Lift off! Elon Musk's SpaceX fires 55
Starlink satellites into orbit on board
Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space
Force Station in Florida
Daily Mail (UK),
by
James Gordon
Original Article
Posted By: Imright,
2/12/2023 9:54:47 AM
SpaceX successfully launched its tenth mission of the year on Sunday by blasting 55 Starlink internet satellites into space aboard its Falcon 9 rocket.
The launch took place just after midnight with cameras capturing the spectacular moment as the rocket appeared to traverse the moon.
The first stage of the Falcon 9 rocket landed on the SpaceX droneship out in the Atlantic, positioned a few hundred miles off the Florida coast.
Falcon 9 is the safest and most experienced active American rocket and the only one currently certified for transporting humans to the International Space Station.
Reply 1 - Posted by:
LC Chihuahua 2/12/2023 10:39:19 AM (No. 1401005)
Elon better keep close count of all his satellites. So should every telecom company at this point.
7 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
Dodge Boy 2/12/2023 11:01:17 AM (No. 1401028)
Elon, yeah, be on the lookout for those green lasers from chicomsville. Space war is here.
9 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
RUReadyY3K 2/12/2023 11:08:03 AM (No. 1401031)
With the recent stories about shooting down Chinese "spy balloons" I'm prompted to ask, at what altitude can sovereign airspace be claimed? Is it 12 miles like the ocean or something different. Can USA or China laser down or otherwise disable and satellite that trespasses into its "airspace" ?
8 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
DVC 2/12/2023 11:18:30 AM (No. 1401043)
In the 1940s and 50s, Robert Heinlein wrote science fiction novels where he had rich industrialists who developed space travel as a business, putting up hotels in orbit, colonies on the Moon, Mars and the asteroid belt and developed huge space launch rockets that worked more like today's airliners than NASA's one use rockets.
As a young man I read these novels and enjoyed them a lot. I'm not sure that I actually believed that I would see these things happen. I may not last until these are reality, but there is such an industrialist....even a few, if you count the fairly lightweight and not quite up and running yet space tourism businesses of Branson and Bezos.
Nothing could make me purchase an electric car, but Musk's satellite internet and space launch service seem to be pretty much 'best in class'. The man is a powerhouse and an industrial giant. Hats off to him and his visions of the future.
I think we will ultimately find that Mars is pretty much a dead end, too many decades of "Mars colony" sci-fi movies and TV shows have painted a far rosier picture of the atmosphere and potential of Mars than are realistic now that we have had research probes crawling over the surface of the red planet for decades and found......wasteland with very nearly zero water, and very slightly better than the "atmosphere" of the Moon. An "atmosphere" with a pressure of 0.09 psi compared to Earth's 14.7 psi, means that the Mars "air" is 99.4% of the way to a vacuum from Earth's pressure. Said another way - when they "pump out all the air" when pulling a vacuum on your car air conditioner to fill it with freon, they probably don't pump it to as low a pressure as Mars' "atmosphere". Oh, yeah, and what little there is of the atmosphere is 95% carbon dioxide, toxic.
I can't see what, beyond the scientific curiosity, would justify spending the immense amounts to create and then supply a Mars colony from Earth. I can't imagine any sort of a material that would be worth mining and shipping back to Earth that could possibly be valuable enough to justify the immense expense. And an energy source to make a colony function is problematic, too. Nuclear is possible but impractical. Solar energy on the surface of Mars is about 1/3 the density of Earth, so three times as many panels would be needed to get the same intermittent power. They have a lot fewer cloudy days but dust covering the solar panels is what eventually ends the functional lives of all our rover probes, so cleaning off panels for power regularly would be a required chore.
I really respect Musk and what he has done. I'm truly impressed. But I think Mars as a sustainable colony isn't reasonable unless some incredibly valuable material is found there which can justify the expense of a precarious "colony".
10 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
whyyeseyec 2/12/2023 12:22:36 PM (No. 1401095)
@#4 - I too believe a manned mission to Mars is futile. If ever there is a manned flight to Mars its purpose will be to say we were there, because that's all that will come from it.
6 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
LC Chihuahua 2/12/2023 1:42:56 PM (No. 1401145)
Agree with #4. What is the economic model that makes space colonization feasible? I doubt the required economic model even exists today. Everything has a price tag. What about resources? Don't want to strip your home planet to the point of making it uninhabitable. Don't want to bankrupt the entire world. Want to colonize Mars? Terraforming anyone? Otherwise, you would have to build a habitat or change humanity so it could survive on Mars. None of the technology exists. There are ethical questions too. We got a long way to go. People like Elon Musk are just the beginning.
0 people like this.
Reply 7 - Posted by:
Birddog 2/12/2023 2:01:14 PM (No. 1401149)
Most "Elon News" is low performing, zero accomplishment, lefties wanting to cancel him...after stealing all the money he has. Yet nearly daily he performs, out of his own mind and pocket, things that were considered "Impossible" ...often only 1 year ago.
With all of the "Anti-Russia" agitprop, US Politicians and NASA handed our entire space travel , and related programs over to Russia, intentionally...only Elon decided HE could offer an alternative, and did.
I don't necessarily "like" everything he does, nor particularly like "Him", but you cannot argue that he is not an admirable individual. Thousands talk about the Future he makes it happen NOW.
3 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
Birddog 2/12/2023 2:06:12 PM (No. 1401152)
With the recent stories about shooting down Chinese "spy balloons" I'm prompted to ask, at what altitude can sovereign airspace be claimed? Is it 12 miles like the ocean or something different"
For what it's worth...60,000ft, the height of the now famous balloon...is just under 12 miles.(12miles=63360ft)
0 people like this.
Reply 9 - Posted by:
czechlist 2/12/2023 2:33:40 PM (No. 1401168)
I cannot understand wanting to colonize Mars because the Earth will become uninhabitable when Mars is already uninhabitable. We can't be certain Mars has the resources to sustain human life. There is an asteroid or comet which will provide doom to the planet as we currently know it. There are two asteroids crossing our orbit in the next month. Low odds of an impact this time but how long will our luck last?
And, everytime someone launches someting into orbit more high velocity orbitting junk results. How long before we can't even safely reach orbit?
1 person likes this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
harleynyc 2/12/2023 4:24:32 PM (No. 1401240)
So, Starlink plans to replace our cable connected modens with direct satellite signal.
I not sure I like the fact they could shut down the nation's internet with just the flick of a switch.
1 person likes this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
DVC 2/12/2023 5:26:34 PM (No. 1401277)
There are some impressive practical things that can be done in space, or at least we are pretty sure that they can be done.
One that was a piece of the 40s and 50s and later sci-fi was "miners out in the asteroid belt". It seemed cool as a teen, but as an adult engineer, I did a few 'back of the envelope calculations" and there seems to be a real possibility for this idea.
First, we are certain that SOME meteors are pure nickel-iron metal alloy. Some which weigh hundreds of pounds have landed on earth and been studied. IIRC, I saw a large one in the Harvard museum many years ago.
In any case, lots of assumptions here, but not crazy ones.....assume that if there are meteors of pure nickel-iron metal alloy, there are probably some asteroids of the stuff out there. A 3 mile sphere has a volume of about 2 trillion cubic feet. A cubic foot of nickel-iron will weigh right at 500 lbs plus or minus 10% depending on the alloy. So, this 3 mile diameter asteroid will have 1,000 TRILLION lbs of nickel-iron METAL in it. Nickel is worth about $12 a lb but iron only about 4 cents a pound. If the asteroid was 30% nickel, and you just don't even calculate the value of the iron, that is 300 trillion pounds at $12 each, or a value on Earth, refined of something like $3,600 trillion. Even if it cost $2 trillion to find said asteroid and move it to Earth orbit....that's one heck of a huge potential economic payout. Now that much nickel coming on the market would depress the price. Let's say nickel drops to $1 a lb because of great supply, the 30% asteroid is still worth $300 trillion at $1 a pound for just the nickel. And the "waste product" iron is worth a good bit, too, even though you wouldn't do the whole deal just on the iron alone.
Asteroid mining is probably the biggest economic potential of space beyond Earth orbit.
The disadvantage to mining on another planet is that the energy to lift it off of the planet into space is HUGE. Asteroids.....you can get a boulder into "orbit" from an asteroid by two guys shoving it hard, the
gravity of a 3 mile asteroid is very, very small, barely above zero. Plus it may be economical to move the entire asteroid close to Earth. Low thrust ion electric drives are real world technology today, and if you put a 10 lb ion thruster on and run it for a year......that adds up to a real useful change in velocity, and can be driven by a moderate sized thermionic nuclear power pack....like what powered Voyager, it's old, well known tech.
3 people like this.
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