SpaceChampion

Surprisingly, renewed for Season 2.

SAOCOM 1A launch and first west coast landing at LZ-4 in Vandenberg AFB and first landing of a Block 5 Falcon 9.

I spent a few weeks with a girl in Australia over the Christmas holidays once. Super awkward xmas day with her work friend's family. So odd having a hot weather xmas too. I recommend bringing them kitschy American gifts, since they gave me kitschy Aussie gifts and it hadn't even occurred to me to exchange presents. I thought it was just dinner. What part of Australia are you going? I took a bus tour between Sydney and Adelaide -- I think it was 3 or 4 days -- along the south coast. My favourite Aussie saying I still use today: "No worries." Use that instead of "no problem". Watch out for the drop bears.

Season 4 sneak peek

The Magicians - season 4 sneak peek

Nynaeve and Egwene being ta'veren would be awful. They are awesome because they did everything themselves. No cheat codes.

It's the Chronic-what?-cles of Narnia - on Netflix. https://comicbook.com/movies/2018/10/03/the-chronicles-of-narnia-netflix-live-action-series/ For a laugh I started consider what an "urban" take on Narnia would be, if the Lonely Island song was the title theme song. Aslan is the purveyor of a new form of ecstacy, and the White Witch the drug queen who wants to push a brand of heroin called Turkish Delight on the neighborhood of Narnia. The lamp post is a cash drop. Mr. and Mrs. Beaver run the last adult video store. Mr Tumnus is exactly the same as in the books. Peter Dinklage doesn't appear at all.

Anyone else see Kanye West on SNL last night? That was so weird...

I'm actually finding it tolerable. The brewer / scientist character is a bit too cringing. The plot is not slow, and it's not overly derivative while seeming like it would fit right in with Shannara, Legend of the Seeker, and some Forgotten Realms module. I guess it's the characters are more interesting than one would expect from a show like this. They're all at least on identifiable arcs.

Member South Park? Forgot they're doing season-long arcs. Don't know where they're going with season 22 but the period/menopause jokes were lame.

You may be right Starlink will require fewer launches, but that's over time. The initial deployment will take a lot. There's only about 40 launches worldwide for payload beyond LEO, and last year SpaceX did 7 of the 40 of them. They could eat that market entirely, but we've yet to see if anything will expand that beyond the ~40. LEO launches worldwide were about 50 last year, with SpaceX doing ~13. Also the market goes in cycles as sats typically are lasting ~15 years before being replaced. Recent sats are having longer lifetimes, so the market may even shrink. The numbers for Starlink I've seen differ a lot -- from 4k to 12k sats -- but BFR cannot launch that many at once, nor is that the best way to deploy them even if BFR had the capacity, since the constellation has to reach most of the Earth from a relatively low orbit as many different inclinations. It'll probably be around 200 sats per launch, depending on their size. So about 20 to 60 launches for the initial deployment, plus replacing them frequently as they burn out or their orbit decays. It's going to be a lot of launches. We don't know if the market for huge sats for GEO will expand with the cheaper launch cost. The majority of the cost in the commercial space industry is not launches -- apparently that counts for a mere 2%. BFR needs to open up entirely new market. Cheaper sats more frequently produced. Hence Starlink and OneWeb (which would eventually be using Blue Origin's New Glenn, not SpaceX) is the first signs of that. SpaceX could likely figure out how to do a fully reusable second stage, probably using the Raptor engine, but there is no point to do so if they're going to have BFR in 3 years or so. Elon wanted it for a long time I think but it just makes sense to move on. If they can get point-to-point Earth travel approved by the relevant authorities, and charge prices similar to airlines for long-haul trips to the other side of the world, that's another huge use for BFR. They'll have to figure out how to make more BFRs faster!

Yeah, I think you got it. The design has changed so we have to speculate what the GTO capacity is now. The change from previous to current design of BFR brings the payload to LEO from 150 tons down to 100 tons. For reaching GTO, the previous design was something like 18 tons, but that's without refuelling. For the current design it might be around 12 tons, but I haven't seen the actual numbers. With refuelling, they can get all the way back up to 100 tons to GTO, the Moon, Mars, etc. The engines can be upgraded from optimize for sea-level to optimized for the vacuum of space -- this should increase the capacity to LEO and GTO substantially. Whether that's all the way back up to 150t and 18t respectively, depends on a lot of factors I don't know. BFR's main advantage is the re-usability of the entire rocket makes the marginal cost of launching to be not much more than the cost of the fuel, which would be around 5 million dollars. With operating costs, let's say $10 million. So it would be vastly cheaper to use AND have greater payload capacity than a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, not to mention every other rocket operating or past or planned. They could easily charge prices similar to Falcon 9, around $60 million, making in profit 5x the cost. Once they amortize the cost of development BFR (~2 to 5 billion) then prices *could* come down further to fuel + operating costs alone, but likely not because SpaceX will be designing bigger rockets and lots of stuff for a Mars colony, so would use profits from BFR (and Starlink) to pay for those. Maybe the most interesting thing is that SpaceX would have considerable flexibility to charge whatever they want, including vastly different prices for Mars colonists than for commercial sat payloads. Like they could charge $60 million per BFR landed on Mars (because it takes 5 tanker BFRs to refuel 1 passenger BFR), which would be the bare minimum -- pretty much giving it away at cost. One hundred colonists sharing the cost would be $600,000 each per ticket. While charging commercial companies $100 million for launching their satellites, making 900% profit, and that price gouging would still be attractive to their customers compared to the current market.

Just to review, since there was no discussion a week ago about it: SpaceX has sold the entire BFR flight around the Moon to Yusaku Maezawa, a Japanese billionaire who is planning on bring 6-8 artists from around the world. He's calling the trip #dearMoon, hoping to inspire these artists to create works of art from the trip. Current date for this is 2023. This would be after BFR is thoroughly tested and has sent 2 cargo flights to land on Mars. Refueling the upper stage (BFS: the Big Falcon Ship) will take a similar number of flights of the BFR with tanker ship on top, as the 5 it'll take to refuel for Mars landing (though the current payload capacity seemed to have downgraded from 150t to 100t). A Moon landing needs to refuel enough to be capable of launching from the Moon back to Earth. A Mars landing comes down with just enough fuel to land, using local water and CO2 to make the methane and oxygen needed as fuel to get back to Earth. While #dearMoon is not a Moon landing, it does provide some opportunity for testing out systems needed to transport people to Mars. It also provides a substantial chuck of money needed to develop the BFR booster and ship, so I'd expect more of these trips as a source of revenue for SpaceX, in addition to their plans for a satellite internet network, point-to-point travel on Earth, and their current business sending science, defense and communications payloads to orbit. Here's the recording of the announcement -- Elon goes on a bit long though.

Captain Marvel