The Rise of # SpaceX Elon Musk’s Engineering Masterpiece.
The Rise of SpaceX
Posted in Elon Musk, engineering, space travel
Category: Elon Musk – Page 174
What is Elon Musk’s Starship?
Posted in Elon Musk, space travel
Anyone who has followed the career of Elon Musk knows that he formulated a set of goals many years ago, and has worked tirelessly and methodically to reach those goals, a process that he knew would take years or decades. Even casual observers are familiar with Tesla’s Master Plan, a three-part strategy to bring a mid-priced EV to the mass market.
Every Mars citizen gets 1miion Teslacoins.
Elon Musk is not only the world’s richest person, he lays claim to the biggest net worth ever recorded: $208 billion as of Friday. What he does with it will be closely watched.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink has a straightforward outlook on artificial intelligence: “If you can’t beat em, join em.” The company means that quite literally — it’s building a device that aims to connect our brains with electronics, which would enable us, in theory, to control computers with our thoughts.
But how? What material would companies like Neuralink use to connect electronics with human tissue?
One potential solution was recently revealed at the American Chemical Society’s Fall 2020 Virtual Meeting & Expo. A team of researchers from the University of Delaware presented a new biocompatible polymer coating that could help devices better fuse with the brain.
Elon Musk just became the richest person in the world, with a net worth of more than $185 billion.
Thursday’s increase in Tesla’s share price pushed Musk past Jeff Bezos, who had been the richest person since 2017 and is currently worth about $184 billion. Musk’s wealth surge over the past year marks the fastest rise to the top of the rich list in history — and is a dramatic financial turnaround for the famed entrepreneur who just 18 months ago was in the headlines for Tesla’s rapid cash burn and his personal leverage against the company’s stock.
Musk started 2020 worth about $27 billion, and was barely in the top 50 richest people.
“The process of creating methane-based fuel has been theorized before, initially by Elon Musk and Space X. It utilized a solar infrastructure to generate electricity, resulting in the electrolysis of carbon dioxide, which, when mixed with water from the ice found on Mars, produces methane. This process, known as the Sabatier process, is used on the International Space Station to produce breathable oxygen from water. One of the main issues with the Sabatier process is that it is a two-stage procedure requiring large faculties to operate efficiently. The method developed by Xin and his team will use anatomically dispersed zinc to act as a synthetic enzyme, catalyzing the carbon dioxide and initializing the process. This will require much less space and can efficiently produce methane using materials and under conditions similar to those found on the surface of Mars.”
Among the many challenges with a Mars voyage, one of the most pressing is: How can you get enough fuel for the spacecraft to fly back to Earth?
Houlin Xin, an assistant professor in physics & astronomy, may have found a solution.
He and his team have discovered a more efficient way of creating methane-based rocket fuel theoretically on the surface of Mars, which can make the return trip all more feasible.
That’s a lot of ships. 😃
To achieve that ambitious goal, SpaceX could build one hundred Starships per year over the course of ten years. –“Building 100 Starships per year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons per year or maybe around 100000 people per Earth-Mars orbital sync,” Musk said in January. SpaceX would launch a Starship fleet approximately every 26 months, which is when Earth and Mars orbits align closer to each other.
Building 100 Starships/year gets to 1000 in 10 years or 100 megatons/year or maybe around 100k people per Earth-Mars orbital sync— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 172020
You can watch SpaceX operations as they work to develop the Starship spacecraft at the South Texas facility in the video below, courtesy of LabPadre via YouTube. In the weeks ahead, SpaceX plans to continue preflight preparations of the Starship SN9 prototype that is awaiting at the launchpad. Meanwhile, teams at the assembly facility are manufacturing multiple vehicles that will also undergo testing next year.
Tesla will need a landing platform to catch the rocket as it lands. According to Elon Musk its to save mass/weight and speed up the rockets readiness for its next launch.
This is for Tesla’s reusable rocket program.
SpaceX aims to develop a fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy launch vehicle, capable of performing multiple flights per day. Musk shared that not adding landing legs to the Super Heavy rocket “Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour,” he said. When asked if the decision to eliminate the legs is due to the high stress the vehicle would experience upon landing Musk responded, “Legs would certainly work, but best part is no part, best step is no step,” he wrote via Twitter.
Saves mass & cost of legs & enables immediate repositioning of booster on to launch mount — ready to refly in under an hour— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 302020