SpaceX has just announced that they’re going to attempt to add another vehicle to their reusable fleet, with another landing attempt at sea early next Wednesday morning from the Cape.
Meanwhile, here’s the most comprehensive analysis I’ve seen so far of how much they can reduce cost and prices, but it’s based on a lot of assumptions.I found this curious:
Musk said the fuel used on a Falcon 9 is between $200,000 and $300,000. Reserving fuel in the first stage for landing adds mass to the vehicle and deprives it of performance, effectively carrying fuel instead of extra payload — a penalty that expendable rockets do not need to pay. Musk was addressing not the performance penalty, but the issue of fuel cost, which is a non-issue in the overall economics of reusability.
Actually, much of the point of reusability is to get to the point at which one cares about propellant costs. It’s expendables in which they are a non-issue.
Dr. Eades reviews what appears to be a very interesting book.
My thoughts: No, we can’t sustain the current human population without agriculture. But then, we’re not sure how we’re going to sustain a human population in space, either. We need advances in technology to solve either problem. I suspect that we’ll be manufacturing meat in the not-too-distant future that will have the taste, texture and nutrition of the real thing, and that will be good for all, including wildlife. But even absent that, I’d amend the old bumper sticker. Grains aren’t food. Grains are what food eats.
It’s an outgrowth of my “SLS Roadblock” project, which I’m figuring out how to either wrap up or extend.
[Update a while later]
Erratum: At the time I originally created these charts, for the FISO telecon at the end of January, Dana had proposed the Space Settlement bill. He has since actually introduced it.
Since Tuesday, I have been asking communications officials in NASA’s Human Exploration and Operations Mission Directorate for clarification on what this extra funding will be used for and whether it’s needed. I haven’t received a response.
Because they don’t have a response. It is programmatic insanity to just throw hundreds of millions of dollars at a manager and expect them to spend it sensibly in a single year.
Eric Berger has the story, including the fact that we’ve done absolutely no research in partial gravity, which will be necessary if people want to procreate on Mars.
I’d note that while it’s never officially been confirmed, it seems unlikely, given the nature of astronauts, that no one has ever done it in space.
Shuttle had very sensitive accelerometers. It's likely that Houston was aware of any rhythmic orbital exertions. https://t.co/RNnYSfnCyi
Here are the proceedings of the symposium in the Netherlands. Haven’t read through them, but I expect to see a lot of support for Moon Treaty-like “solutions.”
According to the pictures sent back from a high-resolution camera, the 600 embryos, which were put under the camera, developed from the 2-cell stage, an early-on embryonic cleavage stage, to blastocyst, the stage where noticeable cell differentiation occurs, around 72 hours after SJ-10’s launch. The timing was largely in line with embryonic development on Earth, according to CAS.
But we still have no idea what happens in partial gravity. And they didn’t bring them to term.
