Kibble

I believe Peadar was being sarcastic to make a point.

Fabulous Blok D! I support scaling it up a little though A video from a camera on Long March 3B launching Chang'e 3. Around 4 minutes you can see a large hypergolic vacuum-optimized YF-20 rocket engine firing in near-vacuum. Smaller hypergolic rocket engines won't produce visible plumes without heavy backlighting.

I agree, OP! I already say "piloted" like Russians do, instead of "manned" - English really should be more gender-neutral, imagine if we had separate pronouns for other characteristics, like a different pronoun for black people. That's clearly racist, and I think the he/she dichotomy is sexist, and inherently excludes all the other genders.

Atlas, V no way! It's my favorite rocket family! I love it can't wait for Centaur and SRMs

Oh, the forbidden question of spaceflight. A question which when can't be answered, because there isn't an answer. We will go into space because we will go into space. Why do we make art, when we could spend that valuable time farming? Why do we spend billions, and expend years of people's professional lives to make the next superhero movie?

Omg please add Tantares<3

Not as expensive as you might think - Proton can soft-land a few metric tonnes on the Moon, about the payload of Progress. Falcon Heavy can probably soft-land a lot more.

He made MPLM for ATV, so you can make PMM and all three Nodes (plus it is shaped a lot like Columbus, even though they aren't based on the same hardware), and the pack is built to make ROS. So all that's missing is US Lab, JEM, and the truss segments. Oh and the PMAs. Beale you should make a PMA part!

Actually an expedition to our Sun-El-Wun sounds like a great idea! You can test against chronic solar radiation, and as an added bonus test all kinds of weak stability trajectories, all within reasonable distance of home. But I thought that was what this thread was about? Actual experience. You can make as many mock-ups and PowerPoints as you like but nothing compares to actually testing hardware in the environments its supposed to work in.

Ha I love it!

Ah Blok D! I'm in love! Just remember to also use actual photographs for reference too, that render looks kinda lame.

I disagree. A Mars flyby is not only a very practical mission which would produce loads of invaluable data about how the habitat and such stands up to solar radiation, and other characteristics of piloted interplanetary spaceflight, but it is also much, much easier than a landing in many ways.

I actually think the warship looks fairly unattractive. I'd take Saturn V over it any day!

I wish there was a more realistic greenhouse (both aesthetically, and operationally)

A piloted Moon laboratory is not a redo of Apollo. It offers much greater possibility for science, including giving us a data point on how the human body responds to environments between zero and one gravities. The Apollo vehicles were meant for short stays, and so only included enough life support to hold them over, and relied on fuel cells and batteries for power. A sophisticated ECLSS cycle like on Space Station is very different. A Moon base would also test the effectiveness of solar panel sun-tracking under gravitational acceleration. The vehicle that delivers the astronauts to the facility might be a "redo of Apollo", in the same way that the Soyuz space vehicle delivering cosmonauts to International Space Station is a "redo of Salyut 1". But that is just one component of the effort, separate from the laboratory itself, from the resupply spacecraft, and from any ISRU experiments.

I think the real fallacy is thinking we have to make a choice at all - the one-legged stool. A proper BLEO infrastructure will have many aspects and probably involve most of the inner Solar System - Venus, Mars, Moon, the Minor Planets, and maybe the Asteroids (generally why they aren't discussed is because they are actually quite far away, and usually inclined relative to the Ecliptic). Here's a link to a blog post by the legendary Hop David about it: http://hopsblog-hop.blogspot.com/2013/09/one-legged-stools.html

In the event of a failure of the habitat, or if an astronaut requires medical attention, you can swiftly and easily abort back to Earth. At Mars if an astronaut requires urgent medical attention they will most likely die, and if the habitat fails when its not a TEI launch window, then they will all die when the resources for the return trip are exhausted. Id est the Moon return vehicle quickly brings the astronauts home, such that life support is only required for a few days, rather than many months. If the lander ascent stage doesn't work. If the ascent stage does work, you can just abort back to the Earth. Earth's atmosphere is not the thing that blocks all that solar radiation, its the magnetic field, which Mars doesn't have. Plus the atmosphere of Mars is less than 1% as dense as ours. Water isn't the only valuable resource out there. Even if excavating water and Moon poles turns out a little too hard for vaguely near-term operations, the dirt on both Mars and Moon is made mostly of aluminium oxide, which can be split for oxygen, and burned with the aluminium as rocket fuel. If you really want volatiles like water, the best place to look is the Minor Planets. We've proven space hardware can survive Lunar nights. It would suck to go all the way to Mars just to find out the gravity isn't enough, and the astronauts return years later with major health problems. OTOH Kirk Sorenson's wonderfully effective, brilliant xGRF concept both makes rotating piloted orbital facilities viable, and makes testing the human body's response at different levels of acceleration easy. If one sixth of a gravity is enough, that would be the best news for human spaceflight since Buzz Aldrin proved manual labour in micro-gee environments is possible.

When you play RO, form IS function! (especially with Tantares)

No 5char

It's possible to ISRU on Space Station or any other orbital spacecraft, with integrated infrastructure importing supplies. Unlike Mars, Minor Planets don't have deep gravity wells, and their entire mass is potentially accessible. Mars doesn't have anything carbonaceous asteroids won't, volatiles like water, ammonia, and carbon dioxide. It also is becoming clear that most asteroids have a layer of regolith, probably made of aluminium oxide, like Moon and Mars. The main benefit the Planets have in general, is the atmosphere, which means all the carbon dioxide you could ever want, and a nice thick aerocapture device. Also Mars has a lot of argon. Not all Earth life. Homo Sapiens though.

It might be possible to shorten the trip time by initially launching on a Solar escape trajectory, and then doing a flyby of Neptune and/or Uranus to slow down to an elliptical transfer orbit (or you could even aerobrake!). Then as you approach Pluto you can use an ion drive to slow onto orbit. Then from there you launch into another solar escape trajectory, that intersects Earth's orbit. It'll be easier at Pluto because of lower escape velocity this far from the Sun, but it'll still require a huge hypergolic rocket stage. Then aerocapture at Earth, and the mission only took maybe 20 or 30 years. It would take a really, really, way-too-big rocket to launch the stack though. Also there are at least a hundred catastrophic failure modes. Also you'd need nuclear power, and a greenhouse, and a bunch of other futuristic junk.

Beautiful! (and wonderfully whimsical) Are you going to make a stock-a-like Centaur stage to go with it?

Hey I never heard of that. Looks pretty, but I can see why it never became operational - its role is already fulfilled by Delta II. His rocket does look pretty similar, except for no RD-180, and same diameter upper stage.

Human nature can be changed, or controlled by society. Thirty thousand years ago we were violent, selfish, and ignorant. Now with civilization we might be the same, but violence is controlled by laws and ignorance is controlled by education. Greed can and will be controlled too - probably by some form of socialism/communism.

Awesome, I love building big piloted orbital facilities and wanted to enter the contest, but I never play without RO!