DonLorenzo

Really? But.... how will you send smoke signals without the fire? I'll see myself out

Also, your signature is very unfortunate under the OP

Some points I'm wondering about -Charging double doesn't usually give you much clientele, unless I'm missing something? Why would people piggyback their cargo on your rockets if it costs twice the rate of the competition? If it's to support the lunar endeavour, they might as well just hand over the cash -Why launch the crew first? Launching them last would minimize life support requirements and could possibly remove the ISS from the picture which seems like a huge wildcard to me? -So this idea is now five years in the making, is there more to it than the selection of 4 launch platforms and their payload capacities? -Is your projected cost just launch costs or does it include mission control/support/training/operations and not to mention R&D for the lunar lander?

Preparing another ambitious mission

There is a button to have everything researched, it's the sandbox mode. Also, it takes you two hours to click 500 things?

Poutrage is my new favourite word of the day

Indeed it is, however that's not what we were talking about. The question was whether they'd perform the test essentially where the stage would come down anyway, or if it would also fly back to(wards) the launch location as the finished version would. That's what my guess was referring to

I'm guessing they're not bringing it back. Doing so would incur a big dV hit, and they're doing this as an 'extra' on a regular paid launch. So I'm guessing it's not got the dV headroom to do so (since otherwise why would the customer not use a lighter launcher)

Progress combined with the inevitable tragedy...

And here's mine! It's rough, that's for sure

Hey guys, After seeing Scott Manleys video on the subject I impulse-bought the early access space MMO Entropy. It's downloading now and I've got mixed feelings already On the one hand it's a space game, so I should like it, on the other hand most of the aesthetic doesn't appeal to me. But space! Anyone here playing it by any chance? Could be fun to team up Here's scott manley's video

The issue at the core of the 'yes we can build long term stuff' and 'we can't' argument is that indeed, it is conceivable that current tech could last hundreds of years. What's uncertain is if we can make it so that that is actually likely. The lightbulb example is a great one. It clearly demonstrates that a lightbulb can last over a century, however it's only one out of countless lightbulbs that actually have. If you absolutely need to light a space for a century or longer, lightbulbs do not become the preferred option just because they CAN succeed. It has to be likely. The problem is ascertaining that likelihood. The timescales are just too long. Another nice example is the shelf life of military grade canned food (made in the 60s for bomb shelters), we don't know because it's not gone bad yet. It might be forever, it might be 60 years. This is actually a very similar problem to the 'well new ships will overtake it anyway'-scenario. No one in their right mind would advocate a trial-run of a century before committing to a build, with what then would be outdated (but proven to be reliable) tech. You can mitigate a bit with multiple redundancy, but intuition tells me that as timespans increase the adding of redundancy will start to have diminishing returns (as they all age together). All that said, considering that our day-to-day stuff routinely lasts a decade, our space stuff regularly outperforms mission durations and 'oops, component X failed'-failures are relatively rare I do think that with careful engineering and a project firmly grounded in a longevity mentality we would be capable of constructing something with decent odds of making it through a century. As an unrelated side note; space, while harsh is a lot more predictable than our terrestrial environmend, which should help in engineering longevity.

Stephen Baxter wrote a book which was essentially like 20 short stories, all exploring different possible answers to Fermi. I quite liked it, I think it was the last of the 'Manifold' series

Pretty cool! I especially like the handwritten labels, nice touch

Lift or no lift, interaction with the atmosphere is going to decrease your orbit. So if you're coming in from the moon for instance, there's no way you're going to escape out into a solar orbit. What could happen though is that you fail to slow down significantly and zoom all the way out to (nearly) lunar height before coming back to earth again (just keeping your orbit, really). In the real world this might as well be 'lost in space forever' since your life support (or at least, Apollo's life support) wouldn't last long enough to try a second reentry edit: yeah, what nibb said

fusion is in effect!

Make it simpler. Tell them liquid water is important for life (they're mostly water themselves!) and that as you go farther from the sun, it gets so cold it freezes and can no longer be liquid. Go too close and it boils away and isn't a liquid anymore. Explain that Earth is just the right distance away so the temperature is always nice. In case there's questions you can explain a little bit more, that there are also other ways to have liquid water and that it's not really the planet that's just right for US, but that we're just right for the planet since we evolved on it. I'd say leave out tidal heating, subsurface oceans and RTGs. They're 8 years old; go with 'not all planets are equally close to the sun, and that does matter!'. You might cover that the Earth is actually always pretty much the same distance away from the sun as well, I bet some of them will think that come winter we're farther away etc. IMO those are useful things to teach kids about. IF they all yawn and know all those things (awesome kids!) go on about jovian moons and so forth

I do like the hearthstone game though!

I say we make a big ball of spores and DNA, all kinds of the hardiest lifeforms we have here and send that on its way to where we think earthlike planets are. That way, if against the odds life here IS a fluke we at least did our duty and ensured (or at least... enlikened?) that the next galactic generation of life WILL grow up with conveniently nearby aliens.

This feels like something for a hypothetical KSP 2.0 (I also just thought it'd be cool if the KSP 1.0 solar system were reachable in KSP 2.0. hah) But yeah it'd be cool.

While I want to agree with the sentiment (technology goes fast, is inexorable and has a driven purpose etc.), just how close are we to overtaking the voyager and pioneer probes again? Edit: also, the newer ships could always go to different destinations. It's not like there's a set roadmap. The universe is vast. A quote from a since forgotten sci-fi book: 'Even if you suddenly got the ability to teleport to all the worlds, and would set to exploring one per day, it'd still take tens of thousands of years to check out just our corner of the galaxy'

One thing I can think of is that the surface of a planet (like pluto, which is a cold dead rock with no tectonics and stuff) is a lot more stable than any attitude control system is going to be. Also it won't fail. Just guessing though

On pluto you have a lot slower motion around the sun (and on our moon it's even worse, it goes around the earth every month!) so you can stare at the same spot for much longer at once. That's one thing I can imagine

My new pet peeve in films isn't so much tech stuff anymore, but rather that the characters ALWAYS discuss the most sensitive and secret things over the phone. Everyone in every spy/crime movie would be busted SO quickly. Dexter was especially bad at this

That's one of those things that's nice to play in reverse