The SpaceX Starship Mk1 in Boca Chica will be fully stacked when Elon Musk presents on Saturday. The STarship Mk1 has two rear moving fins. This is a new design.
Elon Musk has also tweeted a picture of the bottom half of Starship at night. Top half with forward fins & header tanks probably stacks on Wednesday. Three Raptor engines have already been installed.
Adding the rear moving fins to Starship Mk1 in Boca Chica, Texas pic.twitter.com/HWLihqihph
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 22, 2019
Bottom half of Starship at night. Top half with forward fins & header tanks probably stacks on Wednesday. Three Raptors already installed. pic.twitter.com/haq3m1V1Wm
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 23, 2019
Brian Wang is a Futurist Thought Leader and a popular Science blogger with 1 million readers per month. His blog Nextbigfuture.com is ranked #1 Science News Blog. It covers many disruptive technology and trends including Space, Robotics, Artificial Intelligence, Medicine, Anti-aging Biotechnology, and Nanotechnology.
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So(cialist)Cal(ifornia) is full of shit (literally).
My point is people, from the individuals to groups, will want to have multiple redundancies available to avoid fatal situations.
If a single producer of air exist, he has, de facto, life and death power over everyone.
If multiple producers are available and in competition they have no power.
IMHO, people will end having personal habitats with personal air production devices produced by a number of producers. Probably, with advanced 3D printing, etc. they will be able to produce their own air device in case of emergency. Multiple recycling devices, etc.
A normal home could be a 100 m2 (or 1000 m3) habitat plus the space needed for the devices to keep the habitat abitable. They all connect with a corridor or two on the sides of the habitat.
When people want to enjoy larger spaces to walk, play, etc. they can go to a park (and pay for it).
With advanced robotics, it is not implausible people will want to have larger homes, more space for hobbies, etc. Materials, in space, at scale, are relatively cheaper than on the Earth.
Freeside, Neuromancer
Yeah, location, location, location.
These places could make modern gentrification look like a joke. Places with only rich and/or hyper-educated people where poverty is promptly shipped back to Earth.
The pressure to remain successful will be very strong, specially in family groups. If you end up having a lazy kid, it means no future on the station unless you pay them that future with your inheritance.
This also brings flashbacks of Elysium. Hopefully we continue on the path of making many of these things cheaper and cheaper, so more people could reap the benefits.
So far economic development has made us rich in comparison with people of the past, even if we don’t see that in the form or land and properties (there is only so much desirable space on Earth’s surface).
Space settlements can change that too, but I don’t see that coming in less than several decades. The first ones will be pretty much like Elysium: amusement parks for the rich and a few lucky smart worker bees.
Realistically, a city-provider would only accept resident-clients and resident-employees from people who already have citizenship elsewhere and maintain those rights for their children, with corporate lawyers ensuring every new birth is registered to the parents’ homeland(s). So if anyone gets fired or commits a crime, they just get sent on the next flight back. It would legally be much like guests or employees on cruise ships. Seasteads, if they ever happen, would probably work much the same way.
And honestly, this might help them end up as desirable places to live. There are a lot of people across the world today who would leave behind their unsatisfactory home country to live in a place with no unemployed class or criminals, even if residence is always conditional.
That’s what they want you to think.
The airlock always await.
Interesting. So you would have a multi-company built and owned space settlement?
Where you buy your air, water and energy from a set of different companies, with competitors in situ?
That brings pictures of heavily branded cities, with buildings donning hundreds of neon signs, within the upwardly curved artificial horizon. Pretty stylish and Blade runner-esque.
And it sounds reasonable (if maybe unpleasant for neo-primitivists) : the dreams of sparsely populated, southern California suburbs full of greenery of yore are just that: dreams. Any such spaces will most likely be heavily exploited and populated and more akin to Shanghai than SoCal.
A space colony can be modularized very easily.
Every module will have redundant systems, managed and maintained by different, competing services.
In this way, no short-sighted monopoly can fuck up the module or the entire colony.
This can be true for everything but the most frivolous services and products.
I love the open communication style of Musk/SpaceX.
The numerous iterations and open construction makes me feel like
an insider. It gives one an almost vested interest in the success of the rocket.
Most people that end up living long term over there will be employees of the rich guys and corporations sending crewed facilities to space. Most living spaces will belong to these corporations and rich guys in the beginning, except for a few spaces the smart worker bees could eventually build for themselves (as in a module they buy with their life savings or get as a job perk). This doesn’t solve the problem that people would eventually need true public spaces where they can fall into, whenever they aren’t in a paid role at a company.
Where I’m going is that purely private spaces would need to eventually give way to public ones, where regular citizens can live without being an employee of Amazon Mars or SpaceX.
Also, I don’t mind using settlement or colony to call those. It’s the same meaning either way. IMO people is already too sensitive to words and very little to facts. But, whatever, any way people choose to understand what each other means is fine with me.
Your citizenship could be revoked by bezos
Possibly. Better fixturing and use of a roll former rather than just horsing the sheet metal into place and tacking it could account for that, too.
The whole thing looks better. Could some sort of insulation on the inside puffed it up?
The word “colony” has negative connotations, so “settlement” seems better all around. We are going to live, not extract stuff, well, both actually, but we won’t be displacing or conquering anyone. Now, the early stuff may not qualify as too small. What to call them?
Which is different from Earth?
Will was wrong, they will be making more land.
Now, none of this future stuff works at all without Janov.
No, no, no…it’s all about chemtrails.
I buy it (lighter version) from 30+ years in aircraft maintenance…putting the weight of the SS through the actuator that controls the fins requires…a really massive actuator and fittings to hold the weight, let alone move the fins in flight. Separate the functions and simplify the requirements for both results in a lighter, easier to maintain air(space)frame.
Given space colonies will have very high permanent maintenance costs, and those costs can’t be postponed or dismissed (or everyone dies), I imagine O’Neill cylinders would actually have very high taxation, were they public facilities.
Or most likely they will be exclusively private enterprises, where you are an employee of them or pay them for the privilege to belong. Probably both (you are an employee, and one of the perks is living there).
Albeit living in a purely private city-state, nominally under some nation’s jurisdiction, would pose some very interesting legal and ethical problems: what happens if you are fired? what if you commit a crime?
Frankly, it won’t surprise me if that was the case.
A solution at a time usually results in an acceptable solution overall, and sometimes you are just lucky and get an optimal one. As long as the solution exists.
This also shows that even if Mr. Musk may be an actually terrible boss to work for, he’s not impossible to be reasoned with.
Because it clearly shows he wasn’t in the separated fins and legs camp, and yet someone convinced him to do otherwise.
Elon actually stated that this version is lighter than integrating fins and legs, though he seems to still be processing this.
“Current analysis, which I’m not fully bought into, suggests that 2 rear fins with separate airframe-mounted legs will be lighter, so this is the plan for Mk1/Mk2” – Elon’s Twitter
mk=Mind kontrol “ultra” starlink
Imagine there’s no SLS
it isn’t hard to do
Musks to go to Mars in
and no taxes too
Imagine all the people
Living in O’Neills
You can see they put a lot more effort into the quality of the joining for this one.
I like this last iteration. It shows a respect to the KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid) principle of engineering, by removing the over-complicated fins that were also meant to work as landing legs.
So now fins are fins and legs are legs, making them both designed for doing their exclusive function well and not two or more badly.
That may have cost them some weight, but in general, it is best to solve one problem at a time, and then look for another angle than try to solve them all at once.