Starfall – Affordable, routine access to microgravity

Posted by gmays 1 hour ago

Counter53Comment20OpenOriginal

Comments

Comment by syntaxing 10 minutes ago

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.

Comment by czhu12 14 minutes ago

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

Comment by dakial1 26 minutes ago

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?

Comment by itishappy 20 minutes ago

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

Comment by vessenes 19 minutes ago

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.

Comment by drivebyhooting 36 minutes ago

It sounds like a super villain weapon.

If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

Comment by Polizeiposaune 26 minutes ago

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...

Comment by itishappy 28 minutes ago

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.

Comment by ceejayoz 33 minutes ago

> If you manufacture there how do you recover it?

The graphic shows it reentering the atmosphere.

Comment by Bluebird803 30 minutes ago

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.

Comment by 32 minutes ago

Comment by paxy 22 minutes ago

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

Comment by anukin 12 minutes ago

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

Comment by gustavus 29 minutes ago

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.

Comment by jtari3333 26 minutes ago

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.

Comment by hackyhacky 20 minutes ago

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

Comment by _dark_matter_ 16 minutes ago

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

Comment by aliasxneo 10 minutes ago

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.

Comment by batperson 13 minutes ago

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.

Comment by whalesalad 16 minutes ago

worlds most expensive colocation rack

Comment by angoragoats 25 minutes ago

[flagged]