Whitlam posted:

I work for a Member of Parliament, and our government is currently removing 50 of them. Two are in our electorate. Multiple times a week I have to deal with people insisting they're not time-consuming (down for 30 minutes of the daily two hour peak period) and perfectly safe (two children under the age of 12 have been killed, one person suffered permanent brain damage) and "if you're not doing anything wrong, you have nothing to worry about."

The Lone Badger posted:

OTOH I am 100% behind shoving rich people into rockets and shooting them into space.

oohhboy posted:

The costs are going to be astronomical no matter how reusable it is. Even if you could turn it around like a normal passenger jet you have to deal with Concord economics that didn't work even in what is the biggest route for rich assholes that don't have noise problems.

quote:

Man rated rockets don't really have a safe abort either other than riding it up until you can detach assuming you don't just explode or the range officer blows you up because you are going to hit a city.

Raskolnikov38 posted:

musk can't even reliably land the unmanned rockets on his barge so I don't think the manned version is ever happening

oohhboy posted:

Man rated rockets don't really have a safe abort either other than riding it up until you can detach assuming you don't just explode or the range officer blows you up because you are going to hit a city.

Snowglobe of Doom posted:

Russia also seems to have these wacky ramps that are set into the road and which pop up to block people from entering the railway crossing when a train is approaching. Of course, Russian drivers and cyclists always think they can beat the train so they try to drive around the boom gates and forget that there's a ramp ahead of them and hilarity ensues ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OkY5FqEVyzE

EPIC fat guy vids posted:

Rich people create jobs and their wealth will trickle down one day.

quote:

With a few seconds left, the auxiliary power units start. The beast that terrified you out on the launchpad? Now that beast is waking up. At six seconds you feel the rumble of the main engines lighting. The whole stack lurches forward for a moment. Then at zero it tilts back upright again and that’s when the solid rocket boosters light and that’s when you go. There’s no question that you’re moving. It’s not like Oh, did we leave yet? No. It’s bang! and you’re gone. You’re going 100 miles an hour before you clear the tower. You accelerate from 0 to 17,500 miles an hour in eight and a half minutes.

It was unreal. I felt like some giant science fiction monster had reached down and grabbed me by the chest and was hurling me up and up and there was nothing I could do about it. Right after we launched, I realized that all the training we’d had on what to do if something went wrong during launch — how to bail out, how to operate the parachutes, how to make an emergency landing — I realized that all those years of training were completely pointless. It was just filler to make us feel okay about climbing into this thing. Because if it’s going down, it’s going down. It’s either going to be a good day or it’s going to be a bad day, and there is no in-between. There are emergency placards and safety signs all over the interior of the shuttle, telling you what to do and where to go. That stuff is there to give you something to read before you die.

It takes eight and a half minutes to make it into orbit. Eight and a half minutes is a long time to sit and wonder if today is going to be the day you get it. You can’t say much because your mic is live and you don’t want to get on the comm and say anything stupid that might distract people. It’s not the time to try to be clever. You just keep lying there, looking at your buddies, listening to the deafening roar of the engines, feeling the shuttle shake and shudder as it fights to break out of the Earth’s atmosphere. You get up to three g’s for about two and a half minutes at the end and you feel like you weigh three times your body weight. It’s like you have a pile of bricks on your chest. The whole thing can be summed up as controlled violence, the greatest display of power and speed ever created by humans.

quote:

Six seconds before launch of the shuttle the engines start to light and when the engines light it bends the whole thing, so you can actually feel the whole vehicle sway away from you as the engines light. You watch the launch pad disappear out the window. By the time we clear it, we're going 100 miles per hour straight up. And you accelerate at just such a brutal manner. The vibration is so high and, it's not like an airliner that kind of flops along through the sky, this thing moves like a tuning fork. Launch is immensely powerful, and you can truly feel yourself in the centre of it, like riding an enormous wave, or being pushed and lifted by a huge hand, or shaken in the jaws of a gigantic dog. The vehicle shakes and vibrates, and you are pinned hard down into your seat by the acceleration.

After two minutes the solids [rocket boosters] have done their job, so these huge candle sticks are out of fuel and they explode off...And now it's liquid drive, and you're just getting pushed above the air faster and faster and faster and getting pinned heavier and heavier and heavier in your seat like something was just pouring sand on you as you get more and more crushed in your chair. And it just gets harder and harder to breathe and it lasts another 6 minutes and 40 seconds of this steadily increasing weight on you as you're getting crushed and you're having to fight for every breath. And then suddenly, at 8 minutes and 42 seconds, the gas tank is out of fuel and the engines shut off and you're weightless. Magic. Like a gorilla was squishing you and then threw you off a cliff.

quote:

Seen from the inside of the spacecraft, it felt like there was somebody out there outside the spacecraft with a sledgehammer was hammering here and there, up and down. And so every few milliseconds, the spacecraft was shaking. There's a 'BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG! BANG!' It felt really interesting, actually. At the end of the atmospheric reentry, you really start hearing the noise of the wind and the sound. You're almost breaking the sound barrier, and then in the opposite direction, of course. You're coming back into the normal area of flying. And this is around 30,000 feet that the parachute has to open. This is actually a very critical moment. And it's one of the only things in the Soyuz where the crew does not have a manual override. So this is only an automated system.

It's also a very violent moment. You can imagine this 2,000-kg capsule soaring at the speed of sound through the atmosphere, and then all of the sudden you have a parachute that opens on the side and that pulls on you like a little swing. It's almost like a yo-yo. And you see the capsule going all around. It's much worse than in a roller coaster, because it's motions in all directions. And it's a little bit scary for some of us. For some others, it can also be fun, because they're like, 'ooh, this is the best ride I ever had.'"

Sagebrush posted:

My favorite bit of ol' musky's "cram you into a Minuteman" airline is when someone asked him about how he plans on handling the stress of a rocket launch

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/913775198423408640

hmm. A "mild to moderate amusement park ride" eh? Let's hear what some astronauts have to say about the experience



note that in a suborbital trajectory like this the passengers won't really get that weightlessness; it's acceleration all the way up and then deceleration all the way down.

Nerobro posted:

You're comparing apples and oranges. The shuttle was a jackrabbit off the pad. For a bunch of reasons. spacex has much finer control, and with a larger rocket, accelerations will be dampened.

Nerobro posted:

You're comparing apples and oranges. The shuttle was a jackrabbit off the pad. For a bunch of reasons. spacex has much finer control, and with a larger rocket, accelerations will be dampened.

EPIC fat guy vids posted:

Rich people create jobs and their wealth will trickle down one day.

haveblue posted:

Yeah, trickle down over several square kilometers of ocean

chitoryu12 posted:

If you ever go to Epcot, ride Mission: Space on the orange side (the green side disables the acceleration and is family friendly). It's basically a simulator attached to a centrifuge, allowing you to hit 2.5 g's several times as it simulates space travel.

You're only kept at that level of acceleration for about 15 seconds at the longest, and it's incredibly unpleasant if you're not used to it. It's also interactive so you need to try and hit buttons while accelerating, and when you're not used to the acceleration you just kinda flail helplessly trying to smack the console in front of you.

Trust me, you ain't putting grandma on this rocket.

The Lone Badger posted:

OTOH I am 100% behind shoving rich people into rockets and shooting them into space.

boner confessor posted:

there was some miserable show called bering sea gold and it was about these people who live on the alaska coast and try to scrape enough gold out of the ocean to live a marginal existence through the long alaskan winter. everyone had these homemade gold dredges and most of them involved divers vacuuming silt off the ocean floor but the big dogs in town had a barge with a backhoe that would scoop up silt and dump it in a machine to shake out the gold, they often ended up paddling the barge around with the backhoe as well. so if you want to watch a whole bad show about this concept its out there



other highlights included a young woman who lived with her dipshit boyfriend in a yurt on the beach. in alaska. the producers of the show were trying real hard to turn her into some kind of eye candy appeal for the show, but their dredging attempts were always hilarious failures. her dad lived in a bus behind someone's house. everyone was an alcoholic

BlankIsBeautiful posted:

This. I rode it three times when we were there in 2000, and after the third time, my daughter actually had a broken blood vessel in her eye (not the dangerous kind). This is before it killed people, though, and they dumbed it down a bit as I understand.

Trying to follow Gary Sinese's directions and working the controls under that kind of acceleration is hilariously difficult. We made a great team, though, and didn't fall off the cliff at the end.

Best amusement park ride I've ever ridden.

haveblue posted:

Yeah, trickle down over several square kilometers of ocean

chitoryu12 posted:

The actual ride experience hasn't been toned down except for adding a "green side" that isn't on a centrifuge, so there's no acceleration. Other than that, they added sick bags and told people to hang on.

The one good thing I can say is that all of the people who did die had pre-existing conditions rather than the ride being so extreme that it murders you if you're not a fighter pilot. Either way, a rocket with 2.5 g's of acceleration (to say nothing of 3) is absolutely going to kill people on takeoff if it becomes commonplace.

If you want more fun with feeling acceleration, a catapult launch off an aircraft carrier generates I think 3 to 4 g's. Kingda Ka at Six Flags generates 5.

Sagebrush posted:

note that in a suborbital trajectory like this the passengers won't really get that weightlessness; it's acceleration all the way up and then deceleration all the way down.

PittTheElder posted:

There are a lot of flaws in ICBM based transport, but this sentence right here makes it abundantly clear you have no idea what you're talking about.

PittTheElder posted:

There are a lot of flaws in ICBM based transport, but this sentence right here makes it abundantly clear you have no idea what you're talking about.

oohhboy posted:

Dampened with what? You still have to go up on a barely controlled explosion.

Sagebrush posted:

no you're right i'm sure that elon "elon musk" musk, who has never launched a human-capable rocket into space, has already addressed all the violence and energy of space launch that has so far meant that every astronaut must train for months and be medically certified in good physical shape to be cleared for flight. I'm sure the solution is just "use a larger rocket" and this is all it takes to go from 85 pounds of survival gear and "being shaken in the jaws of a giant dog" to sipping red bull and kombucha on the ride up with the other tech bubble shitlords

Volcott posted:

The problem with all those other rockets was that the Gs weren't in a comfortable direction. If you strap people in face-down, it's like a spring breeze.

Nerobro posted:

Mass. And distance from the engines. If rocket engines don't burn smoothly, ~verybadthings~ happen. The whole "engine rich combustion" thing.

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/7829/launch-accelerations-values-history

The graph there, shows the acceleration curve of the Saturn V. It's curve seems to show that the engines were not throttled back to any significant factor. (not that the F1's were friendly to throttling..)

All of the sources I found say the shuttle never topped 3g on launch, or landing. At least, sustained loads. The SRBs were not the smooth(ish) burn you get from the SSMEs.

If Elon wants less than a 3g peak, he can do that. SpaceX's technology does seem like it would give that option. And they can afford the gravity losses.


*hands you a doll* Here, take your straw man.

As I understand it, most astronaut training is not "about the flight" but about their jobs on the flight, and survival training. And for a ride on the shuttle?

But really? That's where you wanna go? Bigger makes smaller changes in thrust (that violence you speak of) seem smaller. Being taller, puts you further away from the noise makers. Again, taking away part of that violence.

A couple G is not a place to be enjoying drinks. But it's also not even bothersome. (to me.. at least... 1.4 is a giggle, 2 is fun.) But I woudl't put my mom though it.


G's are most survivable on your back. Laying down. Facing away from the G's is the least survivable direction. Crushing your stomach, chest, and face aren't conducive to survival.

Course, I could have just missed a joke. Heh.

chitoryu12 posted:

Oh, another fun thing that Mission: Space taught me about acceleration!

Make sure you keep your head back and looking straight ahead. As soon as you start looking around, you get nauseous real fast.

Say Nothing posted:

Synthbuttrange posted:

So... drowned or crushed by the ferry?

FuturePastNow posted:

I assume a suborbital rocket airline would make passengers sign more waivers than a home loan.