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Researchers compared more than 700 neuroscientists' and aerospace engineers' results on a intelligence assessment with the general public. The results were "quite funny, really."
That energy, the rocket engines put all that energy into the vehicle to allow it to travel that fast. when you come down, you got to take that energy out. so you got a heat shield and air friction to take the energy out. it heats up to 3,000 degrees fahrenheit and the hot plasma flowing around the spacecraft burns the heat -- there's other thermal protection material around the rest of the capsule and it scars it and scorches it a bit. that's what you're seeing, the markings of the plasma, the hot plasma actually kind of burning a little bit, the heat shielding on the rest of the spacecraft. >...
What would it take to make it so? >> it's going to take a breakthrough propulsion system. you have rocket engines with a lot of moving parts. you got turbo pumps close to 100,000 rpm, all that has to work perfectly every time, and that's why it's so expensive. so it's going to take a breakthrough propulsion system where we can reliably put the energy into a vehicle to get it into orbital velocity and then you see the price coming down. spacex has done a great job using conventional rocket engines and using innovative ideas like recovering and reusing the the first stage. that's brought the pri...
Capsule that can be reused, how significant is that? >> yeah. that's a game-changer. all of our boosters from the space shuttle era, they were selling rocket boosters two and a half minutes. they fell down in the ocean. we had a barge take them back and refill them. we had been reusing the boosters but not the rocket engines. and so i think this is going to be making space more affordable. the price point will come down for more tourists to go to space. richard branson is 250,000 now. the jeff bezos flight was 28 million, but hopefully the numbers come down so more people can have the opportun...
Although it's not -- it's not $50 million for a week long stay at the iss. it's $250,000 for a few minutes in space. that's still beyond the reach of most of us, right? and so, for that price to come down further, there really needs to be some kind of a breakthrough in propulsion technology. that is, we need to be able to build inexpensive yet reliable and robust rocket engines to really bring the cost of space access down, and so, you know, even the virgin galactic spacecraft, which gets up to about 3,000 miles per hour as opposed to 17,000 miles per hour, that's still expensive, takes money ...