Good morning, Gerbil Nation!
Good morning, Fatwa and Sven!
Safe travels for Mrs. Sven and healing for Sven.
The re-entry for the SpaceX launch vehicle will be on a much more aggressive trajectory this time, making it even harder to successfully land on the barge.
My -- perhaps spotty -- understanding is that a reusable first stage, assuming a proven design for it which can be semi-mass-produced, would reduce the per-pound cost of payloads to low earth orbit by 90%.
I’d say that’s pretty significant. 😉
(Bonus -- Reducing the involvement of the once-heroic NASA and getting much wasteful gummint bureaucracy out of the way.)
Imagine the cost of a plane ticket if a new airliner was used once and then discarded and replaced by a new one.
I believe I have seen figures from 90% to 99%. It would be massive in any case and open space in ways we can only touch on. Look how the solid state computer changed computing and our world.
Look how the solid state computer changed computing and our world.
Yup.
Hell…I was just pondering that the Commodore 64 SX (about $2400.00 adjusted for inflation) had a display slightly smaller than the one on my phone. Which cost about 15% of the inflation-adjusted price of the Commodore. And has slightly better memory, functionality and portability.
Criminy…remember how much fun it was to backup files when you only had, say, 128K of RAM and one 5.25″ floppy drive?
I was late getting into computers so my first one had XP, 512MB of RAM, and an 80 GB HDD. Not too long after I added a 120 GB drive and started using Ghost. You had to boot into there fake DOS mode to do an image. At the company I worked at before they went with a mainframe and terminals. I think it used DOS or some text based OS. I was #3 in the company so I had complete access but I made sure all my department managers had terminals before I did so I never had to use the limb of Satan machine.
Years before I got my first PC my SiL gave me a computer with a Pentium CPU that she said had all the Office programs installed already. I knew nothing about computers but I figured out how to connect everything and start it up. The familiar desktop appeared with icons on it. When I clicked an icon it highlighted. When I clicked another it highlighted. Nothing else happened so I shut it down and took it apart. Years later I found out about double clicking and such. Probably for the best. One of the things that really pulled me into using the computer was being able to work with video, capturing stills and clips. This was magic for me then and a long time dream. I still spend a lot of time doing this, though what used to take 13 hours now takes about 15 minutes or less. The hardware has improved.
Gaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah! 😉
Seconding Mac’s good wishes for SpaceX; hope the launch is successful and that they stick the barge landing this time.
BBL.
Good morning drive-by!
Hoping a jerrylicious day to GN--Mrs Sven is on the road again and I’m still mired in this hellcoldflu thing. Yuck.
Sven
Hai, Sven --
Safe journeys to Mrs. Sven; hope you get well soon.
Good morning, Gerbil Nation!
Good morning, Fatwa and Sven!
Safe travels for Mrs. Sven and healing for Sven.
The re-entry for the SpaceX launch vehicle will be on a much more aggressive trajectory this time, making it even harder to successfully land on the barge.
It looks like the SpaceX launch has been put off until tomorrow.
Thanks for the update, Paddy. IIRC, I read this morning that their chances of having a good launch window today were only 60%.
Thanks, Paddy. I hope they can do it tomorrow. I am excited by the potential if they can make these rockets reusable.
I think that might be the real key to commercial exploitation of space.
My -- perhaps spotty -- understanding is that a reusable first stage, assuming a proven design for it which can be semi-mass-produced, would reduce the per-pound cost of payloads to low earth orbit by 90%.
I’d say that’s pretty significant. 😉
(Bonus -- Reducing the involvement of the once-heroic NASA and getting much wasteful gummint bureaucracy out of the way.)
Imagine the cost of a plane ticket if a new airliner was used once and then discarded and replaced by a new one.
I believe I have seen figures from 90% to 99%. It would be massive in any case and open space in ways we can only touch on. Look how the solid state computer changed computing and our world.
Yup.
Hell…I was just pondering that the Commodore 64 SX (about $2400.00 adjusted for inflation) had a display slightly smaller than the one on my phone. Which cost about 15% of the inflation-adjusted price of the Commodore. And has slightly better memory, functionality and portability.
Criminy…remember how much fun it was to backup files when you only had, say, 128K of RAM and one 5.25″ floppy drive?
I was late getting into computers so my first one had XP, 512MB of RAM, and an 80 GB HDD. Not too long after I added a 120 GB drive and started using Ghost. You had to boot into there fake DOS mode to do an image. At the company I worked at before they went with a mainframe and terminals. I think it used DOS or some text based OS. I was #3 in the company so I had complete access but I made sure all my department managers had terminals before I did so I never had to use the limb of Satan machine.
I think it was XP that led me to get hooked.
Hi GN!
Going to bed, still feeling tired. Mrs Sven landed OK and is happily pursuing whatever she had to go out of state to pursue.
Pleasant dreams, folks.
Good night, Sven. I hope your headache goes away and stays lost.
Years before I got my first PC my SiL gave me a computer with a Pentium CPU that she said had all the Office programs installed already. I knew nothing about computers but I figured out how to connect everything and start it up. The familiar desktop appeared with icons on it. When I clicked an icon it highlighted. When I clicked another it highlighted. Nothing else happened so I shut it down and took it apart. Years later I found out about double clicking and such. Probably for the best. One of the things that really pulled me into using the computer was being able to work with video, capturing stills and clips. This was magic for me then and a long time dream. I still spend a lot of time doing this, though what used to take 13 hours now takes about 15 minutes or less. The hardware has improved.