Now the ship will be made of steel, better have some welding tools.
I will add my request - a fairly large mobile automated drilling rig capable of drilling down many tens of metres possibly 100m, sufficient pipework, a method of sealing the well and equipment to compress CO2, pump it down the well and recover water from the gasses and liquids that come back up the pipe.
Quote from: ThereIWas3 on 12/24/2018 11:58 pmNow the ship will be made of steel, better have some welding tools.For what?Stainless is not the easiest to field weld, by the way...
Quote from: Slarty1080 on 12/25/2018 03:55 amI will add my request - a fairly large mobile automated drilling rig capable of drilling down many tens of metres possibly 100m, sufficient pipework, a method of sealing the well and equipment to compress CO2, pump it down the well and recover water from the gasses and liquids that come back up the pipe.Why that instead of a rodwell? (Rodruigez well). That just requires warm water
Is it known that in-situ scanning into the ground would give inadequately detailed images before drilling? ISTR a Mars probe imaging underground ice banks from orbit. SHARAD?
The presentation by Paul Wooster had a slide, though crude, that showed open trench digging for water, not drilling. This is what I expect to happen. So a rover that can dig, that can prepare a flat landing pad without rocks too.
Somebody posted a pdf in a different thread with a geologists analysis of valles marineris valley floor where it is estimated to have a km deep glacier under a cover of glacial till. This is located almost on the equator and is very low in altitude. Also will probably be a very picturesque place to land.
Quote from: rsdavis9 on 12/25/2018 01:38 pmSomebody posted a pdf in a different thread with a geologists analysis of valles marineris valley floor where it is estimated to have a km deep glacier under a cover of glacial till. This is located almost on the equator and is very low in altitude. Also will probably be a very picturesque place to land.Excellent news! It would be a magnificent site for sure and I sincerely hope that a Starship can be sent there, but there are a lot of imponderables.How deep is the cover of glacial till? How uneven is the surface and what size of boulders are laying around? Can you safely land a Starship on it? Are there crevasses? Will extracting hundreds of tons of water destabilize the surface? Hopefully it will be a boulder free even surface with a shallow even covering of till over a crevasse free pure ice field capable of supporting a Starship close by and a Rodwell. But we better check it out first.
Quote from: rsdavis9 on 12/25/2018 01:38 pmSomebody posted a pdf in a different thread with a geologists analysis of valles marineris valley floor where it is estimated to have a km deep glacier under a cover of glacial till. This is located almost on the equator and is very low in altitude. Also will probably be a very picturesque place to land.Excellent news! It would be a magnificent site for sure and I sincerely hope that a Starship can be sent there, but there are a lot of imponderables.
I’d like to see some small 5g cell towers deployed with those distributed charging stations and some drones for advanced reconnaissance. Once you have a few small charging stations distributed around the base station, drones could cover hundreds of miles and find promising locations for rovers to follow up on. I’m guessing Elon will deploy a small starlink satellite system for ground support and relay back to earth. 5g chips will be smaller than starlink and needed for device connectivity and starlink would be for base station and larger rovers.
I wonder about what their plans are for communication? Would a satellite be part of their cargo on the unmanned starships to be released before they descend from orbit?
Quote from: rsdavis9 on 12/24/2018 06:08 pmSimple solution.For first deploy have six rollout solar arrays from the six aft end cargo slots. They would lower the roll to the surface and then rollout.Are you thinking they could be self-deploying or is that too Rube Goldberg? I'm imagining some possibilities but afraid I'm just being silly.
Simple solution.For first deploy have six rollout solar arrays from the six aft end cargo slots. They would lower the roll to the surface and then rollout.
If I were SpaceX I'd use FH to toss a few rechargeable mini-road graders and a solar charging station to clear target LZ's and an initial solar field. CC: Tesla