Ten Key

Just a slight correction here-- Pioneer 4 was never meant to be an impactor. But it didn't come as close to the Moon as it was supposed to and one of the experiments failed as a result.

Yes to the first question, and "kind of" to the second. I've never actually tried this myself, but I did a little bit of reading and it looks like you can create a thermal shadow with a heat shield in KSP. The problem is that the heat shields are ablative and will eventually start to cook off as they heat up, just like they do on reentry. It looks like people have managed it, but it takes a bit of fiddling. This thread is a year and a half old, but AFAIK the heat management system in stock KSP should be similar to the current version of the game. Some of the screenshots show the radiation flux on the shield parts, and at least one person managed to protect a probe with a depleted heat shield.

The X-15 used alcohol and LOX for early testing, and then switched to ammonia and LOX later on. It never ran on hydrogen.

Solar panels. Agreed. I dumped reaction wheels a while ago and have never looked back.

I felt like I "got it" when I finally grasped the navball and everything it was trying to tell me.

Seconding this. Also. . . Roving Mars: Spirit, Opportunity, and the Exploration of the Red Planet -- Written by the principal investigator of the MER mission, Roving Mars follows the project from it's origins in an impromptu side meeting during an AGU conference, through design and budgetary obstacles and then finally onto the rigors of operating a pair of robots on the surface of a hostile planet. Dr. Squyres is an engaging writer, and I found the book to be a genuine page turner. Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut's Journeys by Michael Collins -- Mike Collins is a good writer, and a good storyteller. Carrying the Fire is detailed, well paced and funny. While Apollo 11 is certainly covered, there's also quite a bit about the Gemini X mission. If I had to pick one book out of this list of four to hold up above the others, this would be it. The Last Man on the Moon -- Eugene Cernan is not the writer that Michael Collins is, but he makes up for it by being quite a character. He is occasionally prone to embellishment, but the book will definitely give you a good sense of what space flight feels like, even if it's not always 100% accurate. Here we are treated to details of three missions-- Gemini IX, Apollo 10 and Apollo 17. Eugene's enthusiasm is contagious, and he's not at all afraid to tell you about the various blunders he made on the way to the Moon. Sometimes you'll find yourself cheering him on, and sometimes you'll find yourself shaking your head. But you will never be bored. Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe -- A memoir for the shuttle era, Mike Massimino flew EVA on STS-109 and STS-125, both of which were servicing missions for the Hubble Space Telescope. Like Mike Collins, Massimino is the rare astronaut who also knows how to write well, and his descriptions of spacewalking are among the best I've seen. The author does not pass judgement on the shuttle one way or the other, but he does make the point that the shuttle, if nothing else, allowed a relatively large number of people to fly in space. We lament the passing of each moonwalker, but it's not going to be too much longer before the number of living people who've seen the Earth from orbit starts to drop.

http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bill-paxton-storm-chasers-find-unique-way-to-honor-twister-star/

You can draw the attention of a moderator by clicking the "report post" link next to the time stamp in the upper left corner of your post. Do this for your original post, add a message asking to have your thread moved to the Mission Reports subforum, and click submit. It will go into the moderator queue and they'll see your request before too long. Alternatively, you could post your request in this thread. Love the screenshots. Those are some very serious mountains west of the space center.

TL;DR = Too Long, Did Not Read

Voted.

Interesting. One of our state senators was in the local news yesterday, with a story about adding a pair of provisions to the NASA Transition Authorization Act of 2016, which was recently passed by the US Senate. One of those provisions was the usual "develop a plan to reach Mars" stuff. (Don't they already have a few of those lying around?) But the other. . . (Sec. 825) NASA shall identify orbital assets in specified mission directorates that could benefit from satellite servicing-related technologies and shall work across all NASA mission directorates to evaluate opportunities for the private sector to perform these services or advance technical capabilities by leveraging the technologies and techniques developed by NASA programs and other industry programs. Full text of bill The provision doesn't mention Hubble specifically, and it looks like it's being interpreted as meaning "designing future missions so that they may be serviced on orbit", but I think its vague enough to serve as a mandate for NASA to start looking at another Hubble servicing mission. It's worth noting that Ball Aerospace, one of the larger aerospace contractors out here, was a major player on Hubble and would stand to benefit from a plan to upgrade the telescope.

More than half of that tube is the solid rocket that made up the final stage of the launch system.

Born and raised. And it sounds to me like ya'll are fixen to blow your noggins off. I think a little perspective is in order. I did a bit of poking around on the internet and found this. . . For comparison, the required velocity for low earth orbit is around 25,600 feet per second. It takes an awful lot of energy to get up to those speeds. And the need to pack that energy into as small and as light of a package as possible means even the most well designed rocket is basically a fireball looking for an excuse. You are correct when you say don't need a college degree to build amateur rockets. But you do need to be respectful of them, because they can and will kill you given half a chance to do so. I would recommend finding a copy of Rocket Boys. It will give you a better idea of what you're in for and what your expectations should be. And just a heads up. . . See that rocket sitting on the table next to them? It's a scale model of the Jupiter-C that put Explorer 1 into orbit. That little tiny rod at the top of the model is the satellite those guys are holding up.

This was a good read. . . Spaceman: An Astronaut's Unlikely Journey to Unlock the Secrets of the Universe Mike Massimino did EVA work on the last two Hubble servicing missions, and the book does a good job of giving the details without being too dry or technical. It mentions the docking adapter (intended to allow an unmanned probe to dock with and then deorbit the telescope) as well as the considerable political maneuvering involved in getting that final servicing mission approved. I want to dismiss this out of hand, but NASA has a lot of pride invested in that telescope and it would not surprise me at all if they found a way to push this back on to the agenda.

Here, this should be the right size and file format. Right click on the above image, select "save as", make sure it saves as a .png file, and put it in the directory IncongruousGoat mentioned above. It should then appear on your flags list in game, and you should be all set.

The first thing I did when trying to place population centers was to look at the coastlines and try to find the good harbors. That would be where I would start.

Have you thought about maybe collating these into a single thread? When I click on the link in your signature, it takes me to a search page that lists chapters 1, 12, 15, 6, 7, 8, 4, 3, 10, 20 and 18. In that order.

Michoud Assembly Facility suffers damage from EF-3 tornado. http://www.space.com/35619-nasa-tornado-recovery-new-orleans-facility.html

Oh good, it wasn't just me.

Peggy Whitson is actually up on the ISS right now. Assuming the mission runs according to schedule, she will hold the record for the most days in space, irrespective of gender.

No worries. We'll still be here when you have the time again.

That half remembered scene is what spurred my original train of thought. Thank you for finding that again. I remember Stephen King writing that story is not something you make, it's something you find along the way. And I think the above is a big part of that. If you put in the work, if you take the time to understand your characters and your world, things will start to click together of their own accord. It doesn't matter if it's a fortunate turn of the language, an abandoned watch tower or even a flying piano. Be true to your story, and it will find you. The truth points to itself. And on that note. . . Whether you're a reader or a writer, you have to be willing to do the work. Start at the beginning Darkowl. . .you'll be doing yourself a massive disservice if you don't. I wish I had half of the drive and self discipline you and KSK have shown over the last year. "I'll do it tomorrow" is not a statement-- it is an epitaph. First Flight had me a little confused when I first started reading it. My general feeling is that the best stories are character driven, and while the characterizations in First Flight are good none of them really pop out at me. . .they serve to drive the story forward, but do not always stand up well on their own. That would make First Flight a plot driven story, but it really didn't feel like it. It is engaging in a way that plot driven stories rarely are, even though there really didn't seem to be any main characters. And then it hit me. First Flight is a character driven story where the world itself is the protagonist. That is an incredible feat of story telling, and one I don't think I've ever seen done before. This story is something special KSK. Thank you for taking the time to share it with us.

And this is the part where I embarrass myself. It is entirely possible that I'm way off in the weeds here. It is also possible that this is something KSK has already spelled out directly somewhere previously, but. . . I will be the first to admit that the structure of language is not my strong suit, and I much prefer to "play by ear" than read through sheet music, but. . .dumping all of that into my brain and spinning it around a bit. . . What do you suppose the etymology of ker-bal is?

Oh wow. I see what you did there.

My own worldbuilding notes might as well be written in crayon.