Bimfred

What power do you have when there's no one to subject to it?

ISS's radiators. It's processing data on the station that would otherwise be transmitted groundside and processed here.

BDSM dommy mommies

17cm/s seems awful low. Is that its speed relative to Didymos?

Your math ain't inherently wrong though. Without strapping a torch drive on that thing it ain't going anywhere.

There's also Santa is sick of your shit.

People can write all manner of stuff, but until someone tries, no one has a definitive answer. That's why SpaceX is doing these launches, to figure out how to build a spacecraft that can actually handle that heat. The last three flights have been such a bummer cause none of them have given actual data on the redesigned forward flaps and the various heat shields.

I wouldn't count Starship out yet. People also wrote all manner of stuff about Falcon 9's first stage reusability and at this point, it's safe to say everyone who thought it wouldn't work has been proven wrong.

As opposed to Blue Origin's solution, which was to be assembled from three different spacecraft in orbit? Or the Dynetics solution, which was over its own mass budget?

It's wild that there's no configuration of SRBs that doesn't have offset thrust. Wonder how much of the energy was lost because the boosters and main engines had to be angled, so the overall center of thrust and center of gravity were still in line, and the damned thing could fly straight?

NASA is funded with tax money and failures mean they get called in front of Congress like a child who sharpied the brand new tv. They don't have the luxury of failure, so they over-analyze and over-engineer everything, to the point that everything they build is reasonably expected to work on the first try.

SpaceX doesn't have that restriction and so they're free to blow up as much stuff as they need to. How many Falcons failed along the way to building the safest, highest flight cadence launch vehicle in history?

The Starship is in development. The Shuttle is retired. Assuming that SpaceX doesn't decide to can Starship before operational flights begin, make this comparison again when it's retired.

They get to claim it because we let them. Every time an article comes out with "____ is a Nazi dogwhistle," there's a set of people who don't want to be associated with Nazis (or insert relevant disliked group of choice) who will immediately drop whatever the thing is. This creates a cycle where something does eventually become a dogwhistle, because everyone who didn't use it as such has stopped using it altogether.

TL;DR: Fuck 'em. Don't let those assholes control how you express yourself.

Along with the antenna, there's another problem to solve - power. The probes need a power source that, after the better part of a century, can still output enough power to send a signal home. That doesn't leave a lot of options. RTGs will not do for this, their power output is too low. It's theoretically possible to build a battery large enough, but it'll add tens of tons to the probe's mass. A nuclear reactor would probably be lighter, but has the same problem as an RTG, in that its fuel supply will decay along the way. And if you need to make course correction maneuvers on the trip (cause let's face it, we're not going to bullseye a dwarf planet sized target from lightyears away), the probe has to stay powered for the entire time, so the propulsion system doesn't freeze up. And now you need to worry about propellant losses.

EDIT: Finally got around to reading the article and I'd love to know what the author of this idea considers unrealistic if decelerating from 0.3c into orbit around a black hole >20 lightyears away sounds plausible.