Toward the third place ribbon

Europe has figured out that Starship is a generation ahead in cargo-to-orbit. Everyone else, including China, is working to catch up... to Falcon 9. On May 2025, Europe mooted something they can do in the interim: a winged booster, which Reusable Launch Vehicle the paper dubbs "RLV C5".

The C5 at least uses tech which Europe has been working on, so there's a base there. Specifically Deutsch: the DLR's SpaceLiner. This paper got to Universetoday last March and it's on ScienceDaily now. Meanwhile all four authors have revisited the theme here (for "RLVC-5").

The Germans independently checked Elon Musk's boasts and, yeah, they confirmed that the 2024-5 Starship was for real. 59 tonnes; and they further predicted that this year's Raptor 3 based booster-and-starship can push this to 115 tonnes. If they don't reuse the booster that goes to a Saturn V tier 188 tonnes. (Once again, that's the SLS ideal of Just Get It Outta Here.)

Since the German booster "SpaceLiner SLB8" is now supporting wings too it is bearing more useless mass toward orbit. This reduces the available cargo on the second-stage. The SpaceLiner would just let that one float for the mission duration. Also the first stage with the wings must burn hydrogen, not methane. Also also the gliding booster gets caught by another aircraft before gently returned to Dusseldorf. Lastly, as of last April the SLB8 was still on the drawing-board; and wings for recovery generally is in low maturity, comparatively.

All that will get their cargo to 70 tonnes. If the second stage chassis counts as cargo that might help.

The RLV C5 does get more "efficiency" however. 74% of mass once-in-orbit is payload; as opposed to the Starship which "is" - meaning, in 2025 was - 40%.

DLR is, I darkly suspect, banking on international agreements sandbagging SpaceX. The pretext will be that methane (and kerosene) expel/s carbon in high atmo.

NERVA on the SLS

As General Atomics was testing their NTP (better, NΘP) engine, and various HALEU-driven tugs were exiled from Earth's gravity well, DRACO got canceled. Anyway here is something I missed that (2025) January: deep-space missions.

The idea best-I-can-tell was to give the SLS something to do besides pay off Senators and prance around on the Moon one more (and last) time. The whole design behind that was to inject something serious past Earth L1, directly, without any infrastructure up there. Starship as you (should) know was never meant for this; it is meant for creating that infrastructure - in LEO, namely a fuel and supply depot.

Anyway last year Arthur Beckman et al. figured that a NERVA engine, once delivered far-enough up that the anti-nuke guys wouldn't bother you, could break the (now-meagre) bonds of Earth and spew out some serious I_sp. This particular design promises 900s. That adds 17% payload to a one-way Deimos trip (relative to Hohmann by hydrox' ~500 I_sp, one assumes). Some of this load is the engine itself of course but they're assuming no difference from the chemical engines we've had. Which is quite the assumption given the need for shielding.

Once at Deimos the passengers do the thing where hopefully they establish a base, unspool cable, kick up local spingrav, make more cable out of anhydrous glass, and generally prepare for a gentle landing on the red planet. (More likely they skip Deimos and fool around in the planet itself which this blog has never recommended.) I mean, they might have the extra space for it . . .

Much more savings can be had from visiting further-away planets. Uranus is noted here in this context because we haven't orbited that one yet. For a seven-year trajectory a chemical rocket could hold "6.8-mt" payload. NTP for the same time boosts payload to 14.3: 210% increase! -mind, here the chemical system was egregiously wasteful (Starship can at least aerobrake) and, again, they haven't loaded up the payload at the depot b/c SLS. This goes up and up as we deal with Pluto (read: Kuiper) or interstellar... but I'm ignoring all that, because interstellar might end up with electrons from a solar statite.

Temematic

Last year I caught wind of something called "Temematic". This was a language somewhere in the hazy region between Old Prussian, German, and Celtic that was not any of the above. Then the Slavs came and the place enters actual history after all the damage had been done. Alexei Kassian is now on Temematic's case.

Holzer in 1989 had defined "Temematic" from the shift of obstruents: tenues > mediae, mediae aspiratae > tenues. Overall IE *p *t *k > bdg, IE *bʰ *dʰ *gʰ > ptk, but IE (*b)*d *g were retained intact as bdg. That shift did not apply to the Balto-Slavic mainline; only to 45 words he'd found within Balto-Slavic. These then would be loans. Maybe it happened in Pomerania.

Most scholars shrugged and went along, it seems, until Matasović in 2013. This one could not find any substrate loans in Balto-Slavic; which - however annoying for Holzer - turns out a boon for students of Indo-European who can now work with Balto-Slavic as a pure offshoot from the baseline of (no less than) Indo-Iranian.

Kassian revives the Temematic hypothesis by allowing for 17 of its words which he can, still, find in protoSlavic. Baltic as well, but independently.

Kassian is elsewhere something of a dissident in Slavic linguistics since he'd date the Slavic breakup to the early first millennium AD, as against the consensus who date it to the middle. But that isn't important here.

What matters here is that Kassian sees the protoSlavs - the first unified Slavs - leaving the Baltic Heimat sometime 1500-1000 BC. They then met up with total strangers. For these 17 words, those indigenes were the Temematic people.

Kassian's Temematic-speakers moreover were not even IndoEuropean. So this looks like a different signal more than a refinement of the signal. They'd be West European Substrates, usually associated with the Neolithic farmers who preceded all those other "Sons of Aryas". Most today associate them with the Funnel-Beaker peoples. Some of their other words entered Greek.

Also: the mix happened in two pulses. One was just the Funnel-Beaker substrate. The later pulse was the pulse we can (still) honestly call Temematic, having undergone the sound-shift; this happened in the first millennium BC or theoretically somewhat later.

The scouring of Flores

There are at least two Portuguese-named Flores islands; we're dealing with the one with hobbits. We now have a record of its climate and of its elephant population.

The Liang Bua clock starts 190kya, for humans anyway (I don't know about before that). After the MIS 5e which we used to call Eemian, this release offers more detail:

We found three key climate phases. It was wetter than today year-round between 91,000 and 76,000 years ago. Between 76,000 and 61,000 years ago, the monsoon was highly seasonal, with wetter summers and drier winters. Then, between 61,000 and 47,000 years ago, the climate turned much drier in summer

After that it gets silly by talking "southern Queensland", as if that part of Australia had the same climate over that stretch. Weak sauce, mates. Maybe instead relate this to Timor.

The Floresian parahumanity limped along as scavengers. Until 48kBC sometime around which, one of Indonesia's volcanoes went boom - and that was it. It wasn't Toba 72kBC; but whatever it was, Flores now went under new management. That first human population might have been like Timor's then; nowadays the "central Malay/Polynesian" cluster has pretty much swamped all those islands.

The mobile tunnel

Last week one Matthew Williams posted Retractable, Pressurized Tunnels (h/t Zim). This is to connect surface assets 'pon an airless surface. One solution is called the TREAD; the other (which nobody is linking right) is the LATCH.

Sure: longish-term d00dz (between returns to Earth or at least to the Spaceline's appendix-C-2) will layover in a lavatube or, later, a kilometers-high Eiffel. But workers will be going out on the surface. Also someone's got to fix up that lavatube in the first place. Problem: EVA sucks.

The projects assume that the initial settlement of, say, the Lunar South Pole colony will be shambolic. Various Earth companies are each sending their own Quonset huts or bare Starship husks, and scattering them all over the surface. They may or mayn't send the covered hallways between them; astronauts will prefer covered hallways over EVA.

NASA are telling the Quonset vendors not to bother hooking up those huts. This TREAD is a single habitable hallway on wheels as can attach two huts. Temporarily: before disconnecting from one hut and attaching another one. Some huts will simply be abandoned or dismantled, or moved, in the process of just-in-time colony planning and construction. The LATCH is similar: less mass per meter, but the corridor can't snake around. The TREAD I think wins this one.

For TREAD anyway they're folding the hallway back when not in use. To let the dust fall to the floor and to protect it from micrometeors and whatever else is kicked up around the surface. As such - and because static-electric dust exists - more wear and tear is expected than on, say, that old inflatable Bigelow on the ISS.

Net or chopstick

Great SpaceX and Zimmerman are onto China's Long March to a reusable booster. The Chinese caught this in a net.

The booster was designed about the same: upright, with prongs. The net, or chopstick for Elon, catches the prongs.

China's difference is that it is on a floating platform, like what catches the Falcon 9 boosters. This allows the landing platform to follow the falling booster, and the net itself might allow for more margin for deviance than a static tower. Great SpaceX (not Elon-affiliated) adds that the net is better-maintainable.

One snag (heh) we have that China might not is coastal law. The Gulf of America (eff yea!) is an international water; also, we have oil platforms out there, and fisheries. Although: that might be clearing up. Another issue - for both of us - is that a booster caught out there in some ocean is not available for relaunch or even refit until it is towed back and moved back, which takes - probably days. If caught on the pad it's right there already.

The net idea still might not even work for a mammoth like the Super Heavy. If it did work (I don't know what kind of cable would do it) it could at least be a plan B for a booster unable to reach the proper pad.

We should update recovery table 2 here, such that arresting-cable is now a Medium tech maturity. Such commends the net for, say, Rocket Lab.

The Heisenberg Compensator

'Tis rare (outside politics) that Sabine Hossfelder produces a video with higher B.S. content than what she's reviewing, but here's the title: Physicists Just Broke One Of Quantum Physics’ Biggest Restraints. That restraint is on cloning quantum information, which goes on to hamper error-checking in qubits.

The key constraint is, rather was, a theoretical result of the Quantum Mechanical equations around big-Φ and big-Ψ. In 1970 James Park proved the no-go theorem; the no-cloning = no-delete theorem followed in 1982. Pace Sabine this result stands; if it did not, it could well refute the whole thing. Lately instead it is compensated, as Trek would say (in the 1960s). At least in high-qubit quantum computers.

The compensation happens if the cloning also encrypts. Thence, among the encrypted clones, one can freely choose any one to decrypt and thereby recovers the original state with fidelity up to 1.

What I did not know is that BM Heron-R2 superconducting processors using up to 154 qubits existed. But then - Current Year is indeed 2026.

Qubit-cloning will likely lead to better error correction. We were already well on our way to Q Day.