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Hall of Famer [20540]
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In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
Apr 26, 2021, 8:56 AM
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1903. Just 118 years ago. And it changed everything. And I mean, freaking everything about the world, like every single part of it, and almost instantly. Once it was established this concept was actually possible, the world shrunk, travel distances - at least for important people and documents and then important bits of freight - became increasingly trivial - and all manner of things that would have been inconceivable in the 1800's became possible. Once this one awkward plane flew, the sky filled with them, and almost instantly.
I mention this because Elon Musk and SpaceX are right at that point with re-useable heavy launch capability with their "Starship" project. Right now it's actually a fairly entertaining internet meme...the running joke goes, how is Elon's rocket going to explode when it lands today, because his Starship guys have been finding new and inventive ways to blow up his Starship rockets upon touchdown.
So...yeah. Clearly some work remains to be done there. But the fact remains, the second - and I mean the second - those things stop exploding (and they will, he always gets things sorted eventually), everything, and I mean everything changes again, and probably in ways that makes the revolution spawned by the invention of manned flight seem a bit precious. What we'll see at that point is a truly epic procession of heavy freight up the gravity well, and an ever-more epic progression of manned habitats in orbit and those stable "LaGrange" points between Earth and the moon. Some of the concepts I've seen for the Orbitals...well. Mind-blowing.
I see some of you guys screeching about your endless petty culture war bullsh!t, gnashing on about the "future of this country". Lordy. Folks, I really think some of you guys have no freaking idea about the "future" that's actually coming, or how soon it's coming.
They're literally planning to start building the first Space Hotel in 2025, but that's almost a starter kit for some of the habs some of the futurists have thought up. This one is called a "McKendree cylinder." Basically it's a giant coffee can. You provide the gravity by spinning it, (it's actually centrifugal force), and the sky is and clouds are holographically generated.
That's the future, folks. You don't like how people are doing things here? Don't like liberals? Conservatives? Black people? White people? Men? Women? Hey! Now you can do it your way right from scratch! Build your own city, your own nation-state, park it in orbit, heck around the moon, around Mars even, if you can't stand the company around Earth, be as crunchy-granola hippy as you wanna be, or build your very own Nazi lockstep Aryan white people paradise in the sky where you can live in idyllic racial purity the rest of your days. All that's coming...and real soon.
Of course, along with all that, you get a whole new set of challenges. Who controls orbit? Who governs? Who polices? Who regulates? What about somebody getting militant, like, say, China? What about that "Kessler Syndrome", that cascading chain reaction of space junk that could happen? Can we clean orbit up enough to prevent it? New Age problems.
That's what really happens. It's never a paradise, the game just changes...and just sort of drags the rest of us along with it in its wake. It always does. But...nevermind. Resume posting rage about Black Lives Matters, and Cancelling Dr. Suess. I can tell you've got your fingers on the real pulse of things.
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Lot o points [155907]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
Apr 26, 2021, 8:59 AM
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
Apr 26, 2021, 9:07 AM
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I was going for extra smug.
Did I get there?
Point is, this grating incessant culture-war crap is pointless. History decides, and it's going to drag us along.
The future decides.
I also think we're right at one of those times where it's about to change real fast, by the way.
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Lot o points [155907]
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It is silly and incessant, and it was pretty harmless
Apr 26, 2021, 9:15 AM
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when it was Tipper Gore vs 2 Live Crew type stuff. I struggle more with it nowadays as it's far more macro and tends (intentionally, a cynic would say) to drive wedges between large groups, while somehow also managing to point back at our very system of government as hopelessly flawed and unrepairable and the source of almost all societal evils.
Culture wars were fun, pre-Internet, when only a few thousand people GAS about any given cause to even know of the cause's existence. Now, due to social media algorithms, the most banal causes seem to become the life mission of far more people than they should be.
As for space.....cool stuff, and despite the whacky, ineffective way he went about addressing it, I think Trump was onto something with his desire to be early to the party with a space military presence. It's going to be everything in a few years, and we ignore it at our own peril.
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: It is silly and incessant, and it was pretty harmless
Apr 26, 2021, 9:24 AM
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Yeah, and again, every one of those big hollow coffee can in space are going to be sovereign nations.
Once people realize that, they're going to throw them up faster than trailer parks. Eff Earth. We've been collectively stuck here together awhile with each because we couldn't go anywhere. Once Elon's Starships stop going boom, the human race can suddenly go places again...and I suspect, Oh, Will They Ever.
Especially as tired of one another as people seem to be right now, people are going to peel rubber right off the tarmac en masse for a while. Might be a real useful safety valve, actually.
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Lot o points [155907]
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Here's the thing......
Apr 26, 2021, 9:30 AM
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China has no problem claiming the entirety of the South China Sea (and then some) as their own, even though the rest of the free world is like "yeah, ok, whatever".
You think it's a stretch to think they won't just also claim sovereignty over all air and space over their borders within a 7.6 parsec distance from Earth? They're working hard already on space weaponry over there, and I'm not sure these coffee cans will be as free from the pull of Earth's various govt entities as they'd like to be.
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: Here's the thing......
Apr 26, 2021, 10:11 AM
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I'm not really sure what they'll try.
I do know they need to be checkmated.
Fortunately we're well ahead in terms of heavy launch, at least for the moment, probably at least 10-15 years. We need to not squander that lead.
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All-TigerNet [13108]
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Heisman Winner [111580]
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Heisman Winner [119707]
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Space elevator should be a priority
Apr 26, 2021, 9:27 AM
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Then you dont always need rockets to take payloads to orbit....
Graphene/carbon fiber is not far away from providing the earth to orbit links...
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: Space elevator should be a priority
Apr 26, 2021, 9:41 AM
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Yeah, it'd be great, we just aren't there yet. First we gotta get re-useable heavy launch; that's really the big first step.
I agree, dropping a skyhook down to Quito or some such would probably be huge for us. At that point you're talking megatons of freight into and out of orbit a day. You pretty much build and do what you want at that point. Bring it up, bring it down.
But we're not even at the "walk" stage, much less "sprint" and "re-engineer the solar system".
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Heisman Winner [119707]
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That’s why I said it should be a priority
Apr 26, 2021, 1:02 PM
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Once up and running, you have little need for heavy lifters. You build interplanetary ships in orbit and less energy is needed to jaunt around the SS ??
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: That’s why I said it should be a priority
Apr 26, 2021, 1:33 PM
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Has it been definitively established that graphene is strong enough for the cable? I know they did the math and figured out that the base of even diamondoid would have to be over a mile wide at the base to be strong enough...since the cable would have be 22,000km above the earth to achieve geosynchronous orbit, I know that wouldn't fly. You'd have to core out Jupiter to get that much diamondoid, and if you can core out Jupiter, you probably don't need the skyhook to begin with.
If graphene doesn't get it done, you're talking monomolecule, and we're a ways off of that yet.
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All-In [34108]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
Apr 26, 2021, 9:36 AM
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My first instinct with McKendree cylinders is that they won't happen. Too expensive with too little benefit. Instead, let's make a RingworldTM.
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Oculus Spirit [78892]
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the TV dinner also changed everything
Apr 26, 2021, 9:38 AM
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along with the TV
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Orange Blooded [3516]
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Elon Musk
Apr 26, 2021, 9:40 AM
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Is as close to a real life Tony Stark as we’ve ever seen. He will be as rich and as powerful as he chooses to be.
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All-In [26504]
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Wake me up when they land on the moon
Apr 26, 2021, 10:41 AM
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Again
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Letterman [257]
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Agreed. All these people talking about space colonies,
Apr 26, 2021, 12:30 PM
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self-driving cars, flying cars, hyper loop, etc. lose me. We put a man on the moon 60 years ago with less technology than is in the phone I’m typing this on. Not a lot of progress on space colonies since then. We were told decades ago all our cars were going to be self-driving soon. And yet we still don’t have them. Progress is slow. Maybe in a hundred years we will have a space colony. But not in my lifetime. I’m just looking forward to 20 or 30 years from now when I can get that self-driving car that was promised to me.
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: Agreed. All these people talking about space colonies,
Apr 26, 2021, 12:57 PM
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Well, yeah.
The big game changers on this are two key words: "re-useable" and "heavy launch."
Oh, and "commercially operated." As in, these rockets take off and then land again...and then take off once more, and then are intended to be leased for private use, for the purposes of making money for private enterprise. They are not very limited-capacity and expensive 1-offs subsidized at great government expense for scientific or military endeavors.
Greed, after all, is what really makes the world go around.
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110%er [5676]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
Apr 26, 2021, 2:51 PM
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Does this happen before or after fully self-driving cars?
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110%er [5676]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
Apr 26, 2021, 2:58 PM
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Someone beat me to that...
quozzel one thing I want to know is how will there be enough money for anyone except the 1% of 1%ers to think about space?
You are assuming that the "fundamental change" in the USA, as promised by the libs (starting with Obama) does not happen.
In that version of America, we regress to a country with little global influence/importance and an economy based on service jobs, not high-tech and high-paying manufacturing jobs. We will be like Greece if we are lucky.
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
May 6, 2021, 7:22 AM
[ in reply to Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane ] |
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So it would seem.
He'll get the self-driving cars down eventually, too. I just wouldn't ride in 'em for awhile, since Beta-testing that particular program is going to involve un-wrapping some vehicles from around light poles.
The dude's best attribute is that he just plain doesn't care that people laugh at him when he fails. He fails, he fails. He'll shrug his shoulders and keep right on failing...right up until the moment he finally gets it right, whereupon he just made another gazillion dollars.
I'm amazed people haven't seen this movie before, with this guy. Anybody who's still sneering at Musk at this point...seriously? Like him or hate him - and I myself am not so sure - the guy does Heap Huge Stuff, you know?
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Hall of Famer [20540]
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Re: In 1903, the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane
May 5, 2021, 7:06 PM
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Well, here we go.
SN15 just stuck its landing...like, a week after I wrote this post. And didn't explode. This is a huge moment though few will mark it at the time, just as nobody really noticed the Wright Brothers flying that rickety contraption either.
It's a big deal, though. A really big deal. The human race just entered a new era, folks. Get ready. The next few years are going to be crazy. Re-useable heavy launch is an entirely different animal than the one-off light launches we were doing before, especially because these are commercial.
There's going to be hiccups a-plenty between here and there, but proof of concept just got delivered. It works.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/05/05/spacex-starship-sn15-livestream-watch-prototype-rocket-test-flight.html
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