Bill Phil

This song, man. This song. Is stuck in my head.

My submission: Word count should be 399.

9 pm and no one is out...

Planet circling. It does require less structural strength, but it is an active structure, in that it has moving parts. Most importantly a matter stream travelling at faster than orbital speed that is magnetically deflected so that it stays in place, thus providing "lift" of a sorts. Tether this to ground stations (or use space fountains I guess) and mount accelerators on the ring. It might be easier to build with a space elevator, but I would argue the orbital ring has at least one advantage. A shorter distance, thus shorter amount of time. The space elevator goes straight through the Van Allen belts, and with a slow elevator passengers could be in the Van Allen belt for weeks. A ring would not. Though this may be a non-issue, depending on a few things. Regardless, the necessary structural strength exists for a ring, but not for a space elevator.

It may actually work out pretty well for providing contracts that develop greater commercial capability, like the ISS has done and is continuing to do. Like Commercial Resupply and Commercial Crew but for LOP-G. While I'd much rather they have loftier goals, they have to start somewhere to get Congress to even think about it. I wouldn't be suprised if this leads to lander contracts and station expansion contracts. So it may work out. Then again, it may not. This station concept has been around for a good while.

Well the steel proper would probably survive but the actual structure is a different story. Of course steel is highly variable and no alloy is identical.

Yes, but steel can be inside the fireball and survive. Humans obviously cannot.

Come on Thunderchild

EML-5. So much for L-5 by 95...

If KSP is migrating to 64 bit only (which is weird to me since I remember when that was way too unstable to be useful) then I don't think the limit will be hit even at timewarp, not before the user dies, I would wager.

I think it's overall a good thing. Projects are a lot easier to start thanks to game engines. And if the game being developed needs some unavailable feature, or you want more control over development, you can develop everything yourself. But if you can get away with it or just don't want the extra control, already existing engines are useful.

That makes no sense though. For one thing, Helium-3 isn't necessary at all. D-T fusion is much easier to get going and tritium can be bred with the neutrons from the reaction. And since fusion is likely to be more of an electricity production technology than anything else, heavy shielding isn't a showstopper. And even He-3 fusion can still give off radiation. For another, He-3 is in the parts per billion on the Lunar surface. So to get 1 kg of it, you need to process hundreds of millions (if nt billions) of kilograms of regolith. Deuterium is available on Earth in significant quantities, and again Tritium can be bred. And the advantages of He-3 aren't really worth it. Any giant planet would be problematic to say the least for getting any He-3.

Longer than that. Development work started in 1969, and began to ramp up in the early 70s.

You're not making the right comparisons. Assumining Wikipedia's numbers are correct, then the 42 billion (2018 value) spent developing the Saturn V makes each of the 13 launches cost 3.2 billion. And that's not including the added costs of payload hardware, or installation operation, or mission support, or anything else. Meanwhile, the 1.5 billion for the Shuttle does take that into account, since we're dividing total program cost by the number of missions. And the main driver for cost is having 20 thousand people working on it. That's billions of dollars per year, even when there were no launches.

Fall Break I assume. Or maybe Spring, if it's the Southern Hemisphere...

Only if someone pays for it. No bucks no buck rogers.

Which article?

(Bolded part mine) ISS: 400+ tonnes Tiangong 1 and 2: 8.6 tonnes each, and each one has only had 20 to 30 days of crew occupation. Skylab did better than that, though I'm sure there are plans to create better stations down the line. It should be common knowledge that the Merlin is based on NASA's Fastrac engine concept. Not only that but SpaceX has considerable support from NASA. They've accomplished a lot, but they weren't alone.

Check for aliens...

Actual visivle light photos would just show a yellow circle. Maybe some pictures from Huygens when it landed?

You see, a smaller booster means we can put moar of them on the rocket.

The Hambach pit's continued existence and expansion plans kind of show that, yeah, the forests aren't saved. There's also Garzweiler, though I don't know how much forest was there before the mine started. Then again, those excavators are some pretty amazing machines.

SRBs/SRMs need an overhaul. Upper stage SRMs are not even present, there aren't any 0.625 meter SRBs, none have thrust vector control, and a 1.875 meter SRB would definitely be great to have.

Try FASA. In 1984.

Geosynchronous is, I believe, any orbit with a period that is equal to Earth's sidereal day.