Rakaydos

Zero, One, two, tree, four, five, six, seven, eight, niner. I dont know why it's "tree", but "Niner" is there because "nein" is confusing to german-speakers.

A 6 wheel chassis is specialized for "relatively" level ground. After a certian point, enough articulation to get over increasingly rough terrain results in a 6-legged walker with wheels on it;s feet anyway. A Bipedal walker embraces instability, like a bicycle. It requires much more on-site processing as it requires a minimum "reaction speed" to compensate for it;s own instability, but if a bipedal sence of balance becomes a solved computational problem, combining bipedal tool use with quadrapedal vertical mobility ("climbing") results in a flexible exploratin platform.

For specialized tasks, sure, but what about as a general purpose design? Can it do everything "well enough" to accept the compromises?

The one advantage I see is in launch infrastructure. Instead of renting a dedicate launch pad with full time maintinance and not enough use to drive down costs, you rent a mass market 747 hanger ad a commercial runway that shares it;'s upkeep cost across thousands or normal flights a year. It doesnt help get to space, but it does make space cheaper... on the ground side.

But how much of that was the fuel, and how much of it was running the shuttle main engines at 105% of their rated maximum thrust every lanch?

Speaking of grindy, i should get back to assembling my super-rocket something this week. 8 double-stacked BACCs, 4 skippers, and a poodle, stacked almost 30m high with 2.5m tanks.

Having a single factory and test stand instead of Space Centers scattered across the continental US, and sizing their rocket to be able to utilize existing freeway architecture instead of having to charter custom lift vehicals, saves SpaceX incredible amounts.

Except that, for the people paying for SpaceX's services, those arnt failures. The mission each time is an unquaified success. Thats why SpaceX has a launch queue several years long. What spaceX does with their dispsanble boosters IS "just a PR setback"

So it's probably like the US Army and the videogames Call of Duty or Battlefield. It's everything you wanted the job to be and isnt.

Did you just reinvent the blowtorch?

I know that most of my rockets so far have used a few SRB stages to get a vaccum rated engine out of the lower atmo- was able to get a manned orbiter that way, and an unmanned low-mun flyby and cut-off solar orbit science.

Leave the reactor on the mothership, and have the lander utilize a microwave/thermal turbojet engine design. With the mothership directly overhead, beaming power down, a squat, wide lander uses it's best cross section to receve power with, and (assuming an atmospheric body) you use your surroundings as an unlimited supply of reaction mass.

Uprated? What did that change about the merlin 1D?

The book explained it as the return window already closing- every day they waited would make the return cost more DV, and the 30 day mission was planned to leave a reasonable reserve for earth return. But as far as they knew, there was no scientific reason to stick around, the didnt have a MDV or MAV to explore the surface anymore, and the space taxi's meter was running. The bosses at mission control basically said "get back with as much left in the tanks as possible so we dont need to send as many refueling flights."

The big one in The Martian is the first storm- the author acknowledges it as a plot device to set up his man-vs-nature story.

Well, a smaller rocket can be stored in a smaller, easier to guard room.

To be fair, it's not like he's surveyed nasa to find out how many engineers play KSP. His answer is perfectly acceptable as a "I wasnt ready to answer that question, so here's my weighted guess"

It's probably not the entire discount, but... Eliminate launchpad support costs- it's launching form a normal runway who's costs are already figured into normal operations.

The only situation I can think of is if the merlin engines ARE they payload.

Problem is, single stage to orbit is still unrecoverable, for the same reason the New Shepard launch isnt comparable to Falcon 9. IT might be useful for getting an empty tank with a lot of Merlins into orbit, but unless you're doing orbital constructon involving retrofitting merlins to vaccum merlins I dont really see the point.

[quote name='Nibb31']Which is why nobody here should be comparing with SpaceX. Only the ignorant media and the SpaceX fanboys are. BO is competing against Virgin Galactic, not SpaceX. They have beaten SpaceShipTwo to the "Karmann Line and back" competition. It's Branson who should feel the butthurt, not Musk. I don't think the market can support two suborbital joyride providers.[/QUOTE] To be fair, you dont really think the market can support anything, to judge by your other posts...

[quote name='gpisic']I just don't understand the recent hate against Musk here. Jealousy? There's no need to tear apart every of his tweets analyzing it into the smallest details. One would call such a thing stalking and stalking is a typical behavior of fanboys. :-D[/QUOTE] Musk's problem is that the achievements are closer than he's like but the differences arnt one he can easilly copy. Falcon 9 is a bigger, better rocket. But that's because it's a 3 stage rocket, where Blue Origin is only a 2 stage. The Falcon 9 -first stage-, after it's boostback burn, is then on a very similar trajectory as the New Shepard Booster stage after capsule separation. The falcon 9, being a bigger better rocket, doesnt have enough mass left at landing to hover even on minimum engine settings of 1/9 of their engines- it's just too powerful. The New Shepard has a mass fraction poor enough that a single engine capable of lifting fuel+rocket+ payload to the karman line can throttle down low enough to hover on just the rocket dry weight, which makes correcting to a landing far easier, as shown in the Blue Origin video. Elon cant get that hover capability with a falcon 9 booster because of the power the Falcon needs, which means he needs to get a soft landing on a crash burn, unlike New Shepard which can correct onto target and set down smoothly.

[quote name='fredinno']No, they figured out new ways to extract oil that allowed that oils to be extracted ecomomically.[/QUOTE] Globaly it actually was a perfect storm, with all the oil-producing countiries that had diversified economies (like USA and Saudi Arabia) got annoyed (for completely non-oil related reasons) at oil producing countries who relyied on oil exports (like russia), and intentionally tanked the price of oil to hurt their rivals.

[quote name='mikegarrison']It's not so mysterious why the price of oil dropped. They found an ocean of it under North Dakota.[/QUOTE] "Found", yea, I think that was his point.

[quote name='fredinno']Imagine how big that thing would be... :) Kerbals might like it.[/QUOTE] It's 2 KM long... the lag woud kill them. :p