Talk-Polywell.org

47th booster landing, and the third landing of that particular booster (B1056).

Fusion occurs at temperatures exceeding 15 million degrees Celsius, which can only be achieved by feeding fuel (unstable isotopes like uranium and deuterium) into a plasma field. The Soviet Union provided the initial blueprint for achieving nuclear fusion through plasma with the first Tokamak react...

2 million meals per year equates to nearly 4 metric tons (3.7Mg) per day, assuming 0.7kg per meal. I base the 0.7kg on 0.85kg per "meal" with about 0.15kg of that being packaging, based on a NASA article I read yesterday.

I found a new article on this battery on IEEE Spectrum's website just now: https://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/en ... ing-better The article is from just a couple months ago.

Okay, now that you mention it, I think you're both right that passive deorbit was just a side benefit of the altitude, but not their actual plan. Still, its nice to know that even if they didn't actively deorbit the satellites, they will (relatively) rapidly fall out of the sky once they run out of ...

Here's to hoping this is not the official start of what causes the Eugenics Wars (Star Trek), or the battles against the Sauron Supermen (Niven's Known Space).

At the end of their useful lives, the satellites will use their ion thrusters to crash back into the Earth’s atmosphere, burning up, and thus preventing them from becoming space debris. Just one nit to pick - the sats won't use their ion thrusters to deorbit. To deorbit, they will stop using their ...

Looks like the center core for the FH tipped over on the way back to port due to high seas, though. Apparently the OctaGrabber hasn't been reconfigured to hold down FH center cores yet, though its supposed to be ready to do so by the next FH launch.

Minor news: Looks like SpaceX has successfully started testing the Raptor engine in the StarHopper. It was a short, tethered, burn, but you gotta start somewhere with new engines and rocket.

As I understand it, they decided not to fund retropropulsive landing of the capsule so they could throw that money toward BFR (or whatever its called this week ;) ). If something comes up to change that, however, - say, NASA wanting to have Dragon 2 land on the moon - I'm sure SpaceX will be more th...

SpaceX DM-1 flight is to launch tomorrow (2 Mar) at 07:49 UTC (02:49 EST) from Florida, heading to the ISS (with a very small amount of cargo). If this happens, it means SpaceX got a man-capable capsule into orbit before Boeing could fly the Starliner. I won't be awake for this, but hopefully it wil...

Looks like a F9 will be used to launch a lunar lander tomorrow evening at about 1945 central (US) time. Hopefully I'm home from work in time to watch the launch (via PC).

Interesting read.

Is it me, or does this design seem to be about where Dr. Bussard was about 15 to 20 years ago?

SpaceCats preventing the mice from leaving? ;) Getting as much delta-v from the first/second stages will definitely save fuel (and thus delta-v) for the payload. Though, it won't take too much to circularize when you are up in HEO (lower orbital velocity, but more work to get up there in the first p...

The mystery to me is that this object seems to be ahead of the stage as the stage overtakes it. The stage has done nothing except a flip end to end while continuing on a ballistic path from MECO. That implies to me that everything that was carried along from launch, ice or whatever is ruled out bec...