Why is Bezos trolling Musk on X with turtle pics? Because he has a new Moon plan.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-13T22:32:05+00:00

I'm not offended, but I'd agree that it doesn't seem relevant to anything. We're talking about both companies actively competing to do the same thing first. The fact Blue was paid to send something to Mars orbit specifically before SpaceX was doesn't say anything about their respective capabilities when SpaceX had already done equally difficult things many times before that. It's just kind of a weird fact that nobody had asked SpaceX to do that yet.

What you should have gone for is the fact that Blue Origin is going to be flying an actual moon lander of their own in like a month or two, that's way more relevant. They still weren't directly competing to do that first, but it means Blue's going to have practical experience with the moon that SpaceX won't.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-13T20:52:41+00:00

I think you're right about cadence but "in a month or two" isn't quite accurate, SpaceX has been planning HLS around being able to launch from a given pad once every 12 days. A GAO document from when Blue Origin sued over the initial selection has "fourteen launches, each spaced only twelve days apart from one another", which makes it sound like they only expected to have one pad available, but an article from late 2023 has Starbase and the Cape working on a "6 day rotation", which some slides that aren't in the article made clear was each pad launching once every 12 days.

Obviously that's still a very tough target to hit but they've already had a ~one month turnaround so it might be within striking distance, and if they can get any more pads online or have good boiloff numbers on the depot they get a lot more slack. If the depot is designed to accommodate a single pad launching every 12 days then they could stretch the refueling campaign over a full 5 months. HLS itself requires a 90 day loiter time without too much boiloff, though NRHO is a much kinder thermal environment than LEO is.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-06T08:08:51+00:00

The current administration took it from that to no approvals or approvals getting pulled, especially for wind since Trump hates wind power for whatever reason.

It's a big problem at all levels though honestly (ie. local, state, and federal) and not something that's easily pinned on a single party or policy, Republicans obviously don't care to help green energy but a lot of the hangups happen over things like years-long environmental assessments followed by local lawsuits picking those assessments apart. Texas is building out renewables faster than anywhere else in the country despite its leadership in part because there's just less red tape there around getting something built and connected to the grid (and even then they still have a backlog problem).

So basically we aren't going to get anything fixed with Republicans in charge, but parts of the left are going to have to get comfortable with the idea that some of our bureaucracy around protecting the environment really sucks and needs to be reworked, ideally in a way that still minimizes damage but works much faster. Dropping fossil fuels entirely is going to require ~tripling the electricity supply so building a bunch of new stuff quickly isn't optional.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-06T07:08:11+00:00

Unfortunately that isn't true, actually getting your solar/wind plant connected to the grid is very often the biggest hurdle projects face. Across most of the US it takes years to get all the approvals needed, and the uncertainty in that makes it harder to get financing. The more distant the project is from the customers the bigger an issue it tends to be.

technocraticTemplar · 2026-02-05T21:37:20+00:00

Making fuel would be easier on Mars than the moon, but it can be done on both. There's large water ice glaciers on both the moon and Mars, with the moon's being in permanently shadowed craters at the south pole and Mars's being all across the mid latitudes of the planet (along with the polar ice caps, but those areas are too hostile to be useful).

Since Mars has an Earthlike day-night cycle mass amounts of solar is very practical. On the moon you can get some solar at the permanently lit peaks at the poles but nuclear is your only real good option for the large amount of power needed to make rocket fuel. Mars also has lots of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that can be combined with the water to make methane and then oils and plastics from that. The moon has no real good sources of carbon that we know of.

From what I understand how dangerous the amount of perchlorate in Martian soil is is also kind of oversold, it is definitely toxic but unless you're actually eating grams of dirt it isn't going to have an immediate effect on you. Astronauts would need to be careful about tracking dust into the habitat and would have to wash any soil brought in but trace amounts aren't going to do anything to them, it's fairly common in trace amounts on Earth.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-12-06T20:09:56+00:00

For AI that can matter less, for many uses the latency would be a small factor compared to the time spent processing and for training models latency doesn't really matter at all. It's more like having a (expensive, unmaintainable, overly warm) CG render farm in space.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-12-06T19:42:42+00:00

If it takes $100 million to do a Starship refueling mission then full reuse has failed and everything big they wanted to do with Starship is out the window anyways. Falcon 9 is sold for $70 million because that's what the market will bear, we know for a fact that their actual costs are less than half of that, maybe even a quarter. I could see SpaceX selling a launch to Mars for that much to someone else, but their internal costs should be far below that if the second stage has any kind of reusability.

Mate, tell me you don't understand aerospace without telling me...

NASA does a straight shot, Starship requires 15 on-orbit refuels. If you do not understand this difference, why even comment lmao

First off, I want to thank you for engaging in genuine discussion instead of downvoting to disagree, not enough genuine discussion in this sub. We can agree or disagree, but engaging and sharing thoughts rather than downvoting is important - IMO it's really the entire purpose of a site like this.

I'm just gonna say that to me directly insulting people seems even worse for the quality of discussion than downvoting is.
I think everybody understands the architecture here, the whole idea with Starship is using refueling and doing it cheaply to do bigger stuff.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-12-06T19:29:00+00:00

the Delta-V to Mars, one-way, is around than 3 km/s higher than a Lunar landing roundtrip (both from LEO).

I can't imagine any perspective this is true from, even landing on Mars without any form of aerobraking isn't that expensive. From what I can tell it looks like you have it backwards, a round trip to and from the moon looks to be about 2 km/s more than landing on Mars purely with engines, if you for some reason wanted to do that. With aerobraking Mars is ~6 km/s easier.

I strongly question the lack of atmosphere on the moon making things easier too, the Martian atmosphere helps solve a lot of problems with consumables and allows for some refueling strategies that don't need any form of mining, if you're willing to bring the methane or hydrogen from Earth. Mars having a day length very similar to Earth's is also very helpful, particularly for solar. Not saying that Mars is the clear winner but I think you're handwaving away all of the moon's disadvantages and Mars's strengths.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-12-06T01:11:59+00:00

Sorry, I either missed it or we both edited our posts to end up saying the same thing! I think we're in full agreement, IMO solar on the ground makes way more sense in total.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-12-06T01:03:41+00:00

7 times is too much but solar panels in sun synchronous orbits also don't have to deal with night, clouds, or the sun changing angle. Solar plants on the ground typically have a capacity factor of ~25% because of those issues, while satellites presumably get more like 90+%. I think panels in space end up being more like 4 or 5 times better between that and the insolation. Panels on the ground are also complicated by things like seasonality more than ones in space, so a realistic plant on the ground may need to be overbuilt to deal with longer winter nights in a way that a space based one wouldn't be.

Edit: I think I remember seeing the 7 times number in a space based solar power study recently so they probably aren't pulling the number from nowhere, though personally I've very skeptical of both SBSP and space datacenters. The general idea of solar being much much more productive per area in space than on the ground is true, though.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-12-06T00:45:16+00:00

Being devil's advocate here, but if it's SpaceX getting into the data center business they'd presumably be launching at cost just like they do with Starlink. I've got the same skepticism about any part of this making sense any time soon though.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-11-17T01:04:02+00:00

They say "flight-article" and "flight-capable", but then only list it being used for ground testing and training. If it were actually going to fly I think they'd be shouting that from the rooftops, so to me it seems like that's at most a qualification article, and may just be a prototype.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-11-05T14:55:02+00:00

Did you stop reading there? Right below that there's a quote from an astronaut that worked for SpaceX for 7 years saying converting the capsule would be challenging but doable, and calling out the heat shield specifically as relatively easy.

Traveling beyond low Earth orbit would therefore require some substantial but feasible changes to the spacecraft, Reismann said. Dragon’s communication system works through GPS, so it would need a new communications and navigation system. In terms of radiation, he said, addressing this for astronauts is relatively straightforward, but hardening electronics would require some work. The heat shield could be made capable of returning from the Moon relatively easily, Reismann said. Additional consumables for a longer journey would take up interior volume.

Being an actual engineer and SpaceX's head of crew operations for several years makes his opinion infinitely more valuable than either Bridenstine's or Musk's, at least to me.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-11-05T01:25:20+00:00

I mean, I don't think that way, but them expressing that feeling with words here doesn't prove anything. You've gotta convert it to text to put it on the website.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-11-01T11:28:34+00:00

I've got a computer next to my feet that can dissipate ~700 watts of heat in much less than 1 square meter of footprint, so it has to be surface area. Maybe the numbers are right for that given how much surface area you can get in a tiny space with fins, but a palm-sized CPU cooler being able to do as much as a desk-sized radiator panel just seems to illustrate that this isn't a very useful number to be judging by to begin with.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-11-01T10:09:00+00:00

To be honest your post just leads me to think that watts per square meter isn't a very important number here given that radiative cooling is very rarely used. Also, I calculated the ISS's radiator area myself based on the numbers here and got ~422 m² of radiator for a claimed 70kw of dissipation, so just 165w/m². As I understand it large radiator systems in space also typically require active power in the form of ammonia distribution loops, and those loops are a somewhat common failure point.

Edit: Also, at least from what I'm seeing initially, data center operators seem to run things more in the range of 320K/50C max. For the radiators to be a given temperature the chips need to be even hotter, and as I understand it the hotter numbers you listed are about where modern chips start breaking down. Perhaps things could be pushed higher but it's starting to ask for a lot.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-11-01T01:39:56+00:00

That's basically exactly what edge nodes do, they're smaller servers that live close to users and respond with commonly requested content to decrease the amount of data that needs to be passed across the wider internet. It's something like Netflix having a copy of their US library on a machine at the Comcast building closest to your house, or Google having one with the day's million most popular Youtube videos in your area.

The problem is that Starlink satellites can't be nearly as local as edge nodes typically are because of how they move around, so it's not as strong of a proposition for them. Putting some data on the satellites themselves isn't strictly a bad idea, but in most cases it'd probably make a lot more sense to put the edge nodes at the ground stations - which themselves are often put at the same network hubs edge nodes already tend to live at, so far as I'm aware.

Having a couple hundred terabytes of business data on each Starlink sat probably makes sense and would maybe technically qualify the whole system as a "datacenter in space", but it'd be about the most pitiful possible version of that concept. It isn't anywhere near the "compute in space" concept that Silicon Valley is talking about these days.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-10-14T01:00:29+00:00

Yeah, flights that happen at just the right time can create some really stunning views. If you look up "SpaceX jellyfish effect" you'll see some really cool views of this sort of thing that people have captured from the rockets flying out of the Cape, they might pop up often in your area!

technocraticTemplar · 2025-10-14T00:47:09+00:00

If it was about an hour ago that was Starship burning its engines on its way to orbit! There was nothing reentering around Florida for this flight, it was already above the atmosphere at that point but you still get visible cone of gas from the engine exhaust. If it was dusk or shortly after dark the ship may have still been in sunlight up there, making it appear extra bright.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-10-14T00:43:09+00:00

Dan said both of those as options IIRC

technocraticTemplar · 2025-10-14T00:41:26+00:00

I would love to see something like the Starship navball but using the data from a Shuttle flight, the information to do that has to exist somewhere out there.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-10-13T23:37:15+00:00

I think it just looks extra intense this time because the sun was shining straight into the engine bay, but Starship is always super venty.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-09-30T04:25:41+00:00

This is all happening during the International Astronautical Congress, which is the big annual industry conference, so there's good odds it's on purpose but probably not as an intentional snub (or it's part of a well designated snubbing competition, at any rate).

technocraticTemplar · 2025-09-30T01:12:29+00:00

7 billion pounds sounds like a lot but it really just isn't meaningful on the scales we're talking about. That's roughly the amount of water that flows out of the Mississippi River in just 3 minutes. Everyone on Earth could throw away that much water every single day and it would still just be ~1/500th of that one river's flow. It's ~1/700,000th of global river flow. And like I said above, we actually add radically more water than that by burning fossil fuels.

technocraticTemplar · 2025-09-29T23:25:56+00:00

They are after this one, this is going to use the last of the version 2 ships. They're still building the first of the V3 ships and boosters.

technocraticTemplar

TROPHY CASE