wumpus

Looks like they want to test fly the thing. Still no word on any rocket being developed for it to carry: multiple pegasus ruin most of the point of a pegasus. And Orbital already has a perfectly good carrier that is almost certainly cheaper to fly. My guess is a last ditch hope some greater fool will take it off their hands.

The point is that LO2 will fall faster (if it is on/close to the pad). If the rocket has sufficient momentum the H2 will of course still be rising, but likely slowing down faster due to aerodynamics than the much denser LO2. A full detonation of the fuel seems unlikely (considering how many rockets have launched), but the effects would be devastating.

As far as I know, all hydrolox engines run rich, that simply optimizes the exhaust velocity and keeps the chamber temperature (and exhaust temperature) down. I thought that whacky big bell might not be so heavy, but then realized that 110kN is a bit more than ten tons at Earth gravity. I still expect that most of that force is near the combustion area, and as the bell spreads out it can be much lighter. Still, expect any vacuum bell to be really, really big (quite the opposite of kerbal graphics).

Hasn't NASA done this time and time again? Of course if they had some real PR pros, they could come up with something like a Tesla (the original Enterprise shuttle mock up? Probably something that isn't quite a valuable asset in a museum, but I'm sure they could think of something. [vintage space on boilerplate loads]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxKgfdUBTZA (harder than I expected to find, nothing about "boilerplate" or "dummy loads" on the title)

"Vulcan doesn't have a moon, it has a nightmare" [some Star Trek book I read in the 1980s. Almost certainly "Spock's World", because I didn't read many (and will admit to even less)]. Now for some googling... stoops to wiki [hey, if I'm going to quote licensed books, I might as well site wiki]. Wiki claims the Moon is 21 times the Roche limit. Big. Really big. I'm guessing the naive guess of 400 (square of 20) should be pretty close, but can't be bothered to check the Moon's angular size and work out if the angles are two big for simple approximation.

I suspect they don't use bombs on crewed missions, but they can be terminated as well (hopefully with a crew-saving abort mode, but that was pretty iffy for the shuttle). The areas around KSC isn't exactly unpopulated (although I think it was when chosen), and Vandenburg (the shuttle was supposed to launch from there as well, but I don't think that ever happened) launches fairly near LA and San Diego. I really wonder how they get someone to agree to handle range safety officer on a crewed flight (you probably don't want someone clueless about how bad those abort sequences are).

The short answer is pretty surprising. All that heating doesn't come from friction (presumably some of it does, but it is a minor source), but from adiabatic compression of air. The advantage of the blunt body is that the highest temperatures happen *away* from the blunt body. The energy is converted to heat, the air around the capsule is heated and then routed around the capsule. You still need a heat shield (in real life, sometimes you can get away with the built in heat shields of KSP), but in the end you only have to shield your capsule from a fraction of heat. This is more "learned thanks to playing KSP" rather than "learned while playing". The actual mechanism doesn't come up in play, you just aim your Pe at 30k of Kerbin or so and watch your capsule come home.

O2 over H2 certainly would be more aerodynamically stable. Doing it the other way sounds expensive. The S-IVB presumably didn't fire in the atmosphere (I'm not sure about the Saturn IB, it was the second stage), so that much seems moot: the explosion would certainly kill the crew. If you are near the ground, the lower stage are so much more of a problem that the S-IVB's configuration is meaningless.

Looks like the fighters need 3/4 of the range of the bomber, because they aren't going to dock back into those positions (they should extend their range by drafting off the bomber). The modern equivalent would be to bring a tanker along with the bombers and fighters, and keep refueling the fighters as you go (allowing you to spend little mass on fighter fuel). I've never heard of this being done (tankers certainly extend fighters/bombers range for long range strikes with little time to move carriers, but not bringing fighters along with heavy bombers).

You would need to add more light anyway, and could presumably put a tint on the inflatable greenhouses (thus making really "green" houses). It just seems easier to 'build' inflatables in a near-vacuum than dig the ditch and then build all the excess support for heavy, poisonous ground (even if it adds radiation shielding). Note that Mars might just have "too much CO2" for plants (something like 10 times Earth's partial pressure) and that increasing the pressure wouldn't work at all (thus don't try inflatables). Do plants need oxygen at all? I'm sure they don't bother with the Kreb's cycle, but I suspect that they could easily have various chemicals that contain oxygen. I'd also expect to start with hydroponics, allowing them to increase carbon mass before working on compost (or perhaps both: supplementing with hydroponics until you have "enough" compost to feed the colonists (doesn't sound likely to ever get there)).

This assumes that the radiation that Mars gets is worse than losing the sunlight that mars gets. I'd note that the partial pressure of CO2 on Earth is quite low (but I don't know the optimal amount for plant growth) and an inflatable greenhouse would probably make sense (depends on the pressure exerted by a Martain storm, making sure the surface can handle the sand abrasion and remain transparent might be key). If you don't care about oxygen levels, inflatable buildings on Mars could easily make sense (especially for storage vs. sandstorms). Also good luck trying to convince NASA to let you try germinating seeds on a rover. The Planetary Protection Officer would likely perma-ban you from all NASA proposals. It may take awhile before any research on Mars farming starts.

Can you bind it to [CRTL/SHIFT/MOD/Coke Bottle]+"/" or something? If dropping things on the keyboard is an issue, hitting two buttons simultaneously shouldn't be a problem.

I wouldn't expect wood to be the first choice for high performance aircraft. Typically it was chosen because of scarcity (thanks to the war) of aluminum and other materials. Of course plenty of aircraft designers were familiar with wood as canvas covered wood was an earlier favorite material for aircraft. The one I heard about killed a test pilot (I think on the second flight), but really wasn't closely connected with Korolev at all (the designers may have corresponded with him at the golag, but that was it). Soviet weapon design tended to be dangerous for the operator and wildly dangerous (thus effective) to anyone it aimed at. This really made sense when looking at the deaths due to the "Great Patriotic War", although reading through "Rockets and People" more people he knew seemed to die in the purges than the war (note he lived in areas that weren't overrun, that probably made the difference). While this looks good at first glance, anyone familiar with the death of SR-71 test pilot Ray Toric launching a top-mounted drone would realize that the second stage orbiter was a "burn or die" rocket, as clearing the carrier's tail is absolutely mandatory (granted, I have no idea where you would land if you could detach from the main jet without thrust, but presumably you *have* to detach or everyone on board dies). While a "center sustainer to [nearly] orbit" might not be a terribly efficient design, there are safety features and why they have flown 99% of all humans to space (just counting Soyuz + Shuttle). I like this design. I'd love to see F-1 based (Kerolox) engines on the booster and RL-10 (hydrolox expander cycle) engines on the orbiter, but I have doubts that even a RL-10 can be sufficiently certain of lighting. Of course, there are plenty of "nobody has ever survived the abort procedure on the simulator" points in the shuttle, I wouldn't want to go ahead with a design with such a flaw. Maybe you could get the RL-10 reliable enough, or maybe the second stage fuel tanks would be small enough to justify hypergolics (the last 300m/s were always going to be hypergolics anyway, and stored within the orbiter). Note that while Spacex has done an amazing job retrofitting the Falcon-9 to hoverslam (it was expected to be recovered by parachutes), I can't imagine anyone remaining on board during such a flight (witness the recent destruction of Falcon Heavy's center booster) and the tech in the 1970s likely required at least pilot assistance. On the other hand BFG's upper stage may be designed that way (presumably with redundancy and hover abilities that the Falcon 9 will never have).

Hopefully rocket. You want to get the thing to roughly mach 9, and jets are extremely difficult to get to mach 3. In general you want to split your delta-v into even sections (it doesn't always work that way, but it is great place to start). Of course, using jets would probably get discarded earlier (although I really hope the X-43 program is still funded somehow. It really looks like it was getting the ability to get significant delta-v out of an airbreather stage). The more I learn about *all* the requirements the shuttle had to fulfill, the more impressed I am with the final design. There are a lot of ways to improve the shuttle (for what it eventually did), but they all generally won't meet the requirements Congress and NASA set forth. All of the issues with the design can be laid at those who came up with those broken requirements.

I can't imagine that the space communication network wouldn't be sufficient for finding your location in space, and it would only take 3 or so base stations to establish location for landing (I'd recommend at least 6, 3 for course location far away and 3 for fine location up close. Presumably using a switchover during the "dead time" during re-entry when the plasma blocks radio signals. I'm fond of the early shuttle plans that included both "booster" shuttles (get up to mach 9 or so and then landed by pilots) and "orbiter" mini shuttles. Of course this doesn't work as well if you insist on a "payload bay" that can return satellites to Earth (your orbiter grows to the size of the real shuttle orbiter). A better question is to ask why the shuttle's maiden launch needed astronauts aboard if the 1970s algorithms (and hardware) were that great (it was the only manned maiden launch, and considering just how many cutting edge tech (by rocket industry standards) I'm sure that decision was unpopular at NASA). In "Rockets and People" there was a mention of a design of a Soviet "rocket plane" designed as an interceptor. It was meant to be manned, but I don't recall it ever being deployed in battle. It was designed with a similar philosophy as the de Havilland DH.98 Mosquito in that it was made of wood, made by cabinetmakers (who otherwise would be simply called to the front), and went one step further and used a rocket engine instead of extremely valuable aircraft piston engines (presumably the rocket engines required different machine tools).

But unpainted orange tanks were preferred for shuttles (although they started out with white paint). It depends on how much you need the mass of that paint. Remember, those orange tanks held LH2 as well as LOX.

While earning multiple doctorates might help, living longer (and healthier) sounds like a more likely plan (with a backup plan of becoming a billionaire)...

Except that fuel (and presumably oxidizer) accounts for .1% of the price of Falcon 9 launch (but presumably more of a Falcon Heavy as it shouldn't cost 3 times as much as a Falcon 9, but use nearly 3 times as much fuel). I'd expect that needing that much less carbon fiber fuel tanks thanks to methane's efficiency will be much more important than the price of methane. Spacex has removed the biggest single cost of going into space, the price to manufacture a booster. Fairing reuse was presumably an even lower level fruit. I'd expect them to spend a great deal of time reducing launch costs, while fuel costs remain a non-issue (although it might make good PR: Elon has already tweeted about mass fractions).

Shuttle-C would also give Congress the ability to cancel manned spaceflight a lot earlier than they did while keeping all the satellite launch capability of the Shuttle. NASA was almost certainly scared silly of it and had no intention of taking it anywhere. If you started the program *after* the shuttle got canned, I can't see it progressing any differently than SLS. Building a new rocket based on shuttle parts but with enough changes (and political meddling) that you have the costs of building from scratch without the freedom to really work around the problems.

Does Venus have a magnetosphere? While any colonization of Venus would be the last step in an excruciatingly long-term process (starting with teraforming), I'm curious if it is indeed possible.

A lot of this depends on Space-x's extreme manifest: presumably things like Proton and Soyez launch as often, but little else does. I'd expect that you would at least consider using aluminum or steel fairings for lightweight missions, but I doubt many rockets have enough "launched at the low end of the range" missions to justify the design. It takes a lot of faith in your manifest to go out and keep spending money on your design, even if you expect to start 'picking up $5M every launch'.

I'm not surprised that things aren't as simple as putting KSP LEGOs together. Seemed that plenty of smart people were concerned about Falcon Heavy, even though every part of it was flight proven (in usage much closer to Falcon Heavy than anything seen in SLS). You're forgetting that it lands money in all the right congressional districts. Even with NG being made in Marshall, AL I doubt that the money would go into the "right" hands. Tonnage to orbit was never SLS's specialty.

Do you seriously think SLS is going to launch 5 times? Of course, the White House may tell NASA to put astronauts on the first mission (this has certainly been suggested), but I can't see NASA following those rules themselves. The shuttle flew manned from day one (although this was certainly a design flaw, Buran [and all other US manned rockets] could fly unmanned), but this doesn't mean it was a good idea.

I'd be shocked silly if Hollywood still wasn't producing romantic comedies largely based on stalking and other court actionable activities (I haven't been watching many movies lately).

I completely doubt it. I can't take their insistence on fuel cells seriously, but it possible that they mean it. If so, they might just want to give this a try. If they have any such plans at all, they were likely low priority power points/white papers which might suddenly become possible with Falcon Heavy's cheap heavy lift capability. Don't expect anything to happen fast (also note that Mazda's new Skyactive-X should make fuel cells pointless. Getting "nearly fuel cell" energy out of gasoline will make building the infrastructure needed for fuel cells uneconomical at any cost). - Edit: the only reason I brought up Toyota is that mining the first asteroid will be unbelievably expensive and will have to return massive amounts of ore for the expenditure. Mining platinum this was would likely crash the market and thus flatten returns making it pointless to try this form of mining (of course, precious metals are a famous means of separating fools and their money). On the other hand, Toyota might very well "need" huge amounts of platinum and has the money to go and get it. Spaceflight is expensive: finding somebody willing to foot the bill can be well over half the battle. I've never heard of Toyota mentioning asteroid mining. They just keep talking about fuel cells that make no economic sense while platinum remains expensive (granted, I thought putting both electric and gasoline engines in a car was equally hilarious. I now suspect that doing such will remain superior (for US-style driving at least) for quite some time).