No you were wrong then, now is when the time is now.
The real question is when will then be now?
2 Likes
What about later? When will it be later? Now?
1 Like
Soon™
10char
2 Likes
so there’s been something that’s been scratching in my mind, and i just recently found this community and haven’t been able to pinpoint a search function so forgive me if this has been asked:
with the new discovery of the gravity waves, there has been something i’ve been wondering a lot about: is space time traveling faster than c inside the black hole? the deeper inside, the faster its accelerating?
No, not under General Relativity, at least. In GR, space-time itself doesn’t move. Waves in space-time can move, but the space-time itself remains still. Instead, what happens inside the event horizon of a black hole is is that the time dimension of space-time and one of the space dimensions of space-time exchange roles.
But time only allows for restricted movement: You can’t move backwards through time. This means when the time dimension and one of the space dimensions switch roles, that space dimension inherits that restriction: You can only move “forward” in that direction!
It just so happens that the space dimension that swaps roles with time is the radial direction, and the “forward” direction is the inward direction.
3 Likes
Sir Richard Branson unveils new Virgin Galactic Spaceship
1 Like
More from Branson, with not much to show for all the money and development time, still its good news the projects moving forward. I hope it does all work well. I’m such a frustrated futurist, I really wish we could have what’s around the next 10 corners now!. I’m not getting any younger. Space development is so slow, I just wish the money investment and man power could be a lot more like the Saturn 5 rocket days.
Maybe once China does their Moon orbit flight things will really start to pick up. China is the one to watch with their ambitious space flight, station and Moon base plans.
A moon base will aid space flight interest from the wider general public which might help NASA with their future manned Mars mission. 2025-2030 ish, If they had a lot more funding this would be happening a lot sooner.
Thankfully we do have the likes of Branson, and Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and all the other private space flight investors. And China. I think China is the one to watch once they reach their Moon orbit mission stage.
1 Like
I was wondering about that since the announcement…
1 Like
Although it doesn’t feel like it, things are picking up. for the first time in over a decade there’s competition for domestic security launches. The cost of kg to orbit has fallen by nearly 10x in the last decade due to SpaceX(Strictly comparing the spaceshuttle to falcon9. I’m sure you could argue 5x even against Ariannespace or Proton rockets). We landed a fucking first stage after it sent it’s payload to orbit. That’s AMAZING and is what it will take to increase(by virtue of cheaper launches) our access to space.
I’m obviously a fan of what SpaceX of doing, but if one looks around the launch provider community(globally) you can see the effects being felt by everyone where you needn’t be a fan to see it.
ULA is moving fast to retire it’s Delta line of rockets because of their obscene costs, and to a lesser extent Atlas V. They are currently designing a rocket, Vulcan, capable of semi-reuse aimed at reducing their costs to launch.
Arianne has released it’s own version of reuse, Adeline, to be used with their next gen rocket Arianne 6, which is supposedly cheaper than Arianne V before even before re-usability is taken into account.
Russia is being Russia, but currently their proton launches rival the cost of SpaceX and are super cheap as it is. I don’t recall having seen any plans for next-gen rockets or for re-usability.
If we follow these trends, especially assuming reusable rockets are successful and can further reduce costs, access to space is getting dramatically cheaper, and prices will continue to fall for decades to come.
I don’t think it will take China to do a lunar flyby to increase space development because a resurgence in space is already happening.
Edit: Added more rocket gifs because rockets are awesome.
5 Likes
Yes your rocket gif’s are cool to watch. I am impressed by all these recent re-usable landing rocket stages. But do wonder how much time and money it takes to turn them around for safe reuse. As we move into the next age of advanced materials and cheaper and smarter manufacturing processes, does it always make sense to re-use.
I think by the time China does the Moon fly-around it should be a world event, since its the first time Man would have returned so close to the moon. If not that event then certainly when they attempt a manned landing which should follow in the few years after the fly around if all goes well that is.
I cannot help but get caught up in the space tech we saw in ‘The Martian’. Stuff just working so much better and faster and with far advanced materials and Mars suit AI tech. Things being done quicker and with much greater ease.
Even though the ship almost tipped over in the storm, which almost wrecked the Sol base, and then air lock blew up… but apart from those events. Everything else was very nice to watch. All that tech was long past its design window in the film /book fiction, but all very well designed though to last that long.
Sad to say I’ll be either over 100 years old, or already dead by the time we start to see the tech and missions seen in the film ‘The Martian’. That makes me sad. Wish I could go to sleep and wake up in that space age.
1 Like
Unfortunately, a work of science fiction isn’t the most representative case of what our tech would look like in the future. The movie nor the book had to explain exactly how each of the materials/suits/people dealt with issues that absolutely exist on Mars but we’re overlooked.
That is the reason why it takes so long. A film or book can make it look so easy when the actual challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult.
Your questions regarding the cost of reuse is one the fundamental reasons these experiments are being conducted. We do not know what it costs to refurb a falcon 9, but you can’t know the answer to that until you recover one intact.
Don’t even get me started. It’s not like we actually account for or even currsntly pay all of the costs of ‘disposable’ launch tech, anyway. Drop a booster in the ocean and forget about it? We’ll pay for it eventually, even if it isn’t the generation, the nation, or the company that launched it that actually foots the bill. It has a cost, regardless.
So, if reusable launch tech is even close to comparable to disposable tech, in terms of cost and reliability, then it’s worth exploring. Because on the whole, it really is cheaper.
3 Likes
Won’t ask you to! That’s also a point I never thought of before with respect rocket launches…obviously reducing costs is clear side effect, but preventing future generations from dealing with our mistakes is a hidden side effect as well. Future generations, and my own, will have to fix/deal with the ramifications of climate change as the decades roll on and it’s nice to realize that we can nip one future cost in the butt early and take care of it now. That being said full reuse including the second stage is at least a 5 years to a decade away unfortunately. The physics of it are daunting since every kg you install on S2 comes directly from the max payload.
I’m stoked on SpaceX because I had decided I was going to go into physics for something in aerospace(I’ve always been interested in space) and not long after that decision SpaceX docked dragon with the ISS for the first time and I knew I wanted to work with them for at least a little bit once I graduate.
How much pollution launches are causing, actually? And how much that is compared to other sources of pollution?
Go after everything not, just the big things.
http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-35631223
Human-induced climate change is triggering changes beneath the waves that could have a long-term effect on marine food webs, a study suggests.
An assessment of phytoplankton in the North Atlantic found the microscopic organisms’ pole-ward shift was faster than previously reported.
My DNA has one atom switched. The pluses and minuses for something so small. So ya everything.
It depends on how or what you define as pollution. If it’s anything non natural dumped in the ocean, every piece of electronics and structure of every rocket is pollution. The metals will electrolyze/rust over time but any batteries could release acids for decades.
Not to mention there is evidence to suggest that every launch punches a hole right through the ozone since the exhaust interacts with the o3 but it’s not quite as serious as CFCs since launches are very wide spread.
I think what @kichae is alluding to is the cost of removing the waste of spent rocket cores from the bottom of the ocean if/when we decide to start bringing the Earth towards a more natural state worldwide, as opposed to dumping our trash wherever we feel like it.
Could totally be wrong though and he might like to elaborate but he did say don’t him started!
A little bit from column A, and a little bit from column B, actually. Because, as you mention:
And it’s not just batteries. It’s the plastics in the plastics as well, which we’re finally recognizing as showing up in the food chain. And it’s the residual chemicals from the solid fuel rockets. It’s the lubricants used in the locking and release mechanisms. And it’s just the incredible waste in general of dropping 100 metric tons of raw materials into the ocean and out of the resource chain. In many cases, the only reason mining raw materials is cheaper than recycling end-products is because we never bothered to invest in the facilities to actually recycle these things 40 years ago.
Once we actually bother to take the time to figure out how to do it, we’ll wonder why we didn’t do it earlier.
3 Likes
Radio flash tracked to faraway galaxy
The cause of the big flash, only the seventeenth ever detected, remains a puzzle, but spotting a host galaxy is a key moment in the study of such bursts.
It also allowed the team to measure how much matter got in the way of the waves and thus to “weigh the Universe”.
http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20151215-the-most-violent-events-since-the-big-bang-itself
There is nothing more violent than a collision between two entire clusters of galaxies. One such impact is so extreme, it could tell us what the universe is made of
What’s caught their attention is that the collision has uncovered the invisible: dark matter.
1 Like
So, I’m not sure I’m okay with being ripped apart into elementary particles and then slapped back together at a distance.
But I have to admit; we’re getting closer to that possibility.
1 Like