Talk-Polywell.org

Yes, congratulations SpaceX :) Be interesting to know about the fairing - I'd guess not, if only to save a tiny bit of weight, it was running very heavy. They've got another launch planned for June 1st, two more for the 15th and 29th and a more speculative one one for "late" June... If they can keep...

It was a great launch
Having the footage both from the rocket and the ground up and down was pretty amazing.
I don't recall ever seeing stage separation from the ground before... And seeing the thrusters doing their thing and the retro-repulsion burn from both perspectives, very cool.

It looks like they might be trying to solve this problem with an onboard robotic system: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/03/23/mysterious_robot_spacex_landing_barge/ Be interesting to see if they use it with the upcoming launch. I'm looking forward to it either way, if they can pull of the booste...

That's a great find, thank you
Certainly sounds positive at Lockheed and would also seem to highlight how unfortunate it is that the Polywell concept hasn't been better funded.
Getting there I suppose.

I'm willing to go with Elon Musk's take that the main problem at this point is launch cost. Get costs down low enough and people will be willing to put a lot of stuff in to space - the distance/time is important but if you can chuck a lot of resources at the problem it becomes less of an issue. So r...

This is one I've not been following.
The paper is, quite reasonably, technically dense but it certainly sounds cautiously optimistic.

How many irons in the fire do we have at this point?

Quite, not saying they wouldn't be! :) Just saying it feels a little sad that this stuff is getting done not because of a more general spirit of exploration, discovery and the desire to get back out there but because a couple of seriously rich people decided it would be fun to take a moon trip. Whic...

This is all over the place but on the off chance you missed it, SpaceX's moon tourism plan: http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year Which seems faintly nuts and wildly optimistic given that both Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy currently h...

This is all over the place but on the off chance you missed it, SpaceX's moon tourism plan: http://www.spacex.com/news/2017/02/27/spacex-send-privately-crewed-dragon-spacecraft-beyond-moon-next-year Which seems faintly nuts and wildly optimistic given that both Dragon 2 and Falcon Heavy currently ha...

Just to note that SSI has post the proceedings of the Breakthrough Propulsion Workshop from last year.
Direct link to the pdf here.

Still hoping we see something from all this.

Apparently a last second call be Musk himself, you can understand that, I'd want to be sure too.. Fingers crossed for tomorrow. In terms of webcasts I'd add that SpaceX usual does a 'technical' webcast along side their 'hosted' one that they show on spacex.com. The technical webcast has the chatter ...

The scam starts to crumble as those who don't buy it took over. Yes, the new president doesn't believe.. Not exactly convincing proof. Pretending something isn't real doesn't make it not real. Which is more or less fine until that thing happens to be important. Well, eventually we will see. Let us ...

No, we just replaced them with still patented HCFCs. Which, depending on what you are doing, have been illegal to use in the EU for 2 to 7 years and are being phased out (more slowly) in the US. They also have a lower ozone depleting effect than the CFCs that were previously banned.. So progress th...

Level of warming proportional to CO2 production - FAIL. I can't directly speak to this but I would imagine a non-linear relationship, the atmosphere and energy budgets are complex. You would see a warming trend, probably. We are seeing that with a high degree of certainty... Temperatures stay level...

That's why we never hear the Greens talking about the ozone hole anymore, it did it's job, services no longer required. Yes, because fortunately we actually got regulation to shut down production of CFCs (and other things) and now the ozone layer is recovering nicely. The amount of conspiracy built...