wumpus

Assuming the boosters have more thrust than the shuttle's (presumably that's what the extra segments are for), they will be the most powerful engines ever launched. SLS in total won't have any such achievements, other than most expensive rocket ever.

Why did they build there if they didn't intend to launch over China? Or did Chinese relations improve between construction and first test launch? Couldn't they get less inclination restrictions by building where they wouldn't have re-route rockets? Robert Heinlein published a book called "Expanded Universe" around 1980. It had a bunch of collected stories, some interesting predictions, and a lot of RAH pontificating. It also mentioned that he was told by a Soviet cadet that they had put a "man in orbit", and the same day all Pravda (and any other) newspapers were removed from the shelves (this doesn't seem to match any historical account of the Ivan Ivanovich flights, but perhaps something was vetoed in that local area). Heinlein died in 1987, well before the information you list was available in the West. No mentions about the "lost cosmonaut" being a woman.

Nothing. The analogy was with the Lunar colony splitting from the US, compared to the US splitting from England. Note that the American colonies were largely penal colonies. The UK opened up Botany Bay roughly the same time they acknowledged the US's existence (roughly within the length of the time it took to get to Australia in the 18th century).

Warn? I'm pretty sure that he would have loved to have had an independent lunar colony. Besides, the existence of the United States has largely been beneficial to England.

I think Minotaur's limitation that they couldn't use AF-surplus ICBM motors for commercial flight might have doomed the idea, but I can't help but wonder if Orbital (or anyone else) could have revived the idea with US missile parts. Or even if the concept was viable with old Russian/Soviet missiles. I'm guessing that reality vs. KSP was part of the problem, but OTRAG failures don't seem to even get that far.

Odd. The only reason I'd expect freighter planes to be as safe as passenger planes is that it wouldn't make any sense to use different designs to manufacture multiple models of the same aircraft. If the FAA didn't require the same level of safety (because the news isn't as hard in air traffic when FedEx loses a jet, similar for general aviation) then I'd expect freight planes to often be "retired" passenger planes, and have a reduced maintenance schedule (well, reduced from what it would be for passengers, it was likely retired because of increasing work).

Sorry, it is a bit late to move to Alabama. Dragon can be parked at the ISS for a month (presumably Starliner can do the same). A lot depends on just how long this "long duration" has to be. The powerpoint slides I googled implied that Block 2 would have "evolved boosters". My guess is that they would be liquid, but who knows. Pretty typical of the whole project to talk of "evolving" a 50-year old design after using it more or less unchanged. To do this, you'd presumably need F-1 engines (which were printed and test-fired for SLS evaluation already), as the STS boosters are the most powerful rocket motor ever used to get into space (presumably to be eclipsed by the SLS booster), and entire Atlas or Falcon9 boosters don't come remotely close to the thrust-weight produced by each booster. Block 1b was supposed to add an extra "exploration upper stage". Note that this keeps the first stage with RS-25 engines and increases payload by ~50%. My guess is that the numbers on charts containing this have wildly overestimated SLS-block 1's capabilities. For sending cargo to TLI (with a craft with enough delta-V to land on the Moon) Falcon Heavy is the way to go. For sending cargo by the time Artemis flies, you will likely have your pick of Starship, Vulcan, New Glen, and possibly New Armstrong.

Both the Shuttle and the SLS have been excellent at obtaining money from Congress and are wildly successful from the perspective of a NASA employee's career (or contractor with a more or less "permanent" job that has revolving employers and the same job. They tend to outnumber "official" employees). This lead to the Shuttle performing something like 200 crewed missions, and certainly keeping the USA out in space. While it to was something of a "rocket to nowhere" when they cut the other 3/4 of the STS program, the fact that it provided a useful area for the crew made it effective by itself. It doesn't appear that SLS has a chance to match this record, but keep in mind that NASA employees presumably want to keep their jobs and like programs that aren't cut. PS: It looks like New Glenn is also on schedule to launch near SLS's expected launch time. Is it bigger as well?

The wiki I found insisted that the Korona DDE mentioned was a VTOL SSTO, presumably to fool the same type of people who fell for DC-X. No idea if the "real" plans for either involved switching to two stages or not, but while it might be possible to get to LEO with one stage (and absolutely minimal cargo), the "vertical landing" would involve a lot of lithbraking (or possibly hydrobraking for the DC-X).

Same reason that Jool still has 4 moons, that's the way the developers hard coded it. From what I understand, the first corrected gravity simulation of Jool's moons ejected one moon in just a few orbits. Also if Kerbin is significantly more dense than uranium, we can only wonder about Juul. On the other hand, that density probably means that the atoms that make it up are pretty high on the periodic table and unlikely to fuse. And as a "gas giant", less likely to be as dense as Kerbin (not bothering to run the numbers). A better question is how much fission to expect from Kerbin.

But it works in KSP! I think it even works in Realism Overhaul. And there were plenty of wagging tongues claiming (with certainty) that it couldn't be done at all. But after scrapping asparagus staging and an order of money more magnitude (at least) of time and money than originally planned it was made. Two fairly recent contracts also are paying for a new fairing design to unlock much more of Falcon Heavy's potential (it is currently painfully limited to cargoes no larger in volume than Falcon9). Falcon Heavy has enough capability that it is sad that they plan to obsolete it so soon. I think that Musk has shown drawings of three booster Starship, although no plans have ever been mentioned. If I were to start designing a followup Super Heavy Booster, I'd certainly look at including side boosters, preferably air-augmented (cost of fuel isn't a consideration *now*, but the way SpaceX is moving, they could well be there in 20 years or so when such a booster would be flown), this should give delta-v similar to the reused Falcon booster (which is supposed to be similar to the Super Heavy Booster). The center booster would then be expected to provide considerable more delta-v, have less thrust, and probably a nozzle design similar to SSME (for sea-level to vacuum operation). It would be limited to whatever delta-v they could get and still allow a Starship-style return, but without the fancy open-loop cooling. I.e. just fall in a "skydiver position" (preferably a rolling one for uniform heating) that doesn't exceed the max temperature of stainless steel. Long cross range travel might be needed, or possibly multiple launch sites by then. Since ULA (like any good military-industrial complex company) never pays for the R&D for the capacity of something like this itself (even SpaceX waited for someone to fund Falcon Heavy fairing redesign mentioned above) it wouldn't be ULA's problem. It would be NASA's, or more like DoD, Space Force, etc.

100% is not only impossible, it also means you can't see out the visor (gotta shield those nasty EM photons). I'd suggest "Earth level radiation". Letting enough UV through for vitamin-D effects without melanoma would also be a plus. Extreme cases would probably look like body armor (either renaissance or modern "trauma plate" armor), presumably depleted uranium as a primary shield with lead as a secondary shield and protection from the U238 itself (unless you are worried about neutron bombardment, in which case U238 might not be ideal...).

I've often thought what would have happened had NASA repurposed an Apollo launch (after Apollo 11) to launch the LEM+whatever other supplies into lunar orbit while the crew would take another Apollo (with more supplies, and possibly more room for whoever was stuck on board) to the Moon. Unfortunately, there would be a strong chance that the crew would be riding Apollo 13 with no LEM to bring them home:(. You could fit a lot of cargo on a Lunar vessel that never intended to come home.

For manifests low enough to allow for recovery, 1 landing is likely sufficient. Also it took 10 landings, expendable launches would have to cost >$200M. They might be able to charge the government that much (but I wouldn't count on it being profitable, there are a lot of hidden expenses taking Uncle Sam's bucks), but I suspect they've sold expendable launches elsewhere for less. Of course, that ignores any R&D costs for recovery. I'd assume that they were mostly low outside of the changes from Falcon9 to Falcon9 block V (in other word, nearly a whole rocket redesign). But those changes also got them plenty of other business, so might have paid for themselves without recovery.

If it is on Elon Musk's dime (presumably some coming from customers), it will be efficiently purchased. Probably by purchasing the supplying companies and vertical integration. Bezos would be even more capable of this, but he's never mentioned an interest. If it is on NASA's dime, the money will maximize pork at the expense of nearly all else. There are plenty of costs simply "baked in" to following all those regulations (safety regulations are written in blood, purchasing regulations are written in the red ink of fraud) and any congresscritters interested in running again won't ignore their own districts. I wouldn't be that surprised if the dinosaurs manged to get off the planet. That said, it made a lot more sense to assume that an asteroid was intentionally captured and decayed after the dino civilization collapsed. A comet seems a bit less likely.

But liquid rockets will have just as much back pressure at the nozzle, so you might want the efficiency of solid rockets producing >>1g thrust until you got too close to supersonic (is there nothing that more thrust won't cure?). That isn't much delta-v, but it should help you take you out of the worst of the atmosphere that the first stage can't escape. Those little boosters that ring some rockets might only provide thrust for ~1 minute, but they provide a significant change in the amount of mass lifted to orbit (presumably by assisting the rocket during the low acceleration phase). I can't be sure if you'd want Venus SRBs to assist the main rocket or simply be the second stage. Hauling low-Isp rockets to Venus (and lowering them to the surface) is expensive, but you'd also have to design your nozzle for a much thicker atmosphere (for a stage likely dealing with mostly vacuum). Finally, SRB Isp isn't that bad, that's mostly a KSPism. It isn't hyrdalox or metholox, but I doubt you are getting off the ground with hydrolox (getting off Earth with just hydrolox is a challenge). You'd probably use a methalox engine combined with your SRBs. Dealing with cryofuels (or oxidizers) on Venus is an exercise left to the reader. For additional fun, consider the additional challenges of an air-augmented rocket (as far as I know, the air isn't used as an oxidizer) with Venusian atmosphere (it will help your Isp, but bring the Hell of Venus's atmosphere inside the rocket. You want the Isp, don't you?

If Shelby retires in 2024, any further development of the SLS is likely to be on hold. Considering that Artemis is an essentially a project invented to give the SLS a mission, missing 2024 really puts the whole thing in doubt. If they like it enough they can probably rebuild around Falcon Heavy or Vulcan (Vulcan will presumably be cheaper than SLS thanks to less Senate funding).

Is it really an "combined event horizon" in the sense that a photon can't make its way through the "combined event horizon"? The black holes themselves might be doomed, but you should be able to tell the difference from the outside between the separate black holes and the combined one (before the gravitational wave meter shows the event). One of Scott Manley's black hole videos also shows that while the event horizon pretty much describes the edge between the universe and the black hole, the "region of certain doom" (for anything not a photon) is about twice the radius of the event horizon.

I'm pretty sure that air resistance is the key to any decay that you might live long enough to see fall out of orbit (Vanguard 1-c was the second satellite the US launched. It is expected to decay to Earth in 2240). The moon will certainly mess with any satellite outside of Low Earth Orbit, and geosynchronous satellites need some sort of engine to remain in position, but not really prevent decay. Those geosynchronous satellites are required to boost to a "graveyard orbit" somewhat higher than geosync and are expected to remain there indefinitely. At that point, it seems much more likely that lunar effects are more likely to eject the satellite into solar orbit than to send it back to Earth. I'd also suspect that any case where lunar gravity > air resistance is more likely to eject the body from orbit rather than reduce Pe to sufficiently within the atmosphere for inevitable decay, but have no real evidence for it.

Buried lede? From what I've heard, the Falcon 9 fairing is one of the biggest limitations of the Falcon Heavy (the other being the mass stress limitations of the Falcon 9, making the maximum total mass unlikely to be much more than the maximum expendable mass to LEO of the Falcon 9). But between this and the classified USSF-67 mission, they have found a customer willing to pay to have this limitation removed (at hundreds of millions of dollars). Presumably Spacex intends to obsolete Falcon Heavy with Starship as fast as they can, but it is nice to see that a launch vehicle that is already in production and relatively inexpensive get more capability. They better get the hang of it, because I'm sure Super Heavy Booster will come down as least as hot (perhaps it will have to assume the "skydiver position" like Starship). On the other hand, I've never seen any mention of the difference between 1/3rd expendable Falcon Heavy vs. full recovered or fully expended, but I strongly suspect that it has close to the capability of fully expended.

I suspect it is similar to the cost of a real launch, less the cost of the rocket. You don't have to worry about notice to airmen and such, but you also have to deal with a huge flame at ground level. It looks like Spacex is going to need a few more (for reliable ignition of raptors). How they are going to deal with the difference of plenty of air blasting up the nozzle (when they fail) vs. none on a static test is a bigger question.

Here's the giant thread where a bunch of us tried to come up with a possible amature built rocket to orbit. Reality check: You can do a lot with a shoestring budget, especially if you are aware of the licensing requirements in your country. There should be a lot of room between off-the-shelf Estes rocket and government-backed sounding rockets. Just realize that after a certain point, the budgets get really big (Raven mentioned a $60,000 budget to lift 1kg to [just under] 45,000ft).

From what I remember of NM weather, you will at best get 23.5/7 reliability. Nothing is going to get through a NM storm, but they don't last long.

I'm guessing that the workshop has had the solder sucker in the toolbox for a very long time. But they also have a real solder station, so they don't need the type that barely works. So it got turned into a prop. I also suspect that prop departments never, ever throw things away. Especially weird items with funky parts attached to them.

You can presumably make a "reverse spin-launch" by using a cyclotron as an ion-propulsion unit (*not* a launch, more likely an interstellar probe engine). Less energy efficient, but arbitrarily high Isp (via relativistic exhaust speeds). No idea if you can keep the efficiency lower than an LED (infinite Isp*) or not. * you could argue that all that energy needed for LED propulsion reduces your mass (well momentum, but the rocket equation is all about momentum anyway).