Talk-Polywell.org

My understanding is that Elon Musk wants to invest in refining existing known good hardware that meets his personal goals, such as taking rockets and making them reusable. If someone developed and built a working, usable thruster - as opposed to a research build thats only really good on a test stan...

choff wrote:When life imitates art.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWMPe3wF9jQ

This was the first thing I thought of when I saw the shot of the Earth behind the roadster. Glad to see I wasn't alone in that.

They did the burn about six hours after launch. It ended up not being a proper Trans-Mars-Injection burn, however. Its more like a Trans-Ceres-Injection burn, clear into the Belt, if not quite to Ceres orbit . I'd call that a success on showing off what its heavy lift rocket design can do, even if t...

Going from memory, but I thought the issue was a-periodic dips in light, as opposed to increases?

With solid state lithium batteries seemingly inevitable, even if you bought into EEStor, they're close to losing almost all of their advantages. If these advantages ever existed in the first place... Thats his point. Whether EEStor ever really worked is pretty much irrelevant if "normal" batteries ...

It is so tempting to take a short notice vacation and "visit my parents" in Eustice FL, "coincidentally" in time to see FH launch.

It looks like a splatter of mildly viscous matter. Couldn't it just be a spurt of ejecta that cooled into that same original shape it was jettisoned as, and be one of a few/the one stray ejectus that got away? If it was hot enough to be considered plastic, it should have reached hydrostatic equilib...

Even without amusing aerobatics, I think we'll hear from the judges when Space X (finally!) starts on their synchronized team flying/landing attempts.

I see Johan's tongue is as sharp as ever.

The descriptions in the article remind me of some of the descriptions Johan Prinn (am I remembering his name correctly?) gave for the work he was doing.

delta v = v_e * ln( wet mass / dry mass ) If we assume the lower (sea level) Isp of 330s for the raptors, and a 100 metric ton dry mass, then you would need 3020 metric tons of fuel to result in a delta v of 11126.31 m/s. If you change the Isp to the vacuum value (375s) and ignore the presence of a...

Even if flight time is bumped up to 1 or 2 hours to mitigate G stresses on the passengers, that would still be significantly better than aircraft for flights traveling more than 1/3 of the way around the globe, and possibly for some shorter distances.

Elon just finished an AMA over at Reddit ... perhaps a little tipsy while doing so. Skimming through the top level questions and responses and found this gem from Musk: The advantage of getting somewhere in 30 mins by rocket instead of 15 hours by plane will be negatively affected if "but also, you...

Cue the setting in Fallen Angles.

Yes, it is currently spring in the Southern Hemisphere as of ~20 September.