News SpaceX heavy-lift vehicles: Launch Thread

starhopper scrubbed at the last second. they'll retry tomorrow, apparently.

 

I love this so much like a real life comic book or a Bond movie

 

Or just classic, old school, Sci-Fi!

 

Indeed it is.

What a time to be alive and such contrast.

On one side you have amazing things and SpaceX and on the other you have Trump and Brexit. Such totally diverse contrasts

 

I saw this and gasped:
http://up-ship.com/blog/?p=41739

"Aiming for 20km flight in Oct & orbit attempt shortly thereafter. Starship update will be on Sept 28th, anniversary of SpaceX reaching orbit. Starship Mk 1 will be fully assembled by that time."

Also of note: Musk is saying the vehicle *after* Starship/Super Heavy will be 18 meters in diameter, twice that of SH.

He's going to have to look out for Dr. Zarkov and Flash--they might steal it
https://www.shapeways.com/product/CE6WNUNLR/zarkov-rocket-filmation

 

trying to find a business case for one that big and I keep coming to point-to-point ballistic passenger travel. The 747 of hypersonic business transport. NY to Tokyo in under 90 minutes

 

Sub orbital flight. Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee as long as you don't get sucked into an anomaly and end up in the land of the giants

 

It will have to look more like the Spindrift for that to happen.

Some nice quotes from the NASASPACEFLIGHT forum section.
Rockets want to be big. Payload mass fractions go up. Easier to land with more modest heat shielding.
*******************************************************************************************************************************
Who needs a rocket that big?

"I think there is a world market for maybe five computers."
-Thomas Watson, president of IBM, 1943

That's why.

 

Don't forget "you only need 640k of ram" which I think was a quote by Bill Gates

 

Well - to be fair - if all computer programmers had continued to write very tight code, we might still not need more than a few megabytes!

 

What you mean they got sloppy?

 

^^ Yes, extremely sloppy, in the past you HAD to be frugal with every resource, programs were done a lot in assembly back then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assembly_language

 

So if I read that right does that mean modern games would be a lot smaller in disk size if they were coded a lot tighter?

 

Yes, but it would mean you're stuck with that particular computer's architecture, if something was written for a Motorola 6800 it would not be possible to port it to x86 you'd have to start from scratch again, high level programming means that you can far more easily port your game/program to other architectures.

 

Correct - the game would have to be completely re-coded for a different platform. There's a price to pay for everything!

 

What I meant was that if coding was done tight like in the old days but on our modern platforms would programs be necessarily smaller in size or would they still be as big as they are now?

 

Coding could be plenty sloppy in the old days too.

Cobol.

 

Programs would almost certainly be smaller and would also run faster than they do now. They would probably be more expensive since there would be more code-work to do and you have to pay the programmers (who know what they're doing) for that work.

XCV330 - don't bring up COBOL - unless you mean Kobol:

https://galactica.fandom.com/wiki/Kobol_(TOS)

 

OH wow COBOL I learnt a bit of that back in 1988. Also FORTRAN.

I remember almost nothing of them but bits and pieces, though I still know Cpm kind of.