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DDE

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Everything posted by DDE

  1. DDE
    Even then, you have to compete with very clever people looking for a crafty alternative, as well as people doing dumpster diving.
  2. DDE
    You don't need to go to the moon to compensate for crappy controls. The reason the Biosphere 2 failed spectacularly wasn't because it was on Earth, but because it was a multilateral, barely scientific project with a lot of hippy green religiosity thrown in, a project eventually led by Steve Bannon of all people. Compare and contrast with the incremental approach used in the BIOS series; no fancy biomes, just lots of algae and plants, with the 1972-1973 experiment at least claimed to have achieved 100% air and water and 80% food self-sufficiency.
  3. DDE
    I doubt it. China isn't an overt, self-declared existential threat, and the US society is no longer largely led by WWII veterans. An "interplanetary gap" would dominate the news for about eight hours, and then be thoroughly forgotten, with the Chinese landing ignored or minimized in the media. A true space race requires a world war - or several.
  4. DDE
    Nope. I have serious doubt it'll reach the DST stage - DSG gives NASA room for backpedalling in the face of reality.
  5. DDE
    Nitpick: no, Skylab was originally designed as a wet workshop, the only reason it ended up dry was because NASA had a spare Saturn V; they'd have gone with that if they had to, plus the manned Venus flyby project was a thing.
  6. DDE
    For a small, dense package, as opposed to a massive rocket stage, the difference is much more miniscule, and you get to pick an arbitrary LZ.
  7. DDE
    Likely not without compromising their ability to take care of themselves, similar to how people with no sense of pain keep injuring themselves until they die of sepsis.
  8. DDE
    At which point the question is, why don't themselves do it themselves, Vulcan-style?
  9. DDE
    It might work for a tiny, landlocked country; not for a thassalocracy like the United States. If the US gives up its 11-carrier fleet, its global network of military bases, and the force projection capability both of these afford, it would be effectively finished as a global power in general and a global economic power in particular. The United States CANNOT AFFORD being on a defensive footing; in order to retain its current standing, it must be able to conventionally annihilate anyone, anywhere and at any time. Hence the fascination with Prompt Global Strike and Hot Eagle, hence the - possibly misplaced - emphasis on carriers, hence the countless military bases encircling every even remotely potential adversary.
  10. DDE
    It's a rather dubious plan. You're simply delegating the need for reusability to an even larger spacecraft, which will be transporting mostly vacuum. It's probably less efficient than the failure that the Space Shuttle was.
  11. DDE
    Musk wants to borrow the VAB now, has reduced the diameter from 12 m to 9 m and may be reviewing the Mars landing mode. It remains to be shown that this sort of spending is any more worthwhile. Nor does reducing military spending lead to a reduction in objective military threats. Military spending is subject to the Prisoner Dilemma: lower it, miss out on the latest toys, and you end up exposed for decades to people from whom you should expect no mercy.
  12. DDE
    With the likely caveat that the consumers have to be spaceborne. Thus, there's only one way to jumpstart space settlement:
  13. DDE
    I arrived to a similar conclusion, actually. Heck, the Baltic fleet's long-range reconnaissance teams during WWII (i.e. guys who spent months at a time camping out in wind-blasted, pedant-ridden mountains to report on steel and tungsten shipments out of Kirkenes) recruited people who were either Norwegian or submariner.
  14. DDE
    And they further wreck the ascent TWR with those skewed nozzles - I still recall that thesis on supersonic retro someone posted.
  15. DDE
    https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search.jsp?R=20140008733 Props to @nyrath, as always. TL;DR 'Afterbuner' design with hydrogen injection into the exhaust of a dusty plasma reactor results in Isp=32000 sec, allowing for a single-stage trip from Earth to Mars orbit and back, hence a high degree of reusability.
  16. DDE
    @kerbiloid, these things are REALLY heavy.
  17. DDE
    Yes, because NASA literally discards every bit of equipment after one year and totally doesn't have absurd fixed, non-material or mothballed assets, right?
  18. DDE
    @NSEP, it's funny how the guy directly quotes Zubrin in the "Alpha Centauri by 2000" rant. Reveals certain sympathies.
  19. DDE
    I think it's because non-kerbonauts have little to no idea of the magnitude of the challenges involved. The average normie's understanding of spaceflight is informed by Star Wars and Star Trek, not Apollo 13; their view on space policy is informed by usually misunderstood opportunities and not realistic possibilities. Actual space cadets are forced to learn to consider the costs and sacrifices.
  20. DDE
    I think SpaceShipOne had such a design... and they immediately ran into cooling issues.
  21. DDE
    1. Other If the mission ends up funded by NASA, it won't be anything like the NASA we're familiar with. Current NASA is more interested in finding or even making up new reasons for new R&D programs than actually going to Mars; it is culturally incapable of a major goal-oriented manned program anymore. Kill it with fire.
  22. DDE
  23. DDE
    Between it being a UDMH-NTO design and using hot-staging with lower-stage retrorockets? Quite likely.
  24. DDE
    @kerbiloid @Scotius
  25. DDE
    That's probably because each of those could come from a different cosmonaut corps - the Soviet Union sometimes had three-five different units with technically separate training (military pilots, Academy of Science, Korolev's engineers, the admittedly often-token female program, and the abortive Academy of Science science journalist corps).
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