The government was a customer. That’s very different from the government giving a research grant.

That’s like saying 25% of Exxon’s development came from tax payer money because the government uses a shitload of oil.

The Internet was built to be literally bomb-proof rather than figuratively. The utility of that has been self evident and “five nines” thinking continues this tradition. AWS AZs are meant to partially survive floods and wildfires. A super volcano would take out an entire region but people would have other problems at that point (the exception being if emergency services were on those machines, but disaster teams have been learning to bring emergency infrastructure with them ever since New Orleans).

As a UIUC student used to be fond of reminding me, part of the University of Illinois’ contribution to the old Internet was in a building that, if it were to collapse, would fall outward and not crush the basement. Officially that building was designed so every office has natural light, like a collapsible water cup, but it’s a very interesting coincidence that it (the basement) is bomb proof.

Yeah but Starlink also intends to put weapons ONBOARD

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_Dome_(missile_defense_s...

Biosphere stuff is more fundamental than just mass. We had several closed ecosystem projects built on the ground out of concrete, with no mass limits, and all of them failed.

I didn’t know this had been done.

If the results hold then it’s another thing that counts toward settling space, not another planet.

It’s where I’ve been leaning for a while. If we want to go beyond Earth build huge rotating stations or spacecraft. Don’t just go down another gravity well.

Build your own spin stations and dial in the exact gravity and everything else you want. Mine asteroids, which are super easy to access. You can launch mass off an asteroid by throwing it really hard.

Or by constant thrust at 1/3g, or a mix of thrust and rotation that achieves sufficient acceleration, though spinning + thrust means precession which I’m glad isn’t my job to zero out.

Unless someone invents the Epstein drive we aren’t going to have astronauts experiencing acceleration for months rather than minutes of the trip. And the more constant the acceleration the shorter the trip anyway.

Curious to know what the smoke would be screening?

Really interesting. I remember scratching my head a little about stainless steel. It’s durable but heavy, cuts into payload fraction, and probably not what you would pick if the goal was to shoot interplanetary. At least not for the upper stage. Maybe for the big chunky reusable booster, but there aluminum probably makes more sense. Falcon is aluminum so it’s already the devil they know anyway.

I recall talk about transpiration cooling. My guess is it died due to complexity or that it would use fuel as coolant which further eats mass. There was a bunch of original work on composites which would make way more sense if you want to hit high energy orbits.

You could still, AFAIK, use Starship to put a bunch of components into LEO and assemble something to go interplanetary. Or at least its booster.

I have wondered if we won’t see interplanetary on a big scale (beyond Apollo scale) until we have fusion or beamed power. You could put up a beamed power constellation with this architecture I guess.

But it makes a lot more sense as is for LEO military applications. I can see that.

The weird Musk-Russia links, if that is real, are odd given this thesis. If we are building Golden Dome or whatever it’s called now then who is the adversary? If not Russia than who?

China isn’t expansionist beyond Taiwan and it’d be way cheaper to build our own domestic TSMC than to fight that proxy war.

North Korea and maybe Iran are the only other credible threats with an interest in attacking the US, and they are kind of a joke compared to Russia and China when it comes to long range capacity.

> which is just too far in the future right now.

How much time is needed to do the required research? Like, how long it would take to learn how to create an artificial biosphere on a small scale, so you can have a farm on the Moon or Mars? 10 years? 20 years? Maybe 50 years? Isn't now is the good time to start the research?

Until they toss Musk out an airlock and found the Mars Colonial Republic. :)