Scienta Plus: SpaceX, quiet launches, no belching or crackles, global open collaborations
Scienta Plus: SpaceX’s Ingenious Idea to Protect Starship Raptors and OLM from Explosion, Vast Space Station at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L22gyQDDXho
If you use arrays of hundreds (thousands?, millions?) of small 3D printed rockets and instrument them with fast controls, you can acoustically tune the whole exhaust down to the ground and have silent launches, The current rockets are still static designs in operation. But I am looking to see if the whole booster stage would be replaced by a “gravitational” ground array. I put that in quotes because acoustics, magnetics, electromagnetics, lasers, ion beams, plasma are all – to some extent – invisible wireless ways to transmit stress and forces, energy and power. Long ago I realized that much of “anti-gravity” was already an everyday thing, These rockets, planes, drones, hypervelocity vehicles, magnetic and acoustic levitation — have already conquered gravity and give practical computer controlled precise movement and behaviors. Reliable, repeatable, predictable, financially, environmentally, socially modeled and testable. The current systems are growing quickly, like an organism. If they too quickly become rigid and monopolistic many alternate paths will be lost, or never really begin. The StarTrek episodes always used the transporter, because that was easy to do with movie technology, But a ship in orbit or from the ground could have used a tractor beam, or sent power to local field generators and devices.
I spent my life seeing these ideas played out, and their behaviors tested in the virtual global world of movies and discussion. But now think real “global open collaborative worksites” are needed for “solar system colonization”, “earth to orbit”, “3D printing”, “volumetric 3D scanning replication” — and NOT this hodge-podge of bits and pieces scattered everywhere all over the Internet and in peoples heads and bottom drawers. But written down, in the proper forms as shareable symbolic equations, universal or global formats, easily integrated algorithms independent of computer language, in hardware languages.
“Computer, lift StarShip 314 high enough to ignite.” “Computer, accelerate this cargo from the surface to where it can be processed by orbital arrays, using the latest Reynolds optimized, boundary layer laser ionization algorithms.” And, of course, “send all the data to open archives so anyone in the heliosphere can take a look to see if the whole can be improved.”
I saw this more than 50 years ago. Everyone excited, steady very slow progress, then too few allowed to see what was happening in detail, so too few with the experience and skills for global replication, verification and expansion. We ended up with eclectic hand-built systems that cannot be systemically optimized and restructured virtually, then for real. “Don’t put all your eggs in one basket” is critical to the survival of the human and related species. My Dad always taught us, “Measure twice, cut once”, and “always have a backup, many backups”. It is possible to do that virtually, especially if it is done openly, globally, verifiably, and taps the untapped potential of the whole human species – not just a few who happened, by chance, to be the front runner with crowds cheering.
Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation
