Rakaydos

Too clean to be reused. SpaceX has demonstrated that they arnt interested in clearing off soot for reused launches.

Like holding the end of a broom in 2 hands. You need to push down on the broomhandle at the end to keep it from falling out of your hands, but can lift closer to the middle to keep it in the air even though it's off balance. You spend more effort than if you were holding it in the middle. in this analogy, the second stage is the broom, and different RCS thrusters are your hands.

I may have mixed up the European Service Module and the Exploration Upper Stage.

That's what Wikipedia says, but it's got to be a typo. Orion is only 5m around, and the EUS is it's service module. None of the renderings I've seen have a massively outsized service module. Edit: Looks like 5.x meters to me.

The rocket equation is a harsh master.

From what brigstene said, FH plus FUS plus EUS and Orion could just barely do a flyby, and FH plus FUS plus ICPS plus EUS and Orion could manage the full mission, if the Orion is lightly loaded. It was rejected for 2020 because of GSE problems, but he's explicitly keeping it on the table for 2024, as a stick to threaten SLS with.

Ads mean you cant actually rickroll anyone anymore.

A Synestia is formed by the energy of a bi-planetary impact vaporizing rock but staying roughly planet-shaped. ("roughly" includes high spin that distends but doesn't disassociate the equator with the main body) An accretion disk is what you get when a field of particles collapses gravitationally and tidal effects induce a spin as they fall in, creating a rotating mass that hasn't solidified yet. If two stars or gas giants tried making a synestia, the result is usually a Nova or a star, depending.

That's called an Accretion disk. It already is the leading theory of stellar formation.

That happened 10-20 years ago.

Not an "Earth sun lagrange" but a mutual harmonic relationship. As a mass began to concentrate i the protoplasmic disk, the lagranges began to form as well. But there's enough mass left in the disk to collapse additional objects, particularly in the relatively stale regions near the lagranges. But if they're too massive compared to the primary, these masses will have their own lagranges, and destabilize the whole system, resulting in planetary collisions and slingshots launching rogue planets into all kinds of crazy orbits.

I wouldn't go that far. the L4 and L5 (greek and Trojan camps) have orbits, just like moons do. They're just very vulnerable to perturbation from Saturn.

Trojans arnt stable, they're captured and released. This still counts as Jupiter gravitationally dominating it's orbit because Jupiter's Trojan is having the capture effect. Same as the Galelean Moons could as under Jupiter's gravitational domain.

We can observe the mud on our wheelwells, the bugs and leaves on our windshield and grill, and our tracks in the road and weather that may have washed out the tracks.

Earth-Sun L3, L4 and L5 makes it likely that the initial torus will form multiple bodies, well separated in orbit. But those bodies are usually unstable relative to each other, and over astronomical time, will eventually "clear their orbit" and collide/combine. I suspect the spin of the rock-plasma disk actually gets tidally transferred to the moon, gradually shifting the moon to a higher orbit.

It fell over in a windstorm a month or two ago. Instead of replacing it they're working on the orbital prototype directly.

Interesting! With how bright the best case is, I wonder if reflection just off the curve of the nose would be visible at night. Also, how much dimmer would a moonlight reflection be?

Coulda shoulda woulda. Point is they didn't.

Sure they can. But they have to do it the same way- get a perfect window where the station is at the right point in the orbit when the launch site passes under that orbit. Fiddling with orbital characteristics doesnt change that.

We KSP players are spoiled by an equatorial launch site, making inclination not an issue. IRL, Inclination is THE issue. because of inclination, we cant pick our launch time to be when the station is in the right place for a fast rendevus. The station's altitude doesnt matter, only where it is in it's orbit when the mission launches.

Because that requires more fuel. The instant window is because they need to match inclination at launch. Enough phasing orbits takes care of the rendevus, but those take time.

A Drake equation "Great Filter" is something that needs a lot of coincidences in a relatively short period to go right to make the next leap. I am of the opinion that humanity is about 2/3 of the way through a Great Filter, and so far so good but we can still fail it. Industrial revolution started the clock on my great filter in a couple different ways. Global Average Warming is the one we havnt beat yet, but the industrial revolution happened as the earth was beginning a slide back into an ice age, giving us a few critical extra degrees to make up before we wipe ourselves out. Here's hoping. But the industrial revolution also brought with it global warfare and atomic weaponry. How lucky are we as a species, that Wold War 1 happened before we had atomic weapons? What would have happened if atomic weapons were developed in peacetime and added to military arsonals to be used the way carpet bombing was, and not thought about until the next major war casually ignites MAD? With the recent global backslide to athoritarian leaders, what would have happened if pedant Germany had developed the atomic bomb? And this problem isnt going away, though we stagnated to a steady state once the USSR collaped. The only way to escape this filter is to become genuinely multiplanetary, self sufficently independant from our home planet, at a minimum safe distance to avoid the latest technological terrors. That's our safe zone. But liquid fuel rocket technoligy was basically ignored until the pedants were V-2 bombarding london, and the space race was built on the backs of America's German Rocket Scientists vs the Soviet's German Rocket Engineers. The Cold war, the Cuban missile crisis, all that was a nessesary backdrop to develop the beginnings of an interplanatry capability. How many civilizations could have survived their own cold war? And that's assuming they got as far as the cold war, and not an oops-we-destroyed-the-planet scenerio as above. We didnt stay at the moon, but we developed the technoligy that is now, maybe, in the next few decades, going to lead to our first major colony on another world. Can you imagine if we didnt have a moon for those first awe inspiring steps? No earthrise photo or apollo 11 or apollo 13 to bring the world together during the height of the cold war, let alone the launch infrastructure for interplanetary rockets? We've gotten miracle after miracle to get as far as we have, but Global Average Warming is the ticking timebomb that would have killed us decades ago if it wasnt for that ice age. Global Average Warming has two major effects- Regional Climate Change, where the enviroment we built our infrastructure to take advantage of changes on us. Good farmland goes dry, or washes into the sea from excessive rain, while permafrost melts and releases centuries of decay products. And Extreme Weather Events, where the higher energy available to weather in general leads to stronger hurricanes, wandering jet streams pulling polar air south (while heating the poles) and record heatwaves.

A gridfin isn't very draggy. For Starship, they WANT draggy airbrakes.

"That is Opportunity's half of the planet. We must never go there."