The SpaceX suits aren't planetary (or lunar) surface suits. That's what needs development. Although this is not and never would be, a significant blocker for a planetary or lunar mission. It's just an engineering problem.
Actually, I know an EV-1 owner, in fact it's his vehicle that is in the National Museum of American History. You can read his comments about it here. Whether the EV-1 owners liked their cars, and whether it was a successful vehicle, are irrelevant. After all, it was the first model they made and computer folks know about "1.0" versions. The point was that GM had the technical lead, and discarded it.
And besides, these days people really like their Teslas. So, whatever was wrong with EV-1 wasn't an indictment of the electric car in general.
Yes, I know that the EV-1 was meant to satisfy a California requirement that enabled them to sell their I.C. cars, rather than to be a cost-effective vehicle for the company. It's been interesting to see Phil Karn KA9Q's old EV-1 at the National Museum of American History. Kind of cool that it belonged to a friend of mine.
If GM had enough of a future vision back then, they would own the lithium battery technology now, not Panasonic. They could have developed it with what would have been chump change for GM.
Sort of like when John Scully fired Steve Jobs because he wanted to spend too much money on developing liquid crystal displays. They could have owned all cell phone display tech.
Tesla rose $28 in after-hours trading. It might be an interesting morning for the shorts.
If GM took EVs seriously starting when they produced EV-1 and kept going until now, there would be no need for a Tesla. The fact that GM discarded any lead they might have had is more meaningful than how many internal combustion cars they can make.
The Galaxy Tab S3 has a 6.6 amp battery, which happens to be the same size as the one in my phone, for a much larger screen. It doesn't last as long as I'd like. I hope the one in this is larger. And having a "laptop-class" machine at this price without a removable battery is unacceptable anyway.
My sell-by date has been exceeded, and I'm not John Glenn. If anyone is to blame, it's William Proxmire, not Barack Obama. I have done most of the things on my bucket list, but I half-seriously have pissing on Proxmire's grave on it.
I really doubt that Obama had anything to do with your spacesuit problem. As far as I can see, SLS is a pork-barrel jobs prgram for Congress, and sucks down too much of NASA's funding for them to do other things they'd like to. And they realize this, but have to get along with Congress.
And it probably should not take a Billion dollars for private enterprise to make a space suit. I bet you could start an SME to do it.
Funny thing about spacex is that they are so successful because of NIH. They don't subcontract. They build everything in-house.
There is a difference between NIH and too expensive to buy. SpaceX seems to be perfectly happy to leverage on known technology invented elsewhere. They just don't want to pay old-space pricing for new-space equipment.
Given the existence of BFR as a working thing; rather than a dream just being staffed up for development, as it is today; I think there will be a lot of cargo business. Given that, extension of it into a man-capable platform can be achieved economically, as Boeing achieved the 707 after being paid to make some similarly-sized Air Force jets.
Lunar lander: we have the part that holds the people, not the part that gets it down to the moon and back. Remember, the original design for Apollo by Boeing was for the command-service module to land on the moon and take off again, without the LEM, and that the actual CSM was overpowered because of that. A Dragon 2 based mission would look like a CSM.
Human-rated launch vehicle: on the way. Take your pick of Boeing or SpaceX. Not counting SLS, which IMO is an expensive albatross around NASA's neck.
Transport Capsule: about to see its first test flight. Boeing's some time later.
Mission equipment: lunar surface suits are necessary. I would not consider the other items to be blockers on the path to a lunar surface mission.
Well, this is contradicted by essentially all of their communications about BFR and the fact that it's eventually intended to hold 100 people for a rather long voyage. Not that it exists yet. But since they probably can be paid to do various non-people missions with BFR, the prospect of getting it to the point that it does hold people is pretty good. Consider Boeing and air force jets before the 707.
First, NASA is not likely to be the primary entity running the next moon mission. They will participate, but that will be done by private enterprise.
Second, of all of the blockers in the way to a lunar mission, a lunar surface suit is smaller in magnitude than things like a lunar lander, which nobody has at the moment. Consider, for example, a SpaceX mission to the moon. The Dragon 2 capsule is not capable of landing and returning on its own. They would need a vehicle for the Dragon 2 to sit on top of. And the Falcon 9 stages are not appropriate, because they are not cryogenic - they don't work when exposed to cold for more than a few hours.
SpaceX BFR still has a lot of risk and is a long way away. ULA is developing a cryogenic stage, but that's also a long way away.
Every day Ford sells an average of 2,452 F-Series trucks...
And in 1907 more people bought horse carriages than all automobiles combined, and the city streets were full of manure rather than the air being full of pollution. Change happens.
They warehoused cars to game around the tax credit and maybe the California express lane sticker. Holding those cars back for a quarter meant that buyers could get the government benefits for another quarter. They go over 200,000 cars in the next quarter and that starts the reduction of the tax benefit. A lot of them were kept in Pt. Richmond, California, right near my home. We knew they had buyers.
I have a number of Rohde and Schwarz FSEB and FSEA spectrum analyzers. These cost at least $80,000 new (I bought them used for a few thousand at most). They come with an old version of windows. I similarly have other electronic test equipment with old Windows or even old Linux which the manufacturer doesn't update any longer. For the Linux-based ones I could hack in a new Linux and make it use the old ABI, forget about Windows.
But what really clued me in was that the Rohde and Schwarz equipment had a battery soldered on the CPU board, and it was an hour-and-a-half service to get to it. A lot of stuff had to be removed.
Similarly, my Tektronix 500-series oscilloscopes had two 40-pin DIP Dallas Semiconductor battery-backed memory and clock chips. The batteries in these die and they aren't socketed. When the batteries die, the 'scopes lose their calibration. The company won't give you the program to recalibrate them.
The manufacturers just want you to buy new ones.
So, obviously I back SDR-based test equipment that's Open Source. Who needs a company that wants to screw you?
The film return capsules were much smaller and fell slowly, so that it could be hooked with a propeller plane that wasn't in a suicide dive. The fairing is 100 times larger and falls faster. Getting the helicopter that far out to sea is a problem. It runs out of fuel. You need a carrier ship anyway. So, they are trying it with just the ship.
There is an international treaty that says SpaceX still owns the rocket, it's not like an abandoned ship. Or yeah, I'd be tempted to get in the space souvenir business.
Good point. It's less than 1:1 fairing weight to payload weight loss. The fairing is dropped pretty close to the time that stage 1 ends its burn, and most of the delta-V is in stage 1. So, let's say 1:0.8
The described procedure is not easily scaled. It has been known for a long time that you could push individual atoms around with a needle, at least 10 years ago IBM produced an IBM logo made of individual atoms. This sets a theoretical record, for densest relatively static medium. I guess subatomic and field versions might go smaller.
But this is not at all about practical storage. To have that, you don't only need a small medium, you need a way to address large amounts of it efficiently, and access the addressed bits to read or write them.
Now I know you're on crack. The FH is 3 F9 cores strapped together. I don't care what kind of "power increments" you're making, 1 core isn't going to be more powerful than 3. That would require a whole new engine design and a switch to a different kind of fuel entirely.
You're being a troll or you just don't know anything about this. The current Falcon 9 is more powerful than the original specifications of Falcon Heavy. This is because of improvements in the rocket and a stretch in its height. All of the missions previously scheduled for Falcon Heavy were transferred to Falcon 9 because of this. The two remaining missions for the Falcon 9 are for much heavier weights than SpaceX was able to book before the various increases in power of Falcon 9.
And people tell me not to feed trolls, so that's all I'm saying.
There have been several power increments since the original Falcon 9, so yes, it's about twice as powerful. It is also more powerful than the original specifications for FH, which is why there aren't more missions for FH.
And I see that they are quoting the GTO missions in expendable and non-expendable mode, but they aren't quoting the LEO missions that way - and they used to. Also, they have learned a lot about landing the rocket and may be more confident now that they can do it on less fuel. So, until they actually quote block 5 missions differently, I'm going to assume that yes, there was a really big change between block 4 and 5, and they really are quoting that weight for a recovery mission.
That was in short tons, and the stage-1-recoverable weight to LEO would be 22.8 tonnes for block 5.
SpaceX keeps changing the figures here as they upgrade, you can look at the older versions on the Wayback Machine.
While block 4 quoted a 22 tonne mission in expendable mode, block 5 does all missions in recoverable mode and quotes that same weight for a recoverable mission. There is a quote here of Musk on the engine difference: The most important part of Block 5 will be operating the engines at their full thrust capability, which is about 7 or 8% - almost 10% - more than what they currently run at. Note that "full thrust" has been used to refer to increases in thrust twice, with different figures each time.
So, block 5 is about twice the power of the original Falcon 9. I think the quoted weight to LEO might be with no boost-back burn, just ballistic re-entry with a retro and landing burn, as they did for the Telstar 19v the other day (to a substationary orbit).
Slashdot Mirror
The SpaceX suits aren't planetary (or lunar) surface suits. That's what needs development. Although this is not and never would be, a significant blocker for a planetary or lunar mission. It's just an engineering problem.
Actually, I know an EV-1 owner, in fact it's his vehicle that is in the National Museum of American History. You can read his comments about it here. Whether the EV-1 owners liked their cars, and whether it was a successful vehicle, are irrelevant. After all, it was the first model they made and computer folks know about "1.0" versions. The point was that GM had the technical lead, and discarded it.
And besides, these days people really like their Teslas. So, whatever was wrong with EV-1 wasn't an indictment of the electric car in general.
Yes, I know that the EV-1 was meant to satisfy a California requirement that enabled them to sell their I.C. cars, rather than to be a cost-effective vehicle for the company. It's been interesting to see Phil Karn KA9Q's old EV-1 at the National Museum of American History. Kind of cool that it belonged to a friend of mine.
If GM had enough of a future vision back then, they would own the lithium battery technology now, not Panasonic. They could have developed it with what would have been chump change for GM.
Sort of like when John Scully fired Steve Jobs because he wanted to spend too much money on developing liquid crystal displays. They could have owned all cell phone display tech.
Tesla rose $28 in after-hours trading. It might be an interesting morning for the shorts.
If GM took EVs seriously starting when they produced EV-1 and kept going until now, there would be no need for a Tesla. The fact that GM discarded any lead they might have had is more meaningful than how many internal combustion cars they can make.
The Galaxy Tab S3 has a 6.6 amp battery, which happens to be the same size as the one in my phone, for a much larger screen. It doesn't last as long as I'd like. I hope the one in this is larger. And having a "laptop-class" machine at this price without a removable battery is unacceptable anyway.
I don't think you can call RP-1 a cryogenic fuel. Its freezing point is around -40 C.
My sell-by date has been exceeded, and I'm not John Glenn. If anyone is to blame, it's William Proxmire, not Barack Obama. I have done most of the things on my bucket list, but I half-seriously have pissing on Proxmire's grave on it.
It's probably David Clark company who would make the spacesuit, but at old-space prices.
And it probably should not take a Billion dollars for private enterprise to make a space suit. I bet you could start an SME to do it.
There is a difference between NIH and too expensive to buy. SpaceX seems to be perfectly happy to leverage on known technology invented elsewhere. They just don't want to pay old-space pricing for new-space equipment.
Given the existence of BFR as a working thing; rather than a dream just being staffed up for development, as it is today; I think there will be a lot of cargo business. Given that, extension of it into a man-capable platform can be achieved economically, as Boeing achieved the 707 after being paid to make some similarly-sized Air Force jets.
Lunar lander: we have the part that holds the people, not the part that gets it down to the moon and back. Remember, the original design for Apollo by Boeing was for the command-service module to land on the moon and take off again, without the LEM, and that the actual CSM was overpowered because of that. A Dragon 2 based mission would look like a CSM.
Human-rated launch vehicle: on the way. Take your pick of Boeing or SpaceX. Not counting SLS, which IMO is an expensive albatross around NASA's neck.
Transport Capsule: about to see its first test flight. Boeing's some time later.
Mission equipment: lunar surface suits are necessary. I would not consider the other items to be blockers on the path to a lunar surface mission.
A decade? Possibly. We could be surprised.
Well, this is contradicted by essentially all of their communications about BFR and the fact that it's eventually intended to hold 100 people for a rather long voyage. Not that it exists yet. But since they probably can be paid to do various non-people missions with BFR, the prospect of getting it to the point that it does hold people is pretty good. Consider Boeing and air force jets before the 707.
First, NASA is not likely to be the primary entity running the next moon mission. They will participate, but that will be done by private enterprise.
Second, of all of the blockers in the way to a lunar mission, a lunar surface suit is smaller in magnitude than things like a lunar lander, which nobody has at the moment. Consider, for example, a SpaceX mission to the moon. The Dragon 2 capsule is not capable of landing and returning on its own. They would need a vehicle for the Dragon 2 to sit on top of. And the Falcon 9 stages are not appropriate, because they are not cryogenic - they don't work when exposed to cold for more than a few hours.
SpaceX BFR still has a lot of risk and is a long way away. ULA is developing a cryogenic stage, but that's also a long way away.
And in 1907 more people bought horse carriages than all automobiles combined, and the city streets were full of manure rather than the air being full of pollution. Change happens.
They warehoused cars to game around the tax credit and maybe the California express lane sticker. Holding those cars back for a quarter meant that buyers could get the government benefits for another quarter. They go over 200,000 cars in the next quarter and that starts the reduction of the tax benefit. A lot of them were kept in Pt. Richmond, California, right near my home. We knew they had buyers.
TDS 500 series.
I have a number of Rohde and Schwarz FSEB and FSEA spectrum analyzers. These cost at least $80,000 new (I bought them used for a few thousand at most). They come with an old version of windows. I similarly have other electronic test equipment with old Windows or even old Linux which the manufacturer doesn't update any longer. For the Linux-based ones I could hack in a new Linux and make it use the old ABI, forget about Windows.
But what really clued me in was that the Rohde and Schwarz equipment had a battery soldered on the CPU board, and it was an hour-and-a-half service to get to it. A lot of stuff had to be removed.
Similarly, my Tektronix 500-series oscilloscopes had two 40-pin DIP Dallas Semiconductor battery-backed memory and clock chips. The batteries in these die and they aren't socketed. When the batteries die, the 'scopes lose their calibration. The company won't give you the program to recalibrate them.
The manufacturers just want you to buy new ones.
So, obviously I back SDR-based test equipment that's Open Source. Who needs a company that wants to screw you?
The film return capsules were much smaller and fell slowly, so that it could be hooked with a propeller plane that wasn't in a suicide dive. The fairing is 100 times larger and falls faster. Getting the helicopter that far out to sea is a problem. It runs out of fuel. You need a carrier ship anyway. So, they are trying it with just the ship.
A de-orbit plan is a required part of the licensing process. Even for cubesats these days.
There is an international treaty that says SpaceX still owns the rocket, it's not like an abandoned ship. Or yeah, I'd be tempted to get in the space souvenir business.
Good point. It's less than 1:1 fairing weight to payload weight loss. The fairing is dropped pretty close to the time that stage 1 ends its burn, and most of the delta-V is in stage 1. So, let's say 1:0.8
The described procedure is not easily scaled. It has been known for a long time that you could push individual atoms around with a needle, at least 10 years ago IBM produced an IBM logo made of individual atoms. This sets a theoretical record, for densest relatively static medium. I guess subatomic and field versions might go smaller.
But this is not at all about practical storage. To have that, you don't only need a small medium, you need a way to address large amounts of it efficiently, and access the addressed bits to read or write them.
You're being a troll or you just don't know anything about this. The current Falcon 9 is more powerful than the original specifications of Falcon Heavy. This is because of improvements in the rocket and a stretch in its height. All of the missions previously scheduled for Falcon Heavy were transferred to Falcon 9 because of this. The two remaining missions for the Falcon 9 are for much heavier weights than SpaceX was able to book before the various increases in power of Falcon 9.
And people tell me not to feed trolls, so that's all I'm saying.
There have been several power increments since the original Falcon 9, so yes, it's about twice as powerful. It is also more powerful than the original specifications for FH, which is why there aren't more missions for FH.
And I see that they are quoting the GTO missions in expendable and non-expendable mode, but they aren't quoting the LEO missions that way - and they used to. Also, they have learned a lot about landing the rocket and may be more confident now that they can do it on less fuel. So, until they actually quote block 5 missions differently, I'm going to assume that yes, there was a really big change between block 4 and 5, and they really are quoting that weight for a recovery mission.
That was in short tons, and the stage-1-recoverable weight to LEO would be 22.8 tonnes for block 5.
SpaceX keeps changing the figures here as they upgrade, you can look at the older versions on the Wayback Machine.
While block 4 quoted a 22 tonne mission in expendable mode, block 5 does all missions in recoverable mode and quotes that same weight for a recoverable mission. There is a quote here of Musk on the engine difference: The most important part of Block 5 will be operating the engines at their full thrust capability, which is about 7 or 8% - almost 10% - more than what they currently run at. Note that "full thrust" has been used to refer to increases in thrust twice, with different figures each time.
So, block 5 is about twice the power of the original Falcon 9. I think the quoted weight to LEO might be with no boost-back burn, just ballistic re-entry with a retro and landing burn, as they did for the Telstar 19v the other day (to a substationary orbit).