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[Ziusudra]

New Kuiper Belt objects lurk farther away than we ever thought

it was thought there was nothing beyond 48 AU ...
New Horizons team detected 11 new objects lurking from 60 to 80 AU ...
the Solar System used to seem small compared to exosolar systems ...
has put the Solar System in more of a normal range ...
as we go farther and farther out, the Solar System is getting dustier and dustier ...
might be a massive population of bodies colliding

[martinuzz]

Sweden is building it's own rocket launching platform to launch satellites.
They consider Elon Musk too big of a security threat to depend on SpaceX any longer.

[Starver]

Spoiler: Why would anyone see anything problematic in the Starship programme? (click to show/hide)

However, there are a number of alternatives springing up (that might turn out to be the VHS of space-launching or the Betamax[1]), from New Zealand to the Shetlands (don't think much of the website design[2]).


I suppose the current popular contender for commercial/non-govermental spaceflight might be Blue Origin (i.e. a choice of Bezos of Amazon, rather than Musk of Xwitter). Although they're well behind on the practical successes, even against other launchers, they've got the progression from New Shephard (suborbital) to New Glenn (orbital) to Blue Moon (lunar... but where's the "New Armstrong" name?) fairly solidly mapped out. On the other hand, looks like Virgin Galactic (Branson of... basically everything Virgin) has mostly dropped out of the running (down in Cornwall, most locally).



As to Elon, an interesting figurehead in all kinds of ways. I'm rather hoping that he might just be satisfied to become the First King Of Mars, if his earthly political support turns out to be irrelevent. But definitely good to have a choice of baskets to spread all your eggs around in. (But make sure you don't shove so many eggs into orbit that baskets cannot now navigate through the resulting omlette!)



[1] Though I'm rather partial, conceptually, to the Video2000-types, actually superior to them all but ultimately doomed to market forces.
[2] At least it doesn't occasionally crash my browser like the German company trying to launch from there (currently mostly exploding, both rocket and web-page) and most of the others trying to be fancy.

[Madman198237]

I suppose the current popular contender for commercial/non-govermental spaceflight might be Blue Origin (i.e. a choice of Bezos of Amazon, rather than Musk of Xwitter). Although they're well behind on the practical successes, even against other launchers, they've got the progression from New Shephard (suborbital) to New Glenn (orbital) to Blue Moon (lunar... but where's the "New Armstrong" name?) fairly solidly mapped out.

Blue Moon is not a launch vehicle at all, hence no "New Armstrong" name, and they have had no huge successes with New Glenn yet because it hasn't flown.

Blue Origin is somewhere between a bonfire fueled with money and a joke, frankly. Delays with their rockets, delays with their engines for other peoples' rockets, a huge rocket about as reusable as Falcon 9 where SpaceX is moving to something that is going to be much more reusable...They have no meaningful income other than Jeff Bezos' ludicrously deep pockets.


It's sad because space is cool and I desperately want variety in launch vehicles and further advancement in the field overall, but the only ones who stand a real chance of catching SpaceX any time soon are an assortment of startups actually trying vehicle concepts that can match or exceed Falcon 9's reusability and with timetables that might actually launch something this century.


Also, lol military Starship/all the Starship point-to-point proposals. Possibly, but hugely unlikely.

[Starver]

I suppose the current popular contender for commercial/non-govermental spaceflight might be Blue Origin (i.e. a choice of Bezos of Amazon, rather than Musk of Xwitter). Although they're well behind on the practical successes, even against other launchers, they've got the progression from New Shephard (suborbital) to New Glenn (orbital) to Blue Moon (lunar... but where's the "New Armstrong" name?) fairly solidly mapped out.

Blue Moon is not a launch vehicle at all, hence no "New Armstrong" name, and they have had no huge successes with New Glenn yet because it hasn't flown.

Sorry, meant to convey that. Their development is 'more traditional' in that they don't cobble together "increasingly less unrefined" prototypes (forgive the double-negative!) in rapid succession, but more try to bang most of the dents out before "having a first go". But they've blown up far fewer New Shepherds than the various "flying watertanks" that SpaceX did on the way to similarly getting suborbital flights of Starship (which has never carried a human payload), but also now have that similar degree of reusable capability (with 100% survival rate of its many passengers). Extrapolating that kind of progress to its New Glenn programme (never flown, but not short of applied development/fabrication), it's possible that (if they hit their November date for maiden flight), they'll have a Falcon-9 equivalent doing the currently proposed four flights for 2025 (still well behind Falcon flights, but well ahead of some other space agencies) and be sending Blue Ring 'space-tugs' atop reusable Jarvis upper stages with everything from LEO to GEO and perhaps even some interplanatary probes.

Blue Moon is the whole thing, yes, but "New Armstrong" would be the logical name for their Lunar Starship equivalent landing component.

Blue Origin is somewhere between a bonfire fueled with money and a joke, frankly.

SpaceX is that with PR in overdrive and a "yeah, we meant to do that" attitude to failures and delays to their ambitious schedule. (Current ETA to Mars (unmanned) mission with Starship is a couple of years to set off just within easy transfer time. Maybe they will, maybe they won't, probably they'll have more than one setting off on a 'doomed' trial landing before the first has even proven it's not a completely bad design that should be revised on the next block of candidates.

Doesn't matter where the money comes from (deep founder pockets or the bleeding off from the everyday business of the founder's other newly money-making businesses), it can be burnt up (perhaps literally!) in R&D in ways both boring and exciting.

Hard to really put them side-to-side. As I alluded to, could easily be VHS/Betamax, once we have the future hindsight from the space-equivalent of bluRay or even Netflix times, but who knows which actually will be which... Or, Edison/Westinghouse, in competion (Westinghouse was proven right!) or Swan/Edison (Swan being left under-rated for his own developmental contributions) if there's any future collaboration.

Also, lol military Starship/all the Starship point-to-point proposals. Possibly, but hugely unlikely.

Proven accuracy to (near-)soft landing, as of FTS5. Quite possible they're only one or two FTSs away from doing that with a payload (should they desire to test that), and if they do the full five Booster/Starship tests a year then I can imagine a crewed suborbital/FOBS-like flight and landing before the end of the second year, if the dice roll well enough on the intermediate mixture of test-to-boom flights. They'll probably be catching both Booster (on return) and Starship (after a whole/functionally-whole orbit), intact, within the text two or three stackings if they don't spend too much time on anything else, and it's not incompatible with the need to prove the ability to do pretty much exactly that with Lunar/Martian versions of the craft, just with subtly different balances of technical challenges.

If they can get anywhere halfway near their ultimate aim of 'colonising' Mars (which, in the short term, I'm not particularly an optimist about, but can't see any particular limit to how much effort they can expend towards this), they'll have automatically gained the 'side hustle' of intercontinental flight/delivery of (at least) bulk cargo. Whether or not they will ever be used to drop in the Space Marines onto the hotspot of the hour.

(What's more worrying to others might be the ability to send in an orbit-dropped ship equipped only for very precisely arriving destruction. Imagine the conventional explosive-load you could hoist up, in amongst the routine Starlink-refreshing missions, then send down to land (or 'land') in the courtyard of any armed compound you want (or any other strategic target, not dug sufficiently far down into the bedrock) and wipe the entire vicinity off the maps.  ...no sign that any of this is Musk's intent, except for his sucking up to the kind of ex-President who I'm surprised hasn't openly suggested he do it yet. But it's comparatively simple to do, given that we already have ICBMs plus now proof that we can scale up the system significantly.)

[Madman198237]

I suppose that's one (very unflattering and negative) way to characterize the very intentionally fast and cheap prototyping system used by SpaceX, but there's not one single argument about the ironclad fact that it's gotten SpaceX a lot further than Blue Origin.

Blue Moon is specifically the proposed lunar lander. It's purely a payload, not a launch vehicle at all.

I did forget about the upgraded second stage deal with NG. Good on them. Wonder if we'll see it before 2030.


The PTP Starship concept, has involved only the upper stage, no booster, making purely suborbital jumps from place to place and it's a horrible idea. It's riskier than any air travel has ever been, expensive, and provides a travel time advantage of less than 12 hours to almost any destination, except now it also requires nonstandard infrastructure to land (the chopstick catch tower).

Also using it as a weapon is a horrible idea with no efficiency anywhere in it. Just use an ICBM...and never use the ICBM or the Starship for conventional weapons delivery because anyone with a missile warning system might well assume it's a nuke and respond appropriately.

And dropping troops into hotspots works only if you load it with troops and drop it into a pre-positioned stock, it's not a tactically useful system that could replace helicopter airborne infantry or paratroopers.

[Starver]

I measured my language to distinguish it from "the traditional approach. Even at the height of the Space Race, the willingness to "explode it, and learn from the explosion" was never so acceptable. It has gotten them further, but could just as easily bankrupt the richest man on Earth (or at least get pulled as a project) if it hits too many things that aren't easily solved by throwing money at.

(Miss-re-explained the Blue Moon thing, in edit-upon-edit. Ignore that. I'm still sure that New Armstrong was actually posited as the name, but somehow got pulled from the future plans before even New Glenn got further than the drawing-board. But seems to not be recorded anywhere I've checked. Even as the beyond-Blue Moon plans.)

The PTP is the Starship only, the Booster is entirely suborbital (though still beyond-Karman, at least if the realistic landing/catch/crash spot is back towards home, not another spot they've prepared for it). If they need Boostering all the way back from the original destination, on a regular basis, then they'd have local Starbase there with its own Boosters to pass the Starship up and around the planet again (the Boosters chopsticking/otherwise back to Sydney Starbase/wherever they launched from, even as the Starship-type tops go from launch-ground to launch-ground). At least until they find a way to SST(nearly?)O the whole thing.

OTOH, any PTPing into impromptu hotspots would be as that (fanciful) image had it, probably landing in (minimally prepared, or at least partly surveyed) LZs that was already secured by the 'feet on the ground' who now needing bulk supplies (many tonnes of military materiel, or perhaps the relief goods that the disaster zone was demanding) that there's not the kind of transport infrastructure or decent airstrip to fly it in by other means. (And I would be derisive about the ability to drop right onto a hot hotspot, at the very least those tall towers of tin are going to be attacked by any local hostile not otherwise completely cleared out of the area, and surviving re-entry doesn't guarantee that you can survive a lucky small-arms shot to some other bit.)

I did try to show my disbelief in the concept of widespread fictional concept of orbital drop-pod shock-troops. Also that I didn't think Elon anticipates subtly diverting an apparent Toronto-to-Melbourne regular UPS-branded cargo flight to land right on the heads of one or other hostile Presidential Palace with a destructive cargo (or even just a combination of kinetics and quite a bit more remaining fuel through not being used up in any significant landing burn)... But one can definitely imagine just such a 'handy accident' happening, should it seem necessary to do so in a hot moment of necessity and enough arms are twisted (or the supply chain hacked?) to make it happen. Hidden in a thicket of criss-crossing 'everyday' semi-orbital traffic, without the flight profile (or the starting point) of an actual ICBM and capable of being 'inadvertently' belly-flopped right onto whatever new building someone has just walked into or even a vehicle (and any full escort) travelling along a highway. That's probably what certain people are going to be more afraid of (beyond even current Loitering Munitions, it'd be Death From Above without so much obvious forewarning). Theoretically possible, even if I think(/hope) it never gets subverted in such a way, even in extremis.


Too much development and potential future development is happening to really predict what the 20-Minutes-In-The-Future world will be like, I'm just going through the levels of speculation that it's not actually so unreasonable to imagine (though noting that it still might not be reasonably expected). And if Elon ever gets himself to Mars then it'd be inconceivable that development (or use) of such stepping-stone tech would ever stop here on Earth. "You got to Vinland/the New World/Ireland, did you Erikson/Columbus/Alcock-and-Brown? That's nice, but I don't think we'll bother with longships/caracks/bombers any more for more trivial purposes..." Always possible things could end up dropped like an Apollo (or be fizzled out like a Concorde) if the achievement is made but not exploited (or becomes not as useful and safely routine as it promised), but still proves that it's possible if someone thinks they can pick up the idea again later. Definitely into the speculative future here, though, assuming the future doesn't go round some unexpectedly sharp corner leading somewhere (or nowhere) else.

[McTraveller]

I mean with AI and moon/Mars bases stuff, it's not too far off from The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.