Bill Phil

They're not bad, just a little more costly to get to.

I mean, steel is technically nuclear blast resistant. Depending on distance from the epicenter.

Well, mass drivers could move some big stuff around too, though on a smaller time scale.

Apparently there are 25 cities, towns, boroughs, and other things named Madison in the United States.

Nothing's wrong with Madison. Huntsville surrounds Madison. So it's constricted. Meanwhile Madison is growing pretty fast. And there isn't much room to grow...

Welcome I guess. (UAH?) My problem with Huntsville is that it surrounds Madison... the city, not the county.

Boeing's having a good time. Easy money. And if there sre huge delays? More money. Big contract, decades long. Boeing is really having a good time.

RS-68s have an issue with clustering. Probably solvable, but RS-25s don't have that issue. All the same they're way too complex for an expendable booster like SLS. Probably had more to do with keeping Shuttle jobs than anything else.

My question is why even pick Boeing? The worst part is that NASA probably can't do anything about Boeing's screw ups.

The 1 ton payload is likely a limitation brought on from having to support astronauts for a few weeks. The majority of the actual payload is taken up by the equipment and other stuff for the astronauts. Taking that out and using most of the propellant to land would increase payload markedly. A few vehicles might be needed to land equipment down, and then once they can refuel on the surface you can launch them back into orbit to be reused. 40 tons of propellant? That probably means a 4 ton empty tank. Making some estimates it should be able to carry something on the order of 10 tons throughout the round trip. Most of that is likely equipment for a manned mission. If it has the thrust then it could definitely deliver more payload if it doesn't need to take off again. Taking this and using it to land equipment for a moon base could eventually lead to a decent architecture.

I believe there was one city with a density higher than 1 million people square kilometer...

Still pretty imposing, all the same.

You could say that... I can see an upright Saturn V almost every day now.

If I recall, "for" loops can be used to define variables. "w" is defined in the "for" loop. Either that or it's some predefined thing... Lambda is a function where you can define an input and then what happens to the input. So "x" is just whatever the input number is, and "x+n" is what the function actually does, and then that gets returned as the value for the incrementor.

One idea I like is to be in the future where there's a spacecraft junkyard and there's a bunch of BFRs there. Maybe the protagonist finds one that happens to be functional? Eventually chemical rockets won't really be as effective a method of transport. And there's no reason that other space companies won't do something altogether similar. One thing could be that the BFR, as great as it is, simply can't keep up with demand on its own, and so they end up building a launch loop or something to increase supply (the service being payload launches) and then you can describe the fall of the rocket as the main method of launching payloads or something.

Watch space anime.

When you derive the rocket equation for fun. Which... I've actually done... Many times... Man I'm a nerd. Or maybe using GMAT to model trajectories...

This one's from last year's eclipse. I didn't get totality though... I almost had it but the camera just refused.

There are numerous advantages to liquid methane. Scott Manley explained it well. Lower combustion temperature and yet higher specific impulse. Less soot, and more The only reason it isn't used often is because RP-1 was a lot easier to get back in the 50s since there was already a large industry for complex hydrocarbons. And if it is significantly cheaper than RP-1 that may be a big reason since BO and SpaceX are hoping to reduce launch price significantly. Eventually fuel price will be a significant factor, unlike the status quo, and so a cheaper, cooler burning, and higher performing fuel would be a good option. Run it through the cold side of a Stirling heat pump...

I'd rather we get news when there is news, or at least something that's significant crops up or something.

We already have the technology, though it's probably not at a TRL high enough for large scale use. Cultured meat is an interesting technology...

I'd place the blame on Boeing and Congress. Boeing has pretty much completely screwed every aspect of SLS they could and Congress just doesn't care.

Well, gateway is supposed to have ion engines and significant maneuvering capacity, right? Could probably rendezvous...

Well if we're talking about Lockheed's lander concept, it could be launched into LEO fully loaded with propellant and then could do TLI itself. From what I can find it's a single stage design, so it may just have the delta-v. Of course, you then need to refuel it.

Probably. They do want to make it reusable, if built, so there'll need to be a decently sized depot in orbit.