DonLorenzo

Well, in this scenario you could grab the asteroid (full of valuable stuff), put it on a return trajectory and announce you're bringing a BAZILLION TONS of unobtanium into the Earth market. When prices crash, you buy as much as you can, then reverse the rocket and fire that asteroid of riches into the sun after which you sell the unobtanium you picked up cheap for a massive profit. Heck, you only need convincing YouTube footage probably As long as you have full control over the supply, you win. Whichever way around

Bringing back stuff? not going to happen. Not until every last ounce of it is exhausted on earth at any rate. Think about it; what's going to be more expensive? Getting something from the moon, or from some backwater country or even scrapheaps? Stuff on Earth is going to win out almost every time. Now if you can get something that someone wants to Earth orbit from another place than Earth itself.. then you're talking. Say NASA (or whichever party) is facing launch costs of X thousand $ per kilogram, but you have put an asteroid in a lunar orbit and mine water from that, which you can make available in Earth orbit for X/n thousand $ per kilogram then you stand to make a profit. All you need is to have customers that want stuff in space, and be able to provide a way to get it there that's not 'launching it from Earth'. Bottom line: taking stuff down into Earth's gravity well is hard to make profitable. Making stuff available outside of it, that's what you want to do.

In my 'Mission a Day' series I play with money constraint and I've actually found asparagus to be prohibitively expensive. I've used it once, with two of the four boosters using small and cheap engines instead of the larger, more expensive ones.

Aaaaaaand touching down the (next) rover! Success! Science! Money!

I dive and oh my god I get so high when deeper than about 30-35 meters (4 - 4.5 bar breathing air pressure). It's thought to be due to the gases dissolving in the fatty acids of cell walls, altering their conductivity. Most of your cells don't care, but neurons do and you use those to think. edit: forgot to make my point, that it's not necesarilly chemical effects that mess you up

Sending a rover to Duna, for Science! and money.

Doing a simple mission and talking of space things like NASA and Copenhagen Suborbitals

There's a lot of cyclic activity going on in stars, and on many different timescales. If some of those events could carry information and... replicate. Perhaps that could go in the direction of something we call life. We started out with a weird molecule that replicated and passed on information

There's quite a few varieties of life that don't really care what the gravity is. Microbes and anything on that scale have virtually nothing to do with it. Small multicellular life lives in a world where conditions are dictated more by surface tension than anything else. Anything in the oceans is hardly affected by gravity (they are neutrally buoyant, gravity provides an up and a down direction, not much else). Gravity would affect the weight of the water, meaning life taken from earth would thrive at different depths (equivalent pressure). That pressure difference coupled with light penetration (only dependent on depth not gravity) could cause some variations in oceanic life, but that's about it for that environment. Just something extra to think about.

Hehe, yeah, good stuff However the refuel tug at Kerbin probably wasn't necesarry? If you were already aerobraking you'd have come down eventually

This is fancy speak for 'don't crash'

In these two missions we manage to set up a reliable (ahem) minmus mining robot!

I would rather send a case of beer or a bottle of champagne on an escape trajectory, possibly towards an exciting exoplanet with a note attached that says CHEERS!

Ooh Albert that's a good point. I didn't consider that. Although I find the possible headline 'Methane found = LIFE' to already be premature. It'd be painful! Such a probably indication but with no (easy) way to back it up

Today we have... dare I say it... a ROOKIE MISTAKE

In Mission 25 we land on Vall! (almost)

Hehe, nice mental image. I wasn't really discussing how to get from scenario 1 to 2, just treating the two separate ones 'as is'. Ie. would you be more worried if a big rock approached or a cloud of pebbles. Not 'would it be smart to turn 1 into 2'.

OOh.. they all sound great! Plato is first off the list for me, as we're already discovering loads of exoplanets with Kepler, and for me the ballpark estimate of their existence ('lots') is exciting enough. Next off is Echo, measuring the atmospheres of exoplanets is super challenging and it would be great to know more about them, but our utter inability to get there makes it completely academic. Also the prevalence of exoplanets ('lots') makes it likely that all kinds of compositions exist. Then we have LOFT and STE, both picking away at the fabric of existence itself and furthering our understanding of it. Hugely exciting stuff, but it's going to off the list as well, but only because we have such an exciting candidate in MarcoPolo-R. Rendez-vous with an asteroid and sample return (as done by the japanese Hayabusa probe as well) and developing the technologies and procedures to make such routine is scientifically interesting, practically useful AND has nigh immediate, tangible real-world application. Asteroid mining, deflection and even moving and capturing them is one of the few amazing sci-fi space things that we are actually quite likely to be able to do.. now. So MarcoPolo gets my vote. Unfortunately I don't really have one

Day/Mission 24 is to Duna and packing a Kethane scanner!

I'm not so sure they would. If you pulverize the big rock, but keep all the pebbles together somewhat (I'm assuming they still hit at the same time, otherwise it's a bit moot) they might still behave a bit similarly to the big rock? Ie. the first pebbles to enter the atmosphere shielding the rest a bit. Some of them would vaporize, but the rear ones wouldn't and still impact, perhaps much the same as the big one? It's still the same mass that's entering, just a bit more spread out. I'm assuming you're not significantly altering the trajectories, obviously if you let the pebbles enter one by one or from completely different angles it wouldn't do a lot if anything. If the scenario is something like '1. One impactor with X mass or 2. N impactors with X/N mass, on different trajectories but in the same day' I feel that scenario 2 cause the least amount of damage, if for nothing else that there's more surface area per mass of entering rock and thus probably more material shed/vaporized/exploded before impact

Today we go nuclear and attach one of what will be three engines to our space station/interplanetary exploration vehicle

I started two years ago with I think version .11 (the one just before mun). Downloaded from a Colombian hotel room which I promptly didn't leave for two days

Knocking out two quick missions to generate some cash!

Today we focus on Kernie, the kerbonaut who seemingly cannot die and screws up every mission he is involved with. Today we tell the story of Kernie

In these four missions we start construction of the spacestation that will ultimately fly off to Vall! A very hot reentry in this one! Deadly Reentry + FAR rocks! Adding one half of the engine core!