Bill Phil

Yeah. But Apollo also wasn't intended to be sustainable. It was intended to put men on the Moon before the 1960s were over, to show the world who was top dog. Apollo got us to the Moon, but didn't keep us there.

Yes. Let's rush to accomplish something great and then never do it again. The space race did more harm than good, arguably. Sure, it was great to land on the Moon, but as soon as they did so, Apollo was basically under attack.

The definition of the Schwarzschild radius is not Newtonian. It is also not necessarily the event horizon. Other factors may come into play, while finding the Schwarzschild radius is only based on mass and the speed of light. It's an upper bound for the event horizon, if I understand it correctly. The horizon itself could be smaller.

Would we, though? The USSR didn't announce an intention to land men on the Moon first. The US decided that landing men on the Moon was the finish line, not anybody else. If anything, a new space race would be a bad thing. It causes people to think that there's a finish line, that there's a goal, that after that line is crossed then we're done, finished. Arguably, the space race of old was exactly this. Once it was certain that NASA would put men on the Moon, funding was cut, tremendously. That was the finish line. Heck, they started cancelling the last Apollo missions in what amounts to the blink of an eye. NASA had to fight pretty hard to get what landing missions they did. A space race justifies killing the program as soon as you cross the finish line. Even earlier, really, once it's certain that you will cross the finish line at some point before you actually cross it.

I haven't done that much with mods because I wouldn't play the game much anyways. I barely play anymore, and I know that the mods I'm interested would make me lose interest real quick.

Well, assuming god-tech, stars are good sources of matter and energy. But starlifting would probably be something so far in the future, if it ever happens, that it may not be needed due to some other god tech. And of course, there are plenty of stars that are elsewhere.

Maybe the edges of a globular cluster, but even that's a stretch. Maybe multiple star systems would be the real power houses. Something like Castor... six stars in one system. Basically Firefly's solar system, but probably not in the 2500s.

Kind of. The only real Shuttle hardware on SLS is the SSME. The SRBs had to be redesigned, the ET had to be completely redesigned to handle an upper stage above it and engines below it. It's barely Shuttle derived, which is probably why it's taking so long... maybe they should've just dropped the Shuttle hardware...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angular_momentum#Vector_.E2.80.94_angular_momentum_in_three_dimensions The goal is to have two vectors which then add up to zero.

It's nothing like Saturn, though... Saturn was after Jupiter, it used similar hardware, at least in the Saturn 1 designs, and so that kind of made sense. SLS, on the other hand, is nothing like Saturn. Maybe you could use the RL-10s on EUS as a connection to the S-IV, but that's pushing it. It doesn't even really work in the context of super heavy launch vehicles, since the Space Shuttle was a super heavy launch vehicle (the Orbiter was pretty massive). And then there's the joke of the situation...

From a commercial sense, it didn't make sense to develop the Saturn V, either. It took over half the Apollo Program's budget to develop. In all honesty, this may be the cheapest super heavy lifter NASA will ever develop, in terms of development costs. And I'd say it's better to have a super heavy in operation for an extended period of time as opposed to just a few years. It's even better that there'll be more than one super heavy in operation relatively soon (next few decades).

Yes. After 10 years of development. (More?)

Rama may be, but Island 3 is explicitly designed with 1970s materials. I use "designed" lightly, however. The shielding is already massive, representing 95%, or more, of the total mass (which is about 10 billion tonnes or so, for an Island 3 cylinder pair). Rama is a bad example of an actual colony design. It's an ark-ship, essentially, but an actual colony would be different. The Island 3 design from O'Neill includes reflectors, as well as structural support through the windows (the beams would be just small enough that the average person couldn't see them). The mass of an Island 3 type colony would be around 10 billion tonnes. Most of which is shielding, IE: whatever you want it to be. It would likely take a decade, at least, to construct, and that's with a century or so of building the infrastructure to build colonies. Even now we produce billions of tonnes of steel and other materials per year. Give it a century or so, and there's plenty of reason to expect much higher output (we produced half as much steel in the 1970s). The Moon. Asteroids. The Moon has iron, silicon, aluminum, oxygen... Smelt the oxides, extract the oxygen, use it for whatever you want. I don't really understand this. To create an Earth-like environment you need a few specific things: Some kind of gravity Radiation shielding Breathing gas Water Soil And energy As well as a number of smaller things for the particular environment being simulated. Are you referring to tides? Yes, tidal forces over a large colony structure would be a major consideration. I'd much rather use the linear formulas, but I guess that's just my preference. If you were inside the structure you might not feel or hear anything, depending on its design. There are innumerable challenges to building a space colony in orbit, yes. However, that is a matter of engineering. The truly difficult aspect would be developing the infrastructure to build the colonies. That would be a herculean task. Building the colony itself? Maybe not so much. The vast majority of the mass is shielding, so only a small percentage needs to be heavily processed. Given the fact that, if this ever occurs, it will be in the future, there will likely be a high degree of automation in the construction of such a colony as well. A colony could be built with no human intervention whatsoever. I suggest giving this paper a read: http://www.nss.org/settlement/physicstoday.htm Also, I suggest perusing Al Globus's site regarding the matter: http://space.alglobus.net/ It's certainly not perfect, but some good reads can be found in there.

Getting delayed happens all the time. Apollo was delayed two years or so, they originally planned for a landing in 67 or thereabouts. Sure, it's not a perfect rocket, but its purpose is to spend money, not be an amazing rocket.

There's always Red Faction.

Constellation was riddled with flaws, more so than SLS.

The mass ratio of the S-IC, the first stage of the Saturn V, without the other stages, adapters, payloads, etc. is about 17. It also had a wet mass of approximately 2286 tonnes, representing a vast majority of the Saturn V's launch mass.

I once sent a poor guy to Laythe, and never had a plan to rescue him... That was way back in the 0.2x versions, though.

Yeah. This solar system is nice. Eight major planets, two large moons bigger than the smallest planet, one of those moons having a thick atmosphere, and its parent has beautiful rings. But wait! There's more!

It doesn't have to be optimal, so long as it can do it with a high degree of confidence and doesn't constitute a major risk. SLS having just four engines on the core isn't optimal, either, but they're doing it.

I wouldn't call a 40 year long program (started in the early 70s, actually earlier...) that did quite a bit of science, repaired Hubble, launched Galileo, built a space station, serviced two, and had a failure rate of 2 in 135, a failure. It didn't succeed in lowering costs, and it didn't get to do its job until the mid 90s (servicing space stations was its job), but it did some great stuff nonetheless. They managed to get a turnaround time just short of two months for Atlantis. Had they built a larger fleet, and had a larger infrastructure to support high flight rates, we may have seen a very different space shuttle program.

Which version? A 552 has a centaur with two engines. Of course, they wouldn't launch it if it constitutes a major risk.

Potentially. Although much of the literature regarding how disorienting high RPMs are is not complete. In the book the centrifuge only generates 1 lunar gravity. It may not be nearly as nauseating if that were to be the case.

Fuzzy dice.

But aren't the largest states built horizontally? I know the S-IC was... but then again, it probably didn't have to deal with almost 2 thousand tonnes of propellant while on its side.