Tugging Mira

Impulse Space is flaunting Helios / Deneb: 66,720 N thrust. I don't know about ISP; the focus on thrust and its use of methane implies something like the Raptor. Although they are not competing with the Starship. They're going to turn the thing on once in space.

Nuclear is better of course but we frown on that in LEO. So, Impulse are aiming for space-tugging: LEO up to mid-Allen up to GEO and beyond. The press-release calls it "kick stage" and "transfer". Which is fine! We need that too.

It is not just a test; Impulse are to use the engine for real cargo, if small cargo. This is all that fits on a Falcon 9, assumed still the game-in-town in mid 2026. The payload is called "Mira" and it's for our Space Force.

Spiral-in

On topic of SLS, and Mars Sample Return, and the upcoming new space telescope: here is NASA on a roadmap to asteroid-mining. The paper, naïvely perhaps, sees a spiral of costs, which it amusingly illustrates, and hopes to invert it to a spiral of savings, as one advance on the way allows for infrastructure creating opportunities for the next advance.

The paper bears a strong musk of PowerPoint, October 2017. However: now we have a reusable SuperHeavy and, maybe next week, reusable Starship.

The tech-aim here is the "Honey Bee", extraction of water and other volatiles from a NEO, preferably polanoid. Also to capture a large rock, or at least to pull ice-blocks from one; and run the material into Lunar Distant Retrograde Orbit. We don't do the Lunar Gateway in this scenario, but last I heard Elon is likely to kill it anyway.

BACKDATE 11/17

Space jerbs

Now that Elon Musk has bought himself a government on Earth, although some may see some downsides, one upside is the end of the SLS. That's a problem for the dilberts, d-fens's, and code-gibbons hired to work on the boondoggle.

Believe me, I em-/sym-pathise with working a job for a company doing The Wrong Stuff. More than you know.

The incoming administration shifting the pain to Blue States like Colorado is a crude solution but, you know, eff em if they didn't vote for us, as Baker put it to the elder Bush. Same with Equity positions, now exiting Boeing although still infesting NASA.

We do have more space jerbs coming on-line - privatesector. The dilberts have real skills and GenX oldsters in particular tended to MAGA this year. Should USG legislate that the dilberts get affirmative action?

BACKDATE 11/17

Mars is bad for aerobraking

I mean, I'd always assumed that Mars' atmosphere is ridiculously thin for altering trajectories or orbital capture; but it's nice to have the maths.

Aerobraking is mostly an Earthling thing. Gary Johnson notes that ablative tiles - tiles wot falls off - are the best way to do it; but once something is down here on Earth we just, like, slap new tiles on (11/14 an active field of study). I think aerobraking is what Elon's planning for the Starship which, remember, is what does the work in LEO before coming back 1819 November.

Venus is also good for aerobraking and assuredly quiet Titan. But the Martian atmo is too unpredictable.

Anyway this blog has been consistent that we normies don't colonise Mars directly. We colonise asteroids, and (so Nyrath has convinced me) Deimos. From Deimos just dangle a tether bro.

BACKDATE 11/17

Alternatives to solar-power on airless rocks

ToughSF will link (pdf) to Alex Ellery 2021: "Generating and storing power on the moon using in situ resources". ToughSf summarises: solar concentrators paired with vacuum tube-based thermionic converters reaching ~15% efficiency.

These are not solar panels ("photovoltaics"). Panels are for LEO, shipped up from Earth. Ellery is working from a paradigm where we don't ship panels further to the Moon; Loonies go assemble their own power-sources. Once set up on the Moon, Casey Handmer can go beam to them additional power from some high mountain on Earth.

I imagine similar should be good for near-Earth asteroids like Atíra.

BACKDATE 11/17

The nebular magnet on Polana

Today we got more on the Polana CI-chrondrites, here Ryugu. We should be able to replicate the results with Bennu.

Before Polana birthed the rubble of Ryugu - they say - it was under a magnetic field. This was 15 microtesla (μT); Earth to contrast is 50 μT. That would have worked on the iron and nickel in these icy mudballs - and on the gas and ice giants out there.

"Out There" would be from 7 AU on. Closer home, the solar system - then - was pulling more like our 50 μT even up to 200. Jupiter, remember, had a Grand Tack at some point, so - implicitly - formed Out There.

This is evidence Ceres and Hygeia and those other iceballs formed even further Out There.

Statuettes to [?] to script

The origins of writing are here matched to cylinder-seals. In effect: typing preceded writing. At least in Sumer and Akkad.

It all starts with accountancy, those little statuettes all over the Cyclades. These are tokens for trade - including trade in humans (not necessarily slaves; round-trip ferrying might do). The question moves to how they became the two-dimensional representations in pictographs. Most researchers don't deem the pictographs to look like the tokens. The seals are that middle path, the "Seals and signs" paper now argues.

We read backward, as we dig backward. Uruk IV is ~3400 BC. The word "language" doesn't come up until the bibliography, but the authors use Sumerograms for most pictographs. Which they can now decipher with help from the seals. Uruk III / Jemdet Nasr is around the turn of that fourth/third BC millennium; seems more-solidly Sumer. Although, as in the case of netted-vessel representation ZATU190: we cannot necessarily read it as the later pictograph would read it. Here the picto will be GAN / [i]kannu[/i], but ZATU190 holds not just the "stand" but also the netting.

BACKDATE 11/7 like hell I was doing anything on Guy Fawkes' Day. Anyhoo h/t Archaeology org which used to be Saraceni, now might be AI.