"...No 'known' threat..." Therein lies the rub

Probably going to invade my neighbors back yard

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A fun number to remember is that a circle with the diameter of the lunar orbit is very close to 1/64th the radius of earth. This means the earth covers about 1/4000th of the area which an asteroid has to pass through if it gets within the lunar distance.

So, if it goes past at 1 lunar distance, you have a 1/4000 chance of a hit (if it was random). 1/4 lunar distance, 16/4000 (1/250).

If the Earth weren't spinning then the water would spread out in all directions, stopping when the surface tension stopped it from getting any thinner. It would be a thin puddle beaded up on the surface. That is, unless the amount of water was enough to cover the whole planet - in that case it would cover the planet to an even depth.

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NASA also says this:

"Newly-discovered asteroid 2023 DZ2 will sail safely past Earth today. Asteroids pass our planet safely all the time, but a close approach by one of this size (140–310 ft, or 43–95 m) happens only about once per decade. (There is no known threat for at least the next 100 years.)"

The two things that jump to mind are; "oblate spheroid" and "centrifugal".

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By the time it is launched for its first flight, SpaceX will be phasing out the Falcon9 for the Starship anyway...

With a NET of 2024... that's a rather large window.

At least MARS and LC-2 are functional.

I hope for the best, as the more launch vehicles, the cheaper lofting stuff into LEO gets. Which is a good thing. Because that leads to putting more humans and human habitats into space eventually but let's get a launch done first.

Space is hard. Relativity found out that adage again a few days ago.

I've never seen this, but this is exactly what I thought Melancholia was about. I was wrong.

Really? Whoopsie.

I guess I'm thinking of something else. I thought there was like a 2nd Earth where everyone had a doppelganger.

It is weird to think that if a regulation billiards ball were to be upsized to that of earth, it would have more drastic topographic features.

"planned prices" aren't competitive with anything because they're not actual prices.

People say all sorts of shit when it doesn't cost them anything to say it. Are they taking guaranteed orders at that price? If not, it's not even worth discussing.

Neutron has a simpler design for landing legs and returns the fairing along with the booster allowing for much more reliable and faster reuse. Neutron also uses LOX/methane which should provide for greater engine longevity, and the engine design is more sophisticated than Merlin-1D. They also designed Neutron to return to the launch site from the start, which simplifies operations.

Starship is likely closer to its first test launch than Neutron is, but that doesn't mean it's closer to operational commercial launches. Starship is vastly more complex than Neutron, and because it is larger many steps of making it operational will just inherently take longer. We've seen this already in how long the development process has been. SN10 was fully two years ago, they're still working on ground facilities problems, they're still working on problems with thermal protection, they're still working on problems with getting all of the engines working together, and so on.

I have faith that SpaceX will be able to tackle those problems successfully, but they just have a lot more to work on than Neutron has because it's a bigger and much more ambitious vehicle and flight profile. Neutron's design may be innovative but fundamentally it is within a by now fairly well explored problem space. They're not trying to do a chopstick catch, they're not trying to do spin apart staging, they're not trying to reuse the upper stage yet, they're not trying to light over two dozen engines at launch, etc.

More to the point, because Neutron is so much simpler they have a much lower bar before entering the commercial launch market. If they can reliably reach orbit (even if reuse is not at 100% with the first launch) then they can start getting business. Starship is likely to have a longer period of development even after the first test launches because it is a more complex design. Even if they achieve success with an orbital flight they still have more work to do, and I doubt they'll have commercial customers in that time frame.

It's very likely that Starship development will continue through a phase of Starlink-only launches for a period of many months, and depending on the timeline it's very possible that Neutron will be launching customer payloads before Starship does.

Yes, we are studying if the planned launch price of a future rocket will be competitive with current rockets.

Even if you follow your logic and our universe was expanding into another volume, you can ask the same question of that — where did it come from, ad infinum.

But even worse, that would all be speculation because anything “outside” our universe is inaccessible to observation anyway. By definition our universe is all matter, energy, space and time contained therein. There is no “outside”.

Your question has been asked many times with regards to the balloon analogy. “But where is the balloon a inflating into?” In the analogy, that’s higher dimensions. But that’s the rub — it’s just an analogy and not literal. Space “is” and expands in a measurable way. Always. Using an analogy (like the balloon) and concluding “must”, well, that’s a fallacy. The analogy helps describe some aspects of what we observe, but it’s not reality.

As for the Big Bang, all energy was contained in a singularity that was a state beyond which our physics can describe. Time, space, forces, and energy were all unified. That’s why there was no “before” the Big Bang because just like there was no space, there was no time. All of our dimensions, space and time, were created with the Big Bang.

One last note, quantum field fluctuations and uncertainty are natural part of or laws of physics. It’s real and tested. “What triggered” the Big Bang may simply be random quantum wave fluctuations in whatever state the universe was in. No special action was necessary. Our current understanding of physics simply isn’t advanced enough to describe that state. Not without quantum descriptions for gravity and maybe time too.

> If Neutron is priced at $50M

That is obviously correct but it's a paper rocket goal price. Too many people assuming it's a real price of a real rocket that exactly hits ever goal.

Wake me up when you can sign a contract locking in that price.

Looking at what he's said/done about EVs it seems like he's usually pretty honest about this kind of thing.

The real differentiator is execution. Competitors don't have the same level of execution because no one else is willing to push as hard.

> Terran R

That's pie in the sky at this point. They can't even make orbit.

Everyone comparing a paper rocket "price" to a flying rocket actual price.

it's not when people abuse it

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