YHK - yet another hacker news clone

Starfall – Affordable, routine access to microgravity

61 points gmays 1 hour ago 24 comments

drivebyhooting 50 minutes ago | parent

It sounds like a super villain weapon.

If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

ceejayoz 47 minutes ago | parent

> If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.

Bluebird803 44 minutes ago | parent

Presumably the same way we have always recovered payloads from space. Heat-shield + parachute. I'm assuming there would be some capability to do a retrograde maneuver so that the re-entey can be done when and where desired, rather than leaving it to the whims of pure drag.

itishappy 42 minutes ago | parent

You're not wrong! It looks that way because it's a reentry vehicle. You put this thing in a low orbit which decays over the course of a few weeks until it eventually falls from space, then you go find it.

Polizeiposaune 40 minutes ago | parent

The Starfall capsule has enough deltaV to deorbit, a heat shield, and parachutes.

So you tell them where to deliver it (anywhere on the planet that its orbit goes over..), they tell you when it will be arriving, and it reenters and lands there.

Article about a recent test (launched on a Falcon 9):

https://www.afrl.af.mil/News/Article-Display/Article/4629122...

paxy 37 minutes ago | parent

It may not be designed for recovery. Launch an experiment, take measurements, beam them down and then just..forget about it.

gustavus 43 minutes ago | parent

Here's the thing I might not love Elon or everything he does and there are plenty of things to disagree with him about and I won't comment on him as a person

But I remember watching live when they launched a Tesla into Orbit, was it dumb, was it pointless and potentially wasteful? Sure, but that moment seeing humanity once again reach out to the stars I could feel it deep in my bones the space race was starting again.

Sure have lots of problems down here but the eternally yearning of humanity to extend out our hands to grasp the cosmos, to touch heaven is a pursuit I think highly worthwhile.

jtari3333 40 minutes ago | parent

Elon turning the concept of space into the vanity project of a mentally unstable man child kinda sucks though. Makes it hard to give a shit knowing he is personally profitting from it.

hackyhacky 34 minutes ago | parent

Not just profiting from it, but then reinvesting that money into subverting democracy

_dark_matter_ 30 minutes ago | parent

*attempting to subvert democracy. But he may yet succeed.

psunavy03 10 minutes ago | parent

I dunno, based on yesterday, the ROI on that seems to be kind of shit.

batperson 27 minutes ago | parent

There's that one photo with a dummy driver in a red tesla and in the background you can see the earth. I think it's one of the best photos ever, part of it is the absurdity of the fact that it exists at all.

aliasxneo 24 minutes ago | parent

We just need someone who can pass the purity test and then we can all celebrate these things. Until then we're not allowed to feel happy about it.

dakial1 40 minutes ago | parent

Here is something that I never imagined there was a use case for. Anyone has any idea of the commercial needs for such a device?

itishappy 34 minutes ago | parent

Material science and manufacturing are two that have always seemed interesting to me, particularly monocrystalline stuff like semiconductors, optics, and metallurgy.

vessenes 33 minutes ago | parent

There's a lot of fundamental science to be done in space; some forms of crystal are much easier to grow, chemical reactions and biological interactions etc. etc. For reference, it wasn't long ago NASA was trying to figure out if spiders could form webs in space.

psunavy03 11 minutes ago | parent

Spoiler alert: they can.

whalesalad 30 minutes ago | parent

worlds most expensive colocation rack

czhu12 28 minutes ago | parent

Quite a bit of money have been raised on the premise that certain things can be easier to make in space than on earth due to gravity, which creates sedimentation

Semiconductors, pharmaceuticals, solar cell crystals, and artificial organs are on the short list. The International space station actually has done some experiments on this premise with promising results

anukin 26 minutes ago | parent

This is amazing. Especially for biotech. A robot can do biotech in microgravity.

syntaxing 24 minutes ago | parent

Space datacenters sounds dumb and impractical to me. Manufacturing semi conductor in space is actually a pretty interesting idea. I designed a few PVD, CVD, and IBE machines before. Ion thrusters from NASA are what semi conductors use as their source anyway. I can see the business proposition for processes like MBE that requires -12 pressure. It takes days, if not weeks to pump a chamber to those values.

cozzyd 13 minutes ago | parent

It would be nice if SpaceX published GNSS pseudodistance/carrier phase from all Starlink satellites. It would give excellent realtime tomographic information about the ionosphere...

Qworg 12 minutes ago | parent

I wonder where this leaves Varda? Tough to win when your ride is also your competitor.

everyone 6 minutes ago | parent

Why is it called microgravity and not freefall? Cus afaik you are experiencing almost the same force of gravity as you would on the surface, you are just constantly falling.