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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 10th, 2023

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  • There was an extensive amount of refurbishment required to re-use the SRBs. Not to mention they had to be physically recovered, and salt water certainly made the process more complicated.

    The shuttle itself needed each of its heat shield tiles replaced, which due to the shape of the shuttle were all unique.

    The fuel tank was not reused.

    The shuttle was meant to be a leap forward in rocket reusability, but it didn’t really pan out that way. There’s good reason the program was scrapped and not replaced with another space plane.

    The Starship booster has the potential to launch multiple times per day. The only refurbishment period is how long it takes to refuel it.



  • Moore’s law factored in cost, not just what was physically possible.

    The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year. Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years.




  • Can you find a source that provides any scale for how much over the recommended daily 8-28mg (men vs. women) is required to cause long-term concerns? All I can find online is for acute iron poisoning which is usually when a kid wolfs down a bottle of supplements.

    If you’re curious, Wikipedia says iron poisoning happens at around 20-60mg/kg or 1.8-5.4g for a 90kg (200 pound) person. That’s like 3/4 of an M&M’s worth of pure easily digestible iron which is a shitload.

    I’ve never heard anyone talk about any negative health impact of cooking with iron (which people have been doing for literally thousands of years), so I’m curious.