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MinimumSky5

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Everything posted by MinimumSky5

  1. MinimumSky5
    I don't know exactly who, but they've been training 2 NASA astronauts for Demo - 2, so they do have quite a bit of experience in that department.
  2. MinimumSky5
    I still think that the most impressive part of this is the interior of Dragon 2. It doesn't look like a spacecraft, it looks like an airliner.
  3. MinimumSky5
    The Saturn 5 was oversized and expensive for post Apollo uses (as was planned at the time), so they stopped building them. As the engineers and designers that worked on it retired, the knowledge of how to build them was lost to NASA and its contractors, and so, we can't build them now. You need a heck of a lot more than blueprints to build any complex machine, and there is a good reason that S-5 is regarded as the most complex machine we've ever built.
  4. MinimumSky5
    Please tell me that that song will play out when Dragon 2's hatches are opened!
  5. MinimumSky5
    I seriously, sincerely think that we are alone in our supercluster, let alone galaxy. It makes no evolutionary sense for a species to just stop expanding its numbers, as nature is simply not kind to those who stop trying to (yes, that is fairly irrelevant to an advanced civilisation, but by the time they are spacefaring, they'd have spent billions of years having this baked into their instincts and psyche.) Even if they do stop, would all civilisations stop, enerringly, every time? Would everyone in that civilisation stop having more children than nessasary to maintain themselves? With no exceptions? IMHO, Rare Intelligence means that there likely is no extraterrestrial civilisation for us to reasonable meet.
  6. MinimumSky5
    Has something happened to the Atlas performance graphs on the Github wiki? The Imgur links aren't worked, and I for one was finding those things very useful!
  7. MinimumSky5
    That's why I'm thinking this is the solution. Hit a puddle of kerosene with a blowtorch, and it'll happily sit there, heating up and silently mocking you.
  8. MinimumSky5
    Idle speculation on a series of events... 1. "Engineers" connect LOX and kerosene pipes back to front. 2. After a few liters of propellant is loaded, problems are noted. 3.Rather than delay launch, they simply reconnect the pipes in the correct orientation, and carry on regardless 4. LOX in the kerosene tank simply vents relatively harmlessly, but kerosene in the LOX tanks becomes a viscous gel in the LOX, which would likely float as LOX is quite dense. 5. In the latter stages of engine burn, a semi solid lump of kerosene enters the feed line. Some form of sensor detects the lump, and shuts the engine down. OR Lump of kerosene enters the LOX turbopump or preburner, and causes a RUD of at least that part of the engine. 6. Fregat saves the day! Egypt starts spying on us. I know that LOX will ignite with most things given half a chance, but LOX + kerosene is not hypergolic, so could this situation last long enough for kerosene ingestion into the oxygen side of the engine?
  9. MinimumSky5
    ULA misunderstanding SpaceX's goals of "airliner levels of safety"?
  10. MinimumSky5
    Bear in mind that liquid oxygen at its boiling point has a density of 1.141 g/cm3, with kerosene having a density of about 0.8 g/cm3. That gives us 13.76 m3 of LOX, and 9m3 of kerosene, which still doesn't quite add up, unless the Soyuz is using deep cryogenic LOX.
  11. MinimumSky5
    Very likely. Scott Manley has said that they intend to detonate the entire rocket, to see if the capsule can protect the astronauts from the worst possible situation it is designed to survive.
  12. MinimumSky5
    I'm going to shed tears over an overacheiving camera on wheels tonight, and I will not apologise for that. This rover has been around for two thirds of my life, and with the demise of Opportunity, all of the probes that inspired my love of astronomy (MER, Cassini, Kepler, and Dawn) are now dead. We will continue to explore space, and I will get to see Opportunity displayed in a museum on Mars, even if I don't get to return.
  13. MinimumSky5
    Definatly, I've flown on that route before. The question is, do you value money or irreplaceable memories more?
  14. MinimumSky5
    It looks like it might be. Falcon 9 had its launch price reduced to 50 million recently, for 13 tons to LEO (for droneship recovery). Ariane 6 goes for 90 million, for 21 tons.
  15. MinimumSky5
    Just to point something out here. Musk has repeatedly said that he's aiming for airliner levels of safety with BFR. Now, this is a hard thing to do, but if he can demonstrate that he has such a reliable vehicle, do we really need an escape system? If it does, then go to Boeing and Airbus and start pestering them for escape pods on all commercial airliners, because you obviously think that the risks are too high in todays aircraft. And no, we don't need to wait for several crashes of the BFR system to confirm that safety level. Planes have individual parts fail fairly commonly (given how many currently fly) and we can calculate from that how often a certain failure cascade will occur that results a loss-of-hull accident. The same logic can be applied to BFR when it starts flying. Starting unmanned is entirely fair and I completely agree, but I don't think that we should wait very long before we start manned flights.
  16. MinimumSky5
    I'm fairly certain that it's an LED array, partly because I vaguely recall hearing about that, but mostly because if it isn't, then thus experiment wouldn't likely last a lunar night. 2 weeks without light is very tough on any plant.
  17. MinimumSky5
    But why would they do that? Stainless is more than capable of containing LOX and LPG, why add mass to the rocket with seperate fuel tanks?
  18. MinimumSky5
    I suppose that the main reason I'm wanting a fourth catagory for rocks is that the very first thing I've been told to do with a rock, throughout college and university, is to determine if a rock is sedimentary, metamorphic, or igneous, saying none of the above was never an option. Actually thinking about it, though, there is no reason that that is not a valid answer!
  19. MinimumSky5
    I've heard of 'leaky gut syndrome' before, but it was pure quackery. The person was trying to claim that gluten can cause autism (amongst other things) by opening pores in the gut lining, allowing undigested food into the bloodstream... Yeah, it's probably BS. Just to be clear, that is sort of, but not really, what gluten does, but there is no evidence that it actually affects gluten tolerant humans (surprisingly, most of us have evolved to eat our staple food). But on a more serious note, as someone who is on the autism spectrum, I've had mild gut issues for a long time, and as far as I can tell, altering my diet was about as effective as consulting my horoscope. Reducing stress did help, but diets didn't.
  20. MinimumSky5
    True, but the question @kerbiloidraised is still a very valid one. At what size do we start using the sed/ig/meta system, rather than spectra? Spectra also aren't massively useful for hand samples.
  21. MinimumSky5
    AFAIK, there is no term for the material on asteroids like Ryugu, which is a significant oversight, IMHO. I'd introduce a new term, something like "Primordial", to demonstrate that the material has not been altered by geological processes in any way.
  22. MinimumSky5
    And at least this isn't Elon time, it's *gets into a needless political rant*. But seriously, it makes me sad thinking of all the media outlets screaming that SpaceX has delayed again, when it has absolutely nothing to do with them.
  23. MinimumSky5
    At midday on the Moon, temperatures can easily top 140C, and it lasts something like 60 hours. There's no atmosphere there, so rejecting heat is a serious issue.
  24. MinimumSky5
    IIRC, Es'hail 2 was the payload for B1050, the Falcon 9 that underwent aquabraking at Kennedy.
  25. MinimumSky5
    Falcon Heavy/Elons ego Tesla Delta 2/Icesat 2 Falcon 9/CRS-16 And while its not a "favourite" launch, honourable mention goes to: Soyuz FG/Soyuz MS10 One made my jump for joy, one made me shed bittersweet tears (I've always loved the Delta 2 for its history and versatility), one made me laugh at an incredibly Kerbal launch in all respects, and one had me at the edge of my chair, hoping that we hadn't just witnessed the end of two heros. So, 2019, what have you got in store for us?
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