Kibble

The piloted Venus flyby was planned before we had discovered solar flares and the extent of the danger of chronic solar radiation. In fact had the mission been flown as scheduled in 1973, the intense solar activity probably would of killed the astronauts. D: A capable interplanetary habitat might end up being too massive to be part of a single-launch mission architecture.

Its probably going to be hard to build anything other than an N1 with N1 parts. Thats partially a problem with its tapered shape (all of those stages would hate stacking, or attaching boosters) and partially because of the whole engine cluster thing KSP is missing. If you just make NK-33, its a hassle to attach all the engines you want, but if they come as a cluster, then the parts pretty much can only be built for one purpose. Oh and those parts look amazing your an artist

Kryten how do you know so much stuff about stuff?

There are almost no disadvantages that I know of, except if the Orbital Module fails to separate before reentry, it'll be aerodynamically unstable, and will almost certainly be...catastrophic</3 Thats why for the first several Soyuz flights they jettisoned the OM before deorbiting, until it was judged to be more unsafe to not have docking capability, in case the rocket engine fails to ignite. Its just as unlikely as any other mission-ending failure though. Don't worry, PPTS is almost certainly going the way of Buran, Kliper, CSTS, and all the other proposed Soyuz replacements.

̹i̹f iɯ̹ kip θ̬ə ɛlfəp̬ɛt stɛti̹k p̬ət θ̬ə spɛliŋ̬ flɯ̬i̹t̬ hɑɯ ɯɛ̹t̬s̬ ɑɛ̬ spɛlt̬ ɯəɯn̬t p̬ikəm̬ ɑɛ̹p̬i̹tɛ̹ɛɛ̹i ɯɛn̬ spəɯkn̬ ɯi̹θ ɛn̬ ɛksɛn̬t ɤ̹ɛ̹ p̬ɑi θ̬əɯs̬ ɯi̹θ spitʃ t̬i̹səp̬i̹lətis̬

The worst (but not most glaringly obvious) technical plot hole in Interstellar is, if these are people from the future creating the wormhole to another star system to save humanity, why did they choose such a sucky one? I bet there is at least one star system out there that doesn't have horrible cray planets on crazy orbits around a crazy black hole. How about a nice planet orbiting a star?

The planets are generally much harder to excavate for resources than small Solar System bodies - they are big, and that bigness means the deeper you go, the hotter and more pressure you have to deal with. Asteroids are (almost) all un-evolved cold hunks of rock, in a microgravity environment - the whole mass from surface to centre is accessible.

A LR87-11 like rocket engine could double as representing RD-180. Its within the same realm of Isp and thrust, and both have two nozzles and (I believe) two thrust chambers. That Gemini would look good on any 2.5 diameter rocket! i want your rocket beale

Beale so beautiful make all the spacecraft

Inject some sci-fi? A little late for that, we're talking about EmDrive!

Thats a photon drive, which is a real thing. The reason we don't use them is the microscopically, cripplingly, insignificant thrust - its like 1 N for 300 MW.

Woah thats bigger than real life F1 :3

Because with infinite delta vee, they could fly to an asteroid and push it into a collision course with Earth. If they fly to an asteroid that turns out to be a rubble pile, they can just fly to a new one.

It also would mean any crazy group or person with enough money to buy a cubesat with an emdrive has the ability to easily exterminate the human race.

You should make the forward piece of the Gemini nose section work like a standard four-way RCS, and make the rear bit just a Tantares-style decoupler/parachute, but .625 size. That would make both pieces more useful for building non-Gemini craft, especially because the "docking port" function of the front bit would have no use unless there was Agena. EDIT - Oh and are there going to be separate reentry and equipment modules?

That's why solid boosters are used, when they're used. Making the rocket a horizontally-launched plane is a much more complex solution to this small problem.

That's why multiple-stage rockets were developed.

Actually I'm fairly certain its the opposite. Generally upper stages are much more mass sensitive, while lower stages are more robust - adding a kg of mass to the first stage subtracts less payload then adding a kg to the second. Increasing delta vee at all exponentially increases the mass fraction you need, regardless if its performed by an upper or lower stage.

Everybody seems so obsessed with finding one extant practical reason to expand human settlement to space - but that's one of the things that makes Homo Sapiens special! All other terrestrial life forms stay in their safe, practical, little habitats doing practical life tasks until evolutionary pressure forces them to change. Humans make art, push social progressivism, and explore outer space. We don't need to do these things for the species to survive or thrive, but we do them anyway.

A Destiny or DOS size module should be enough space for one to three pilots for a 501 day flyby expedition. Plus an MPLM/ATV size module stuffed with supplies brings the mass to about 60mt. It will probably be at least a little more massive than that, to account for radiation shielding. Orion on the front brings it to around 60mt. Where it gets tricky is what rocket stage to push those sixty tons. For a quoted C3 of 38.8km^2/s^2 you'll need a Delta vee of 4.86km/s from LEO. Assuming an optimally-performing cryogenic rocket stage with 10mt dry mass, the total stack unacceptably massive - over 200mt. But maybe I'm overestimating how much supply mass you need. Maybe for one pilot you only need something like Enhanced Cygnus, plus Destiny/DOS-alike, plus Orion for a total mass of just about 45mt. That cuts IMLEO to 160mt. Still out of reach even for the biggest-block System, but Raptor BFR with O2/H2 upper stage might manage it! Or Block II System, if you launch the Orion on Block I first, and the rest next.

Multiple launches puts enormous logistical strain on a program - any expedition involving an interplanetary stack assembled from several modules will be on the economic scale of International Space Station.

I like all of the threads they post, they either have unique access to rare information about CNSA, or an extreme drive to find it. Its hard to find Chinese websites if you don't speak Chinese. And most of it is interesting, Long March 6 is derived from Long March 5 hardware, so the launch will give us a much clearer idea of its configuration.

Not nessecarily. The Moon, and all the other words for it in other languages used to be a proper noun of a specific object, but it has been generalized to mean any object in the Solar System whose primary is not the Sun. Right now Bacteria is a taxon which refers to a specific set of terrestrial organisms, but if we find creatures like it somewhere else, we'll likely call them bacteria too.

You can't cite specific examples of where a reason for human colonization is irrelevant to space exploration - if you list them all the list will quickly grow to infinity, and each example will also be irrelevant to all the other human colonization efforts. We conquered the world because we could, and we found reasons at the time. We can conquer the Solar System, and we'll find reasons to do it too.