upvote
Even then. If you're building a million satellites, they only need to be about 42 meters long for you to make them into a contiguous ring in LEO. Smaller (22.5m) or fewer (537,000) for the same in a 200 km orbit around Mars.

Do that, and you can quickly bootstrap an orbital ring and make rockets obsolete from surface to orbit of either body.

In the case of Mars, the planet-wide dust storms make it a good idea to locate your PV off-planet, and an orbital ring is also very convenient for that.

reply
Maybe I missed something obvious, but how does an orbital ring make rockets obsolete for surface to orbit trips?
reply
Because it's held up by being in orbit (strictly: a bit faster than that), you can by the same process as a maglev hang a stationary-with-respect-to-ground cable off it; and because the cable is only as long as your orbit is high (~200 km or whatever) rather than the 36,000 km you'd need for a full space elevator, we don't need to invent any supermaterials for it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

reply
What would you like to make this orbital ring out of?
reply
Structually, it barely matters. The physics works even if each element isn't joined contiguously to the next, it's just that if you do make it contiguous you can also use it for power delivery and worry less about elements drifting out of alignment.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring

reply
Pangolin scales?
reply
Goodness no, all subspecies are listed on Wikipedia as having various kinds of "Threatened" conservation statuses.
reply
What specifically do you disagree with from the article to say its Smoke and Mirrors? I think their analysis is reasonable and that it will reduce to a launch cost problem.
reply
Giving it a quick look they're doing the same thing as everyone else and handwaving away really difficult engineering problems with some back of the envelope math that only looks at one or two aspects.

Like their section on collision avoidance isn't any more sophisticated than "Starlink has a great record so far" when we're talking about a very different scale of how much mass and surface area has to be moved around in a coordinated way.

This is in effect an editorial from two postgrads, not an actual detailed workup. I don't feel like spending time going into any more effort based on that.

reply
Saying it is equivalent to launch costs is hand waving. Their "median" scenario would involve Starship working at the lower bound of their operational goal for it.
reply
"Failed businesses" is some insane cope.

The impulse to discredit someone's "art" because of their politics has always stuck me as incredibly juvenile.

It's as if people can't imagine competence - even in some narrow way - in someone who doesn't share all their exact beliefs.

It seems especially silly because literally every great man and woman of history shares only a tiny fraction of our modern beliefs.

reply
Just so you know, this is what cope looks like.
reply
Sure bud. The richest man alive is a huge business failure and I'm just coping about it.
reply
deleted
reply
[flagged]
reply