DDE

But not to such a degree. A 50% growth in IMLEO cannot alone account for such difference, especially with propellant crossfeed and/or nuclear third and fourth stages.

@ARS @Gaarst There’s this curious case of Faget’s completely straight-winged DC-3... so curious I can’t really comment on it.

Saudi shenanigans may have had just as mich to do with that. The De Beers have had wars started over less.

@Diche Bach, I think you underestimate how much firepower that will summon on your аss. The last circa three years in international relations have shown that bone-headed politics trump economics every goddamned time, no pun intended. You can fully expect your attempt to dominate the markets be boycotted by every player that matters, and then you yourself getting droned as a threat to world peace. Basically, if you're gonna pull a Garin by crashing the world’s precious metal markets, you better have a death ray.

I have a railgun. Maybe I should lob some rocks...

VASIMR's upsides have been repeatedly put into doubt (especially without a nuclear reactor), I wouldn't be surprised if NASA has already chosen its own Hall effect propulsion and will have private contractors working around that.

Easy, relatively speaking - xrasers and grasers are a valid concept. Never heard of a non-consumable graser, but a German-Russian research team in Hamburg already operates a free electron laser that produces x-rays. Both x-rays and gamma rays can be produced by nuclear-bomb-powered designs. It's not a laser. The L constrains it to various forms of electromagnetic radiation.

No reason. Large-scale permanent orbital presence is too vulnerable to surface-to-space weapons. Ultimately, there isn't that much utility in space-to-ground weapons compared to ground-to-ground weapon - orbits are inflexible, and unless you put the huge manufacturing facilities in orbit too, you basically need the same ICBMs to throw your weapons in orbit. THERE IS NO SPICE ON MARS! The Columbus analogies don't work!

Wait, @wumpus, so the 3.75 m sustainer whatchimacallit is conceptually based on the M-1, it seems? Yeah, but there’s a reason the UR-700 ended up almost four times as heavy.

Except that people for some reason think that the unique challenges of surviving in hostile alien conditions would somehow produce a panoply of advances across all fields of applied science. I have a cheaper idea. It’s called “working in a sharashka with a deferred sentence to execution for being an Enemy of the People”. Ah, those kryptoids otherwise known as “bigfoot”. Whenever millionaires run away from civilization, they always do so to low-tax countries, and to within less than a half-day trip from major metropoli of a First World country. They never move to Antarctica, or even Spitsbergen.

Yep. Modern SLBMs are basically sub-launched ICBMs. Early boomers had to camp in the enemy’s ASW grid right off their coast, whereas modern SSBNs can launch without leaving their home ports.

Energomash RD-600. Thing’s worth loving just for the face people make when hearing about a vortex-confined bimodal gas-core nuclear thermal rocket.

Compare the dV expended for vertical ascent and dV used in horizontal acceleration. Horizontal acceleration tends to occur way above the operating envelope of scramjets, let alone turbofans. And Kerbal makes airbreathing hypersonic dash a much more credible version than it is in real life. In which mode? Unlike rockets, turbojet thrust is really unstable and dependent on velocity and altitude. Jumpjets can barely haul themselves off the tarmac, and turbofan missiles use a solid-rocket booster.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1710.09455

Come on, the ITS handwaved radiation and gravity problems from Day One.

Honest question in continuation of my argument: is permanent colonization required to achieve the goal I outlined above? Because I'm a proponent of a few long-duration (MARS DIRECT-style) flag-and-footprints missions just to blaze a trail. Musk's plan doesn't really have a "demonstrator" or "pilot plant" stage..

Let me drop in some Russian Imperial soldiers into this Polish-dominated thread! Data from this paper gets thrown around quite a lot. I’ve seen further reasearch based on Soviet anthropometric records that paints a similar picture.

And that’s ultimately where I’ve arrived as well. The only pragmatic purpose of manned spaceflight is that pesky externality called “inspiration”. A giant middle finger to the seeming mediocrity and risk-aversity that stifles modern society. All of which is, of course, difficult to pitch to investors, and even to taxpayers. But this ultimately explains why manned spaceflight is a government’s job, because the market is unfit for these kinds of tasks. Remember that crowdsourcing campaign for a movie which ended up with the team shooting a movie about how they blew their budget on alcohol and hookers? You Won’t Believe What Hapenned Next! Hm. Now I really want Geert Hofstede to run an intergenerational version of his cultural dimensions theory.

Point of order! They are the supposed silver bullet that gets batteries into chemical fuel territory in terms of energy density.

@Kerbal7 I'm primarily talking about the alphabet soup having ties to the big names in the private space industry. They're quick to get their fingers into all of Silicon Valley's pies, which includes Google, a stakeholder in SpaceX; and the $600 million contract that went to Jeff Bezos is probably excessive to be just the compensation for buying the Washington Post for $200 million.

That’s only assuming the elites remain as pathologically obsessed with virtue signalling as they are today. In the apocalyptic scenario you’ve set up, the help would be a burst of machine gun fire, because the bloody pleb got uppity enough to demand something of their betters. It costs less to run an oppressive rentier state on Earth than to escape the planet. Problem 1 is, your money will be the only revenue stream in that operation. You’d have to pay for a lifetime set-up. And Problem 2 is that people that are as willing as you to go there lack the money – while those that have the money aren’t exactly spending them on spaceflight. When the Rotschilds and the Soroses start to invest into manned spaceflight, let me know. Right now the US private space industry ultimately is controlled by the defense and intelligence establishment, who have a vested interest in cheap payloads to orbit, but not beyond.

Why can’t you just buy a cupola on Earth with all-in service, and use the money you’ve saved to buy the whole nation it’s in?

But would the rich buy it?

The same requisite technology can be used to do the same on Earth, much more cheaply, with free gravity and air. The “the rich are fleeing Earth” narrative is nuttery with a dash of Marxism.

Well, Falcon 9 was expandable only a few years ago.