Oh, they've been quite successful at what they want to do. They have successfully looted the company quite thoroughly. Boeing had spent nearly a century building up a strong company with a strong brand that was recognized and valued across the world. After the MBAs took over they looted everything, they trashed the brand for short term gains, they funneled all of the cash on hand into the pockets of shareholders through dividends and stock buybacks. They've enriched many already hyper wealthy folks by many tens of billions of dollars, and all it took was destruction of a world class engineering institution and a few hundred lives.

We won't see them as gamma ray bursts but we might see them as supernova (or hypernova) events, but only much closer.

That's part of the reason. We've also made very poor architectural choices with Orion and SLS, both of which have been insanely expensive. We've also had very questionable program leadership and half-hearted management over the lifetime of the program. The current lunar program is the 3rd iteration of beyond-LEO human spaceflight within the past 15 years.

A solar system is formed out of a mix of gas and tiny nanoscopic dust (and ice) grains. Those dust grains contain the whole variety of elements that exist in nature, from hydrogen to uranium, including things like gold. As those grains stick together and form into balls of rock and ice there is a certain size range where the energy released by impacts starts becoming enough to start melting the material of the grains. As you progress through the ladder of accretion of larger and larger objects (from gravel to rocks to boulders to mountain sized asteroids to moon and planet sized objects) eventually the heat released from these impacts becomes enough that it can keep a whole object molten for an extended period of time, not just an isolated melting but a full molten asteroid or "planetesimal".

When this happens the grab bag of materials in the dust grains that made up all of the component parts of the object become liquid and start to separate based on mutual solubility. Just like oil and water don't mix, different kinds of molten elements and minerals either mix or don't mix. In broad strokes you can categorized elements and minerals into the group that is more soluble along with molten iron and nickel (the siderophilic elements and minerals) and the group that is more soluble along with molten silicate rocks (the lithophile elements and minerals). When a large planetary body exists in this molten state for an extended period (perhaps as short as hours or days even) it separates into layers of materials based on mutual solubility and density, with the denser iron and siderophilic materials sinking down into the core and the lighter silicate rock materials floating to form a mantle and crust.

Many precious metals including gold, platinum, palladium, iridium, etc. are siderophiles, and preferentially separate out into the core of a planetary body. Earth contains an enormous amount of gold and other precious metals effectively locked away within the core, on the crust gold is much rarer due to this differentiation process which has occurred. During the formation of the solar system some planetesimal bodies became large enough to become differentiated but then cooled to become solid, and some of them were disrupted by impacts and their pieces ended up not becoming parts of planets or moons. Today there are multiple types of asteroids. Many are made of very primordial material (chondrites) and were likely never part of a larger body and never underwent differentiation. Some are the debris of larger bodies which became differentiated and then were smashed into pieces by impact events, leaving behind floating chunks of stony crust or metal rich cores.

The metallic asteroids are fragments of the cores of larger differentiated bodies, and they represent a peak into the sorts of collections of materials that on Earth are mostly abundant within the core. Psyche does not have the density to be purely a chunk of iron-nickel core material, it likely is some mixture of metallic and stony materials. However, the metallic materials will include mostly iron, nickel, and cobalt.

(Here's the tl,dr part):

The precious metals within 16 Psyche exist at trace levels, with higher concentrations within the metallic portions of the asteroid. For gold, platinum, iridium, palladium, etc. these levels would typically be somewhere in the 10s of parts per million range. They do not exist as native metals or in the form of flakes, grains, veins, or nuggets. Those require hydrothermal processes which do not occur on asteroids or asteroid parent bodies. This means that in terms of precious metal content even a high metal content asteroid represents merely an ore body that would need to be processed in order to produce bulk quantities of those precious metals. It would take processing tens to hundreds of tonnes of asteroid material just to produce a singular kilogram of gold or other precious metals, for example.

That's just how many GRBs happen. There are certain kinds of stellar deaths which result in the collapse of an extremely massive star into a black hole. As a considerable chunk of the rest of the star gets swallowed by the black hole it forms into an accretion disk and the rotation creates high energy axial jets. The axial jets contain super energetic material being propelled at close to the speed of light, this creates a relativistic effect which substantially increases the brightness of the emitted energy near the axis of the beam. Many of these events occur throughout the universe routinely, projecting intense gamma ray beams across billions of lightyears. When Earth happens to be in one of these beams we detect a gamma ray burst.

This particular event wasn't inherently exceptionally bright, nor exceptionally close (it was about 1.9 billion lightyears away), but we were basically directly in the brightest part of the beam, which is very narrow.

> It is insanely so. x100 more difficult. If it wasn't, someone else would have landed an orbital rocket by now, when they landed a suborbital in the 90s.

It's not insanely difficult, it just hasn't been tried very often. Every program that tried VTVL rocket landing has succeeded (DC-XA, Blue Origin, SpaceX). It just hasn't been tried much. The reason it hasn't been tried much is because reuse hasn't been prioritized or done very pragmatically. Prior to the 2000s most RLV development focused on unrealistic designs such as the Shuttle or SSTOs, not on simple two stage launchers with booster reuse. More so, there hasn't been much competition in the launch vehicle space until the 2000s, for a variety of reasons, so extreme cost competitiveness wasn't a major factor until then.

Additionally, there are many natural optimizations that have traditionally been made with expendable launchers which deoptimize them for booster reuse. Expendable launchers tend to have simpler, lower cost first stages with only a few engines (Delta IV, Atlas V, and Ariane 5 only have one), while the majority of the cost and complexity is pushed into the upper stage. This makes first stage reuse much harder, especially in the VTVL configuration (it's very difficult to throttle down a single huge engine vs. simply turning off extra engines) and it makes it useless, as you end up simply saving the cost of expending the cheapest part of the rocket. You have to go into two stage launch vehicle design while planning ahead for VTVL first stage reuse to actually make it worthwhile. The genius of SpaceX was that they made very pragmatic design decisions that aimed at reusability straight out of the gate, and they figured out how to do the R&D for reuse within the context of paying commercial customer flights, making use of "thrown away" hardware that created the equivalent of a billion dollar funding stream. But much of that can be copied by anyone paying attention. SpaceX may have some degree of "secret sauce" that drives their success, but simply achieving VTVL reusable rockets is not it alone.

Landing a booster from an orbital rocket is a greater challenge than a sub-orbital rocket, but not insanely so. SpaceX took time to figure out how to do it because they were trying many different methods and they were trying to do the R&D extremely cheaply. And it worked. Today we have the benefit of hindsight, and companies like Rocket Lab have the benefit of being able to follow in SpaceX's footsteps, without having to steal their confidential trade secrets. Some lessons on the process are publicly known, such as the use of an entry burn to moderate speed, and so on. Some lessons are actually publicly available data because NASA commissioned SpaceX to gather data on supersonic retropropulsion to inform future Mars landings. SpaceX's "secret sauce" has never been trade secrets, it's always been it's ability to execute operationally and get things done.

Additionally, Neutron is attempting an easier flight profile than Falcon 9, it's not doing barge landings and instead focusing solely on returning to the launch site. SpaceX succeeded with their first ever attempt at an RTLS landing, which was their first successful landing overall, and their success rate for ground landings was very high (100% in fact) even while they were improving the reliability of drone ship landings. It's just an easier and simpler flight profile. But it requires you design the rocket from the get go with that in mind (because you need enough performance margin), which Neutron and Starship have been.

SpaceX may be able to get things done, but Starship is a tremendous amount to bite off all at once. The launch tower is different, the landing profiles are different, there is upper stage atmospheric re-entry and controlled descent, there is upper stage landing, there is the thermal protective system on the upper stage, there is orbital propellant transfer, and on and on and on. Getting all of these things working is required in order to meet their Artemis Program Starship-HLS commitments. Without those commitments it's possible that Starship could see commercial service in a sort of "early access" mode where they were still working on upper stage landings and reuse, but because of the Starship-HLS contract it's very likely that'll be a secondary priority.

I'm not sure why people have this idea that Starship is going to be easy or why Neutron is going to be hard. Neutron vs. Starship are just fundamentally different things. Neutron is a much shorter race to "run" compared to Starship, it's a sprint vs. a marathon. Even if SpaceX is much faster at working through Starship design and development issues than Rocket Lab is with Neutron they just have much, much longer to go.

The DC-X was doing vertical landings in the '90s, Blue Origin has been doing vertical landings with their New Shepard since 2015. Yes, it's harder to do with a larger rocket but Rocket Lab is stacking the odds in their favor (by going for RTLS only, for example), and they have the benefit of watching SpaceX having done it.

When SpaceX began testing landings of the Falcon 9 they had a grand total of 7 successful orbital launches under their belt. Rocket Lab has done over 30 launches of the Electron and they have a tremendous amount of public knowledge to draw from. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they succeeded with landing on the first attempt.

Starship is a great design, but it's incredibly ambitious and will take a while to achieve maturity because of its complexity and ambition. Far too many people are riding the Starship hype train imagining that as soon as it achieves partial success with an actual launch they'll start launching commercial payloads a week later and retire the Falcon 9 the week after that.

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.

> They are targeting their next generation rocket at SpaceXs last generation rocket.

I wouldn't say that exactly. Neutron is fully LOX/methane, and it includes several innovations not seen in the Falcon 9 which potentially will be advantageous. That said, it is not the quantum leap that Starship represents, and SpaceX is still far ahead of anyone else in several areas (Raptor engine development perhaps, for example). However, in that regard, it is very likely that Neutron will be launching commercial payloads before Starship does.

From a practical standpoint Neutron or something very like Neutron is still an absolutely solid choice for Rocket Lab as their next move beyond Electron. It's achievable enough to reach the market soon. It's capable enough to be cost competitive even with the best in class, and it has a capability profile which should enable it to be profitable even given a lot of potential variability in the launch market. It's main target may be in servicing LEO constellations, but it'll have the capability to launch a wide variety of more conventional satellites. Even with the SpaceX "steamroller" in full effect there is still unmet need in the launch business. It's very likely that if Neutron work they won't have any problem finding customers for it.

The planet in question is on the borderline of being almost massive enough to be classified as a brown dwarf. Just like proto-stars and brown dwarfs, planets receive a great deal of heating from accretion and gravitational contraction. And due to the square-cube law the more massive an object is the more of this energy is released and the longer it is retained because surface area grows more slowly than volume. The result is that there is a great deal of internal heat that is retained within gas giants, especially the more massive ones.

Nobody will ever be able to visit ancient egypt, time machines would break the laws of physics, but that doesn't mean there's no value in studying it.

https://www.fdic.gov/news/press-releases/2023/pr23019.html

> No losses associated with the resolution of Silicon Valley Bank will be borne by taxpayers. Shareholders and certain unsecured debt holders will not be protected. Senior management has also been removed. Any losses to the Deposit Insurance Fund to support uninsured depositors will be recovered by a special assessment on banks, as required by law.

As for Shuttle, it was not ended and replaced with nothing. It was replaced with what became SLS and Orion (plus some other stuff that didn't continue), which has so far made use of over $40 billion in funding. On top of that the commercial crew program was started. All of these things started before the last Shuttle flight.

That doesn't necessarily change the main point, but accuracy is important.

Glad to see you're onboard with basically what the plan will turn out to be, not sure why you were so resistant to the idea.

So you're proposing they just build a propulsion system on the station as a DIY project?

The whole purpose of this is to build a system that works reliably. And one can be developed, but not for zero dollars. Very likely this will end up being a variant of a cargo spacecraft (Cygnus or Dragon) optimized for propulsion. None of those vehicles have enough thrust to do the job in one go right now, the station weighs 400 tonnes after all.

Yes, that will for sure happen, but in order for it to happen safely we need something with a lot of propulsive capability. The original plan was to use 3 Progress vehicles, but that puts Russia in the critical path.

First off, SVB wasn't "bailed out". SVB has always had plenty of assets to cover deposits, they just fucked up their liquidity and management and caused a bank run. The FDIC stepped in and is going to make sure it's run properly, but realistically there won't end up being a single dollar of tax payer funds that goes into SVB for a "bail out".

Regardless, that is mostly besides the point. Yes, there should be a larger commitment to ongoing space station operations. Unfortunately, the way these things work is with specific projects and there hasn't yet been an "ISS 2" project that has been able to congeal political support. There is both half-assed commitment to next generation fully commercial stations and also to the Lunar Gateway, but these are not the same things. For Congress something like Lunar Gateway seems like a perfect replacement, it's a sink for federal aerospace dollars and it allows for international cooperation, but operationally it's apples and oranges.

The Lunar Gateway isn't a replacement for the ISS, for one it won't be continuously inhabited.

I really hope we don't half-ass a transition from the ISS to the next generation of space stations. One of the best things about the ISS currently is that every crew has a roughly 3 month overlap with the previous crew, which allows a tremendous amount of transfer of knowledge. That's continued for about two decades, it'd be a shame to let that operational expertise die.

OK, here we go.

First off, this is a solved problem if you spend the money. None of the currently active Mars rovers (Curiosity and Perseverance) have this problem, because they are powered by RTGs. If you want to solve the problem more affordably, then it's still a bit of an issue.

Let's start from square one. Imagine you are adding something to a Mars rover that literally does nothing, what does that look like? Well, that doesn't come for free, you still have to do testing, modeling, integration of the component into the design planning, and so on. At the complexity of a Mars rover that could very easily cost millions. Now imagine you have something that takes up power, has mechanisms of operation, and has some purpose related to power generation. Now the testing requirement goes through the roof. At the absolute minimum that component needs to not cause a problem. It can't vibrate loose during launch or landing, it can't get in the way of anything else, it can't cause a problem with the power system, it can't short out, etc, etc, etc. Additionally, it can't make the power production worse. Imagine a windshield wiper type design which scratches the surface of the solar panels and permanently reduces the power output the first time it's used. Or something that craps out and ends up partially blocking the solar panel or making dust buildup worse.

And that's before you even get to the question of how you make something that will actually work. Sure you can theorize that a simple brush or a high powered fan or a jet of compressed air will do the trick. How do you know for sure? Do you have a room off of your garage that you can step into that has a replica Martian atmosphere, replica Martian surface conditions, and replica Martian dust? Mars isn't identical to Earth, the dust there is slightly different, it has a different consistency and it is generally more "sticky" and staticky because of how dry Mars is. These properties are why Martian dust is such a problem and why testing a solution is not that easy.

This means that realistically the R&D program to develop a solution that has a high probability of working would clock in at tens of millions of dollars, maybe more.

Meanwhile, you're trying to add all of this mass and suck up all of this budget to increase the longevity of the rover, but this comes at a cost, you have to displace something else on the rover. You're going to have to lose some other functional equipment to make room, and that's going to come at a distinct blow to the science return on the rover within the nominal mission, with the hypothetical advantage of increasing the extended mission duration. Currently nobody has thought that's a good idea so far.

On top of that, if you design a solar powered rover with absolutely no dust mitigation systems whatsoever then there's still a reasonable chance that with some luck you can have a rover that naturally lasts for 15 years on Mars.

Given these tradeoffs and uncertainties it hasn't seemed worth it for anyone (either the US, China, or Europe) to design a solar powered rover or lander that attempts to make use of a dedicated dust removal system. Eventually that technology is likely to be developed, but so far the cost vs. benefit equation hasn't hit a point where it makes sense to make that investment.

It's a matter of time, mostly. The big issue is that you have to design for it up front. Which doesn't necessarily mean you have to commit to it with the first launch, although that might be changing as SpaceX redefines what is market competitive. But you have to design the vehicle so that landings are feasible and sensible.

Most of the traditional optimizations for expendable launches de-optimize for reuse. The first stage is where there's the least sensitivity to mass, so first stages end up being the cheapest parts of the rocket with the upper stages being the most costly. They also tend to be optimized to have a small number of engines. The Atlas V has one engine on the first stage, for example. These things make reuse harder (can't throttle deep enough to make landing easy) and less worthwhile (you're reusing the cheapest part).

RocketLab and Blue Origin are designing their next gen rockets with reuse in mind, hopefully they can achieve success and get some market diversification in the reusable rockets field.

It scales up to some degree. There are lots of different kinds of asteroids which might be a threat to Earth. The DART data represents the first entry in a spreadsheet which might be filled out well enough to start having confidence in one way to divert rubble pile asteroids.

What that could look like eventually in a hypothetical practical application would be a medium sized asteroid that was a threat many years (hopefully decades or centuries) into the future and a series of impactor vehicles being sent to apply a sufficient set of nudges to divert it away from the impact scenario. Realistically anything like that would be part of a family of systems with different operational characteristics to handle different bodies of different scales of threat over different timelines.

They were always expecting dimorphos to be a rubble pile. That's the whole reason they did the mission, to collect this data, because there are unknowns involved.

It's not about pessimism it's about the difficulty of simulation, and lack of detailed knowledge.

And no, this is not a simple inelastic collision problem, it's not simply a matter of the final momentum of the asteroid being its starting momentum plus the probe's momentum, if it were we wouldn't have sent the probe. The asteroid is a rubble pile, which means that the impact ejected a huge plume of debris out of a crater. Because it sends a debris plume backwards (and that momentum needs to be balanced) you get greater than 1:1 momentum transfer, essentially turning the crater into a rocket engine powered by the probe's kinetic energy. The details of that plume depend greatly on the compositional and structure details of the asteroid, something we have very little firm data on up until now. We have literally fewer than five data points to go on for this sort of thing. So folks put together some simulations with variations according to the knowledge we have. As it turned out in this one instance the result was on the high end of all of the simulations, well above the average.

One thing worth pointing out here is that this is still just one data point. It may be that dimorphos is actually an outlier in terms of its compositional structure. Or it may be that the particular spot we hit was unusual. The average could be lower or higher than what we achieved with this specific instance. That's why we need a lot more studies like this one to collect enough data to be actually of practical usefulness.

That would be less valuable than other studies. DART with Dimorphos is one data point, to gain enough knowledge of the problem space to be able to build actual asteroid diversion systems based on the principle would require a lot more data points (realistically dozens). We need to understand the variations of how rubble pile asteroids are built, the range of possible impact dynamics, and what levels of predictability can be expected along with what features and measurable aspects can be relied on to guide that predictability. It may be that the next rubble pile asteroid we try to do this with is twice as effective, or half as effective, or maybe not effective at all, we don't have that data yet. DART is really just the first step of a long journey towards building the technology of asteroid diversion, and it is also not the only way to do it. It's a technique that will work in some situations but not others.

A lot of people imagine DART as being like this prototype of a system that we can just pull off the shelf and use to save humanity, but it's just basic research into the problem space, it's nowhere near anything like a prototype.