I'm aware of that, but didn't their rocket's second flight make an actual orbit, just one so low that the satellites ended up deorbiting in the next few days? Or have I been misinformed about this?

Yeah agreed. That's the big difference with relativity. Even if their rockets don't end up mattering they still have, by far, the world's most advanced 3d printing capabilities. Thats marketable regardless of how their rocket is doing

People have mortgages, grocery costs, bills to pay in general. A 'pause in operations' furlough realistically means a bunch of them are jumping ship so it's hard to imagine them recovering from this. Anything is possible, of course, but best case scenario is probably that they lose their top workers who can bring their ability and expertise to another company that can make payroll.

>Why is it taking so damn long to do anything?

Because it hasn't ever been done before (successfully).

Because the technologies needed to make it all work are still very much in the prototype/development phase.

Because of the potential that if things go wrong, they can go really, really wrong.

And because SpaceX has to keep the bureaucrats on side, informed, and willing to support the efforts. Without an FAA license to launch, there is no launch.

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We don't know. We exist as part of the balloon.

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Do they? .. have they released why their last (second) launch failed?

Let me introduce you to the scientific method. At the very basic level, it has only four steps: Observation —> Hypothesis —> Prediction —> Experiment.

This is an ever ongoing process. You observe nature, form a hypothesis based on that hypothesis you make a prediction on what would happen if the conditions were X, and then you test then you observe the result of the test and either validate or adjust your hypothesis then make a prediction and test it again, so on and so forth.

If you look at modern cosmology, you will see this thread of observation, hypothesis, prediction, experimenting leading it throughout history. It is ever evolving.

Now, for the sake of argument and start with your hypothesis — “the universe is ever lasting, perpetual and non-changing.” Now lets make a prediction based on it — what would the universe look like, how it would behave if that would be true?

Let’s start close by — our sun. If your hypothesis is correct the sun shouldn’t exist. Let me explain why — the sun is fueled by a fusion reaction. Two hydrogen atoms are being squeezed together so hard that they combine to make helium and as they do a lot of energy is being released. Some of that energy escapes as light and heat and reaches us.

But that presents your hypothesis with a hurdle. The fusion reaction itself is finite. Because the mass of the sun itself is the limit. Eventually all that hydrogen will be converted to helium and the reaction as we see today would stop. We can actually calculate it. I won’t get into much detail but its basically taking the mass if the sun, then dividing it by the mass of hydrogen being converted to helium via fusion at a given amount of time. This in itself violates the principal of your observation — the universe is never changing, therefore the reaction cannot be finite. So for your observation to be true the sun must therefore be powered through a different process. It needs to shine somehow, right?

But that means that our understanding of nuclear fusion must be wrong — because if we put the mass of the sun in hydrogen in a place the size of the sun it must start fusion. Because it will create the temperatures and pressures needed for fusion. That also means that all of our lab experiments where we recreate this process are also wrong.

But more than that — that means that our understanding of matter is wrong —> our understanding of chemistry is wrong —> our understanding of basic biological processes is wrong and so on and so forth.

So to fit your hypothesis most of our understanding of nature must be wrong. Most of the observation and hypothesis and predictions that were successfully validated with experiments done since the 17th century must be wrong.

Believe me, scientists constantly try to pole holes in our understanding of reality, they look at every constant, every factor and try to see if it can be explained otherwise. You think that your hypothesis is so unique? No, it isn’t up until maybe late 19th century it was the working hypothesis. There was no reason to believe anything else.

But with science done ever since, we’ve grown to understand how many elements in so many scientific disciplines interact. And the most exciting thing is — we still got a ways to go.

Okay, so.

Take a balloon, uninflated, and take a marker and put a bunch of dots onto the outside of the balloon.

Each dot represents a galaxy. Put as many dots as you can onto the balloon.

Now, blow it up.

Notice how the dots are spreading away from each other even though they're not moving?

That's the universe. The universe itself is expanding like a balloon, and the galaxies are moving apart from each other.

The galaxies stay together as galaxies due to something to do with dark matter that we don't yet understand.

When it comes to questions like this, your guess is as good as everyone elses... well i mean to an extent. Ive seen some pretty terrible guesses.

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Either nothing, itself expanding is creating the space, or it's looping back on itself. Humans will probably never know.

The earth equatorial radius is ~6378km. The ISS is just 400km above that, or less than 6%.

99% of the energy is expended just to get into a suborbital trajectory. Its only the last couple of seconds in any spaceflight that raise the perigee from being below ground to being above the atmosphere.

In order to deorbit the station, they just need to lower the perigee enough so that drag does the rest. And a huge space station with huge solar panels has much more drag then a small, cylinder shaped capsule.

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And then instead of one problem, you have half a dozen or more problems.

Currently, the problem is somewhat simple:

Attach to Node 2 forward, and be able to produce 47m/s of delta-v attacked to a station of 450 tons.

Boost-de-boost maneuvers of the whole station are well researched at this point, so we know the force vectors and what happens to the station when doing so. The station itself can also help with attitude control.

If you break it up in pieces, you would need to find out where to attach, what the force vectors need to be to properly boost of module through its CoM without spinning out of control. Most pieces won't be able to support the burn with attitude control.

You'd also have to disassemble the station, which in itself might take months or longer. All while diminishing the capabilities of the station further and further while doing so.

Honestly, keeping it as one piece looks a lot simpler. You basically just need to do a stronger de-boost burn. So basically business as usual, just more fuel.

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We don’t really know. With our current technology we can only see so far. I commonly see the theory of its expanding into nothing, represented by a white void.

if you interpreted that as an outright dismissal that dark matter is correct, then again, you have entirely missed the point... Saying that "not having evidence doesn't mean it doesn't exist" is not a strong argument for dark matter, or a strong argument against alternatives. It's pleading, and doesn't really imply anything meaningful. I hear it when people ask for proof that god exists.

I don't understand why you insist that I have claimed dark matter is incorrect, maybe I am failing to communicate my point properly, but that definitely is not it at all. I would appreciate it if you took some of your valuable time to respond to literally anything else that I have actually said, thanks

The SLS? Well, good question. Seems a bit adventurous to put people in it on its second flight, but hopefully NASA knows what they are doing.

The Starship? Only the Starship (the top part) flew and landed. The booster has never flown. When reading about Starship, you need to be careful. The entire thing is called Starship, but the orbital part (top part) is *also* called Starship. That makes understanding the news a bit tricky.

Tests for the Starship had a long pause while the bureaucrats figured out what to do with safety and the effects on the environment and so on. That went about as fast as such things go, frustrating as it is.

Theoretically they could have started testing again, but my guess is that they made so much progress while waiting for the OK they decided to just go for the orbital flight next.

SpaceX basically have all the needed tests finished. I'm not sure if they have an official OK to do the orbital, but I seem to remember reading that they do have it.

I guess now it is just a matter of dealing with unexpected problems as they pop up.

Notably, RocketLab is getting out of the small launcher business in the long run. Neutron will be closer to Falcon 9 sizes, if it works. When you see the only successful company in a field trying to build themselves out if it, that's not a field you want to be getting into.

Making it to orbital height briefly is not making to orbit, it's just a balistic trajectory that happens to have a high enough apogee.

It takes more energy (possibly much more) than that to actually "make it to orbit" a state which amongst other things has the noteable characteristic that things don't just fall down from it immediatelly after reaching it (they can, over time, end up falling down from lower orbits were there is drag from the top of Earths athmosphere, but when things just go up and the fall back down again they haven't made it to orbit)

It flew once, why wasn't it tested more?

Relax.

The most powerful rocket to ever fly that also just happens to be fully reuseable is going to take some time.

The SLS was based on 30-40 year old proven technology and *still* took over a decade to get off the ground. And we will have to wait for over a year to get a second flight. Granted, they are going to make it exciting by putting people inside...