Codraroll

Just to steer the thread even more wildly off course... say that Musk finally manages to build his colonial transporter. 150 tons to Mars or whatnot, with options to return home as well. Wouldn't it make just as much sense to load up a couple of the things with an excavator and a small refinery, maybe some crew quarters if required, and make a beeline for the closest suitable* asteroid instead? Sure, you'd get less payload with you per launch on that trip, but the stuff you bring back home will hopefully be able to cover the cost of the extra launches. I mean, it's nice to have the capability to go to Mars and fund a colony there, but that capability isn't exclusively applicable to Mars. If you can take colony equipment there, you can take colony equipment almost anywhere. And, as has been extensively discussed in the last few pages of this thread, there isn't an awful lot of profitable things to do there that you can't do on Earth. By contrast, asteroids full of rare earth metals are like treasure chests littered across the abyss, if certain ideas are to be believed. I presume it's cheaper to do refinement on-site in the beginning, then carry only the refined products home (I guess somebody would pay well for the slag, ice and gravel too, but maybe not in the long term). Another benefit, you don't have to drag the goods out of a gravity well before taking them home to Earth. On the other hand, you'd have to leave a lot of really expensive mining/refining equipment tethered to the mined-out asteroid. *As for what counts as suitable, I think convenience of travel and presence of useful metals would be the biggest prequalifiers. You'd have to make sure the trip is worthwhile before going there. Finding a suitable asteroid would be a time-consuming matter, but developing the required technology for remote prospecting sounds like pocket change compared to "sustainable colony on Mars" amounts of money. Also, the prospector probes could presumably be launched on existing or near-future ships. Perhaps somebody will get on with that task within a few years?

So in other words, by pursuing the colonization of other worlds, we could be able to mitigate existential threats from outside Earth? Sounds like a good enough reason to pursue colonization to me. We might not get actual colonies out of it, but the side effects sound beneficial enough to be worth the hassle. Or vice versa, by working on ways to mitigate existential threats from outside Earth, we would go a long way towards being able to colonize other worlds. Might as well do the threats first, then, and go the extra step on to colonization afterwards. Either way, it seems like there would be some great value in this kind of research.

Unexpected applications? I wonder what that is? Transporting cargo very quickly between a complex on shore and a barge/ship/platform far out at sea, by way of the upper atmosphere?

Uh... just a silly question: could Aldrin Cyclers be a way to get a decent-ish Internet/communications connection to Mars? You'd need a few hundred of them, working as relay stations, sending the signal in a chain back and forth between Mars and Earth. Evenly spaced, there would only be a few gigameters between each one, and with every one having a fixed transmitter and receiver pointing at both of its neighbours, you could get a decent bandwidth throughout the entire chain. Signal delay would be atrocious, of course, even more so than a direct connection, but bandwidth and signal loss should be good enough. Or would a direct Mars-to-Earth connection be sufficient on its own?

Yes, maybe. I guess the "innovation" would be that the recovery spacecraft is launched with less payload than it lands with. Therefore, its launcher wouldn't have to be as powerful. It's launched mostly empty (save for some orbital maneuvering system and its fuel - which admittedly would weigh quite a bit), which could make it light enough to be able to push itself into orbit after first stage separation. Deorbiting wouldn't require that much fuel. And even if it had to be launched on its own expendable second stage, it would still be able to collect and reuse a half-dozen or so upper stages for each one discarded. That's almost close to resemble economics. Maybe it would be more useful as an orbital junkyard, as @kerbiloid suggested. Go up, collect upper stages or discarded satellites, retain them in orbit until some space shuttle-like spacecraft is developed so they can be brought down to Earth or dismantled or something. Basically a "waste bin" for potential space junk, keeping it all in a few boxes instead of floating all over the place. It would technically mean reusability, in a distant future where space travel is cheap and convenient enough to send somebody to pick them up. I'd like to see the economist who'd recommend this approach, though.

Yes, but I think that can be found out easier - well, everything is relative - by making a spinning station somewhere close to Earth. Or just in Mars orbit, if one is so adamant to make a colony there. You need roughly the same measures to survive on Mars as you need to survive in space (air tightness; radiation shielding; food production; recycling of everything organic, breathable, or drinkable; emergency contingency plans since Earth is months away at best...), and the only benefit offered by the planet surface is access to raw materials and water. Frankly, I think any eventual Mars colony would be situated in its orbit, in a large, spinning space station. It saves any supply ships and visitors from the hassle of landing and eventually getting back to orbit. There would be mining outposts on the surface, possibly some refineries too, but the bulk of the colony itself would enjoy 1 G and a dust-free environment high above it. Working on the surface would be like working on an oil platform today: Two weeks on site, four weeks off, the site only has quarters for temporary living, while the workers have their home and family on the orbital station. Same would go for Mercury and the Jovian moons. Except on Earth, life isn't any easier down the gravity well, so you might as well stay out of it.

And... if you can build these in the first place, why go to Mars with them? It's a dead rock with inconvenient gravity, icky dust getting everywhere, and which is just as complicated to carve out a living on as the vacuum of space itself. Might as well stay in your awesome, self-sustained space habitats until the robot colony has made the planet somewhat habitable.

May I ask a silly question about upper rocket stage reuse? ... oh shoot, gonna do it anyway. Would it be possible to recover upper stages in orbit instead of on the ground? As far as I've understood, reusability of rocket first stages is possible because the first stage neither goes particularly high up, not particularly fast - relatively speaking, of course. Reusing the second stages would be harder since they go a lot faster and a lot higher - meaning that they would have to go through almost a complete orbital reentry and somehow survive intact, as their secondary function. Their primary function, of course, is pushing a payload from the high-and-fast-but-not-too-high-and-fast position of first stage separation, and (almost?) to the desired payload orbit (unless a third stage takes care of that). But say that the second stage is given extra orbital capabilities instead of re-entry/landing capabilities. Enough to enter stable LEO, and do some basic maneuvering. The same as what they do today, basically, but a little more. Then the second part of the plan, where the thread tags begin to come into play. It would involve a... let's call it a "butterfly net". A spacious but empty cargo spacecraft launched in advance, which does a rendezvous with the upper stage in orbit, loads it up and straps it in. This craft would be on a fairly long mission, loading up multiple upper stages from different launches, then re-entering and landing in a fashion similar to a space shuttle once it's full. Not necessarily on a runway, but smooth enough to allow its cargo to be reused. It would eliminate the requirement for the upper stage to be able to re-enter and land. It would "only" need to have orbital maneuverability instead. However, it's not very hard to see all the other problems it would introduce. Most prominently, the act of snagging, stowing, and securing a spacecraft inside another. And landing the damn thing while full of cargo, I presume. One might need human astronauts to do these tasks, which means craft with crew and EVA capabilities would have to operate alongside it. Maybe the upper stages could be stored temporarily on the "butterfly net"'s exterior and then properly stowed and secured in a single manned operation once it has reached capacity (say, 4-6 upper stages). Not sure if the landing could be done remotely, but that would be preferable, that way you wouldn't have to have crew compartments on the "butterfly net" itself. It would just have to be a big box that can be launched, maneuver in orbit, reenter, and land. I can't imagine it would be a profitable venture, since the development costs of such a program would probably be vastly more expensive than the dozens (let's say hundreds in the best case - still not enough) of upper stages it would allow the reuse of. Orbital maneuvering with a few upper rocket stages in its belly is probably not cheap when it comes to fuel either, and adding a rendezvous to every mission profile probably wouldn't be less expensive than just throwing the second stage away. Maybe second-order effects would recoup some of the costs, though. But would it be feasible, if not economically profitable? It would require the crew and EVA capabilities of the Space Shuttle, also roughly the same landing capability, albeit split into two different craft. Orbital rendezvouz would, optimistically, be on the same order of magnitude of complexity as docking with the ISS. Alternately, the "butterfly net" could instead be swapped for a manned orbital warehouse/workshop where upper stages would be collected, outfitted with heat shields, parachutes, legs, and/or what-have-you, then sent on their merry way back to the ground. Or just disassembled for parts, I suppose. Takes away the need to be able to land the big craft, at the cost of a permanent manned space operation, which we all of course know is not expensive at all. I feel like I'm not getting any closer to a viable/economically feasible solution here, so might as well hand the microphone over to you guys. What do you think of the concept?

Why go all the way to the US? There are "Space Centers" for sounding rockets both in Norway, Sweden, the UK, or even on Svalbard. No need to haul the rocket all the way to New Mexico.

That stuff is all over Luna, or the Moon, depending on how formal you are. The Gagarin crater is 265 km in diameter and almost 5 km deep. 1772 Gagarin is also the name of an asteroid approximately 8 km in diameter. There is also an Apollo crater (also on the Moon), an Apollo asteroid (which later gave name to a class of asteriods commonly known as - you guessed it - the Apollo asteroids), and a variety of other craters named for the individual Apollo astronauts. I agree that these historical heroes ought to have places named after them, which is why somebody named places after them. But they can't claim the name of every geographical feature out there forever. We have a lot of other deserving candidates too.

Not sure if this has been brought up before, but I think some parts are strangely integrated in the stock tech tree. The node "Very Heavy Rocketry" has the Penguin and Quad Penguin engines, but the inbetween Dual Penguin is relegated to "Massive Rocketry", which is a full tier later. Even stranger, "Very Heavy Rocketry" also has the Dual Emu and Quad Emu engines, but the plain Emu (which is much smaller than those, as the names suggest) is in "Massive Rocketry" again. Shouldn't it be the other way around? Likewise, the 10 m thrust plates are found in the node "Meta-Materials" (cost: 550 Science), but the smaller 7.5 m thrust plates are two tiers later, in "Gigantic Structure" (cost: 1,500 Science). I know it's picking nits and such, but I thought it might be of interest to know. I take it that those parts are meant to appear in later nodes in the Community Tech Tree or Engineering Tech Tree (Colossal Rocketry or something), but without those tech trees install they are lumped into lower tiers - even lower than those housing the smaller part counterparts. So I'm sort-of suspecting that the shenanigans required to make it work properly with the stock tech tree would break something for those other tech trees (which I probably should have used instead). But in case the fix is trivial - now you know the issue, at least! And for the record, you got it right with the fuel tanks - all the 10 m tanks appear in the last available fuel tank node, later than all the parts 7.5 m and down. Thanks again for an awesome suite of mods!

Let's hope they approve all the suggested Charon names too. I really like the guidelines they've put down for that one... (Picture from Wikipedia)

I put KSP away when it updated to 1.2or somewhere around there, because I had put so many mods on it and I couldn't be bothered to update them all. I was afraid to break something, or not be able to continue, or generally frying my aging PC., and I had other games to play that didn't require this attention upon start-up. The aging PC was eventually fried by something else than KSP almost a year ago, but I recently caved in to the Kerbal craving and downloaded it on my laptop. It appears to work just fine. But the mods! Oh, the bother of looking up a bajillion download sources and keeping them all up to date! No, stock KSP would be the way to go for me, I feared... And then today I discovered CKAN, embarrassingly long after picking the game back up. It's like a personal assistant just fixing things for you. It's brilliant! Thanks! ...wonder how many mods I'll install before frying the laptop too...

The general rules of thumb for space-related stuff: Anything said to happen more than two years into the future is just as likely not to happen at all. Anything said to happen somewhere between six months and two years into the future can be postponed for a year or more at a time, indefinitely. Anything said to happen in less than six months will happen 50 % later than estimated. You could also put in some clauses of "things due to happen tomorrow", or the "20 years in the future" rule, or stuff like that, but let's just keep it simple.

Thanks for the replies, everybody (very interesting story, @DerekL1963!). I guess that the takeaway is that the future is here, and we have a precense in space and do interesting things there, but space is still so dangerous that even with the best technology and the smartest people available, it is still necessary to take half a day to open a hatch. Opening hatches is an inherently dangerous activity in space. Thinking about that fact is a bit of an ice bucket in the face of the optimistic sci-fi enthusiast in me, but I guess I should be really excited about the fact that we have found a way to open hatches in space at all, given how much can go wrong with it. Here's hoping that plenty of hatches will be opened safely in the future too!

There are times when I wonder how complex certain tasks in space really can be, and if the (probably perfectly valid!) reasons why they are so complex can ever be trivialized. When something as conceptually simple as opening a hatch becomes an operation that has to be scheduled and set aside for later, things either seem too complex or too daring to shake my faith in the whole "space future" thing. EDIT: Initially misread as "the hatch will be opened tomorrow". Point still stands, though. I'm either wondering why they can't just reach a hand out and open the damn thing already, or if the reasons they have to wait are so challenging and dangerous that space travel can never be made practical or convenient.

That depends on the level of precision. With sufficient technology, you could make the enemy's weapons useless in their hands, or flash-weld the moving parts of a vehicle-mounted gun together. Just hope they have the precense of mind to drop the weapon before it becomes too hot to touch...

Even if the Mobile Launch Pad turns out to just be another part to stick on a vessel, I'm intrigued by the "adapting to terrain" bit. Because it has implications for making planetary bases, which currently is a rather tedious and unrewarding piece of gameplay. It's nearly hopeless to asssemble anything on a surface, which is made even worse with uneven terrain. It's doable to construct something rudimentary on the flat plains of Minmus, but on more rocky bodies you'd have to be an expert player to assemble anything half-decent (not that there's much to gain from it anyway - you have to physically dock to a stationary base to extract resources from it, which is extremely difficult to do with a vessel built for spaceflight). Best-case scenario is that this feature allows the construction of launchpads on other bodies. I want to be able to build a "stepping stone" base on Duna and construct and launch my Dres mission from there. If I want to jet ski across the seas of Laythe, and have a well-staffed and -supplied base there already, I shouldn't necessarily have to haul the craft all the way from Kerbin. Opening up for permanent off-world bases would make interplanetary gameplay a lot more rewarding. Besides, it would allow you to create some fun late-game challenge scenarios, such as transporting goods from Ike to Eeloo, or Dres to Duna, or Eve to Tylo The Mun to Kerbin.

I guess asteroid mining or a really large and for some reason well-funded lunar colony might do it. For asteroid mining, one would need both excavators, separators and refineries. No need to bring tons of ore back to Earth if you're only going to get a few kilograms of refined metal out of it. Not after the first few rounds, at least, where the scientific and novelty value of even "useless" asteroid slag has diminished. An industrial asterioid mining vehicle or station would be a really big and heavy thing, requiring lots of material to be placed in orbit. Might as well do it in as few launches as possible, and/or do as much assembly as possible on Earth and sending it to space in large, prebuilt chunks. And lunar colonies... I guess if somebody found some incredibly lucrative reason to go to the moon, a large amount of equipment would have to be hauled there in a relatively short time frame. That would probably be mining-related as well, once again needing large and heavy-lift capable rockets.

Alternate interpretation: Prograde burn - burning to accelerate in the direction you're heading. Retrograde burn - burning to accelerate in the opposite direction of where you're heading. Tardigrade burn - sterilizing your spacecraft.

I think this discussion has sprung up off-topic in several threads, but not had a thread of its own that I know of (I'm comparatively new here, but I'm fairly sure we haven't had anything in the recent couple of months, at least). So I figured... why not create a thread for it? So, we're all quite aware of SpaceX's development of the Falcon Heavy, touting the capacity to send just short of 64 metric tons to low Earth orbit, and a little less than half that to GTO. NASA's questionably-fated Space Launch System promises to (well, intends to, at the very least) send 70 tons or more to the same place, on a mounting plate 8.4 meters in diameter. Blue Origin has a slightly smaller bird than those two in development with the New Glenn, and the Russian Energia corporation has also spoken about building a super heavy-lift launch vehicle (I' using Wikipedia's term here, I hope it's the correct one). Now, big rockets are fun and all (that very fact is presumably part of the reason why most of us are right here right now), but common criticism against these projects goes along the lines of "they have no payload". This might be true for the SLS in particular, since it's very big and very capable, but not built to the specifications of any mission. The Falcon Heavy has also been mentioned to have problems integrating the heavy payload - lifting it to space is not an issue, but lifting the rocket from a horizontal to a vertical position might be. Let's just assume that the rockets work as intended without significant payload integration problems for the purpose of this thread. In this thread I'd like to discuss what all this super-heavy launch capacity could be used for. What could you possibly (or feasibly, or economically) bolt to the tip of such large rockets and send into orbit with a meaningful purpose? I suppose "recreating the Apollo missions" could be an answer, but let's try to be more creative than that. Besides, the Saturn V was even larger than the SLS, so presumably the latter wouldn't even be suitable for that purpose. I presume an obvious payload candidate would be whatever will success the ISS. Some perhaps-not-directly-applicable-to-real-life KSP experiences suggest that you can get away with fewer launches to build a space station if you assemble more of it on the ground and launch it in fewer, heavier parts, but volume might be an issue. Also, with limits of 8.4 meters and 70 tons to play with, you could probably launch a very big and capable space telescope. Or perhaps another rocket stage with a smaller payload destined for some far-off location - but where, and how? What do you think?

Okay, it's presumed that the self-sufficient moon colony has a manufacturing base, and that all necessary electronics and machinery can be repaired and/or even manufactured from scratch with materials from the colony. Luckily, the colony would only need to stay by itself for a few decades. With no complex life to infect, and an individual lifespan of minutes to hours, any plague bacteria would die out rather quickly. Intense radiation would be a longer-term problem, but luckily high intensity also means the material "burns out" more quickly. Intense radiation corresponds to a short half-life, after all. Of course, some concentrations of radioactive waste would be lethal for centuries or millennia, but you wouldn't manage to spread dead-within-hours-of-exposure levels of radiation all over the planet. The Earth is simply too big for that. So I guess the first thing the colony would do, would be sending probes with dosimeters down the well. Trying to map the areas of higher radiation, and surveying for useful materials. A city would still contain vast amounts of scavenge-able materials, just scattered about a little. There could very well be some mining robots coming next (assuming they figure out a way for them to survive landing - luckily, areobraking with parachutes or even glide-landing on intact airports is an option). The lunar colonists would eventually have to master remote-controlled robot operations. They would have to have a robot operation going on on Earth for decades, gathering materials enough to manufacture lunar rockets to return scavenge to the moon, or hardened radiation shelters (has to be a known technology to the moon, as a lunar colony is dependent on them anyway) so colonists can come down to Earth again. Living underground on Earth without a biosphere wouldn't be much different from living underground on the Moon, except that the human body is much better adjusted to the gravity. From there on, everything would have to revolve around bringing in more resources, filtering out and scrubbing away radioactive isotopes, and using them to continue human survival in underground shelters, or radiation-proofed suits/vehicles on the surface. Life would go on both on Earth and the Moon, eventually.

I'm not sure if the grainy cameras are silly and outdated, or a testament to an impressive policy of making do with what you've got and not squander money upgrading things that still work perfectly. That footage from the control room looks like it was shot by cameras produced in the seventies, and they may very well roll for several more years because they still do the job they were designed to do.

On a weighted scale, a promise of less than six months is a great improvement, though. As a rule of thumb: Anything announced to happen more than two years into the future is just as likely to never happen at all. Announcements between two years and six months in the future may eventually be realised, but they can be postponed for one year at a time indefinitely. For anything announced to happen in less than six months, add 50 % to the time span between now and the scheduled event (min. value 1 day). For anything announced to happen today, the chance of it being postponed may always be approximated to 50 %. So if they say "it will happen in four months", it may happen in six months, rather than being postponed for longer periods of time again.

They should just pack up and start constructing a launch pad in Mogadishu already. Seriously, while Somalia has a few too many problems and then some today, if/when the dust settles they've got the perfect location for a spaceport. Not much room for launches inclined to the north, but they've got almost the entire south-east quadrant completely free of places that would mind a booster falling down on it. Apama, Brazil, has its north-east quadrant free, so with some cooperation, the two locations could handle all kinds of launches along the equator plane.