Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying
by sandworm101 on Saturday November 30, 2024 @12:36PM
(#42282833)
Those things were never seen as impossible, just difficult. Nobody has even a theoretical concept of how to move tons of liquid oxygen between rockets in orbit. And there is some talk of banning it as too dangerous. Remember all those pad explosions related to fuel issues? We cannot risk that much space debris as spaceX goes through a learning process.
Re:NASA's Europa Clipper: Miles Down, Instruments Deploying
by kolinko on Saturday November 30, 2024 @01:39PM
(#42283204)
If I'm not mistaken, SpaceX is already contracted by NASA to do on orbit refuelling, and one of the recent starships did initial trials of fuel transmission (internal for now).
Update: - source article - $58M contract to do that - https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starship-nasa-contract-orbi...
- chatgpt confirmation + links to more sources - https://chatgpt.com/share/e/674b5c1b-d318-8004-b79d-c0eefc59...
Sure, it’s hard, but that is perhaps the best engineering team in the history of humankind, and I think they’re up to the task.
Additionally, people much smarter than me ALSO think they are up to the task, and they have more and higher-resolution data about the problem space, too.
My money’s on they get it working. Maybe it takes five years or a dozen failures, but I’m confident that they will succeed eventually and there will be orbiting methane and lox fuel stations sooner rather than later.