[ExI] I salute Elon Musk, Captain of Spaceship Earth!

Wed Apr 27 13:15:31 UTC 2022

From: Giulio Prisco <giulio at gmail.com> 
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On Wed, Apr 27, 2022 at 7:35 AM spike jones via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:

 …

>>…Rafal, people appear to be second-guessing Musk’s intentions and then arguing against the intentions they assigned to him, in flat contradiction to what he actually said.  …  It looks good to me.  Can anyone find something bad in there?  What?

>…Elon Musk is a smart and strong person who gets shit done instead of whining all the time. In today's sad parody of culture, this is a capital sin.  Giulio

Ja thanks for that Giulio.  Musk is a disruptor, perhaps the most important disruptor in the past coupla decades.  We desperately needed a good disrupting.  OK we get one.  Disrupting a sad parody of culture isn’t a capital sin in my scriptures, it is capital righteousness.  I am a big fan of capital righteousness.

Regarding the feet-first landing boosters:  currently we have two of those rigs landing simultaneously side by side.  Is that cool or what?  If two can be done, then three can land simultaneously, or six.  We get the advantages of liquid-fueled first stages without the crazy expensive throw-away-after-one-use liquids used on everything pre-shuttle.

With that notion, we have another possibility: a partial atmospheric re-entry, not a full-on space shuttle style re-entry with payload, but rather a re-entry from half orbit speed and 70 km altitude (so it is still skimming the upper atmosphere (and loses much of its velocity up there (getting all the way down to subsonic before hitting the thick stuff))) with a landing site in Africa.  The re-entry event is with a lightweight shell, an empty tank, with minimal control surfaces and that expensive liquid-burning engine.

spike

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