Re: That typically happens much higher up than the launchpad.
Vegemite is perfection.
ACCEPT NO SUBSTITUTES
778 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Aug 2018
There is a science museum, optimised for school children, near where I live. It has a feature which has been there for at least three decades that i know of: a pair of parabolic steel mirrors on opposite sides of a large courtyard. When one child whispers at the focal point of one mirror, their friend can clearly hear the whisper at the focal point of the opposite mirror.
"the beam strikes a parabolic mirror that reflects it onto dozens of photovoltaic cells housed within the device"
OK, that checks out, but it's hardly ground-breaking tech, is it?
"meals flown on this flight will ensure the crew has sufficient supplies to last through the summer"
Summer? Winter? The ISS spends half its time in the northern hemisphere and half in the southern hemisphere. If you want to specify from the point of view of someone living down on the ground then FWIW it is currently autumn where I am.
Brrr. I'll get my coat.
"But various iterations of Starship have added mass with additional stringers & strengthening, heat shielding which reduces the mass to orbit and thus increases cost per kg."
The version which ferries people from LEO to LMO won't need any heat shielding or wings/flaps. It just goes from orbit around one planet to orbit around another.
Having said that, it will need a different kind of shielding: radiation.
"For one it would have still been over 3/4 of the way full with oxygen and methane (so over 2500 tons of the stuff)"
Looking at the tank indicators on the feed it had only around 15% oxygen remaining, and in the short time before telemetry was lost the methane level quickly reduced from around 15% to around 5%.
So, we know the leak was methane, and we know it was not "over 3/4 of the way full" but actually mostly empty.
NASA uses metric. A quick glance at the SpaceX website shows metric units displayed first and in bold, followed by imperial conversions without bold. Metric is the logical choice and rocket engineers are logical people.
https://www.spacex.com/vehicles/dragon/
"Posting AC but even though I'm not in the USA, I see the local FBI office (you probably have one in the US Embassy) or the CIA to come knocking at the door..."
I hope you don't think posting AC is actually anonymous. Your post is still linked to your user account in the El Reg system.
This could have had a completely different use case though. High speed long distance passenger flights between major city airports, e.g. Sydney - LAX in 1 hour instead of 14. While Starship could do that it doesn't look like they're going to, and a spaceplane has the advantage of being able to fly out to sea before noisily breaking the sound barrier, and can use existing long runways. And due to the much shorter flight time and considerable unpowered glide, fuel costs could have been lower than for a conventional aeroplane too, making tickets cheaper.
Only two of the Mercury 7 (Shepard, Grissom) didn't go into orbit during the Mercury program, both went into orbit in later programs. The X-15, while very impressive and achieving very high altitude, is an aircraft not a spaceship.
I know what the current official astronaut definitions *are* (USAF and FIA), I'm just saying I think they should be different.
It's good they are going above 100km, other definitions of the Kármán line don't quite seem enough.
On the subject of definitions, I think we need to be more clear about what it means to be an astronaut. A straight-up-and-down joyride isn't enough. You need to go orbital to be a real astronaut. What does orbital mean? Well, even though Yuri Gagarin didn't quite complete one full orbit, if his craft hadn't done a re-entry burn it would have stayed in orbit for about 20 days, so he was definitely orbital. So that's my definition: achieve an orbital trajectory to be an astronaut. Yuri is in the club, Beardy Branson isn't.
Show me a large western organisation that doesn't like to exploit loopholes, e.g. one which pays full taxes in every country where it does business. The Cayman Islands, Luxembourg, even Ireland are doing very well by providing lucrative loopholes. It's a global thing, not just an eastern thing.
I also knew a maths teacher who was a navigator in Lancasters in WWII, it must have been a common assignment. He was very tall though, and the navigator's table area was too cramped for him, so he switched role to bomb aimer because he could stretch out his long legs while lying down. He was shot down twice, the first time over Allied territory, the second time behind enemy lines so he spent the rest of the war in a POW camp.
"had it underperformed earlier in the flight we could be looking at a very suboptimal outcome."
What's the worst that could happen? Unless I'm missing something, the Dragon can separate and come down for an early splash-down. It has some thrust capability itself, hopefully enough so it can choose to come down over water instead of on dry land. Then they just bob about waiting to be picked up, like 007 and Amasova at the end of The Spy Who Loved Me.