Thread for watching rocket launches and shit.
>>17665GPS is pretty cool. Sattelite internet might be good too. We'll see.
How many Musk launches have y'all seen in person? He keeps tricking me into thinking we're being invaded by ayyliums
Shit looks freaky as fuck in person. I saw picrel and I also saw a stream of Starlink sattelites deploying. Looked like a military helicopter convoy but it looked like way too many. Both times they were probably way up high in the atmosphere when I saw them but it's hard to tell from the ground.
>>18468The bulk is starlink, but they also send people, supplies, scientific missions, military stuff etc. Falcon 9 is the US workhorse rocket.
Most of our solar system resources are up here, waiting to be exploited free of pollution. Regardless of the mode of production there is really no way forward but up and this avenue will be wide open in the near future with fully reusable launchers coming online. Then deep space industry will follow making space based activities even less costly in a positive feedback loop sort of way.
>>19292Just imagine being some rocket engineer or something who spent your youth studying hard because you wanted to make a difference. You wanted to be part of advancing aerospace technology and help move humanity into the future. But there's no real "space program" any more, just billionaire children of privilege with no respect or understanding of the significance of space. To them it's just a vanity project or a grift. Their companies are the places you can get a job in your field.
And you try to make the best of it. You and many like you try to push technology forward among a lack of public interest and the whims of an egomaniac boss. "Make the rocket look more phallic." "Shoot a car into space." "Change the launch day to the weed day." "Get me Captain Kirk; I want to fly into orbit with him." You try to make the best of it, but again and again these oxygen wasters fuck it up. And why? For what? Because they hold the keys to the kingdom. The world is their playground, and we are the toys.
Here's a good bit on Energia/Buran
https://web.archive.org/web/20120922071933/http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/energia.htm
>Had the Soviet Union not fallen and the Energia booster gone into production, huge projects were planned to take advantage of its capabilities to realize Soviet military and international space goals. These included:
<Restoration of the earth's ozone layer<Disposal of nuclear waste outside of the solar system<Illumination of polar cities by reflection of the sun's light<Large-area space energy reflectors<Solar sails for interplanetary flights<Exploitation of lunar resources for fusion reactors on the earth<Space control system to assure ecological compliance and guaranteed strategic stability<International global information communications system<Removal of space debris in geostationary orbit<Large space radio telescope to study galaxiesDamn, what could have been.
>>20425<Restoration of the earth's ozone layerAlready done. We only had to stop emitting teh gases responsible.
<Disposal of nuclear waste outside of the solar systemNo chance. Too dangerous to pack a rocket full of nuclear waste in case it fails.
<Illumination of polar cities by reflection of the sun's lightPossible. More useful to light solar panel fields tho.
<Large-area space energy reflectorsOk
<Solar sails for interplanetary flightsNuclear propulsion better
<Exploitation of lunar resources for fusion reactors on the earthOk
<Space control system to assure ecological compliance and guaranteed strategic stabilityOk
<International global information communications systemOk
<Removal of space debris in geostationary orbitOk
<Large space radio telescope to study galaxiesOk
>>20429>with a rich space historyLol not since the 70s with a complete collapse of the intellectual, educated population since
Anyways they just fucked up as
>>21359 said
>>21407I also heard that a bunch of top companies' books are basically lies. Not only that, a lot of them have very fragile basis, like being very sensitive to oil prices or sensitive to the mood of investors.
Apparently it's an open secret that top auditing firms are running cover for the top companies too.
>>21406>>21407>>21408It makes sense that with re-usability of hardware you offer cheaper services, I don't understand why it's so unfathomable, for a higher launch cadence if anything else.
People who didn't believe in private space companies 15 years ago had good arguments because the capital that had to be put in front was so high for a high risk enterprise that was tied to governmental whims with few commercial applications. But now it's just plain denial, it is no secret that SpaceX is loosing money right now because they are launching so much starlink sats but they will have a monopoly on LEO internet constellation for years and years, which will be used by the US military and by most of the boats and planes. Their business model is sound, they are supported by the US government, and they are at the bleeding edge of space tech. Meanwhile almost every country, even Russia or China, who has stakes in space activities is pursuing re usability, sponsoring "newspace start ups", and "funneling public funds for government created billionaires", so they clearly don't think SpaceX is cooking the books and will collapse any day.
>>21411I somewhat want to agree with you but the data doesn't. In a way it reflects the behavior AES countries in regard to economy, it's clear you need states and governments to organize and pay upfront for the beginning of a space program, because technological and manufacture knowledge are commodities that need to be accumulated in a coherent manner for a full fledged economy to develop and opportunities to appear. For example a cryogenic engine is twenty years of development for a big country, no business can pay for that development… but they can refine and exploit it.
But that's it, planned economies crunched or collapsed, pure state owned space programs ossified or are repeating missions that "only" have scientific value and we are here now, so even an AES country like China is pursuing market based strategy because they chase what works, and anyone looking to the future expects humanity to spread out in the solar system.
Maybe it's just time to not put space industry in a special place full of that cold war glitter and human accomplishment and consider it's now just infrastructure building and commercial enterprise that obeys to market conditions in a capitalist mode of production. We built railroads and locomotives in the past, we're building rockets and satellites now, with capitalism.
When the American space program was based on merit and not on personality cult, like in the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, failure was named as failure and success as success – and were followed by actions appropriate for each.
Indeed, when the Navy's Vanguard rocket exploded after takeoff on December 6, 1957, it was named as failure and was followed by giving the chance, without delay, to the competing Redstone rocket team to complete and test their rocket. Of which success on January 31, 1958, is now history.
Thus, only naming this latest Starship explosion – after at least 7 previous explosions of this basic design at the costs of about $3B – as failure can lead to understand the related engineering and managerial problems. You may remember that the launch of this spacecraft was postponed on April 17 due to the discovery of an engineering error. Yet, Space X proceeded with the launch just 3 days later. Sure, their machine exploded again.
Thus, the question remains: Should an intelligent and moral society place the fate of starting Moon and Mars settlements into the hands of a leadership that doesn't fully understand the difficulty, complexity and dangers of this mission, partly, because it spends time with selling cars, digging tunnels for trains, implanting brain devices, buying social media companies and acting in the entertainment industry almost daily?
>>24699If Musk was privy to any UFO shit he wold be chirping about it on
twitter X.
>>25538First thing coming to mind is Starlink because that's the only mega constellation currently online with 6000+ sats in orbit as of now and between 12,000 to 34,400 planned.
I can't see China doing something of this scale before they have a cheap reusable launcher or Long March 9 ready to regularly launch. And they are still half a decade away from that at best.
>>17685>They'd instead use a Falcon 9 with dragon to get the astronauts from earth to LEO and HLS from there to go to the moon.Incredibly amazing that the Cult of Elon Musk has devotees even here, almost as amazing as thinking that a platform designed to cheaply launch as many Starlink satellites into orbit as possible can somehow be modified into a lunar lander. You cannot look at SpaceX's near-monopoly on the US' launch capacity tell me the lunar lander competition was completely on the up-and-up.
>>24695>>24699Hard no because the "secret space program" is UFO cult bullshit. If this secret technology existed, then capitalists would move to market it as fast as they could. If they had things like anti-gravity during the Cold War, do you REALLY think they wouldn't have weaponized it against the Soviets? The blunt truth of the matter is that Americans by-and-large are incapable of keeping their mouths shut about something like this.
>>19438>>24623The problem is that if you're "too big to fail" in America, you'll get bailed out. There are no real consequences for failure if you're rich enough.
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