Heh...
Heh...
To be honest, there still is a risk with the Starship development program. That's mainly because SpaceX is financing this on their own resources. If they could get the money that Congress and NASA squander on SLS/Orion in one year success would be almost certain.
maybe not, it's easy to throw a lot of money on stupid wasteful projects
tight budgets forces you to be creative and efficient, and disciplined in your project
Not sure if this is still good, but the site has been referred to on this thread before:
Upcoming Mars Oppositions – and what SpaceX is planning for each
July, 2018: Send a Dragon spacecraft (the Falcon 9’s SUV-size spacecraft) to Mars with cargo
October, 2020: Send multiple Dragons with more cargo
December, 2022: Maiden BFS voyage to Mars. Carrying only cargo. This is the spaceship Elon wants to call Heart of Gold.
January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.
Let’s all go back and read that last line again.
January, 2025: First people-carrying BFS voyage to Mars.
Did you catch that?
If things go to plan, the Neil Armstrong of Mars will touch down about eight years from now.
And zero people are talking about it.
But they will be. The hype will start a couple years from now when the Dragons make their Mars trips, and it’ll kick into high gear in 2022 when the Big Fucking Spaceship finally launches and heads to Mars and lands there. Everyone will be talking about this.
And the buzz will just accelerate from there as the first group of BFS astronauts are announced and become household names, admired for their bravery, because everyone will know there’s a reasonable chance something goes wrong and they don’t make it back alive. Then, in 2024 they’ll take off on a three-month trip that’ll be front-page news every day. When they land, everyone on Earth will be watching. It’ll be 1969 all over again.
This is a thing that’s happening.
"Now" was 2016 at time of writing.
https://waitbutwhy.com/2016/09/space...ull-story.html
Thanks again for a great thread.
So not best case scenario.
Optimism wins, let's be positive.
Lose a battle, war drags on, but this one will be won.
Because it's the future of our species , and Elon cares about this.
Sure. I think it's great that such people and companies are getting behind it in such a major way.
We'll get to see men walk on Mars pretty soon, personally I don't think major colonization is going to be a reality anytime soon. Humans just aren't evolved for it biologically.
With AI coming along soon, it's hard to imagine what our young children will see in their lifetime, never mind beyond that.
It's probably more than a few generations away, but when humans/AI master the manipulation of space-time, is when the adventures really begin.
OK but there's a driving sense of necessity here.
You understand the need in IT for backups - offsite backups.
Mars is the offsite backup of Humanity.
Never lose a hard drive?
Dragon missions to Mars were cancelled by SpaceX after NASA torpedoed powered landing capability of Dragon. NASA being ultraconservative as always does not approve of anything beyond what Apollo did. SpaceX decided not to spend the effort against the push of NASA and concentrate their money and engineering capabilities on Starship.
Starship unmanned with cargo to Mars in 2022 and manned in 2024 is still the plan. It is notional though and likely to slip by 2 years, but not much more.
I agree. We will probably survive everything we can do to planet earth with the possible exception of all out nuclear war which I think wil not happen. But we may easily lose our present technological civilization to the likes of flat earthers and religious fanatics, not only Muslim extremists, Christian fundamentalists can be almost as bad. If we don't go out and build a second civilization we may never be able to do it in the future.
"don't attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by incompetence"
I agree. Government money would come with strings attached, NASA oversight would add a decade or more to development time and multiply the cost.
But Mars with the resources of a single middle sized private company is hard. $3 billion with no strings attached would help a lot. SpaceX could raise that money through share sales. Howeve Elon Musk would lose his majority in shares and would be vulnerable to demands by investors.
I think 3 years from now we will know if he succeeds. I am optimistic as is Elon Musk but nothing is sure. He is betting the company on 2 mega projects. Starship and the satellite constellation Starlink. Starlink needs Starship for cost efficient launch and if it succeeds it will be the money printing machine that finances Mars. So the two are locked and he can not go forward with one or the other alone. Or maybe Starlink alone but he would not abandon Starship.
For space fans, go to youtube and search for "1 year in space" about a nice documentary on the ISS with very nice inside footage between take off and landing of the Soyutz module
you can FF most of the emotional family things, and focus on the direct testimony of the astronauts and their nice personal footage of their filming their whole experience for going to the ISS
SpaceX did the first test fire of the production run Raptor engine this night. A major milestone for the most advanced engine design ever.
OOPS that is the old test of the development engine. Seems the new test is not yet on YouTube.
Here the new test fire. Not YouTube. Let's see if it is a clickable link or a direct window.
https://cdn-b-east.streamable.com/vi...res=1549279510
There is a YouTube video now, with different angles of the test fire. It is short. First firing of a new engine is never for a long time
The old video
Last edited by Takeovers; 04-02-2019 at 11:32 PM.
Who fucked up the page?
The first test was quite cautious with low thrust, llike any first firing of a new engine design.
They have now fired it again, at higher thrust.
A tweet by Elon Musk today.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1093423297130156033
So they have the thrust they need and an easy way up by 10-20%.Raptor just achieved power level needed for Starship & Super Heavy
Design requires at least 170 metric tons of force. Engine reached 172 mT & 257 bar chamber pressure with warm propellant, which means 10% to 20% more with deep cryo
This methane flame is beautiful
The Starship Hopper on the move to the launch site at Boca Chica, Brownsville, Texas. It was a short trip.
The first engine or engines are on the way to be installed. First test fires maybe as early as next week. This one will do low hops initially, maybe up to 5km altitude later, no more. An orbital test vehicle is being built as well, scheduled to be finished by June. But we don't know where exactly it will be built. In the Brownsville area as well. But will they really build an orbital vehicle outside, not in a building?
A Raptor in the wild, seen by bocachicagal.
The first production Raptor engine that is scheduled to be fired soon on the Starship Hopper above. There will be 3 of them for the Hopper to fly.
Once flying it will be the best rocket engine existing, by any rational metric.
That Starship Hopper is looking a little worse for wear. The panels look like my mom's 78 Chevy Rambler after I smashed it into a dumpster at work and tried to repair it myself.
On a related note, I once worked with a guy who went to M.I.T. and majored in astronautical engineering. His graduate thesis was on aeroelasticity of spacecraft and listening to him explain the various pressures on rockets throughout ascent made your head spin. This was at the USAF Space and Missile Systems Center in El Segundo, just down the street from SpaceX.
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