DDE

Why bother going down a gravity well when you have Saturn's rings?

There are at least two mods that produce such an engine, PorkJet's Atomic Age and Nertea's Kerbal Atomics. Isp is inherently lowered because the oxidizer is heavier than the tiny H2 molecule. To boost efficiency of a hydrogen-based engine without raising core temperature, you should go from H2 to H. Good luck containing that.

Somebody appears to have investigated a combination of fluorine, lithium and hydrogen as a working tripropellant with a record-setting Isp of 542 sec. Just to keep it on rockets. And yes, the Soviets actually had a functioning upper-stage ammonia-fluorine engine.

Wait, didn't the formation of the Pangea cause The Great Dying (tm) of the Perm-Triassian? By the golden age of the larger sauropods it had already fractured, hasn't it?

That's beyond the theoretical maximum capability of the stock nuke. Whatever it is, it's gonna have to be staged.

Yeah, but combined they prove doubly nasty. Plus it seems that even working as intended the ecological impact of that thing is horrific. But then, it's unclear when the next generation of Russian launchers comes into active play: Angara (a few test flights), Zenit (production has not yet been duplicated) and Soyuz-5/Fenix (not yet on the drawing board). And the old Soviet tech is absolutely at its limits, which is why minor and major mishaps keep happening. Mentioning Orion in the context of a Mars flight is, admittedly, ridiculous. NASA does that all the time, of course. Right now Orion is being lofted on a Delta IV. In practice, it won't - NASA proclaimed they've given up on human-rating Delta IV and Atlas V (*cough* Boeing Starlifter *cough*). The smallest launcher it's designed to be used with - upon the demise of Ares I - is the SLS, which can do nothing less than deliver an Apollo-style stack to the Moon. If Orion is going to Mars, it's going as a part of a completely different, much larger, and not yet even prototyped ship - and I see no reason to take the descent vehicle to Mars and back anyway.

Chapter 7: Black Sun The Surge Week began. With tested boosters and the SAT staff finally having learnt how to operate a drill, they had several related satellite launches to do. Skipping the A4 for a moment, A5 Deacon was rolled onto the pad, and departed in the dead of night. Unlike other launches, it pitched north, and accelerated into low orbit. The satellite’s solar arrays and whip antenna unfurled as it drifted above the frigid arctic wastelands. As it escaped KSC’s LOS, the new-fangled Satellite Group Control woke up the TARDIS passing above their heads, and improvised a high latitude relay to the Deacon. Above the ice cap, the Terrier upper stage borrowed from old Moho launches, half-empty to maintain commonality with A4 stacks, inserted it into planned orbit before separating. The large antenna grid on top of the bulky power management system unfolded, and began sending radio waves towards the surface. Jeb and Gene watched the transmitted data turn into a blocky altimetry map of Kerbin’s tundra. The resolution was about half a kilometre. “Not exactly useful,” Gene sighed. “It’s good enough for Eve,” Jeb assured him. ---------- Pad reconditioning was in full swing, meaning Jeb was confined to his office for the rest of the day. Val peered in through the door. “Flight, we’ve got a problem,” she said. The daylight coming through the door behind her was weak and a deep orange, but that couldn’t have been it. “There’s a crowd outside, they want us to drop what we’re doing.” Jeb just stared back. “They think we’re to blame for the eclipse, and they want to sacrifice you to the Kraken!” she laughed. “Eclipses happen weekly everywhere under 20° latitude,” Jeb sighed, his pained expression amusing Val even further. “And since when exactly are the loonies concerned with facts?” she asked. Jeb pushed the desk clutter away from himself, and then gave his head a good bang on the hard surface. Without pulling his head up, he took the phone off the hook. “Gus, what’s the status on the Odin? Still casting the fuel? What about Beacon-Alpha? Good, skip a few checks, roll it out.” The Beacon blasted off the pad as usual; the Terrier just got to burn a lot longer, lobbing its payload into an orbit that was 2.5 Kerbin diameters away from its surface. Upon reaching the target orbit and disposing of the upper stage, the Beacon’s side antennae unfolded. Its directional radio transmitters could sense lightning in Eve’s atmosphere, and communicate with probes as far away as Dres. The bulk of the loonies fled upon seeing the rocket depart, probably convinced that Jeb cold control eclipses. Odin finally completed launch preparations the next night. A tiny craft less than 200 kg in mass, it used a design Bill quickly slapped together from a Vector’s retrorocket, mounted atop two sequential solid motors. Odin’s job was quite peculiar. It was developed largely to assist Gene Kerman’s astrodynamics team, with its gravioli detector and on-board telescope assisting them in plotting transfers and predicting optimal launch windows. The grind continued onward. Beacon-Bravo and Beacon-Charlie were first sent into the 250 km parking echelon, completing an orbit before receiving the data for a Hohmann transfer that would put them into the 1500 km orbit, precisely 3637 km apart. ---------- “Alright, tracking station dishes warmed up, orienting to target – Beacon-Bravo,” Linus, the newly appointed head of SGC, narrated. Jeb watched thoughtfully. Being outside of radio range, on the wrong side of Kerbin, had been a bizarre experience. The home was so close, yet doom was one retrorocket failure away. “Uplink achieved. Beacon-Alpha… online. Beacon-Charlie… online. Deacon… online. Odin… online. TARDIS… online. We have control.” Near-Kerbin space, except for the wrong sides of the two moons, now had constant radio coverage. No more radio silence. ---------- Jeb entered the Astronaut Training Centre’s main auditorium. Sitting before him was about a hundred candidates selected for the Hermes program flight crews. The rather dim eyes were hardly promising. “Alright, does anyone know the Kerbinovsky rocket equation?” he finally asked. No hands came up. “Does anyone know what an orbit is?” he asked, his heart sinking. Still no hands. “OK… can everyone point in the general direction of space?” A third of the class pointed upwards. Two-thirds pointed directly at him. The rest was pointing downwards. Jeb sighed. This was gonna be interesting.

It succeeded in murdering Roscosmos's previous chief. Say it with me: asymmetric dimethylhydrazine nitrogen tetroxide extremely toxic extremely cancerogenic. Russian launchers may be rugged designs, but right now they are suffering greatly from crappy management and crappy workmanship, to the point that it's becoming a major commercial liability. Those payloads are insured, ya know?

Well, SSTOs are not a dead end. If NASA's willing to design a closed-cycle nuclear turbojet/scramjet/afterburning thermal rocket/power-generating reactor, they might get some nice results. But then no-one even lets them make the really cool stuff. No, I'm afraid the OP's actually actually comparing SpaceX's interplanetary probe program (0 launches) with NASA's. In the launcher business, ULA has a considerable chance to get trashed, and even Roscosmos's cheap and toxic Protons are feeling the pressure. But then SpaceX is unlikely to take over the whole market. Also, Protons kinda deserve it.

Well, to be honest, the US pretty much has had that title since the mid-60s, thanks to Gemini, the cancellation of Soviet Tsiolkovsky and Saturn probes, and, oh, that little fact that the Soviets put two tortoises on a lunar fly-by while 'merica put some boots on the regolith.

And that's what's alarming. The consensus is that extraterrestrial colonization is not an economically viable project. Which is the kind of project you'd expect to be right up an statist's alley. Elon Musk is eventually going to run out of money. NASA can nag the executive branch into just borrowing more.

Yeah, but the MCT is just a plan, with no metal behind it. They'll spend half a decade just developing the engines. There's a massive chasm between the concepts and an actual spacecraft. Imagine if everything that was in design stage in the 60s made it to the launch pad. Sorry, but I can't value someone's plans.

...also playing KSP.

Yes, but it's as if the OP thinks - judging by how the poll question is formulated - that the Red Dragon project equals NASA's more than five decades of actual work.

Yeah, but it remains to be seen if someone with a façade of an idealistic billionaire can do better than that. While "meandering around doing nothing" NASA has managed to explore much of the Solar System. Sure, planting flags and collecting moon rocks by hand is cool, but the cost-benefit ratio is way too unfavourable for manned missions.

A) I find your excess of trust in Musk disturbing. He has a lot of incentive to be less than perfectly honest while maintaining a façade of being perfectly honest. B) If it's being checked out, than it's not a certainty that it will fly. If it will be reusable as the Space Shuttle Orbiter (20-30% of ship replaced between each flight), it will be a failure. C) Because they haven' achieved reusability, they have not yet dropped the cost per kg to orbit. D) NASA's doing just fine, thank you. They're about to put Juno into Jupiter orbit, they're fixing Discovery Mission 12 (InSight), busy picking Mission 13, pushing ahead with two Flagship missions, and have at least three craft in Mars orbit alone. SpaceX have gone further than any commercial program ever, but it's nothing compared to state-backed ones when it comes to exploration: You're falling to the hype.

You shouldn't have added "planetary exploration". Because, right now, SpaceX is nothing more than a taxi service, and hasn't actually done any planetary exploration. Even India is ahead of SpaceX. Also, they have not achieved reusability. Word is the landed Falcon stages are too banged-up to ever fly again.

Returning to the OP subject, from what I've picked from Freitas's Xenology, which is pretty dated but should still represent SETI, SETI pretty much up-front tells us that they 'may' instigate a media lockdown and cover-up if they judge it to be For The Greater Good (tm).

Uh... they don't have to be powered. From what I understand it's possible to "arc-boost" a regular monoprop thruster.

The problem is that Squad seem to go for the 1970s-1980s tech. For that time period, and even for today, it's a pipe dream. So we probably won't see it in stock.

-1. If you feel it to be this necessary, you can quickly rename the basic design in the VAB before rolling it out onto the pad.

Aye, sah, I shall run them down! Fooooor da Empra!

Guys, is anyone getting injured by all the puns I have flying fast and loose here? FYI, the bit with Morse code comes from the transcript of Vostok-1 comms. The Soviets, especially early on, had a problem similar to what the ISP has - very limited radio coverage, so I thought it was appropriate. The Phoenix lander is going to get quoted much, much later.

As I imagined. Got any step-by-step instructions? I know the Scatterer has a UI, but it's a bit too in-depth for me.

Chapter 6: Rendezvous and Drama The Intern booster carrying the A3 Targeted Automated Rendezvous and Docking Instrumentation System departed the pad a few minutes after midnight, its twin Hammer boosters leaving a column of smoke. As it entered the thermosphere, the nose fairing ejected, and the solar panels and whip antenna extended, but instead of the payload separating, the two small engines alongside the Dachshund kicked in, completing the orbital insertion and the extended circularization burn. After that, the ejector valves on the stage ensured it wouldn’t explode in the near future. The oversized satellite came to rest in a 250 km equatorial orbit. Jeb arrived to KSC a few minutes later. Before he was kitted in the new ISP-issue spacesuit and strapped into a Vector, Bill– quiet but seemingly lucid – showed him the experimental Kerbal Ramification Artificial Simulation Hub. KRASH still needed more work. Val didn’t bother to show up in person. But then, there would be an emergency interruption on all TV channels anyway, so there was no need to rub it in her face. The Vector blasted off within five seconds of the predetermined time required to catch the target hundreds of miles above. However, the rendezvous was inherently set outside of comms range. Jeb was going to handle it on his own. The problem was amplified by the fact that, in the middle of the Chelyabinsk burn, he began to realize he’s going to overshoot the target. As the circularization burn was coming up, Jeb had the automated docking system send a heartbeat to the target vehicle. The signal came back, allowing for the separation to be measured. The distance shined on the console. 221.3 km. Jeb pulled out his kustom astrogation slide rule. After a few manipulations, he produced the required orbital period for an intercept on the next orbit. A few more operations, and he had the value of 26.6 m/s that could effortlessly be added to the circularization burn. He informed the KSC of the unscheduled manoeuvre half an hour later. There was panic among the junior staff, before Jeb managed to get a telemetry update out of them. The intercept was coming up. Distance on the docking radar kept ticking off at a maddening pace. At precisely the determined time, Jeb fired the SM engine. The Spark rapidly slowed down the ship to a stop relatively to the target. Jeb unclutched the gyros, and brought the ship around, peering through the tiny window. The TARDIS hung in space, less than 2 km away. Jeb immediately fired an 11 km/s burn along a vector passing slightly ‘above’ it, and less than a minute later he used the forward two RCS jets to kill the velocity again. He then carefully compensated for the slight overshoot, flying slightly back before locking his bow onto the docking port. Carefully he brought the ship onto the approach axis, using lateral thrusters. He had half the thrust on the left-right axis compared to the two others, but that wasn’t much of the problem; neither was the slight asymmetry causing the manoeuvring thruster to generate torque – the gyros and automatic stabilization compensated for it. Controlling the docking was no simple affair. Jeb had no direct view of the target ship through the tiny window. He had to rely on the docking radar and, later, on the narrow-angle camera embedded in the docking ring. Finally, he began to bring the ship in, somewhat overzealously using the retrograde thrusters to keep his velocity down. A few last meters… He saw the camera black out; he heard a bang, and watched the indicator lights flicker as the ports grappled onto each other. He pulled a handle on the console, and the two ships were linked solidly. Telemetry from TARDIS’s flight computer flowed onto his consoles. But that wasn’t the end of the day’s work. Jeb almost immediately undocked, backed away from the port, and then sent his ship “upwards”. He waited until he drifted to 50 m, and then reinitiated the docking approach system. “Alright, tin man, show me what you can do,” Jeb mouthed, flipping on the autopilot. The RCS thruster valves clicked furiously. Jeb wouldn’t have risked translating along three different axes simultaneously, but the autopilot did so with mechanical precision as it moved to the final approach initiation point, and then performed a nice, soft re-docking. Jeb ran the checklist on TARDIS and the docking system before undocking and departing the target. He was hurtling towards the terminator, and KSC’s radio range. ‘Never too old for this,’ Jeb thought, as he began to tap on the long-range radio: “...- . -.-. - --- .-. ..--- .-. --.- ... - .-.. -. -.. .. -. --. ... .-.. - .. --- -.”