avmich

35 ms·

541.
by avmich 2y ago
But that's not the lander's problem. I do agree NASA's Artemis program is strange. However it's enmeshed with Starship, and that's sufficiently different story.
542.
by avmich 2y ago
I'm strongly disagreeing with some qualifications there, to the point it's hard to find where to start. E.g. what this passage mean - "...this single-use lander carries less payload (both up and down) than the tiny Lunar Modu
543.
by avmich 2y ago
> There's nothing there we can't get on Earth, 10x cheaper. It's not too big a stretch of imagination to consider producing oxygen on the Moon from rocks and sending it to LEO for refueling Starships - this activity might
544.
by avmich 2y ago
> Tiny gram-scale interstellar probes pushed by laser light are likely to be the only technology capable of reaching another star this century. I'd encourage to look at beam propulsion e.g. from here - http://www.gdnordle
545.
by avmich 2y ago
I do think that if we'd make Shuttle today, it would be much more reliable than it was. Successes of vertical Falcon-9 landings notwithstanding.
546.
by avmich 2y ago
Mostly agree. Winged design can be much gentler for passing the atmosphere on the way back comparing to capsules and can probably even get passively to landing speed, the drawback being the requirements of the landing strip. They are also b
547.
by avmich 2y ago
There's a long chain of influences across the border in winged spacecraft development. Dyna-Soar ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-20_Dyna-Soar ) project in USA pushed works on Spiral' project in USSR, a
548.
by avmich 2y ago
It's interesting to see so much similarity with BOR-4 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BOR-4 and http://buran.ru/htm/bors.htm ), particularly foldable wings. Surely DC is bigger and much more po
549.
by avmich 2y ago
> Senior engineer gave him a copy of The Cathedral and the Bazaar, just to share something that could lead to some kind of common vocabulary. Founder spent weekend marking up his copy and on Monday I'd quite like to read those marki
550.
by avmich 2y ago
The advantage of TI approach is that they propose to earn money - if you bought their plant, you can sell methane, no carbon tax needed - you just make a product. I think in this sense TI has greater scaling potential.
551.
by avmich 2y ago
Wonder how does it compare with Terraform Industries approach - how quickly Climeworks is going to increase the capacity in comparison.
552.
by avmich 2y ago
The overall quality of this website I'd estimate at least in top 5% of all Web, if not top 1%. The content is superb, the presentation is quite clear.
553.
by avmich 2y ago
> Could we come up with novel things to do with this deep interior space? A friend of mine had an opportunity to build the house for himself and his family. He architected the house as - mostly - several groups of 3 spaces in each. One i
554.
by avmich 2y ago
This looks like a textbook comparison of old-space approach versus new-space in similar projects.
555.
by avmich 2y ago
Here is a good book for some of the school-level math - https://archive.org/details/skanavii/mode/2up - in Russian.
556.
by avmich 2y ago
Yes, US has a lot of obvious things to do too right now. And it should be done, yes, while also paying full attention to quite large problems outside of US.
557.
by avmich 2y ago
No principal disagreement, I see.
558.
by avmich 2y ago
My point is the societies - and West in particular - become better with time and it's not very useful to remember past clashes to justify the avoidance of collaboration today. It's actually every country, not only West, which ough
559.
by avmich 2y ago
> America gov is still fighting random wars around the globe Give credit where it's due, last 3 presidents were consistently trying to reduce the number of foreign - non-USA - countries where American soldiers were operating. Amount
560.
by avmich 2y ago
It's a sad situation if those considerations would lead to conclusion that since everybody is not perfect, then all approaches are equally valid. For example, references to historical events gradually lose sense, as in a distant past h
561.
by avmich 2y ago
West has really not much of a choice here. The US Declaration of Independence states: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, tha
562.
by avmich 2y ago
> But such employees will sometimes leave and build their own stuff. Which they'll very likely succeed at, exactly because of the approach they have. Microsoft was known at some time to provide good environment for their engineers s
563.
by avmich 2y ago
I interpret this as that SpaceX has a high margin between market prices and their internal costs, so they can safely reduce prices when needed while remaining profitable. The competitor of course should aim not to the current prices, but to
564.
by avmich 2y ago
> I'm very curious though if you have counterexamples, or think the premise is otherwise flawed. I suspect we can find counterexamples if look enough, though to truly present some a serious knowledge of science history is needed. Wh
565.
by avmich 2y ago
SpaceX is certainly giving a hard time to its competitors, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't exist. Some of them may actually follow the same route, designing reusable hardware and reducing launch costs. SpaceX took 20 years to b
566.
by avmich 2y ago
That's correct, but it's still interesting that you have that opportunity to shave - slash? - costs here. And also the other engine mentioned isn't an aluminum one.
567.
by avmich 2y ago
I suspect John Ousterhout https://web.stanford.edu/~ouster/cgi-bin/papers/ramcloud.pdf would have other ideas.
568.
by avmich 2y ago
Paul Breed, from Unreasonable Rocket team - https://x.com/unrocket - mentioned, a decade or so ago, that he printed some aluminum engines for regenerative cooling by hydrogen peroxide for ~$1000 . Another story from http:&
569.
by avmich 2y ago
Awesome story, thanks! It seems the design choices are rather conservative, which is entirely justified by the "from scratch" part for the first engine. I'm sure subsequent designs will be more bold and adventurous. Keep up g
570.
by avmich 2y ago
> Certainly more than aviation per passenger * mile (assuming altitude being the traveled distance) But then it's much less of passenger * mile with the given definition.

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