Comments by "Digital Nomad" (@digitalnomad9985) on "The Space Race" channel.

So you can see it in the Lunar environment and know that it's on the Moon. Cut and fill is a good long-term construction plan, but you need some equipment. Trying to excavate a basement with a shovel sucks, even on the Moon.
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@inkbold8511 "Those failures from spaceX are causing more debris in space than any Chinese spacecraft." What orbital, debris generating failures has SpaceX experienced, Wumao? All the flecks expelled during the second stage burn are sub-orbital. They won't even complete one orbit. He's going to try to boost the satellites during the apogee half to get the perigee mostly out of the atmosphere, but if he can't keep the SATELLITES up without further accel, any other objects expelled by the 2nd stage won't orbit.
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@jmar665 You don't know what a firmament is.
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@tfneto2417 Private space stations will be launched soon.
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We can't cooperate because we aren't trying to do the same thing. China is attempting global and transglobal hegemony.
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# The Space Race "Let us know what you think" Don't terraform. The theoretical equations on computation speed are inversely proportional to temperature. You could make Titan the supercomputer/Memory Alpha/AI development/robotics/etc. center of the solar system with electronics cooled by liquid methane filtered and pumped from a lake or river. All of the big 4 colony destinations except for Venus are quite useful without terraforming. Venus is largely useless until you terraform it, at least partly, and may be the one that can be terraformed most completely (gravity) and hold a benign atmosphere longer (gravity again).
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@mervstash3692 I don't find the word "simple" or any synonyms in the post you're replying to. He is asserting a fundamental essential for colonization.
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SpaceX recently celebrated it's 200th successful launch. They are dominating the launch market with reusability, reliability and LOW COST. Cope.
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@chriswong9158 NASA is not SpaceX's sole source of revenue.
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That would make more sense. But there have to be hydrocarbon clouds, too, to get hydrocarbon rain.
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He is a US citizen and SpaceX is a US company. He would be the first to tell you he couldn't have done all this in South Africa.
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@nickmegert4662 " freezing/boiling points of water are also effected by gravity." No, they are effected by PRESSURE. In the pressure/temperature controlled environment of the ISS, water stays liquid in microgravity. Also, known and proposed terraforming methods don't appreciably change the gravity of a world.
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3D printing gives you cheap prototyping when you can use it, or for short runs. It doesn't mass produce a product in quantity faster and cheaper than a custom tooled assembly line. All the Starship units built so far have been welded , not riveted.
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Six hardpoints for Falcon boosters around a Super Heavy should be less technically challenging and more flexible (if less awesome). This allows for a symmetrical layout with 6, 4, 3, or 2 boosters.
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If the US owned it, it wouldn't be showing up Boeing.
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China screws borders when it comes to Earth.
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"Zero Data on booster refurbishment has ever been released to the public, Why?" Because SpaceX has the tech that they expended the money and sweat to develop. This tech enables them to severely undercut other launch providers on cost while still making a profit and gobble up more and more market share. Why should they give their competitors a leg up in catching up with them by disclosing proprietary secrets when they could keep plowing some of the profits of their current tech and market lead into R&D to stay ahead? To silence an Internet troll? How does that figure into their business model? If reuse isn't saving them money, what is, and why are they still doing it?
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If only as a screening system.
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He's a libertarian. Apparently you regard everyone to the right of Stalin a right "winger". Retro? Show me something from the past, even in an engineering proposal that looked like it or was to operate on a similar principle. He isn't undercutting other launch providers on cost while making a profit and eating their lunch by getting his design ideas out of a Cracker Jack box.
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The lunar south pole is not too big to take over (where most of the volatiles are). You talk like China isn't acquisitive. They have border disputes with all their neighbors, and they're trying to bite off chunks of the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and constructing artificial bases to enforce their claims. If they are claiming water on Earth, why not on the Moon, too? Control of the Moon's water is control of the Moon. Control of the Moon is control of Earth's high orbitals with a source of materials. That, in turn, is the ability to blackmail the whole Earth with the threat of orbital bombardment. Also they can forestall us circumventing their monopoly on rare earth ores and acquire precious metals. The Moon has a plethora of military, industrial, and propaganda uses. They are still the Tortoise to our Hare, but remember the Soviets got a lead the same way and it took us 20 years to catch up. When the Hare gets lazy and overconfident the Tortoise wins.
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@juyngkwogayo206 "Why does he even make it sound like it’s a bad thing that China is racing ahead? " Because China is colonialist NOW. If they are making territorial claims against all their neighbors and large swaths of the ocean and building military infrastructure on Earth, what makes you think they will act differently in space?
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Just a propulsion stage, not a cargo or passenger vehicle for the ISS, which is what Dragon series is. Second stage booster that gets discarded every time. In the case of an ISS run, it's the stage that goes between the first stage and the Dragon.
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No, Musk might have been all for "Mars first" at first. But for years now NASA has been "Moon base before Mars". "Moon first" is right, at least if you want to colonize Mars instead of planting a flag and leaving. A Moon base can deliver oxygen from the Moon (more than half of a kerolox, methalox, or hydralox propellant mix by wieght) and other resources to LEO cheaper than boosting oxygen from Earth to LEO. It IS possible to do a Mars "plant the flag and run" mission without a Moon base. There simply won't be a PERMANENT MARS BASE or colony without an industrial Moon base. The seed infrastructure and supply train would just be too expensive to fund, even with the space and defense budgets of all the nations of the Earth. Direct to Mars gives you some Mars rocks and a flag on the surface. An industrial Moon base gives you cislunar O'Niel colonies and the Solar System with Mars thrown in.
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The reentry burn pushes the fast air away from the booster until it slows enough that the reentry heat won't damage it. You would see the mushroom on the booster aft cam if you watched a launch and recovery. During the ascent, the rocket plume gets wider as the air gets thinner, but it doesn't curve back toward the rocket (mushroom) until the rocket is thrusting INTO the airflow. How could it?
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You are comparing long term multi-month microgravity stays with one week Moon missions. The Russians are not asking for evidence of the Moon landings. That is just a lie. The Soviets tracked the telemetry signals and communications of Apollo missions all the way to the Moon and back and congratulated NASA when they did it.
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@Michaelwklee "Why hadn't USA returned to the moon to explore and colonise IT YET?" No budget for it. NASA had 4% of the US budget at the height of the Apollo program. Since then it has been closer to .4%.
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All scientific data of western space missions was shared openly. Even the Soviets did that. It is NOT hypocrisy to expect China to do the same.
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They launched socialism.
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What makes it a zero sum game is the fact that the CCP wants to do to the world what it did to Tibet, the Uighurs, and Hong Kong.
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The CCP wants to do to the world what it did to Tibet, the Uighurs, and Hong Kong, and they're not even really trying to hide it. That is "peaceful" to a CCP shill because in Orwell-speak "peace" MEANS despotic oppression.
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What would be the reverse of space being for all humanity? All humanity being for space?
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@michaeldeierhoi4096 I think you have read too little history. Enemies exist. Moreover passive preparation for enemy action deters enemy action, and often comes in handy against other exigencies.
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I'm afraid China is reaching out to cover acquisitiveness. I agree that Bridenstine would be more effective and get us there for less money. I agree that Nelson is fishing for a blank check for Boeing and the old guard military/industrial complex via a new "cold war space race". That doesn't mean he's wrong about the Chinese. "Even paranoids have real enemies."
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"Why is it so big?" Bezos plans to launch a competing Internet access constellation. If Musk is successful in transferring Starlink deployment to a successful reusable Starship, a large reusable deployment vehicle will be the only way Bezos will be able to compete in terms of capital investment in deploying his constellation, and thus in price to recoup his investment. That is the bottom line. Both Musk and Bezos are creating launch companies, but they both expect their satellite Internet service to be their cash cow. If they are right about where it's at, that's game. Bezos has to at least compete THERE or go home. If Starlink saturates the market before Bezos is ready to play, it's back to the drawing board for a business plan.
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@samr.england613 Maybe an awkward name, but by the time Musk came up with it he was already launching Starlink corporation. If you think of it as "Starlink launcher ship" it seems more fitting. The best launchers traditionally are doing very well to get a run of 100 successful commercial launches in a row, but Falcon recently passed 200 (and counting). "what if 1 out of 100 passenger jets exploded? I think there'd be fewer people flying on passenger jets!" Not if that was the only way to get to America.
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@samr.england613 "SpaceX and Starlink are two different companies." Starlink started out as a division at SpaceX. Later Starlink was spun off as a corporation. At that point, Starlink was a wholly owned subsidiary of SpaceX. The relationship of SpaceX and Starlink is not, as you imply, analogous to that between SpaceX and Tesla, namely two independent corporations which just happened to have had at one time the same CEO. The technical term for the relationship of SpaceX to Starlink is "parent corporation". "SpaceX Falcon rocket has not been launched 200 times, thus you are lying." You didn't even bother to search it before popping the "L" word? This is the Internet, not a shouting match in a pub. You can't get away with that crap here. (or maybe you can if the channel administrator has set the channel to autodelete posts with links) Note: I had to delete my sources and references because apparently the channel administrator has set the channel to autodelete posts with links. Some lazy admins do this to curb linkbait spam. This really sucks because it looks like the post was posted, and it even shows like it did, but when I reload the page, my comment is gone. Because of crap like this, I have to check every time to see that my post took, then sometimes edit the links out of my post and repost. Surely having the posters able to cite and readers able to confirm my data is more important than eliminating some spam links that few people are going to click on anyway, at least if we're going to improve the "He said, she said" nature of Internet discourse.
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@samr.england613 " Really? SpaceX Falcon rocket just passed the 200 success launch number and counting? Really? Are you SURE about that?" Why are you asking me when you can just do a DuchDuckGo search for "spacex 200 successful launches"? Or since I can't post links to this stupid channel, you could just brazen it out and keep on trolling, I suppose. THIS IS WHY YOU DON'T BAN LINKS. I found 5 links confirming the stat in less than 5 minutes, but I can't post them and have them stick.
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@david50665 "Executioner"? Nobody is punishing China, yet. It is China that cultivates territorial disputes with all her neighbors. The US does not.
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To first order, fuel is cheap, spacecraft are expensive. But even reusable spacecraft have a design life. Perhaps a Starship used up as a vehicle could be used as a station/fuel depot but the way reuse makes access to orbit cheaper is not having to use each vehicle only once. By not reusing any Starship you negate the savings and make SpaceX launches as expensive as everybody else's. Reusing spacecraft means that for the price of one spacecraft you get to launch many times the spacecraft's payload into orbit. Using it once means you get to launch ONE time the spacecraft's payload into space for almost the same price. That is what we have been doing before, and it is EXACTLY HOW NOT TO SAVE MONEY.
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@DucaTech "what's SpaceX funding coming from?" In the future, Starlink. The only funding for Starship they got from NASA is a pittance for the lunar variant and for a development of LEO refueling. SpaceX was the low bidder for delivering crew to the lunar surface (by a long shot). SpaceX is investing in Starship with the short term goal of cheaply deploying the rest of the Starlink constellation. Deploying Starlink sats with Falcons is a stopgap. According to what I have heard, Musk is gambling the whole company on Starship working. The only lunar base NASA plans to build is planned in cooperation with SpaceX (among other contractors). SpaceX has a fixed price contract from NASA for the crew and cargo variants of Dragon (for less than they paid Boeing to fail), and they are swallowing up launch contracts, scientific, commercial, and military, by underselling other providers with reusability, so he has a revenue stream, but he's put all his chips on black. Basically, he knows that the old guard aerospace contractor is the "house" in this game, and the house wins all ties. He can't wait for Boeing to catch up with him on reusability, because if they can come close to his price, Boeing's political contacts will secure the contracts (at least the government contracts). He has to stay way ahead to survive.
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Sure. Do you want us to wait for an answer?
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Falcon uses kerolox. Starship uses methalox.
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