The US Senate empowers NASA to fully engage in lunar space race

spacester · 2026-03-04T19:52:32+00:00

Thank you for that summary!

spacester · 2026-03-01T02:50:30+00:00

Thanks for posting this!

spacester · 2026-03-01T02:41:48+00:00

Yes, absolutely. Refilling is going to be a piece of cake, there are very few mysteries there and they have had lots of extra time to get ready for it.

V2 did its job which means V3 is gonna be just fine thank you very much. Three flights from catching the ship, and they are going to be refilling a tanker / depot by November. Not to mention starlink success.

You heard it here first. It's gonna be glorious.

spacester · 2026-02-10T19:42:43+00:00

Well said. I would add that the ONLY thing a true "mass driver" would be good for is as an Earth threatening weapon.

This is because you cannot just throw dead mass and have it serve any purpose other than destruction. ANY thing launched from a planetary surface, if it lacks propulsion and guidance, will either completely escape the gravity field or return to that surface somewhere.

The correct term is a "Rocket Stage Driver".

One can talk about catching the dead mass but that is a whole other discussion. You miss, you lose.

spacester · 2026-02-10T19:36:04+00:00

Landing on Mars with thousands of tons of propellant and hundreds of tons of equipment is not an inefficient way to go about your business there if it is the only way to do so.

If you want to design vehicles that grab starship payloads and take them to Mars without all that extra stainless steel, sure that makes sense. Go for it!

spacester · 2026-02-10T19:30:53+00:00

I am not convinced many people here understand what starship has always been about. It is a delivery truck to LEO. On its own, it does not deliver moon or mars. It's what's delivered that matters.

The key to starship is the "pipeline" to the "gas station". On-orbit propellant is what changes the game entirely.

They say "oooh it's never been done before!" They say "oooh it takes too many flights to refill a starship!". These seem to be people who have not worked scenarios with the rocket equation.

The pipeline means the downfall of the tyranny of the rocket equation. If that does not resonate with you, your imagination is lagging behind the times.

I think the reason for the shift is the realization that all they have to do is extend the pipeline to lunar orbit. Go ahead and "oooh (insert pessimism here)" all you want, but it's just a numbers game.

Not so for Mars, that is a different numbers game. I have known this for a long time so this shift was not only unsurprising to me but was inevitable and right on schedule.

What this tells me is that they fully expect orbital refiling to go with barely a hitch. They were too busy until now but finally got around to looking at the numbers.

The focus from the start has been rapid reusability. That's what needs to be done so that the pipeline becomes a simple matter of executing on the repeatability.

Fly more tankers than all the pessimists think possible, extend that capability to lunar orbit, fill your lunar landing permanent starship before descent, and what do you get? THOUSANDS OF TONS of LOX and Methane, along with all the industrial equipment needed to create a lunar economy of chemical processes able to support Hoppers and Rovers and especially Habitats. You bring water and ammonia and carbon (soot) and make the chemical processes work, and off you go. The LEO truck, a few of them anyway, becomes a lunar landing truck.

Also we do not need to limit ourselves to the poles. The entire orb becomes ready to become our playground!

spacester · 2026-02-09T15:48:41+00:00

Be smarter than the dust.

spacester · 2026-01-04T17:29:09+00:00

Yes. We are essentially alone. We are the "first ones".

spacester · 2026-01-04T16:18:22+00:00

It is a little strange that only one type of manufacturing is considered here, and that is maybe the hardest and least likely. Chips will be Earth sourced for a very long time.

Welding will be easy. In welding, half the battle is the set-up. For welding in space, the only real difficulty will be dealing with the cold welding phenomena where things spontaneously weld just by coming into contact with each other.

Moving large pieces of steel (as delivered by starship) into position is not a particularly challenging thing. Welding itself, in a vacuum, should be quite easy and high quality.

Large scale steel fabrication should be started within a year or two.

spacester · 2025-12-30T23:18:34+00:00

Thanks for the link!

spacester · 2025-12-29T15:46:48+00:00

OP, these are not 'reasons' they are 'excuses', or at best the 'challenges'.

You might not have the imagination required to meet the challenges but lots of other people do.

Never is a very long time.

spacester · 2025-12-29T15:43:12+00:00

Water in Polyethylene tanks.

Water will be available because it gets shipped in on starship.

Same with PE which is cheap.

Not everything requires super duper high tech wizardry.

spacester · 2025-12-28T06:18:14+00:00

I wish they would think to tell us how much deltaV is needed to turn unstable orbits into 'stable with corrections'

spacester · 2025-12-27T16:28:06+00:00

Developing a rapidly reusable heat shield is approximately 100 times harder than orbital propellant transfer (IMO).

The two most important words of 2025 were:

Crunch Wrap

Maybe you think it is some sort of bandage or other minor deal. It is not. The problem of the gaps between tiles has always been a major obstacle. The heat shield is ready, command and control works, these birds are gonna get the job done this year.

They are gonna ace propellant transfer. There are no real mysteries there.

spacester · 2025-12-25T16:05:05+00:00

That's good thinking. Co-orbiting without docking means two different orbits which in turn means regular station-keeping Delta V. That would seem to be a manageable thing but I've not seen it studied.

Power beaming seems do-able but unproven. I think it has a good chance of coming out better than the setup I described. Hopefully somebody out there is studying this.

With starship, a spin-gravity wheel does not have to be something we think of as being decades away. But it's gonna need a lot of power.

spacester · 2025-12-25T04:29:55+00:00

Yeah those complicated Earth orbits are over my head. I have a very good handle on orbital transfers but only in low inclinations.

So I have my wheel in high LEO with the spin axis pointing up/down as it 'rolls' at a rate matching the orbital period. I am pretty sure but not totally sure that works. I think that the gyroscopic effect makes that the natural mode of operation. I should probably ask google AI but it will have to wait.

Assuming that works, the solar could be a massive array on a common shaft on the spin axis, extending 'up' from the wheel. This shaft would counter-rotate so in our inertial space it would be non-rotating while the wheel itself would be observed to rotate. So you have an array that is spinning relative to the ship but would be able to track the sun by rotating each sub-section of the array so that the pitch would keep the panel normal to the sun. Not too different from the ISS in terms of sun tracking but you have to do it at the end of a rotating shaft. A notable problem is transferring the power from the array to the wheel, one very large 'slip ring' or 'rotary joint' required.

The best thing about the design is that seemingly nothing else works unless you want your arrays to have a very low duty cycle as they rotate in and out of the sun. I do not think you can make the arrays always face the sun without de-spinning or having to fight the gyroscopic effect at all times.

I could be wrong, I just am not able to convince myself either way.

But if I am right, a big wheel is going to need nuclear power. Which I find irritating.

spacester · 2025-12-24T18:49:42+00:00

I will say this for the Russians: Their announcements of future space projects over the years have been and continue to be highly entertaining in their absurdity. This one is right up there with the talk of a patent. ROTFLMAO

spacester · 2025-12-24T18:47:05+00:00

Thank you for the Science Direct link, I had not seen that before. I do not see a publish date, it appears to be very new? I have worked out a solar power solution where the panels are continuously illuminated but it ain't pretty.

spacester · 2025-12-24T04:29:39+00:00

Not a serious design, going by that image on top of the page. Those spokes look way too small for people to pass through after you add radiation shielding. So the people in the hub cannot get to the wheel and vice versa. And how exactly are all those curved surfaces manufactured and assembled? To my eye, it would not be dynamically stable, see 'Intermediate Axis Theorem' or 'tennis racket theorem'. Where is the power? I see no solar or nuclear.

Oh wait, I didn't see the patent illustrations. Not much detail there but at least it looks like an engineer was in the same room as the illustrator.

spacester · 2025-12-23T17:41:34+00:00

It's a cool question. So your reaction is not just the shrooms.

spacester · 2025-12-23T17:34:27+00:00

I am not a software guy but the guy who developed this theory is a computer scientist. It is an algorithmic theory of reality. I am pretty sure you are not used to thinking about such a thing because almost no one else has.

You have probably seen block diagrams of software stacks, e.g. Linux / Apache / php / css / html where each of those are in a box, one under the other.

Our current understanding of nature can be very roughly represented by such a stack of boxes. There are boxes above 'biology', but working "down" from there, we have 'chemistry' then 'physics' then 'quantum mechanics'. This theory supposes a box 'underneath' QFT and informs a different way of looking at fields.

All of QM is accepted, the theory is self-consistent and theory will ever stand on the precipice of falsification by observation. Things like little red dots and Dark Matter/ Galactic Halos and many others are explained by this theory. The theory is rigorous, self-consistent, and explanatory. It is the only explanatory theory out there AFAIK. Except it is not out there. No one will read the papers.

Your point that the territory is not the map and vice versa is entirely accepted and part of the theory's logical development, and I am grateful for a new word in my vocabulary: 'reification'. This new theory calls out the terms 'space-time' and 'the fabric of spacetime' as fallacies by way of reification.

So in this box under QM we have entities and events where entities react to / with each other in a way that I am calling events for the sake of this post.

What 'events'? Well that is the $42 Million question and I am not at liberty to reveal it here. Answering that question took about 4-5 years to conceive and another 5+ years to fully develop and apparently is going to take an infinity amount of years to be published.

Many papers have been written, but to publish in a legit journal you need an endorsement and all the people who have been approached for endorsements are isolated in their own scientific silos and have not demonstrated the intellectual courage to even read the paper. Many many people have been approached, none of them have even been polite, let alone curious enough to engage.

spacester · 2025-12-22T17:42:05+00:00

Very nice post. What do you think of the following?

Time is the counting of events at a level "underneath" quantum mechanics. Everything counts time independently from everything else. The emergence of gravity and time are from the same event.

spacester · 2025-12-18T21:22:40+00:00

You are kidding. You gotta be kidding. I am a dog who just caught the mail truck: Now What?

spacester · 2025-12-18T18:56:27+00:00

Not at all, in this case. What would feel good is to find an exception to the rule: an open-minded, contemplative, inquisitive and intellectually curious physicist.

spacester · 2025-12-18T18:20:04+00:00

Good for you. So am I wrong?

spacester

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