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Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
@MaxFagin
Jul 7, 2019 • 8 tweets • 3 min read • Read on X
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Hey! It's been weeks since I raved about how awesome #SpaceElevators are. That's too long. Here is my take on 5 portrayals of space elevators that I've seen in science fiction (Not definitive, and limiting myself to visual media).
#5) The planet Drill from Star Trek 2009. Completely impractical, and only exists because it's a fun setting for a 23rd-century sword fight. But not a complete loss because it correctly shows how space elevators are deployed (lowered down from orbit, not built up from the ground) Image
4) Ace Combat 7, The Lighthouse. In game, it's built to enable space-based solar power, which is accurate! Space-based solar power isn't really competitive with ground-based solar power unless launch costs to geosynch fall to <$1000/kg (Space elevators would operate at ~$500/kg) Image
3) HALO Forward Unto Dawn. Some advice for the idiot commander of this Covenant fleet: You attacked at exactly the wrong place! Cutting a space elevator at the base will just leave everything above still standing. If you want to *bring down* a space elevator, attack its midpoint. Image
2) "Young Builder" by @BryanLarsenArts . You don't even notice the space elevator at first glance. Then you do, and the piece takes on a whole new meaning. Image
1) But my favorite portrayal of space elevators in fiction is @ErikWernquist short film "Wanderers". Accurate climber speed and accurate tether cross-section, and accurate portrayal of where the first space elevator is likely going to be built: On Mars.


Image
Adendum: Halo TV Series. Meant for lifting water instead of people, which has all sorts of problems, and after ending its inaugural episode still standing, got blown up in the end and *framed as a good thing* 3/10

Addendum: The Wandering Earth. Great production design with lots of cool visuals and animation, but ultimately not very good engineering. Mistakes space for orbit, uses rockets on the climbers (why?), and once again just set up to fall down. 4/10

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More from @MaxFagin

Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
Oct 10
A new space-based solar power concept enters the chat. Let's take a look at @AetherfluxUSA 's proposal.

As with so many things in space, the focus is often on the tech, but the thing that is make-or-break for SBSP isn't technical; it's economic. Let's dive in.
After running numbers on *hundreds* of combinations of SBSP ideas, I can say that the economic feasibility of an SBSP idea boils down to three numbers:

1) The $/W of setting up the panels
2) The $/Wh you can charge to customers
3) The operational lifetime of the system
Other numbers matter (the SBSP model that I built has ~50 input parameters that can be tuned), but most are rounding errors next to those big three assumptions. Pretty much any idea can be made feasible or infeasible by a bad assumption in one of those three.
Read 19 tweets
Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
Jul 9
I encountered a delightful little astrodynamics proof last week when an astronaut casually stated it as a fact, and when I looked skeptical, he just smiled and said, "Check it yourself."

Here's the statement:

"It takes 2 hours to orbit at the surface of any object made of rock"
My first thought was that it couldn't be right since Low Earth Orbit period isn't 2 hours; it's 1.5. But of course,🌎isn't a rock; 🌎has an iron core that bumps our density up to ~twice that of rock, (and actually makes Earth the densest planet in the solar system) Image
My second thought was that ~2 hrs did seem like a surprisingly good approximation for the low orbit periods of the rocky objects I could call to mind.

🌎: 1.5 hrs
🌔: 2.0 hrs
🔴: 1.8 hrs

3 different sized ~rocky objects, each ~2 hr low orbit periods.

So what's going on here?
Read 9 tweets
Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
Jul 2, 2022
I am where I am in my career today because of hard work, support from friends and family, and luck. But today, I ran into a former SpaceX colleague who reminded me of a factor I often forget: I am where I am today because I did theater in school to fulfill a sports credit.🧵
The first space job I ever had was in '10 where I was fortunate to be one of 14 students from a pool of +1000 candidates for the @NASAAmesAcademy. I worked in the @NASAAmes director’s office with Gen. Pete Worden. Still the most insightful 3 months I’ve had into how NASA works.
At one of our tagups, after General "Call me Pete" Worden talked me through the org chart on his whiteboard (I still have the notes!) he mentioned that the thing that had made my resume stand out from the pile was... that I’d listed my student theater experience on my resume😳
Read 15 tweets
Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
Aug 31, 2019
Oh! I am *so* glad you asked that question! Thread incoming:
1/ If you want to make an experimental astronomer cringe, here are two good ways to do it:

1) Touch an eyepiece with your bare finger.

2) Say the words "flat field".
2/ Every digital camera (including the ones used in telescopes) is composed of a grid of millions of pixels. These pixels are, fundamentally, just semiconductor devices for turning light (photons) into an electric signal (electrons) that a computer can read.
Read 20 tweets
Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
Dec 21, 2018
3... 2... 1... 22:23 GMT! Happy #WinterSoltice Earth!

I'm going to let you in on a little trade secret: There is script astronomers are supposed to follow today when explaining what the solstice is, and that script goes something like this:
1) Construct a strawman who mistakenly thinks winter is because Earth has gotten further from the sun.

2) Ask the strawman "Ah! But if that *were* the cause of winter, then why is it summer in the southern hemisphere right now?"
3) Pivot to a discussion of the tilt of the Earth's axis (the real reason for the seasons).

4) Bonus Points: Use the words "obliquity", "eccentricity" and "precession" as much as possible to give your audience some impressive words to drop at their holiday parties.
Read 13 tweets
Max Fagin 🚀🔴🌐☄🌘 Profile picture
Nov 1, 2018
November is here, and that means a massive shift is coming. And by "massive" I am of course referring to the redefinition of the kilogram unit of mass that the world has been building up to for more than 100 years. Let me explain:
1/ I've had an unhealthy fascination with metrology (the study of measurement) ever since my 2nd year as a physics major when I took a class devoted to duplicating historic physics experiments, so please indulge me for going into heavy detail (get it?) about the kilogram.
2/ So what actually *defines* a unit of measurement? If you're American, you probably know a mile is 5280 feet and a foot is 12 inches and an inch is 2.54 centimeters etc. But where does this chain of definitions end? Is it turtles all the way down?
Read 22 tweets

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