Teamwork

My school has an online collection of kinematic machines for display. http://kmoddl.library.cornell.edu/collection-toc.php You click on the pictures to bring you to the individual sub-collections.

His/her name is RuBisCo, and he or she is suggesting an artificial method of carbon fixation. I get it!

I agree with you on this. I wrote a paper on this last year and one of the main problems I found with long distance space flights was the lack of CELSS systems. Although the hypothetical systems were quite heavy, when you started to have larger crews, the need for more supplies ended up being a far bigger burden.

Well it obviously depends on what the propellant is. A quick search from wikipedia told me that and ISP of 68 is about what it should be for nitrogen gas.

The CM has nothing to do with it. What keeps the stick together is the EM forces in the stick itself which are carried by photons. Since light only travels at a constant pace, once the stick goes into the black hole (where the escape velocity exceeds that of light) it'll become trapped inside. You could probably still continue to lower the rope inside the event horizon but you won't ever be able to pull whatever fell into the hole out again, regardless of where the CM is. Though more likely the rope would be shredded long before it got to the event horizon. Though I'm not entirely sure on this, the mass that is "converted" into energy is actually the energy of matter going from falling into an infinite gravity well. As an object falls closer to BHs, it gains kinetic energy which is often converted into heat if this object rubs against another one. This has the tendency to form these very very very hot material disks that revolve around BHs that give off tons of energy, something like 40% of the mass of the matter consumed. While I'm not really sure what causes matter to be excreted from the poles, (probably something to do with the way the angular momentum of the disk is excreted) I can tell you that the energy comes from the gravitation collapse of the material around the hole.

Here's an another article on docking: http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20120015496.pdf It focuses on the techniques to minimize air loss through docking nodes, discussing possibilities such as seal-to-seal connections as well as seal-to-flange ones. From the same place, I found this one on nuclear rockets. http://ntrs.nasa.gov/archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/20140009572.pdf I haven't had enough time to read through it completely but it's a study comparing different nuclear rocket elements, specifically the reactor core; really interesting.

If you mean my major, I'm an undergraduate in mechanical engineering.

I was looking into many of the resources I have and I realized that many of them are moderately to heavily copyrighted except for a few. The fragment I posted was one of the few that was okay under "fair use" (a rather nebulous definition I'll say, but I'm debating now if I should take it back), but I'm thinking of sending emails to a lot of the publishers and authors of the more copyrighted ones to ask if I could use excerpts for this project. Edit: Oh and I'm not really sure if I'm considered a contributor but I'm completely fine with you PM'ing me.

I know this is really off topic but !!I didn't know you went to Cornell, that's awesome! I'm a mechanical engineer there/here, and I think it's so cool that you went to the same school as me.

Yeah, I was a little worried about this too, it was why I only posted a small portion of a chapter instead. I was thinking that I could perhaps paraphrase some of the documents while citing the material to the original author.

Although I haven't read the whole thing, I have an interesting chapter on docking mating devices that I think you guys might find interesting. I didn't know where to put it so I just uploaded it to my dropbox. https://removed Edit: Killed link

If the photons are leaving, then aren't they technically on an escape trajectory and not in orbit.

You can trap photons in orbit around a black hole. They orbit right where the event horizon is.

Oh sweet, I've been hoping for something like this to come up!!! As an engineering student, I have access to a lot of scholarly engineering articles related to [though not limited to] space flight and other similar fields. I'm a little busy right now because of midterms and such, but I'm definitely going to contribute to this thread once all that's done.

Forgive me if this may be mentioned in a previous post, but what exactly is being scaled down in this mock solar system? I know you mentioned the diameter of the sun was 33 meters, but does that mean every thing else is scaled down (like the sun's mass is significantly lower, ect).