Administrative, General

On The Road Again

20 Comments

We’re heading back to California from Golden this morning, spending the night in Mesquite, NV (which we’ve never done before, so that will be mildly interesting). Probably back in LA early tomorrow afternoon (we have to return the rental by 4:30). More anon.

20 thoughts on “On The Road Again”

        1. I remember just the 4% grade down through Monitor Pass not being good for either the brakes or eventually the transmission seals on my 2004 Chevy Tahoe SUV.

      2. Back in the day when I was doing a lot of testing at Edwards, I would try to have some fun driving the 138 back to I-15: crest the pass at slow speed, put the car in neutral, and try to coast all the way down to the 15 connector. You have to be willing to carry a lot of speed through the steeper sections, because if you brake at all you’ll be out of energy on the flat parts, but if the traffic cooperates, it’s a fun ride.

    1. Since this is kind of a free topic thread for random follow ups. I’ll comment on this. I don’t get that from Elon’s Xeet. I think he’s saying the cargo space of a Starship for P2P Earth transport is about the same as an A380 and can hold up to 1,000 passengers. If you’ve never ridden on the Disney Space Mountain roller coaster, you are basically seated with a bar-like object locked over you to hold you in place as you do pull negative g’s. So to me that means not standing but in a coach seat with maybe a full restraint or perhaps a five point harness you must leave on at all times during the flight. I would expect a launch attendants to check everyone’s restraints are securely fastened before launch. Most flights are 40 minutes or less (you are riding an ICBM) so no need to leave your seat at anytime during the flight. No galley, toilet or cockpit w/pilots! So go before you get aboard. Standing during this flight might not be ideal for people with weak bones, bad feet or leg/hip joint problems. Seated gives more options, perhaps as pointed out in the Xeet thread, the only limiting health factor might be heart conditions. I suspect SpaceX will also learn to offer disposable diapers for all passengers who want them. Another thing I think SpaceX will learn is that people in general do not want to pull negative g’s nor experience 0g during flight. I would not be the least surprised that SpaceX learns to actually maintain small positive g as much as possible throughout the flight profile even though it wastes fuel in order to give the passengers a more enjoyable flight.

      1. I suspect your seat restraint has a combination lock on it. The combination will be announced over the PA in an emergency, otherwise wait for your landing attendant to unlock you from your seat after landing.

        1. Launch and landing will be labor intensive to some degree, esp if you are flying up to 1000 people per flight. This will be a boon for the flight attendant occupations, but actually the vast majority of them will be operating on the ground. Only a handful will be aboard for flight.

        2. Didn’t the Soviets have a similar arrangement for Yuri Gagarin, where the reentry code was kept in a safe with a combination lock, only Korolev thought that was completely stupid, and he gave Gagarin the code?

          1. Yuri Gargarin is a far cry from the flying public.
            A panicky passenger unhooking from their seat becomes a loose multi-pound object free to uncontrollably strike itself and others during acceleration. It will ultimately depend on the number of maximum g pulled during flight, the scale of acceleration and the cabin design how severe the restraint restrictions. Even Haywood Floyd was fairly secured in that Pan Am seat during 0g. Less so on the Moon Shuttle. As an obvious frequent red-eye flyer he was clearly a sleepy outlier.

          2. In another Yuri contrast:

            …Future Starship passenger at Starbase BigApple Bay 1 in NYC harbor to launch attendant after finding their seat:

            “This bowling ball is a gift for my brother-in-law in Sydney. Is it okay if I just hold it in my lap?”

      2. Starship for P2P will be a major redesign from what exists today. Nobody is going to want to stay strapped and locked into their seat for 3 hours awaiting fueling, etc. for a 40 minute flight.

        The cargo section will have to be detachable from the rest. Loaded separately and then attached to the rest of the already fueled rocket probably using the grand-child derivative of Mechazilla. Either that or SpaceX figures out a way to rapidly fuel the rocket, say in 20 minutes or less.

      3. With a thousand passengers, getting all those people securely fastened down and unfastened will take a looong time, a lot longer than the flight time. Depends to the rescue. An even bigger problem is why the A380 went out of production, there just aren’t a lot of routes that have that many passengers all wanting to travel at the same time.

        I wouldn’t worry about the combination to the seat belt, what’s the scenario where that would make a difference? Not much chance of a survivable accident.

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