I disagree with going to Venus on a flyby. And a floating blimp base high in the atmosphere will only give the crew the ability to do remote sensing which can just as easily be done robotically.

The reason you travel to Mars is to put boots on the ground and have astronauts make real time decisions about which rock to pick up and which to split in half. A blimp base is just ISS at a lower altitude in a foreign place.

And that's fine. Before spending months to get to mars on the surface, an interplanetary mission to a closer planet without so few launch windows or a need to blast back off from the surface would be a step in the crawl-walk-run process to making humanity interplanetary, is the basic argument/rationale. Maybe it isn't necessary, but it seems like a logical intermediary step, imho, with an end goal to become interplanetary and also to make asteroid mining etc. happen (hello, 'green' energy fans.)

The communication, sustainment, transportation, launch, EVA, and all kinds of capabilities would benefit. Comparatively, keeping up the spending for ISS for another decade seems…asinine. What are we proving? Why? This is why in 2018 Bridenstine tried to kill off ISS by 2024.

For instance, there's a debate going on about whether there is still a chance starship launches (a payload) to mars in the 2024 window (unmanned I guess). I doubt it, but if it was being run by Nasa…it would be impossible. We might not even see a manned SLS mission launch to the moon until a couple years after that, if ever. (Also, someone from TA management needs to reach out to nasaspaceflight.com guys to help with their message board software a la how that happened with the poor baylor guys.)

Last, I forgot about the Nancy grace Roman telescope that is coming up. Fun time to be a fan.

I'm a fan of the Venus manned balloon colony, simply because it'll be possible to breathe the air at that altitude, won't need as much power for the airlocks.

lb3 said:

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I disagree with going to Venus on a flyby. And a floating blimp base high in the atmosphere will only give the crew the ability to do remote sensing which can just as easily be done robotically.

The reason you travel to Mars is to put boots on the ground and have astronauts make real time decisions about which rock to pick up and which to split in half. A blimp base is just ISS at a lower altitude in a foreign place.

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It would also need to be protected against hydrochloric acid. Those aren't just clouds of water vapor.

Speaking of Venus... Most meteor impacts spew ejecta in all directions, but Venus' atmospheric pressure is so high that it actually contains the explosion and the debris is carried away in the direction of the slow surface winds

Figured this was the best thread to ask for thoughts on this?

Artemis mission exposed. NASA caught pasting their fantasy world images on a black background. Watch until the end. Research #flatearth pic.twitter.com/XSHV9arCMv

— Flat Earth Zone (@FlatEarthZone) November 25, 2022

I just spent 20 seconds perusing that twitter feed and I think my IQ dropped 2 points. It's not really even good humor.

The Hubs asked me and I didn't watch it before I asked here. He wondered if it was possible.

Brain fart on my part.

No worries, I did laugh at some of it!

TexAgs91 said:

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lb3 said:

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I disagree with going to Venus on a flyby. And a floating blimp base high in the atmosphere will only give the crew the ability to do remote sensing which can just as easily be done robotically.

The reason you travel to Mars is to put boots on the ground and have astronauts make real time decisions about which rock to pick up and which to split in half. A blimp base is just ISS at a lower altitude in a foreign place.

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It would also need to be protected against hydrochloric acid. Those aren't just clouds of water vapor.

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Never heard of these Venus balloon colonies but evidently it is the favored concept for this planet.

As for the acid clouds, evidently Teflon coating is the answer. Who knew.

Based on my experience with pots, that won't last more than a month.

I stopped listening when he said a globe was impossible…

Nice update this weekend. A lot of small iterative improvements seem to be getting made to various parts/bits of starship, from welds to the flame diverter/launch mount etc.

Hopefully nasa does manage to get a second and final use out of the utterly disastrous SLS launch tower that has cost way, way too much. The DRO orbit discussion is pretty funny, admitting that it is basically…a reflection of how much less delta-v SLS has vs. Saturn V. Sigh…

To get to the point of the video, space is VERY DARK. Our sky may appear clear on a dark night but the light passing through it (from both space and the ground) is diffused across the entire sky and puts some minimal light into every pixel. In a vacuum this doesn't happen.

But I am a bit surprised by how severe the cutoff is in the photos. Electrical 'noise' in the analog ccd circuits should result in some variation in the dark pixel values away from zero resulting in a grainy or noisy appearance at max exposure gain settings. I would also think impurities in the camera lenses or back scatter within the camera body itself would produce a noisy effect at super high exposure gains as well.

So in addition to having ultra sharp images due to the photos being taken in a vacuum, there is likely some processing of the images, either onboard Orion or by public affairs.

Many image compression algorithms drop imperceivable differences so dropping the dark background values is not necessarily unprecedented. Or, they could have simply adjusted the black point, even a fraction to eliminate the graininess of the image, resulting in this effect which would also have the benefit of reducing image size which may be important when transmitting images across NASA's space network, or to simply make web pages load quicker.

New job posting. I definitely am not qualified but I kinda hope we get some Aggies into some of these jobs.

SpaceX has just released a job posting for Crew Starship!

To "own the design and development of interior systems for Crew Starship vehicles."

Exciting to see SpaceX going forward with developing Starship's crew interior. Unclear if this is for NASA's HLS or a different varient. pic.twitter.com/GwGkftKX6Y

— Toby Li (@tobyliiiiiiiiii) November 27, 2022

Convoy at checkpoint after hours of nothing happening. Looks like this will be an extended delay if not a scrub.

— Michael Baylor (@nextspaceflight) November 28, 2022

T-10 minute siren has sounded (or it could be as much as a 25 minute siren)

Niiiice

How many engines was that?

Don't know yet. I think usually Elon tweets afterwards with the engine count

If they fire a couple more engines than last time they should beat SLS

However many it was it was a fairly long duration test. And they filled those tanks full from the frost lines on them.

11 engines. Need 22 more...

Booster 7 completed a long-duration static fire test of 11 Raptor 2 engines on the orbital launch pad at Starbase pic.twitter.com/fFnKR00XNo

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 29, 2022

Danm When I watched it I assumed it was way more than 11. It was massive.

If thats 11 I cant imagine 33.

Elon stated in a tweet 2 weeks ago thereabouts that they were going to do a full lox load, long duration SF to test autogenous pressurization. My guess is that's what they did today.

Mathguy64 said:

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Danm When I watched it I assumed it was way more than 11. It was massive.

If thats 11 I cant imagine 33.

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Falcon 9 is vertical on pad 40 in Florida ahead of launch of the @ispace_inc HAKUTO-R Mission 1 – the first privately-led Japanese mission to land on the lunar surface → https://t.co/D9BYeHj1EW pic.twitter.com/mU5BOgE4IB

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) November 30, 2022

Being ignorant on how orbits work, I find it funny they are taking 3-5 months to arrive at the moon when it's not that far away.

https://ispace-inc.com/m1

You can fit all of the other planets in the solar system between us and the moon, it's not THAT close.

I think trying to land begets a much slower transit to the moon, especially when you don't have to worry about humans on board.

bthotugigem05 said:

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You can fit all of the other planets in the solar system between us and the moon, it's not THAT close.

I think trying to land begets a much slower transit to the moon, especially when you don't have to worry about humans on board.

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They say they are doing it to save on gas $

bthotugigem05 said:

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You can fit all of the other planets in the solar system between us and the moon, it's not THAT close.

I think trying to land begets a much slower transit to the moon, especially when you don't have to worry about humans on board.

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They are going slower/using the weird orbit precisely because they lack the Delta V of the 60's lunar program. Recycling shuttle components and Orion has...a lot of trade-offs exorbitantly expensive sacrifices to claim it somehow makes sense.

There are several complications to doing a Moon landing with only SLS/Orion. First, SLS is slightly less powerful than Saturn V at sending payload to the Moon. Second, the Orion Command Module is significantly heavier than the Apollo CM, while its Service Module provides way less delta-v than the Apollo SM. Third, the mission today is to land at the poles of the Moon, which takes a lot more delta-v than it does to land near the equator, so the nasa guys had to get pretty creative on the whole thing.

What's amazing is how...nasa basically knows all of this, and also knows in-orbit refueling is the future, which is reflected in their selection of...lunar starship as a lander. Orbital refueling and other advanced propulsion concepts are what we should be throwing more money at instead of this ludicrous disposable 70's era rocket (with re-usable engines that cost $100 million each to replace each time they are tossed into the sea.

nortex97 said:

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bthotugigem05 said:

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You can fit all of the other planets in the solar system between us and the moon, it's not THAT close.

I think trying to land begets a much slower transit to the moon, especially when you don't have to worry about humans on board.

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They are going slower/using the weird orbit precisely because they lack the Delta V of the 60's lunar program.

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The diagram is the orbit for the Japanese mission about to launch on a Falcon 9. They are taking the scenic route, as mentioned above because no carbon-based lifeforms onboard.

The complete and adamant refusal to consider on orbit refueling or EOR comes back to one person, and his cronies. Senator Richard Shelby has done more to damage US space exploration, and more to endanger US astronauts, than possibly any human left alive.

Ag_of_08 said:

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The complete and adamant refusal to consider on orbit refueling or EOR comes back to one person, and his cronies. Senator Richard Shelby has done more to damage US space exploration, and more to endanger US astronauts, than possibly any human left alive.

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Is there a lot of difference between EOR and LOR? (safety-wise, not efficiency-wise)