't hear the engines anyway...) So you would need a serious telescope.
This close to the bleeding edge, definitely. We have better models and more teraflops to run them than ever before, but real breakthroughs come from unexpected, unintuitive results. Remember how hard it was for most engineers to believe that mere foam could bash in a shuttle wing - until they fired an actual piece of foam at an actual leading-edge panel?
Flying real hardware is still the only way to conclusively
1. Learn Something (if it has problems) or
2. Silence the critics (if it works fine).
IMHO, while a good number of aerospace contracts can be criticized for either being pork or thinly veiled airliner-maker subsidies, that should be focused on those never producing an instrumented flight.
Just to have some pun...
Actually, we don't think of it as having dots in the words. We simply have 3 more letters in the alphabet (and on the keyboard).
Unrelated, it seems one of the booms will be windowless. I wonder if it will get painted-on windows like on the models.