RE: Succesful launch of Falcon Heavy
February 7, 2018 at 12:57 pm
(This post was last modified: February 7, 2018 at 12:58 pm by Anomalocaris.)
(February 6, 2018 at 11:50 pm)AFTT47 Wrote:(February 6, 2018 at 8:29 pm)chimp3 Wrote: Musk is impressive. His work is the Apollo launches of this era! Impressive accomplishments. When I first read of his goals, thought pie in the sky. Soon, I believe a private entity might make it to Mars before any nation.
I disagree with his space goals. I believe artificial orbital space colonies in the vision of Gerard K O'Neil - spinning to give you what ever simulated gravity you want - are the future - not colonizing frozen snowballs like Mars. The first steps to building those are settlements on the moon and near-Earth asteroids to mine them for the necessary materials.
That said: I LOVE Musk. He has visions totally lacked by the government. He has the will and the skill to make the world a better place. Thank goodness for guys like him and Jeff Bezos.
The orbital energy is always of such large magnitude that it will always to enormously costly to either attain it from the ground, or vary it significantly to move objects to a different part of the solar system.
In the long run, you will probably still get a much bigger bang for the buck by gradually transitioning to using in-situ raw materials to support colonizing mars than always having to move raw material up to orbit or around different orbits to build orbital habitats.
Also, also, I suspect a fully developed colony on a planet is inheritently safer and less vulnerable to catastrophic disruption than artificial construct in orbit.
(February 7, 2018 at 4:18 am)shadow Wrote:(February 6, 2018 at 5:18 pm)zebo-the-fat Wrote: Musk has sucessfully launched his Falcon Heavy, perfect launch, all 3 boosters landed ... very impressive
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-42969020
Love it! Governments have stopped caring about space exploration but it's great to see the private sector take it up. And it's fairly revolutionary. Musk said: "It'll be like trying to sell an aircraft where one aircraft company has a reusable aircraft and all the other companies had aircraft that were single-use where you would parachute out at your destination and the plane would crash-land randomly somewhere. Crazy as that sounds - that's how the rocket business works."
Exciting times in space travel, once again! Who knows, maybe I'll have a chance to be a space tourist before I die?
The economy Musk prophesied hasn’t actually been really demonstrated yet.
