mikegarrison

Having done this before, many times, there are many reasons why someone might prepare a proposal like this and not submit it. Number 1 is that your own management, who asked for the proposal in the first place, changes their mind either once they see it or just because time has passed and things have changed.

Yup. Mostly operators want to avoid that, so they burn off fuel. A potentially more difficult problem is if the current fuel load is not within the cg limits for landing. Airplanes can (and do) sometimes fly in cruise with cgs that are not allowed for landing.

No human (or even animal) children have ever been born off Earth, so it's not entirely certain that humans could have children on Mars or in a space station.

Seattle's Museum Of Flight has a Yuri's Night party every year. This year the radio station I listen to in the car (C89, a Seattle high school radio station) was heavily advertising that the party would include wearable vibration technology for deaf and hard of hearing people to enjoy dancing to the music.

I find I never watch these anymore. Partly for the same reasons networks stopped live-covering shuttle launches by the time that one exploded. And partly because they stopped putting them on YouTube. I know, I know, Elon owns "X" and wants to drive traffic there, but if he actually wants people to watch the broadcasts.....

The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates. Written by Himself. would have been a book whose text was shorter than its title if he couldn't even breathe the air on his island.

I didn't realize someone had restarted this discussion. The romantic stories always pretty much come down to assuming that people go to these remote places because they want to leave society. They are trailblazers and explorers and individualists by nature, and that's the appeal for them. But the problem is that Mars is too hostile for individuals. You need the support of a society to live there. Which leaves the other main reason, resource exploitation. Except, we don't actually know of or even expect any resources that justify the difficulty in going to Mars, harvesting them, and coming back. So it kind of looks pretty bleak right now. More like a "scientific outpost" situation than a "colonization" situation. Or maybe, there is a third option, which actually could be the most realistic one. Some super-rich people fund it just because they want to and they have nothing else to spend all their money on.

I imagine all the rockets sitting around and pounding a few back, and suddenly the Delta IV Heavy stands up. "Here, hold my beer. I'm gonna set myself on fire! It'll be great!"

What's not to love about a rocket that SETS ITSELF ON FIRE just before it launches?

Blueprints don't matter as much as tooling, and I'm fairly sure the tooling is all gone.

So did the world end? I heard from a friend in Texas that some of the locals were worried that might happen.

That's not completely true. They often use derated takeoffs, because they are easier on the engines, but it's not true that they *always* do, even if they otherwise have enough runway length to do it. Most operators will have policies to use derated takeoffs when possible, but it is always up to the flight crew what they do.

Longer spans are more expensive. They are generally only used when they are needed. There is a lot that goes into bridge design in this respect, but to the best of my knowledge the key factors are usually the available support. If the water is shallow and the bedrock is solid, they use supports. If the water is too deep or there is no solid ground, they use longer spans. (Or where I live, they sometimes use floating pontoon bridges.)

Most countries have laws about cabotage (picking up people or cargo inside of a country and delivering them to another place in that same country). Typically they protect their own industries by not allowing foreign operators to do that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabotage In air travel, the Chicago Convention defines the "freedoms of the air" that include these concepts. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedoms_of_the_air

Launching straight up from the Mun to a return at Kerbin is totally doable. If you are on the equator at the trailing terminator, and you launch perfectly straight up, you can simply make sure you are at 0 velocity relative to Kerbin as you leave the Mun's SOI. That will let you just drop straight down the well to Kerbin. However, it's not the most efficient way to do it, because you fight the Mun's gravity the entire time. If you choose a path that spirals around the Mun until it reaches the SOI boundary point with the same 0 speed relative to Kerbin, it takes more time but uses less fuel.

So by that definition there has not yet ever been any reusable space launch? (Except, I guess, Blue Origin's New Shepard? Or, perhaps the X-15 and the Virgin Galactic?)

The Space Shuttle was a fully functioning small space station that could house more than half a dozen people for a week in orbit, and you are comparing it to the cost of a titan launch? Yes, an uncrewed reusable booster would have been cheaper for routine sat deliveries to orbit. Like most of crewed space flight, there is some question about whether it should even be done at all. The shuttle was designed to do everything for everyone, which usually doesn't end up making it ideal for anything or anyone. But the things you are complaining about here are ridiculous in terms of apples versus oranges.

Why do people in this forum continue to take potshots at the Space Shuttle? It was a fantastic system, that absolutely pioneered the practical reuse of space vehicles. Nearly every part of a shuttle was reused -- the only thing that wasn't was the external tank.

I've been hearing that about fusion power for the past 45 years.

I still remember the time before the breakup of the USSR when the official story from the Soviet Union was that there had never been any attempt to make a manned lunar mission.

Here's how it works, to the best of my knowledge. You write a plan of what you are going to test. The plan gets approved. You conduct the test. If things go according to the plan, that's fine. If they don't, that's what needs to be investigated and resolved. It's up to SpaceX what they write in their plan. If it had just said "Splashdown of the first stage, destructive reentry for the second, both at predetermined spots..." then that would have been good enough. Obviously the plan must not have said that, though.

TRL2, at best.

That's just standard engineering. You always have to balance margins of performance between the risk that you unexpectedly exceed the limits versus the risk that you overdesign and fail for cost, weight, etc. The skill and experience is in knowing how close to the edge you should get. Race car engineer Carroll Smith wrote in one of his books: "An engineer is someone who can do for a dime what any fool can do for a dollar."

My name is not "Mikey", I'm not your boy, and why are you trying to make this argument personal? (Against the forum rules, I will add.)