Seats filled for first all-civilian spaceflight crew
reuters.com
reuters.com
They failed miserably. Meanwhile spacex has been founded and got to the point commercial customers are about to go up, not just to 100km, but to orbital speeds.
“The first 90 percent of the code accounts for the first 90 percent of the development time. The remaining 10 percent of the code accounts for the other 90 percent of the development time.” [1]
Did not Russia earn some cash for flying passengers to the ISS some time ago?
These everyday people did not pay either. That wealthy guy just brought them in by paying large sum. So I think this "being first" part is disingenuous / propaganda. I think we might take a while to wait till "ordinary people" could actually afford such trip.
One is an aerospace professional and ex US-airforce, one is an ex-astronaut candidate with a PhD, and the other is a physician with deep historic ties to a very prominent childrens hospital & the charity that isaacman is a huge donor of. These are all extraordinary people, and not "everyday" people by any means. They are there because a billionare chose them and they're qualified, extraordinary people, (and a billionare is sponsoring them).
I read the Terms and Conditions, and it seemed on the up-and-up.
Maybe they mean to say first crew without any former soldiers? Ok. That might be true, but is a fine line to draw. I have never heard of any other organization be openly proud of not employing veterans on a project. Does this mean that any country with mandatory military service, making everyone a former soldier, is unable to ever launch a civilian crew?
If we really want to draw legal lines, the US still has selective service in place. Any American males on this flight are subject to it, giving them a small tie to the US military in that they has registered as potential recruits. They have a number and a card somewhere. The fact that someone is x-military does not mean they are never again a civilian. Being drafted doesnt mean you are soldier forever. Lots of all x-military flights have happened.
Thinking that space exploration resumes only to SpaceX is the same for me as some of my acquaintances thinking Facebook being the whole internet.
I'm not for "climate shaming" people into "green behavior". I'm all for a fair and square pollution taxes, that every polluter has to pay.
But this kind of news make even me frown...
Hence I think the only way out fair and square taxation.
It's not a new idea, and thus has a name:
There’s still nitrogen, phosphate, biodiversity, and antibiotics abuse to care about, but I’m confident greenhouse gases are a solved problem and that people will get rich by reducing emissions by at least half by December 2030.
We're still in a car that's headed off the cliff. We've only just reached the point where when people want to press the accelerator harder it reliably causes widespread yelling from those convinced that hurtling off a cliff is a bad idea.
We not only aren't steering away from the cliff edge, we haven't even checked the brakes work, maybe this car doesn't have brakes, and if we only finally try them after we go off the cliff I can assure you they won't help then.
But yes, these days most calls to accelerate faster are getting shouted down, if you think that's enough I hope we both live long enough for you to find out how wrong that was.
More importantly, exponential growth of the solution is much faster than the sub-exponential growth of the problem. Indeed, faster than almost everything else in the technological world — so far as I am aware, only Moore’s law and the cost of gene reading/writing have been improving faster for any length of time.
Still sub-exponential, which is why I’m still optimistic.
If you said that about an algorithm you were considering introducing into production code, I'd say you had a lot of optimization to go. Or, maybe you need to improve your proof. :P
Calls to go faster may well be getting shouted down, but it’s also the cheapest form of new energy — at current prices, PV beats coal and gasoline for electricity and transport respectively even after adding the cost of batteries — so people are deploying it as fast as they can anyway for selfish reasons, and output is limited more by the rate of construction of factories rather than anything else.
[0] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:PV_cume_semi_log_cha...
At some point I wish we could just go off the cliff, then we can stop hearing all of these dire warnings constantly about how the edge of the cliff is this close.
>>>The Falcon 9 rocket runs on fossil fuels, namely Rocket Propellant 1 or RP-1, which is highly refined kerosene.
>>>Each launch burns 29,600 gallons or 112,184 Kilograms, with each Kg of fuel releasing 3 Kg of CO2, so each launch releases 336,552 Kg of CO2.
>>>A flight from London to New York City has a carbon footprint of 986 Kg, so a SpaceX launch is the equivalent of flying 341 people across the Atlantic (Jacob calculated 395). It sounds terrible, until you realize that that is about the number of people that fit into one 777-300, which can carry 45,220 gallons of fuel. So overall, one transatlantic flight of a 777 is considerably worse than a flight of the Falcon, and they do this hundreds of times a day. [1]
[1] https://www.treehugger.com/spacex-launch-puts-out-much-co-fl...
What am I missing? Seems space flight is a lot more polluting...
My point being: I dont care how many flights of one type or the other is happening. I want to tax pollution fair and square. Same pollution tax on the petrol pump around the corner, as on the airport, as on the space center.
I disagree. We should fight pollution, and air travel seems to evade all taxes on fuel mankind came up with...
> Pollution taxes are one way to do that.
It's about making pollution taxes fair and square. Not: tax this, don't tax that.
Yes, I agree. My mind forgot to read your last sentence...
This also means that for both industries, switching to green fuels will not have much of an impact on the bottom line but will have a huge PR impact. F1 racing is doing so, and I expect SpaceX to do so as well.
Musk recently announced that they'll be generating their own liquid oxygen using green energy, and liquid oxygen is ~85% of the propellant used in a launch.
SpaceX has several other reasons:
- Musk cares about this stuff
- RP1 and Starship's methane are highly purified variants of kerosene / natural gas respectively. Therefore they are more expensive than their feedstock, so if they start with a pure synthesized variant, they can avoid additional purifying steps.
- the plan is to synthesize methane on Mars. They'll have to be doing this in large quantities on Mars, so some experience doing it on Earth is a little bit useful.
Realistically, it will be easier and cheaper to achieve the same goal by buying carbon offsets on the market. Let's be pessimistic. At 3400 tons of propellant per launch (not sure how much of it actually becomes CO2), and an estimated 50$ per tonne on the market, we're talking about 170 000$, so instead of 2 000 000$ per launch, we're talking about 2 170 000$ per CARBON-NEUTRAL launch.
Only factoring in PR value, it's totally worth it.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1364470475620044802?ref_...
The perfect stoichiometric ratio would get the highest exhaust velocity, but thrust is mass x velocity, and ISP is relative to propellant mass. Oxygen is relatively heavy, so optimum ISP is fuel rich.