Tag: space

Spinlaunch

It is great to see alternatives to Rockets becoming feasible, both for pollution reasons, as well as for the Moon, where it would be much easier to build this than to produce fuel.

it’s a 100 meter diameter chamber they are rotating at 450 rpm. This is about 10k g at peak loading. They pointed out that even unmodified smartphones and action cameras are within the tolerances needed to handle this and that might be hard to believe if you’ve ever dropped your phone and broken its screen but the screen breaks because you’re putting a whole lot of force on a very small point if you spread that amount of force over the entire device it’s not unrealistic that these things can handle that. So while they’re not going to get customers that just decide to switch their satellite from falcon 9 to this rocket they might well be able to get customers who are interested in the complete ecosystem who can build their satellites to the specs required in exchange for having a much cheaper launch system

Space Timesharing

“We are completely inverting the legacy economics of space, shifting from CAPEX — a huge investment in a platform — to OPEX — a lease of a module or a usage fee — which will open the field to a whole new set of customers and uses”. We are building a distributed architecture of space sensors. This incredibly flexible system allows us to accommodate any type of client both before and during the course of the mission as we can reconfigure our payloads and use residual capabilities at will. In some cases, we will become clients of our own customers. We will have the infrastructure, we can flash software as needed for any kind of mission” For Timesharing, the client pays on a usage basis, usually a combination of onboard resources (electrical power, processing power, time, data transfer) and available pre-existing payloads.

Crew Dragon reuse

Both Booster and Dragon spacecraft are flight proven for today’s Crew-2 flight to the ISS. NΛSΛ chooses flight-proven spacecraft and booster for its most precious missions. Dragon Pilot Megan McArthur is sitting in the very same seat that her husband Bob Behnken sat for the SpaceX DM-2 mission 11 months ago. Thank you for helping humanity raise its aspirations and dreams!

P.S. many years ago, when reusable boosters were an audacious dream, I heard them described as “used”, as in a used car. No, no, we should call them “flight proven” and I wagered that the long term data would show them to be safer than a first flight. “Would you want to be on the very first flight of a new airplane coming off the line?” I asked. The moniker became a meme.

SpaceX telemetry

Neat: due to some nuclear weapons treaty, rocket communications are transmitted more or less in the clear, and a group of enthusiasts have decoded additional internal sensor readings & pictures from spacex, but also some chinese ones(?). Kind of surprising that there’s not more industrial espionage going on, or if there is, others don’t seem to suspiciously catch up with spacex.

2020s Technology

Therapeutic plasma exchange is FDA-approved (not for aging, but for a bunch of other conditions). I imagine there remain prohibitions on advertising that it can add years to your life, but it is safe, and a doctor can prescribe it off label. It’s also cheap. An automated plasmapheresis machine—which lets you do treatment after treatment—can be bought online for under $3000. That is less than the cost of a single transfusion of young blood sold by the startup Ambrosia. How long until someone opens a clinic offering plasma dilution? I bet someone tries it in 2021. If it works, people will get over the weirdness, and it could be commonplace by 2030.

What is more plausible this decade is enhanced and advanced geothermal systems. The legacy geothermal industry is sleepy, tapping energy at traditional volcanic hydrothermal hotspots—forget about it. The next generation of the industry, however, is a bunch of scrappy startups manned by folks leaving the oil and gas industry. The startups I have spoken to think with today’s technology they can crack 3.5¢/kWh without being confined to volcanic regions. With relatively minor advancements in drilling technology compared to what we’ve seen over the last decade, advanced geothermal could reach 2¢/kWh and become scale to become viable just about anywhere on the planet. Collectively, the startups are talking about figures like 100s of gigawatts of generation by 2030. I’m watching this space closely; the Heat Beat blog is a great way to stay in the loop. As I wrote last month, permitting reform will be important.

The 2020s will be a big decade for sustainable alternative fuels (SAF). Commercial aviation can’t electrify—batteries will never match fossil fuels’ energy density. Given political realities, aviation has no choice to decarbonize, which means either hydrogen fuel or SAF. Hydrogen fuel is much better than batteries, but still not as energy dense as fossil fuels or SAF, and so my money is on SAF, and particularly on fuel made from CO₂ pulled from the atmosphere. It is easy to convert atmospheric CO₂ to ethanol in solution; and it is easy to upgrade ethanol into other fuels. But it is hard to separate ethanol from water without using a lot of energy—unless you have an advanced membrane as Prometheus Fuels does. I have written about Prometheus before and continue to follow them closely. Their technology could decarbonize aviation very suddenly.

Construction tech is another area to watch. Whether it’s 3d-printed homes as imagined by Icon, or advanced manufactured housing as designed by Cover or Modal, there has to be a better way to build than our current stick-built paradigm. Housing costs have skyrocketed largely due to zoning rules, but construction technology is another lever by which we can increase housing productivity. This is another area where the barriers don’t seem to be primarily technological.