GatewayRedbirds.com

I can’t believe this totally insane idea not only worked, but worked the first time they tried it. Just a stunning achievement:

Arthur Dent wrote: ↑

October 13 24, 6:46 am

I can’t believe this totally insane idea not only worked, but worked the first time they tried it. Just a stunning achievement:

for the sake of discussion (and because im too lazy to do any research), can you briefly explain the significance of this?

One way it's significant is that it is extremely cool to have a massive rocket go up to space, come hurtling back down and then delicately place itself into mechanical arms on the launch tower it left from while balancing on rocket engines. That did not seem like something that could be done, and yet, here it is.

But more to your point, the idea is that theoretically if the thing lands back on the tower, you could refuel and reuse it maybe the same day. Even though rockets still use massive quantities of fuel, that's actually a small part of the cost. If you can do rapid launches where the biggest piece of the cost is just fuel, it becomes much more practical to put a lot of stuff in space.

From one who followed the Apollo program with great interest and pride back in the day...

Arthur Dent wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:31 am

If you can do rapid launches where the biggest piece of the cost is just fuel, it becomes much more practical to put a lot of stuff in space.

And how will this help solve the biggest problems in our lives?

Joe Shlabotnik wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:40 am

From one who followed the Apollo program with great interest and pride back in the day...

Arthur Dent wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:31 am

If you can do rapid launches where the biggest piece of the cost is just fuel, it becomes much more practical to put a lot of stuff in space.

And how will this help solve the biggest problems in our lives?

I don't know how realistic it is, but one theory I read a while back for combating climate change would be some sort of "heat shield" kind of thing we could put in space. It could be an array of stationary mirrors or opaque plates that could be positioned remotely to either let the sun in or help shield us if we want to cool the surface a little bit.

Might be far fetched. Might be too costly, etc. But it's one example of how a more cost effective reusable rocket engine could help solve one of our biggest threats globally.

Joe Shlabotnik wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:40 am

From one who followed the Apollo program with great interest and pride back in the day...

Arthur Dent wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:31 am

If you can do rapid launches where the biggest piece of the cost is just fuel, it becomes much more practical to put a lot of stuff in space.

And how will this help solve the biggest problems in our lives?

Similar to Apollo, I don't think it will. I'm following for basically the same reason people followed Apollo: it's cool and impressive.

GeddyWrox wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:48 am

Might be far fetched. Might be too costly, etc. But it's one example of how a more cost effective reusable rocket engine could help solve one of our biggest threats globally.

Definitely, if access to space becomes much cheaper, it opens up possibilities, and maybe something can be made of that, but also I think it's pretty likely that the uses will remain fairly limited. Even if much cheaper than today, it's still going to be way more costly to build in space than on land not just in the (still going to very high) cost of moving stuff up but because there aren't easily accessible resources in space, there are many challenges to building things that can survive out there, etc. There needs to be a really good reason to put something in space for it to be worthwhile. And there are a number of such things, but they are fairly niche. The only real currently practical idea for why it would be useful to have a lot of stuff up there is communication (internet) satellites. I think that it's fairly likely that just deploying a bunch of Starlink satellites will be the main purpose of this rocket, and the rest is mostly hype.

Arthur Dent wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:31 am

If you can do rapid launches where the biggest piece of the cost is just fuel, it becomes much more practical to put a lot of stuff in space.

Not to be a downer, but haven't we already put a bunch of stuff in space? I thought I remembered reading that space junk is a real problem. If what I read is/was accurate, then putting stuff in space doesn't seem like a problem; it's getting stuff out of space (so that the stuff we do want up there doesn't get damaged by all the space junk).

mikechamp wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:50 pm

Not to be a downer, but haven't we already put a bunch of stuff in space? I thought I remembered reading that space junk is a real problem. If what I read is/was accurate, then putting stuff in space doesn't seem like a problem; it's getting stuff out of space (so that the stuff we do want up there doesn't get damaged by all the space junk).

We have put a lot of stuff in space, especially recently, but the fact that it still costs ~$70 million for one one semi truck load obviously limits what's feasible. Of that, the fuel cost is "only" $200k, which tells you it could probably be much cheaper.

Regarding space junk, it's certainly a concern. My impression is that there are greater efforts to be responsible than back in the day by not intentionally leaving dead junk in orbit, but there is still lots of uncontrolled junk, the quantity of stuff in low orbit is getting very high, and cleanup is extremely difficult to impossible. My understanding is that the so called Kessler syndrome of self sustaining exponential growth of junk due to collisions in orbit is already happening but time frame is long, so it doesn't trigger some kind of all out crisis.

Joe Shlabotnik wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:40 am

From one who followed the Apollo program with great interest and pride back in the day...

Arthur Dent wrote: ↑

October 14 24, 8:31 am

If you can do rapid launches where the biggest piece of the cost is just fuel, it becomes much more practical to put a lot of stuff in space.

And how will this help solve the biggest problems in our lives?

I don't know that there is an exact answer. From my limited understanding, being able to put more stuff into space at reasonable costs will greatly increase the ability to conduct research/observations in space. Something that is currently limited due to budget and therefore capacity.

Here's an astronomer talking about the issue a couple years ago:
Expanding on that a little bit and taking the optimistic approach, it's possible humanity doesn't know what it doesn't know and through increased research and pursuit of information, civilization changing scientific discoveries/breakthroughs are made that will have widespread direct and indirect implications on all aspects of life.

Taking a pessimistic view, this is all a waste of time/resources that will result in nothing more than the ability to make a few bucks sending relatively worthless stuff into space.

I'm hopeful for the former though don't expect it in my lifetime. But, sheeesh, it's good to see people pushing the envelope on new frontiers and creating stuff like this. Tough to deny just how impressive it is in many regards.