Carl Sagan

We're good to go at this point. The SpaceX feed is just about to go live. Launch timetabled for just after 9pm

We're trying again tonight, but in case of more problems the no-fly zone above the launch site has been extended to also cover Thursday and Friday. But the tank farm (which provides the cryogenic fuel) is now active (venting fuel) and the NASA high-altitude spotter plane has filed a flightpath from Florida to Texas to observe the hoped-for launch, so hopefully tonight is the night. Not as many streams right now, but it's live here:

Aborted! The Raptor engines automatically shut down  with 1 second to go (reason unknown). Presume we go again tomorrow. 

Ten minutes to launch!

Roughly. There isn't a set time. Could even be sooner. The official feed (4:30 CST is 22:30 GMT):

Finally we're underway. The test flight will be in the next hour unless there's a problem. The flaps have been extended and fuelling has begun. Also, the NASA high-altitude tracking plane has taken off from Florida and is heading to Texas to monitor the flight, hoping the Starship doesn't explode before it reaches high altitude. It may well!

The SpaceX feed still isn't live, but there's commentary on NASA Spaceflight. I'll see if I can get it to embed this time:

Today's the day of the first proper test flight (all being well). We don't know when, but anytime from now (though they've not started fuelling up yet) over the next severak hours. There are several live feeds.

I'm using NASA Spaceflight because it has commentary so I will hear when something starts to happen:

https://youtu.be/OLpN8Cco3mU

Better quality but mostly quiet is the LabPadre feed:

https://youtu.be/STGWOEKhrtI

Then there's an official SpaceX feed that's not yet live but well over 100k people are already waiting for it!

https://youtu.be/nf83yzzme2I

Apparently SpaceX beginss in five minutes. The "tank farm" (which they fuel te rocket from) is already buzzing with activity.

Traditional rocket development happens in secret, far away from prying eyes. A problem with building your prototypes outdoors in a field in Texas in front of a global audience of space fans, paying for 24/7 streams, is that schedules keep changing. Indoors in secret, we'd never know. 

If you'd set a reminder to watch the 15km first test flight tonight, I'm afraid it's not now happening. It's been changed to tomorrow (hopefully) or Wednesday as a backup, with the altitude reduced to 12.5km (41,000 feet). I don't know why the altitude is lower. It may be SpaceX thinks they can test everything they need flying to a lower altitude or, for a very first flight of an experimental spaceship built in a field, the Federal Aviation Authority might have insisted for safety reasons. 

However, it turns out that SpaceX will likely do another static fire test tonight. That normally only fires the engines (this SN8 prototype has 3 Raptor engines) for a second or so, but at this early stage of the journey to Mars, it's still quite exciting. 

For those looking forward to watching the first test flight tomorrow, it's now gone back to "no earlier than Monday". 

The launchpad the prototype is on can't take much more punishment from the pre-flight tests of the super-powerful Raptor engines, so I'd be surprised if they're delaying to perform more engine tests (static fires). 

NASA's relationship with SpaceX has occasionally been tense because NASA has sometimes claimed SpaceX is concentrating too much on the Starship program at the expense of the Dragon contracts for the International Space Station. 

This Saturday sees the first launch of the new SpaceX Cargo Dragon to the ISS, taking up an important new airlock among other things. My sense is that it would look terrible if something went wrong (and it's a new vehicle) at the same time SpaceX is slapping itself on the back for the first launch of its Mars rocket, so I think this may be a political decision. 

2 hours ago, maxjam said:

@Carl Sagan

Not looked at this yet other than the trailer, looks like it might be worth a watch though ?

https://www.netflix.com/gb/title/80221410

Alien Worlds

Applying the laws of life on Earth to the rest of the galaxy, this series blends science fact and fiction to imagine alien life on other planets.

Thanks! Sounds a little like something I made earlier:

The NOTAM (notice to airmen) has been approved by the authorities, creating an air exclusion zone above the Boca Chica launch (and landing) site. This means the 15km altitude test flight can go ahead, any time from Friday (all being well) through to Sunday (in case there are delays). 

If the Starship flies properly and reaches the target height, it then descends (belly flops) over the Gulf of Mexico until the last moment. Only if everything is working well, will it make a late move away from the water to attempt a controlled vertical landing. 

31 minutes ago, 86 Schmokes & a Pancake said:

I think some are making stuff up Mr Sagan! Inception a superior film in every sense in my view. Have you seen Tenet and if so what did you make of it? Initially it did make me think of you as I thought it'd be your kind of movie. By the end I'd changed my mind though! ?

Here's what I wrote in August. 

On 28/08/2020 at 18:38, Carl Sagan said:

Went to TENET last night as a lover of Nolan's Inception, Interstellar, Memento and The Prestige.

I didn't know what the film was going to be about, but it turned out to link to areas of my scientific expertise on which Nolan decided to build the plot. I found it so disappointing. It might be that on the third or fourth watch it falls into place, but a film has got to give you a decent payoff on first viewing.

I'll give it 3/10 for some pretty scenes and the mention in the script of Richard Feynman.

Such high hopes, all shattered. But time is a great healer and having heard the Inception theory (aka made-up nonsense), I might give TENET another go soon. 

8 hours ago, WhiteHorseRam said:

Clever glossy film ... but a bit too clever maybe.

Was it it's own prequel?

Robert Pattinson's speculative job application for 007 too.

6/10 due to Ken being the dogs danglys.

Some say TENET is the sequel to Inception. But I think that's unfair to Inception. You're waiting for a train... 

2 hours ago, DarkFruitsRam7 said:

I'm hoping Wilder gets sacked at Sheffield United and we move heaven and earth to bring him here.

I have my fingers (and toes) crossed for exactly this. 

The 15km test flight (the reason I finally got round to starting this thread) has actually been put back to "no earlier than Wednesday", and potentially a little further into December. That's with the 8th prototype, called SN8 (SN = serial number). But what's brilliant is the backlog of prototypes, each better than the last, which is building up on site. For example, here's the completed SN9 in the hangar (called the High Bay):

Sometimes the improvements are incremental, sometimes they're a step change. The latest prototype being worked on is SN15, and Elon says this will be a major improvement on the previous versions. 

12 hours ago, ramit said:

Hanson's Great Filter is built on a rather shaky foundation.  It supposes that our instruments of observation are fully capable of detecting signs of intelligent life, that our ability to correctly read their measurements is sound and so forth.  It does not consider the possibility that we can only see what we are allowed to see at this time, that advanced civilizations would take the protective steps of cloaking their whereabouts to less advanced races, such as ourselves.

The Big Bang Theory has had many doubters, such as Einstein himself. From Wiki:  "It violates the first law of thermodynamics, which says you can't create or destroy matter or energy. Critics claim that the big bang theory suggests the universe began out of nothing. ... The first is that the big bang doesn't address the creation of the universe, but rather the evolution of it."

We can discuss, formulate theories and even arrive at a conclusion of how life can spring from chemical interaction in a certain sort of timing and environment, but we still won't be much nearer to solving the greatest mystery of all, consciousness, which i believe is the key to understanding, life, ourselves and this universe we inhabit.

Hanson is a good Bayesian. He adjusts his reasoning based on his observations, so the Great Filter supposes nothing over the longer term, but is right to use current knowledge to draw conclusions. Over the past 60 years or so we have made quite remarkable progress in astrobiology. We now know every star comes with planets, that it's a straightforward process to colonize the Galaxy in a million years or so, and that Earth is a relatively young planet in the Milky Way so others would have had headstarts on us of billions of years. But now with instruments like the WISE telescope we can also look beyond and see there are apparently no alien dyson spheres in the nearest million other galaxies we observe. The further and better we see, there remains nothing there. The next constraints will be the likes of the James Webb Space Telescope and the much better analysis of atmospheres around exoplanets. Maybe things will change, because you're right that we still can't observe anything like as much as we'd like, but we can see a lot. It's my belief it's telling us something fundamental about the Universe and the nature of reality.

Consciousness is an interesting one. In my day job I'm a publisher (for instance Robin Hanson's editor, and Milan Cirkovic's for his work on the Fermi Paradox), and I'm working with a brilliant author on a fascinating book at the moment that is a very interesting exploration of consciousness, but of your three areas it's mainly about understanding ourselves. But probably not out for a couple of years if I can persuade the powers that be to let me sign it up!

33 minutes ago, ramit said:

I am surprised that you consider it likely that we are the only intelligence in this unbelievably vast universe.

https://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/the-drake-equation/

It's a brilliant observation. You can have no idea how pleased I am you made it. 

This is a topic I think about daily (I'm writing a novel about it, a bit of a homage to my namesake's "Contact") and is exercising many of the world's great minds. It's perhaps the biggest challenge to modern science, trying to combine the ideas of the cosmological principle (that the universe looks largely the same when viewed from anywhere, that the laws of physics apply equally everywhere and there's nothing privileged about our place in the Universe) with our observations that there isn't a shred of evidence for complex life anywhere else in the universe. How long can these ideas remain compatible? 

We tend to think of the Drake Equation as part of old-fashioned SETI when people expected aliens to be listening with radio telescopes for whispers of intelligence elsewhere. Nowadays a lot of things are framed through the lens of Robin Hanson's Great Filter. 

Every nook and cranny here on Earth is teeming with life. Everything out there in the vastness of the Universe can be explained by dead processes. It's a conundrum.

On 26/11/2020 at 14:36, SchtivePesley said:

An interesting take from Werner Herzog this colonising Mars - that  "We should not be like the locusts, coming, grazing empty our planet, okay, and now where do we go next?"

23 hours ago, ramit said:

And we take for granted that Mars and other planets and moons in our solar system are ours for the taking

Few humans have done more for the planet than Musk. For decades we were facing Carmageddon with the motor industry not giving a stuff. Elon single-handedly has transitioned the world towards electric cars and sustainable transport, with a heavy focus on solar power too. Reluctantly the traditional car companies are being dragged kicking and screaming in Tesla's wake, but they're all a decade behind now so effectively are already dead. 

You can look after your own planet and want to improve it at the same time as wanting to colonize others. Call me crazy, but I'm speciesist. I want Humanity to survive. We might be the only complex intelligence in the Universe, and if we go that could be the end of intelligence everywhere. Of course the other planets of the solar system should be ours to do with as we see fit, to help protect intelligence in the Universe and let it flourish. 

Meanwhile, Starship is to begin twice monthly test flights from next week, having established a 90 square mile safety zone around Boca Chica, mainly in the ocean, where spaceships will be blown up if they get out of control. 

https://www.krgv.com/news/spacex-planned-9-mile-launch-self-destruct-zone-over-gulf

It was a very short static fire, but everything went well. According to Elon, we remain on course for next week's historic test flight. 

He gives it a one in three chance of succeeding fully, but whatever happens we'll learn something. 

At the moment it looks as if what we call a static fire will be happening today. It's where they fire up the engines to test them, before a rocket flight and is being live streamed here: 

Last time they tried this it went wrong, leading to some molten stuff pouring out onto the launchpad, meaning they've done some design fixes and replaced one of the engines. 

This is very rapid development and prototyping. The philosophy is, if you're not failing at times you're not innovating quickly enough. Should the SN8 rocket blow up on the pad (very possible!), SN9 is now completed and a little better, so would simply be rolled out to take its place. Amazing! 

We have a new (provisional) date for the 15km test flight of Starship SN8! Powered by 3 Raptor engines, it will be the first attempt at a "proper" flight, above just 150 metres (the first 3 tests). The request for road closures around the site gives 30th November as the hoped-for day, with 1st and 2nd December as backups. 

https://www.cameroncounty.us/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/PUBLIC-NOTICE-OF-CAMERON-COUNTY-ORDER-TO-TEMP.-BEACH-CLOSURE-AND-HWY.11.30.20.pdf

For those who think of commercial airliners flying at around "40,000 feet", 15km is nearly 50,000 feet.

Hoping the prototype can get there, it then "bellyflops", falling back towards the landing site, maximizing its air resistance to slow it down before reorientating and relighting its engines at the last moment to land vertically. 

If it happens it will be spectacular. There's a strong chance of a Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly or RUD (aka explosion) and that will be spectacular too. Well worth a watch! 

Playing for the Slovenian U21s now. Against Germany a few days ago and then Russia the other night. Central midfield, I think. 

There are now 8 Starships in different stages of development at the Boca Chica site, SN8 (completed on one of the launchpads) through to SN15. And also Super Heavy 1.

Here's a lovely 13 minute video showing different activity on the site yesterday, and how much is being done:

It's also a historical document to let us look back and see how Boca Chica used to look, once we're used to it having become a gigantic spaceport in a few years' time! 

On 09/11/2020 at 16:24, AndyinLiverpool said:

2 things:

Kipo and the age of Wonderbeasts. Watched this with the kids and it's absolutely fabulous.

Queen's Gambit. A brilliant watch, even if you don't play chess.

On 09/11/2020 at 18:20, Mr. P said:

I'm too dumb to understand or enjoy chess, but Queen's Gambit was really good. I enjoyed it. Mini series too so it had my attention for long enough. 

The whole TV world is raving about Queen's Gambit, which is on Netflix for those of you who don't have Kodi. Seven hour-long episodes. I've just started on it.

Here's one of the live feeds from the site, which runs 24/7. The tanks are for the different cryogenic propellants. There's a small stainless steel object nearby that looks a little like a water tower, but in fact is StarHopper, the first vehicle to ever fly using one of the Raptor engines that have been developed for Starship and Super Heavy. Again, it only flew to 150m as a test.

For those who want to see the rudimentary Starship on the test stand, this is SN8 being readied for its 15km flight. It's the first of the prototypes to have the nosecone and flaps fitted. Above it we see the Moon, where as I said some adapted Starships may go, but above that we see Mars, the real target.

Starship itself stands 50m tall (9m diameter) with Super Heavy an additional 70m, so when they're mated together for flights into Earth orbit, it will be the tallest rocket ever built, but more importantly will have much bigger carrying capacity than anything that's gone before.