Posted on 09/08/2018 10:27:17 AM PDT by BenLurkin
To make the roughly six-month one-way journey, Musk and his engineers have dreamed up a 347-foot-tall launch system called the Big Falcon Rocket, or BFR. The spacecraft is designed to have two fully reusable stages: a 19-story booster and a 16-story spaceship, which would fly on top of the booster and into into space.
SpaceX employees are now building a prototype of the Big Falcon Spaceship at the Port of Los Angeles. Gwynne Shotwell, the company's president and COO, reportedly said Thursday that the spaceship may start small test-launches in late 2019.
Several official graphics of the spaceship's internal structure exist, but none show exactly how the ship would be equipped for Mars. So spaceflight-loving artist Nick Oberg created his own illustration of how the vehicle might look and function on the inside.
Oberg is a 29-year-old scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, where he's working toward a PhD in astrophysics. But he used some spare time to make what he calls an "imaginative" cutaway drawing of the BFR spaceship. It includes detailed sketches of hydroponic greenhouses, messy crew cabins, and even a person pooping on a zero-gravity toilet.
Ober noted that he "is not in any way an engineer" and his graphic of the Big Falcon Spaceship "almost certainly has completely ridiculous things in it that make no sense."
Nevertheless, his vision of Big Falcon Spaceship's guts has grown popular in the absence of official details from SpaceX.
"Some people take these diagrams very seriously," he said. "I'm glad I've gotten people arguing about things they hadn't thought about before."
…
" You need fresh food," Oberg said. "These people will be eating dehydrated food for years. Even if plants can't sustain them entirely, they're going to want fresh produce."
(Excerpt) Read more at thisisinsider.com ...
Solar Sail
The only solar energy system that ever made sense to me.
Of course you need something different to slow down.
Big F’n Rocket
How childish
Must have chosen the COO while high....Gwynne Shotwell...!!!
Wow! That is a big falcon rocket!
It’s whatever.
Homes can smoke a joint if he wants to. As far as I am concerned, it’s legal now.
I’m neutral on Musk personally.
Replace “windows” or viewing ports with a series of HD cameras in/on the hull and transmit the video to any monitor aboard...
There’s been proposals to eliminate ports in the fuselages of future commercial aircraft (stiffens and strengthens fuselage, and eliminates places for cracks to form as well as lightens) and replace with LCD displays on the “walls” and “ceiling” of the passenger cabin for a panoramic view...
Sounds beautiful to me but may freak out a lot of people, especially the agoraphobic ones...
No “freaking” way!
This image and it’s captions are enough to prove to me that we are no where near ready for this trip.
And the berths convert so that people can shack up ? Wow, he thought of everything.
And the hydroponics is for morale more than food. And there is plenty of space for solar panels which he thinks are all we need to be happy on Mars.
I love how calling a space the hydroponics lab makes marijuana plants that grow here on earth grow inside the space ship and help sustain the crew even though there isnt a single solitary marijuana plant on Mars.
EITHER THEY’RE GONNA fly backwards, or their communications array is pointed away from earth...?
Thats due to the hi-tech 3D printed vacuum engines that suck so much this particular space ship flys backwards everywhere it goes.
And it spins ever so slowly so the natural sunlight entering the shutterable windows recreate natural day-night sleep cycles for the crew.
I tell ya. They thought of everything!
snip
The espresso maker is dubbed ISSpresso - ISS standing for International Space Station. Italian coffee giant Lavazza joined forces with the Turin-based engineering company Argotec and the Italian Space Agency to provide a specially designed machine for use off the planet. NASA certified its safety.
-snip-
I watched that podcast live; he’d already had more than a few bourbons on the rocks and took a single baby-draw on a blunt.
BFD (IMHO)
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