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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   4936 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for June 7, 2024

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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I feel like "Impressive" is a motte-and-bailey. Musk regularly makes entire series of predictions and promises, and people give him an amount of praise I'd consider valid, if he actually managed to fulfill said promises. But since he hasn't we retreat to acting like the things he accomplished are what earned him the amount of praise he's getting. I heard, on several occasions that "rapid reusability" means rockets turned around as fast, and as often as airplanes. When I see that, I'll be writing my apology letter to Daddy Musk.

I guess I fundamentally disagree with this view because it's anti-aspirational. The aspirational goal is aircraft-like rapid reuse, and yes, that goal has not been achieved. But the actual accomplishment of slightly-less-rapidly reusable boosters good for at least tens of flights is still way more than anyone else has achieved, worthy of great praise, and should not be diminished! I'd much rather over-praise a company that delivers on 25% of its extremely aspirational goals than one that delivers 90% of unambitious goals.

how much maintenance was required between those flights, and how much did that maintenance cost?

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Musk claims that for them, refurbishment cost is ~10% of mfg cost of a booster. If you have a gigabrain theory how it's actually not cheap and SpaceX is borrowing money to sell launches at an artificially low price, I'd surely love to hear about it.

Naw, just looking for numbers to sanity-check the claim of reusability. 10% refurbishment sounds like extremely good savings.

I think we're going to need to build some things off-planet before battleships are worth having to defend those things, but I'm definately rooting for Musk on this one.

The nuclear salt-water rocket propulsion that would give them range to Pluto and back one tank fairly fast are doable

"When Chernobyl reached peak x power during its explosion it was about 350 gigawatts for a fraction of a second. This is 700 gigawatts continuously, right, it's a non-stop Chernobyl going on."

are doable

Well, maybe? For obvious reasons we'll never get the EPA to approve a ground test, and I'd be a bit leery about LEO too, which leaves us just hoping that Zubrin's paper was solid.

Of course, the 66 km/s exhaust version was his conservative design; the really speculative version upgrades the uranium enrichment level from "20%" to "weapons grade" and bumps up the yield, to get the delta-V to a few percent of the speed of light. YOLO, right?

Either way, while I'm generally a big fan of the SpaceX "get hardware flying so if it breaks you learn more faster" strategy, I think I'd be cool with taking things more slowly before assembling a 200,000 megaton hopefully-not-a-bomb in orbit.

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