Bill Phil

"NASA" could literally mean a dude in a T-shirt or polo who's handing out bags full of stuff. I hope not though.

You're gonna have to play with the cards your dealt, I'm afraid. Or cheat. Whichever one's up your alley.

Apollo 13 is a real event. The Martian is fictional. I think that's enough of a distinction.

Conglaturations. (no that isn't misspelled) I'm reminded of Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger for some reason.

Maybe an Atlas style stage and a half using F-1b engines? I recall a proposal to do the same to the S-IC. Jettisoning the engines once they're no longer needed.

"He" works if you don't know the gender.

Let there be light...

Well... SpaceX's engine department may not deserve that much credit. Merlin is based on Fastrac, with help from NASA. They've done good work, but some of my conversations with NASA employees at Marshall have turned towards SpaceX's engine development, and they're pushing their designs too far. Problems crop up, and the solutions to them cause more problems. This cycle is pretty vicious. Still, I wish them the best. I wonder how NG's engine dev is going.

Same problem here. Suprising. Well, maybe not... Rush is pretty awesome though.

The intent was to start with SRBs and then use LRBs for later generations. It was supposed to help keep jobs and prolong/replace existing contracts, and also be relatively quick. What they didn't expect was that the SRBs had to be heavily redesigned.

Styx, another moon, is also a band name. Though that's probaby a coincidence.

I'll take that bet. 500 funds. I say it closes in less than a day.

Us not seeing evidence may be a result of the aliens and their works being indistinguishable from nature.

Some argue we are already in a post scarcity society. Some people may not want us to be post scarcity.

Exactly. War can be quite lucrative. No war, less money to be made... sadly there's a lot of money to be made in war. Anyone know about Solar Warden? It's a conspiracy theory about a secret space fleet to protect Earth or something. Good sci-fi (Stargate actually is one example, if only later in the series), but probably not the case. The Space Force will probably just be a consolidation of the military's space endeavors.

We haven't even built a gas core reactor on the ground. Flight articles are basically out of the picture for the foreseeable future. I also don't think much research is being dedicated to it, and even though fusion isn't being researched as much as it should be it's still likely getting more resources. Gas core seems like something that won't happen.

Gas core has a host of problems, and at this point is probably further away than fusion.

BFS is already an SSTO, the question is how much payload. Probably around as much to LEO as F9...

Well, a good chunk of the space program is in the South... We should get one here in Huntsville... Instead we have a mockup.

Yeah. NASM is pretty sweet. I used to visit the Naval Aviation Museum in Pensacola when I was in the area visiting family. It's got a plane hangar stylized as a carrier deck, which is pretty cool. Not many spacecraft, though.

How much experience are they asking for? And what kind?

Ever read Stranger in a Strange Land? The Martian language allows people who understand it to do some cool stuff.

The Shuttle only made sense economically if they flew it at almost impossible rates. I say almost because it could've flown at those rates, but the necessary infrastructure and other investments were not made available, and the program was limited by that. The Shuttle cost a large amount to refurbish, yes. But this cost was still less than the over 1 billion dollar launch cost, by a large margin. The program itself was a multi billion dollar per year project, whether or not a single launch even happened in that year. The majority of the Shuttle program's cost wasn't refurbishing the orbiters and building a new ET, but just having tens of thousands of people employed. They launched 135 times, over 30 years. The original design goal was 100 launches per orbiter. They didn't even break 40. Could they have gotten 100 launches per orbiter? Not with that design, but the real issue with the Shuttle was lack of continued development. The Space shuttle was effectively a series of prototypes for reusable vehicles. Reusability only makes sense when there's enough demand for launch services.

The delicate sound of thunder can be pleasing indeed. Although it used to scare my dog.

7.5 million km is well outside Mars's sphere of influence...