@cstross Are those fluorescent lights at the top? And two of which have already died?
I thought LED things are used in space - you know, saving energy, weight, lack of a glass balloon, which, if damaged, turns into a bunch of deadly glass fragments, etc.
@yrabbit The oldest chunks of the ISS went up in 1992, before white LEDs existed outside the lab. And spacecraft engineering is notoriously conservative. (A "cutting edge" computer specc'd for a deep space mission is typically at least a decade behind the state of the art when it launches, years before the mission arrives at its destination ... because "a decade old" = "we understand it pretty well and its failure modes have been explored: also we took 5 years to radiation-harden this version".)
@cstross
I think the biggest difference is that spaceships in movies (like Star Trek) are built in a space dock, rather than on earth. (Although the last movies show the ship being made on earth)
Having the parts beamed to a space dock (or through an orbital lift) could allow for larger, more spacious and comfortable ships...
@mackaj Also the ISS is 25 and has been occupied for all of that time. I'm going to stick my neck out and say that Tiangong will be a bit less pristine by 2048 …!
@cstross I love the little CRT in the lower-right corner. Just thinking about how long it must have been there, the fuel expended to get that heavy glass bottle into orbit…
@rbanffy@adamrice The original ISS modules used the APAS-95 docking system, descended from the APAS-75 (developed for the Apollo-Soyuz test program) and APAS-89 (used on Mir). There are descendants (like the Common Berthing Mechanism) but the older modules are still attached.
@HairyChris Don't forget the size of payload shrouds and the space shuttle's payload bay—while there's a prototype expandable module docked to the ISS (BEAM) most of the modules are rigid metal pressure vessels that had to fit inside a launch vehicle's payload.
(Starship, with a 9m diameter, is a huge increase over the Shuttle's 4.6M wide payload bay.)
@HairyChris Naah, Starship's going to fly again within a month or two: the last test achieved most of its goals and SpaceX (currently floating with a valuation of $175Bn) absolutely needs it to launch the Starlink 2 cluster (the new sats are too big to fly economically on Falcon 9). I reckon they'll lose at most 1-2 more prototypes during the test program then get it working smoothly.
@cstross Maybe, but the NASA funding for Spaceship's lunar stuff is dependent on them hitting some very precise targets (which SpaceX & Musk signed up to). They got ~$3bn and must have blown through most of that, with many more launches required.
They didn't hit LEO last time either.
I wonder how much cash SpaceX has, and whether it can fully self-fund Starship. Any engines used here can't be used for their commercial shipments.
Plus if Musk self-destructs the jury is out on everything.
@cstross@HairyChris I can't wait to see what Bigelow(Boeing?) can fit inside a Starship cargo bay. Or, even cooler, a Superheavy-launched expendable second stage.
@rbanffy@HairyChris Boeing as it used to be is dead—eaten from the inside-out by McDonnell-Douglas management after the merger and reconfigured in McD-D's image, they're now a bloated trad defense industry contractor who can't innovate or build spacegoing hardware to spec and on time.
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