SpaceX High Altitude Test of Starship SN8 Delayed

SpaceX had Starship SN8 prepped for a high altitude test launch but conditions were not ideal for the test today.

SpaceX will likely try again tomorrow.

SOURCE – SpaceX
Written by Brian Wang, Nextbigfuture.com

14 thoughts on “SpaceX High Altitude Test of Starship SN8 Delayed”

  1. It's not just computation. Moving trillions of atoms into place takes time. Anything large and complex enough to matter would take massive parallelism of the manufacturing devices.

    That alone would take a lot of engineering effort. But even when we figure out the manufacturing, there's still a huge amount of engineering (as well as basic research) to do on the products those manufacturing systems would need to build. There's still a long long way to go.

  2. The Josephson junction article showed a pretty good advance from previous electron microscope 3d printing. Just a year ago, there was another group that showed electron microscope 3d printing at just under a hundred nanometers. The netherlands group got down to 5 nano-meters, and that's without all those other advances listed. An advance I meant to show, but couldn't find real quick comes from a Georgia Tech group . . .

    https://news.gatech.edu/2020/09/16/e-beam-atomic-scale-3-d-sculpting-could-enable-new-quantum-nanodevices

    The Georgia Tech group is able to get to down to single atom 3d printing by electron microscope. They even said they have multiple parallel beams(how many is the question). They say they have done 3d and not just 2d.

    Obviously, to do trillions of atoms takes a lot of computation. A single cell has a trillion atoms; and a single animal like a cat or a human has trillions of cells. But, we have Cerebra CS-1 at a trillion transistors, and they have a 2.6 trillion transistor chip in testing phase right now. Not to mention Quantum Computers advancing pretty good.

  3. Those are all very nice advances, "but"…

    Protein folding is the inverse of what one needs for nano (molecular) manufacturing. I.e. one would want to specify a shape and locations of functional effects of a molecule, and generate a protein that folds up to provide that. Having a fairly fast way to accurately predict folding is a major step in that direction, but a lot of science and engineering (maybe deep learning?) will be required to move beyond guess-work, trial and error as a means of designing proteins with specific functions.

    Extremely fast atom-scale imaging is a great research tool and may well be useful to make progress in nano manufacturing. But we've had something like this for quite a while – the one you cite is presumably just better?

    Atom-precise patterning of a highly regular atomic material like graphene is a nano manufacturing method, but the limited material type and serial nature of the manipulations severely limits its direct applicability to manufacturing. It might be leveragable to help create systems for more general and parallel nano manufacturing, but a huge amount of work will be required to get there, if so.

    The Josephson junction article doesn't appear to be "atomic scale" – just sub-micron scale. Maybe if combined with the atom-precise graphene patterning to create masks? In any case, a lot more work to be done.

  4. they get down to 5 nano-meter resolution. This is better than the 30 nano-meter resolution just a year ago, Single atoms are like 1/3rd a nanometer though. Still got a little ways to go.

    "Even more enticing is the capacity of EBID( for 3D nanoprinting"

    -Supramolecular Relay-Control of Organocatalysis with a Hemithioindigo-Based Molecular Motor – https://pubs.acs.org/doi/10.1021/jacs.0c09519

    the latest on light driven synthetic chemistry nano-motors. They controlled a chemical reacitons, and it sounds like they can control the rate, or effectiveness of a chemical reaction by a general catalyst.

    The geometry of this molecular machines is not linear; but, anyways, seems the next step is to string them up into a nano-factory!

    -Attosecond metrology in a continuous-beam transmission electron microscope – https://advances.sciencemag.org/content/6/46/eabb1393

    We've already got patterning of individual atoms by

    https://physics.aps.org/articles/v12/58 – A Quantum Molecular Assembler

    a laser tweezer atom by atom assembly. They can't imagine doing massive parallel processing with this.

  5. For one, the deepmind, fairly accurate enough, approximations to the protein folding problem. But, there's been lots of good electron microscope and Scanning Tunneling Microscope advances.

    Basically, both the S.T.M's and electron microscopes can pattern with single atoms.

    There were two advances with S.T.M's a few months ago – one was a kind of laser strobelight that allowed S.T.M's to really take control of single atom chemistry. The other was an A.I. controlled S.T.M's that could figure out how to do single atom chemistry.

    The Electron Microscope guys have gotten down to patterning single atoms. A georgia tech group showed this. And, there's been all kinds of advances in electron microscopes that can allow for even more more nano-manufacturing ability.

    https://journals.aps.org/prl/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevLett.124.054801 – Femtosecond Compression Dynamics and Timing Jitter Suppression in a THz-driven Electron Bunch Compressor

    "For measurements made with the electron beam, these two factors, electron beam pulse-length and time-of-arrival, determine the timing resolution. This is much like the shutter speed of a camera and the time stamp of each image.

    This terahertz (THz) laser-based technique could ultimately produce electron beams short enough to capture crisp images of electron and proton motion within molecules. This ability would open a new window into the atomic world."

  6. Brian just said conditions were not ideal. That's true, but he was talking about the condition of the engine 🙂

  7. What have you seen to make you so optimistic about nano-manufacturing?

    Hopefully you can point to something beyond the hijacked definition that is applied to anything manufactured with nanoscale features?

  8. I've been teasing SpaceX youtubers that nano-manufacturing will happen before SpaceX lands a man on Mars.

    I'm tempted to say that they will probably land a man on Mars before nano-manufacturing really takes full swing. But, I'm still predicting that the nano-revolution will happen before, certainly, a sustainable Mars colony is established.

    Quantum Computers revolution will happen before the first manned landing on Mars.

    A.I. is kind of already here.

Comments are closed.