Vocal Voices

SpaceX managed too get their Starship SN5 prototype (or flying stainless steel beer can), up to 150 meters and back to land without blowing up, leaking, or crashing.

They have two more prototypes in production so we should see more from them over the following months. They already have permission to fly 20km sub orbital flights, so it should be an interesting watch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s1HA9LlFNM0

Note that about 15 seconds in as the rocket slews sideways over the launch mount, it rips something apart and blows it up in the air. I think we'll be waiting a few more days before they put the thing back in it's mount again (if this one even does).

It is more impressive because the ship is designed to have 3 atmospheric rockets in a triangle which balance each other and this launch had a single rocket which was offset and they had to counter the offset with thrusters.

It is nice to see that there is something else going on in the world other than the pandemic and Trump and Brexit and.... Well, politics.

Seems an awful lot of effort to have moved that beer can a few hundred feet sideways ....

It's impressive, technologically, no doubt about that, but to what purpose?

Yes, we can get to Mars and possibly some of the moons of Jupiter and Saturn - then what? Terra-forming them to make them habitable for a few humans? So what, the Sun will still die and us with it.

We have lost the plot and are living on dreams. We are further away from interplanetary travel and colonisation than we are from the free energy of nuclear fission and that is proving, shall we say, a bit difficult. Because of Capitalism and our current economic models we will have done ourselves in long before either dream becomes reality.

We seriously need to care for Earth 1.0 and its inhabitants - all life. We are massively failing.

It does (effort that is). But when you consider the goal.

On Friday Spacex will launch another 57 Starlink satellites and two commercial satellites to low earth orbit. The second stage will be lost and burn up on re-entry, if they are lucky they will catch (again), both halves of the payload fairing (cost to manufacture, around $5m) and they will land the booster. Then it will take them two months to turn around the booster, manufacture a new second stage, refurbish the fairings and go again.

With Starship, the booster (larger than the beer can), will land, be refuelled and be ready to go by the morning. Starship itself will deliver 300 starlink satellites, return to ground and land (no fairings, the loads are internal), refuel and be ready to go again by the morning.

Worth expending the effort. They're going to run every other launch providor out of business for commercial traffic.

We're going to fail anyway WM. If you consider that the move from hunter gatherer to farming and the acquisition of wealth and power, you can see that where we are going is inevitable.

The only way out of where we are going is technical innovation and the advancement of the entire population to the point where everyone sees the advantages of a sustainable world.

Right now we are further away from that than we are away from being an interplanetary species.

Just because we are 200 years away from societal enlightenment does not mean we should not reach for the stars. In fact we should try even harder because I keep waiting for some fanatical religious cause that will drag us back into the dark ages by destroying what technology we do have.

Nuclear fusion may continue to be 30 years away for another 100 years, or it may suddenly become a fact and free us from the daily grind of powering our future. Although if anyone believes that this will suddenly create a society of leisure and lack of want, I have a condo, on a swamp, in the path of both tornado's and hurricanes.
Excellent opportunity!!

Fusion is more likely than most think. Steam power was held up by quality mettaleurgy and high precision machene tools.

Fusion is being held up by software modelling, magnetic field manipulation and the ability to build truly fault free equipment. We solved this for nuclear weapons and there is no doubt we will do it for Fusion. Initially we didn't even know what we needed. Now we just need to create what we need. Entirely different situation.

Meanwhile why wouldn't we wish to reach for the stars?

I, for one, could do with truly Global Internet that outperforms my land-line and is a one stop shop for price wherever I go. SpaceX estimates it will take 35,000 satellites to do this. Should we do it in 60 inefficient chunks or 300 efficient chunks?

It is about time the space industry claimed out of the1960's

Oh, wow!

More space junk to allow us to not drive into a field in the middle of nowhere, get TwitFace access to remote addicts and enable morons to download the Simpsons' in nanoseconds. Great stuff!

Meanwhile, back on the only planet we are likely to ever have, we are growing its population exponentially, using up its finite resources at an increasing rate, changing its climate at a pace never seen before and trashing our own environment. But do we care? No! We live for today in our comfortable state and kid ourselves we are OK based on the dreams of a few of the new tomorrow.

Yet it is us who will suffer most. The meek, the Nomads, the Aborigines and Bush Men will one day inherit the Earth and they will do OK.

A penthouse condo in Millionaireville will not save the rest when the food and water run out. Billions of us are never getting off this planet, and nearly all of us are only ever going to take from it till we destroy it. It's not easy to accept, but it is the truth, the way we live at present cannot go on ad infinitum regardless of our wishes and dreams. If we are ever going to get to the stars we must change how we live today.

Actually I was thinking more of not laying 10 billion miles of Copper cables and 100 billion miles of fibre.

But see it as you must.

You know thee is a line of reasoning that said that the luddites didn't mind progress, they just wanted to control it.

There are countries like France who don't want satellite Internet because they cannot control and monopolise it.

It takes all opinions to make a community.

I am sorry but I find all this enthusiasm] and optimism about space exploration and all things technological quite depressing.

I obviously gaze on in wonder at such things as the Hubble telescope and the up coming Webb telescope and the things they can see and show us. The same goes for the various spacecraft and rovers, landing on asteroids, flying through the rings of Saturn and orbiting Pluto. And of course I am amazed at how far we have come with machine learning, AI and quantum computing, everyday computing and the Internet, and I do understand where these thing could take us if we keep progressing at the same rate.

Then I look at planet Earth and I am not sure we have the time left. The population grows at roughly 10,000 every hour. That equates to about an extra 20,000 litres of clean water, 24 million calories of food and 4.5 million litres of air to breathe each and every day, and remember they are for just one hour's population growth. Multiply them by 24 to get the daily figures and then by seven for the week and then by 52 for the year. Then do the same for the 7.8 billion of us who were already here when you started and you might get to understand why I am not so optimistic.

I understand WM, what is more concerning is that the environmentalists completely ignore it, or worse, say it is a smokescreen to cover inaction.

I have even pointed out that the entire western world going net 0 carbon will be overwhelmed by the population and emissions growth of India alone by 2050.

So going on a diet of livable biosphere killing emissions won't do it, because it is going to fail anyway with the current population growth.

What is left?

Space, the planets, the asteroid belt.

So I chose to aim in a different direction and Spacex is doing a very good job of giving us some options.

Suff wrote:So going on a diet of livable biosphere killing emissions won't do it, because it is going to fail anyway with the current population growth.

What is left?

Space, the planets, the asteroid belt.

It's a nice dream, but.....

I have this recurring dream. I am on the playing fields and I sense this thing overhead. I can't smell it, see it or hear it, but I know it's there. So, I get some pebbles and start throwing them. The first 'hits' something and I try again. The second sails off as it should. Turn slightly and the third hits again. Next thing I know I am in this room with some 'people' and the commander is talking to me.

"How did you know we are here, we are cloaked?"
"I didn't, but my sixth sense said something was not right"
"Sixth sense?"

And so the discussion starts. S/he wants answers about our sixth sense and I do my best. We get into animals knowing about earthquakes and volcanoes and how we instinctively know someone is looking at us, and on and on. Eventually I have had enough.

"You have been watching us, haven't you?"
Silence.
"You have visited us many times. You have watched us over millions of years. You have seen us come down from the trees, master fire, colonise the Earth and create civilizations, agriculture and Empires. You have seen us grow and grow and you have seen that in only a few hundreds of our years we have gone from simple farmers to be on the cusp of reaching to the stars."
"This is true."
"You have also seen our wars and our weapons and that we have gone from spears to nuclear weapons and could wipe ourselves out in seconds, and we did it in no time. We are both good and bad."
"This is also true."'
"So why are you here?"
"We have to decide whether to help you or destroy you or..... You are a violent people and if we help you to reach the stars we will have to control you, and we will, or we could wipe you out and move on. The alternative is to let you enjoy your planet and lead comfortable lives without bothering us. Unfortunately if we do that we will need to reduce your population. We have plans.

OK, do the necessary then let us live in peace here on Earth. We don't need the stars.