GregA

Well that is the beautiful part of the SpaceX plan. Anyone who can afford a ticket can go and do whatever they want. The colony will be designed by capitalist forces, not a bunch of bureaucrats deciding that there should be nothing in the way of creature comfort with some crazy political agenda like "in the 22nd century all humans should be vegetarians", or "free college for everyone."

Apparently science has frozen trout for multiple years, thawed, fertilized the eggs and produced viable offspring... That has to be the lowest mass way to get Livestock to Mars initially.

Chickens will just be there. there will be no historical record of when they first arrived. everyone will assume they are native species.

Here is a video of what I think it will probably look like... Except it will be indoors, with high intensity lights... These guys are using Tilipia fish as their protein.

Basic science question for the real life chemists out there... Where did the fixed nitrates on Mars come from? I thought fixed nitrates on Earth came from biological processes? Anyhow, here is a device that makes pure water and enriched brine, and pure water is going to be an issue on Mars with all the salts everywhere.. https://www.google.com/patents/US5458781

Ok I slept on it a little bit. One of the rovers on mars found clay. That means is should be possible to simply build soil up from Hydroton growth media, and fabricate fertilizer from local elemental nutrients, nitrates, phosphates and calcium, while only needing to import a small amount of micro-nutrients from Earth.. Colonists could even spin rockwool from silicates that are freely available everywhere on mars... Hydroton works out great because the clay is fired sealing the growth media into a fired clay ball, rending it inert as a nutrient (or contaminant) source. IMO, it is easier to grow with hydroponics on mars than fabricate earth like topsoil. I just about have poly-carbonates from Mars soil worked out as well. I think we can conclude the first settlers are all going to be chemists...

Is the accelerating expansion really happening, or are those high z galaxies just running into floating point errors at the edge of the simulation?

Mars smells like a swimming pool. Considering all the horrible things an alien planet could smell like, I don't think this is a bad result. On second thought this is a really great result, with all those people living indoors for entire lives, in close quarters, with limited fresh water the disinfecting nature of the Mars environment will probably help quite a bit. Also, Mars appears to be loaded with Calcium Carbonate, which is great because it is the magic bit in CO2 scrubbers for air handling systems. Sodium, Nitrogen and phosphates have been found in abundance on Mars as well. Ok, I only have chemistry 101, and it was many years ago. But heating on mars will be achieved with Acetylene gas, because it will be a byproduct of just about every reaction you do on Mars to make useful stuff out Mars dirt. The reason that Acetylene gas is used is that ethylene is produced during oil refining, and will be unavailable. Methane however will be readily available and there will be large scale production of Methane, and can be readily converted into Acetylene as a precursor chemical. Gregs Mars dirt public domain PVC recipe - Elon, are you reading? I get my name in the credits because of this, right? Electrolysis of perchlorides, recovery of chlorine and Oxygen. React chlorine with hydrogen to get HCL. Synthesize Acetylene gas by getting some methane from the rocket fuel factory, and reacting it in an oxygen constrained environment. Mix Acetylene gas and HCL gas with a mercuric chloride catalyst and get vinyl chloride. Add water to the vinyl chloride and an initiator (all wildly out of my chemistry ability but only a tiny amount is needed as it is a chain reaction) and you get a vat of PVC, which only needs to be dried and sieved before use. This yields a product that is similar in consistency to vinyl siding, not as flexible as PVC pipe for example. It loses strength at 140C, and is very cold resistant. It will however degrade over time if exposed to certain types of bacteria and fungus.

I dunno, we got lots of practical technology from the Large Hadron Collider even though it produced no useful science...

Well you could start with the freely available calcium perchlorate, carbon, and water to make vast quantities of PVC, and make your initial habitats and building materials out of a plastic that is extremely well understood, very strong, and would last a 100 years in the conditions on Mars. I suspect with a little engineering you could make giant extrusions based pressurized green houses. They might not be suitable for human living, but isolated, and you have a perfect environment for farms and live stock. Even then you have a feed stock to make a whole host of products. For example, your chair that easily buckles under the weight of a 150# man on earth is steady and strong on mars...

Well im at 1300 hours, and I got bored exploring planets like a 1000 hours ago. Im looking forward to version 1.8, and stock Matrioshka Brain and Dyson Sphere components.

Alright. I have some time. (no work, no snow) I spent this afternoon working on documenting my mission (im learning how to use vegas video again), give me a couple of hours and I'll show an iteration of my rocket. Right now, I can, launch, get to Jool, visit three moons and come home. With objectives like... get on the leaderboard and make a video with whisky tango foxtrot qualities. (ahh the life of construction worker in deep winter with no snow)

The TR38-D and it weighs 0.8 tons, not 8 tons... And wobble bugs me more than a little bit on a craft with 400+ parts and a launch weight of 2500 tons... Jool 5 mission, with 5 kerbals on each moon. And just to put a point on it, yes, I am hauling the laboratory around with me.

Snark, Having trouble bring up Kerbal to get game name of parts. They are the the 10k liquid fuel tanks feeding 21 nuclear engines. The big separators are 0.8 tons each.

The issue didn't bother me at all... Sort of informational really.... "hey there is heat here" but here is the effect. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3agKu2UQmWk&feature=youtu.be

Ok, so I did it and flew it and picked up like 450 deltaV... So question answered. Yes, loosing 16 tons of tank in the middle of a burn is worth it even though it adds to the launch weight and requires that I burn JOI insertion fuel during launch...

Slashy, I feel you there. Back during my first space station there was a space junk yard in a 20km halo around it. Big cloud of stuff, just floating there. I used to go on missions to scavenge it for extra fuel and thruster juice.

Suicidejunkie, Well thats the thing. That is a joi rocket only. Once I am in Jool, I drop that tank and rocket stack, and the next statge plunges deep into jool (165k/m) depending on where I want to go in Jool system. I am slowing adding bits to the payload section until I get down to just a few deltaV left in the stage. I am just about there for a Jool 5 mission... But I still have to add a Tylo descent stage, so I am getting to the every meter counts. Sometimes science is more art than science. Just blowing up the tanks with c4 wont work because it happens in the middle of the burn.

https://scontent-yyz1-1.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-xap1/v/t1.0-9/12400711_1539572699688534_1414992046260350469_n.jpg?oh=0a3b6d5f0df1508579eab5cae97d2732&oe=5702FAC6

I am building a rocket that is fairly large and complex to do a noteworthy Jool mission. At one point in the mission I have two largish tanks that I wish to dispose of, but I am having trouble deciding if it is worth it, because of the length and complexity of the mission. On one hand I have these two 16 ton empty tanks that are only going to be kept for the remainder of the JOI burn. On the other hand I can dispose of them by adding 1.6 tons of equipment to my rocket, but now Ive carried those two parts all the way into orbit, and for the first third of my JOI burn. This might be an oddly specific question, but it basically takes a day to test out either possibility, and Im wondering if there is some easier way to calculate this or some experience that someone can relate...

I learned docking and rendezvous by watching Mechjeb do it about 100 times, then I started to notice the potentially inefficient things that mechjeb does, so I started to take over here an there. Now I just do the whole thing because it is just faster and easier if I do it. It is tough to tell from your description of problem, but it sounds like you were intercepting your target, then didn't burn off your relative velocity in time. The final intercept requires a burn that can potentially deorbit if the maneuver is not completed in time.

It is possible to be critical of Big Bang cosmology without invoking creationism. For example, many scientists are now openly talking about eternal inflation without fear of it destroying their career. Mainly because of Dark Energy observations, and the complete failure of Big Bang cosmology to predict it.

Im just saying... I love this machine. However, concepts like Fermi Paradox, and the Great Filter come to mind when you starting talking about making nuclear bomb machine guns. (wild speculation with a few facts thrown in) The legend is, Kennedy went to a presentation by the Pentagon for the Orion Program. Just a few days later he canceled the Orion Program, and funded Apollo. This is the specific device he was afraid that an arms race with the Russians would present as an existential threat. Nasa to this day has a working group that does nothing but design state of the art Orion ships (they admitted this recently), in the event that one is needed. The Character "Harry" in the book Footfall is how I have modeled my life, as the type of man I decided I wanted to be when I was a child. It is an extreme ship, to be utilized in extreme circumstances. - - - Updated - - - Carl Sagan wrote a fiction piece about this. I wish I could remember the title.

It is the time of the cold war in the old soviet union. Ivana and Rudolf are sitting sitting in their house, both members of the Communist party, doing communist things. It begins to snow. Ivana says: It is snowing outside! Rudolf says: Ridiculous, that is rain! Ivand say: No it it is snow! Rudolf stands up angrily and shouts "Ruldolf the Red knows rain dear!"

As a direct beneficiary of Jupiter clearing the inner solar system of asteroids, I say Ceres had it coming.