marsokod

There are a few things that are different from what NASA has done in the past:

1. SpaceX Rocket is the most powerful rocket ever, surpassing everything that NASA or anyone else has ever done.

2. they are landing the rockets, with the aim of being able to recover them. If you skip the technicality that SpaceX first stage is suborbital but is part of an orbital launcher, that makes SpaceX the only entity who has achieved that, with some comparison to the Space Shuttle and Buran, though both were losing significant sections of the initial launcher, with very difficult repairs once on the ground.

3. the cost of the launcher. In terms of capabilities, NASA’s SLS is probably close to Starship. However, it costs around $2B/launch, and nothing is recoverable. Starship is meant for low cost. It is estimated that the current hardware + propellant for a single launch is under $100M. With reusability, a cost per launch under $10M is achievable in the mid term (10 years I would say) once the R&D has been paid ($1.4B/year at the moment, I would guess the whole development for Starship will be $10-20B, so same if not less than SLS).

4. the aim for high speed reusability - SpaceX aim is to launch as much as possible, as fast as possible, with the same hardware. While it is a bit early to understand how successful they will be (Elon was saying a launch every 1hr, which seem to be very optimistic, I would bet 6-12hrs to be more achievable). That was NASA’s original goal for the Space Shuttle, and they failed that.

5. finally, orbital refueling means you have a single vehicle that can basically go anywhere in the inner solar system without much issues, and minimal cost.

Also, what gets people excited are the prospects of what this enables. A 10-100x decrease in the access to orbit changes completely the space economics and opens a lot of possibilities. This means going to the Moon is a lot simpler because now you don’t need to reduce the mass of everything. This makes engineering way easier as you do not need to optimise everything to death, which tends to increase costs exponentially. And as for Mars, Starship is what makes having a meaningful colony there possible. Doing an Apollo like mission on Mars would have been possible for decades, but at a significant price for not much to show for. With cheap launch, you can just keep sending hardware there.

Around 20-25% power consumption reduction against native resolution, that’s neat.

To do the math, an assuming constant volume, a 30C increase corresponds to around 10% increase in pressure. That’s well within the margins of the tyre even if you go to the max rated.

If you then consider deformation and most importantly leakage over several weeks, this is a non-issue.

You cannot really hide it. The launch has to be public to warn airplanes and ships so they can avoid the area. And once the launch is public, such a failure is quite evident to anyone who was interested in following it, so you might has well publish the news instead of trying to hide the unhidable.

I wear slippers inside mostly to protect agains cold floor, coffee tables, and most important of all, Lego bricks on the loose.

Also another reason to wear shoes inside is when you are constantly going inside and outside. Which means then your floor is dirty… which means you want to protect your feet from the dirt. That’s a vicious cycle but can be one of the reasons.

It means that U.S. automakers find it cheaper to have their vehicles made in China and then import them in the U.S., rather than make them directly in the U.S. in the first place.

This means that manufacturing in China is so cheap that even with the tariffs, it is more cost effective to go there. If your goal with the tariffs is to level the game, then this should not happen (no one would relocate like that unless there is a massive gain).

As heating network, they are and will be regulated like other energy suppliers: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/energy-security-bill-factsheets/energy-security-bill-factsheet-heat-networks-regulation-and-zoning

That’s interesting, it looks like I may have a bias on that due to my scientific background.

I always said salt, of sodium chloride for NaCl. Who is using sodium for table salt? The only time I heard that associated was when saying that table salt is a source of sodium, which is true.

Most likely because the news is in English. And why would Natrium be better on an international forum?

It is Sodium in most Latin languages (despite Natrium being Latin), in Hindi and in Arabic. And Chinese has a different root. Among the 10 most spoken languages (according to Wikipedia), only Russian is using Natrium.

By quantity of oil, I would think an oil spill is more damaging.

However, the damage from the sum of all oil spills pale in comparison to the damage of burned fossil fuels. But that’s because we try not to spill oil too much, that’s expensive to waste it.

The cheapest ICE Dacia is 12000€. I suspect you are comparing a new car price vs a used car price, which is quite unfair.

You can get a used Dacia or a used Zoe for a bit under 10000€, which has probably less km than your car (see this one https://zoomcar.fr/dacia-spring-business-2020-33479218.html, or the numerous Zoe). Now granted these are not great cars: but it is hard to compare a 5-10 year-old ICE with an electric, simply because the electric used market is still small as these cars are new.

Now you raise a valid point on the chargers. But this is coming and that’s why no one (almost no one, I’m sure there are lunatics somewhere) wants to ban ICE right away. You ban new ones in 7 years, and this means that in 17 years a good majority of the cars will be electric. Chargers are quite quick to install, especially low power ones. There are many companies focusing on street light charging and as the number of electric cars grow, public chargers will become more available with a denser network. It’s really a chicken and egg problem - they won’t install massive amounts of chargers for them to stay unused.

Je suis curieux, tu parles de quelles voitures là ?

Defense money is not lost, it pays people within your country. And you can even decide whether it goes to big corps or small companies.

More accurate data here: https://planet4589.org/space/con/star/stats.html

Total down over the past 5 years is 355 over 5200 launched. And definitely not 50-100 satellites were lost in a week.

It’s not really major news because the report is inaccurate and they are not dying at any abnormal rate at the moment. The only news is that one website is having issues updating their data and can temporarily display misleading information.

Be careful about news on this. The data coming from satellitemap.space can be unreliable for recent data.

If you look at he work from Marco Langbroek https://twitter.com/Marco_Langbroek/status/1705562829225410697 or Jonathan McDowell, respected figures in space object tracking, these reports are inacurate.

Overlay it with a map of electricity emissions and it will fit nicely with a few small exceptions (like any small country neighbouring Poland, they will have bad air regardless of their own production).

https://app.electricitymaps.com/map

Even as a slave, the cost of a human work is magnitudes above the cost of using a pump with petrol. A slave may be able to output ~1kWh per day, that’s mostly a few 10s of cents anywhere. Can you feed anyone on that?

I think that’s unlikely. The nigerien force would encounter a lot of resistance, and this is likely to escalade the situation with ECOWAS and the African Union.

This is a game of chicken and the junta has very few good cards to play right now. Strategically, their only option is to wait until people are forced to accept them. But that option is extremely difficult given the current economical situation and blocus. They have almost no allies around them