wumpus

Space-x hype/fanboy reality check. 2002 Space-X founded. 2003 Falcon 1 launch planned (according to wiki) 2006 Falcon 1 actually launched (failed) 2008 fourth Falcon 1 launched, succeeded in placing a satellite in orbit (this was likely do or die for space-x) 2010 Falcon 9 launched (succeeded) 2013 Falcon 9 finally attempted landing test (succeed in orbit, decent engine cut out in flight. Hit hard). 2013 Next attempted landing landed soft on water (and then sank as expected). A further test soft landed in 2014 2015 Attempted 6 landings (not including total loss of booster and playload 6/28), landed one 12/22. 2015-2020 - don't expect even this speed (getting Falcon Heavy to [once] achieving full performance in 5 years). Things will have to meet the speed of funding. PS. Falcon 9 is a straight Falcon 1 derivative (much like Falcon Heavy is a straight Falcon 9 derivative (all use Merlin engines). MCT is a completely different beast and will take a much longer schedule than 2002-2010 (from paper to launch the 10-merlin engine Falcon 9) to go from paper to a 10 (newly designed engines) MCT. While Elon Musk may wave a public schedule with optimistic dates written on it (see 2003), the actual schedules used by Space-x are slow and methodical. Compare this to the politics-driven NASA schedules and you will see death and destruction in forced schedules (while the shuttles are obvious, don't forget that Kennedy's 10 year deadline lead to Apollo 1). While I'd expect regular landings of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy (at least the two "easy" boosters), I don't expect anything like the MCT being launched in 10 years. Another thing to remember is that Space-x has to pay for itself. Elon Musk's fortune may have been enough to push space-x through the early years, but the costs for the MCT isn't in the range of the Falcon 1. They can only build with what they make on commercial flights, and that doesn't appear to be expanding anywhere near the rate some of these "optimistic" schedules require (see other space-x threads for launcher economics). As long as Mr. Musk intends to keep Space-X private (until Mars), they will be constrained by launcher economics (if they EPO earlier, it is doubtful shareholders will let them go to Mars).

It isn't that hard if you are going to use expensive liquid rockets. Before, there was zero point for wasting that money as parachutes worked wonders. Now they barely work at all and you either perform miracles with aerobraking (I haven't bothered to find if it's possible) or use liquid rockets and use them for braking (within limits: if you wait too long you will lose control and quickly die. If you fire early you will waste them. No idea how a beginner is supposed to know). I'm pretty sure I managed to complete the "into space" mission with only solid rockets (might have been 1.0.2), but a quick run through in their defense left me giving up and using liquid fuels (which made it easier to haul science jr. for big science). The problem isn't the thermal. The problem is the chutes. They are absolute killers compared to the old "easy mode". Even the side chutes are "easy mode" compared to what you get in career mode for this mission.

There isn't much help for EMI-safety issues. Simple explanation: wear sunscreen when outside: sunlight is by far the most dangerous radiation you will ever face (might not be true for pilots/flight crew, but that is just *different* solar radiation. Still true for submariners manning the nukes). Also if you see big antennas with high fences and "no trespassing" signs, stay out: it is quite possible there is lethal EMI around there (more than a simple computation of power vs. power down would include). In depth explanation: pretty much needs the Maxwel equations and complete solution breaking down radiation (EM waves) and inductive coupling (the dangerous but short range stuff). Just where are you going to find a radiophobe that can deal with differential equations, let alone a high level EE class. PS: with respect to jokes about people dying, I remember the whole slew of such jokes after Challenger exploded. Even between seriously pro-space types (such as those who were trekkies between the cancellation of TOS and the first movie). Re: American History. When does the history in the class end? Mine ended up roughly 20 years before the students were born, so the space race simply wasn't an issue (Sputnik was *huge*, but since we didn't bother with the Cuban Missile Crisis (except for personal notes about what the [cuban] Spanish teacher's husband was doing during the Bay of Pigs), I guess such absence made sense. I strongly suspect that much of the reason for this was to keep any understanding/discussion of the Civil Rights era out of an all white(/asian) school. It's probably harder to whitewash an era when you take homework home to parents who remember the era you are trying to whitewash.

Tactically speaking, you are asking how to fortify a city at the bottom of a valley surrounded by high hills/mountains (I'm assuming that the planet is at the bottom of a significant gravity well). You don't put the fortifications on the planet, you put them in orbit, and probably beyond them as well. One of the basic ideas of medieval castle design was "defense in depth" (it was called bailey design then). This keeps be rediscovered every time someone needs to fortify something. Another thing is that the further away your defenses are, the longer they can detect and react to an offense. This might be less important with lasers and near-C neutron particle beams, but for missiles and such it could be critical. As of now, the most dangerous conceivable attack (ignoring "global thermonuclear war") would be redirect a comet from the Oort cloud. As noted in recent "planet 9" hype, we can't directly detect things that far out, it would be on course before we knew it. By the time it was detected, we would have a couple of months (instead of multiple years needed for present tech vs. asteroids: see recent Scott Manley video). A large array of detection and interception would be needed for defense at high speed.

I burned out on KSP due to career mode, but much of that was due to things that I was doing with or without career mode (trying to limit costs). Note that the game won't even tell you about recovery success without playing career mode, and I've always tried to limit costs on my rockets (you don't need to in career, but I didn't need to in sandbox either). I'm presently switching my "career mode" playstyle to more like the old science mode. Just unlock the science, hit the milestones and the money will be there. Not to say I will refuse an otherwise juicy contract or more likely alter my plans to meet the occasional contract requirement (there are a few that follow my plans), but the idea is to switch to more exploration and ignore time wasting contracts. Note to players who ignore career mode. It is *tough* to survive that initial launch into space. I was arguing for my favored SRBs with a KSP authority and discovered that SRBs (without liquid rockets on top) were a great way to get kerbals killed (they have more than enough delta-v for space. They just are way to easy to burn up going up *and* down. I killed two kerbals before adding extra stages to my SRBs). If space is hard, getting to the Mun is even harder. They don't give players maneuver nodes and patched conics from the start, you have to *earn* them. New players who can make it through these challenges will learn many of the tricks old timers took a lot longer to learn (other new players will have quit in disgust fairly quickly). Doing things with minimal parts is different when you don't have such key parts as aerobrakes, maneuver nodes, and LV-909s.

Why not? It has 8 times the mass and takes a much smaller tank. The ISP might be in the ~300 range, but with 8 times the fuel it wouldn't be a trivial amount of delta-v. And then you have all your hydrogen to 'burn' after that. This mostly depends on how much water you mined and how much power you are getting from your solar panels/TNGs. If you can easily get enough hydrogen, there is no need to worry about the oxygen (and all the corrosion it causes). What the cracking buys you is vastly better staging: the high mass/low ISP fuel goes first, followed by the low mass/high ISP fuel. Don't forget, that hydrogen is going to leak (probably not that much, but it will add up). You can't simply assume that it will completely build up as the solar cells slowly crack the water. The oxygen will stay put.

I have this vague memory of watching a movie called "the Phantom Menace" that had a bunch of guys wielding things that looked like light sabers with a complete contempt for gravity. I'd rather not see a similar movie.

The point is that you use solar arrays to crack the water (presumably when you are sciencing down on the surface of a planet), and then when you return there is plenty of hydrogen and oxygen. You either ditch the oxygen (because it will corrode everything it touches) or toss it first into your NERVA*. Once the oxygen is gone, you start shoving the hydrogen into your NERVA. Since you aren't trying to move any of the Oxygen, your ISP will be around 800 (instead of less than 400 with the oxygen). The point of cracking is that you just want to carry the hydrogen (or possibly just use it as an "upper stage"), the oxygen is never going to be as efficient in a NERVA as hydrogen. It isn't about energy efficiency (who cares how many watts your solar panels waste), it is about mass efficiency and rocket efficiency. * expect some pretty bad ISP (actually, I'd guess between LH/LOX and RP1/LOX, but maybe a little lower. Nowhere near LH/nukes). But presumably something is better than nothing.

I was thinking more the space suit. Why would the "space station" life support be in the cage?

[Why not use superheated water] The answer can be summed in the concept of ISP. Understand ISP and you are on your way to understanding KSP and the rocket equation. Assumption: these work similarly to those toy rockets (do they still have them?) that operate on the "supersoaker" principle (although they predate supersoakers by decades) that you fill with water and then pump in a bunch of air (and build up some pressure) and release? Probably the closest thing to a "real rocket" (i.e. one that while presently on paper but actively being developed with real money behind it) is the firefly alpha. Of course, it doesn't use water at all: the similarity is that it uses pressurized fuel (and oxidizer) tanks to force the fuel (and oxidizer) into the rocket nozzle. This requires a *huge* amount of pressure already (thus why other rocket manufacturers spend so much on the turbopumps), but is only used to force the fuel & oxidizer into position to burn. The Ve (and thus ISP) all depend on the fuel burning and exiting the bell. I'm curious how far you could "launch" a firefly alpha without ignition (which would strongly resemble the OP's suggestion in practice). My guess is it might get out of sight (assuming you somehow removed a stage and probably a lot of fuel, obviously the thing isn't going to have the right TWR without ignition), but the delta-v would really be miserable for a rocket hoping for orbit.

concerning "cage match": No space suits? Attacking the air supply/pressure is the obvious if they are needed inside the cage. Smooth cage? "Rope-a-dope" sounds important to cage fighting. Having something to push against means long-medium distance strikes are possible. Grabbing the cage (if possible) would be critical. When all else fails, grapple. Note that virtually all Earth [non-ground] grappling becomes useless in null-G (n-th dan judo? too bad*), but the ground stuff gets nasty. Locks and "hold and pound" become the entire point (obviously, the whole concept of "pin" goes out the windows). * no, not really. I learned that really fast after sparing a [kyu-grade] judoka in karate long ago. There is a lot more than just the throws.

How do genes die? That is the question. Death of the individual is irrelevant in the eyes of the gene. Last I heard, giant sequoia are effectively extinct: even before man's climate change they no longer had the needed ecology/climate to reproduce. They are pretty much one of the few examples of (effectively) immortal species out there.

"Steal money from the taxpayers and voters" is what the military-industrial complex does. Why in the world would this be any different? You are claiming some sort of vast sea change in US politics with zero evidence.

While this is certainly true, generations of engineers grew up on Star Trek, and used things they saw as inspirations to building some nifty devices. I certainly remember a hand-held oscilloscope (voltmeters:the next generation) sold with the tag line "Mr. Chekov, I believe you dropped something." "Did you tech the tech?" doesn't lead to hard science. Hiring J.J.Abrams is worse. But don't expect Scotty-wannabes to put down their soldering irons and stop making such toys.

My best guess is that it needs a clamp-o-tron (or decoupler) to break them up into separate labs. I'd check this with hyperedit before building the entire structure. Also (as of 1.0.2?, haven't heard any changes), the best place to put them is likely the seas of Minmus: landed (anywhere but Kerbin) gives you a significant bonus, but it doesn't matter *where* (presumably this will change at some point). Also, there are lots of nearby places to grab data on Minmus. Just understand that your solar panels are going to be in the night half the time.

Note that this doesn't apply at all to the shuttle. The shuttle ditches the tank at 114km (ISS for example is about 400km up). Circularization burns are done by completely different engines (the OMS engines). This isn't much of a burn, but it is needed. Not too likely. I don't think many of these ships have throttles to manage (the shuttle could emulate such things by pre-packing the SRBs to burn at different rates).

As long as they are unmanned, that's fine (or aren't pushed). Long, long, ago there was another group doing monthly launches. I'm sure you heard about it recently.

That was poor phrasing on my part. The whole point was that a single company wants to launch 700 sats. Iridium is the closest thing we have to that, and I thought the original plan was 77 (thus named after element #77), now 66. Buying up room to launch 700 sats is going to be a bit different than any previous customer. Come to think of it, would they really need more than 11 different orbits (for Falcon*). I suspect that we are missing the fundamental question behind OneWeb economics: are they mass producing the satellites or not? If they are, then you would expect all 700+ available at the same time. You want the launches at the same time as well. You also don't have any issues ordering an extra 65 (or 130) in case a falcon 9 fails. If you don't mass produce them, you get them in drips and drabs, but you still want them in orbit and returning some money. So you put them up in groups of 10-30, and try to keep the various orbits with roughly the same number of satellites. I wouldn't be at all surprised if the rocket chosen has little to do with the performance and cost of boosters (within reason) and a lot more to do with the satellite building schedule. * Somehow I think they need more than 11 orbits. But they might well want 65 birds on some of those orbits, but I doubt they want to have to deal with Falcon's schedule in scheduling 11 (or any fairly large number) in a row, as Fredinno pointed out.

At lunar gravity probably pretty good. Less so on Mars (although that seems to be less an issue with new suits). I don't remember anyone splatting on Earth, but they seemed to take short shuffling steps (especially when going from the tower into the Apollo. YIKES!).

A lot depends on who is launching, where they are launching (anywhere works for the first one, it gets worse as they go up), and what is the cost of each bird (typically, they are a lot. But at 700, they might finally be mass produced). At least one of SpaceX secondary customers lost a payload when the DoD (? might have been NASA) demanded that all fuel be used to cover their launch and reserve, while SpaceX could launch both (but not with full certainty). I suspect that with launching 700 birds, they are going to break a few of the old rules. Those rules just never were made for 700 birds all at once.

I believed Chariots of the Gods and had trouble sleeping because I was afraid that alien mummies would land in the back yard. In my defense, I was 5. I blame my father, although more than made up for it for taking me to the Smithsonian and similar places many, many times (I lived in Baltimore so it wasn't that far).

You make it sound like ULA is landing stages or otherwise competing on costs. That isn't their game. The original poster comes along and claims that the entire space arm of the US military industrial complex* is going to be shut down has to be taken with a grain of salt. I imagine there are some contractors that aren't Boeing or Lockheed (in non-space aerospace), but I doubt they have much business where those aren't the primes. The political re-alignment of such an epic scale would be hard to imagine. Such a thing didn't happen when the cold war ended, it sounds very odd for such a thing to happen 25 years later. So far the old "competitors" have done nothing but join forces with the Pentagon's and Congress' blessing. * Calling ULA a johnny-come-lately is terribly disingenuous. Boeing and Lockheed Martin took all their contacts and lobbyists inside the government and built a system to absorb large amounts of DoD & NASA space money. The name might be new, but most of the divisions, organization, and employees are old hands at the game.

Depends on the cost of the sats vs. the cost of the launch. I really doubt that number of sats per launch is a deal breaker (Orbcomm just launched 11). The problem with Falcon 9 is much more likely "only" 11 missions to cover the entire planet. You would need a ton more fuel to fix all the attitudes, change orbits, and the like. Putting 65 sats on nearly the same orbit wouldn't be that bad a thing (somebody put a webcam on the Lloyd's agent), at least compared to trying to get them into where they are needed. I'd suspect that the Soyuz might be what they go with, although there could easily be a lot of political pushback of buying 20+ launches on Soyuz. Also we are looking at a price tag well over a billion dollars: are any of the backers looking for a less than off-the-shelf rocket? I'd suspect that ATK-Orbital would be the launcher most interested in using/developing something with multiple upper stages (something like a MIRV, only to put satellites in different orbits)*. A bigger question is: "what point does the system have to start paying for itself". If you have to have full coverage after only 1/3 of your birds are deployed, you can't save money by launching them in to the most similar orbits. That one is going to keep the accountants running their spreadsheets for months. * I may have to fuss with this in KSP. I suspect it is just a bad idea and you might as well follow the path your booster set and then adjust the orbit, but can't be sure. Of course, KSP won't be able to tell me if the system I successfully save millions with costs billions to develop.

Even James Bond (or a Bond villain) couldn't get the SSMEs to light without the fuel tank added. On the other hand, I'd bet that the OMS would be even brighter (and have more exhaust) than what's shown (although with only two engines, I'd be shocked if they were in those positions). I'd hope they [NASA] drain the OMS fuel (it's hypergolic) before sending it back, but presumably some Bond villain minions prevented that from happening.

You don't need to upgrade your pad for a BACC "thumper", and it is great for getting a mk1 into orbit. I just ran through a test run (default difficulty) to make sure. What I *did* find out was just how rough the new re-entry issues are, and how much more dangerous they make using early SRBs. My first attempt "leaving the atmosphere" involved slapping a BACC "thumper" (this was the point, after all) on a mk1 cockpit and letting her rip. RIP Bob. Killed due to re-entry effects on the way up (I assumed a beginner wouldn't be adjusting thrust and such). Tried again with lowered thrust: RIP Jeb, killed on the way down (coming down steeply from 140,000m is a bad idea). I started over (and this time remembered to play with the materials lab. Moar science!). My successful launch into space actually required a larger rocket than my orbital craft(it also hauled up a science jr up into space, along with goo canisters, and fins so Bob could control the rocket). But a lot of the reason was because I didn't have the LV-909 and had to make to with the swivel. The orbital craft was a BACC thumper, [decoupler] LV-909 with medium and small (LT-400 & LT-200) fuel tanks [another decoupler] a heat shield and a mk1. No science experiments or fins (Jeb at the controls). Both rockets fired any remaining fuel on the way down, and I suspect that may have been important to their survival. By this time I could afford to upgrade the pad if I unlocked kickers and wanted to go to the Mun or Minmus (at least 250,000 funds and the astronaut complex with the first upgrade). While I still recommend SRBs for beginners, I now know that you have to recommend putting liquid rockets on them for even suborbital maneuvers (using liquid engines on top for orbit becomes obvious).